Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
As COVID vaccines (slowly) arrive, patience is a virtue
There’s a very good chance that you, loyal reader, won’t get vaccinated against COVID-19 for a couple of months, or maybe longer. My advice is to take a deep breath and accept it. We have reached the beginning of the end of this pandemic but there’s a long, difficult...
Buried stones can tell us the last time they saw daylight
Carrie Deegan of the Forest Society has a column in the Union-Leader today talking about a study in New Hampshire at a long-gone town called Monson (divvied up between Hollis and Milford) for a technology to determine how long rock structures have been buried. It's...
Building a better beehive
The design and construction of beehives seems like a long-solved problem. Aside from occasional tweaks, there’s nothing left to figure out. That’s roughly what John Rocheleau of Sandwich thought when he set up his first hive three years ago as an extension of his...
N.H. patents through Jan. 10
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Jan. 3 to Jan. 10. *** Parallel Wireless Assigned Patent for Base Station Power Management Using Solar Panel Parallel Wireless, Nashua, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No....
It’s time to fly the Stars and Stripes
Sorry to bring politics into Granite Geek again, but I'm writing this the day after Trump incited bands of punks to storm the U.S. Capitol in a last-gasp attempt to keep hold of power and attention. It failed because of his lifelong inability to plan and execute...
Backup batteries for Vermont statehouse
The Vermont statehouse has 250 kW of li-ion batteries for backup power, replacing an old diesel generator. It appears to be the first installation in any statehouse. Unlike a generator, which just sits there most of the time, they'll also be available to store and...
State dinosaur? State fossil? N.H. geology makes both unlikely
As I write this, Massachusetts is deciding on a state dinosaur joining the many states that already have one. New Hampshire doesn't have a state dinosaur because of our geology - we're so igneous/metamorphic that no fossils (which are only preserved in sedimentary...
New England is no fan of electric heat
Many people in New England have long-term memories of electric heat being expensive thanks to our prices and, if you suffered through '80s-era heat pumps, ineffective. So it's no surprise to read from Axios that Northern New England has the lowest rate of home heat...
You think you’ve done puzzles during the pandemic?
f you are like me, you have wrestled with a lot of puzzles during these stay-at-home months. Jigsaw puzzles, crossword puzzles, Sudokus, chess puzzles, retrograde chess puzzles (intriguing; check it out), even one those metal puzzles you try to take apart while...
AltaVista, the early search engine that might have saved DEC, was born a quarter-century ago
AltaVista was probably the best of the pre-Google search engines, created by Digital Equipment Corp. mostly to help them sell their DEC Alpha processor line. It was launched in January 1996, a cool quarter-century ago. Vice has a nice overview (read it here) of why it...
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