Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Study: Ice drownings expected to rise as winters warm
Label this one "hadn't thought of it before, but this makes sense" A new study says rising winter temperatures are associated with more accidents involving people falling through the ice on ponds and rivers. From the story in EENews: In general, drownings were rare in...
So far, New Hampshire’s in good shape with hospital beds and ICUs. So far.
From the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic a major concern has been that hospitals would get overwhelmed, causing a ripple effect throughout the health care system. Portions of the Midwest seem to be on the verge of that right now as the long-feared winter...
N.H. Democrats in House to use ranked-choice voting
When New Hampshire House Democrats meet Thursday to choose their leader for the upcoming legislative session, they’ll use ranked choice voting for the first time. So says WMUR in this story, which also says this is "unique to New Hampshire," a puzzling statement. At...
Report: New England electricity needs to triple (whoa!) to slash carbon emissions
New England's goal to cut economywide carbon emissions to near zero by 2050 would require electric power supplies to more than triple, as vehicles and building heating switch from fossil fuels to electricity, E&E News reports on the story (here, paywalled but you...
We don’t need to warn individuals about COVID any more because all of us are at risk
You know things are going badly with COVID-19 when it’s not worth the effort to warn people anymore. New Hampshire public health officials announced last week that they would cut way back on contact tracing, the process of alerting people who have been in contact with...
Another utility-scale solar farm – 75 MW this time – eyed in N.H.
A solar farm many times larger than any currently operating in New Hampshire is being eyed for more than 100 acres near the Webster-Hopkinton border. The project, not far from the two-town transfer station, will be discussed Monday evening by the Webster Select Board....
Watching SpaceX launch from N.H. beaches
Eric Orff, a wildlife biologist who used to work for the state and is well known in New Hampshire, is a rocket-launching buff. He tells me that he heads out to Odiorne State Park in the New Hampshire coastal town of Rye to watch them. This Sunday's launch of SpaceX's...
City-owned electric utilities buy hydropower
New Hampshire doesn't have municipal electric utilities - city-owned providers of electricity - but other New England states do. They have a lot more flexibility than large corporate utilities or even regional co-ops. And here's an example: 21 of them in...
N.H. patents through Nov. 15
By Targeted News Service The following patents were assigned in New Hampshire from Nov. 8 to Nov. 15 *** BAE Systems Information & Electronic Systems Integration Assigned Patent for Signal Chopping Switch Circuit BAE Systems Information and Electronic Systems...
Did the ‘first digit law’ find election fraud? (Spoiler: No)
I've written many times about Benford's Law, the non-intuitive discovery that certain types of data sets have an odd property: The first digit of their data is more likely to be small than large - in a classic Bendford's dataset, numbers will start with a "1" about...
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