Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
COVID cases rising fast in N.H. as colder weather arrives
The long-feared autumn rise in New Hampshire COVID-19 has started to arrive, as reflected in a deterioration of the Monitor’s weekly tracking – for the first time in months we are missing two of our goals – as well as the state’s concern that community-wide...
Here’s a story about the state’s energy efficiency push that doesn’t use “negawatt”! (Such self-restraint)
It has long been known that the cheapest and cleanest unit of energy is the one you don’t need to use, and a group that includes the state’s utilities is rushing to put this into practice statewide despite the scheduling complications of COVID-19. “We were put on hold...
Science fiction awards from N.H.
The Neukom Institute for Computational Science at Dartmouth College gives annual awards for speculative fiction. Not quite as well known as the Hugos or Nebula awards but not bad. Here's the story from Dartmouth News Service: Debut author Cadwell Turnbull won for The...
The biggest Excel error ever? British COVID mixup!
Great Britain lost more than 16,000 positive COVID-19 test results, apparently because they use an old version of Excel that doesn't have enough rows or columns to handle the data. Australian mathematics comedian Matt Parker, a well-known spreadsheet fan, has fun...
Men, you’ll be amazed to hear, take COVID-19 less seriously than women
in the U.S. right now, dudes - I think that's an appropriate term to use here - are more likely to pretend that COVID-19 isn't a big problem than women are. That extremely non-surprising result, obvious to anybody who goes into any public area and counts the gender...
All those ‘stinkbugs’ aren’t necessarily stinkbugs & may not even (officially) be bugs
There are probably a lot of bugs invading your house right now that stink when you smash them. But that doesn’t mean they’re stinkbugs. They’re more likely to be western conifer seedbugs, or perhaps box elder bugs. And they might actually be a stinkbug – the damaging...
Maybe deer aren’t the forest-killers we thought they were
The explosion in white-tailed deer throughout the Northeast hasn't been good for forests because those voracious so-and-so's eat all the tree seedlings, altering the makeup of the woods (when they're not eating all your hostas). Or so I've always heard. New research...
Mass. ‘right-to-repair’ fight is very different than ours was
The right-to-repair movement, which says you should be allowed to tinker with things you've bought, hasn't had much success in New Hampshire, or just about anywhere else. Most recently in the Granite State a "digital electronic product repair" bill that would require...
UFO festival & silent film “Woman in the Moon” (by the guy who made “Metropolis”)
Here's a hardly edited PR release from an art house movie theater near me. If you've never been to the Wilton Town Hall Theatre, you've missed a treat; it is an awesome place. A sci-fi adventure sometimes called the first feature film to depict realistic space travel...
More in sorrow than in anger, I make a political statement
Tomorrow''s election day for the roughly two-thirds of N.H. voters who haven't cast a ballot yet, so I'm rerunning this item from a month ago. If you ever attended a Science Cafe New Hampshire session back in those glorious days when we could sit next to strangers in...
Return to the Concord Monitor