Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
N.H. video game record ends up in court
In 1999 at the iconic New Hampshire gaming arcade Funspot, a guy named Billy Mitchell achieved the first-ever perfect score on an arcade version of Pac-Man – 3,333,270 points over about six hours. Since then, his claim and other of his arcade records have been...
N.H. patents, April 26 to May 3
By Targeted News Service Patents assigned in New Hampshire from April 26 to May 3 Position Imaging Assigned Patent for Virtual Reality Mobile Devices Position Imaging, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, has been assigned a patent (No. 10,631,131, initially filed Feb. 1, 2019)...
Those UFO tapes aren’t too hard to un-Unidentified
Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy column has a good look at those UFO tapes released by the Pentagon. (Spoiler: all are easily explained by non-alien reality.) You can read it here. And this seems a good time to re-run part of a piece I wrote clear back in 2012. (I've...
N.H. hospital joins COVID plasma study
Portsmouth Regional Hospital announced today that it is participating in a national study to determine if plasma from convalescent, or recovered, COVID-19 patients may benefit individuals currently hospitalized with severe or life-threatening cases of the virus. As...
Fun with trend-spotting in graphs!
We all know that when dealing with an erratic data set, choosing end and start points to trend lines makes all the difference. The state's daily count in confirmed COVID-19 cases is a perfect example - as my amateurish illustration (Microsoft Paint doesn't seem to...
Happy Birthday, BASIC
56 years ago on May 1 at about 4 a.m. the computer language BASIC was born at Dartmouth when "Professor John Kemeny and a student programmer simultaneously typed RUN on neighboring terminals. When they both got back correct answers to their simple programs,...
Ticks are still here (but maybe carrying just one disease!)
You’re probably tired of hearing about the invasion of disease-carrying viruses, so today’s column will cover something entirely different: The invasion of disease-carrying arthropods. Yes, folks, once again it’s time to talk about ticks. Specifically, let’s talk...
Creating coronavirus tests is harder than it seems
Dartmouth News has a good piece about research at the college, especially the medical and engineering schools, into creates tests and possibly treatment for COVID-19. It has lots of good details about the medical and logistical issues that have to be overcome. Check...
‘We are reliving the Russian Revolution’ in food distribution
I live very close to a working farm (Julie's Happy Hens) that sells eggs - they have up to 3,000 birds - as well as sheep's milk cheese. The owners, Matt and Julie, occasionally post on Facebook. This is part of a long discussion they just put on their site. It's a...
Civil Air Patrol cell phone forensics records 1,000th find
Almost two years ago I wrote about how the Civil Air Patrol uses cell phone forensics to find people lost in the wild, a process that is much more complicated than TV shows would make you believe. (You can read that column here) This complexity means that if you make...
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