Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Other NH towns would like that broadband deal
This year the little town Chesterfield partnered with Consolidated Communications to bring fiber-to-the-home to the towns. The Keene Sentinel reports that a number of other towns in the region would like to do the same thing (story is here): Officials from several...
Wait – the first secure Internet retail sale took place in Nashua?!?
This is embarrassing! I just learned that a vital bit of Internet history happened in Nashua in 1994, when I was a reporter at the city's newspaper who was writing about the online world, yet I've never heard of it before. According to a 1994 article in the New York...
Hunting with ferrets, and roadable aircraft: Lawmakers get to work.
This is the time of year that legislators in the New Hampshire state government start the process of submitting bills. First the 400 representatives and 24 state senators draft a Legislative Service Request, which is basically a general idea for a law. It gets whipped...
Playing in the dirt when it’s 140 million miles away
If Elon Musk ever makes it to Mars, he’ll grab his phone and start tweeting. Frances Rivera-Hernandez, on the other hand, would grab a shovel. “I want to dig some pits to see if the ground ice is there and how much,” said Rivera-Hernandez, a post-doc in Earth science...
Is the Internet changing English?
Where do languages come from? Is the Internet changing English? Can I split infinitives? Why do some languages have masculine/feminine nouns but we don't? Why is “enough” spelled so weird? Come and ask your questions about the science linguistics – a topic we’ve never...
New Hampshire is getting a mass-timber building
A few days ago I wrote about the way that engineered timber, a.k.a. mass timber, can replace steel and sometimes concrete in buildings, which creates big greenhouse-gas benefits. Here's the item, if you didn't see it. I mentioned that New Hampshire is behind our...
“Clockwise” is losing meaning in a digital world
Steven Strogatz, a Cornell math professor and math communicator (I'm waiting for his much-praised book "Infinite Powers" about calculus to come out in paperback) had an interesting series of Tweets over the weekend that began: "I've long worried about this, and it is...
Tall buildings made with wood help loggers and the climate
Tackling the biggest problems of the world today and in the future could benefit from technologies of the past. “This is back to the future,” is how Joe Short, vice president of Northern Forest Center, put it at the start of a conference Friday discussing mass timber,...
Maine would be great for a spaceport, Part II (with tech startup addition)
Last November I had an item about vague thoughts of creating an orbital small launching facility at closed air bases in northern Maine, using small rockets to launch cubesats. As I said at the time, "More like Wallops Island, Virginia, than Cape Canaveral." That idea...
N.H. data-visualization geeks, celebrate
Do you like data? Do you like data about demographics and economics and other topics that shape how the world works? Of course you do, Granite Geek fan. So UNH Carsey School of Public Policy has a treat for you: They've taken "What is New Hampshire?", a chart-filled...
Return to the Concord Monitor