Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
New Hampshire burns a lot more oil than you might think
Check the above graphic from the Energy Information Agency showing estimated total energy use in New Hampshire. You probably didn't think that almost two-thirds of our energy comes from burning oil, did you? That's because I, like most places, talk mostly about...
Sea level rise cost to NH: A billion bucks, more or less
A climate-action organization says it has crunched the numbers to estimate how much it would cost the U.S. to protect itself from "moderate" sea-level rise by 2040. Because we have a small coastline - about 18 miles, depending on how fractal you want to get - we have...
NH will peer at tiny houses (and wake boats)
The legislature has passed and Gov. Sununu has signed into law a bill to study tiny houses, specifically "issues associated with state and local permitting of tiny houses suitable for year-round occupancy, including both tiny houses on permanent foundations and tiny...
Eight years later, the Hooksett disks are still floating around the world
(I wrote most of this a year ago, but the state Department of Environmental Services tweeted about it this week as part of ocean environmental awareness, so let's remind ourselves of this fun story.) On March 6, 2011, more than 4 million plastic disks were...
Hashtag inventor is from New Hampshire
I've long been a fan of the Internet History Podcast which is, you'll be surprised to hear, a podcast about the history of the Internet. The most recent episode (listen here) has a long interview with Chris Messina, who was involved in lots of interesting things like...
This was a ‘meh’ year for NH maple syrup
Unseasonably cold weather this year hurt New Hampshire’s maple syrup industry, which produced about 148,000 gallons of syrup, the smallest amount of syrup in five years. The data reflect another fact which might surprise people here: New Hampshire is not a major...
Are smartphones eating our brains? How would we know?
I'm old enough to have avoided smartphone addiction - my habits were set in stone before they were invented - but I've commented along with everybody else that these phones are altering homo sapiens before our very eyes, turning us into nearsighted,...
Lots of reaction to the historical marker about BASIC
My article about the new historical marker in New Hampshire honoring the creation of BASIC made it to the front page of Slashdot. Among the comments is the one above, which probably goes a bit too far! In case the JPG is hard to read, it says: After the Old Man of the...
Fast-charging stations coming to NH interstates
The state’s three biggest electric utilities are proposing to create a dozen fast-charging stations for electric vehicles along interstates in New Hampshire, using money from the Volkswagen emissions-rigging settlement to create the state’s first such network open to...
Paper is good (ballot-booth edition)
New Hampshire requires voters to fill in little circles on the ballot when voting for public office, sort of like answering questions on the SAT. (Assuming they still do that - it's been a loooooong while since I took the SAT.) Then you run the paper ballot through a...
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