Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Should New Hampshire let an algorithm draw our political boundaries?
There's a bill before the state Legislature that would designate a "computer algorithm" to draw our political boundaries. It's similar to one introduce last year by the same legislator - I wrote about that effort one year ago. It went nowhere last year and probably...
Dartmouth will switch from oil-fired steam to wood-fired hot water for building heat
From Dartmouth News Service: Dartmouth is seeking proposals to build a biomass energy heating facility and transmission system to replace the existing central heating system. The new system, estimated to cost more than $200 million, will change how heat is produced...
Calm down: There’s no real answer to ‘who got the most snow in this storm?’
I use a snowboard (not the Flying Tomato kind) and specialized meteorology ruler and frankly, it’s still pretty much an estimate.
A two-sided solar panel is better than a one-sided one
They've rolled out a big solar canopy - solar panels over an outdoor parking lot - in Burlington, Vt., but what's interesting is that the 156 kW system has two-sided panels. (Here's an article describing that technology) From the press release: Encore Renewable Energy...
Which is safe enough: 1 ppm or 10 ppm? How do we know?
It sometimes seems that every chemical ever used in every product ever made turns out to be toxic, which we only realize after it has spread throughout the world and made people sick. Wouldn’t it be nice to know how toxic a chemical really is before we start using it?...
Stone walls can be found via LIDAR from above, crowd-sourcing from below
A combination of the aerial mapping using a system called LIDAR plus Internet-based crowd-sourcing may finally answer one of the most fascinating, if not very pressing, questions about the New Hampshire countryside: How many miles of stone walls do we have? “We want...
N.H. newspapers need Dan Brown to get mad at them on Twitter
Last week, Maine's best-known writer, Stephen King, got mad at the state's biggest newspaper through Twitter because it said it would stop buying freelance reviews of Maine-based books for its book page, instead relying on the national book reviews by AP that it...
UNH moved up to top tier of research universities
From UNH News Service: The University of New Hampshire has risen to the top echelon of research universities in the country as designated by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education and is now among the 130 doctoral-granting universities in the...
Discovery Center looks at the most distant flyby humans have ever achieved
If you want to learn more about that NASA exploration of the deepest deep-space object ever seen closeup, check the McAuliffe Shepard Discovery Center's show “To Pluto and Beyond - New Horizons Visits Ultima Thule”. The presentation will be Friday Feb. 1 at 7 p.m.,...
That cool gasholder building in Concord is in big trouble
In 2016 I got to tour inside the iconic gasholder building in Concord, a handsome circular brick structure that once held gas made from coal that was used for lighting and heat in the city, in the days before natural gas pipelines showed up here. (Here's that story,...
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