Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Salting icy roads without killing everything else is tough
Government awards given to state employees do not usually carry amusing titles. Unless you’re talking about de-icing technology in New Hampshire. Then you’ve got awards like “Salt-n-Peppa,” “Shaken Not Stirred” and “Salt of the Earth” – given out annually by the N.H....
Analyzing tree interiors with ‘sonic tomography’
The exterior of a tree isn't always a good reflection of its internal condition - think of it as "can't judge a book by its cover" applied to books' raw material. In Connecticut, as NPR reports (read/listen to the story here) there's an interesting research project...
If you’re going to teach IP law, why not teach it online?
The UNH School of Law in Concord is about to take its first big steps into the world of online education, and if all goes as planned it will go further and create what it calls the nation’s first specialized law degree. The school is awaiting permission from the...
Cell-phone blimp gets a test flight in N.H.
The MIT-connected startup Altaeros Energies has built a blimp hangar in Fremont, N.H. – halfway between Manchester and the Seacoast – to do R&D on their plan to use blimps as cheap cell towers in rural areas. The Union-Leader reports that they had their first test...
More young adults are moving to New Hampshire. Hooray, says New Hampshire
The state's demographics guru, Ken Johnson of the UNH Carsey School of Public Policy, regularly crunches census data to give big-picture looks at our population. A report out today is good news for this aged state: More young adults are moving here from other states....
Ponds outdoors are freezing naturally, but freezing indoor ponds takes work
The early arrival of cold weather has brought up hopes of outdoor ice skating before Christmas - always an iffy possibility, since it requires both enough cold weather and not so much snow that ponds are unskateable. I'm going to the Everett Arena in Concord this...
In Maine, a serious legal challenge to ranked-choice voting (which worked smoothly, by the way)
The man who lost the first ever election in the US to used ranked-choice voting to decide a statewide race is suing, with an eye toward getting the national Supreme Court to say that this type of voting is unconstitutional, reports the Portland Press-Herald. Poliquin...
Tax system is so old it needs COBOL programmers to maintain in
UPDATE: The original headline said "State government needs you" for COBOL programmers, which grossly overstates the case. I heard from a couple COBOL-wise job seekers, including one from Brazil, so I've tweaked it. It’s pretty easy to see why the state’s tax...
Reinventing the power grid on coastal Maine (sort of)
If I was going to redesign the national power grid, perhaps the biggest and most complicated thing that the human species has ever created, I wouldn’t think of starting in a quiet part of coastal Maine. But maybe I should. “We figured if we could do this in Boothbay,...
‘Amazing Stories’ is in TV production
Regular readers will know that the original science fiction magazine "Amazing Stories" has developed a New Hampshire connection, since a state resident bought the rights to the name and relaunched it, first online and most recently (as I noted here) in print. A...
Return to the Concord Monitor