Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
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...
Hedgehogs are cute, but one in NH carried an incredibly rare virus
From UNH News Service: A pathologist with the New Hampshire Veterinary Diagnostic Lab at the University of New Hampshire has identified the first case of Skunk Adenovirus-1 in the United States. The rare respiratory disease was found in tissues of a hedgehog...
Who should draw NH political boundaries – people or algorithms?
As the Concord Monitor reports today, there's a new push to have an impartial group of people, rather than the political party in power, draw legislative boundaries in New Hampshire. Similar pushes are being made around the country in response to concern about...
Were the White Mountains once as tall as the Himalayas?
NHPR reporter Sam Evans-Brown does a regular answer-reader-question feature called Ask Sam. This week's takes on a question I hadn't really thought about: How tall were the Appalachian Mountains, including the White Mountains, when they were first formed by plate...
New England has plenty of electricity this winter unless things go really wrong
There are enough power plants, power lines and systems in place to provide all the electricity that New England will need this winter, according to the organization that operates the six-state electric grid. ISO New England said Wednesday the grid can meet demand,...
Our snow will disappear, but perhaps not as quickly as we feared
Here is my Concord Monitor column this week (Nov. 27): This column will discuss the way a major climate model is overly pessimistic about the coming disappearance of snow and skiing from New Hampshire due to climate change. In other words, it’s a bit of good news...
Return to the Concord Monitor