Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire

Who still uses a rotary phone? Way more people than you’d think
Dial N for Nostalgia – except a whole bunch of these phones are still in daily use.
Company wants to train commercial drone pilots at NH airport
A company that trains corporate and government clients to operate drones wants to set up shop at the Concord Municipal Airport to help figure out how unmanned vehicles can work alongside piloted aircraft. If the plan goes through, this would be one of the first such...

We don’t have to worry about that Chinese space station (just barely)
I am happy to say for my fellow New Hampshire residents that we are too far north for the out-of-control space station Tiangong-1 to land on us, but our friends on the south side of the border with Massachusetts might want to keep an eye on the heavens. In its orbit...

At a big enough scale, N.H. is like a washboarded dirt road
UNH researchers used data collected from extremely high-resolution LiDAR laser scans of the region to discover that the landscape was riddled with washboard-like ridges.
Oh boy, it’s Box Elder Syrup Weekend! Wait – it’s not?
Why do sugar maples dominate our syrup conversation? There are good biological reasons (plus one added by a reader in the comments that I missed).

Yeah this is a good, long-running blog – but check Cow Hampshire!
If you want to know why the lowest possible Social Security Number (001-01-0001) was issued to a New Hampshire woman, then a blog as old as mine is the place to go.

The unending fascination with New Hampshire’s first-in-nation UFO abductees
The saga of Betty and Barney Hill’s abduction by space aliens near Franconia in 1961 is still my favorite piece of New Hampshire history.
UNH says space radiation could be worse than we thought
And in *real* space news, UNH says it’s more dangerous than we thought out there.

You can’t build a house here, you’ve got the wrong kind of dirt!
Want to subdivide your parcel into 2-acre properties in a residential zone? You’d better have a high degree of “Gloucester sandy loam.” If your yard leans more toward “Woodbridge very stony loam,” you might be in a rural agricultural zone.
5.4 million words and counting …
This isn’t a theological commentary, but my career is 6.88 times wordier than the King James Bible.