Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
NWS confirms that it’s our winter has been record wet, even if not very snowy
National Weather Service in Gray, Maine, which covers NH and most of Maine, says the first half of meteorological winter (Dec., Jan., Feb.) has been the wettest on record for both the Concord and Portland stations. That includes rain - so, so much rain - and melted...
Report: Manchester police using AI-driven surveillance cameras, part of a national network
A site called 404media says it looked at scraped data about a national network of shared public and private surveillance cameras and found "more than a hundred" police departments, sheriff's departments and others using them - including Manchester NH police. The full...
This summer will see two sets of cicadas emerging!
MassLive reports (here): This summer, millions of cicadas from broods XIX (emerging every 13 years) and XIII (every 17 years) will both crawl out from underground and fly across the south and Midwest looking for a mate, according to Cicadamania, a website dedicated to...
Granite Geek: The peril and promise (and plenty more peril) of A.I.
As mythological metaphors go, the one that SNHU professor David Humphreys gave during a recent talk about the eruption of technologies known as artificial intelligence wasn’t terribly reassuring. “We’ve opened a Pandora’s box,” he told two dozen university students...
NH wants to know more about fishers
Over the years I have occasionally glimpsed a scurrying weasel-like shape that might be a fisher but I can't say with certainty that I've ever seen one, much to my annoyance. These elusive beasts are the subject of a $2 million grant to NH Fish and Game from the...
NH patents through Jan. 14
(Links to each patent can be found here, using the patent number or inventor’s name.) By Targeted News Service WASHINGTON – The following federal patents were assigned in New Hampshire through Jan. 14. *** Inter-Cell Fractional Frequency Reuse Scheduler PARALLEL...
Granite Geek classic: “Windshield wipers up or down?”
As long as I'm using this excellent snowstorm as an excuse to avoid thinking of new articles - I mean, to rerun popular classics - let's dust this one off from 2015. Winter brings many vital issues to the fore, perhaps none more contentious than this: Wipers up or...
Concord has a chance to make a big climate move
The city of Concord has a golden opportunity to show that it's serious about its admirable clean-energy goals, but it's not the sort of opportunity you might think of. Two huge mixed-use developments are proposed for the city: here's a Monitor story about a recent...
‘Clean cement’ factory coming to Massachusetts
In Holyoke, Mass., on the Connecticut River, they're replacing a closed paper mill with a factory that will make "clean cement." If it lives up to hopes, that would be a big deal since making cement is a huge emitter of carbon. From the article in Heatmap (read it...
Solar panels on self-storage units makes a ton of sense
Self-storage units are all over the place - we sure own a lot of crap, don't we? - and seem to be perfect places to put solar panels. Flat roofs, already ugly so nobody will complain, connected to the grid. The problem is that the units don't consume much electricity...