Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Are any of your home network-connected devices harboring malware? You sure?
Many of you reading this have in the past year or two allowed a spy or a bad guy to settle happily into your home, using it as shelter for unpleasant activities. But unless you’re a lot tech-ier than me, it’s hard to realize this, and harder still to stop it. IoT...
The Lawnchair Astronomer looks at the Perseids and, of course, the eclipse
Gerry Descoteaux is a New Hampshire astronomy fan I have known for 26 years - although I'm not sure we've ever actually met in person, come to think of it. I was an editor at the Nashua Telegraph when he started writing his monthly Lawnchair Astronomer column in 1990,...
A place (maybe the only one in NH) where you park backwards at an angle
There are certain topics that get everybody riled up – politics, religion, which way to hang the toilet-paper roll. And parking. Especially parking. Everybody hates parking but everybody wants more parking, and they want it a specific size and shape. It’s risky to...
Birth dearth addendum: It would be OK if we just used less, but …
In response to my column last week celebrating (despite the many drawbacks) a global trend of smaller families, some readers and callers said that the real solution to planetwide environmental destruction is for each of us humans to consume fewer resources, rather...
If Lyme disease designed a mammal to spread itself around, it would design the white-footed mouse
Great story by the Washington Post (reprinted in the Bangor Daily News here) about why the white-footed mouse is such a prolific carrier of Lyme disease: What makes the mice such excellent carriers? Lax grooming habits. Passive immune systems. Endless offspring that...
The ‘baby bust’ is going to be a disaster. It’s our only hope
The most hopeful change in human society that has occurred during my lifetime – a change that must continue if our grandchildren have any hope of a decent life – is really bad. It’s bad economically, bad socially, even bad culturally. But if you love your kids like I...
They’re going to test a moth that eats an invasive weed I hate, hate, hate
Pardon a personal rant, but for more than a decade my family has been fighting an invasive weed known as black swallowwort. It's a vine that grows up from the ground and tangles everything; when we bought our property it had filled one field to the point that it was...
NH bitcoin machines to shut July 31 (for a bit) because of a complex dispute over forking
As I've noted several times, New Hampshire is one of the hotbeds of retail bitcoin usage thanks largely to the ultra-libertarian Free Staters. I believe we have more public bitcoin vending machines per capita than any state. For a short period s of July 31, however,...
N.H. infected with way more malware than any other state, claims anti-malware company
Companies that make software to fight malware issue lots of alarming press releases about malware and I take them with a grain of self-serving salt. But here's one that tweaked my Granite State interest: Computer users in New Hampshire were three times as likely to...
Dartmouth on list of 100 top patent-producing colleges
Dartmouth College is on the National Academy of Inventors’ top 100 list of universities worldwide granted U.S. patents in 2016, marking the fifth consecutive time the College has made the top 100 since the list was launched in 2012. More details are here.
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