Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
Upside of the drought: Lyme ticks are dormant or dying
I've been meaning to do this story in New Hampshire; the Portland Press-Herald did it for Maine. “Especially when you get away from the coastline, the dry conditions have knocked the tick population down,” Lubelczyk said. “The humidity along the coast keeps the tick...
Photos of that Rhode Island offshore wind farm
The Block Island wind project in Rhode Island is small by offshore wind standards - 30 megawatts, or about twice the peak output of the Amoskeag hydropower dam in Manchester but only about 3 percent of the peak output of Seabrook Station - but it will be the first in...
Lake buoys will warn us about E. coli outbreaks – with math
Virtual Beach is an EPA-developed software package that correlates various environmental factors to make predictions about E. coli outbreaks in seawater. New Hampshire is using it and testing automated buoys on two lakes to see if we can better predict outbreaks in...
What’s it like to know advanced math? For one, you don’t really care about answers
Quora, a sort of wikipedia of question-and-answer sessions, has an excellent discussion about what it's like to work in advanced mathematics. You should read it all here. A few tidbits* to whet your appetite: . Mathematicians don't really care about "the answer" to...
Pelt prices fall and beavers bloom – for better or worse
The Chinese and Russian economies are weak, so people there have stopped buying as much fur - which means that the price of a beaver pelt has fallen from the mid-40-dollars to barely 10 bucks. As any good capitalist would predict, this means fewer people are trapping...
Like all things fractal, the NH coastline is hard to measure – and it gets more complicated than that
My Monitor column today looks at why some sources say New Hampshire's ocean coastline is 18 miles long, some say it's 13 miles, some say it's 235 miles, and why people who know how to pronounce Benoit Mandelbrot say the whole discussion is pretty arbitrary. You can...
Carbon nanotube cables, hockey boot & a ‘life-extension agent’ – recent NH patents
Some recent patents issued in New Hampshire, from Targeted News Service: Standex International of Salem has been assigned a patent (9,398,645) developed by Terry Gray of McKinney, Texas, for “current detecting and switching apparatus.” The patent application was filed...
Older workers grew up with lousy tech, so they handle work problems better
Take THAT you crummy digital-native millenials: A survey says that older workers use more and different types of technology in the workplace than those darn kids who won't get off my lawn, and also find it less stressful. From the story by CIO.com: Cloud storage...
Clash of desirables: Cleaner water vs. fighting invasive fish
AP reports (here) that Vermont is worried that stricter EPA limits on a chemical called TFM in drinking water will hurt the fight against the invasive sea lamprey. Fishing enthusiasts (are) worried that scaling back on the use of TFM could cause lamprey to boom and...
Helicopter firm tests drone for power grid inspection
Yes, that was a drone over downtown Nashua yesterday, reports the Nashua Telegraph: Pembroke-based JBI Helicopter, which provides helicopter service for Eversource in New Hampshire to make regularly scheduled inspection flights, brought one of its unmanned aerial...
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