Sci/tech tidbits in and around New Hampshire
The realities of permaculture (plus an awesome picture of a pig)
The Monitor's new Ag & Eats blog explores a "permaculture" farm in Chichester, where agriculture and social activities mix and mingle: During the winter, the pigs and ducks, plus geese and chickens, all live in a shed together. The pigs provide the heat, the geese...
The bitcoin machine is dead, long live the bitcoin machine
A bitcoin vending machine (not an ATM) has been set up at Murphy's Taproom in Manchester, reports Free Keene. A year or two ago I would have thought we were beyond being surprised by such announcements, since bitcoin machines were the hot new thing, but this makes...
Granite Geek on the air: The wicked-hard-math-problems edition
Hey, *you* try describing the Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture on the radio.
It’s hard to get excited about preserving boring, scrubby land – but it’s important for wildlife
From US Fish and Wildlife Service: Over the past century, many shrublands and young forests across the Northeast have been cleared for development or have grown into mature forests. As this habitat has disappeared from much of the landscape, the populations of more...
Maine considers statewide ranked-choice voting
"An 1880 Maine insurrection could sink ranked-choice voting" - that's the intriguing headline on this piece from the Bangor Daily News concerning efforts to install an alternative voting procedure in statewide races in Maine. As the name implies, the system would let...
Largest prime number (with 22.3 million digits) found by crowdsourcing
The largest prime number ever found has been confirmed - it's 2 multiplied by itself 74,107,18 times, minus one (in other words, it's a Mersenne Prime) and it has 22,338,618 digits. It was discovered as part of the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search or GIMPS, an...
‘Approval voting’ bills would let you vote for as many people as you like
Approval voting is the simplest form of alternative voting procedures - basically, it would let voters chose more than one candidate when more than one was running for a single office, as in the current GOP presidential primary. The choices wouldn't be ranked or...
Lyme disease-carrying ticks are now found in half the U.S.
And in today's depressing news, the tick species that carries the virus which causes Lyme disease is now found in nearly half the counties in the lower 48, "a much broader swath than was seen in the late 1990s." Read the story here from the National Library of...
Take that, NY Times guy – I have a unique research name!
One of the advantages of having the same name as somebody else in your profession is that you're pretty protected from random Google searches: Nobody's going to find me amid the torrent of stuff from and about David Brooks of New York Times fame. But that's also a...
Should electric cars be charged by the hour or the kilowatt-hour?
Dave Solomon's weekly energy-related column in the Union-Leader points out that the state is trying to decide whether to change the way electric vehicles are charged: Electric car owners have complained that they are overpaying at EV stations that charge an hourly or...
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