There aren’t a whole lot of reasons to visit Baltimore, but here’s one: As of next month, you can rent an electric car by the hour! The program, sort of Zipcar-like except with funky looking battery-powered vehicle, is run by the Maryland Science Center.They’re even giving free test rides during weekday afternoons, through the end of this month (after that you have to pay to join up). The cars are Maya 300 manufactured by electrovaya. Let’s see; if I jump on Acela in the morning, can I take a spin down there and be back by night? Not quite ….
I will admit to some irrational techno-lust for electric cars. My commute (shame on me) is too long for battery life to make sense, plus I have a long-ish dirt driveway and a half-dozen times each winter I need four-wheel drive to get out to the road.
But wouldn’t it be cool to zip around Nashua’s streets in a silent vehicle?
I have just added a button in the right-hand rail to the Sense About Science site - pretty belatedly, since I’ve been following the issue for a while. It concerns a British matter, involving an absurd legal ruling in the UK that equates a demand for scientific support for medical claims with a libelous insult, [...]
This panel from the always clever Bad Reporter comic is too good to pass up, in light of the “celebrity blog TMZ reported Michael Jackson’s death first!” discussion. There are two other equally good jokes in the latest cartoon, so be sure to click through and read it.
If you can’t get enough Nostradamus debunking, here’s [...]
A column on Network World says the U.S. is preparing to test a new multi-channel radio system that would, at least in theory, allow all emergency services (police, fire, ambulance, etc.) to talk to each other; currently they tend to operate on non-overlapping bandwidths. Here in the Northeast, the U.S. marshal’s service is participating in [...]
Internet Nostalgia Alert: CompuServe Classic is closing today after 30 years! (Report from The Paper PC blog is here.)
There was a time when CompuServe was the geeks’ choice in Internet connections, before the Net really came along. And remember those euphonious CompuServe names? I think mine was 97217,45231 or something like that. It was a [...]
Massachusetts is releasing a draft plan of “zoning” for coastal areas, designed largely to speed the process for developing wind farms. (Globe story is here.) As with zoning on land, the question is how to encourage use without screwing up everything else, like the environment, fishing, passage of undersea cables and pipes, etc.
Zoning on land [...]
Some coworkers have enjoyed tweaking me since the news came out that a local math teacher won a “million dollar” scratch ticket in the NH Lottery (he took the $650,000 payout, hence the quotation marks) because I have frequently written about the mathematical absurdity of expecting to win in lotteries. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing this math teacher realized that the odds were very, very much improved in this unusual case. In fact, they were just about even!
In a new report, Environment New Hampshire crunches the numbers and says that in 2006, NH spent $3,118 per person on fossil fuels, a number that could rise as much as 45 percent over the next two decades. More than three-quarters of that is spent on oil, rather than coal or natural gas; this percentage is higher than in many other states thanks to the Northeast’s historic dependence on heating oil (which is what my house uses).
University of New Hampshire physics professor Roy Torbert has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a new member of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC). Torbert, interim director of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS), will join the 35-member council that provides [...]
What will happen to the 10-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative if the U.S. Senate also approves a national cap-and-trade system? (Here’s a Washington Post article about the legislation, which was narrowly OK’d by the U.S. House.) I asked that question a few months ago in preparation for the March RGGI auction, and the official response was that it would take so long for a national system to get set up that it wouldn’t immediately affect RGGI, which under its current iteration runs through 2012 and then restarts.
The other uncertainty, however, is what a national system would do to RGGI’s price - although I suppose that would depend on whether RGGI allowances can be swapped over to a national system. (If they can’t, there will be a lot of pissed-off utilities!)
The weirdly named Vinalhaven (not “vinyl-haven” so don’t go there looking for LPs) is the largest of Maine’s year-round islands. As the Portland Press-Herald reports, it is installing three 1.5-MW wind turbines that it expects will lower electric rates 20 percent, because they’ll sell excess power into the grid. This has helped the project get [...]
It’s hard to think of a good fund-raiser, but the Boy Scouts have one: For $1,000, you can rappel off New Hampshire’s tallest building. Here’s the Union-Leader story. They say 100 people can participate in the August event - very cool.
The article says the state’s tallest building, the Brady-Sullivan office tower (a boring glass-and-steel rectangular [...]
You never how other people are going to react, do you? Consider this feeble little joke that I ran in today’s Telegraph, making fun of our lack of sunshine:
Officials are cautioning area residents not to be startled today about the possible appearance overhead of a luminous body of spectral class G2, luminosity class V. Although [...]
Today’s rerun Peanuts comic strip has Linus celebrating because his security blanket - lost when sister Lucy made it into a kite that got away and floated out over the ocean - was rescued by the Air Rescue Service. It concludes with a punch line that will baffle 95 percent of readers: Charlie Brown says [...]
The Union-Leader has a story today about Epping police (not exactly “small-town” but not big city either) putting out a query on Twitter to catch a litterbug. The story says the cops have 129 “followers” on Twitter that they can use as insta-sources.
Depending on your point of view, this is an interesting example of a [...]
David Brooks has written a science column for the Nashua (N.H.) Telegraph since 1991 (see recent ones here) and has overseen this blog since 2006. (E-mail him or call 603-594-5831).
Also contributing:
UNH News Service posts about research at the University of New Hampshire.
Earle Rich is a jack-of-many-trades engineer with particular experience in wind turbines.
Archive of Shareware Report, which test-drove shareware.
Alternative power map
This Google map shows large-scale solar, wind, hydro and nuclear plants in and around N.H., plus a few other intriguing alternative-power items.
