There was a semi-urban legend among touring cyclist about the need for deflating bike tires before shipping them on an airplane. It was claimed that the altitude would surely explode the tires. I wrote an article for DoubleTalk, the tandem magazine, showing that the increase in tire presssure even in the vacuum of outer space [...]

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epiindex.htm

Here’s a link to periodic postings of John H. Lienhard, University of Houston. He is someone who has a very nice sense of the historical flow of technology from prehistory to the present. It’s nice to poke our head up and get more of a sense of how we got where we are today. Each [...]

I was junking some old computer stuff, but as usual, opened the cases to see if there were any salvage possibilities. I was quite surprised when I looked inside a ten year old US Robotics 28Kb modem. The number of parts, complex ICs, surfacemount devices, transformers and so on is amazing for such a simple [...]

One of the most theraputic activities I can do is stacking the winters wood. Here in the Northeast, trees grow almost like weeds. If a pasture is neglected for a few years, it will quickly be taken over by birch and poplar. Later, this will change to pine, oak, beech and other healthy, mixed forest [...]

David has left for a few weeks with his family to visit another continent and hemisphere. In the meantime, he has entrusted the Granitegeek blog to me, Earle Rich, also of Mont Vernon.
I’ll be contributing short essays and pieces that I run across in the many magazines and websites that I monitor every day. [...]

Greeley Park in Nashua will be the kickoff site on Tuesday, July 31, for a five-day anti-global-warming march that hopes to snag some of the 472 (by last count) presidential hopefuls wandering the state. (A similar event is taking place is Iowa.)

Called the March to ReEnergize, organized by college students, it involves five days of [...]

Philbrick’s Sports in Dover is annoyed that philbricksports.com (not enough "s"s) goes to another retailer, and has filed suit in U.S. District Court in Concord about it. It says the site was bought up by eNom, which makes a business owning URLs that are close to real URLs, and selling ads seen by the mistaken [...]

The Union-Leader has a classic "give two local people who disagree abut an issue equal time" controversy story today, about the effect of global warming on New England. Retired Channel 7 weatherman Fred Ward says results spearheaded by UNH’s Cameron Wake exaggerate the rise in temperatures over the past three decades because he selected [...]

The Boston Globe has a story about NStar allowing people to buy electricity directly from a wind farm in New York state and another under construction in Maine, at a premium. I was surprised that they could get power from a specific source, instead of from the general grid … and it turns out they [...]

The Portland Press-Herald reports that the issue of political appointees in Washington manipulating scientific data has come up in a long-running debate over whether to give the Canadian lynx protected status in Maine and elsewhere. (They may live in the N.H. North Country, but that’s not certain.)
From the story: "Julie MacDonald, a former Interior [...]

One of the reasons I’ve kept playing with wikipedia for four years is that you can stumble across random stuff doing it - like the concept of pareidolia, which is seeing patterns where none exist (a famous face in a burnt muffin, the Rorscasch test, etc.) Here is an AP story about a nice example: [...]

This video by Telegraph photographer* Stanton Paddock gives a quick look at one of those small but necessary jobs that undermines science and public health: doing species identification on mosquitos trapped in public places as part of keeping an eye on West Nile and EEE - that includes, by the way, the "tuxedo mosquito"! [...]

Here’s a wonderful A.P.story about the state telling people they don’t need to pick up their E-Z Pass responders and wave them around as they go through toll plazas - in fact, doing that might make the devices unreadable. Apparently some folks think it works like swiping a jub of milk over the bar-code scanner [...]

This A.P. rewrite of a Foster’s Daily Democrat story tells the tale: The number of loons counted by volunteers and professionals in annual surveys is down 44 percent in four years, although the decline is variable: the Lakes Region is way down but the Monadnock region seems stable.
Possible reasons for the decline range from [...]

I don’t link linking to the NY Times unnecessarily, since you need to register to read things, but it has a terrific opinion piece today about the way wireless carriers lock up services and hardware in the U.S. (unlike in Europe, where switching carriers ususally means switching smart cards in your phone), and the debate [...]