The old Cranmore Mountain skimobile on a postcard; image from Teachski.com
If you’ve ever wondered "what’s the radius of a pure carved turn?" and how best to factor in the inclination angle of the skier’s leg vs. the inclination angle of the slope, then this site (from the University of Utah math department) is for [...]

As if often the case, User Friendly says it best.

Six inches.
There - a nice quick answer. (Of course, there are variables, as this PDF of a state safety booklet for ice fishermen makes clear). From a state press release: "The Cold Region Research Laboratory in Hanover offers a rule of thumbon ice thickness, suggesting that there should be a minimum of sixinches of hard [...]

No local connection again, but I thought you’d enjoy this amazing video I found in New Scientist’s roundup of its favorite science videos of the year. It shows what happens if you take cornflour/water "oobleck" with its wonderful properties (it is a liquid when still, and a solid when agitated) and subject it to sound [...]

Because of the clouds and fog from sublimation from the snow, it’s really dark this morning. But then, we still haven’t gotten to the latest sunrise of the year, which doesn’t happen until Jan. 4 (although the change in sunrise times in minuscule this time of year - it will be around 7:14 a.m. for [...]

This story has absolutely no connection to New Hampshire, but who can resist this sentence: "There are no regulations governing the possession of hallucinogenic toads."

An "open-access, fixed, wireless broadband infrastructure" (i.e., wireless broadband towers) throughout Carroll, Grafton and Coos counties would be great for the fast-Internet-starved North Country. But I’m afraid $686,000isn’t going to get a whole lot of that done. There’s a lot of empty space to fill, up there.
Still, the amount, a federal grant, will help.

It’s an obvious choice, but certainly the biggest sci/tech story of the year in and around New Hampshire was the variety of efforts to face our energy-usage problems, whether to fight global warming, cut down other pollution, or reduce dependence on foreign oil.
The big actions were regulatory (like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative) and financial [...]

There’s a Texas professor who has been a longtime critic of that state’s lottery system - as well as other state lotteries - because he says they mislead players by doing such things as continuing to sell instant scratch tickets even after the top prizes have been won. He has ranked all 47 state lottery [...]

In a desperate scrounge for material - by which I mean, of course, as part of my ceaseless efforts to entertain and inform GraniteGeek readers - I came across this entertaining rant about pseudo-scientific formulas developed to illuminate everyday life. A classic example is the "beer goggle effect", whch uses this formula to determine how [...]

The Union-Leader’s Lorna Colquhoun - North Country reporter par excellence - has a nice feature today on a "17 or 18 year old" cat that has lived in the summit buildings of Mount Washington for a decade. He’s being retired to the flatlands (it’s Gorham, so only flat-ish) to be closer to a veterinarian in [...]

It’s Christmas - go spend time with friends and family, for crying out loud!

Neat Globe story about research that finds spices from seasonal baking can be found in waterways during the holidays - an indication of how the stuff we send down the sink and/or toilet doesn’t just disappear. This is no problem with sugar and spice, but it can be a problem with drugs.

Traffic is, I think, what is known in mathematics/computer science as an NP problem - so hard that it can’t be solved by algorithms. (NP stands for "Non-deterministic Polynomial time" meaning roughly that a computer would have to run forever to solve it.)
So I love this story about a town in Germany that [...]

The last 10-15 years have seen most communities in New Hampshire, except the very smallest, develop some sort of local-access channel, where you can watch selectmen’s meetings or school board meetings or planning board meetings, either live or taped. It’s about as un-sexy as TV gets, but it’s an important part of a working democracy, [...]