The Burlington Free-Press has a good story about the aesthetics debate of a single wind tower in Vermont - something to keep in mind as springtime work is soon to begin on New Hampshire’s first wind farm (Lempster Mountain Wind Farm, north of Keene). The money quote: ""We need better direction on how tosite wind [...]

This could be really stupid or really fun: ROFLCon, a convention about Internet memes, from ROFL to Dancing Baby to "all your base" to LOLcats. The pompous description is "a group discussion about Internet culture" but it sounds like it’ll mostly be goofy in-jokes and people wondering whether they can make money off that stuff.
The [...]

The extra financial baggage caused by the credit crisis had some regulators worried, so they held special meetings this weekend on the sale of Verizon’s landlines to FairPoint. But they have let the deal go through anyway. (It officially closed today, with a complicated stock swap.)
I’m not quite sure what else they could have [...]

If your hard drive seems sluggish, chugging away with nary abyte to spare, you have several options, including discarding extraneous filesand defragging your hard drive. But what if you’re still experiencing problems? Your drivecould have something more seriously wrong than simply overcrowded data.
That’swhen you want to run HD Tune, a free utility that runs [...]

From a story in the Telegraph today: "A Hanover area woman who found herself listed onadult sex and swinger Web sites can sue the companies under an ‘intellectual property’ exception to the federal Communications DecencyAct, a judge has ruled."

It’s a complicated and interesting case, yet another example of the legal questions raised by the ever-changing [...]

(I have moved this post up to Saturday as a reminder: Earth Hour is 8 p.m. tonight. And check out Google’s "blacked-out" home page - I think it looks pretty good.)
Advocates are asking people to turn off their lights and non-essential electronics from 8 to 9 p.m. Saturday, to make a statement about how much [...]

All that data swiped by hackers from Hannaford Brothers last week was taken by software that had been secretly installed on servers at each of its more than 300 grocery stores, according to this Globe story.
Frankly, that scenario sounds a lot more alarming than thinking hackers somehow tapped into to a stream of customer [...]

The Burlington Free-Press has a story today - it’s practically a lecture - about computer encryption, focusing on a University of Vermont math professor who’s teaching an course in it, using recent data braches at retailers as the news hook.
The story is a marvel: It actually explains how encryption works, talking about prime [...]

We’ll still be able to use our driver’s licenses to board airplanes and visit federal buildings after May, even though the state government is balking at the Real ID requirement: The feds have given us an extension. Here’s the government’s FAQ about the issue.

It’s time for a little rant about digital cameras, specifically those little bitty pocket cameras that are so popular. They are great cameras, taking wonderful photos BUT. . .
Why are they so hard to use? One of the things I enjoy while traveling and visiting tourist sites is taking photos of families with their camera. [...]

There have been rumblings for ages about a water-purifying system that Kamen’s firm is developing (e.g., this post 15 months ago), but Wired.com has distilled (ha - get it?) information about it from a variety of sources, including Kamen’s appearance on the Colbert Report of all places.
The Slingshot, as it’s called, appears to be [...]

That’s one conclusion to be drawn from a press release sent out by the DoD about research grants to universities around the country.
Two grants went to Dartmouth and one to UNH, so I took at look to see if the research was worth writing about. I found a study about turbulence (important to planes [...]

Illustration from NOAA
No, not deep-fried - "fry" as in immature fish. New Hampshire Fish & Game is looking for folks to help them stock millions of inch-long Atlantic salmon fry in creeks, rivers and streams from the Monadnock region to the upper Connecticut River watershed. It’s a fun excuse to get outdoors in early spring [...]

Best research of the day: Researchers at Wood’s Hole are working on fish that will swim into nets when they hear a tone. Why, you ask? (Good question) From the AP story: "the system could eventually allow black sea bass to be released intothe open ocean, where they would grow to market size, then swim [...]

That’s what a Worcester Polytechnic Institute researchers says. A study of people with and without cancer "show that the odds of developing lung cancerfall below one (the "no effect" level) at radon exposure levels withinthe range measured in about 90 percent of homes across the UnitedStates (about 0-4 picoCuries per liter of air)." In other [...]