And you’d get something like this two-side-by-side-wheeled, gyro-balanced, electric something-or-other profiled in the Chicago Tribune. It’s called the Uno (the Web site is sparse - you’ll learn more at the article) and while I doubt it’ll drive Dean Kamen out of business, it’s way cool. The photo above is a photo by the inventor, shown [...]

A couple of days ago I posted an item about a guy in Germany who has built a hack that projects images onto surfaces just as they’re being photographed by somebody else - effectively placing that image into your photo. Clever and incredibly annoying.
Wired has a follow-up about all the attention he has drawn from [...]

I’m a little late on this, but it’s interesting: Last week there was a conference about non-compete clauses (if you leave my company you can’t work for my rivals), which are prevalent in Massachusetts business, especially in high-tech, biotech and other industries depending on intellectual property. According to this article in Network World, the conclusion [...]

Videophiles will find much to like in Avidemux, anopen-source video editor heavy on features but light on installeddocumentation. Nevertheless, Avidemux contains sophisticated features worthy ofany mid-level commercial package with its abilities to cut, filter, and encodefiles. Among the file types it supports are AVI, DVD-compatible MPEG files, andMP4.
If you’re a new videographer, you might findAvidemux [...]

In my lifetime, three astonishing events have happened - ones that I never would have predicted as a know-it-all teen: 1. The fall of the Soviet Union and communism. 2. The end of public smoking in the U.S. 3. The sharp decline in the world’s birthrate.
The last is the most important, of course, and [...]

Many economists, but not all, say that a straightforward carbon tax would be a better way of reducing greenhouse emissions than a cap-and-trade system, because there’s less room for political wiggling and businesses know the cost of their pollution more easily. North America will get a little test of that debate soon: British Columbia is [...]

http://www.choosingvoluntarysimplicity.com/tiny-eastern-american-toads-nature/
The invasion of the toads has occured again. The driveway is covered with thousands of these small toads, about half the size of a dime. We get lots of these every couple of years.
Best description is "cute".

For a while, Gene Mallove was probably New Hampshire’s highest-profile scientist - although he didn’t get much mainstream support because his forte was championing cold fusion (he wrote "Fire from Ice," a 1989 book about the Pons/Fleischman controversy, and co-founded "Cold Fusion" magazine, which is now "Infinite Energy").
Unfortunately, Mallove was murdered in 2004 while [...]

The Globe’s Braniac blog has an item (which it found via Make) about something called a Fulgurator, which detects flash photographs and projects a very short-term image at just that instant. The result is that the subject of the photograph has text or images superimposted on it in the photograph, even though that text/image wasn’t [...]

Catamount Energy in Rutland, Vt., which has been developing wind farms since 2001, has been bought by North Carolina-based Duke Energy for (whew!) $240 million.
Quarter of a billion here, quarter of a billion there - pretty soon you’re talking real money.

New Hampshire Fish & Game is proposing to tweak its list of species that are endangered or threatened in the state. (This tweaking is required by federal law). A hearing on the plan is set for July 9 at the Fish & Game offices in Concord. Here are the changes they propose:
SPECIES THAT ARE DOING [...]

I can’t find anything local to discuss this morning, so in a desperate attempt to feed the blog beast - er, that is, to provide compelling content - I’d like to draw your attention to a fascinating Op-Ed (if that isn’t an oxymoron) at the N.Y. Times, arguing that Web 2.0 content can undermine terrorist [...]

But that’s a good thing, at least in and around Lake Champlain, where the lampreys are an invasive species that is harming the local trout, among other fish. A federal and state "The program treats each spawning river with a lamprey-killing pesticide every four years, and erects physical barriers to spawning lamprey on smaller streams," [...]

One of the arguments against various solar power projects, including solar electric or wind, is that being intermittant, it can’t be depended on as a source of power. Whenever a new wind project is proposed, the percentage of availability is touted as the main reason we shouldn’t visually foul our ridgelines or farms with those [...]

My Telegraph column today talks about a local company, Beacon Power in Tyngsborough, that’s developing utility-grade flywheel systems to store 25 kwh as part of load-leveling. Short-term storage is one of the systems needed if alternative energy is going to be a big part of the grid.
(ADDENDUM: Mass.-based A123 batteries says its lithium-ion batteries can [...]