The dream of any state is to have a self-generating industry, a la Silicon Valley - an industry that spontaneously grows it own companies, better than any other location does. Minicomputers are the obvious Boston-area example; biotech hasn’t quite gotten there yet. This Globe article raises the hope that robotics might do it. From the [...]

Picture this: You’ve just taken pictures at your neighborhood’s annual block party. Now it’s time to post them the neighborhood Web site for those who purposely missed the gala celebration. “Who’s that with the ape mask on? Must be Andy, he’s always a jerk at these parties,” you think. As you move the cursor over [...]

On another political note … the Democratic National Convention was big on "green" hype, but as this report from CNet notes, had some trouble following through:

"Bikes aren’t permitted inside the convention’s security perimeter, sogolf carts and other vehicles are used. The wooden card keys provedbuggy, and some were replied with more reliable plastic. Fried mini-donuts [...]

It’s ground-breaking that an African-American has gotten a major party nomination for president, as it will be one day when a woman gets a nomination, or a Latino, or a Jew.
But here’s a historic change in presidential nominees I’d like to see: Somebody with scientific training. As far as I can tell, no president has [...]

I finally heard from Iberdrola, the Spanish renewable-energy giant that is building New Hampshire’s first wind farm out on Lempster Mountain. Construction is finally beginning and they do plan to have all 12 turbines (24 megawatt total) sending power into the grid this year. They’ll have a media day, perhaps as early as next week, [...]

The Wall Street Journal’s Numbers Guy column says Prof. Andrew Bernard of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth did the best job of using economic and historical models to predict national medal hauls at the recent Olympics, beating similar efforts at Colorado College and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
However, none of them was particularly close.

I liked this NY Times article about the growing business by retailers (notably Best Buy) of removing installed bloatware from new PCs and how it threatens the slim profit margins of computer firms. I hate all the crud that clutters a new computer … on the other hand, I like the fact that computers are [...]

The geek-fave comic strip xkcd calls itself "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language" … but I don’t think I’ve ever seen math and sex mixed quite as well as the most recent comic.
Maybe Hofstadter should have titled it "Godel, Escher, Lust"

The NY Times has a story about the "dirty secret" of alternative energy - that we don’t have the power grid to move electricity from non-traditional electricity plants (wind farms, solar farms) to population centers.
This is hardly a secret in New Hampshire, of course, where the need for at least $100 million in line [...]

My Telegraph column this week is about Nashua-based Sky-Skan, which makes equipment for displays at planetariums. Those of us who grew up snoozing through clumps of pinpoint lights in the dome ceiling and the occasional grainy slide may not realize how much planetarium shows have changed.

GT Solar of Merrimack has had issues since it went public - some folks are suing because they say the company withheld bad news until after it started selling shares - but it posted a real profit ($5 million) last quarter, according to this report. The company makes equipment used to make photovoltaic equipment, and [...]

Now that I’ve ridden Acela to D.C. a couple of times, I’ll never fly that route again if I can avoid it. It takes longer and usually costs more (unless you go at weird times) but the trip is so pleasant compared to aviation hell that it’s worth it.
Apparently I’m not alone: as the [...]

This story from The Register notes that a Canada study says that wind turbines kill bats not by hitting them - echo-location allows bats to avoid the blades - but by causing a sharp drop in air pressure which expands the air in the mammals’ lungs and causes hemorrhaging.
From the story: "The findings indicated that [...]

I can’t find any New Englanders involved, but this is too much fun to ignore: Symmetry, the trade journal of the Fermilab/Stanford Linear Accelerator, did a great article about vanity license plates owned by some of its physicists, like the one shown here. The best are the competing positron and electron license plates.

Here’s a scary story - a guy has hacked one of an RFID toll road systems that is like EazyPass, although this system is in San Francisco.
From the Technology Review story, spotted via Slashdot: "fraudsters could clone transponders … by copying the ID ofanother driver onto their device. As a result, they could travel [...]