I was, alas, not one of the people who attended last week’s taping of the NPR comedy quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me" at the Palace Theater in Manchester: I had to listen to it later (streaming online here). Dean Kamen was the guest, and host Peter Sagal made a point that had [...]

When measuring wind speed or air movement, we have quite a few choices. The ones we used for windmill site monitoring was a rotating cup anemometer as a zero power, rugged sensor. The rotating part inside the housing is typically a cylindrical magnet with 4 poles. We had Maximum, the manufacturer make 8 pole magnets [...]

The Sunday Telegraph takes a look at a trio of state blogs that are specializing in presidential-primary politics. At least one is beginning to get press invitations to some campaign events.
And in the "plus ca change" category, I’m old enough to remember writing "Hey look - this presidential campaign has a real Web site!" [...]

Fans of big project engineering should head down to Nantucket tomorrow to see the 500-ton Santaky Head Lighthouse moved 400 feet. As the Sunday Globe reports, erosion is threatening it, so it’s being shifted.
From the story: "The company overseeing theSankaty Lighthouse move, International Chimney Corp., a company basedin Buffalo, previously handled the moves of two [...]

It’s kind of silly - I can’t imagine that wind patterns in the middle of a high-rise-filled city are terribly useful - but Boston Mayor Manino’s vague idea to stick a wind turbine in the ugly, empty City Hall Plaza at least shows that the "green geek" phenomenon has gone mainstream.
Hey, if Unitil [...]

I saw this on Slashdot, so you’ve probably already seen it, but here’s an estimate that computers, data centers, modems and the phone network needed for current Internet usage use up 350 billion killowatthours in the U.S., about 9 1/2 percent of our total power usage. Globally, the estimate (which is pretty back-of-the-envelope-ish) is that [...]

(Tabloid fodder, me?) They’re going to take a DNA sample from the "mummy baby" to see if it’s really related to the folks who have been putting it on display for years. They say it’s a great-uncle’s stillborn child, but if they’re not related, under state law they have to bury it.

I may be getting too inside-baseball here, but I was very interested in this piece about how science journalism, like journalism in general, in trying to survive in the face of the Internet. It’s written by a science journalist talking about creating what a few years ago would have been a long, wordy piece concerning [...]

As New Hampshire again prepares to become the prettiest place in the universe, here’s a N.Y. Times story (reg req’d) about a poison oak festival in California, celebrating that nasty plant’s lovely autumn hues.
Speaking as somebody who gets nailed badly by poison ivy - the ugly patch on the back of my right hand [...]

Our little town of Mont Vernon, New Hampshire has an annual "any excuse for a party" gala where we have a big parade (kids with crepe paper-decorated bikes, floats with goats, local politicians and anyone else with a message) along with our library used book sale. One year we had a LOT of books, textbooks, [...]

This occurred in Scotland - but, hey, we’ve got seagulls in New Hampshire, too, so it’s kind of local! The wonderful Snopes site that examines urban legends checked into a report that a seagull has learned to sneak into a shop in Aberdeen, Scotland, when the owner isn’t looking, and swipe bags of Doritos. A [...]

As part of a series this month in Wired magazine about biofuels, there’s a profile of Dartmouth’s Lee Lynd (click through to the second page of that article), who is trying to tease the raw materials of ethanol out of tree chips and other cheap, but hard to crack open, plant material. We’ve mentioned Lynd [...]

One of those ponderous statues of somebody-or-other in Harvard Yard was transformed into a ‘Halo 3′ hero by MIT pranksters.
Such hacks are, of course, part of the MIT aura, celebrated by the administration as a way to lure new students.As I’ve noted before, that leads to the odd situation where the establishment celebrates acts [...]

If the "of course" in the following sentence doesn’t strike you as funny - "65,535, of course, is the highest number that can be represented by an unsigned 16 bit binary number" - then I’m sure you already know about the odd arithmetic error in Excel 2007.
Otherwise, you might be surprised to learn that any [...]

I can’t imagine this will fly in live-free-or-die land, but Mike Kaelin, a state representative from Lyndeborough who is a big alt-energy fan (his home is entirely off the grid; I first met him several years ago, doing a story about such folks) may introduce a bill that would eventually ban standard light bulbs, forcing [...]