In a wonderful example of our irrational animal-centric nature, the Union-Leader reports about the continuing fire on Rattlesnake Mountain, which has undoubtedly consumed scores or hundreds of small mammals, amphibians and birds among its 54 scorched acres - but it hasn’t hurt the one peregrine falcon family we know of!
Environmental activists are well aware [...]

The headline is obvious - it costs less to dispose of a pound of recycled material than a pound of incinerated or landfilled trash - but this Portland Press-Herald story underlines it, saying that increased recycling from the "green" craze is saving cities big bucks.
The most recent NH data (PDF here, from Department of Environmental [...]

Slashdot has all the info - somebody got into Comcast’s account at Network Solutions and repointed the DNS records, and apparently just for the fun of it. No rogue ex-communist mafiosos seeking extortion funds!
ADDENDUM: Wired.com has a story from an interview with the teen-age hackers, who sound slightly startled about what they stumbled into.

UPDATE ON SATURDAY: Apparently it showed an "alien head" peering through a window. Here’s the tongue-in-cheek-ish Rocky Mountain News follow up. I don’t think the video’s on YouTube … yet, anyway.

I can’t do any better than to quote the first two grafs of this Rocky Mountain News story, so I won’t try to:
A video that [...]

Slim pickings in the Granite State geek world today, except this interesting twist on the my-eyes-glaze-over topic of a business conference: Even the business world is jumping all over the "sustainability" wagon.
The conference, to be held Wednesday, June 18, at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, is titled

My kids are preparing for college, so we’ve been beseiged with dead-tree spam from schools for ages. They all (a) show a picture of kids sitting out on the lawn and (b) say they have the best food around.
We got one from Bowdoin College today which fit the cliche list perfectly. And then I [...]

The test of a prototype tidal power generator off Eastport, Maine produced "positive results that clearly demonstrate the technical feasibility" of the technology, says Ocean Renewable Power. The report (in PDF) says the design - horizontal axes driving permanent [...]

At the risk of becoming a NY Times recognition service, they have a good story on Vermont’s debate about nuclear power, triggered by the problems (noted here several times) at Vermont Yankee, a relatively dinky and aging power plant. It touches all the bases on the environmental debate about whether it’s feasible to tackle global [...]

The power of placebos is impressive - why else would homeopathy still be around? - and I’ve always thought it’s a shame we can’t harness this ability of the body to fool itself as part of actual medicine. The problem is that you have to lie to the patient ("This pill does real stuff!") for [...]

I’ve written before about how a lack of real-time feedback makes it hard to reduce energy cost. (Should you heat that pizza in your oven, which is big but efficient, or your toaster oven, which is very inefficient but much smaller? Darned if I know - I can’t get to the oven’s plug to fit [...]

I hadn’t realized the author/artist/whatever of xkcd, an Internet comic strip I have extolled here previously, lives in Somerville, Mass.! The profile says he’s a Peanuts fan (of course; who wouldn’t be?) and grateful that he lives in a post-syndicate world:

UPDATE: A little over 50 people showed up at the planetarium last night to watch TV footage of NASA engineers looking nervous and then cheering. It was fun, in a weird way. According to the Mars Society, this was the only major event for the Phoenix landing in Northern New England. (The Globe [...]

Here’s a link to one of the most viewed but also ignored natural wonders that we all experience.
http://www.cloudappreciationsociety.org/
The cloud appreciation society has a wonderful collection of clouds of all descriptions, photos taken with an eye to the beauty of nature.
Earle Rich - Mont Vernon

It’s hard to believe, but many towns in New Hampshire only started up zoning laws a couple of decades ago. Before that, if you owned a piece of land you could do pretty much whatever you wanted with it. Some "live free or die" fans still think that’s the way it should be - at [...]

Janice Brown’s intriguing Cow Hampshire blog loves New Hampshire historical tidbits, and she’s got an interesting one: The developer of the Gee Bee, a nub-nosed little racer of a propeller airplane that held the world speed record in 1932, is from Madison.She’s even got links to YouTube videos of historic Gee Bee flights.
A historical [...]