I’ve tried to explain RGGI in a number of articles, but I have to admit that the Washington Post has a great multimida-ish explanation of carbon cap-and-trade here that does a better job than I ever have. (I swiped the above image from it.) They’re doing the piece because the Obama administration is talking about creating a national version of our system, too.

How about some more gloomy news, to get you ready for the weekend? Science Daily notes that a study found the hemlock wooly adelgid - an invasive tree-killing pest that has begun to show up in New Hampshire - does more harm to the eastern Hemlock than expected, and does it faster. The study was [...]

At the Verizon Wireless Arena - from 9 to 11:30, then 1 to 4 today, the same tomorrow (Saturday). You can wander in and watch for free; it’s a lot of fun. Here’s the schedule.

In celebration of NASA declaring 2009 the International Year of Astronomy, the University of New Hampshire physics department will present weekend lectures given by faculty, staff, and students .
The lectures are free and open to the public and each date will correspond with free public viewings at the UNH Observatory [...]

Got ideas for ways that New Hampshire should spend the money it gets from the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative? The N.H. Public Utilities Commission wants to hear them.
Actually, they’ve got to be more serious than just ideas. The PUC has issued a request for proposals (RFP) for energy efficiency, conservation, and demand response programs to [...]

Xconomy has a good interview with the president of E-Ink, the Cambridge, Mass. firm that makes the “electronic ink” used in Kindle2 and Sony’s Reader. (It’s in Cambridge because most of the founders met at MIT; that’s why cities love to have good schools.) It’s a good piece, not very technical but valuable for those who dream of building a start-up

This article calls it Boston-based, but we know that Mascoma Corp. is really a Dartmouth spinoff doing its interesting research in Hanover - after all, it’s named after an NH lake. Who cares where the suits work, eh?
Anyway, the article notes that the company  says it has started producing ethanol from wood chips - the [...]

Police in Norwalk, Conn., are asking for the public’s help in solving the murder of Eugene Mallove, the Concord-area science writer who had an international reputation in fringe science areas, particularly those around cold fusion. He was murdered four years ago near where he had grown up. Police arrested two men and said they killed Mallove during a burglary of rental property he owned in Norwalk, but charges were later dropped and now they say they need help. A $50,000 reward is offered.

The UNH power-from-landfill-gas program is getting attention (including from me) because there’s something comically interesting about burning gas from trash, but from an environmental point of view its importance is also due to the fact that it’s a cogeneration plant - that is, it uses waste heat from the electricity-producing turbines to warm up the [...]

My Telegraph column today laments the fact that the digital transition has not been smooth at my house (read it here) - it’s accompanied by a first-person piece by an editor who is among those testing FairPoint’s TV-over-IP service over fiber-optic lines in the Seacoast. Alas, she had to sign a confidentiality agreement to participate, [...]

[lis-copula-function]

If the above formula tweaks your interest,then you have to read this article from Wired.com, about the role played in Wall Street’s demise by the mathematical quantification of risk, as shown in this formula, which I swiped from their Web site. It’s a great read and very informative about how the dazzling power of mathematical terminology helped financers blind themselves to their own idiotic behavior.

Comet Lulin is, in theory, naked-eye visible now - rising in the south-southeast around 9-10 p.m. near the constellation Leo, not far from Saturn. I haven’t seen it myself, because that part of the sky is blocked by tall trees from my house and it’s been too nippy to take a long walk into nearby [...]

It was only a matter of time before white-nose syndrome was found in bats in New Hampshire, since it has been found all around us. The Associated Press reports that this time, alas, is now: Final test results are still being awaited, but it sounds certain that it has been discovered in bats in a Grafton County cave.

A wicked cool video was posted here by Manchester’s Ralph Baer, one of the pioneer inventors of video games, at a site called pongmuseum.com. It shows him and partner Bill Harrison demonstrating a “video ping pong” in 1969, three years before Pong was released into arcades.  Check it out!
I’ve written about Baer a number [...]

This was inevitable: One governor wants to take some of the money collected by the carbon cap-and-trade system for utility plants (Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, RGGI) and use it for something other than energy efficiency, which was the whole idea of RGGI from the get-go. Here’s the Baltimore Sun story.