My daughter posts to LiveJournal where she made some comments on this list of books that we MUST read during our lifetime. I’ve read a few of them, but I expect most people are doing quite well without having most of these cluttering up their wet memory banks.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/23/bestbooks-fiction
When I was a teenager, I made a [...]

In the category “no local connection, but quite geeky”, we have this: A small flurry of news come up late this week saying that a 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant in Sweden had solved a four-century old mathematics problem regarding Bernoulli numbers. Alas, it’s not true, as Uppsalla University had to announce: He discovered the solution, but [...]

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how I’d had to wrap our tree-mounded wooden birdhouses with plastic bags because a woodpecker was using them as sounding boards to brrraaaaat-tat-tat-tat pause) tat-tat for hours, starting before dawn, in some endless territorial/mating signal. It was amazing how loud the result was - and it drove us bonkers. According to “Something Wild”, the short nature snippets that appear on New Hampshire Public Radio, this is standard woodpecker behavior.

Because of runoff from nearly (relatively) Greenland and ocean coastal patterns, melting glaciers from the world’s biggest island will raise ocean levels in the Northeast U.S. and Maritime Candad by an extra foot or so above the foot or two rise expected from overal global warming, says a new study.  (Science Daily story here.) The [...]

OK, I’ll admit it … Prodigy and America Online were my first online outlets. They were crummy, of course, but I’m still kind of nostalgic about AOL version 2.5 and those clunky enormous Prodigy fonts. I remember being astonished when AOL bought CompuServe - wow, David bought Goliath! - although by the time the Time [...]

This article by me appeared in the May 17,2009, edition of the Telegraph. It’s currently hard to find due to Web hosting issues, so I have cut-and-pasted it here, in order that I can link to it!

By DAVID BROOKS
Telegraph Staff

Jon Hall, of Amherst, has the most celebrated license plate in New Hampshire. Actually, it’s more [...]

Why are student spelling bees (pointless exercises in rote pattern spewage) so popular, whereas student math contests (multi-faceted competitions measuring deep knowledge and understanding) couldn’t buy an audience with love nor money? Because most people can sort of spell, but can’t do any math beyond two-digit multiplication - that’s why. Blame those humanities majors who run the world!

The approval process isn’t completely done but it’s just about there, as the Union-Leader reports: The 33-turbine, 99-megawatt wind farm north of Berlin got the approval fo the state Site Evaluation Committee.
Concerns had been riased that the project over a long set of ridgelands would affect several species. As part of a mitigation plan, [...]

What do crop fires in Asia have to do with the melting Arctic? Quite a lot, it turns out. For two years, scientists – including UNH’s Jack Dibb of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans and Space (EOS) – looked at how pollutants from “down south” affected the Arctic. Known as POLARCAT, the [...]

I have a story in the Telegraph today about Spica Tech, a small (6-person) firm in Hollis that does laser-damage testing on much of the optics used in the National Ignition Facility in California, the latest attempt to create “hot fusion”. I’m not holding my breath that NIF will succeed, but it is very cool Big Science. I couldn’t fit one interesting side point into the story: One of the most interesting hoped-for projects from the NIF is called LIFE, which would take spent fuel from atomic reactors and make it usable for fission power again. Here’s part of the decription from the Web site:

Click and Clack are based in Cambridge, Mass., so this is a legitimate local topic: The Car Talk Web site now has a section all about hybrid cars. Like almost everybody I know, I love “Car Talk” and the Car Talk guys - who are probably the most famous MIT grads alive today. By the way, their NPR bio says they started out in a “do-it-yourself” garage in Cambridge called “Hacker’s Haven” which provided rented space and tools for people to fix their own autos. Open-source automotive repair!

Thanks to this piece in Salon titled “Why the 2012 cult is a silly scam,” I found research by Dartmouth geography professor Vincent Malstrom titled “The Astronomical Insignificance of Maya Date 13.0.0.0″ which shows how ridiculous the whole thing is.

The Wolfram Alpha search engine - actually, more of a database manager -  will tell me: Hubble will be overhead shortly after 5 a.m. tomorrow (Tuesday, May 26). I don’t think I’ll get up to see it.
The WolframAlpha is fun to play with (New Hampshire’s population is 110.8% larger than Vermont’s) although it’s wildly incomplete, [...]

There are occasions when I think I’m reasonable geeky, at least for a newspaperman: For example, the son of a friend of mine is doing a high school project about mathematical development in the Renaissance, and I was able to bury him with books about the history of math* - books that nobody except me [...]

I stumbled on an intriguing site today, in which somebody claims to have developed a formula that, with reasonable accuracy, predicts the distribution of word lengths in English-language  dictionaries of various sizes - the idea being that bigger dictionaries have room for more obscure, long words.
Here is his site, for more details: http://www.thefreelibrary.com/On+word-length+and+dictionary+size.-a0189832222
And here is [...]