Some coworkers have enjoyed tweaking me since the news came out that a local math teacher won a “million dollar” scratch ticket in the NH Lottery (he took the $650,000 payout, hence the quotation marks) because I have frequently written about the mathematical absurdity of expecting to win in lotteries. I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing this math teacher realized that the odds were very, very much improved in this unusual case. In fact, they were just about even!

In a new report, Environment New Hampshire crunches the numbers and says that in 2006, NH spent $3,118 per person on fossil fuels, a number that could rise as much as 45 percent over the next two decades. More than three-quarters of that is spent on oil, rather than coal or natural gas; this percentage is higher than in many other states thanks to the Northeast’s historic dependence on heating oil (which is what my house uses).

University of New Hampshire physics professor Roy Torbert has been selected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a new member of the NASA Advisory Council (NAC). Torbert, interim director of the UNH Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS), will join the 35-member council that provides [...]

What will happen to the 10-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative if the U.S. Senate also approves a national cap-and-trade system? (Here’s a Washington Post article about the legislation, which was narrowly OK’d by the U.S. House.) I asked that question a few months ago in preparation for the March RGGI auction, and the official response was that it would take so long for a national system to get set up that it wouldn’t immediately affect RGGI, which under its current iteration runs through 2012 and then restarts.

The other uncertainty, however, is what a national system would do to RGGI’s price - although I suppose that would depend on whether RGGI allowances can be swapped over to a national system. (If they can’t, there will be a lot of pissed-off utilities!)

The weirdly named Vinalhaven (not “vinyl-haven” so don’t go there looking for LPs) is the largest of Maine’s year-round islands. As the Portland Press-Herald reports, it is installing three 1.5-MW wind turbines that it expects will lower electric rates 20 percent, because they’ll sell excess power into the grid. This has helped the project get [...]

It’s hard to think of a good fund-raiser, but the Boy Scouts have one: For $1,000, you can rappel off New Hampshire’s tallest building. Here’s the Union-Leader story. They say 100 people can participate in the August event - very cool.
The article says the state’s tallest building, the Brady-Sullivan office tower (a boring glass-and-steel rectangular [...]

You never how other people are going to react, do you? Consider this feeble little joke that I ran in today’s Telegraph, making fun of our lack of sunshine:
Officials are cautioning area residents not to be startled today about the possible appearance overhead of a luminous body of spectral class G2, luminosity class V. Although [...]

Today’s rerun Peanuts comic strip has Linus celebrating because his security blanket - lost when sister Lucy made it into a kite that got away and floated out over the ocean  - was rescued by the Air Rescue Service. It concludes with a punch line that will baffle 95 percent of readers: Charlie Brown says [...]

The Union-Leader has a story today about Epping police (not exactly “small-town” but not big city either) putting out a query on Twitter to catch a litterbug. The story says the cops have 129 “followers” on Twitter that they can use as insta-sources.
Depending on your point of view, this is an interesting example of a [...]

Here’s another objective confirmation of our cloudy present: The above graphic is from the Fat Spaniel site that records solar-power collection for a variety of small and midsize facilities around the country. This chart is for a good-sized (38.8 KW) rooftop panel on MIT’s Building 57 - but look at those green bars! At this time of year (summer solstice, you know) it should be generating at least 300 KWH a day, but for all practical purposes over the past week there has only been one day with sunshine. With today’s downpour, I wouldn’t look for much of a change.

For all those weather watchers in the Granite State, the University of New Hampshire and National Weather Service want you. The state has joined 44 other states using a network of community volunteers to measure precipitation. The project, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS), is a joint effort of UNH and the [...]

The Coos County Democrat has a very good, detailed piece today about the effort required to move a massive electric transformer, one part of which weighs 227 tons, on the Conway Scenic Railroad to a PSNH substation in Conway.
The author, Edith Tucker, must either be an engineer or a train geek. Consider these meaty paragraphs:
The [...]

HowManyOfMe.com

There are
3,742
people with my name in the U.S.A.

How many have your name?

This widget is from the site How Many of Me, which takes Census data about name frequencies in the US and multiplies first name and last name to arrive at this amusing if not exactly cast-in-stone estimate. The wikipedia article on “David Brooks” has [...]

The Boston Globe has a story today that every reporter in this soggy, cloudy month wanted: Accurate measurement of how much sunshine we’ve had. Not how much rain, but how much sunshine. (Answer: The second lowest amount of any June since 1903. So far, we have received 32 percent of the total possible sunshine, whereas [...]

There is a full page ad in a recent Telegraph paper about a miracle product that promises to keep you cool for only pennies a day. The concept is that you insert a reuseable “glacier ice block” and the fan, blowing past this block, cools the room.
The claim that it only uses about the same amount of [...]