A judge has bought a Boston University study guilty of downloading 30 songs illegally and sharing them online, and fined him $22,500 per song. Here’s the short, pithy Boston Globe article. Unlike the failed RIAA attempt to fine a Hudson NH woman (you remember this, right?), there was no question about the downloading this time: [...]

Sometimes, when you go to a hospital or emergency room, check out the electrical outlets on the wall. If they were installed correctly, the ground side will be up, opposite to what you usually see in a residence.

What? Why are these installed differently?

The reason is for safety. If an outlet [...]

I’ve been a collector of magnets for many years. Cruising through Harbor Freight, Radio Shack or even Tractor Supply, I’m always attracted to any unusual magnets that might create some interesting experiment. My large band saw is covered with all types of magnets. I’m always harvesting one for temporary hold downs for jigs and fixtures. [...]

I’ve been known to subscribe to way too many magazines, totaling around 36 that I’m paying for right now. Some of these, like PC Magazine have forgone the dead tree approach and have gone over to the dark side, delivering information entirely on the internet. I think that may be a good thing in the [...]

 
http://www.homeenergyamericas.com/energyball.htm
My brother sent this link to me as something they are considering for Acadia National Park in Maine. It’s an artistic approach to harvesting useful energy from the wind. They have an interesting interpretation of the energy content in the swept area of the machine.
“Due to the unusual and exceptional aerodynamics characteristics of the Energy [...]

I’ve been paying attention to frog populations around the world. I’ve even noticed that our little pond seemed to have diminished numbers the past couple of years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_amphibian_populations
Not this year though. Perhaps due to the extreme amount of rain or that I’ve scared off a visiting Great Blue Heron a couple of times has improved [...]

When I was in the Navy on the guided missile test ship, the USS Norton Sound, we spent a lot of time in the Pacific slowly cruising at night, just barely making steerage way. The ship was a converted seaplane tender and still had the tall crane on the port side formerly used for servicing [...]

It would have been hard to spot without binoculars and no one would have heard the stealthy aircraft, but a National Aeronautics and Space Administration ER-2 scientific plane recently photographed the Durham/UNH campus area from the edge of outer space with a camera that “sees” in 242 spectral bands of light.
The [...]

The Globe has a piece today about a project by MIT’s Senseable City Lab, which develops and studies the use of small sensors in understanding urban areas - this project involves putting smart tags on bits of trash to see where they really go.
The three pieces involved in the Boston test, the article says, were [...]

Anybody who has done work on an old house knows that they have their charms - right angles are for wimps! - but that making them energy efficient is very, very hard. Homes sag, wood swells and shrinks, ants and rot and moisture wreak havoc, and the result is that filling up all the energy-losing [...]

I can find nothing geeky in New England this morning, so let’s just note something very very New Englandy: A snazzy vending machine that sells bait for fishing. I can do no better than quote the lede of this story in Foster’s Daily Democrat, datelined Kittery, Maine:
You know you’re in coastal Maine when you’re at [...]

Those of you who love the details of real-world electrical systems must read this post from Granite Viewpoint, a Seacoast blog, about some weird effects of compact fluorescent bulbs when operating the house on a generator during power outages. It turns out that these bulbs have a very large instantaenous power draw when starting (perhaps [...]

I don’t know what things are like where you live, but where I live, purple loosestrife seems to be retreating.

The seasonal creek/wetland that runs through my property used to be choked with with this pretty invasive, but over the last three years they have virtually disappeared. They’re also gone from my little pond, where they were doing the astonishing task of out-competing cattails. They’re gone from the bigger pond across the street, and wet areas that I drive past daily seem far less lavender-colored than they used to be.

This link discusses the way humans and animals see the world. It got me to thinking about my own sense of color and how it differs from ‘normal’ people. My wife has much better sight for detail in the midst of chaos than I do. When we are out in the woods, she can see [...]

I’m late on this, as the legislature passed the law last month and Lynch signed it a week ago, but let’s celebrate the passage of HB585, which carries the euphonious title “AN ACT relative to outdoor lighting efficiency”. (Why do laws have names that sound like the chapters of a Dickens novel?)

Basically it’s a “dark sky” law, setting standards for outdoor lighting to reduce light pollution of various kinds.