In honor of the Ig Nobel awards happening tomorrow, my column today in the Telegraph re-examines the contentious issue of past Ig winners from New Hampshire. By doing some creative number-crunching, I have made a 180 degree turn from my long-held position: Instead of lamenting the lack of NH winners, I now celebrate New Hampshire as an Ig Nobel factory!

The Kansas State University Geography department mapped county-by-county data of various types to measure the prevalence of the “seven deadly sins” throughout the country. New Hampshire showed up as bad only in the “envy” category, in which they measured high-income folks vs. those in poverty. Wired.com has a good little summary here. The accompanying map taken from it shows red in the places with high income inequality, green in places with low inequality.

One of the most surprising stories in recent days (IMHO, of course) is the way three large utilities have left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce because of its stance over global warming - the utilities think the chamber isn’t taking the problem seriously enough! When electric power companies are acting like environmental activists, the times [...]

Remember when “chaos theory” and “complex systems” first hit the public consciousness? (I have a copy of James Gleick’s “Chaos” on my bookshelves, and you probably do too - unless you’re young, which case you’re saying “what are these bookshelves of which you speak?”).
One of the most prominent names in those early years was Stuart [...]

Here at the Telegraph we are switching the newsroom over to a new system, designed to make it easier to integrate the Web and print. Today is the big day for the switch. I’m sure it will go smoothly - (pause for riotous laughter) - but I suspect I won’t be posting much as a [...]

Harvard will host the 19th first-annual Ig Nobel prize on Thursday (hope you have a ticket; they’re virtually sold out). In the 16 years that I have attended the Igs have gone from obscure to globally celebrated within a certain demographic, and it’s very rare to encounter any criticism of them.

But here’s an interesting and mildly critical take from a visiting reader - sort of an associate professor, I think - at a British university, who argues that we must be careful not to make too much fun of trivial research because sometimes it leads scientists into unexpected depths:

Over the years I have written more stories than I care to remember about “leaf-peeping” - the autumnal rite of gazing at New England’s gorgeous deciduous forests while the leaves change color. I’ve written about the science of why leaves change color, the economics of its tourism, the effects of climate change and, in a [...]

Can you imagine New Hampshire without the White Mountain Observatory - the winter trips to the “worst weather in the world”, the visitor center at the top of the mountain road (so annoying to hikers who have slogged all the way up), the weather reports on New Hampshire Public Radio?

No, of course not. So I’m happy to report the not-exactly-unexpected news that the state has approved a new five-year lease allowing the observatory to stay

Is it time to start worrying about a green-tech bubble? A123 Systems, the Watertown, Mass. developer of lithium-ion batteries for cars and industrial uses, made $380 million in its Initial Public Offering yesterday. Much of that will be used to match stimulus funding to build a manufacturing plant in Michigan. Here’s the Globe story; here’s [...]

My Telegraph column yesterday was about reports of a decline of birds at local bird-feeders - the essence of the column was that it may not be a problem, partly because bird populations fluctuate all the time, partly because it’s hard for individuals to see the big picture and know what’s going on in statewide [...]

Even as some people are thinking about using some of the hundreds of small dams in New England for hydropower (as I wrote here), others are being removed to aid fish passage. The latest is the removal of the Winnicut River Dam in Greenland*, N.H., which  is getting underway at the cost of many hundreds [...]

Jackson Labs in Bar Harbor, Maine, is known to any lab technician in biological sciences, because for decades they have been the gold standard for breeding laboratory mice. When it burned down in 1989, there was panic among white-coated PH.Ds from Tokyo to Harvard to Germany, but it bounced back; now it has1,400 employees and a $169 million budget.

All this raises a question though: What the heck is a scientifically important place like that doing in Bar Harbor? Mass High Tech answer that question in this short story. In brief: Somebody donated the land for it.

The MacArthur Foundation $500,000 “genius grants” were announced today. Nobody won in northern New England winners; two local-ish winners of interest to GraniteGeek were Harvard scientist/researchers - climate scientist Peter Huybers, who does research on modeling for long-term patterns, and mathematician L. Mahadevan (his first name is so long that nobody writes it out), whose [...]

Next week (Sept. 25) is the deadline for nominees to the N.H. High-Tech Council’s Product of the Year.
The first judging of all applications takes place by Oct. 5. Selected semi-finalists will present their products to judges on Oct. 14 in Manchester.  Up to five finalists will present their products in a trade show format that [...]

The Pew Research Center has a science knowledge quiz online (here it is) - 12 questions, ranging from tectonic plates to antibiotics to astronomy. If you’re a GraniteGeek regular, you’d better get 100 on this pretty easy test, as did 10 percent of the 1,005 randomly samples adults who took it.*
The quiz is “part of [...]