The “Katrina of oil spills” spreading in the Gulf of Mexico right now is a reminder that (a) we in New England use a lot of oil, because we heat our homes with it more than any other part of the country, and (b) we almost had a huge offshore refinery at the Isles of [...]

Nothing of local interest today, so let us admire this website, called Good Show Sir, which features photographs of really, really back science fiction and fantasy paperbacks. And you can’t get worse than bad sci-fi cover art - even bad detective story art and bad romance-novel art isn’t as bad, because those two are so predictable; bad sci-fi art can go ANYWHERE.

I show you the above book (Heinlein’s “The Star Beast”) because I own it. I hadn’t really admired its cover-art awfulness before now, however …

PSNH has created a real-time map of New Hampshire to reflect power outages on a town-by-town basis. It’s a nice example of a database-based scripting interface, or something like that. Here it is.
PSNH also has a decent Twitter feed that is used for breaking news.

The third annual Formula Hybrid Competition is next week at New Hampshire International Speedway. It’s a version of a long-running college competition in which schools build miniature formula racecars (think FIRST Robotics meets Grand Prix), except the cars are electric/gas hybrids. It’s sponsored by Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering. I covered the very first one [...]

Sports Illustrated reports that Graduating UNH Tight End Scott Sicko has changed his mind about forgoing an NFL career to pursue post-graduate studies.
It seems the world will have to wait for a Dr. Sicko, unless he recieves an honorary degree in Special Teams.

Boston.com, the online face of the Boston Globe, says that the Interior secretary will, about an hour from now, give  the thumbs up to Cape Wind off Cape Cod, launching the nation’s first offshore wind farm and probably setting the stage for a bunch of multi-hundred-megawatt turbines a few miles offshore up and down the [...]

Nashua has triangular manhole covers, making it virtually unique in a world filled with circular and, occasionally, square manhole covers. I love writing about them, but I just got a phone call from somebody reading a 2003 story on the topic - and he found a geometry mistake!
I wrote “A square manhole cover could fall [...]

There’s a great quote in this Globe story (read it here) about Joule Unlimited in Cambridge, Mass., which just got $30 million in venture capital to fund R&D for its hush-hush method of making diesel substitute by using “an unnamed organism — not algae — that sits in a device similar to a [...]

I am going to Manchester today to take a look at HeatNE: Heating the Northeast with Biomass, a conference about making more use of burning wood to reduce fossil fuel usage. So I couldn’t help but notice this story in the Globe, about $3.2 million in stimulus funds helping western Mass. convert from oil-burning to [...]

No? Yes? Huh?
Well, I guess an earthquake is better than a Black Hole or a Time Travelling Bird(he poops on your car before its even there!)

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/04/26/sony-to-stop-manufacturing-floppy-discs-after-30-years/
Sony is stopping production of the 3.5″ floppy disc. I can’t say that I’m sorry to see the end of them.
When I bought my first computer that didn’t have a disc drive, I bought a USB powered floppy drive, just in case I might need to recover some older files. I think I used it [...]

While volunteering at the Life Enrichment Center in Florida this winter, I did the usual miscellaneous jobs that always need doing. My primary responsibility though was to look into possible energy savings. This is important because of the nasty penalty that the local energy company imposes when we go over a defined KWH limit. That [...]

Slate has a great piece with a great headline (”I tried to sauté my brain at the base of a cell phone tower. It didn’t work.”) about anti-wireless folks who whip up fears about electronic signals and what they might be doing to our systems. It takes a few shooting-fish-in-a-barrel potshots at “electro-sensitive” hypochondriacs, but [...]

My Telegraph column today is a bit of a grab-bag about solar power. In it, I say that I’ll explain a couple of items here, that I didn’t have room for in print. So here goes:

I calculated the efficiency of the 51.3-kilowatt solar installation on the roof of PSNH’s headquarters in Manchester because it is connected to FatSpaniel software, which provides remote access to data about solar power production. (Here’s the site - play with it yourself!)

1. From the start of August 2009 (it wasn’t online for all of July) through the end of March 2010, we find a total generation of 26,227 kilowatt-hours. Those 8 months had 243 days or 243*24=5,832 hours. So on average, the solar array was continuously producing 26,227/5,832 = 4.5 kilowatts of power, or a bit under 9 percent of its theoretical maximum output.

Of course, this was the worst half of the year: In all of December it generated a feeble 650 kilowatt-hours. In August it generated 11 times as much power.

If nothing else, this quickie calculation shows why utility folks, who are used to coal/gas/nuclear plants that generate 80 to 90 percent of their rated power every hour of the year, aren’t too impressed by solar and wind power.

2. One of the interesting facets about the participants in the state’s “net metering” program, which allows homes to sell power from alternative-energy systems back to the utilities, is how small wind is faltering.

There are 265 photovoltaic installations with an installed capacity of 787 kilowatts, compared to 35 small-wind operations. Further, wind is fading (so to speak): In the few half year of the program, roughly 20 percent of applications were from home turbines; how it’s down to about 13 percent. I suspect this is a sign that people are realizing small (under 5 kilowatt) wind turbines are very hard to position correctly; they can very easily be duds.

Massachusetts, I was told by an official there, has seen the same thing; the only wind power that’s succeeding there involves units of 100 kw or more, located near the coast. New Hampshire, obviously, doesn’t have much coast (18 miles is the usual figure).

The Hubble Telescope turns 20 years old tomorrow.
It’s produced amazing pictures over the years, but in its early years it was best known for a faulty lens that needed to be fixed.
What’s forgotten is that several more servicing missions followed that first servicing mission to fix that initial lens problem.
The fourth mission was STS-109, in [...]