Lots of cities are hoping Google chooses them for its plans to provide complete fiber-to-the-home and develop a superfast municipal Net system - I’ve mentioned Burlington before, but Portland, Maine (Press-Herald story) and various Massachusetts cities (Globe story) are trying, too.
I don’t know of any New Hampshire submissions to this effort - which is defined [...]

Saturday, right after a couple of rainy days, probably isn’t the best time to go to the Disney Magic Kingdom. But, in spite of dense crowds of kids and parents, it was a great time. We couldn’t help but be inspired by parents and kids enjoying each others company.
Disney is great at handling masses of [...]

Go is the finest of all board games. I was never able to raise myself above lousy - 15 kyu at the best - when I played regularly, but it still fascinates me.

If it fascinates you and you are a lot younger than I am, consider the Youth Go Tournament being held in Boston on March 20. Here’s the Web site. There are 17-and-under contests, and some for 12-and-under, with wicked cool trophies. $20 entry fee.

I suspect the level of play will be quite high - it’s a qualifier for the US Youth Go Tournament, and is held at the Greater Boston Chinese Cultural Association, a reflection of the way East Asian players dominate. Not for the faint of heart.

If you don’t know anything about Go but would like to learn, a group meets many weekends at the Barnes & Noble in Nashua to play. Email Peter Gousios(pgousios@myfairpoint.net) to learn more.

MIT’s Media Lab, which if nothing else is the highest-profile geeky place on the Eastern Seaboard, having generated more news stories than any equivalent space this side of Cupertino, Calif., has a new $90 million, 163,000-square-foot building. It’s not as funky looking as the Stata Center, which is probably a good thing - perhaps it [...]

Pardon me if I wander outside New England here, but this NY Times story headlined “Darwin Foes add Warming to Targets” is depressing:
Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by linking the issue to global warming, arguing that dissenting views on both scientific subjects should be [...]

My column in the Telegraph today (read its prose poetry here) is about alternative methods of voting, in which I pointed to Burlington, Vt., which uses “instant-runoff voting” in its mayoral race. I lost track of what is happening in Vermont, because yesterday Burlington rejected this voting method, which has been used in two [...]

The comic strip PHD has long been a favorite of researchers, post-grads and others living in the upper realms of academia - so popular that the author does speaking tours at prestigious universities! So far as I know it’s never had a New Hampshire angle, alas, but that’s not going to stop me from linking [...]

I have the great good fortune to live next door to a 100-acre, largely wooded parcel of land, with one old home in the middle. For almost 20 years out family has tromped the trails in the woods, which lead to the remains of an old sawmill (shown above, 13 years ago) that I think of as our Roman ruins. The homeowner recently died and his grown children have have begun logging the woods - whether to get some money out of the property or as a prelude to development, I’m unsure.

Either way, I find myself in the odd position of getting lost in woods that I strolled through since my college-aged children could barely toddle: The old trails are often blocked by limbs and new trails have been made by the loggers. It’s weird to find yourself looking around, confused, when you’re perhaps 20 yards from a place you’ve been 500 times - not just weird but unsettling. It makes you wonder about how many other certainties are ephemeral.

Britain has released lots of formerly top-secret UFO files, which show that (a) a percent or two of the endless reports aren’t well explained and (b) some UFO fanatics are annoyingly persistent. Here’s the Huffington Post summary, or you can sit through the Telegraph (of UK) video.
Closer to home, Barnstead town meeting will vote on [...]

A moment of silence, please, for the passing of Walter Fredrick Morrison, the man who invented the Frisbee. The BBC has some great pictures - check them out.
I have long been puzzled as to why throwing Frisbees is the sporting activity of choice among geeks, rather than soccer or lacrosse or something like that. Is [...]

Six New Hampshire churches - most from the “liberal” side of Protestantism (Universalist and Congregationalist) and one affiliated with American Baptist Churches - are participating in the fifth annual Evolution Weekend, described by organizers thus:

Churches, temples and mosques from across the United States and around the world are joining together to celebrate Evolution [...]

My Telegraph column today (read it here) asks that question, based on a sixth-grader’s interesting science project.

The answer, judging from my inability, is no: looking at pictures of people’s naked feet, I guessed that an 80-year-old was 11, and a 16-year-old was 44, among other wild misses.

Check out the column and see how you do - I have a truncated version of the test there. You can email me your guesses (dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com) or put them in comments below the article itself.

Meanwhile, I’m keeping my socks on.

This guy has analyzed a ton of Facebook data and put together some wicked cool interactive pages reflecting them, titled Facebook Pages of Countries, States and Cities. Among his analysis: He breaks up the US into 7 regions, based on their Facebook habits like friends and fan pages; we’re part of Stayathomia, because we rarely [...]

Town meeting season is coming up, which means elections will be held in a couple hundred towns and school districts over the next two months for selectmen, budget committee, supervisor of the checklist, etc. Everybody in New Hampshire uses good old fashionied majority voting: Whoever gets the most votes, wins. But there are other methods.
One [...]

Researchers at Southern New Hampshire University say they have uncovered a method to use the implicit association test (IAT), used by social psychologists as a measure of subtle prejudice,  to reveal more about the cognitive processes involved in lying. The school reported it as follows:
As originally developed, the implicit association test showed participants a [...]