From this week’s Ask the Pilot column on Salon about the seventh anniversary of the crash of a plan on departure from kennedy airport in New York, killing everybody:
Eighty-four months have passed since then. That’s 2,555 days and counting. In that span, our carriers have transported approximately 5 billion people and made more than 51 [...]

The changes in print media (like the Christian Science Moniitor and PC World going online only) made this inevitable, but it’s still sad to learn that Harvard Square’s wonderful Out of Town News is closing - news that was broken yesterday, I believe, by Wicked Local Cambridge, and today gets front-page play in the Globe, [...]

Miles-per-gallon is pretty easy to calculate when a vehicle’s wheels are powered exclusively or mostly by internal combustion engines. But how do you calculate it when they’re usually powered by the electric motor in a hybrid?
That question is raised by AFS Trinity Power, which installs systems similar to the upcoming Chevy Volt, in that the [...]

Dean Kamen gave his hometown paper, The Union-Leader, a look at a prototype model he created of an electric car in which the battery is recharged in part by a Stirling engine that can use a variety of fuels. (Kamen loves Stirling engines, which in theory can be vastly more efficient than internal combustion engines, [...]

I love Daylight Savings Time in the fall, when we get an extra hour, but I hate it in the spring. In this, I suspect, I’m not alone. I’ve always suspected the whole thing is kind of stupid in its attempt to alter energy usage - cutting off one end of the blanket and sewing [...]

I know the above headline is true, so I should put my hours where my mouth is, eh? Thanks to the SeacoastNRG blog, I found a terffic program called StayWarmNH, in which volunteers help do basic “winterization” in thousands of low-income homes throughout the state.
You can consider it a social-service exercise, helping those in need [...]

Get out and vote, won’t you?

And since we can’t avoid being political today, check out this NY Times analysis of the candidates position on science issues (one key sentence: “Both implicitly fault President Bush, whom critics have assailed as weakening the federal advisory apparatus and politicizing scientific panels“), and this interesting essay on Salon: “Why [...]

The FCC will vote tomorrow on whether to use some of that “white space” for broadcast of Internet broadband signals, which would be a huge help in rural areas like the North Country. Technies say yes, please; broadcasters say no, it will interfere with our signals.

I had the stereotypical reaction portrayed in this NY Times story about the small but growing commercial traffic on the Erie Canal: “The Erie Canal still functions?!?!” Here’s the money graf:
The canal still remains the most fuel-efficient way to ship goods between the East Coast and the upper Midwest. One gallon of diesel pulls one [...]

One of the most interesting buildings in Nashua is the “egg” at the wastewater treatment facility - a 90-foot-tall, 1.3-million-gallon spheroid (it looks more like an onion dome on a Russian Orthodox church than an egg, actually) full of tons of bacteria that partially digest the city’s sewage, greatly reducing the amount of sludge that [...]

We keep several Notepad replacements in our shareware utility belts, including TextPad, NoteTab Light, and Notepad++. We do this because one program might have a feature that the others don’t, for example, multiple-file search and replace, word count, or HTML and CSS capabilities.
Our latest ersatz Notepad is DocPad, whose interface [...]

I didn’t write about a push to get people to pledge to turn off lights during the baseball playoffs because it was a thinly disguised advertising campaign with no follow-through - online pledges aren’t worth the photons they’re written on, so to speak.But if you’re interested, the Wall Street Journal’s excellent Numbers Guy column talks [...]

All my posts from yesterday seem to have disappeared … hopefully not forever. (UPDATE: Yes, forever. Ah, the joys of databases.)

I have a cold, and need to do somebody else’s job at work today that I don’t enjoy, so let’s compound my misery by pointing to a NY Times story that says Web revenue is stalling for newspapers. Online ads, of course, are supposed to save us in the news business. If they stall out, [...]

Further evidence that the home of Bangalore and Bollywood is moving up the tech-development chain: MIT’s Technology Review magazine is putting out a monthly edition in India. I learned of it in this article in India New England, a Boston-area publication for the region’s South Asia diaspora.
It turns out that Tech Review already puts out [...]