This isn’t really geeky, but since tomorrow is Town Meeting day in NH and many people will be voting on road-paving projects, I can’t resist: This is the blog of a guy in Britain who fills in potholes with dirt and plants flowers in them. “If we planted one of those in every hole, it would be like a forest in the road.” So grab your petunias and get to work!

(Spotting via Treehugger)

Seacoast Online reports that recent storms washed away sand at the northeast end of Jenness Beach on the N.H. seacoast, revealing stumps of trees that are several thousand years old.
The instance of extremely low ebb tide and periods of increased storm activity have revealed the stumps of the cedar and pine trees, dating back 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 [...]

Tags: Boston, MIT

Every once in a while I read a blog posting that really blows my mind. This is one that truely impressed me with not only good writing but explains just how big the universe is.
http://anotherj.blogspot.com/2010/02/space-and-numbers.html
Earle Rich

Burlington, Vt., likes to think of itself as a cutting-edge place among small cities - which isn’t always a good thing, as its innovative city-owned fiber Internet system is tied up in a snarl of financial and regulatory hassles - so I’m not surprised to see it being very public about applying for what the [...]

Tags: broadband

This is mostly lifted from a NH Department of Health and Human Service press release:
The  New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services says initial samples taken of water  in the Connecticut River near the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant in  Vernon,  Vt.,  showed  tritium  levels  below  500  pCi/L,  which  is  the  lower limit of [...]

Tags: vermont yankee;

Slate has an ongoing project in which one of its writers is trying to live “the efficient life”. Today’s installment (read it here) raises an interesting point:
As I’ve started paying attention to my household energy use, I have noticed something strange. It is incredibly easy for me to monitor my electricity usage and nearly impossible [...]

Tags: efficiency

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 [...]

It sounds odd at first that the population of lobsters is estimated by the number of them that are caught each year. It might seem that catching more means fewer are left in the wild, but it’s the opposite: when more are caught it means that there are more in the wild.
This is possible because [...]

Tags: lobster

Slate has a good piece about efforts by Vail, the monstrous ski area in Colorado, to cut its energy use by 10 percent. New England ski areas like to be seen as “green,” but are facing the same difficult issue of meeting the energy-sucking demands of their fickle clientele:
Vail was clear: no turning off the [...]

Tags: efficiency

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.

I hadn’t realized that PSNH wants to build a large (up to 5 megawatt, or 5,000 kilowatt) solar farm atop the capped Manchester city landfill. This would be the first almost-utility-scale photovoltaic plant in the New England, 11 times the size of the Brockton Brightfield and 100 times the size of the biggest solar sites [...]

Tags: solar panels, solar power

The ever-wonderful Improbable Research blog has a post (here it is) pointing to one of the weirdest bits of research I’ve seen in a long time: It claims that use of cell phones over long periods of time correlates with “human parotid gland secretion” - i.e., salivating. It claims that in 50 subjects, there was [...]