It's Fibonacci Number Day (5/8/13)

Posted by David Brooks    |    Wednesday, May 8, 2013

It's Fibonacci Number Day (as Americans abbreviate dates): 5/8/13 ... there won't be another such sequence until Aug. 13, 2021.

Here's a nice site about it, with lots about the song "Lateralus" by the band Tool, which has a Fibonacci relationship for its time signature and syllables of the lyrics.

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A great picture of the world's first wind farm, which was in NH

Posted by David Brooks    |    Tuesday, May 7, 2013

Photo by Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center

New Hampshire had the world's first wind farm, an experimental operation by Umass-Amherst, as I noted in a post yesterday, but I've never been able to find good photos of it ... until now!

The above picture was sent to me by Don Shumway at Crotched Mountain Rehabilitation Center, which owns the land where the UMass-Amherst wind farm was located in the early 1980s. So far as I know it has never been published before (if you count this blog as "publishing"). We're trying to get more information about the who/what/where/when, and I'll let you know when I learn more - but until then, let's just admire it.

I'm guessing that those are WF-1 turbines, an example of which is now at the Smithsonian because of its importance in developing windpower. But I'm not sure - that, also, needs to be researched.

UPDATE: The wind turbines are 30 kw US Windpower turbines, not the WF-1, I'm told in an email from the Wind Energy Center.

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Streaming-TV service Aereo, coming to NH, counter-sues CBS

Posted by David Brooks    |    Monday, May 6, 2013

A few weeks before streaming-TV service Aereo arrives in New Hampshire (my earlier story here), it has upped th elegal battle with broadcasters by counter-suing CBS, one of several companies suing it for copyright infringement.A s The Verge explains in this story:

Aereo is a web TV service that enables users to view over-the-air broadcasts via the web. Two groups of television networks — groups that include CBS, Fox, and NBC — filed copyright claims last year and argued that Aereo is an illegal service because it distributes their programming without compensating them. After losing two decisions in New York this year, a CBS spokesman said on Twitter two weeks ago that CBS plans to file another lawsuit against Aereo in Boston, an area Aereo recently announced it would move into. Aereo says that the broadcasters are just shopping for a sympathic court.

Aereo uses a huge host of tiny antennas, one per paying customer, to gather up the signals, and then lets them control the antenna to watch over-the-air broadcasts. - because of that, courts have ruled that it's not liable for paying retransmission fees. I'm not entirely sure I understand the court's point of view, to be honest, but it's certainly interesting.

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How about an electric hybrid vertical takeoff flying car?  

Posted by David Brooks    |    Monday, May 6, 2013

http://www.terrafugia.com/tfx-vision

Terrafugia, the Woburn, Mass. firm that is developing a flying car - sorry, "roadable aircraft" - using a push propeller has a new dream: an electric hybrid vertical-takeoff car!

Artist's rendering is above. (Artist's renderings of possible technicial are always so cool.) The company describes it as a "vision" which, depending on how things go, can mean anything from "roadmap of the future" to "vaporware".

Terrafugia has stuck to its gone with the push-prop Transition craft, which is working its way through the very difficult federal licensing process, so we should give them the benefit of the doubt.

XConomy's Boston bureau has a good, long piece about it - they (unlike me) visited and did actual reporting.

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Want comments from readers? Write about wind farms

Posted by David Brooks    |    Monday, May 6, 2013

Every time we write about wind farms, we run one of Don Himsel's pictures from this 2008 fly-over of Lempster Mountain Wind, because they're so gorgeous.

Ever since The Telegraph switched to Facebook comments for its articles, the number of reader responses on most stories has plummeted. I'm not certain why: perhaps people don't want their real names attached to their comments, or fewer Telegraph readers are on Facebook than we thought, or it adds one extra layer of hassle that makes the whole process not worth the time.

The same thing happened in this blog, where comments virtually disappeared once we instituted the Facebook requirement. In this case, I suspect an added cause: Engineering types who read GraniteGeek are less prone to be on Facebook, or more worried about Facebook privacy issues, than the general public.

But there are certain subjects which hit enough buttons to overcame this drawback. Consider a story I had in Sunday's paper on the state of wind farms in New Hampshire: It has more comments tha anything I've published in many months, mostly of people yelling at each other.

My favorite part of that story is that it gave me a chance to remind people that NH had the world's first wind farm: A semi-experimental effort on Crotched Mountain in Francestown, built by UMass-Amherst in the early 1980s, when that school was a global wind-power pioneer. Here's a discussion of their history, if you'd like to learn more.

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Mourning New Hampshire's greatest pareidolia, 10 years after the Old Man fell

Posted by David Brooks    |    Friday, May 3, 2013

You had to go to Mars to find a rock "face" better that the Old Man of the Mountain. Like the Old Man, this doesn't look anything like a face when viewed from different angles.

The Old Man of the Mountain collapsed 10 years ago today, as many news folk (including me and others at The Telegraph) note.

That chisel-jawed profile was a classic pareidolia - a random shape that our pattern-seeking brains turned into something with meaning. We are, of course, particularly good at turning things into human faces, so in that sense the Old Man was nothing special. But what a great profile it was.

One of the things I asked people in my "man in the street" story was whether they thought the profile should ever be replaced as a New Hampshire state symbol. The answer, unanimously, was no.

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I did better on a general religion-knowledge quiz than a general science-knowledge quiz; hmmm ....

Posted by David Brooks    |    Thursday, May 2, 2013

Pew Research Center put up easy-ish, 15-question online quizzes recently - one about general science knowledge, one about general religion knowledge.

I missed one of the science questions, as I mentioned earlier, and none of the religion questions.

Does this mean I need to rename this blog?

You can get to both quizes from this Slate item, which pontificates more about what the results mean than the numbers really deserve.

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A true author for geeks: Nevil Shute (not just for 'On the Beach')

Posted by David Brooks    |    Wednesday, May 1, 2013

This is the cover of the Pan edition of "Round the Bend" that I own, with its bit of attention-grabbing cheesecake.

One of my favorite authors is Nevil Shute, the British/Australian novelist best known for "On the Beach," the stiff-upper-lip tale of Earth dying after a nuclear war.

Although Shute didn't write science fiction and his era, the '40s through '60s, was pre-computers and pre-modern tech, he is in many ways the perfect geek novelist. He was an aeronautical engineer whose engineering outlook shaped his writing, most notably in "No Highway," the tale of an engineer realizing that a new jet design was fatallay flawed - echoing events in Shute's own life around the failure of the De Haviland Comet - and "Round the Bend," a brilliant novel that tells of a religion growing up in southeast Asia around an airplane mechanic who approaches life the same way he approaches engine repair.

I mention Shute because BoingBoing had an item about him today (here) that basically says "I just heard of this guy: he's great!" ... a perfectly good reason for a blog post, I'd say. And a good reason for this post, too.

If you've never read any Shute, try "Trustee in the Toolroom" - perhaps the greatest paean to the Maker community ever penned, even though it was four decades before The Maker Community existed.

You can find him at many second-hand bookstores. Shute isn't all that popular these days, but his fan base is big enough that he has an international fan club, called a Foundation (website here).

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Should kids still be taught to write in cursive? (Hint: No.)

Posted by David Brooks    |    Wednesday, May 1, 2013

My son, who's about to enter a Ph.D. program in mathematics (i.e., he's not an idiot), has atrocious handwriting. It's not that his writing is hard to read, although it is - the problem is that it looks like a 5-year-old's scrawl. Not dignified.

I've told him he should make it look more like the product of an adult, but this child of the digital keyboard age just rolls his eyes at out-of-date dad.

Which leads to today's issue: What about cursive writing? (My son has basically given up on cursive; he writes in a sort of modified block print, like many people.)

Teaching cursive is no longer required under recommended national education standards, and The Washington Post has a debate today about whether that's a good idea. Read it here. I suspect most geeky folks would say it's a waste of time teaching penmanship to kids.

Despite my old-fashioned thinking about handwriting, I believe that, too. Cursive can die. It was developed to make handwriting fast, and there are far too many options around for fast "writing" via devices. Kids should be taught how to *read* cursive, but they don't need to practice penmanship any more, just like they don't need to memorize how many pecks are in a bushel or learn how to use a slide rule. Use that classroom time for something more valuable.

Besides, it's way past time for the cursive upper-case Q (the one that looks like an Art Deco "2") to shuffle off this mortal coil.

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I got to write 'acoustic Doppler current profiler' in a story today!

Posted by David Brooks    |    Tuesday, April 30, 2013

"Something bad isn't happening locally" isn't a very exciting news story, but sometimes fun stuff comes out of it. I have an article today about sequestraton and automatic stream gauges which notes that our local ones aren't threatened - ho-hum - but I did get to write about "acoustic Doppler current profiler".

That's how the gauges determine the flow of the river, as compared to just the depth. They bounce sound waves off debris floating in the water to determine the speed and volume of the water column at their location. Cool!

The gauge signal are sent up to a GOES satellite, and used by a bunch of groups - as well as presented online by US Geological Survey.

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