DISQUS

Hi David,
In giving this article a second look, why are there bare hands when handling the bees? [See article picture]

I can understand Michael's logic, but upwards of 90% for the rich?! Ouch! Talk about creating an exodus of the wealthy...

Hi David,
I too enjoyed the Slashdot discussions about your article. Glad that Telegraph website was able to hold up to "The Slashdot Effect".
One of the nice things about living in the Souhegan Valley area is how often I see maddog's famous plates. (along with "LINUX" and "GNU GCC" plates). Perhaps I should look into "YAPH" (Yet Another Perl Hacker)

New data from PSNH

The "War on Science"?! If anything, all I've seen the last decade is a squelching of all skepticism and debate, which used to be the trademark of science. If Einstein were trying to get his ideas across nowadays, all he'd hear is "we have Newton, Newton is fact, the debate is over!" Then when he can't get published because of the closing of debate, discredit him because he has nothing published in a "peer reviewed journal". [let us bow]

We have two wood pellet stoves in our house -- one on the first floor and one down in the basement. Around mid-spring we have four tons delivered to our house for the upcoming winter. This year they ran around $230/ton at that time of year. They come from the local plant in Jaffery and were sold/delivered by StoveKeepers in Amherst (avoiding that trucking from Oregon issue). While they require more cleaning than a gas/propane furnace, we still love ours and run them from morning till night. I haven't re-run the $$ per 100K BTU calculations, but it was pretty huge savings when I checked several months ago. It may have moderated a bit since then.

We used them at my last job to certify Ethernet controllers that we were developing. We visited them whenever we did an update to that product.

I remember one time they caught something that was very subtle. When there's a collision on an ethernet network, the source is supposed to "back off" for a random amount of time. Hardware guys often use an approach called LFSR's to implement psuedo-randomness. The developer had not quite wired the LFSR correctly so that back off time was not sufficiently random after each collision.

In their lab they can induce collisions and get a histogram of the randomness of the "back off". It quickly identified the "back off" bug, we fixed the LFSR, and later got certified.

I've done these tests before in the recent past and get upwards of 5 megabits/sec download speed. But I noticed something else last night that makes me wonder if there might be something else at the source or distribution network.




I was running Apple's Software Update and watching it download the large OS updates. I was just using wall clock time and noticing that it was regularly downloading 10 megabytes in 9-10 seconds. This works out to better than 8 megabits per second. Curious… maybe they bumped the speeds, maybe there are other sources of measurement error. Either way, I'm content.





Comcast in Milford, NH. DSL doesn't reach my neighborhood last I checked. Too far from a CO.

So if we should avoid exploration of Alaska to spare the endangered Polar Bear, are we now to avoid wind turbines to save the bat?




Inquiring minds want to know...

“before slipping with a mere MBA from Harvard.”
Good bit of tongue in cheek there David. ;-)

Out our way (west end of Milford) the hail was just a bit smaller than peas. My younger children had never seen it before.

The last time I checked (about a year ago or so), residential solar was generating a kilowatt for about $8-10K, assuming no storage batteries but just feeding excess power back into the grid. That might have given you that daily 9kWh. Your solar hot water upgrade was much cheaper.

Whoa! Electric hot water in NH... Ouch! Then, definite kudos on the solar upgrade!

I don't want to rain on your parade, but I looked at our PSNH bill yesterday too. This past month's usage was significantly down from a year ago at this time, roughly by the same percentage. I don't have a cool major upgrade to point to though. Perhaps the A/C tuneup, cleaning the fridge coils, and easing up on A/C usage...




Was your hot water heated by electricity?

24 years? Not 44 years? Is my brain just not working at this late hour?

Each car is a little different, depending on gearing and the horsepower/torque vs RPM. I've done a lot of tests of my car on I-495 with my ScanGaugeII. The differences I get between 65, 70, and 75 are almost hard to detect over the 16+ miles I'm on it. Above 75mph though I do see the dropoff. Most of my commutes between Milford and Marlborough average 55-58mpg door to door now that winter is over.

An effect I find interesting (especially in the winter) is the benefit of running your errands back to back or within roughly half an hour of each other. The poor mileage you get when the engine is cold is significant and easily noticed. But if I run the errands around the same time, having an engine already warmed up means even short 2 mile errands gets me mileage approaching 50MPG. This was even more true in the winter.

Without debating its validity, you have to admit: Nothin' gets funding like linking your research to global warming...

Up to 2 megabytes!? Whoa! ;-P

Oh David... stop being so irrational! ;-P




Or do like we do and balance your checkbook with complex numbers ... so many real dollars and plenty of imaginary dollars. The angle of our checkbook vector approaches 90° at times.

I'm betting they get a bunch of letters to their editor next month...

Replace |ass| with |as|. Doh!

When I was debating whether to leave the USAF or stay, I took a tour of the NSA where officers like me do ASIC chip design. An area that I thought was interesting was related to defending against reverse engineering a chip ass you describe above. They had come up with coatings that prevented x-ray'ing the chip, abrasive etch, and chemical etch. The etch preventatives were essentially reactive coatings, not unlike a holiday sparkler, that would destroy the chip as you tried to remove it. Cool stuff.

What tends to happen is that if you've used dino-diesel and make a sudden switch to a mixture that's too rich and it "cleans out" your tank/fuel lines. These end up in your fuel filter. You could change the filter and be okay.




Speaking of things that don't adhere to standards very well... ahem.

That's too bad. I hadn't been following much of the Verizon/Fairpoint debate -- mainly because our house doesn't get any Verizon service. I do wish that Comcast had some competition though...

Several of my co-workers at my Marlborough, MA office have switched within the past year to FiOS for some combination of television, phone, and/or internet. Most seem to have been happy with the switch. If nothing else it has caused their cable provider to get its act in gear. It might be nice to get it in the Souhegan Valley area.