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“In France, we live not only for ourselves but for the joy of living together.” -- Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
Ecole Polytechnique | Arrondissement of Palaiseau -
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ALWAYS OPEN
“Mainely” Potato Salad
Ancestral summer favorite; part of the University of Maine Cooperative Extension Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program.
Campus Electric Transit
We have followed standards setting action in this domain since 1993. During todays colloquium at 15:00 UTC we will answer questions about our involvement, guided by our Safer-Simpler-Lower Cost - Longer Lasting advocacy in all relevant standards. Use the login credentials at the upper right of our home page.
Gallery: Campus Transportation and Parking
Budgets for moving people and things around these "cities-within-cities" often exceed academic department budgets. The footprint of roadway and parking lots is the same order of magnitude as the footprint of campus buildings themselves. Its a gaudy bureaucracy and this gallery of presentations by twelve United States colleges prove the point.
Wireless EV Charging
Clever, and we wish them the best. Before scaling upward we hope government transportation departments will give priority to doing the simple things well -- such as keeping roadway striping visible -- especially in the Upper Midwest.
Quadrivium: Summer
Educational settlements are the closest many people come to feel at home in beautiful surroundings. The catalog that informs the safety and sustainability of these "cities-within-cities" changes 100 to 1000 times per day. Titles are unstable, time-sensitive, copyright protected and land in public law. We explore the action continuously; assign priorities, then schedule a separate teleconference to formulate responses to public consultations. Daily colloquia topics appear on our CALENDAR.
Electric Vehicle Power Transfer System
We assume electric mobility technologies will persist penetrating at present pace even as some campus populations diminish. The parent standard for all electrotechnology wiring safety in the United States is the National Electrical Code. Linked here are the transcripts of (widely scattered) passages that deal with charging EV's. The 2026 NEC will be released for public use sometime in October.
I-Code Group B Committee Action Results
We will sort through the results of last month's standardization action as it applies to health care facilities -- with particular interest in maternity and neo-natal intensive care technologies -- ahead of the follow up technical meetings in Cleveland in October. Today we examine the back and forth on solar and wind farms located on actual animal, produce and grain farms. Many educational settlements are co-located on these convergent enterprises.
Current Issues and Recent Research
Next: Approval by the NFPA Standards Council for release of the 2026 National Electrical Code this week at the Annual Conference & Expo in Las Vegas. IEEE Release of the proposals for the 2028 National Electrical Safety Code on July 1. Sorting the electrotechnology concepts appearing in the recent release of the International Code Council's "Group B Complete Monograph" ahead of the follow up meetings in Cleveland in October.
Force Majeure
Nassim Nicholas Taleb has made his life's work observing freak disasters—rare, high-impact events—which are unpredictable and underestimated due to their low probability. He argues that people and systems are overly reliant on normalcy and linear models, ignoring the potential for such outliers. Our coverage of this topic dates back to 1993. We will expand upon this topic as more information is derived from catastrophic floods in Kerr County Texas.