Expensive cat physics

With baby Benjamin taking our attention, poor Mizuna the cat has been rather neglected recently. Unfortunately, this has proved an expensive (for us) and painful (for him) mistake. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed one morning that he was clearly in pain, and desperately trying to urinate. CLANG, CLANG, go the alarm bells. Male, […]

Continue reading

How many significant figures?

The overstating of accuracy is something that physics teachers have to continually correct. Just because one’s calculator gives an answer to ten significant figures doesn’t mean one should quote it to ten significant figures. I’ve just looked up the location of Nakedbus’s Auckland City bus stop. It was very easy to do – drawing from […]

Continue reading

Static electricity

Static electricity is, above all, fun, but it also can be annoying at times. I was at a conference in Queenstown last week, and was haunted by static everywhere I went. I’m guessing that atmospheric conditions were pretty dry, meaning that electric charge didn’t leak away quickly. When you know that you are going to […]

Continue reading