Elecmystery

I’m beginning to wonder how I’ve ever found time to do the nearly 400 entries that this blog has accumulated over the last two and a half years.   It’s Friday already and I’ve only done one entry this week, on top of not much last week either. One of the highlights of electricity is the […]

Continue reading

Chocolate problems

Thinking back to last week’s MasterChef (the chocolate tower of terror – re-live it here), there were a couple of nice examples of cooking being a branch of physics. I’ve heard it said that cookery is all about managing the flow of heat into (or, in this case, out of) an object, which, of course, […]

Continue reading

Formative assessment

I’m stuck at home at the moment with a horrible cold (yuk) and a cat with a burst abscess (double yuk).  In between blowing my nose and mopping up bits of goo emanating from poor kittykat’s wound, I’ve been reading a book I bought last week very cheaply from our university bookshop. It’s having a monster […]

Continue reading

Rotating aircraft

I guess a lot of you will have seen this video of the crash at JFK airport this week. It’s almost a perfect example of what I’ve recently covered in my dynamics class, concerning collisions that result in things spinning, because the forces don’t act through the centre of mass. So, in this example, the […]

Continue reading

Information overload regarding Fukushima

On Tuesday night, after Cafe Scientifique, I was listening to a radio interview with Motoko Kakubayashi, from the Science Media Centre of Japan. She was talking about some of the hysteria that is brewing regarding the Fukushima nuclear power complex.  (The link will download the interview from the NZ National Radio website – though I’m not sure […]

Continue reading

Carbon dioxide or methane?

Here’s something I learned last night at Cafe Scientifique from one of our chemists, Chris Hendy. Lake Rotorua produces a significant amount of methane. It just bubbles up to the surface from below. We could harvest it, and fuel a small power station; enough to provide energy to a small town.  "But Oh No" – […]

Continue reading

I hate statistics

A week or so back I walked into the lecture room to give a lecture on electromagnetic waves, and was promptly asked: "Marcus, how much statistics do you use in your research?"  My initial reaction was to think "what has this got to do with electromagnetic waves?" and then, realizing that clearly it had nothing […]

Continue reading