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 readingMonth: April 2011
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 readingHappy Easter
I’ve been away in sunny and calm Wellington for a few days (who says the weather is bad there?), which explains the lack of blog entries. Back at work and blogging next week, but in the meantime have a good Easter.
Continue readingFormative 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 readingRotating 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 readingThe wonderful logarithm (or blog on log)
I’ve been marking a couple of student assignments today. I won’t go into the details, but as part of it they had to process some data and plot some graphs. The graphs showed values that varied considerably – some thousands of times bigger than others. I had expected (assumed = bad move) that the students […]
Continue readingInformation 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 readingCarbon 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 readingI 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