Nothing to do with physics this bit: My wife was at home yesterday afternoon, and she phoned me at work. "Err…we’ve got a bit of a problem…." My immediate thought was maybe the plumber had severed the main water pipe or something disastrous like that, but no, rather different. "…I kind of heard this buzzing […]
Continue readingMonth: November 2011
Hot water
This weekend I decided it was about time that I twiddled all the various taps and valves associated with our water system – just to make sure none of them get seized in the ‘on’ position – wouldn’t be good if can’t get the water turned off when you need to most. Perhaps checking was […]
Continue readingRena: Where’s the physics?
On Tuesday night I attended a very informative and lively discussion at Cafe Scientifique on the Rena disaster. (For readers not in NZ, the Rena is the container ship that has been stuck on Astrolabe reef off the coast of Tauranga for the last few weeks, shedding oil and containers into the sea – see […]
Continue readingElections and antimatter
Reading opinion polls in the papers tends to cause despair and hilarity in roughly equal measure. Despair, not because my current favourite party might be nose-diving in the polls, rather because of the journalists scant regard for statistics, and hilarity for the way a story is built up where no story exists. A really, really […]
Continue readingYou know you need a new car when…
Our cars (one of them in particular) are beginning to cause a few too many problems. Last night we were left stranded again, just outside Cambridge, and had to have those friendly AA guys rescue us. This time there was a sudden "Thwunk" sound and then a rapid "fwap-fwap-fwap" from underneath the bonnet. We pulled […]
Continue readingBending of beams
The ceiling in our new house is held up by seven large, curved, steel beams. There are also steel beams holding up parts of the upper floor. These beams are I-beams – so-called because they resemble the capital letter ‘I’ in shape (except they don’t in a sans-serif format as this blog gets published in.) […]
Continue reading11:11 (and 11 seconds) on 11/11/11 (or 11/11/11 if you are American)
I’ve scheduled this post to appear today (the 11th November 2011) at 11:11 am plus eleven seconds (NZ summer time). Why? Because I can.
Continue readingElectricity Show
I’m guessing many of you readers saw the ‘Sunday’ programme last Sunday. (Would be silly if were on another day of the week). Carlos Van Camp, the guy with the lightning show, was pretty impressive. What was refreshing was how the whole piece was presented without mangling the science, which is something that media are […]
Continue readingThermal expansion again
Our new house (new to us – it’s twelve years old) can make some ferocious noises sometimes. It has some huge steel beams supporting the roof – these being held up as far as I can tell partly by steel supports and partly by concrete walls. I’ve been trying to work out just what is […]
Continue readingBugs and more bugs
I’ve spent a frustrating day trying to drive out the bugs in one of my computer programmes. It’s a piece of computer code that is implementing equations describing how neurons talk to each other. I knew there was a bug because my modelled neurons were clearly not firing at the rate they should be. It […]
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