The gearbox problem

At afternoon tea yesterday we were discussing a problem regarding racing slot-cars (electric toy racing cars).  A very practical problem indeed! Basically, what we want to know is how do we optimize the size of the electric motor and gear-ratio (it only has one gear) in order to achieve the best time over a given […]

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Seeing in the dark

No, nothing to do with carrots and vitamin A I'm afraid.  With dark evenings and mornings with us now :(, Benjamin's become interested in the dark. It's dark after he's finished tea, and he likes to be taken outside to see the dark, the moon, and stars, before his bath. "See dark" has become a […]

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A closing thought for Friday

We are three-quarters of the way through semester A. My Friday afternoon 🙁 tutorial for solid-state physics is still very well attended.  Is this: A. Because the students are really engaged in this paper, learning a lot, and generally want to be there, or B. Because they don't have a clue what's happening and are […]

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When does collaboration become collusion?

Yesterday I attended a very interesting discussion on the problem of student collusion in assignments. It's a really grey area that is particularly prevelant in the sciences and engineering. This is the kind of thing we mean: Student A and Student B discuss their assignment one evening. Together, they think through what processes are needed […]

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Two is a big number – revisited

In a long-in-the-past blog entries I commented on how two is a large number and three might be considered a working approximation to infinity. This kind of mathematics suits Benjamin (22 months old now). He's beginning to grasp what counting is about, but there's some way to go. I'm not exactly sure what's going on […]

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