A few weeks ago I commented on a task our second year software-engineering students are doing: building robots to follow a white line with the Lego 'Mindstorm' kit. It's been entertaining watching their various attempts and their design selections. Most groups have pretty-well optimized their robot now, and there's some final tweaking going on, ahead […]
Continue readingMonth: September 2014
When energy conservation doesn’t add up (or does it?)
In the last few weeks holes have been popping up all over Cambridge. They are being dug by 'ditch-witches' – pieces of machinery designed for making small-diameter tunnels for cabling – as part of the installation of fibre-optic cables for the much vaunted ultra-fast broadband. A ditch-witch is about the ultimate in machinery-obsessed-toddler heaven. We've […]
Continue readingTelepathy breakthrough – great science, not science fiction
The 'Science' news hitting the media at the weekend was Guilio Ruffini and Alvaro Pascual-Leone's demonstration of 'telepathy'. There's been a lot of media coverage on this – for example the neat little interview of Ruffini on the BBC's 'Today' programme. Their article on this can be read here. It's not a long one, and, […]
Continue readingWhat do students expect at university?
I've been reviewing some papers for an engineering education conference this week. I can't go into detail about any of them, because I've been given them in confidence to look at, but they have provoked some thoughts about the nature of university. Students come to university, to study physics or engineering or whatever, and what […]
Continue readingMagnetic fields and USB sticks
Question: What does a rare-earth magnet do to a USB stick? Answer: (Having accidentally carried out this experiment by having both in my desk drawer at the same time): It sticks to it. I was rather relieved to discover that the data on my USB stick seems to be perfectly intact, despite the casing of […]
Continue readingWhy you need a physicist
I was at a conference on 'brain research' last week in sunny Queenstown. There were some great talks, but I was particularly taken by one on the final morning by Jason Kerr, a kiwi now at Max Planck Institute in Germany. He was talking about the vision of rats, and described a very interesting series […]
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