Here’s a biomechanics example for rugby fans http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/womensrugby/rookie_documents/mechanics_of_scruming.doc
Continue readingMonth: May 2009
Biomechanics
I might have had a bit of a sarcastic tone in my last entry about kicking football penalties, but we shouldn’t jump to the idea that sport science isn’t proper science. After all, it’s what has given Australia three zillion more gold medals than is warranted by its population. Have a look at the Australian Institute […]
Continue readingFootball physics. Whatever next?
The global recession obviously hasn’t hit science hard enough yet. There is still money available for someone to research the optimum way to shoot a football penalty. (By which of course I mean soccer – the only real kind of football there is). According to Tim Cable, as reported in May’s PhysicsWorld, the best thing to […]
Continue readingWhy I am not a chemist
OK , so I’ve told you why I didn’t become a biologist, but what about chemistry? That’s a pretty fun science area too. At school, I had a great chemistry teacher, and when I started university I thought there was still a small chance that I could be tempted away from physics towards chemistry as a […]
Continue readingSlippery ice
First – sorry blogging has slowed down a bit in recent days – busy time at the university having to teach courses and prepare for next semesters courses and get ready for a major conference all at once. So I’ll keep this one short. The wild weather over the last couple of days has brought […]
Continue readingCookery physics revisited
Does anyone know the answer to this question? Why is it that, when you bake a cake or make a loaf of bread, the bit in the centre of the tin always rises more than the bits around the perimeter of the tin?
Continue readingScience Fraud
I’ve just been reading an article in Physics World about a high-flying young physicist who deceived the science community for several years (including the editors of ‘Nature’ and ‘Science’), by, putting it bluntly, making up his results. After reading it I have several questions in my head. What makes someone do that? Why did it take […]
Continue readingIt’s no fun any more
I spent yesterday morning with a group of students studying some properties of antennas, as part of one of our courses. One of the things we did was to measure the beamwidth of a typical satellite receiver – the sort of thing you stick on the roof of your house to get all the decent […]
Continue readingLook no wires
My wife was complaining this morning about the mass of knitting that is underneath our home computer. Not knitting of the woollen jersey kind, but knitting of the wire kind, that is needed to supply power to the computer, printer, modem, etc etc etc and to allow the computer to talk to the printer, etc. […]
Continue readingAstrophysical Fluid Dynamics
I’ve just had an email invitation to subscribe to a journal called ‘Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics’, with a lovely note that they hope it will serve my research needs. I’m at a loss to think of how it possibly could; maybe at some conference years ago I filled in a card saying I had some […]
Continue reading