Bending light

      Here’s a nice picture I took a couple of years ago at Auckland Airport, looking over Manukau Harbour. Can you work out what’s happened to the Waitakere Ranges?   I’m in the middle of teaching a group of 3rd years about some of the ways that light doesn’t travel in straight lines, […]

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Why you need to proof read

I’ve just supervised a test for a group of second year students. On looking at their answers afterwards, it was rapidly clear that there was a problem with one of the questions. Specifically, I had given the value of Boltzmann’s constant as 1.38 times 10 to the power 23  Joules per Kelvin, instead of 1.38 […]

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Does the future affect the present?

Well, my comment on Naked Short Selling has certainly sparked a bit of discussion (for readers on sci.waikato.ac.nz/physicsstop you’ll need to look at the sciblogs hosting of the blog, http://sciblogs.co.nz/physics-stop/ ).  There’s the reasonable question asked as to whether letting people trade in things they don’t yet possess (basically anticipating the future – letting the future, […]

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Going Naked

I’ve been reading about Naked Short Selling, following Germany’s decision this week to ban it. What the financial world gets up to is rather interesting, to say the least.  For those who don’t wish to read about it themselves, my summary is this:  Short-selling is where you borrow something, then sell it, buy it back […]

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What spin would you like with that?

I’ve been trying to avoid commenting on the recent mobile phone and cancer study (since everyone else is) but something I’ve just read has rather irked me so I’m going to do it. So we have a study that’s just been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. As with other high interest scientific research, […]

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Alison’s recent bioblog entry made interesting reading/listening for me – Dan Meyer talking about how traditionally-phrased physics and maths problems tend to hinder students from working things out and grasping what is important – instead it teaches ‘learned helplessness’. Real world problems don’t come in neat little packages that you can do in a few […]

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How obvious is technology?

In order to help pass the time on my long-haul flights of the last couple of weeks, I bought a copy of H. G. Wells’  War of the Worlds.  I’ve read a lot of his work, but somehow this, arguably his most famous book, had previously escaped me. I should emphasize the obvious point that […]

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Stunning Physics

Sorry about the gap in activities – I had something unexpected come up which was rather more important and urgent than writing blog posts. More or less back online now. A couple of weeks ago we had our University Open Day, at the University of Waikato. This covered the whole university, and, of course, our […]

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