I read in the NZ Herald this week that one of Air New Zealand’s energy-saving strategies was to make sure an aircraft’s insulation is dry. Apparantly, 200 kg of water can be sucked out of a plane’s insulation. Sounds impressive. The article appeared to be pushing the weight saving as the main cost saving. Two hundred […]
Continue readingYear: 2010
Unconventional projectiles
I thought that sometimes I over-analyzed things for their physics content but obviously I have a long way to go… http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/physics-of-angry-birds/ Rhett Alain, a fellow physics-blogger 🙂 discusses his favourite computer game… This reminds me that several years ago I looked at a PhD thesis about the mathematical modelling of deformation – i.e. describing how an object […]
Continue readingWhat’s cooking at the LHC?
I’ve just been perusing CERN’s Twitter site http://www.twitter.com/cern for some of their latest news. While the Higgs is still hiding inside some time-travelling baguette, there’s still some really nice physics arising. This example is one that caught my attention – it’s the detection of a bound state made up of a beauty (or bottom) quark […]
Continue readingA daylight conundrum
Our organic alarm clock has now taken to jumping on the bed at about 5 in the morning and purring very loudly in an attempt to persuade us it’s breakfast time. It’s not surprising, since sunrise (and therefore cat-rise, if not Marcus-rise) is becoming earlier and earlier. Daylight hours are now long – in fact the […]
Continue readingSound proofing by closing a door
We’ve had a couple of fire alarms in the last week. Both false alarms, which is good. We still however pile out onto the grass in front of the Faculty of Science and Engineering and time how long it takes for the fire engines to arrive and bet on whether the Hamilton City-based crew will […]
Continue readingElectrical Noise
Lectures have finished; students now are into the exam period; and my thoughts naturally turn to research for the summer. To be more accurate, they first turn to marking the aforementioned exams and other assignments, but research will quickly take over. One of the projects we have going involves recording small electrical signals from a […]
Continue readingPendulum mayhem
One of the main intentions of our 2nd year Experimental Physics paper at the University of Waikato is to have students learn how to put together a physics experiment that measures something, and to measure that thing in a systematic and robust manner. What that means in practice is dealing with uncertainties. Whereas the average […]
Continue readingSticky Milk Powder
Earlier this week, we had the end-of-year display of student engineering projects. There were lots of posters put up to browse around over tea, several interesting large objects such as pieces of electric cars, and many fascinating talks given by the students. One of the most enjoyable talks was given by student Timothy Walmsley, concerning a study on […]
Continue readingThe3is in Three is Back
October is ‘Postgraduate Studies Month’ here at the University of Waikato, and the highlight is ‘The3is in Three’.I talked about it last year – it’s a competition in which PhD students have to explain their research in three minutes using just one powerpoint slide. This year two of my PhD students have done very well. One […]
Continue readingDiffraction
If you’re like me, you’ve been mesmerized by the colours created by reflections from a DVD or CD. The discs do a great job of splitting the illuminating ‘white’ light of your home light-bulbs into its constituent colours. But unlike a prism or raindrop, which achieve this effect through refraction (blue light travels more slowly […]
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