Yesterday I had a look around the Tate Modern art gallery in London. As is the way with modern art, there was the expected mix of fabulous, bizarre and seriously-stretching-the-definition-of-art exhibits. One of the pieces on show at present is a pile of porcelain ‘sunflower seeds’, by the artist Ai Weiwei. This piece of artwork is […]
Continue readingMonth: June 2011
Force, momentum and umbrellas
Perhaps the most difficult of the ‘big’ challenges facing modern engineering is designing a lightweight umbrella that doesn’t turn inside out with the slightest breath of wind. There you are, walking down a Portsmouth Street with your umbrella up, when a bus comes along and its wake is sufficient to rip the umbrella inside out. […]
Continue readingTroublesome Turbines
I’ve been reading in theUK’s Daily Telegraph newspaper in the last couple of days about the troublesome position the UK’s wind turbines are in. As well as being noisy and (according to some) ugly, there are big problems with managing their power output. Apparently, the average wind turbine is shut down for about 25 days each year […]
Continue readingDiode Flavours
A week or so ago, I had an exciting poster session with my second year solid-state physics class. Their main assignment for the term was to prepare, in small groups, a poster on a particular flavour of diode. My intention here was to get the students to learn about the underlying physics of a solid-state […]
Continue readingGrowing as a teacher
Yesterday I had a lunchtime discussion meeting with some of my colleagues doing the Post Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching. It was really a social session with the idea of being able to learn from each other with regard to our teaching experiences and the things we’re doing with our classes. The PGCertTT at Waikato […]
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