Reading opinion polls in the papers tends to cause despair and hilarity in roughly equal measure. Despair, not because my current favourite party might be nose-diving in the polls, rather because of the journalists scant regard for statistics, and hilarity for the way a story is built up where no story exists. A really, really […]
Continue readingYear: 2011
You know you need a new car when…
Our cars (one of them in particular) are beginning to cause a few too many problems. Last night we were left stranded again, just outside Cambridge, and had to have those friendly AA guys rescue us. This time there was a sudden "Thwunk" sound and then a rapid "fwap-fwap-fwap" from underneath the bonnet. We pulled […]
Continue readingBending of beams
The ceiling in our new house is held up by seven large, curved, steel beams. There are also steel beams holding up parts of the upper floor. These beams are I-beams – so-called because they resemble the capital letter ‘I’ in shape (except they don’t in a sans-serif format as this blog gets published in.) […]
Continue reading11:11 (and 11 seconds) on 11/11/11 (or 11/11/11 if you are American)
I’ve scheduled this post to appear today (the 11th November 2011) at 11:11 am plus eleven seconds (NZ summer time). Why? Because I can.
Continue readingElectricity Show
I’m guessing many of you readers saw the ‘Sunday’ programme last Sunday. (Would be silly if were on another day of the week). Carlos Van Camp, the guy with the lightning show, was pretty impressive. What was refreshing was how the whole piece was presented without mangling the science, which is something that media are […]
Continue readingThermal expansion again
Our new house (new to us – it’s twelve years old) can make some ferocious noises sometimes. It has some huge steel beams supporting the roof – these being held up as far as I can tell partly by steel supports and partly by concrete walls. I’ve been trying to work out just what is […]
Continue readingBugs and more bugs
I’ve spent a frustrating day trying to drive out the bugs in one of my computer programmes. It’s a piece of computer code that is implementing equations describing how neurons talk to each other. I knew there was a bug because my modelled neurons were clearly not firing at the rate they should be. It […]
Continue readingWhere maths and physics gets you…
I learned yesterday that Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce studied maths and physics at university. (See this article from the NZ Herald.) Who said that studying physics didn’t lead to good career prospects? In Joyce’s case, it’s got him in charge of a huge organization that is really going places. Or, in this case, going […]
Continue readingThe curious problem of assessing physics
Here’s a bit more on the NCEA Physics assessments that I heard about at the NZ Institute of Physics Conference last week. I alluded to it very briefly in a previous post. This comes from my notes of the presentation given by David Lillis, a statistician at the NZ Qualifications Authority. Unsurprisingly, NZQA throw lots […]
Continue readingThe continuity equation
Yesterday, being a warm, sunny Labour Day holiday (those words don’t usually go together) we decided we needed to get out of the house and go somewhere interesting, and chose the Waitomo area. Didn’t go into the show caves this time (done those a few times before) but chose to keep the bank account under […]
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