Mysterious power generation

One consequence of being a physicist is that you can’t go anywhere without seeing physics calculations that need doing. I’ve just been to our library hunting down books on the medical technique of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which was an interesting exercise in itself, since one textbook I found also has a chapter on homeopathy. […]

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Experiments with known answers

Earlier this week I read through a student’s work placement report. Our engineering students all go out on two work placements over the course of their study with us, and need to provide reports on these. I was slightly amused to read about the student’s views on the novel experience of doing experiments where you […]

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Convection and continuity

With the coming of the colder evenings, we’ve had our new heat pump going. It’s quite a powerful beast, as it has a large volume to heat, and it comes with a plethora of different settings – temperature, fan speed, air flow angle and so forth. It’s taken some experimentation to get some decent settings […]

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The test with talking in

It’s about time I got another entry onto this blog. To be fair, we spent the long weekend (and the university stretches it out by making Tuesday a university holiday) in sunny (not) Hawke’s Bay, enjoying the wine (well, I did – Karen obviously didn’t, being pregnant), the art deco architecture, the coffee (some nice […]

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Benefits of student assignments

I spent a large fraction of last week marking assignments. I’m currently teaching three different papers, and, due to a major lack of concentration on my part, I managed to set each class an assignment that was due on the same day. To be useful for students, assignments need to be marked rapidly, which meant […]

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