Technology is changing how education is done. Anyone my age (shall we say larger, but not much larger, than 40) who has gone into a school recently will see that it’s vastly different from what they themselves experienced at school. Technology abounds, and the children are using it. Also, university is vastly different from what […]
Continue readingMonth: June 2012
The fast Fourier transform
I made the brave decision yesterday to attend a seminar in the Computer Science department. I used to like computer science as a teenager – I was one of those geeks who wrote their own computer games – but in latter times I’ve stuck with the physics and used computers begrudgingly as a means of doing my […]
Continue readingWhy you shouldn’t bother buying a thermometer
Well, looks like winter has finally arrived here. There’s not much worse weather-wise than having a clear night with the cloud rolling in just as the sun rises. The clear night lets the temperature drop, as the ground radiates away more energy than it receives from the atmosphere and surrounding objects, and then the clouds […]
Continue readingAnother bad physics joke
Brrrrr. It was so cold this morning I had to wipe the Bose-Einstein condensation off the windows. Perhaps more amusing was the sight I saw on the edge of the road this morning on my way into work. The ‘white-line painting crew’ had clearly been out remarking the road. The white line on the left […]
Continue readingSabbaticals
One of the most interesting talks from last week at the Transit of Venus forum was by Craig Nevill-Manning, the Engineering Director of Google, and, by the way, a graduate of The University of Waikato. He let us in to the ironic secret of Google’s success: Google promotes face-to-face meetings. While its products help us […]
Continue readingTransit of Venus
That was different! Yesterday no-one expected the sky to be clear enough to see the transit, but see it we did. We had an early start – herded onto buses and shipped up to Uawa/Tolaga Bay – a rather poignant place to see the transit, given that’s where Captain Cook arrived in 1759 after viewing […]
Continue readingThe dangers of wrapping Christmas presents
I learned this interesting factoid last week in a seminar by Les Kirkup on student-led learning. Sticky tape emits x-rays. Honest, it does. It’s in Nature. You can watch the movie here. It’s all to do with triboluminesence. This week I’m at the Transit of Venus forum in Gisborne, along with about 900 other delegates […]
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