On Monday evening this week I managed to do a bit of time travelling while driving back home. I was driving back through one of those heavy showers that have been marauding around the place recently, with windscreen wipers full pelt on a rather wet road. However, these showers don’t last for very long, and […]
Continue readingMonth: August 2012
The wonders of concrete
As I mentioned in an earlier post, one of the buildings near my office is currently being redeveloped. By redeveloped, I mean a mix of rebuilding, extending and renovation. In the last few weeks the building has been stripped back to its structural shell – pretty much all things that aren’t necessary to hold the […]
Continue readingWading recklessly into the water ownership debate
If you’re in New Zealand, you cannot have failed to be aware of the legal wranglings over the ownership of water. Who owns or has rights to the water in our rivers? The raising of this question is a not-so-subtle attempt from one half of the political spectrum to delay (or stop) the sale of […]
Continue readingEquipment failure
In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working with one of our technicians tracking down what has been going wrong with one of the experiments we get our third year physics students to do. It’s on Brownian Motion. Specifically, analyze the movement of small particles suspended in water by scattering of laser light. By […]
Continue readingSome thoughts from teaching appraisals
First of all, sorry for the lack of entries. That’s what having a baby does. To write blog entries, or to try to extract a smile out of the bubba? Baby wins every time! Anyway, this morning I was going through some teaching appraisal forms. At the end of every paper, the students have the […]
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