With baby Benjamin taking our attention, poor Mizuna the cat has been rather neglected recently. Unfortunately, this has proved an expensive (for us) and painful (for him) mistake. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed one morning that he was clearly in pain, and desperately trying to urinate. CLANG, CLANG, go the alarm bells. Male, […]
Continue readingMonth: September 2012
What do students make of physics and maths…
Last week I did my first interview with students regarding a small research project I’m doing – looking at the ways that students percieve the relationship between physics and maths and how similar they are in their thinking to expert physicists. It was an interesting interview. I had four students, and their was quite a […]
Continue readingThe Higgs Boson for not-so-dummies
A few months ago I agreed to do a physics talk for the Hamilton Junior Naturalists (Junats). When pushed for a title I decided on the Large Hadron Collider and the Higgs Boson. Hmm. How does one go about explaining the Higgs Boson to an 11 year old? (I’ve got to Friday evening to come […]
Continue readingHow many significant figures?
The overstating of accuracy is something that physics teachers have to continually correct. Just because one’s calculator gives an answer to ten significant figures doesn’t mean one should quote it to ten significant figures. I’ve just looked up the location of Nakedbus’s Auckland City bus stop. It was very easy to do – drawing from […]
Continue readingEarly warnings of a change of state
It’s been wonderful watching Benjamin grow in the last nine and a bit weeks. He’s now become fully interactive – he’ll respond to what we do and what’s going on around him. hearing him ‘talk’ is fun – he can come out with an excited string of goos and gahs when he’s happy. Naturally, though, […]
Continue readingStatic electricity
Static electricity is, above all, fun, but it also can be annoying at times. I was at a conference in Queenstown last week, and was haunted by static everywhere I went. I’m guessing that atmospheric conditions were pretty dry, meaning that electric charge didn’t leak away quickly. When you know that you are going to […]
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