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 readingYear: 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 […]
Continue readingTime travel
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 readingThe 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 […]
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