For reasons best known to their small chicken-brains, Harriet and Henrietta have decided to abandon the coup and roost in a tree. Maybe this is because it is rather hot in the coup at night, or possibly because a neighbour’s cat enjoys sitting outside the coup at six in the morning. (One day that cat […]
Continue readingMonth: January 2013
Tests: Assessment for learning
With the start of semester less than four weeks away now, I’ve been writing my exam papers, test papers, assignments etc for the A-semester papers that I teach. If I don’t get them done before the semester starts, it will be a real rush job to do them later on. Since the key to good […]
Continue readingScholarship exam 2012: Videos now uploaded
Sam has now uploaded the videos I talked about last week onto physicslounge so you can view them for yourself. They take some time to go through (it is a three hour paper after all) but if your internet connection is up to it they are there in glorious high definition. Before you go through […]
Continue readingStructural failure: Jam yesterday
We’ve had a bumper crop of plums from our two plum trees. Way more than we can eat our way through in the short plum season. It appears that we aren’t the only ones – the last couple of weeks have seen bucket loads of free plums turn up in the tea-room here. (And yet […]
Continue readingThe power of steam
Over Christmas, we were staying with my wife’s sister and her family in Dunedin. Early one morning (sometime before I got up, anyway – that is my definition of early) a loud ‘bang’ came from the direction of the kitchen, followed by the sound of eight paws beating a hasty retreat. There are two young […]
Continue readingScholarship physics: When the obvious is not-so-obvious
On Tuesday my physics skills were put under the spotlight. Back in November, I think, I was discussing with Sam Hight from the Physics Lounge (www.physicslounge.org) ways that we could, together help high-school students in their physics. One of the things we came up with is that I had a go at doing the 2012 […]
Continue readingNonsense maths
This one has hit the blogs recently, but, since it’s quite amusing – and perhaps a bit disturbing – it’s worth a comment. Kimmo Eriksson has recently published a paper on ‘The Nonsense Math Effect’. The study was conceptually very simple. It used two hundred participants, all of whom had postgraduate degrees, with the participants […]
Continue readingThe sneeze jet
Well, I’m back in at work after a lovely Christmas break. Lots of sunshine (we dodged the bad weather by going southwards for Christmas and then back north for New Year), beaches, playing with baby, and hacking back the jungle that sprung in the back garden in our 10 days’ absence. Benjamin has now pretty-well […]
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