After doing the washing up a few days ago, I returned to the sink to find a raft of bubbles had formed on the surface of the water. All the bubbles were roughly equal size, and they had aligned themselves into a close-packed lattice, as the photo shows. (Sorry about the quality of the photo […]
Continue readingYear: 2013
You know you are having a bad day when…
This morning I turned up to give my solid state physics lecture and I realised I was in the wrong place. I’d gone to the lecture room where the Friday lecture is held, not the Thursday one. The trouble is, I had absolutely no recollection of where the Thursday lecture was. Not being a smart-phone […]
Continue readingDon’t miss the eclipse (hee hee)
Friday is the last opportunity to view a solar eclipse in New Zealand for a long time (till 2021 – or 2025 if you don’t count anything of a few percent or lower). I say ‘view’, but the reality is that such a smidgen of sun is going to be covered that you’re going to […]
Continue readingThe sleep machine
I came across this paper while doing a bit of reading about the applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). A TMS machine applies pulses of magnetic field to the brain. The rapidly-varying magnetic field induces an electric field (Faraday’s law) and this in turn influences neural activity (but just how and where is an open question). A […]
Continue readingBig and small
Here’s a great interactive website by Cary Huang to give you an idea of how big and small things are. Thanks to Greta Dromgool for pointing me towards it. It covers a whopping 60 orders of magntiude in length – from ten to the power of minus thirty five (the Planck Length) through to 10 […]
Continue readingA bigger splash
The crawling baby is now undertaking a series of physics experiments. His favourite is the investigation of vibrational modes on biscuit tins and their coupling to longitudinal waves in the atmosphere. But he’s also repeating Galileo’s (supposed) famous experiment in studying the free-fall acceleration of various objects. In this case the elevated position is not […]
Continue readingTurning moments
The last couple of weeks has seen a few changes in the house as Benji has finally mastered crawling. Being a rather LARGE baby, he’s been the last of his coffee-group babies to become mobile, but now he’s got it worked out he’s away at high speed. No peaceful sunbathing for the chickens or the […]
Continue readingWatch the students
This week I sat in on a lecture given by a junior colleague of mine. Partly this was so I could offer him some guidance, but partly so I could see how someone else approaches the the teaching of physics and engineering material. It was enlightening experience for me. One thing I did was to […]
Continue readingThe amazing vacuum microwave
Happy Easter everyone. Sorry for lack of blog activity – lots of marking has been building up that I’ve needed to get through. Yesterday we experienced the vacuum-packing ability of a clip-container in a microwave. In this case, it was being used to cook some vegetables for Benjamin’s dinner. The veges were placed in the […]
Continue readingIt’s what the learner knows…
On the door of her office, Alison Campbell has a sign that says "the biggest factor in learning is what the learner already knows". Or something like that. In other words, students build upon an existing foundation when they make sense of the world. This can be very helpful, or very unhelpful, depending on whether […]
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