A friend has just started a Bachelor of Arts degree here at Waikato. As part of her first year study, she’s chosen to do a Philosophy paper. Apparently, one of the questions that has been posed, is "Is maths real?". Well, what is real? You certainly can’t put ‘maths’ in a box and give it […]
Continue readingYear: 2013
Don’t underestimate the estimate
A few weeks ago we had a small, informal competition in the department – guess the maximum gradient on one of the roads on campus. I think the motivation for this this small stretch of hill (or what passes for a hill here in Hamilton) was going to be used as part of a dynamics […]
Continue readingBlackwater rafting
I’ve had my brother visiting from the UK, which has been a good excuse for doing some of the touristy things in the area. I wasn’t taken by the prospect of zorbing, but we did give blackwater rafting a go in the Ruakuri cave at Waitomo. I’ve always wanted a go at that – and […]
Continue readingDispersion in water waves
I’ve been perusing YouTube looking for good videos illustrating wave packets – which are bunches of waves containing different wavelengths. I want to come up with a good illustration for a second year physics paper on introductory quantum theory. This contains a lot of ‘wave’ things. Here’s a nice one I’ve stumbled on. It shows […]
Continue readingMega- and nano-everything
While generally speaking I’m very pleased to hear physics words appear in everyday conversation, I would prefer for them to be used approximately correctly. ‘Exponentially‘ is a case in point – it gets used for something that keeps getting bigger, regardless of how exponential it really is. So, while ‘nanotechnology’ is a good word to […]
Continue readingTeaching how to think physics
One of the things I frequently bleat about is that physics isn’t synonymous with stuffing numbers into formulae. Therefore, it’s with some horror that I’ve watched through my attempts at doing the 2012 NZQA Scholarship Physics exam and seen myself stuffing numbers into formulae. At least, that is how many of the videos come across […]
Continue reading2012 Scholarship exam finished
Yesterday Sam and I finished filming my attempts to do the 2012 Physics Scholarship exam. There were some tough questions in there. I got on top of them, I think, with some careful thinking through the principles involved, which is a very good way to start when you are bemused by a question. I’m sure […]
Continue readingShock fronts: literature and surfing
One of baby Benjamin’s books has a storyline that goes like this. (Not wishing to fall foul of the Copyright Act I shall not quote directly from it – any sensible quote is about 10% or greater of the work!) There’s an animal that’s being chased by another animal. This second animal is being chased […]
Continue readingWhen inifinity isn’t infinite
I’ve been having some discussion with a collaborator in Sydney regarding a numerical model that we are developing. It concerns the response of the brain to pulses of magnetic field, but for the purposes of this blog entry, that is immaterial. One thing that we’ve been grappling with is ‘dealing with infinity’. Basically, in physical […]
Continue readingWeight and lift: Chicken style
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 […]
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