I take back what I said last week about amazing vehicle management systems on milk tankers. Last night a GPS took a forty-two tonne tanker onto the three-tonne-rated Cambridge High Level Bridge, in what could have been a catastrophe. The bridge, with which I am very familiar, was designed for people, horses-and-carts, and the occasional […]
Continue readingMonth: October 2015
How do you measure the volume of beer in your bottle?
Someone has to do it. There are laws in NZ pertaining to how the stated volume of bottled liquids corresponds to their actual volume. If, for example, you are selling beer in 375 ml capacity bottles, you need to make sure that your bottling plant is working to the NZ definition of what 375 ml […]
Continue readingTanker physics
I'm currently at the Metrology Society of Australasia conference in beautiful Queenstown. For those that don't know, which might be most of you, metrology is the science of measurement. How do you measure things well? At this conference, we've got presentations on measuring temperature, pressure, liquid volume (a surprisingly tricky one this – if you […]
Continue readingPlants in circular motion
In our first-year physics lab we have the following horticultural experiment. Here we have some bulbs growing on a rotating turntable. The array of five pots is placed on the turntable so that the centre pot is at the centre of the turntable; the left- and right-hand pots are at the perimeter.The turntable is rotating […]
Continue reading