A couple of days ago I arrived 'home' to discover our local ant colony at work. There's a nest located somewhere in the bushes at the front of our temporary home, and the occupants have become rather adept at raiding our kitchen. Anything left on the kitchen bench is fair game for the taking. Ants […]
Continue readingMonth: March 2017
Having just visiting the Electronic Engineering building…
,,,I have the following question. Why is it that electronic engineers like to find themeselves the most labyrinthine building on campus and place their reception area somewhere that no-one is likely to find? I can only assume it is because they don't want their own private world disturbed. Best leave them be.
Continue readingPhysics is a science. Or maybe not.
A couple of hours ago I gave a talk to the 'education group' in the Faculty of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Broadly speaking, the audience was a group of physicists and engineers who are interested in education. I recycled a talk that I'd given a couple of years ago […]
Continue readingWeather records
I came across the following on the BBC website "Australia's summer broke 205 records…" It draws from the recent Climate Council report. The BBC article doesn't list them all 205 of them, but does pull out the most impressive – the hottest summer on record for Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, and the wettest on record […]
Continue readingBlowing potholes
As part of our trip southwards last week, we visited one of the many caves scattered across the Margaret River region. The immediate impression on entering the 'Jewel Cave' is its vast size. It's hard to estimate just how big the main cavern is, but as a rough guess maybe 100 metres by 50 metres […]
Continue readingTrusting someone’s engineering calculations
We put our trust in someone else's calculations and measurements all the time. It's just part of the modern world. Cross a bridge, drive a car, use anything electrical, and we implicity trust that the people who designed it, built it, installed it and tested it have done their job correctly. Occasionally things go wrong […]
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