In August 1999, I had the opportunity to travel from the U.K. to Varna, Bulgaria, on the Black Sea coast, to view the European Total Solar Eclipse. Just why we ended up in Varna, as opposed to a plethora of other possibilities in Europe, is a bit of a long story, but a substantial part […]
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One of the top challenges for physics in the modern era, along with Climate Change and explaining Dark Energy, has to be fixing the problem of bad light*. (I’m talking cricket – what else?) It’s a quintessentially English problem. It’s not raining, the pitch is perfectly playable, the spectators (COVID-19 notwithstanding) are enjoying themselves, but […]
Continue readingThe problem is [this] big surge in New Zealand … it’s terrible. We don’t want that.’ Yes, Mr Trump, it’s unwelcome. And we certainly don’t want it. But the US, on the other hand, might be a lot happier to replace its last 7 days of COVID-19 statistics with New Zealand’s. Here’s the graphs, with […]
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In the last few weeks, I’ve been working with some colleagues at the University of Waikato to construct a first-year course introducing Climate Change Science, with a bit of a NZ focus. This would be suitable for students of all backgrounds (not just science students although those would likely be the majority). It’s not that […]
Continue readingI have just got back to my office after a lunch-time run around campus. I have seen almost no evidence that anything is different from yesterday. Two people were having a conversation at an obvious ‘social-distance’ length. Another person was wearing a mask. (To be fair, so were the staff at Bongo sushi, but that […]
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If you drive an electric car more than trivial distances between charges, you likely appreciate a state-of-charge meter (that is, what would be called a fuel-gauge in a petrol car) that is accurate. When it reports a range of 30 km, you do want to be sure it will actually do this distance. If you […]
Continue readingThat was clearly a huge explosion. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12354134 Just after the explosion, we see a cloud of ‘fog’ moving outwards at high speed. This is a shockwave, rather similar to that which causes a sonic boom. The ‘fog’ is caused by water condensing from the atmosphere in areas of intense low pressure and temperature, and parallels […]
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Yesterday we arrived back in Cambridge after a few days holiday in Auckland, being tourists. We sampled such delights as the unheated hotel swimming pool, the complicated and expensive process of getting on a bus (basically having to find somewhere from which to buy a HOP card, for a non-refundable $10 a card), the completely […]
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As we emerge from ‘lockdown’* it’s time to start reflecting on how we, as a tertiary teaching establishment, have been continuing to provide quality teaching to our learners. Like most places, The University of Waikato has a rapid transition to online teaching. From what I hear from colleagues and students, through official and unofficial channels, […]
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You might not know them by name, but you know the idea and have seen the movies – Rube Goldberg machines serve a trivial purpose that but are stupendously overcomplicated. A classic is the Honda Cog advert – a machine for unveiling a banner. It goes like this: And, for those who have stockpiled too […]
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