My wife was complaining this morning about the mass of knitting that is underneath our home computer. Not knitting of the woollen jersey kind, but knitting of the wire kind, that is needed to supply power to the computer, printer, modem, etc etc etc and to allow the computer to talk to the printer, etc. […]
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Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics
I’ve just had an email invitation to subscribe to a journal called ‘Geophysical and Astrophysical Fluid Dynamics’, with a lovely note that they hope it will serve my research needs. I’m at a loss to think of how it possibly could; maybe at some conference years ago I filled in a card saying I had some […]
Continue readingMy experiment won’t work (or, Why I am not a biologist)
Let me take you back a few years, to when I was in year 9 at school, in the fair county of Sussex (in UK). In my biology class we did an experiment to look at the preference for woodlice for light or dark. Basically two petri dishes, one painted back, with lids, joined together […]
Continue readingNZ Scholarships – hot exam tip number 2
For you final year school students contemplating doing the scholarship physics exam, you should check out the examiners’ report on last year’s exam which has just been released on the NZQA website. (Scroll down to ‘physics’ and then download the 2008 files). It gives a summary of the skills successful and unsuccessful candidates possessed. Even […]
Continue readingWhat’s in a name?
Last Monday I gave another talk on the Large Hadron Collider, this time in Tauranga. It led to the usual kind of questions (like what is a Higgs Boson?, how fast are these protons going?, how can they be 100% sure it is safe, etc), plus a few less obvious ones, like could they use […]
Continue readingHuygens’ Clocks
I was reminded this week about the story of Huygens’ clocks. Christaan Huygens was one of those too-clever-by-half physicists / mathematicians who was into just about any science that was going on at the time. This seventeenth century dutchman is maybe best known in physics for his work on wave motion, but he was also […]
Continue readingFlu
Swine flu is no joking matter, so I’ll keep this one short and to the point, and just comment that the spread of the virus (or, for that matter, any virus) is another example of a stochastic system. Partly predictable, and partly random. The spread of viruses such as SARS have been well studied by […]
Continue readingTechnology
WARNING: This entry relies entirely on my memory, and as such I make no guarantee of its authenticity. I recently read an article in NZ consumer magazine about LCD televisions. What ones are worth the price etc. That prompted a memory from years ago (I think end of 1992 but I might be mistaken) when, as […]
Continue readingThree is a big number
Carrying on the big number theme I will now tell you that three is a good working approximation to infinity. Yes, three, you know, the number that comes after two. As in one, two, infinity. So you are thinking I’ve finally lost my marbles.
Continue readingMore than a googol things to count
So this week I said that there weren’t a googol of things in this universe to count. That might not be quite true. It really depends on what you mean by a thing. If it’s something tangible, that you can hold in your hand (like a grain of sand), then that is true. But we […]
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