I’ve just been reading this article on the BBC website about the puzzling lack of sunspots. The sun should be entering a period of high activity (equals lots of sunspots) but observations show otherwise. Maybe it’s just a bit late, or possibly our star is doing something rather different to normal. I’ll leave discussion on what […]
Continue readingMy niece, the one who was interested in reflections, is now into maths. She’s recently added the number ‘googol’ into her vocabulary. As in "Uncle Marcus, I’m going to count from one to a googol; one, two, three, four…" – though I’m not convinced she’s actually done it yet. A googol (not to be mistaken for […]
Continue readingI was marking some of my third year students’ work last week. One would have thought that by the time a student had reached third year at university, he or she would know the basic rules of answering an exam or assignment question. But apparently not. I know it isn’t exam season for you school students […]
Continue readingBeing Easter, blogging may take a back seat for a few days. Be assured that like governer Schwarzernegger, I’ll be back.
Continue readingNo, this isn’t about Chris Martin’s batting performance at the Basin Reserve. A couple of weeks ago, I thought I might have discovered a new phenomenon in biophysics. I won’t bore you with the details, but it concerned the behaviour of neurons (brain cells) under external stimulus. Now, I could have rushed out and tried […]
Continue readingNo time to make an intelligible comment just now, but this BBC report describing the new ‘gravity satellite’ looks a good read.
Continue reading(Yes, this entry is about physics, but it takes a little while to get there, so please bear with me…) Last night I attended a talk on nutrition. It was focused towards a particular health issue, but was also reasonably general in places. Now, I emphasize that I am a physicist not a nutritionist, so […]
Continue readingSo daylight savings is over for another year. Back to boring old standard time. Now’s a good moment to comment on what time zone New Zealand sits in. In ‘winter time’ it sits twelve hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time, GMT (or Univeral Time, as astronomers like to call it). Is that reasonable? In Greenwich (south-east […]
Continue readingI’ve just been reading in ‘Physics World’ magazine (IOP publishing, physicsworld.com) of one of the less well-known side effects of the delay on the Large Hadron Collider: many PhD students, who hoped by now to have that final bit of data to conclude their PhD theses, are stuck. A PhD is a research degree – […]
Continue readingThe holy grail of power generation is nuclear fusion. That’s the process by which stars are powered – simply put, hydrogen turns into helium and releases energy in the process. What makes it so perfect is that there is pretty-well a limitless supply of hydrogen on the Earth, tied up in the copious quantities of […]
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