…No, it isn’t something everyone smokes… But it is common in machine mechanisms. The universal joint is a neat way of turning rotation in one plane into rotation in another. A common use is on driveshafts where you want the direction of the shaft to bend. There’s a neat animation on Wikipedia of how the […]
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The storm surge
I shudder to think what it must have been like in the path of Cyclone Winston. It is hard to conceive of winds 230 km/h sustained for minutes at a time. I remember vividly what is now known as the Great Storm of 1987 (an extra-tropical cyclone) which pulverised south-east England on 15/16 October 1987. There […]
Continue readingThe problem with science communication
Yesterday I was part of a very interesting workshop on Science in Society, in Auckland. There was a plethora of good examples of science communication discussed – including forest restoration on the East Coast, biological control of pests in vineyards in Canterbury and improvement of health outcomes for Native Americans in Montana. For me, it […]
Continue readingGravitational Waves
The big breaking physics news is the detection of gravitational waves. These waves are distortions in space-time, caused by a large mass doing something spectacular (two colliding black holes in this case) that propagate across the universe and create tiny changes in space when they reach us. The commentary here describes what goes on. Essentially, […]
Continue readingWeighing magnetic properties
It's a New Year and there are lots of things to do at work before the students get back in any numbers. There are still summer students and research students here, and in the last couple of days I've been working with a summer student on getting a new piece of equipment running for our […]
Continue readingFeedback, feedback and more feedback
I've recently received the final report from the Conference Organizing company that looked after the New Zealand Institute of Physics (NZIP) conference, back in July. The report includes such things as the final accounts, the breakdown of who attended, and feedback from participants. It's the feedback that is particularly interesting. When we attend an event, […]
Continue readingHow 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 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 readingClothes racks are the cause of mouldy homes. I doubt it.
I read the 'Rental Nightmare' article on stuff.co.nz last night. Some of the stories are horrific indeed, and I'm reasonably confident that the writer has deliberately sought out the worst situations rather than the most common situations. But one cannot deny that a great deal of housing in New Zealand is sub-standard. In housing-deficient Auckland, […]
Continue readingAxis labels – accurate but not at all obvious
I had a conversation with a class this morning regarding the labelling of axes on graphs.In particular, how we should indicate the units. Most quantities we deal with in physics carry units. A speed might be 35 km/h, a distance might be 16.8 mm, a pressure could be 28 kPa. Saying that a speed is […]
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