Counting Barretts

Just in case you don’t have a seven-year old boy in your house (in which case this will be obvious) a well-known brand of breakfast cereal here in NZ is currently coming with All-Blacks stats cards. Perfect for finding out your favourite rugby player’s height, number of caps, and how much they can eat for […]

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The lying dashboard (part 2)

Following-on from my suspicions as to the accuracy of my car’s reporting of my travel statistics, here’s another mystery. The length of my journey from home to work, as recorded by my odometer this morning, was 24.7 km.  The length as recorded by Google Maps is 25.2 km.  So, my odometer underreads. Or it did […]

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Quantum cryptography

I was reading last week a children’s book about “Secret codes”.  You probably know the kind of thing I’m talking about – substituting one letter for another, or a squiggly shape for a letter, rearranging letters, and so on. Fun things to do, but not the basis of modern cryptography. However, the book didn’t just […]

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The bed of nails

It’s always fun to see this demonstrated. Here’s Haggis Henderson, at the recent NZ Institute of Physics conference in Christchurch, not only lying on a bed of nails but having a teenager stand on him too. He survived the experience, though I can’t vouch for what his back looked like afterwards. The bed of nails […]

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