As we drove on a family outing at the weekend, we sung “Alice the camel”. For those who don’t know it, it goes like this (to the tune of “Dem Bones”): “Alice the camel had five humps; Alice the camel had five humps; Alice the camel had five humps; so go, Alice go! Alice the […]
Continue readingLast week saw the first ‘fault’ on our washing machine. We’ve had this particular one for nine months, and with a baby and young boy in the house it is well used. When I went into the laundry to empty the machine I found the cycle had not finished as I had expected. Instead, the […]
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Saturday afternoon saw a break in the rain, and I was able to get out into the garden. The first thing I did was to harvest a red cabbage for dinner. The nice bit of the cabbage is the tightly rolled leaves in the middle, but surrounding that are a whole lot of larger leaves, […]
Continue readingIn the last few weeks I’ve been talking with a colleague about magnetizable materials – what they do and how they are categorized. I’m talking about things such as iron – which, when you put them in a magnetic field, will magnetize. That makes the field bigger than you started with. Some materials will stay […]
Continue readingHaving had a rather extended half-time break from blogging I have some time to get it kicked-off again. And what better topic that the Football World Cup. (Or, as it’s referred to everywhere except New Zealand, the World Cup.) There are some great examples and analogies of physics that we can pull from this, but […]
Continue readingTo the idiots in Te Awamutu who thought it fun to shine a powerful blue laser at flight NZ5622 on its approach to Hamilton airport at 8.34 last night: You may be surprised to learn that I would actually like to spend the rest of my life being able to see. And when I'm on […]
Continue reading,,,I have the following question. Why is it that electronic engineers like to find themeselves the most labyrinthine building on campus and place their reception area somewhere that no-one is likely to find? I can only assume it is because they don't want their own private world disturbed. Best leave them be.
Continue readingI came across the following on the BBC website "Australia's summer broke 205 records…" It draws from the recent Climate Council report. The BBC article doesn't list them all 205 of them, but does pull out the most impressive – the hottest summer on record for Sydney, Brisbane and Canberra, and the wettest on record […]
Continue readingYou have got to see this… This movie is a demonstration of laminar flow. My colleague Julia Mullarney used it last week in our Osborne lectures to high-school students to demonstrate what turbulent flow ISN'T. Basically, laminar flow is time-reversal invariant. This implies a few things, but, notably here that if you reverse the processes […]
Continue readingI didn't actually intend to visit the Synchrotron. I didn't actually know it was right next door (honestly – I don't exaggerate) to the Centre for Biomedical Imaging at Monash University in Melbourne until I arrived there on Monday. Somehow I managed to get myself tagged onto a tour with a group of students. The […]
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