Last night our cat failed to live up to the reputation of his species for executing four-footed landings when he lept off a perch in hot pursuit of a piece of string, landed on his front paws with too much forward rotation, performed a graceful flick-flack and thuded head first into the CD rack. After […]
Continue readingWhat’s happening in Geneva?
In the last few days I’ve had a couple of people ask what is happening with the Large Hadron Collider. Well, if you want the latest news, you can grab the press releases from http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/News.htm . In short, they are doing various tests, and finding and addressing various problems as they arise. It now looks like November […]
Continue readingMore coffee cup physics (or, am I quite sane?)
So last Friday, after a hard week at the office, I went over to the Opus Bar on campus to enjoy some evening music. And, because I wished to consume neither alcohol (I had to drive home) nor caffeine (I didn’t want to stay up till midnight), I bought a hot chocolate.
Continue readingScience Fair
For those in easy reach of Hamilton Gardens, the NIWA Science Fair is well worth a visit. I spent a considerable portion of yesterday looking over the exhibits – which mostly consist of posters describing children’s science projects. It is wonderful to see that, despite the perpetual moanings in the media, there are children out there who are interested […]
Continue readingZombie attack
This is doing the rounds at the moment. Modelling the spread of zombie-ism amongst the human population. (E.g. report on BBC website.) The original article is actually a bit physicsy – the methods used are pretty common ones for modelling physical processes with a computer, and the sort of thing I do a lot of in […]
Continue readingTransformers
One of the likely candidates for the recent explosion at the Sayano Shushenskaya hydro-electric plant in Russia is a transformer. But what is a transformer, and why might one explode? Transformers are an ubiquitous part of our electricity generation and distribution network. Their job is essentially to transform an electricity supply from one voltage to […]
Continue readingBlue squid
Did anyone see Saturday’s ‘Country Calendar’ on TVOne? In case you didn’t, it followed a group of long-line tuna fishermen on their fishing trip North of North Cape. They were testing out a method for detering albatross from trying to take the bait (squid) from the hooks – a decision often fatal for the albatross. The method […]
Continue readingSophie’s law of gravitation
With reference to my entry last week, here is the bit in Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World about gravity. Spot the misconception. Sophie is talking to Alberto: ‘Well, if the moon was drawn to the earth with the same foce that causes the apple to fall, one day the moon would come crashing to earth instead […]
Continue readingAre children more science-literate than their parents?
I came across this article on the BBC website yesterday. It talked about how parents feel that they are being routinely baffled by science questions their children asked. Apparently, the top three questions that parents don’t like to hear are: "Where do babies come from?", "What makes a rainbow?" and "Why is the sky blue?" […]
Continue readingMore energy issues
You may have seen the article in the NZ Herald on Saturday about our use of fossil fuels (The Carbon Party’s Over, Chris Barton, NZ Herald 8 August 2009). The bit I loved about this article was translating a barrel of oil (159 litres) into more everyday terms – namely the energy in it is […]
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