It’s that time of year when school students become seriously focused on exams. This year has been messy for student learning, and has affected some students more than others, but the NCEA external assessments and the Scholarship exams are going ahead pretty-much as normal. I’ve taken some interest in the Scholarship Physics exams over the […]
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I was reading in a physics magazine earlier in the week about the nature of neutrinos. These are extremely numerous elementary particles, but only interact very weakly with anything. Around a million billion pass through you each second, almost all originating from our sun, but few of them are likely to interact with you enroute. […]
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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 readingIt'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 readingWhen I was at school, and introduced to magnetic fields in a quantitative sense (that is, with a strength attached to it), I remember being told that the S.I. unit of magnetic flux density (B-field) is the tesla, and that 1 tesla is an extremely high B-field indeed. Ha! Not any more. Last Friday night […]
Continue readingI've spent most of today thinking Google's image-of-the-day is a wicket, but have just realized it is in honour of Alessandro Volta.
Continue readingNot so long ago, a tennis ball appeared in our garden. It's a rather distinctive red one. It doesn't belong to us. It was lying close by to the (low) fence between us and our neighbour, so I just chucked it back. Next morning, it was there again. I threw it back. And, more or […]
Continue readingThe 'Science' news hitting the media at the weekend was Guilio Ruffini and Alvaro Pascual-Leone's demonstration of 'telepathy'. There's been a lot of media coverage on this – for example the neat little interview of Ruffini on the BBC's 'Today' programme. Their article on this can be read here. It's not a long one, and, […]
Continue readingI've just been at a great lecture by Peter Leijen as part of our schools-focused Osborne Physics and Engineering Day. He's an ex-student of ours, who did electronic engineering here at Waikato – and graduated just a couple of years ago. He now works in the automotive electronics industry. That's an incredibly quickly growing […]
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No, nothing to do with carrots and vitamin A I'm afraid. With dark evenings and mornings with us now :(, Benjamin's become interested in the dark. It's dark after he's finished tea, and he likes to be taken outside to see the dark, the moon, and stars, before his bath. "See dark" has become a […]
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