A sure-fire way to increase the value of any piece of electronic equipment is to add some superfluous flashing red, yellow and green LEDs to it. (Light Emitting Diode.) They serve no use, but their presence is somehow comforting (especially in sci-fi films) and gives the impression that the equipment is busy doing something useful. There […]
Continue readingTag: electron
Where the smart money is…
Mark Twain is reputed to have said on investment choices "Buy land – they’re not making it anymore". There’s got to be a good deal of truth in that – it’s hard to see that there will be a decreasing demand for land on a global scale in the next century (though there are perhaps […]
Continue readingGoing Naked
I’ve been reading about Naked Short Selling, following Germany’s decision this week to ban it. What the financial world gets up to is rather interesting, to say the least. For those who don’t wish to read about it themselves, my summary is this: Short-selling is where you borrow something, then sell it, buy it back […]
Continue readingWhat spin would you like with that?
I’ve been trying to avoid commenting on the recent mobile phone and cancer study (since everyone else is) but something I’ve just read has rather irked me so I’m going to do it. So we have a study that’s just been published in the International Journal of Epidemiology. As with other high interest scientific research, […]
Continue readingStunning Physics
Sorry about the gap in activities – I had something unexpected come up which was rather more important and urgent than writing blog posts. More or less back online now. A couple of weeks ago we had our University Open Day, at the University of Waikato. This covered the whole university, and, of course, our […]
Continue readingA computer isn’t a replacement for your brain
As part of one of our research projects, one of my students has just acquired a set of tiny electrodes, set into plastic in a grid-like pattern. We’ll use this array to measure the electrical conductivity of various fluids. We don’t need 60 electrodes, about 4 would do nicely, but the particular company concerned makes the electrode arrays like […]
Continue readingGoodbye old technology and hello new
First the new stuff: Judging by the excited twittering of the last day or so, there are a few rather excited people at CERN. http://www.twitter.com/cern . It’s now running and producing collisions at 3.5 TeV per beam. We are well in the realm of new physics. The Higgs boson might feel a little nervous now – it […]
Continue readingThings that don’t like water
So, my class of students (well, at least one of them) have done the calculations and think that a centimetre of water is enough to shield a mobile phone from communicating with the nearest mast. Only one way to find out. I’ll bring along a bucket, lots of glad wrap and waterproofing materials to tomorrow’s […]
Continue readingMind games for physicists
Here’s a gem of a paper from Jonathan Tuminaro and Edward Redish. The authors have carried out a detailed analysis of the discussions a group of physics students had when solving a particular problem. They’ve worked hard (the researchers, as well as the students) – the first case study they chose was a conversation 45 […]
Continue readingMobile phone physics
Just occasionally, I have a crazy thought regarding a physics demonstration. This is one that I’m thinking about inflicting on my third year electromagnetism class. We’ve been discussing the way electromagnetic waves travel (or rather, do not travel) through electrical conductors. Basically, conductors allow electric currents to flow in response to an applied electric field (in simple terms […]
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