Benjamin has recently acquired a 'new' book from Grandma and Grandad: Mr Archimedes' Bath (by Pamela Allen – here's the amazon link – the reviews are as interesting as the content). The story-line is reasonable guessable from the title. Mr Achimedes puts water into his bath, gets in, and the water overflows. What's going on? […]
Continue readingTag: experiment
Toddler does physics-art
As we all know, a scientifically-minded toddler plus a piece of technology can lead to unexpected results. This is the result of Benjamin playing with a retractable steel tape measure at the weekend. How we came to break the case apart I don't know, but the results are pretty (the cellphone shot in poor light […]
Continue readingRobot racing
The Engineering Design Show is currently in full swing here, with the competitions for the various design projects. The white-line followers kicked off proceedings. They were pretty impressive, with all but one team successfully being able to follow the (very squiggly) line without mistakes. There were traps to confuse the robots – the line got […]
Continue readingTelepathy breakthrough – great science, not science fiction
The '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 readingEngineering, lego and line followers
In the last few weeks I've been working with some second-year software engineering students on a design project. Their particular task is to build (with Lego – but the high-tech variety) a robot that can follow a white line on a bench. It's fun to watch them play with different ideas and concepts – there's […]
Continue readingGoing down the plughole
Being a father of an active, outdoor-loving two-year-old, I am well acquainted with the bath. Almost every night: fill with suitable volume of warm water, check water temperature, place two-year-old in it, retreat to safe distance. He's not the only thing that ends up wet as he carries out various vigorous experiments with fluid flow. […]
Continue readingDismantling the health and safety pyramid
A few days ago I was updating one of the lectures I do for my Experimental Physics course. I was putting in a bit more about safety and managing hazards, which are things that are associated with doing experiments for real. When I was a student, we didn't learn anything about this – my first […]
Continue readingThe gearbox problem
At afternoon tea yesterday we were discussing a problem regarding racing slot-cars (electric toy racing cars). A very practical problem indeed! Basically, what we want to know is how do we optimize the size of the electric motor and gear-ratio (it only has one gear) in order to achieve the best time over a given […]
Continue readingSeeing in the dark
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 […]
Continue readingDon’t trust the machine
Back to blogging, after a nice holiday in Taranaki dodging the rain showers (and, as it turned out, the volcano, which we never even got a glimpse of) and a frantic week of lab work while the undergraduates were away. Both were very interesting, but it's the lab work I'll talk about here. Something that […]
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