Our new house (new to us – it’s twelve years old) can make some ferocious noises sometimes. It has some huge steel beams supporting the roof – these being held up as far as I can tell partly by steel supports and partly by concrete walls. I’ve been trying to work out just what is […]
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The continuity equation
Yesterday, being a warm, sunny Labour Day holiday (those words don’t usually go together) we decided we needed to get out of the house and go somewhere interesting, and chose the Waitomo area. Didn’t go into the show caves this time (done those a few times before) but chose to keep the bank account under […]
Continue readingThermal expansion
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been fascinated by the amount of thermal expansion demonstrated by the chimney flue in our new house. Like many New Zealand houses, there is a log-burner located in the living area. The flue basically consists of a vertical column of large (steel?) cylinders slotted into each other, going […]
Continue readingHot air rises
Well, we have now moved into our new house. We moved last Friday, mostly dodging the heavy showers that have been marauding around the country for the last week. We are slowly unpacking – the place is looking a lot tidier now than it did at the weekend, but it will take a while to […]
Continue readingElectricity and heat
There’s an advert that’s well-featured on the television at the moment for a plug-in wall-mounted heater. As part of the advert, the product is described as ‘efficient’. Now, I’m not at all saying that these heaters aren’t a good purchase, but a bit of physics tells me that this statement about efficiency doesn’t really mean very […]
Continue readingWet house, dry house?
We’re looking for a new house at the moment. We’ve decided to be a lot more environmentally friendly and shift out of Cambridge and move to Hamilton to cut down the pesky commute in the mornings and evenings. We haven’t made much progress, though, with finding a house – what we’re looking for is in […]
Continue readingPaint
Question: What’s more tedious than watching paint dry? Answer: Waiting for a dry day so you can put the paint on in the first place. Or, to be closer to the truth, waiting for a dry day so that the guy you’ve hired to do the painting can get on and finish it. Getting the […]
Continue readingChocolate problems
Thinking back to last week’s MasterChef (the chocolate tower of terror – re-live it here), there were a couple of nice examples of cooking being a branch of physics. I’ve heard it said that cookery is all about managing the flow of heat into (or, in this case, out of) an object, which, of course, […]
Continue readingUses of Liquid Nitrogen
I went to the doctor yesterday and he attacked me with liquid nitrogen. To be more specific, I had a wart ‘frozen’ off. Now, I had some similar treatment years ago, in which the doctor used a container of the stuff surrounded by polystyrene foam, and open to the air. Rather like what we use […]
Continue reading“It’s a rain forest, expect rain…”
So says an information board at the Aniwaniwa Visitor Centre at Waikaremoana in Te Urewera National Park. We know this well, so before heading down that way with the tent this weekend, we carefully checked the weather forecast. "Mostly fine, with occasional showers", it advised, and the nice weather charts indicated a high pressure area […]
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