Misleading reflections

For some reason I have yet to discover, the flagpole at The University of Waikato on Monday was flying the flag of the Republic of Ireland, at half-mast. However, observing this for the first time from the Faculty of Science and Engineering tearoom on Monday morning, it was hard to be sure just which flag […]

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A photon walks into a hotel…

A photon walks into a hotel and checks in. "Do you want a hand with your luggage?" asks the receptionist. "No thanks", replies the photon, "I’m travelling light". Thanks to my friend Julie for that one.   But it got me thinking about the quantum nature of things that may not immediately appear quantum-like. There’s a […]

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Schlieren imaging

I’ve been sent this link to a movie of a shock wave from a trombone.  You’ve got to feel sorry for the poor clarinetist who is sitting in front. This sort of thing can be done neatly with the method of schlieren imagaing. (See some more examples here) This is a ‘simple’ way of picking up […]

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Wet 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 […]

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Light fantastic

D’oh. Missed the exploding meteor last night. From the news reports it sounds like a pretty impressive sight.  (N.B. I like the comment on the stuff.co.nz article that says "Faster than a plane = definitely over 10000 km an hour. I don’t know how many planes this guy has travelled in, but doing 10000 km […]

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Mirror trickery

Last week I heard about for the first time something that is common knowledge to all women in the western world – namely that women’s clothes shops use convex mirrors to make you appear thinner. Since I don’t frequent women’s clothes shops particularly often (I don’t frequent men’s clothes shops more than is strictly necessary, […]

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A daylight conundrum

Our organic alarm clock has now taken to jumping on the bed at about 5 in the morning and purring very loudly in an attempt to persuade us it’s breakfast time. It’s not surprising, since sunrise (and therefore cat-rise, if not Marcus-rise) is becoming earlier and earlier. Daylight hours are now long – in fact the […]

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