On Christmas Eve, child number 1 spotted a crack in a window. It’s a double-glazed window, and inspection showed that the small, horizontal crack was in the outermost pane. It was perpendicular to the frame, about three-quarters of the way up one side. The origins are a mystery. It MIGHT have something to do with […]
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I had the delight of being at Seddon Park on Friday 4 December, watching Kane Williamson on his way to 251 runs. It was a wonderful innings to watch and he’s a perfect example to try to copy if you’re learning to play the game. Part of his success is down to his ability to […]
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Yesterday afternoon I had to call on my car’s anti-lock braking system (ABS). For reasons best known to its driver, a car pulled out of a side road right in front of me while I was driving home after work, and I needed to stop in a hurry. I rather think the car behind me […]
Continue readingThose of us who fly out of NZ reasonably frequently will have noticed how flight times differ significantly depending on whether one is travelling west to east or east to west. Take my recent flight to and from Perth, in Western Australia. The Auckland to Perth flight was timetabled to last 7 hours 25 minutes, […]
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At the recent NZ Institute of Physics conference in Dunedin we heard about a wide range of different physics topics -measuring electrical forces; atomic frequency combs; why a highly gendered physics class is not a good thing and measuring forces with your phone. One very simple but thought-provoking presentation was by Tim Molteno – on […]
Continue readingWe put our trust in someone else's calculations and measurements all the time. It's just part of the modern world. Cross a bridge, drive a car, use anything electrical, and we implicity trust that the people who designed it, built it, installed it and tested it have done their job correctly. Occasionally things go wrong […]
Continue reading…No, it isn’t something everyone smokes… But it is common in machine mechanisms. The universal joint is a neat way of turning rotation in one plane into rotation in another. A common use is on driveshafts where you want the direction of the shaft to bend. There’s a neat animation on Wikipedia of how the […]
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