Somewhere in the Cambridge / Hamilton vicinity is a car with no oil in it. I know this because on the way in to work this morning there was a trail of oil on the road. The damp road surface led to it being very prominent. A splash of oil, being less dense than water, […]
Continue readingTag: Newton’s laws
A bigger splash
The crawling baby is now undertaking a series of physics experiments. His favourite is the investigation of vibrational modes on biscuit tins and their coupling to longitudinal waves in the atmosphere. But he’s also repeating Galileo’s (supposed) famous experiment in studying the free-fall acceleration of various objects. In this case the elevated position is not […]
Continue readingTurning moments
The last couple of weeks has seen a few changes in the house as Benji has finally mastered crawling. Being a rather LARGE baby, he’s been the last of his coffee-group babies to become mobile, but now he’s got it worked out he’s away at high speed. No peaceful sunbathing for the chickens or the […]
Continue readingIt’s what the learner knows…
On the door of her office, Alison Campbell has a sign that says "the biggest factor in learning is what the learner already knows". Or something like that. In other words, students build upon an existing foundation when they make sense of the world. This can be very helpful, or very unhelpful, depending on whether […]
Continue readingIs maths real?
A friend has just started a Bachelor of Arts degree here at Waikato. As part of her first year study, she’s chosen to do a Philosophy paper. Apparently, one of the questions that has been posed, is "Is maths real?". Well, what is real? You certainly can’t put ‘maths’ in a box and give it […]
Continue readingBlackwater rafting
I’ve had my brother visiting from the UK, which has been a good excuse for doing some of the touristy things in the area. I wasn’t taken by the prospect of zorbing, but we did give blackwater rafting a go in the Ruakuri cave at Waitomo. I’ve always wanted a go at that – and […]
Continue readingWeight and lift: Chicken style
For reasons best known to their small chicken-brains, Harriet and Henrietta have decided to abandon the coup and roost in a tree. Maybe this is because it is rather hot in the coup at night, or possibly because a neighbour’s cat enjoys sitting outside the coup at six in the morning. (One day that cat […]
Continue readingThe sneeze jet
Well, I’m back in at work after a lovely Christmas break. Lots of sunshine (we dodged the bad weather by going southwards for Christmas and then back north for New Year), beaches, playing with baby, and hacking back the jungle that sprung in the back garden in our 10 days’ absence. Benjamin has now pretty-well […]
Continue readingUndiscovery in physics
With the recent undiscovery of Sandy Island I’ve begun wondering what other things might be ripe for undiscovery. Wasps, for example. Wouldn’t it be great if we realized that there wasn’t actually any evidence for the existence of wasps after all. Their discovery had been just a mistake made by an entomologist back in the […]
Continue readingNeed more grunt
When I came to New Zealand nearly nine years ago (it doesn’t seem that long – a sure sign of aging) I had to learn some new words. Or rather, new meanings for existing words. Things like ‘jug’, ‘dairy (as in the shop down the street), ‘five-eighth’ , ‘bush’, all have different meanings to what […]
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