Brrrrr. It was so cold this morning I had to wipe the Bose-Einstein condensation off the windows. Perhaps more amusing was the sight I saw on the edge of the road this morning on my way into work. The ‘white-line painting crew’ had clearly been out remarking the road. The white line on the left […]
Continue readingTag: Newton’s laws
Why going downhill is hard work
On Saturday I took the train out to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains. The train journey certainly gave me a feel for just how vast Sydney is. An hour out of central station, and one is still in the Sydney suburbs. But suddenly the end of the city comes abruptly – the train is suddenly […]
Continue readingHow to cheat aging
It’s ‘Wellness Focus’ week here, and there are all kinds of wonderful activities going on to promote health among the employees of the University of Waikato. I’ve just finished a REV class, which has finished me off for the whole afternoon, I think. Yesterday, I had a free health check – where my blood pressure, […]
Continue readingTorque equals rate of change of angular momentum
Another day, another New Zealand batting collapse. But while Kane is still there, there’s hope. Not what I wanted to blog about. Halogen lights. You know the ones, the little light bulbs that are all the fashion. You fit lots of them snuggly into your ceiling to provide a nice even illumination of the room […]
Continue readingImpossible angular momentum
Remember many, many years ago the urban myth that it had been scientifically proven that bumble-bees couldn’t fly? Many people took that to mean that science was clearly bonkers, and good reason to ignore anything a scientist said. Unfortunate, when as a scientist you want to campaign on the fact that science is a useful […]
Continue readingNewton’s laws in action
For reasons best known to their little chicken-brains, Hyacinth and Brigitta (our chickens) have decided that their coop is no-longer the des-res that it once was and a far better location for a night in the wind and rain is on top of the garden shed. The problem is that neither (especially Brigitta) is particularly […]
Continue readingGuilty of order-of-magnitude neglect
I’ve often commented on the failure of students to apply common sense when calculating physical quantitites. For example, perhaps I ask them to calculate or estimate the pressure exerted by a car tyre on the road (with the car attached to the tyre) and they punch their figures into a calculator and get 10.4 pascals. […]
Continue readingHitting sixes
Tuesday evening was a very enjoyable night spent at the NZ versus Zimbabwe Twenty20 cricket at Seddon Park in Hamilton. I got to watch the New Zealand fast bowlers serve up boundary-fodder for the aptly-named Hamilton Masakadza and Brendan Taylor, who didn’t disappoint, wafting Mills and Bates and co over the square-leg boundary with monotonous […]
Continue readingFree fall
A couple of weeks ago I found this brief article in the newspaper about Vesna Vulovic, who perhaps holds the record for the longest non-fatal fall – a staggering 10 km after a midair explosion on a plane in 1972. I say ‘perhaps’ because the circumstances of the fall are disputed – it is possible […]
Continue readingPotential energy and climbing upwards
At the end of last week, seeing a good(ish) weather forecast, we had a short break away in Wellington, taking the train both directions. Despite the lovely weather (Wellington isn’t ALWAYS blowing a gale) we didn’t get to see the volcanoes en-route, in either direction – they were shrouded in cloud as is often the […]
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