A colleague remarked to me yesterday, as we were trudging up the two flights of stairs from the tea-room to the third floor, "I'm sure they turn up the force of gravity in this building each year." I feel like that too, sometimes. However, I suspect it has more to do with the aging process […]
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Clothes racks are the cause of mouldy homes. I doubt it.
I read the 'Rental Nightmare' article on stuff.co.nz last night. Some of the stories are horrific indeed, and I'm reasonably confident that the writer has deliberately sought out the worst situations rather than the most common situations. But one cannot deny that a great deal of housing in New Zealand is sub-standard. In housing-deficient Auckland, […]
Continue readingAxis labels – accurate but not at all obvious
I had a conversation with a class this morning regarding the labelling of axes on graphs.In particular, how we should indicate the units. Most quantities we deal with in physics carry units. A speed might be 35 km/h, a distance might be 16.8 mm, a pressure could be 28 kPa. Saying that a speed is […]
Continue readingA light puzzle
Here's a puzzling photograph that Hans Bachor showed me at the end of the NZ Institute of Physics conference last week. It comes from his public lecture on lasers a week ago. And we don't have the answer to it, so maybe you can enlighten us (pun intended). The photo is of a demonstration of […]
Continue readingNZIP2015 Highlights
So the NZ Institute of Physics conference is in full swing. I have a bit of a break between the end of the last session and tonight's conference dinner, so there's time to give some highlights so far. Well, first, the low-light: Like the rest of my family and half of Hamilton I've had a […]
Continue readingTwo great talks coming up in Hamilton
As part of the forthcoming NZ Institute of Physics conference, and to celebrate the International Year of Light, we have arranged two fantastic and very different public talks for the evenings of Sunday 5th and Monday 6th July. First up we have Richard Easther, from the University of Auckland. In "Dawn's Early Light" he'll be […]
Continue readingMessing up the test: the next installment
In the last few years I've been experimenting with the way I test our 3rd year mechanical engineering students in their 'Dynamics and Mechanisms' paper. I've chosen this paper because (a) it has more than a handful of students, and (b) I am in charge of it. When I've suggested to my peers that I […]
Continue readingThe difference between a theoretical physicist and a mathematician is…
A mathematician can say what he likes… A physicist has to be at least partly sane J. Willard Gibbs What is it that makes a physicist sane (if only in part)? Everything has to be related back to the 'real world', or the 'real universe'. That is, a physicist has to talk about how things […]
Continue readingFirst a cricket fan, second a physicist
I've spent most of today thinking Google's image-of-the-day is a wicket, but have just realized it is in honour of Alessandro Volta.
Continue readingStatic friction is something sticky (as is Scholarship physics)
In January I had a go at the 2014 Scholarship Physics Exam, as I've done for the last couple of years. Sam Hight from the PhysicsLounge came along to help (or was it laugh?) The idea of this collaboration is that I get filmed attempting to do the Scholarship paper for the first time. This […]
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