Over Christmas, we were staying with my wife’s sister and her family in Dunedin. Early one morning (sometime before I got up, anyway – that is my definition of early) a loud ‘bang’ came from the direction of the kitchen, followed by the sound of eight paws beating a hasty retreat. There are two young […]
Continue readingTag: water
Seeing circular polarization
Physicsworld magazine is doing a ‘special feature’ this month on animal superheroes – those with rather unusual physical abilities. The best of the lot (in my subjective opinion) is the featured-on-the-cover mantis shrimp. Not because of its ‘dactyl clubs’ that can produce a force of 700 N, but because of its eyesight. The mantis shrimp […]
Continue readingExpensive cat physics
With baby Benjamin taking our attention, poor Mizuna the cat has been rather neglected recently. Unfortunately, this has proved an expensive (for us) and painful (for him) mistake. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed one morning that he was clearly in pain, and desperately trying to urinate. CLANG, CLANG, go the alarm bells. Male, […]
Continue readingTime travel
On Monday evening this week I managed to do a bit of time travelling while driving back home. I was driving back through one of those heavy showers that have been marauding around the place recently, with windscreen wipers full pelt on a rather wet road. However, these showers don’t last for very long, and […]
Continue readingWading recklessly into the water ownership debate
If you’re in New Zealand, you cannot have failed to be aware of the legal wranglings over the ownership of water. Who owns or has rights to the water in our rivers? The raising of this question is a not-so-subtle attempt from one half of the political spectrum to delay (or stop) the sale of […]
Continue readingThe shortest distance between two points
I remember as a student being presented with the proof that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line (at least, on a 2 dimensional flat surface). Although it’s almost blatantly obvious, it can be formally proved through Calculus of Variations. However, the quickest route between two points is not necessarily a straight […]
Continue readingBack to work
It’s been great having time off work with Karen and Benjamin, but, as they say, all good things come to an end. So today it’s back to work, with my first class in about an hour and a half. I spent my final afternoon of parental leave probing the underlying geology of our driveway, trying […]
Continue readingWhat 3am looks like
I shan’t apologise for the lack of entries – other things have been on our mind in recent days. But Benjamin is sleeping just now, which gives a few minutes for some blogging. He’s already been doing a bit of physics – studying the continuity equation. That is, the change in mass equals the mass […]
Continue readingAnother bad physics joke
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 readingVirga
I learned a new word today: virga. It was used in a short article in one of the Sydney newspapers, discussing yesterday’s weather. Virga is simply precipitation that evaporates before it hits the ground, and we had some here yesterday. So it was raining, but we didn’t get wet. Virga can rapidly cool the air […]
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