Marcus Wilson • Aug 19, 2014 •
In the last few weeks I've been working with some second-year software engineering students on a design project. Their particular task is to build (with Lego - but the high-tech variety) a robot that can follow a white line on a bench. It's fun to watch them play with different ideas and concepts - there's the occasional … Read More
Michael Edmonds • Aug 03, 2014 •
I need to lose some weight. The was the conclusion I came to on a Friday night just over a week ago when my bathroom scales told me I weighed 92.2 kg, which according to a BMI calculation for my height and weight puts me into the “overweight” category. Not the best place for someone who has a family history … Read More
Marcus Wilson • Jul 04, 2014 •
Being a father of an active, outdoor-loving two-year-old, I am well acquainted with the bath. Almost every night: fill with suitable volume of warm water, check water temperature, place two-year-old in it, retreat to safe distance. He's not the only thing that ends up wet as he carries out various vigorous experiments with fluid flow. One that he's … Read More
Marcus Wilson • Jun 04, 2014 •
A few days ago I was updating one of the lectures I do for my Experimental Physics course. I was putting in a bit more about safety and managing hazards, which are things that are associated with doing experiments for real. When I was a student, we didn't learn anything about this - my first introduction to the ideas … Read More
Marcus Wilson • May 27, 2014 •
At afternoon tea yesterday we were discussing a problem regarding racing slot-cars (electric toy racing cars). A very practical problem indeed! Basically, what we want to know is how do we optimize the size of the electric motor and gear-ratio (it only has one gear) in order to achieve the best time over a given distance from a stationary … Read More
Marcus Wilson • May 21, 2014 •
No, nothing to do with carrots and vitamin A I'm afraid. With dark evenings and mornings with us now :(, Benjamin's become interested in the dark. It's dark after he's finished tea, and he likes to be taken outside to see the dark, the moon, and stars, before his bath. "See dark" has become a predictable request after … Read More
Marcus Wilson • Apr 28, 2014 •
Back to blogging, after a nice holiday in Taranaki dodging the rain showers (and, as it turned out, the volcano, which we never even got a glimpse of) and a frantic week of lab work while the undergraduates were away. Both were very interesting, but it's the lab work I'll talk about here. Something that I've learned … Read More
Marcus Wilson • Mar 13, 2014 •
I received the latest PhysicsWorld magazine from the Institute of Physics yesterday. A quick flick through it reveals a fantastic demonstration you can do with kids (or grown-up kids) to show how strong friction can be. Take two telephone directories, and interleave the pages (so every page of book A has a page from book B above and below … Read More
Marcus Wilson • Mar 11, 2014 •
One of the questions on everyone's lips at the moment is "How does a large passenger jet simply disappear from radar without trace?" It is clearly very distressing for anyone with friends or relatives on board - not knowing what has happened. As I write this, there still seems to be a complete lack of clear evidence pointing one … Read More
Marcus Wilson • Feb 21, 2014 •
I've just been shifting around various bits of equipment and computers in our 2nd and 3rd year physics lab, to make way for an item that's shifting in there from a nearby lab. It's gone something like this...(rising in semitones, with apologies to the original performers) Da power socket is connected to da extension cord; Da extension … Read More