Term has now finished, so teaching is all done for 2011. Phew. It was 11 weeks, and as always, sometimes it felt like a lifetime but at the same time it seems as if you blink in week 3 and then its suddenly week 8. But that is just my perspective. For the son of […]
Read more
We had a forum for our final year undergraduates on Friday. This was to allow them to give feedback on what the Department is doing well, and more importantly what we, and the rest of the Uni, could do better. The coordinator will gather together the feedback and send it round – maybe I’ll do […]
Read more
Many of the most powerful, and to me, most interesting, ideas in science connect two apparently unrelated observations. The breakthrough is to realise that there is a hidden connection between two aspects of the natural world. A simple example is the force one charge exerts on another, that is a distance r away. Coulomb’s Law tells […]
Read more
Over the last few days, I have been struck by the number of uses of the statistics term ‘median’ by a number of politicians and commentators. This is a relatively technical term and I rarely hear it from politicians, or indeed anyone else on TV or in newspapers. The terms has been used in the […]
Read more
Nowadays when you are teaching a course at university, you are co-teaching it with Dr Wikipedia. Your lecture notes will be supplemented, for free, by Wikipedia. This is almost always good. Although it does mean that you if took inspiration and examples off Wikipedia, which I have done, you will be found out. Incidentally, the […]
Read more
I have been watching and enjoying the BBC’s Frozen Planet series on Wednesdays. This Wednesday they showed this amazing footage of a brinicle forming http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMhBuSBemRk worth the licence fee alone. The amazing thing is that this is salty water being frozen by even saltier water.
Read more
Comment