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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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.
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I had always thought this orginated with Newton, and thought it a bit odd as he was notoriously argumentative and touchy about receiving what he thought was the proper credit for his work. But according to the mighty Wikipedia it orginated with a chap called Bernard of Chartres. Newton did however say it as well. […]
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