Polar eyes
More on polarisation. This time thanks to Russel Fleming and his students (I think its about time my students spotted something). Looking in a mirror whilst wearing the sort of 3D glasses you wear in...
Colin's conundrum
Regular commentator Colin Cuthbert from Toulouse International school sent me a photo of an unusual phenomena. You take a polariser hold it in front of your computer screen and rotate it until the planes...
Biggest wave ever surfed
I know we are supposed to go skiing during the winter in Norway but it's also the time of year when you get the best waves. Last weekend I headed North with a group of students to see if we could catch...
Cos(yt)
Over the last couple of weeks my wife has been knitting a tea cosy as a present for a friend. A tea cosy is an insulating jacket to keep the tea pot warm. I’ve always been amazed at the effectiveness...
Solutions moved
I have had a couple of notifications that the solutions websites that I made for the two IB text books published by Pearson have been taken down. It's a long story but when I made the sites Pearson didn't...
Charged up
In my last post I wrote about an invention that produces light from the potential energy stored in a bag of rocks. Apparently, what a lot of people want to know is whether it will charge up a mobile phone. ...
Gravity light
Last week an article in the weekly Guardian caught my eye. This time it wasn't the one on the science pages, which incidentally was about the Higg's Boson and dark matter, it was the one about the gravity...
More randomness
I've been looking for more examples of randomness in measurement and how to show that finding the mean reduces random error. It's no good simply measuring a line with a ruler since you just get the same...
Pigs on the wing
Enough of pigs, today I'm going to write about plasticine spheres. Actually I've just been marking the first pig pracs and the results are remarkably good. One student even asked what they could write...
That'll do pig
Today I tried the flying pig practical with one of my first year classes. It took a lot more room that I had anticipated so I shortened the strings on a couple of the pigs so that they'd fly in smaller...