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Recent Posts
- What do Y, Yb, Tb, Er, Gd, Tm, Sc, Ho, Dy and Lu have in common?
- Why is Quincy, Washington so popular with tech companies?
- Why putting missiles on roofs in London isn’t as dumb as it sounds.
- The classified Space Shuttle missions
- Where is the best place to launch a rocket from?
- Transporting the Shuttle
- Clockwise
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- Poverty and the wind
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- What are contrails?
- Three different types of magnetism
- Consanguinity and the coefficient of relationship
- Magnetic coins
- A rectangular galaxy
- Smiths
- Water in Bermuda
- Do bowling balls float?
- The base rate fallacy
- Recent solar flare
- The man who put his head in a particle accelerator
- Does time go faster as you get older?
- Unclaimed Antarctica
- Uptake of triple science
- LHC quilts
- Which university course is most popular?
- Understanding the problem with RSA
- How big are pizzas?
- Shapes of equal width
- Ebb and Flow
- The polarisation of the sky
- Whiteboards
- The cost of coins
- Technetium-99m generators
- Plug wiring colour scheme
- Night vision
- The most radioactive parts of the UK
- Biosphere lungs
- Anscombe’s quartet
- Haversine formula
- Patterns in birthdays
- Curiosity’s nuclear battery
- You’ve already experienced the earliest Easter you’ll ever know
- Logarithmic scales
- The Milky Way is shaped like a CD
- The speed of jet lag
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- The Moses Bridge
- Why does metal feel cold?
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Author Archives: Mr Reid
The man who put his head in a particle accelerator
The U-70 synchrotron control room. On July 13 1978 Anatoli Bugorski, a physicist working on the U-70 synchrotron at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russia decided to put his head into the particle accelerator whilst it was … Continue reading
Tagged HEP
2 Comments
Does time go faster as you get older?
Whilst two observers moving relative to each other will experience the other’s time as moving slower or faster (Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity), the passage of time for any given observer in a single reference frame is constant. But as you … Continue reading
Tagged time
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Unclaimed Antarctica
Officially, Antarctica is not ruled by anybody; the entire continent is terra nullius: land that belongs to noone. After the Moon, it is the largest terra nullius area that men have walked on. Seven countries (the United Kingdom, New Zealand, … Continue reading
Tagged antarctica, law
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Uptake of triple science
There are two main options for pupils taking GCSE science in the UK: Dual Award and Triple Award. In Dual Award Science pupils are awarded two grades across the three sciences, and in Triple Award Science they are awarded one … Continue reading
LHC quilts
Artist Kate Findlay makes beautiful quilts inspired by CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. I don’t know if they’re for sale, but I’d definitely buy one if they were.
Tagged CERN, LHC, quilt
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Which university course is most popular?
UCAS provides a great deal of statistical information about university applications. One of the most interesting datasets compares the number of applicants for each course with the number of places available. (Note that the scale starts at three applicants per … Continue reading
Tagged UCAS, university
1 Comment
Understanding the problem with RSA
Recent reports suggest that the very commonly used RSA encryption algorithm has significant security flaws. I couldn’t find a good explanation of the mathematical problem that causes these flaws online, but I think I’ve worked it out below. The security of … Continue reading
Tagged encryption, mathematics, security
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How big are pizzas?
Is a 12-inch pizza twice as big as a 6-inch pizza? Simply put, no. The amount of pizza (its area) is proportional to the square of its diameter, so a 12-inch pizza is actually four times bigger than a 6-inch … Continue reading
Tagged geometry, pizza
4 Comments
Shapes of equal width
Circular objects roll because a circle is a shape of equal width. No matter where you measure from, the distance from one side to the other (through the centre) is the same. But circles aren’t the only shape with this property. … Continue reading
Tagged coins, geometry
3 Comments
Ebb and Flow
The twin Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory satellites were initally given the highly original names of GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B. But thanks to students at a Montana elementary school they are now the best-named satellites out there. Readers, meet Ebb and Flow: … Continue reading
Tagged gravity, satellite
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The polarisation of the sky
When light from the Sun or the Moon strikes Earth’s atmosphere it is scattered, sent in all directions by the atoms and molecules that make up the air. During this scattering process some of the light is polarised — instead of the … Continue reading
Tagged lightpollution, polarisation, sky
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Whiteboards
Sometimes after a lesson I take a photograph of the whiteboard left over. Some recent photographs are below.
Tagged teaching, whiteboard
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Technetium-99m generators
Technetium-99m is a radioactive tracer that is used in twenty million medical diagnostic procedures per year. At least 31 radiopharmaceuticals based on Tc-99m are used for imaging and studying organs such as the brain, heart muscle, thyroid, lungs, liver, gallbladder … Continue reading
Tagged medicine, nuclear
2 Comments
Plug wiring colour scheme
UK plugs use brown insulation for the live wire, blue insulation for the neutral wire and green with yellow stripes insulation for the earth wire. But why this particular combination of colours? The answer is deceptively simple: there is no type … Continue reading
Tagged colour, electricity, plug, safety
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Night vision
The vision of human beings is well-adapted to daylight; the human eye has evolved to see in the range of wavelengths that are brightest in the spectrum of light that the Sun emits. The intensity of the light the Sun emits … Continue reading
Tagged eye, light, vision
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The most radioactive parts of the UK
The average radioactive background dose in the UK is 2.7 millisieverts. Of this 2.7 mSv, 1.35 mSv comes from radioactive radon gas leaking out of the ground. This radioactive radon (Rn-222) is produced by the decay of uranium-238, after a series of intermediate … Continue reading
Tagged radioactivity, radon
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Biosphere lungs
Some people refer to the rainforests as “Earth’s lungs”. In reality this is quite far from the truth, as rainforests actually contribute little (net) oxygen to Earth’s atmosphere; 70% of oxygen production is done by water-bourne green algae and the … Continue reading
Tagged biosphere, pressure
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Anscombe’s quartet
Anscombe’s quartet is four sets of data that are used to demonstrate the importance of graphing data. Set 1 Set 2 Set 3 Set 4 x y x y x y x y 10 8.04 10 9.14 10 7.46 8 … Continue reading
Tagged graphs, mathematics
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Haversine formula
The haversine formula is used to calculate the distance between two points on the Earth’s surface specified in longitude and latitude. d is the distance between two points with longitude and latitude (ψ,φ) and r is the radius of the Earth. As … Continue reading
Tagged earth, mathematics
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