Sitting in traffic in the middle of London gives you a lot of time to think. Here’s a fun problem born entirely of frustration sat waiting to cross the Hammersmith bridge.
The perfect speed bump
Science
Warped ideas
I was in Rome airport not long ago, and noticed that the reflection of the striped ceiling looked warped and bent due to the non-flatness of the reflecting surface:
As I’m sure will be familiar to any traveller, the excruciating boredom of an airport drives the mind to wander, so here is my derivation of the underlying mirror surface structure from this image.
Axes of rotation
I recently tried my hand at throwing axes at a wall, courtesy of Whistle Punks in London. While this was a fun and satisfyingly macho activity, I noticed that the attendants were careful to position people at various distances from the target to increase their chances of success. This piqued my curiosity, so here I’ll have a look at why that might be.
A geometry puzzle
Here’s a fun problem I came across when trying to analyse some data, which I thought I’d write up to illustrate the kind of interesting puzzles I get paid to solve as a physicist. Perhaps have a go yourselves and let me know if there are more intuitive solutions.
Writing a thesis
It’s done! After 58,627 words, 233 pages, 369 references, 162 figures and 3 lonely tables I finished my PhD thesis. Weighing in at 161.8MB, it was unceremoniously uploaded and that was that. Here are a few tips and observations I made on the way, which are probably only useful to those of you battling through a long Latex document. Never fear, normal blogging service will resume shortly.
Almost looks like work 