Rob Cook - Mechanical Engineer

This was an idea that came about when ordering pizza with friends, where we didn't have a very large table to put all the pizza on. The question arose: how large a pizza could we order and have them all fit on the table? I don't remember the exact answer to that particular question, but I do recall where it went next: what's the limiting factor at a larger scale? How large a pizza could the citizens of a small, densely-populated country order and still have them all fit within the country area? As a fan of Randall Munroe's What If?  this sort of 'apply maths to stupid question' problem appeals to me, so I had a go. The nesting of 2D shapes in an irregular planar area is a tricky subject, so to simplify, we'll consider any country to simply be a hexagon. Why hexagons? Because the most dense arrangement of circles on a plane is hexagonal close packing, or 'HCP'. ...

This project's actually a few years old, from just after I finished my A-levels, but I have enough pictures to explain it well, unlike some other work from around the same time. The motivation for this is simple - I'm a big fan of shaving soaps and creams that you need to lather up manually, rather than using an aerosol can-type shaving foam. This is partly environmental in origin, because a used pot or metal tube is easier to recycle (and lower energy to make in the first place) than an aerosol can. The other reasons are more pragmatic - a tube of shaving soap lasts ages, and is easy to travel with. The downside is the need to use a shaving brush, which isn't that big of a hassle, but I wanted mine to last as long as possible, and one of the things that was causing it to look a bit worn-out was the wooden handle being put down on a wet surface, cracking the finish. To prevent this happening any more than it already had, I thought I should make a stand for it that wou...

The National Grid have a fantastic website where you can view what they call the 'carbon intensity' of electricity in Great Britain, broken down by region, and with half-hourly forecasts for the next two days. While this on its own is pretty interesting (if, like me, you like large engineering systems and want to know more about your personal climate impact) it also comes with an API, designed for interacting with smart meters and other IoT devices to allow them to optimise their power use to when electricity is clean and cheap. To this end, last month the company put out a press release hailing their new 'Green Light Signal', claiming a "world first" in producing a device that tells consumers when electricity is low-carbon by changing the light to green. The threshold for this is apparently "150 g of CO 2 /kWh" , which on a UK scale is not too bad, especially given that as recently as 2012, the carbon intensity generally stayed between 400 and 7...