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“People in the industrialised world don’t know very much about Singapore other than the trivial and the silly stuff like the banning of chewing gum and your homosexual laws” - Peter Schwartz, Chairman, Global Business NetworkTODAY ran a very interesting article about Singapore’s image problem from Peter Schwartz, co-founder of the Global Business …
Yesterday I had a revelation during the La Scala Philharmonic’s performance: I really like Wagner, I just had never heard it performed well. SSO, you suck. CUS, you suck. Compared to the bad boys at La Scala, all the other Wagner recitals I’ve heard resemble draggy and badly tuned cats in heat stuck in a ...
How to List an eBay Auction for Maximum Profit ∞ Get Rich SlowlyInvesting Education & Classes: Stocks, Mutual Funds, Bonds & Portfolio Building
One of my labmates’ father’s colleagues won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this morning. Apparently they had shared offices or something like that.Anyway this year’s prize is for way cool research on knockout mice. Capecchi, Evans and Smithies invented the procedure to carefully prepare genetic mutations in mouse embryonic stem cells. When …
This goes out to blogging heavyweight Kevin Lim, who is a finalist for a blogging scholarship. Having made it to the final round of the selection process, the sponsor (CollegeScholarships.org) has mysteriously decided to decide the final winner solely by populist voting. This means, of course, that it’s an all out fanwhoring popularity contest battle ...
Filed for possible amusement value: Yo mama’s like an overlap integral: she so fat, she overlap a ground-water well!ReferenceEric Feezell, Science Creative Quaterly, Iss. 3.
I suppose it was just waiting to happen. A student at University of Massachusetts at Amherst majoring in legal studies and sociology, 51-year-old Brian Marquis, expected an A- for one of his courses but instead got a C. Marquis claims his grade was wrecked by curving1Marquis sued UMass for ‘violating his civil rights and contractual ...
I just learnt about geosmin, the chemical compound responsible for the smell of fresh earth.
He signed on the dotted line because his parents told him it was a prestigious scholarship. He majored in engineering because no one else told him that there were other options. He came back to serve his bond thinking that he was going to make a difference for the scholarship recruitment talk told him that ...
Tetris was my first computer game ever. Watching this guy play makes me feel like I need to go back to kindergarten:
Title says it all. 12 wounded tourists in a country whose economy revolves around the tourism industry.Not even living in the middle of the ocean is safe anymore.ReferenceBBC News, Tourists hurt in Maldives blast, 2007-09-29.
In the ongoing unrest in Myanmar, Japanese jounalist Kenji Nagai as well as several civilians were reportedly gunned down by the Burmese military.The UN special envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, was finally allowed to enter Myanmar.In 2002, I saw a moderately high-ranking civil servant being asked about Singapore’s official attitude toward Burma/Myanmar. The response was a …
The lab has been abuzz with the latest discovery of a silly cell formatting bug in Excel 2007. (Apparently this does not happen in earlier versions of Excel; it certainly doesn’t exist in Excel 2004.)Here it is: if you enter “=65535*1″ as a cell formula, you do not get the expected result of 65535 as ...
This is just fucking weird. Irradiate a test tube of salt water with radio-frequency energy, and this releases hydrogen from the water that is energetic enough to produce a real flame. How is this possible?John Kanzius is the discoverer of this strange phenomenon.Important note: Despite all the excited claims from breathless (and ignorant) newscasters and ...
Education systems reflect the societies in which they exist. It’s difficult to copy Finland’s world-beating system - where there’s no failing school - because to do so, you need a relatively egalitarian society in which there is no failing community.- Owen Bennett-Jones, Top of the Class, BBC Documentary Archives, 2007-09-19.As usual, I highly recommend …
Thanks to Fox who wrote in with a very odd tidbit about the “urine-powered battery” that made waves about two years ago in the international press.You can see what the device looks like on the UK Science Museum’s website:Image from IBN Singapore, via Science Museum websiteBack in the day, I was somewhat annoyed at descriptions ...
From Singapore science blogger FreshBrainz comes a “vlogumentary” on the history of the pipet, that bane of many a ‘O’ level chemistry student and the staple instrument of many working scientists:
“If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1,024 chickens?”This quote is allegedly attributed to Seymour Cray, arguably the Father of the Humongous Computers. Cray was comparing two designs for a supercomputer, one using fast single processors; the other being a massively parallel systems. Unfortunately for the apocryphal ...
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