Two fun flash games to start your week off!

And it’s not like I was even actively searching for them.

Lab equipment is often quite specialised, and it’s not always simple to track down companies selling that optonanobioquantum spectroanalysometerscope that you need. That’s when vendor directories like GlobalSpec and the Thomas Register come in handy. Of course, finding a company with a representative or distributor in Singapore is a different matter entirely…

Anyway, I was looking for…I forget what it is…on GlobalSpec when I spotted these two fun things:

The Brain Strainer

The Trebuchet Challenge

There goes my whole week.

Won’t somebody please think of the children? (Yet Another 377A Post)

Really, what kind of values are we imparting to our children if we do nothing about 377A? Don’t we want them to grow up to be citizens with a sense of what is lawful and what is not?

Take a look at the implications of this statement:

“The Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had earlier said it did not pro-actively enforce the provision and would continue with this approach. “

What message does this send to your impressionable youngsters? This, apparently:

Do what you want, but
1) don’t do something else illegal and enforceable in the process
2) don’t get caught

Incidentally, this also seems to be the current interpretation of the Singapore Highway Code.

So please, for the sake of the children, do something now!

And the 2007 Nobel Physics Prize goes to…

Albert Fert and Peter Gruenberg, for their discovery of the giant magnetoresistance (GMR) effect.  Congratulations to both of them!

How is this significant? Without this discovery, the hard disk drive industry in Singapore would never have taken off and grown to what it is today.  Heck, we even have a research institute dedicated to this area, and one of the winners of the 2007 National Day Awards was Mark Kryder (formerly of Seagate).

Satellite view of the Seagate Plant in Woodlands

But that’s not all.  Highly sensitive magnetic sensors based on the giant magnetoresistive effect are also used in accurate position sensing (gears and pistons for example).  And in the field of biomedicine, GMR-based sensors can be used to track specific molecules that have been previously marked by magnetic nanoparticles.

Fert and Gruenberg’s original work were done in 1988 and the first GMR hard disks appeared on the market in 2000 - so yes, it’s been a long overdue prize!