This is a laboratory safety notice to all of you guys working in labs out there.
Last week, the standard radiation hazard symbol, also known as a trefoil has been given a makeover by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
Apparently, some people did not think much of the warning symbol, necessitating a change. Obviously, they didn’t play Supreme Commander. See, whenever you launch a nuclear missile ingame, the trefoil symbol shows up on the map till they land on Ground Zero. And I should also add, their nukes capture more of the fearsome majesty these devices have in real life than any RTS game I’ve seen so far (animation is cool and damage radius is BIG, but not that terribly realistic still :P). All in all, it’s been fun conducting ‘nuclear testing’ in SupCom.
Back on topic, this is now the outdated symbol for those who still don’t know.
This ain’t harmless guys, remember that
And so, with a new red triangular background and skull and crossbones to go with it, you get the new radiation warning symbol.
If this still looks harmless to you, you need to see a shrink
Welcome to my first post this month. We’re at the halfway point through Yr 1 Sem 2, yet 2006 already feels like half a lifetime ago.
Now, obviously I haven’t been blogging lately. Hopefully, I can reduce the frequency to a post every 2 months or something. After all, I have enough writing commitments to keep me busy for quite some time (and so, the things I would like to share stay unshared). Been trying to manage time like a miser lately. Nevertheless, with some scheduling foul-ups with the occasional miscommunication there and here I should be able to make it until my PDA gets repaired. Many thanks to all who helped fill me in on some of my blank sheets. Yeah, my time management sucks, so please bear with me and my absences.
Now on with something more interesting.
While using GMail this week (Outlook wouldn’t access my NUS myMail out of campus somehow), I saw this link to videos of GMail engineers. Out of curiosity I went to have a look. You know what? I envy Google employees. They get to spend their time doing creative stuff (which would probably be translated as unproductive time wasting here :P). That includes making cheesy (but entertaining) ‘theater productions’ like this
While following the link, it led me to another video. Larry Page, the cofounder of Google gave a plenary lecture at the AAAS Annual Meeting. FYI, AAAS stands for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I only had the condensed summary on CNN the other day, which made this discovery a pleasant surprise. After all, when a Silicon Valley celebrity comes to tell the world’s largest general scientific society on what he thinks they should be focusing on, you’d want to be listening too.
What was amazing is the size of the video, 68 MINUTES!!! The bummer was that this video was probably made by a Google worshipper, who ever so faithfully trained the camera on Larry Page, and missed the presentation slides! I guess it’s a compensation for having this video in one complete piece.
What was really interesting is that he wants S&T to go more closely with entrepreneurship. Interestingly, that makes me wonder why he hasn’t made a stop here at NUS yet. Their fundamental philosophy is the same don’t you think? The key points of the lecture are on better teaching methods, AI, commercial spaceflight, climate change, developing the Third World and the US making more friends (not sure if they are in chronological order). I have a few interesting thoughts from his lecture, but that’s for another time.
P.S.: If you watched the video and was wondering what equation was talked about in the Q&A session, it’s called a Mandelbrot Set.
Click on image for a bigger version.
