e pur si muove

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.

Reference

• BBC 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. An unnamed Singaporean has been wounded and shot by riot police.

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 laissez-faire combination of “you know, the Burmese are just like that” and “they are just stubborn about some things”.

Let’s see how much longer laissez-faire proclamations of concern can continue. For ASEAN to still preach noninterventionism is incredulous; Singapore, as the current head of ASEAN, must urge the association to act or forever lose credibility in the eyes of the international stage. And for crying out loud, a Singaporean has been hurt! What more do you need to justify taking a stronger stance than being “concerned”?

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 the value of the cell, but rather you get 100000.

Microsoft is aware of the problem but the explanation posted is a little vague; Joel Spolsky has a much better article explaining the bug and how it has to deal with the specifics of floating point representations on modern computer architectures.

References

1. Molhan Serry, microsoft.public.excel, Bug in Excel 2007, 2007-09-22.
2. Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Excel Calculation Issue Update, 2007-09-25.
3. Joel Spolsky, Explaining the Excel Bug, 2007-09-26.

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?

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