Science

How to Size a Cable: the Six Checks, and the Three People Skip

Picking a cable looks like one lookup — find the current, read the size off a table. That answer is right in a cool plant room and wrong in a tropical riser, in the direction that makes the cable too small. There are six checks, the corrections multiply, and the small-conductor cap is applied after them rather than before. Worked on four real circuits, with both defects this audit found in our own calculators.

9 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Sustainability

Google Is Building a $15 Billion Campus in a City That Rations Water

Google's $15 billion data centre campus near Visakhapatnam faces a High Court petition and three environmental-court cases over water and a wildlife sanctuary 860 metres away. The city already rations water. The campus's own draw has never been published, which is why every party is arguing from a figure the others cannot check.

8 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Statistics

16 Working Viruses Out of 285 Built — and the Survivors Were Not Copies

Genome language models designed 16 viable bacteriophages out of 285 physically built. The reflexive debunk says the survivors were near-copies of the template; the researchers report up to 392 novel mutations, an altered capsid protein and phages fitter than the original. The number nobody has published is how many candidates there were.

8 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Sustainability

Singapore Cannot Say How Long Finished Solar Panels Wait for the Grid. Nobody Records It

Asked for the average time between a completed solar installation and grid connection, MTI said the data does not exist because installers are not required to report completion dates.

8 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Science

Dilute It Tenfold. The pH Moves One Unit, or None at All.

C1V1 = C2V2 looks like arithmetic but is a physical claim with four assumptions inside it. Dilute a strong acid tenfold and its pH moves by exactly 1.00. Dilute a buffer by the same factor and it moves by exactly 0.00 — because Henderson-Hasselbalch depends on the RATIO of base to acid, and dilution divides both by the same number. What the concentration sets is not the pH but the capacity. And at the bottom of the scale the rule that worked perfectly breaks outright: 10⁻⁸ M hydrochloric acid is not pH 8, because an acid cannot make water alkaline.

8 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

Sustainability

Malaysia Says Data Centres Will Take 31% of Its Electricity by 2035

A written parliamentary reply puts data-centre electricity use at 31 per cent of national consumption by 2035, against 7 per cent today.

5 Aug 2026 · 8 min read

AI & ML

We Tested the Prompting Folklore — 474 Answers Later, Nothing Had Changed

Tell the model it is an expert. Offer it a $200 tip. Threaten it. Say please. Add "let's think step by step". We ran all seven of those against a plain instruction, 480 times across two models, and scored every answer with a script rather than an AI judge. All 474 scored answers were correct, in every condition — because the plain instruction was already at 100%, and no trick can improve on that. Getting there took eleven task variants that all hit the ceiling, and a harness bug that briefly showed shouting at the model made it the only thing that worked. Our own prompt builder, meanwhile, was claiming a 30-60% accuracy gain on the authority of internal benchmarks we had never run.

3 Aug 2026 · 12 min read

Statistics

Grades, GPAs and What They Convert To

NUS publishes separate grade profiles for A-level and polytechnic applicants, and none at all for IB — because, it says, the sample is too small to be accurate. Malaysia's UPU puts STPM, Matrikulasi, Asasi and STAM into one category with one calculator. Two systems, opposite answers, same unanswerable question. Plus the reason our own converter told a first-class Malaysian student they had 33%.

1 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Statistics

Kati, Tahil, Cups and Grams

Ask for a catty of pork and you get 500 g in Guangzhou, 600 g in Taipei and 604.8 g in Singapore — all three legally correct. A recipe's "1 cup" spans 180 ml to 284 ml depending on who wrote it. Here is what the units in an ASEAN kitchen actually equal, why cup measures betray you, and why the knuckle trick for rice works when a ratio does not.

1 Aug 2026 · 12 min read

Statistics

Three Breaches Caused Eighty Per Cent of the Half-Year's Victim Notices. The Other 1,800 Shared the Rest

The Identity Theft Resource Center counted 471 million victim notices in six months, more than all of last year. Take out the single largest incident and the total falls below 2025 again.

1 Aug 2026 · 6 min read