Magnetism

One of my colleagues is a mad gadget freak. Eachan seems to spend an infinite amount of money on bizare and largely useless gadgets, but the other day an amazing thing happened, he found one that was genuinely kewl, magnets. Of course there is nothing new about magnets but in the hands of geeks much fun can be had. For starters we immediately tried to degauss various media and were successful with floppies. Later I was randomly poking a magnetised stick at a bunch of coins and noticed something strange, some of the coins were able to be picked up but others weren't. I started to collect some penny coins and soon found that any coins older then 1991 were not able to be picked up, shortly thereafter google came up with the explanation in the form of this page. I have of course added them to my wishlist.