Thread 11 - TalkLair: “The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles.”

[Kucinghitam]

Whoops, missed the filling up of the previous thread! (thread 10).

Although the nights are gradually drawing in, the new lair of JTT escapees is all cosy and homey inside. The hearth is glowing, the walls covered in dubious artwork, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them).

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Sulphate is British English and sulfate is US, I think, though I think the one with an F may also be the preferred spelling in yer actual chemistry.

Not when I went to school!

Ha! I have no recollection whatsoever of school chemistry. I was at a girls' grammar school back in the Stone Age and we did some abomination of a combined O-level called Physics-with-Chemistry. I remember a fair bit of the physics, which made sense, but pretty much none of the chemistry.

I remember a fair bit of school work. It's what I was doing half an hour ago I can't remember! 😃

Same here, Gonners, I went to a girls' school and wasn't taught chemistry or physics, or geography for that matter.

your husband is a total darling

@MouseMinge - he really is an absolutely sweetheart!

It's the modern way - sulfur now takes the US spelling as standard.

Over my dead body!

I’ve noticed that my toothpaste sometimes makes my gums/inside of my cheeks peel, which I assumed was due to the SLS but am too lazy to do anything about it.

I was taught quite a lot of geography. Sadly, as it turned out, none of it was on the O-level syllabus for that year. "The geography results were a little strange this year," remarked the headmistress, where by "a little strange" she meant that pretty much everyone had failed.

Physics was mainly memorable for the day the teacher said "Whenever I need a lubricant, I always use iron filings" to a room full of 15-year-old girls, and had absolutely no idea why we were laughing. But I did learn a fair bit of physics.

I went to an all girls school that firmly believed that girls should be scientists if they were so inclined. I think about half the year group did physics A level.

Sulfate is American but is also used as the international standard. (Edit: or what bint already said!)

Bloody hell, @artant - the school I'm talking about taught no sciences beyond O-level. I'm not even sure that they taught maths. I remember that the girl who wanted to be a dentist (supported by her dentist parents) had to fight tooth-and-nail to be allowed to attend the boys' grammar school. And yet this "women, know your place" school somehow produced ... Baroness Hale.

The next (mixed sex) school I went to had a bizarre timetabling system for A-levels, whereby if you were taking a foreign language, you couldn't take Maths. But let's not go there ... 😆

I went to an all girls school where we did the three sciences, biology, chemistry and physics but there was an issue with physics. In our first year the chemistry teacher semi-blew up the physics classroom. She was then let go. We didn't get a replacement for quite a few months and so I never caught up and stopped doing it at the end of second year which was a real shame. I had issues with chemistry until we got to organic chemistry which opened the subject up for me. I ended up with middling O levels in biology and chemistry. Biology was the easiest of all the sciences.

I went to a mixed secondary school in the 1960s. It was one of a rare breed called a technical high school, but you had to pass your 11+ to get there, like a grammar school. I think the differences were that we didn't do Latin, the foreign languages offered were German and Spanish (though they did introduce a French CSE about a year before I did my O levels), and they offered things like technical drawing and woodwork and metalwork. That was just for boys though - us girls got needlework and cookery. They had a very good art department though.

Weirdly, our O level choices at the end of what is now Y9 but was then the third year required us to drop one out of physics, chemistry and biology, one out of history, geography and RE, and the girls had to choose between Home Economics or art (the boys between technical studies and art). Everybody had to do English lang and lit, and maths, and a foreign language (I did German). After the mock O levels, my marks in Chemistry were so dire that the school said it wasn't worth their entrance fee to enter me, so I only entered the biology exam. I also did a slightly odd A level combo - English, history, biology and art. I enjoyed all of them - biology in those days was a lot less chemistry based and relied heavily on the ability to dissect things and do diagrams, both of which I was good at.

Biology was the easiest of all the sciences.

No! Biology required learning so I dropped it ASAP. Physics was the lazy person’s science as you could work stuff out from first principles in the exam. This was not true at undergraduate level when it all got very mathematical and involved lectures at 9am five days a week. I have a very bad physics degree as a result of pursuing a strict policy of doing the minimum required to get by and no more. I went to art school years later and got a very good degree as a result of actually doing some work.

My uncle went to one of those, Brit, but by the alternative route of failing the 11+ then passing the 13+.

(Which eventually led to Russian intelligence attempting to recruit my mum. But that's another story.)

@artant later in life I got into physics a little and realised that there were things that I'd thought impossible to understand that made sense to me and it saddened me that I'd missed out on that at school. I read Seven Brief Lessons on Physics by Carlo Rovelli and realised that with the right teacher, a Rovelli, I'd probably have fallen in love with physics.

Thirding what @BinturongsSmellOfPopcorn and @artant said, sulFur is the international convention (IUPAC nomenclature). I use both spellings interchangeably at work, with a bias towards the British spelling because I can't help instinctively spelling that way.

Is anybody else desperate to find out the story of Bint's Russian spy maternal story??

Oh well, beaten to the explanation of why sulphur and sulphate are commonly mis-spelled!

In other news, yesterday we "officially" adopted Cat Burglar.

It's been months of discussion between us - we kept them updated on CB's constant stalking of our house and reassured them that we were not encouraging her at all, and they tried to lure her home with food and shutting in. But over the Christmas break it really became clear to everyone that CB just didn't want to go back to her previous house and would even rather sleep outside in the cold (we'd often find her huddled in our porch shelving at night).

Everybody was getting worried about her welfare, and so her previous humans asked if we were willing to adopt her. We had a trial few days in which I unlocked the cat flap (locked the day Phoebe died ) so CB could freely enter as she pleases and I started feeding her for the first time. (She seemed quite astonished to be offered food, as she'd probably thought we were a weird foodless house!)

Yesterday her previous family came over for a sort of Hello-Goodbye handover in which we sorted out vet details etc. So now we are Cat-Owned servants once again!

Weirdly, we haven't worked out what her official name will be. Her current name is the same as DD1's (and selfishly DD1 refused to change her name to Tiddles so CB could keep her name). When she first turned up, DDs nicknamed her Postie because of Postman Pat's black-and-white cat (I know it's called Jess really) and they are insisting we stick with that; I said "that's not a name!" but DH thinks we could tell everyone it's short for Post Office Scandal.

That's lovely Kuc! You had no option really by the sounds of things.

I have no scientific education after General Science either, yet lots of languages. I belatedly realised I was actually good at maths when unexpectedly I came top in Maths in my O Level year but no one encouraged me to do Maths O Level. That was lucky really, as no one got more than a D in my year IIRC.

Ah, new year, new cat! Glad it's all been sorted, Kuc, I hope Cat Burglar will be very happy in her new home.

I'd also like the story of the Russian's trying to recruit Binturong's mother.

It was the same for me with physics, @MouseMinge. By the time I started on physics, after I'd left the girls' school and gone to the school my brothers were at, everyone was into the third year of the subject and I hadn't a hope of catching up. Many years later I read Richard Feynman's 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out' and realised I'd probably have loved physics if I'd learned early on. The funny thing is that I only read the book because I was attracted by the title, so it was a treat to find it so fascinating.

I didn’t really do physics at school (I didn’t have much of a secondary education) but kept on with biology as best I could and later chose a biomed degree. Physics obviously came up but not very much thank god.

My dad was very good at chemistry and unbeknown to me worked in a military lab for a time. I recently acquired a certificate of his for some sort of chemistry prize he won in the 60s. He sadly died before I started my degree. I lost count of the number of times I wanted to ask him something physics or chemistry related!

About halfway through I started to become interested in environmental science which I tied in with biomed for my project. I’m hopefully starting a postgrad environmental science training programme this year, if they’ll have me.

@Kucinghitam that is exciting news re CB. I agree with you that Postie is not a name though.

@Kucinghitam - Congrats on having acquired a new owner! Raffles would be my choice of name for a Cat Burglar. Yes, I know she's a girl, but ...

Oh dear, I've just come across this YT channel and am lost to it: https://www.youtube.com/@country_life_vlog/videos

There are loads of vids and, except for ambient sounds, they all seem to be pretty much silent. They're filmed in Azerbaijan and the scenery is absolutely stunning. The story is that the woman is the local chef for weddings and big parties, the man is a small farmer, while the son was a restaurant chef until, as happened for so many, his business closed down in 2020. The family decided to make an income by setting up a YouTube channel, getting in a professional cameraman and just making and cooking, which seems to be extremely successful. 6m subscribers and you can see why.

I'll be watching a lot of these, they're an excellent antidote to the world around us.