Thread 18 - TalkLair: "That's no moon. It's a space station!"

[RasaSayangEh]

(Previous thread 17)

We've had our heatwave - is this it for the summer? All is lush and green in our LairGarden, flowers are blooming, berries are ripening...

In the TalkLair, all the windows are open, the Pimms is chilled, the MN massive salad is ready to serve. The denizens of the lair are a welcoming bunch, always eager for general chit-chat on all manner of topics. We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

What a good cat!

DD1 messaged me from college, wanting to check whether she'd answered a test question correctly. It was about scientific units, so right up my alley as something that I do in my head literally every day. Turns out she (and everybody in her row) had got the same answer, but had been marked wrong.

So I looked carefully at the question and answer, confirmed she was correct and the teacher was wrong, and suggested to let the teacher know.

Apparently this was the worst suggestion in the history of suggestions. Far better for the entire class to misunderstand a measurement by 3 orders of magnitude than to say "Excuse me, sir?"

I hate that! Did the teacher explain why their answer was correct?

It's also good for young people to realise that teachers and academics are fallible too.

No explanation from the teacher (at least none forthcoming from DD). It was a straightforward confusion between micrograms and milligrams so could have been a simple misreading on the teacher's part. Easily done and surely uncontroversial to point out - but not, apparently, if you're a teenager

That is quite a difference. I wonder if the teacher meant the other one and expected the students to read their mind...

When I was a teen I was an arrogant little snot and would definitely have pointed it out.

Me too! Are kids really cowed into silence like that in schools these days?

I don't think it's about schools, I wonder if it's just a generational thing? Anyone remember my story (last year maybe?) about the young people on the bus that wouldn't stop?

Edit: Advanced search myself, it was beginning of this year.
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5233442-thread-16-talklair-well-im-not-exactly-quaking-in-my-stylish-yet-affordable-boots-but-theres-definitely-something-unnatural-going-on-here?page=4&reply=141347767

I must have been an arrogant little snot too because I remember having an argument with a professor at my university about a line in a poem by John Donne which had a misprint in the edition we were using but I had read differently in another edition. I knew that the other version just made sense whereas the one that we had didn’t in the context of the poem. I was right.

I wasn't an arrogant little snot at that age, different culture and all that, and I still don't think I'd have let such a blatant marking error slide.

I got into a furious row with my mother once over a quote from the Bible ("Stay me with flagons and comfort me with apples, for I am sick of love"). She swore it was "Stay with me" and was MASSIVELY annoyed that I was right. We are extremely similar and very close. And we both hate being wrong. My brother, who is naturally much more pacific than either of us, will occasionally, if we're arguing, say "You're BOTH right, now STOP!"

You sound similar to how I was as a teen, Brit. Arguing with teachers was just part of life and very enjoyable, especially if I was right. There was one time a teacher had got into trouble for something and I asked one of the others what had happened to him. He told me this teacher was on holiday, which I knew wasn't true, so I said 'I don't believe you' and after a long pause he told me the truth, which was that he'd been suspended.

I remember the bus story. Interesting thought, Rasa.

I foolishly pointed out to a lecturer that he was wrong about pepper moths. He said the leukoform was Latin for white and carboniform Latin for Black. I said it was Greek for white and Latin for black, he bet me a tenner I was wrong.

Next lecture, I took in Greek an Latin dictionaries and proved it. He said, "Yeah, exactly what I said, where's my tenner?"

My coursework marks plummeted after that!

On Bake-Off (which over here we don't get until Friday) they had to make their own sprinkles in the technical challenge. Does even the most devoted home cook actually ever make their own sprinkles these days?

What fresh madness is this?

How do you make sprinkles? I've got images of making lead shot where they drip the lead into water from a great height, but surely there must be a straightforward method.

Part of the reason why we stopped watching it years ago, the challenges had become stupid... It must be a real headache thinking of new challenges and trying to keep things fresh, but I found myself doing so much eye-rolling at the deliberately manufactured crisis situations that it stopped being an enjoyable watch.

They were supposed to pipe very thin lines of royal icing, then chop it once dry.

I prefer.the professionals version. The challenges are also quite silly, in many ways, but not as far from what would be real-world.experience for most of them. And they have a wider variety of challenges- for example the technical might be to cook something specific with limited instructions, or it might be a big pile.of ingredients and they have to come up with a recipe on the spot.

best not to use lead shot as sprinkles

I was more thinking of the method and imagining someone dripping the sugar mix down a high chimney.

pipe very thin lines of royal icing, then chop it once dry

Makes sense.

The lead shot method would be more fun.

I now really want to see a factory making sprinkles. I bet they have some excellent machines.

Bake Off does have some ridiculous challenges and also makes things impossible by just not giving them enough time (plus the stupidity of being in a boiling hot tent in summer) but I still love it anyway. Homemade sprinkles was an unusually stupid idea though.

Found a video of how they're made. From approx 1:14. The narration is annoying but seeing the process is interesting.