Posts by Peter Ashby
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Oh and it is also why I like conferences. Everyone has on those name tags...
i wish I worked in an area where people hand out business cards too. That would help I think.
-
Russell you have just described me, except that I have a near photographic memory so I will definitely remember your face, but your name will completely escape me. First day at a new job for me is a nightmare as I will fail to remember the names of 80% of the people I will be introduced to. It can take me 6months to remember the names of everybody in a large workplace. The names from my last are beginning to fade.
I have tried hard to counter this with only limited success. I have now got to the place where I am simply open and honest about my disability and apologise for it. This is less embarrasing I think and has the upside that since people know you have such a bad memory for names they are touched when you remember theirs ;-)
-
Good gods, how wide-spread is this? Because that was 6th and 7th form Chemistry for me. Our teacher was hopeless, and had a thick Punjabi accent that with the best of intentions we couldn't decipher, so we used to sit at the back of the class with the textbook and the lab manual and try to puzzle it out as best we could. It didn't make for great marks to be honest, and I still don't understand that whole mole thing.
Ah yes Chemistry, well it went like this: our 7th form chem teacher was actually a Geography graduate shoehorned into the role, and a blissfully happy newly married xian to boot. In term 3 we were doing revision and he didn't know that gypsum was CaSO4 and not CaCO3 which was School C chemistry and I was so fed up I sotto voice swore at him and I'm sure he heard me. So all the rest of the term when it was Chemistry I would wait a couple of minutes until class and had started and saunter ostentatiously down from the 7th form common room and past the Chem lab windows with the textbook under my arm and take myself down to the library.
In contrast to maths though I came first in Chemistry and two decades in Biology labs and I not only understand molarity by know the difference between it and molality.
-
the data doesn't back these claims up, it's absurd when we can't even see eye to eye on data and stats. We owe so much to the study of data, why fuck with it at election time?
Because as Craig pointed out people take what are essentially faith based positions wrt their politics. So when the demonstrable facts go against them they react like the fundies do to evolution.
I would go so far as to say that someone's reaction to solid evidence that their position is wrong is a litmus test of how faith based their position is. It is one reason you see so few scientists in politics, as a breed we care too much about 'the truth'. As a yoof I fancied a career in politics, but you wouldn't catch me joining a political party now, I'm far too pragmatic.
Besides you can always fall back on the idea that in a while the scientists will find that things are the other way around. Problem with that is it can make you paranoid...
-
It's interesting reading this from the UK where tats are still more of a working class thing. I suspect that the difference in attitudes is the Maori/Polynesian influence whereby ink can be something socially/culturally/spiritually significant rather than the nihilism often ascribed in European culture. Though the sports/music stars with various moko is now becoming an epidemic.
I don't have one but more because I could never decide on what to get since it is so permanent. I do very much like the spiderman tats in Matthew's links though, very nice and very imaginitive.
-
because that's a balmy summer's day, innit..
Nah, balmy summer's day is when the mercury is pushing, almost, up to 20C. The problem here with hot summer days is the hot air rising off the land draws cold air in off the North Sea and a haar begins to form above the Tay which can then creep up onto the land and can lower the temp significantly. We're 50m above the beach/river and it has to be bad to get up here but many is the time I have walked down the hill into a cold mist from a sunny summer's day on the top of the hill. So when it is a nice hot summer's day, you go out in the morning, or you head inland. Say to the Angus Glens which, facing South catch the sun something wonderfully.
-
Ah peer group learning, has that become dogma now? We invented that by necessity in 6th form maths. Our teacher was good at maths but couldn't teach for toffee. Ask her how to do something and she would do an example, without explanation and say: 'like that'.
So we taught ourselves Calculus out of the textbook. Set something we would all try and figure it out. Those who did first would confer to ensure they agreed then each would teach someone else who would then help someone else etc. We did quite well, though it might be the cause of my inability to ever 'get' integration properly.
The 7th form maths teacher could teach but was a snarky sod who thought that only maths mattered. I passed (just) Bursary maths just to spite him since he pronounced that I couldn't (on the basis that I had been ill too much).
Best moment came when he was teaching us to rotate graphs in 3D and work out areas. He had two parabolas, one smaller than the other and inside it. I stuck my hand up and opined that I could now work out how much chocolate was around and a scorched almond. He took me seriously. Fortunately the lesson ended at that point and we managed to get part way down the stairs before erupting into laughter.
-
Mind you I had no sympathy for soft Aucklanders who complained about the cold in 'winter'. You see I had come to Auckland from Dunedin and prior to that Scotland. Anyway I cycled 5 miles to school and back every day so no standing around being cold for me.
It always amused me to see people walking to school in hats and gloves once the mercury fell below about 15C. Here in Dundee we wear t-shirts at 15C, partly because if you wear hat and gloves then, what are you going to wear when it's -5 with 20mph Easterly blowing freezing rain in your face?
-
i believe I was in zone for that school David. However I escaped that fate by going to a school further east and south, co-ed and very racially mixed. No race rumbles that I recall particularly even though we had our own Boot Boys.
Technically we (boys that is, not girls) could be caned, but iirc in my five years there was only one such incident. For drinking vodka in the bogs. I do know of what you speak wrt the strap though. Mr M, ex desert rat in primary school in Dunedin. I was 8. I managed to avoid it being used on me though. He once marked wrong a sentence I wrote using the word 'god'. I had written 'Thor was the Viking god of thunder.' Apparently I was supposed to realise that only sentences about the xian god were allowed so my precocious readings of Greek and Norse mythology was of no use...
-
@Eddie Clark
Tis a pity they pour so much of their malt into blends.
The notes with the unpeated Caol says they have been making it for decades and selling it for blending. So perhaps their attitude has changed. Anyway it is a different wrinkle, we have un or lightly peated whiskies with peated stablemates (often under different names Springbank/Longrow or Tobermoray/Ledaig) so for heavy peated ones to bring out unpeated versions is certainly interesting. You wouldn't pick the unpeated Caol for a Caol on a blind. Closest to Scapa as i said.