b3ta.com user Fishcat
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Wow you actually read the profiles?

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(Wed 1st Nov 2006, 23:42, More)

Best answers to questions:

» Crap meals out

It's a bit of a chestnut
but several years ago, on a nice family sunday lunch out at a posh hotel nearby, I had got halfway through my chicken salad starter only to find a slug, still very much alive, on a half-eaten piece of lettuce.
The waiter told us that he was surprised, as the lettuce had been frozen (can you really freeze lettuce?) and washed.

Still. the puddings were free.

Incidentally, last year we went back again, and the man on the table next to us, eating alone, was dressed as hitler (complete with mustache, beige shirt and shorts, socks pulled up and side parting hair). He looked terrifyingly like der Fuhrer, I'll have to dig out the photo taken not-very-subtly on my phone.

Mod-Edit: Ooh, yes please. Stick it here instead of this edit :)
(Thu 27th Apr 2006, 15:30, More)

» Child Labour

Despite what they tell you
Young Enterprise schemes do not look good on a CV and can very quickly turn into some nightmareish capitalist version of Lord of the Flies.
(Fri 17th Feb 2006, 12:37, More)

» My Greatest Regrets

I once had the chance to see Patrick Moore
playing the xylophone in concert in Leamington Spa.

Being a foolish child at the time, I declined the offer. The chance will never come again.
(Thu 5th Oct 2006, 19:26, More)

» Pointless Experiments

For my psychology degree...
...we had to do a final year project worth a large percentage of our final degree mark. My experiment, entitled "Emotion and ego-depletion: Self-regulatory resource and the exaggeration and suppression of anger." aimed to see whether controlling emotions (specifically anger) had a deleterious effect on other cognitive functions.

This involved a year's worth of planning the experiment, creating the manipulation conditions, literature reviews, meetings with my tutor (the excellently named 'Doctor Ulrich von Hecker'), test runs before I even started my experiment proper. The experiment itself involved 25 hours of sitting in a cupboard-sized room asking unwashed, hungover first years to listen to recorded message telling them how rubbish psychology is (in order to try and make them angry)and then measuring their performance on a few carefully designed tests of self-regulation. Apparently the ethics board thought this was all dubious, and so I had to then play these freshers Bill Withers' 'Lovely Day' in order to ensure that they left in a more positive frame of mind...Finally I had to statistically analyse my results and write 10k words on the whole study, pay £20 to have it bound, and try not to kill myself out of deadline-stress.

So why was this pointelss? Well I found absolutely zero effect at all- every single result was statistically insignificant and I couldn't even make out a vague pattern to my results (some of them even went in the opposite direction to what I had predicted). A year's work on an incredibly dull subject for no reason at all.


Sorry, no hummus here.
(Fri 25th Jul 2008, 18:44, More)

» Stupid Tourists

Grand Canyon
We were told by our tour guide at los Canyonos Grandos (eh?) that the three most common questions they get are "Is the donkey ride to the bottom air conditioned", "Is it floodlit at night" and "how long did it take to build".
He assured us this was true, and judging by some of the people there, I'm enclined to believe him.
(Thu 14th Jul 2005, 10:41, More)
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