Oh, for god’s sake

I’m really going to have to finish the Urinal in the not too distant future – if only to give Lisa a posting account so she can put her news finds up [on the site, snig snig] herself. (You all remember Lisa‘s previous contributions, don’t you?)

In the latest bid to justify top-up fees and the relevance of higher education, a Loughborough University student has apparently discovered the real reason why biscuits crack in the packet. Good. ‘Cos that was keeping me up a nights. Apparently:

Qasim Saleem, the PhD student who carried out the work, baked and studied more than 100 biscuits in the laboratory using a sophisticated laser technique, called digital speckle pattern interferometry.

“Digital speckle pattern interferometry”? Fuck off. Don’t give me that. You mean he took photos of them and showed them to his mates, don’t you. And just how exactly do you bake biscuits with a laser? And isn’t that a bit of a waste when you can use a bog-standard perfectly normal oven?

Still – you have to be happy really. I’ve always said that Universities should allow some freedom for pure research – independent of whether there’s a ‘product’ in sight. Microsoft – take note: that’s freedom to innovate.