I finished off my marking for the image processing course today. As in previous semesters, this was followed by a tedious hour or so of pasting all the marks and comments into the university online interface – 10 separate entries for each of the 54 students I’d been assigned. I was very glad once I got that finished!
This evening I had the first three classes on my new ethics topic: Success and Failure. I think they went pretty well. This topic has less of me talking and more questions for the students to answer than the previous one I did on Dinosaurs, so it feels a lot more interactive, which is good.
This afternoon I read an article on the ABC News site about pears falling out of favour with Australian consumers relative to other fruits, with the result that a lot of pear farmers are finding the crop to be no longer commercially viable, and are removing pear orchards. This prompted two things:
Firstly, a conversation on with my friends on Discord in which two of them revealed that they never realised that pears are sold in supermarkets in an unripe state and that they ripen and soften over several days in the home. Both of them said they never thought much of pears, as they were too hard, crunchy, and bland compared to apples. I was amazed that they’d apparently never experienced the fact that pears soften considerably as they ripen, nor had the pleasure of eating a nicely ripe pear.
Secondly, I resolved to go out and buy some pears! When I went out with Scully for a walk after lunch I popped into the local grocery store and grabbed four nice Packham pears. Which are very firm now, but will ripen and soften nicely in the next few days. And one of my pear-incredulous friends also went out and bought himself some pears today as well, to experiment and try to experience this phenomenon of ripe pears himself.
I don’t know if it’ll be enough to convince the farmers to keep growing pears, but I certainly hope they don’t end up disappearing from our supermarket fruit sections.
New content today:
Interesting, those pears! I don’t like even ripe pears that much, but I’ve never given them that much thought.
In our office we get fresh fruit in the kitchen area several times a week. Now that you mention it, I realized that the pears there are basically straight from a store, so they’re unripe. It might be better to take some to my desk and wait a day or two for them to ripen, so they’d be better. They’re usually the last fruit left in the bowl, so I don’t think many people know this.