Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: March 31, 2013

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OVER-REACTION OF THE WEEK: SCHOOL BANS POINTY FLAPJACKS

by Hazed

In a classic case of health and safety gone mad, it was reported earlier this week that a school in Essex, England, had issued a ban on triangular flapjacks following an “incident”.

Flapjacks are delicious biscuits made from oats, butter and golden syrup. They sometimes contain dried fruit as well. They are baked in a flat tin and then cut into squares, rectangles or triangles. Depending on how they are cooked they can be crumbly, chewy, or quite hard. Here’s a recipe.

I am guessing the flapjacks in this story were the hard kind rather than the chewy or crumbly kind, because this incident involved a boy being hit in the face by a triangular flapjack.

Hence the ban on triangular flapjacks: catering staff have been told from now on not to sell those pointy three-sided ones, but to stick to the safer four-sided rectangular or square ones. A school spokesman announced that the incident lead to a review of “the texture and shape of the flapjacks”. Yes, that’s the words the school used when explaining their change of policy.

Now, the choice of the safest shape for a flapjack is not as straightforward as you might think. On the one hand, I guess the logic is that the corners in a square are not so pointy as the ones in a triangle, so less likely to cause damage. On the other hand, there are more corners in a square so it’s more likely the face will be hit with a corner rather than an edge.

Possibly it’s an issue of aerodynamics. A triangular flapjack may well fly better than a square one, thus making it a better ballistic missile.

Of course, the kids could be bright enough to figure out that if they are served a square flapjack they merely have to snap it in two diagonally, and they will have two triangular ones to use as missiles.

Perhaps the safest thing would be to make the flapjacks circular - no corners at all - or even spherical! Although that would cause problems when producing them, since cutting circles or spheres out of a flat traybake would provide a lot of wastage. To balance maximum obtuse corners with the least wastage, hexagonal flapjacks would do the trick - they fit together nicely, so the only bits to be thrown away would be the offcuts around the edge.

I am sure I don’t have to point out to readers of the Star how stupid this is... half-baked, in fact! The proper response is to discipline the child who threw the food item, not to obsess about what shape it is!

Better hope the canteen never wants to serve up rock cakes.

Source: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4858110/School-bans-dangerous-triangular-flapjacks-after-pupil-is-hit-in-face-by-one.html and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-21923218

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