Happy New Year!

[Thread Zero]

The Chinese New Year starts today.

It's the Year of the Monkey this year!

[Devons Daddy]

gong xi fai chia

sadly im working today. but was with the family for dinner yesterday. im impressed you know.
local takeaway closed was it? or got friends who celebrate. :~)

[Dudley]

No, DD, it's been quite heavily promoted this year...


Some people are naturals at manoeuvring their chopsticks. For the three out of five people in Britain who have trouble, two physicists have come to the rescue: a formula that can help to measure your technique.

Jim Al-Khalili and Qiang Zhao, of the physics department at the University of Surrey, have devised a formula to coincide with the Chinese new year which claims to put a number on how well you use chopsticks.

"The hardest thing was actually figuring out what the hell we should work out," said Dr Al-Khalili. "We decided the nicest thing was to work out comfort factor - how much energy you need to use to pick up lumps of food."

He and Dr Zhao spent a morning scribbling equations on a blackboard to crack the problem. "By coffee time, we'd thrashed out the formula," he said.

To work out the comfort factor - on a scale of one (for maximum discomfort) to 100 - of picking up a specific piece of food, you need to look at several things, including the number of Chinese meals you have eaten in your life and how many times you eschewed the knife and fork option to use chopsticks.

"Most of the formula is serious physics," says Dr Al-Khalili. "Mass of the food, the size of the food; how slippery it is between the sticks. Then we had to put in the texture of the food, how crumbly it is and so on."

They also found that if your fear of using chopsticks runs deep, you might have some serious practising to do. "If you wanted to pick up a piece of chicken of appropriate size ... it would take you 20 years eating one Chinese meal with chopsticks per week for the comfort factor to be the same as picking the bloody thing up with your fingers," said Dr Al-Khalili.