The real cheese

Our return to regular food continued yesterday evening with a batch of cheese scones. The first of the two trays being snapped above.

Prompted by the thought that my cheese scones were usually a little undercooked, the second tray was given an extra few minutes, quite a lot considering that the usual cooking time is only around 12 minutes. They turned out a lot browner and tasted rather different, with the different taste rather growing on one. But a difference which vanished when the scones had gone cold. Maybe next time I will aim for the middle.

All done by breakfast this morning.

And I was surprised this morning to find that the last batch was as long ago as mid-October, as noticed at reference 1. I would have thought some time in November.

And while I am on, the matter of counting petals has cropped up again. That is to say how much variation in the number of petals was there for plants of a given species, say the buttercup or the apple. My starting point having been that for any given species of flowering plant, this number was genetically determined and was highly conserved. The question now being, how highly conserved? See, for example, reference 2.

Then in the margins of another matter, noticed at reference 3, I acquired a copy of the old but famous text at reference 4. From Oliver & Boyd, who, when I was a student, still had a shop near Dillons, off Gower Street. At that time, as I recall, a specialist in medical texts. No doubt long gone.

Turning the pages the other day, I came across the diagram snapped above. Not Fisher's data, but clearly people were worrying about this more than a hundred years ago, by the looks of things turning up a simple logarithmic relationship. I doubt whether I would have got that far under my own steam.

But I am prompted to wonder whether, somewhere out there, someone has compiled lots of statistics about all this. Will I be able to run them down?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/10/a-snack-for-thursday.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/08/trolleys-933-934-935-and-936.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/06/unlikely-crimes.html.

Reference 4: Statistical Methods for Research Workers – R A Fisher – 1934.