Armchair strategists are always quick to point out things that are obvious with 20/20 hindsight, like Custer should have brought more than 250 troopers with him.
Non-US Dopers: Please Share Any US Culture References You Didn't *Get* from Exported American TV/Mov
Also, way too many courses taught by TAs* (some of whom had less than perfect English) rather than tenured professors. I have never encountered anything like this at a private college.
*Teaching Assistants, i.e., graduate students.
The concept I don’t understand is 20/20 hindsight; what do those numbers mean?
If you’d ask me about my eyesight I’d tell you I have -2.5/-2 prescription, those numbers describe the lenses in my glasses.
(I get what hindsight is, just not how you classify eyesight on a /20 scale)
Getting back to eggs, the concept of sunny side up and over easy just seems really odd. I’ve never heard of over hard before this thread.
Generally, in Australia, fried eggs aren’t flipped at all. The amount of ‘doneness’ of fried eggs (runny yolk, soft yolk, hard yolk, etc) comes from how long they’re cooked, not whether or not they’ve been flipped. Also, flipping the egg and cooking the yolk side spoils the look of them!
The expression ‘over easy’ doesn’t make sense to me, I don’t know why, it just doesn’t. The ‘over’ part of it sounds more like putting something over something else, not turning or flipping, and I had no idea what was meant by the ‘easy’. That’s not to say I’ve never flipped an egg, but it’s not something that’s done very often and if someone wants their fried egg turned over and cooked on the other side, they’ll just say ‘can you flip it?’
Other than that, we cook our eggs all the various ways you mentioned. Scrambled eggs can be broken into the pan and mixed as they cook, but it’s more common to mix them in a bowl, then pour that into the pan and stir as they cook.
It’s based on the Snellen chart, which is the most common test of visual acuity in the US. The first number refers to the distance (in feet) the patient is standing from the chart; the second refers to the smallest line of symbols he/she can see clearly. So “20/20” vision is normal, “20/30” is slightly nearsighted, “20/400” is severely nearsighted, etc.
It’s a scale of visual acuity relative to a nominal human’s sight. 20/200 is severe nearsightedness; something 20 feet away is as blurry as it ‘should’ be at 200.
“20/20” is often used as a synonym for “perfect,” but that’s not really correct. Some people see better than the nominal; somebody with 20/15 vision can resolve images from 20 feet away as well as the nominal person does from 15.
In the case of a big state university like the ones mentioned, the institution may be quite prestigious because of the important research that is done there, faculty members who are experts in their fields and have published important books and articles, etc. But none of this is necessarily relevant to the education you’d receive as an undergraduate.
In the US, people go to restaurants, order, then receive a check from the waiter, and pay that check with bills.
In other places, you might order at a restaurant, receive a bill from the waiter, and pay that bill with notes.
A surefire way to be outed as a foreigner in the US is to refer to a “twenty dollar note”. Nobody calls it a note, even though the thing itself has a legal blurb saying “This note is legal tender…”. It’s just one of those American things that you have to deal with.
Your personal experiences don’t change the fact that these schools, and a number of other public universities, are both harder to get in to and more prestigious than plenty of private colleges in the US. I probably got a better undergraduate education at the small private college I attended than I would have at most big state universities, but that doesn’t mean other people are impressed when they hear the name of the place or that it was particularly difficult to get accepted.
I don’t want to leave this as an uncited claim, so I’ll post the acceptance rates of some different schools in Wisconsin. This wasn’t particularly systematic, I just went with the first three public and private schools in the state that I could think of. It’s easy to find the acceptance rate of a school just by Googling the name and the words “acceptance rate”.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (state school): 90%
Alverno College (private school): 82%
University of Wisconsin-Eau Clair (state school): 76%
Beloit College (private school): 71%
Marquette University (private school): 57%
University of Wisconsin-Madison (state school, “Public Ivy”): 50.5%
I can’t find that there’s a private school in the state that has a lower acceptance rate than UW-Madison, although I didn’t check the figures for everything.
As far as prestige, it looks like the top 19 schools in the US News & World Report list of best national universities are all private, but the University of California, Berkeley is tied for #20 and I see a lot of other state schools in the top 50. UW-Madison is tied for #41. The next Wisconsin school I see on the list is Marquette, tied for #75. The other Wisconsin schools I looked at are not considered national universities, but regional universities or (in the case of Beloit) a national liberal arts schools.
Yes, that observation was a head scratcher. I am a professor and researcher, and generally, Americans use college and university interchangeably. Meaning higher education. However, typically a college is an academic division of a university. So a college is typically smaller and more specialized, functioning in undergraduate studies. At my uni, f’rex, we have colleges of liberal arts, natural sciences, business, engineering, etc.
In fact the college/university divide does exist: two year institutions are called community colleges, never universities. And people attend beauty colleges. The most rigorous and prestigious apex of American higher education is the research university.
The majority of scientific research comes out of the large flagship universities: think Berkeley (California), Wisconsin, Texas, Illinois. These are huge institutions with prominent faculty, and they are public. There are a number of private universities of this caliber; Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and MIT come to mind. All of which are universities.
Now, the other side to this is that universities tend to focus on research first, undergraduate education second. A gross simplification, but this is where elite colleges fit in. Macalester, Colgate, and Oberlin make their reputation based on high quality, small classes taught by award winning faculty. One pays a premium for these services.
While the private elite colleges are known to people in education and certain industries, most Americans probably couldn’t tell you where Middlebury or Colby is. But they know Ohio State and Michigan, both through athletics and their research scope.
Last note: there is a Harvard University (dozen plus schools and units) and Harvard College (aforementioned unit that is the home of undergraduate education). People often conflate the two, but Harvard College is a relatively small but famous part of the university.
Re your last note: Same with the University of Chicago. The undergraduate portion of the thing is called simply “The College.”
Okay, can you explain what exactly is confusing?
I’m obviously too close to it to see any problem in the current metric system - our coins are 1p, 2p, 5p, 10p, 50p, £1 and £2 (where 1p is 1/100 of £1, p is short for pence), and our notes are £5, £10, £20 etc, with an occasional rare £1 found lurking in Scotland.
It’s the language. We eat our eggs in a variety of ways, yes, but we don’t use the colourful terms that you use. Our equivalent to “omelet, scrambled eggs, poached eggs” in the UK are “omelette, scrambled eggs, poached eggs” and your “sunny side up” is our fried egg. I don’t think we have an equivalent to your “over easy” but if we did, we’d probably try to give it a descriptive name like “twice fried egg” or “double fried”.
Omelet, scrambled, poached, yes. But while dictionaries tell me that huevo frito is fried egg, my senses tell me that British fried eggs are, indeed, huevos fritos, whereas American fried eggs tend to be more akin to huevos al plato (an observation shared by others who’ve been surprised by the mismatch); the American friend who told me my huevo frito was sunny side up asked “what’s that brown stuff?” - that golden-brown stuff is puntillas, which leads me to the two and only two varieties of fried egg I’d encountered before those baffling American lists: with or without “lace” (huevos al plato don’t properly have brown stuff).
In part it’s a problem of translation and in part a problem of concept.
It’s because they think of the old pre-metric system.
I was thinking more of the older system.
I think it’s pretty weird that the British money system changed at some point. I remember watching an older Doctor Who where Ace had to have 1960s money explained to her, and I was baffled. What changed? Did certain coins get a different value? Were some coins and bills (or notes or whatever) abolished? Were new ones introduced? When did they change it? Why did they change it?
From what I’ve gathered off of BBC America, UK money works pretty much like American money, except you say “p” instead of “cents.” So “50p” would be “50 cents” or “half a pound” - worth more than an American 50 cents, but the same idea. Did it used to be something like “fourteen farthings to a half shilling” or something, and somebody in charge decided to put an end to that shit?
But what’s confusing about it?
I’ve lived my entire life wityh decimal currency. I’ve sometimes read stories from pre-decimal referring to shillings and pence, and I’ve never been confused. Something costing three pounds eleven shillings and sixpence is perfectly clear.
The maths is a lot easier with decimal currency. What will the item cost next year assuming 2.2% inflation? Unless you have been asked to perform a calculation like that, I don’t see the problem.
Some coins were assigned a new value and when new coins were minted they had the same size. Some were dropped altogether and some new once were introduced. Notes were unaffected.