Wrong bottle

I was organising some science activities with kids, and one involved a bottle of cola. If you remove a little cola from the bottle and replace it with milk, you might think that you get slightly milky cola. In fact, the fat in the milk reacts with the acid in the cola, coagulates, and settles out at the bottom, taking the brown colour of the cola with it, and leaving most of the bottle holding only cloudy water.

So I told the parents that their kids would need, among other things, a bottle of cola. I got an email from a parent.

[Kid's name] is hoping to take part tonight. She went shopping for cola and unfortunately was too short to reach the cola so she came back with Fanta fizzy blackcurrant. Will this be a problem?

I reassured her. But as I didn't run that particular session, so I can't report what happens if you put milk in Fanta blackcurrant.

Weird protection

The man who killed George Floyd is a murderer. How could it be otherwise? Imagine if the roles were reversed, and a member of the public had knelt on police officer's neck until they died. But if you're on the official side, the rules don't usually apply. The police in the US kill about a thousand people a year. How many even lose their jobs, never mind get convicted of anything? But I suppose that one conviction is a small step in the right direction.

In the UK, a minister is out of government because he wanted to protect soldiers against prosecution for things that happened in Northern Ireland. It seems that even though he's gone, they're going to give the protection anyway. Again, imagine if the roles were reversed. No one would be campaigning for civilians who killed soldiers to avoid prosecution. Why should someone be exempt from the law because they're wearing a uniform?