It has TENTACLES!

irc transcript from #soc.bi, a few minutes ago:
<Beetlebau> IA! IA! CTHULHU CITRUS FHTAGN!
<astra> ?!
* Beetlebau found out about Buddha's Hand.
<Beetlebau> A type of citrus fruit that looks like a cross between a lemon and Cthulhu.
<astra> does this exist in reality?
<Beetlebau> Well, yeah!
<fluffymormegil> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha%27s_hand
<fluffymormegil> freaky!
<Beetlebau> We found some at Jungle Jim's Sunday. Kind of regret not buying one.
<astra> that really DOES look like Cthulhu!

B1a, b, C and D... er, P

* baratron is printing exam papers and marking other ones. It is about as fun, sexy, and exciting as you can possibly imagine (that is to say, not at all).

I rather like the AQA exam board in general because rather than trying to sell their papers for extortionate prices (e.g. £3 per paper *cough* Edexcel *cough*), they make them all freely available on their website - with terms and conditions which say, basically, do what you want with these papers as long as you respect our copyright. So teachers and students can copy and photocopy the papers entirely freely, as long as no one tries to pretend they wrote the questions, or try to sell the papers themselves. This is all well and good, and I generally feel quite favourable towards AQA. I would, however, like to shoot whoever decided the modules in the new GCSE Science syllabus were going to be called B1a, B1b, C1a, C1b, P1a and P1b instead of, ooh, Module 01-06? Even B1, B2, C1, C2, P1 and P2 would be more meaningful than all that B1a nonsense.

The letters stand for Biology 1 part a, Biology 1 part b, Chemistry 1 part a, etc - and the reason why they're B1a then B2a is that next year's modules are called B2a and B2b. So the first year modules are coded 1 and the second year modules are coded 2. This sort of makes sense... but they used to be B1, B2, B3 & B4, which is a damn sight easier to read. My poor dyslexic students are going crazy trying to figure out what the hell module they're taking, as B1a, B1b, C1a, C1b, P1a and P1b ALL LOOK THE SAME! Even I, a person with no learning or visual impairments whatsoever, am finding that my eyes are blurring as I'm trying to download the things; and I keep overwriting old files and getting extra copies of the same one by mistake. How on earth did they manage to trial this syllabus for two or three years yet none of the test schools came back and said "Change the module codes"? Gah.