I like this thread. Can we expand it to become a general question and answer thread? If so, who can tell me the precise difference between a tangerine, satsuma and a mandarin?

Different shades of orange. And the fact that all occupy distinct subquantum fields within relative space, neither of which may impinge upon each other without catastophic disentropy. Unless you throw one at the wall.
So there.

Well, that's what I suspected . Just wanted it confirmed.

What came first, the PhD student or the supervisor?

PhD student of course.

Otherwise you would have a situation where supervisors actually do donkey work, and that, as we all know would simply be impossible.

i think the really burning question is how do they get the figs in to the fig rolls?

Carefully!

Who said that it is a chicken egg? For it to be a chicken egg the chicken must have come first to have been laid by a chicken. But if it was any egg then it could have been a dinosaur egg which would have come before the chicken.

Alternatively on a pro-life theory the egg is a chicken therefore they both came at the same time.

However the best theory has to be the egg McMuffin vs McChicken sandwich! I like it

This one will get you scratching your heads

Which came first the head lice or the eggs!!

The difference between tangerines satsumas and mandarins. Do you mean the qualitative difference or a detailed phylogeny of cultivated citrus fruits. All three are probably derived from an ancestoral fruit, perhaps a satanderine, from which farmers in Empiral China selectively bred for small size, as in the satsuma, small size, as in the tangerine, or maybe small size, as in the mandarin.

And if we take the chicken-egg thing to its logical conclusion then some sort of asexual protist, with feathers.

Which came first, the PhD student or the supervisor???

YIKES...what the rest of the post should be is...
that...

Some supervisors were there even before the university! I think that when they went to build some universities, the supervisor was there and they just built the university up around him/her/them.

I think some supervisors like to think that the University was built up around them!

The supervisors WERE there before the university, debating which came first, the chicken or the egg. Astonished, the university builders decided that was the place to build a university, and invented red bricks and built the structure up around them. Later, when the debate widened to DNA and molecules, plateglass was fitted into the red brick structures. Latterly, new universities began to appear alongside the red brick and the plateglass, which will doubtless tempt future generations with questions on which came first, red brick or plate glass?