Monday morning, after the daylight saving change, and I have three ethics classes beginning at 8am now for the winter. I was barely awake for the first one! These classes finished off the “Trusting Experts” topic I’ve been doing for the past week. Tomorrow we start a new topic on “Science Fiction Cloning” – for which I need to write the lesson plan tomorrow.
After the classes, I had lunch and then went into the city early. I had tutoring at the university from 3pm, but my wife suggested I go in early and browse around the bookshops and stuff, which I haven’t done for ages. So I did that. I checked out a couple of my favourite bookshops, and then went to a game shop. I have some store credit here from when I sold them some old Magic: the Gathering cards a while back, so I had that to spend.
I took some time browsing around, and looking up interesting looking games on my phone to check reviews. Then I used Discord to contact my friends and ask if any of them had the games I was looking at – because there’s relatively little point buying a game that someone in our group already owns. Good news! All three games I had my eye on were up for grabs, so I got all of them!
The one that I really expected someone must already have was Root, which I’d heard of and is fairly well known for having excellent reviews. I also found Brew and Evergreen, which also look intriguing, have good reviews, and importantly play times under 90 minutes, and support 2 players so I can play these games with my wife when not sharing them with my friends. This chewed up a nice wad of my store credit, though I still have a bit left.
So I’ll be looking forward in the next few weeks to trying these new games out, both with my wife, and also with a larger group of my friends.
In the afternoon and early evening we had the last lecture of the Data Engineering course, and introduction to the assessment project which the students need to do over the next four weeks. I went around and asked some of the groups what they were thinking of working on. One group is planning to look for connections between potential risk factors and diabetes from a public dataset of patient data. Another is going to search among a very broad range of possible data sources for correlations with phases of the moon! They asked if this would really be a sensible thing to work on (it’s actually one of the suggestions in our list of potential project ideas), and I said yes, as long as you cast a wide enough net – look at human physical/psychological data like crime rates or hospital admissions, geological data such as wave heights or earthquakes or rainfall, and biological data such as nocturnal animal activity or bird migrations or stuff like that. It’s basically a big data project to try and study a very wide range of phenomena and look for any surprising correlations.
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