It was a little warm today, 27°C, but pleasant and not humid. The weather has really cooled down and become drier since summer and the days are really nice now. The few imported deciduous trees in the area are starting to turn – plane trees going their drab shade of brown, while the liquidambars are turning a lovely red and the ginkgos are starting to turn their delicious shade of butter yellow.
I took Scully on a long walk to the Italian bakery at Cammeray for lunch. I had a pizza slice and I looked for any of their delicious pasties, but they seemed to have sold out of most of them. There were some croissants and a cherry danish, but I decided to look in the cake display and found a seasonal item: a “Monte Bianco”, I guess the Italian version of a Mont Blanc. Chestnuts are the classic autumnal treat. So I decided to try that.
To be honest, it wasn’t entirely to my taste, being a mass of soft creamy chestnut puree, with only a tiny strip of biscuit base at the bottom to give it any other sort of texture. The flavour was a bit bland too. I think I like chestnuts more in the abstract than as an ingredient in cooking. it’s the first sweet treat I’ve ever tried at this bakery that I wouldn’t have again – their hit rate is usually very good.
I spent the morning writing my class notes for this week’s new ethics topic, on the question of “Why don’t we?” This is really a more critical thinking exercise this week, getting the kids to think about the reasons—which must exist—why we don’t fix particular problems in the world. Some of the questions:
- Why don’t we prevent natural disasters?
- Why don’t we give everyone free food?
- Why don’t we switch to a better keyboard layout than QWERTY?
- Why don’t we ban all pesticides?
- Why don’t we keep criminals in prison forever so they can’t commit crime again?
- Why don’t we have more bins in public places to reduce littering?
The hope is that the kids will realise the wide variety of reasons behind the questions: some are physically impossible, some are socially unacceptable, some are economically infeasible, some are ethically questionable, some are politically intractable, some are environmentally irresponsible, and so on.
I built stage 5 of the Lego D&D set today. The first building is now complete! It’s the whole tavern, with the ground floor and the bedroom second storey now added, with completed roof.
There’s another new figure, a human fighter/rogue/assassin kind of guy. The roof parts and windows are really well done on this model.
And here’s the interior details seen from the back (there’s no back wall, so you can see inside).
The Lego pieces are in numbered bags inside the box, and you open the bags in numerical order as you build through the instructions. So far I’ve opened the first 5 bags. As I was searching through them all to find bag number 6 (for tomorrow), I noticed bags with numbers as high as 32! SO with 5 bags done, I’ve completed building less than one sixth of this set!
New content today:
– Why don’t we prevent natural disasters?
Humanity has been preventing flooding for ages. The other are a bit trickier.
– Why don’t we give everyone free food?
It’s deemed too expensive
– Why don’t we switch to a better keyboard layout than QWERTY?
Herecy! I mean …tradition
– Why don’t we ban all pesticides?
People would starve
– Why don’t we keep criminals in prison forever so they can’t commit crime again?
Most country try to resocialize criminals to non-criminals. USA excepted.
– Why don’t we have more bins in public places to reduce littering?
Curious question. Australia doesn’t have a lot? The UK doesn’t due to The Troubles.
Apart from that: economic. Too expensive.