Deep learning and fire weather

Today was the final content lecture of the image processing course at the university, with the lecturer going over deep learning as a technique for pattern recognition in images and videos. For the next few weeks the students will be concentrating on their assessment projects, which is where the fun really begins. So far the students who have talked to me are planning some of the usual suspects for project ideas: tumour detection in medical images, car and other object detection for automated driving, handwriting recognition, and so on. I’m hoping some team will come up with something cool and new.

Today was also the first total fire ban of the… summer that we’re not in yet. The temperature only reached 27.4°C, but it was very windy and the humidity was super low, getting below 10% in parts of Sydney. I’ve been noticing extremely low humidity the past few days, as it’s drying my skin out and I’m using tons of moisturiser.

There’s no rain forecast for the next week and temperatures should get up to 29°C again. Some of the grass in the parks is starting to turn noticeably brown from lack of rain. We had 2 mm of rain last Friday, but apart from that it basically hasn’t rained for almost a full month now. Which is very unusual for Sydney.

More interesting responses tonight from kids about that car driving question about letting people cut in ahead of the queue in the turning lane:

  • 2 American + 1 Canadian kid: Let the car in.
  • 1 New Zealander: Don’t let them in.
  • 2 Hong Kong: Very strongly don’t let them in. When I explained why it could be dangerous not to let them in, the Hong Kong kids both changed to: Let them in, but everyone should honk at them.
  • 2 Thai kids: You should let the car in. But for different reasons: (1) because it’s dangerous to leave them in the other lane; (2) to be nice and “show them mercy”.
  • 1 Hong Kong: “Definitely not!” They should block the car out until they give up and keep going straight. Because they’re doing the wrong thing and deserve to be punished.
  • 1 Portugal: No, block them out, because otherwise everyone will think they can do the same thing.

New content today:

Comics batch done!

This morning we had to do an emergency bed linen change and wash, after Scully threw up on the bed. Thankfully this is a very rare occurrence, but it’s nasty when it happens.

I spent much of the day finishing off that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote and photographed a couple of weeks ago. I do batches of 30 strips at once for efficiency purposes, enough to last six weeks. And now they’re all done and uploaded, so I won’t have to do any more until mid-October. Phew!

I actually completed what I think will be the last strips in a couple of the themes, as I work towards winding down the entire comic. It’ll be interesting to see how many readers realise which strips are the last ones for any given theme.

In ethics classes tonight I asked that question I posed yesterday: If there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out?

  • Two kids from Taiwan were both very insistent that you not let the car in.
  • One girl from Australia said you should let them in, but wind down your window and….
    I thought she was going to say “Yell at them.” But she actually said, very politely and meekly, “… tell them not to do it again.”
  • And one kid from Singapore said you should let them in, even though they’ve done the wrong thing, because it’s dangerous to block the second lane.

A friend of mine predicted that the answers would vary by country, and so far he seems to be right.

New content today:

Tax return time

Today I prepared my class plan for the new week’s critical thinking and ethics class, on the topic of Driving. I came up with a lot of questions, and in the first class tonight got through only about half of them. Which is a good thing – better than running out of material!

One interesting question I’m asking in this one is if there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out? And why? I expect there to be some varied answers to this one!

Scully got a big walk at lunch time – we spent about an hour and a half out before returning home. The weather has improved since the weekend and it was a really nice mild day.

This evening after dinner (lentils, potatoes, and broccoli with some curry spices) my wife and I sat down to do our tax returns. I’m sure I mentioned this last year, but the Australian Tax Office has really streamlined tax returns and it takes only a few minutes online to confirm all the financial stuff they already know, and to add in some deductions and my foreign income from Outschool (that the ATO doesn’t automatically know about). We were done with both of our returns in under half an hour. Job done for another year!

New content today:

Like Garfield, Mondays can be the worst days sometimes

Monday is my busiest day with online ethics classes. I have four between 8am and 1pm, with an hour break in between the two sets of two. And two of my most challenging classes are in this batch, with kids who are reluctant to speak, have difficulty speaking, I have difficulty understanding, have technical issues with their audio, and/or have lots of distracting background noise making hearing the difficult. It takes a real effort to concentrate on what they’re saying, or give them enough time to think, or encourage them to speak, or work around the audio issues.

By 1pm I was worn out. It was time to take Scully for a walk and get some lunch. We went up to the fish & chip shop and I grabbed some fish & chips there, then we walked down to the park by the ferry wharf to sit and eat by the water. This is a nice secluded park which is never busy, so it’s good for Scully to run around in. After eating I threw a ball for her to chase and fetch a bit, before we started walking home.

In the afternoon I worked on assembling more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch. I got through a few, but still have many more to go.

My wife took Scully on another walk before dinner, and I met them up at a supermarket to buy some pizza cheese and pumpkin for dinner.

Tonight I have two more ethics classes. These are easier ones, but the last is from 9-10pm, so it’s quite late. Phew! It’s a long day.

New content today:

Last gasp of winter?

Today dawned cold and windy. I forced myself to go for a 5k run, but it wasn’t pleasant, being around 14°C and very windy. On my normal route I ran past a house that had had a tree fall over, probably during the night, and I had to run around it as the top was extending out of their property into the footpath area.

After showering and cleaning the bathroom, I spent time assembling Irregular Webcomic! strips from the photos I took last week. I got a couple of weeks’ worth done, but still have three more ready to make.

The day remained cold and windy, but no rain. Things will warm up over the next few days, and be back to 27°C again by Wednesday.

Preliminary results from yesterday’s local council elections seem to indicate that our incumbent Mayor will be re-elected, which I think is a good thing.

Oh, and Duolingo’s Japanese course is throwing more kanji at me. I haven’t even managed to learn the hiragana yet! I’ve downloaded Anki flashcard software to do a crash course in learning those so I can master them, but I need to find some time to get started on it.

New content today:

Local council election day

Today was election day in the New South Wales local council elections. We have three levels of government in Australia:

  1. Federal: Covering all of Australia. At this level we elect the Parliament of Australia and (indirectly) the Prime Minister.
  2. State: Each state elects a state government, generally a Parliament similar to the Federal one, led by a Premier. The contiguous territories also elect their own territorial governments. I live in New South Wales, so vote in the NSW state elections.
  3. Council: The states are divided into Local Government Areas (LGAs), usually called “councils”. For example, the state of New South Wales currently has 128 Local Government Areas, 33 of which are within metropolitan Sydney. The smallest covers less than 6 square kilometres, and the largest over 53,000 square kilometres. Voters elect a small group of councillors, who elect the Mayor of the LGA from among them.

I’m in the North Sydney Council area, so today I was voting for councillors for this LGA. My wife went to a yoga class first thing in the morning, and after that we met up at a local high school which was set up as a polling place. It wasn’t very busy, the queue in front of us was literally only two people, so we were in and out after voting in just a couple of minutes. While I was waiting there for my wife to arrive, two men approached and one went in to vote, while the other waited outside. A polling place worker came over and asked the waiting man if he was here to vote, and he said no, he didn’t live here, he was visiting from the USA. This sparked a conversation between the poll worker and the man about the differences between our electoral systems.

After voting, we walked home a long way, via the shops at Waverton to pick up a loaf of bread and so my wife could see the new Bay Brew cafe that has opened up in the premises of the old Waterview Cafe.

At home I worked on a couple of new Darths & Droids strips. I also played a game of Root with my wife. We haven’t played this game for several weeks, so it was good to pull it out again. This time I played the Eyrie (birds) while my wife played the Alliance again, and we used the bot players for the Marquise (cats) and Vagabond. It’s the first time we’ve used the Vagabot, and it was surprisingly effective, racing to the lead mid-game. But my wife managed to haul it in and overtake to win, with everyone else just a few points behind.

For dinner tonight we drove over to Four Frogs crêperie and had galettes. They had a special with Swiss cheese, gorgonzola, bacon, walnuts, and fresh figs, which I tried. It was pretty good! Rather than have a dessert crêpe, I had a second savoury one, with chorizo and mushrooms, which was also nice.

I didn’t do a 5k run today, since I did one yesterday evening, before the board games night started.

New content today:

Home made pizza and games night

This morning I went out to pick up the grocery shopping. I wasn unable to order any eggs in my online pick-up order, so while I grabbed fresh fruits and vegetables manually I also went to the egg section to get some there. But that section of the supermarket was completely bare – there wasn’t a single pack of eggs to be had. We’ve been having an egg shortage which I believe is because of a bird flu outbreak in Victoria. So I had to go home without.

But later in the day I took Scully for a walk up to the local shops and there’s a small grocery store there, and they had some eggs, so I bought a dozen there.

I had four ethics classes today. I was a bit worried about how heavy this topic on Hate would be after the first one on Tuesday. But it’s become easier over the week and today’s classes were kind of fun actually, discussing various things that the kids hated and why.

For dinner I made a potato pizza, rather than us going out to a restaurant. And tonight is online board games night. We have slightly fewer people than usual since one of the gang is going to see Iron Maiden in concert tonight.

We played a new game for me, called Mountain Goats. It’s an interesting dice combination game sort of like Can’t Stop, but with some new twists. It’s quite enjoyable.

New content today:

Machine learning classifiers and image processing projects

Today’s university lecture was about machine learning as applied to the field of image recognition. I was there as a tutor assisting the lecturing professor, who went over various details of how machine learning works, different algorithms, and how to measure their various statistical types of performance so you can compare them. In the tutorial part of the session the students got to run various classification algorithms and play with the software tools that we provide.

Several teams also asked me about the end of semester project and reports that they have to do. They’re thinking about what topic they want to investigate and they need to get our approval before beginning, just in case they attempt anything unethical or questionable. (For example, using copyrighted data or taking photos of people without consent.) One group was thinking about using medical scans to detect cancerous tumours, another using automotive camera photos to classify objects on or near roads that cars might need to avoid, another just using a large database of photos of different objects to classify them, and another hoping to read photos of car number plates. These are all kind of standard ideas that many teams often have and are all fine.

Other activities today: Mailing more Magic cards to an eBay buyer. Walking Scully a couple of times. Making spaghetti pesto for dinner.

Oh, and we had some rain while I was coming home from university. It’s the first rain we’ve had since 24 August, 19 days ago, when we just had a trace 0.2 mm. The last time we had serious rain was 17 August. We’ve really been enjoying the lack of rain though, after the last 2.5 years of ridiculous amounts of rainfall.

New content today:

Mailing, sorting, pricing, inventorying

Today I spent several hours doing stuff to sell some more of my Magic: the Gathering cards. I listed a set of common cards for auction on eBay last week, and it sold yesterday, so I had to packaged them and then walk up to the post office to send them off.

Then to finalise a deal with someone online I had to make up a checklist, count all the cards I had from an old set (Fallen Empires), record the inventory numbers, then go through an online sale site to find latest sale prices for all of the cards, and enter them into a spreadsheet to calculate the total value. Despite being several hundred cards, most of them currently sell for less than a (US) dollar each, so the total only came to about $250. But! I have a buyer and hopefully he’ll go through with the purchase and I’ll be $250 better off and have gotten rid of a huge pile of cheap cards.

Then I did the pricing process for another old set (Homelands), which I’d inventoried a week or two ago. The total price for another several hundred cards came out almost the same. Although these are old sets from the 1990s, they didn’t have any really strong/desirable cards in them, and they were printed in large quantities so they aren’t particularly hard to find, thus the low resale prices.

And today another auction ended, for a lot of 285 cards on eBay, which ended up selling for just $26. I’m kind of happy to get anything for some of these cards! None of these are the few rare/expensive cards that I have.

I also took Scully for a couple of walks, and made a quiche for dinner before my three online classes in a row tonight, so my wife could eat when she got home from work, while I was busy doing classes.

The weather today was pleasant, mildly warm, but there was a whiff of smoke in the air from controlled burning of bushland around the city, to reduce fuel load before the summer. It wasn’t so bad where I live, but I could see across the harbour to the centre of the city and the air looked very smoky there. Tomorrow we’re supposed to get a cool change and back to winter-like weather for a few days.

New content today:

Dealing with Hate

This morning I wrote up my lesson outline for the new week’s ethics topic, which is Hate. And this evening I had the first class on this topic. There was a new girl in the class, a younger sister of another girl who’s been doing my classes for a couple of years now. She was nine years old, a bit under the recommended age range of 10-12. And it turned out to be a rather intense introduction, with lots of questions about hating things and the consequences of hatred. Hopefully she didn’t find it too heavy going and will return next week!

This afternoon I did more comics stuff. But in between I took Scully on a long walk, around the Waverton loop past the harbour shore. She did some tennis ball chasing on the grass down there to get some exercise. And when my wife got home from work we did two more walks! A short one before my class, and then a longer one afterwards to go to the grocery store and get some sour cream and a zucchini for dinner. I made vegetable fajitas, with the zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, carrot, and mushrooms.

Tomorrow I should have a bit more time to do some other things. Hopefully!!

Oh, I see announcements have been made about the new Apple iPhone 16, to be released soon. It’s about time I upgraded my old phone, as the battery life is getting quite short. I wanted to do it before our trip to Tokyo in February, so hopefully there’ll be plenty of supply of the new model before then.

New content today: