April 2025 – dangermouse.net

Election countdown: 5 days

Five days until the Australian election. But also our friends in Canada vote today. It’s a similar story in both countries, with both incumbents being left-leaning and before Trump returned to power in the USA polling behind their respective right-leaning oppositions. But Trump has turned around the fortunes in both countries, with voters in Canada and Australia shifting away from right-wing favour, and polls in both now predicting incumbent victories. But we shall see.

Today was busy, with three online ethics classes in the morning, followed by having a quick lunch at home before racing to the train to head into the university for my teaching stint there for Data Engineering. The students are into their four weeks of working on their assessment projects (after having the last two weeks off). So I need to patrol the room seeing what students are working on, answering questions, giving advice, and so on. I was surprised that some of the student groups hadn’t yet decided on the topic of their investigation, whereas some had almost finished writing their first report!

The weather was very rainy, and I got wet walking to the station to catch the train, despite using an umbrella, because of how heavy the rain was. This rainy weather is set to continue for at least the next week as well! When I got home this afternoon we had four umbrellas drying in the bathroom – even though I live with just my wife.

I made pizza for dinner. And then had two more evening ethics classes, to round off a very busy day.

A baking accident

Last night I baked a rye sourdough loaf, but when I turned the oven temperature down and removed the bowl of hot water (to generate steam for the first part of baking), I forgot to reset the oven timer. I only noticed about 30-40 minutes later, and jumped up suddenly, thinking it would be a block of charcoal.

But it looked salvageable, and as it cooled I tried cutting a slice and had it with orange marmalade, and it was crunchy but fine. Today I used it for sandwiches at lunch.

And wow, it was good! The rye sourdough I’ve been making has been fine, but nothing like the German rye bread I remember from my childhood. But this was much more like it! The crust was thick and chewy and tasted great. So I think this is a happy accident, and in future I might just bake my bread longer.

In other photos, I took this one of a white-faced heron the other day:

And a mushroom, sprouting in the wet weather:

Today I did my 5k run and we dodged rain showers again when heading out after lunch with Scully. We dropped in at the library and borrowed some books for reading. I found a new Asterix title which I haven’t read before, so that should be fun!

Games night, games day

Friday I had my usual four ethics classes, continuing the Antarctica discussion. I found this topic a bit tricky to keep the kids engaged, so I rejigged some of the questions to prompt more detailed logical thinking and get their brains working more. Like thinking about what possibilities might happen when the Antarctic Treaty comes up for renegotiation in 2048, which I point out is within their lifetimes so they will get to see what actually happens in real life.

Friday was also Anzac Day, so my wife was home for the public holiday, and all the shops were closed. This pushed my usual Friday morning grocery pickup to today (Saturday). After doing that I did my 5k run.

Last night was online board games night, though a few people were away, so we only had four people. We played a new game, Easy Peasy, which is a fairly simple card game. After one game we characterised it as Uno with more complexity and more luck. It felt like a very random shoot-out. There was an extremely obvious strategy (get rid of your high cards as fast as possible), tempered by random chance deciding if you could manage to do that or not. Needless to say we didn’t bother playing it again. I can’t even recommend it for a kids’ game, as it’s significantly more difficult to learn and understand the scoring than Uno, for no more fun.

After this we played some of the usual suspects: A couple of games of Jump Drive, Just One, It’s a Wonderful World (which I won!).

Today I played a game of Root with my wife. She played the Marquise de Cat, I played the Eyrie, and we used a clockwork bot Alliance, with no Vagabond. We also tried the winter map for the first time ever. It was a super close game. I won, but my wife could have won on her turn before mine if she’d only had a bird card in and, and if I hadn’t won, the bot Alliance would have won next turn.

For dinner I made okonomiyaki, which we haven’t had for a while. Yum!

Ethics of automated AI summaries of ethics lessons

The weather here has been showery for the past several days. Intermittent sunshine, with occasional heavy showers passing across and vanishing within half an hour or so. But it looks like the showers will get more frequent and intense as we head into the weekend, with up to 100 mm of rain forecast. So that should be interesting.

It’s another long weekend, with tomorrow (Friday) being Anzac Day, another public holiday where the supermarkets are closed, so I can’t do my regular Friday morning weekly shopping for the second week in a row.

And in other news, I discovered today that Outschool is producing automated AI summaries of each of my lessons and sending them to enrolled parents after each class. I don’t recall being informed of this new feature (but it’s possible I missed it in one of the teacher newsletters that Outschool sends out periodically). Importantly, I can’t find any teacher settings to control this feature—there’s no way to disable it. I was a little puzzled as to how it was generating the summary, because when I clicked out of curiosity on the link that I’d never noticed before that said “View the AI class summary”, it showed me the following:

The teacher led a discussion about Antarctica, exploring reasons why people might want to visit or explore the continent, as well as potential challenges and risks they would face. The class considered the benefits and drawbacks of allowing countries to claim or mine parts of Antarctica, and whether it would be acceptable for people to live there in the future if global warming made the continent more habitable. The teacher provided context about Antarctica’s unique environment, the history of exploration, and the current Antarctic Treaty that regulates activities there. The class also discussed the role of science and research in Antarctica, and the potential impacts of tourism. Overall, the session focused on critical thinking about the complex issues surrounding the use and preservation of this remote and harsh continent.

This is more and more detailed information than I include in the class description text for this week’s topic. So I went back to the class that I taught an hour earlier, and it listed the following summary:

The teacher introduced the topic of Antarctica, discussing its geography, climate, and wildlife. The class explored why people might want to visit or explore Antarctica, considering both the benefits and risks, such as the extreme cold, lack of food and resources, and hazardous terrain. The teacher presented information about the history of Antarctic exploration and the current system of claims and treaties governing the continent. The class also considered the potential environmental impact of activities like mining and tourism in Antarctica. Throughout the discussion, the teacher facilitated dialogue with the students, asking questions to elicit their thoughts and perspectives on the various issues surrounding Antarctica.

Similar in content, but very different in wording. After discussing with some friends in our Discord chat, we’ve concluded it must be an automated transcript of the voice from the Zoom meeting, then fed through an AI summariser. I’m sceptical of the value of AI for many things, but in this specific application I think it’s done a reasonable job of accurately describing the class content. So I don’t actually mind it so much, as it does help to keep the parents informed of what their kids are learning. But I would like the opportunity to configure or disable it in settings if I wanted to.

On the bright side, I suppose if parents are getting these AI summaries for every single class their kids are enrolled in, hopefully they won’t be reading them all super carefully and critically.

I wonder how likely it is that one of these summaries might include some of the small-talk chat that I engage in with the kids while we wait for later arrivals to join the Zoom call. It’d be bad if the summary included something like: “The teacher asked about the pet puppy of one student and how its toilet training was going.” 🤭

Star Trek rewatch

Another thing I’m doing at the moment is rewatching all of the original Star Trek. And the Animated Series. I’m interspersing them because sometimes I have an hour in the evening to watch something, while sometimes I finish working late and only want to watch a 25-minute show before bed time, which suits the animated episodes.

Yesterday I watched “The Deadly Years“, which marks the halfway point of the original 79 episodes. Unfortunately most of the better episodes are in the first half of the run, and most of the bad ones are to come.

I’m also using this is an opportunity to reread through my own comic parody of the series: Planet of Hats. I drew these comics about ten years ago now, and haven’t looked at them much in the meantime, so I’m reading each episode after watching the TV episode, and pleasantly surprising myself with what I did for them.

Today I mostly worked on Darths & Droids comics, writing and producing two whole strips. I’m building up my buffer adequately to have enough completed before my June trip. In between I took Scully for a walk, managing to avoid the intermittent showers. These are forecast to last for the next week or so, and we might get some heavy rain on the weekend.

Tonight I made lentil dhal with potato and pumpkin for dinner – something I could keep warm on the stove for my wife to eat later after I began my three classes in a row from 5-8pm. On Wednesdays I’m eating half my dinner before 5, and half after 8pm. Which is not ideal, but it works.

Awful Australian politics

Maybe not what you’re thinking from the title. My wife has started watching the Netflix series The Residence. It’s set in the White House and there are various political characters, including one who is repeatedly referred to as the “First Lady of Australia”. It’s clear that the writers have no idea about how Australian politics works, because the spouse of the Prime Minister has no such title and no duties anything like the role of First Lady of the United States. Can’t they do even basic research to get these things right and not annoyingly wrong?

As an aside, our current Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, isn’t married, being divorced from his first wife before being elected. He has a partner, and proposed marriage last year (while Prime Minister). Their wedding is expected to follow the imminent election, now just 11 days away. If he’s returned as Prime Minister, it will be the first time an Australian Prime Minister gets married while in office.

I suppose I have another story about politics. With the election very soon, the political ads are ramping up in all media. As has become usual, many of them are scare tactic ads aimed at making voters afraid of the other major party. And one of them which I heard again today is making the point that our Opposition leader wants to make Australia “more like America”. This is enough to scare Australian voters. “That guy wants to make Australia more like America” is an effective scare message to get people not to vote for that guy. And it’s working, because the Opposition is falling behind in the polls. That tells you something about our collective opinions on the US right now.

This morning my wife took Scully to work, so I had a morning free to go for a run, and took the chance to do another 5k. The weather was chilly, with intermittent heavy showers all day, but I managed to avoid them while running.

This afternoon I wrote up my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic, which is Antarctica. There are plenty of questions about why people are interested in Antarctica, who (if anyone) should be allowed to go there, live there, own it, use mineral resources, etc, etc. I did the first class this evening and it went fairly well. It’s always tricky doing the first class of a new topic, and not knowing which questions the kids will find interesting or have strong opinions on.

Tonight we had one kid who was pretty gung-ho in favour of letting people mine Antarctica, and two who were more concerned with protecting its environment, so that was interesting!

The joy and despair of roast vegetables

I’ve realised that although I love roast vegetables, the reason we seldom have them is because I really hate cooking them. I find it unenjoyable to make roast vegetables, compared to cooking most other things.

My wife and I were talking today about what to make for dinner to go with the last slices of leftover lentil loaf from Easter lunch. She suggested roasted vegetables: potato, pumpkin, onions, the usual sort of thing. My heart sank.

I’m not even sure why I dislike making roast vegetables. It’s not like it’s difficult or time consuming, other than just waiting for the oven to cook them. There’s something about all the oil, and the mess in the roasting pan… I don’t know. I love eating roast vegetables, but I really really dislike making them.

Anyway, my wife decided to take the reins and do the cooking tonight. So I got to eat roast vegetables without having to prepare them! So that was pretty good. She was home today because of the Easter Monday public holiday, and in fact only has three days of work this week due to Anzac Day being on Friday.

This evening I completed the last two ethics classes on the “Memories” topic. I did the Deese–Roediger–McDermott paradigm experiment results with all my classes, and now that the topic is completed I can report the final result: 33/47 kids said they remembered seeing the word “sleep” on a slide that did not include that word. So that’s over 70% success rate in giving them a false memory, compared to a reported rate of about 44% for tests over many subjects. I saw that it’s more likely to work with adults and less likely to work with children, so my result is a little against the trend. But of course the numbers are not really high enough to make any significant conclusion, other than yes, it really is easy to induce false memories in people.

I claim this is ethical because I explain to the kids afterwards what happened, and how it works, and we discuss the consequences of the fact that our memories are unreliable, and how we should take this into account in our lives. It was a really good topic!

Easter lunch

You’ll be happy to know the antibiotics are working and my nose is not as swollen or sore as yesterday.

I got up this morning and had a quick breakfast before heading out for a 5k run. I took it easier today and also did the more scenic, but hillier route, so my time was slower. But I’ve been good this month and already run more than either February or March.

Then it was off to my mother-in-law’s place for Easter Sunday lunch with the family. She made roast lamb and vegetables, which was very nice. And then dessert: cheesecake and of course lots of chocolate. We had the fancy little Easter eggs and hot-cross-bun-flavoured chocolates that my brother-in-law gets from a local chocolate shop near his place. These are always really good.

We had to leave early, at 3pm, to get home in time for my first class of the evening, which began at 4:00. It’s a little tricky having them on a holiday where we normally do family stuff, but we managed okay. Fortunately the traffic coming home wasn’t bad.

And we just had some leftover lentil loaf (that I mentioned we were cooking yesterday) for dinner, since we came home with half of it from the lunch. I also have some lamb, which will be good on sandwiches for lunch tomorrow!

Easter weekend is no time to get sick

I’ve been monitoring a slightly sore nose for a few days and last night I decided it was sore enough that it’s probably infected. So I wanted to see a doctor and hopefully get some antibiotics – or reassurance that it’s not infected.

But it’s Easter weekend, and my GP isn’t open again until Tuesday. There’s a walk-in medical centre up the road, and when I checked during a wakeful period during the night I saw they opened at 8:00. They don’t take appointments, you just show up and wait for the next doctor to be available. So I decided to get up at 7:00, have a quick breakfast, and walk up to wait at the door before they opened, to ensure I wouldn’t have to wait long to see a doctor.

I got there about 7:30 and was the only one waiting until about ten minutes to go, when a queue began forming behind me. The woman behind me was fiddling with her phone, and expressing some frustration, muttering something like, “They must only activate the app when it opens.” I asked her, “Do you need an app to get an appointment?” She answered no, you can go to the receptionist, but they try to direct you to download the app.

I really hate this sort of thing. No way I want to download and install an app on my phone just to access a service like this, and doubly so for a place that I’m not a regular customer. I figured if the receptionist tells me to install an app just to get an appointment, I’ll just refuse and ask to have one without it.

Eventually the door opened and we went in. I saw next to the reception desk were huge billboards on either side, with a QR code to download the booking app, but I ignored these. I was first in the queue, so approached the receptionist first, and asked to see a doctor. She didn’t mention the app, but simply asked my date of birth and name and found my record very quickly (I’d been here once before for a vaccination), and booked me in. It only took 30 seconds at most. But by the time she’d done this, she said that I was seventh in the queue, and that being Easter Saturday there was only one doctor on duty! So… in the time it took me to walk from the door to the reception desk and get the receptionist to enter me into the waiting list, six other patients behind me had used the app to claim places in the queue ahead of me! 😡

Fortunately, a couple of other doctors apparently arrived, and they churned through the patients very quickly, so I was seeing one just before 8:30. He confirmed my nose was infected and prescribed some oral antibiotics and a topical ointment. I left with the prescription (at zero cost, thanks to Australia’s Medicare system). Next step was to find a pharmacy where I could buy the medicines. I searched online and found on down the street that said it opened at 8:30, so I walked down there, only to find a sign stuck to the window saying that it opened at 9:30 on Easter Saturday!

I walked back up the street, checking the windows of all the pharmacies—there are four of them within a few blocks. They all had later opening hours for the holiday, but I found one that opened at 9:00. By now my wife had appeared with Scully, having walked up to get some coffee. So we sat together at a cafe for half an hour until the pharmacy opened.

Unfortunately everyone else had the same idea and when I arrived at about 5 minutes past 9, there was a queue of about 8 people ahead of me with prescriptions to be filled. So that took some time, and I didn’t get home until almost 10:00. I had some antibiotic tablets and applied the ointment, and then changed to go for a 5k run.

After that and post-run stretching exercises I had a shower and it was almost time to go to the supermarket to pick up my online pick-up order. I couldn’t do this on Friday as usual because it was Good Friday and the supermarkets were all closed. And the supermarket was very busy, because tomorrow it’s closed as well for Easter Sunday and so a lot of people need to cram their shopping into Saturday on this weekend.

After all that I finally did some comics stuff in the afternoon. I helped my wife cook a lentil mushroom loaf which we’ll be taking to lunch at her mother’s place tomorrow, as a vegetarian alternative to the roast lamb. And for dinner I made enchiladas, with spinach as we had some leftover fresh spinach that needed to be used up.

Board game learning night

Today was Good Friday, but unlike most people I didn’t have a day off work. I had two ethics classes in the morning, and two in the afternoon. But in between I got to do a long walk with my wife (who had the day off work) and Scully.

After the last class I went over to a friend’s place for our fortnightly board games night. But since most of our friends were off enjoying the long weekend with their families, there were only two of us present. We used the opportunity to teach each other some complex games that we’d been stalled on learning. I taught him Root, and he taught me Spirit Island.

I also spent some in between time writing up the log of our last Dungeons & Dragons session, in preparation for the next one, scheduled in two weeks time. I divvied up the treasure and awarded experience, and most of the characters will be going up levels… or at least they will be when they get time train! At the moment they’re too busy dealing with a death curse placed on them by the God of Swords to take time out to train, so they’re going to have to defer levelling up until they (or if they) manage to avoid dying from the curse.