David Morgan-Mar – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

Wenona School visit

Today I had two online classes in the morning, then I had to get ready for my visit to Wenona School, during the student lunch break when they had their Science Club meeting. I took a laptop loaded with the slide presentation I made yesterday.

After checking in at reception, I met the head of the science department, who escorted me into the science labs. These are in a very new building, and were super modern. We chatted a bit while waiting for the classes to end and lunch time to begin, then moved into one of the rooms where the girls in the Science Club would assemble. I set up my laptop to project on the screen.

The audience was about twenty girls from I think Years 8 through 11, plus several of their science teachers, and the lab assistant. I did my talk about human vision and cameras, showing the links between the biology and physics and going into details about colour vision and perception. I had to cut short the end to finish on time, since we started a few minutes late (the students were getting lunches and arrived in dribs and drabs).

Then we had question time. The first three questions from students were:

How does colour blindness work? I was happy to hear this, as one of the slides I’d stopped short of was specifically about this, showing how missing one type of cone cell in the eyes can make it impossible/difficult to distinguish red and green
Do we know if people are really seeing the same colours if they look at the same things? Oh my gosh… Believe it or not, this was exactly what another of the skipped slides was about! I moved ahead to that one and explained what we do and don’t know about this idea.
I heard this species of shrimp can see lots more colours than we can; how does that work? Okay, wow. I didn’t specifically have a slide on the mantis shrimp, but I did have one on tetrachromacy in birds, which is essentially the same thing, just not as extreme.

So that was amazing and really good. As the students left, some of them came up to me and said they really enjoyed the talk, and the teachers did too. So over all it was a great success.

The head of science then took me to a quiet room where we could talk about ongoing projects and how I could help. The Year 9 students are doing term projects on light, and could use some ideas and assistance with organising their projects. We ran through some of the fledgling ideas and I offered advice on what was doable and what might be tricky, and gave some suggestions for extending things in different ways. She seemed really happy with that, and our plans to work together this year.

One other thing: I found out their head of science studied physics at Sydney University, and was doing her undergraduate degree when I was doing my Ph.D. So there’s a chance that I actually taught her in the physics labs! Neither of us remembered each other, but it’s highly possible.

More teaching prep work

So I had a few things to do today. I’m visiting Wenona School tomorrow to give a talk to high school students in their lunch time science club. I told the teacher I’d do it on cameras and human vision, thinking I had a slide presentation ready to go. But when I checked, I’d sort of remembered two halves of different ones I’d done previously. So I had to spend some time deciding what content from each one to use, and then stitching them together into a single presentation. Which was complicated by the fact that one of them was very old and done in 4:3 aspect ratio at lower resolution, while the other was newer and in 16:9 at high resolution. I had to reconfigure and recrop a lot of the diagrams, so it took some time.

When I was done I uploaded a copy to Google drive and sent the teacher a link, suggesting she could download it to have a look, and maybe have a copy on a school machine just in case I have trouble connecting my laptop to their display.

Secondly, I’ve been trying to juggle a couple of requests from Outschool parents of two different kids who approached me about doing some additional classes for their kids. One wants a science class for a 10-year-old, and the other wants some one-on-one tutoring for a student starting Year 9 who needs help with formulating arguments in essays. I can do both these things, and would like to help them out – the main issue is finding time in my schedule. I suggested I could do them both on a Wednesday, during the day since they’re both in a good time zone for that (Japan and Australia). Now I have to make new class outlines and submit them to Outschool for approval.

In between all this I wrote a new Darths & Droids comic (which will have to wait until tomorrow to make), and picked up Scully from my wife’s work and took her for the long walk home. And then three classes on “Light and Darkness” this evening. Another full day!

Neighbourly coincidences

Today I wrote my new critical/ethical thinking class, this week on the topic of Light and Darkness. This is a sort of mish-mash of different concepts only linked by their relationship to light and darkness. I touch on fear of the dark, artificial lighting and the fact humans do stuff at all hours of the night, light pollution, creative uses of light and darkness, health and environmental effects, and some speculative what-if questions like, “What if the world had no night time?” and the opposite, “What if there was no daytime?” (assuming enough warmth that we wouldn’t just freeze).

I had the first class tonight and it went pretty well, despite having just one student this time. So at least I have enough questions!

I cooked pizza for diner, and used the warm oven to bake some chocolate chip cookies afterwards. I’ve made cookies many times, but they always spread out very flat and semi-merge into one another. I found recently that the secret to avoiding this is to chill the dough before baking, so it doesn’t have as much time to flow in between being put into the oven and setting firm. I’ve wanted to make cookies for a while to use up some carob powder and leftover choc chips, and had some time around lunch to make the dough and then set it in the fridge to chill for several hours before baking.

The cookies came out nicely! I decided to take a few on a paper plate over to our new neighbours as a mini housewarming gift, to welcome them to the building. While I was chatting with the woman at their threshold, I noticed that on the bookcase behind her were several board games: Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, and Azul among them. I mentioned my wife and I were into board games too, and said we’d have to invite them over for a games night some time. They both sounded keen.

I can ease them in with games like Kingdomino and Camel Up, before seeing how game they are for something complex like Root. And then of course I have to test the waters to see how they feel about roleplaying games… Maybe we’ve found a couple of new Dungeons & Dragons players!

Sketching at university

This morning I had the last of the ethics classes on the Sharing topic. After that I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off. Then I ran home on the 5k route. The weather was a little warmer and the rain has finally stopped, mostly.

I went into the city for tonight’s Image Processing lecture and I decided to take my sketchbook with me. I stopped in first at Roadhouse Burgers and Ribs for dinner. This place looked good when I walked past in the last couple of years, but it opened at 6pm, and the lectures I assist with start at 6, so I was never able to try it. But now they’re open at 5pm, so tonight I finally had the chance. I chose a basic cheeseburger and chips.

It was pretty good. This place is highly rated on Google reviews, so I figured it must be decent.

On the way from there to the university I snapped a couple of scenes and then sat and sketched them. This is the original tower building and the adjacent new Building 2:

And this is the old clock tower with the new building of UTS College behind it, and some surrounding buildings and streetscape.

The lecture went close to 9pm and then I came home. A busy day!

More rain, getting out in between

The rainy weather continued for the sixth straight day, with intermittent heavy showers. But today was a bit warmer than the past few days, so it didn’t feel nearly as bad. And the breaks between showers allowed some activity.

I went for a 5k run, leaving as a shower was tailing off. It picked up and rained heavily again for a couple of minutes as I was doing my warm-up walk to my starting spot. But by the time I began my run the rain had stopped, and it didn’t rain for the entire run, which was good. But when I was back close to home and doing my post-run stretches in the park the rain started up again, and was getting heavy by the time I dashed home a couple of minutes later. But it was good to get the exercise in.

I jumped straight in the shower, and also took the opportunity to clean the shower with disinfectant and scrub the surfaces clean of soap scum. A task which is okay in warmer weather but not fun in the cold.

At lunch time my wife and I took Scully for a walk and to get some lunch at a cafe. We left right after another rain shower and walked to the cafe without getting wet, except for a few drips falling from trees. I haven’t been to this cafe before, and I tried their hot roast chicken sandwich on Turkish bread, which was really good. While we were eating, the rain returned and was really heavy for a few minutes. But it stopped again before we left, and we managed to walk home again dry. Then within 10 minutes after we got home, it was pouring again.

This has been the pattern all day. It’s now late evening and we just had another heavy downpour, that lasted a few minutes. Thankfully the rain should ease up tomorrow and there may be only light falls the next few days.

In one of my critical thinking/ethics classes tonight I had a scenario on sharing:

A park has 3 picnic tables. A family arrives and spreads out across all 3, even though they could fit on 2. Later another family arrives and could fit one 1 table, so they ask the first family to move over onto 2 to free up the other one for them.
Should the first family move over, or do they have precedence on all 3 tables because they got there first?

One kid was sort of looking to one side of his video as I asked for his answer. He said, “My mother wants to know if the families know each other, because you shouldn’t talk to strangers.”

Catching up with old neighbours

Friday I did my usual routine: pick up groceries, teach a bunch of ethics classes, then in the evening it was board games night. This week was online, but only three of us could make it. We played a game of Parks, which is a longish game, so that took up some time. I came a close second, though I thought I was in with a good chance of winning before the bonus pints were calculated. We cut the night short after that as one player wanted an early night and the two of us who remained decided not to continue with just two people.

Both Friday and today were cold and rainy as we continue to be hit by this southerly weather. I was woken in the middle of the night by several long rolls of thunder, and there has been intermittent dry spells and thundery showers today.

Today I cleaned up the house and I also went to the liquor store to stock up on wines because tonight we had guests over. Our old neighbours who had to move out of the apartment next door when the owner sold it (they were renting). This is what’s resulted in us getting the new neighbours recently (the new owners). We were friendly with the old neighbours, and they’d minded Scully a few times for us. So we invited them over for some pre-dinner drinks and snacks to catch up. They were keen to hear about our trip to Europe and they had various news about their doings as well.

I didn’t go for a run, though I kind of wanted to. But the weather is so cold and miserable, I didn’t want to end up in a rain shower and freeze. I don’t mind running in the rain if it’s warmer, and I don’t mind going out in coldish weather if it’s dry, but the combination is nasty. And it’s been very cold. Thursday was the coldest July day recorded in Sydney for three years, and some suburbs recorded their coldest July day in 35 years. Around 12°C maximum, which really is about as cold as it ever gets here. (It may not sound so bad for people used to colder climates, but for subtropical people like me this is unbearable.)

Setting up for more teaching!

Well, I had the usual five online classes today, on the Sharing topic. For the older 13-15 age group I recast the topic as “Resource Distribution” and concentrated more on complex real world scenarios such as countries or communities sharing resources, rather than individuals sharing things. I wrote about 1.5 times the usual length of scenarios and questions, and am picking different subsets with some overlap between the age groups. So it’s kind of an efficient way to get two somewhat different topics.

Also I had a video meeting with a teacher at Wenona School, to kick off our new STEM Professionals in Schools partnership. She told me some of the science programmes and projects the kids are doing to give me an idea of where I might be able to help. I suggested a first step would be if I come into the school and do a short presentation for some of the students and the use the visit to meet some other science teachers and get further ideas on how we can work together. She said they have a science club every fortnight on Thursdays at lunch time, and I could come to do a talk next week. So I’ll be heading in then and doing a talk on cameras and human vision, to cross over between physics and biology and hopefully appeal to a wide range of the students.

For lunch today I got fish & chips from my regular shop in Greenwich for lunch. I was shocked to discover they’ve raised the price for a basic fish & chips to $18.40. 😲 The last price I recall was $14.90. Which I still hadn’t got over thinking of as a bit expensive after they raised it from $12.90. Wow.

Weather was miserable, as you’d expect from the forecast of a solid week of rain. It was very cold. The rain did stop occasionally, and I almost got home from buying lunch without getting wet, but it started raining again just as Scully and I approached home, and then she had to dawdle and sniff around the grass for a few minutes before going inside. 🙄

Start of a week of rain

Two natural events dominated today: the massive 8.8 earthquake off Kamchatka and the subsequent tsunamis events still rolling across the Pacific Ocean as I write this; and the local weather here in Sydney.

It’s raining here, and has been all day, and the forecast is that we’ll only see the sun again next Tuesday. It’s not especially heavy, but has been steady and the accumulated total over the next six days is forecast to potentially be well over 100 mm. And it’s very cold. We’d been enjoying some warmer temperatures, but now we’ve plunged back into cold about as harsh as Sydney ever gets.

I did brave the weather briefly at lunch time to go buy some bread. But other than that I’ve bee rugged up at home trying to stay warm. One of my classes tonight had a Japanese student, but she didn’t show up, so I guess her schedule might have been disrupted by tsunami evacuations.

In some good news, I received a response from the local council about my request to spray the nearby park for bindii weeds. The grassy areas where Scully likes to walk and sniff around are covered with this weed and in the spring make it almost impossible for her to walk there due to the thorns. The council sprays larger parks for bindii, but they’ve always neglected this one small one near my place. I’ve asked them in the past to spray it, but this year for the first time they’ve responded positively and said they will add it to the spraying roster this year and for the future. Yay!

Super busy Tuesday

Not much time to write a blog post. I spent all my time today completing my report on the Berlin standards meeting for Standards Australia, writing my new ethics topic for the week on the topic of “Sharing”, running a class with it, then writing and making a new Darths & Droids strip so I don’t get behind and miss an update.

And walking Scully. Here’s a photo.

The weather was nice, but it looks like it’ll be the last day for a while. The forecast is for a lot of rain over the next few days, and no more sunshine until Tuesday next week!

Image Processing restarts for another year

Today it was up early for an 8am start with critical thinking classes, up to 1pm. Then I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off there for the afternoon, so I could head home and get ready to go into the city for the first Image Processing lecture of the semester. I used the opportunity to run home via the 5k route I developed in the last couple of weeks. Today I managed to run below 27:30, which I consider a good time. And this is on a route that involves a road tunnel with about 30 steps down and the same number back up on the other side. I don’t run down steps as I’m too terrified of tripping, so this slows me down a fair bit.

I used to work with a guy who would leap down flights of stairs, taking 2 or 3 steps at a time. I tried it once and was so convinced I’d end up breaking a leg that I’ve never tried it again. I don’t know how anyone could do that.

One I was home and had a shower and changed, I had about an hour free before I had to go into the city. I worked on my Berlin meeting report for Standards Australia, getting another section completed. Only one part to go, which hopefully I can knock off tomorrow.

I got into the university about 5pm, giving me time to eat dinner before the lecture began at 6. But I was still full from the lunch I’d picked up on the way to dropping Scully off, after 1pm. The combination of a late lunch and a forced early dinner meant I didn’t want to eat much, so I just got a small box of sushi rather than sit in at a restaurant for a hot meal. Next week I’ll have to remember not to have such a big lunch, even if I’m hungry after the long morning of working.

The lecture went easily, as it was the introductory stuff about the overall subject and administrative details for the students. I didn’t have to do too much other than introduce myself to the students. We had a special observer today, a visiting lecturer from Ho Chi Minh University of Technology, who is here for collaborations and to observe our teaching methods. The lecture was very full; something like 350 students are enrolled in the subject!