A drenching

One more online class on Monsters this morning.

The morning was warm and sunny. I had some lunch and then went to take Scully out for a walk. I looked outside… yep, very sunny. I smothered myself in sunscreen to ward off the ultraviolet rays. Took Scully and we set off on one of our loop walks that takes about an hour, with time for some ball chasing at the park down by the water.

We got about a quarter of the way and the clouds closed in thick and very very fast. It started raining. It looked like it could be a serious storm. And I’d left most of the windows at home wide open. If the wind blew from the wrong direction, we could have arrived home to a sodden bedroom or living room. The rain got heavier and the wind picked up.

I aborted the walk and we took a shortcut home as fast as practicable. Which wasn’t all that fast, as part of it was up a steep slope. Scully got soaked. I got soaked. I dreaded getting home and finding the bed and the carpet soaking wet.

By the time we made it home… the sun was out again! We got in and I rushed to check the windows. We were very lucky. Open windows facing two different directions had not a drop on them. I’d left a window facing a third direction closed, and that window was soaked on the outside. I dried Scully off with a towel. I did a complete change of clothes, drying myself with a towel as well, and hanging up the wet clothes to dry.

And then the entire afternoon was hot and sunny again. We’d somehow chosen the exact 10 minutes that the weather turned into a stormy downpour to be out walking around, not expecting it.

Speaking of weather, our Bureau of Meteorology a short time back changed the way they format rain forecasts, to make them “simpler and easier to understand”. We used to get rain forecasts that looked like “1 to 3 mm of rain”. They thought this was “confusing” because it was a probability band corresponding to 1st and 9th deciles or something, so you could in fact possibly get more than 3 mm of rain. To avoid this “misleading” information, now we get a set of explicit probabilities, and today’s included this:

50% chance of at least 0 mm of rain.

Seriously. Much more useful. 🙄

Tonight for dinner I wanted to use up some mushrooms that I’d bought, but wasn’t feeling inspired. I didn’t want to make risotto, which would be the usual thing to make to use up mushrooms. So I searched for mushroom recipes, and I found this one for mushroom and caramelised onion quesadillas. I had everything except the rocket leaves, so I took Scully out for her evening walk past the nearest supermarket and grabbed some, and then cooked it up when I got home. Turned out good!

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New Thai food

This morning I had my face-to-face ethics class at the school. We moved on from the last topic about Fatalism, and now we’re discussing Determinism – the idea that everything is cause and effect, and that our decisions are caused by events including our upbringing, our emotional state, and other circumstances, such that we don’t really have a choice. It’s a tricky topic to discuss, particularly with kids. But they were engrossed in it! For the first half of the lesson they were all listening rapt to the dialogue and discussion, and I could see they were thinking about the issues in ways they’d never considered before. It devolved a little when we got to the point of demonstrating reflex actions (that we have no control over), by tapping under our kneecaps, when of course all the kids tried to do it and chaos ensued. They didn’t fully calm back down after that, but it was still a really good lesson.

For lunch today I went on a walk with my wife (her day off) and Scully to our favourite bakery. Except I decided to try a new place – there’s a Thai restaurant there that I’ve never tried before. I got a green curry chicken, and it was pretty good, but very filling as they didn’t offer any sort of lunch special, so I got a big serve of curry, and rice in a separate container, rather than what was designed as a single meal of curry and rice together in one container. So while good, I don’t know if I’ll get lunch there again.

Tonight it was three more Monster classes. One kid arrived on Zoom while I was wearing my skull mask, and he looked at me and immediately disconnected! It turned out he was having Internet issues, as he later sent me a message saying so, but for a few minutes I thought I’d scared him off.

The other news is that the weather has turned hot. Monday felt like winter still, but today it got up to 28.3°C, and I heard cicadas singing in the trees. Full on summer. I don’t think we had a proper spring at all.

New content today:

Critical thinking about monsters

This morning I wrote my lesson for the ethics and critical thinking class on Monsters. It’s much more of a critical thinking class than ethics, this one. We discuss why people make monster stories and the inspirations for various types of monsters.

One thing I’m also doing is a survey of all the kids. I’ve been having an ongoing argument with friends about whether a mummy is a type of zombie, or a different type of monster. I thought this would be a good opportunity to survey a bunch of diverse people. So far, after the first three lessons this evening, the score stands at:

Mummies are a type of zombie: 4
Mummies are a different type of monster: 5

I’ll keep you updated on the end result after a week of classes. The other thing I did for this class was to go to a shop today to purchase a cheap Halloween mask, which I’ve been wearing while doing these classes. It’s kind of a skull thing with a black hood. Fortunately it doesn’t interfere with my Zoom headset, but it is very hot wearing the mask.

It’s hot because today was warm – the warmest day since the 4th of May. Sydney reached 26.6°C. And it was rainy, with heavy rain in the morning and a thunderstorm this afternoon, so it was again ridiculously humid. Within the next week we should break 30°C. The warm, wet, and very humid third La Niña summer has kicked off.

Storm passing

I took this photo after the storm, while taking Scully for a walk.

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It’s not the rain, it’s the humidity

We had another 25 mm of rain today. But the worst thing is that the humidity hasn’t dropped below 90% all day (since 7pm last night), and was hovering around 99-100% for much of it. It’s not particularly warm (only 20°C maximum), but it feels stifling.

Before heading into the university for tonight’s tutorial session, I walked with Scully up to my wife’s work to drop Scully there, and by the time I arrived I was dripping with sweat, all my clothes clinging to my skin.

The tutorial session was a little short, as not many students showed up, and after answering a few questions from some of them, they drifted off early. So I could head home before it was too late. Earlier in the day I was mostly handling the morning ethics classes, the final ones on the Greed topic. Tomorrow I need to write the new lesson plan for Monsters!

In entertainment news, I’ve been watching the Fear Street trilogy on Netflix. It’s been in my “to watch” list for ages, and I finally decided I was in the mood for a slasher flick, so I watched the first one last week. There are a few slightly corny things (to be expected from a slasher film), but mostly I’m finding it to be fairly smart and well made. I’ve finished the second film in the trilogy and plan to start the final one tonight.

And I recently spoiled myself by getting the special 40th anniversary Call of Cthulhu Classic 2″ Deluxe Boxed Set (available here, scroll down). This is a reprint of the original boxed set rules from 1981, with five of the original adventures. A classic piece of roleplaying history – I couldn’t go past it. I’m looking forward to reading through all of this!

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7 Bridges and an excuse not to run

Today the 7 Bridges Walk was on. This is a charity fundraising walk for the Cancer Council, where participants walk a circuit around Sydney harbour, crossing seven bridges along the way, The circuit is 28 km long, and takes most of the day to complete. It’s a very popular event, but has been cancelled the past two years because of COVID, so today’s was the first one in three years. Despite the showery weather, there was a big turnout.

I know because the route passes very close to my home, and I saw many people walking. The route actually coincides with my normal running route for part of the way… so I took this as a good excuse to be lazy today and not do my run, as I didn’t want to be competing with hundreds of walkers.

I worked on comics, getting a good lead on Darths & Droids, and completing a batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips for the upcoming week.

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Games night Friday, and humid Saturday

Last night was board games night with friends, so I didn’t have time to write a blog entry. Most of the guys happened to have other things on, so only three of us attended. But this gave us a chance to play a long game, without worrying about people showing up late or leaving early.

We played Arkham Horror. Three turned out to be a good number for this cooperative game, where we’re pitted together against the Cthulhoid forces of darkness.

I took an investigator role, while the others played the muscle, and the mystical. My main task was moving around the map board and working to ward off Doom as it slowly accumulated in various places, while the muscle guy intercepted the various Cthulhu mythos monsters that kept spawning and trying to hunt us down. The mystic was searching for clues and artefacts to help us. The scenario we played was protecting Innsmouth from an incursion of Deep Ones, manipulated by Dagon and Hydra behind the scenes. We had to uncover enough clues to work out how to summon the malign entities and then trust that we could defeat them with a combination of muscle and occult knowledge.

After 3.5 hours of play which became increasingly tense, we confronted the main horrors and beat them, only to discover that we couldn’t figure out what the winning condition of the game was. The owner of the game later told us that he’d missed a single card in the setup stages of the scenario – and that card happened to be the one informing us of the winning condition! But we’d satisfied its requirements and won the game, even if we were confused about it at the time. It was a tight-run thing – there were several decisions that could have led us to disaster along the way, so it felt like a sweet, hard-earned victory.

Besides the usual online classes, I spent time yesterday and today doing Darths & Droids writing and comic making. Oh, and I did some major housecleaning today, doing a long overdue thorough dusting of everything in the living room, polishing up the wooden furniture, and vacuuming floors.

The other main thing to talk about is, of course, the weather. We’ve had more intermittent rain, and the humidity this week has shot through the roof, hovering around 80-100% at different times of the day. Sydney has had 170 rainy days so far this year, today being the 295th day of the year. The annual mean is 99 rainy days. Since we broke the annual rainfall record back on 6 October, we’ve had more than 200 mm more rain. The forecast is for rain every day for at least the next week, with some really heavy rain tomorrow. There continue to be severe floods in rural areas.

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New content today:

More marking…

Most of today I spent hunkered down, reading through student assignments and assigning marks for them. I had seven teams’ reports to read, on various image processing project proposals. They have to describe the problem area they’ve chosen to look at, describe suitable datasets they’ve found or collected, describe suitable image processing methods and techniques that they plan to implement, and describe what performance evaluation metrics they will use and why they are appropriate.

There was an interesting range of proposed projects, but I won’t mention them here (as it’s possible some students may find this blog). I completed the marking after a full day of work, just before dinner. Phew! It’s good to have that job completed.

That didn’t leave much time for anything else, other than my one ethics class this morning, and taking Scully out for a couple of walks.

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Marking, running, teaching

I had a few things on today. In the morning I went to the school for my volunteer face-to-face ethics class. We were finishing off a short two-week topic on Fatalism. Last week the kids were a bit rowdy, talking over each other a lot and requiring me to intervene to get them to speak one at a time. This week was better. But an amusing thing happened.

In my class there is a group of four girls who always sit together. Let’s call them April, May, June, and Julie (not their real names). April is the joker of the group, and tends to butt in and talk over other people a bit. She gives good answers, but is prone to just blurting out her thoughts rather than raising a hand to speak. May and June are more serious, but also get involved when April starts talking uncontrollably, and the three of them often devolve into discussing the topic amongst themselves, resulting in me having to quiet them down so that one student can speak at a time. Julie is super quiet. She never answers questions. I don’t think I’ve ever heard her speak at all. (This is perfectly fine, by the way. In our training we’re told that there are often students who never volunteer to speak during class, and we are not to call on them unless they express a want to speak. They can listen to the others and absorb the content and still get a lot out of the class.)

So anyway, today I asked a question and there were some answers by kids raising their hands and speaking in turn, and then April called out and started saying something, and May and June joined in, and soon the three of them were talking about the question among themselves. I had to get them to stop chatting so we could get on with the class. I called out their names individually: “April! May! June!” and while I was doing this I saw that Julie was saying something quietly to June, though I couldn’t hear it. So I also said, “Julie!”

The reaction was immediate. April said, accusingly, “What did Julie do?!?!” She clearly knows that Julie is quiet and inoffensive.

I said, “Well, she’s hanging out with you three.”

And April answered, “Oh, guilt by association. Fair enough.”

She genuinely got me laughing. These are actually pretty good kids – none of them are actively mischievous. They just get a bit carried away with the topic and discussion sometimes. Since the start of the year we’ve developed a bit of a rapport, and I think they enjoy the classes I teach, so this exchange was all done in a bit of a joking way. I suppose if I was their regular class teacher, I’d need to keep things a bit more formal, but I feel like since I’m only with them for 40 minutes every week, I’m allowed to be a bit more casual and friendly with them. Especially since the class is always done with us sitting in a small circle, on their classroom chairs, so I’m sitting at their level on the low children’s chairs, so it feels more intimate than a typical classroom setting.

So yeah, it was a fun class this morning.

Back at home I started work on marking the first assignment of the university image processing course. I have reports from 7 groups of students to read and mark. I read through and marked two of them, and will do more tomorrow.

I took a break to go for a run. Today I decided was the day for a longer one, so I ran 5k instead of 2.5. The weather was warmer, and humid, so it was a bit enervating. I took it a bit easier and ran slower than last month’s 5k, so my time was about 30 seconds slower. I’ve decided that I only really start to feel good about running after having a shower afterwards.

New content today:

Ethics of Greed

Tuesday is the start of the next ethics topic for my online classes, and for the first time I’m recycling a class I taught before – the very first one from when I began these classes early in 2021 – Greed. So I had a lesson pan already written, but I updated it and rearranged it a bit, with the experience I’ve gathered from teaching this class for over a year now. I streamlined the material and added some more in-depth questions to get the kids thinking. For instance, in the original lesson I never asked the kids “What is greed? How would you define it?” So I added that in.

The first three classes tonight went pretty well, but I do notice that the sort of questions I wrote back when I began were fairly simple and didn’t lead quite so much into extended answers from the kids. So I’m glad I did that restructuring.

Having a bit more time that I didn’t have to spend writing an entirely new lesson, I assembled some Irregular Webcomic! strips and a new Darths & Droids strip today as well. I took Scully for a long walk at lunch and had a seafood pie before getting her some running around exercise, doing sit and wait, followed by calling her to run to me. And for dinner I made pizza: pumpkin, asparagus, and walnut.

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Science and Engineering of Photography

This evening I gave my lecture on the Science and Engineering of Photography to the students in the image processing course at the University of Technology Sydney. As I think I mentioned before, this is a special bonus lecture for the students, not part of their coursework, to give them something interesting in their project period during the last 4 weeks of the semester. So I used up most of the first hour of tonight’s three hour time slot with that. There weren’t a lot of students present, but some were listening in on Zoom as well, and several came up to me afterwards to say they liked it.

Earlier today I finished off the last three Outschool classes of the week’s topic on Risk. I assembled a couple of new Irregular Webcomic! strips for this week. And with other random daily stuff like eating lunch and taking Scully for a walk, that ate up the day before I headed into town, where I had some satay chicken and rice for dinner at Spice Alley before the lecture.

The other notable thing about today is that we had over 50 mm of rain, with almost all of it between 6:30 and 9:30 in the morning, so it was really pouring down then. The forecast was 1 to 5 mm! In the next week we’re looking at another 50 mm or so, with thunderstorms indicated almost every day. Yep… after setting a record for wettest year ever, we’re now heading into spring thunderstorm season.

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