dangermouse.net – Page 193 – David Morgan-Mar

School science visit

Today was my visit to the primary school where I talk to the kids about science stuff. I had three separate session with kindergarten, Year 1, and Year 2. As mentioned on Saturday, I presented a talk on dinosaurs for the K and 1 kids. I included a bunch of photos of fossils with feathers, and showed them what feathered dinosaurs look like. The conclusion was that only some of the dinosaurs died out a long time ago, but some of them – the birds – never died out at all, and are still around us today. They really enjoyed it, so that was good.

With the Year 2 class I did a general Q&A. Some of the questions they asked included:

Where did the Earth’s water come from?
Why did the dinosaurs die out?
Where did humans come from?
Why isn’t Pluto a planet any more?
How do you make a black hole?
Does the Earth run on coal? – I talked a bit about what coal is, and how it’s used to make electricity, and how it adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and how this is a bad thing because it’s causing climate change, but how hard it is to stop using it because people need the electricity.
How do potions work? – This was fun. I talked a little bit about how potions are fictional and don’t really work like in books and movies, and also a bit about alchemy and how alchemists used to believe they could make magical potions. By mixing things together and learning how they worked, they actually invented the science of chemistry instead.

Besides these three large groups, I also had Science Club with the group of 13 students I’ve been working with all year. It’s really quite a strange thing to be left in charge of 13 kids aged 7 to 10, with no other supervision, and be allowed to do science experiments with them (not on them!). Today I brewed up a pH indicator liquid by mixing hot water and shredded red cabbage. Within half an hour (during which I went over the results of our previous laser experiment), we had a rich purple liquid strained off. I gave each child a plastic cup and one of the chemicals I’d brought in. Then we added the cabbage liquid to each and watched them change colours:

From left to right around the table, the kids had: baking soda, soda water, white wine, bleach, apple juice, cream of tartar, lemonade (i.e. Sprite/7-Up for the Americans), vinegar, lemon juice, and ammonia solution. The bleach and ammonia I gave to the oldest kids, and made them wear rubber gloves for safety. And you can see the different colours they produced. Here’s a shot with them arranged in order of pH:

After establishing a sequence of colours for the chemicals, we tried mixing some of them. Adding baking soda to the vinegar made it (1) fizz up, (2) change colour, becoming a deep blue-purple. We mixed a few other things together, and the kids tried to predict the resulting colours (without much success). We established that mixing acids and bases tends to neutralise the result, making it closer to the original neutral purple colour. I made absolutely sure we didn’t mix the ammonia and bleach – I didn’t want to be generating chlorine gas!

This pretty much took up my whole day, as it took a while to drive home in the late afternoon traffic. And I was exhausted! I don’t know how school teachers do this every single day!

New content today:

Le Marché Français

Today was a family Sunday! My wife heard about a French market day being held at a school ground in a suburb not far from us, so we drove over with Scully to check it out. It was way busier than we’d expected!

We were lucky to get a parking spot within two blocks in the normally quiet back streets, which were absolutely chocka with cars. Fortuitously we spotted my wife’s sister and mother arriving as well – we’d planned to meet up here at the market, but it would have been tricky with the crowd, so it was fortunate that we happened to run into one another right after finding parking spots. There were dozens of stalls selling all manner of things with a French theme, and also dozens of food tents and trucks selling crepes, raclettes, pomme frites, gateaux, cheeses, baguettes, pastries, sausages, and all sorts of other French food. And there were also several portable amusement park rides for the kids, including slides, merry-go-rounds, and even a dodgem-car pavilion. All this was set up on the school’s playing fields.

Scully had a good time exploring and sniffing everything.

And I found these amazing eclairs (L-R: Salted caramel and peanut; mango, lemon, and raspberry; guava and banana custard; and pistachio and blueberry):

They were as delicious as they look!

After spending a good chunk of the day at the market, I spent some of the afternoon cleaning the bathroom again. Not a regular weekly clean, but I finally got around to scraping the excess plaster and paint off the wall tiles. It’s been there for decades, and slowly getting discoloured and more noticeable, so I took a knife to the walls and spent an hour or so scraping them clean. It looks so much better now.

And I went grocery shopping. Mostly for supplies for tomorrow’s Science Club experiment at the school. But I’ll describe that tomorrow after we’ve done it!

New content today:

Science Saturday

Besides the usual bathroom cleaning, I dedicated much of today to Science! I finished writing that 100 Proofs article I’ve been mentioning.

And I planned out what I’ll be doing with the school children on my next STEM Professionals in Schools visit on Monday. I wanted to do a Q&A session with all the classes, because it’s minimal preparation for me, but my contact said the kindergarten and Year 1 teachers requested me to do a presentation, because their kids are too young to be able to come up with sensible and meaningful questions. [It’s true – last time they got fixated on asking me “how many X are there?”, for X=(cats, animals, fish, bones, trees, etc).] SO I went through my old slides and found one I did on dinosaurs 5 years ago – so none of the younger kids will have seen that one. I refreshed myself on what was in the slides so I can talk about it on Monday.

And for Science Club I planned a new experiment. We’re going to make pH indicator using red cabbage, and then test various household chemicals. The usual suspects like lemon juice, vinegar, baking soda, etc. Which meant I had to draw up a shopping list. I’ll have to go shopping tomorrow for everything I need.

Oh, and I spent a bunch of time making tomorrow night’s Darths & Droids strip, following the writing session yesterday.

And now, it’s late… time for bed!

New content today:

Games night!

Late update, because last night was fortnightly games night with friends. I took my new games acquired at Spiel in Essen, and we played Walking in Burano:

And Deep Blue:

Burano was a hit. Deep Blue I think we need to play a few more games of, and with more players. We had four players for Burano, which was great, but two more people arrived after that, and Deep Blue only supports up to five, so we split into two groups of three. The box says Deep Blue plays in 45 minutes, but we took almost 2 hours to play the first game. It’ll speed up as we become more familiar with the rules and strategies, but my feeling is that more interaction with more players will be better as well.

We also played a new game that AS brought, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, a magic potion brewing game which was a lot of fun:

Earlier in the day I wrote a few scripts for Darths & Droids, hoping to be able to go through them with the guys before games started. But AS was hosting, and it’s difficult to do at his place since he doesn’t get home from work until later, and by then everyone just wants to get started on the games. So we’re going to review the strips over online chat this weekend – hopefully in time for Sunday’s new one to be published!

Doing that, and other stuff, meant i didn’t have time to complete that 100 Proofs entry I started on Thursday. Maybe today??

New content today:

Running and phoning

This morning I went for another 5k run. I skipped last week due to being overseas, and I’m still getting over a back strain I sustained during the trip. I’m setting this up as an excuse, because I didn’t manage to best my previous time. This time I averaged 6:13 per kilometre, which is my second fastest time. Hopefully next week I can improve again!

After getting back home and cooling off, I set out to a shopping centre a few stops away by train to pick up a new phone. It turns out the latest release of iOS is no longer supported by my old iPhone, with the result that when I upgraded my desktop machine some apps got broken and no longer synch between phone and desktop. This was kind of unsupportable as I use those apps frequently for things like shopping lists and keeping appointments. So I decided to bite the bullet and get a new phone.

One advantage is that the camera technology has improved a lot over my old phone. And for someone like me who takes a lot of photos, and enjoys the technical side of photography, that’s a substantial positive change. I experimented with it a lot this afternoon, and here’s one of the photos, taken while out walking Scully on the path we take by the harbour:

For lunch today I had leftover ratatouille that I cooked for dinner last night. There was some drama while cooking it, as I’d added all but one of the ingredients and the dish was basically 90% done, when I discovered we had no tomato paste in the pantry. I had to get my wife to watch the stove while I raced out to the grocery store to buy some. I tracked the walk on my phone, and it was almost 3 kilometres and took over 20 minutes. I wonder if other people do this sort of thing often.

I also started writing another of the 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe today. I’d hoped to finish and post it today, but there was so much other stuff going on that I’m barely half way through. Maybe tomorrow, although I have some other more urgent things I need to do then too.

New content today:

Back to Ethics

It’s Wednesday, which means Ethics teaching day. I walked to the school – which is a bit of a hike, and very hilly. The kids told me that last week they didn’t have a substitute Ethics teacher, so I did the final lesson of the Homelessness topic with them.

One of the scenarios today was about and 8-year-old girl named Jenny, whose mother and father lose their jobs, and can’t afford their rent any more, so they move to a caravan park, and then after a while the bills pile up and they can’t even afford that, so the family ends up sleeping in their car. The question: Did Jenny’s family choose to become homeless? Or did they have no choice in the matter?

The first kid to answer said it was the parents’ fault, because they must have done something wrong at work to get fired and lose their jobs. As someone who lost my job earlier this year, because the company was closed down, I had to bite my tongue. Fortunately some other kids mentioned that people can be made redundant and companies can shut down, so no, it probably wasn’t their fault. I think some of the kids have had their assumptions challenged during this topic!

I walked home via a longer route, passing by the post office depot where I had a package waiting to be picked up. It’s weird – when I have to pick up a package sometimes it’s an one of the nearby post offices, sometimes it’s at the other post office, and sometimes it’s at the further away postal depot. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to which place I have to pick it up from. Oh, the item was a Kickstarted roleplaying book that I backed almost a full year ago – so it was good to receive that! And my total walk was close to 9 kilometres.

I got home close to lunch time, and spent the afternoon mostly cleaning the house. Oh, and this evening I played the first game with my wife of Walking in Burano that I picked up at Spiel in Essen. It’s very strategic for a small game. My wife beat me 61 points to 53. But it was only a learning game, so the result doesn’t count! 😉

New content today:

Germany travel diary completed

I’ve completed work on my Germany travel diary from last week’s trip. I’ve revised the text a bit and added photos, after completing work on the photos I took over there.

And in some other good news: Remember how one of the hotels I booked through Amoma, and then Amoma went bankrupt, leaving my booking in limbo and me out of $500? I applied to Visa for a chargeback, and submitted evidence of Amoma’s bankruptcy and defaulting on my prepaid hotel bill. It took 7 weeks for Visa to process the claim, but today I got the money refunded! Woo!

Apart from that, I didn’t do much today. I strained my back yesterday while hauling those groceries home, and wanted to take it easy today, so I relaxed a bit.

New content today:

More Germany photos

This morning I went up the street to get some groceries, to restock things after being away for a week. I walked up the hill to the supermarket, and hauled three heavy bags of stuff home, including a cooler bag full of stuff to go in the fridge and freezer. I got home… and realised I hadn’t taken the key. Oops.

Fortunately, two circumstances made this not a disaster. Firstly, one of my neighbours was home, and let me put my cold groceries in his fridge, and leave the rest fo them in his kitchen. Secondly, my wife works only 20 minutes away. So I headed over to her work to pick up her keys, then came back home, picked up my groceries from the neighbour, and finally let myself in. So that was an interesting waste of an hour or so.

I spent much of the day sorting through Magic: the Gathering cards, trying to catalogue all the bulk commons in my collection. It’s time to clear them out and regain some (a) storage space and (b) cash, if I can. In between, I processed and uploaded a bunch more photos from last week in Cologne. Here’s my travelling companion Monkey at Cologne Cathedral:

On one afternoon after my meetings finished, my wife and I checked out the Wallraf-Richartz Museum of art. It has this painting, among others: Drawbridge at Arles, by Vincent van Gogh (my photo):

And then also the Museum für Angewandte Kunst Köln (MAKK), a museum of art and design. The historical permanent exhibit was closed for renovation, but the modern design exhibit was open, with lots of funky design stuff from around 1900-1950, like this Russian radio:

New content today:

Recovery Sunday

I slept soundly from 22:30 (after the Rugby World Cup Final) to 05:30, when Scully woke me up requesting to go downstairs to the grass for a toilet. I climbed back in bed about 6 and dozed for another 3 hours, while my wife got up and pottered around.

After a late breakfast, we took Scully for a walk. It was a hot day in Sydney – reaching over 30°C by 11:00. But it was cloudy and a cool wind picked up, reducing temperatures through the afternoon until we got a huge thunderstorm around 15:00. A bit after that we invited Luna (next door’s poodle) in for a puppy play-date for about an hour and a half. The dogs love each other and raced around the house playing and fighting over toys.

I didn’t do much else, taking it easy to get over the travel, except for uploading some more photos from Germany – including my day at the Spiel board games exhibition.

I also formatted my travel diary into HTML and uploaded that to my website. I’ll add photos to it a bit later, but you can read the text now.

New content today:

My trip to Essen

So, it’s Saturday evening and I’ve been home almost 12 hours now, after not sleeping since Thursday morning. I can never sleep on planes – just too uncomfortable. I am however surprisingly awake. I’m about to watch the Rugby World Cup final game between England and South Africa, before dropping into bed for hopefully about 10-12 hours, and waking up Sunday morning with no jetlag. We’ll see how that plan goes.

As mentioned in the previous short update, I couldn’t log into this blog from my iPad/phone, so I couldn’t update while travelling as I’d planned to do. Which means I have a full trip to report on. I kept a detailed travel diary as I usually do, and will be formatting that into web pages and posting it with photos over the next few days, so I’ll just mention some highlights here.

My wife and I flew out of Sydney on the afternoon of Friday 25 Oct, and landed in Frankfurt on Saturday morning 26 Oct. Which doesn’t sound so bad, until you realise Frankfurt is 9 time zones later than Sydney, which adds another 9 hours to the transit time. We got a train to Essen and spent the afternoon/evening exploring the centre of the city.

Essen Cathedral (it’s not very big):

A wurst hut:

On Sunday we went to Spiel, the huge board games exhibition. I have photos, but haven’t processed/uploaded any yet. But here’s a photo of the haul of games I bought/was given:

Top left: a pack of exclusive bonus cards for Race for the Galaxy. Below that two bonus tiles for Roll for the Galaxy, then bonus dishes for Sushi Go Party!, and a pack of bonus words for Codenames (in German). Next column is Cultistorm Face 2 face, a quick card game spinoff from the huge Cthulhu mythos board game Cultistorm. Below that Walking in Burano, a pattern construction game, with a pack of bonus cards exclusive to Spiel. Some Lego minifigures my wife and I made from the custom figure construction bins at the Lego store in Cologne (so not from Spiel). And finally Deep Blue.

On Monday-Wednesday I attended ISO Photography Standards meetings in Cologne, while my wife explored Cologne. Then Thursday we explored together before catching a train back to Frankfurt and flying home.

New content today: