dangermouse.net – Page 34 – David Morgan-Mar

A nice lunch in a new place

Today I worked on my class plan for the older students, who are discussing Fashion this week. I know this is a topic which some kids might think will be uninteresting at first, but I think there’s some though-provoking questions for them to ponder. The most basic ones at the beginning ask the kids to think about what fashion really is, and how important it is. I get them to imagine a world without fashion… there are no choices you can make in clothing, or hairstyle, or shoes, or accessories. Everyone wears the same thing all the time, like a uniform. And then ask if the self-expression that we all exercise whenever we choose to wear this shirt rather than that shirt is an important part of human existence and culture.

Anyway, it should be interesting!

Scully had her regular groom today, clipping her hair down from unruly to neat. My wife dropped her off and then we went out for lunch to a nice restaurant that I’d found yesterday by searching for a good lunch spot. We could sit inside, without Scully! It was a delicious meal. I had Murray River cod with dashi broth, spinach, and pickled mushrooms. I saw it on the menu, but was still surprised when I tried the mushrooms and found them vinegary – it’s not a flavour you expect from mushrooms! It was good though, balancing the savoury aspect of the broth.

I also had a dessert, which was a crema catalana with burnt fig. Again I was surprised by the flavour. I expected the sauce to be sweet caramel, but it was a complex fruity flavour of the fig, with some citrusy sourness. It was surprising, but contrasted nicely with the sweetness of the cream, balancing it out.

Overall the meal was really good!

Back home I made a leek and potato soup for dinner – just something light as we were both so full from the lunch. Then three classes in the evening on the animal communication topic.

New content today:

If I could talk with the animals…

I spent most of today thinking about talking with animals. This is this week’s topic for my ethics/critical thinking class with the younger students. I spent time this morning writing the lesson plan and questions, and then had the first three classes tonight.

I introduce the topic by talking about Doctor Dolittle, and the fanciful way in which he learns to speak with animals. Then I go into discussing the experiments we have done with chimps like Washoe and subsequent research that has cast doubt on the initial optimistic early findings about ape intelligence and communication skills. I ask questions about the importance, relevance, and humaneness of such experiments.

And then I go into speculative mode and ask the kids questions about how our attitude to animals might change if we could communicate with them, and what we should do in various hypothetical scenarios in which we talk with animals. Should we continue eating cows and pigs and chickens if they could talk to us? If pet dogs and cats tell us they want their freedom, should we let them run free, or treat them more like children and confine them to keep them safe? If cockroaches could talk to us, should we still treat them as vermin to be exterminated? What would the world actually be like if suddenly we could communicate with animals?

In other items, I did a 2.5k run this morning. And baked the sourdough loaf I made last night and let rise overnight. It’s a special loaf with dried apricots, dates, and walnuts in it, by special request of my wife who likes a fruit and nut loaf now and then.

The weather has been glorious the past few days. Beautiful autumn weather, with cool mornings and evenings, and a pleasantly warm day in the middle – great weather to be out in, without being too hot. The deciduous trees are turning colours. We don’t have a lot – 99% of the trees around here are evergreen eucalyptus, ficus, bottlebrushes, wattles, banksias, and other native species. But there are dots of imported deciduous trees in places, and some are going lovely shades of red or yellow. I like the liquidambars the most, because of the vivid red leaves. The ginkgos are starting to go their beautiful butter yellow. Unfortunately there are also a lot of plane trees, which just go a dull brown colour and drop tons of leaves.

Oh, today is ANZAC Day too, so a public holiday here in Australia. It ends what I think of as the “public holiday season” – the four months from 25 December to 25 April contain 8 public holidays: Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, and ANZAC Day. The remaining 8 months of the year only have two holidays: The Queen’s Birthday (I guess the King’s Birthday this year for the first time in over 70 years) in June and Labour Day in October.

New content today:

A survey of data engineering projects

Monday morning, 8am ethics class is the new schedule for winter. So I need to get up a little early and grab breakfast and get ready. We finished off the cloning topic, ready for Tuesday to start a new topic for the next week. Tomorrow morning I’ll need to write that lesson.

After lunch I walked Scully over to my wife’s work where she could mind her while I went in to the university for the first week of project work for the Data Engineering students. They have two weeks to write a project planning report, outlining what they intend to study and how, and then two further weeks to do the project and write a final report on the outcomes, as well as recording presentation videos. (All of which I have to mark…)

Today I walked around all the tables and asked each group what they planned to work on. It was a diverse range of project ideas. Some samples:

Looking at food prices in developing countries to see if they are affected/correlated with climate, economy, and other factors.
Examining agricultural output versus weather.
Checking for any effects on the consumer price index and other economic indicators of the COVID pandemic.
Collecting data on person and car movements at various times of the day and week in the vicinity of the university to determine any patterns.
Examining and comparing the image quality of difference phone cameras.
Studying the extent of glaciers over many years compared to weather records.
Determining if electricity consumption is affected by factors such as wind speed, temperatures, and building parameters such as height of building.
Characterising the popularity of video games on Steam versus time, looking at factors such as genre.
Modelling diabetes risk factor as a function of various demographic and health measurements.
Determining if the investment returns of US members of Congress outperforms stock market indices.
And the moon phase correlations one I mentioned last week.

So a really interesting range of projects!

For dinner tonight I made pizza. We got a new bag of bread flour in the groceries on Friday. Normally I get one brand, but it was out, so the supermarket replaced it in the online order with a different brand. It feels really different – finer and denser. And I think the pizza dough turned out a bit different, maybe a touch lighter, chewier, and crustier. I’m also making a new sourdough loaf tonight, so tomorrow morning when I bake it we’ll see if that is any different too.

New content today:

Brew 2

This morning I had lesson 2 of my current iteration of Creative Thinking/Board Game Design, with the two kids from last week, and the third enrolled student also showed up. So it got very interactive and was a lot of fun. We came up with a big list of ideas for possible game themes, and the kids have homework to rate them and also write down any new ideas, so next week we can pick a theme to work on.

My wife and I played another game of Brew, and it went faster and we had a better idea of what we were doing than yesterday. It was extremely close, and she ended up beating me 79 points to 78. After this we took Scully for a walk. We thought it would be cold and cloudy, possibly rainy, so we rugged up and took umbrellas. By the time we got home, it was bright and sunny and we were peeling off jackets to avoid overheating.

Three more classes tonight, and in a one hour gap between them I made fried rice for dinner. I think my wok is finally getting a decent non-stick seasoning layer on it. I’ve been too lazy to take the time to season it specifically. I heated it up clean with some oil a few times, but not enough to season it effectively. But using it for cooking is slowly building up a layer and tonight the fried rice was sticking noticeably less than last time I made it, so I guess that’s a good thing.

New content today:

D&D night, Brew day

Friday night was Dungeons & Dragons at my place. I ran the final session of the adventure Tomb of the Serpent Kings. We had a new player, one of my neighbours, who has been a long-time D&D player and I invited to join us. One of our regulars had to miss out, so we had 6 players again, the same as last time.

It was another good night, with plenty of amusing incidents and action and treasure. They defeated a basilisk by successfully reflecting its petrifying gaze back onto itself. They negotiated their way out of a dangerous encounter with an undead serpent-man wizard, through the fact that he was a bit absent-minded and didn’t realise that the serpent kingdom had collapsed on top of him hundreds of years ago.

Prior to that, Friday was grocery shopping, cleaning the house ready for guests, and teaching 4 ethics classes online.

Today, Saturday, was mostly spent making comics, and then writing up the adventure notes from last night. This evening my wife and I went out for dinner, getting French galettes and crepes. The weather has turned cold and drizzly and we needed real winter gear* for the first time this year.

* In Sydney terms: long pants and a light jumper/sweater.

Back home after dinner we played a two-player game of Brew, one of the board games I bought last week. The rules are not too long and the game play was fairly quick. It was of course just a learning game. (So the fact my wife beat me 67 points to 62 is irrelevant…)

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Solar eclipse day

Today there was a total solar eclipse visible from Australia. Totality was seen at the remote Western Australian town of Exmouth (pop. 2800), and virtually nowhere else on land. But the rest of Australia got various amounts of partial eclipse. Here in Sydney we got 19% totality. I was planning to go out with a pinhole and project the image of the sun with the moon partially obscuring it and take some photos.

But…

I basically couldn’t see the sky all day. It was heavily overcast, and raining for much of the day. It reminded me of another partial eclipse, back in 2012, when we had 70% totality here in Sydney:

At least it’s consistent.

There was a break in the rain at lunch time and I took Scully for a walk. For dinner tonight I wanted to use some sweet potatoes and an eggplant, and I searched for some recipes for inspiration. I ended up making vege burger patties, which we ate on burger buns with tomato and salad greens (and chilli sauce on mine).

They turned out pretty good!

Another thing I did today was work some more on porting my notes into Obsidian from OneNote. I’m getting close to having all my gaming stuff transferred. I’m really liking Obsidian and its superior organisational features. The fact that I can hyperlink documents is great, and it makes notes naturally form clusters of related concepts. And it has a graph feature where you can see your notes as nodes, with the links:

Graph showing document nodes and hyperlinks

Neat! This is mostly the gaming part of the graph. You can see some of the other topics I keep notes on on the right hand side.

New content today:

Finally a run again

This morning I did a 2.5k run – the first one in a week. I had no chance on the weekend with all of the other activities happening. I did a better time than last week, as I was still having a few lingering issues with COVID last week and this week I feel 100% again.

I had to work today on my lesson plan for the older ethics students, whose topic this week is Virtual Reality. The first class is first thing tomorrow morning, so I had to get it done today. I think I have plenty of material, and it should be interesting.

At lunch my wife and I took Scully for a walk to the Cornucopia Bakery at Naremburn. I had a Mexican pie, and they had little pecan pie tarts which I haven’t seen there before. They’re always changing their cake/pastry offerings and coming out with new things. Being a fan of pecan pie, I had to try it. It was a little different to what I consider a usual pecan pie, with the filling cooked a bit more, with a more toasty and slightly bitter charred flavour, which was actually nice to cut through the sweetness a bit.

The day was lovely, warm and sunny without being too hot. A perfect autumn day, in between the heat of summer and cold of winter. Leaves are starting to turn on the deciduous trees. It’s a very nice time of the year.

New content today:

Science fiction cloning

This morning I wrote my lesson plan for this weeks new topic of “Science fiction cloning”. And tonight I’ve run the first three lesson, which were a lot of fun. It’s a good topic for getting the kids engaged and interested, and there were some very interesting and diverse opinions on some of the questions. Some of the questions include:

Would you like it if there was another copy of you, who looked the same and had the same personality and memories?
If it were possible to create a copy of someone like this, would that be okay? Under what circumstances?
Should we clone people as backups (“extra lives”) before sending them into dangerous situations?
Would you feel okay taking a risk that could end up in your death if there was a perfect clone of you who could take your place if you died?
In a world where cloning was common, should originals and clones be treated the same, or differently?

The first one was very polarising. Some kids said it would be creepy and they wouldn’t like it at all. Others said it would be cool, they’d have someone like a new brother/sister to play with, and they’d like all the same things, so it would be great!

At lunch I took Scully for a long walk – she was really tired by the time we got home. Which was good, as she slept for much of the afternoon.

For dinner tonight I was inspired by a friend who made a roasted pumpkin, coconut, and ginger soup the other day. I improvised my own version, and it turned out very nice!

New content today:

Board game shopping!

Monday morning, after the daylight saving change, and I have three ethics classes beginning at 8am now for the winter. I was barely awake for the first one! These classes finished off the “Trusting Experts” topic I’ve been doing for the past week. Tomorrow we start a new topic on “Science Fiction Cloning” – for which I need to write the lesson plan tomorrow.

After the classes, I had lunch and then went into the city early. I had tutoring at the university from 3pm, but my wife suggested I go in early and browse around the bookshops and stuff, which I haven’t done for ages. So I did that. I checked out a couple of my favourite bookshops, and then went to a game shop. I have some store credit here from when I sold them some old Magic: the Gathering cards a while back, so I had that to spend.

I took some time browsing around, and looking up interesting looking games on my phone to check reviews. Then I used Discord to contact my friends and ask if any of them had the games I was looking at – because there’s relatively little point buying a game that someone in our group already owns. Good news! All three games I had my eye on were up for grabs, so I got all of them!

The one that I really expected someone must already have was Root, which I’d heard of and is fairly well known for having excellent reviews. I also found Brew and Evergreen, which also look intriguing, have good reviews, and importantly play times under 90 minutes, and support 2 players so I can play these games with my wife when not sharing them with my friends. This chewed up a nice wad of my store credit, though I still have a bit left.

So I’ll be looking forward in the next few weeks to trying these new games out, both with my wife, and also with a larger group of my friends.

In the afternoon and early evening we had the last lecture of the Data Engineering course, and introduction to the assessment project which the students need to do over the next four weeks. I went around and asked some of the groups what they were thinking of working on. One group is planning to look for connections between potential risk factors and diabetes from a public dataset of patient data. Another is going to search among a very broad range of possible data sources for correlations with phases of the moon! They asked if this would really be a sensible thing to work on (it’s actually one of the suggestions in our list of potential project ideas), and I said yes, as long as you cast a wide enough net – look at human physical/psychological data like crime rates or hospital admissions, geological data such as wave heights or earthquakes or rainfall, and biological data such as nocturnal animal activity or bird migrations or stuff like that. It’s basically a big data project to try and study a very wide range of phenomena and look for any surprising correlations.

New content today:

Board game design starting again

I slept in a bit this morning after yesterday’s busy day. But not too long, because I had a new class starting at 10am – another iteration of my 6-week course on Creative Thinking & Problem Solving: Let’s Design a Game. This time I have three students enrolled, which makes a nice change from the past two times I ran it, each with just one student.

Then I had three ethics classes this afternoon, so there wasn’t a lot of time to do much else. After lunch I washed the car – it needed it after yesterday’s road trip, and the fact that I hadn’t done it for a long while.

New content today: