This darn winter

It’s cold and it’s wet.

Now, you may be thinking it can’t possibly get all that cold in Sydney. You’re right. A cold winter’s day in Sydney is a maximum of 12-14°C, and even at night it never gets colder than about 4°C where I am near the coast. But the thing about Sydney is that our homes are not designed for this weather. Insulation is poor to non-existent. I have never seen a double-glazed window in Sydney.

This means when it’s 14°C outside… it’s 14°C inside. This morning after getting out of bed I was sitting here, with three layers of clothing on, drinking hot cups of herbal tea, and shivering. The design of Sydney homes actually violates the World Health Organisation’s guidelines on safe winter indoor living temperatures, as pointed out by this article from today’s news. It’s a very common observation by visitors from northern Europe or North America, where they get regular snow during winter, to say that they’ve never in their lives felt as cold as spending a winter in Sydney.

And then this year there’s also the rain. I’ve been telling you about the record rainfalls all year. Has it let up in July?

14 days into July, Sydney has already set a new record for the highest ever rainfall recorded for the whole month of July. We still have more than half the month to go! And we’re now only about 200 mm short of beating the wettest year on record – a record that will almost certainly be surpassed. And now the weather bureau is saying there’s a greater than 50% chance of the coming summer being another La Nińa, meaning more rainfall.

I took a look at the latest minutes form the monthly meeting of my apartment complex’s managing committee. 9 out of the 18 items on the agenda were about building leaks or other rainfall-related problems such as damp and rotting woodwork, collapse of garden retaining walls, or inadequate drainage leading to puddling of water.

In non-weather news, I see the news sites are all hyping the latest “super double wolf blood moon” for the current full moon. Have people forgotten that full moons happen every month, so that they get excited about it every single time it happens and have to hype it up into something “amazing” each time? Anyway, I was inspired to write a quick mezzacotta random supermooon generator.

New content today:

Secret Project milestone

That secret project I’ve been talking about recently – I completed a major milestone today. The hardest and most time-consuming part has now been completed, as of this morning. There’s a bit of tidying up around the edges required before it’s ready to unveil, but that’s all very minor and mechanical compared to the major creative parts that are now finished. Yes, it’s a creative project, and yes, you will see it soon. Just not quite yet.

The other thing I achieved today was finishing watching season 4 of Stranger Things. I’ve loved this show since the first episode of season 1. I thought season 3 was a bit weaker than the first two, but this new season was amazing, and my wife and I both were spellbound from start to finish.

The other main thing today was I got my fourth COVID shot. The Australian Government approved them for people aged over 30 on Monday, and I made sure to get in early before demand ramps up and makes bookings difficult to get. I had it about 5 hours ago now, and still feeling fine, so hopefully no fevery side effects like I had for one of my previous shots (I forget exactly which it was, but it was just one of them).

New content today:

History off the rails

This morning I had some spare time, and my golfing friend had suggested we take the opportunity to play a round at the short “par 3” course that we go to sometimes. We had to check the weather this morning, as rain was forecast, but the morning was sunny, so we met at the course and managed to get our game in before the clouds closed in. We played two balls each, and I started well, hitting the ball cleanly in the air and putting decently. But unfortunately my game deteriorated a little as we continued and I ended weakly, posting rounds of 75 and 76 with the two balls, just shy of my best score of 71 on this course.

After the game we went to have lunch at a nearby bakery, where I had a sausage roll and a salted caramel tart as we watched the dark grey clouds roll in.

Later in the afternoon I went to pick up Scully from doggie daycare, just before the rain came down. It’s been raining moderately heavily throughout the evening.

And this evening I had three online ethics classes in a row. The third one went a bit off the rails, as the kids were all keen to interrupt and provide comments about stuff that became increasingly tangential to my lesson plan. I had a question about the Black Death, regarding how we can be sure that such an event actually happened, considering it was almost 700 years ago. But one kid started asking questions about plague doctors and why they had masks with pointy noses, and then two other kids started taking about the various things they had stuffed into the noses to try to filter out the plague, and it kind of took off from there. I don’t mind too much, as long as the kids are enjoying the class and hopefully learning something, but I did try and get it back on track. It was exhausting though, and I understand why school teachers have breaks for recess and lunch – so they don’t have to handle kids for more than 2 hours in a row!

New content today:

Thinking critically about history

It’s Tuesday, start of a new week of online ethics classes. This week the subject is History – which is really more on the critical thinking side of things than ethics.

I start with a story about the Library of Alexandria, mentioning how the huge collection of scrolls has been lost, and ask the students how tragic a loss that is for our understanding of ancient history. Then we go through a series of questions about how we can know that historical records are accurate, and how important it is to know about history. I end with thinking about people in the future considering the present as a part of their history. We are recording more and more of our lives and storing or uploading enormous amounts of information. But imagine if YouTube went out of business and all those videos were lost – and people 100 years from now heard stories about how YouTube contained hundreds of millions of videos, and all of them were lost – how would they feel?

New content today:

The end of Fighting

Highlights of today:

  • I got a package from a Kickstarter I backed in April 2021. I’ve stopped backing new Kickstarters, but the trickle of rewards form old projects continues to flow in.
  • I finished off the Fighting topic in my online ethics classes. It was a good one. Next up for this week is History.
  • I made calzones for dinner. My wife made the pizza dough, and I stuffed them with spinach and ricotta and made a tomato and garlic sauce to spoon on top of the cooked calzones.
  • It rained. of course.
  • I took Scully for a walk for lunch, a bit late since we waited for the storm to pass. We met Bongo, another neighbourhood dog, and had a bit of a walk with him and his owner.
  • I worked on a very special Darths & Droids strip, which took a lot more work than normal. (to be published on Thursday)
  • I forgot about tonight’s Irregular Webcomic! – I hadn’t made it in time and had to rush to make it and upload it before going to bed.

New content today:

A Short Cut to Mushrooms

There are a lot of mushrooms sprouting all over the place around where I live. From all of the rain. I’ve been finding weird shapes and species I’ve never seen before. A friend of mine forages for wild mushrooms, but I wouldn’t do anything like that without knowing for sure if they’re safe, so I don’t touch them.

And yes, it rained a lot again today. There were sunny breaks, but the showers in between were heavy and windy and cold.

We took advantage of a long break in the middle of the day to take Scully on a walk to a bakery. I had a passionfruit tart, which was really good. Very tart, in the sense of not too sweet. We got home just as another shower broke, dashing in the last few metres to the door and getting a few drops on us. A minute later, once inside, it was pouring down, so we were very lucky not to have been a couple of minutes longer.

New content today:

Friday games, Saturday game

Friday was online board games night with my friends, so I didn’t have time to write up an entry. We played games of Fruit Picking, 7 Wonders: Architects, Codenames, Nidavellir, 7 Wonders, and then Sketchful.

Fruit Picking is a new game we tried for the first time. It’s based on mancala; you move “seeds” round several “farms” mancala-style, and then use sets of seeds to buy fruit cards form the market to build winning sets of fruit. The tactics were interesting and we may try it again. The Codenames game was hilarious, as both sides had difficult combinations of words to clue, and also one side had SAND while the other had DESERT, so the team spymasters (me and a friend) also had to come up with clues that indicated one of those words but not the other. Our team-mates ending up hitting numerous bystanders and failing to make sense of either spymaster’s loose associations. Eventually the team opposing my team won, alas.

The other big event on Friday was Scully had her annual vaccinations at the vet. She’s been healthy the past year, with no visits to the vet since her last vaccinations. After the vet visit we gave her a bath and extra cuddles all evening.

The other thing I was doing on Friday, which extended into Saturday, was drafting a new round of our Goldfish Draft Magic: the Gathering game format that we invented. I may have mentioned this before – it’s a game based on Magic: the Gathering, in which players attempt to score the most points, and scores can often be so large that they require exponential notation to write down, or even more than that, things like Knuth’s up-arrow notation.

Today we finished drafting our cards, and now my mind turns to calculating my score. This is non-trivial, and can take several days to work out, often involving a spreadsheet. Yes, we’re complete nerds – we’re playing a game that requires a spreadsheet to calculate our scores, and often we actually deal in the logarithms (or super-logarithms) of our scores to make it easier to handle. When I’ve figured out my score, I’ll let you know, and I’ll also report what the other players scored.

Also today I worked hard on my current secret project. It’s approaching completion – so close I can taste it. Potentially I could knock it over tomorrow, but it will probably take until Monday or Tuesday given I have other things I want to work on too. You won’t see the finished result straight away – its publication is contingent on another thing happening first, but it will finally be ready, and that other thing will happen within a few weeks. So all the teasing is nearly over – you will see the result soon.

For dinner tonight, I took my wife out to the French galette and crêpe place in the next suburb. They’re having a series of special “French flavours” this month to celebrate Bastille Day. I had a galette with duck confit, carrots, potatoes, Swiss cheese, and pickled onions as my savoury meal, followed by a sweet crêpe with poached pear, flaked almonds, and chocolate sauce. All very delicious!

New content today:

International ethics of fighting

First though: there was no rain today! 😃

The ground outside was very soggy though. I took Scully for a big walk at lunch. It was good to get out and into the fresh air after being cooped up against the elements for so long.

This morning I had my first lesson on the current ethics topic of “Fighting” with kids in American time zones. Most of my classes are in the afternoon or early evening, and attended by kids from Australia or Asia (in similar time zones) or Europe (where it’s morning there). Those classes are in the middle of the night in American time zones. My opening story is about the Burr-Hamilton duel, and the first question I ask is: “Is it okay for two people to agree to have a fight?” (I don’t specify with or without weapons – those are follow-up questions.) The kids from Australia and Asia and Europe have almost all said it’s not okay; people can get hurt or killed, and it’s better to solve an argument by talking.

This morning I had a class at 9am, which is afternoon/early evening in American time zones, and so I had my first batch of kids from the USA in this class for this topic, three of them. I was slightly taken aback when every single one said that it was fine if two people agreed to fight one another. And when I pressed and asked if it was okay if they fought with weapons, they all continued to say it was okay; they agreed, they knew what they were getting into and the dangers, there was nothing wrong with that.

It’s small number statistics, but I’m amazed by the clean split in opinions between non-American and American kids on this question.

The theme continues with other questions: “Is it okay to defend yourself if you get attacked? To try to hurt your attacker to get them to stop?” Almost all the kids so far said yes. But when I asked: “Is it okay to defend yourself with a deadly weapon, like a knife or a gun?” all of the Aus/Asian/European kids said either outright no, or yes but you shouldn’t try to kill them – you could shoot in the air to scare them off, or shoot a limb, but not shoot to kill. However, all of the American kids said if you’re attacked it’s absolutely fine to shoot and kill your attacker. One went so far as to add that you should be praised as a hero for doing so.

So yeah… this theme continued throughout the whole class. The American kids were much more comfortable with the idea of fighting, and of solving things with violence. Again, small numbers, but there are obvious statements that could be made about this. I’ll be interested to see what happens when I have more American kids in this class on Monday morning.

New content today:

Not so fast! More rain

So we only had 10 mm of rain yesterday. Today we’re up to 24 mm, and only halfway through the 24-hour recording period, and it’s currently raining heavily outside.

Sorry to go on about it, but this damn rain is pretty much the only thing that anyone in Sydney is talking about.

Related to that I spent a bit of time today applying mould remover to various walls, window sills, window blinds, and furniture throughout my home. Damn stuff is insidious and relentless in this weather.

And…. I stayed in all day and didn’t go anywhere. Because of the rain, you know.

New content today:

Not so rainy day

The rain eased off a bit today and we had intermittent showers, although it rained heavily overnight. Sydney is well on track to record its wettest year since rainfall records began. We’ve recorded 1768.6 mm since the start of 2022, and the wettest year ever recorded was 2194 mm in 1950. We’re barely halfway through the year, so if the second half is similar to the first we could potentially end up with over 3000 mm.

A new week of ethics classes started today. I wrote up the new topic: Fighting. I’m asking the kids questions such as:

  • Is getting into a fight ever justified?
  • If two people agree to have a fight, should it be allowed? With fists? With weapons?
  • Is it okay to carry a dangerous weapon, for the sole reason of self defence?
  • Are combat sports like boxing or mixed martial arts, where the goal is to actually hurt your opponent, okay or not?

I think this is a good topic, as it’s generated some interesting and diverse answers in the first three classes tonight!

New content today: