weather – dangermouse.net

A cold, cold run and lunchtime walk

As you can probably guess, it was cold again today. My wife took Scully to work and I did a 5k run and it was very cold, around 12°C. But I think the cold weather means I don’t get too hot running, since I managed to clock under 27 minutes for the fourth time in my last six runs, when I hadn’t broken that time for several months previously.

I spent time today working on more advance Darths & Droids strips to buffer over the time I’ll be away on my upcoming European holiday. The script writing today was particularly tricky, though I don’t want to spoil anything by saying exactly why.

After eating lunch (my home-baked sourdough with cheese and tomato), I caught a train up to my wife’s work and met her there at a cafe that i hadn’t been to before. They had home-baked dog treats, with chicken and vegetables in them, and she’d bought one to let Scully try it. Scully is very hit and miss with different dog treats – some she doesn’t eat at all. But this one she really liked.

My wife went back to work and I walked all the way home with Scully. It was a chilly afternoon, but my multiple layers of clothing and the bright sun shining on my back made it bearable. We walked past a bunya pine tree, which had these warning signs posted around it:

The bunya pine (Araucaria bidwillii) is the large tree at the top left, behind the foreground foliage. It grows enormous, heavy seed cones, from 3 kg up to around 10 kg, which can fall from heights as high as 40 metres. They have caused serious injuries to people. Bunya pines are not very common in Sydney, but there are a few around, and it’s a good idea to be cautious around them during the cone-dropping season. Although that’s January to March, so I’m not sure what the warning signs here were for. I guess the council just didn’t remove them. I wrote a blog entry three years ago about collecting bunya nuts from fallen cones, which had this photo showing how large the cones are:

Tonight I had my first three ethics classes on the “Let’s Design a Government” topic, and they went pretty well. I have tons of questions which we didn’t get through, which is way better than ending up with not enough!

Cold and busy holiday Monday

Today was very cold. We had the first snowfalls of the winter on the mountains, but of course it wasn’t quite that cold here in Sydney. My wife was home because of the King’s Birthday public holiday, and when we went out to walk Scully at lunchtime I checked the temperature, which was 14°C, with wind chill making it feel like 4°C. It was very definitely very cold.

Apart from that walk I was at home teaching ethics classes. We’re finishing off the Science Fiction topic for the week, which turned out to be quite a tricky one to moderate as the teacher, and some of the questions were very challenging for some of the kids.

I also did some comics work. I still have to make another two weeks’ worth of Darths & Droids comics before I leave on my Europe trip in… less than two weeks. It’s going to come quickly and I’ll ru out of time to do all the stuff I want to do before then!

Coldest day of the year so far

It was all about the weather today. A cold front with rain came in overnight, blowing cold air from the south. Sydney’s maximum temperature today was 14.5°C at 1:30am, but really that barely counts, as it never rose above 13.4°C during daylight, and for most of the day it was more like 12°C or less. This was accompanied by intermittent cold rain, and steady winds putting the “feels like” temperature more like 7°C. But even the middle of the night 14.5°C made this easily the coldest day of the year, by a good two degrees.

I only went outside very briefly to pick Scully up (in the car) from my wife’s work at lunchtime, and to take her out for a toilet around 5pm. It was freezing and awful outside. Even Scully wanted to get back inside as quickly as possible.

This morning I wrote my critical thinking/ethics class for this week. I normally do it on Tuesday, but I did my university marking yesterday because my Tuesday evening class currently has no kids enrolled, giving me an extra day to write my lesson plan. The topic is “Science Fiction”, and I thought this would be very interesting and have some cool questions. But in my first class tonight I realised that a lot of the questions are very yes/no type, with not much opportunity for interesting reasoning or discussion. So I modified them a bit in the subsequent lessons, which went better.

The apartment next door to ours has been listed for sale since February, and they finally had an auction on Saturday, where it sold. When the real estate agency had moved display furniture into the place for photography and in-person inspections, they ignored the sign in the lift that says “don’t block the doors with furniture”, and broke the lift. After the sale on the weekend, today they moved the furniture back out… and broke the lift again. So I had to go up and down the fire stairs with Scully several times, instead of using the lift.

Final word for today: Brrrr!! 🌬️🌧️🥶

Fog and cheesecake

This morning dawned cold and foggy – the first significant fog of the year. My wife suggested I take a photo to put in this blog, but I neglected to and now I’m kind of regretting it. But we have more forecast for tomorrow, so if there is I’ll try and get a photo then.

In other non-weather atmospheric phenomena we had two interesting astronomical things happen overnight, visible from Sydney: a significant meteor sighting, and also a brilliant pink aurora australis which was visible as far north as Sydney. Unfortunately I was asleep for both. But I’ve been enjoying the views of Scorpius directly overhead late at night when I take Scully out for her pre-bedtime toilet.

Monday is always my busy day with lots of online ethics classes to wrap up the week’s topic. It’s been an interesting one on names, with plenty of interesting questions that I rotate from class to class to keep it fresh for myself.

In between I marked another university Data Engineering assessment report. A student team studied potential predictors of the length of stay in hospital for cardiac patients, from among variables such as: vital signs during initial triage; levels of haemoglobin, blood oxygen, and electrolytes in an initial blood test; demographic data such as age, sex, ethnicity; and also insurance status. They used publicly available data from over 265,000 United States patient admissions, collated by the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Centre, Boston—the MIMIC-IV dataset, downloadable from physionet.org. Note especially that this is data from the United States.

After doing various regression analyses, they discovered that the strongest indicator of a longer stay in hospital was… being non-white. The second strongest indicator was a low blood haemoglobin level at admission. Although the actual correlations were quite weak in all cases.

AT lunch I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off for the afternoon. On the way home I decided to pop in at the cake shop nearby and grab something. I got there about 1:40pm, and was surprised to see the cake displays completely empty. They’d packed them all away already, in preparation for closing! My wife and I always comment how silly it is that cafes in Sydney all seem to close at 2pm. It’s really weird… it’s virtually impossible to find a cafe anywhere in Sydney that is open later than 2pm. They seem to think all the business is for the morning rush and lunchtime, and nobody is interested in coffee or cakes after that.

Anyway, I expressed surprise and told the woman in the cake shop that I had wanted to get a slice of cake. She said she could go get one for me and asked what I wanted. So I decided on a slice of cheesecake. She dashed out the back and returned with a slice for me. And then probably proceeded to close up shop as soon as I left.

I took the slice home on the train and ate it at my desk while I marked the above student report. I needed the sugar to get through the day!

Drying out; phone birding

Friday was wet again, but the rain stopped early in the afternoon and by nightfall the sky was clear. I actually saw stars when taking Scully out before bedtime.

I had my usual ethics classes, and in the evening was online board games night. We played games of Mountain Goats, Jump Drive, Settlers of Catan, Just One. We played five games of Jump Drive, and I did miserably in the first four. And then I thought I was going to win the fifth game, as I was ahead by several points and could reach the winning score of 50 points in my next turn… but one of my friends managed to score much more than I did on the last turn and beat me by one point!

Today was sunny! No rain! I think we were up to something like the past 5 weeks having only 4 non-rainy days. Everyone was well and truly sick of the rain. But today was beautiful – blue skies, a little warmer, and humidity down around 50% instead of 80-100% like it has been for weeks on end.

My wife and I took Scully for a walk down to the harbour side park near our place. Scully ran around and chased a tennis ball, and then I spent some time photographing birds. I only had my phone, but it was good enough to get the following photos.

Laughing kookaburra:

Masked lapwings:

Australian wood ducks:

White-faced heron:

And an Australian magpie spotted on the walk back home:

This evening we went out for dinner to Garfish, a nice seafood restaurant. We really like this place, but don’t go too often as it’s a bit pricey. The salt and pepper squid appetiser is really good, but this time I tried a new menu item: battered zucchini flowers stuffed with snapper and prawn.

And for the main dish I had grilled mirror dory with mash, spinach, and kaffir lime beurre blanc.

All really nice.

Yet more rain; flooding disaster

I mentioned the rain and the flooding north of Sydney yesterday. Since then it’s gotten worse. Three people are confirmed to have died because of the flooding, and one person is missing, feared dead. Several weather stations recorded over 300 mm of rain in 24 hours yesterday, and it’s continued today. Almost 600 flood rescue operations have taken place, and around 50,000 people are under evacuation orders or expected to be soon. There’s a news story here with photos and video.

The rain is moving slowly south and Sydney got hit today, with 35 mm in the city, and over 50 mm in some suburbs, with similar or more predicted for tomorrow. It’s been raining heavily here for most of the day.

There was a brief respite at lunch time, when I managed to take Scully on a decent walk. I basically kept an eye on the rain, and as soon as it stopped around midday, we went out. We did a walk for about 40 minutes, and managed to get home before the rain started up again, about 10 minutes after we came inside. And it’s been pretty much non-stop since.

While staying home I did my ethics classes, on the new week’s topic of “Perfection”. And worked on some Darths & Droids comics. And stayed glued to the rain radar.

More rain; Indonesian horror film

The rain continues to be a problem in the region north of Sydney. Here in the city we had a gloomy, heavily overcast day, with some scattered showers. But north of us has been hit by record rainfalls, with some towns receiving almost 6 months worth of rain in just 48 hours. And there’s more to come, with the rain expected to be very heavy all the way to the weekend, with 24-hour falls of 200 mm or more. The Manning River has already reached a flood level above the record floods of 1929. Evacuation orders are in place for dozens of towns, and over 400 flood rescue operations have been carried out to get people to safety. Thankfully nobody has died.

Here’s a static story about the floods and rainfall, and there’s also a live feed of latest news (which may not be a permanent link).

Sydney is expecting up to 60 mm tomorrow, and another 50 mm on Friday. That’s heavy, and there’ll probably be some minor flash flooding in places, but hopefully nothing too serious.

Today I spent mostly huddled indoors, except for venturing out for a 5k run after breakfast. Oddly, I decided to take it easy with today’s run and set off at a more leisurely pace than I’ve been trying lately, and the run felt less exhausting, but I ended up clocking a time 15 seconds faster than my last few runs. I have no idea how this happens.

Last night I watched another Netflix movie: The Haunted Apartment: “Miss K”, which is an Indonesian horror film from 2024. I thought it was pretty decent, though with some flaws—not bad if you like Indonesian ghost horror. It had some good creepy moments, and an interesting plot with some unexpected turns. It’s not as tightly paced as slick US productions so it drags a little in places. There was an excellently robust fight scene near the end. Overall positive, though I’ve seen better.

I’ve noticed Indonesian films love the trope of the leading lady being in a relationship with a genuinely nice guy for 6 years, but still not ready to marry him because she’s worried he might turn out to be “a bad person”.

I other news: the new raised pedestrian crossing/speed bump outside our place looks almost finished. Construction was scheduled to last until Friday, but it looks like all the heavy work of digging and concrete laying has been done. There are new garden beds with empty soil lining the sides of the street around the crossing, which may be planted with some ground cover plants still. I’ll try and post a photo when it’s done, at some point when it’s not raining.

Avoiding the worst of the rain

We got a bit of rain overnight, but it looks like the low pressure system bringing this is concentrated north of Sydney. Towns a couple of hundred kilometres north of us got almost 300 mm yesterday and there is widespread flooding. Today eased off a bit, but there’s more very heavy rain coming, and Sydney will catch the edge of it over the next few days.

Most of the day here was dry. The main exception was when I took Scully for a morning walk. Just a short 20-minute walk around the block. But halfway around the rain came down heavily, and I hadn’t expected it at all, so didn’t have an umbrella. We just had to get wet as we made our way home. Where I had to change my clothes and lay the wet ones out to dry.

In the morning I write my next ethics class, on the topic of “Perfection”. I have a good amount of questions and I think this could be another very interesting topic for the kids, like last week’s “Socialisation”. Then I took Scully for a lunchtime walk, and bought some Turkish bread and hummus to use for lunch.

Big news in Australia today was the break-up of the Coalition between the Liberal and National Parties. The Coalition, as a composite entity, has been the major conservative/right power in Australian politics for over 100 years, holding government more times than the progressive/left Labor Party. But the Coalition lost the last election two weeks ago dramatically, losing 13 seats in Parliament, handing the incumbent Labor Party a huge victory. The Coalition suffered from losing relevance to traditional inner city conservatives, promoting a nuclear power policy, and embracing some aspects of Donald Trump’s policies in the US. The Australian public rejected them soundly.

In the aftermath, the dominant Coalition partner Liberal Party replaced its leader Peter Dutton with Sussan Ley, who in the few days she’s been in charge moved away from right-wing policies and more towards the centre in an attempt to rebuild support. But this sat badly with the Nationals, who are further right. Sussan Ley has committed her Liberal Party to a net zero carbon emissions policy, which the Nationals have been fighting against (being interested in supporting the coal and petroleum gas mining industries), holding the prior Coalition back on this policy. Ley’s stance has so angered the Nationals that today they formally withdrew from the Coalition agreement.

This leaves Australia’s major right party, the Liberals, essentially incapable of winning government in the foreseeable future, as they relied on Nationals seats in rural areas to make up majority numbers in Parliament. So this is a major shake-up in the political landscape in Australia. We have up to three years to the next election, so things may change and it’s possible the Coalition will re-form if the parties can agree on a combined policy, but it will be interesting to see how things develop before the next election.

Autumn is here. Finally

Today was the first day that really started feeling like autumn here. And we’re most of the way through it already, with winter just two weeks away. There are fallen leaves on the roads and footpaths. Glimpses of autumn colour with the liquidambars, camphor laurels, and ginkgo trees turning. (Although these are the minority – most of the trees around here are evergreens.)

And it’s turned chilly. Today only reached 16.2°C in Sydney, which is about average for a winter’s day, and it was windy which made it feel even colder. We had heavy rain in the morning, but the middle of the day was dry, though overcast. The heavy rain is back in the evening, and is expected to get heavier overnight and we will get some very heavy falls over the next two days.

We took advantage of the break in the rain to go for a drive at lunch. I suggested we go to Allambie Pies to get some pies. Unfortunately the traffic was bad. The few blocks near our place in that direction seem to always be choked on weekends nowadays, and it took us about 20 minutes to drive as far as we could have waked in the same amount of time.

It eased up and I thought we were okay, but we hit a big traffic snarl further on. This one turned out to be caused by a serious car accident ahead. By the time we crawled past, two cars were being towed and police were directing traffic around the obstruction. It looked pretty bad. But I just saw on reddit’s Sydney sub that the driver of one of the cars had posted to thank a good samaritan who stopped to check everyone was okay, and directed traffic around the obstruction until the police arrived. One driver was taken to hospital with minor injuries, but nobody was killed or badly hurt, thankfully.

This evening I had three more ethics classes on the “Socialising” topic. An interesting observation I’ve made: One of the question I ask if it’s okay that some people might treat an AI chatbot like a friend, conversing in a natural way, telling it secrets and emotions, looking for advice, etc.

Almost everyone in the 10-12 year old classes answered very much: No, that’s bad, an AI isn’t a real person, it doesn’t understand like a human, it could be harmful, etc.
But several kids in the 13-15 year old classes gave more nuanced responses. Some saying it could help shy people or people without friends to express their emotions in a useful way, or to get some advice for things they might not have thought of themselves (although they should filter it for sensibility themselves), and so on.

I’m glad pretty much all the kids have a healthy scepticism about AI tools. I suspect that’s not the case for kids whose parents don’t invest so much in their education, though.

Getting a bit sick of all this rain

It’s pouring down as I type this. We’ve had showers every day for the past few weeks, and the forecast that I just saw for the next week is more rain, every day, with heavy falls up to 45 mm early next week. Our weather is broken and I want some new weather.

Also, the USA is broken, can we have a new one? I don’t want to go into any details, but I had an interaction today which almost broke my brain about how far gone the USA is under Trump. Reasonable people are actually fearing for their lives under this regime. It’s horrible, and terrifying, and exhausting. Ugh.

On the bright side… I managed to complete marking of all of my assigned student project reports for Data Engineering. This is the experimental planning report. In two weeks we get the final results report and their presentation videos to mark. And I’m happy to report that this year’s crop of students appears to be better at planning their experiments and writing their reports than last year’s. I was prepared to disappointed but I was pleasantly surprised.