Today could be a repeat of yesterday

The main differences from yesterday:

  • I picked up the weekly grocery shopping.
  • Today’s storm was more intense than yesterday’s. We got hailstones and torrential rain and some really spectacular thunder.
  • I went out with my wife and Scully to a local Greek restaurant for dinner. It was good and I’m very full.
  • Tonight is virtual board games night with my friends. We’re currently playing 7 Wonders Architects on Board Game Arena.

New content today:

More running, more storms, more ethics of time travel

It’s a bit repetitive, but today was somewhat similar to yesterday. I did a 2.5k run. I had online ethics classes at 11am, 6pm, and one to come shortly at 9pm.

I’m really loving this time travel topic in my classes. At one point I go through a series of scenarios for how you might make money if you invented a time machine.

  • You could send the winning lottery numbers to yourself last week, so that you win. Most kids think this is unethical. Many describe it as “cheating”.
  • You could send your past self instructions to buy Bitcoin, or Apple shares, or whatever when they were cheap, so you make a lot of money on Bitcoin/the stock market. A few kids considered this “cheating” as well, but about half were okay with it.
  • You could go to the future and bring back some tech that hasn’t been invented yet, and claim to have invented it. Most kids thought this was unethical because it involved lying, and a few called it stealing as well, as in stealing someone else’s invention.
  • You could get some furniture made in an old fashioned style, go back a thousand years and hide it, then retrieve it in the present. It’s now genuinely a thousand years old, so you could sell it as an expensive antique. Nearly everyone thinks this is perfectly okay.
  • If you invented the time machine, you could go into business producing and selling time machines. This one is so far universally considered the absolute worst idea of all! The kids all said if they invented time travel they’d do everything they could to keep it secret, because they’d be afraid of other people messing up history. The idea of time machines being widely available horrified them.

And the weather… yes, it’s been thunderstorming again this afternoon. The morning however was fine and sunny. A very rare occurrence lately – I don’t know exactly but it feels like we’ve only had two or three days where the sun has broken through the overcast in the last 3 weeks or so. We’re supposed to get more rain and storms tomorrow, but then the weekend might actually be rain-free. Let’s wait and see.

The annoying thing is everything is just so humid, all the time. I hate it when you dry off after a shower, and then when you have another shower 24 hours later, your towel is still damp. Ugh.

New content today:

5k, storms, and ethics of time travel

This morning it was time to do another 5k run. I missed the 5k last week, so wanted to make sure I did one this week. I did it at the oval, running laps on flat ground, because last time I did it on the streets and the hills nearly killed me. I recorded a surprisingly good time of 27:49, which was a big improvement on my previous oval run of 29:42. I guess the daily 2.5k runs are really building up my stamina.

I wrote the new ethics class topic for the week. This week we’re doing a fun one before I take a break for Christmas, on the ethics of time travel. And I had the first three classes of kids this evening. The last one was really fun, with the kids laughing at the various hypothetical situations I proposed and their various answers. I proposed the following:

A future version of you appears. They show you a tattoo, and insist that you go out and get it done now. You don’t want a tattoo. But your future self apparently does, and thinks it’s important enough that they have to convince you to do it today. What should you do?

One girl said, “Yeah, that sounds like fun, I always wanted a tattoo!” Another girl said, “If I got a tattoo, I’ve probably turned evil or something, so I’d avoid doing it at all costs.”

And, yes, there was more stormy weather today. We had some moderate rain with a little thunder around 4pm, which cleared up enough for me to take Scully out for a walk without getting too wet. But then after 5pm a bigger and heavier storm rolled in, with some really loud thunder and heavy rain. We may be in for more of the same again tomorrow.

New content today:

Will this rain ever end?

Five days into summer, and the weather today was very wintry. The maximum temperature was only 19.2°C, which would be perfectly normal for the middle of winter. And it was rainy and gloomy. It was similar yesterday, but colder today. And… we have rain forecast every day for the next week too, up to about 75 mm in total. This is a really weird weather pattern for this time of year, certainly under the influence of La Niña. I keep waiting for the day when suddenly the clouds and rain will vanish and the temperatures will soar into the 30s for the remainder of summer, but it shows no signs of happening yet.

My wife had a video thing on today, so I took Scully out for a long walk over lunch time so she could do it without interruptions. We walked out to the new bakery at Naremburn, where I grabbed some lunch – a vegetarian mushroom pie and a custard tart. It rained intermittently and I had to put my umbrella up and down about a dozen times before we got back home again.

This afternoon I worked on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I need to get those photographed on Tuesday morning when I have some spare time, so I need to get all the scripts written by then.

Oh, I also took Scully for a short drive over to the hardware store to get some craft supplies for my wife. She’s going to try using some of the leftover scrap material from her dog bandana sewing to make decoupage bangles.

For dinner I was going to make Thai red curry vegetables with rice, but I discovered that we’re almost out of red curry paste, so I switched at the last minute to green curry instead. I wonder if I should add some yellow curry paste to the shopping list as well…

And this evening I had two ethics classes. The topic this week is organ donation, and it’s been a really good topic. There are lots of tricky questions that are obviously getting the kids thinking, and their answers span the range of possibilities, which is always more interesting than when they all agree with one another. There’s a strong divide on the following question:

Imagine someone is in a hospital and desperately needs a heart transplant. A car accident victim is brought in. Doctors try to save them, but unfortunately they die. Their heart could save the person who needs a transplant. If the dead person’s driver’s licence says they do not consent to be an organ donor, should the doctors respect that wish, even if it means letting the heart patient die?

I’m getting roughly half the kids saying that you have to save the heart patient’s life, even if it means disrespecting the dead person’s wishes – because saving a life is imperative and the dead person isn’t going to know anyway. And roughly half the kids saying that you must respect the dead person’s wishes – because it may be really important to them what happens to their body, and why even bother recording a donor status if doctors are going to ignore it anyway? And there are a few other questions that are just as divisive. The good thing is this is exposing the kids to different opinions, as well as the reasons why people hold those opinions (as I get each of them to explain why they answer the way they do). I also get the kids to try to provide reasons supporting the other side of the argument.

New content today:

The end of the spring that never was

Tomorrow is the first day of summer, making today the last day of spring, despite it not really feeling like late spring. La Niña has made a mockery of spring, as we experienced wintery temperatures and unusually high rainfall for the past several weeks. Indeed, the Bureau of Meteorology reported today that New South Wales just had the wettest November since 1917. (Despite the cold, wet conditions in south-east Australia, the north-west is experiencing extreme heatwaves already.)

I mentioned how unusual it was that the sun came out briefly yesterday – well today it didn’t appear at all again. We had heavy, low overcast, with tall buildings disappearing into the low cloud, and it rained a bit around midday.

This morning I went on a trek into the city, to the University of Technology, to meet my friend who is the lecturer of the courses in Image Processing (that I tutored for this past semester) and Data Engineering (that I’m helping him redesign for next semester). The plan was to go over our course plan, discuss various issues, and decide on what needs to be done next to get it ready in time. I also picked up my university ID card, finally, which had been waiting for me in the security office since August.

After the meeting, I walked around to a book shop to pick up a copy of The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, the first graphic novel by Shaenon Garrity. I had to get it, considering I know Shaenon and we try to meet up every time I travel to the San Francisco Bay Area.

The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor

I also picked up a copy of Troy by Stephen Fry, since I found one in the smaller size that matches my copies of the previous two books in his Greek mythology series. I saw it in another book shop the other day, but they only had the larger paperback size for some reason, so I passed it up, and thought I’d have to wait months for the smaller size release. But it’s good to have it now!

And I went to the game shop and picked up a couple of Dungeons & Dragons books. Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons has just been released, and they also had a sale on Candlekeep Mysteries, which I’d declined to purchase some time ago because I don’t really need more books of adventures, but which I figured I’d grab for the bargain price when I saw that it was a compendium of one-shots which I might get use out of, rather than an epic campaign that I’m much less likely to use.

I spent the afternoon writing a lesson for tonight’s one-on-one class with my science student. She’s into art, so I decided to do a lesson on colour mixing, and why what people say about “primary colours” is so confusing and often wrong. She really seemed to like it, and get a lot out of it, so that was good!

New content today:

The sun come out today!

It didn’t rain today, and the sun actually peeked through the heavy cloud for a few minutes. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen sunlight for about a week and a half, at least. I went for a 2.5k run, and took it a bit easier today. Yesterday I really pushed hard to make a good time, so I thought I could ease off a bit today.

I had the last two lessons of the ethics class on introduced species. One of the last questions I’ve been asking in each class is about domestic cats, which are of course introduced species in much of the world. They cause particular problems here in Australia, where cats kill an average of 75 native animals each, every year. Yes, that means for every cat that’s kept indoors and doesn’t kill any, there’s a cat out there killing 150 animals a year. Domestic cats have caused the extinction of at least 22 species of native Australian animals. It’s even worse in New Zealand, where they’ve caused the extinction of over 70 native species. Some councils in New Zealand have considered banning the owning of pet cats. They haven’t enacted this, because there’d be a lot of upset cat owners.

I put the question to my students: should pet cats be banned, if it can save native species from extinction? The response was pretty uniform: no. The all thought that was going too far, that it’s not fair to ask people to give up owning a cat. I reminded them that it would save entire species from extinction. They said it would be nice to do that, but there’s no way a government could ever enforce a ban on owning cats – too many people would just ignore it. I hadn’t really expected the answers to be so uniform to this question.

Because I’ll be busy tomorrow, I worked on the next class for the coming week, with lessons starting on Wednesday. This week the topic is organ donation.

I also took the opportunity today with the lack of rain to take Scully to the dog park this afternoon. In a couple of weeks they’re going to have the traditional dog park Christmas party. I’ve gone to the past few, since we got Scully, and it’s always a fun event, with everyone bringing some food or drink and sharing everything. We get about 20 dogs and their owners.

Oh, and one of our neighbours has decorated the lift and the ground floor entry foyer with Christmas decorations already. I’m not sure which neighbour it is, but we have our suspicions. There’s an entire tree on the ground floor. Fortunately Scully ignores it!

New content today:

Extreme wet Friday late update

On Friday morning I received an email response to a question I’d sent to Outschool. (Friday morning here being Thursday evening in the USA, which is relevant.) It said that they’d get back to me in a while, because currently staffing was very low due to the holiday. My first thought was, “Are they all on Christmas holidays already?”

It took me a few minutes to realise it was Thanksgiving in the USA. This happens every year around the end of November – people all start wondering why nobody in America is answering their emails all of a sudden. Just one of those weird international things.

Friday was wet – very wet. The rain was pretty heavy most of the day, with very brief periods when it eased up a bit. I managed to get a 2.5k run in, starting with no rain but it was drizzling again by the time I finished. I had a couple of Outschool lessons and there was thunder and lightning.

Sydney’s not even copping the worst of this weather. Inland is getting a lot more rain, which is causing widespread flooding. Some places have received triple the average November rainfall in the past week, and some of the flooding is approaching “worst ever” conditions. Meanwhile, nearer home, Warragamba Dam is reported to be overflowing this morning. This could cause floods in north-west Sydney, downstream from the dam.

During the day I worked on a report for Standards Australia on the latest ISO Photography Standards meeting I attended back in October. We have a follow-up Australian meeting next week, so I had to get this report written.

And in the evening was virtual games night. I played Balloon Pop, 6 Nimmt, 7 Wonders on Board Game Arena, then we played Scattergories and finished with a round of Gartic Phone.

New content today:

Rain, sushi, and data engineering

More weather – more rain. The morning was cloudy and the rain started a bit after lunch – while I was taking Scully home from my wife’s work. I went via the shops to get some sushi rolls for lunch and we sat under a plane tree for shelter in the village square. Fortunately it didn’t rain too hard while we were there.

But I did hear a woman get attacked by magpies. She was sitting and eating her lunch, which looked like a box of hot chips and something, maybe fish or a burger or whatever. She was there for some time with magpies stalking around her, looking for a handout. The magpies don’t bother me while I’m eating there because I have Scully with me and she gives them the evil eye. I was looking the other way when suddenly I heard a loud scream, and I looked around the the woman was beating off magpies from the lunch on her lap. I didn’t see, but I assume one jumped right onto her food, because she got up and threw the lot into a bin.

This is the problem with feeding birds in urban areas. They get used to handouts, and they get aggressive when people are eating.

My main work today was planning out lectures for next year’s data engineering course at the university (for which I’m assisting the lecturer in redesigning the course from this year). I wrote lecture outlines for a lecture on data presentation, and one on data fitting and modelling. Next Tuesday we have a meeting to go over and discuss the plans to start locking things into place and moving onto the next stage of developing the course. We need to figure out the assessment tasks, and weave them into the course material.

New content today:

Chilly and a bit wet

The cool wet week continued on this Monday, but it wasn’t as rainy as yesterday. I had to bake a sourdough loaf this morning so that we had bread, so I didn’t have time to go for a run before my two ethics classes.

That finished off the week of the topic on cancel culture. It was an interesting topic to discuss with the kids, because there was a wide range of opinions about it. Some of them thought it was fine to cancel celebrities who do something offensive, because they’re in the public and eye and need to behave themselves, and if they suffer the consequences then it’s their own fault. While others thought that the public acting as judge, jury, and executioner, potentially ruining someone’s career and life because they said something online, was going way too far. And there were a range of kids in between, thinking it was fair enough for really offensive things, repeated, but not for mildly offensive things, or things that might be one-offs or accidents.

After my classes I had some lunch and then picked up Scully from my wife’s work. I used the afternoon to write annotations for a new week’s worth of Irregular Webcomic! When my wife got home I went for my daily 2.5k run, then came home and made pizza for dinner (I’d made the dough just before my wife got home).

New content today:

A very rainy Sunday

Sydney was cold and wet today. We only got up to 16.3°C, which is ridiculously cold for late November, and it rained basically non-stop all day. This is only the beginning too, as rain is forecast every day for at least the next week, with significant amounts on several days. Warragamba Dam, our main water supply, is already full to capacity, and the surrounding catchment area is already saturated from rain last week. If it has to be spilt to release water, it could lead to flooding downstream. It could in fact lead to the second “once in 100 years” level flood event in Sydney – this year, after the floods of February.

This is La Niña in action. We were told months ago we’d be in for a cool, wet summer, and it looks to be the case. Although in some sense it’s better than El Niño and the dry hot summer we had two years ago, with all the terrible fires.

Despite the rain, I gritted it out and did a 2.5 km run. I picked a period where the rain radar showed what looked like easing conditions, but it lied, and the rain actually got heavier as I ran. Since this exercise routine is still very new, I haven’t done a run in steady rain before. It was somewhat unpleasant… but at least I didn’t get too hot. Oddly, although a do a there-and-back sort of route, somehow the wind was blowing the rain straight into my face for about 90% of the route.

In the dry comfort of home, I worked on comics again. I managed to churn out three new Darths & Droids strips and five new Irregular Webcomics, so that gives me some breathing room to work on other things for the next few days.

New content today: