Tag: weather

Hot and not cool

As forecast, the temperature was 38°C today, making it Sydney’s hottest day since 26 January 2021. The really bad part is we’re in the middle of a four day gap between our air conditioner breaking and the new one being installed. So we had no relief inside at all. I just kept the windows and blinds closed all day to try to keep the heat out, but the thermometer inside still got up to 27°C.

It’s now after 9pm and I’ve just opened the windows to try to cool things down, but it’s not clear if it’s still warmer outside. And I think there’s zero breeze.

My wife is sick too, with some sort of stomach bug. I called in to the university and told them I couldn’t come in to tutor the Data Engineering course today, having to stay home to look after her.

I did my last three classes on the ethics of being offended, then I tried to take advantage of being home in the afternoon to start work on this weeks new topic: Movies. But with the heat and making sure my wife was okay, I only got about half of it done.

It’s going to be a long and hot night. The hourly temperature isn’t forecast to drop below 27°C until after 2am.

New content today:

ISO meeting day 3, and more rain

The ISO meeting today was mostly administrative cleanup, going through action items and minutes, but there were two technical discussion on potential new standards that we may want to develop, based on submissions from the Italian and Spanish national standards bodies. The Italian one is the tripod strength one they proposed a couple of meetings ago, and which we need to figure out how to handle. The Spanish proposal is for a standard for machine vision cameras, and we decided that sounds like something we should be doing, so we’re encouraging that too. The side benefits of these are the hope that Italy and Spain will join out committee as full members, and hopefully host meetings in their countries some time in the future.

We had a lot of rain overnight. I mentioned last night that we’d had 20 mm of rain. By morning that total had increased to over 50 mm. And we had another 15 mm during the day today. I took Scully out for a brief walk during a break in the ISO meeting, when I thought the rain had eased off for a while, but we got caught in a heavy shower. There was news about flash flooding across Sydney and a lot of trees down, cutting roads and power lines.

But the good news is that today was much cooler than the run of very warm days we’ve been having. They haven’t been hot – it has most definitely not been a hot summer, but it’s been hovering around 30°C every day for weeks now. So today’s 22°C was a welcome respite.

New content today:

ISO meeting day 2, and a big storm

Day 2 of the ISO Photography standards meeting was all technical discussions. We talked about standards for measuring low light performance, specifying camera-related vocabulary definitions, defining transformation maps for converting between standard and high dynamic range images, updating definitions of camera technical specification to handle new technologies, measuring the information-theoretic capacity of camera images and systems, and measuring autofocus performance.

One of the interesting quotes from the discussion concerned the autofocus standard. The authors wanted to allow measurement of autofocus under conditions that simulate being held by hand – with the camera shaking and wobbling due to hand unsteadiness. In a formal testing situation, you need to simulate this with a robotic device that is programmed to shake the camera in the same manner as a human hand. Another expert said that it seemed weird to have this, rather than just using a tripod to hold the camera, since we already have a different standard for measuring imaging performance when hand-held. The author responded that (my paraphrasing): Almost 100% of photos taken are hand-held, so requiring a tripod for a performance test is somewhat perverse.

Another interesting concern that was raised came about because of the recent explosion in AI algorithms. Someone pointed out that we have standards for measuring image quality that work by having the camera take a photo of a standardised test chart, and then comparing the quality of the image to an ideal reproduction of the chart, noting where the image from the camera is degraded. This reflects the real world performance, since photos of scenes will be degraded in the same way. But someone pointed out that digital cameras are increasingly using image processing to improve image quality, and soon no doubt they’ll be using AI algorithms. And if an AI algorithm knows the standard test chart it can recognise when you try to take a photo of one… and output an image which is a perfect reproduction of the test chart. So when you take a photo of a test chart, the measured “camera performance” will be absolutely perfect, but this will not reflect the camera’s actual performance when photographing a scene.

This is something we actually have to think about, to try to design a performance test that can’t be cheated in this way. There are options, such as randomising the test charts or procedurally generating them, but this all requires very careful design and testing. So we have plenty of work ahead of us in the next few years!

Tonight while teaching my new ethics class on Exploration, there was a big thunderstorm. Lots of lightning and heavy rain and wind. We had 20 mm of rain in a couple of hours, and no doubt there’ll have been some flash flooding and probably some trees down across the city. No problem here, thankfully.

New content today:

Summer heat and storms

Yesterday was online board games night with my friends. We played a bunch of the usual games, and I did very badly at 7 Wonders and 6 Nimmt, but was on the winning team for Codenames. Before games, I went out for dinner at the local pizza place with my wife and Scully. I ordered one particular pizza, but got served a different one – but it was actually the second option that I was tossing up between, so it was no big deal and I just ate it.

In the morning I picked up grocery shopping. I order online for in-store pickup, so I can choose my own fresh fruit and vegetables. When I got home, I discovered that they’d packed two dozen eggs for me, when I was sure I’d ordered only one. But I checked the order history, and yeah, there were two dozen eggs listed. So I must have mis-clicked when assembling the order. Oh well, at least eggs last a long time, so we’ll use them all before they go off.

And then I had four ethics classes, which ate up most of the day. After the first one I picked up Scully from my wife’s work and we went to the Italian bakery for lunch. I had a slice of mushroom pizza (so pizza for lunch and dinner!), and they had a special flaky pastry which was filled with pistachio custard, strawberry jam, and chocolate. It was delicious.

Yesterday was hot and humid, and so was today. But we had relief this evening when a big thunderstorm front came through. We’re still in the tail end of, it with a lot of lightning and thunder, but the rain wasn’t particularly heavy. We did have very strong winds for a while – the evening news said winds up to 90 km/h had been recorded in some suburbs. A lot of places have had power outages, over 50,000 residences. Probably from downed trees.

I did 2.5k runs yesterday and today, as early in the morning as I could manage, but it was still warm and humid and my times were slow. And I’ve been working on comics, trying to build up some buffer because of the ISO Photography Standards meeting which I will be attending Monday-Wednesday this coming week. I’m attending virtually; it’s in Japan so it’s not too far from my time zone, and it’ll be running 7am to 3pm, although Monday I need to miss the final session to travel to university for the start of the Data Engineering course I’m tutoring. It’s going to be a very busy week!

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Thunder and rain

Today was all about the weather. We had intermittent heavy rainfall all day, with some very loud rolls of thunder at times. Some suburbs of Sydney received over 100 mm of rain in one hour this afternoon, and there was flash flooding in many places. It wasn’t so bad where I am, but it was definitely torrential for a while in the mid afternoon.

I did manage to take Scully for a couple of walks during lulls in the rain, when the sun even came out, just to make it steamy and humid.

Besides my ethics classes, I worked a bit on preparing for tomorrow’s Dungeons & Dragons game. I made an invitation graphic using the picture from the front of the Basic Set rulebook that we’ll be using.

Invitation

I also planned out the pizza menu for the dinner I’ll be cooking while the guys roll up their characters. Looking forward to it!

New content today:

… and very wet

The humidity that was oppressive yesterday has really peaked today, and the clouds burst early this evening. We had 60 mm of rain in just over 2 hours, and it’s still coming down, with more on the way.

My day was filled with ethics class activity – teaching 4 classes, and in between writing a new lesson plan for the week beginning tomorrow (I update topics on Tuesdays). The next topic for the 10-12 age group os “Games”. I wrote a long scenario involving three kids playing a board game, punctuated by questions at appropriate events in the game. Here’s the beginning:

Tegan, Josh, and Adele are playing a board game together. They roll dice and play cards and move pieces on the board, chatting and laughing while they play. Whenever the three of them get together, they like to spend some time playing a game like this. They’re playing a game where the goal is to win. Only one of them can win – the other two have to lose the game.

  • If you’re playing a game like this, is it okay to be competitive – to try your very hardest to beat your opponents and make them lose? Why or why not?
  • Generally, it’s considered to be good to be nice and generous to people. What makes it okay in a game to deliberately try and make your opponents lose?
  • What about the opposite: If you’re playing a competitive game, is it okay to not try to win? Why or why not?

Tonight I made pizza for dinner – well, my wife made the dough and I did the toppings and cooked it. We do this once every week or two, but I mention it tonight because it turned out extra delicious today, with the crust nice and thin and crispy. Or maybe I was just really hungry. 😄

New content today:

So humid…

It was a very warm, overcast, and mostly humid day. The humidity barely dipped below 70% for one official reading mid-afternoon, but fr the rest of the days it’s been hovering around the 80-95% range. It was 92% when I did my 2.5k run at 9am this morning. We’re supposed to get storms late this evening, and tomorrow is forecast for around 35 mm of rain.

I worked on comics today for both Darths & Droids and Irregular Webcomic! And a bit more stuff to prepare for running D&D in a couple of weeks. Before finishing the evening off with three ethics classes. I had the last class of the older students discussing The Meaning of Life, and that was fun.

New content today:

A pretty wet Sunday

It rained most of today. The forecast was up to 30 mm, but in the end we haven’t received that much, more like 10 mm. Although the day’s not over yet. So we didn’t go on a long walk with Scully, and she got slightly stir crazy this afternoon, but nothing to worry about.

Mostly I worked on writing a particularly difficult strip for Darths & Droids, discussing alternatives, consistency with previously published material, and things we needed to get done as part of our planned storyline. It took a lot of hacking and redrafting before we achieved something we were happy with. Sometimes strips just flow, but sometimes they take a lot of hard hammering into shape.

Not too much else to report…. not much happens on a rainy day.

New content today:

And that may be the end of summer…

After yesterday’s warmth (barely above 30°C for the first time in almost a year), we had storms and a cold change overnight. Today was chilly and wet. When I took Scully for a walk at lunch I almost felt like I needed a jacket, although by the time we got home I’d warmed up.

I did my first ethics class today for older kids on the topic of “How to rig an election”. We went through some gerrymandering as a sort of interactive game, and then I showed them some real electoral districts in the USA to see what they thought of them. It was really fun and I think the kids enjoyed it and learnt a lot about the sort of sneaky tricks that politicians get up to. I want to post some of the diagrams that I use in the class here and walk through them, but it’s already late this evening and I don’t have time, so I’ll try to do it maybe tomorrow.

This afternoon I caught up on work for ISO Photography standards. I need to clear out my mailbox of documents and scan through them from time to time, and also keep up to date with meeting news, as our next meeting is coming up in Tokyo in February. I’m not planning to travel there, so I need to be on top of the agenda scheduling to make sure I can attend the most important stuff by Zoom, in between all my other things.

New content today:

30°!

Sydney finally hit 30°C today, for the first time since 20 February last year. It’s been a very unusually cool year, but we finally seem to be getting some decent warm weather, albeit already halfway through summer.

I braved the heat to take Scully out for a lunch walk and get some fish & chips. She was completely pooped by the time we got home! I put ice cubes in her water bowl and she lapped it up greedily.

Tonight we’re having a storm front move through, which will cool things down considerably for tomorrow.

I don’t have too much else to report today. I made a Darths & Droids comic, and taught three ethics classes tonight. Oh, that’s right – I spent time making some extra slides to present to the kids during the class, to explain the differences between user-pays and socialised health care, which I was having some trouble getting across to the kids verbally yesterday. I think they helped a lot.

New content today: