weather – Page 17 – dangermouse.net

Rainy rainy day

Today was very rainy and even colder than yesterday – max 20.4°C. I even had to wear a jacket when taking Scully out for a walk.

This morning I picked up my grocery order. Unfortunately there was a missing item when I got home. This has happened to me a few times since I started ordering groceries online. The supermarket has a nice website interface for reporting a missing item, and they simply refund you the price without needing any further verification. Which is nice, but I’ve now had to do it enough times that I’m starting to get worried that the supermarket will think I’m taking advantage of it and blackball me from claiming missing item refunds. Hopefully it’s something that happens enough to many people that they know my instances are within statistical likelihood bounds.

I had more ethics classes today, and tonight is online games night.

New content today:

Ethics for older kids

Today I had my first class of online ethics for older kids (ages 13-15). I just had one student, and it was a kid I’d taught earlier in the 10-12 class. He’d stopped taking lessons several months back, but I contacted his mother to let her know that I had a new class for more mature kids and thought he’d be a good fit, and she signed him up.

The first lesson is on “Crime and Punishment”. We talked a bit about crime and why people commit crimes, and then concentrated on the idea of punishment. Why do we punish criminals? Do we as a society need to punish crime? What punishments are fair/unfair? Should criminals be given a chance to rehabilitate, or to live a life after serving punishment without prejudice? And so on. He really enjoyed it I think, exercising his brain on more difficult questions and ideas than I’ve done in previous classes. So I think it went really well!

The other main thing about today was the weather took a turn for the colder and wetter. It was very wintery, with a top temperature of only 22°C, also accompanied by wind and showers. Didn’t stop me going for a 2.5k run though!

New content today:

Lunch in the city

Today was cold. Really cold for December in Sydney. The temperature didn’t even reach 20°C – it topped out at 19.9°C. It was also windy, and there were a few drizzly showers, so it felt even colder – the maximum “apparent temperature” was only 14.7°C. Don’t forget it’s summer here. We’re supposed to be having days over 30°C at this time of year. Today actually felt like the middle of winter.

Despite this, we had to venture out to the city for a birthday lunch for my brother-in-law. We took Scully in on the ferry. Here’s a shot I took as the ferry approached Circular Quay:

We disembarked and walked south through the streets to lunch. We passed through Martin Place, the central square in Sydney, where the city’s giant Christmas tree is:

Before heading to lunch we stopped off at Hyde Park so Scully could run on the grass a bit and do a toilet.

We also stopped off at a game shop to buy a copy of the second edition of Camel Up, that I’d ordered from them a couple of weeks ago.

While we were in there, a woman and her daughter, about 12 years old, came in and the mother was asking the staff for assistance with buying some Magic: the Gathering cards for the daughter, who wanted to start playing the game with her friends. The staff gave some advice about various decks they could buy. After the staff had finished the mother and daughter browsed around a bit and I approached and said I’d overheard that the girl wanted to start playing Magic, and I said I had an old collection with hundreds of old common cards that weren’t worth my while trying to sell, so I could let her have them for free. The woman was extremely grateful and I gave her my email address so she can contact me to arrange to pick them up some time. I was happy to help, especially for a young girl who wants to get into the game.

We had lunch at a French place, sitting outside because of Scully. Although we were under an awning, the drizzle got us a bit wet, and it was very cold in the wind. The food was good – I had a burger and chips, and then waffles and hot chocolate for dessert, which were both really good.

After lunch we walked back to Circular Quay to catch the ferry home again. Scully had a fun day out, walking through the city and riding the ferry. This evening she’s completely exhausted!

New content today:

Dentist day

Yes, today was a trip to the dentist. A regular clean and check-up. I mentioned an issue I’ve been having with food getting stuck between two molars, and the hygienist had a look and said, “Oh, yeah, one of your fillings is chipped.” The dentist had a look and said he’d have to fix the filling. So I’m booked to go back on Monday morning next week to have that done.

Before the appointment this morning I did a 2.5k run. And afterwards I took a walk with my wife and Scully to the Italian bakery, where I spoilt myself with a slice of their delicious ricotta cheesecake, as a reward for going to the dentist.

It was chilly today. The weather is truly bizarre at the moment. It should be hot in December, being summer here, but it was only 24°C in Sydney today, and it felt colder because of the wind. Tomorrow is forecast to be cooler and a lot windier. There’s been snow in the Snowy Mountains, which is extremely unusual at this time of year. There was a news story tonight saying this has been the coldest first two weeks of December ever recorded. And the next week’s forecast is 22°C almost every day, dropping to 21°C on Sunday. It’s really really weird. I wonder if it will warm up for Christmas. It really doesn’t feel like Christmas unless it’s approaching 40°C.

New content today:

A warm, stormy Sunday

The Bureau of Meteorology forecast 28°C and late afternoon thunderstorms today, and they were pretty spot on. It was warm and humid, though very cloudy all day, with odd patches of sun poking through occasionally. And then multiple lines of intense thunderstorms came through from the west in the early evening. I was in the middle of teaching a Zoom class when the first one hit, and I had to interrupt and tell the kids to wait half a minute while I raced around the house closing the windows to avoid rain coming in. The thunder was pretty intense too.

And coincidentally I taught my science class on weather tonight too, while it was storming outside.

The other main thing I did today was finish off assembling and writing annotations for that latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips.

New content today:

Power line clearing

After two morning online classes, I went out for a short walk with Scully around midday. We passed a work crew still clearing off the tree branch that had fallen onto the power lines during the high winds yesterday.

The wind was very strong again today. Checking the weather records, it was even stronger than yesterday. It was absolutely miserable being outside on the short excursions that I took to give Scully some outdoor time, and I rushed home and indoors again as fast as possible. Fortunately the forecast is for milder conditions tomorrow.

This afternoon I worked on assembling some Irregular Webcomic! strips from the photos I took last week. And did two more online classes. I have four now on Mondays, so it’s pretty busy. I finished up the topic on Generalisation, which I think turned out to be a pretty good one.

New content today:

Final marking of projects

More image processing marking today…

I powered through the second half of the student report sand videos and assigned marks for them all. Then I had to spend a half hour or so pasting all my comments and entering the marks into the university’s grading system. Although the students work in teams and I only had 7 teams to mark, I have to paste all the comments individually into each student from each team, so it’s a huge amount of copy-pasting. Then I mailed the professor to say I’d done, and to pass on some comments for specific students that he may want to investigate further to adjust marks if he deems it necessary.

I finished all this… about 9:30pm, following my two usual Sunday evening ethics classes. So it’s been an exhausting day.

Oh, it was also very windy today. Gusts reached 85 km/h in Sydney. I had the windows open for fresh air, but closed them halfway through the day because it was so tiring listening to the wind. I went out for a 2.5k run at 6pm, and I saw this:

The wind had broken a branch off a huge liquidambar tree, and the branch had fallen onto the power lines. The leafy end of the branch is tangled in the power lines as you can see, while the bottom end is on the ground. I kept my distance and reported it to the electrical grid authority, who dispatched an emergency response crew right away to deal with it.

New content today:

Count my ethics classes… 1… 2… 3… 4… ah ah ah!

I’ve had three online ethics classes for kids on Monday morning for ages. (Well, morning-ish. Because of daylight saving changes I shift these classes two hours later in my summer, so that they are the same time for students in the USA and Canada, who form the majority of the kids in classes that are early for me, since that corresponds with afternoon/evening in America. Anyway, in winter I had the classes at 8, 9, and 11am. Now that we’re on summer time and the US has gone off daylight saving time, the same classes are now at 10, 11am, and 1pm for me.)

But one (Australian) student’s parent asked if they could move from a Friday class to Monday to better suit their schedule. Last week I had the kid in the 1pm class, but the parent was hoping for one later than that. So I created a new class at 4pm, which I ran for this student for the first time today. It’s the first time I’ve had four online classes in one day. Hopefully I don’t find it too busy!

I’ve also had the thought to start up a new class, for kids aged 13-15, rather than the current 10-12 age range. I have a few kids who are 13 and noticeably more mature than many of the others, and it might be good to move them to a more advanced class. I have some topics in my ideas list that I’ve avoided so far as they’re probably a bit too complex for 10-12 year olds, but might work well with a slightly older group.

On the weather front, we had 37 mm of rain overnight, almost all of it between 1 and 3am. The noise of it woke me up and it was really heavy for a while. It had stopped by sunrise though, and the day was warm and sunny… and humid.

The flood emergency in central New South Wales continues to get worse. The floods began 62 days ago now, and the Commonwealth Government declared it a natural disaster today. State Emergency Services has requested help from New Zealand, and emergency personnel from there will be arriving tomorrow to assist. This is the first time in history that international assistance has been requested for any emergency other than bushfires, and we’ve also requested assistance from Singapore and the USA. Here’s a news article if you want to see some photos or read more.

New content today:

A discussion of rain forecasts

I didn’t post an entry yesterday because my evening was full of three ethics classes, followed by me very quickly heading to bed so that I could get as much sleep as possible before getting up at 3:50am for the beginning of my ISO Standards meeting this morning.

First up though, I mentioned a while ago about how the Bureau of Meteorology recently changed the way they quote rain forecasts. The new example I gave there was the mathematically bizarre/useless forecast:

50% chance of at least 0 mm of rain.

Well, that’s not all of the mathematical weirdness. A few days back I saw this in my official BoM app and took a screenshot:

rain forecast screenshot

In text, that says:

75% (high) chance of no rain.
50% (medium) chance of at least 1 mm.
25% (low) chance of at least 2 mm.

Now… if there’s 75% chance of no rain, but 50% chance of at least 1 mm… that’s 125%, right. Probabilities do not work that way! Then a few days later my friends and I had this discussion on our Discord chat, where one of my friends attempted to explain – to the best of his understanding – what the actual heck the BoM is trying to say:

forecast discussion

We are smart people, with degrees in maths and science, and we can barely figure out what the BoM is actually trying to say with their new style of rainfall forecasts. The old style was perfectly fine, yet they gave the reason for changing to the new style that the old one was “too confusing”. Yeeesh. 🙄

Anyway, on to today’s activities. Got up at 3:50am as I mentioned, and fired up Webex for my Photography Standards meeting. The first part was administrative stuff, and in future meeting planning I talked about the possibility of hosting a meeting here in Sydney in October 2024. I’d really love it if I can get that organised and happening, as the previously planned meeting for Sydney in 2019 was shifted to Germany at the last minute due to a travel clash with another conference that many of the delegates wanted to attend in Europe (they didn’t want to have to fly from Australia directly to Europe for some reason – I dunno… it’s only 24-25 hours travel time. Wimps.).

Then we discussed technical projects, including the adoption of Adobe’s DNG image file format as an ISO standard (which was reported publicly back in 2018 – these things move slowly sometimes); measuring performance of non-optical image stabilisation methods; and defining high dynamic range and wide colour gamut still image file formats.

After the meeting ended at 11:30am my time, I walked to my wife’s work to pick up Scully, as she’d taken her to work this morning so everyone in her (wife’s) new office could meet her (Scully). I had some lunch nearby and then Scully and I walked home via a roundabout route to get some extra steps in.

For dinner tonight I made mushroom and spinach omelettes. My wife’s turned out perfectly, but I didn’t get a photo of it before she ate it. Mine folded a little messily:

New content yesterday:

New content today:

A drenching

One more online class on Monsters this morning.

The morning was warm and sunny. I had some lunch and then went to take Scully out for a walk. I looked outside… yep, very sunny. I smothered myself in sunscreen to ward off the ultraviolet rays. Took Scully and we set off on one of our loop walks that takes about an hour, with time for some ball chasing at the park down by the water.

We got about a quarter of the way and the clouds closed in thick and very very fast. It started raining. It looked like it could be a serious storm. And I’d left most of the windows at home wide open. If the wind blew from the wrong direction, we could have arrived home to a sodden bedroom or living room. The rain got heavier and the wind picked up.

I aborted the walk and we took a shortcut home as fast as practicable. Which wasn’t all that fast, as part of it was up a steep slope. Scully got soaked. I got soaked. I dreaded getting home and finding the bed and the carpet soaking wet.

By the time we made it home… the sun was out again! We got in and I rushed to check the windows. We were very lucky. Open windows facing two different directions had not a drop on them. I’d left a window facing a third direction closed, and that window was soaked on the outside. I dried Scully off with a towel. I did a complete change of clothes, drying myself with a towel as well, and hanging up the wet clothes to dry.

And then the entire afternoon was hot and sunny again. We’d somehow chosen the exact 10 minutes that the weather turned into a stormy downpour to be out walking around, not expecting it.

Speaking of weather, our Bureau of Meteorology a short time back changed the way they format rain forecasts, to make them “simpler and easier to understand”. We used to get rain forecasts that looked like “1 to 3 mm of rain”. They thought this was “confusing” because it was a probability band corresponding to 1st and 9th deciles or something, so you could in fact possibly get more than 3 mm of rain. To avoid this “misleading” information, now we get a set of explicit probabilities, and today’s included this:

50% chance of at least 0 mm of rain.

Seriously. Much more useful. 🙄

Tonight for dinner I wanted to use up some mushrooms that I’d bought, but wasn’t feeling inspired. I didn’t want to make risotto, which would be the usual thing to make to use up mushrooms. So I searched for mushroom recipes, and I found this one for mushroom and caramelised onion quesadillas. I had everything except the rocket leaves, so I took Scully out for her evening walk past the nearest supermarket and grabbed some, and then cooked it up when I got home. Turned out good!

New content today: