weather – Page 2 – dangermouse.net

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.

Last blast of summer?

Yeah, it’s getting close to winter, but today was very warm, getting to 27°C across much of Sydney, compared to the mean May maximum of 19.5°C. The next week is expected to be cooler, around 21°C, so today might be the final heat of another long summer.

I took Scully on a few walks today. First thing in the morning we ran into a couple who live around the block and their dog Monty, who gets along really well with Scully. They played a bit and enjoyed walking together as we were heading in the same direction. And then at lunch when I took Scully for a walk up t the local shops, we ran into Monty (and one owner) again on the way back. They had a bit of a run around, hopefully tiring them out a bit for tonight! And then before my ethics classes started tonight I took Scully out again, though we didn’t run into Monty a third time.

I planned ahead for a future ethics topic, on Names. And I made another Darths & Droids comic.

I also started reading a new Asterix book which I borrowed from the local library, Asterix and the White Iris. This is the newest Asterix book, released in 2023. I always enjoyed Asterix when I was growing up, but I had no idea I’d still be able to read brand new stories in 2025! There are a few of the intermediate books that I still haven’t read yet. I’ll be keeping an eye out for them in the library, but they are always popular and often out on loan.

Feels like winter!

Last week everyone here was complaining how it seemed like summer just wouldn’t quit, and gee wouldn’t it be nice to have a night where the minimum temperature falls below 20°C for once, and why is it still so hot most of the way through autumn. And then yesterday and today the cold hit like a brick wall. The week of rain we’e had has slammed temperatures down and where last week we were going around in shorts and T-shirts, now we’re pulling out the winter gear and rugging up in long pants, jackets, and wearing slippers inside to keep our feet warm.

However apparently it won’t last, because the rain is forecast to clear up over this weekend and next week we’ll be back up to 26°C days again.

Today while huddling inside and trying to stay warm, I taught some ethics classes, and in between did some comics stuff and processed some photos from my Japan trip back in February. While doing this I normally would put the radio on, but lately it’s been full of election campaign ads, so I decided to play some music from my collection, and I threw on the Howard Shore soundtracks from the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies. And while listening to them I realised just how utterly depressing I find everything to do with Lord of the Rings.

I mean the fact that Frodo is so scarred by the experience and seems to have PTSD, and can’t talk to his friends any more, and decides to go off and exile with the elves in their overseas Land of Perpetual Lamentation. It’s not a standard happy ending, and I respect that, it’s just that it makes me depressed and not want to reread the books/rewatch the movies. As much as I like the story, the ending makes it kind of sour for me.

Anyway. On a happier note, here’s a photo of some sakura (cherry blossoms) I took in Japan in February.

Ethics of automated AI summaries of ethics lessons

The weather here has been showery for the past several days. Intermittent sunshine, with occasional heavy showers passing across and vanishing within half an hour or so. But it looks like the showers will get more frequent and intense as we head into the weekend, with up to 100 mm of rain forecast. So that should be interesting.

It’s another long weekend, with tomorrow (Friday) being Anzac Day, another public holiday where the supermarkets are closed, so I can’t do my regular Friday morning weekly shopping for the second week in a row.

And in other news, I discovered today that Outschool is producing automated AI summaries of each of my lessons and sending them to enrolled parents after each class. I don’t recall being informed of this new feature (but it’s possible I missed it in one of the teacher newsletters that Outschool sends out periodically). Importantly, I can’t find any teacher settings to control this feature—there’s no way to disable it. I was a little puzzled as to how it was generating the summary, because when I clicked out of curiosity on the link that I’d never noticed before that said “View the AI class summary”, it showed me the following:

The teacher led a discussion about Antarctica, exploring reasons why people might want to visit or explore the continent, as well as potential challenges and risks they would face. The class considered the benefits and drawbacks of allowing countries to claim or mine parts of Antarctica, and whether it would be acceptable for people to live there in the future if global warming made the continent more habitable. The teacher provided context about Antarctica’s unique environment, the history of exploration, and the current Antarctic Treaty that regulates activities there. The class also discussed the role of science and research in Antarctica, and the potential impacts of tourism. Overall, the session focused on critical thinking about the complex issues surrounding the use and preservation of this remote and harsh continent.

This is more and more detailed information than I include in the class description text for this week’s topic. So I went back to the class that I taught an hour earlier, and it listed the following summary:

The teacher introduced the topic of Antarctica, discussing its geography, climate, and wildlife. The class explored why people might want to visit or explore Antarctica, considering both the benefits and risks, such as the extreme cold, lack of food and resources, and hazardous terrain. The teacher presented information about the history of Antarctic exploration and the current system of claims and treaties governing the continent. The class also considered the potential environmental impact of activities like mining and tourism in Antarctica. Throughout the discussion, the teacher facilitated dialogue with the students, asking questions to elicit their thoughts and perspectives on the various issues surrounding Antarctica.

Similar in content, but very different in wording. After discussing with some friends in our Discord chat, we’ve concluded it must be an automated transcript of the voice from the Zoom meeting, then fed through an AI summariser. I’m sceptical of the value of AI for many things, but in this specific application I think it’s done a reasonable job of accurately describing the class content. So I don’t actually mind it so much, as it does help to keep the parents informed of what their kids are learning. But I would like the opportunity to configure or disable it in settings if I wanted to.

On the bright side, I suppose if parents are getting these AI summaries for every single class their kids are enrolled in, hopefully they won’t be reading them all super carefully and critically.

I wonder how likely it is that one of these summaries might include some of the small-talk chat that I engage in with the kids while we wait for later arrivals to join the Zoom call. It’d be bad if the summary included something like: “The teacher asked about the pet puppy of one student and how its toilet training was going.” 🤭

Roti pies and German smallgoods

After breakfast this morning I went for a 5k run.It was a bit warmer and more humid than last Saturday, but I ran a similar time, so I’m happy with that. Although I was pushing hard and thought I’d done a bit better than that.

We made a special expedition for lunch today, driving all the way to Narrabeen, in the northern beaches region of Sydney, to try a new place that has really good reviews for their pies: Roti Pies.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it turns out the pies are pretty much exactly that. The crust is made just like Indian roti, and the fillings are all various Indian curries. My wife tried the cauliflower & chick pea korma pie, while I had a butter chicken pie and a lamb achari pie. They were really delicious, and the unusual roti pie crust was amazing with the spicy and juicy fillings. They leaked a bit, and it was a bit messy, but we sat at one of the outdoor tables there and had plates to catch it all, so it was fine.

After this, we went two doors down to a gelato shop and I had scoops of apple pie and coconut, cherry, chocolate gelato. I ate it as we crossed the road to walk along the grassy patch by the lagoon there, which was nice, and gave Scully a chance to walk on the grass a bit.

On the way back to the car we passed Brot & Wurst, a German smallgoods and grocery shop. We browsed around all of the cool stuff and bought a few things: German mustard, pfeffernusse gingerbread, stroopwafels, and a bottle of gluhwein syrup for mixing with red wine to make gluhwein. That should be nice with winter on the way!

Speaking of which, the weather still seems warm, with temperatures around 26-28°C during the day still. But there are signs of autumn, with the London plane trees lining many streets starting to go brown. The Bureau of Meteorology has released the long range winter forecast, predicting it will be another very warm winter, following on the last two which were the warmest two winters on record for Sydney. This one is likely to be similar again.

For dinner tonight I made calzones: one mushroom and one spinach, which I split and my wife and I had one half of each, with a basil and oregano tomato sauce that I whipped up.