weather – Page 9 – dangermouse.net

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:

It’s not the rain, it’s the humidity

We had another 25 mm of rain today. But the worst thing is that the humidity hasn’t dropped below 90% all day (since 7pm last night), and was hovering around 99-100% for much of it. It’s not particularly warm (only 20°C maximum), but it feels stifling.

Before heading into the university for tonight’s tutorial session, I walked with Scully up to my wife’s work to drop Scully there, and by the time I arrived I was dripping with sweat, all my clothes clinging to my skin.

The tutorial session was a little short, as not many students showed up, and after answering a few questions from some of them, they drifted off early. So I could head home before it was too late. Earlier in the day I was mostly handling the morning ethics classes, the final ones on the Greed topic. Tomorrow I need to write the new lesson plan for Monsters!

In entertainment news, I’ve been watching the Fear Street trilogy on Netflix. It’s been in my “to watch” list for ages, and I finally decided I was in the mood for a slasher flick, so I watched the first one last week. There are a few slightly corny things (to be expected from a slasher film), but mostly I’m finding it to be fairly smart and well made. I’ve finished the second film in the trilogy and plan to start the final one tonight.

And I recently spoiled myself by getting the special 40th anniversary Call of Cthulhu Classic 2″ Deluxe Boxed Set (available here, scroll down). This is a reprint of the original boxed set rules from 1981, with five of the original adventures. A classic piece of roleplaying history – I couldn’t go past it. I’m looking forward to reading through all of this!

New content today:

Games night Friday, and humid Saturday

Last night was board games night with friends, so I didn’t have time to write a blog entry. Most of the guys happened to have other things on, so only three of us attended. But this gave us a chance to play a long game, without worrying about people showing up late or leaving early.

We played Arkham Horror. Three turned out to be a good number for this cooperative game, where we’re pitted together against the Cthulhoid forces of darkness.

I took an investigator role, while the others played the muscle, and the mystical. My main task was moving around the map board and working to ward off Doom as it slowly accumulated in various places, while the muscle guy intercepted the various Cthulhu mythos monsters that kept spawning and trying to hunt us down. The mystic was searching for clues and artefacts to help us. The scenario we played was protecting Innsmouth from an incursion of Deep Ones, manipulated by Dagon and Hydra behind the scenes. We had to uncover enough clues to work out how to summon the malign entities and then trust that we could defeat them with a combination of muscle and occult knowledge.

After 3.5 hours of play which became increasingly tense, we confronted the main horrors and beat them, only to discover that we couldn’t figure out what the winning condition of the game was. The owner of the game later told us that he’d missed a single card in the setup stages of the scenario – and that card happened to be the one informing us of the winning condition! But we’d satisfied its requirements and won the game, even if we were confused about it at the time. It was a tight-run thing – there were several decisions that could have led us to disaster along the way, so it felt like a sweet, hard-earned victory.

Besides the usual online classes, I spent time yesterday and today doing Darths & Droids writing and comic making. Oh, and I did some major housecleaning today, doing a long overdue thorough dusting of everything in the living room, polishing up the wooden furniture, and vacuuming floors.

The other main thing to talk about is, of course, the weather. We’ve had more intermittent rain, and the humidity this week has shot through the roof, hovering around 80-100% at different times of the day. Sydney has had 170 rainy days so far this year, today being the 295th day of the year. The annual mean is 99 rainy days. Since we broke the annual rainfall record back on 6 October, we’ve had more than 200 mm more rain. The forecast is for rain every day for at least the next week, with some really heavy rain tomorrow. There continue to be severe floods in rural areas.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Rain and mud

The weather wasn’t do bad today. We had a respite from the heavy rain.

I took Scully out for a drive for lunch, to go get some pies for me. We went to a place I discovered a few weeks ago, which has a nice park nearby where Scully could run around and get some exercise. Unfortunately I hadn’t counted on it being quite so muddy. I actually picked this place because it’s on top of a hill and I figured it would drain well. The edges of the grassy football field were a bit damp, but from there it looked like there was a slight rise to the centre of the pitch, so I figured that area would be drier, and set out with Scully in tow.

Big mistake. It may have been a little more elevated, but the grass wasn’t flat, but rather had a lot of bumps and hollows where water had pooled and turned the soil into mud. By the time I got halfway across the field it was clear the whole thing was just one huge bog. And now I had to get back out again without getting my shoes too wet, which was very difficult.

Scully was having fun running around though… spraying water behind her as she splashed through the mud.

When we got back to the car, I grabbed the dog towel from the boot and tried to wash her feet at a drinking station, but it was too fiddly holding the button down to operate the water flow and hold a wriggling Scully with only two hands. So I just wiped her clean as best I could, creating big muddy brown streaks on the towel, before loading her back in the car for the drive home.

At home I gave her an emergency foot and leg bath, rinsing all the mud off and drying her off before she could run around the house.

I worked on the usual comics and ethics classes today. This evening we went out for dinner, choosing to drive over to another suburb and park under cover instead of braving the walk up to the nearest shops in the rain that closed in late afternoon. We had galettes and crepes at our favourite French creperie. They had a special Black Forest dessert crepe, which I couldn’t pass up, being a big fan of Black Forest sweets.

New content today:

Rainfall record broken!

It’s been raining heavily here all day, and as of 1:10pm, Sydney officially broke therecord for wettest year in recorded history. The previous record was 2194 mm, set in 1950. The 1:10pm reading sent 2022’s total to 2199.8 mm (so the previous reading, at 1pm, would have been at least 5.8 mm less).

Here’s Scully after a 5 minute jaunt outside to do her toileting on the grass.

In other news, I did my income tax return today. (Australia files on fiscal years, so this is the for the July 2021-June 2022 year, and tax returns are due by the end of October.) My return was a bit complicated this year, because of income from various non-traditional-employment sources including Outschool teaching, selling print copies of my Irregular Webcomic! books, and selling photo art prints and greeting cards at market stalls and by Etsy, combined with all the various deductions for those things.

Overall it took me about 20 minutes to enter all the info and lodge the form online. It used to take quite a bit longer, but Australia streamlined its tax return system a few years ago. Now if you just have a regular job with a registered employer, you can basically be done in under 5 minutes.

One thing doing this reminded me about is setting up a sale on those Irregular Webcomic! books. After the Kickstarters, I had a couple of hundred extra copies printed, because they’re much cheaper in bulk, so I could sell them online. But after a couple of years the printing and distribution company (which is based in the USA) started charging me storage fees for the unsold books, so that’s been eating into my profits every year since. So I figured I should reduce the price and move them on sale. If this doesn’t reduce the stock enough, I’m going to have get them to just discard the remainder, as I don’t want to be paying fees in perpetuity for books I can’t sell (and shipping them all to me in Australia to store myself would be stupidly expensive). So… buy some books! They’ll make great gifts. 🙂

I also finished off my slides for the photography science presentation I’ll be doing for the university students. The lecturer decided it would be better if I do it on 17 October instead of 10, since the student’s first assignment is due this coming week, and they’ll probably have lots of questions and pay less attention to the lecture, whereas the week after they should be more attentive.

New content today:

More about Fun

Continuing my online classes on critically/ethically thinking about fun, there was another interesting thing that happened last night in the three classes I had. I asl this set of questions:

Is it okay to have fun playing a prank if the target person is upset by it?
Is it okay to play a prank if the target gets a laugh out of it too?
Is it okay to have fun with a prank if the target is neutral about it – they’re not upset at all, but they also don’t think it’s funny?

There seemed to be a bit of groupthink within each class, as within classes they were fairly consistent, but across the classes the answers all varied. Here’s what each group of kids said:

Class 1: It’s not okay to prank anyone if they are at all upset. It’s fine if they enjoy the prank. If they are neutral about it, it’s okay because at least you enjoyed it.
Class 2: It’s not okay to prank anyone if they are at all upset. It’s fine if they enjoy the prank. If they are neutral about it, it’s not okay because even though you enjoyed it, it was still at the expense of someone else (even if they weren’t upset by it).
Class 3: If the target is upset, but not too upset, it’s fine to prank them, because the total fun outweighs their small upset.

The most notable thing about today was the rain. The first day of forecast heavy rain arrived, and we have more ahead of us. I think we have a very high chance of setting a new annual rainfall record this week. Sydney’s highest ever recorded annual rainfall was 2194 mm, in 1950. Up to the end of September we’d recorded 2100.8 mm, plus another 11.2 mm in the first two days of October, taking it to 2112 mm, just 83 mm short of the record.

In the past 24 hours we’ve added another 30.2 mm, and it’s still raining solidly now. The forecast rain amounts for the next four days are: 15-20; 5-10; 30-40; 30-45. So even the low end of each day’s range will add another 80 mm, comfortably breaking the record. Watch this space.

New content today: