Today I gave my first second lecture of regular coursework for a university course, as I’ve mentioned preparing for over the last few days. The professor had an important meeting and asked me to give the lecture for him. I’ve done “guest lectures” before for this image processing course, during the project work period, on topics that weren’t strictly covered by the course, but this is the first second lecture I’ve done that was actual course material. (Edited after the professor reminded me I in fact did one last year!)
In the morning I did a couple of critical thinking classes. Then I had to get ready for the trip to the university. I would normally leave at 12:30 and walk Scully down to my wife’s work to drop off there and then catch a train in. But I ran out of some ingredients for my usual home lunch fixings (falafels and tortilla wraps), so I decided to walk up to the shops and get some sushi. I didn’t really have time to walk back home again so we went straight from there to my wife’s work and arrived a little early.
After dropping Scully off, I rode on the new Metro train from there in to the university. This train line only opened on Monday, and it’s a significant change from the style of train lines Sydney has always had. Our old train network is heavily interlinked, with many lines diverging and converging, so the train traffic has to be carefully regulated to avoid collisions between trains on different lines merging into one. The Metro is designed on the principle of a single line with no branches or merges, so the trains can run more frequently and faster while still being safe. From my place to Central Station (the closest station to the university) takes 16 minutes on the old line, but only 12 on the new Metro line.
Being a brand new rail line, the stations are gorgeous and clean, with impressive architecture. Here are some photos: Victoria Cross Station.
I arrived in good time for my lecture. It was about image processing operations like binary morphology, cross-correlation, segmentation, and so on. It’s material I know pretty well and the lecture went smoothly. I made sure to try and give context and motivation for every algorithm that I covered, and explain it in simple terms. Afterwards, a couple of students came up and told me they enjoyed the lecture and thought I explained things well. So that was good!
And another Metro photo: Central Station, on the way back home:
Tonight for dinner I made lemon pasta with broccolini, garlic, black pepper, and Parmigiano Reggiano. I used a fresh lemon that I picked up for free from a crate of lemons out the front of someone’s place. Presumably they have a lemon tree out the back and had ridiculous numbers of lemons so wanted to give them away. It was super juicy and the pasta turned out delicious.
I’d use fresh lemons more, but I always feel like paying $1 or whatever for a lemon from a supermarket is bad. It just fells like lemons are a thing that should be free.
New content today: