This morning I worked on my report for the Photography Standards meeting I attended at the start of November. I finished it by lunch time and sent it off to Standards Australia. Next week we have a meeting where I will go through the report with various Australian experts from different institutions, universities, and so on. We’ll also be discussing hosting an international meeting in Sydney in October 2024. I’m hoping we can get that happening, as it would be good to have the international delegates come here again.
I had one more class on the ethics of teleportation today. This is a really fun class, because the kids are really being made to think about strange things that they’d never considered before. Today, of the four kids in the class, when I asked how teleportation would change the world, three of them thought of fairly obvious useful things, while one kid kept coming up with evil uses such as sending bombs, or weapons, or sneaking into secure places. Another kid said, “What if someone appears in your bathroom!!”
After that class I had some admin tasks to do on Outschool. I needed to post in all the classes that I’m taking some time off over Christmas, letting parents and students know the last class date for the year and when classes will resume in January. And then I sent messages to the parents of eight former students who were older/more mature, and invited them to enrol in my brand new class for January, Critical and Ethical Thinking for ages 13-15. I created a coupon for any returning students to use for a free first lesson.
I took Scully on a couple of walks, and I spent some time this afternoon going through and editing photos from my trip to Europe in June, adding some to my travel diary. I still have several more days’ worth of photos to edit from that trip. This was our hotel in Würzburg:
Oh, and today was the first day of summer here, but you’d hardly notice it, as it was chilly and overcast all day. The Bureau of Meteorology released a summary of the spring just ended, and it was unusually cold and wet. Sydney had almost double the average rainfall for the months August-October. In terms of average temperature, it was the coolest spring since 2003, and in terms of the maximum temperatures, it was the coldest spring on record – i.e. the lowest maximum temperatures ever recorded. This is the effects of a third La Niña in succession, combined with a negative Indian Ocean Dipole, which reinforces the cooler/wetter effects. They’re predicting our summer will be unusually cool and wet as well. For the third summer in a row.
New content today: