Daily update – Page 187 – dangermouse.net

Proof 33/100 – almost a third done!

I finished off the next Proof that the Earth is a Globe, and have just posted it. It’s one of the more basic ones in my list, but it took a long time to write and make the diagrams for. And there’s a surprising corollary at the end of it. I completed it several hours ago, but wanted to wait until after dinner to post it.

My wife and I went out for pizza tonight at our favourite pizza place, a 15 minute walk or so from where we live. It’s a little suburban place run by a guy and his wife from Lipari, in the Aeolian Islands of Italy. He always greets us in Italian as we arrive, and she has a chat with us in between serving tables. They have checked tablecloths, and photos of Italy on the walls, and a giant poster of Sophia Loren eating a bowl of spaghetti on one wall. We’ve been going here for years, and always go back because the food is good and the atmosphere is casual and friendly – it feels like visiting relatives, not a restaurant.

Anyway, when you see the post, you’ll understand why I wanted to wait until after dinner to post it.

New content today:

Ballet Friday

I’m queuing this post up early for automatic publication because I’ll be out late tonight. For our wedding anniversary I got my wife tickets to the Australian Ballet’s production of Sylvia, which is on at the Sydney Opera House. So that’s where we’re going tonight. This is one of the more obscure and rarely performed ballets, so it should be interesting.

It’s a 12 minute train trip and 15 minute walk away from where I live, which is easier and more convenient than battling traffic by driving. Normally we’d eat dinner out somewhere near the Opera House, but our neighbours are minding Scully and they don’t get home from work until late-ish, so we can’t leave early enough to squeeze in dinner.

Otherwise, today I’ve been working on writing a new proof for 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe. Unfortunately it’s not finished yet, so it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Oh, and processing some more photos from May’s trip to Portugal.

New content today:

Fitness Thursday

I’ve been busy every morning this week so far, so today was the first real chance to go for a run. I did my now usual 5k run route, from home up* to the nearest sports oval, and then laps until I reach the 5k mark.

* Literally up. From my place to the oval is an elevation rise of 40 metres. There are stairs.

I tried to beat my previous best effort, by doing longer running segments and fewer walking segments, and I succeeded, with a time of 5:49 per km, beating my previous best of 5:52. (i.e. 29:05 for the 5k, versus 29:20.) One annoying thing I discovered with my new phone is that it’s impossible to unlock it while running. My previous phone had fingerprint unlock, which worked fine, but the new one has face ID, which I could not get to work while running – I presume because it needs your face to be relatively still, not bouncing around all over the place. And forget trying to type my password while running, without my reading glasses. So I couldn’t get lap times or anything, and had to wait until I’d completed the run and stopped before I could unlock my phone and stop the timer.

For lunch I went out to the fish & chip shop, but this time I decided to try one of their burgers rather than seafood and chips. I got the basic beef burger, which of course comes with tomato, lettuce, fried onions, and sliced beetroot. It was good! I’ll have to get burgers from there more often.

To eat I went to my favourite lunch spot, about which I previously wrote about someone illegally poisoning the trees. The shade trees are now even more dead looking, and throwing essentially zero shade on the seats. I sought a shady spot down the slope, sitting on the grass under a large gum tree, where the view isn’t as good as this:

To head home, I decided not to walk along the streets, but to take the bushwalk route along the creek. It’s a steep set of carved sandstone steps down from the lookout point to sea level, where you walk along a mangrove swamp for a bit, before heading inland and uphill, following the creek gully.

It’s a 1 kilometre walk up the creek back to my home, and was very pleasant being in the deep shade of the forested gully, rather than the hot and sunny streets. I really like having areas, albeit small, that look like wilderness so close to home.

This afternoon, Scully had her first exam to qualify as a Delta therapy dog. My wife organised this to see if we can volunteer with Scully to visit hospitals and so on, to let patients interact with a dog to help brighten their day. The Delta Society is a volunteer organisation that does this. They have pretty strict requirements on the dogs, so we have to go through a bunch of tests. Today was the physical exam by the vet, which Scully passed with flying colours. On Sunday we do a 15-minute interview during which they test Scully for obedience, calmness, and ability to be handled by strangers without reacting adversely. We don’t know if she’ll pass that one, but we don’t think there’s any obvious issue that will instantly rule her out. It’s going to be a matter of degree and how strict they are. We have our fingers crossed.

New content today:

Ethics and Discord

Today was Ethics teaching day. I walked to the school, thankful for the cooler weather after yesterday’s heat. I was the first scripture/ethics teacher to arrive today, as I often am – I like to get there early to set the classroom up with the chairs in a circle. As I signed in, I decided to count how many classes there were for each of ethics and the various religions.

When I started teaching Ethics here in early 2017, there were only 3 Ethics classes. We’ve expanded to 7, which is now the same number as Anglican and Catholic. That’s pretty good! Good to see that plenty of parents are aware of the secular option and are electing to put their kids into it.

In the class today we started a new topic: Is it okay to kill animals for food? The first lesson was basically just introducing the topic and then asking the kids to come up with as many reasons as they could think of for both sides of the argument. Next week we’ll start discussing which reasons might be better or worse than others.

This afternoon I spent some time polishing off the slideshow for the Science Club presentation at the other school, where I went on Monday and Tuesday. I calculated the size of the Earth using the data the kids have been collecting since May, measuring the length of a vertical stick’s shadow. We got a value of 40574 km for the diameter, not too far from the true value of 40008 km for the polar diameter.

Also since yesterday I’ve been reconfiguring my Discord server that I’ve been using as a Patreon reward for high-level patrons. A few people in the Irregular Webcomic! forums asked me about having some sort of Discord server so that followers of my various works could hang out and discuss things. I realised that rather than start a new server, I could just reconfigure the existing one, creating a set of restricted access channels for Patreon patrons, and public channels for anyone who wanted to join and chat with fellow fans of my stuff.

So what this means it that anyone who’s interested can now join the server! Here’s an invite link, just click and you can connect to the Discord chat. I hope to see some more of you there!

And also! I was editing some typos in Planet of Hats transcripts, when I realised that I have the images at high resolution (for a possible future book printing, if anyone would buy it). Which means I can set up the web pages with hig-res images for people with high-res monitors. A quick Photoshop macro and a multi-file search and replace later, and all the strips are now double resolution. Check them out! (if you have a high-res monitor)

New content today:

Fire day

The main thing about today was not anything I did, but the weather and the resulting fires across the Eastern parts of Australia. We’ve had out-of-control bushfires burning in various parts of New South Wales and Queensland since the weekend, and today’s weather was very hot and windy. The combination resulted in declarations of (a) total fire bans across all of NSW and Queensland, (b) “catastrophic” fire conditions in the Sydney and surrounding regions – the first time this warning level has ever been issued for Sydney, and (c) an official state of emergency in NSW from today, for the next seven days.

Over the past few days, several hundred homes have been destroyed by fire, and a handful of people have been killed by the fires. We expected the worst today, as temperature rose to 37°C in Sydney, and hotter in some rural areas, with very low humidity and high winds. Throughout the day as the temperature climbed, I kept up with the news, hoping not to hear of further tragedies.

While this was happening, I spent the morning back at the school I went to yesterday, working with a couple of the kids in the Science Club, to prepare a short slideshow presentation of the work we’ve been doing all year. The older kids in the Science Club are going to present the experiments we’ve been doing to the whole school at an assembly in a couple of weeks. They have a 15 minute slot, so I made sure to keep things tight, and helped them write a script to read from.

I was home around lunch time, and then began work on getting a result from our solar shadow measuring experiment, that the kids have been working on since May – recording the length of a shadow each day as the sun moves.

Later I went out with my wife and Scully to the pet shop, for some exercise, since it was a much cooler option that going to the park. We walked over to the hardware store as well, and a couple of other places nearby to buy a few odds and ends. Scully enjoys going to the pet shop, as there are so many interesting things to smell. But she was getting restless again early this evening, so I braved the heat and took her to the nearest park to chase a ball around for a while until she got exhausted. While we did this, I could see the smoke from the bushfires around Sydney drifting across the sky.

(This photo was walking home, not at the park.)

New content today:

School science visit

Today was my visit to the primary school where I talk to the kids about science stuff. I had three separate session with kindergarten, Year 1, and Year 2. As mentioned on Saturday, I presented a talk on dinosaurs for the K and 1 kids. I included a bunch of photos of fossils with feathers, and showed them what feathered dinosaurs look like. The conclusion was that only some of the dinosaurs died out a long time ago, but some of them – the birds – never died out at all, and are still around us today. They really enjoyed it, so that was good.

With the Year 2 class I did a general Q&A. Some of the questions they asked included:

Where did the Earth’s water come from?
Why did the dinosaurs die out?
Where did humans come from?
Why isn’t Pluto a planet any more?
How do you make a black hole?
Does the Earth run on coal? – I talked a bit about what coal is, and how it’s used to make electricity, and how it adds carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and how this is a bad thing because it’s causing climate change, but how hard it is to stop using it because people need the electricity.
How do potions work? – This was fun. I talked a little bit about how potions are fictional and don’t really work like in books and movies, and also a bit about alchemy and how alchemists used to believe they could make magical potions. By mixing things together and learning how they worked, they actually invented the science of chemistry instead.

Besides these three large groups, I also had Science Club with the group of 13 students I’ve been working with all year. It’s really quite a strange thing to be left in charge of 13 kids aged 7 to 10, with no other supervision, and be allowed to do science experiments with them (not on them!). Today I brewed up a pH indicator liquid by mixing hot water and shredded red cabbage. Within half an hour (during which I went over the results of our previous laser experiment), we had a rich purple liquid strained off. I gave each child a plastic cup and one of the chemicals I’d brought in. Then we added the cabbage liquid to each and watched them change colours:

From left to right around the table, the kids had: baking soda, soda water, white wine, bleach, apple juice, cream of tartar, lemonade (i.e. Sprite/7-Up for the Americans), vinegar, lemon juice, and ammonia solution. The bleach and ammonia I gave to the oldest kids, and made them wear rubber gloves for safety. And you can see the different colours they produced. Here’s a shot with them arranged in order of pH:

After establishing a sequence of colours for the chemicals, we tried mixing some of them. Adding baking soda to the vinegar made it (1) fizz up, (2) change colour, becoming a deep blue-purple. We mixed a few other things together, and the kids tried to predict the resulting colours (without much success). We established that mixing acids and bases tends to neutralise the result, making it closer to the original neutral purple colour. I made absolutely sure we didn’t mix the ammonia and bleach – I didn’t want to be generating chlorine gas!

This pretty much took up my whole day, as it took a while to drive home in the late afternoon traffic. And I was exhausted! I don’t know how school teachers do this every single day!

New content today:

Le Marché Français

Today was a family Sunday! My wife heard about a French market day being held at a school ground in a suburb not far from us, so we drove over with Scully to check it out. It was way busier than we’d expected!

We were lucky to get a parking spot within two blocks in the normally quiet back streets, which were absolutely chocka with cars. Fortuitously we spotted my wife’s sister and mother arriving as well – we’d planned to meet up here at the market, but it would have been tricky with the crowd, so it was fortunate that we happened to run into one another right after finding parking spots. There were dozens of stalls selling all manner of things with a French theme, and also dozens of food tents and trucks selling crepes, raclettes, pomme frites, gateaux, cheeses, baguettes, pastries, sausages, and all sorts of other French food. And there were also several portable amusement park rides for the kids, including slides, merry-go-rounds, and even a dodgem-car pavilion. All this was set up on the school’s playing fields.

Scully had a good time exploring and sniffing everything.

And I found these amazing eclairs (L-R: Salted caramel and peanut; mango, lemon, and raspberry; guava and banana custard; and pistachio and blueberry):

They were as delicious as they look!

After spending a good chunk of the day at the market, I spent some of the afternoon cleaning the bathroom again. Not a regular weekly clean, but I finally got around to scraping the excess plaster and paint off the wall tiles. It’s been there for decades, and slowly getting discoloured and more noticeable, so I took a knife to the walls and spent an hour or so scraping them clean. It looks so much better now.

And I went grocery shopping. Mostly for supplies for tomorrow’s Science Club experiment at the school. But I’ll describe that tomorrow after we’ve done it!

New content today:

Science Saturday

Besides the usual bathroom cleaning, I dedicated much of today to Science! I finished writing that 100 Proofs article I’ve been mentioning.

And I planned out what I’ll be doing with the school children on my next STEM Professionals in Schools visit on Monday. I wanted to do a Q&A session with all the classes, because it’s minimal preparation for me, but my contact said the kindergarten and Year 1 teachers requested me to do a presentation, because their kids are too young to be able to come up with sensible and meaningful questions. [It’s true – last time they got fixated on asking me “how many X are there?”, for X=(cats, animals, fish, bones, trees, etc).] SO I went through my old slides and found one I did on dinosaurs 5 years ago – so none of the younger kids will have seen that one. I refreshed myself on what was in the slides so I can talk about it on Monday.

And for Science Club I planned a new experiment. We’re going to make pH indicator using red cabbage, and then test various household chemicals. The usual suspects like lemon juice, vinegar, baking soda, etc. Which meant I had to draw up a shopping list. I’ll have to go shopping tomorrow for everything I need.

Oh, and I spent a bunch of time making tomorrow night’s Darths & Droids strip, following the writing session yesterday.

And now, it’s late… time for bed!

New content today:

Games night!

Late update, because last night was fortnightly games night with friends. I took my new games acquired at Spiel in Essen, and we played Walking in Burano:

And Deep Blue:

Burano was a hit. Deep Blue I think we need to play a few more games of, and with more players. We had four players for Burano, which was great, but two more people arrived after that, and Deep Blue only supports up to five, so we split into two groups of three. The box says Deep Blue plays in 45 minutes, but we took almost 2 hours to play the first game. It’ll speed up as we become more familiar with the rules and strategies, but my feeling is that more interaction with more players will be better as well.

We also played a new game that AS brought, The Quacks of Quedlinburg, a magic potion brewing game which was a lot of fun:

Earlier in the day I wrote a few scripts for Darths & Droids, hoping to be able to go through them with the guys before games started. But AS was hosting, and it’s difficult to do at his place since he doesn’t get home from work until later, and by then everyone just wants to get started on the games. So we’re going to review the strips over online chat this weekend – hopefully in time for Sunday’s new one to be published!

Doing that, and other stuff, meant i didn’t have time to complete that 100 Proofs entry I started on Thursday. Maybe today??

New content today:

Running and phoning

This morning I went for another 5k run. I skipped last week due to being overseas, and I’m still getting over a back strain I sustained during the trip. I’m setting this up as an excuse, because I didn’t manage to best my previous time. This time I averaged 6:13 per kilometre, which is my second fastest time. Hopefully next week I can improve again!

After getting back home and cooling off, I set out to a shopping centre a few stops away by train to pick up a new phone. It turns out the latest release of iOS is no longer supported by my old iPhone, with the result that when I upgraded my desktop machine some apps got broken and no longer synch between phone and desktop. This was kind of unsupportable as I use those apps frequently for things like shopping lists and keeping appointments. So I decided to bite the bullet and get a new phone.

One advantage is that the camera technology has improved a lot over my old phone. And for someone like me who takes a lot of photos, and enjoys the technical side of photography, that’s a substantial positive change. I experimented with it a lot this afternoon, and here’s one of the photos, taken while out walking Scully on the path we take by the harbour:

For lunch today I had leftover ratatouille that I cooked for dinner last night. There was some drama while cooking it, as I’d added all but one of the ingredients and the dish was basically 90% done, when I discovered we had no tomato paste in the pantry. I had to get my wife to watch the stove while I raced out to the grocery store to buy some. I tracked the walk on my phone, and it was almost 3 kilometres and took over 20 minutes. I wonder if other people do this sort of thing often.

I also started writing another of the 100 Proofs that the Earth is a Globe today. I’d hoped to finish and post it today, but there was so much other stuff going on that I’m barely half way through. Maybe tomorrow, although I have some other more urgent things I need to do then too.

New content today: