ethics – dangermouse.net

NZ trip recovery day

I got a good night’s sleep last night – my first one since leaving home last Friday. I got up just before my wife left for work and took Scully out for a walk to the local grocery store to buy some fresh fruit and vegetables so we have cooking supplies for the next few days until our regular grocery shop.

Today I finished off my critical thinking/ethics lesson plan for this week, on the topic of “Written Text”, which is talking about writing and writing systems. The questions for the kids touch on the invention of writing, the effects of writing on civilisation, writing in different languages, and modern developments such as the fact we all type way more than we handwrite these days, and what effects abbreviations and emojis have on writing.

I also made a new Darths & Droids comic. And I copied all my New Zealand photos off my SLR camera and phone onto my computer. I processed some of the SLR bird photos.

Here is a New Zealand fantail:

Variable oystercatchers (which vary from all black to black-and-white pied):

Australasian gannets:

And a house sparrow, which is not that exciting as it’s an introduced species and very common, but at least I got close to it:

For lunch I took Scully for a walk to the pie shop, since I didn’t have any bread at home to make sandwiches. I’m baking a new sourdough loaf and will have fresh bread tomorrow. It was drizzling gently as we walked up. The weather forecast for the next few days is wet, with heavy rain of up to 70 mm predicted for Saturday.

Ethics of Migration

Today I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week of online ethics topics for the kids. The topic this week is “Migration” – as in human migration, not animals. A few kids last week when I announced this week’s topic assumed I meant animal migration!

Then I was doing the first class tonight with two kids, a brother and sister, who are American, but currently living on Crete in Greece. I think their father works on a US base there. So they have first-hand experience of what it’s like to move from one country to another. They were saying how the Greek people assume they are tourists, and are reasonably nice to them, but when they say no, they live there, the locals change manner and become more rude to them. I’m not sure why, but maybe because the locals then think they can’t make as much money off them?

I didn’t really go out today. It was raining steadily for most of the day, as we finally caught the tail end of Cyclone Alfred. It was cool too, but should warm up again later in the week.

Last night I finished watching Saving Private Ryan, the first time I’ve seen this film. It’s been on my Netflix to-watch list for ages, but given I have to break even 1:30 movies into two parts to watch over two nights, starting a 3-hour movie always felt difficult. But I bit the bullet when I saw it was leaving Netflix soon, and managed to fit it into three nights of viewing. I can see why it’s so highly regarded. A very powerful and gripping film.

Now to decide what to watch tonight…

Getting back in the swing Tuesday

I got another good sleep, although I went to bed a bit late due to not finishing ethics classes until 10pm last night. Tonight should be an earlier night.

My first task today was writing the new lesson plan for the new week’s classes. The topic this week is “Always Connected”, discussing the modern phenomenon of being able to contact and be contacted at all times, no matter where you are, thanks to mobile phones and devices. I start with a story about myself, and the fact that when I was the age of the kids in the classes, I had a pen-pal. I think I’ll have to explain what a pen-pal is! And how over time, as technology advanced, we moved from exchanging letters to e-mails, and then onto social media. And along the way I ask the kids about the effects of this technology change on how we communicate and our well-being. In the afternoon I had two classes to finish off the “Danger!” topic from last week, then in the evening the first class on the new topic.

After completing the plan (before the afternoon classes), I went for a walk with Scully up to the pie shop to get some lunch. They had a new special today, a peri-peri chicken pie. This sounded great so I tried one, and it was indeed very good.

I also spent a bit of time processing some photos from my last day on Tokyo. Here are some from Nezu Jinja shrine, in Nezu, Tokyo. The entrance, with the market:

Torii gates:

Torii and a pavilion overlooking a koi pond:

Ema plaques and the main temple building:

A warbling white-eye. Taken with my phone!:

Urban wildlife surprise

This morning when I went for my 5k run, my wife took Scully out for a walk. I got back home and had just had my shower and changed, when she phoned me. She said that she’d just seen a “kangaroo”, in the park right across the street from our place. It had emerged from the bushland around the creek there and come right up to her and Scully, to within a couple of metres, and then took off back into the brush. I said it probably wasn’t a kangaroo, but most likely a swamp wallaby.

There are a few populations of these guys in bushland a bit further out towards the outskirts of the city, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of them being this close to the city centre. I searched online, and the only reference I could find to wallabies being in this area was in this document from North Sydney Council, which says (Section 2.1.8, page 22):

Other notable wildlife returns to North Sydney over the past decade include the Swamp Wallably [sic], Superb Lyre-bird and the Long-nosed Bandicoot.

The report was written in 2021, so presumably the wallabies have been in the area since some time in the 2010s. I don’t know how they would have got here, because although there are pockets of bushland that could sustain a small population, they’re well separated from any other bushland by large tracts of heavily populated suburban development, that I doubt wallabies could or would travel through.

I spent some more time today preparing for our japan trip. I printed out a bunch of bookings and also maps for my wife to navigate around Tokyo to various places, while I’m working.

I also had three ethics classes. I got a message from one parent about one of the students in one of tonight’s classes. He enjoys the class but wants to free up time for other classes, so will be leaving. This was a bit sad because this kid was my longest running student, having been enrolled continuously since January 2022, over three years! I don’t know who the next longest running student is, but I have records and will work it out another day.

New content today:

Fantasy logic and a little Japanese

This morning I took Scully for a walk first thing, before the day got hot or rainy, both of which were forecast. As it happened, neither turned out to be true. I took Scully for another walk at lunch time and it was a bit cloudy and breezy, and not too hot. It felt like the beginning of the end of summer. Then when my wife got home from work we took Scully for a third walk, passing by the local mini supermarket and picking up some eggs and a cucumber.

This morning I worked on my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic: Fantasy Logic. It’s about applying logic and realistic consequences to fantasy story ideas, to see what would happen, and strengthen the kids’ skills at applying critical thinking to crafting a story. Some questions I ask:

What would happen if dragons existed in real life? How might people deal with them?
In Harry Potter, the wizarding world hides magic from Muggles. Do you think that makes sense?
In fairy tales, why does a magical wish often have unintended consequences?
You want magical items in your story, but you don’t want magical shops where people can just go to buy them. How do you explain why nobody is selling magic items?
You want your hero to have a powerful magic sword that makes them unbeatable, but you don’t want every fight to be boring because they always win. How could you make the sword more interesting?

After lunch I worked on some comics stuff, both Irregular Webcomic! and Darths & Droids.

And I did some preparation for our upcoming trip to Tokyo. I checked out eSIMs for our phones, so we can stay connected while over there, since I’ll be working at the ISO standards meeting while my wife and her mother and sister are off exploring Tokyo on their own, so we need some way to communicate. Up to now, my wife and I have relied on WiFi spots to stay in touch while travelling, but I figured this time we’d need connection at all times. I explored a few companies and found a good looking one, which I have now purchased.

I also had an interesting discovery in Duolingo Japanese tonight. I came across the new word ちょっと. If you know Japanese, you’re probably already nodding sagely. If not, then I’ll point you at an article I had to read to understand what the heck this word is about. I feel like I levelled up in Japanese ability just from learning about this one word!

New content today:

D&D prep and a Italian treat

Today I spent a few hours working on preparation for running my Dungeons & Dragons game on Friday evening. The PCs in the last session ended up getting cursed by the God of Swords – now they have to kill 9 people with 9 different swords in 9 days, or die. For some players this wouldn’t be a problem, but my group are not murder-hobos and were horrified by this, seeing it as a serious ethical dilemma. Where are they going to find 9 people who actually deserve to be killed?

So I’ve been preparing some different possible ways in which they could attempt to solve the problem posed by this curse. I don’t want to railroad them into a particular solution, so the adventure planning has to be open-ended and loose. Hopefully I’ve anticipated most of the possible things they might want to do. But being D&D, it’s almost bound to be something else, and I’ll have to assemble something suitable on the spot. The trick is to have enough pieces in place that they can adapted easily and quickly to whatever they try.

It was another hot day today, and very, very humid. I took Scully for a walk about 5pm, when clouds had come in and blocked the ferocious sun, but I was dripping in sweat within a few minutes of walking outside because of the oppressive humidity. Last night when I took Scully out for pre-bedtime toilet, it was 10:30pm, the temperature was 25°C, and the “feels like” temperature was 29°C.

At lunch time I went for a short drive over to Maggio’s Italian bakery to get a pistachio pasty treat, and also pick up a couple of Italian biscuits for dessert tonight. We haven’t had them for a long while and I just felt like some today.

This evening was three ethics classes in a row. The topic on “Prizes and Awards” is going well. I ask one question about “participation awards”, where everyone gets an award, not just the people who have performed best. Most of the students have been saying they think these are a bad idea, because if everyone gets a prize they remove the motivational part of awarding prizes, which is the whole point of them. But tonight one kid said that participation awards are a good idea for younger children, since they’re not emotionally mature enough to deal with the disappointment of missing out on a prize. I asked what age he thought they should be used up to, thinking he’d answer about 9 or 10 years old. But he said 16! 😳

New content today:

A beach break for lunch

Today I had to refuel the car, and decided to take Scully on a drive to Collaroy and Fisherman’s Beach, next to the golf club there. Of course I stopped for a couple of pies at The Upper Crust, one butter chicken, and one Mexican beef. Excellent as usual.

It was hot and sunny and I expected to sit on the grass under the shade of a huge Norfolk Island pine tree that grows there. You can see it on the left edge of this photo:

But when we got there, there was an older couple already sitting there, with their dog. The patch of shade is fairly small, and Scully didn’t like the look of their dog, so we had to move along the beach a bit to the other side of the golf clubhouse and find a shady bench for me to sit on.

At least this spot gave me a good view of some Australian pelicans who were sunning themselves and drying off their wings. Among a swarm of silver gulls.

I also saw Australian ravens, masked lapwings, noisy miners, common mynas, Australian magpies, welcome swallows, rainbow lorikeets, and one grey butcherbird, all of which I recorded in eBird.

Back home, I worked on my ethics lesson plan for this week, on the topic of “Prizes and Awards”. I have questions like:

Why do people or organisations give out prizes and awards?
Do prizes sometimes get given to the “wrong” person?
Why are some awards, like Nobel Prizes, Olympic Medals, Academy Awards, so famous?
Is it fair that something or somebody that wins an award will become more popular?
Should awards always go to the best performer, or should effort and improvement also count?

Oh, and new neighbours moved into the apartment across the hall from us today, after our old ones moved out just last week. This seems a very quick turnaround given that our old neighbours were told they had to leave because the owner was intending to sell the apartment. We never saw anybody come in to inspect the place or any prospective buyers or new renters. And then suddenly two young women showed up today with furniture. I’m wondering if these woman actually offered a big rental increase and the owner decided to just tell the previous ones that they had to vacate. 🤔

New content today:

Preparing a trivial competition

Today I slept in quite a bit. I had a good solid sleep and probably caught up a bit on less sleep on Friday night. After breakfast my wife requested a lift down to Kirribilli Markets with Scully, so I dropped her off before going on my 5k run. These things combined meant I went for my run significantly later than usual, and it was already 26°C by the time I started. Nevertheless, I went faster than yesterday since the humidity was a bit lower and that made it feel not so bad.

I worked on some comics, and I also spent some time thinking about a revived old project. Some years ago a friend ran a trivia quiz during one of our online games nights. I had the idea to run a quiz myself and wrote some questions, but ran out of momentum. But I ran across the half-written quiz the other day and was inspired to work on it again. I mentioned it to the guys and they were all keen. I’ve asked them all to think of and submit their individual “expert subjects”, for which I will research and craft specific questions related to that subject for each of them.

I think I’ll run it as a team event, with pairs or triplets of people, depending how many players we have. Hopefully it’s not a prime number!

I also came up with a couple of new topics for future ethics classes, which I jotted down some preliminary questions for: “Danger!” and “Always Connected”. The latter is about the modern phenomenon of everyone being constantly plugged in to communications networks, no matter where they are, in contrast to a generation or two ago when people could easily get off the grid and in fact were forced to much of the time.

New content today:

Public holiday, but I’m working

Since Australia Day was on a Sunday yesterday, the Monday is a public holiday. My wife had the day off work and spent time at home doing her watercolour artwork. While I didn’t have a day off at all, and did my usual 6 ethics classes!

There wasn’t much time for me to do much else. There was some light housework, cleaning a few things, doing cooking for dinner, and so on. But basically not much else. Oh, I did put in a little work on Darths & Droids, making a comic and reformatting part of the website to move the fan art stuff to the new bonus material area.

Oh, because my wife was home all day I also spent an hour or so removing photos from her phone, backing them up on my computer. Some of them went back about three years!

New content today:

Ethics of peer pressure

Today I cycled my ethics class topic for the week, writing a new lesson plan for the topic of Peer Pressure. This is a recycled topic from a few years ago, but I rewrote the examples and added some new questions to keep it fresh. I included some new questions about online pressure, in contrast to pressure from friends.

I assembled a few more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch I did a couple of weeks ago. Puttered around at random.

Watched a couple of Italian YouTube videos to get some language listening practice. A 4 minute video can take me 20 minutes to watch as I pause it to look up Italian words I don’t know yet. It’s good for my vocabulary. Today I learnt words like filastrocca, meaning “fairy tale”. I knew fila meant “queue” or “row” or “line”, but I looked up strocca and discovered that it’s an adjective meaning “awful” or “sucky” or “crappy”. So a fairy tale is a “crappy row”? I checked an Italian dictionary etymology and it was unclear on the origins of the word, but suggested that it might instead have originated from strocco, which is a noun meaning a type of silk. Which is also a bit bizarre.

I also learnt the word abbozzo, which means a rough draft or sketch. As I was confirming the meaning online, I discovered to my surprise that abbozzo also has a Wiktionary entry for English, with the same meaning, stating the word is borrowed from Italian. The Cambridge Dictionary and Merrian-Webster also agree that abbozzo is used in English. I can only assume that it’s mostly a fine arts jargon word, like sfumato or chiaroscuro.

I also learnt: agrumo (citrus fruit), pasta frolla (shortcrust pastry), and the verb macinare (to grind, as in pepper). Oddly enough, it wasn’t a cooking video; it was a video about Befana, the Italian holiday that occurs on 6 January to mark the end of the Christmas season. There are a bunch of traditional Befana treats that are served on the day.

For dinner tonight I wanted to use up a bunch of sourdough starter discard which I’ve accumulated in the past few days while trying to freshen up my sourdough starter. I mixed it with some extra flour and baking powder and formed it into simple flatbread which I pan fried and served with some lentil dhal, as a sort of substitute naan. It worked pretty well!

The weather was hot today, forecast to be hotter tomorrow, with a late storm to cool things down before a few cool and rainy days filling the rest of the week.

Finally, there’s a hotel in Berlin that really doesn’t want my business. I’ve emailed twice about a conference rate (for the ISO Photography Standards meeting there in June, which I’m planning on attending) that I’ve been told they have, and they haven’t answered. The info from the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN) is that you have to book by email to get the conference rate; you can’t just book on the web site. I may have to look at other hotels.

New content today: