ethics – Page 20 – dangermouse.net

Rain running, and ethics of extinction

Wednesday dawned cool, grey, and… wait for it… rainy. This has really been the “summer that never was”. I went for my 2.5k run in steady rain, because looking at the rain radar I didn’t have any confidence that the weather would be any better later on. I’ve been keeping track of the temperature and humidity when I do my runs. The temperature has mostly been around 25°C, give or take a few degrees, but check the humidity:

Humidity during my runs in January

Yes, it’s been 80% or above every day since 4 January, over two weeks. And into the 90s on several days. It’s not great weather for running!

I spent a few hours today writing the next week’s ethics lesson. The topic this week is extinction. I found a very cool film of the last known thylacine, which has been colourised recently by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. And it’s public domain, so I could use it during my classes.

This was taken in 1933, and the animal shown died in 1936. No living thylacine has been seen ever since.

The class asks questions about whether humans have a moral responsibility to try to save species form extinction. Even if it’s not our fault – say a species is dying off due to disease that has nothing to do with humanity. How can we balance the needs of humans against those of other species? We can’t save all species, so how do we prioritise which species to save? Should we save charismatic large species, or species that almost nobody knows about? Assuming we could do it successfully, should we reintroduce extinct species such as the thylacine by cloning?

Then this evening I had three classes in a row with this new material. Wednesday nights are always the most exhausting, as it’s three lessons without breathing space in between, and I’m having to adapt the class dynamically as I see how the kids react to the new questions.

New content today:

Thinking about art

Today I had a Zoom meeting with the university lecturer I’m working with on this data engineering course, to discuss our progress and plan the next week or two of work. We’re making progress on things and integrating stuff to keep the curriculum flowing from week to week. He also mentioned that a colleague was looking for some proofreading for journal paper submissions, to see if I was interested in a bit more casual work. So after the meeting he contacted her and put me in touch with her. So hopefully this will lead to a bit more paid work for me.

My wife decided it would be a good day to send Scully in for doggie daycare so that she can socialise with other dogs. Scully really enjoys it there. I took her in and she got super excited when she realised where we were going. After dropping her off I went to the hardware store to buy some humidity removing crystals and containers. I found a little mould in our garage storage cupboards yesterday, and given how ridiculously humid the weather has been for the past few weeks, I think it’s necessary to take steps to reduce the humidity in those cupboards.

From the hardware store I drove over to that new bakery at Naremburn that I’ve been enjoying occasionally, to get a pie for lunch. They also had chocolate custard tarts today, so I tried one of those for dessert, and it was really good.

This afternoon I had to work solidly on writing the new ethics class for this week. The topic is art, and it’s really more of a critical thinking topic than an ethics one, although I included a few ethical questions in there. The main thrust of the questions was to get the kids thinking about what art is, how it might be defined, what counts as art and what doesn’t, and why we make art. I just got it finished in time for tonight’s triple classes, which mostly went pretty well. Phew!

New content today:

Ethics of data; and body systems

Today I got in a good chunk of work on the university data engineering course, writing an outline of a presentation on the ethics of data science. I also went over the lecturer’s notes for the lecture on data types and some exercises he’d prepared. We’re having a Zoom meeting tomorrow to discuss progress and plan out the rest of the time between now and the beginning of the course in late February.

The rest of the afternoon I spent assembling slides for tonight’s private Outschool science lesson. Today we’re covering body systems – or at least getting started on it. I suspect I have enough material to last for two weeks.

For dinner tonight I made calzones – spinach and ricotta, with a tomato/onion/garlic sauce to spoon over the top.

New content today:

Ethics of laws

This evening I restarted my online ethics classes on Outschool, after a break over Christmas and New Year. I had three classes in a row, so it’s diving right back in. There were 7 returning students and 3 new ones all together, so I did my class introduction bit a couple of times. Then we got stuck into the topic, which was “laws”.

We started with questions about why we have laws, would it be possible to have a society without laws, what might such a society be like? Then we moved on to the fact that historically laws were stated unilaterally by a king or emperor and everyone had to follow them, so what gave them the authority to do that? In modern society in contrast, governments make laws, and what gives them that authority, and is it any different to a king?

Then we moved on to questioning if everybody in a country needs to follow the same laws. What if someone strongly objects to a law, or disagrees with it for religious reasons or whatever, should they still have to obey it? What about people from ancient traditional cultures, whose traditional laws conflict with modern government laws? Is it fair for a government to recognise ancient cultures by allowing them to do things that other citizens can’t do?

All this stimulated a lot of very interesting discussion with the kids! I think it’s a good topic that really led to a lot of tricky questions and thoughtful answers.

In other news, earlier I worked on a particularly tricky bit of Darths & Droids plotting and script writing. I wrote a good chunk of material, but it needs polishing and reshaping a bit to flow properly, so it’s not finished yet. I also took a walk up to the shops because I had to visit a pharmacy to get some things. I’ve been trying to avoid going anywhere with people due to the now rampant COVID omicron strain going around, at least until I can get a booster vaccination in a couple of weeks, but I needed some things. Usually the shopping area is bustling with people, but today it was almost like a ghost town a a few people around, but nowhere near the normal levels. I stopped to grab some sushi on the way home for lunch.

New content today:

A mixed bag Christmas treats day

I got up early this morning. The sun is rising early these days – in fact I just realised today is the summer solstice. I went for a 2.5k run before the day got too hot. I’m still improving in my times, despite the weather recently getting warmer and more humid. I’ve been hovering around 13:20-13:30 for the past week or so. I thought today’s time would be slow because of the heat, but somehow I managed to clock 13:03, my best time so far.

Remember the council renovation work on the nearby park, which I posted about a few months back? They finished the work a month or so ago, but I was very disappointed by a set of sandstone stepping stones which the workers laid between the path and a section of grass up a steepish slope. The posted landscaping plans showed a proper stairway installed there, but for some reason they didn’t go ahead with that, and instead simply laid a set of three stepping stones on the hillside – at the angle of the slope. So each stone was at maybe a 20° angle or so to the horizontal. This made them tricky to walk on – not especially so for me, but we have a lot of elderly people in the neighbourhood who use that park, and I could see that they would be difficult to negotiate for anyone of less than sprightly mobility.

So I contacted the council. I phoned up and spoke to the councillor in charge of the landscaping work, and explained why I thought the stepping stones were dangerous, and suggested that – even if the full staircase had been abandoned – the stones could be relaid so they are horizontal, thus forming a set of horizontal steps ascending the slope. The woman I spoke to took my suggestion seriously and said it sounded like a good improvement, and that she would look into it.

And a few days ago, this happened!

The stepping stone slabs that were sloping have been relaid with concrete under them so that they now lie level, and form steps, exactly as I’d asked for. Nice! You really can get government to do some things if you ask nicely for them.

This morning I had an Outschool ethics class scheduled… Even though I stopped all my classes for a few weeks over Christmas, Outschool has a teacher tool where you can set up time slots in which parents can schedule classes if you have no class already on at that time. I’d set this up early on, when I was trying to expand my enrolments – and forgotten about it. So, of course, a parent scheduled a class for today. I tried to contact them to ask them to choose a different time slot, because I really wanted to keep Tuesdays free, but they never got back to me. So when the time came, I started Zoom and waited for the student…

And they never showed up. Oh well, I get paid for it anyway, so at least it wasn’t a complete waste of time. After 10 minutes waiting, you can cancel the class, which I did. And then a minute later the parent contacted me! But they didn’t complain about the cancelled class as I feared. They requested a transfer into one of the existing Monday classes (which start up again in January). So that’s actually good.

After I picked up Scully from my wife’s work, we went on a drive. My wife had got an order for some dog bandanas from a woman who had met her at the market on Sunday, shed offered to make them and deliver before Christmas. To ensure that, I drove over and popped them in the mailbox, rather than entrust them to Australia Post. It was only about 20 minutes drive, so not too far.

On the way back I stopped at a liquor store to pick up some bottles of wine, since we were completely out of red wine. They allow dogs there, so I could take Scully in with me. And then we stopped again on the way home, at the new bakery in Naremburn that I’ve mentioned a few times. I’d been feeling like some cake for the past few days, and decided to satiate my craving. They had slices of carrot cake there – they seem to have a rotating menu of sweet treats that they go through, as there’s a different selection every time I go. They also had some amazing looking mince tarts for Christmas, so I got half a dozen of those too, which we’ll work through over the next few days.

In between all this, I worked on Darths & Droids comics. Phew! A busy day!

Addendum: And I just fed my sourdough starter, in preparation for baking tomorrow. It’s a significant day, because today my starter is a year old! It was spawned off a friend’s starter one year ago today.

New content today:

Last ethics of the year

Today I taught my final two ethics classes for the year. I’m taking a break over the Christmas/New Year period and will return to teaching the kids in the first week of January.

To celebrate, I went out for lunch, trying a new cafe in the area that I haven’t tried before, called Bitter & Twisted. They had a Korean chicken burger on the menu which looked tempting, so I got that.

Wow, that’s enormous! I was very full after that. The burger was decent, but the chips were really good.

This afternoon was the Christmas party at the dog park where I take Scully. I took her there before 4pm so we could go for a walk along the waterfront before the party officially started at 4:30. My wife finished work a little early and came on down as well, arriving around 5, so we could meet and greet all the other dog owners and share some of the snacks and things that everyone had brought. It’s a nice gathering, in a nice outdoor setting, with kids and dogs running around.

This evening back at home… I can relax! Whew! Oh, also, it was sunny today! And warm! It almost feels like summer, finally.

New content today:

More running, more storms, more ethics of time travel

It’s a bit repetitive, but today was somewhat similar to yesterday. I did a 2.5k run. I had online ethics classes at 11am, 6pm, and one to come shortly at 9pm.

I’m really loving this time travel topic in my classes. At one point I go through a series of scenarios for how you might make money if you invented a time machine.

You could send the winning lottery numbers to yourself last week, so that you win. Most kids think this is unethical. Many describe it as “cheating”.
You could send your past self instructions to buy Bitcoin, or Apple shares, or whatever when they were cheap, so you make a lot of money on Bitcoin/the stock market. A few kids considered this “cheating” as well, but about half were okay with it.
You could go to the future and bring back some tech that hasn’t been invented yet, and claim to have invented it. Most kids thought this was unethical because it involved lying, and a few called it stealing as well, as in stealing someone else’s invention.
You could get some furniture made in an old fashioned style, go back a thousand years and hide it, then retrieve it in the present. It’s now genuinely a thousand years old, so you could sell it as an expensive antique. Nearly everyone thinks this is perfectly okay.
If you invented the time machine, you could go into business producing and selling time machines. This one is so far universally considered the absolute worst idea of all! The kids all said if they invented time travel they’d do everything they could to keep it secret, because they’d be afraid of other people messing up history. The idea of time machines being widely available horrified them.

And the weather… yes, it’s been thunderstorming again this afternoon. The morning however was fine and sunny. A very rare occurrence lately – I don’t know exactly but it feels like we’ve only had two or three days where the sun has broken through the overcast in the last 3 weeks or so. We’re supposed to get more rain and storms tomorrow, but then the weekend might actually be rain-free. Let’s wait and see.

The annoying thing is everything is just so humid, all the time. I hate it when you dry off after a shower, and then when you have another shower 24 hours later, your towel is still damp. Ugh.

New content today:

5k, storms, and ethics of time travel

This morning it was time to do another 5k run. I missed the 5k last week, so wanted to make sure I did one this week. I did it at the oval, running laps on flat ground, because last time I did it on the streets and the hills nearly killed me. I recorded a surprisingly good time of 27:49, which was a big improvement on my previous oval run of 29:42. I guess the daily 2.5k runs are really building up my stamina.

I wrote the new ethics class topic for the week. This week we’re doing a fun one before I take a break for Christmas, on the ethics of time travel. And I had the first three classes of kids this evening. The last one was really fun, with the kids laughing at the various hypothetical situations I proposed and their various answers. I proposed the following:

A future version of you appears. They show you a tattoo, and insist that you go out and get it done now. You don’t want a tattoo. But your future self apparently does, and thinks it’s important enough that they have to convince you to do it today. What should you do?

One girl said, “Yeah, that sounds like fun, I always wanted a tattoo!” Another girl said, “If I got a tattoo, I’ve probably turned evil or something, so I’d avoid doing it at all costs.”

And, yes, there was more stormy weather today. We had some moderate rain with a little thunder around 4pm, which cleared up enough for me to take Scully out for a walk without getting too wet. But then after 5pm a bigger and heavier storm rolled in, with some really loud thunder and heavy rain. We may be in for more of the same again tomorrow.

New content today:

Will this rain ever end?

Five days into summer, and the weather today was very wintry. The maximum temperature was only 19.2°C, which would be perfectly normal for the middle of winter. And it was rainy and gloomy. It was similar yesterday, but colder today. And… we have rain forecast every day for the next week too, up to about 75 mm in total. This is a really weird weather pattern for this time of year, certainly under the influence of La Niña. I keep waiting for the day when suddenly the clouds and rain will vanish and the temperatures will soar into the 30s for the remainder of summer, but it shows no signs of happening yet.

My wife had a video thing on today, so I took Scully out for a long walk over lunch time so she could do it without interruptions. We walked out to the new bakery at Naremburn, where I grabbed some lunch – a vegetarian mushroom pie and a custard tart. It rained intermittently and I had to put my umbrella up and down about a dozen times before we got back home again.

This afternoon I worked on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. I need to get those photographed on Tuesday morning when I have some spare time, so I need to get all the scripts written by then.

Oh, I also took Scully for a short drive over to the hardware store to get some craft supplies for my wife. She’s going to try using some of the leftover scrap material from her dog bandana sewing to make decoupage bangles.

For dinner I was going to make Thai red curry vegetables with rice, but I discovered that we’re almost out of red curry paste, so I switched at the last minute to green curry instead. I wonder if I should add some yellow curry paste to the shopping list as well…

And this evening I had two ethics classes. The topic this week is organ donation, and it’s been a really good topic. There are lots of tricky questions that are obviously getting the kids thinking, and their answers span the range of possibilities, which is always more interesting than when they all agree with one another. There’s a strong divide on the following question:

Imagine someone is in a hospital and desperately needs a heart transplant. A car accident victim is brought in. Doctors try to save them, but unfortunately they die. Their heart could save the person who needs a transplant. If the dead person’s driver’s licence says they do not consent to be an organ donor, should the doctors respect that wish, even if it means letting the heart patient die?

I’m getting roughly half the kids saying that you have to save the heart patient’s life, even if it means disrespecting the dead person’s wishes – because saving a life is imperative and the dead person isn’t going to know anyway. And roughly half the kids saying that you must respect the dead person’s wishes – because it may be really important to them what happens to their body, and why even bother recording a donor status if doctors are going to ignore it anyway? And there are a few other questions that are just as divisive. The good thing is this is exposing the kids to different opinions, as well as the reasons why people hold those opinions (as I get each of them to explain why they answer the way they do). I also get the kids to try to provide reasons supporting the other side of the argument.

New content today:

The sun come out today!

It didn’t rain today, and the sun actually peeked through the heavy cloud for a few minutes. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen sunlight for about a week and a half, at least. I went for a 2.5k run, and took it a bit easier today. Yesterday I really pushed hard to make a good time, so I thought I could ease off a bit today.

I had the last two lessons of the ethics class on introduced species. One of the last questions I’ve been asking in each class is about domestic cats, which are of course introduced species in much of the world. They cause particular problems here in Australia, where cats kill an average of 75 native animals each, every year. Yes, that means for every cat that’s kept indoors and doesn’t kill any, there’s a cat out there killing 150 animals a year. Domestic cats have caused the extinction of at least 22 species of native Australian animals. It’s even worse in New Zealand, where they’ve caused the extinction of over 70 native species. Some councils in New Zealand have considered banning the owning of pet cats. They haven’t enacted this, because there’d be a lot of upset cat owners.

I put the question to my students: should pet cats be banned, if it can save native species from extinction? The response was pretty uniform: no. The all thought that was going too far, that it’s not fair to ask people to give up owning a cat. I reminded them that it would save entire species from extinction. They said it would be nice to do that, but there’s no way a government could ever enforce a ban on owning cats – too many people would just ignore it. I hadn’t really expected the answers to be so uniform to this question.

Because I’ll be busy tomorrow, I worked on the next class for the coming week, with lessons starting on Wednesday. This week the topic is organ donation.

I also took the opportunity today with the lack of rain to take Scully to the dog park this afternoon. In a couple of weeks they’re going to have the traditional dog park Christmas party. I’ve gone to the past few, since we got Scully, and it’s always a fun event, with everyone bringing some food or drink and sharing everything. We get about 20 dogs and their owners.

Oh, and one of our neighbours has decorated the lift and the ground floor entry foyer with Christmas decorations already. I’m not sure which neighbour it is, but we have our suspicions. There’s an entire tree on the ground floor. Fortunately Scully ignores it!

New content today: