Tag: ethics

Comics batch done!

This morning we had to do an emergency bed linen change and wash, after Scully threw up on the bed. Thankfully this is a very rare occurrence, but it’s nasty when it happens.

I spent much of the day finishing off that batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I wrote and photographed a couple of weeks ago. I do batches of 30 strips at once for efficiency purposes, enough to last six weeks. And now they’re all done and uploaded, so I won’t have to do any more until mid-October. Phew!

I actually completed what I think will be the last strips in a couple of the themes, as I work towards winding down the entire comic. It’ll be interesting to see how many readers realise which strips are the last ones for any given theme.

In ethics classes tonight I asked that question I posed yesterday: If there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out?

  • Two kids from Taiwan were both very insistent that you not let the car in.
  • One girl from Australia said you should let them in, but wind down your window and….
    I thought she was going to say “Yell at them.” But she actually said, very politely and meekly, “… tell them not to do it again.”
  • And one kid from Singapore said you should let them in, even though they’ve done the wrong thing, because it’s dangerous to block the second lane.

A friend of mine predicted that the answers would vary by country, and so far he seems to be right.

New content today:

Tax return time

Today I prepared my class plan for the new week’s critical thinking and ethics class, on the topic of Driving. I came up with a lot of questions, and in the first class tonight got through only about half of them. Which is a good thing – better than running out of material!

One interesting question I’m asking in this one is if there’s a queue of cars waiting to exit in a single turning lane, and some driver decides to jump the queue by driving up the adjacent lane and then merging into the turning lane just before the turn: should the queued cars let them in, or should they bunch up to block them out? And why? I expect there to be some varied answers to this one!

Scully got a big walk at lunch time – we spent about an hour and a half out before returning home. The weather has improved since the weekend and it was a really nice mild day.

This evening after dinner (lentils, potatoes, and broccoli with some curry spices) my wife and I sat down to do our tax returns. I’m sure I mentioned this last year, but the Australian Tax Office has really streamlined tax returns and it takes only a few minutes online to confirm all the financial stuff they already know, and to add in some deductions and my foreign income from Outschool (that the ATO doesn’t automatically know about). We were done with both of our returns in under half an hour. Job done for another year!

New content today:

Like Garfield, Mondays can be the worst days sometimes

Monday is my busiest day with online ethics classes. I have four between 8am and 1pm, with an hour break in between the two sets of two. And two of my most challenging classes are in this batch, with kids who are reluctant to speak, have difficulty speaking, I have difficulty understanding, have technical issues with their audio, and/or have lots of distracting background noise making hearing the difficult. It takes a real effort to concentrate on what they’re saying, or give them enough time to think, or encourage them to speak, or work around the audio issues.

By 1pm I was worn out. It was time to take Scully for a walk and get some lunch. We went up to the fish & chip shop and I grabbed some fish & chips there, then we walked down to the park by the ferry wharf to sit and eat by the water. This is a nice secluded park which is never busy, so it’s good for Scully to run around in. After eating I threw a ball for her to chase and fetch a bit, before we started walking home.

In the afternoon I worked on assembling more Irregular Webcomic! strips from the last photo batch. I got through a few, but still have many more to go.

My wife took Scully on another walk before dinner, and I met them up at a supermarket to buy some pizza cheese and pumpkin for dinner.

Tonight I have two more ethics classes. These are easier ones, but the last is from 9-10pm, so it’s quite late. Phew! It’s a long day.

New content today:

Dealing with Hate

This morning I wrote up my lesson outline for the new week’s ethics topic, which is Hate. And this evening I had the first class on this topic. There was a new girl in the class, a younger sister of another girl who’s been doing my classes for a couple of years now. She was nine years old, a bit under the recommended age range of 10-12. And it turned out to be a rather intense introduction, with lots of questions about hating things and the consequences of hatred. Hopefully she didn’t find it too heavy going and will return next week!

This afternoon I did more comics stuff. But in between I took Scully on a long walk, around the Waverton loop past the harbour shore. She did some tennis ball chasing on the grass down there to get some exercise. And when my wife got home from work we did two more walks! A short one before my class, and then a longer one afterwards to go to the grocery store and get some sour cream and a zucchini for dinner. I made vegetable fajitas, with the zucchini, broccoli, cauliflower, onion, carrot, and mushrooms.

Tomorrow I should have a bit more time to do some other things. Hopefully!!

Oh, I see announcements have been made about the new Apple iPhone 16, to be released soon. It’s about time I upgraded my old phone, as the battery life is getting quite short. I wanted to do it before our trip to Tokyo in February, so hopefully there’ll be plenty of supply of the new model before then.

New content today:

Full day of teaching and Lego

After four ethics classes this morning, I took Scully for a walk to the post office, where I had to mail a couple of things, and the to the fish & chip shop for some lunch. I ate at my usual favourite spot, in the small park on the hill overlooking the harbour. The day was sunny and mild, really nice.

They were very generous with the fish today. Normally it’s one fillet piece, but today the pieces were smaller, about half the usual size or a little more. But they didn’t just give me two pieces, they gave me three!

Back at home I spent the rest of the afternoon photographing the next batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips, that I’d written over the weekend. That took almost three hours of effort. By which time my wife was home from work. She took Scully out for a walk while I finished off photographing the last few strips.

Then I made pizza dough for dinner. While that was rising, I assembled a few strips and uploaded them to the server, ready for the first new update of the week tonight. And then it was time to make the pizza, rolling out the dough, topping it with tomato paste, herbs, cheese, and the regular diced pumpkin, walnuts, feta, and some chilli flakes. into a super hot oven and five minutes later it was ready to eat!

Then I had a shower, before two more classes in the evening. In between those I’m writing this. The first evening class has two kids in it who are very talkative. Either one of them I could probably ask one or two questions and they would be happy talking for the remainder of the lesson. But because there are two other kids in the class as well, I have to keep interrupting them to let those kids have a say too.

I’ve also just done my daily Japanese and Italian practice. I’m using Duolingo for Japanese now, and have moved to listening exercises on YouTube for Italian. I just watched a five-minute cake recipe video in Italian and made note of some new vocabulary words, like mescolare (to mix), versare (to pour), stampo (cake mould), impasto (dough), manciata (handful), dattero (date, as in the fruit), and my favourite new word of the day: sbizzarrire (to indulge) and the related sbizzarrirsi (to indulge oneself).

New content today:

More signs of spring

Out walking with Scully at lunch today and the London plane trees are all starting to produce new spring leaves. And wisteria is blooming all over the place. And jasmine.

My wife and I both hate jasmine. We can’t stand the smell of the flowers. But as far as I can tell this doesn’t seem to be a very common thing. I don’t recall ever meeting anyone else, except my mother, who also hated the smell of jasmine. Whenever I tell people this, everyone looks at me like I’m crazy and declares that they love the smell of jasmine.

Anyway, we walked all the way to Cammeray to have lunch at Maggio’s Italian Bakery. I didn’t want to overload on sweets today, so I had two slices of the pizza, a mushroom and a capricciosa. And this afternoon I made a quiche for dinner, so my wife and I could eat our slices separately because I had classes online from 5-8pm.

At Cammeray they’re demolishing a couple of shops next to Maggio’s Cafe (which is a couple of doors down from Maggio’s Bakery, run by the same people). It looks like they might be keeping the old Victorian era front facade on the street and redoing the entire rest of the building behind it.

Oh, and I thought of a cool idea for a future ethics/critical thinking class. I’ll get the kids to do a Turing Test on me, but I won’t tell them if I’m answering as me, or copying their questions into ChatGPT and pasting the results. I’ll prime it first by telling it about the exercise and that it needs to impersonate a human response as best it can. I tried this today and it worked… moderately well, but not great. And then I’ll see if the kids can work out if I’m being human or an “AI”. It should be fairly easy with the right sort of questions. The exercise will be for them to think of the right questions to ask.

New content today:

Making a will

Yep, you heard that title right. Today my wife and I took the important step of starting to draw up wills. We’d been talking about it for a bit, but today we had an initial appointment with a solicitor to go through the details, legal formalities, and so on. We covered what we want to happen if either of us dies, or in the event we both die at the same time (or in quick succession). We also covered powers of attorney and other stuff. The solicitor will draw up drafts based on what we covered and pending any amendments or errors we’ll get to sign them in the next few weeks.

That appointment was in the afternoon. In the morning I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week’s ethics topic, on the subject of “Hospitality”. I did a first class this evening, but it was abbreviated because the only student had to leave early. I’m hoping there are enough questions and subject matter to sustain a full length class. I think it should be okay.

Weather was chilly again today. But should be back up to 29°C in a couple of days. Spring here really isn’t a “warm” season, it’s more like cold and hot days randomly interspersed.

Also today I collated, photographed, and listed on eBay a big pile of Magic: the Gathering cards. All the common cards and basic lands from the 1994 Revised Edition of the game, 4 copies of each, for a total of 360 cards. If anyone reading this is interested, the eBay item is here.

New content today:

Starting mega-engineering

This morning I wrote up the lesson plan for the new week’s ethics classes, on the topic of “Mega-Engineering”. I start with potential technological solutions to climate change, such as large scale carbon capture, stratospheric aerosols, or space mirrors. Then I move on to an existing mega-project: the Three Gorges Dam. And ask about good and bad things about these things. Then go on to speculative future things like arcologies, space elevators, and Dyson spheres.

I had the first class tonight and it went pretty well. It was only one student, and she was returning after a long break. She was surprised that I remembered her!

I took Scully on a longish walk at lunch. I had a sausage roll at The Grumpy Baker. They used to be delicious, but they’ve changed the recipe and now the meat is dry and gristly and rather unpleasant. It’s been this way the last few times I tried one, hoping that it would be back to how they used to be. I think I’ll have to remember to just never buy them again. Very disappointing.

One of the LED light bulbs in the bathroom blew again today. This is the third time in about a year. I think there must be something wrong with the wiring… LED bulbs should last much longer than that as I understand it. The weird thing is: There are two sockets in the oyster light fitting. I install one daylight colour temperature bulb and one warm colour temperature bulb, so we get a pleasant mix of colour temperature. The warm one blew the first two times. Last time I switched the sockets and put the daylight one in the suspect socket. But now it’s the new warm bulb that’s blown again. The daylight one has been fine for like 3 or 4 years. Warm ones keep blowing every few months. Despite swapping sockets. A friend thinks it’s most likely humidity from hot showers getting into the fitting and messing with the voltage step-down circuitry, blowing that before the actual LED itself.

New content today:

Ticking off many tasks

I had several things I wanted/needed to get done today. I started making a Darths & Droids comic, from a script we worked on last night (with my friends online), ready for tomorrow’s update. Then I made Irregular Webcomic! strips for tonight and tomorrow.

With those out of the way, I had some tasks to do for photography standards work. I went through the list of currently open ballots for international standards, recommending voting positions for the Australian committee, and emailing the committee members about those.

Then I had to do some mandatory training exercises for the university, so that they will pay me for the lecturing and tutoring work I’m doing. I had four new courses to complete, about data security, fraud, corruption, and remote working. One course said it took 10 minutes to complete, but it had about 5 or 6 videos to watch, each of them three minutes long! It took me 25 minutes to complete that one. The others had more reasonable time estimates. Overall I spent about an hour and a half on them.

I kind of wonder, has anyone in the world ever done a mandatory training course and then failed the quiz at the end so many times that they actually had to resign or be dismissed because they couldn’t complete the mandatory course?

After that I went through the lecture material for tomorrow’s image processing lecture, to make sure I knew all the work and could explain it to the students. I had to refresh myself on the Canny edge detection algorithm, for about the tenth time in my life. But having to lecture about it to students tomorrow will hopefully mean that I never forget the details of the algorithm again!

This evening I had three ethics classes in a row. We’re having fun discussing Sayings. a friend of mine suggested using some foreign sayings and found a good one in Swedish:

Att glida på en räkmacka.

Translated literally into English, this means:

To slide in on a shrimp sandwich.

I told the kids this and then asked them to guess what the saying meant metaphorically. I got some wildly varied answers, including:

  • To do something dangerous, like sliding on something slippery
  • To be lucky
  • To make something delicious
  • To be lazy, like sliding off your couch
  • To do something ridiculous

My own guess, before I knew the correct answer was “to make an unwelcome appearance”. But it turns out the real meaning in Swedish metaphor is “to succeed without having to work at it”. This is a really fun topic, at least with kids who get into the spirit of it. I had one class where they were all a bit reserved, and nobody wanted to guess in case they got it wrong.

Oh, my wife got to ride the new Metro train today, from the station near her work to the one near our home. A day before I get to try it to go to the university tomorrow!

And the weather today was absolutely gorgeous! We got up to 26°C. I don’t think this winter has any real cold left in it. It’ll be a touch cooler the next few days, but then next week we’re forecast to have a run of 25°C, 28°C, and 26°C. It was so nice going out today without a jumper or jacket on.

New content today:

Ethics of video games

It threatened rain all day today, but I don’t think it ever actually happened. I took Scully for a drive to get pies for lunch and also fill up the car with petrol. I have this petrol price monitoring app and it’s amazing how the price fluctuates over the weeks. Thankfully we don’t drive enough to have to refill weekly, so I can wait a few weeks for the price to come down. The difference can be 30-40 cents a litre these days, if you just wait a couple of weeks for the prices to cycle, which is insane.

I spent much of the day writing a class plan for a topic on Video Games. Some questions:

  • Why do you think video games are so popular among both kids and adults today?
  • Do you think playing video games is any better or worse than traditional hobbies?
  • What do you think about in-game purchases?
  • What do you think about people making a career out of playing video games or esports?
  • Are video games an important part of modern culture? In what ways?
  • Are old video games worth preserving for future generations?

I also planned ahead for future topics in the next few weeks on Mega-Engineering, and Hospitality. Which should be interesting subjects!

New content today: