Tag: ethics

Back to the ethical grind

I had a busy day today. In the morning I was taking care of negotiating/finalising some sales of some old Magic: the Gathering cards. Then I had to take Scully to my wife’s work and head into the city for today’s Data Engineering lecture at the university. Today was all about machine learning and deep learning to discover patterns in data.

I had some sushi for lunch before the lecture. During pauses in the lecturing, I talked with some of the student groups about their projects. One is keen on the idea of analysing traffic accident data to determine causative factors, such as day of the week, time of day, speed limit zones, weather conditions, and so on.

After the lecture I headed home, picking up Scully again on the way, Then I had about 20 minutes to pack Magic cards and head up to the post office before it closed. I didn’t get home until about 5:30, and then I had three ethics classes in a row from 6 to 9pm. So it’s been non-stop all day… and now I can finally relax a bit. After I make myself some dinner….

New content today:

Weather forecast got it wrong

Yep, the Bureau of Meteorology got today’s forecast very wrong. It was supposed to be hot and sunny, 29°C. It briefly reached 25°C and hovered closer to 20°C for most of the day, under grey skies and some heavy rain.

I took Scully for a bit of a drive at lunch time, and we got caught out by the rain. I had to find a seat under shelter to eat after getting a couple of pies from the Allambie Pies shop. Scully’s not keen on rain, so she didn’t want to run around in it at the park there.

No progress on the jigsaw puzzle today, as I said I wouldn’t work on it while my wife was out at work. And then when she got home, I went for a 5k run, and then when I got home from that she went out to a Zumba aerobics class. And she brought home a copy of The Barbie Movie from the library to watch, so she’s watching that this evening.

I worked on my ethics class for this week, on the topic of Persuasion. I point out that persuading people is attempting to change their minds about something, and explore the ethics of when that’s okay, and when it’s not okay. And how people persuade others, what methods do they use, and are some methods more effective, or more ethical, than others.

And I spent some time tidying up a bunch of loose ends and tasks that needed to get done. Nothing particularly interesting or noteworthy – just mundane chores.

New content today:

Refreshing the bathroom

Today, without my usual array of online ethics classes, I spent a bit of time attending to housework chores. I went to the hardware store and bought a brand new toilet seat, to replace our old one, which had been getting scratched and discoloured due to age. Then I had to figure out how to install it and wrestle it into place. The screws have a lot of horizontal movement in them to allow positioning of the seat relative to the toilet bowl, which is good, but meant that actually getting it into the right position and staying there while I tightened the screws was tricky. But the result looks good, literally like brand new.

I also grabbed some more calcium chloride crystals for the damp absorbers around the house. And then emptied the water out of those and refilled them with crystals. It’s shocking how much water can be absorbed from the air so quickly around here.

At lunch I took Scully out for a walk to the fish and chips shop and got a take-away to eat at my favourite lookout spot with a view across the water to the city. The sky was dramatic with dark grey clouds. It was a cool and cloudy grey day, but the only rain was early in the morning.

I worked on some future topics for my critical thinking/ethics classes. I’m planning one on dreams—as in sleep dreams, not aspirations—and one on asking “why don’t we” questions, to get the kids thinking about things like “why don’t we eradicate fleas?” or “why don’t we ban unhealthy food?” Things with different reasons: economic, social, scientific, and so on.

This evening we went out for dinner, since the usual Friday night tomorrow is Good Friday and most places won’t be open. We felt like Thai food, but since our favourite Thai place closed down there aren’t any within walking distance that have dog-friendly seating. So we drove a few suburbs over to the one we usually go to now with Scully, only to find their outside table was occupied. We drove back another suburb and thought we’d just get out and have a look around the shopping area to see what restaurants were there, and we found a Thai place with several tables outside! It turned out they were all booked (by other diners with dogs), but the staff were happy to carry an extra table out onto the patio for us.

The food was great too! My wife ordered a vegetable and cashew stir fry which was very tasty and spicy, and I tried the daily special, which was a black pepper and chilli sauce over sliced chicken pieces. It was all very good and the staff were really friendly. I think we’ll add this to our list of good Thai places to go to.

New content today:

The problems with countries

With five classes on this week’s critical/ethics topic of “Countries”, I got a lot of varied opinions from the kids today. One girl in particular was fixated on power plugs.

What are some disadvantages of the fact the world is split up into different countries? “The power plugs are different. You have to take adapters wherever you travel.”

Some time in the future, it might be possible to abolish countries and have everyone on Earth be one big community. What challenges would we face if we tried to do this? “We’d have to change all the power plugs so they’re the same everywhere around the world.”

In between classes I took another trip to the post office to send off more cards – this time a bulk lot of Netrunner sealed packs (vintage 1996!), with a couple of Magic cards thrown in.

And I did some comic writing. Struggling with a series of interconnected dialogue that needs several strips written out in full before I can make them.

New content today:

Considering countries

This morning I took Scully on a walk in the cool dampness after a night of rain. She’d been off her food all day yesterday until a late dinner, but was hungry for breakfast and perky again this morning.

Back home I wrote up my lesson plan for the new week’s critical thinking and ethics topic, on “Countries”. I framed much of the lesson around a story about a girl who goes on her first overseas trip with her parents, and all of the different things she encounters. She visits a museum to learn the history of the country she’s visiting, and I’ll get the kids in the class to compare that with countries they know, for example.

The post office received another visit today, as I packed and sent another Magic card to a buyer. I also took the chance to drop in that envelope with the Opal cards in it.

I completed this week’s batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips and uploaded them to the buffer. And made another Darths & Droids strip too.

And with everything I wanted to do achieved by early afternoon, I spent some time cleaning the house. I cleaned up the balcony, sweeping and removing spider webs. I also took out the bathroom window sliding pane and cleaned it, and removed the insect screen so I could reach outside and clean off a lot of spider webs from covering the window. They’ve been annoying me for ages. I really should clean all the windows, but that’s a big job for another day.

And when my wife got home from work I took the opportunity to do a 5k run. The day was warm, though not too hot, so it was a bit warm for a run, but I persisted and got it done.

Oh, and after dinner (potato and broccolini tikka masala with rice) we gave Scully a bath. She rolled around a lot in the grass at the park today, so we thought we should clean her up a bit.

It’s good to have a day when it feels like you got a lot done!

New content today:

More thinking about cooking

It was hot again today. This autumn heatwave didn’t let up, but it’s predicted to break tonight, with some rain and a cool change, and tomorrow should be a much more tolerable 24°C. But when I took Scully for a walk this morning there was a distinct smell of smoke in the air. Authorities were doing controlled burns of bushland around Sydney to reduce fuel load and the overnight wind direction brought it into the heart of the city. I closed up the windows soon after opening as I noticed the smell permeating the house.

My ethics topic on Cooking continues to be entertaining. Kids love talking about food, so it’s a good one. One question I ask is: Is cooking an important skill that everyone should learn?

One girl answered:

Yes, because if you become a refugee, and you see a dead deer by the side of the road, then if you don’t know how to cook you’ll either die by starvation or die by parasites. I’d choose the first one, myself.

I did the week’s grocery shopping online as I usually do, for pickup tomorrow morning. I added everything on the shopping list, and looked through the regular items to see if I needed to add any of those. When I was done, the total was barely over $30, which was really unusual, because usually it’s closer to $100. It must have just been a weird confluence of not running out of things that need replenishing this week. But when I tried to check out I discovered that the minimum online order for a pick-up (also for home delivery, incidentally) is $50. So I had to go back and choose things to add to bring the total up to that much! I added a few things that we don’t specifically need this week, but probably will next week, such as dried cranberries (which go in our home made muesli) and sesame seeds… and then I decided to add some things to make a dessert: cream, mascarpone, and chocolate biscuits.

Last night I started watching The Cabin in the Woods on Netflix. I’m halfway through and will finish watching it tonight after my last ethics class. I was expecting a standard sort of horror movie, but it’s clear that there is something very different going on in this film, though I’m still somewhat baffled as to what exactly. I’m eagerly looking forward to the second half. It feels like this is some sort of deconstruction of horror movie tropes and—I’m not sure if this will still apply after I finish it, but—I feel like it’s a significant film that anyone who thinks they know the horror genre must watch. Sort of like Scream (an absolute classic), only in a very, very different way. Anyway, I may give my final impressions after I finish it. (I’m avoiding spoilers, but I’ll have finished watching it by the time I read any comments on this post, so feel free to comment.)

New content today:

Thinking about cooking

Tonight I had the first three classes of the new ethics/critical thinking topic on the topic of “Cooking”. As an icebreaker I asked the kids if they did any cooking, were learning to cook, or whatever. Some of the kids said they never cook – their parents just cook for them. Some said they were learning and could cook a few things and weren’t very good yet.

And then there was one kid who said, “Yes, I’m good at it. I cook chicken and pasta, and crème brûlée, and croissants.” 😯

Earlier in the afternoon I had today’s university lecture, today on summary statistics for data. This is a long lecture and tutorial exercises, which occupied nearly the full 3-hour timeslot, so I got home a bit later than usual. Usually the classes only go about 2 hours. I had some sushi rolls for lunch, from a new place that I haven’t tried before. They were pretty good, and they have an interesting variety of fillings that is different to other places I go. One of them was a soft-shelled crab roll!

I picked up Scully from my wife’s work on the way home. Scully didn’t have breakfast again this morning, but she ate it when she got home, and then had a dinner as well. So hopefully her stomach is settled back down again.

Despite all the focus on food today, I didn’t have time to cook a proper dinner before my evening classes, so my wife and I just made ourselves eggs on toast at different times.

New content today:

Thursday’s pretty busy too!

Five classes today on the Artificial Intelligence topic. It’s a fun one, which is good. The kids generally have quite a lot to say about this topic, as many of them are familiar with ChatGPT or other AI tools, having used them themselves.

In between I squeezed in some comic writing and making a simple pasta dinner. And now, with the last class ending at 10pm… it’s time to relax and wind down before bed so I can go to sleep.

New content today:

What is data and what is ethics?

Today was a busy teaching day. This morning I wrote my lesson plan for the older group of kids and the ethics topic on Confession. Then I dropped Scully off at my wife’s work and took the train into the city and the university for the second lecture of Data Engineering. Today the lecture was about different types of data: nominal, ordinal, numeric, qualitative, quantitative, subjective, objective, and so on. Th first coding tutorial took place during the lecture and as usual someone asked me a question that basically came down to debugging Matlab syntax, which is always a pain since I don’t use Matlab regularly and always have to relearn the syntax every semester.

The students spent some time during the first tutorial break moving around to find their assignment groups. The lecturer splits the class into random groups of 6 students to work on their final projects. It’s always a bit chaotic since few of the students know each other and they’re assigned to these groups with strangers, and have to work out who they are and find them. It doesn’t help when one student can’t find Group 10 and I go around shouting “Group 10! Group 10! Put your hand up if you’re in Group 10!” and nobody reacts, and then 5 minutes later it turns out Group 10 is right there but they were too busy introducing themselves to have heard me earlier.

After coming home I finished off the Confession lesson, in time to start making some lentils and chick peas with rice for dinner, before the three in a row classes on the “What is Ethics?” topic. This is a pretty deep topic and I can really see the kids are thinking hard about some of the questions. Which means it’s a good one!

New content today:

Last ethics classes for a week

I had my final ethics classes for the next week today. I’m taking a break for a week because next week is the ISO Photography Standards meeting in Tokyo. I’m staying home and attending virtually. It’s going to be a long one, because there’s a lot of technical discussion sessions on high dynamic range format specifications. The sessions begin 08:30 Tokyo time and run to 18:00, which corresponds to 10:30 to 20:00 in my time zone. At least I don’t have to get up early!

For dinner we went to our local pizza place. We chat with the owners and they know us as regular customers, but ever since COVID they’ve been a bit down about their business falling off, and it seems it hasn’t yet returned to prior levels. We noticed last time and confirmed it this time that they’ve shrinkflationed their pizzas. They’re a little bit, but noticeably, smaller than they used to be, for the same price. It’s not actually a big problem for us, because we used to g home stuffed full, but now we’re a little less so. It’s still enough for dinner.

This morning I finished my presentation on Astronomy/Photography/Human Vision and sent it off to Loreto school, so the teacher there can load it up on their presentation system for my talk next week.

And tonight is online board games night with my friends. I just joined in after dinner and we’re playing Just One.

New content today: