ethics – Page 8 – dangermouse.net

Last day of work for the year

Today I had four ethics classes, finishing off the “Rebuilding Civilisation” topic for the week, and my classes for the year. I’m taking two weeks off over Christmas and New Year, starting up again in January. It’s been a very interesting topic to discuss with the kids. One of the ethical questions I ask them: In a disaster situation, where your own life is in danger, do you have a responsibility to help other people survive, or look after your own survival first? Almost all of them have been pretty clear that in this situation it’s sensible and reasonable to ensure your own survival, not necessarily help other people. Some of them quoted the airline safety briefing, that when oxygen masks drop from the ceiling of the cabin, you should put your own mask on first before helping anyone else.

This evening, my wife and I agreed to do something very unusual, and go out for dinner on a Monday night. We normally only ever go out on Fridays (usually) or Saturdays if we have skipped the Friday. Well, we skipped Friday because of my D&D night, and then I just cooked something at home on Saturday. We both kind of felt like something special, so we walked up the street to the local shops and sat in the warm evening air outdoors with Scully at a bar. They do bar snacks type food, and we had arancini, haloumi sliders, and soft tacos with two different fillings: hoisin duck and pulled pork. To wash it down we had some nice cold cider. A bit decadent, but very delicious!

Oh, and the other day I took a Christmas portrait of Scully, after her grooming appointment.

New content today:

Cyclone Jasper

The main news today in Australia is the approach of Tropical Cyclone Jasper to the north Queensland coast. This is a long way from me so there’s no direct concern. But the forecast track looks like making an almost direct hit on the town of Port Douglas tomorrow around lunch time, with the much bigger city of Cairns also within the zone of destructive winds. Hopefully people in the region will be prepared and nobody will be hurt.

Here it was warm again, but felt a bit less humid. I assembled comics in the morning and then took Scully for a drive over to the Italian bakery for lunch. I had a slice of mushroom pizza, and the special pastry today was a panettone snail. It was a scroll of flaky pastry filled with candied fruit and almonds and was delicious. This bakery is always creative and coming up with new things. I just wish they’d do the banoffee croissant again!

This afternoon I wrote my next ethics lesson for this week, on the topic of Restarting Civilisation. We’re going to start by imagining that some disaster such as an asteroid strike kills a few billion people, and then consider what life would be like for the survivors. How would people get food and water? Would they be likely to cooperate for survival, or become hostile? Do survivors have an ethical responsibility to help other survivors, or to maximise their own chances of survival? Once groups of people have stable food supplies, what aspects of modern civilisation should they prioritise in rebuilding first? (laws, education, electricity, transport, etc.?) Should we take some effort (and expense!) now to provide usable information and resources to future survivors in the event of a global disaster?

Tonight for dinner I tried a new thing. I like fennel whenever I go to a restaurant and have a dish that includes it, but I think I’ve only ever tried cooking with it once, doing it as a roast vegetable with other vegetables. On a whim last grocery day I grabbed a fennel bulb, determined to try something else with it. This afternoon I decided to make caramelised fennel and eggplant calzones with a tomato sauce. I caramelised the finely sliced fennel with some balsamic vinegar, then let it cook slowly with diced eggplant. I made pizza dough, and stuffed it with the fennel and eggplant, plus some mozzarella cheese and baked it. And made a separate sauce with onions, garlic, chopped tomatoes, and oregano, to spoon over the top of the baked calzones. It turned out really good!

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Lesson planning concentration

Not much to report today. I spent most of the day writing lesson plans for this week’s ethics classes, with topics “Comics” for the younger kids and “Uncertainty” for the older ones.

Weather was warm and sunny. We’ve entered a heatwave cycle, wth temperatures expected to peak on Saturday, above 40°C in most parts of Sydney, a bit lower on the coast.

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Back into ethics teaching

Today I had my first online ethics classes with kids again, since returning from my trip. I’m still a bit jet lagged – I managed to sleep until just before 06:00 this morning, which was much better than I’ve been doing but I still need to catch up on a lot of sleep. So I was very tired when I began the classes at 17:00 this evening. It was a bit of a chore getting through them, but I managed okay. Today and tomorrow morning I’m finishing off the weekly topics on “Shrinking and Enlarging” and “Revolutions” that I started in the week before I left for the trip. We start new topics on Wednesday.

Early this morning after breakfast I left home to go for a run. I decided I felt okay enough to tackle 5k instead of just 2.5k. But I was almost foiled by something I found on the warm-up walk to my starting point. It was a dog – a little Pomeranian, perhaps not fully grown. It was just standing on the nature strip by the road as I approached, with no owner or other person in sight. It had a harness on it, but no collar or tag with any contact details.

I approached it carefully and it was friendly and didn’t try to move away. So I picked it up and set about trying to find where it had come from. The nearest house had an open gate leading up steps and around the side of the garage, so I thought, “Aha, it’s escaped from that open gate.” I took it in the gate and went up the stairs, turned the corner… and found a closed gate. Okay, so it couldn’t have wandered out through there by itself. I looked for a doorbell or intercom system anywhere, but there was none. I noticed the inner gate had a child lock on it and I opened it and poked my head in, seeing a yard strewn with toys. There door of the house wasn’t insight – I’d have to walk through the yard to find the door if I wanted to knock, and being 07:30 on a Sunday morning I didn’t fancy walking through some stranger’s yard and possibly scaring someone or having them get angry at me.

I put the dog down to see what it would do, and it turned and walked out of the property. Okay, so maybe this isn’t where it belonged. I closed the gate and followed it back to the street, where it turned and walked along the footpath. I followed, accelerating after it as it crept away. I feared it might run off down the street and I wouldn’t be able to catch it again. And then it turned into another yard several doors down, crossed to an open gate leading to the backyard, and went through there. I figured this must be where it lived, and it had escaped through that open gate. So I closed the gate so it couldn’t escape again and left, to go start my run. Hopefully that’s where it lived, and the people there didn’t wake up to find a strange dog locked in their backyard!

My run went a lot better than the efforts earlier in the week. I managed 5k, and a reasonable if not spectacular time. It probably helped that the weather had cleared up a bit and wasn’t rainy with 100% humidity. Although we have a fun “up to 150mm” of rain to look forward to over the next few days. What sort of stupid El Niño is this? We’re supposed to be having hot and dry conditions and fires all over the place.

I spent some time today processing and uploading photos from my first day in Rome on the recent trip. You can see them on the diary page on my website.

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Kids around the world

Thursday’s my busy day, with 5 ethics classes. And I’m also trying to get my comics buffers filled up for my trip to Europe next month, so I spent much of the in-between time working on those. After lunch I took Scully for a walk up to the main shops nearby and got myself a caramel tart for a treat, which was pretty good.

In one of my classes tonight there was a new kid. I normally ask what country they’re in, because I’m curious and like to know. He said he was in Israel. And… he said his father had just been called up to serve in the army. 😳

On my list of countries that I’ve had kids join my classes from I’m now up to 46 different countries. The last one I added was Zambia, a couple of weeks ago. And Bulgaria a few weeks before that. It’s really quite amazing when you stop to think about it, that technology allows us to do this sort of thing. I’ve had kids from every continent, except South America (and Antarctica).

New content today:

Ethics of dinosaurs

I spent much of today writing my lesson plans for this week’s topics for my ethics classes: Dinosaurs for the younger kids and the closely related but more general Paleontology for the older kids. I get to overlap many of the questions by doing this, so it should have taken me less time than usual to prepare the lesson plans, but I was a bit lethargic today and ended up frittering away a good chunk of time.

I also need to revise my slides for the class on Colour and Human Vision, because I volunteered to give a guest lecture to the university students next week, during their project period. This isn’t part of the coursework, but the lecturer has liked to have someone do a bonus lecture on tangentially related material to the image processing course. Last year I did one on the Science and Engineering of Photography. I was hoping to revise the slides today, but didn’t get to it. Maybe tomorrow!

I made vegetable soup for dinner, so we can have the leftover converted into minestrone tomorrow. And after my three classes in a row this evening I’ve just made myself some sticky rice with banana and cinnamon for dessert, since the soup wasn’t super filling.

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New ethics classes: Crowdfunding and Rationality

I spent most of today writing up my lesson plans for the new week of ethics classes. The topics are Crowdfunding for the younger children, and Rationality for the older ones. This evening I’ve done the first three classes for Crowdfunding, and so far none of the students have been familiar with sites like Kickstarter and GoFundMe. Which is okay, as I explain how they work and then we go through questions about the principles and ethics of crowdfunding. It’s been interesting and the kids have some clever ideas about it.

I also planned ahead with my lesson topics, to the point where I have plans up to my trip in November. So I’ve added details of the three weeks of classes that I’ll be skipping to Outschool so parents can see it well in advance.

I took Scully for a couple of walks. The day was thankfully cooler than yesterday, overcast. And rain has developed this evening, and is quite heavy now. There’s not much else to tell about today. I should have abit more free time tomorrow now I’ve written this week’s classes.

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Observations on energy ethics

I’ve run this week’s lesson on critical/ethical thinking about “Energy” a few times now, and I’ve noticed two interesting things.

Firstly, I ask if there are any problems with all of the electrical wiring that we use to carry electricity from power stations to our homes. Several kids have pointed out potential dangers if they fall in storms, and the possibility of animals being injured by them. Apart from that, they’re mostly of the opinion that they’re fine. I’m very surprised nobody so far has said they are ugly! They get in the way of scenery, they make cities look grimy, etc.

Secondly, I present several alternatives to burning fossil fuels for generating electricity, and we go through the advantages and disadvantages of each of them. Then I ask which they think we should prefer switching to. Nearly all of them have said solar power. I point out the disadvantage that it’s very expensive, and the kids are all dismissive of this is a problem. They say things like, “The cost doesn’t matter”, or “Well, we can just make it cheaper”. It’s very hard to convince them that cost does matter, and we can’t just magically make things cheaper.

This evening I was supposed to be running Dungeons & Dragons for my friends, but a couple of them called in sick, not wanting to spread cold symptoms. So that put us below threshold and we called it off for tonight. Hopefully we’ll get to it in a couple of weeks. So tonight we’re doing online games instead, which means our sick friends can still participate.

Weather was cold today! A nice change after the record heat of earlier this week. We had overnight rain and a chilly southerly wind. I made use of it with a 5k run.

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Trying a new sandwich

This morning I worked on finishing off my lesson plans for the new week of ethics classes. I’m doing two related topics for the different age groups: Brain Uploading for the younger kids, and the broader topic of Transhumanism for the older kids.

For lunch I went for a walk with my wife and Scully to Botanica Garden Cafe, which does some really good food. I wrote about the first time I went there back in March. I’ve tried a few things off their menu and today I thought I’d try something I hadn’t had: the poached chicken and brie sandwich.

It was good, and very filling. There’s a lot of chicken stuffed in there. I barely wanted to eat dinner by the time evening rolled around. But did make some fried rice and had a smaller serving than I usually would have.

In the early afternoon I worked on version 2 of the Haunted House game for the game design class. I went for a 2.5k run after that, but still felt so full from lunch that I had to take it pretty easy and didn’t run a very fast time. On the way up the hill for my pre-run warm-up to the starting point, I passed more of the demolition work that is going on near here for redevelopment into loads of new apartments.

This is another whole street of houses that have just been torn down, a couple of blocks over from the photo in this entry. It’s a huge area that is being worked on.

Tonight I started with three ethics classes on the “Brain Uploading” topic. In the first class I started with the premise that you could scan your brain and run a copy in a computer, and it would be an exact emulation of you, with your memories and personality. All three kids that it sounded awesome and wanted one. The second class, in contrast, had one kid who was keen on it, one who wasn’t so sure, and one who was totally freaked out by the idea and said it would be the scariest and most horrible thing ever. Should be fun running this over the next week!

New content today:

Five-class Thursday

Having moved all my Tuesday ethics classes to Thursday to make room for the university image processing course, I now have five classes to teach on Thursdays, beginning from today. Two in the morning first thing, and three in the evening, ending late. This gives me some time in the middle of the day to do a few other things, which I filled by taking Scully for a couple of walks, getting sushi rolls for lunch, making a sourdough loaf, and doing a bit of comics stuff.

Time to relax before bed….

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