Schools strike for climate

Today, all four of us attended the Schools Strike for Climate protest rally in Aotea Square, Auckland.

We're 100% supportive of those involved in this strike/protest.

First off, there is overwhelming evidence that climate change is real, humans caused it, and it is going to continue into the future.

Those who wish to deny this, or who wish to sit on the fence about it, are not on the side of best evidence and reasoning.

The current best evidence also points to the future being pretty bad for us humans unless we do something about it.  The Earth is okay, it will survive, but there is a good chance that a lot of humans won't.

Unfortunately, doing something about this problem is going to cost money, and currently those around the world with power (both politically and economically) are reluctant to lose a tiny slice of their current good life.  They prioritise their own comfort and ease in the present over the wellbeing of all our children and grandchildren in the future.

So, as is so often the case, the only way to make those in power give up a bit of their selfish comforts is for enough people to gather together and make enough noise about it.

So, here we were, making as much noise as we could.

(Personally, I feel very uncomfortable in noisy crowds, and I feel even more uncomfortable shouting out in crowds.  But every small contribution matters, and our little family added four extra bodies to the crowds.)

This protest was organised by school students and attended primarily by school students.  They were knowingly leaving school during school hours to do this.

Consequently, some educationalists were critical of the school students.  The main argument I hear from these educationalists is that these students are wasting lesson and teaching time.

This argument by these educationalists is very weak.  Let me tell a story:

As I said here before, this summer I have been involved with our athletics club, volunteering to help about 20 or so schools with their athletics sports days at the athletics club grounds.

Some schools have small athletics days, while some have bigger productions.  The biggest production by far was Westlake Girls High School.  All 2200 students attended the day.  They had several portaloos delivered the day before.  They had an ex-netballer/TV presenter on microphone duties.  They were sponsored by a car company, who required that we open the gates early so they could drive a car onto the grounds and have a promotional photo-shoot.  The 2200 students' morning "warm-up" consisted of them congregating around the finish line and doing zumba to loud music from a sound system brought in by the school (damaging the grass athletics track in the process).  Many of the students were in fancy dress rather than athletics attire, and some were waddling rather than athletically running.  Others were not involved at all, merely sitting around having a day off school.

I say all of this because I am convinced that there was far less learning happening throughout many of these school athletics days than happened at the strike/protest.  Surely yearly corporate sponsorship and social events are a greater waste of school lesson/teaching time than students gathering together for one afternoon to collectively ask to save our children.

I don't say stop the athletics day.  I just call out those anti-strike educationalists as talking nonsense.

Our little family caught the bus to the protest rally, along with plenty of school students in school uniform.  We stayed in Aotea Square for about an hour before catching an emptier bus home again.

Because we went to the rally, Mulan and Miya didn't do their weekly piano lesson with Nainai.  We decided that joining the protest was more important (their piano learning is very relaxed, and they'd only had their first lesson last Friday as Nainai has already canceled a few lessons this term when she wasn't feeling energetic enough to teach).  But we left the protest early to get to the girls' weekly swimming lesson.  We decided that swimming was more important (they have the homeschoolers swimming sports day next Wednesday, and also this is a paid lesson).

Were we inconsistent in our actions?  Certain extended family members told us we were.

I don't believe we were.  In life, we need to be wise with respect to how much time we spend on ourselves and how much time we spend on others.  We need to be generous with our time, but not stingy on the one hand or extravagant on the other.

Our family recognised that it was important to be a small part of the crowd at the protest rally, playing our small part to help others.  How much did us being there help?  Most likely very little, but a bit.  But we also recognised that we have our own life and interests.  Consistency doesn't require us to go to the extreme of either (a) only attending the protest and cancelling all our classes, or (b) attending all our classes and not going to the protest rally.  It is okay to be a bit more subtle in weighing up the value of our competing activities, and do a bit of both.

And you never know, there is a very small chance that my writings here might be read by someone who will then be inspired to think a bit more about climate change.  I want them to be encouraged that every little bit helps, but they don't need to give up their entire life for the cause.  Do what you can, and please put yourself out to help others, but don't feel guilty if and when you also have your you-time.

What happens when maths goes wrong?

A few nights ago I was relaxing in front of the screen, watching Matt Parker give a talk at the Royal Institution.

You know how it is.  It's about 10 o'clock at night.  The 8-year-old is in bed asleep.  The 11-year-old is almost in bed, but dragging things out quietly so you don't notice.  You just want to relax with a bit of maths.

Mulan quietly sat down next to me and started watching alongside me.  We ended up watching about half of the hour-long talk together.

But eventually it got too late and we had to stop it, unfinished.  Mulan informed me that I wasn't allowed to finish watching it alone, and I had to wait until the next day to watch the remainder with her.

What could I say?  Deprive her of learning some maths?

So, the next day we watched the rest of it together.  Miya joined us too.

If you want an awesome piece of maths advice, skip to 3 min 50 sec in the above linked video.

Matt Parker is always really inspiring with his maths videos.  His standup maths YouTube channel is excellent.  I've just requested from the library his two books, Humble Pi and Things to make and do in the fourth dimension.

Driverless cars

This is a fun and thought-provoking series of questions about driverless cars (I just did it together with Mama).

If you click on the link you must decide whether a driverless car, in which the brakes have failed, should smash into this or smash into that.  Whichever option you choose, someone (or at least an imaginary someone) will die.

Philosophers like to call these sorts of questions "trolley problems", and historically there have been mixed opinions about the usefulness of them.  To some people, they are too artificial to be meaningful for real life -- all the rich, relevant, real-life information has been abstracted out to the point of uselessness.  To other people, they allow us to clarify which values and principles are important -- all the distractions have been abstracted out, leaving us with the relevant hard questions.

But whatever the case about that, these days with the way driverless car technology is rapidly improving, many people see trolley problems as directly relevant to the programming of driverless cars.

If a human is at the wheel of a car that is having an unavoidable crash, we don't expect that person to have perfect reactions and thought processes regarding where they should steer the car.  People are excused as just reacting in the moment.

But when we have a driverless car, there is no such thing as reacting in the moment.  Its reactions cannot be excused.  How it reacts depends on the pre-crash programming, which was consciously encoded weeks/months/years in advance.

As a society, we have choices about what values and principles we encode into driverless cars.  In an unavoidable accident:

• should we prioritise humans over non-human animals?
• should we prioritise more lives over fewer lives?
• should we prioritise passengers or pedestrians?
• should we prioritise law-abiders over law-flouters?
• should we prioritise old people or children?

Face recognition technology may even make it possible for us to identify each person involved in the accident in progress:

• should we prioritise doctors over criminals?
• should people have a "social usefulness" ranking, which determines who gets hit in an unavoidable accident?

As a society, we also have choices about who chooses which values and principles to be encoded into driverless cars.

• should it be entirely up to each for-profit car manufacturer?
• or should there be some sort of government regulation/standardisation?
• should the general population be consulted?
• or should experts decide (who counts as an expert?)?
• should the algorithms be publicly available to everyone, or should they be hidden by corporations or ministries?

Lots of very tricky questions.

And it is important to remember that there are no value-neutral, purely objective mathematical algorithms here.  Whatever algorithms are encoded into driverless cars, they will include the values of those in charge of encoding them.

Here is an article introducing some of the results of the above-linked series of questions.

I've taught this topic a few times to critical thinking students.  I often show them bits of YouTube videos, such as from this, this, this and this.

Homeschool swimming day

Our Auckland homeschool swimming championships are happening in ten days time (on the 20th of March).

Registrations are open for another few days -- click the link above if you want to be involved.

Our homeschool athletics day, which I mostly organised, went so well that I've kind of been put into the organising team for the swimming day, too.  Not that I know much about swimming -- most of what I've learnt about swimming has been from watching Mulan and Miya's lessons over the past few years.

My attitude, though, is that something is better than nothing for the kids, and let's just get them into the pool for some fun, but competitive, races together.

In addition to this, Sandra, who is the main organiser of the swimming day, contacted the organisers of the local inter-school swimming competitions, with the aim of getting a homeschool team competing at the inter-schools.

The Primary School organisers got back to Sandra, and welcomed us to enter a homeschool team.  They have been very supportive of the idea.  Based on our homeschool swimming day results, we'll choose a team of 7 to 11-year-olds to compete in the North Shore inter-school competition on the 2nd of April.  If Miya does well at the homeschool day, she'll also swim at the inter-schools in the 8 years and under age group.  Mulan, sadly, turns 12 just a week before the age cut-off date.

The Intermediate School and Secondary School organisers have been less welcoming.  In fact, from what I hear they haven't even bothered to get back to Sandra about this.  Sigh!

Mulan and Miya have never properly raced before, and up to now they hadn't even specifically swum any of the race distances.  So we went to the Takapuna public pools on Friday with the aim of them trying out a few distances to see how they feel.  Because they were swimming in the public lanes, they occasionally had to zig-zag a bit and couldn't do ideal turns.  Nonetheless, in the hour we were there they both gained a better sense of the race distances.

Out of interest, I timed them as they each individually tried out a few distances.  They did:

Mulan:
100m freestyle: 1 min 54 sec
100m backstroke: 2 min 26 sec
100m breaststroke: 2 min 17 sec
33.3m butterfly: 54 seconds
33.3m freestyle: 27 seconds

Miya:
33.3m butterfly: 2 min 8 sec
100m freestyle: 2 min 53 sec
100m backstroke: 3 min 31 sec
100m breaststroke: 3 min 33 sec
33.3m freestyle: 43 sec

Just for fun, we came across the Auckland Swimming website, where we found the results of the recent Auckland junior championships.  Unsurprisingly, the girls have still got a way to go!  And amusingly, there is another Mulan in the 11-year-olds who is doing extremely well.

What Mama was doing in Melbourne

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that Mama was in Melbourne for work.

Here's a trailer for the documentary series she was working on:

Have a look at 1 minute 7 seconds.  That's Mama walking along the beach.  (She claims she did more work over there than just play on the beach.)

Rabbits

There's a story about a farmer who one day happened to see a rabbit accidentally knock itself out by running into a tree.  The farmer picked up the rabbit and had it for dinner.

After that, the farmer sat next to the tree hoping another rabbit would come along and also knock itself out.  It never happened again, and the farmer's fields were left untended.

Whenever we're lucky enough to win something, we call it a rabbit.

We've had a couple of rabbits lately.

We have a family membership at our local YMCA gym, and last month they had spin-the-wheel style prizes if we used the gym ten times in the month.  All four of us got our ten.  I won one month free gym membership (wow, with our family membership that's over $160!).  Miya won a 15-minute massage (she was not impressed; I bought it from her for $10).  Mulan won a plastic coffee cup.  And Mama won a bottle of water (haha!).

Mama said they are continuing the same prize offer this month.  We'll see if we can win something else.

Miya won our other rabbit.

Over summer, Mulan and Miya did the Auckland Library summer reading challenge.  There were various reading categories, and whenever they read a book from that category they submitted it online.  Both girls completed almost all of the categories on offer.

Miya was lucky, and won a book in the draw for those who completed more than five categories.

Our activities in term 1 2019

We're already four-ish weeks into term 1, give or take a week depending on when our activities started.  It's about time I listed out what outside scheduled activities we're doing these days.

Mulan:
Ballet: 6 classes (5 3/4 hours) per week, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays
Mulan is continuing with her ballet at Rowe Dance, this term doing two Intermediate Foundation classes, two Intermediate classes, one Contemporary class and one Conditioning class.

Music: 6 classes (5 hours) per week, on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays
Mulan is continuing to learn cello, flute, recorder and ukulele.  She learns ukulele with Yeye, while the other three instruments are with Belmont Music Centre.  She is also doing private cello lessons with her Music Centre teacher.

Swimming: 2 classes (1 1/2 hours) per week, on Fridays and Saturdays
Mulan is continuing with her swimming lessons at Swim Lovers' Swim School, but this term has also joined a one-hour squad training group.

Gymnastics: 1 class (1 1/2 hours) per week, on Sundays
Mulan has moved to North Harbour Gymnastics for her lessons.

Athletics: clubnights Wednesdays plus coaching Mondays
We've got another three weeks left of our athletics season with Takapuna Athletic Club.

Miya:
Ballet: 2 classes (2 hours) per week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays
Miya is also continuing with her ballet at Rowe Dance, this term doing two Grade 3 classes.  She plans to start a Contemporary class in term 2.

Music: 4 classes (3 hours) per week, on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays
Miya is continuing to learn violin, recorder and ukulele.  She similarly learns ukulele with Yeye, while the other two instruments are with Belmont Music Centre.  Mulan's cello teacher also gives Miya a few minutes at the end of Mulan's private lesson, with the girls playing together.

Swimming: 2 classes (1 1/2 hours) per week, on Fridays and Saturdays
Miya is also continuing with her swimming lessons at Swim Lovers' Swim School, and has also joined the one-hour squad training group.

Gymnastics: 1 class (1 hour) per week, on Tuesdays
Miya is still at the YMCA for her lessons.

Athletics: clubnights Wednesdays plus coaching Mondays
We've got another three weeks left of our athletics season with Takapuna Athletic Club.