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Diary of a B+ Grade Polymath ([personal profile] tcpip) wrote2012-11-24 01:07 pm

Isocracy AGM, VPAC Supercomputer Project, Socialising

Prepared the committee report for today's Isocracy AGM with Race Matthews speaking afterwards on worker's cooperatives. For an organisation with a mere 26 members, we made extraordinary achievements this year (two branches established, seven forums, two Senate submissions, etc). Most recent post on the website is Stephen Spirgis' review of Rising Up and Rising Down, an excellent assessment of political violence in politics. Will take his opportunity to thank [livejournal.com profile] sebastianne for her great work over the years as VP, as she's unfortunately standing down.

Very pleased this week with the efforts on the new supercomputer. We've managed to get an enormous amount of the software installed, with numerous nodes installed with various DNS wars. [livejournal.com profile] imajica_lj deserves special recognition for his herculean efforts. Indeed, despite the swearing, cursing, and glazed-eyes from trying to get the system to an excellent state, there has been a high level of camaraderie from those on the project. First "real users" expected early next week. The most amusing media coverage compares our little 45.9 teraflop machine with Titan, the world's fastest at 20 petaflops.

Thursday night was another excellent Call of Cthulhu session, playing out the Zargeb and Belgrade chapter of Horror on the Orient Express; one character is increasingly insane, but the others are actually improving! Second chapter of our game-play posted. Last night attended the weekly multicultural gathering organised by Keith P.; some thirty (mostly) students crammed into his flat to discuss community. Will be presenting at the group in a fortnight's time on the topic "The Worst Features of the English Language", which I imagine [livejournal.com profile] fluffyblanket would have a few comments to make!

[identity profile] fluffyblanket.livejournal.com 2012-11-26 07:10 am (UTC)(link)
Español es muy fonético . If we can't have Esperanto , I'd settle for that , as it's the second most spoken language on Earth - after Mandarin - by population .

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2012-11-27 12:09 am (UTC)(link)
Italian is an example of another language where the phonetic transcription and orthography are strongly related. Apparently Albanian is very good too, but I can't see that taking off as an international language!

[identity profile] fluffyblanket.livejournal.com 2012-11-27 07:54 am (UTC)(link)
Neither stands much chance , but Spanish is the language of 23 nations - many of them huge !!!
¡ y viva España !
PS I'm delighted to have you as a friend as you're so responsive to my drivel .
:D

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2012-12-05 01:27 am (UTC)(link)
Spanish is a great second language choice for the reasons you've stated. Certainly a much better choice than French (a language I have a serious love-hate relationship with)! What do you think of Interlingua?

[identity profile] fluffyblanket.livejournal.com 2012-12-05 09:12 am (UTC)(link)
We have-
http://x-french.livejournal.com/
Re Interlingua-there are actually two !

Interlingua/Latino sine Flexione incited by Peano is brilliant .It has a latin vocabulary, just using the ablative form for nouns and adjectives and the imperative for verbs.
But there is another one, stealing the name but much inferior.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latino_sine_flexione
Edited 2012-12-05 09:17 (UTC)

[identity profile] tcpip.livejournal.com 2012-12-05 10:22 am (UTC)(link)
Heh. When I saw the name "Peano" I thought "I wonder if that has anything to do with the mathematician?.."