Dying With Dignity and VSL, Gaming Updates, Coursework

It was a small but thoroughly interesting meeting with Dr. Rodney Syme from Dying With Dignity Victoria. As jokingly mentioned, it's not often you get to meet with someone who has been investigated nine times for assisting in the death of others. He made a very good case for the introduction of palliative voluntary euthanasia, despite the inability of politicians and especially some religious leaders, to engage in the very basic human right of letting people themselves decide when the time is right. I took some notes from the meeting that are of interest. Of particular interest was the presence of a Anabaptist who argued emphatically for the separation of church and secular governance. On other matters relating to the Victorian Secular Lobby, have also managed to get the website up-to-date in terms of news items of import; most recently, despite Exodus International apologising for the harm they've caused, Australia groups still persist.

Sunday's game was Twilight 2000 with another episode of the battle for Warsaw, which saw the local militia push the mercenaries and marauders of the self-styled "Black Baron" away from their defensive perimeter. In other end-of-the-world scenarios, RPG.net have published my reviews of Aftermath!, and The Apocalypse Stone. Still working through a review of Horror on the Orient Express, as well as material for RPG Review 20's themed "Monsters and Aliens", including overviews of the GURPS Aliens and Humanx, AD&D 2nd edition Monstrous Manual, Call of Cthulhu's Malleus Monstrorum, White Wolf's Hunter: The Reckoning, and a variety of RuneQuest material. Part of the challenge will be taking into account the tension between the grotesque weirdness associated with the monster alien and the sense of sympathy with the other. Material has also been provided by tzunder, specifically some classic D&D creatures for OpenQuest (RuneQuest etc).

Today completed another session of Introductory HPC With Linux, which went exceptionally well especially considering the complete lack of familiarity members of the class had with Linux and HPC. Nevertheless they were nearly all doctoral candidates and some of them had done extensive Fortran programming (on MS-Windows for goodness sake; I didn't even know that such beast existed). Received extremely good feedback from course attendees, and will be initiating a longer-term mentoring program with this group. Tomorrow and Wednesday will be the intermediate and advanced courses, the former including scripting, regular expressions, job arrays, dependencies, and interactive jobs, and the latter including even more on scripting, but mostly on MPI programming. Have suggested new courses for 2013-2014 including Tools for Researchers (SQL, Version Control, Make for projects), Mathematical Programming (R and Octave), and Scientific Programming (Python, C and Fortran). On the related subject of my studies in Tertiary and Adult Eduction, still haven't received the final mark, but did receive excellent feedback on my suggestions of changes to the way the course is assessed, with significantly more emphasis on continuous summative assessment for formative purposes.