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Tomorrow I am giving an address at 11 am the Melbourne Unitarian Church entitled The End is Nigh: Failed Stewardship of Planet Earth. Putting it together has been an interesting exercise, ranging from an investigation into various (failed) predictions of earth's apparent demise from religious prophecy to a somewhat more secular investigation into the effects of global warming and the various forms of environmental destruction and the existential threat that poses to human and non-human species. The address correlates quite nicely (and without any pre-planning) with strikes and protests by school students who are understandably frustrated with political inaction. "Protest and survive" was a rallying slogan when I was their age in the early-mid 1980s and the issue was the possibility of nuclear war; it remains just as important and realistic now.
The past few days have also seen significant progress in my MSc in Information Systems studies and having finally received the relevant course material (lost in the post), I'm making some headway in the GradDip in Economics. My weakest point in the latter will be econometrics, an area which I have managed to avoid in most of my life as a student, but a comment by Tim R., in a different context suggests that the best way to learn it will be to program it, which will work nicely as I have planned to write a training course for high-performance computing usage for economists.
A rather full weekend is planned with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ser_pounce and hathhalla coming around in about ten minutes for our regular cheesequest followed by a session of D&D which, as is my want, is based on a historical fantasy version of the era of Charlemagne. For this scenario of retrofitted the classic Moldvay scenario The Lost City, placing it in North Africa as they search for the lost Eagle of the XIXth. Tomorrow nephew Luke and his housemate Nick are coming over for dinner; I am considering firing up a game of RuneQuest for them, having given Luke a copy of the game for his birthday a few years back (and he is yet to play).
The past few days have also seen significant progress in my MSc in Information Systems studies and having finally received the relevant course material (lost in the post), I'm making some headway in the GradDip in Economics. My weakest point in the latter will be econometrics, an area which I have managed to avoid in most of my life as a student, but a comment by Tim R., in a different context suggests that the best way to learn it will be to program it, which will work nicely as I have planned to write a training course for high-performance computing usage for economists.
A rather full weekend is planned with
ser_pounce and hathhalla coming around in about ten minutes for our regular cheesequest followed by a session of D&D which, as is my want, is based on a historical fantasy version of the era of Charlemagne. For this scenario of retrofitted the classic Moldvay scenario The Lost City, placing it in North Africa as they search for the lost Eagle of the XIXth. Tomorrow nephew Luke and his housemate Nick are coming over for dinner; I am considering firing up a game of RuneQuest for them, having given Luke a copy of the game for his birthday a few years back (and he is yet to play).