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Isocracy, HPC Courses, Various
Dec. 11th, 2019 10:50 pmIn preparation for Saturday's Isocracy annual general meeting on Saturday I've been working my way through Nicolò Bellanca's "Isocracy: The Institutions of Equality". It broadly has the same orientation (liberal, socialist, and anarchist) as the political group which I founded several years ago, and it's good the name at the very least is being raised when people start thinking of alternatives. Apropos, in preparation for the UK election on the morrow, I've written an fairly lengthy article the website entitle The United Kingdom is Falling Apart, which I posted simultaneously on talk.politics where the moderators were kind enough to give it a "highly recommended" status.
Workwise I've been spending a great deal of time on the final set of HPC workshops for the year. Today's Introduction to HPC and Linux course has a higher-than-registered turnout which made things a bit crowded and ever-so-slightly rushed, but we made our way all the content. Some pretty switched on people who asked the right questions that both indicated a certain naivety about how such systems work, but a good conceptual understanding of the environment - which meant that they understood the answers pretty much immediately. A rather perfect place for an educator to be, really. Most of my spare time in the past few days has been putting the finishing touches on the new regular expressions course; whilst I have been a moderate advocate for a while, it has really hit me how astoundingly useful Simple Regex Language (SRL) is as a teaching tool.
Whilst work and politics have pretty much taken up most of the past few days there have a few other diversions as well. On Sunday run a session of Eclipse Phase for the "psychic mutant sex-fiends on the moon" plot arc (EC can get pretty damn weird if you let it). Slowly returning the rest of the furnishings to their proper locations, with just a few bookcases and the dining table to go, and doing a bit of a cull as we go. In a house ("a small library") of some thirty bookcases or so it's never going to look spartan, but it certainly will be neater. Perhaps also of note, over the past few weeks, I've been in the "diamond league" of Duolingo, which I believe is those mad bastards who simply do too much language revision on a weekly basis. Actually I do it whilst traveling in public transport and am reserving the more serious learning for Russian. I'm still utterly terrible at it, but Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen.
Workwise I've been spending a great deal of time on the final set of HPC workshops for the year. Today's Introduction to HPC and Linux course has a higher-than-registered turnout which made things a bit crowded and ever-so-slightly rushed, but we made our way all the content. Some pretty switched on people who asked the right questions that both indicated a certain naivety about how such systems work, but a good conceptual understanding of the environment - which meant that they understood the answers pretty much immediately. A rather perfect place for an educator to be, really. Most of my spare time in the past few days has been putting the finishing touches on the new regular expressions course; whilst I have been a moderate advocate for a while, it has really hit me how astoundingly useful Simple Regex Language (SRL) is as a teaching tool.
Whilst work and politics have pretty much taken up most of the past few days there have a few other diversions as well. On Sunday run a session of Eclipse Phase for the "psychic mutant sex-fiends on the moon" plot arc (EC can get pretty damn weird if you let it). Slowly returning the rest of the furnishings to their proper locations, with just a few bookcases and the dining table to go, and doing a bit of a cull as we go. In a house ("a small library") of some thirty bookcases or so it's never going to look spartan, but it certainly will be neater. Perhaps also of note, over the past few weeks, I've been in the "diamond league" of Duolingo, which I believe is those mad bastards who simply do too much language revision on a weekly basis. Actually I do it whilst traveling in public transport and am reserving the more serious learning for Russian. I'm still utterly terrible at it, but Es ist noch kein Meister vom Himmel gefallen.