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HPC Education, Stoicism
Jun. 17th, 2020 09:10 pmThe past three days I've spent most of my work time conducting HPC training classes, the standard introductory class, shell-scripting, and finally parallel programming. As has happened in the past, by the end of the third day I'm quite exhausted and this time even more so than usual. It doesn't help that the final part of the third day is the most difficult, debugging message passing programs and I found myself making some simple mistakes at the end. My researcher-students were very kind in offering some supportive comments, especially after I mentioned that I was beginning to lose concentration after three days of lecturing for about five hours straight each day. The poor bastards, imagine having to put up with me talking to you for five hours? They put up with for three days. After today's class, I also had a board meeting of the international HPC Certification Forum, which is seeing some useful progress with the injection of some new contributors; slowly the tortoise advances. On a related note, given the content, I have received the feedback for my second assignment in my MHEd studies at the University of Otago; a pretty good grade again, although I am amused by the insistence of providing me what is effectively a B++ rather than an A-. Many years ago as an honours student I received such a grade and asked my assessor why on earth they just didn't give me an A-. Their answer was unforgettable; "Oh, we want you to work harder". There is a reason why my 'blog is subtitled 'Diary of a B+ grade polymath'.
I have had recent challenges to inner stoic, which has led me down the path of reading The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, something that I have not touched for decades. There are many things I find disagreeable about the Stoics of course; the fact they place virtue prior to action or motive in ethics, their dogmatic appeal to nature, and their physics is obviously contrary to contemporary evidence. Nevertheless, there is much to be gained by their emphasis on asceticism, and especially the mental training to concern oneself with the things that are you can actually control and what actually matters; although I do strongly agree with the critique that there are an empirical reality and physiological needs that have priority. Modern stoicism has, of course, has encounters with utilitarianism, Marxism, and the recognition of the similarity with some of the mental approaches and ethical systems in some versions of Buddhism. It is perhaps of the latter matter that a special highlight in recent days was catching up on a video-conferencing session with my old friend Glenn K. Way back in 1996 we shaved our heads and went on a Buddhist pilgrimage by hitch-hiking from Melbourne to the temple in Woolongong for the Year of the Rat. It was quite an epic tale, and one day I promise to write down this strange and wonderful "on the road" trip.
I have had recent challenges to inner stoic, which has led me down the path of reading The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, something that I have not touched for decades. There are many things I find disagreeable about the Stoics of course; the fact they place virtue prior to action or motive in ethics, their dogmatic appeal to nature, and their physics is obviously contrary to contemporary evidence. Nevertheless, there is much to be gained by their emphasis on asceticism, and especially the mental training to concern oneself with the things that are you can actually control and what actually matters; although I do strongly agree with the critique that there are an empirical reality and physiological needs that have priority. Modern stoicism has, of course, has encounters with utilitarianism, Marxism, and the recognition of the similarity with some of the mental approaches and ethical systems in some versions of Buddhism. It is perhaps of the latter matter that a special highlight in recent days was catching up on a video-conferencing session with my old friend Glenn K. Way back in 1996 we shaved our heads and went on a Buddhist pilgrimage by hitch-hiking from Melbourne to the temple in Woolongong for the Year of the Rat. It was quite an epic tale, and one day I promise to write down this strange and wonderful "on the road" trip.
