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Work, Studies, Ron Cobb
Sep. 23rd, 2020 08:41 pmI've spent far too many of my waking hours on work-related activity over the past few days, partially on developing a Mathematical and Statistical Programming for HPC and partially working on surveys and content for the workplace culture working group, along with my usual tasks. The former has been a bit of a hard slog; I'm a few thousand words in, including code, and I feel like I've only done a quarter of the content that I want to deliver (I haven't even started on the parallel extensions), which is often typical of my workshops. There is so much information to impart and I'm always worried about the cognitive load of the researchers. Still, they keep coming asking for more material and coming back, so maybe a dint of experience and interest in this content provision does provide something.
A related issue has been my first assignment for the last piece of coursework for my MHEd. To date, I've been a "straight-A" student in this course, but for this assignment, I was horrified (joking, you know) to receive a B+. Now there are genuine issues in my writings, including an unorthodox personal referencing system (I loathe all of the standard methods; APA, MLA, Harvard; the lot, they're all horrid). What I was unhappy with was errors of misreading on different leadership approaches (transformational, positional, distributed) for different aspects of a proposed mentoring project. Still, it is the implementation that is ultimately important and I'll concentrate on that; one more assignment and a thesis to go and I'll finish this stiff piece of cardboard by the middle of next year (I hope).
I find myself rather saddened to hear of the death of Ron Cobb. I suppose many have encountered his designs in famous scenes for movies like Dark Star, the cantina scene of Star Wars, the clothing of Conan The Barbarian, the Nostromo in Alien, and the DeLorean time travel machine in Back to the Future. But it was his acerbic social and political cartoons that really cut a path to my heart, many of which still feature on his website. My love for his work is sufficiently strong that I'm trying to source a couple of limited edition pieces; more news on that in a week or so.
A related issue has been my first assignment for the last piece of coursework for my MHEd. To date, I've been a "straight-A" student in this course, but for this assignment, I was horrified (joking, you know) to receive a B+. Now there are genuine issues in my writings, including an unorthodox personal referencing system (I loathe all of the standard methods; APA, MLA, Harvard; the lot, they're all horrid). What I was unhappy with was errors of misreading on different leadership approaches (transformational, positional, distributed) for different aspects of a proposed mentoring project. Still, it is the implementation that is ultimately important and I'll concentrate on that; one more assignment and a thesis to go and I'll finish this stiff piece of cardboard by the middle of next year (I hope).
I find myself rather saddened to hear of the death of Ron Cobb. I suppose many have encountered his designs in famous scenes for movies like Dark Star, the cantina scene of Star Wars, the clothing of Conan The Barbarian, the Nostromo in Alien, and the DeLorean time travel machine in Back to the Future. But it was his acerbic social and political cartoons that really cut a path to my heart, many of which still feature on his website. My love for his work is sufficiently strong that I'm trying to source a couple of limited edition pieces; more news on that in a week or so.
