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Cyberpunk 2020: Year of the Stainless Steel Rat convention continues in its development. A massive success in the past few days was scoring major author Walter Jon Williams as a speaker. Hardwired is, of course, one of the earliest and most famous cyberpunk novels and was certainly one of the first that introduced me to the genre. Nevertheless, with no intention to stop, the quest is on to bring even more interested and interesting panelists along with the fans. Appropriately, played in a session of CyberDarkSpace on Thursday night. Still working on what was supposed to be the September release of RPG Review - only five more pages to go! In the past week I've managed to put together reviews of In Nomine, Little Fears, and LexOccultum. The latter was particularly appropriate with watching the series La Révolution, a very fine example of historical horror-fiction.
Earlier this week delivered two HPC workshops on successive days; Regular Expressions with Linux, followed by Mathematical Applications and Programming. The latter was the first time I'd run the course at UniMelb and I must confess it was quite difficult, mainly because there is so many relevant applications; from core Linux utilities, to giants like R, Octave, and Maxima, to impressive new upstarts like Julia. Bringing all those under a single umbrella in four hours is difficult and there will be future fine-tuning. In comparison, I attended an Australian BioCommons workshop today on what was supposed to be data management, but really it was a really basic showcase for CloudStore. As a related online meeting, managed to squeeze in an hour to see a live presentation by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz on "Regulating Big Tech", which was heavily orientated around media quality, fake news, and social media. In further academic matters, today I ventured out to Swinburne University to help give![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lei_loo more of a feel for the place. She's been a bit unlucky in finishing tertiary studies, but this time she has a superhero in such matters for support, and I know she'll make it.
"Life is for the living"; a saying which was strongly affirmed recently when I attended a funeral procession and celebratory wake in a local park and gardens. It did not know the deceased (it was a friend of lei_loo's) but I can determine from their friends that being driven down a major road in an old Cadillac with cheering support from the procession behind and from the kerbside was just what they would have wanted (and probably planned). It also served as yet another reminder of our temporal state. To be a passive consumer of the arts, to be a mere subject of laws, to be neglectfully ignorant of science, is about a close to being mentally dead as far as I'm concerned, and I despair when I see it happen. The purpose of consumption is to inspire critique and from critique we prepare ourselves to make a better world; whether through the expressions of art, the justice of laws, or the discoveries of science. It is not even success in those fields that makes us truly human, but the very struggle itself to improve; that is living.
Earlier this week delivered two HPC workshops on successive days; Regular Expressions with Linux, followed by Mathematical Applications and Programming. The latter was the first time I'd run the course at UniMelb and I must confess it was quite difficult, mainly because there is so many relevant applications; from core Linux utilities, to giants like R, Octave, and Maxima, to impressive new upstarts like Julia. Bringing all those under a single umbrella in four hours is difficult and there will be future fine-tuning. In comparison, I attended an Australian BioCommons workshop today on what was supposed to be data management, but really it was a really basic showcase for CloudStore. As a related online meeting, managed to squeeze in an hour to see a live presentation by Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz on "Regulating Big Tech", which was heavily orientated around media quality, fake news, and social media. In further academic matters, today I ventured out to Swinburne University to help give
lei_loo more of a feel for the place. She's been a bit unlucky in finishing tertiary studies, but this time she has a superhero in such matters for support, and I know she'll make it."Life is for the living"; a saying which was strongly affirmed recently when I attended a funeral procession and celebratory wake in a local park and gardens. It did not know the deceased (it was a friend of lei_loo's) but I can determine from their friends that being driven down a major road in an old Cadillac with cheering support from the procession behind and from the kerbside was just what they would have wanted (and probably planned). It also served as yet another reminder of our temporal state. To be a passive consumer of the arts, to be a mere subject of laws, to be neglectfully ignorant of science, is about a close to being mentally dead as far as I'm concerned, and I despair when I see it happen. The purpose of consumption is to inspire critique and from critique we prepare ourselves to make a better world; whether through the expressions of art, the justice of laws, or the discoveries of science. It is not even success in those fields that makes us truly human, but the very struggle itself to improve; that is living.
