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tcpipIt is sufficiently difficult not to say "I told you so", but eight years ago (after the Russian annexation of Crimea) I wrote an article about self-determination in Ukraine, where I argued that a principled position (as opposed to great power maneuverings) would allow oblasts under dispute - through UN-managed referenda conducted with independent international observers - to determine their own fate. Of course, this has not happened, and Putin - the sort of Russian nationalist who doesn't think that Ukrainians are a separate nationality anyway - has led Russia into an invasion rather than allow Ukrainian self-determination as a whole. Whilst Russia does have greater firepower and many more troops, they are finding it difficult going. I think that the Russians do have the strength to take over Kyiv but will be subject to an ongoing quagmire of civilian resistance and guerilla warfare. Putin must have wanted a quick victory - now he is clearly being denied that and when he loses - as he will - the repercussions will be severe. I suspect that this will be his biggest mistake and the world won't be sad to see the end of him.
It is quite extraordinary how desperate people are in the pursuit of money, and on a related matter I've been spent a good portion of the weekend in the company of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caseopaya as we worked our way through Squid Game which, whilst a violent survivalist series, does indulge in power criticism of inequalities of wealth and the psychological effects of such inequalities. In addition to this, we also attended Brendan E.'s 50th birthday gathering, held a local park. It was a great day, although my head reminded me the following morning that two bottles of champagne followed a vodka cosh was a bit much even for myself.
At the end of last week, I conducted two HPC workshops, one on parallel processing (mainly OpenMPI and MPI) and one on High Performance and Parallel Python (modules, environments, job submission, threads, multiprocessing, MPI4PY, etc). Unfortunately, I was feeling pretty nauseous on the Friday and had to finish an hour early with some of the optimisation techniques only partially addressed. The researchers were very sympathetic to my plight and thanked me for what I have to say was a lot of content anyway even up that point. On the other side of the lectern, I have enrolled and accepted an offer at the University of Auckland for my next degree - a Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology.
It is quite extraordinary how desperate people are in the pursuit of money, and on a related matter I've been spent a good portion of the weekend in the company of
caseopaya as we worked our way through Squid Game which, whilst a violent survivalist series, does indulge in power criticism of inequalities of wealth and the psychological effects of such inequalities. In addition to this, we also attended Brendan E.'s 50th birthday gathering, held a local park. It was a great day, although my head reminded me the following morning that two bottles of champagne followed a vodka cosh was a bit much even for myself. At the end of last week, I conducted two HPC workshops, one on parallel processing (mainly OpenMPI and MPI) and one on High Performance and Parallel Python (modules, environments, job submission, threads, multiprocessing, MPI4PY, etc). Unfortunately, I was feeling pretty nauseous on the Friday and had to finish an hour early with some of the optimisation techniques only partially addressed. The researchers were very sympathetic to my plight and thanked me for what I have to say was a lot of content anyway even up that point. On the other side of the lectern, I have enrolled and accepted an offer at the University of Auckland for my next degree - a Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology.
