Lev Lafayette's journal

The major event of this week was discovering that I received an 'A' grade for my research essay for a Master of Climate Change Science and Policy (MCCSAP) and thus an A average for the course. Obviously, there are many things that I intend to do with this new qualification, but I must confess the temptation to do a doctorate, with a probable scholarship, is quite alluring. On the other side of the lectern, I also conducted three trains of HPC workshops; the standard Introductory and Advanced Linux for HPC, and also a course on Regular Expressions. On a related matter, late last week I attended an AI panel hosted by Interactive at Pearl Diver; it was pretty high level, and pretty corporate, but one certainly couldn't complain about the food and drink, and managed to strike up a couple of interesting conversations.

An event like that contrasts with attending a QandA session the previous evening with punk/nowave artist Lydia Lunch at the Thornbury Picture House introducing a documentary of her very interesting and rough life, "The War is Never Over". The fact that she was staying in my apartment block and we squeezed in a bit of a conversation the night previous just adds to the experience, and coupled well with a visit to a laneway bar, Red Betty with Ruby M., to see some bands perform on a minuscule stage. As for Thornbury, it would the second time in the week that I was visited said suburb, also attending Justine M's housewarming-birthday combination celebrations of which very worthy congratulations are due for both. Plus, the entertainment of the Justine-Simon motorcycle trip through Vietnam, was quite special.

For smaller gatherings at my abode, both Liana F., and Erica H., have visited on different evenings to receive my a little obsession with Moroccan food; in both cases fatteh (stewed chickpeas, garlic, and lemon yogurt, toasted pita bread) and meskouta (Moroccan lemon cake) were on the menu. In Liana's case, it was also essential for her to watch "Casablanca"; it just didn't seem right that a film studies student had not seen this, easily one of the greatest films of all time. Besides, she has blessed me with her cat, Bowie, to look after for a week. He spends most of his time under things (a bit of a cave cat) but otherwise is doing fine. It's certainly nice to have a house pet again, even if for a short time.

I am now down to the final week of editing the 15000-word research project for my Master's in Climate Change Science and Policy, following that and a short presentation on the topic, that will be the conclusion of that degree, although I strongly suspect what is the beginning of a lifetime of further study and activity on the subject, starting with the initial subject of my research project; climate change impacts, adaption, and financing for Pacific developing nations. As much as climate change mitigation is absolutely necessary to prevent future impacts, some impacts are and will occur regardless - hence the need for adaptation. For the Pacific, we are talking about nations that have contributed very little to greenhouse gas emissions (both in absolute and per capita terms), but will feel the brunt of its effects; the moral principle of torts should apply.

In my working life, I have two impending HPC-related trips interstate pending in the next two weeks. The first is a visit to Sydney for Supercomputing Asia, where I have a presentation to give as part of the international HPC Certification Forum and a poster on HPC training metrics and usage. Apparently, if you train people, they submit many more jobs - who knew? Two weeks after that, and with an interesting dovetail with my studies, I'll be spending a week in Townsville conducting training workshops at the Australian Institute for Marine Science; it's been almost ten years since I've visited said people and it's pleasing to see that some of the staff are still there!

Even with all this on the agenda, I have had some opportunities for social occasions. Liana F., and I caught some the Triennial exhibition that's on at the NGV, which makes me want to go again, and for Invasion Day we went to Connection at Lume; our third visit to said exhibition. On Wednesday night I received an impromptu ticket to see the Pet Shop Boys' movie "Dreamworld" with Robbie K, which I observed featured quite a demographic of men of a certain age and greater than zero on the Kinsey Scale, and on Tuesday night caught up Nathan B., who is visiting from interstate with a lovely collection of old and true friends at Naked for Satan. For someone who is finishing a master's project I've had zero evenings this week when I've been in my own company; possibly not the most sensible decision, but I'm rather glad that I did manage all this.

As the EoY approaches I have found myself entertained with pretty much a week of pre-Xmas feasts. Starting last Wednesday was an EoY event for the Business Services Division at The Timber Yard, with several hundred people in attendance. I don't particularly like the venue at all, and the food was equivalent fare. It included the worst gnocchi I've had in my life, and this is from someone who rates that as a favourite dish. That Friday, Liana F., visited and I responded with "Filipino Night", which included a sweet potato and rice flour gnocchi in response, and a rather delicious chocolate biko. The following night I was taken out by Alison B. to Renee H.'s annual Midsummer Eve party, where there were some sixty people, many from the old Melbourne goth crowd. A special highlight was the individual expression of gratitude and wishes for the coming year. The day after that I had James N, Liana F., and Erica H., over for dinner after getting my hair shortened by James; all of us from the Perth goth scene of the later 1980s and all of us having haircuts from James (including his own). The day after that it was a visit to Anthony L., and Robin M., for more plotting for the great South Pacific venture of early next year.

Liana F., and I have also managed to sneak away for a couple of days to Phillip Island, staying at the perfectly reasonable Amaroo Park in Cowes. It was a pretty relaxing couple of days and included a beachside picnic, a bit of a dip in the ocean, a visit to the string of opportunity shops nearby (I picked up a small collection of Tintin books), a visit to the koala conservation reserve, and visits to Nobbies Point and Cape Woolamai. Apart from the aforementioned koalas, we spent some time in the company of some swamp wallabies, the famous Cape Barren geese, and a multitude of other birdlife. With the parade sold out, the only penguin we chanced upon was a youngster who had come out of its breeding box at Nobbies Point and had promptly learned an evolutionary lesson about coming out whilst the seagulls were still awake; "nature, red in tooth and claw", as Tennyson observed.

Officially I am on leave for the rest of the year, and I have done well so far not to even glance at the system or my work emails. However, I do have one more activity for tomorrow, to chair a delayed tech-talk and do a write-up of the activities of the Cultural Working Group which I have chaired for the past couple of years. Of course, when I am not working my nose is buried in research and as a result, I have made quite a reasonable start to my master's research project on "Climate Change Impacts, Adaption, and Finances for Developing Pacific Island Countries". The bulk of the findings will be conducted, of course, after the trip in the Pacific itself. But I have made a pretty good start on the aims, geography, demographics, methodology, and methods. I optimistically assigned myself the possibility of completing a draft by the end of the year. More realistically, I will complete more than half the content. But that is more than good enough.

There's been a couple of opportunities for exploring the arts this week with Erica H., being present for both events. The first was entitled "Folio Live" for graduating students in Interactive Composition from the University of Melbourne, which combined film, animation, dance, and theatre. The second was the Australian World Orchestra and the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (again, recent graduates) performing Mozart, Glinka, and Dvořák, the latter as always being very impressive to me. This coming Tuesday I also have an evening with Alison B., for Chant du Saxophone Ténor with pieces from Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Glazunov. Whilst in so many ways Southbank is the Manhatten of Melbourne with its towers of glass and steel, it is also a great arts precinct, and I cannot imagine living here without taking advantage of that.

On the work-related front, the Spartan supercomputer has finally run the necessary tests on part of the upgraded system, earning itself a certificate in the top 500 this week as the third most powerful ranked system in the country (after NCI and Pawsey). The assessment actually leaves out a good portion of our GPU nodes that would have pushed our ranking even higher and doesn't include any of our CPU-only nodes which would have given it another third in performance. This said the Top500 is really a marketing exercise that provides an at-a-glance indication of improved computational performance over time. The real metric is how much successful research is done, and on that criteria, we're doing extremely well. On that matter, the first three days of next week will include HPC training workshops, including "High Performance and Parallel Python", which I have spent a fair bit of this past week doing further development.

Finally, there is some academic progress for the Masters of Climate Change Science and Policy. As expected my illness in the assessment week had led to a dip in grades, although in one case it really strikes me as quite implausible. Nevertheless, by my calculations I have two A- grades for "Climate Change Mitigation" and "Climate Change Impacts Adaption" and have fallen just short of one with a B+ for "International Climate Change Policy"; I am still waiting for the results form "Climate Change Lessons from the Past". In any case, I am certain to have received a sufficient overall grade to do the research paper, which will be a 15,000-word essay on climate change impacts, adaption, and mitigation in developing Pacific nations - that is, combining content from the year's study. I am extremely tempted to take a visit to one such set of islands in the next month or so as part of that research, and the most likely candidate is looking like Vanuatu.

With an eight-hour overnight layover between flights at Guangzhou airport, I find myself composing a few notes on my first visit to the People's Republic of China after spending a week at the 2023 International Conference on Green and Innovation-Driven Development in Cities and Towns (a rather wordy title) at Suzhou, a large city that has a long history and is now a hub for international technological developments. The conference and the few hundred guests were housed in the brand-new and truly massive (1500 rooms!) Suzhou International Conference Hotel, which is certainly one of the best I've ever been to in my not-inconsiderable experience. Attendees included the Vice-Director of the provincial foreign affairs office, the district mayor and deputy mayor, a multitude of local academics and scientists, and various international guests, including the deputy speaker of the Portuguese parliament.

The formal conference agenda was really only a single day of parallel sessions, concentrating on heritage protection and integrating urban and rural areas. The rest of the time was a combination of historic town visits (Museum of Imperial Kiln Bricks, Humble Administrator's Garden (a UNESCO World Heritage Site), Suzhou Silk Museum, Embroidery Art Musuem) and high-tech development centres (the industrial park exhibition centre, the Higer bus company, the High-Tech Rail Tram Limited, the local campus of Nanjing University). Also of particular note was the astoundingly beautiful Taihu Lake wetland park whose resident giant pandas attracted, of course, a great deal of interest. My main interest was the degree to which the city is especially involved in the development of ICVs ("intelligent connected vehicles") and their production of electric vehicles. I was positively charmed by the automated cleaning robot that did its rounds on the lake next to the hotel. There was, it must be said, an absence of discussion on the pressing environmental challenges facing China as a whole and more of an emphasis on the successful integration of high-technology industries, historical character, and the natural environment in the city itself.

Of course, there were a number of networking opportunities, although I must confess I often gravitated toward the several visiting New Zealanders and the other two Australians. One new contact of note was Pinjun, a deputy director of the Provincial Department of Agricultural and Rural Affairs, who introduced me to the work that the local vocational college of Agriculture and Forestry is doing with international students from developing countries for food security science in the context of climate change. With three assignments and an exam this coming week for my own climate science degree, it was a very serendipitous meeting of minds. I will also take this opportunity to express my deep thanks to Tower L., for helping organise my attendance on the trip, to David, who helped manage the Australian visitors during the conference proper, and Robin M., and Anthony L, for pre-and-post journey assistance.

I am cognisant that I have visited a fairly well-off area of China. Even with this in consideration, I cannot help but notice the exceptional scale at which operations are carried out, the gleaming newness of the modern structures and infrastructure, the levels of cleanliness, the quantity of electric vehicles on the road, the landscaping of public space, and so forth. There were little signs of dire poverty and an absence of visceral petty crime (I'm sure all of this exists, I'm just going on my observations). It is clearly still a developing country in many ways, but one that is that is making its way to a top-tier economy very rapidly. Most of all, "Shared Prosperity" is apparently more than just a slogan.

For the past five days in succession, I have been involved in presentations in some manner. Today I attended the seminars for our paleoclimatology paper at the University of Wellington and I presented on "The Younger Dryas and The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation" at Wellington University. The YD is clearly a topic of great interest as one other researcher gave a paper on the "impact hypothesis" as a critical review (it's almost certainly not true) and another in the context of volcanism (a contributing factor, but probably insufficient). Other seminar presentations included the idea of microplastics as a marker for the Anthropocene (I rate animal population extinctions and habitat change a little higher, but plastics can certainly be an "indicator species"), along with one on animal and plant population changes in the New Zealand Southern alpine regions due to climate change.

In addition to this, yesterday I chaired the presentation by Dr Matthew Burns and Tom Wilkins from the University's Waterway Ecosystem Research Group, who spoke about the implementation of "backyard catchments" and invertebrate populations. Preceding this was three days of Spartan Upgrade workshops that I conducted; the second day was probably the most interesting with the most relevant questions on the new software stack. Next week there is another presentation at Wellington University, but that is a group project (climate change mitigation in the Te Tairawhiti region - fortunately someone else has stepped up to do the actual presentation, so I'll just be making contributions to that.

It is probably opportune to mention in this context that I'll be visiting China is a couple of weeks, specifically Wuxi for the "International Conference on Green and Innovation-driven Development in Cities and Towns". I attended the first conference last year (online) and was quite impressed by the emphasis on presentations from an engineering, town-planning, and ecological background, and of course, the city itself has been part of a low-emissions pilot program for some years. This will be my first visit to said country and, as can be expected, the visa application was quite a hefty form, but all processed quite efficiently.

A good portion of this week was spent working on a 3,000-word essay - with 60 references - for the paleoclimatology paper (goodness, I've fallen into Aotearoa New Zealand parlance). My chosen subject was comparing the Younger Dryas, the last stage of the Pleistocene, with the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), especially in light of a recent paper that posit an impending collapse of the AMOC through the same mechanism as is commonly believed caused the Younger Dryas (i.e., a sudden influx of freshwater). If such a collapse were to occur one could end up with a situation where land and atmospheric temperatures increase, whilst the North Atlantic Ocean temperatures would fall - and there would be global ramifications. Interestingly, studies on the AMOC are most paleoclimatological as well, given that it's only been in the last twenty years that we've had an instrument record. Anyway, the essay will be followed up in a few weeks with an accompanying presentation.

Another form of connection between the prehistoric and modern occurred last night when I visited the Connection exhibition at Lume with Liana F. This is the third such event of theirs I've been to (along with Van Gough and The French Impressionists), it was really quite an impressive experience, expressing the deep and even religious connection of people to their land (broadly defined), and yet again with a combination of immersive and gallery artwork, accompanying music, interactive pieces and more. I was sensible enough to purchase "unlimited visit" tickets, so another visit mid-week is in order. One thing that really struck me was the disproportionate number of people from a non-European background that were present (based on phenotypical characteristics) - African, Indian, and Southeast Asian.

A related matter is the ongoing issue in the Voice campaign. I've had a number of interactions with "no" voters over the past few weeks. Based on these I started asking the question: "Do you know what you're voting on? The actual words to the constitutional amendment?". Of the 118 I surveyed (yes, really), over 97% could not give the correct answer, or even something close. Given that the 'no' campaign has now been caught out for instructing their volunteers to literally lie and sow confusion, one wonders what this means to the principle that an effective democracy depends on an informed public sphere, rather than one controlled by demagoguery.

It has been a diverse week of the scientific nature for me which, unusually, covered not just work and study events but social events as well. Last night I was pleased to meet one Juliette W., with whom we share an interest in science fiction and fluid dynamics. We have mutual friends, but a surprising connection was with Robert McLay of the Texas Advanced Computing Centre - I attended his final pre-retirement presentation on LMod a few evenings prior (at 1 am in the morning, Melbourne time). LMod really has transformed the management of applications in the high-performance computing space over the past several years, so I hope Rob receives some recognition for his contribution.

Another event that crossed the scientific and the social occurred the night before when I caught up with a former workmate, Martin P., to see Oppenheimer at iMAX to a packed audience. It's a great topic and the representation of the science wasn't terrible even if the history was not quite right and it managed to omit the fallout effects. It must be said the performance by all and sundry was of excellent quality, and the story delved deeply into the persecution and troubled individual psychology of the protagonist. Ultimately, however, I was rather underwhelmed by it all - the movie was too long and it really didn't gain anything by being on a big screen. Still, small mercies that it wasn't a travesty of an action film.

In more typical activities, earlier in the week I had the pleasing opportunity to chair a work forum where we were addressed by two excellent researchers (Dr. Shanaka Kristombu Baduge and Dr. Sadeep Thilakarathna) who have usd our kit (cloud and HPC) to develop AI robots for plastic waste selection. In regards to the more typical study project, in the final lecture of the week on paleoclimatology and current events I drew attention to recent warnings of a very probable collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and raised whether it was possible to have a collapse in North Atlantic ocean temperatures whilst having simultaneously a significant increase in atmospheric temperatures. It seemed plausible and but I was hoping Professor Rewi Newnham would answer in the negative; he didn't. Fun time ahead, eh?

Adding to the last entry, yesterday morning I received my final grades for "Physical Basis of Climate Change"; an overall A grade, B+ for the exam (one mark off an A, and I think they made a mistake!). An additional email involved the remarking of the final essay for the GradDipAppPsych. I initially received a middling B grade for this, gave a Gallic shrug, and moved on, as it was the final mark. It turns out however that there had been a muck-up in the grades and comments, and I had actually written an A+ essay. The essay in question was on relationship advice which must cause a wry chuckle among those who have an inkling of what was the train wreck in that experience in recent years. In any case, it involved contemporary evidence compared to a traditional Rogerian humanist and client-centred approach, and I was rather pleased that I managed to find some relatively rare and late material by Carl Rogers on the topic.

All these endeavours do lead me to reflect on that thorny epistemological question of justified true belief. I cannot help but notice that there are many people who have very strong opinions on matters that they know little about, and often it seems the less they know the more strident they are. I personally prefer expert opinion and, if I have sufficient interest, I end up taking up a relevant professional activity (e.g., politics, supercomputing, education, etc) or a formal qualification.

Two particular examples come to mind where popular opinion is at great variance with expert opinion. The first is seventy-five percent think that China is a military threat to Australia. Whilst modernising, any serious analysis reveals that China has neither the intent nor the capability of engaging in invasive wars. The second is climate change, where over forty percent think that it's either not a problem at all, or the effects are sufficiently gradual that no drastic action is required which, of course, runs quite contrary to the latest IPCC report, but what would they know? After all, as Gettier pointed out, it is possible that ignorance can be right through luck and knowledge wrong due to unknown, but critical, variables. It is really not a good basis for public policy, however.

For the past few days I've been almost entirely buried in the last pieces of assessment for "The Physical Basis of Climate Change" and "Environmental Law", which wraps up trimester one of my MCCSAP degree. In the end, I am quite happy with what I submitted for both, although in the latter I did veer in the direction of critical legal studies. The more I studied the re-interpretations of Aotearoa New Zealand's ill-fated Resource Management Act as new legislation comes in after thirty years, I could only conclude with the Maori Whakataukī (proverb): "Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua" ("I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past"). As for the former, the grim and factual reality of stubborn physics and the relentless and tragic march of mathematic projection leads me to echo the words of Kate Marvel; "As a climate scientist, I am often asked to talk about hope. .. Climate change is bleak, the organizers always say. Tell us a happy story. Give us hope. The problem is, I don't have any... But the opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief... We need courage, not hope."

At the end of last week I also ran two days of Linux and HPC workshops for a range of bioinformaticians mostly from the veterinary and agricultural Sciences, but quite a few from health sciences and the attached medical centres as well. They were a good lot, with some excellent questions, and it pleased me a great deal that I was able to work my usual content to fit more precisely to the software that they use, including the several steps of a genomics workflow including sequencing data, quality control, alignment, and variant calling with everyone's favourite E. Coli. The process led me to discover a couple of applications that we didn't have installed, specifically the FASTX-toolki and Seqtk, both of which can be slotted into my regular expressions workshop.

The weekend also witnessed being host to the visit of one James H., with whom I share interests in roleplaying games and indigenous affairs, both fields in which I consider him to be more expert than I. Through James and Alison B I was taken to the 50th birthday of Caitlin H, which had a "Doctor" theme on account of the number of people present who had both PhDs or were science fiction fans; there were quite a few attired in a Dr Who style, for example. It was quite a delightful evening with some 50 people crowded into the Understudy of the stylish Bar 1806. For my own part, I went as the son of Dr. Merkwurkdigliebe, who some would know as "Doctor Strangelove", and I continued his message, albeit with a climate disaster approach. The following day James hosted an RPG session with the Futurama-like Farflung, which generated a story that was dramatic, hilarious, and wild. Plus it cleverly used the six quarks (up, down, strange, charmed, top, bottom) as attributes. I will be giving that another look in the future. For now - a moment's break! I think I deserve it.