Lev Lafayette's journal

Last night I attended the annual Chinese Language and Culture award ceremony held at the Chinese Consulate. This event, held over the past several years, recognises those university students who have excelled in the namesake award and is co-organised by the consulate and the Australia-China Friendship Society, with the awards determined by the Australian Tertiary Chinese Teachers Association. Short speeches were provided by the Consul-General, Xinwen Fang, myself in the role as president of the ACFS (Vic), and Chunming Shan of the ATCTA. Each of us made reference to the importance of language to understanding culture and the importance of understanding to reach a successful relationship between people; the Consul-General quoted Wittgenstein (I wonder how many people noted that), whereas I made the point that the students were over-turning Chris Bowen's "educated guess" from five years ago that there there are only 130 Australians of non-Chinese heritage who can speak Mandarin with competence. A rather worrying statistic when one considers that China is Australia's largest trading partner (for both imports and exports) and the dependence on a good working relationship with said country for secure peace in the region. Following the awards there were song and spoken performances from tertiary and even high-school students and a dinner - the consulate does put on some rather delicious food. From the performances (they were all excellent) I must note one young woman who nervously gave a speech in Chinese and then, when the music started, completely went into her zone with the confidence of an expert and with an utterly stunning and angelic voice.

Continuing on-topic, the day previously, Duolingo dutifully informed me that I am in the top 0.1% of its learners for the third year in succession. I know I started the year with the objective of concentrating on Chinese, French, and Esperanto, which I certainly did in the first half of the year (I came first in the Diamond Tournament in early June), but it's turned out that my studies have ended up with Chinese, Spanish, and Music. My emphasis on Chinese is for obvious reasons, while my interest in Spanish has come about with the decision to participate in "Sonidos del alma", the local Spanish-language choir and a desire to visit South America in the second half of next year. This week, according to Duo, I also reached CEFR B1 in Spanish, which suggests a modest level of competence. As for Music, this relatively recent interest (as a practitioner rather than a critic) dovetails quite nicely with the choir participation. Speaking of which, I am making excellent progress in the course in music theory derived from Augsburg University curriculum, and I am certain I will complete it by the end of the year. If I start rambling on about diatonic chord progressions in minor or minor keys and the circle of fifths, you know what's happened to me. Actually, I know exactly what's happening to me; I am exploring language, culture, and music as a means of emotional regulation as I attempt to reconstruct ethics in the face of profound human cruelty.

"People talk sometimes of a bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel."
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "The Brothers Karamazov"

As Victorian President of the Australia-China Friendship Society it is unsurprising to discover that there are more than a few events to organise and attend under that banner. For what it is worth, my own orientation still tends toward a critical evaluation of that country's political system, which includes recognition of their truly impressive economic success and especially encouragement in their role in developing environmentally beneficial technologies (whilst noting that the country is now the largest producer of greenhouse gases). This aside, there is also the cultural aspects of promoting friendship. For my own part, this includes finishing the heavily revised (it needed it) Duolingo Chinese course this morning. In addition, this Saturday, a small number of from the society and friends will visit the Dai Gum San precinct (museum, gardens, temples, restaurant) and then the historic Bendigo Joss House Temple. Bendigo has a remarkably a rich Chinese history and we're planning on meeting some members of the Bendigo Chinese Association.

A few weeks after that, the society will be hosting its annual dinner at the Red Emperor in Melbourne's Chinatown, and we're hoping to have an announcement of a very special guest speaker in the next few days. Running parallel with this is a sale of a collection donated from the former Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, Ken Smith, who served in the parliament from 1988 to 2014. A number of items in that catalogue are really quite extraordinary; the riverside rice paper and silk painting that spans over 4 metres in length is an example. There are, of course, a great number of smaller items available as well. Obviously if anyone is interested, the catalogue is available on request. Hopefully, between the dinner and the catalogue the society should generate enough revenue to keep ourselves financially afloat in the coming year.

A number of weeks ago, I finished a draft of the society's website, sticking to the principle that a simple HTML/CSS design is vastly preferable to the previous fashion of database-driven sites (which, I admit, I succumbed to under duress some twenty years ago). Alas, the company that holds our domain has been expensive and without great service to make up for it, so I've arranged for a transfer. Further, a few weeks back, Anthony, Robin, and I met with the director and colleagues from the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Melbourne with a view of setting up a prize fund for an appropriate essay. That is, of course, a lumbering process through any bureaucracy, but at least it has been formally initiated. Finally, the national body is already making plans for next year's annual trip in April, which, if I recall correctly, will be the Beijing-Shanghai region - another temptation!

As the end of the year approaches various organisations start their individual annual reviews and group celebrations. Duolingo sent me their version where, for the second year in a row, I was among their top 0.1% of global learners. I celebrated that by sending them an email about how I am not renewing my subscription after several years, which actually ends today. Reddit, an environment where I have had an account for twelve years, but rarely touched, has found me in the top 1% of "Karma" earners this year. I have found that Reddit is a lot better for group discussions, especially after FB has made such a mess of groups. After for organisations in the real world, a few days ago was the EoY lunch for Research Computing Services, and at the end of the week Business Services will be hosting an event at the Natural History Bar, which looks like my sort of place. It will be the fourth event of the week, with Kerrie's birthday gathering on Thursday, the local ALP branch hosting an event the evening before, and the NTEU having on tonight. Obviously, I'm going to have to pass myself quite carefully!

Whilst Melbourne is grudgingly dragging itself into summer I've taken the opportunity to revive my balcony garden. The indoor plants in the study are thriving, but the it's been a bit more of a challenge outside. The doves continue to provide entertainment regardless. Erica H, with a few matters on their mind, has been in my company a fair bit in recent days and with a knowledge of good popular culture far superior to mine, has introduced me to Umbrella Academy, a Victorian-styled dysfunctional superhero family. Among all this I continue with my cognitive science studies which finally has become slightly interesting with cognitive approaches to addiction (in comparison step-wise variation in sense perception and optical illusions just don't interest me) and my application for the next degree, a Master of Climate Change Science and Policy has been accepted for 2023.

The subject title hints at what was a pretty interesting weekend. With regards to meetings there was my presentation to SoFiA on the topic "Is Moral Reasoning Innate of Learned?; plenty of discussion of course, and a video of the Zoom session is also available. The next meeting, the following day, was the Annual General Meeting of the Victorian Secular Lobby, Inc., where I have been president for over ten years. I've stepped down from that role and Andrew Rawling has taken it up, so it's a continuing organisation. I think we've done pretty well in getting our objectives achieved, although there are still a couple of big-ticket items to go.

A very lovely social occasion was a visit to The Rookery from Eddie, Robbie, Liana, and Nick for "linner", which developed further into the night, after animated conversation, into dance lesson instructions from Nick who knows a thing or two about such things, and a little bit of fencing instructions from myself, which is also a form of dancing. Actually, on that matter, it is a gap in my entry into proper society, right? I might be a scholar and gentleman, once who has toured to The Continent a few times, one who can ride a horse, shoot a pistol, and compose prose and poetry, but I have never learned to dance - well, not since school, anyway. So that is something I intend to change, and apparently, a smart thing to learn at my age.

Of course, I had to hit the books on the weekend, and I have again found myself on top of the Duolingo Diamond league after working through an unreasonable quantity of lessons on Sunday across French, Spanish, German, Esperanto, and Chinese. I actually topped the league a few weeks ago, and completely neglected to mention that. I rather wish that Duolingo had Thai as one of its courses as I find myself spending a bit of time on that language as well. As required of course there was also the need to put together a couple of thousand words for my final psych essay for the semester - almost done, except for the editing! How was your weekend?

The past week has consisted of days dedicated to the Otago University HEDC Symposium, three days of teaching workshops (Introduction to Linux and HPC, Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting, and, tomorrow From Spartan to Gadi). So far everything is doing well. Also doing well is my interviews for online learning tools, a field that has become all the more important in these coronavirus days. I feel the need to preface each time this is brought up that my study commenced just before the pandemic, a curious contextual serendipity that one would rather not have to experience! Apropos, a week ago I topped the Diamond League in Duolingo, the third time I have achieved such a level. However, it felt somewhat undeserved as I managed to snipe the position with less than 2,000 points - around the same amount that a year previous would need per day for a week to achieve such a position. Despite the flurry of online learning in its various forms, perhaps it is the case that fewer people are taking up languages or with as much gusto as in the past. It would seem that a certain "petite chouette verte" is also a victim of SARS-CoV-2, at least in some regions.

On that matter, the European Union 3G policy of "Geimpft, Genesen oder Getestet" (vaccinated, recovered, or tested) seems to be working surprisingly well with rapid testing tools. New cases having declined significantly in France, Germany, Spain, and Italy in recent months (but, notably, not the UK). Australia continues to lag on overall vaccination levels, and our case rates are three times their peak last year and increasing, with New South Wales and Victoria continuing to fare very poorly. Fortunately, vaccination does work and death rates have not increased proportionally. It is, of course, absolute figures that matter in this context if you're on the receiving end and the reality continues to be if you're wilfully not vaccinated or immunocompromised, life is going to be hard. It is the former group which appropriate disdain should be directed.

Which is one of those matters that vaccination is self-interested and other-interested as it does reduce transmission (the virus dies out quicker in a vaccinated person). It is, in a sense, an act of generosity. Contrariwise, being wilfully non-vaccinated is a sense of selfishness, combined with ignorance that is a danger to others. Fortunately, the overwhelming majority of people tend towards generousity and a concern for others, and not just in this area. This is my own round-about way of expressing the pleasure of generosity toward a friend who required some bridging finance for a medical issue, but even more so, a most unexpected gift from overseas which I can only spend in memory of a dear and departed friend. Neither act was necessary, but both are carried out with a collective human spirit that inspires.

The past few days have been almost entirely buried in either teaching or learning. On Monday and Tuesday, I ran courses on Parallel Programming and Mathematical Programming, respectively with the usual format. The latter is only the second time I've run the course at UniMelb and I'm afraid that it still needs more work. There's too much content, but how else is one supposed to pack the scope and capacity of extensive programming languages like R and Octave/MATLAB into one-hour sets and then book-end either side with a variety of shell tools and alternative languages such as Maxima, Gretl, and Julia. It's a smorgasbord that is as deep as it is long, and the only real option I have is to provide plenty of examples for people to explore in their own time in detail expressed as HPC job submission scripts to give it a particular context (in particular I have introduced several new job arrays which are very useful). Julia, in particular, is a tricky one because of its sudden increase in popularity over the past eighteen months or so, as it begins to fulfill its promise of being an easy, high-level, programming language that is flexible, but with the performance of lower-level languages such as C. Perhaps I am going to have to develop a workshop entirely dedicated to Julia.

In another teaching forum, I have started teaching the intermediate English course at the University of Rojava. I find myself encountering what is a common issue for me among many of the other teachers where, by virtue of some network engineering knowledge, I am slightly horrified by the lack of consideration of whether various tools are appropriate for learners who are trying to take their classes by mobile 'phones with poor Internet connectivity. Some are using Google Docs (I suggested Etherpad), others are talking about extensive video-conferencing, and so forth. Now some audio is necessary for pronunciation experience and learning, but I'm trying to do as much as possible in plain-text. One hundred thousand words of plain-text are roughly a megabyte. Put it in a binary format and watch it grow. Save it as an audio file and it'll be ten times the size, at least. Give it video and, well, you get the picture (literally); "A picture is worth ten thousand words". But this is rarely experienced by the sender, it is the recipient that suffers. I always find it curious that there are so many who are advocates to access to technology and information are often those who do not practice what they preach, because it's a technical detail that they don't understand, but also don't try to understand.

When I haven't been teaching, I've been learning (and there's certainly plenty of learning involved in the act of teaching). In particular, in an act of linguistic solidarity, I've decided to give Arabic another crack this year. The difficulty involved is substantial, I wonder which would be harder to learn as a non-native speaker, Arabic or English? Arabic has a fairly complex alphabet, in which a letter having up to four different shapes depending on where it is in a sentence. Further, I have also been hitting the books pretty hard for macroeconomics in particular, and also econometrics as well, as the pile of some twenty or so textbooks in front of me should indicate. I've been working on a regular paragraph or three on my MHEd dissertation, but that has fallen on the wayside a little bit for the first half of this week. Still, it hasn't been hard work, one way or another; Sunday was pretty much entirely dedicated to RPGs, with a compilation of more material to be sold, plus sessions of RuneQuest and Cyberpunk 2020 in succession. But apart from that it really has been much work and little play.

The weekend evening festival comes to a point where I have now watched all the Studio Ghibli feature films. This weekend was the charming re-telling of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter as The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, the other-worldliness of When Marnie Was There and finally, with all prior warnings of not being a happy film at all, Grave of the Fireflies. At the end of it all, I remain with my earlier opinion that Princess Mononoke is the best of the set with its clash between traditional beliefs and early modernism and complex characterisation. I was also particularly taken on a personal level by The Wind Rises which dealt well with the curse of the engineer; that their work, inspired by a love of turning scientific knowledge into real and practical things, are all too often funded and appropriated for the killing of fellow humans. It is now some six years since Studio Ghibli has released a feature film, and I do wonder whether what will almost certainly be Hayao Miyazaki's final film How Do You Live?. At 79, I hope he does complete it, and I hope that it is a wonderful capstone to a life dedicated to promoting the issues of environmentalism, anti-militarism, and feminism through animated film.

The past few days (when I haven't been working!) has also seen the publication of a 1500 word article that I've been composing mentally for a couple of weeks, Isocracy is an Antifa Organisation, a response to President Trump's declaration that AntiFa (not an organisation) is "terrorist organization". Of course, with the campaign team making use of the symbol for Nazi political prisoners in promoting this idea it is clear who is threatening terrorism, and for that matter, fascism. It is remarkable to think that in such a deep economic and health crisis that has now killed more than 128,000 people in the United States that the head of state runs the place as a kakistocracy. I am also currently in the process of composing articles on the "All Lives Matter" debate and symbolic value of statues, which apparently is the latest front in the culture wars.

In other matters I finished the Indonesian tree in Duolingo, the first one I have done in six months, bringing my total of "golden owls" to fifteen. I've also had the opportunity to do a bit of gaming over the past few days, with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha today and Lex Occultum on Thursday night. I have also made a few sales from my vast collection in the past couple of days as well, with a special visit from Glenn K., on Friday to collect a pile for a younger individual who has gotten into gaming. My review of Pantheon has also been published on RPG.net. Finally, there is a major announcement coming soon from the RPG Review Cooperative, but the committee has to sort out some of the finer details before I am prepared to go public on it. Life, apparently, has been busy.

I understand that many people like things. They provide pleasure, a sense of homely belonging, memories, security etc. And, I must confess, have a particular appreciation of finely crafted items, "brown wood" furnishings, and a deep love of written word on paper. But the path I am taking in life commands more minimalism, in part from döstädning (Swedish for "death cleaning"!). I grok the approach of Marie Kondo's apparently Shinto-inspired advocacy to only keep those things which "spark joy", although the fact they have an online shop and their partner is a sales consultant leads me to question how genuine they are. What makes good empirical sense is that less clutter in one's life reduces entropy, reduces anxiety and stress, improves diet, reduces cognitive overload and improves productivity. etc. As for my friends who love cultural artifacts, a well-organised book, music, or video collection does not really constitute clutter even if it consists of many visual things. Does anyone really consider a library, "cluttered"? A poorly organised file system however does, even if it is just one system unit!

Which a very round-about way of saying that I've been decluttering and simplifying the objects, real and virtual, in my life. The past couple of days I've spent some time working through about eight old desktop computers that I've had under the desk in the games library, one of which (my old VPAC desktop, Slackware Linux) hadn't been turned on for around five years. Some of the others haven't been turned on for ten years, and one machine (which I'm currently working on) dates back from 2001! There is, among all this some old data that I'd like to recover, mostly of a similar vintage if not older - I've done this a few time in the past and it's worthwhile documenting - it's not that hard! So that careful process of data recovery, often by making use of old Linux live CDs and mounting even older IDE drives, is underway. It will take a few days overall, I suspect, but lost data is irreplaceable. There is at least one drive which I know will have to go to a specialist service (I have recommended Payam Data Recover for a number of years now).

Just as one cannot have everything (where would you put it?) nor can one know everything. Many years ago I was introduced to the notion of "epistemophilia", by my honours examiner, Dr. Zoe Sofoulis. It is expressed as the desire and even the paraphilia when the quest for knowledge becomes irrational. The sanest expression of this is seeking understanding and communication; the worst is secret knowledge for manipulation. One could make a point about where our social system fits in this regarding so-called intellectual property rights, let alone direct political censorship of factual content. On a personal level, I consider myself a bit of a late bloomer in my love of languages, but in the past week, I powered through a number of Duolingo stories in French, German, Spanish and found myself on top of the Diamond League, the highest possible level. It only required two days of obsessiveness, but obsessiveness nonetheless. At least I can justify it by saying I have, and will, use those languages in real practise. I would like to get my teeth into some SE Asian languages again at some stage with travels in mind, once this damn virus is done with. It's been a long time, for example, since I've been to the Malay archipelago, and my time in Thailand has been woefully short. Idle speculation at this point of course, but something on mind.

Isocracy AGM was held today; a smaller-than-usual gathering, although we did have person dialing-in as well. Discussed Nicolò Bellanca's "Isocracy: The Institutions of Equality", and noted that in most cases the programme developed by the Isocracy Network had a greater level of exactness, detail, and coherence. But that is to be expected, we've been working on it for quite a while. There was widespread discussion about various suggestions in the book, especially matters of federalism, economies of scale, and so forth. The discussion continued on (and went on a wider range of subjects) when the official meeting ended and we continued at the local coffee shop. Next items on the agenda include submitting our paperwork to Consumer Affairs and writing a submission on homelessness to the Victorian parliamentary inquiry.

Finished the English to Russian tree on Duolingo earlier tonight. Still not feeling very confident of my abilities in said language at all and a lot more revision is required. I will also do the Russian to English tree as well, which seems to help reinforce some core concepts, and I suspect it is more developed that the other way around. In any case, it is my only "golden owl" of the year, bringing my total to 13. I remain amazed at users like ClaudioAg1! who have completed 43 trees. Worse still (for me) I have discovered that Duolingo now also has Latin. I'll finally make use of those old textbooks on the subject that I've barely looked at over the last 25 years or so, despite their old-world charm, and have a close look at Damian Conway's famous Lingua::Romana::Perligata Perl module, written due to Latin's strong lexical structure, although it seems to me that consistent positional languages have certain ease-of-learning and consistency advantages over the use of inflexions (English adjective order is quite a wonderful example).

Speaking of coursework, my Linux and HPC workshops took up most of the work time for the latter half of last week, with the Introduction to Linux and HPC class being full to the rafters, followed by Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting on the second day. Both of those had some excellent questions from some pretty switched on researchers. The third course, Regular Expressions using Linux had to be cancelled due to attendance numbers, which was a real shame given the amount of effort that's been put into it. The researchers who did attend pleaded for me to run the course again next year, which I certainly will. It is too important a subject, especially for various bioinformatics subjects.

After a couple of days of deliberation among the committee, the Victorian Secular Lobby launched a petition this morning (picked up by no less than Lee Lin Chin, hooray), calling for the Australian Christian Lobby to be de-registered as a charity and for the Federal government to remove the "advancing religion" clause from the Charities Act. which basically allows any religious group to claim tax-exemptions even if they are not doing any charitable work in a meaningful sense of the term. This does come on the midst of a significant court case in Australia between Israel Folau by Rugby Australia after he was sacked for various social media comments. I have written an extensive piece on the Isocracy Network, Rugby, Religion, and Charities, which was simultaneously posted in a slightly modified form in talkpolitics. For something that has been running for just over twelve hours, the petition currently has over 4,000 signatures.

For a good portion of this week I've been delving into various linguistic studies. I have neglected my Portuguese from French studies for months and with a new co-worker who is a Portuguese speaker (from Brazil), there is an opportunity to practice my woeful skills in this language. Duolingo has also just started an Arabic course, which I have thrown myself into with some interest and less competence. I have also spent some time (i.e., have completed the first week's worth) of Noongar, the Australian aboriginal language of the south-west. A course is available on edX and co-ordinated with Curtin University. One thing I have discovered over time is that quite a few words in my childhood which I thought were standard English words, were, in fact, Noongar words. I was always brought up with the knowledge that a hand-spear for fishing was a 'gidgee', for example.

Apart from that, I've been making a few remarks on my information systems course on the difference between methodological individualism and institutional socialisation, along with the economic and business value of free and open source software from a strategic perspective; as one does. On Wednesday most of our team avoided going to work because the building site next door was breaking up concrete which would have been a hell of a racket - I spent a good portion of the day building software and updating my introduction to parallel programming course, especially with additional material I had overlooked in the shared-memory OpenMP API; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has been very helpful in that regard. Plus I have a co-authored presentation in at the ARDC Skilled Workforce Summit, so I might be going back to Sydney again soon. Speaking of which, neglected to mention that last Tuesday week I was on Sydney Radio Skid Row with John August talking about truth in political advertising, and the relationship between an informed electorate and a functioning democracy (quite a strong correlation, it turns out).