Lev Lafayette's journal

That well-known body of fair-minded thinkers, the Institute of Public Affairs, have released an opinion poll that argues that 75% of Australians want to celebrate Australia Day on January 26. Other opinion polls say that most people don't care what day it's on, as long as there is an "Australia Day". Less than half the population even knows why it's held on January 26, including the Sports Rorts former minister Bridget McKenzie. I describe the choice of date in some detail in an article I wrote three years ago about Invasion Day). So it seems that most people still want to "celebrate" this particularly insensitive choice of date, at least for the time being: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice". If anyone thinks that this campaign is going to go away, they are sorely mistaken. You may as well be celebrating Columbus Day.

This is not to suggest that I do not take advantage of the public holiday (indeed, I suspect that is the most important component for most people). Damien B., had a birthday lunch on Saturday and afterward we went to see Jojo Rabbit, an impressive humour noir of a fanatical and delusional pro-Nazi German boy's perspective as WWII comes to an end ("It's not a good time to be a Nazi", his friend Yorki helpfully explains). The evening prior visited Brendan E., and watched half the first season of The Mandalorian, which is really quite well done. Also, I now understand the Baby Yoda memes. I'm quite up-to-date on popular culture, you know? In two other major social events, played RuneQuest Glorantha today, where I shamed a ghost over holding onto powerful items that it couldn't use and argued with Dwarves over the rightful owners of an iron and gold fallen star (we got to it first, so the World Machine had decreed was clearly ours). Thursday night was a session of Lex Occultum where we got into the spirit of things with the collective production of French food for dinner, and dealt with weirdo Jansenites and a traditional Fronde-like rebellion.

I also managed to complete the third chapter of my MSc dissertation yesterday which discusses Methodology and Selected Methods. I had a few harsh words to say about those who confuse methodology and methods, which unfortunately includes my supervisor who is obsessed with structure and doesn't comment at all on content. Still, at this rate, I will have the draft done before my self-imposed deadline of the end of the month. What remains of this month will also see me completing two submissions for the Isocracy Network and the Victorian Secular Lobby respectively, the former on the state of homelessness and solutions in Victoria and the latter on the proposed "religious freedom" bills that the Federal government is determined to introduce. Should also have the next VPAC book, Sequential and Parallel Programming with C and Fortran out by the end of the month as well.

When I was a teenaged Marxist, my favourite badge was a quote from the Manifesto: The working men have no country. The appeal was very much towards international worker's solidarity and against racist prejudice. Unfortunately, working people are as much - if not more so - swayed by nationalistic loyalties than other classes. In the Australian context however we are led to believe that January 26 is to be celebrated. Celebrate what? It marks the proclamation of British sovereignty over the eastern seaboard of Australia. In other words, Invasion Day. Whilst some deny it the question is raised in what way wasn't it an invasion? Tell me what has happened to the diversity of indigenous cultures, now driven to extinction, and whose surviving members still suffer the entrenched structural effects of discrimination. Yet, there is outrage over the graffiti on a fake cottage. This is the effects of reified nationalism; being upset over graffiti over a building, whilst remaining silent and ignorant at the death and destruction of real people.

But of course, it was a long weekend and that does mean the opportunity to spend time with friends and loved ones. On said weekend itself we were visited by ser_pounce and hathhalla where we engaged in an afternoon of food, drink, and merrymaking - including a visit to the local bat colony by the river and a most inspired session of Cards Against Humanity. For our continuing quest to complete the cheeses of the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch, I made liptauer as a contribution. We're down to about the last half-dozen, which includes those which are not actually cheeses at all (e.g., Ilchester, Caithness, Perle de Champagne) plus those which are somewhat difficult to acquire in Australia (Fynbo, Abertam). I have, as recently posted, made a request to the Adelaide zoological gardens for that rarest of produce, the Venezuelan Beaver Cheese.

It's been confirmed that at the end of next month I'll be visiting New Zealand to be the MC at Multicore World, which will then follow up with the workshop for Computing for the Square Kilometre Array, the world's most impressive radio telescope project (in my considered opinion). On a related topic, next Tuesday is the monthly Linux Users of Victoria meeting where Les will be speaking on Linux on non-Intel architectures , and I'll be putting together a "best of" compilation from LCA2014. This is also dovetailing with another round of three days teaching high performance computing and Linux to postgraduate researchers.