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Humans are fascinating creatures; as regular readers would know I repost my public Livejournal/Dreamwidth posts to Facebook, where most people live in the social media space. Which included (a) a photo and small reference to my new haircut and (b) a reference to the fact that I had raised close to $6K for Medicines sans Frontiers. There was a veritable mountain of comments about the former, and nothing about the latter even though the latter is far more important. Sure, I participated in the conversation as well, but it was still an amusing insight on our culture or maybe even our privilege. Are aesthetics more interesting or easier to talk about? Either way, that figure for MSF is now close to $8K, as one buyer purchased close to 16kg of Dungeons & Dragons books, nearly all modules, and I have over 50kg to post today. And there is still more buyers on the way. So today is mainly dedicated to providing more lists of gamebooks for people to select from and getting some of the postage out of the way. As Bob Bemer used to put it, ((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!).
The novel coronavirus continues it's swathe across the globe. We have now reached over four million confirmed cases, and over 275K deaths. The United States is now a third of the world's confirmed cases, the UK now has the second-highest number of confirmed deaths, and China's numbers are not to be trusted as they expel foreign journalists. Meanwhile Australia is talking about relaxing restrictions in the very week that the R0 value above 1. We're at the stage where people are going a bit stir-crazy from being on restricted movements for so long, and the economic and political pressure is mounting to open up as unemployment rises. Then there will be another outbreak, and restrictions will be re-imposed: Our society will change, forever, as it fluctuates between being half-complacent and half-paranoid."
As a person still in gainful employment and who can work from home, I must confess to being a little frustrated in the past couple of days. Certainly, if I look it at more objectively, I have had some good successes - I'm finally contributing material upstream to the Easybuild repositories, and was able to identify some path and permissions issues with our most recent installation of some computational chemistry applications, and I'm smashing my way through the applications list for the new build system. But there has been one snag with a certain numerical application with a lot of dependencies. The software builds successfully but then fails its sanity check with symbol lookup errors. Given that it is one of the most commonly used applications there's no getting around the need to get it installed. But it is one of those situations where I am reminded by how supercomputing really can be quite challenging.
The novel coronavirus continues it's swathe across the globe. We have now reached over four million confirmed cases, and over 275K deaths. The United States is now a third of the world's confirmed cases, the UK now has the second-highest number of confirmed deaths, and China's numbers are not to be trusted as they expel foreign journalists. Meanwhile Australia is talking about relaxing restrictions in the very week that the R0 value above 1. We're at the stage where people are going a bit stir-crazy from being on restricted movements for so long, and the economic and political pressure is mounting to open up as unemployment rises. Then there will be another outbreak, and restrictions will be re-imposed: Our society will change, forever, as it fluctuates between being half-complacent and half-paranoid."
As a person still in gainful employment and who can work from home, I must confess to being a little frustrated in the past couple of days. Certainly, if I look it at more objectively, I have had some good successes - I'm finally contributing material upstream to the Easybuild repositories, and was able to identify some path and permissions issues with our most recent installation of some computational chemistry applications, and I'm smashing my way through the applications list for the new build system. But there has been one snag with a certain numerical application with a lot of dependencies. The software builds successfully but then fails its sanity check with symbol lookup errors. Given that it is one of the most commonly used applications there's no getting around the need to get it installed. But it is one of those situations where I am reminded by how supercomputing really can be quite challenging.
