Lev Lafayette's journal

On Wednesday I went to an RMIT lecture and concert at The Capitol Theatre where alcohol was the musical instrument, i.e., some scientists from the ARC Exciton centre applied a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer to ethanol, producing a pitch in G-minor. The event was hosted by RMIT and hosted at their rather beautiful "Chicago-gothic" Capitol Theatre, which has been pretty much closed for the past two years. I went with Simon S., the second night in succession with his company, with he and Justine visiting the evening before for dinner and drinks before we went to the Ian Potter Centre for a performance from UniMelb's School of Fine Arts and Music. Before you all gasp "Lev went to a jazz performance!", I wish to point out that it was competently performed and subtle lounge music. To add to further events, this evening Mel and Vanessa S visited for dinner and drinks, and then we went to the New Music Studio "Of Birds and Monuments" by The Melbourne Conservatorium of Music which was heavily influenced by narration with the indigenous sites near the Melbourne CBD. Yes, three concerts in four days!

Apart from alcohol as an instrument, there has been a couple of interesting science-related matters that I've been involved in this week. One is a recent publication using the Spartan supercomputer which involved automated malware detection based on the image-based binary representation, with a pretty high level of accuracy. On another work-related science matter, I hosted a presentation today for Research Computing Services at UniMelb with Associate Professor Mohsen Talei on developing low-energy and cleaner gas turbines and reciprocating engines; it is from such engineering that a better planet can be made. Finally, in another work-related matter, I have spent a fair bit of time working on a high-performance and parallel Python workshop which I will run next month. Python is a great scripting language for beginners and has good object-orientated programming practices built in, which means that it is often used on an enterprise level as well. But if you care about performance and resource utilisation it's incredibly slow and inefficient. The workshop is designed to overcome some of these issues, but ultimately recommends "polyglot programming".

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).