Lev Lafayette's journal

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.

With formal classes at Zurich completed the opportunity presented itself to explore the city more completely. Of special interest was a couple of trips to Cabarat Voltaire, a bar and performance art space in the Altstadt, located where the original Dada movement was founded. The "artists-in-residence" (meaning, they were living there) provided a piece called "Hausen", which combined audience participation of how people lived, their occupation and fears etc, combined with interactive VR, electronic music etc. Whilst I understand the desire to bring out commonalities through isolated differences, the ensemble lacked a emergent narrative direction or flow and as a result, was pretty disappointing overall. The signature cocktail of the establishment (consisting of gin, absinthe, lemon, and thyme) was pretty tasty, however. To be honest, I think Bauhaus has more staying power than Dada, and more cogent manifesto and besides, nobody does dress up parties like Bauhaus. Anyway, that was Zurich. I hope I don't think I have any real need to visit the place again.

I should mention that on the way home by pure chance I came across a protest march against the Turkish attacks on Rojava and, having that political alignment, joined in immediately. I had already done so in Freiburg as well, so this seems to make me a bit of an international protestor for Kurdish self-determination or some-such. Of course, this must always be understood as a protest for national self-determination, rather than independence per se - that is for the Kurds to decide. Likewise, it is not associated with competitive nationalism either. If the Kurds were the ones denying the Turks their right to national self-determination, I would find myself marching with the Turks against Kurdish oppression! Nor does the right of national self-determination does not trump universal individual and social rights. But this is all matters that I have spoken about before.

The following day was a visit to the Principality of Liechtenstein, a political anachronism if there ever was one. When I was a wee lad of a mere eight years I sat next to a boy at the North Beach Primary School and we poured through an atlas finding the smallest country in Europe, with Luxembourg, Andorra, San Marino, Monaco, and eventually Leichenstein getting a guernsey (the Vatican City seemed to be a bit of a cheat). Now, forty-three years later, I have fulfilled a childhood dream and visited the country, taking the train past the beautiful alpine lakes Zurichsee and Walensee and then the bus from Sargans, through the south-western section of the country to the capital Vaduz. The place is tiny and unless one is into hiking over mountains you can see a lot of it in a single day. The impressive national museum was well worth the visit and alas, the Vaduz Castle was undergoing renovations and closed to the public. The Rhine separates Switzerland from Liechtenstein and that provides a good opportunity for a picnic lunch as well as a visit to the old bridge where one can play the game of being in both countries at once.