Lev Lafayette's journal

For the past few days I've been almost entirely buried in the last pieces of assessment for "The Physical Basis of Climate Change" and "Environmental Law", which wraps up trimester one of my MCCSAP degree. In the end, I am quite happy with what I submitted for both, although in the latter I did veer in the direction of critical legal studies. The more I studied the re-interpretations of Aotearoa New Zealand's ill-fated Resource Management Act as new legislation comes in after thirty years, I could only conclude with the Maori Whakataukī (proverb): "Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua" ("I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past"). As for the former, the grim and factual reality of stubborn physics and the relentless and tragic march of mathematic projection leads me to echo the words of Kate Marvel; "As a climate scientist, I am often asked to talk about hope. .. Climate change is bleak, the organizers always say. Tell us a happy story. Give us hope. The problem is, I don't have any... But the opposite of hope is not despair. It is grief... We need courage, not hope."

At the end of last week I also ran two days of Linux and HPC workshops for a range of bioinformaticians mostly from the veterinary and agricultural Sciences, but quite a few from health sciences and the attached medical centres as well. They were a good lot, with some excellent questions, and it pleased me a great deal that I was able to work my usual content to fit more precisely to the software that they use, including the several steps of a genomics workflow including sequencing data, quality control, alignment, and variant calling with everyone's favourite E. Coli. The process led me to discover a couple of applications that we didn't have installed, specifically the FASTX-toolki and Seqtk, both of which can be slotted into my regular expressions workshop.

The weekend also witnessed being host to the visit of one James H., with whom I share interests in roleplaying games and indigenous affairs, both fields in which I consider him to be more expert than I. Through James and Alison B I was taken to the 50th birthday of Caitlin H, which had a "Doctor" theme on account of the number of people present who had both PhDs or were science fiction fans; there were quite a few attired in a Dr Who style, for example. It was quite a delightful evening with some 50 people crowded into the Understudy of the stylish Bar 1806. For my own part, I went as the son of Dr. Merkwurkdigliebe, who some would know as "Doctor Strangelove", and I continued his message, albeit with a climate disaster approach. The following day James hosted an RPG session with the Futurama-like Farflung, which generated a story that was dramatic, hilarious, and wild. Plus it cleverly used the six quarks (up, down, strange, charmed, top, bottom) as attributes. I will be giving that another look in the future. For now - a moment's break! I think I deserve it.

It is sufficiently difficult not to say "I told you so", but eight years ago (after the Russian annexation of Crimea) I wrote an article about self-determination in Ukraine, where I argued that a principled position (as opposed to great power maneuverings) would allow oblasts under dispute - through UN-managed referenda conducted with independent international observers - to determine their own fate. Of course, this has not happened, and Putin - the sort of Russian nationalist who doesn't think that Ukrainians are a separate nationality anyway - has led Russia into an invasion rather than allow Ukrainian self-determination as a whole. Whilst Russia does have greater firepower and many more troops, they are finding it difficult going. I think that the Russians do have the strength to take over Kyiv but will be subject to an ongoing quagmire of civilian resistance and guerilla warfare. Putin must have wanted a quick victory - now he is clearly being denied that and when he loses - as he will - the repercussions will be severe. I suspect that this will be his biggest mistake and the world won't be sad to see the end of him.

It is quite extraordinary how desperate people are in the pursuit of money, and on a related matter I've been spent a good portion of the weekend in the company of caseopaya as we worked our way through Squid Game which, whilst a violent survivalist series, does indulge in power criticism of inequalities of wealth and the psychological effects of such inequalities. In addition to this, we also attended Brendan E.'s 50th birthday gathering, held a local park. It was a great day, although my head reminded me the following morning that two bottles of champagne followed a vodka cosh was a bit much even for myself.

At the end of last week, I conducted two HPC workshops, one on parallel processing (mainly OpenMPI and MPI) and one on High Performance and Parallel Python (modules, environments, job submission, threads, multiprocessing, MPI4PY, etc). Unfortunately, I was feeling pretty nauseous on the Friday and had to finish an hour early with some of the optimisation techniques only partially addressed. The researchers were very sympathetic to my plight and thanked me for what I have to say was a lot of content anyway even up that point. On the other side of the lectern, I have enrolled and accepted an offer at the University of Auckland for my next degree - a Graduate Diploma in Applied Psychology.

In a hat-tip to the previous journal entry (which referred to SF adventures), there is a certain degree of similarity in this one. The weekend, apparently, is similar to the week prior which explains why I feel that I haven't had a weekend yet. Today however I was teaching mainly immunological doctoral researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute. I was planning to do an Introduction to Linux and HPC but after listening to their explanations of existing genomics workflows, I switched my presentation immediately to my Bioinformatics for HPC course which combines the general courses with the Date Carpentry course on genomics (so yes, two courses squeezed into one), with most of the first part being completed. They were a pretty switched-on group, with a number having good levels of previous experience, and with some challenging and insightful questions.

Out-of-hours what spare time I have has been largely spent on working on an assignment for my final course for my MSc in Information Systems, with the dissertation to follow. With a few stuff-ups in my residency enrolment, I am now booked to go to Zurich in November. After missing winter for two years in succession, it will be a pleasant change to get two in a single year, although I imagine it will be quite a shock to the system returning from the onset of a European winter to the beginning of an Australian summer. Still, the practical upshot of all this will be the completion of degree number five, and with six and seven in the wings as well. It will, of course, be another opportunity to visit Europe which will require mapping out something will include visits to friends and family as well as trying to expand the scope of places to include new areas.

On the weekend played a session of the new edition of RuneQuest, having wrapped up our third edition game that made use of various "gateway" settings (Questworld, Griffin Island, Elderaad). This is set in the deep, weird, and mostly consistent fantasy world of Glorantha which in some many ways has a mythic structure that is stronger than most real-world religions, but that's what you get for a fantasy world designed by a practicing shaman and mythologist. For my own part, I took the role of the most comic species in the setting, the duck-like durulz (and with an appropriate pun, named her Rowena Wigeon, a trickster cult member). The curious thing about these beings is that even though they come across initially as quite ridiculous (image of Donald Duck come to mind), they have an extraordinary depth of character. Cursed, flightless, they live in a swampland inhabited by a demi-god vampire and his minions. As a result, they may seem initially to be ridiculous, but they carry with themselves a level of surly seriousness and are savagely foul-beaked as a result. Strange, deep, but consistent? That's Glorantha for you and that is why in the past I have described it as the greatest fantasy world ever created.

Finally finished and sent out RPG Review issue 39, a special issue of "The Far East". Turned out to be a really text-heavy issue with nearly all the material from myself and Karl B. Still, we ended up with a good range of material in my opinion; a balance over time of various RPG games in such a setting including Bushido, GURPS China, Legend of the Five Rings, and RuneQuest Samurai, various creature builds for Dungeons and Dragons, etc., and campaign stories for Gulliver's Trading Company, the Malay archipelago, and a fantastic version of the Ainu. It is also the first time that I have published my wild hypothesis that the Indonesian Borobudor and Prambanan temple were a friendly competition between Buddhism and Hinduism - and were defeated by the animist Merapi. One day I'll explore that more seriously. Speaking of which (not an intended pun there), Duolingo has started offering Bahasa Indonesian, a language which I have learned the basics and promptly forgotten at least three times. Maybe this time it will stick.

In actual play this week ran two games because I'm that keen. The Thursday night session of Exalted introduced the second story of the journey to the far west as the mighty heroes travel into the Kingdom of Ma Chu, although a lot of the session was spent on character upgrades. On Sunday ran as session of Eclipse Phase where the PCs had to deal with a rather delusional meglomaniac named Lachiesis Robespierre Hobart who operated an armoured yacht staffed by lobotomised bikini girls with machine guns, which kept watch over a three-kilometre long humanoid being built by AGIs on the mid-Atlantic Ridge. Naturally enough, they managed to defeat the dangerous captain, save the unfortunates, and are now heading towards Belém to find new morphs (and hopefully new brains). On a different sort of gaming, visited log_reloaded and Jase on Saturday night at their new digs and had a play with their HTC Vive kit; I ended up eaten by a zombie, but that's how such things go. Never enough bullets when there's zombies around.

I've had a very busy few days workwise as well. Managed to get my journal article (with German co-authors) in to the Advances in Science, Technology and Engineering Systems Journal on the final day. On top of this had two training classes to run, one Introduction to Linux and HPC and the second Advanced Linux and Shell Scripting for HPC. Both of these are from 4 to 5 hours long, so it pretty well takes out the day. There is still one more class to run on Wednesday, Parallel Programming. I still have to finish my paper for the HPC Advisory Council conference in Fremantle, WA. Given that I leave on next Monday, I'd better get a move on for that. Especially considering that shortly afterwards I'm also going to be presenting at eResearchAustralasia. In the meantime we have the system from Melbourne Bioinformatics to shift and attach to Spartan. Just as well I've made a good dint on the software installs a couple of months ago.

Attended the LUV Beginners talk today at InfoExchange with Andrew Pam giving a good presentation on the history of version control with supplementary contributions by Mike Hewitt. Have volunteered myself to give a talk at the main meeting in a fortnight's time on UNUMS - how to do computation without error. Apropos, recently a small GPU cluster illustrated its power in cracking passwords. This has implications for some institutions, including a certain university I have taught at, which had a terrible password policy. I could not help but write a few words about it. Work this week included preparation for upcoming conferences (OpenStack Australia, QuestNet), the lecture I'm giving for Cluster and Cloud Computing, creating more space on the Edward cluster, and organising weekly research training sessions.

On Monday we went to visit hathhalla and ser_pounce for the regular cheesequest and played Journey : Wrath of Demons, which went very well, although I do note that many of this big, expensive cooperative boardgames are very much in style of traditional battle scenes from traditional tabletop roleplaying games. Also enjoyed the company of their new household ferrets, very silly creatures. Friday night was another session of the Eclipse Phase Mars storyline where we smuggled weapon-grade uranium to the social democrats (I'm sure they'll use it responsibly). On other science fictions interests now have a copy of The Booger Peril courtesy of an invitation only book launch, and have also received responses and published an interview with John Snead, on of the most prolific writers in the RPG world.

Over the past week I've been thinking intensely on race conditions, but not in computer science. Rather, I've been thinking about them in terms of the sociology of crises, for example, the ability of disparate world political systems and interests to engage in effective unified action on global warming before a critical point is reached - in other words following the metrics of the Doomsday Clock, and noting that we're now in the same 'time' as we were globally as 1984.