The highlight of the past few days was attending a Lunar New Year party hosted by tabouli. It was mostly attended by her friends in Toastmasters and a writing group, which were all lovely company and with cherry conversation. I've even made a couple of new friends out of the event. Tabouli really provided a wonderful reading of "The Great Race: The ( Read more... )

As the countdown to the end of 2021 approaches, I am welcoming the end of what has been an unpleasant year in many respects, whether I consider my unfortunate prescient comments at the start of the year on COVID-19 cases and deaths, or some rather challenging times in interpersonal affairs. All of these have had quite a toll on initial plans (" ( Read more... )

In the past several days I've been working on numerous writing projects. which is not so unusual for me. The first is a compilation of transcript and notes from my presentation at the University of New South Wales on cryogenic electron microscopy. The second is an article for Isocracy on a "parliamentary path" for the abolition of economic classes ( Read more... )

This afternoon I was deeply honoured to chair a presentation by Dr Jo Birch of the University of Melbourne Herbarium, which has plant and fungi collections items from 1770, a really wonderful opportunity. Kinda-related had a pretty good meeting with my MHEd supervisor on Wednesday, much of which had to do with the economics of value. I am getting ( Read more... )

The past weekend I spent down in the Great Otways National Park. It's the fourth time I have had reason to visit, and each has reminded me that I should have done so more often, given its fairly close proximity to Melbourne. The cool rainforest produces a remarkable density of foilage, with emergent and canopy layers of eucalyptus, beech, and ( Read more... )

There's been a small flurry of the articles on the Isocracy Network in the past few days; my own contribution, just posted, is a comparison between New Zealand and Sweden for dealing with the novel coronavirus. Wes Whitman has contributed a piece on the economic policies of James Meade, a rather under-rated 20th-century economist. Finally, there is ( Read more... )

Work has been hellishly busy for me the past week as we're preparing for an outage on the supercomputer from Monday to Wednesday with a great variety of operating system upgrades, storage improvements (from CephFS to GPFS), network upgrades, and the addition of some 3,000 cores, and the removal of around 2,000 cores worth of older system units. For ( Read more... )

The weekend evening festival comes to a point where I have now watched all the Studio Ghibli feature films. This weekend was the charming re-telling of The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter as The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, the other-worldliness of When Marnie Was There and finally, with all prior warnings of not being a happy film at all, Grave of the ( Read more... )

World COVID-19 confirmed cases are now at 3.395 million, and 239 thousand dead. The United States makes up 1.129 million and 65 thousand of those figures. It has now killed, in three months, more Americans than their military intervention in Vietnam, which was over two decades, which is more of an indication of the political and cultural shift ( Read more... )

It has been an interesting week, mainly because I've been one of two-three people still going into work at our office, which has thirty or so staff in normal circumstances. But events being what they are, this was the week that I had to present a lecture (via Zoom) in a course that has some three hundred students in it, and is followed up by two ( Read more... )