Ben's Bazaar

In the next few weeks, I will be speaking on two very different topics. The first on September 13, hosted by the Melbourne Agnostics Society, will be on "Stoicism, Taoism and Apathy", where I'll be wearing my hat as the University Outreach Officer for the International Society for Philosophers (yes, there is such a thing). I promise that the presentation may be quite different from what one might assume from the title! I am not giving too much away, however, in previewing that there is a great deal of similarity in what could be called the psychological versions of Stoicism and Taoism, although even this touches upon a common physics and even metaphysics that correlates with the two: the Logos and the Dao.

The second presentation is part of the "New Zealand Research Software Engineering Conference" on September 23-24. Despite my deep wish to have another excuse to return to the home country, this conference is being held entirely online. My presentation, with the truly riveting title "Programming Principles in a High Performance Computing Environment", will provide both an overview of the current postgraduate cohort's programming experience, their needs, and the relevant training courses that I conduct at the University of Melbourne, especially in relation to high performance and parallel code. It will dovetail quite well with recent workshops that I conducted last week on "Regular Expressions with Linux" and "GPGPU Programming", along with near-future workshops on "Mathematical Applications and Programming" and the ever-popular "High Performance and Parallel Python".

Finally, on a related note, many would have seen from photos on Facebook that I am giving away a number of academic and general books, spanning my rather diverse interests; about five hundread in total and a shared Google Drive folder has been created for those who wish to peruse, with more (especially from business studies and computer science) forthcoming. I suspect after this, the next giveaway will be from my fiction books and then from my rather vast music collection. All of this is in aid of finding happy homes for various useful things that I don't have a strong emotional attachment to, creating more space within my abode, and, ultimately, thinking of where I will live for the next chapter in my life. But that is in a couple of years at least; nobody has ever accused me of acting with only short-term in mind.