Retroid Raving

Yes, it's exam time again - and one has to devise ways of amusing oneself while standing in a large lecturing facility, watching 80-odd industrous young persons scribble frantically away, in yet another largely pointless exercise in more or less accurate regurgitation.

So this year, as it was cold, and because we HAVE to keep a toilet visit register, I was able to keep a tally of who went when (and where: there is a column for "Stall Number"!  I kid you not) - which resulted in these, shared via Twitter with the multiverse from the very bowels of the examing venue.

Exam haiku the first: inside the first hour

Examinations! 
It's cold; girls have small bladders. 
Laura handles this!

Exam haiku the second: second hour and counting

Boys hold it in well. 
Grimly, legs crossing, they write.
Will this ever end??

Exam haiku the third: coming up to the end 

Not true!  Boys pee more. 
Constant stream [heh, heh] of young men go. 
Women sit smugly.

So it goes...or rather, they went.  B-)  Final score: Men 5, Women 4.

...though only G*d in her infinite wisdom knows why....

Consider the following from ICTS this morning:

"We are pleased to announce that solutions to a number of identified problems have been implemented. After Novell identified a number of bugs in their code, they wrote and tested fixes, which they then provided to us. This has improved the stability of the GroupWise system significantly. We have included more technical details below, should this interest you."
....
Thank you for your continued support while we address these problems.

Regards,

ICTS Communications"

So what happened VERY soon after I read this??  Why, I noticed that GroupStupid! seemed reluctant to take notice of keystrokes...then crashed.  I opened it up again, it considerately offered me my half-composed-and-very-important-message-to-patent-lawyers back again, so I continued - right up to the point when it crashed AGAIN.  This time, losing all the attachments I had so carefully added....

 I said bad words.  I crashed around the office.  I kicked things.  I reopened GroupSTUPID!!!! AGAIN, redid all the attachments - saving it twice while doing so - and sent the message off.  I could have DRIVEN it down to Research Office quicker!!!

I reiterate: Group STUPID!!!!!! is a clunky frakkin' piece of sh1t, and we must GET RID OF IT!!!!!

You know, the Retroid Kollectiv has long held the view that nine-tenths of literature - in terms of the requirements of Sturgeon's Law - is crud.  The corollary to this is, of course, that nine-tenths of all literary criticism is crud, except that this is not true: it is more like 99%....  And of course, a further corollary is that nine-tenths of all literary critics are crud - except that this is also not true, as they are in fact all crud.

And a glowing exception to the literature rule is the fiction of one Terry Pratchett.  Yes, despite his having single-handedly having invented a genre (science fantasy satire), and having written some 30+ books in said genre, it may be said that all his offerings are gems beyond compare.

This member of the RK speaks with the authority inherent in his having read all of said oeuvre over more than twenty years, and nearly all of them more than once (many recently, in search of Escape), and having read his non-science fantasy satire books before he was famous.

These are of course few in number - if two can said to be "few", rather than just a couple.  However, I can safely claim to have read "Dark Side of the Sun" WAAAAY before TP achieved serious fame, and to have read "Good Omens" before Diskworld became the famous structure it is today.

To read his works is to submerge yourself in a world where the whimsical and the side-splittingly funny share a stage with the learned, the knowledgeable, the erudite and the sensitive, and yes, their cousin the sad.  For TP is nothing if not well informed, well educated, accurate - and an astonishingly good observer of human behaviour.  And also of the behaviour of dwarfs, trolls, vampires, werewolves, witches, policemen, wizards, and of Death Himself.  And his horse, Binky.  In a world which is a disk, borne on the back of four elephants standing on the back of the great turtle A'Tuin, who bears this load uncomplainingly across the universe, through billenia.  With the odd diversion down the wrong trouser leg of Time.

With humour.  And pathos.  And acute sensitivity.

 Catch me any pre-post-demi-modernist who could do any of that, and I'll show you your derrida....

I'm off to re-read "Thud!".  Wherein Commander of the Ankh-Morpork Watch, Samuel Vimes, battles ancient demons, dwarfs, trolls, vampires, himself and the Patriarch - and still finds time to read a bedtime story to his son.  Every night.  I can identify with that....

I see The Man Who Would Have Been DVC at UCT - only he went north, and became a VC - not only didn't give up his plog (=paper blog, aka The Times column), but now calls for...nuns?!...yes, actual penguins!, to rescue South Africa's ailing school system.

All across the land, I hear the despairing cry, of "Oh, please, for pity's sake, nooooooo...!"

You see, while J Jansen esq - for it is he who plogs thus - thinks a good dose of nunning would stiffen the moral fibres and backbones of the sullen mob of under-educated and under-achieving children that are our learner cohort, because such treatment worked wonders for all of the well-educated Zimbabweans who flock south and make bead ornaments instead of being allowed to teach our children, he gets the wrong end of the stick to some extent.

As did many, many of us who WERE nunned, in the lands to the north.

You see, the reason that many of us-who-were-trained-by-religious-and-especially-by-penguins over-achieve and do well, is because the nuns are behind us.

ALL THE TIME.

With a thick 30 cm ruler.  Waiting, waiting for the infraction - real or imagined; these are one to the nun - so that she can leap into view, ruler upraised, ready to strike at the trembling fingers.

Oh, I exaggerate - well, a little, anyway - but as anyone who survived went through the Dominican Convent Schools of Salisbury/Harare or Lusaka can attest, the German Dominicans should more properly have been called The Little Sisters of Perpetual Torment, and it takes many, many years to forget some of the petty cruelties and arbitrary punishments.  And then you get early arthritis in the fingers.  I only suffered nuns by proxy, as it were - my sister and my wife were at the Lusaka Convent - but I was welcomed to kindergarten in Lusaka by a Sister Mary Pia, who kept popping up throughout my schooling, and has haunted my dreams since I was five.

For the nuns stay with you...always over the shoulder out of sight; always about to berate you for your stupidity - and the ruler, always the ruler, always there....

So we may achieve, we the nun-schooled ones; we may do well - but we do it out of neurosis and guilt, more for fear of the Wrath of a Small Nun and The Ruler, than for ourselves.

I give to you,then, as learned in religious schools, the principle of Pre-Emptive Guilt Installation as a teaching tool: make the learning recipient guilty right up front, and they are yours for life.  And they'll always double-check the centrifuge door; always check AGAIN before throwing the switch that sets amps coursing through gels; always check the lights are off and the doors are locked...because YOU are standing behind them.  Forever....

So, Professor Jansen: do you want neurotic, over-achieving well-educated-but-damaged school graduates that nuns would give us?  Or at the other end of the spectrum, do you want the happy, well-adjusted, low-achieving products of the Waldorf and Steiner schools of the leafy suburbs?  I have chosen the safe middle way for my children: gentle Anglicans for one, and a good government school for the other (no, not SACS or Rondebosch or Westerford).  No overt religion, no guilt, no jockism, and no single-sex dysfunction incubators for the Retroid children!

Because I still dream of what happens when you stumble over the conjugation of "pouvoir", or what happened at the Council of Trent - and my back doesn't work properly because of rugby.  And I am an atheist because (partly, anyway) I went to schools called St Augustine's Abbey School (Benedictine monks), St Francis College (Franciscan friars), and St George's College (Jesuits).

So no, Professor Jansen, no nuns: what we need instead is what the mission and other schools gave Rhodesia and then Zimbabwe - which was a cohort of well-trained, literate, motivated teachers, who educated people well, even in rural mission-school contexts.  At UCT we have gone seamlessly in the last thirty+ years from well-educated white Rhodesians coming first in everything, to well-educated Zimbabweans coming first in everything - who come from schools that didn't even exist in the 1980s, which gives the lie to Jansen's comments that the Smith regime killed the schools.  And consider: these are the kids who didn't get into the University of Zimbabwe, whose entrance requirements are still FAR stiffer than any SA University.

More Zimbabweans, Professor Jansen - not nuns.  Please, no nuns....

It's at times like this morning - when the N2 was stationary as far as the eye could see, and Durban Road was little better - that the Pinelands branch of the Retroid Kollektiv explores his CD library (given that he is not permitted to play things loudly at home, for fear of interfering with House, or Private Practice, or Army Wives).

And he should have known - but somehow forgot - just what a good blues band Fleetwood Mac were, back there in 1970 (yes, that's why the title).  As were Jethro Tull.  And Gravy Train.  Because it's the blues that calms the road rage as the taxis come roaring along past stalled traffic in the wrong lane; when morons run red lights to clog up Durban Road so traffic feeding in from Raapenburg can't get in with their green light - and when a Jammie shuttle pulls out in front of one again there by Condom Heights (aka Leo Marquard Hall), without signalling, and without due regard for bodywork. 

Ah, me...

Got them almost-southern suburbs blues, mama
Got them commuter rage blues
Got them suburbian blues, babe
Right down, to my shoes
Stuck here in slow-down mode, yeah
With them N2 rush-hour blues....

From ICTS this evening:

Dear UCT staff and students,

In order to try to resolve the DNS problems affecting Internet access and external mail delivery, we need to reboot our edge router at 17h00.

IMPACT:
The restart should take about 10 minutes.  During this time, there will be no access to the Internet and no internet mail will be delivered.  All mail will be queued and delivered once the router is back up.

Thank you for your patience while we restore services.

Regards,

ICTS Communications

As aficionados of this blog (yes, both of you) may know, I am wont to distort Szekspir on occasion...and in this case, it would be to say: "Groupwise, Groupwise; wherefore art thou, Groupwise?  For thou art not on my home PC, my Blackberry or the Web, so where the frak* ART thou???"

Was it only in June I said "Jou Groupwi'se m***!"...and Transplant_Ed was moved to ask "GroupWise or GroupWoes?" back in March,I see...because the woes double and redouble; the wont's are even more frequent, and the sound of despair is heard in UCTland.  Which place could start with another lower-case letter, as some T-shirts are seen to, as it would then aptly describe the predicament.

MY FRAKKIN'* GROUPWISE ACCOUNT IS INACCESSIBLE!!!

AGAIN!!

Not that I wanted any email this weekend, not really: only the exercise programme emailed to me by a biokineticist (the back is sort of improving, thank you; but I keep having to TRY to work from home!!); only info on how/whether I would be going to Brazil; only whether some arrangements regarding impending trips to Pretoria will happen or not...and I can get no dates more recent than 10/9 via my home installation of G'wise, and the Web server comes back with

- despite my having changed my password - AGAIN!! - via the ICTS service.

Really, folks, really: Groupwise is a piece of shit, and we can do better.  PLEASE!!??

* = Perfectly respectable word; they use it a lot in Battlestar Galactica.

The Cape Times today was very interesting: in the middle, where the cartoon, editorial and opinions are, there were three items dealing with race.  Two - diametrically opposed in space, as in, top right and bottom left - were opinion pieces on the "-ism".  One - top left - was simply on "race".

As in - the human race, and where we come from.  Like Mossel Bay...!

Remember that famous Campari ad?  As in, where did you have your first one - and the answer is "Benoni"?  So where did the race start - and the answer is Mossel Bay.... Could have been sexier, I suppose - but if it had to start somewhere, then I suppose that's better than Benoni.  And it was probably called something like "nice cave with good seafood and a view" back then.

But we digress: the fact that we all probably came from not 500 km from here, some 72 000 years ago (OK, some of us via detours which took in northern Europe), and yet are STILL arguing about "race" issues, simply boggles the mind.

Jellybean Malema thinks "minorities" should not control the financial cluster; the ANC leadership is at pains to point out its non-racial stance - which implies Malema is being racist.  Injustice Hlophe insults people for being white - Pius Langa, were you aware you are?? - and is justifiably called a racist.

And UCT uses race as a "surrogate for disdavantage" for entry purposes.

Racism is as racism does - and any policy which actively disadvantages any definable group of people because of the melanin content of their skin, is racism.  What makes an even bigger nonsense of the policy is the fact that there are kids out there right now, who are known in the Retroid circles, who can CHOOSE what they want to be in terms of the old "racial" classifications, to gain an advantage in entering this University.

And so it goes.

But isn't it wonderful, that in the middle of all this silliness and name- and race-labelling, that we can as humans point at one location, just down the coast, and say with some degree of assurance:

"We all came from there".

Our guy shoulda worn shades too...B-)

The Retroidal component of The View From the North is safely back from Moscow - mostly very nice, since you ask; awash with oil money, and a prime exemplar of what happens when nouveau richesse meets good taste - where he found in Sheremetyevo Airport yet more evidence of the size and geographical range of the Shaik family.

You've heard of Mo, Shabir, Shamin (aka "Chippy") and Yunis: now meet their cool youngest brother.

...is the headline for an article from from Michelle Faul of The Associated Press yesterday, after the publicity junket organised for the local launch of the UCT-developed HIV vaccines presently in Phase I clinical trial here and in the USA.

The AP piece goes on:

After a government official lauded the project at a ceremony at Cape Town's Crossroads shantytown, the scientist leading the research said state funding had been halted.

The contrast between Monday's hopeful vaccine launch and the revelation of funding cuts raised questions about whether the government was backsliding on its pledge to combat AIDS.

Anna-Lise Williamson, an AIDS researcher at the University of Cape Town, told The Associated Press the clinical trial would continue with U.S. money. But she said South Africa's Department of Science and Technology had pulled its funding in March, while the project's other sponsor, the state electricity utility Eskom, did not renew its contract when it expired last year.

Neither government spokesmen nor Eskom immediately returned calls seeking comment about funding cuts.

....

Williamson, the vaccine project's head researcher, said it was crucial to continue testing.

"For vaccine development presently, the South African AIDS Vaccine initiative has no money. If we do not continue working on this, we will never have a vaccine," she said. "It's incredibly important that we keep working."

Which contrasts rather with the UCT piece this morning, which doesn't mention the last bit.

Nice to have some of this out in the open, though - especially as it directly affected me, in that my HIV vaccine development projects halted abruptly, and caused the retrenchment of three people with about 27 years worth of accumulated expertise in HIV vaccine development.

Because of what amounted to a spat between a statutory funding body - the MRC - and a government Department - Science & Technology - over governance of the SA AIDS Vaccine Initiative, administered by the MRC.  Basically, DST wanted SAAVI management to change; when it did not, they pulled their funding.  And the largest biomedical biotechnology initiative in Africa abruptly folded.

Oh, it gets worse: there were comments that our vaccines were the products of bad science and would never get into people, for example.  Amazing how petty people can be, when there is a lot at stake.

Someday the whole story will be told.  Soon....

Ed Rybicki

Who could forget, who could forget....

Sitting in a classroom in St George's College in Harare; listening through a storm of static on a little radio to the halting voice of Neil Armstrong doing his small step and giant leap - and then trekking to a cinema in Harare a week or two later, to see the actual footage of the moon landing - in black and white, so fuzzy it was hardly visible, but we wouldn't have missed it for the world.  For a 14-yr-old science fiction aficionado, this was Christmas, the Millenium and the Holy Grail, all wrapped into one.

So it was entirely fitting that, on my way to the airport at 5 am yesterday, I commemorated the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11's successful mission with Jethro Tull's "For Michael Collins, Jeffery and me" (Benefit album, 1970) - loudly.  Commiserating with Michael Collins.

"I'm with you, LEM
Though it's a shame that it had to be you
The mother ship is just a blip
From your trip made for two
I'm with you boys, so please employ just a little extra care
It's on my mind, I'm left behind
When I should have been there
Walking with you..."

We marvel now that it was done with slide rules, with less computing power than is now packed in the average cell phone, that 1950s technology was driving a 1960s achievement.  That it was probably done for all the wrong reasons - we didn't care then, and we shouldn't care now.

We took a step off the planet.

And then we stepped back.

Ah, well.

"And the yellow soft mountains
Grow very still
Witness as intrusion
The humanoid thrill"

As a long-time aficionado of the Weekly Mail Mail & Guardian, it was hard not to miss - in the Higher Learning supplement in today's issue - an article entitled "Research put on hold to fund World Cup", with reference to the National Research Foundation's lack of funding for an SA-Spain joint programme.

Now, this was the first time I have seen this in print - although I have heard it said a number of times with regard to why it is that the NRF has dismally failed recently in what one would assume to be their prime function: actually giving out money for research.

Devotees of this blog - yes, T_Ed, you and The Cow - will know that I have oft referred to our premier "pure" research funding agency - the NRF - as being an acronym for "Not Real Funding".

And now you know why.

Seriously, now: what with the fiasco around the "Blue Skies"  funding area, recently featured in the SAJSci (and here), where the NRF blithely redefined the mission statement for the Focus Area to mean ONLY original research proposals would be funded, one HAS to conclude that the agency is ineffectual, underfunded, and directionless.  From the M&G supplement:

Dr Therina Theron, senior director of research and innovation at Stellenbosch University [and formerly well known to UCT folk], captured a wider mood when she said that "although the academic community strongly supported the development associated with the World Cup, serious long-term damage" is envisaged if the already insufficient national investment in research is reduced even further as a result of any event.

"Scientific research and the building of highly skilled human capacity require a long-term and consistent approach. Any diversion of funding away from research, regardless of where the funds are diverted to, will result in a loss of highly skilled academic staff, a lack of ability to train adequate numbers of postgraduate students nationally and the reduced ability to effectively perform innovative research … It will take the South African research community many years to recover -- long after the euphoria of the World Cup event has passed," she said.

Although the South Africa-Spain joint science and technology research agreement is one of 30 similar projects managed by the NRF, the research community said the cancellation of this initiative was indicative of wide-ranging problems at the agency, which has the task of supporting and funding research organisations and their work.

These problems include a decline in real terms in the core funding received from the department of science and technology and a new funding strategy, which has diverted funding from general research to national priority areas. The funding crisis was highlighted in a recent article in the South African Journal of Science.

On an operational level the research community has raised concerns over the service levels of the NRF. These include a lack of well-trained staff at the NRF, inadequate processes in terms of peer reviewing of applications for funding, inadequate communication and ineffective management in the process.

The absence of a chief executive for seven months [he stayed in a hotel, then went back to his family in the USA] has also had a negative effect on the agency, meaning there are high expectations from the newly appointed head and previous vice-president, Dr Albert van Jaarsveld, to tackle the crisis.

Ja, boet...so add "leaderless" to the catalogue of woes.

There are real consequences to this buffoonery: one of the most important is that programmes which train students are being terminated, with all of the knock-on effects that this implies.

Like alienation from research for students who get cut loose.  Like the gatvol factor kicking in with unfunded researchers.

Let's hope there is a long and lasting economic benefit to SA from the 2010 World Cup - because there may well be a long and lasting research deficit to offset.

I'm a big fan of Scrabble, especially when there's no TV or only hand-held internet access - and I enjoy collecting those inadvertent sentences that crop up in a good densely-populated board.

You know: things like "seamen wee badly", or "nuns howl insane"?

But I have a recent example here that can only be a Message.  From Someone on a Higher Plane....

But WHICH Dean??!!  We should be told....

...is what my son had started saying to me recently - a bit too often, it seemed.  I wondered why - and then the daughter and the wife forced us into a holiday last week, and the familial blue bus took off into parts unknown....

To us, that is: I am sure the Karoo National Park, the N12 south from Beaufort West, the R328 and Swellendam are familar to many, but not to the family Rybicki-Williamson, and definitely not in winter.

Not that it was like winter, mind you: shorts and T-shirt weather most of the time - at least, until we had to drive into Cape Town yesterday, into the howling teeth of a gale-force north-wester, and lashing rain.

But I had chilled - big time; no work more complicated than quick emails (OK, I confess I took my phone), and nothing more intellectually taxing than Scrabble; the only things to worry about being whether or not we would see a rhino or a buffalo to round out our viewing.

It was quite ridiculous what constituted necessities for a week away, though: a Nintendo DS Lite, four cell phones, Nikon D-60 and CoolPix, Sony digital video camera, laptop for photo downloads - and chargers for all of them, with a breadmaker.

Ah, well.  Maybe next time we'll go tenting, with just gas.  And maybe an inverter for the breadmaker.  And solar chargers for the phones....