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Tsipras, go to Hell
Once the initial disappointment was over, I was able to step back and appreciate that this was a rather infantile post. While I stand by my comments that Tsipras was naive and feel that, if they weren’t going to use it to fight back against the EU, calling the referendum was ultimately harmful because of the ensuing economic turmoil, name calling such as this is not very helpful. On the other hand, I don’t wish to erase history, so I have decided to leave the post up, but with this disclaimer.
Greeks Bearing Debts
Just over five months ago, Greece elected a new government lead by left-wing party SYRIZA. SYRIZA comes out of a radical tradition rejecting both reformist social democracy and authoritarian communism and was swept to power on a wave of anti-austerity sentiment. Austerity refers to the massive cuts to public spending (tending to hurt particularly those on lower incomes) which Greece has endured over the past five years, along with the associated policies of deregulation, cuts to the minimum wage, an end to collective bargaining, and the privatization of anything which actually makes a profit for the government.
Blog, Rebooted
After years of dragging my feet, I have finally designed a new theme for my blog, using the Foundation CSS package. Along with the new theme, I have updated the information on all of the static pages and moved it to GitHub pages. Perhaps most importantly, I have renamed and rebranded in order to reflect my evolving identity, both personally and politically; my blog is now called The Political Physicist.
Let’s Talk About Bell
The good people at Bell, through their Let’s Talk campaign, are once again donating money to mental health initiatives. Isn’t that nice of them? Well, no, it’s not, on several levels. First and foremost, if they really care about mental health then surely they can just donate the money anyway, rather than only do so if people share their Facebook posts.
FORD: FORtran Documentation
Over Christmas break I’ve been working on this project to produce documentation for Fortran programs. I’ve (just) managed to finish it before school starts again! Here is the README for it, containing the documentation which I wrote. You can find the code on Github.
The Rights and Wrongs of Remembrance
Well, it’s that time of year again. 95 years and 362 days ago we saw the Armistice that ended World War I. This marked the end of the first case technological war, which caused the world to realize the horrors that could be inflicted by industrial-scale killing. It was a horrible, pointless event in which some 16 million people lost their lives. I tend to identify as a moderate pacifist. My relative pacifism results in me having rather ambivalent feelings towards Remembrance Day. These are difficult to put into words, but I’m going to try my best here.
A (Not as Brief as I’d Hoped) Fortran Tutorial
Fortran, which stands for FORmula TRANslator, is the oldest high level programming language and remains, albeit with significant improvements, one of the main languages used by physicists. Most computational physics is done using Fortran and this is the language typically used in SMU’s Computational Methods for Physicists class. This introduction will show you how to use various useful features of the language in its modern form. It will do this by defining a problem which we wish a program to solve and then showing how to write such a program.
I Designed a Website
I have recently finished designing a new website for the Saint Mary’s University Astronomy and Physics Society (SMUAPS). I decided to build this website using Pelican (the same software that I use for this blog). The website can be found here.
Fixing Pharmaceuticals
A while back I read a story about how Canada is facing recurring drug shortages. More recently I read about how difficult it is to get the pharmaceutical companies interested in developing new antibiotics. It is clear to me that the private sector is now longer performing adequately in providing medications. It seems to me that radical ideas are becoming pragmatic.
10 Reasons I Sometimes Hate Being a Socialist
As you might have gathered from my blog posts here, I am pretty left wing. You know you’re pretty radical when you have to preface any explanation of your beliefs with “Well, I would not consider myself a communist.” And, while I am quite confidant in the validity of my beliefs, there are days when I really wish that I didn’t have them. So, without further ado, here are the top 10 reasons I wish I wasn’t a socialist.
