Tuesday, November 15
Nov. 16th, 2022 12:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
soid10-11:30am Middle East lecture. Finishing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, then moving to Saudi Arabia. Wahhabies, ARAMCO, dynasty legitimizing its rule by religion – everything is still there as of 100 years ago.
2:40-4pm Topology lecture: Brouwer's fixed point theorem and some applications of homotopy groups. A continuous map between two disks has a fixed point (where f(x)=x). The same is easier to see for a map between [0,1] to itself. It won't apply to open disk or open intervals, though. I've seen this used to prove existence of Nash Equilibrium in game theory, but it looks like a quite interesting theorem of its own.
5-6pm Middle East discussion – today it was engaging. Everyone shitted on Schindler's Modern Israel book. Nathan said it was a typical Israeli propaganda (he said it as an Israeli citizen). Ali said calling a chapter "A Road to Beirut" about the war in Lebanon was a strange choice since Lebanon was half in ruins after the war. Lelia pointed out to the chronology in the book that goes as far back as the first Jewish-Roman war in the first century – which highlights Schindler's agenda, establishing the continuity between the Bible and the modern Israel. I didn't expect so much criticism, actually.
I got bored with the book and stopped paying attention to all details, but it turned out thtat there was a lot to talk about if I tried to be more critical.
Then we talked about Gelvin's Modern Middle East book covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: interestingly, it doesn't even mention Holocaust. It's a cliché to relate the establishment of Israeli state to Holocaust.
Worked on the NLG project in the evening. Preparing to run Optimus model which uses both GPT2 and BART for encoder/decoder and runs out of memory on 16G GPU. I'm going to rent a 40G GPU for $3 per hour. But I want to make sure everything is prepared, and I don't waste the money.
Bed by 1am.