It’s been a couple of years now since AI really took off, with ChatGPT becoming this widespread, easily available tool available for free* (of course, with ourselves being the product) for people to use. Although early reactions to AI were – and continue to be – mixed, I also find it hard not to believe […]
This week the wifi went down at my residence in Bali. I think it says a lot about the state of the world we live in right now that I felt immediately that this was a big hinderance to me. In some ways I think this is justified – the internet is how we stay […]
This week, I had the pleasure of joining in a Hindu ceremony in my local village in Bali. It was meant to start at 3pm, at 3pm I went out of my house and Grandma (not my Grandma, but she’s the Grandma of the homestay I live in and sure acts very grandmotherly towards me, […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of “fun” recently. For most of us, “fun” is a concept that is reserved for our relaxation time outside of work or study. The things that we do aren’t considered “fun”, that’s “work”, and work cannot be fun (or if it is, it is usually in the […]
You’re probably familiar with the concept of bi-lingualism, which is where someoneone is fluent in 2 languages (for example, English and Indonesian, or Chinese and Japanese). But did you also know there’s a similar concept in music, called bi-musicality? This is where one person is fluent within 2 musical systems. You may have heard the […]
Recently, ANU announced it was closing the Art and Music library branch. Of course, they have been very tight-lipped on the details, so we don’t know exactly what that entails. What we know is: that the physical location of the library will be repurposed into study spaces for students; some materials will be moved into ANU’s main Chifley Library, and the rest will be stored in a repository and can be borrowed by request online. I was very disheartened by this news, so I went on a big borrowing spree last week before the doors closed and borrowed about 30 books. Anything that looked remotely relevant to my research, I borrowed. Yes, I probably should have done this earlier anyway – I have typically done most of my research online, which I suspect is a reason for this decision. But as I’ll go on to explain, I think this is a short-sighted reason to close a library.