Well, early-ish week links this week, following an activity- and food-packed Christmas and Boxing Day. I have a lot of reading to do; to keep myself on track, will start posting notes here.

The Chatham House podcast, Independent Thinking, on the UK’s tilt to the Indo-Pacific: largely niche contributions, resurrecting old friendships and finding new ones, and identifying contingencies, or shared interests, that would allow a ‘minilateralist’ approach. While Britain may have global capabilities—science, business, cyber—it is stretched.

Traditionally, the Australian government has considered high-performance computing (HPC), or supercomputing, as a research tool, separate from development. This article on the contribution of HPC to the recent successful fusion experiment shows how that’s changing:
‘This is making HPC a real-time commodity for experiments, and entirely blurring or erasing the boundary between HPC and experiment.’

On the effect of Twitter’s disruption on science: ‘…for many scientists, Twitter has become an essential tool for collaboration and discovery — a source of real-time conversations around research papers, conference talks and wider topics in academia,’ with an estimated one-third of scientific literature being tweeted.

‘Why I am thankful for Silicon Valley.’

Real-time resilience for leaders under pressure and in the fog of war requires the following traits: ‘cognitive ability, confidence, the ability to control their emotions, and effective communication skills.

The BBC has dramatised Susan Cooper’s classic, The Dark is Rising.