Happiness

A long while ago I realized the three things in a "job" I would need to be happy: enough money to eat whatever I want (smoked salmon, orange bell peppers etc), a flexible schedule and most importantly challenging work. This is why academics is perfect for me and I can do my 50-90 hour work weeks and feel great! Now on top of this criteria I had come up with some other conditions about my work: short commute and I must have a "boss" I respect (another reason to stay in academics). The commute part is very important to me since I very much dislike commuting in general but the cost of living near work can sometimes be very high. It turns out my experience was correct though and is now scientifically verified: long commutes are a good way for unhappiness as you can see in this interview (link near the bottom of the page).

It turns out (and there are other articles in sciam and sciammind about this) that it is the small everyday things that will make or break your happiness. If there are plenty of little things in the day you get to do that you like, you'll be happy even if you never take a dream vacation to some poor beach country. Good thing too since I dislike most traveling, Id rather take the dog for a run in the park and then spend the money on a good book. What I have never understood is how people can do 2 hours of commute a day (1 hour each way), which was the average in the suburb which I grew up in, since you are only awake 16 hours and need 8 hours to work, 2 hours to eat leaving only about 6 hours of effective "free" time. Two hours is 33% of that! No wonder people feel rushed and that's not counting the decompression time after the travel. But then humans are not usually rational and so they never think about these things. Plus there is one major caveat: happiness is largely "programmed." Most people are born with a certain innate "happiness" and only fluctuate marginally around it, although even an initially happy person can eventually be worn down by things.

Thompson on Bhutto and hypocrisy

When I heard what Thompson said about Bhutto's assasination, i couldn't help but notice the hypocrisy of most of his party in this. Here' the quote:
"I think the fact that a secular woman had a chance of ascending to power in Pakistan again as prime minister probably drove the more looney of them to do something like that -- that in of itself. Plus the fact that this reminds us that this is part of a much greater picture - this is a war that we are engaged in and it is an international conflict...Pakistan and other parts of the world are part of this and they are under attack."

Yet in the US his party (and the Dems to some degree, especially of late) constantly tout their religiosity! We want other countries (especially Muslim countries) to have secular progressive leaders and at home Mike Huckabee is competing with Romney to be the "Christian" candidate! Thompson is not Ron Paul with a true understanding of church-state separation and so it is just hypocrisy, but I do wonder if in Muslim countries they hope for a president who is a secularist instead of a Christian in the US?

Why celebrate?

Most people celebrate things having to do with their religion, monetary status, relationship and rarely achievement. As an acedemic celebrating monetary success would be silly and I certainly have no desire to celebrate religious events (although I don't mind attending to see friends and relatives). My wife and I rarely celebrate our relationship on marked days (V-day or anniversaries) , most evident since we passed our 10 year anniversary and neither of us noticed until 2 days later. We prefer to celebrate when the mood strikes.

But what we do celebrate is achievement. In fact I've developed a rather odd celebration for my minor but satisfying achievements: giving the dog a treat. It seems odd, but to keep her in good health she rarely gets soft treats, but when I get a program working, find a code bug and fix it or make a small discovery the first thing I do is excite the dog and give her a treat. Often this will be followed by a celebration with my wife. It may seem odd but when you succeed you tend to want to share your success and the simplest way to start, for me, is to make the dog ecstatic!

Qualifications for president and evolution

People have a right to believe whatever nonsense they wish, but the idea of electing representatives means the electorate must decide who is qualified to lead them (since we no longer believe in divine right in the modern world). But when candidates today say they "don't believe in evolution" they should be disqualified by the electorate. The reason is not due to them violating church-state separation or not having attained a sufficient level of knowledge to function in the real world (since they have being that all main candidates are wealthy and successful in their own rights), it is due to there lack of reason and disjoint views from reality coupled with being the Commander-in-Chief.

Evolution has more evidence than any political or economic situation will ever have and if they cannot accept the facts with such overwhelming evidence it is worrying what will happen in situations with much less evidence. We have seen first hand what happens when a belief is touted as fact (WMD's in Iraq for instance) and a president who cannot either admit he does not know enough about biology to comment or make an informed decision but rather takes the word of religious officials is a liability for the country.

MPI and lapack

I've been upgrading my code to use mpi and since I use lapack in C for the diagonalization and some other procedures I needed to make a doublecomplex type for mpi and I didn't find anyone else who has posted this. It's not hard but when you are starting out with mpi one less thing to worry about is nice so I'll post the relevant few lines.

MPI_Datatype MPI_DOUBLE_COMPLEX;
MPI_Type_contiguous(2, MPI_DOUBLE, &MPI_DOUBLE_COMPLEX);
MPI_Type_commit(&MPI_DOUBLE_COMPLEX);
MPI_Type_free(&MPI_DOUBLE_COMPLEX);

This works by making MPI_DOUBLE_COMPLEX from two contiguous doubles since doublecomplex is a struct with two doubles r and i.