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Cool covers

Why is it that sometimes I feel I can juggle with chainsaws and other times I can’t play catch? Fortunately, this week was chainsaw week, and lots of things got done 🙂

To celebrate this, here’s two covers of two cool bands by two cool bands!

First one is a pearl I found by chance… Belle and Sebastian sing Mutantes! Mutantes is a Brazilian band from the 60’s, formed by some more or less famous people like Rita Lee and Arnaldo Batista, among many others that came and went. They play cool and happy songs which I like very much. Belle and Sebastian is a Scottish band known (by me) for Piazza New York Catcher from Juno’s soundtrack, among other really cool songs, like Funny Little Frog.
Anyway, isn’t it cute how they sing in Portuguese with this accent??? 🙂

Belle and Sebastian – A Minha Menina (Os Mutantes)

Second one I found while listening to the MTV Unplugged of Florence + the Machine, which is a nice album on itself. Don’t you love when you’re just not paying attention to what it’s playing and then something super cool plays? They have a cover of Jackson, by Johnny Cash and June Carter, country singers also from the 60’s. Very interesting combination 🙂

Florence + the Machine – Jackson (Johnny Cash and June Carter)

Vintage

Last Christmas my brother in law sent us a gift. The gift was a CD, this one:

If you don’ t know this guy, he plays the lead character of the series House M.D. (interesting series… by the way). Buuut he is also a musician, a pretty good one. He plays some kind of blues/jazz influenced by the New Orleans school of music (I don’t know if this is actually a real thing, but I am hoping you understand), which is funny, since he is British. Here’s a sample.
I already knew a few of the songs, and I was very happy to get the CD. One weekend I decided to listen to it. I don’t know if this ever happened to you, but I had this nostalgic feeling as I opened the CD and put it in the player. It’s been years since I don’t do this!! Really! With the advent of music streaming, I never touched a CD again. And it felt so good 🙂  It feels like now we take music for granted, just push a button on the browser and you can play whatever you want. But the CD… it’s like this thing, this materialized music, with a cover, and texts, and pictures… You put it to play and you go through this little booklet, reading the lyrics, seeing the pictures, reading the names of the people as you listen to the music.
I guess now I know how vinyl records feel like to the previous generation…

Or maybe you should.

A few weeks ago I had a job interview. Yes, ladies and gentleman, I seriously considered moving to the dark side of the force. Seriously. I went through the interviewing process and everything. Unfortunately, they turned me down… That hit me harder than I expected. Before getting the result I thought that, if they said “no”, things would just go back to what they were. That’s not really how it went… They said I had not enough software engineering experience. Well, of course I don’t. I am a PhD student, in *theoretical* computer science… What did they expect? I do take part in some small and medium size projects, but this was not enough. They need some more technical experience. All I have for me is the ability to understand really freaking hard problems, and try to come up with solutions. But it’s not like the subject of my thesis will help me with anything else than that. Also, my advisor recently admitted that the problem was harder than he had expected, and it’s ok that I have only partial results in the thesis. It’s disappointment all around.

In any case, this rejection unleashed a chain of reactions that I am still trying to make sense of. At first I was really considering getting a job in industry, and getting this damn experience that I am lacking. I checked companies I like and projects I think I’d be happy working for. Then I started thinking what is that I like to do. What would make me happy? And I made a list because I like to make lists. They help me organize myself. Here it is:

– solving puzzles
– programming
– mathematics
– music

It’s not very helpful though. What I need to know is what kind of job will give me that, and at the moment I don’t know. I am in academia for a while, and I know I can get the first three things at least. But it seems they have not been enough. Maybe it’s because I am reaching the end of my PhD, because I’ve been working for three years in some problem nobody understands and getting only partial results nobody will ever use, but I am sick and tired of this research already. If in the end I decide to stay in academia, it’ll really do me some good to change research topics to something more applied. What about industry? Is there some kind of job that will require me to work on things of this list all the time? The job announcements I saw in the companies I selected claim so. But it just seems too good to be true. I’ve had jobs before and I know how boring it can be. How so not challenging. But then again, I didn’t have a real job in one of these cool companies that claim to have cool jobs. You see my dilemma?

In the middle of despair I took two career tests to see which careers fit me the most. The result of both was basically that I have the profile for research, programming and engineering. Really? Well, *that* I knew already! I am not trying to decide whether I should study literature or computer science.

Anyway, in the end I decided to explore possibilities… Learning about new research topics and about bigger projects in industry (as an intern, employee or volunteer, there are few possibilities I checked). But I am really focusing on getting this mysterious software engineering experience, either in academia or in industry. I learned over the years that you cannot tell me I can’t do something. That’s probably one of my biggest motivation triggers. And they told me I could not get the job… you shouldn’t have done that.

About happiness

This has been a recurring theme in the past few weeks on my random walk on the internet (maybe not so random). It started with an article on the BBC Travel about the cities to visit in the happiest countries in the world, which led me to this report: http://unsdsn.org/files/2013/09/WorldHappinessReport2013_online.pdf

It is a nice report, and I wish I had time to read it all, but the first chapter alone gives a nice overview of the document. It you’re curious, here are the top 10:

1. Denmark
2. Norway
3. Switzerland
4. Netherlands
5. Sweden
6. Canada
7. Finland
8. Austria o/
9. Iceland
10. Australia

This is interesting, because whenever I say I come from Brazil, people imagine that I come from a place where everybody is going to the beach and dancing and smiling all the time. And we are advertised as very happy people… And you’d think that countries that have the sun and wonderful beaches would have the happiest people, right? But it’s just the opposite. Nine out of the top 10 countries do not have wonderful beaches, on the contrary. Lots of them have a harsh winter and are sometimes labelled as places with high suicide rates because of the winter depression. So how did this happen??

After reading and watching videos on the subject here and there, I found out that we tend to overrate how happy we will be because of something (or how sad as well). So you might think that winning the lottery will make you the happiest person on Earth when, in fact, studies suggest that it doesn’t. Or you might think that becoming paraplegic will make you miserable for the rest of your life, but studies also suggest the contrary. This happens because we have a tendency to adapt to whatever situation life brings us, it is called hedonic treadmill. There is a very interesting TEDTalk on that. Actually, the experiment the guy mentions towards the end of the talk, reminded me of another very interesting TEDTalk about how we are actually less happy when we can choose over lots of options. This is a curious effect, that haunted me as I was a kid. Turns out I was really bad at choosing stuff, really simple stuff, like new shoes. I would rummage over and over again which shoes would be better for me, or what I liked the most, without ever being able to decide. I remember even feeling a bit nauseous in a few situations. And after deciding on something, I would sometimes regret it. I guess the message of the second video is exactly this: if you have too many choices, the choosing process is so stressful that you cannot really enjoy the thing you chose. And there will always be that mean little voice in the back of your head: “what if I exchange?”. This is what happens when there’s too much space for freedom. When you make a choice and you’re supposed to keep it, our adaptation thing kicks in, and you feel happy with what you got. This reminds me of the Indian arranged weddings… At the time, I could not really wrap my head around the whole concept. How is it that you can have a good life with someone your parents chose for you?? What if you don’t like this person (divorce is not really an option)? Well, they learn to like each other. They adapt, and they are just as happy as someone who dated 20 people before settling down (maybe happier!).

So what does this have to do with the countries there?? I am not sure actually… If we tend to adapt to all situations, what is it about the happiest countries in the world? I can think of two things: (1) quality of life and (2) the need to cooperate to survive.

If you look at the full happiness ranking of the countries, you will notice some relation between quality of life and happiness (not all of the time, of course). In the top ten countries, people don’t have to worry about mobility, health issues, education, security, and this makes an enormous difference on one’s life. I can tell by personal experience. You don’t see poor people begging for money, mothers with sick kids in every block or families living in shacks that are about to fall down. I think this affects us. So I would guess it’s one of the reasons why people in wealthier countries are happier. Not because of the money, but because of social security.

The second thing is more subtle. When winter comes, there’s no such thing as someone living on the streets. They will die if nobody gives them shelter, for sure. So there is a social responsibility of taking care of others, just because, if they don’t, the consequences are too tragic. And as this TEDTalk* suggests, we are happier when we are helping others than we are when helping ourselves.

A third thing just came to my mind. In these countries the seasons of the year are really noticeable. There’s a huge change in temperature the whole year, and as one season comes and the other goes away, we are remembered what is good about each one, and we can enjoy each season’s particularity. I came from a tropical country, but I was never so happy to see the sun as I am in summer here in Austria. After three months of cold, you really appreciate the first rays of warm light again. In Brazil, the sun is shinning the whole year, so you don’t really pay attention to that… It becomes normal and it is no more a source of happiness.

I think the bottom line to all these things is that happiness comes from our actions, and not our stuff. We learn to enjoy everything we choose, so don’t worry too much about choosing. Just be nice to people, smile and they will smile back. And meditate, one of the sources of happiness 🙂

* In the end of this TEDTalk, the guy advertises one of the most interesting charity campaigns I have ever seen. You should check it out too: http://www.donorschoose.org/

Hummingbird

I haven’t had much time to write these past few days… But I came across this video and thought it was worth posting it even without explanations 🙂

About researchers and politicians

These days I’ve been thinking a lot about politics… I realized this is a problem around the world, and politicians are usually seen by non-politicians as bad people. Non-politicians usually think that politicians are greedy, selfish, lazy and that, in the end, they are not interested in helping society whatsoever. Of course most non-politicians have their exceptions, that one or two politicians that they really believe in, and if they are not doing enough, it’s because the system does not let him. I started thinking if it was possible that so many people in politics really did not care about doing some good for society. I mean, this should be their main motivation for getting a job there in the first place, no? So what happens??

There is an interesting experiment in psychology called the Milgram experiment, where some people, test subjects, are told to give electric shocks on another person if they do not memorize some words correctly. Although the learning person is already screaming in pain, most participants do not stop giving the shocks, since they were told so. At a first analysis, the results of this experiment seem quite disturbing… How can people be so mean? It was just a stupid experiment, they could have stopped once they realized the other person was in pain, right? Well… not really. I mean, yes, they could have stopped, but a deeper (and less sad) analysis of the whole thing takes into account the environment in which this test subject was. And you have to keep in mind that you might just as well be one of the people that continues to give shocks.
Yes, yes… but what does this have to do with the politicians?

The point is that, it’s very easy to judge from the outside. “He should have done this, he shouldn’t have voted for that, he shouldn’t have accepted that money, how can he be so unethical??” But we don’t really know the point of view of somebody who is on the inside. It is actually easier to follow the rules as they are posed then to try to fight them… Even if you think that they are wrong.

As I thought about this, I realized that it happens to me, and most researchers and PhD students I know. We are all very aware of the way universities decide which people to hire: they check our publication list. Of course they don’t read all of them, and I doubt if they actually read the titles carefully… They check how many there are and in which conferences/journals they were published. There is a huge discussion on whether this is the right thing to do, and most researchers I know, young or old, agree that this is not a very good system, and the relevance of the publications should be taken into account, no matter where they are published. But as we go into this academia field, we are pulled by the current and we believe the only way to survive is publishing… So we become one of those people that try to publish no matter what. We behave as if we accept the system, even though we disagree with it. And we think: “but what can *I* do? I am just a PhD student…” Everyone knows that it’s up to us to end this journal industry and to change how we are evaluated, but who’s brave enough to start this? If this person is alone (or only a few), she’ll certainly perish… It’s a high risk to take. So no one takes it, and we are swallowed by the system, just like the politicians we so much condemn.