Some People Are Idiots

I've been sick for the past week and a half. The whole stay in bed, drink lots of tea, use entire rain-forest's worth of tissue paper deal. It sucks. I've even lost the ability to speak. At least I can still write.

I've tried every remedy conceived by those old hags that live alone in the middle of some dark forest. You know the ones. It turns out that lemon really is a good anti-bacterial substance, and so is garlic. That's science. I happen to have a wife in the chemistry business, you see. The undisputed winner in the "your grandmother says its good" category of medicine is without a doubt a bit of whiskey. Well maybe most grandmothers don't recommend it, but there's nothing like 40% alcohol to burn all the nasty germs. Sure, there might be some collateral damage, but at least the germs will die. As the song goes, "Just a tea-spoon of whiskey helps the cough go away, helps the cough go away, in a most delightful way!".

So I've been thinking about all the idiots who say pearls of wisdom like:

"All You Need is LOVE"

or perhaps:

"Live Every Day As If It Were Your LAST"

You see, people who live everyday as if it were their last would never bother going to school, have children or advance mankind. It's like one of those governments in those democracies which have elections every two years. They never accomplish anything, because they are only thinking about today. Life is great because we don't live each day as it were our last.

Oh, and finally, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" is a great book, right up there with such classics as "Ubik" or "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".

TBB and Non-Integer Ranges

I've been using the Intel Threading Building Blocks (TBB) library for a while now, and I finally figured out how to overcome one of the annoyances I had with it.

All of the examples I've been able to find show how to iterate over a range of integers. I couldn't find how to directly iterate over a range of doubles. I worked around this by iterating over integers and translating back to doubles in the inner operator() function. I finally figured out the answer, after reading the Reference Manual (as they say, rtfm).

The trick is that the blocked_range construct can accept, in addition to integers, random access iterators. So, with a range:


tbb::blocked_range< std::vector<double>::iterator > ( bunch_of_doubles.start(), bunch_of_doubles.end() );

I can now parallelize a group of doubles.

Of course, this assumes that you have a container ready. Luckily, I happened to have one ready. In other cases, it's probably best to continue and shuffle between ints and doubles.