I live in Plano (i.e., for y'all far away, a bit north of Dallas). I might be interested in participating in a meatspace study group arrangement of some sort. I've never done something like this outside of university classes, dunno how it'd work out, except to guess that it probably depends strongly on individual personalities and schedules and such.

I've studied parts of the Jaynes book in the past. Recently I've been studying more specialized machine learning techniques, like support vector machines, but it seems clear that more time spent studying the more general and fundamental stuff would be time well spent in understanding specialized techniques, and the Jaynes book looks like a good candidate for such study.