The goal is to date successfully. The subgoal is to get one date. Despite meeting a lot of single women, flirting with them, and getting some phone numbers, none of them have been willing to actually go out, or they've made plans and then cancelled. The working theory is that I'm way less attractive than I think. So I'm debugging my appearance and behavior.

Clothes. My process was this: go online, read about fashion, put clothes on, stare at mirror. "According to this, none of my shirts actually fit!" Go to the store, try shirts on, "and none of these fit either!" Go to a tailor, spend $180 to get five shirts ruined (N.B. test a tailor before giving them a big chunk of your wardrobe). Go to a new tailor, and finally I now own a shirt that fits like it's supposed to.

I had tried improving my clothes before without effect, but I think the latest batch of changes bumped me up a level. I've also been testing out these high-status behaviors, so it's hard to isolate changes, but these are new in the last two months:

1. People walking on the street get out of my way (this led to a lot of "sidewalk dancing" for a while, because I was still expecting them to expect

I'm doing mechanism design for eliciting information without money. Most people here are aware of scoring rules and prediction markets, which reward participants according to the accuracy of their predictions. Drazen Prelec's Bayesian truth serum (BTS) is an alternate mechanism that rewards predictions relative to the answers of others instead of the actual event. Since verification is done internally, the mechanism works for questions that would be difficult or impossible to evaluate on a prediction market, e.g. "Will super-human AI be built in the next 100 years?" or "Which of these ten novels was the most innovative and ground-breaking?".

All three types of mechanisms assume the participants want to maximize their score from the mechanism. In many circumstances though, people care much more about influencing the outcome of the mechanism than their score or payment. Consider a committee making a high stakes decision, like whether to fire an executive officer. Paying committee members based on their predictions would be gauche. Scores could be ignored if it meant getting a favored outcome, so BTS is easily manipulated without money. The usual fallback of majori... (read more)

Psy-Kosh and I are exploring Alice Springs, seeing if you really can make money in Australia. We have harassed all the local restaurants and bars but they say they have no jobs at the moment. I'm making enough to pay the bills at a local fast-food joint, but Psy-Kosh has scruples about serving meat.

I am currently looking for a fruit/vegetable picking as it would:

• Pay enough to allow me to make a profit.
• Enable me to renew my visa in a year.
• Be compatible with Psy-Kosh's ethics.

But even this is a challenge. I may migrate to Darwin or Katherine, where I've heard farm jobs are more plentiful.

I'm working on a video game in which the player controls a horde of orcs and attempts to take over the world. The game is narrated, however, from the perspective of the humans who are being crushed. You get lots of opportunities to commit atrocities, of course.

As far as mechanics go, it's simplified grand strategy tuned so that a typical game takes no more than a couple hours. Haven't gone much beyond design writeups and figuring out my platform (Unity), but I'm only about five hours of actual work into the project.

My realistic goal for the game is for it to serve as a portfolio piece (I work as a game designer). My stretch goals are to get it into the IGF and/or release it on Steam/Desura/etc.

I am one month away from the official deadline for completing my PhD thesis. It is about Natural Language Processing, more concretely about building a set of tools for morphological disambiguation, shallow parsing, named entity recognition, sentence alignment and such. The topic is a bit parochial, engineering rather than science, as much of it is just applying well-known techniques to Hungarian. Some of our tools are used by the broader language technology community, though.

I would really appreciate feedback. Send me a PM if you'd like to have a look. (You can decide whether you'd like to give feedback after you have looked into it.)

Any kind of project is fair game: personal improvement, research project, art project, whatever.

Oh, I had no idea.

I somewhat recently finished a Flash animation, Manly Brawl on a Big Tree, and I'm working on a sequel. (Warning: this movie is very manly.)

Not sure how much people would want to read about this, but I recently started the /r/NoFap challenge. I've been abstaining from masturbation because I do it too much. While I don't feel like I shouldn't do it at all, I need to get to at least the level of self control where I can do it not at all. Just a few days successfully, and a few weeks of unsuccessful attempts, but I feel like this time it's really coming along.

This is part of a larger plan to increase my general self control, and a concrete first step while I try other various little things.

I bought a commercial EEG monitor called Mindwave ($100). I'm interested in two things:

(1) Can reliable, useful signals be extracted from EEG?

(2) If so, can this (bio)feedback be used for training mental states?

Extra info:

(2) This appears to be the main gimmick for selling these devices. It includes proprietary measures of "attentiveness" and "meditation". You can record these signals over time and see if you can improve your mental state. I was also intrigued by a connection with a program called "Vitamin R", which suggested that you could leave the EEG on while working and it would find your peak productivity times and warn you when your attention wanders. I've tried the meditation program and it does seem to be legitimately measuring something about meditation. I'm able after a few minutes to keep a consistently higher meditation score. An experienced meditator I know (>15 years practice) was able to max out the reading in under 10 seconds, and keep it there indefinitely.

(1) Multiple electrode EEGs have seen a moderate amount of success in the literature. People are able to control up/down/left/right and use this ability to type a few character... (read more)

I develop a vector drawing program. It seams to have a good balance between archivability and ambition for me. So far it has 80% of the functionality i use of Inkscape. Currently i'm struggling with getting the performance from barely usable to smooth.

I'm trying to learn to program. Again.

In my previous attempts I became frustrated by my slow progress, but now I've finished Learn Python the Hard Way and I'm reading through The Django Book while working on a prediction market webapp that uses points instead of real money. Not a particularly original or groundbreaking project, but it's good to actually be making something that might be useful at some point.

An example that it could be useful for could be gaming communities like Minecraft, when it comes to prioritising the implementation of features reque... (read more)

I have some data here. The waiting time between two eruptions and the duration of the eruptions for the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA.

The question is of course, what is the underlying math, governing the lengths of these eruptions and pauses between them?

I have found a nice approximate algorithm. In fact, I have evolved it. In fact it is still evolving, I'll give it here, when the evolution will stop giving ever nicer results - in C programming language.

Reading Learn You a Haskell. Currently on chapter 6. LYAH is humorously written, but it is not something you can read through all in one sitting. I am slowly drawing inferences to Lisp/Scheme and Forth/Retro (which is the language I've spent the most time on.

I've been running my message flasher in the background as an experimental anti-akrasia mechanism. (Apparently priming from subliminal stimuli can prime you to do what you already intended to do, though the effect is more muted than some claims that have been made.)

My tentative goal is to be employable ... (read more)