Dating. Progress from June, February, December, October.

A year into my experiment, I'm glad to finally report some success: I asked a girl out and she said yes and we had a very nice time together ending in my first real sexual intimacy. I tried to see her again, and she was enthusiastic about the prospect for a week or so, but things cooled after that. I think she moved on.

For a long time before this I had to seriously consider some scary hypotheses about myself, many along the lines of "you are so X that you'll never Y." I've updated all of those downward. But as far as the actual date went, I don't think my changes of the last two months had much to do with it. In the honesty of calm retrospection, no theory fits as well as "we both wanted to," i.e. "I got lucky," i.e. I don't actually know exactly what works and what doesn't, yet.

However

A year ago, I wouldn't even have been in a position to have this kind of good fortune. And even if, say, half the effort was hers, well, the other half came from somewhere, along with a bunch of nontrivial skills that took practice & research & reflection to build. I could name a dozen ways that the night wo... (read more)

I'm an undergrad astronomy researcher. About a month ago my advisor asked me if I'd ever heard of a strange thing called "Bayesian statistics." I had, thanks to lesswrong :D.

Recently there's been a movement in astronomy research towards Bayes. Astronomy is one of the most statistical of the physicses, so it's about time this happened. The recent rush has been almost entirely caused by the rise of MCMC algorithms and increasing computing power.

Anyway, my project has been to redo a bunch of statistics from an old paper of his with new data and the new statistics. At first I didn't think it would be any fun, but I've made huge progress and MCMC is really cool. I'm lucky that my advisor is good and gave me a "big picture." Turns out with decent statistics we'll be able to constrain cosmological parameters like the ratio of dark matter to luminous matter and such. Over the last few weeks I've figured everything important out. I've done all my fits, made a whole lotta graphs, and I'm writing a paper. Yeah!

On the side I'm teaching myself general relativity and figuring out how to better teach special relativity.

Well, the thing you might be interested in is that I'm thoroughly revamping the combat system of Yvain's Dungeons and Discourse RPG (sorry, not linkable yet, but Yvain's original can be found here). This involves me riffling through a lot of philosophy summaries for cool skill names. Marxist: "Perpetual Revolution." Nietzschean: "Will to Power." Materialist: "Summon: Laplace's Demon." Idealist: "Summon: Cave." So it's been good for my philosophical education. I'm doing this both because I'm enjoying turning philosophy into sweet RPG humor, and because I plan on using it. The learning part is merely a happy side-effect.

I've gotten far enough in my MLP rationalist fanfic that I'm pretty sure it will see the light of day. I have a very edit-heavy writing style, though- I'd much rather have the entire thing be complete and then release it than go chapter by chapter- which is highly atypical for successful online writers, which worries me. (As far as I can tell, it's standard for normal writers). I think I'm also at the point where having people reading my drafts will be interesting for them and motivating for me- so if you're interested in being an alpha reader, send me a PM.

(Why? Because ponies are fun, it's something to do at night before falling asleep, and I'd like to add to the growing rationalist fiction genre. And, who knows, maybe more bronies will end up at LessWrong.)

I'm working on a relativistic shoot-em-up. I decided to work on it because it's pretty cool, and it's fairly easy, so I can use it to sort of work my way up to the really awesome stuff I want to do.

I finished my sixth novel on Tuesday. (Best read after Summons in the same series.) I'm seven chapters deep into another one (best read after Summons and also Silver).

Still working on hypnosis and related stuffs.

In one direction, I’m turning the python based chat bot into a web based automated hypnotherapy business. I just got it put together, so there’s a lot of tweaking to do and a lot more to add.

In another direction, I’ve been moving away from the label “hypnosis” as it’s become less mysterious (and hence less deserving of a name to toss over the unknown). Instead, I’ve been mixing in various techniques to normal conversation and getting results that way.

A Bayesian Calculator with visualization that is easy to drop into existing web pages. It is built in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. I've been working on this for around a year on and off. Richard Carrier was looking for a replacement calculator for the one he uses in his introduction to Bayes Theorem material, and I was at the time looking to better understand and develop intuition for Bayes Theorem. There are a number of features I intend to add (more visualizations, more config options and other things identified here), and also some refactoring work that ne... (read more)

Working on an indie game that (roughly) is a combination of Diablo and Bejeweled.

I've been working on a turn-based tactics game mainly inspired by Missionforce: Cyberstorm. The mechanics are mostly there, so I'll spend the next month polishing and adding content. I doubt I'll have time for it after this month, but it would be nice to have something reasonably playable. Maybe I'll open-source it or put the goofy sci-fi writing on a blog or something. I'm doing it mostly for fun, although it's partly an exercise in coding productively.

I've also been sketching out puzzles for a mildly educational logic game, based on boolean circuits and ... (read more)

Just for fun, writing an imaginary abstract for a paper I wish someone had written and cross-posted on gr-qc and quant-ph.

In this vein (or, more likely, vain), who wants to write an abstract for a fake paper proclaiming a breakthrough in, say, FAI research?

Having a day job writing C++ leaves me without the mental fortitude to write more C++ for fun, so now I'm reanimating my abandoned and thoroughly bit-rotted Google Go language roguelike game into what is starting to look like a total rewrite in Go version 1. Trying to get a playable version out by mid-September.

Learning banjo chords. My hands can physically hold down the strings better than they could in May, and I can do more chords without looking. The goal is to practice at least five times a week for at least five minutes. I've been meeting that most but not all weeks.

I picked the goal of messing around for at least five minutes rather than a stricter goal because I know someone who's gotten good at a lot of instruments this way, and he says his motivation is best if practicing is just goofing around rather than drilling.

A personal project: I've been working on trying to listen to more music recently. I've noticed that the more rockish-upbeat music I listen to, the more motivated I am to be productive, etc. I haven't actually quantified this with my journal, but I would be astonished (p=0.05) if it weren't statistically significant.

I created a pandora playlist seeded by some of the songs I have that work best for this, but it's been pretty hit or miss. Sometimes it's really upbeat, sometimes not. I recently downloaded Journey, which had a number of songs that were awesome ... (read more)