Hi. I keep forgetting to log in, and mostly just watch the front-page feed in Google Reader, but I do pass interesting articles and posts along to friends and family. They generally seem to like it, so that's good. I'm interested in what you might call community outreach via my comics where I try to subtly involve issues of rationality and such. Feel free to drop by and suggest themes I should use.

Having someone watch me. Works four out of five times. From talking to other people it has a much higher success rate, but I'm still trying to figure out what's akrasia and what's an executive functioning deficit resulting from minor frontal lobe damage.

I have a friend who hires people to sit across from her at work. Pays for itself with the extra work she can get done.

Stepping back and watching the meat-I-am start to do stuff helps too, but not nearly as often, and I only learned that trick a few weeks ago -- from this site.

The diet pretty obviously works because fat plays a huge role in satiety. If you can get a certain amount of fat in the lowest caloric form possible (olive oil, most likely), you won't be have to eat massively caloric things like bacon cheeseburgers in order to slake your hunger.

Still, good diet and exercise are the keys to staying thin. Satisfy your hunger by filling up on vegetables and lean protein. Exercise harder, eat less.

Hmm.

I found that with all of those I could make out at least some, and in some cases all, of the words in the sine-wave versions without the "priming" original recording. The very first example on that page was pretty much perfectly clear to me on the first listening; others were more work.

Then, for the ones where I hadn't been able to make out all the words in the sine-wave version, I listened to the "primer" and tried again with the sine waves. In each case, I found that I could then recognize the words I'd found unclear before, but I wouldn't say they were "clear as day" or anything like; more like "well, OK, I suppose it could be interpreted that way".

The effect of priming, for me, therefore appears to be very small.

I tried the first pair on my wife, and her response appears to be the canonical one. Obviously I'm just strange. Anyone else have the same experience as me?