Edting software recommendation: If you're a Linux/FOSS guy (a lot of the LW crowd is), Cinelerra is a really good thing to learn how to use. The learning curve is a bit steeper than some other stuff, but the power and flexibility that comes with it should benefit you down the line when you're working with more complex stuff

Cold Thermogenesis

Taking very cold showers or baths. You gradually decrease the temperature of your shower over several weeks. I can now take a shower or bath with the water on just cold. Other people use ice to lower the temperature of their baths even further.

Some claim that it has significant health benefits, but I haven't noticed any although I haven't been doing it for very long. Still, it's neat to be able to modify your body to tolerate something that would have previously caused unbearable pain.

Here is some discussion of cold thermogenesis on a paleo website.

I was wondering about the ages of all the people who want to start this club.

Not that age really matters, I just wanted to know what kinds of people we have here.

How about we give our ages in a 10 year range?

I definitely see some value in this idea. If this gets off the ground and the particular subject we're going with doesn't require substantial background knowledge that isn't easily obtained, I'm in.

Hello, my name is Baeo. Last summer, while looking for information on Dual N-back, I came across gwern's FAQ on the subject. I noticed that he had been leaving a lot of links to LessWrong, but I didn't look too much into it at first. Eventually, after another blogger I follow recommended the sequences, I decided that they were at least worth looking into. I started to read the sequences and I was impressed with what I read. As it stands now, I've gotten through the core sequences but other work has sucked up enough of my time that my effort to get through the other sequences (Quantum Mechanics, etc) has stalled.

A few months ago, I began to attend the Berkeley LessWrong meetup. If you live in the area, stop by. It's usually a lot of fun. Participation in this motivated me to actually go through the trouble of creating a LessWrong account a few days ago. I've gotten one friend to start reading the LessWrong sequences and three or four friends to start reading HPMOR (it really is excellent for introducing people to the ideas).

As it stands now, I'm just a high school student, so I don't have too much choice over what I study, but an electrical engineering or CS degree with a lot of math and physics courses to supplement it seems to be a likely path for me once I go off to college. I've been programming in my spare time for 5 or so years now (functional programming for almost 2 years). I feel like I'm a pretty typical LessWrong user in most respects: atheist, libertarian leaning, INTx, sci-fi fan, etc. I don't have much else to say at the moment, except that I really have barely scratched the surface of the space of human knowledge and I would like to thank this site for quite a bit of what I've done.