The Society for Creative Anachronism started as a backyard graduation party for a medieval studies student and grew to 32,000 members as of 2008. Does anyone have any insight into how that happened? Of particular interest would be any intersection between the SCA's mode of growth and the usual modes of growth of religions (keeping in mind that not every intersection would be worth incorporating into a strategy for raising the sanity waterline by spreading LW-style ideas and approaches).

I'm contemplating  I've decided to make a trip from Ottawa, Canada to New York City on the weekend of April 2-3 specifically in the hopes of meeting some members of the LW NYC Chapter (and EY as well, if I can manage it). Since I don't know anyone in the city, I'm hoping this discussion post will generate interest in having some kind of get-together on that weekend.

Anyone in the national capital region is welcome to contact me in comments or by PM to get in on the action. (I've already canvassed XFrequentist and received a positive reply.) Cosmos has offered to let me crash at his place, but I haven't asked him about extra space for other folk.

Behold the power of applied rationality!

...ok, this is really just geek mind candy.

The alt text of today's xkcd reads:

After years of trying various methods, I broke [the habit of clicking on my favorite distractions every 5 minutes] by pitting my impatience against my laziness. I decoupled the action and the neurological reward by setting up a simple 30-second delay I had to wait through, in which I couldn't do anything else, before any new page or chat client would load (and only allowed one to run at once). The urge to check all those sites magically vanished -- and my 'productive' computer use was unaffected.

Anyone have ideas about how to implement this? On Firefox one can always use LeechBlock. On *nix systems there would be a number of ways of implementing this, but not all of us use that OS or have the necessary savvy. 

(I'm kind of surprised no one's made a discussion post on this yet.)