I'm not too sure who is familiar with Web of Trust, so I'll start with a brief description. It's basically a browser app that inserts a circle next to text links in websites. The color of the circle indicates whether or not it's average rating by users rates it as having a "good reputation" (green) or a "bad reputation" (red). There are four criteria: Trustworthiness, Vendor Reliability, Privacy, and Child Safety.

Singularity.org's printout is here. As you may have guessed from the title, Web of Trust lists Singularity.org as "poor" in trustworthiness, vendor reliability, and privacy. There's a comment that, when translated (via Google translate) says "Mass mailing of non-thematic Forums". It's also commented under the category "malicious content/viruses".

I'm not entirely sure how these ratings are generated, (How Ratings Work, related) but I've used it for several years, and this is only the second time I've disagreed with a rating. I've always found WOT to be very reliable, and a decent way of warning me if a site is unsafe so I don't have to think about it. So I was fairly alarmed when I saw the red circle there, since I'd imagine it's turning away people that don't know any better. If LW had a red circle, I never would have come here. I'm not sure what SI or LW can do about it, but there's a "click here if you are the owner of this site" button, although I don't know what that does. I've left my own rating on there, but it didn't seem to change the overall rankings.

Edit: When I made this post, the scorecard read Trustworthiness 30, Vendor Reliability 31, Privacy 31, Child Safety 100.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres, which I was apparently too dumb to do.
• If you have a thread to add, such as a video game thread or an Anime thread, please post it to the Other Media thread for now, and add a poll to the Meta thread asking if it should be a thread every month.

Article can be found here.

I am considering trying this, and I'm wondering if anyone on LW has tried this or something similar. This seems like it could work, but it also seems like it could be hokum. A simple search for "how to develop a photographic memory" returns any number of methods. If this works with the success rate that they imply, this seems like tremendously low hanging fruit.

This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. I find that reading the sequences makes me less likely to enjoy some entertainment media that is otherwise quite popular, and finding media recommended by LWers is a good way to mitigate this. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees for genres, which I was apparently too dumb to do.

Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing!

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting recommendations just because you don't personally like the recommended material; remember that liking is a two-place word. If you can point out a specific flaw in a person's recommendation, consider posting a comment to that effect.
• If you want to post something that (you know) has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees, which I was apparently too dumb to do.

^{(Warning: Intermittent gooey personal details inside)}

I'm surprised I haven't seen this topic brought up before, but I haven't, and cursory searches of "diary" and "journal" came up with nothing, albeit largely because the latter got a bunch of hits for scientific journals. But I digress. I have recently started a journal. So recently, in fact, that there are only two entries. There were a number of motivating factors that went into this decision, which correlate rather directly with the number of goals I have for this project.

First, I think it will help me be less stressed. I estimate that at least 60% of my stress is due to the fact that I refuse to even think about the things I need to do until I actually start on them. Because I haven't actually thought through what I need to do, I often feel swamped and very stressed, even when I have comparatively little that needs done. When I actually start working on it, I realize that I don't have as much as I thought, and worried for nothing. One of the things I want to do in this (and haven't in my first two entries, very well) is briefly mention things I know I am procrastinating on. I haven't done this yet, because I forgot for the first two entries, but I intend to have a section of "What am I procrastinating on" for every entry.

Speaking of which: Secondly, I want to stop procrastinating so much. Stopping to actually think about what I need to do will naturally make me more productive. I've noticed that whenever I actually start thinking about things I need to do, I start doing it immediately. I also want to have a section "Productive things I've done today". This will give me some kind of incentive system to actually be productive, since I won't want to acknowledge when I haven't done anything I didn't have to.

Third, I have a terrible memory for things that don't matter that much. I don't know if this will help that or not, but at least I'll have some record of what I've done. And it only stands to reason that reviewing one's activities in a day would help one remember them. I first got an idea of this when I made this comment. I doubt this would specifically address that problem, but at least I would have a record of something.

Fourth, I want data on what makes me happy. Part of what I'm doing is keeping a companion Excel file to my OneNote folder. For each entry, I assess my emotional levels on a scale of 0-100, with 50 designed to be what I perceive an average day to be like. Emotional levels I'm currently using are: Happiness, Stress, Motivation, Energy, Relationship Satisfaction, and an arbitrary category called "Winningness". I'm sure everyone on LW understands what I mean. :-) I also record about how much time I spent doing various things that day. Under the productive category, I have going to class, homework/studying, Extracurricular Activities, Work, and a total category. Under the social category, I have time spent with my girlfriend, and time spent with general friends, and another total category. Under recreation, I record time spent watching Television, reading, and playing various games I enjoy, as well as a total category. Lastly, I'm recording miscellaneous things:

• Sleep the previous night (hours)
• Current length of To-Do list
• Tasks added to To-Do
• Items checked off the To-Do
• Day of the Week
• Where I am that day (Rather, where I'm sleeping that night)
• How much I've eaten that day (Again on a scale of 0-100, 50 average)
  • This is somewhat of a problem for me, I don't really eat as much as I should. I considered recording specific foods, but that seems like it would get out of hand very quickly, even though it makes a lot of sense, neurologically, that the type of food I would eat would be correlated with happiness levels. It feels wrong not recording the difference in the gooey butter cake that I ate for breakfast this morning (It was fast, and I needed to study, don't judge me!) and a bowl of oatmeal. I'd also like a better scale, like an exact caloric count, but that would really take too much effort.
• How much I've exercised that day (Same scale)

I will probably post again on this topic once I actually have some form of history doing it, including evaluations of the practice, recommendations, things I would change etc. But right now, I would like advice from you all. What am I missing that I should be doing? Does anyone Journal? Is it as involved in this? Has anyone tried and failed? I would particularly like advice on things I might include in the Excel file.

There was a recent discussion considering the idea of a monthly Book (later expanded to movies, links, etc) thread. The poll was pretty unanimous (Both before and after I was karmassassinated) that this was A Good Idea (tm), and daenerys's Janurary thread (from which I obviously stole a lot of this) was fairly successful, so let's see if we actually need one per month.

Post what you're reading or watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing!

Rules:

• Please avoid downvoting; this is a thread for sharing subjective experiences, and people should feel comfortable posting their personal opinion without fearing a karma backlash. If you disagree with a person's recommendation, please post a comment to that effect.
• If you see something that has been recommended before, but have another recommendation to add, please link to the original, so that the reader has both recommendations.
• Please use the comment trees, which I was apparently too dumb to do.

Comic can be found here. Related: Vasili Arkhipov Day, Petrov Day.

Yesterday, I made a post asking if anyone else had noticed LW being particularly slow. I offered to collect data on this, and was fairly sure (Probably about 80%) that it would show that LW loaded slower than other webpages. I took the post down after about 20 seconds (sorry if I confused you) since it was almost entirely insubstantial, and resolved to collect some actual data to report.

So I did that. Data was taken using this website. I was on my school's wireless network at the time, running Firefox 8.0. I didn't think to disable my addons before doing this, but I was running Adblock Plus, FastestFox, Greasemonkey, IE Tab 2, Movable Firefox Button, Omnibar, and Web of Trust. Data points were generated at the following websites. Each website was measured five times.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/new
http://lesswrong.com
http://lesswrong.com/user/RobertLumley
http://lesswrong.com/promoted/
http://predictionbook.com
http://predictionbook.com/predictions
http://predictionbook.com/users/rlumley
http://www.nature.com/news/index.html
http://volokh.com/
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/news-opinion-commentary.html
http://www.webdiplomacy.net/index.php

After doing this, I downloaded an offline copy of each of these websites, and calculated load time per byte of website size. I plotted these results. To my surprise, LessWrong ended up being one of the fastest, although PredictionBook could use some work. I considered deleting the obvious outlier, but trends are clear even with it in there, and all things equal, I'd rather not delete data. Data points (in groups of 5) correspond to the webpages above, in order, ie. the first five points are from the discussion page of LW.

Surprisingly, LW is still one of the best even when only raw load time is compared. But the discussion page (remember, that's the first 5 points) takes somewhat longer than the other pages:



The excel spreadsheet used to generate this can be viewed here.

Since there is no real problem here, and it was all in my head, I considered not publishing this, but after all of the discussion we have about positive bias, I wasn't about to turn around and do the same thing. So here they are: my negative results.