Because it has twice as many pixels as two of those.

(Is that enough reason? Maybe not. But that's the main reason you'd want it, if you did.)

How do I decide whether to get married?

• My girlfriend of four years and I are both graduating college.
• I haven't found employment yet, and she's returning home for work.
• As near as I can tell, we're very compatible.

Pros

• We are very fond of each other, get a lot of value out of each other's time.
• We've been able to talk about the subject sanely.
• Status
• We agree on religion and politics.
• Married guys make more on average, but the arrow of causality could point in either direction or come from something else.
• Financial benefits

Cons

• Negative Status associated with marrying young?
• No jobs yet, no clear home or area to live in.
• She sometimes gets mad at me for things I'm "just supposed to know" to do, not do, say, or not say. I'm not sure if she's right and I'm a jerk.

She has said that she doesn't want to marry me if she's just my female best friend that I sleep with. But I don't know how to evaluate what she's asking. There are a number of possibilities. Maybe I don't feel the requisite feelings and thus she wouldn't want to be married. Maybe I do have the feelings and I have no way to evaluate whether I do or not. Maybe I'm not ever going to feel some extra undetected thing X, ever, and so I should just go through the motions saying that I do, and our marriage prospects are entirely unchanged. Maybe this is just some signalling ritual we have to go through.

We both are concerned that I've not really had a relationship not with her, so there are no points of comparison for me to make.

Well, e.g., you can get a Seiki 39" 3840x2160 TV/monitor for $500 from Amazon right now. It's not the world's best monitor (TN panel, 30Hz refresh, and be warned that many things don't work well with very high-resolution monitors right now) ... but it's ~40" and it's >3000px wide and it's cheaper than some "normal" monitors.

Should we listen to music? This seems like a high-value thing to think about.* Some considerations:

• Music masks distractions. But we can get the same effect through alternatives such as white noise, calming environmental noise, or ambient social noise.

• Music creates distractions. It causes interruptions. It forces us to switch our attention between tasks. For instance, listening to music while driving increases the risk of accidents.

• We seem to enjoy listening to music. Anecdotally, when I've gone on "music fasts", music starts to sound much better and I develop cravings for music. This may indicate that this is a treadmill system, such that listening to music does not produce lasting improvements in mood. (That is, if enjoyment stems from relative change in quality/quantity of music and not from absolute quality/quantity, then we likely cannot obtain a lasting benefit.)

• Frequency of music-listening correlates (.18) with conscientiousness. I'd guess the causation's in the wrong direction, though.

• Listening to random music (e.g. a multi-genre playlist on shuffle) will randomize emotion and mindstate. Entropic influences on sorta-optimized things (e.g. mindstate) are usually harmful. And the music-listening people do nowadays is very unlike EEA conditions, which is usually bad.

(These are the product of 30 minutes of googling; I'm asking you, not telling you.)

Here are some ways we could change our music-listening patterns:

• Music modifies emotion. We could use this to induce specific useful emotions. For instance, for productivity, one could listen to a long epic music mix.

• Stop listening to music entirely, and switch to various varieties of ambient noise. Moderate ambient noise seems to be best for thinking.

• Use music only as reinforcement for desired activities. I wrote a plugin to implement this for Anki. Additionally, music benefits exercise, so we might listen to music only at the gym. The treadmill-like nature of music enjoyment (see above) may be helpful here, as it would serve to regulate e.g. exercise frequency - infrequent exercise would create music cravings which would increase exercise frequency, and vice versa.

• Listen only to educational music. Unfortunately, not much educational music for adults exists. We could get around this by overlaying regular music with text-to-speeched educational material or with audiobooks.

* I've been doing quantitative attention-allocation optimization lately, and "figure out whether to stop listening to music again" has one of the highest expected-utilons-per-time of all the interventions I've considered but not yet implemented.

Optimal for fun, given the PERMA model within Martin Seligman's happiness studies:

Should be a group activity Frequent goals, scores, or other sparks of dopamine. Or a feeling of constant flow. For males it can be positive to have women doing it, both motivationally and to diminish hierarchical male-only stress and bullying. You should probably not absolutely suck at it, after training, to avoid frustration.

I've found the most fun exercises to be, in this order:

Sex

Ecstatic Dance (oxytocin bonus points for touching)

Contact Improvisation (also a touch dance)

Ultimate Frisbee

Tennis

Dance Walking

Fighting waves in the ocean or bodyboarding them

Rollerblading.

Honorary status for Volley, Handball and Basket ball due to frequency of scoring, compared to others.

Not recommended for happiness alone would be: Lifting Running Speedbiking Competitive distance running Soccer Baseball (bad ratio of time doing stuff versus not, few hole in ones) Swimming (if you don't feel flow) Abs, push ups, all that stuff that you only do for instrumental reasons and for the endorphin, which all other exercise also provides. Yoga (if you don't flow or connect with the universe when doing it)

Hopefully I can upgrade soon. I've had those dumbbells since probably ninth grade! Anyway, thanks for all the info and the link. I've already worked out a list of exercises by body part. Time to put it to work!

Actually, I have a pair of ten pound weights in my room I use during my evening routines. I know there is a name for this type of weight lift, but what about letting the weight hang and lifting it towards my chest? Making the pulling effort come from lifting it against gravity rather than lifting myself. Sure, it won't be much of a work out, but I can at least keep the muscles engaged and work them.

I see. My thought at the time was “Push up for arms, sit ups/crunches for back, leg lifts for abdomen/legs, lunges/squats for the legs themselves.” However, I have been worrying about the pressure on my back, so I’ll definitely consider replacing the sit ups/crunch.

I would like to exercise more pulling muscles to balance things out, but my central problem is a lack of sturdy places to exercise from. I’ve nothing that can support my weight while also being the proper height to pull against. Any suggestions of household ways of getting in more pulling exercises? I’ve considered buying a chin up bar (I would also like to do more hanging stretches to keep my back fit) but lacking that, any other options?

Hmm, got ya. I’ll give planks a try at home and see if I can find a way to implement them at work. If I miss my core at work, it’s not as big a loss as missing it in my actual work out.

Edited: Right after typing my response, I went outside to do my five minute stretches and realized that my work is surrounded by sturdy poles cemented in the parking lot. At the very least, I can work my pulling muscles a little at work on my breaks by doing short sets of pulls against these.

I have a nightly home exercise I'm pretty content with, consisting of push ups, crunches, sit ups, leg lifts, lunges, and squats. When I'm at work, though, I have a short "break" routine. Every thirty minutes that I'm seated at the desk, I get up, go outside so that I'm in the sun, and do a series of full body stretches. Neck, shoulders, arms, wrists, hands, chest/back, spine, obliques, stomach, hips, thighs, knees, legs, ankles (listing those off, I just realized I need to start stretching my feet as well). Then, I do a set of ten squats and return to my desk where I do ten push ups using my chair's armrests, raising myself off the seat with my feet on the floor. In all, it takes about five minutes.

The only thing I can't really work on at the office is my core. Legs and arms I can get but nothing for core muscles. Any suggestions for something simple I can do around the office to keep my core as energized as the rest of me? Besides getting down on the dirty floor for a set of crunches.

I'd been using some android apps to determine how many sets of how many pushups/squats/situps I should do. My current set of reps for pushups is 24/26/28/29/27/29/27/29/27/29/28/25, totallying 328 (takes too much time :P) - so 3 sets of 8 sounds a bit weak-sauce (at least for standard pushups).

I'm not sure what you mean by "a circuit" (I'm kinda new to this fitness thing); do you mean doing squats than pushups then rows on the same session? I had the impression that it was better to say train one's arms one day and let the arms rest another day (where I'd train a different part). Or is that what you meant?

Those links you gave are pretty good suggestions for variations on pushups, and pullups I can do with just a table or something, thanks!

Instead of doing many long sets, I'll probably start switching to fewer sets of more difficult exercise, improving my morning routine :)