Here I be, looking at a decade old Kurzweil book, and I want to know whether the trends he's graphing hold up after in later years. I have no inkling of where on earth one GETs these kinds of factoids, except by some mystical voodoo powers of Research bestowed by Higher Education. It's not just guesstimation... probably.

Bits per Second per Dollar for wireless devices? Smallest DRAM Half Pitches? Rates of adoption for pre-industrial inventions? From whence do all these numbers come and how does one get more recent collections of numbers?

I tried the pomodoro system for a bit (which I understand is somewhat popular here) but I found it to be largely useless, for myself at least. Instead just removing various distractions was far more powerful. This is corroborated by the literature; Gloria Mark's research is worth a look: http://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Welcome.html

My brilliant plan to tell everyone my plan to go knock on startup doors did not magically give me motivation to get out the door and knock on startup doors.

I still feel plenty of guilt and embarrassment about it; that much went as planned. Quite possibly those social consequences are too far away to care about relative to the inconvenience of driving and the nearer SCARY-INSECURE-REJECTION.

update: asked my roommate to go with me to places

This week in Hamland:

• switched task systems again, from gtasks to ticktick. Better integration with web, and it includes an inbox.
• explicitly made effort to be open about my insecurities with my roommate/friendboy. I took advantage of my usual weekly freewrite to write an email, and followed it up with an in-person talk.
• took small steps to talk to customers and coworkers, CoZE-style. That is, I'm counting my own discomfort as a reason to push forward, and paying attention to whether the real consequences match up to my perception of them. I wrote notes and set goals after each shift, and started improving just in time to quit and move further south. I felt undertrained to help customers, as I was just holiday setup help, tended towards hyperfocusing on tasks, and got too self-conscious about the speed/quality/accuracy of my work to reach out.

My third update on curcumin (previous: one, two): I haven't been taking it very regularly lately. This is not unusual for me; as my focus on self-improvement waxes and wanes, so does my likelihood of continuing a practice that either is productive in itself or causes me to be more productive.

Mostly, I've been too depressed to take my pills. My antidepressant pills.

The thing is, the antidepressant effect is not so powerful as to leave one into a basically neutral mood absolutely regardless of what's happening. It can help you withstand minor stress without being emotionally affected; and if you're the kind of person who slips into a bad mood suddenly and without any exterior cause, it will probably help. But if sufficiently unfortunate events happen to you -- say, your mother is in hospital with cancer, your father commits suicide, the love of your life rejects you and then kisses someone else right in front of you, all of your friends turn out to be fake, you have to survive on two dollars for the following week, and you find yourself having to drop out of college -- all at the same time -- then I'm sorry to say that curcumin ain't gonna do shit for you.

I'll be saving my current supply for a time when things go better for me and I can actually focus on the goals for which I chose to take curcumin pills in the first place. Or maybe I'll just take them on days when I don't expect much to be happening, to improve baseline mood.

--

In a similar vein, I started experimenting with melatonin. I never had any problem sleeping when tired, and only very recently I experienced a couple of episodes of insomnia, but after reading gwern's sterling recommendation of it I thought I should give it a shot.

I took it thrice so far. The first two times -- 2 pills of 1 mg melatonin each; I was surprised to see they actually worsened my problem. I got stuck into the unpleasant state of being extremely tired (from the melatonin) and still unable to sleep. I am not sure whether this was because of melatonin or in spite of it. The third time I only took 1 mg, and slept very well for a very long time -- but then again I had amassed a very large sleep debt in the previous few days, and probably would have slept well no matter what. Needless to say, the data I've gathered so far is inconclusive. I have enough pills for the following two months or so; I'll continue taking it and see whether my response improves.

I think there is not much hope to remove biases from System 1, so we might as well use them for our benefit. With System 2, let's try to be as unbiased as possible.

More metaphorically, use your thoughts for (unbiased) thinking, but use your emotions for (productive) action. Don't try to use your emotions for thinking, they are not made for that purpose.

I've had a longstanding desire to start a video blog. One major cause of my procrastination around doing so has been a tendency to scrap work that wasn't good enough even when I did get around to making an attempt to create a first video, as well as a spiral around "the first video" where I spent more time thinking about it the longer I didn't make one, and the more I thought about it the more it had to match an ideal picture of what a good first vlog/intro vlog for me should look like.

Noticing that, I intentionally made and uploaded a very flawed video consisting of just two sentences describing what I'm doing.

I went back to scheduling my life using my phone. It's basic stuff like workout or clean on this day at this time. This has been an utter failure so far. The reason I originally stopped using the schedule is because, after some initial success, I wasn't following it then either. I need to get into a habit of following it, but breaking the schedule when I've only barely started is a really bad sign.

I'm having good results from using HabitRPG for this sort of thing. Your character gets experience points as you accomplish various daily, weekly, or one-off tasks, and it also records how many times in a row you've successfully done each recurring task. It's kind of silly, but I really feel good about my 37-day streak of actually eating breakfast.