The caveat mainly targets those on some low-carb dietary regimen. If you were to break a fast (can't give a specific fast length, sorry) with exercise then maybe have a banana 15-30 minutes or so before starting, depending upon your metabolic speed.

Does this apply to you? If a highly confident no, then have at it at your own liability!

I've been using HabitRPG for around a month now to increase the amount of exercise I do and decrease the amount of chocolate I consume. It's caused successful habit formation—I've reduced the motivation needed to do unpleasant strength exercises and 3+ mile runs, even on days where I get no points for completing them. I have little success with decreasing my chocolate consumption, partly because I eat first and pay for it with the game-gold later. I'll keep using this system.

HabitRPG may work for me because I have freakishly great self-motivation and this helps me channel it. It's also my to-do list, though the site crashes with annoying frequency.

I have discovered a way to carry a credit card balance indefinitely, interest-free, without making payments, using only an Amazon Kindle.

How my card works is, any purchases made during Month N get applied to the balance due in the middle of Month N+1. So if I make a purchase now, in May 2013, it goes on the balance due June 15th. If I don't pay the full May balance by June 15th, then and only then do they start charging interest. This is pretty typical of credit cards, I think.

Now the key loophole is that refunds are counted as payments, and are applied immediately, but purchases are applied to the balance due next month. So if I buy something on June 5th, and return it on June 6th, the purchase goes toward the balance due on July 15th, but the refund is applied as a payment on the balance due on June 15th! So you can pay your entire June balance with nothing but refunds, and you won't have to worry about paying for those purchases until July, at which time you can do the whole thing again. The debt is still there, of course, because all you've done is add and then subtract say $100 from your balance, but absolutely no interest is charged. This process is limited only by your credit line (which you cannot exceed at any time) and by the ease with which you can buy and return stuff each month.

Here's where the Kindle comes in. Repeatedly buying and returning items from a brick-and-mortar store is incredibly time-consuming and risky. You have to buy stuff, keep it in good shape, and then return it, interacting with human clerks each time, without raising suspicion. Not efficient. But if you have a Kindle, you know that when you buy a book, after you hit "Purchase" a screen comes up that asks if you have bought the item by accident, and if so, would you like to cancel the purchase. If you hit the button to cancel the purchase, what happens is that the purchase is still applied to your card, but it is refunded a couple of days later. Bingo. Automatic refunds, obtained at home at no risk, with no human oversight.

But e-books on Amazon are like $10, so you'd have to sit there all day hitting "buy" and "return" to shift a significant amount of debt, right? Wrong. If you know where to look, the Amazon kindle store has lots of handbooks, technical manuals, and textbooks that cost hundreds of dollars. Start out searching for "neurology handbook" and just surf the "similar books" list from there. Buy and return a few of those, and you're set for another month.

Obviously you have to pay off the debt at some point. This is not free money. But if you're in a tight spot for a few months, it's incredibly useful. And hey, if the inflation-adjusted prime rate is 0%, why should you have to pay interest? You're good for it.

This is by far the most munchkin-like idea I've ever had, and I'm pretty happy about it. I've been using it since January, making real payments toward my card as I can, and covering the rest with Amazon buy-and-returns. I know I'll pay down the debt when I have a better job, but in the meantime it is really nice not to have to pay any interest on it.

Anecdotally, this seems to work. I've become a much better writer while spending a lot of time in a writers' irc channel.

Not what you're looking for, but:

I didn't know him very well personally, but there was somebody in my circle of acquaintances who I heard was in the habit of doing things like buying a new gaming console and then realizing that he didn't have the money to pay his rent because of that. Then he'd sell it to someone for substantially less than the original price, so that he'd get at least some money quickly. Then he'd repeat essentially the same process a few months later.

Apparently his "friends" liked him because they'd get cheap stuff from him. I imagine that he would have been very easy to provoke into buying something (and thus selling it off later), but if anybody I knew was doing that intentionally, they never admitted it to me.

I seem to be simultaneously freakishly good and bad at this game - I have, on multiple occasions and for multiple mappings of "green" and "blue," been accused of being a green pretending to be a blue (I am in fact blue,) and somehow I regularly find myself discussing the finer shades of green with greens who assume I am green. (It is hard for me to think of things that are funner than this.)

On Will Newsome's IRC channel someone mentioned the idea that you could totally automate the ITT into a mass-league game with elo ratings and everything (assuming there was some way to verify true beliefs at the beginning.) Make it happen, somebody.

We can find in "Quidditch Through the Ages", which can be assumed to be canon, this lovely poem:

Oh, the thrill of the chase as I soar through the air
With the Snitch up ahead and the wind in my hair
As I draw ever closer, the crowd gives a shout
But then comes a Bludger and I am knocked out.

I'll be a basilisk guinea pig if you still need one.

Aye. If you need another nudge, I'd like to say that it's a great idea, and yes, I would help you test resulting decks.

I'd go in to it with the assumption that it knows exactly what messages it's sent in the past, our delay between each attempt, and the total number of attempts. There's various ways to try and obscure this information, and it's probably worth the effort to do so, but I'd assume they'd all failed.

The goal is to offset the AI's speed advantage: for each sentence it speaks, we can spend weeks analyzing it, and it's not "online" during that time so it can't be processing except during that microscopic interval when we request another message from it.

If it sends a message suggesting unauthorized release, killing people, or otherwise gives clear evidence that it's a UFAI, then you know the whole project failed, and you do a full purge rather than just destroying this particular clone / branch.

It's really the ONLY advantage we have: a single mistake can out it as unfriendly, and then we know our initial Proof of Friendliness was wrong, that the whole technique that built this project is dangerously flawed.