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I have a low attention span but I read through your entire document and when I reached the end I was surprised because I had the impression I was still reading the preliminary part. So, for what it's worth, I found it easy to get through.
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Weight training
I recommend articles by Chad Waterbury and Dan John to start, which you can find on www.t-nation.com (which is a quality resource in general). Dan John tends to recommend simple, effective strategies, and Waterbury writes a lot addressing your first and second questions.
A great place to start, this article by Mark Rippetoe: http://www.t-nation.com/free_online_article/most_recent/most_lifters_are_still_beginners
Eric Cressey and Christian Thibaudeau write great stuff, if you're into a more complicated approach.
Also I agree strongly with Zed's point 2.
I agree with Zed's point 3. about supplements sort of. I think the exceptions are (1) "peri-workout nutrition" about which there are many complex strategies but you can keep it simple, say a whey protein & gatorade shake before or after (or both) your workouts, and (2) things often lacking in a modern diet or lifestyle: fish oil (or some other way to get omega 3) and vitamin D seem to be the most frequent recommendations.
The case to which I referred was when I first studied calculus as a teenager. The book I was reading took what I think is the standard approach to handling trigonometric functions, namely first prove that the limit of sin(x)/x is 1 when x->0, and then use this result to derive all kinds of interesting things. However, the proof of this limit, as set forth in the book, used the formula for the length of an arc. But how is this length defined? Clearly, you have to define the Riemann (or some other) integral before it makes sense to talk about lengths of curves, and then an integral must be used to calculate the formula for arc length based on the coordinate equations for a circle -- even though that formula is obvious intuitively. But I could not think of a way to integrate the arc length without, somewhere along the way, using some result that depends indirectly on the mentioned limit of sin(x)/x!
All this confused me greatly. Wasn't it illegitimate to even speak about arc lengths before integrals, and even if this must be done for reasons of convenience -- you can't wait all until integrals are introduced before you let people use derivatives of sine and cosine -- shouldn't it be accompanied by a caveat to this effect? Even worse, it seemed like there was a chicken-and-egg problem between the proofs of lim(sin(x)/x)=1 for x->0 and the formula for arc length.
This was before you could look for answers to questions online, and it was unguided self-study so I had no one to ask, and it took a while before I stumbled onto another book that specifically mentioned this problem and addressed it by showing how arc lengths can be integrated without trigonometric functions. So it turned out that I had identified the problem correctly after all. But considering that I was a complete novice and thus couldn't trust my own judgment, I had an awfully disturbing feeling that I might be missing some important point spectacularly.
Thanks for this. I guess this goes to show how hard it can be to communicate math well. When I learned the sin(x)/x limit I accepted the "proof" by geometric intuition with no protest and was not alert to any deeper source of confusion here.
Come to think of it, the rigorous treatments of sine that I've seen probably all use power series definitions. To see that it's the same function as the one defined using triangles I expect you have to appeal to derivative properties, so that approach would not skirt the issue.
Interestingly, I never found this to be a problem with mathematics, although I did find it a problem many times I tried to teach myself physics. In my experience, textbook-level mathematics is almost always a perfect self-contained edifice of logic, whereas textbook-level physics often leaves unclear points that you can clarify only by asking an expert or finding another book that addresses that specific point. (I suppose things might be different if you're reading bleeding-edge math research papers.)
Out of the large number of mathematical texts I've read, I can recall only one occasion when I felt genuinely confused after making the effort to understand the text in-depth. In this case, it turned out that this was indeed a fundamental conceptual error in the text. (I can write down the details if anyone is interested -- it provides for a nice case study of what seems "obvious" even in rigorous math.) Otherwise, I've always found mathematics to be perfectly clear and understandable with reasonable effort, as long as you can locate all the literature that's referenced.
I agree the problem is even more pronounced in physics.
Also, I am interested in and would appreciate the details of the case study to which you refer.
This is good advice, to which I'd add: once you're done studying some particular area, be sure to have a clear and systematic "bird's eye view" of the basic definitions, lemmas, and theorems, how they depend on each other, and what the salient point of each one is. Because if you don't use this knowledge for a few years, it's surprising how thoroughly you can forget almost everything -- and in case you ever need it again, you'll be in a much better position if your knowledge decays into a still-coherent outline of this "bird's eye view" than a heap of disorganized fragments.
I find it scary how thoroughly I've forgotten some large chunks of math that at some point I knew so well that I would have be able to reconstruct them, with proofs and everything, given just paper and pencil. Those I still remember very well after 10-15 years are either those that I drilled so intensely that it developed into an irreversible skill like bike riding, or those where I organized my knowledge into a very systematic outline (even if I never had a truly in-depth understanding of all the logic involved).
I also find that scary/frustrating. But don't you find you can relearn those forgotten chunks much more rapidly than the first time, if you need to?
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Discuss: How to learn math?
Self-teaching math is a skill in itself. The hardest thing is to recognize what it feels like to be confused, and to attack the source of your confusion (it's way too easy to think "meh, this makes sense" when it doesn't.)
Read with a notebook, like a monk, copy things down as you go. When you finish a book you should have a (somewhat paraphrased/shortened) copy of your own. Do the exercises if there are any (yeah, this will make you feel stupid. The more you can face this feeling, the more math you'll know.)
My own experience is that it is fairly easy to identify points of confusion, and the hard part is finding a book or whatever, at the right level, to address that specific point. This is a tough problem to solve with self-teaching.
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Waterloo, ON, Canada Meetup: 6pm Sun Oct 18 '09!
If this meetup happens, I'd drop in.
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An observation on cryocrastination
I can tell you a reason I've cryocrastinated. I don't expect the reason to hold up under scrutiny. It held up under my half-hearted scrutiny, but so what? I have low confidence in my own ability to be rational. In fact, I'd be grateful if someone can eliminate this worry for me.
So, the reason is concern about dystopian or hellish scenarios. For a cartoon of such a scenario, think I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.
One thought I had was that these scenarios are so unlikely that if I felt they warranted avoiding cryonics, I'd also feel they warranted preventative suicide. I'm confused about where I stand on this, but in any case preventative suicide is an action I am absolutely unable to take, whereas not signing up for cryonics is easy.
Thanks if you can straighten this out for me.
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BTW, I've had numerous "wow" moments with philosophical insights, some of which made me spend years considering their implications. For example:
I expect that a correct solution to metaethics would produce a similar "wow" reaction. That is, it would be obvious in retrospect, but in an overwhelming instead of underwhelming way.
Is the insight about free will and logical facts part of the sequences? or is it something you or others discuss in a post somewhere? I'd like to learn about it, but my searches failed.