What are you working on? August 2012

Dating. Progress from June, February, December, October.

A year into my experiment, I'm glad to finally report some success: I asked a girl out and she said yes and we had a very nice time together ending in my first real sexual intimacy. I tried to see her again, and she was enthusiastic about the prospect for a week or so, but things cooled after that. I think she moved on.

For a long time before this I had to seriously consider some scary hypotheses about myself, many along the lines of "you are so X that you'll never Y." I've updated all of those downward. But as far as the actual date went, I don't think my changes of the last two months had much to do with it. In the honesty of calm retrospection, no theory fits as well as "we both wanted to," i.e. "I got lucky," i.e. I don't actually know exactly what works and what doesn't, yet.

However

A year ago, I wouldn't even have been in a position to have this kind of good fortune. And even if, say, half the effort was hers, well, the other half came from somewhere, along with a bunch of nontrivial skills that took practice & research & reflection to build. I could name a dozen ways that the night would have sucked if it happened to wmorgan_2010. But it was actually awesome, and while I can already feel myself climbing back on the hedonic treadmill, for now I'm very very happy to have finally completed level three. Next subgoal is to do it again.

I'm an undergrad astronomy researcher. About a month ago my advisor asked me if I'd ever heard of a strange thing called "Bayesian statistics." I had, thanks to lesswrong :D.

Recently there's been a movement in astronomy research towards Bayes. Astronomy is one of the most statistical of the physicses, so it's about time this happened. The recent rush has been almost entirely caused by the rise of MCMC algorithms and increasing computing power.

Anyway, my project has been to redo a bunch of statistics from an old paper of his with new data and the new statistics. At first I didn't think it would be any fun, but I've made huge progress and MCMC is really cool. I'm lucky that my advisor is good and gave me a "big picture." Turns out with decent statistics we'll be able to constrain cosmological parameters like the ratio of dark matter to luminous matter and such. Over the last few weeks I've figured everything important out. I've done all my fits, made a whole lotta graphs, and I'm writing a paper. Yeah!

On the side I'm teaching myself general relativity and figuring out how to better teach special relativity.

Well, the thing you might be interested in is that I'm thoroughly revamping the combat system of Yvain's Dungeons and Discourse RPG (sorry, not linkable yet, but Yvain's original can be found here). This involves me riffling through a lot of philosophy summaries for cool skill names. Marxist: "Perpetual Revolution." Nietzschean: "Will to Power." Materialist: "Summon: Laplace's Demon." Idealist: "Summon: Cave." So it's been good for my philosophical education. I'm doing this both because I'm enjoying turning philosophy into sweet RPG humor, and because I plan on using it. The learning part is merely a happy side-effect.

I've gotten far enough in my MLP rationalist fanfic that I'm pretty sure it will see the light of day. I have a very edit-heavy writing style, though- I'd much rather have the entire thing be complete and then release it than go chapter by chapter- which is highly atypical for successful online writers, which worries me. (As far as I can tell, it's standard for normal writers). I think I'm also at the point where having people reading my drafts will be interesting for them and motivating for me- so if you're interested in being an alpha reader, send me a PM.

(Why? Because ponies are fun, it's something to do at night before falling asleep, and I'd like to add to the growing rationalist fiction genre. And, who knows, maybe more bronies will end up at LessWrong.)

I'm working on a relativistic shoot-em-up. I decided to work on it because it's pretty cool, and it's fairly easy, so I can use it to sort of work my way up to the really awesome stuff I want to do.

Publishing Kindle editions of the work of Dora Marsden (1882 - 1960). Her trajectory is fascinating: from suffragist to suffragette to secularist to anarchist to egoist. To mental ill health? To long-term isolation and confinement, definitely. While not forgotten, her work is not in currency. I'd like to change that. The only other Kindle title on Marsden is generated by robots and costs six times more than my book. The only print book on Marsden published in the past twenty-plus years is nearly one hundred dollars used. By human-editing my edition, providing a new introduction and making it inexpensive, I'm hoping more people will read her work. Perhaps also read more egoism in general.

From my introduction... "Post-everything by 1913. Reading books of comics twenty years before the first comic book was published. Small-press publishing forty years before the first photocopier. Social media savvy eighty years before the Web."

Volume one is here.

Volume two is what I'm working on.

PS: just this morning applied to teach how to make model rockets at local science museum. Hope to increase number of model rocket builders by making it accessible to many kinds of brains, hands and budgets. This is barely in progress, but if accepted will be a larger undertaking.

Working on the storyboard for "My Little Monad: Qualia Are Magic".

Research has mostly stalled over the summer due to several trips -- California, Canada, and currently China -- and also my new boyfriend (who was partly responsible for the Canada trip). At the same time I'm changing apartments, and so after I return to the states I'll be homeless for a few days.

The article I've been working on for the past year recently stalled when I realized that the technique I'm building off of horribly broke in my situation for a subtle but hindsight-obvious reason. It was a good opportunity to rewrite the article and standardize some of the notation. The only thing left to rewrite at this point is about three pages of vector calculus and to find a different proof for one of the theorems.

I finished my sixth novel on Tuesday. (Best read after Summons in the same series.) I'm seven chapters deep into another one (best read after Summons and also Silver).

Been working on a website for a network of meetup groups promoting effective altruism/optimal philanthropy. Still needs a little bit of polish but we're looking for feedback (you can check it out at www.thehighimpactnetwork.org). (We'll be doing an official announcement soon)

Also recently started a meetup group for a rational humanist open mic, where people can share performance art relating to ideas we tend to care about, which had a pretty successful first meeting. (Around 19 people)

Still working on hypnosis and related stuffs.

In one direction, I’m turning the python based chat bot into a web based automated hypnotherapy business. I just got it put together, so there’s a lot of tweaking to do and a lot more to add.

In another direction, I’ve been moving away from the label “hypnosis” as it’s become less mysterious (and hence less deserving of a name to toss over the unknown). Instead, I’ve been mixing in various techniques to normal conversation and getting results that way.

A Bayesian Calculator with visualization that is easy to drop into existing web pages. It is built in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. I've been working on this for around a year on and off. Richard Carrier was looking for a replacement calculator for the one he uses in his introduction to Bayes Theorem material, and I was at the time looking to better understand and develop intuition for Bayes Theorem. There are a number of features I intend to add (more visualizations, more config options and other things identified here), and also some refactoring work that needs to take place.

The project is hosted on github for anyone interested in helping or looking at the way it is implemented.

The graph I like the most is the area-proportional venn graph.

Working on an indie game that (roughly) is a combination of Diablo and Bejeweled.

I'm pushing my bodyweight up and increasing strength. On July 22nd 2012 I was back squatting 90 kilos for 3 sets of 5. Last week I was able to squat 297lbs(134.7kg) for a single. I've also pushed my deadlift up to 130k for a single. In this time my bodyweight has increased from 150lbs to 167lbs.

My goals for Halloween are to deadlift 400lbs and squat 315lbs. I'd like to get up to a bodyweight of around 200lbs at 5'8" as a long term goal but that will probably take much longer than till Halloween.

Why?

• Because it's fun
• Because strong men are harder to kill and more useful in general than weak men
• Because I have an undying fear of being a pussy
• Because I want to increase my bone density
• Because I want to compete in Olympic weightlifting competitions one day
• Because I want increased strength for playing BJJ
• Because I want to look AND BE strong and sexy for the wimminz(and possibly some guyz too)

What I will be working on come Fall semester: Intro to Abstract Algebra 501, Advanced Calculus 407 and spanish 101

Why?

• Because I want my mind strong like my body and I need to major in something

Yesterday I received a draft of a poem which I'm setting as a madrigal (SATB) for a concert in September. I only have two weeks to work on it, so time is pretty tight, but for the majority of that time I have my house to myself, the usual distractions in the house aren't available, and recently the place was tidied up so I will be better able to focus. (I find it difficult to study or work when my environment is messy - I don't know if this is common.)

I've been working on a turn-based tactics game mainly inspired by Missionforce: Cyberstorm. The mechanics are mostly there, so I'll spend the next month polishing and adding content. I doubt I'll have time for it after this month, but it would be nice to have something reasonably playable. Maybe I'll open-source it or put the goofy sci-fi writing on a blog or something. I'm doing it mostly for fun, although it's partly an exercise in coding productively.

I've also been sketching out puzzles for a mildly educational logic game, based on boolean circuits and models of computation, maybe eventually building up to quantum stuff, but the idea is turning out to be dryer than I hoped.

Also working through courses on QFT and Convex Optimization, lectures by David Tong and Stephen Boyd, respectively. As much as I like the lecturers I find myself mostly reading the textbook/notes with the videos playing in the background. I have much less patience for lectures than I used to.

Just for fun, writing an imaginary abstract for a paper I wish someone had written and cross-posted on gr-qc and quant-ph.

In this vein (or, more likely, vain), who wants to write an abstract for a fake paper proclaiming a breakthrough in, say, FAI research?

While there has been a slump the last weeks, before that I've done more since the last thread than in a years before that.

The one most relevant to lesswrong is here: http://jsbin.com/eqomac/66/ Very much work in progress, fluff text and polishing and clarifications needed. Also two core functionalities of proper AI and multiplayer from different computers needed before it's really playable, which may require large rewrites...

(also wrote this silly thing: http://jsbin.com/idifof/121/ Or not. Sort of write it ship-of-thesus style over a random thing I found online that there are almost not traces left of.)

Also some random python games and 3d models mostly done for practice. And some writing not suitable for these parts.

I've also slowly started getting ubuntu working on my laptop, wich is hopefully the start of moving everything in my life over to linux and in the proccess refactoring it.

And a bunch of other stuff I havnt bothered to mention.

Working on updating js3-mode with a better parser - one that will be faster and understand comments.

Writing a js lexer is harder than it ought to be.

Having a day job writing C++ leaves me without the mental fortitude to write more C++ for fun, so now I'm reanimating my abandoned and thoroughly bit-rotted Google Go language roguelike game into what is starting to look like a total rewrite in Go version 1. Trying to get a playable version out by mid-September.

Working on a fanfic of a fanfic of a fanart of a fanfic. At this level of recursion, the original source material has become difficult to detect. I understand at seven levels, it becomes Douglas Hofstadter slash fic. (blatant EY joke theft)

I started off writing this in second person imperative, in response to a challenge from a writer friend of mine (e.g. "You are thinking you would never write in second person imperative. Try it anyway. See what happens."). Not sure I'll stick with it, though; it works beautifully in some parts, and like chewing aluminum foil in others. Also, I'm guessing it would make it more difficult for anyone who wanted to take the recursion to another level.

It's not a huge project, probably a few thousand words going by the outline. Thought I might as well post here so as to put a little pressure on myself to actually finish it.

Learning banjo chords. My hands can physically hold down the strings better than they could in May, and I can do more chords without looking. The goal is to practice at least five times a week for at least five minutes. I've been meeting that most but not all weeks.

I picked the goal of messing around for at least five minutes rather than a stricter goal because I know someone who's gotten good at a lot of instruments this way, and he says his motivation is best if practicing is just goofing around rather than drilling.

Installing Arch Linux.

Learning introductory physics and statistics at Udacity

A personal project: I've been working on trying to listen to more music recently. I've noticed that the more rockish-upbeat music I listen to, the more motivated I am to be productive, etc. I haven't actually quantified this with my journal, but I would be astonished (p=0.05) if it weren't statistically significant.

I created a pandora playlist seeded by some of the songs I have that work best for this, but it's been pretty hit or miss. Sometimes it's really upbeat, sometimes not. I recently downloaded Journey, which had a number of songs that were awesome for this purpose, but I'm starting to get tired of listening to them incessantly, which is a problem. Below are the songs I've found that work best for this, if anyone has recommendations for similar music (Particularly 60's-80's music that was before my time), they would be appreciated. All the Small Things (Blink 182), Any Way You Want It (Journey), Blue Collar Man (Styx), Born This Way (Lady Gaga), Burn Out Bright (Switchfoot), Carry On Wayward Son (Kansas), Come Sail Away (Styx), Dead or Alive (Journey), Don't stop Believin' (Journey), Godspeed (Anberlin), The Great Escape (Boys Like Girls), Nightmare (Eve 6), Pressing On (Relient K), Salvation (The Cranberries), Separate Ways (Journey), and Tubthumping (Chumbawamba).

Edit: I've edited this like 4 times for typos now. Sorry guys.

I'm learning how to play gypsy jazz. I've already been playing guitar for about 15 years but gypsy jazz is a completely different guitar style than what I normally play. Right now I'm learning how to play a typical rhythm guitar for gypsy jazz by listening to some tunes that I like and lessons on YouTube. The problem is that these are chords that I hardly ever play so transitioning between them -- at fast gypsy jazz speeds -- has been... difficult.

I'm learning the use and care of firearms and melee weapons. The two sides of human interaction are reasoning and force, and I've always dealt with the former rather than the latter. Thus, I plan on learning more about force, both historical and modern, and purchasing my own weapons.

I'm also exercising. This is the first time in my adult life I've managed the recommended daily dose of exercise, thanks to recent analysis of how to overcome personal barriers. I exercised 16 out of the last 27 days.