What are you working on? April 2012

This month I'm implementing a self-incentive mechanism to achieve tasks (and vaguely profit if I don't).

Last month I wrote up a list of 30 tasks, one for each day in April. If I fail to use any given day to complete one of my tasks, I move 1/100th (1%) of my previous month's salary to my savings account. This way my future self will either be cleverer (/stronger/more socially talented - due to the nature of the tasks) or richer than would happen otherwise.

Taxes. Opened an IRA. Those of you in the US should do likewise!

A couple of months ago I started keeping a journal. I posted about it here, asking for recommendations, and vaguely outlining my plan. (TLDR for that post: I'm writing a traditional journal when I have the time and keeping track of activities and emotional levels in a spreadsheet everyday, since that only takes like a minute.) It's gone very well. Originally I envisioned the journal as being a far more important part, but I'm enjoying the data collection much more. (Though both are valuable and I encourage both) I've recently made the tools for actually analyzing the data I've collected, and I thought I'd make the template publicly available for anyone who wanted to try a similar project. If you are, please send me a message or comment, and I'd be happy to explain the spreadsheet in more detail, since I know it can be hard to follow. But I don't want to take the time to write this if no one is going to use it.

Surprisingly, I have found very few statistically significant correlations. For example, there is not yet any statistically significant correlation (p<0.05) between how much sleep I've gotten and how energetic I feel the next day. R-squared values for linear regressions of variables tend to be around 2%-7%, even for variables that I thought would correlate very highly. Surprisingly, what is most strongly predictive (of the things I've looked at) of my happiness is how much exercise I have gotten that day (even more so than how much I have eaten).

I feel like this is mostly because I need a lot more data. There are trends that are evident in most of my things, but they're just not statistically significant yet. I really want to have about 4-5 more months of data, and then I feel like I can make some strong conclusions. I hope I'm not coming back in another 4-5 months wanting another 4-5 months though...

Edit: Apparently I am more energetic (Significant at alpha = 0.05) when I eat more than average than less than average. I must not have looked at food eaten vs energy before. I thought I had. There's an R-squared of 21%, which is astonishingly high comparatively.

I'm maybe 2/3 of the way through Empaths; after its completion I'll write section 4 of Blood, then start Siaddaki (the direct sequel to Silver, now complete), then finish Blood, then finish Siaddaki, and I'm not sure what's after that.

(This is all part of the Elcenia series. If you want to read it start with Summons.)

Finally got it rendered and zipped. This (zip, 37MB) is the result of an experiment, based on "I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp" (W. Somerset Maugham).

The aim here: write a song on each of thirty days in a row. Doesn't have to be good, can be any old crap. You just have to do something that constitutes a finished piece. If you do two in a day, that's great! You still need to do one the next day.

Failures: well, I didn't manage one a day for thirty days. I managed twenty-two over thirty-five days. Many are nothing like a finished piece, just the barest sketch. Reasons include being too busy to reliably clear an uninterrupted hour each day on headphones to work on stuff, a bout of illness and just saying "fuck it" a bit often.

Successes: this "do something every day" method seems to get my brain pointed in the right direction, and when I said "OK, need today's tune" something would bubble up out of my brain. Frequently something awful, but that's not a criterion, and some of it is not a bad starting point at all.

Summary: I'd say it demonstrated the value of the method. It seems the sort of thing I'd do again, but if I think "would I actually do it this year, for instance?" I'm not so sure. Even though I'm basically not doing anything else in particular.

Bits you can help with: some of these I think I nicked. In particular the last one, "Please Don't Make Me Wait" (n.b.: working titles were made up on the spot) - I've listened to ten or so songs of that title, but I still strongly suspect it's ripped off. Edit: It's "Don't Get In My Way" by Linx from C81. Bah!

I am writing a simple computer game in Java -- an improved Minesweeper. (When a first playable demo is ready, I will put in on Sourceforge.)

Why? To overcome my akrasia (I would like to start and complete something nontrivial to start a "success spiral") and to improve my emotions about programming (to make mental association: programming = "what I do freely for fun" instead of "boring stuff I have to do to pay my bills"). Later I plan to describe specific tasks related with creating this game on my web page -- I think people interested in game programming might like it.

Undergraduate thesis and portfolios handed in today. Victory!

Teaching myself C, because I will need it for my day job (I'm a software engineer, but mostly work in Perl right now) and because it will be useful for many things in the future. People in software who don't know C are like people in business who don't know English.

Writing a book on the Kinks Writing enough short stories to get a complete book of them out, and also in the process trying to get them published by SF zines. These two both because I have a long-term aim of making enough money from writing that I can devote more of my time to doing interesting stuff instead of working a job.

Assisting with a political campaign in the local elections. Aim is to slowly build a saner society -- I think we need fundamental changes to the political institutions in the UK, and support for the party in question will, long-term, lead to the probability of those changes increasing.

Teaching myself decision theory. I am on record as saying that I think Eliezer's/the SIAI's analysis of AI risks is wrong, but I think it's a non-zero probability of being right. I think that if it does turn out to be right, the most useful thing I could do would be to contribute to some of the open decision theory problems, and that this would be useful even in the much more likely case that they're mistaken.

I've been on holiday for the past two weeks. I had a to-do list this long, so of course I did other stuff. Most of what I actually achieved was working on two cover-status articles for RationalWiki.

• Freeman on the land - like the sovereign citizen movement with less guns and white-supremacism. They've actually achieved slight notice in the UK, with legal magazine Benchmark even running a feature on them ... which was entirely rewritten from the RW article. Hopefully this article will help keep some of the desperate from being fooled.

• 101 evidences for a young age of the Earth and the universe - a point-by-point refutation of a Creation Ministries International Gish gallop. This one required actually searching out papers from creationist pseudojournals. The intended audience is people miseducated into creationism who have an Internet connection and are capable of reading and thinking. I have been told by some that the current approach would actually have worked on them, so this article might indeed make the world a better place.

I have other "what have you been working on?" to post, will do so when I have them to link.

While I await laptop repairs, I've been killing time by registering predictions on PredictionBook.com for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, to go in my little page of categorized predictions.

I finished my Europa Universalis to Victoria converter, and even made a website for it and for my older Crusader Kings to Europea converter. I started work on the Victoria to Arsenal of Democracy converter.

I've been in the process of getting my law firm going for a bit, and I finally took a tangible step by getting the website online. I represent parents in north Georgia seeking appropriate support services for their special needs children from the school districts. Mostly I attend Individual Education Program (IEP) meetings with parents.

It's been very difficult keeping focused on the business because I'm so used to others setting the goals and constraints for my work. And it's all very anxiety provoking. A lot of my posting here has been avoidance of something I should be doing for the firm. But I'm slowly developing an entrepreneurial spirit about things. Wish me luck.

the bullet points...

• neuroscience research, particularly related to neuroeconomics

• rewriting codebase from 10 projects by breaking down into about 30 smaller more easily tested components

• reviewing and automating infrastructure selections (java,eclipse,jquery,couchdb,postgres,bash,ubuntu lts, maven, git, custom code for lots of stuff, apache for various little things notably hadoop and mahout) deciding on feature subsets for internal use, trusted group use, and launch trajectory in 2012

• some work on money and such annoying tasks

• adjusting to being engaged to my cofounder and out of cali permanently

• increasing online presence

...this is all changes that benefit many different wordlines, need to select how to go public on various things

Working on finishing off my two projects to complete my degree: a portfolio of my compositions, with a three-movement horn concerto as the centrepiece, and a dissertation on the composer Gyorgy Ligeti. I'm about halfway done on each, with a month to go before deadlines. I also have to revise/complete a small number of other pieces for my portfolio, and a write 2,000-word commentary on the concerto. I'm going to post some extracts from my thesis and commentary to my blog, when they're a little more presentable.

At the same time, I've got a super-heavy workload of piano practice; I'm going for a recital diploma at the end of may, as a warm-up for a teaching qualification exam in November. And I'm involved in launching a new ensemble based in my college, playing contemporary music. I'm programming a festival for the centenary of John Cage's birth for late May - my main goal here is to get dancers involved in at least some of it, as dance was a huge part of Cage's work.

I've started working on a project to see if I can make a computer program which can generate a reasonably readable article on a given subject automatically. It's all a big mashup of various news and natural language processing APIs.

I've also discovered that there's a whole bunch of public domain motion graphics assets on the web designed for use in christian churches, so I've been making a series of "Inspiring Quotations" youtube videos out of them. Stuff like Nietzsche, Anton LaVey, horrifying bible verses, and so on. So far I've finished seven, and I have enough material for probably a dozen more.

Here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/user/inspiringquotations

I'm working (still) on my emacs-based e-mail client mu4e (github). It's been a lot of fun so far (and a great learning experience); and I can combine a project for learning with improving a tool that I use all the time.

Also, reading quite a bit. After going through a series of rock-star biographies and some Dennett, Pinker, I went back to fiction; Truman Capote (In Cold Blood) and Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), and I'm now reading Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It's long, near self-parody and preachy, but somewhere there's a kernel of an interesting dystopian science-fiction story. Oh well.

Finally, I may need to start looking for some new way to make money in a few months. I'm studying my options.

I'm writing a forward planner to help me figure out whether to attend university for another year to finish my computer science degree, or do something else such as working for my startup full-time. I have a working prototype of the planner but still need to input most of the possible actions and their effects.

I chose this project because I think my software will do a better job assessing the utility of alternatives than my intuition, and because I implemented a forward planner for an artificial intelligence class I'm taking and wanted to apply something similar to my own life to help me plan my future.

Definitely not time travel.

More immediate goals have been put on hold while I pursue a project of opportunity. Work has sent me to the Philippines, where I've been for the past three weeks, to help the US Army build schools. Since I want to, one day, live and work in southeast Asia for an extended period of time, this has been a great chance to gather information cheaply.

Lots of firsts for me: first time outside the US, dealing with a language barrier, working in a military environment (I used to wonder how I'd have fit in if I'd joined the service, and WOW the culture does not suit me AT ALL). It's been highly stressful (also a new experience because my life is so relaxed) and highly rewarding. The best part is the success we've seen on the project: this reflects well on my boss and my company, and I'll use that capital when I get back home. I just have to decide how to spend it.

I'm currently studying Hameroff and Penrose's ideas about quantum consciousness, as well as various techniques of mind control, visualization, psi and "quantum jumping." I am persuaded that conventional AI is a fool's dream which can at best create machine zombies with no consciousness or free will. I am therefore attempting to lay the ideological foundations for a "Butlerian Jihad" against such machines and the founding of mental training schools which will arise in the wake of the Singularitarians' defeat. May the Force be with us all...