Really interesting idea. Really awful science.

I think this notion of self-improvement-as-research-project has some merit, though, from the motivational psychology blueprint. Setting out to exercise 30 minutes a day 3 days a week is a vague, indefinite goal. But setting out to measure and plot the effect on resting heart rate of exercising 30 minutes a day 3 days a week for 12 weeks almost sounds interesting. So, insofar as "self-experimentation" can help make personal goals more concrete and hence more attainable, I think it's a great idea. The problem comes when one tries to generalize beyond oneself.

Awesome and brilliant. Kudos.

Thanks to everyone for your interest and your comments and your e-mails. Lots of people have been asking how I made the graph. In point of fact, it did not take very long using AT&T's freely distributed Graphviz package,

http://www.graphviz.org

which compiles and lays out graphs from simple text files which define the node and edge relationships. The text and titles were added in Photoshop.

-Sean

Um. It's a little guy made rather crudely out of cardboard boxes. What exactly is so cool about this, again?

So I tried this with the blue-dial combination Master Lock padlock I used to keep my organic chemistry glassware locked away when I was an undergraduate chemist, and I can't make it work. I have made no fewer than 5 shims, following the video as closely as possible, and it simply does not work. The stem when the shim is pushed down into the lock inevitably fails; the shim will fit into the lock casing but sticks, and as force is increased, begins to wrinkle and bend. Perhaps some lubricant on the shim would help, but the fact of the matter is that this is no where near as easy as the video's narrator (who has had the luxury of choosing and practicing with his own demonstration lock) makes it seem. Anybody else actually try it?

Does this really come as a surprise to anyone? If there's news here at all, it's just the empirical verification of what any worker with sound statistical instincts would have hypothesized in the first place, namely that as organisms become less structurally sophisticated they become more diverse as well as more ubiquitous--arguments from entropy and energy, respectively.