Kaj Sotala: I seem to have a serious problem in that my need for days off doesn't follow a regular rhythm. In an optimal situation, I could work a few days, then take a day or two off when I began feeling like I could no longer work, then continue working, as happened to suit my state of mind.

Now, since I'm working/studying from home, this would be possible.. if not for those darned weekends. Everything social is always on weekends, which means that in practice my pattern is "work for a few days, take a few days off, and then I would like to resume working again but now it's weekend and I've scheduled social stuff on the weekend so I have to take two more days off and now I've had something like four days off in a row and gotten a whole three days worth of work done this week".

I'm seriously starting to consider the idea that I should simply stop scheduling anything on weekends. Or on any other time that's not a late evening, for that matter - the problem isn't so much specifically weekends, but rather having any scheduled event that's on a fixed date and doesn't take into account the current phase of my "rest/work" cycle. But then not scheduling anything social on weekends would also deny me of a considerable fraction of what little social life I do have, so I'm not particularly keen on that.

Of course, there are also all kinds of compromise solutions - even keeping only every other weekend free would already considerably help things out. I do have some ongoing commitments in the form of RPG campaigns that tend to be on weekends, so starting out by dropping everything but those could be worth a try.

Kaj Sotala: One of things that probably contributes to the myth of "nobody ever changes their mind online" is that continuing to argue against doesn't mean that you're persisting on your old position, but it sure looks like it. If I have a position supported by multiple different arguments and somebody starts chipping away at them, I'm sure going to see if they can counter all of them... and as each one gets refuted, my position will be increasingly shifting towards the other person's view, all the while everyone else might think that I'm persisting in my old view.

We should more often explicitly signal that we've reduced our confidence in some position after considering the other person's argument. Of course, this can be difficult to do in the heat of a debate.

Kaj Sotala: "So apparently the FDA operates on an honor system where they trust that the company isn't just making up the results, and Ranbaxy just made up results. Lots and lots of results. For years."
Dirty medicine - Fortune Features

Kaj Sotala: Gaaahh. My mouse has started registering single clicks as multiple ones, with super-annoying consequences. Click on any interface element (like G+ notifications) where a first click brings it up and the second dismisses it, and it can take several tries to actually see it. Try to paint something with the mouse so that you could copy it, and see it select weird parts of the text. Click somewhere in the text because you want to move the cursor there, and it ends up selecting the closest word. Click on the top of an application to bring it up, and the double-click ends up changing the size of the window... aaaaargh.

(And yes, I did already tell Windows to only count the very fastest of double-clicks as a double-click, to no effect.)

Kaj Sotala: Although I don't endorse elitism in art, that's not to say I couldn't enjoy good parody, and this made my morning:

"Renowned author Dan Brown woke up in his luxurious four-poster bed in his expensive $10 million house – and immediately he felt angry. Most people would have thought that the 48-year-old man had no reason to be angry. After all, the famous writer had a new book coming out. But that was the problem. A new book meant an inevitable attack on the rich novelist by the wealthy wordsmith’s fiercest foes. The critics.

"Renowned author Dan Brown hated the critics. Ever since he had become one of the world’s top renowned authors they had made fun of him. They had mocked bestselling book The Da Vinci Code, successful novel Digital Fortress, popular tome Deception Point, money-spinning volume Angels & Demons and chart-topping work of narrative fiction The Lost Symbol.

"The critics said his writing was clumsy, ungrammatical, repetitive and repetitive. They said it was full of unnecessary tautology. They said his prose was swamped in a sea of mixed metaphors. For some reason they found something funny in sentences such as “His eyes went white, like a shark about to attack.” They even say my books are packed with banal and superfluous description, thought the 5ft 9in man. He particularly hated it when they said his imagery was nonsensical. It made his insect eyes flash like a rocket."
Don't make fun of renowned Dan Brown - Telegraph