Do you do any simple experiments? Or track things and analyse them?

Yep. 15 years in the trade. I even put together some cute python code to make bar plots where the bars were in the pattern of Vanilla vines with leaves in them. I just literally do not have the time to get back into it because I'm either writing or analyzing on 5 other papers at once and I've got two teams of analysts on other projects that I have to provide leadership for. It's just not something I can justify spending my free time on.

It's important to me that my hobbies don't become burdensome so I'm more than happy to just let it sit for a time where I have a couple free cycles to write it up and publish. Well probably just get it out as a note in a local ag journal. We took the data with the intention of building a growing degree day model for Vanilla.

Obtainium, for installing phyphox directly from GitHub. 😉

Of course!

I wanted to test whether a cheap piezo buzzer could be used as a crude ultrasound probe. It worked, so I tried to upgrade it into full-blown ultrasound imaging. The third iteration of that did produce an image, using a piezo buzzer cut in sections, a cheap FPGA, a MCU, custom PCB and mostly 3D printed pieces (acoustic lens, etc.). Aside from the expected low resolution, turned out that it wouldn't image anything beyond about 1 cm.

I did make a fourth iteration of the device, much smaller and theoretically much better. But life happened and I never finished the coding part.

Well, one thing I've noticed in most measures that involve mental things (mood, performance...) is that lots of things seem to be cyclical. For example, mood is often alternating (more so in my case), but productivity and burnout also tend to repeat predictably as long as the routine doesn't change.

Also, I'm maximally performant in tasks when most stable (good sleep, moderate mood, medication, no drugs...), but maximally productive when in a better mood.

Yeah. All games tend to be games of probability and statistics. Once you figure out how to do the math, then comes testing and experimentations.

I don't really run analysis on the numbers. I just use them when I'm shopping to see if a price is good or not.

I have noticed that at least here in Denmark, it never makes sense to buy butter if it's not on sale, and some sales are still priced badly.

Not sure if my "notes" apply unless we share similarities in geographic and market.

Backgroud:

• 1\3 of my country is in the arctic circle
• During summer sun hardly sets, during winter is hardly rises (up nort, not at all)
• Energy is produced mainly with Nuclear (main bulk), hydro, wind, solar (lately on the rise), coal (transfered to backup)
• it doesn't get hot, so cooling is rarely needed during summer,
• from may to september electricity is mostly dirt cheap. Nickle and dime stuff. It has even been negative. During winter it's quite expensive.
• most panel systems here use some amount directly but sell most of their production to the grid and then buy it back when there's not enough own production. No batteries involved. Energy broker takes a cut and so does the grid company.

1. Salesmen that have come to my door to sell panel sets use annual average energy price and even that has been exaggerated. It totally ignores that you will be producing most when energy price is lowest. Their sales pitch calculations are designed to be hard to follow and then they rub the wonderous estimates in your face. You can't base a reclamation on unrealized results.

2. People who say that they have saved a ton of money with panels are usually those who have had fixed value pricing and totally ignore the fact that they would have saved most of it during summer time having energy market based pricing, which they now need to have in order to sell their solar juice to the grid and later buy it back. They of course suffer during the winter, but ignore that because that "has nothing to do with panels" (because it's dark and panels are covered in snow.

3. If I'd been connected to the grid, counter-intuitively the panels facing West would the most usefull, not the ones facing South, because they were active when I used the most. In our market the more you can use your own production the better and this high North sun is still somewhat usefull late in the evening.

4. If off-grid, lithum based batteries seem to be the only viable option. They are however a fire hazard. Up here if you store them outside, you need to insulate the space and keep it above freezing from December to March and that takes energy, when it's most expensive. You can dismantle your battery setup and store them unconnected more safely indoors, but that is not for the layman.

This is becoming too long I'll add more later

I'm using 220V/6kW heating element. When used with 60VDC directly from the panels, it's about 0,45kW. No need for control system, since that is too weak to bring the water to boil. It's function is just to decrease the consumption of heating oil. Oil burner is set to start at eavening just before enyone needs hot water and panel output goes down. Oil burner heats the water in the tank to 80ºC. It's about 40-60ºC next morning when the sun rises, depending on the consumption.

For the average household I think tracking your energy and gas consumption is most useful as it allows you to spot accidental wasteful usage and both save money and the environment :)

I lifted seasonally, phasing from 3 lifts and one cardio day in the winter to 3 cardio and 1 lifting day in the summer. Each fall was a bit of a reset, jumping back in at lower weight and working my way back up.

For me 5/3/1 is where it’s at. I started with 5x5 and plateaued out pretty quick particularly on OHP but I stuck with it for 2 years. From there I tried a variant that was 3x5 and amrap sets, I forget what it was called. That was only marginally better, tried it for two years.

From there I found 5/3/1. I was able to improve my 1RM in each lift beyond what I ever hit and the best part is I still improved year over year, so it has a much more gradual plateau.

It's an ongoing experiment that devolved into taking apart the mqchine andreplacing the broiler due to a manufacturing defect. The experiment will resume this month.

well on computers I mostly do performance benchmarking and comparing one to each other or installing other OSes and seeing how well they perform. on my phone, I use phypox, apk editor (apk extraction and editing), debloating and heavy phone optimization.

Sure! I'm assuming you're talking about coffee. I aim to get the best coffee possible as cheap as possible, so these factors are by far not optimized but they're good enough for me:

• Coffee beans: Getting coffee that you like is maybe the most important factor. The first time I tried floral coffee, I thought my cup was not properly washed and still had detergent in it. Now I know I don't like floral coffee!
• Water: I hate myself for doing this because of the plastic waste I generate, but buying a massive container of water that has been purified by reverse osmosis consistently results in way better coffee than using my tap water.
• James Hoffman's V60 recipe v.s. Osmotic flow: James Hoffman's V60 recipe is a thousand times better. I think the main factor here is agitation; in this case, more is better. I have not experimented much beyond Hoffman's recipe because I like it. It's possible I could optimize a bit more with little cost.
• The cheapest grinder my partner used in their previous place v.s. the grinder we recently bought: I am so sorry if I sound like a snob, but getting a grinder that is capable of creating uniform grinds has been game changing. It's not even close.

The way that I think about these factors is that I'm affecting the extraction of the coffee. I'm trying to take the things that taste good in coffee and leave the things that don't taste so good. I'm playing a balancing game: not too extracted and bitter, not too underextracted and insipid.

Of course, there are other variables that I could try to optimize for, such as body, acidity, sweetness, etc.. Maybe I will someday pay attention to it, and if it's not expensive or hard to optimize for them, then I'll be happy to change my way of making coffee. In the meantime, I'm happy with what I've got.

In the off chance you meant Scrum and ACT-Advisor stuff:

• In Scrum, I'd say a lot of the experiments end up affecting factors that have, in the literature, already been identified as important: happy workers are more productive, stable interfaces between teams leads to faster development and higher quality work, cross-functional teams are better than having handoffs, etc..
• As to the ACT-Advisor stuff, this may seem obvious, but doing Acceptance and Commitment Therapy improves my scores. I like to see that it's not only therapy sessions that improve the scores, but also weeks of intensively doing ACT exercises on my own.