h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

There's a weblog about it and one of the bloggers, Gary Wolf, recently wrote an article in the NY Times magazine that has caused the subject to flash. Article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/magazine/02self-measurement-t.html?ref=magazine

Blog here:
http://www.quantifiedself.com/

This is like what you do when you're doing serious fitness training or dieting; you measure output or intake and record the measurements. And you are given to understand that the specific things you are measuring will tell the whole story of process and accomplishment.

Or you have an illness: you record those things you can measure (temp, bp) as well as the subjective stuff (pain on a scale of 1 to 10) and believe that this set of data will describe the arc of the pathology completely... or well enough.

As the article describes, there are now people out there recording ALL the minutiae of their daily lives and quantifying the (ongoing) results, and sometimes learning salient things or gaining insights into their own clockwork.

At first I thought this was a bit self-indulgent. Then a friend pointed out that I have a comparatively unusual ailment. I speak of micro-improvements with joy, and am downcast when something seems to regress, she said, but do you know why these events happen? Can you even remember when they happen, or what you might have done/not done/eaten/experienced to bring them about? Is it possible that you might discover something that would help not just yourself but other syringomyelia specimens?

Good point. And so I have launched a spreadsheet to record everything I can think of (not difficult for a shut-in!) in the course of the day, categorizing the data on different pages, to see whether there are patterns I've been missing, that I might be able to control. I'm giving it sixty days initially.

I call it the TMI Project. And it's not as interesting as one might think, obsessively recording times, amounts, events, attitudes, meals, basic stuff and meta stuff. We shall see.

The only thing I've ever kept track of daily is weight and the odd stab at a food diary. Both things made me crazy. We used to record blood pressure and blood sugars for F. Not taht it seemed to do us much good.

How many categories are you going to track? It sounds time consuming. But if you find something to improve your condition, it will be well worth the effort.

It's tedious, yup. I'm categorizing everything I can think of; fortunately, when you're life is rigorously circumscribed, there are not all that many categories. I should give the experiment six months, but I'm not sure I can be so self-absorbed for such a length of time.

That will be hard for you. It's against your nature. Think of it as research in the common good, not as self-indulgence. That is in your nature.

I can't ~believe~ I used "you're" instead of "your". *smacks head* Maybe I should log that.