An article Election Exclusive: British Advisors to Kamala Harris Hope to "Kill Musk's Twitter" by 

Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi has the following redacted image:

Gee, gosh and golly, it's an incorrectly redacted document! Let's have some fin. I mean, fun. I mean... you know what I mean!

Let's see if we can unmask the E-mails of the people involved.

Take a close look at the selected section from the image above. Look under the redaction block in the second (lowest) line. Notice the descenders?

The character immediately to the left of "child" is the @-sign, and the E-mail name ends with a descender. The person (unredacted) is listed as "Danielle Lilly".

Step 1, lets overlay the @-sign and see how much space is left. We need an @-sign in the same font, but there are several available in the image. Select->Copy->Paste Transparent

While placing the @-sign, notice that the descender of the character exactly matches the visible descender on the redacted block.

So far so good!

Notice the (unredacted) name is "Danielle Lilly", and the redacted E-mail has a descender ? Let's do the same operation with the text of the name in the document.  Select->Copy->Paste Transparent

Now E-mails are always listed lower case, so we can't paste the full "Lilly" name here, we'll have to duplicate one of the lowercase "l" letters instead. Be sure to keep the same spacing.

And finally, note that a lot of systems use first initial+last name. Let's add a lowercase "D"  (for Danielle) and see where that gets us.

The red line shows the beginning of the left margin, and note that this exactly lines up with the left margin of the "Email" header.

I think Danielle Lilly's E-mail address is "dlilly@childfund.org".

Let's try another. Looking a little further in the document:

Notice the redacted section doesn't quite cover the ascenders in the document. Notice also that the ascenders in the name are quite similar. Hmmm....

And there's just enough room for "jmillican" in the redacted box.

Also, note that the "j" has an ascender that goes up above the redaction box. Is that a problem?

Nope. It's there, faintly, in the original image:

Many of the redacted E-mails in the image can be deduced by looking at the ascenders and descenders of the incompletely redacted names.

I won't post the full redacted image, only note that many of the E-mails listed on the original image can be deduced from the incomplete redactions.

Elliot's recent article and the comments about inspiration had a lot of um... information and I thought I'd post some of the more concrete scientific findings.

If you're interested in being creative, if you're stuck on a problem and are looking for inspiration, the following background information and specific advice might help.

Your brain has a filter

Our lives are awash in sensory input, but only the valuable parts are presented to our conscious mind. If something is not relevant to one of our goals, the brain filters it out and considers it irrelevant.

Most people don't realize how powerful this filter is. If you haven't already done so, check out the monkey business illusion. Pause reading this post, check out the video, and continue below:

The illusion works because your brain is given a goal. While you are focused on the goal, your brain filters everything that doesn't apply to that goal.

Your brain is a goal seeking mechanism

Your brain is essentially a goal seeking mechanism. We're born with a few innate goals, but we also get to set new goals over the course of our life.

You set your goals by explicitly identifying them. The best way to do this (people have found) is to write them out longhand. Doing this activates several sensory pathways in the brain at the same time: while writing you are simultaneously controlling your hand to make the letters, reading the letters, sounding them out in your mind, and thinking about the concepts.

Inspiration advice #1: Set a clear goal

The biggest reason people don't get inspiration is that they don't set clear goals. If you want to start a new project using Neopixels on a costume for an upcoming convention - that's fairly explicit and your goal setting mechanism can latch onto it pretty easily. There are clear design pathways and choices to make, a time limit, and physical and probably budget limitations. The brain works well with specific goals.

On the other hand, if you're just casting about for something new to do, you'll have tremendous difficulty. Your brain doesn't know what to do and you'll wander around in a fog. You might even try a few things, but you'll find it very difficult to follow through with the process: without a clear goal at the start, your brain will eventually give up saying effectively "why bother"?

So if you want inspiration, the first thing you want to do is to set a goal that has value to you.

Inspiration advice #2: Enter the open mode

Having set a goal, for actual inspiration, you need to turn your brain's filter completely off. You need to get into the open mode.

The best introduction to the open mode I've found is this video by John Cleese. It's fairly long (40 minutes) and you can watch it at your leisure, but to summarize: you get into the open mode by avoiding external stimulation for longer than 30 minutes.

The best way to do this that I've found is to go for a walk where there are no people. Find a nice path in the woods, or a back residential street with no pedestrians and no traffic, or the track around the football field when no one else is there.

For this to work you need to have no distractions. Turn off your phone, don't listen to podcasts or music, and don't go where you're constantly passing people or being interrupted by traffic. Just a nice, leisurely walk for about an hour.

Your brain is constantly being primed by interruptions in your environment, and each priming sets off a little subroutine that makes your brain focus on the primed subject for a short while. You need time for these subjects to die down so that your brain isn't primed. This becomes the open mode that John Cleese talks about.

Radio Shack

The original article talks about Radio Shack providing inspiration for hackers, but I don't think this is quite the whole story.

I think what really happened is that people set some goals and had project requirements, then went to Radio Shack, and found components that fit the requirements.

(A response to Elliot's article about creativity.)

How to be creative

There is no single recipe for creativity, but they all seem to follow roughly the same technique.

The best intro to creativity I’ve found is this video by John Cleese. Being John Cleese it’s a fun video, but what he talks about is completely accurate and based on how our brain works and is backed by research:

For an in-depth look at creativity, check out the book “deep work” by Cal Newport. Among other points, he talks about how artistic and highly productive people have managed to set themselves up for productive output throughout history. For another viewpoint look up Brian Tracy’s lectures on “the superconscious mind”. Many other sources say pretty-much the same thing.

To summarize, at any one time your brain runs lots of competing little subroutines that are primed by what you encounter in the environment (see “priming” on Wikipedia) used to predict the immediate future, called “nexting”.

When you set yourself in an environment with no distractions, these subroutines run their course and eventually die down, leaving your mind clear to think deeply about something with no distractions. During this time, if you have set up a problem for your brain to think about, it will do exactly that… and eventually give insight into the problem.

The effect is real, and not something people usually experience or even know about. The experience is also highly pleasurable.

It takes about 1/2 hour of uninterrupted time to *begin* this state if you are practiced at it. The first time might take a person 60 minutes and the first time they might not even be able to do it at all. It takes a few sessions to get the feel of it and know what to expect and where to put your mind.

Anything that distracts you from the state will stop it completely, and it will take another 1/2 hour to get back into the mode. A phone call will do it, someone stopping by your office will do it, and checking twitter on your phone will do it. Any distraction will activate more subroutines in your head, and it takes time for these to die down again.

There’s a brain neurochemistry explanation for this which I won’t go into (it’s in Cal Newport’s book, IIRC).

Lots of famously productive people practice this technique, it’s the root of their creativity.

Difference from flow

Flow is a slightly different state. The flow state is where you are hyper focused and lose track of the sense of time, but it’s not specifically tied to creativity. If you are an expert in something you can get into flow and be highly productive by using your existing skills, but not necessarily creative.

Creativity is described as being in the “open” or “closed” state, online it’s called “systemic mode” and “heuristic mode” (cf. wikipedia).

A good distinction between flow and creativity is the target: if you have a task to complete (writing, coding, sewing, circuit design) you can get into flow and complete the task quickly and efficiently. At any point you always know what the next task is.

Being creative is the opposite: it’s where you *don’t* know what the next step is, you don’t have a ready-made solution, and you have to mull over possibilities.

If you can quiet your mind, and think through the issues, your brain will eventually pop up a creative solution seemingly at random.

It’s weird – you’re thinking through a problem with no obvious solution, and suddenly the answer pops into your head with no obvious prior reasoning.

That’s the open mode. It’s closely related to flow.

(Flow also has a neurochemistry explanation.)

Jenny's recent article about purchasing a green vehicle prompted this comment and my reply:

Some people can barely live within their means despite working two grueling jobs

a day, and saving for an EV is not a priority over putting food on the table or paying

off medical or educational debt.

Do you have any advice about bootstraps?

Yes.

How many books have you read about success? How many about whichever field your jobs are in? Do you have a goal of switching to a single job? Have you written down exactly what your ideal job would be?

How often do you go looking for a new job? Do you scan the papers every day, check out Craigslist, and ask around? Do you study up and learn how to interview, how to make a resume, how to do well in your job? Are you willing to move to get a better job? Have you compared the expenses of moving with the extra money?

The US is having a shortage of workers right now. I’ve read this in the news, and I pass a *ton* of “help wanted” signs in my area. I have no reason to believe it’s not true today.

Lots of people have been in your situation, and you can find out what those people have done and what works and what doesn’t. Much of this information is available for free on the internet and in libraries.

Your first step will be to do everything you can to get more spare time. That probably means cutting down to a single job, and one that will pay more than both of your existing jobs.

Once you have spare time you can use it to bootstrap a better life.

There are 3 psychological aspects that determine success in life: intelligence, conscientiousness(1), and luck. Each is responsible for about 30% of the variation in life success.

Conscientiousness is the ability to work hard, to do a good job, and to make sure all the bases are covered. You can pump up your conscientiousness by building good work ethic habits. In other words, don’t approach work as something to be avoided, approach it as something that you must excel at.

Static intelligence is how much you know, and fluid intelligence is how easily you learn something. Fluid intelligence can’t be changed, but there’s an out: if you keep learning as an adult, you can amass more knowledge than a smarter person who stops learning, and most people simply stop learning as adults.

Most people don’t read even a single book a year – if you can read 10 books a year you will be far ahead of the average person. Choose books that will help your life success. Audio books count, are easier than reading, and you can listen to them while doing other things (such as driving, or doing manual labor).

Finally: you can’t do much about luck, but you can give luck a better chance to happen. Move to a city, or a different area of the city, or hang out in a different area of the city. Go to meetups and group meetings for your areas of interest. Generally put yourself in whichever environment you think will give you the best chances of achieving your goals.

There are many examples of people who sat down, wrote out their situation, and attacked the problem logically. Those people are now successful.

Go thou and do likewise.

(1) Conscientiousness is personality trait that can be measured numerically, similar to IQ. It's one of the "Big 5 personality" traits, and you can find tests to measure it online.

The note (below the fold) was posted response to Eliot's recent "Goals and Goalposts" article.

It occurs to me that learning about project motivation from makers is sort of like apprentice learning, as opposed to formal school learning.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with Eliot's post, and you can learn a lot from watching an "old hand" do things, but it's sort of like the difference between being an apprentice in a machine shop and learning by watching the experts (and asking questions), versus going to school and taking formal courses.

Old pros explaining something they discovered after years of experimentation is fine, but going to school can give you the background you need to understand *why* certain ways work best, and can give you an understanding of subtle differences that you might not notice just by watching someone.

Eliot's post misses one of these subtleties; namely, that there are types of motivation, and the differences are crucial. Focusing on one type will diminish your love of projects, while focusing on the other type will enhance it. Without explaining this distinction, it's entirely possible that future articles will serve to reduce peoples' motivation to make projects. Without this distinction, it's even possible that Eliot's current article will do this.

I'm not an expert in these things either, started studying this less than a year ago, and my reason for doing it is unrelated to making things. I'm not in a position to critique Eliot's post, but it bothers me that a future post might actually be harmful.

It's too bad we don't have an actual expert we could ask about such things.

Suggestion: Could HAD find a researcher in these things and do an AMA article about it?

Extrinsic motivations are goals, things you get in exchange for being done such as money or likes.

Intrinsic motivations are what you get while doing something, and fall into 4 categories: learning something new, practicing something you’re rusty at, creative control, and value to yourself, family, or community.

Creative tasks respond to intrinsic motivations but if you concentrate on the extrinsic goals, the intrinsic motivations will fade. This is called the “overjustification effect” and it’s well established in the literature.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overjustification_effect

Setting a completion target is fine so long as it’s not an extrinsic goal. Don’t do projects to get subscribers on your YouTube channel, do projects because you like to do projects. Set goals so that the project is inherently valuable to you (or your family, or the community) instead of valuable for the money it brings in.

Moving the intrinsic goalposts is fine because your enjoyment comes from the journey, not the destination. The enjoyment from extrinsic goals quickly fades, and you’re always looking for the next one. Happiness from extrinsic goals is always over the cognitive horizon.

It’s not known whether the overjustification effect can be reversed, but I have an experimental technique that might work. I'm in the process of coding it up as a project that people can download and try.

Available in about a month.

https://hackaday.io/project/180726-motivation

A discussion at the bottom of Donald Papp's article We All Need A Win Sometimes talks about getting through the boring parts of a project. My response is based on what I've found out about motivation.

sjm4306 says: I used to find the process of designing and making in and of itself rewarding but now that I’ve merged my hobby with making content for my youtube channel I’ve grown to hate all the other bits of the documentation process that get in the way of the fun bits, making them no longer fun or at best much less fun. Like filming is a huge pita and often works against what I’m trying to accomplish, then there’s monotonous editing of the footage. But it’s sort of a catch 22, I cant continue making all this stuff without monetizing it through youtube so that my hobby can self sustain. So either I have my cake but cant eat it or I have no cake to eat. And I get that I actually am blessed to be in the position that I am in, not everyone’s hobby can be financially viable, but at the same time I’m starting to burn out. Idk, maybe I need to put the brakes on yt till I can figure out the balance I need to both have some fun and be able to support my hobby.

Extrinsic rewards are best at motivating rote and mechanical tasks, things you can do all day without thinking about them. For example, the auto mechanic in the dealership does mostly rote, mechanical stuff and his pay is the motivation for doing that.

Creative projects are best addressed with intrinsic rewards, which are autonomy, excellence, growth, and usefulness. If that same mechanic goes home and works on a project racecar, he gets autonomy (he chooses what to do and how), mastery (he does a good job), growth (he learns about racecars), and usefulness (he wants to start racing).

You’re linking video editing to the extrinsic reward: money. At the same time, it's not routine for you so it’s not a bang-it-out task – you’re always considering what to do, how to do it, whether to try different things, how to use the tools, and so on.

To fix this you need to change the editing into a rote mechanical step as much as you can. Once you do that, the external rewards will provide better motivation.

Start a new project to learn video editing, top to bottom. Choose a concrete goal as motivation: a parody commercial, a 10 minute self-directed movie, your kids as superheroes, or whatever you want. Learn all the video editing you can with an eye towards how it would apply to the project goal, then when you’re ready make that video. Read books, watch youtube videos, consider different styles and techniques, use different features of the software, play with the concepts – cover as much of the field as you can.

Next, create a boilerplate description for project videos that makes the editing as routine as possible. For example, imagine the videos as all having a start, middle, and end. The start has *these* characteristics. The lead-in goes *there*. The end section always has *those* features, and so on. Make it so that creating a video is as simple as following the boilerplate instructions.

Once you’re done with that, video editing will be more automatic. You’ll need to make fewer decisions, you’ll know the software better, you won't be as uncertain, you can do it "on autopilot”.

Video editing will then be a rote, mundane task. It will respond to extrinsic motivations, and you should have an easier time of it.

Carl Rogers introduced the concept of "Unconditional Positive Regard" when working with other people. It's part of Humanistic psychology, a doctrine that "emphasizes the individual's inherent drive toward self-actualization, the process of realizing and expressing one's own capabilities and creativity."

Humanistic psychology developed as a response to the more pessimistic views of psychology: instead of identifying flaws to be fixed, humanism focuses on strengths to be encouraged. It's the umbrella term containing self-help, motivation, and life hacking.

Which brings me to Elliot's post saying that success is 99% collaboration. The article got my hackles up a little, and deserves a response.

I understand that no one creates in a vacuum, that we all rely on the fruits of others.

What I *don’t* understand is why anyone would take the trouble to bring that up. Just because it's true isn't an actual cause for mentioning it - lots of things are true, but this doesn't compel us to point them out.

Many people suffer lack of motivation for finishing projects, and one reason could be that others keep undercutting the resultant satisfaction. Your brain is a correlation engine, and “Nice project, but others are responsible for the bulk of the work” sounds like a recipe for associating completion with cutting critique. Keep getting accomplishments dismissed and your brain will learn to correlate accomplishment with disappointment.

Overbearing pride, arrogance, superiority, or false accomplishments are bad obviously, but this does not mean that all pride is bad. Some quick googling on religious opinion bears this out. A little bit of pride in accomplishment is healthy. It probably triggers the dopamine hit that encourages you to have more accomplishments.

A different way to look at this is to note that the societal structures used are *also* available to you – except that they completed a project and you did not. Saying they only stand on the shoulders of giants is indistinguishable from envy. Newton said it about himself, which is quite different from someone saying it about others.

Suppose your teenage son shows you a completed project. Do you say "that's nice, but you couldn't have done it if I hadn't given you money for materials"?

We should also consider the social media context. Admonishing a child might bring a tiny bit of disappointment to one person, but social media greatly amplifies that effect. With 4 million visitors each day, how much total disappointment resulted from Elliot's article?

I can think of no positive reason for taking Elliot's position. It's potentially an interesting idea to point out once in a philosophical discussion, but on a website that encourages creativity saying literally "success is 99% collaboration" to a wide audience seems counterproductive.

Response to a blog post about printing Yoda heads. Is *just* reproducing someone else's work being a maker? Is copying the same thing as doing original work?

I can add some suspiciously depressing observations: almost no one is creative.

There’s a psychological test for this, called the “Creative Achievement Questionnaire”, you can find it online and take it yourself. Don’t do that.

Seriously, don’t take that test – it’ll only make you depressed and want to give up being creative.

The median score for this test in the general population is… wait for it… zero. About 70% of the adult population scores zero on this measure of creativity.

Of further note, creativity follows a Pareto distribution; meaning that the amount of creativity people have is an inverse exponential curve: most of the creativity is generated by a small number of people, and the vast majority of people who even score on the creativity scale score below 5.

About 70% of the population score zero, of the remaining 30% we see that 70% of *those* people score a 1, and of the 30% of the 30%, about 70% of *those* people score 2, and so on.

About half a million books are published each year, the square root of that number have half the sales (Pareto distribution…), the square root of the square root take up 3/4 of all sales, and so on. Stephen king sells a lot of books, while the vast *vast* majority of writers have no sales at all.

It’s depressing, really.

As a further observation, I note that the vast majority of articles and videos of people doing “science” is actually people reproducing what other scientists have done. Ben Krasnow is mostly a reproduction shop (with a little bit of science), Tech Ingredients is somewhat sciency, but just about everyone else is just reproducing something “neat and interesting”, and claiming that it’s “Science!” for audience appeal.

Also depressing.

There are mitigating factors and some nuance in the Creative Achievement thing, but article commentary is the wrong place for discussion. Contact me on .IO if you want more details.

Kristina Panos wrote a blog post "What If I Never Make Version Two?

Looking at the issue from a psychological perspective.

The psychology of happy

Happiness has been studied over the last few decades, and those findings might be relevant.

We can start with the definitions: "Happy" is generally taken to mean "joyful", but it can also mean "satisfied"; as in: "I am happy with the results". Looking through the literature, it's not clear to me whether the findings on happiness are specific to "joyful", which would be Serotonin, or "satisfied", which would be Dopamine. My take is that the research doesn't make the distinction, so the results might be applicable to both.

The key observation about happiness is that we never achieve it because we keep moving the goalposts. No matter the difficulty of achieving a happiness goal, achieving it doesn't make you happy - it only means that you focus on the next goal.

Getting good grades doesn't make you happy because now you have to get better grades. Getting into an Ivy League college doesn't make you happy, you focus on the stress and workload and competition with the other students. Getting a good job doesn't make you happy because now you have to get a better job. It's always more pay, a bigger house, less stress, and a generally better life.

Happiness is always on the other side of the cognitive horizon(*).

We could apply this to projects as well. If we take the "satisfied" definition of happiness, then we're never "happy" with our projects because they can always be improved. This leads to philosophical discussions of when (or if) to continue to version 2, which lead to Kristina's post.

One useful result from studies of happiness is that it helps if start noticing things that already exist that you should be happy about. "Gratitude" exercises (google that) can increase your personal happiness: write down 3 things to be grateful for, do this each day for 30 days, and your brain learns correlation and changes your world view to notice the things that make you happy.

(As an aside, being happy makes you more effective in just about every positive way: you learn faster, make fewer mistakes, have more energy, get along better with people and so on.)

Can a similar campaign make people more satisfied with their projects?

Let's propose a similar process.

Each day for 30 days, write down 3 project things/aspects that you are satisfied with: things that you did well, that that are particularly pleasing, elegant, or robust. Things that you probably wouldn't change in version 2. These can be specific physical aspects ("that new stitching pattern was especially robust"), or abstract ("using shell commands instead of function calls makes a lot of sense").

Also, each day for 30 days write down 3 project things that you are *not* satisfied with... but also write down what the better solution is: rebuild with better materials, rework the PCB layout, find a different chip to use. Whatever it is, write down just a sentence or two describing the proposed solution.

Three aspects, drawn from everything you have ever done. Reduce that number accordingly if you are a freshly-minted adult without many projects to draw from.

At the end of 30 days take a look at any project and note both the satisfactory things and the unsatisfactory ones and their proposed solution.

Is it worth going to version 2? Do you want to spend the time, will the results be useful enough, will it teach you something, will it make more money? Will the value of version 2.0 be worth the extra effort/time/money needed to product it?

If the answer is no, then make a conscious decision to be *satisfied* with the project. Write down that you completed the project, it satisfies its goals, and improvements would have negligible value.

Be happy about completing a project, as a goal.

(Also, it helps to give yourself a treat when you complete a project: do something that you know will make you happy, and be...

Hack your Dopamine levels to encourage finishing projects

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter associated with completing tasks (among other functions). When we complete an object of desire, it triggers a dopamine release that makes us feel good.

(It's really more complicated than this, but a good definition for an overview.)

The brain is also a correlation engine, so if you associate completing tasks with “nothing”, your brain can learn that completing tasks leads to "nothing", so... why do it?

Additionally, there is a trade-off between the good feeling of accomplishment and any pain you feel on the way, and the brain can correlate that as well.

Thus: be sure working at your bench is comfortable. If every time you work on a project you get back aches (or similar), your brain will notice even if you don’t. If you accidentally burn your fingers or hit your thumb with a hammer, take a break and do something else for a few minutes: don’t let your brain associate the pain with the project. (Eating a slice of cake helps.)

Thus: be sure your goals are clear, finite, and measurable. Set a clear end-point for a project, something where you can say “now it’s done”, put it on a shelf, and move on. Dopamine doesn’t respond to fuzzy, indistinct goals.

Thus: Put an emotional payoff into your project. Decide *why* you want to do a project, and if possible make the outcome more emotionally (not intellectually) valuable to you. Promise yourself that the money from sales will go towards that camping trip you’ve always wanted to take, and keep fantasizing about that trip and how good it will be. Fantasize about all the attention you will get at the next con while wearing the costume. That sort of thing.

Many times projects falter because they become too large. Dopamine is “future expected reward”, and if that future never comes your brain can learn to avoid projects.

This: Keep the project finite and focused. Don’t keep adding features or bonuses ad infinitum – focus on a specific end goal or end date. If you really want to add features, write them down for a hypothetical “version 2” and focus on completing version 1 for now.

This: For large projects, and projects that seem short but become large, break the project into clear, specific sub-goals. Version the different levels of complexity, or break the project into overall steps: finish the design, build one prototype, test the prototype, then take a specific amount of time thinking about the project. Are there enough bugs to update the design? Should you move to production? Should you send test-cases to friends to evaluate?

This: For each sub-task completed, celebrate! Promise yourself that if you complete such-and-such goal, you’ll do something you consider fun and rewarding. Tailor the celebration to the level of the goal (ie – smaller celebrations for sub-goals, big celebrations for major milestones). Go to a dinner theatre with your spouse, go to the arcade and play skee-ball for a day, spend the day nudist hiking – anything that you will find enjoyable and charged with emotion.

(The key here is emotion: find something that you consider fun, and meter it out as a reward for doing something useful.)

Check: Are you putting things off because you’re tired? Check your vitamin D level. Improve your sleep quality. Get some blood work and see if you’re deficient in something (maybe Iron) or have a low-grade infection. See if you can eliminate some stress in your life – stressful friends, for instance. Switch your project time to mornings instead of evenings.

There’s a lot of science behind goal setting that’s backed up by psychological studies. It’s not hard to learn, and it definitely can make a difference in attaining your goals.

Managing lack of energy after work

Many creative types (writers especially) have faced the same problem. Their solution is to get up two hours early and do all their creative stuff before everyone else...

I got bored and wrote a script to find 2020 HAD prize statistics.

To make the initial cut, a project needs at least 4 logs:

• 110 projects have 0 logs
• 25 projects have 1 log
• 19 projectshave 2 logs
• 10 projects have 3 logs

Of 263 projects entered to the prize, all but 99 are disqualified for having too few logs. Since up to 100 projects will advance to the next round, it looks like all qualifying projects this year will advance to the next round.

The project with the most log entries is "Sky Anchor WiFi Drone with AP brings the GIG" with 56 logs.

Of the initial 263 projects, 73 projects are tagged "wildcard".

Of the 99 projects with four or more logs, 34 are tagged "wildcard"

Statistically speaking, if you entered the 2020 HAD prize and have satisfied the log requirements, your chances of winning the $50,000 overall grand prize are 1-in-99 or about 1%.

The expected payoff for this gamble is 1% of $50,000 or $500.

If you entered under the wildcard tag your chances of winning are 1-in-34, or about 3%.

The expected payoff for this gamble is 3% of $5,000 or $150.

Pretty good motivation for entering the prize, eh?

Update:

The project "Modular add-ons for the CalEarth Dome Homes" has 5 logs but no images, so is presumably disqualified for having no images.

(Duplicate of a HAD blog post, placed here for posterity.)

Here's some things to try that might help depression.

Firstly: there's a direct correlation between poor sleep and depression, but no one knows whether depression causes sleep disturbance or vice-versa. Listen to Joe Rogan's interview with Matthew Whittaker (link below), then adjust your sleep so that you are getting 7 to 9 hours - with no compromise - and that you stop looking at monitors and displays - including phone and TV - at least 2 hours before bedtime.

Try this for 1 week and see if it helps. If it doesn't, discard it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig

Secondly: Some depression is caused by lack of vitamin D. For a quick test, go to a tanning salon and get a single session: take the attendant's advice on which booth and how long to go to not get sunburned. If there's an effect you'll know it about 30 minutes after the session and it will indicate you're low on vitamin D.

Alternate secondly: Reasonable amounts of vitamin D are not toxic, you can get it at any pharmacy or supermarket, it's not expensive, try taking one a day for a week. If this doesn't help, discard it. Taking 4000 IU or less per day is considered safe to take, but if you take a multivitamin be sure to include that amount in your calculations.

Thirdly: Go to SelfAuthoring.com, purchase the suite, and do it. It's one of the few psychological help system backed by solid theory with repeatable results. It works, it's known to work, and has solid evidence of working. It's not that expensive - about $40 for the full suite.

Fourthly: Depression has different forms depending on which neurotransmitter in the brain is affected. The "low energy" depression (dopamine) is different from the "dark thoughts" depression (serotonin), which is different from the "in pain" depression (endorphins), which is different from the "nervous/stress" depression (catecholamines). Grab a copy of "The Mood Cure" by Julia Ross and take the self-test in that book to discover which type of depression you have.

If your dopamine is low the supplement SAM-E will elevate it. If your serotonin is low, 5-HTP will elevate it. Grab a copy of "the supplement handbook" by Mark Moyad and look up the medical facts backed by studies surrounding all the various supplements on the market and see what works.

Again, try something for a week and if it doesn't work then stop. It's performing a $30 experiment: if it works, great! If it doesn't work, you're only out $30.

Fifthly: Interior critical narrative is a big problem that keeps many people feeling guilty and depressed. There's ways to get over this using some of the professional self-help systems, but I don't remember enough specifics to make a recommendation. Basically there's two approaches used by Brian Tracy for logical thinkers, and Tony Robbins for emotional thinkers. You can find these online and if one seems natural to you then go with it, otherwise try the other style. Then find their individual program on interior narrative and try listening to it to see if it helps.

You can find some of the older versions of these systems (Brian Tracy/Tony Robbins) online for free.

Finally: We're men of science here on this board (women, too). If something is a problem do some research, try some experiments, and see what works.