Off the top of my head, this is what I think I would do: set it up for 5 min/day and 0 safe days. Then, set the api up to check once weekly for this week’s total and then have it make up for the difference over the following week if you were under 6. It’s “chunky” (on a weekly level as well), but it works over the long run. {So, set the road rate for next week to 6-[this week’s total]+35 minutes. Or, you could spread that out only over your coming weekend, if you wanted to use roadall instead, though that’s slightly harder. That would look like (6-[this week’s total]+10 minutes)/2 set on the coming Saturday and Sunday. I’d probably do the first, I think. In fact… I think I’m going to do that for both my meditation and yoga goals. Thanks for the idea. I’ll pass on the code if you’d like it (though, I probably won’t build it for 2-3 weeks due to other commitments).
Thanks for the suggestion. If I understand your solution correctly, it is artificially imposing weekly boundaries on the calculations, rather than some kind of moving average? But even if you could apply your tuning daily to avoid this problem, it feels like a pretty ugly (albeit clever) hack working around the underlying lack of functionality :-/
One of my main goals of using beeminder is to bring more focus in my daily life to the things I care about. Even though personally I’m a coder, beeminder is not really helping me if it’s adding extra coding requirements to my life workload (or even just requiring me to make use of someone else’s API-consuming code). Also I presume that beeminder is targeted at non-coders too? So ideally beeminder would have a way of achieving this natively, in a user-friendly fashion.
P.S. I have no idea what ‘roadall’ means 
I don’t think there is any way to do this with a single goal currently.
But setting up two goals sounds to me like it would work really well. One
goal where you just say whether you practiced at least 5 minutes or not,
with the rate set to 7/wk. The other goal set to the amount of time you
want to practice per week. You say this is “really ugly” but it doesn’t
sound that ugly to me, only slightly inconvenient. In some sense, you
really do have two goals: you want to spend a certain amount of time, to
make progress, and you also want to be consistent, to build a habit. To
mitigate the inconvenience you could very easily automate the data entry
using a tool like https://github.com/lydgate/bmndr — it would just be a
couple-lines long script that calls bmndr. You enter a time and the script
submits the time to one goal and a data point of ‘1’ to the other goal.
Getting back on the topic of triangular aggregation, is there a way to make the aggregation “interval” longer than a day? I am thinking about using this for snacks at work, but I’d be interested in aggregating over a week rather than a day. You know, so the 2nd snack in the last 7 days counts as 2 rather than 1 regardless of whether I already had a snack today.
I’m guessing no since it is called “aggday” and not “aggwhateveryoulike” but why not ask?
Thanks for the feedback. Only catch is that I regularly alternate between entering data via the web UI and the Android app. So any clean solution to this would be server-side. If I went with your twin goal suggestion, I wonder if it would be possible to use Zapier to get Beeminder to automatically feed data from one goal to the other?
Beminder really should make it super easy to automatically handle meta goals like this & it’s an easy way for them to double the amount pledged, so I’m not sure why it’s not a higher priority.
I’m assuming this is what they mean by having Beeminder on the Beeminder integration list. But you gotta admit it can’t really be the highest priority.
Welcome to Beeminder, we integrate with ourselves. Coming soon Fitbit!
Ha, yeah, I love how you think but Beeminder’s not quite that flexible yet! I also want to hear how triangular beeminding works for people longer-term before getting carried away with fancy aggregation functions.
I’m also excited about this.
And, breaking news: @bee just added an “Added Datapoint” IFTTT trigger (ask us for a link to the beta) so we may have just nailed this…
I am also interested in this. Just posting to a) let the devs know that there is interest and b) be notified if this does become a possibility! [“This” being an aggregation interval of a week.]
Just my thoughts about this. I also have a beeminder goal for this. But I count beers (half a liter) as one unit. I have a weekly rate of one. This is what the german association for healthy nutrition is suggesting. I don’t know how much a drink is. If it is less volume of alcohol than in an average beer, then it would be ok. I don’t want to discuss the amount of alcohol uptake here, this is up to personal thoughts and preferences. But I think that penalizing the second or third drink at the same night has one drawback: You can drink each night a drink. I fear that this is not a good idea! You will end up drinking every day instead of once a week several drinks. I think it is better to have – say – two drinks and then a break of one day. The body needs time to regenerate……
If you want to penalize this, you could make the formula:
lambda x: triangle(x) + N if triangle(x) else 0
Where N is some suitable penalty for drinking at all, perhaps N=1 or N=2. If N is too large then you’ll end up always drinking a 2nd drink whenever you drink 1. To some extent this is unavoidable unless you explicitly Beemind # of days with 0 drinks. But I tried that and it is its own form of annoyance.
TBH taking a day off a week isn’t at all difficult for me so it’s not something I need beeminder to enforce.
I don’t know who the German association for healthy nutrition are, but honestly if they’re suggesting that more than half a litre of beer a week is too much then I don’t consider them a credible source - unless German beer is ridiculously strong that’s literally an order of magnitude smaller than the NHS or various other professional medical bodies recommend.
Awesome! I am going to use this for meditation, because the second
sitting in a day is way harder than the first, but I would like to get
in the habit of sitting multiple times per day. This seems to align the
incentives with the difficulty of each sitting.
Maybe I need to clarify it a little bit. Alcohol is substance your body does not need. It is a stimulant. You can consume it or not. If not your body will not suffer in any way. Moreover it a poison. A single dose of 1400 mg per kg body weight will kill you. The german association for nutrition says only that 20 g per day are “acceptable” for an adult male. They mean that this will cause no pathological changes to your body. Of course you can drink more. And you will not die instantanious… But this does not mean that it is good to drink this every day. So at the end it’s your decission how much you drink.
Citation needed. I’ve tried searching for oral ethanol LD50s and all I’ve been able to find are the figures 7000 mg/kg for humans and 7060 mg/kg for rats. Both are a far cry from your 1400 mg/kg.
That ingesting an amount of it can kill is not insightful, since that is true of any substance including water. Examining the specific figure you gave, if I weigh 85kg then I would die with a dose of 150ml (chose 25C arbitrarily)?
1400 mg/kg * 85kg * 0.78522 kg/L = 151.5 ml
If I drink 5 330ml 9% beers or 8 shots of 85 proof liquor (ignoring temperature variations) wouldn’t that be
330 ml * 9% * 5 = 148.5 ml
45ml * (85/2)% * 8 = 153 ml
the supposedly lethal dose you’re talking about? Sure, I would get to metabolize while drinking, etc., but your figure is still clearly hyperbole.
I continue to maintain that your german association for nutrition’s recommendations as to safe alcohol intake are so radically low in comparison to any of several respectable medical sources that unless you can cite actual clinical studies I basically can’t take this opinion seriously.
And as much as I hate to do the “gotcha” thing, if you really think alcohol is a stimulant then you probably don’t have a clear understanding of the physiology here. Alcohol is a depressant. This is literally the exact opposite of a stimulant.
ETA: I would also like to note that 20g/day is nearly an order of magnitude more than what you were originally suggesting. 20g/day is merely about 2/3rds of normal recommendations.
The data I got is from wikipedia. You are right for rats the LD 50 is 7000 mg/kg. The dose of 1400 mg/kg is a LD LO which means this is the lowest known dose to be letal. Of course it means to take the ethanol on one step in.
One beer (half a litre) has around 20 g of alcohol, sorry to be misleading here.
With the stimulant: Maybe I used the wrong word: I meant “Genussmittel” which means a suff like tobaco. I took one of the translations from leo,org. Sometimes it is difficult to choose the right one.
Maybe you can share cliinical studies with me.
When you wrote “will kill you” I took it to mean you had quite a bit of certainty here, in which case I don’t think an LD LO is a useful datapoint. An LD99 maybe. But in any case, tossing figures around without citing exactly what they’re referring to is generally not a good use of anybody’s time.
EDIT: I have edited this post at @dreev’s request to be less of a jerk.
I’m sure everyone’s just tryin’ to help out. The point was just to share a personal preference and then to explain why. That’s pretty much what we’re all doing based on the info we each have.
Getting back to the triangulating setting, has it been helping? Have you found it useful? I’m tempted to switch it on for one of my other bad habit goals, so that I won’t be punished too hard for inattention once or twice in the day, but that willfully ignoring the goal will cost more. …but I’ve been too chicken.
Yes and yes. The best feature of it is it forces me to do an honest “How much do I actually want this?” assessment for drinks past the first - even if I’ve got a comfortable buffer, being forced to go “Am I really going to derive three drinks of enjoyment from this drink?” very often will stop me after the second drink (and the same for the second drink, though on the nights when I want a second drink in the first place this doesn’t usually stop me).
I’ve had to patch it in a few ways from the version I’ve posted to avoid some perverse incentives that may be specific to the alcohol thing. Patches:
- I’ve dropped the weekly rate down to 12. 15 seemed a little too permissive (this ends up at a maximum of 9 drinks a week, or two nights with three drinks)
- I double-count some drinks. I noticed that counting in terms of drinks was causing me to make larger drinks than I otherwise would have, so I make a judgement call. If a drink is really large or quite-large and followed another quite-large drink I count it as two drinks. Unit counting would probably have been a better idea here, but it makes it harder to evaluate the “cost” of a drink.
- I haven’t field tested this one yet but on suggestion of @drtall if I’ve already derailed for today then any additional data points get counted against tomorrow. This prevents derail days being free days but still gives me a bit of leeway. (I had an evening where I derailed and then completely blew through my limit because this encouraged a “No rules! Party!” mentality).