= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
I find it impossible to wake up at a consistent time every day (+/- 8 hours)
By this, do you mean that the time you wake up varies over a full range of 16 hours around its median?
In response to
Modeling sleep patterns
I wouldn't exactly call it a median. It trends forward every day, eventually wraps around, but it doesn't spend much time at all around 2-8 AM, due to sunlight keeping me awake when I'd otherwise go to sleep in late morning or afternoon.
In response to
Modeling sleep patterns
I think you're taking the fundamentally wrong approach. Rather than trying to simply predict when you'll be sleepy in the near-term, you should try to actively get your sleeping patterns under control.
Besides, having a tool that could forecast my sleep patterns given different variables would allow me to understand the interactions of those variables and ultimately would allow me to take control of my sleep patterns.
In response to
Modeling sleep patterns
If it's really that bad, you should use a mild sedative to force yourself to fall asleep at a consistent time.
These don't work for me. The details are boring.
In response to
Modeling sleep patterns
I think you're taking the fundamentally wrong approach. Rather than trying to simply predict when you'll be sleepy in the near-term, you should try to actively get your sleeping patterns under control.
"I find it impossible to wake up at a consistent time every day (+/- 8 hours), despite years of trying"
In other words, I've tried everything else.
In response to
Lifelogging: the recording device
foucist has suggested that one quick route to a lifelogger is to modify the uCorder to have longer battery-life, since it is almost perfect in every other respect. The uCorder recharges through its USB port, so one could hook it up to a USB battery.
USB batteries are popular for things like iPods, so we benefit from economies of scale; it seems possible to boost recording time to upwards of 10 hours with a USB battery like this $42 one.
Unfortunately, foucist also found that the uCorder manual says it cannot record while charging, and presumably wouldn't automatically draw on the battery anyway. So this wouldn't work (without a lot of manual intervention, and the uCorder takes hours to recharge...)
But the basic idea is sound - we just need to find a nice recorder which will run off a battery pack.
What about the PocketPro II? It draws 240 mA, so a 1 Ah external battery gets you 4 extra hours.
In response to
Lifelogging: the recording device
I've been doing audio-only with a $40 dictator from Wal-mart that fits in my pocket. It averages 150-200 MB a day. I generate hashes of each file and timestamp them so they're more likely to be useful if I ever need them for proof of something.
The thing that prompted me to start doing this was frequent arguments with close ones that often got down to "you said this", "no I didn't" type of stuff. It's oddly very assuring to have this recording. (FTR, I used it for that purpose more or less once. Although I find it useful for recording therapy sessions too.)
In response to
Excluding the Supernatural
I remember, when first reading this article, that it was really convincing and compelling. I looked it up again because I wanted to be able to make the argument myself, and now I find that I don't understand how you can get from "if the staid conventional normal boring understanding of physics and the brain is correct" to "there's no way in principle that a human being can concretely envision, and derive testable experimental predictions about, an alternate universe in which things are irreducibly mental." That seems like too large a jump for me. Any help?
In response to
Debate tools: an experience report
I thought a lot about creating such a system and how it would look a number of years ago, but never did make any good progress on it. The point where I got stuck was to take a particular blog post with lots of debate in the comments and try to dissect it in different ways and see what ended up being the most useful. I found I didn't have the focus to do so.
Anyway, there's Truth Mapping, which I think sucks for quite a number of reasons.
I forget who brought this up--maybe zero_call? jhrandom?--but I think a good question is "How quickly does brain information decay (e.g. due to autolysis) after the heart stops and before preservative measures are taken?" If the answer is "very quickly" then cryonics in non-terminal-illness cases becomes much less effective.
I came across a few cites supporting the "quite a bit" answer in the "Cold War" article at Alcor (linked elsewhere on this thread).
It is interesting and more than a little ironic to note that fifteen years prior to the time that Persidsky wrote the words above, a large and growing body of evidence was already present in the scientific literature to discredit the "suicide-bag concept" of lysosomal rupture resulting in destruction of cells shortly after so-called death. I cite below papers debunking this notion:
Trump, B.F., P.J. Goldblatt, and R.E. Stowell, "Studies of necrosis in vitro of mouse hepatic parenchymal cells; ultrastructural and cytochemical alterations of cytosomes, cytosegresomes, multivesicular bodies, and microbodies and their relation to the lysosome concept," Lab. Invest., 14, 1946 (1965).
Ericsson, J.L.E., P. Biberfeld, and R. Seljelid, "Electron microscopic and cytochemical studies of acid phosphates and aryl sulfatase during autolysis," Acta Patho Microbio Scand, 70, 215 (1967).
Trump, B.F. and R.E. Bulger, "Studies of cellular injury in isolated flounder tubules. IV. Electron microscopic observations of changes during the phase of altered hemostasis in tubules treated with cyanide," Lab Invest, 18, 731 (1968).
Eight years before Persidsky pronounced the situation hopeless due to lysosome rupture after death, an excellent and exhaustive paper appeared, entitled "Lysosome and phagosome stability in lethal cell injury" (Hawkins, H.K., et al., Amer. Jour Path., 68, 255 (1972)). The authors subjected human liver cells in tissue culture to lethal insults such as cyanide poisoning and then evaluated them for lysosomal rupture. They state: "In conclusion, the findings do not indicate that the suicide bag mechanism of lysosomal rupture prior to cell death was operative in the two systems studied. On the contrary, the lysosomes appeared to be relatively stable organelles which burst only in the post-mortem phase of cellular necrosis." And when does this "post-mortem phase of cellular necrosis" occur? Again, to quote from the Hawkins paper: "As late as four hours after potassium cyanide and iodoacetic acid poisoning, where irreversible structural changes were uniformly seen, it was clear that the great majority of lysosomes continued to retain the ferritin marker within a morphologically intact membrane . . ." To translate: even four hours after poisoning with drugs that mimic complete ischemia, the cells had stable lysosomes.
There's more at the link.
= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
What information are you hoping to get out of this? "I just slept for 7 hours, I can expect to be awake for X hours with probability pX"? Or "my sleep patterns repeat this 125 hour cycle"?
If you have the data in a convenient format, I could take a look at it more easily than I could explain how to take a look at it.
More like, "here's the times I went to sleep and woke up in the previous month. What can I expect today?" Hopefully including the effects of caffeine, delayed sleep, early awakening, etc. My sleep may sort of follow a cycle, but it's not regular enough that knowing the cycle would be that useful.
Here's the raw data for 6 months or so last year: Data.
EDIT: I was unemployed during this period, and not using an alarm regularly, so I was sleeping exactly when I felt like it. If I was working it would look much different.