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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.
Modeling sleep patterns
My sleep is unpredictable. Not in a technical sense, but a colloquial one. To be literal, I have no idea how to predict my sleep. I just as often sleep through the day as I do through the night. My sleep itself, as far as a sleep study can tell, is normal. I can vaguely say, 60% confidence, if I'm likely to fall asleep in a given 3-4 hour period, and occasionally I will be fairly sure, 80% confidence, 6-10 hours beforehand, of a 1-2 hour period. I can similarly predict the length of my sleep (which is relatively normal--generally distributed 7, 8, 9.5, 13 hours at .1, .4, .6, .9).
My sleep is seriously disturbed. Without understanding the process behind my sleep, without being able to predict it days beforehand and understand the variables behind it, I find it impossible to wake up at a consistent time every day (+/- 8 hours), despite years of trying, which makes it extremely hard to hold down a job, or do dozens of other normal things. There could be a profession that I could make my sleep work with, but I'm still searching for it.
So I ask you readers: Is there some sort of pattern detecting thing, whose name perhaps includes something like "markov" or "kolmogorov" or "bayesian", that could automatically take a time series data and predict the next values based on an unknown, complex model?
So, I could like enter the times I go to sleep and wake up, and when I have caffeine or I exercise, and maybe other things, and it would puzzle out how my sleep works and forecast my next few sleep cycles?
To have an accurate tool like that would transform my life.
"Hidden Markov models" comes to mind, but at first glance I don't see how a sleep model would count as a Markov process, given that you have to factor in sleep debt, time of day (because of sunlight), and perhaps other variables. But then I know nothing about HMMs.
Also, this is my first post. Is this the sort of thing that goes better in LessWrong or Less Wrong Discussion?
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.
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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.