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Don’t Sleep So Much

In hindsight, my high school Algebra teacher may have been certifiably insane. The first day of class he wandered off on a tangent about a Medieval prince who loved his sleep. This prince loved his sleep so much he decided to sleep five minutes longer every night: 8 hours, 8 hours 5 minutes, 8 hours 10 minutes … until he slept over 24 hours. Then, he died. Class dismissed, Professor continued. Don’t forget the quiz on polynomial expressions this Thursday.

I asked around, and no one has ever heard of this prince’s cautionary tale. I did, however, find a bizarre news story about 15-year old British girl named Louisa Ball. My friends sleep through half of every class (but still get better grades). And I’ve been known to sleep through flights. But Louisa sleeps through entire family vacations. Louisa is stricken with a rare disease called Kleine-Levin Syndrome, dubbed Sleeping Beauty Disease, that makes her sleep for weeks. Her longest snooze was 13 straight days. Baffled doctors can’t stop it, so Louisa’s parents must her wake up once a day so she can eat and use the bathroom.

In spite of Louisa’s affliction, people today sleep less than ever before. According to an American Cancer Society study, Americans slept 8 hours a night in 1960. Today? 6.7 hours. That’s a groggy 15% drop in sleep within 50 years—despite NBC’s late-night lineup’s best efforts. In our defense, our grandparents/parents didn’t have the following distractions: sensationalized 24-7 news-cycles, Red Bull, the Internet, and late-night SportsCenter reruns. National Geographic pegged the costs of our national “sleep debt” at $15 billion dollars in health care expenses and up to $50 billion in lost productivity (or Syria’s nominal GDP).

As usual, our grandparents were right. Eight is the correct answer for number of sleep hours. Sleep more than that and you are more likely to die sooner. With modern life getting busier each year, the average age of people not getting enough sleep is slowly dropping down. The advent of technology that is easily in our hands has made it even easier to get immediate satisfaction in expense of one’s sleep. College students are spending more time late at night studying, opting to get Modafinil they can get from https://buy-modafinil-online.org to stay awake and focus as they cram through the exam weeks. Children are spending way too much time on mobile devices during the night unattended.

A University of California San Diego psychiatry study found “sleeping more than 7 to 8 hours per day has been consistently associated with increased mortality.” But beware of sample bias here. The guy who sleeps 11 hours a night is more likely to be lazier and/or unhealthier.
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Don’t Call Me Babe, Cuz I Ain’t Yo Little Girl

140 Characters To Sum Up A Band

My favorite Twitter account to date.

Favorite zing 1:

Smashing Pumpkins: 1-2 grandiose delusions; 3 Hubris!; 4-6 “Acquired Situational Narcissism” (cf. DSM-IV); 7 feelings of entitlement.

Favorite zing 2:

M.I.A.: 1 “A pop revolutionary’s gotta move fast…”; 2 “…before success softens your ideas…”; 3 “…and all that remains is celebrity.”

Chomsky On The US, Israel, And Middle East History

The Article: Noam Chomsky: The Real Reasons the U.S. Enables Israeli Crimes and Atrocities by Kathleen Wells at Race Talk [via Alternet]

Kathleen Wells: Hi, I’m Kathleen Wells, political correspondent for Race-Talk. I’m speaking with Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and renowned political activist and writer. He has written over a hundred books on linguistics, human rights, economics, and politics. Thank you, Professor Chomsky, for taking the time to speak with me this afternoon.

Noam Chomsky: Very pleased to be with you.

Kathleen Wells: Speak to me about the relation between the United States and Israel. Specifically, address, as you have previously stated, how every crime, violation of international law, that Israel commits is done through the direct participation and authorization of the United States.

Noam Chomsky: That’s a… As a descriptive statement, that is pretty close to accurate. I mean “all” is a very strong word but it is certainly generally true. And, in fact, the United States has overwhelmingly vetoed Security Council resolutions condemning Israeli crimes and atrocities, prevented the Security Council from calling on Israel to terminate aggression, and so on and so forth. The descriptive comment is not really controversial. There are interesting questions about why it’s true. There were also interesting questions about the sources of support for this position in the United States, which helps us explain why it is true.

The history is reasonably clear. This was not the case up until 1967. In fact, before 1967, the relationships were not very different from relationships among other powers. There was sympathy and support for Israel, which has many, many sources, including the Christian Zionism, which is a very powerful force that precedes and is numerically far stronger than Jewish Zionism. But for somebody like, say, Harry Truman, raised in a deeply Christian tradition, it was just taken for granted that the Bible instructs us that God gave the land of Palestine to the Jews. So it is kind of like in his bones. And that’s true for a very large part of the American population, much more so than — far more than any other country. So that is one factor, and there are other factors.
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