Word of the day: "circadian"

"I wonder who discovered we could get milk from cows, and what on EARTH he was doing?"
-Billy Connolly

Here's a fascinating article on Uberman sleep cycles:


The Uberman sleep schedule is a method of organizing your sleeping time to maximize your REM sleep and minimize your non-REM sleep. The goal of the sleep cycle is that you are actively in REM sleep within a couple of minutes of falling asleep and remain in that state until you awaken. I originally read about the schedule on everything2.

In essence, someone utilizing the Uberman sleep schedule is actively modifying their sleeping habits so that they can immediately jump from waking to a few minutes worth of stage 1 sleep straight to stage 5 REM sleep, as described in this discussion of sleep stages.

It is important to note that there are no studies as to the long-term physical or physiological impact of this sleep cycle. I really don't know if this cycle is causing long-term damage to myself or not, and if this concerns you, I wouldn't attempt the cycle. However, the benefits are fantastic.

The Uberman's Sleep Schedule

Sleeping Hours
The Uberman's sleep schedule revolves around forcing yourself to rely on six twenty to thirty minute naps spread throughout the day for your daily dose of sleep. I stuck to thirty minute naps, currently having them starting roughly at 2 AM, 6 AM, 10 AM, 2 PM, 6 PM, and 10 PM every day.

How & Why It Works
Over the course of a normal eight hour sleeping period, your body moves through a continuous cycle of five distinct sleep stages. Of these, stage 5 REM sleep has been found to be the part of the cycle that provides the benefits of sleep for your mind.

Essentially, the trick of the Uberman's sleep schedule is to trick your mind into entering REM sleep as soon as you drift into a sleeplike state. Unfortunately, the only real way to do this is through sleep deprivation of sorts.

Adjusting To This Schedule

Adjusting to this schedule (as you might imagine) will make you feel like you've put your body and mind through a blender for a few weeks. Here are some general tips for adjusting that I found to be greatly helpful.

Do the adjustment when you are in complete control of your schedule. I converted to the cycle during a three week vacation; it would have been impossible to get through a normal work day while adjusting to this cycle. I was by and large a zombie.

Find a large project to work on while adjusting. If you don't keep busy, you will revert to a normal sleep cycle. In my first failed attempt at switching (on vacation more than two years ago), I didn't have an ongoing project to keep me focused.

Use physiological "tricks" to teach your body the cycle. I found that using a dawn simulation trick worked nicely. Every time I went to lay down, I set my monitor to wait thirty-two minutes, then begin running a program that had a strobe effect along with some excessively loud music. I also used two alarm clocks, and during the day I would adjust my blinds such that the sun would start shining in my face roughly a half an hour later. These would force me to become somewhat conscious for a while, which was all I needed to keep going.

Days 3 to 10 are the hardest and least productive. I spent the adjustment period working on two projects, one involving programming and another involving writing. At the start of day three, I stored a backup of these projects because I knew that my thought processes were starting to become nonsensical and bizarre. For the next week, I continued to "work" on the projects, but utterly failed to make any sensible progress (interestingly enough, the fiction I wrote in this period was entertaining in a Thomas Pynchon meets The Electric Company kind of way). Don't expect to be hugely useful during the actual forced adjustment to compressed REM sleep.

Convert to a more nutritious diet. I've found that drinking a great deal of orange and apple juice makes the Uberman schedule easier to follow, as does eating plenty of vegetables and avoiding fatty foods like the plague.

You will discover that after day ten or so, you will automatically begin waking after about thirty minutes. Quite often, I find that when a dream ends, I just awaken automatically. Although I still use an alarm clock, I now do my 10 AM, 2 PM, and sometimes 6 PM naps at work on my breaks without an alarm and have no problem waking up from them, feeling utterly refreshed.



This has a large amount of appeal to me. How often have I cursed my body and mind's inability to function without a wasteful 6 hours of sleep a day? Unlike those who savour sleep for its own sake, sleep has always seemed to me to be a terrible, terrible waste of time necessary only because our feeble human bodies require it for continued functioning. If I had my way, the need for sleep should be utterly flensed from the human condition, whether through genetic manipulation, or crude conditioning techniques such as the above. The weakness of fatigue is a constant reminder of the frail, pulsing flesh that houses our consciousness - our bodies are a weak vehicle that should be purged as soon as possible. Possible alternatives include consciousness upload(although the virus possibility corrupting the software is a bit scary), and/or good old genetic modificationof our creaky, disease-prone, cannot-eat-steaks-in-bearnaise-sauce-without-getting-an-infarction, must-actually-fucking-EXERCISE-to-remain-in-functional-condition .. and above all, too, too mortal bodies.

However, I'd like to retain the ability to appreciate food, but not the overriding need for it. Life without the capacity for tasting blue cheese or a linguini vongole.. that's scary.

On the value of dreams? I remain ambivalent - but that's because I don't like my dreams much. I cull enough insight from my waking nightmares.

Fascinating insight into male priorities:

The big downside to pr0n, compared to a cock book, is that you can't get all friendly with yourself in the bathroom or in bed with pr0n. What are you gonna do? Lug a laptop in with you? Prop it on your chest in bed? Try and cycle between .jpgs in Iexplore with one hand while stroking yourself off with the other? The laptop falling off your chest the whole time, or you can't see the screen when it's at an angle... or prop it on the septic tank in the bog. Stroke stroke stroke... Nah. You're all crouched over trying to look at it. And as for doing it in the living room with the computer? No way. Coz when you're finished, you're sitting in the living room, as brazen as you please, with your lad in your hand and a bunch of tissues. Undoubtedly feeling very exposed and L0serish. Unless of course you dimmed the lights to create the right mood. And then you've got to get up, unstick your hand from the keyboard, and shuffle into the bathroom, taking care not to break your trousers in the process. The bathroom incidentally, is where you should have been to begin with.

The only other thing to do is - you guessed it - print those piccies out. And what have you got then? YES folks, you've got a cock book.

Nope. The printed page has a time honoured and traditional place in men's "private special time". It's personal, it's romantic, it's intimate. The computer, while offering a greater variety of images, is also not really as conducive to that self-love action.

Note that the article above is culled from a discussion thread on the role of Maxim, GQ, and Esquire vis-a-vis classics like Hustler and Playboy. It's an interesting discussion in and of itself:)

Here's a pretty good website on various right-wing-nerd topics, albeit with way too much postmodern critique.

It strikes me that nerd culture often lends itself to a very odd mix of libertarian and liberal leanings (as these two terms are commonly understood in American politics). On the libertarian hand, there's the distaste for government intervention, the obsession with libertarian freedom, the fixation with firearms, the rather stubborn insistence on absolute, literal perspectives (for real-life affairs), or even absolute, literal submersion in fictional narratives, using these to lend context to their everyday lives (like those people who name their PCs "Palantir" and all Klingon-speaking UNIX sysadmins or KKK-ers). But there's also the liberal element; general tolerance of all ethnic, racial, or sexual peccadilloes, a usual indifference to all matters religious, an insistence on complete freedom of information in all its forms, and an inherent distrust of large corporate enterprises.

Of course, this is a gross generalization of the geek position; and within the many manifestations of geek culture there all kinds of extreme viewpoints. But it seems to me that geekdom cannot be cast in terms of political viewpoint because it's more about a cultural affinity to and with technology, in all its forms. And this affinity with technology is usually informed and shaped by science-fiction and fantasy-fiction metaphors and paradigms. The political opinions one forms as a result of all these influences can vary greatly; geekdom is thus not an ideology or a archetype per se, but a general cultural template from which many differing personalities and ideologies can emerge.

Ah, Christmas Eve. My first Christmas Eve ever spent working. It's been more a year and four days since I returned from my old life, and was cast into the fiery perdition of this one. While I'd like to say I've emerged from the flame and hammer and anvil of productive labour like a newly-tempered mithril sword, in all honesty I feel like overburnt kaya toast - sickly sweet, caramelized lumps of despair congealing all over an overburnt, brittle piece of bread with black flakes constantly sloughing off, with the odour of brimstone and smoke, and sticky goo clinging everywhere. Still, as I've said before - I've made it past a year, I've got a decent job, and the place inside my head into which I can retreat even from myself grows ever more inassailable everyday, buttressed by the stones of my little distractions, and mortared by imagination and desperation.

It's not that bad to be mad, is it?

[NB: Thanks to certain unforeseen circumstances, this was posted on Christmas instead, and the Christmas Day post follows immediately.]