Recruiting Animal

Split-Shift Sleep

From: New York Times, Rethinking Sleep by Dave Randall Sept 22, 2012, (edited)

History prof Roger Ekirch noticed references to split-shift sleep in historical literature. People would sleep for awhile then wake up for awhile and then go back to sleep again.

A character in the “Canterbury Tales” decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.”

A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection.

A 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love.

At the same time, Tommy Wehr, a psychiatrist, was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light.

At first, the subjects slept through the night. Then they began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern Ekirch saw in historical records and literature.

Subjects grew to enjoy the time in the middle of the night as a chance for deep thinking of all kinds, whether in the form of self-reflection, getting a jump on the next day or amorous activity.

 

How To Recover From a Punch

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in face.

Mike Tyson said that and I think it's a great line but after I heard it I asked myself, "What do you then?".

Tyson's remark is obviously another version of the famous military saying that once battle is engaged your strategy goes out the window. The result is that you have to adapt to situations on the ground.

However, I read Tyson as saying that once you get hit you lose your sense of direction. So, pursuing that idea, I did some research online about taking a punch and my conclusion is that pro fighters don't get confused. They train to take a punch and when they get hit they just keep on fighting as before.

For instance, this boxer explains how pros prepare to take a hit without getting totally confused or knocked out.

1. They do neck exercises.

A strong neck keeps your head from being whiplashed too hard which increases the chance of you losing consciousness.

2. They protect the head against the worst blows.

A punch coming from the side will turn your head and spin your brain knocking you unconscious. Boxers are taught to protect their face from the side punches like the left hook. Straight punches can be negated easily by head-movement and ducking movements.

3. They spin their heads.

Pro's quickly spin their head in the opposite direction off the punch and this small movement deflects much of the damage.

4. They see the punch coming.

That allows you to prepare for the impact by bracing to take the punch.

Most people get knocked out because they are swinging wildly and don't see the punches that their opponents are throwing.

It's also why, in a pro fight, you have two highly trained fighters who can hit hard for 36 minutes but still don't get knocked out.

However, this still doesn't tell us how they recover when, as Tyson says, their plans go out the window.

Beware of Visionaries

From: Failing The Mentally ill (heavily edited)

The destruction of our mental health system started with the idea that mental illness does not exist because the mind cannot be diseased.

But, in fact, the brain is just as susceptible to malfunction as any bodily organ.

And, even now, when the consequences of radical deinstitutionalization should have become clear to everyone, the bad idea lives on.

How could it become so influential?

The idea began with Thomas Szasz and would have remained a fringe curiosity had the counter-culture and political radicals not taken him up along with the similar misconceptions of R.D. Laing.

The mentally ill became a group to be liberated.

Indeed some countercultural intellectuals went so far as to claim that the sane were mad and the mad were sane because they so radically rejected the corrupt established culture.

Deinstitutionalization was also attractive to people eager to cut costs.

The Lanterman-Petris-Short Act of 1967 inaugurated a wave of state legislation sharply restricting the grounds for involuntary hospitalization and its length.

It passed both houses without a single dissenting vote. Conservative Republicans saw a way to save money, liberal Democrats a way to expand civil rights.

The promise of saving money by doing good was irresistible.

Unfortunately, the humane community treatment for the mentally ill that was supposed to replace institutionalization never materialized and the families of mentally ill people are forced to navigate a hopelessly fragmented system where the “right to refuse treatment” far outweighed the right to receive it.

 

Always Look at the Positives

From: The Daily Mail (edited)

When he was was confronted by Shriver, Arnie ‘profusely apologized’ and begged forgiveness.

But when she asked that they temporarily separate and go to therapy he refused to cooperate.

When Maria told Arnold to move out, he refused. It was his house and he wasn’t budging.

Schwarzenegger told a neighbour: ‘I think things will work out OK with Maria, but if they don’t, I’m getting me a 20-year-old honey’.

Woman Bites Dog

Disrespect for positional authority

From: Jeff Weintraub (edited)

Iranian cleric, Hojatoleslam Ali Beheshti, insulted one woman too many. And he seems to have pushed this one past her breaking point.

According to Beheshti's account, he encountered a woman with a bad hijab (head covering) and told her to cover herself up.

She responded that he could just close his eyes. When he wouldn't stop bothering her, she knocked him down, beat him up, and put him in the hospital.

Dedication

What does it take to pursue a goal against opposition?

From: Belmont Club (edited)

The street level of the revolution was dominated by the Islamists and young toughs, high school and technical school students who hang out around Tahrir Square.

They like fights, they like to storm buildings, some, if not most, are addicted to Tramadol.

It’s a great anti-police drug. You don’t feel pain. They can beat you to death and you won’t feel a thing.

They’re calling it the Zombie drug. Tramadol was a big part of the revolution.

The point is that for the ideological revolution to have succeeded you needed these toughs because you had to win on the street level.

To take on the entire police force of a dictatorship like Mubarak’s you needed to bring them down on the street through force.

That’s who these kids are. They took on the Mubarak regime alongside the Islamists, whose willingness to die for their cause cannot be underestimated.”

Comment: Note that these tough young men already like to fight before they take the Tramadol. It just helps them do what they are already doing.

 

On Feeling Dumb

From: Who Killed The Liberal Arts (edited)

A great many of my fellow students in the College at the University of Chicago seemed to come from New York City, several others from academic families.

They appeared to have been reading the Nation and the New Republic from the age of 11.

One morning in Elder Olson’s class in modern poetry, Olson began quoting Baudelaire and a student next to me, named Martha Silverman, joined him, in French, and together, in unison, the two of them chanted the poem to its conclusion.

This was one of those moments when I thought it perhaps a good time to look into career opportunities at Jiffy Lube.

“I invariably took the first rank in all discussions and exercises, whether public or private, as not only my teachers testified, but also the printed congratulations and carmina of my classmates.”

So wrote Leibniz about his own classroom performance.

Reverse everything Leibniz wrote and you have a fairly accurate picture of my classroom performance.

None among my teachers there ever suggested that I had intellectual promise. Nor should they have done, for I didn’t show any, not even to myself. I made no “A”s. I wrote no brilliant papers. I didn’t do especially well on exams. I was not quick in response in the classroom.

 

Nature vs Nurture

From: David Hawkes via Normblog (edited)

Anyone following the career of Noam Chomsky is soon confronted with a problem.

Chomsky has achieved eminence in theoretical linguistics and political commentary.

The "Chomsky problem" is that his approaches to these fields appear to contradict each other.

In politics Chomsky is a radical, but in linguistics he takes positions that can easily be characterized as reactionary.

He traces language to a "Universal Grammar" resident in the physical brain.

He believes that our linguistic nature is hard-wired into our genes.

Because they diminish the influence of environment on human behaviour, such claims can be used to suggest that certain modes of social organization are natural and immutable.

As a result, they have often been associated with conservative politics.

Comment: Can the same be said of success?

 

The Prejudice of Scientists

From: Beware the Fausts of Neuroscience, George Walden, Standpoint, April 2012 (edited)

As a minister for science, had I been able to rely on scientists for rational and detached advice, things would have been simpler.

But my impressions of those I met convinced me of two things:

1. their awesome intelligence and real achievements

2. in some cases an equally awesome propensity to overweening ambition and incurable condescension towards the common man.

I arrived with my own prejudices. I was a diplomatic specialist in Communism.

In China and the Soviet Union I had witnessed at first hand the biggest live experiment in history, as more than a billion human beings, caged in their own countries like laboratory mice, were subjected to the parascientific creed of dialectical materialism and Marxism-Leninism.

Of the outcome — some hundred million dead, three million in China during 1966-69 the years I was there — there is little more to be said, except to recall how many Western scientists, some eminent, went along with the experiment.

 

She Dreamed Herself To Death

From: Toronto woman dies on Mount Everest - Josh Tapper - Toronto Star - May 22, 2012 (edited)

Shriya Shah-Klorfine dreamed of scaling the world’s tallest peak. On Saturday, she unfurled Canada’s flag at the summit of Mt Everest.

A few hours later she died from exhaustion.

She was remembered by friends for her perseverance and relentless work ethic. Her training regimen included daily 19-kilometre runs carrying a 20- kilogram pack.

“She never let her dream be lost,” said friend Bikram Lamba. “She transferred the dream into reality.”

About 150 climbers attempted to reach the summit over the weekend.

“With the traffic jam, climbers had a longer wait for their chance to go up the trail and spent too much time at a higher altitude. Many of them are believed to be carrying a limited amount of oxygen, not anticipating the extra time spent.”

80% of Everest deaths occur in the final stretch because of its low oxygen level.

Bruce Klorfine said: “My wife was someone who lived life to its fullest, with irrepressible energy and vitality."

In 2011, she participated in a five-day hunger strike to protest skyrocketing auto insurance premiums. She collapsed after four days but returned to the strike after her release from hospital.

For the last two years, she squeezed in seven hours of training each day before running her business in the late evening.

She also mortgaged her home to cover climbing costs.

Priya Ahuja, a close friend, said nothing could hold her back.

“She would say: Life, you’ve just got one, just try to live it. ”

Of course, some might say: Life, you've just got one. Don't throw it away.