Ξ December 11th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
The story of our ruined sleep, in virtually every telling I've heard, begins with Thomas Edison: electric light destroyed the sanctity of night. Given more to do and more opportunity to do it, we gave sleep shorter and shorter shrift. But the sleep that we're now trying to reclaim may never have been ours to begin with. "It's a myth," A. Roger Ekirch, a professor of history at Virginia Tech, told me. "And it's a myth that even some sleep experts today have bought into."
Ekirch's 2005 book, "At Day's Close," described just how frenetic night in preindustrial times was. People slept, or tried to, in poorly insulated buildings that let in the weather and noise. Livestock huffed and mewled and stank just outside -- if not inside. Generally, you slept beside a chamber pot of your own excrement, staggering across the room every few hours to keep your fire alive. With physical health comparatively poor, night was when people simmered most acutely in their discomfort. In 1750, one writer described London between the hours of 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. as a ghastly encampment of "sick and lame people meditating and languishing on their several disorders, and praying for daylight."
Because there was inadequate bedding, if there were beds at all, three family members and the odd houseguest might sleep on a single mattress -- sharing in all the usual annoyances of tossing, blanket-hogging and snoring. Beds were not always, or even often, seen as having much impact on sleep. Another book, "Warm and Snug: The History of the Bed," by a scholar named Lawrence Wright, suggests that they were valued primarily as furniture, settings for public rituals around birth, death and courtship. Beds did raise you up off the floor, away from the bugs and vermin, and kept you warm. But warmer bedding also created a new vector for mites. And when comfort was a consideration, preferences were just as idiosyncratic as today. Mattresses were stuffed with hair, moss, feathers, wood shavings, seaweed or straw. Louis XI had an uncannily Sleep Number-esque mattress, filled with air and inflated to his liking with a royal bellows.
More surprising still, Ekirch reports that for many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night -- divided into a "first sleep" and "second sleep" -- also included a curious intermission. "There was an extraordinary level of activity," Ekirch told me. People got up and tended to their animals or did housekeeping. Others had sex or just lay in bed thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with bedfellows. Benjamin Franklin took "cold-air baths," reading naked in a chair.
Our conception of sleep as an unbroken block is so innate that it can seem inconceivable that people only two centuries ago should have experienced it so differently. Yet in an experiment at the National Institutes of Health a decade ago, men kept on a schedule of 10 hours of light and 14 hours of darkness -- mimicking the duration of day and night during winter -- fell into the same, segmented pattern. They began sleeping in two distinct, roughly four-hour stretches, with one to three hours of somnolence -- just calmly lying there -- in between. Some sleep disorders, namely waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to fall asleep again, "may simply be this traditional pattern, this normal pattern, reasserting itself," Ekirch told me. "It's the seamless sleep that we aspire to that's the anomaly, the creation of the modern world."
Ξ December 11th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Stumbleupon Review of :
In fact, many contemporary, nonindustrialized cultures contentedly pass portions of the night in the same state of somnolence, says Carol Worthman, an anthropologist at Emory University who is one of the first to look at how other societies sleep. Sleep and wakefulness are rarely seen as an either/or, but rather as two ends of a wide spectrum, and people are far more at peace with the fluidity in between. Among the Efe in Zaire, and the !Kung in Botswana, for example, someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and cannot sleep "may begin to hum, or go out and play the thumb piano," Worthman and a colleague have written. Others might wake up and join in. "Music or even a dance may get going."
Worthman says, "In our culture, quality sleep is going into a dark room that is totally quiet, lying down, falling asleep, doing that for eight hours, and then getting up again." She calls it the "lie down and die" model. "But that is not how much of the world has slept in the past or even sleeps today." In some cultures sleep is more social, with crowds crammed together on little or no bedding, limbs entangled, while a steady traffic comes and goes. And while it all sounds unbearable, Worthman notes that science has never looked empirically at whether our more sophisticated arrangements actually benefit us. For children, learning to sleep amid all that stimulation may actually have developmental advantages.
Still, we can't afford the same equanimity about not sleeping through the night as the Efe and !Kung; the flipside is that men and women in those cultures are content to pull a cloth over their faces and doze off during the day if necessary. Our peculiar preference for one well-organized hunk of sleep likely evolved as a corollary to our expectation of uninterrupted wakefulness during the day -- as our lives came to be governed by a single, stringent clock. Eluned Summers-Bremner, author of the forthcoming "Insomnia: A Cultural History," explains that in the 18th century, "we start overvaluing our waking time, and come to see our sleeping time only as a way to support our waking time." Consequently, we begin trying to streamline sleep, to get it done more economically: "We should lie down and go out right away so we can get up and get to the day right away." She describes insomniacs as having a ruthless ambition to do just this, wanting to administer sleep as an efficiency expert normalizes the action in a factory. Certainly all of us, after a protracted failure to fall asleep for whatever reason, have turned solemnly to our alarm clocks and performed that desperate arithmetic: If I fall asleep right now, I can still get four hours.
Nevertheless, while it may be at odds with our history and even our biology, lie-down-and-die is the only practical model for our lifestyle. Unless we overhaul society to tolerate all schedules and degrees of sleepiness and attentiveness, we are stuck with that ideal. Perhaps the real problem is that we still haven't come to terms with the unavoidable imperfection of this state of affairs.
Electric light didn't obliterate nighttime so much as reinvent it. Our power to toggle between light and dark encouraged us to see night as an empty antithesis to day -- an unbroken nothing-time that begins the instant we flip off the switch. And this significantly reshaped and rigidified our expectations of how we ought to be spending it. All of this leaves us -- regardless of the circumstances or how poor our sleep hygiene is -- insisting that we go out, and stay out, like a light.
Ξ November 27th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Browse the pics on my blog by thumbnail.
e.g.
Or don't, it's up to you really. Don't see why you would actually.
In case you do, sorry about the design, it was more proof-of-concept than zengarden.
Ξ November 23rd, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
A Ukrainian man gave up his job, sold his two other vehicles and spent one and a half years in his garage to create his dream vehicle. His literally half-modern, half-retro car has a wooden body made of thousands of oak parts.
Ξ November 21st, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz
[ Eligible for SuperSaver delivery! ]
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately dairy-house decree:
Where Alf, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
the sacred cows wandered and fed,
And there were gardens bright with soft young grass,
Where blossomed many a pound of fresh-churned butter;
And casein scents filled the air,
Engorging the nostrils of naughty milk-maids.
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian milk-maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Cottage Cheese.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dairy in air,
That sunny dome! those cows of wonder!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Moo! Moooo!
Her flashing eyes, her swinging udder!
Weave a circle round her thrice,
And squeeze the teats with care,
For she on sweet grass hath fed,
And produced the Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon,
128 fl oz, of Paradise.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1816 [via. Debunker]
Ξ November 20th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Stumbleupon Review of :
I recently read a review of a newly published collection of de Clayre's work, in which the reviewer made the claim that she wasn't an original thinker; that what she did was take the ideas of others and redraft them in a more easily digestible form. That is to say, she was a parrot, albeit a very prettily worded one. To me, nothing could seem further from the truth, and to suggest so really only illustrates the reviewer's lack of understanding of her depth of it.
She is one of the few people I have read who enumerates genuine compassion and common sense* as essential virtues necessary for the development and furtherance of an anarchist society. Without the former, it would be a hateful thing; without the latter,it simply cannot be.
Others have their pet theories as to the best economic system and abstract ideas as to how things must be, replete with jargon resplendent in its complexity and disdain for those of the out-group (that they write endlessly about), often seeming far more interested in proving themselves correct than they are in being right. Others, indeed, have compassion as their Cause, engaging in recreational rebellion and conspicuous pappier-mache concern. Yet others engage in the common-sense** exaltation of the postmodernist freedoms-from of the individual, railing against The Man--yet ironically, in doing so, joining in a movement fostered by neoliberalism and ultimately more beneficial to its cause than that of the disenfranchised classes.
Few however, really dare see the shape of things with the humility without which it can never be much more than a petty projection of preconceptions and dreams.
* As the term is normally understood, not Gramsci's definition.
** This time I do mean Gramsci's one.
Ξ November 5th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
If the Democratic base pulled levers for the candidate whose policies best reflected its own beliefs, Dennis Kucinich should win his party's nomination in a landslide.
OK, sure, his reign as mayor of Cleveland was a mess. He has never passed a piece of legislation. He loves to flash peace signs that provoke flashbacks of your crazy Aunt Martha's annual Woodstock slide show. The fact that when you try to picture him at any sort of summit, you quickly envision Nicolas Sarkozy stealing his lunch money leads you to suspect that he might be an ineffective player on the world stage. He is a vegan. He has been compelled by his sense of honesty, and his close personal friendship with Shirley MacLaine, to disclose his encounters with extraterrestrial life. Also, he really does bear an unfortunate resemblance to a leprechaun. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Extra-repellent are the signifiers that surround Kucinich: the hippie-dippy factor of his supporters and their wavy-gravy, pierced, peacenik naiveté. You don't want to descend into the Unitarian Church basement and talk about peace over potluck fruited rice casseroles. Because, sure, you might believe in peace, you might want peace, but you don't want to text peace. And you'd sooner eat a bucket of trans fats than talk about it with a bunch of Hacky-Sackers in Phish T-shirts. It's just like how you believe the music of Bruce Springsteen is important but don't attend his concerts because you prefer not to picture yourself in the company of overweight men from New Jersey who wear unironic mustaches and know the air-guitar chords to "Glory Days."
Ξ November 2nd, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Ξ October 19th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Only 90%, drat. Knew I should have taken time to work out the multiple pulley lift one properly :/
Ξ October 15th, 2007 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Misc |
Dilemma!
((p → q) ∧ (r → s) ∧ (¬q ∨ ¬s)) ├ (¬p ∨ ¬r)
