sunday

About a month ago, I asked my friend in med school why our blood appears blue. Of course, the easy answer is because it becomes deoxygenated, but that wasn’t the answer I was looking for. On a physical and molecular level, why does the blood appear blue to the human eye? She found this article for me, which I finally got around to reading today (thanks to procrastination) at work. To refresh my memory, I had to do a little Google search on which vein/artery was blue/red and eventually stumbled upon some answers. That’s when I came to the conclusion that idiots must feel the need to populate the internet (and the world) with more idiots; or in general, idiots beget idiots.

This also relates to my observation that poor, uneducated families are the largest; you don’t see wealthy, educated folks shuttling eight kids to soccer practice. It can be shown that the lower social classes, those on welfare, without jobs, in the projects, produce more offspring than the upper classes. I don’t know if there is a direct correlation between education, ergo IQ, and wealth, and I’m too lazy to perform a full-out data search on it right now. But assuming that there is one, you can follow the logic that because one is uneducated, one can’t get a job, and if one can’t get a job, one doesn’t have money, and if one doesn’t money, what does one do but stay at home and make babies all day [1]? In a sense, it becomes the paradox of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Are you poor because you are stupid, or are you stupid because you are poor?

A similar logic can be drawn for the upper class: if one is educated, one can get a job, if one can get a job, one becomes wealthy, and when one is wealthy, one focuses on his career and doesn’t have time to make babies all day. I suppose wealthy/educated people are more focused on their career, their lifestyle, and understand the financial repercussions of having a large family, whereas stupid people don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on around them, because, well, they’re stupid.

So if stupid people keep producing offspring at a rate greater than smart people, then soon, the world will be overrun by idiots.

[1] Reference Chris Rock’s stand-up comedy skit “Niggas vs. Black People.”

Quality not quantity. No matter how much your mother tells you that you need eight hours of sleep, if you’re not tired and you can’t truly relax, your sleep time will be worthless.

Robin Lloyd of Live Science reports that at the 2006 National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference, experts agreed, according psychiatry professor Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego on the following recommendations for obtaining optimum sleep value:

• Do not take sleeping pills. This includes over-the-counter pills and melatonin.
• Don’t go to bed until you’re sleepy. If you have trouble sleeping, try going to bed later or getting up earlier.
• Get up at the same time every morning, even after a bad night’s sleep. The next night, you’ll be sleepy at bedtime.
• If you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t fall back to sleep, get out of bed and return only when you are sleepy.
• Avoid worrying, watching TV, reading scary books, and doing other things in bed besides sleeping and sex. If you worry, read thrillers or watch TV, do that in a chair that’s not in the bedroom.
• Do not drink or eat anything caffeinated within six hours of bedtime.
• Avoid alcohol. It’s relaxing at first but can lead to insomnia when it clears your system.
• Spend time outdoors. People exposed to daylight or bright light therapy sleep better.

A six-year study Kripke headed up of more than a million adults ages 30 to 102 showed that people who get only 6 to 7 hours a night have a lower death rate than those who get 8 hours of sleep. The risk from taking sleeping pills 30 times or more a month was not much less than the risk of smoking a pack of cigarettes a day, he says.

So what happens when you don’t have time for even 6 hours of sleep? Surely you can’t go without sleep? Without adequate rest, the brain’s ability to function quickly deteriorates. The brain works harder to counteract sleep deprivation effects, but operates less effectively: concentration levels drop, and memory becomes impaired.

Similarly, the brain’s ability to problem solve is greatly impaired. Decision-making abilities are compromised, and the brain falls into rigid thought patterns that make it difficult to generate new problem-solving ideas. Insufficient rest can also cause people to have hallucinations. Other typical effects of sleep deprivation include:

• depression
• heart disease
• hypertension
• irritability
• slower reaction times
• slurred speech
• tremors

B?cause the amount and quality of the sleep we get affects our hormone levels, namely our levels of leptin and ghrelin, many physiological processes that depend on these hormone levels to function properly, including appetite, are affected by our sleep.

While leptin is a hormone that affects our feelings of fullness and satisfaction after a meal, ghrelin is the hormone that stimulates our appetites. When you suffer from sleep deprivation, your body’s levels of leptin fall while ghrelin levels increase. This means that you end up feeling hungrier without really feeling satisfied by what you eat, causing you to eat more and, consequently, gain weight.

Scientists say that a successful midday nap depends on two things: timing and (no kidding) caffeine consumption. Experiments performed at Loughborough University in the UK showed that the sleep-deprived need only a cup of coffee and 15 minutes of shut-eye to feel amazingly refreshed.

1. Right before you crash, down a cup of java. The caffeine has to travel through your gastro-intestinal tract, giving you time to nap before it kicks in.
2. Close your eyes and relax. Even if you only doze, you’ll get what’s known as effective microsleep, or momentary lapses of wakefulness.
3. Limit your nap to 15 minutes. A half hour can lead to sleep inertia, or the spinning down of the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which handles functions like judgment. This gray matter can take 30 minutes to reboot.

I’ve finally transcribed this song and put it into Finale. I thought it was going to be a quick two-hour scribble some notes down but it turned into a 12-hour ear-training exercise. You can find it here and it’s also on my music page. I didn’t put the lyrics onto the sheet music via Finale because I tried, and I failed…quite miserably. So I gave up, but should I succeed in the future, I will post an updated version. Enjoy.