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Insomniacs, the Phantoms of the Internet
theodp writes "Ever since she was a toddler, freelance writer Lily Burana has been a Stay Up Late kind of girl. When her kindergarten teacher asked students 'What time do you go to bed?,' young Lily felt compelled to lie rather than rat out her own mother by saying, 'Oh, between midnight and 1 a.m.' She still suffers from insomnia, but has discovered that Facebook is the Promised Land for the awake and alone. She finds comfort in the company of others who, like her, live counter to the conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world."
Wow... am I the only one in this thread at this time of day?
before those 1am facebook sessions or Mark Zuckerberg is gonna read all her emails
And here I thought the lack of interaction with people was a positive aspect of staying up late.
Once forums, IRC channels, and other websites that are driven by user-created content reach a certain size, there is no longer a difference between "daytime" and "night time" because while Americans slumber, Europeans are waking up, and Australians are coming home from work. "Peak" time ceases to mean anything once you're factoring in physical location and have at least two "peak" times. You use the same forum as others, but probably know different mods, OPs, and key players.
It is important that the Internet hang-out be user-driven, because groups who select content to publish tend to originate in geographic proximity, and a single time zone becomes favored.
Facebook isn't a place where it's easy to intrude on a social network in a geographical location outside your own, so I don't understand why the author isn't using a broader term.
Insomnia (307.42, DSM IV, pg. 599) [doesn't every geek have a copy of the official guide to crazy human behavior?] is not the word I would use (I don't have a problem getting to sleep or maintaining sleep). I'm a night owl. My whole life I have basically lived ~8 hours behind wherever I live (i.e. I go to bed at 4-5am local time), and I sleep for 8 to 8.5 hours like a clock (seriously, my primary experience of sleep is I put my head down and then *poof* I'm awake, rested, and it's 8 to 8.5 hours later). Fortunately I have found a way to use this to my benefit (tech writer/minimal interruptions, cover stuff that happens at night). But honestly the though of a "regular" 9-5 existence sort of ... well horrifies me (when do you normal people run errands? and rush hour, like WTF? you realize that you can belt across a city at 2pm in like 15 minutes, but at rush hour that will easily take an hour). Also added advantages: the internet (locally) is faster (the normals are asleep), no phone/email/SMS/IM/etc. interruptions(the normals are asleep) and as a result I am far more productive.
She was a stripper, is there anything else I need to know? I probably won't hear anything else after the word stripper, anyway....
I'll be here all night.
Assuming that everything genetic can be explained as having an evolutionary purpose, does anyone know of an evolutionary purpose to a large group of people having a different schedule than everyone else?
Maybe they are suppose to be the stronger of the genetic pool and replace the weaker day walkers?
You could always learn a foreign language of those on the opposite side of the globe. Never have to worry about no one being up the more languages you know.
As I write this, I am at work at 11:30 PM. I got to work at 8:00 PM. When my coworkers come in in the morning, I'll be heading home to sleep.
I have been this way for as long as I have had conscious memory. My mother tells me that I have been this way since I was a newborn in the hospital.
Lots of treatments have been proposed with many studies being done, some with thousands of test subjects. Not one single treatment has ever been demonstrated to work in a statistically significant way.
Thus the best advice that the medical community can give us "Night Owls" is to find some way to accomodate it. That's why I took up computer programming in the first place. My degree is in Physics, but I'm afraid that teaching morning classes just doesn't work for me.
I have lots of friends who have DSPS as well. I met most of them by hanging out at Dennys at three in the morning.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
The article makes an interesting point: her husband "keeping up a soldier's rhythm". I suffered from exactly the same problem during childhood and adolescence, until the Dutch Marines made the error of accepting me in their ranks. It totally cured me. ( Being daily kicked and yelled out of your bunk at 5 am is a sort of a horse's medicine, but Gawd - did it work !! )
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
This is obviously a desperate cry for help from Lily - she's never been able to escape the shadow of her more famous sister, Carmina.
#DeleteChrome
I'm not insomaniac, but for various reasons I used to sleep at about 2am. And then it became 3am. And then it became 4am. after a while the sliding window slid so much that I started sleeping at 8pm. There was a time I got used to be awake at about 4am, but this time not before bed, but after. It was terrible when I was trying to keep my working day life with my 4am nights, until i realized that if I let it run its course, I could decide where it should stop.
conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world
My problem goes a step further. I like to stay awake for 20 hours and then sleep for like 10. I spend the same amount of my life sleeping/awake as a normal person, just in longer chunks. Trouble is, left to my own devices, I effectively "stay up" 4 hours later each night untill I wrap back around. Before I had a job I could actually live like that. It was kind of a strange sensation brushing my teeth with my roommate at midnight; She was going to bed, i just got up.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
She could just start fight club, like a normal person!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
"These lumivores reject the safety of darkness and appear to seek out light. Sickening !"
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
> "It was kind of a strange sensation brushing my teeth with my roommate at midnight; She was going to bed, i just got up."
Have you never heard of a toothbrush?
I'm one of these folks. I use solar-spectrum bulbs in my bedroom that are on a timer to come on early in the morning. This puts me on a normal sleep schedule with the rest of US Central Time when I need to be. Otherwise, I sleep in until 10-11am and don't go to bed until 3-4am.
What does insomnia have to do with being nocturnal? Night owls still sleep, they just sleep in the daytime! Insomniacs can't sleep at all, the poor buggers. It figures, it was written by a journalist. They aren't the sharpest pencils in the box, you know.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
IANAD, but your example of the appendix is not a clear cut case. How most of the human body actually functions on a microbial level is not understood. The appendix could serve a function that is perhaps redundant, but helpful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vermiform_appendix#Possible_secondary_functions
Roughly half my comments are never submitted. You may be reading the better half...
Okay, I'll concede that it may have unknown benefits - we know that there is no measurable negative side effects to removing it (and a massive positive in that it can save your life if you have appendicitus) but we don't know for sure that it may not have some unknown secondary effect that remains useful.
One thing that becomes clear if you actually study what we know about evolution though is that a great deal of things are used for different purposes to what originally let the mutation survive - evolutions is an unpredictable (emergent) process that can and will take any available path (if only because animals will use any advantage they can to survive - those that don't fell out of the chain right at the start).
I read an article a while ago about a piece of research that found that genetically the human crab lice which most slashdotters never need to fear getting are descended from the lice species that gorillas carry all over their bodies - only, there is a major catch. Human and Gorilla lines split up some 9 million years ago - but crablice only split up from gorilla lines some 5 million years ago. the best theory as to why suddenly 4 million years later the lice would split off into a species that attacks humans - and then only in one area, is that humans didn't evolve pubic hair before that point. The bare downy fur we got is not suitable for lice - and so we were basically immune to them - until hair that is quite ideal for lice infections returned to us - in a localized growth. Chances are those early infections came from sleeping in abandoned gorilla nests - and soon, we had our own species that spread primarily through sex.
Which raises the very interesting question - if we didn't have pubic hair once we started thinning our fur, and getting them made us a target for a parasite we had previously become immune to - why would we get it later on ? Most likely explanation is that it serves another purpose which is a much more definite advantage. Doctors still argue about what the advantages and disadvantages of pubic hair are though (most viable theory to me is that it acts as a friction absorber preventing chafing of the pubic area during sex, thus allowing more frequent sex).
The article ended with the suggestion that this means the current fashion for shaved pubic areas may have a bona-fide health-benefit by making us significantly less likely get crab-lice infections - if indeed friction control is the primary purpose of having them in the first place, our other major evolutionary power (known as "the ability to create technology") provides a wonderful alternative in the form of KY-jelly :P
Anyway - enough semi-serious science and sex jokes (alliteration FTW) my point originally was simply that evolution isn't intelligent and it's not easy to predict, it doesn't have to make sense or make an easy-to-tell story. Unlike creationism ... it has to describe what HAPPENED, there is no natural law that bends natural history to fit our sense of narrative. We can identify likely advantages or disadvantages that a given gene may have had at a given time - but we can't ever say "we evolved X because of Y" - because the real world just isn't that simple.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
First I helped the client deal with some old emotional traumas. A few weeks later I supplied the Radial Appliance. He uses it every night - if he wakes up at 1am (sometimes the dog wakes him up), he'll move, re-attach the wires, and go right back to sleep.
That's a looong walk you took to arrive at peddling your placebo.
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
insomnia is a mark of depression or anxiety or a number of physical problems
if you are an insomniac, you have a problem that will eat into your ability to carry on with your jobs or your relationships
additionally, your health will suffer: many normal physical processes are tied into circadian rhythms, such as cholesterol production, and fat burning
insomnia is not a mark of subculture pride, it is a danger warning
treat your insomnia, it is not in any way cool
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
>or the ability to roll your tongue. :P
Only somebody who has never learned how much a perfectly execute tongueroll kiss can improve your chances of getting laid (not to mention improving oral skills) could possibly think that it does not have an evolutionary advantage... but then again, what did I expect from slashdot ?
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I'm just posting this out of idle curiosity, so please indulge me.
As a 33 year old, I currently sleep between 3-5 hours in a day on average. Today I went to sleep around 5:10 AM, and woke up around 7:59 AM (one minute before the alarm, happens frequently). Though I am somewhat grumpy for the first 10-15 minutes, I quickly 'wake up' and feel refreshed and alert. This is normal for me. Back during college, I would often go 2 or 3 days without sleep, though it's more likely I'd take a nap somewhere between 9-11 am (depending on my schedule). I even work out and take martial arts classes to get regular exercise since my job is pretty sedentary.
Is there anyone else out there like this? Where sleep is this annoying intrusion into your schedule that you only allow when you're physically exhausted? Maybe you can help me figure out why people hear me describe my sleep cycle and say they're sorry, like this gift of another 1/6'th or more of my life to live is terrible compared to those people who voluntarily give up 1/3 of theirs.
Other random items; ... ... just curious to hear if there's anyone else out there like this.
- According to doctors way back when I was 6 or so, I'm 'Hyperactive' - though I guess today it'd be called ADD or ADHD or something
- Only time I feel sleepy/awkward/wrongish is sometime around sunrise and the next 2-3 hours, but it goes away. On cloudy or foggy days, I may not experience this at all. It appears I have to actually see the early morning sunlight to really be negatively affected by it.