Sleep is NOT behavior that has evolved 'for some reason'. Sleep is a metabolic imperative. It is the 'normal' state of life. Being awake is a temporary state that is actually destructive to the metabolism of cell life. Being awake is necessary to move around and obtain food and to procreate, but being awake is not necessary for anything beyond this. After the food has been obtained and the procreative act is complete then the life form able to end the destructive metabolic state of 'being awake' and return to the constructive metabolic state, otherwise known as sleep. Asking the question why do we sleep is akin to asking the question why do we live. The answer is that we do. Asking the question why do we wake up is a question that actually makes sense and can be answered with ease.
The only way to understand sleep / awake is to first understand anabolism / catabolism, balancing metabolic states. Sleep and Awake are balancing metabolic states, nothing more, nothing less. Just because we can exhibit 'behavior' when we are awake does NOT mean that sleep has anything to do the the notion of behavior. And just because we can measure brain activity during periods when we are awake or asleep does NOT mean that sleep is anything more than a metabolic state. Sleep is the Normal, Natural state of any living organism. Awake is just heightened activity and enhanced skills necessary to obtain food and procreate. Making too much of what being awake is is the source of all the confusion and misunderstanding about what sleep is.
There does not exist a methodology by which doctors can record a patient's symptoms, register the diagnosis, determine the eventual accuracy of the diagnosis and record the outcome of the process of diagnosis and the success of the treatment. It's my opinion that in this era of computers and application-specific graphic interfaces that there is no excuse for such a methodology does not exist. If it were to exist, and it soon MUST come to exist, then I am very much in support of the idea that patients should have access to the reports that could summarize the events in a system containing this methodology, and that they should even have the ability to enter information into it.
Doctors are very often wrong and are in a very poor position to note whether they are wrong or not. When doctors do not learn from their mistakes they become less able to serve their patients. Public databases which can help us all understand the meaning of our symptoms are very much necessary. It always has often been and often always will be a matter of life and death whether any patients symptoms can be correctly understood and whether the diagnosis drawn from the symptoms is correct or not, as well as whether the treatment applied is successful or not.
It's time to introduce expert systems into the situation, to allow everyone to contribute to it what they know from their own experience and to allow everyone to be given the answers that the system can logically provide from the expert knowledge which the system contains. Such a system and methodology can be designed to improve itself with use and can eventually provide anyone with both better information about illness and better information about how illness should be treated.
This idea, that people can list their symptoms and answer questions about how they feel, and receive a diagnosis from a database, is an idea whose time has come. It offers the opportunity, for the first time, for people to have access to knowledge that they need to understand what might be causing ill health, pain and suffering. This opportunity also allows for people to provide information back to the database that can be used to improve it.
It is too often the case that our search for information about alleviating our ill health, diseases, disorders and pain is limited by the amount of money that we have to give to doctors and hospitals. It is too often that the doctors themselves are wrong when diagnosing the causes of our symptoms. It is too often that doctors fail to learn from the mistakes they make when attempting to diagnose ill health and diseases.
It is time for people to be given a mechanism to empower them in the search for good health, a mechanism that does not depend upon how much money they have with which to purchase the opinions of doctors, one which can be improved as it is used.
In virtually every area of human knowledge we recognize that software and databases are used to do jobs that no single person could possibly be able to do, be expected to do, to do these jobs better than, faster than, and at far less cost than any single person could do them. It's time to accept that this is also true of assisting us in understanding the meaning of the symptoms of our ill health, ill nutrition, pain and suffering.
There should be no objection by anyone to the idea that it is anyone's basic right to such knowledge, and that the Internet is the ideal method of providing this.
It's about time. The energy efficient, low cost derivation of safe, potable water from ocean water is one of a handful of technological achievements that is urgently needed to prevent the ongoing suffering, impoverishment and deaths of a significant percentage of people throughout our planet. Here's hoping that technology can achieve this, finally, this time.
The biggest unexploited advantage of Linux is the same biggest unexploited advantage of the BSDs, UNIX and Apple's OSX: the failure of application developers to leverage the X Windows System as a network protocol.
When an enduser has a graphical display that is running an X server and the display is connected to the network instead of to a PC running Linux then the user has no hardware, Linux or X issues to deal with. The enduser gets the same display over the network that they would get from a PC's video cable but the responsibility for issues related to PC hardware, Linux and X configuration issues lies with people somewhere else in the world who are properly trained, equipped and paid to deal with these issues.
All of these 'operating environments' have the ability, because of X, to deliver all of the software applications that anyone wants without requiring endusers to have anything more than displays, rich user input, a network connection and an X server.
Most people would agree that, without X, Linux, BSD, UNIX would be crippled in a world where endusers want to move from the 'Microsoft experience' to something better. These same people need to also understand that without making use of the capability of X to be a networking protocol, a remote display/input protocol, these operating systems have to try to compete with the 'Microsoft experience' on terms that are very favorable to Microsoft. In a world where X would be used to provide endusers with software applications but do not also require them to own and maintain PC's Microsoft would be at a magnificent disadvantage.
The PC running a Microsoft is not a requirement for endusers to be able to use software applications and neither is the PC running Linux, BSD, OSX or UNIX. This is not theory or pie in the sky. It is X.
The real significance of this is that any technique he uses in a video release for public view becomes part of the body of work of prior art that can be used to prevent future attempts to patent anything shown in the video.
When I first developed, but didn't patent, the graphical point of sale software paradigm in the mid 80's I began a fifteen-year effort to travel the world and show it to thousands upon thousands of people. As a result, none of the aspects of the graphical POS software user interface could be patented and the use of the software paradigm was adopted in virtually every country of the world free from the impediments of intellectual property assertions by anyone.
This is exactly what I also hope happens to this man's efforts - that people will also copy his ideas and build countless useful, intuitive touchscreen interfaces (yes, the display itself is the interface, by definition, even if he doesn't concede that it is) and the people doing this work will forever be unhindered by organizations asserting intellectual property rights on the interfaces that drive these systems.
Germans must love to pay taxes. They have the beloved Kirchensteuer, or "church tax," which amounts to 8 or 9 percent of taxable income for the 28 million German Catholics. Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish wage-earners also pay a church tax for their churches and synagogues. The German Catholic church was handed a cool $11 billion last year by the German Government and brought in another $5 billion on its own. That's an awful lot of money for an organization of just a few thousand priests - barely 150 new priests are joining the Catholic church annually in Germany these days - the average age is over 60! So what in hell are those old geezers doing with all that dough? And why do the Germans put up with such nonsense?
Such a 'container' has a name - it is a 'twenty-foot equivalent unit', a TEU (or teu). Here's the wikipedia writeup http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization A 2 teu is actually far more common. It is 40 ft. in length.
Every time software is 'set free' like this I see not only yet another confirmation that Stallman right about the absolute need for software to be free but also that his life's work since he first dedicated his life to free software has ensured that free software would inevitably triumph over software that isn't free. Those of us who have been around for several decades remember all too well when you needed a lot of money and official permission to even be allowed to create software. It was not fun and it was not a way forward. In an era when many things are becoming less free it is a significant comfort to know that software is becoming more free and is consequently better in so many ways.
Even Jim, who is posting here and has provided his signature so everyone has the opportunity to notice, doesn't seem to mind but I do. For the anonymous Slashdot contributor, for Zonk the Slashdot 'make-believe' editor and to anyone else who does not actually know what Jim's family name (surname) is, I'll spell it for you: "Gettys".
And, for anyone who doesn't already know, without the work of Jim Gettys, and people like Bob Scheifler and Keith Packard, Linux & GNU would have had to come up with another plan for graphics and input devices than the X Window System.
Find and Replace 'U.S.' and 'United States' with all of the following: China, Russia, Japan, Israel, Germany, France, U.K., Iran, or any country that is threatened by any country implementing the following...
U.S. assets must be unhindered in carrying out their space duties,'...'freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.'...'The policy calls upon the Secretary of Defense to "develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries.'
In otherwords, the U.S. is demanding the right to interpret any country's scientific exploration of space, or even its nominal activities as a nation as a military threat, and thus apply military force to attempt to put an end to it, much as it is doing in Iraq now or as Israel is doing in Lebanon now.
You're right. This correlation has been established, as have a whole host of other such correlations between sleep and health.
Sometimes a very ill patient is deliberately put into a coma for the fact that it is a deep-healing state. A fetus sleeps nearly all the time because sleep is the growth state, and because it has no need to be awake, not to find food, not to have to ingest it, not to expel it and certainly not to procreate. Same situation with animals that are born from eggs.
Doctors are, generally, poorly trained to recognize the symptoms of sleep apnea (apnoea). They typically misinterpret its symptoms and, as a result, prescribe medications for illnesses patients don't even have. Estimates of the frequency of this common problem (obstructive sleep apnea) are as high as 5% of the adult population. Sleep, its importance and its nature, are vast and fascinating topics.
I wrote major portions of that article. The fact that metabolic states are even mentioned there are because of the interaction I had with others there. Sleep cannot be properly understood as a phenonmenon of behavior. Sleep is generic to every living cell, including, of course, brain cells. Brain cells need to repair and to grow in a way that's different, however, from other types of cells. The brain is an instrument of survival or any 'higher' organism but that doesn't exempt its cells from the requirement of maintain the prime directive of maintaining metabolic balance (catabolism and anabolism).
The cost of not sleeping adequately, of not allowing your body to repair, to grow, is devasting across the human race just as any disease is. Not sleeping well can ruin your life. Spend a few minutes studying phenomena such as sleep apnea and you'll hopefully gain an appreciation for the cost that people pay for suffering from this, largely because medical professionals are not taught the fundamentals of maintaining good health, concepts such as sleep, nutrition, diet, attitude. Look around you and you'll see lots of people suffering from poor sleep, poor nutrition, poor diet, bad attitude.
Wrong Question. You should ask "What is the purpose of waking up". Once you understand why we wake up, to find nutrition, to ingest it, to expel waste and to procreate, activities which are all catabolic, then you can go on to accept the need for metabolic balance that anabolism (a.k.a. sleep) provides. First you do one, then you do the other, etc., throughout your entire life. When you fail to find nutrition, or to ingest it, or to expel waste, or to adequately repair or grow your body, then you die. When you fail to procreate, you have failed the prime directive - to reproduce. It's that basic. Anything else (civilization, for example, and happiness) is extra, a bonus made possible by achieving sufficient effiencies in finding nutrition, ingesting it and procreating. Sleep is the other half of the metabolic equation that being awake is.
The best answer, as far as science has so far been able to ascertain, is at least two-fold. First, only half of the bird's brain is 'sleeping' (repairing itself, growing). Second, the muscles that maintain flight continue to respond even when asleep the same way that the muscles that maintain breathing respond even when asleep.
There is no getting away from the fact that metabolism is present, by definition, in EVERY life form, and, even in single-cell life, is a balance between anabolism and catabolism. To the extent that animal life and plant life have a common source, and therefore have common metabolic fundamentals (at the most fundamental level) then the question of whether plants sleep is something that can be probed only by probing what sleep actually is at the most basic level. The answer is a very definite maybe. When we understand better what sleep is, when the sleep researchers who study sleep as a behavior give way to neuroscientists who study sleep as a metabolic phenonmenon, then the understanding of sleep will dramatically change from what is commonplace today.
By the way, it's been proven conclusively that fruit flies do sleep.
If sleep is just the anabolic state, and if being awake is just the catabolic state, then it is universal among all life. It may be more interesting to ask - why do we wake up? That's a far easier question to answer. Asking why do we sleep may turn out to simply be asking the wrong question, or asking a question that is simply too big to answer in 25 words or less - i.e., akin to asking why do we live.
First of all, experiments I've read about have been done on birds that are flying, hence no cage.
More importantly, though, although you must accept the inevitability of sleep, nonetheless you assume that sleep is a behavior and that behavior can be affected by a cage. Well, the view that sleep is behavior has no scientific basis, in spite of the fact that we (as do other animals) have some control over when we sleep, which is, well, totally beside the point. The fact remains that we, and all animals, MUST sleep and we cannot change that. If we don't sleep, our immune and nervous systems shut down and we die. This is true of all animals.
The latest science indicates beyond any doubt that sleep has nothing to do with behavior but is, rather, a metabolic state (anabolism) which is, of course, cell-based and which, therefore, cannot be affected by putting a bird in a cage or by attaching a neuro-transmitter to a flying bird.
Studies of this kind, therefore, do NOT lose credibility because it is not behavior which is being tested, but rather it is what is being tested is a simple measurement of how the catabolic - anabolic (awake - asleep) balance is maintained in birds, in particular.
It's too bad everybody seems to think that either this is just a humorous article or that they aren't interested enough in understanding what sleep is to spend a few minutes either thinking about what sleep really is, or reading about it. Sleep is important enough that if you try to do without it you will soon be rendered useless and die. Understanding sleep can make your life better. Not getting good sleep makes your life hell, if it doesn't kill you. You can't alter the basic metabolism of life by deciding that you are somehow special and you can't understand sleep if you simply dismiss it as behavior.
Based on these results, we can clearly say that Radeon X1900 XTX is targeted to really heavy gamers running DirectX 9.0 and beyond games at a resolution of at least 1600x1200 with all image quality settings at their max. If you won't run your games at these configurations, buying a Radeon X1900 XTX is pointless, since you can have almost similar performance with "cheaper" products.
In our opinion, paying between USD 590 and USD 650 for a video card is insanity even for the most hardcore gamers, as there are high-end video cards that provide far better cost/benefit ratio available at the market (Radeon X1800 XT and GeForce 7800 GTX are good options with you have the money to buy them and Radeon X1800 XL and GeForce 7800 GT are terrific solutions for those that aren't crazy enough to pay more than USD 400 on a video card).
General Retail Point of Sale, Food & Beverage Point of Sale and other vertical markets. When Ultra Wide Band is available then all the cables disappear. Chips that include a combined UWB and Bluetooth implementation will be able, finally, to free workplaces and homes of cabling, a major step forward. Look what happened to the telephone when the cord was cut. Embedded computing solutions absolutely demand the elimination of all cables and the presumption of the ability to work with a whole universe of devices, peripherals, machines and intelligent control systems.
Desktop users will not understand this. The rest of the world will.
You know, if you ask people how you 'catch a cold' a lot of them would say that if you are too cold, and especially if you get wet and cold, then you catch a cold. A few short generations ago virii were unknown to us. Want to help defeat the common cold? Join Stanford's Folding Project.
Slashdot Mirror
For what it's worth, The maker of the Silly String brand, Just for Kicks Inc. is in Watertown, N.Y., about a 10 minute drive from Fort Drum, home of the 10th Mountain Division. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/army /10mtn.htm
http://www.drum.army.mil/sites/about/hist-10mtn.as p
And, no, we should not have invaded Iraq. We knew it then, we know it now.
Sleep is NOT behavior that has evolved 'for some reason'. Sleep is a metabolic imperative. It is the 'normal' state of life. Being awake is a temporary state that is actually destructive to the metabolism of cell life. Being awake is necessary to move around and obtain food and to procreate, but being awake is not necessary for anything beyond this. After the food has been obtained and the procreative act is complete then the life form able to end the destructive metabolic state of 'being awake' and return to the constructive metabolic state, otherwise known as sleep. Asking the question why do we sleep is akin to asking the question why do we live. The answer is that we do. Asking the question why do we wake up is a question that actually makes sense and can be answered with ease.
The only way to understand sleep / awake is to first understand anabolism / catabolism, balancing metabolic states. Sleep and Awake are balancing metabolic states, nothing more, nothing less. Just because we can exhibit 'behavior' when we are awake does NOT mean that sleep has anything to do the the notion of behavior. And just because we can measure brain activity during periods when we are awake or asleep does NOT mean that sleep is anything more than a metabolic state. Sleep is the Normal, Natural state of any living organism. Awake is just heightened activity and enhanced skills necessary to obtain food and procreate. Making too much of what being awake is is the source of all the confusion and misunderstanding about what sleep is.
There does not exist a methodology by which doctors can record a patient's symptoms, register the diagnosis, determine the eventual accuracy of the diagnosis and record the outcome of the process of diagnosis and the success of the treatment. It's my opinion that in this era of computers and application-specific graphic interfaces that there is no excuse for such a methodology does not exist. If it were to exist, and it soon MUST come to exist, then I am very much in support of the idea that patients should have access to the reports that could summarize the events in a system containing this methodology, and that they should even have the ability to enter information into it.
Doctors are very often wrong and are in a very poor position to note whether they are wrong or not. When doctors do not learn from their mistakes they become less able to serve their patients. Public databases which can help us all understand the meaning of our symptoms are very much necessary. It always has often been and often always will be a matter of life and death whether any patients symptoms can be correctly understood and whether the diagnosis drawn from the symptoms is correct or not, as well as whether the treatment applied is successful or not.
It's time to introduce expert systems into the situation, to allow everyone to contribute to it what they know from their own experience and to allow everyone to be given the answers that the system can logically provide from the expert knowledge which the system contains. Such a system and methodology can be designed to improve itself with use and can eventually provide anyone with both better information about illness and better information about how illness should be treated.
This idea, that people can list their symptoms and answer questions about how they feel, and receive a diagnosis from a database, is an idea whose time has come. It offers the opportunity, for the first time, for people to have access to knowledge that they need to understand what might be causing ill health, pain and suffering. This opportunity also allows for people to provide information back to the database that can be used to improve it.
It is too often the case that our search for information about alleviating our ill health, diseases, disorders and pain is limited by the amount of money that we have to give to doctors and hospitals. It is too often that the doctors themselves are wrong when diagnosing the causes of our symptoms. It is too often that doctors fail to learn from the mistakes they make when attempting to diagnose ill health and diseases.
It is time for people to be given a mechanism to empower them in the search for good health, a mechanism that does not depend upon how much money they have with which to purchase the opinions of doctors, one which can be improved as it is used.
In virtually every area of human knowledge we recognize that software and databases are used to do jobs that no single person could possibly be able to do, be expected to do, to do these jobs better than, faster than, and at far less cost than any single person could do them. It's time to accept that this is also true of assisting us in understanding the meaning of the symptoms of our ill health, ill nutrition, pain and suffering.
There should be no objection by anyone to the idea that it is anyone's basic right to such knowledge, and that the Internet is the ideal method of providing this.
It's about time. The energy efficient, low cost derivation of safe, potable water from ocean water is one of a handful of technological achievements that is urgently needed to prevent the ongoing suffering, impoverishment and deaths of a significant percentage of people throughout our planet. Here's hoping that technology can achieve this, finally, this time.
Daniel Brandt can't edit Wikipedia so it's not true that anyone can edit it.
The biggest unexploited advantage of Linux is the same biggest unexploited advantage of the BSDs, UNIX and Apple's OSX: the failure of application developers to leverage the X Windows System as a network protocol.
When an enduser has a graphical display that is running an X server and the display is connected to the network instead of to a PC running Linux then the user has no hardware, Linux or X issues to deal with. The enduser gets the same display over the network that they would get from a PC's video cable but the responsibility for issues related to PC hardware, Linux and X configuration issues lies with people somewhere else in the world who are properly trained, equipped and paid to deal with these issues.
All of these 'operating environments' have the ability, because of X, to deliver all of the software applications that anyone wants without requiring endusers to have anything more than displays, rich user input, a network connection and an X server.
Most people would agree that, without X, Linux, BSD, UNIX would be crippled in a world where endusers want to move from the 'Microsoft experience' to something better. These same people need to also understand that without making use of the capability of X to be a networking protocol, a remote display/input protocol, these operating systems have to try to compete with the 'Microsoft experience' on terms that are very favorable to Microsoft. In a world where X would be used to provide endusers with software applications but do not also require them to own and maintain PC's Microsoft would be at a magnificent disadvantage.
The PC running a Microsoft is not a requirement for endusers to be able to use software applications and neither is the PC running Linux, BSD, OSX or UNIX. This is not theory or pie in the sky. It is X.
The real significance of this is that any technique he uses in a video release for public view becomes part of the body of work of prior art that can be used to prevent future attempts to patent anything shown in the video.
When I first developed, but didn't patent, the graphical point of sale software paradigm in the mid 80's I began a fifteen-year effort to travel the world and show it to thousands upon thousands of people. As a result, none of the aspects of the graphical POS software user interface could be patented and the use of the software paradigm was adopted in virtually every country of the world free from the impediments of intellectual property assertions by anyone.
This is exactly what I also hope happens to this man's efforts - that people will also copy his ideas and build countless useful, intuitive touchscreen interfaces (yes, the display itself is the interface, by definition, even if he doesn't concede that it is) and the people doing this work will forever be unhindered by organizations asserting intellectual property rights on the interfaces that drive these systems.
Germans must love to pay taxes. They have the beloved Kirchensteuer, or "church tax," which amounts to 8 or 9 percent of taxable income for the 28 million German Catholics. Protestant, Orthodox and Jewish wage-earners also pay a church tax for their churches and synagogues. The German Catholic church was handed a cool $11 billion last year by the German Government and brought in another $5 billion on its own. That's an awful lot of money for an organization of just a few thousand priests - barely 150 new priests are joining the Catholic church annually in Germany these days - the average age is over 60! So what in hell are those old geezers doing with all that dough? And why do the Germans put up with such nonsense?
Such a 'container' has a name - it is a 'twenty-foot equivalent unit', a TEU (or teu). Here's the wikipedia writeup
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Containerization
A 2 teu is actually far more common. It is 40 ft. in length.
Every time software is 'set free' like this I see not only yet another confirmation that Stallman right about the absolute need for software to be free but also that his life's work since he first dedicated his life to free software has ensured that free software would inevitably triumph over software that isn't free. Those of us who have been around for several decades remember all too well when you needed a lot of money and official permission to even be allowed to create software. It was not fun and it was not a way forward. In an era when many things are becoming less free it is a significant comfort to know that software is becoming more free and is consequently better in so many ways.
Even Jim, who is posting here and has provided his signature so everyone has the opportunity to notice, doesn't seem to mind but I do. For the anonymous Slashdot contributor, for Zonk the Slashdot 'make-believe' editor and to anyone else who does not actually know what Jim's family name (surname) is, I'll spell it for you: "Gettys".
And, for anyone who doesn't already know, without the work of Jim Gettys, and people like Bob Scheifler and Keith Packard, Linux & GNU would have had to come up with another plan for graphics and input devices than the X Window System.
Find and Replace 'U.S.' and 'United States' with all of the following: China, Russia, Japan, Israel, Germany, France, U.K., Iran, or any country that is threatened by any country implementing the following...
U.S. assets must be unhindered in carrying out their space duties,'...'freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power.'...'The policy calls upon the Secretary of Defense to "develop capabilities, plans, and options to ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries.'
In otherwords, the U.S. is demanding the right to interpret any country's scientific exploration of space, or even its nominal activities as a nation as a military threat, and thus apply military force to attempt to put an end to it, much as it is doing in Iraq now or as Israel is doing in Lebanon now.
Oh great!
You're right. This correlation has been established, as have a whole host of other such correlations between sleep and health.
Sometimes a very ill patient is deliberately put into a coma for the fact that it is a deep-healing state. A fetus sleeps nearly all the time because sleep is the growth state, and because it has no need to be awake, not to find food, not to have to ingest it, not to expel it and certainly not to procreate. Same situation with animals that are born from eggs.
Doctors are, generally, poorly trained to recognize the symptoms of sleep apnea (apnoea). They typically misinterpret its symptoms and, as a result, prescribe medications for illnesses patients don't even have. Estimates of the frequency of this common problem (obstructive sleep apnea) are as high as 5% of the adult population. Sleep, its importance and its nature, are vast and fascinating topics.
Yes, these stories are false.
I wrote major portions of that article. The fact that metabolic states are even mentioned there are because of the interaction I had with others there. Sleep cannot be properly understood as a phenonmenon of behavior. Sleep is generic to every living cell, including, of course, brain cells. Brain cells need to repair and to grow in a way that's different, however, from other types of cells. The brain is an instrument of survival or any 'higher' organism but that doesn't exempt its cells from the requirement of maintain the prime directive of maintaining metabolic balance (catabolism and anabolism).
The cost of not sleeping adequately, of not allowing your body to repair, to grow, is devasting across the human race just as any disease is. Not sleeping well can ruin your life. Spend a few minutes studying phenomena such as sleep apnea and you'll hopefully gain an appreciation for the cost that people pay for suffering from this, largely because medical professionals are not taught the fundamentals of maintaining good health, concepts such as sleep, nutrition, diet, attitude. Look around you and you'll see lots of people suffering from poor sleep, poor nutrition, poor diet, bad attitude.
Wrong Question. You should ask "What is the purpose of waking up". Once you understand why we wake up, to find nutrition, to ingest it, to expel waste and to procreate, activities which are all catabolic, then you can go on to accept the need for metabolic balance that anabolism (a.k.a. sleep) provides. First you do one, then you do the other, etc., throughout your entire life. When you fail to find nutrition, or to ingest it, or to expel waste, or to adequately repair or grow your body, then you die. When you fail to procreate, you have failed the prime directive - to reproduce. It's that basic. Anything else (civilization, for example, and happiness) is extra, a bonus made possible by achieving sufficient effiencies in finding nutrition, ingesting it and procreating. Sleep is the other half of the metabolic equation that being awake is.
The best answer, as far as science has so far been able to ascertain, is at least two-fold. First, only half of the bird's brain is 'sleeping' (repairing itself, growing). Second, the muscles that maintain flight continue to respond even when asleep the same way that the muscles that maintain breathing respond even when asleep.
There is no getting away from the fact that metabolism is present, by definition, in EVERY life form, and, even in single-cell life, is a balance between anabolism and catabolism. To the extent that animal life and plant life have a common source, and therefore have common metabolic fundamentals (at the most fundamental level) then the question of whether plants sleep is something that can be probed only by probing what sleep actually is at the most basic level. The answer is a very definite maybe. When we understand better what sleep is, when the sleep researchers who study sleep as a behavior give way to neuroscientists who study sleep as a metabolic phenonmenon, then the understanding of sleep will dramatically change from what is commonplace today.
By the way, it's been proven conclusively that fruit flies do sleep.
If sleep is just the anabolic state, and if being awake is just the catabolic state, then it is universal among all life. It may be more interesting to ask - why do we wake up? That's a far easier question to answer. Asking why do we sleep may turn out to simply be asking the wrong question, or asking a question that is simply too big to answer in 25 words or less - i.e., akin to asking why do we live.
First of all, experiments I've read about have been done on birds that are flying, hence no cage.
More importantly, though, although you must accept the inevitability of sleep, nonetheless you assume that sleep is a behavior and that behavior can be affected by a cage. Well, the view that sleep is behavior has no scientific basis, in spite of the fact that we (as do other animals) have some control over when we sleep, which is, well, totally beside the point. The fact remains that we, and all animals, MUST sleep and we cannot change that. If we don't sleep, our immune and nervous systems shut down and we die. This is true of all animals.
The latest science indicates beyond any doubt that sleep has nothing to do with behavior but is, rather, a metabolic state (anabolism) which is, of course, cell-based and which, therefore, cannot be affected by putting a bird in a cage or by attaching a neuro-transmitter to a flying bird.
Studies of this kind, therefore, do NOT lose credibility because it is not behavior which is being tested, but rather it is what is being tested is a simple measurement of how the catabolic - anabolic (awake - asleep) balance is maintained in birds, in particular.
It's too bad everybody seems to think that either this is just a humorous article or that they aren't interested enough in understanding what sleep is to spend a few minutes either thinking about what sleep really is, or reading about it. Sleep is important enough that if you try to do without it you will soon be rendered useless and die. Understanding sleep can make your life better. Not getting good sleep makes your life hell, if it doesn't kill you. You can't alter the basic metabolism of life by deciding that you are somehow special and you can't understand sleep if you simply dismiss it as behavior.
Based on these results, we can clearly say that Radeon X1900 XTX is targeted to really heavy gamers running DirectX 9.0 and beyond games at a resolution of at least 1600x1200 with all image quality settings at their max. If you won't run your games at these configurations, buying a Radeon X1900 XTX is pointless, since you can have almost similar performance with "cheaper" products.
In our opinion, paying between USD 590 and USD 650 for a video card is insanity even for the most hardcore gamers, as there are high-end video cards that provide far better cost/benefit ratio available at the market (Radeon X1800 XT and GeForce 7800 GTX are good options with you have the money to buy them and Radeon X1800 XL and GeForce 7800 GT are terrific solutions for those that aren't crazy enough to pay more than USD 400 on a video card).
--hardwaresecrets.com
General Retail Point of Sale, Food & Beverage Point of Sale and other vertical markets. When Ultra Wide Band is available then all the cables disappear. Chips that include a combined UWB and Bluetooth implementation will be able, finally, to free workplaces and homes of cabling, a major step forward. Look what happened to the telephone when the cord was cut. Embedded computing solutions absolutely demand the elimination of all cables and the presumption of the ability to work with a whole universe of devices, peripherals, machines and intelligent control systems.
Desktop users will not understand this. The rest of the world will.
If you're looking for a team to join, how about Tech Report, # 2630
later...
You know, if you ask people how you 'catch a cold' a lot of them would say that if you are too cold, and especially if you get wet and cold, then you catch a cold. A few short generations ago virii were unknown to us. Want to help defeat the common cold? Join Stanford's Folding Project.