Brain Workshop is a free, open-source program which can make you smarter. It implements the dual n-back task, which has been shown to improve people's performance on IQ tests in threeseparatestudies.
According to http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0360544204004888, fossil fuel CO2 emissions during the 1990s was 23.5 petagrams of CO2 per year. Ethanol consumption per capita in 2005 for the United States was 2.2 gallons (http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Resource/GraphicsGallery/Epidemiology/consfigs1.htm), or 6.6 kg per person. Assuming that's roughly representative of the world as a whole (a generous estimate), the world drinks 44 teragrams of ethanol per year. Roughly, human ethanol consumption emits 0.2% of the CO2 that fossil fuel consumption does.
The mass of CO2 used to pressurize kegs is certainly trivial, since it occupies roughly the same volume as the ethanol with much lower density. Also, the CO2 used to pressurize them was produced as the byproduct of other industrial processes, so it shouldn't be counted twice.
Besides which, all of the carbon in ethanol came from the atmosphere anyway, so the net change is 0.
Americans bought 12,000,000 new cars in 2005. At $25,000 per car, that's $300 billion per year. More than 75% of New Yorkers did not own a car in 2000. Total expenditures on roads at all three levels of government (federal, state, and local) were $112 billion in 1999. The New York subway has 842 miles of track (including non-revenue-generating track), only 60% of which is below ground. At your quoted $400 million per mile (assuming 100% below ground), the NYC subway would cost very roughly $330 billion to build today. That's a lot of money. However, considering that the NYC subway has lasted us 104 years so far, and saved $4.6 billion in gasoline costs alone in 2006 (when oil cost roughly $70/barrel), reduces commute times and pollution, allows denser cities, reduces expenditures on roads and new cars, etc., and subways may begin to make more sense. I don't think subways make sense everywhere, but I do think they're underutilized by maybe a factor of four in the USA.
I'd also really like to see more money assigned to PRT research. PRT has the potential to produce public transit networks with passenger capacity similar to heavy rail at $1-50 million per mile and with competitive transit times. PRT also has the added benefit of potentially allowing for much faster transportation than cars or subway--a PRT system that runs at 160 km/h (100 mph) nonstop from within 2 blocks of your origin and destination is plausible with enough capital.
This discussion needs more numbers. If you don't want to read all of the below, then at least read this: sorghum-based ethanol cars use 200 times as much land as solar panel-powered battery-electric (not hybrid) cars.
In 2006 the USA consumed 5.1x10^11 L of gasoline. Gasoline's energy of combustion is 34.8 MJ/L; ethanol's is 23.5 MJ/L, or 68% that of gasoline, so replacing the USA's gasoline consumption would require 7.5x10^11 L of ethanol. Sorghum can produce 3100-7600 L ethanol per hectare, or 3.1-7.6x10^5 L/km^2. Let's assume 5.0x10^5 L/km^2. The total area of the USA is 9.83x10^6--that includes agricultural powerhouses like Alaska and Los Angeles. To replace our gasoline consumption with ethanol, we would need to use 1.50x10^6 km^2 of land, or 15.2% of that. In 2002, 20% of US land use was agricultural, and 26% was pasture land. Harvesting sorghum is more akin to harvesting corn than to letting cows roam free, so the agricultural portion is likely to see a larger hit, so in order to fulfill all our gasoline needs with ethanol the USA would probably have to halve it's agricultural production. That's impractical. Diverting smaller amounts of land to ethanol production is still not worth it; the land is simply better used for producing food for the world's burgeoning population. (Alternatively, the USA could shrink its national parks, forests, and wilderness preserves.) Gasoline only accounted for 23% of all energy used in the USA in 2004, and 61% of fossil fuels used for transportation. Diverting agricultural land to biofuel production is a bad idea.
(On the other hand, the USA produces a lot of waste biomass. Reclaiming this as biofuel is a good idea, since it reduces landfill use while also providing energy. However, this can be at most a supplemental energy source, since it can't be scaled past the amount of biomass waste we produce. McDonald's only makes so many french fries.)
The internal combustion engine is grossly inefficient. A typical gasoline car engine and drivetrain in typical usage is able to convert about 20% of the chemical energy in gasoline into kinetic energy; the rest is lost as heat. Diesel engines are better, largely due to their higher compression ratios, and average roughly 25%. Modern gas turbine power plants extract about 60%. For comparison, fuel cells can convert roughly 36% of the energy stored in H_2 to kinetic energy in typical automotive conditions; including energy expenditures in generating H_2 from electricity and storing it, that figure drops to 17% or 22% if stored as liquid or high-pressure gas, respectively. Electric motors convert 85-95% of the electrical energy input into kinetic energy. Battery charge-discharge efficiencies vary by chemistry from 66% (NiMH) to 99.8% (Li-based chemistries). Electrical transmission losses in the USA in 1995 were 7.2%. (I'm too lazy to look up transportation and processing losses for fossil fuels, so I'm assuming (inaccurately) that they're zero.) Thin-film solar cells convert about 15% of incident light energy into electricity, or 200 W/m^2 (perpendicular to the sun's rays, NOT parallel to the ground). At 38 degrees latitude, that figure drops to 126 W/m^2 (parallel to the ground). Annual average insolation is roughly 18 MJ/m^2/day in most of the USA, so a 15%-efficient solar panel would produce roughly 990 MJ/m^2/year of electricity.
Multiplying these efficiencies out, a battery-electric car powered off of a gas turbine gets 31-53% of the natur
Yeah, a sleep clinic would be a very good idea. Go to one. Spend a few nights there. See what they can find or tell you. They know a lot about abnormal sleep patterns than I do.
Being really tired or groggy for fifteen minutes or even forty-five minutes after waking is normal, and will happen even if you wake up in the middle of REM or stage two sleep. Being tired for several hours (but NOT groggy--there's a difference) in the morning after waking from REM or stage two is also pretty common, though not as universal as the above. Being groggy and unable to think straight for several hours suggests that you woke up during SWS.
From what you said, it sounds like you're having a more extreme version of the problem described in sentence two of the previous paragraph. One of my housemates has pretty much the same problem--he never really feels awake and alert until about 6:00pm every day, and can rarely stay awake during even the most interesting classes. His family has a lot of atypical narcolepsy-like sleep disturbances. It sounds like you may have something similar. Of course, you might also have sleep apnea or something simple like that, too--you'll have to find out.
In the short term, you can try playing around with your alarm clock settings. Try to start going to bed at exactly the same time every night, but change your alarm clock time by ten minutes or so each night, and see if you can find a time that works better for you. Paradoxical as it might seem, you may have to sleep less every night in order to feel better. Personally, I think that this won't fix your problem, but it's definitely something you should try.
It might come to drugs for you. Don't be afraid of them; some of the new anti-narcoleptics are quite effective and come with very few side effects. I recommend that you check out modafinil (brand name, Provigil): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinilhttp://www.modafinil.com/http://www.erowid.org/smarts/modafinil/. Go to a sleep clinic, ask them about modafinil, and have them watch you. If they can't find an easier or better solution, modafinil or something like it may be able to lessen your symptoms dramatically.
Nothing in the above is intended to diagnose any condition, or recommend any treatment for any condition, blah blah blah.
I think this article (the news version, at least--I haven't read the actual paper yet, so I can't comment on it) makes one gross error of omission: there is very little discussion of where in the sleep cycles the subjects were woken up. The only thing I've seen that even remotely relates is the 8-hour sleep period used, and that disturbs me for reasons I'll go into later.
So the human sleep cycle is about 90 minutes in length, and is composed of up to five stages. Stage one sleep is just a euphemism for barely-awake drowsiness. Stage two sleep is the first stage of what we typically call "sleep". It's a rather light sleep, usually dreamless or with vague, poorly-defined hallucination-like dreams. The EEG of stage two sleep is characterized by dominant theta wave (4-8 Hz) activity with small amounts of alpha (8-12 Hz) and delta (0.5-4 Hz). Stages three and four are commonly called "deep sleep" or "slow wave sleep" (SWS), and are defined according to the amount of delta waves present. By definition, stage three consists of 20-50% delta wave activity and stage four consists of more than 50% delta wave activity. These stages are completely dreamless, as the brain is nearly completely inactive during these times. Stage five sleep is also known as REM sleep. During the other four sleep stages, the eyes have little or no movement (as measured by electrooculogram, or EOG), and muscle tone is moderate (as measured by electromyogram, or EMG). During REM sleep, this pattern reverses: the eyes move rapidly, as if the subject were awake and alert, whereas muscular activity and tone flatlines. REM sleep is where the majority of dreams occur, and all of the more vivid ones. EEG and brain activity is similar to stage two sleep. I don't know for sure, but something makes me want to say that while theta waves are the dominant waveform in REM sleep, a fair amount of beta (> 12 Hz) and alpha present as well, moreso than stage 2 sleep.
There's a paper or two in Claudio Stampi's/Why We Nap/ that describes performance on cognitive tests (e.g., a mathematical reasoning test) after being woken up from each of the five stages of sleep. They tested subjects who had been deprived of sleep for some period of time (I think about 24 hours or less), and then let the subjects sleep for between something like 15 minutes and 80 minutes, depending on their random group assignment and how long they took to enter each stage. On average, the cohort woken up in the middle of stage one, two, and five sleep performed the best, with cognitive deficits disappearing after about 40 minutes, followed by performance that for up to four hours significantly exceeded their pre-nap (and sleep-deprived) performance. Of those three groups, those woken during REM sleep performed the best, and those "woken" during stage one sleep (i.e., drowsy wakefulness) performed the worse, taking about 10 more minutes before shaking off the weight of slumber. On the other hand, those woken during SWS had much greater deficits that lasted several hours, followed by a (shorter) period of above-baseline performance that lasted until about four hours after being woken.
If the subjects in this study performed that poorly for several hours after being woken, they were probably woken during SWS. Given that they were given 8 hours to sleep, they probably were woken during SWS.
An average (uninterrupted) sleep cycle typically consists of about 25-40 minutes of stage one and two sleep at the beginning, 10-40 minutes of SWS in the middle, and 0-35 minutes of REM at the end. The amount of each stage of sleep depends on a number of factors, such as the time of day, the time since the last sleep, the amount of "sleep debt" (which is really SWS debt), how physically active the person has been (physical exhaustion produces more and deeper SWS), how mentally active the person has been (the more things a person has learned in the last 1-4 days, the more REM sleep the person will typically get--especially if the new knowledge is procedur
Slashdot Mirror
Brain Workshop is a free, open-source program which can make you smarter. It implements the dual n-back task, which has been shown to improve people's performance on IQ tests in three separate studies.
According to http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0360544204004888, fossil fuel CO2 emissions during the 1990s was 23.5 petagrams of CO2 per year. Ethanol consumption per capita in 2005 for the United States was 2.2 gallons (http://www.niaaa.nih.gov/Resource/GraphicsGallery/Epidemiology/consfigs1.htm), or 6.6 kg per person. Assuming that's roughly representative of the world as a whole (a generous estimate), the world drinks 44 teragrams of ethanol per year. Roughly, human ethanol consumption emits 0.2% of the CO2 that fossil fuel consumption does.
The mass of CO2 used to pressurize kegs is certainly trivial, since it occupies roughly the same volume as the ethanol with much lower density. Also, the CO2 used to pressurize them was produced as the byproduct of other industrial processes, so it shouldn't be counted twice.
Besides which, all of the carbon in ethanol came from the atmosphere anyway, so the net change is 0.
Americans bought 12,000,000 new cars in 2005. At $25,000 per car, that's $300 billion per year. More than 75% of New Yorkers did not own a car in 2000. Total expenditures on roads at all three levels of government (federal, state, and local) were $112 billion in 1999. The New York subway has 842 miles of track (including non-revenue-generating track), only 60% of which is below ground. At your quoted $400 million per mile (assuming 100% below ground), the NYC subway would cost very roughly $330 billion to build today. That's a lot of money. However, considering that the NYC subway has lasted us 104 years so far, and saved $4.6 billion in gasoline costs alone in 2006 (when oil cost roughly $70/barrel), reduces commute times and pollution, allows denser cities, reduces expenditures on roads and new cars, etc., and subways may begin to make more sense. I don't think subways make sense everywhere, but I do think they're underutilized by maybe a factor of four in the USA.
I'd also really like to see more money assigned to PRT research. PRT has the potential to produce public transit networks with passenger capacity similar to heavy rail at $1-50 million per mile and with competitive transit times. PRT also has the added benefit of potentially allowing for much faster transportation than cars or subway--a PRT system that runs at 160 km/h (100 mph) nonstop from within 2 blocks of your origin and destination is plausible with enough capital.
I used the figures for switchgrass, but wrote sorghum. My apologies.
This discussion needs more numbers. If you don't want to read all of the below, then at least read this: sorghum-based ethanol cars use 200 times as much land as solar panel-powered battery-electric (not hybrid) cars.
In 2006 the USA consumed 5.1x10^11 L of gasoline. Gasoline's energy of combustion is 34.8 MJ/L; ethanol's is 23.5 MJ/L, or 68% that of gasoline, so replacing the USA's gasoline consumption would require 7.5x10^11 L of ethanol. Sorghum can produce 3100-7600 L ethanol per hectare, or 3.1-7.6x10^5 L/km^2. Let's assume 5.0x10^5 L/km^2. The total area of the USA is 9.83x10^6--that includes agricultural powerhouses like Alaska and Los Angeles. To replace our gasoline consumption with ethanol, we would need to use 1.50x10^6 km^2 of land, or 15.2% of that. In 2002, 20% of US land use was agricultural, and 26% was pasture land. Harvesting sorghum is more akin to harvesting corn than to letting cows roam free, so the agricultural portion is likely to see a larger hit, so in order to fulfill all our gasoline needs with ethanol the USA would probably have to halve it's agricultural production. That's impractical. Diverting smaller amounts of land to ethanol production is still not worth it; the land is simply better used for producing food for the world's burgeoning population. (Alternatively, the USA could shrink its national parks, forests, and wilderness preserves.) Gasoline only accounted for 23% of all energy used in the USA in 2004, and 61% of fossil fuels used for transportation. Diverting agricultural land to biofuel production is a bad idea.
(On the other hand, the USA produces a lot of waste biomass. Reclaiming this as biofuel is a good idea, since it reduces landfill use while also providing energy. However, this can be at most a supplemental energy source, since it can't be scaled past the amount of biomass waste we produce. McDonald's only makes so many french fries.)
The internal combustion engine is grossly inefficient. A typical gasoline car engine and drivetrain in typical usage is able to convert about 20% of the chemical energy in gasoline into kinetic energy; the rest is lost as heat. Diesel engines are better, largely due to their higher compression ratios, and average roughly 25%. Modern gas turbine power plants extract about 60%. For comparison, fuel cells can convert roughly 36% of the energy stored in H_2 to kinetic energy in typical automotive conditions; including energy expenditures in generating H_2 from electricity and storing it, that figure drops to 17% or 22% if stored as liquid or high-pressure gas, respectively. Electric motors convert 85-95% of the electrical energy input into kinetic energy. Battery charge-discharge efficiencies vary by chemistry from 66% (NiMH) to 99.8% (Li-based chemistries). Electrical transmission losses in the USA in 1995 were 7.2%. (I'm too lazy to look up transportation and processing losses for fossil fuels, so I'm assuming (inaccurately) that they're zero.) Thin-film solar cells convert about 15% of incident light energy into electricity, or 200 W/m^2 (perpendicular to the sun's rays, NOT parallel to the ground). At 38 degrees latitude, that figure drops to 126 W/m^2 (parallel to the ground). Annual average insolation is roughly 18 MJ/m^2/day in most of the USA, so a 15%-efficient solar panel would produce roughly 990 MJ/m^2/year of electricity.
Multiplying these efficiencies out, a battery-electric car powered off of a gas turbine gets 31-53% of the natur
Yeah, a sleep clinic would be a very good idea. Go to one. Spend a few nights there. See what they can find or tell you. They know a lot about abnormal sleep patterns than I do.
Being really tired or groggy for fifteen minutes or even forty-five minutes after waking is normal, and will happen even if you wake up in the middle of REM or stage two sleep. Being tired for several hours (but NOT groggy--there's a difference) in the morning after waking from REM or stage two is also pretty common, though not as universal as the above. Being groggy and unable to think straight for several hours suggests that you woke up during SWS.
From what you said, it sounds like you're having a more extreme version of the problem described in sentence two of the previous paragraph. One of my housemates has pretty much the same problem--he never really feels awake and alert until about 6:00pm every day, and can rarely stay awake during even the most interesting classes. His family has a lot of atypical narcolepsy-like sleep disturbances. It sounds like you may have something similar. Of course, you might also have sleep apnea or something simple like that, too--you'll have to find out.
In the short term, you can try playing around with your alarm clock settings. Try to start going to bed at exactly the same time every night, but change your alarm clock time by ten minutes or so each night, and see if you can find a time that works better for you. Paradoxical as it might seem, you may have to sleep less every night in order to feel better. Personally, I think that this won't fix your problem, but it's definitely something you should try.
It might come to drugs for you. Don't be afraid of them; some of the new anti-narcoleptics are quite effective and come with very few side effects. I recommend that you check out modafinil (brand name, Provigil): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modafinil http://www.modafinil.com/ http://www.erowid.org/smarts/modafinil/. Go to a sleep clinic, ask them about modafinil, and have them watch you. If they can't find an easier or better solution, modafinil or something like it may be able to lessen your symptoms dramatically.
Nothing in the above is intended to diagnose any condition, or recommend any treatment for any condition, blah blah blah.
I think this article (the news version, at least--I haven't read the actual paper yet, so I can't comment on it) makes one gross error of omission: there is very little discussion of where in the sleep cycles the subjects were woken up. The only thing I've seen that even remotely relates is the 8-hour sleep period used, and that disturbs me for reasons I'll go into later.
/Why We Nap/ that describes performance on cognitive tests (e.g., a mathematical reasoning test) after being woken up from each of the five stages of sleep. They tested subjects who had been deprived of sleep for some period of time (I think about 24 hours or less), and then let the subjects sleep for between something like 15 minutes and 80 minutes, depending on their random group assignment and how long they took to enter each stage. On average, the cohort woken up in the middle of stage one, two, and five sleep performed the best, with cognitive deficits disappearing after about 40 minutes, followed by performance that for up to four hours significantly exceeded their pre-nap (and sleep-deprived) performance. Of those three groups, those woken during REM sleep performed the best, and those "woken" during stage one sleep (i.e., drowsy wakefulness) performed the worse, taking about 10 more minutes before shaking off the weight of slumber. On the other hand, those woken during SWS had much greater deficits that lasted several hours, followed by a (shorter) period of above-baseline performance that lasted until about four hours after being woken.
So the human sleep cycle is about 90 minutes in length, and is composed of up to five stages. Stage one sleep is just a euphemism for barely-awake drowsiness. Stage two sleep is the first stage of what we typically call "sleep". It's a rather light sleep, usually dreamless or with vague, poorly-defined hallucination-like dreams. The EEG of stage two sleep is characterized by dominant theta wave (4-8 Hz) activity with small amounts of alpha (8-12 Hz) and delta (0.5-4 Hz). Stages three and four are commonly called "deep sleep" or "slow wave sleep" (SWS), and are defined according to the amount of delta waves present. By definition, stage three consists of 20-50% delta wave activity and stage four consists of more than 50% delta wave activity. These stages are completely dreamless, as the brain is nearly completely inactive during these times. Stage five sleep is also known as REM sleep. During the other four sleep stages, the eyes have little or no movement (as measured by electrooculogram, or EOG), and muscle tone is moderate (as measured by electromyogram, or EMG). During REM sleep, this pattern reverses: the eyes move rapidly, as if the subject were awake and alert, whereas muscular activity and tone flatlines. REM sleep is where the majority of dreams occur, and all of the more vivid ones. EEG and brain activity is similar to stage two sleep. I don't know for sure, but something makes me want to say that while theta waves are the dominant waveform in REM sleep, a fair amount of beta (> 12 Hz) and alpha present as well, moreso than stage 2 sleep.
There's a paper or two in Claudio Stampi's
If the subjects in this study performed that poorly for several hours after being woken, they were probably woken during SWS. Given that they were given 8 hours to sleep, they probably were woken during SWS.
An average (uninterrupted) sleep cycle typically consists of about 25-40 minutes of stage one and two sleep at the beginning, 10-40 minutes of SWS in the middle, and 0-35 minutes of REM at the end. The amount of each stage of sleep depends on a number of factors, such as the time of day, the time since the last sleep, the amount of "sleep debt" (which is really SWS debt), how physically active the person has been (physical exhaustion produces more and deeper SWS), how mentally active the person has been (the more things a person has learned in the last 1-4 days, the more REM sleep the person will typically get--especially if the new knowledge is procedur