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post 188

By anders pearson 09 Nov 2000

all this crap about the poor ballot design in florida has been making the usability pundits disgustingly self-righteous and i worry that it will be a long time before we ever hear the end of it. nevertheless, they’ve certainly got a point.

i experienced problems during my very first voting experience. when i was in grade school, we held a mock election. i was zoning out as usual (probably day-dreaming about dinosaurs or planes) while the teacher was explaining to the class that you could check off your choice with either a check mark or an X but that you could only check one box. the warped version of the instructions that made it past the dinosaurs and planes to my brain was that you should use a check to mark the one you want and put an X in the box of the candidate that you didn’t want. so i marched into our makeshift voting booth and checked one box, X-ed out the other. later, the teacher announced the winner and mentioned that someone in the class screwed up and marked both boxes. luckily, it was a secret ballot so i just kept my mouth shut and no one was the wiser.

of course, if you ever hear me tell the story again, don’t be surprised if i change it and in the new version, i performed my first act of rebellion against the system at the tender age of ten when i screwed with a mock election because i realized how much of a sham “democracy” in our country really is…

post 186

By anders pearson 08 Nov 2000

i am now more convinced than ever that there is a media consipiracy. it’s not a “liberal media conspiracy” as all the right-wing paranoids like to rant about, or even a “conservative media conspiracy.” it’s a conspiracy by the media to keep elections as close as possible. i think CNN and all the rest keep a close eye on the election and subtly help whichever candidate is behind or hurt whichever is ahead; an offhand remark by a newscaster here, a DUI charge dug up there… end result is that everyone in the US has to stay up till 3 am watching the news (and all the commercials therein) and we still don’t know who won.

post 184

By anders pearson 06 Nov 2000

one thing that i’ve wondered about for a long time and never really found a satisfactory answer to is why we need to sleep. there really doesn’t seem to be any real, easily verified function to sleep.

UCLA’s Basics of Sleep Behavior starts out as: “in spite of a century of scientific study of sleep, including three decades of modern intensive research, the function of sleep remains a biological enigma.” and then goes on to list several different theories on the matter. nothing there actually seems to be a compelling explanation of why we need to sleep. the best we can do, it seems, is to explain why we sleep in evolutionary terms: the reduced energy consumption and reduced degree of exposure to predators would give organisms that sleep an evolutionary advantage in many situations. but now that food is more or less abundant and i very rarely run into tigers wandering the streets of manhattan, it shouldn’t be necessary.

if we could explain it as “the body only produces certain hormones during sleep” than we would be able to synthesize those chemicals. and i don’t buy the “your brain needs to rest” explanation that people try to give when they haven’t really thought about it for very long. Nikola Tesla, according to his autobiography, slept about 2 hours a night for his entire adult life. Leonardo Da Vinci reportedly took a 15 minute nap every 4 hours and otherwise didn’t sleep at all. The UCSD School of medicine has even found that brain activity is increased by sleep deprivation.

why are we not researching methods of conquering sleep with the same intensity that we work on curing Aids and cancer? curing cancer will extend a percentage of people’s lives by a few years, and then only at the end. conquering sleep will effectively extend ALL our lives by 33% (assuming 8 hours a night of sleep; far more than i get…) and not just when we’re old. that’s 33% more of our youth as well.