A few days ago I needed to grab some lunch before teaching at the Crucible. I thought “Hmm, I could pay $5 for a sandwich at Subway or… hey what about those McDonalds Dollar Menu McDouble Cheeseburgers? Certainly 5 double cheeseburgers is more food than just 1 Subway Sandwich.”
Dearest reader, I’m sure you know how this ended. Poorly. I got 3 McDoubles and continued my day. After 10 minutes I felt rejuvenated having put food in my belly. About 40 minutes later I got this “not so good” feeling. Like maybe I had eaten too much salt and/or fat without enough… without enough of anything else. Blah! I felt buzzed and bothered and had a little extra trouble focusing on my tasks all evening. :-(
From the McDonalds website:
390 calories – reasonable for a buck
170 calories from fat (44%) – pretty high, don’t eat these every day!
920 mg of sodium (38% of your RDA) – It’s a fucking salt sandwich!
My friend Barry now has a weekly radio program on KSRO radio. The station is based in Sonoma County. It’s called “The Clean Energy Show with Barry Cogbill” :-) He talks about solar power, energy efficiency, green jobs and other stuff each week!
The show airs Wednesdays from 12:30pm to 1pm on AM 1350, KSRO
My little corner of the internet gets a surprising amount of look-sees.
The blog gets about 800 hits a day according to WordPress Stats
Lee.org got about 4.7 million page views in 2009 and 15 million file requests.
Last week Lee.org got about 100,000 page requests!
Take a glance at some stats from Analog:
Analyzed requests from Tue, Apr 25 2006 at 12:03 AM to Sun, Mar 07 2010 at 12:57 AM (1412.04 days)
Figures in parentheses refer to the 7-day period ending Mar 07 2010 at 3:53 AM.
Successful requests: 65,999,273 (414,283)
Average successful requests per day: 46,740 (59,183)
Successful requests for pages: 13,864,666 (123,701)
Average successful requests for pages per day: 9,818 (17,671)
Failed requests: 768,050 (182)
Redirected requests: 608,002 (734)
Data transferred: 2.38 terabytes (11.64 gigabytes)
Average data transferred per day: 1.73 gigabytes (1.66 gigabytes)
Steve Nelson just forwarded along this awesome OK Go music video.
I’ve been teaching Introduction to Mechanical Sculpture and Electromechanics for Everything at the Crucible. So I sent this to my students as encouragement:
I had a recent conversation with a friend about polyphasic sleep. Here’s my followup email to him about this
——————
…It was my impression that you believed polyphasic sleeping couldn’t be done because people just aren’t capable of doing it for more than a short period of time (IE like the breatharian argument – no one is a breatharian for more than a few weeks because they die).
Morgan Engel presented at the September 2009 5 Minutes of Fame “A Primer on Polyphasic Sleeping”. http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2180170 25 minutes into the video. At 29:00 he says (paraphrased ) “I did it for 6 months and it was great. I taught myself many things with the extra time. I had to stop because my girlfriend thought it was weird”. But also … “it’s really hard to do because to have to live a regimented lifestyle.” That is a popular refrain I’ve seen from others.
If this page (http://trypolyphasic.com/map) is any indication, there are maybe 100-1000 people in the world who say they have successfully done polyphasic sleep.
That said, I think a good simple summary would be:
Polyphasic sleep is certainly possible. However, it takes at least as much personal effort as going to a gym regularly. The awkward social aspects add to the difficulty.
Since I’ve never been able to make it to a gym on a regular basis despite trying and knowing that there are many personal benefits (having more energy, improved physical strength, needing less sleep), and I don’t feel a serious desire to attempt this, I’m not going to. At least not right now… ;-)
The International Space Station (ISS) will be passing over San Francisco Thursday night!
Look up in the southwestern sky at exactly 6:57pm on Thursday night and you’ll see the International Space Station appear and fly all the way to the northeastern horizon. It should take about 4 minutes to go from horizon to horizon. It looks a bit like a jet flying at very high altitude, only it’s way too bright, it will likely be the brightest thing in the sky besides the moon, brighter than venus, brighter than watching the planes coming into SFO on Bernal Hill! When I first saw it on Bernal Hill last year, it took my breath away. It’s this tiny tin can moving at 20,000 miles an hour with 5 astronauts bobbing around inside, an artificial satelight that was put there by all these countries cooperating with one another.
