| Sleep video |
[Dec. 15th, 2009|11:17 am] |
Some material from my Quantified Self presentation on sleep self-experimentation is on Wired's blog today.
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Some Q&A:
> Why are you doing these sleep experiments?
I'm hoping to improve my amount of wakeful, pleasurable, and productive time during the day by improving my sleep. I've been specifically trying to shorten sleep latency and decrease awakenings during the night.
> You've done some experiments with drugs. What works best? What sucks?
I tested sleeping pills for two things -- effectiveness at getting me to fall and stay asleep, and the amount of "hangover" I experienced during the next day. I found two types of sleeping pills that worked best for me. Melatonin was best for typical situations, as it was moderately effective and had almost no hangover effect. Ambien was best for extreme situations (eg a noisy bus) as it was highly effective and had only moderate hangover effect. Ambien also had the nice side effect of resetting my circadian rhythms, so it's great for adjusting to new time zones when traveling internationally. Diphenhydramine HCl (the active ingredient in most over-the-counter sleeping pills) was the worst as it was moderately effective but produced a very strong hangover effect. I noticed that it also tends to lower my sleep quality by dramatically increasing the amount of snoring and number of apnea events.
Of course, effectiveness and side effects vary from person to person. I am not a doctor. Consult your doctor before [disclaimer] etc.
> What advice do you offer to friends who want to improve their sleep?
Different people have very different sleep issues. Some people have difficulty going to sleep. Others have difficulty staying asleep. Still others have a lot of awakenings during the night.
As a result, I'd recommend tracking the aspects of sleep you have trouble with and experimenting with various factors to see how they affect your sleep quality.
Some factors I'd recommend experimenting with include:
- If you share a bed, try a queen (or better yet, a king) bed and get one quilt per person so that your partner's sleep movements are less likely to disturb you.
- Get some aerobic exercise every day.
- Don't do stressful things (work, arguments etc) late at night.
- Lower the lights during the last couple of hours that you're awake.
- Play with your diet. Don't eat large amounts of protein (or large amounts of food in general) late at night.
- Try a range of sleeping pills to find one that works well for you on nights where you can't fall asleep naturally.
- Use curtains and timed lights to control the morning onset of light in the bedroom.
- Sleep with earplugs.
- Change sleep posture (side vs back vs face down)
It is of course worth talking to sleep specialists as well. The Stanford Sleep Clinic is one of the best in the country.
> After your experiments, what were you surprised about?
The biggest thing that surprised me was seeing how much I moved around while sleeping. It was fascinating to glimpse the workings of this hidden unconscious world that occupies close to a third of our lives.
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| Houston just elected an openly gay mayor |
[Dec. 13th, 2009|02:14 am] |
Houston just elected an openly gay mayor.
Several smaller cities in other regions have chosen openly gay mayors, among them Providence, R.I., Portland, Ore., and Cambridge, Mass. But Ms. Parker’s success came in a conservative state where voters have outlawed gay marriage and a city where a referendum on granting benefits to same-sex partners of city employees was soundly defeated.
When I visited Houston in 2001, it seemed to me to be a time warp back to the 1960s in terms of race and gender roles.
It blows my mind that a gay mayor could be elected in a city that doesn't support domestic partner benefits. Maybe it's the force of personality that an individual politician can bring to bear that makes the difference. Perhaps some voters object to homosexuality as an abstract concept but can relate positively to Mrs Parker as an individual person. Of course this is silly cognitive dissonance, so perhaps over time these individual examples may start to help people overcome their abstract distaste for it.
Meanwhile, the most powerful person in Houston can't get her employer's healthcare to cover her wife. |
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| What charities actually work? |
[Dec. 11th, 2009|11:18 am] |
A lot of research coming out lately has shown that many charities who are trying to help the 3rd world end up doing the opposite:
From an interview of the founder of KickStart in the WSJ:
You can't donate people out of poverty, although many people think so. [Economist] Jeff Sachs believes it will take $1.6 trillion a year, and he believes that a dollar a day people are too poor to invest in their own path out of poverty. Martin and I both feel that poor people have to invest time and money to move out of poverty. In Bangladesh, President Ershad was impressed with treadle pumps, so he said would give 10,000 of them to people in the district he came from. Then farmers stopped buying them, local manufacturers had to close their doors, and it set farmers back in that region two years.
I like KickStart's philosophy -- they create devices that dramatically improve the productivity of families in the 3rd world (such as irrigation pumps, brick-making machines etc). Then they sell them at cost to shops in 3rd world countries, who in turn sell them to local farmers. Their site claims some impressive numbers, showing that they've lifted hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty in a sustainable fashion. Their ultimate goal is to create a thriving middle class, which has been shown to be correlated with greater political stability.
Microfinance is a similar idea. Instead of us going in and buying the locals what what we think they need, it empowers them to use small amounts of money to create businesses that they can use to pull themselves out of poverty.
However, societies that are stuck in a state of mass poverty often have many things holding them back, and it's unclear whether just pressing on one lever will actually solve their intricate web of problems. There have been various studies showing a strong correlation between poverty and lack of women's rights. An organization called Half the Sky is looking to empower women as a way of getting African countries out of poverty.
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For those of you who know more about this than I do, what do you think of these organizations? Who else has a data-driven and results-driven approach? |
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| Dappled sunset over San Francisco |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|04:09 pm] |
I took a sunset walk with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) weiskind around Bernal Hill in San Francisco on a bitingly cold day shortly before sunset. We were freezing but we watched in pleasure as the sun shot through various holes in the clouds, illuminating various slivers of the city.
 
 
While walking back, I said "It would be awesome if the sun hit just that one smokestack." A couple of minutes later, it did.
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| Motion blur experiments |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|04:03 pm] |
If you set a camera to flash and are in a dark (bot not too dark) environment, especially an environment with a mix of foreground and background objects and a significantly varying light level, try the following experiment:
- Move the camera as you take the picture.
- If you're doing a portrait, move so that the camera remains pointed at the person you're photographing. This is easiest with a self-portrait as you can just point the camera at yourself and spin.
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| Algorithmic blunder |
[Dec. 9th, 2009|08:28 pm] |
A friend of a friend died suddenly at the age of 35 a couple of weeks ago.
Now, whenever I log into Facebook, it suggests "You haven't talked to [name] in a while. Reconnect with him." Facebook wants to make sure it's as sticky a medium as possible, so whenever anyone stops using it, it uses various tricks to pull them back such as encouraging all of their friends to message them. Facebook's software probably noticed that he went from posting several times a day to not posting at all, and that triggered the system to start working hard to pull him back in.
It's creepy as hell. It's probably far more awful for those who knew him well. It's also probably totally unintended on Facebook's part.
As we move toward having automatic systems taking an ever-more-active role in our social lives, expect this sort of thing to increase. |
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| Millennium party |
[Dec. 9th, 2009|07:38 pm] |
I'm thinking of having a Millennium party where we set the clock back 10 years to celebrate all the exciting progress we've had in the last decade.
We had a budget surplus, an irrationally booming market, easy air travel, and no foreign wars. We were upset over silly things like white house interns. You could still dress as a terrorist with a belt full of dynamite for Halloween.
Perhaps I shouldn't allow anything made after 2000 at the party. No cellphones (unless they have a B+W screen and no "smarts"). Music will be tricky. I don't have much on CD. Perhaps someone can bring a laptop running Winamp on Windows 98 or one of those Diamond Rio MP3 players that could hold like 60 songs.
Any other ideas? |
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| Transcendent Man |
[Dec. 9th, 2009|10:20 am] |
There's a documentary about Ray Kurzweil and Transhumanism coming out. It recently debuted at the TriBeCa film festival, and early reviews suggest it is quite good though the sample size (19) is small.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1117394/
I'm hoping this film will help his ideas get more mainstream attention. It's a hell of a lot easier to get big things done when public opinion is pushing with you. |
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| Farmville |
[Dec. 7th, 2009|12:42 am] |
The Facebook game Farmville apparently now has 69 million active users per month.
I've never played it, but I just read a review of it here.
The following paragraph caught my attention.
The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and "adopt" the adorable little self-promoter.
Sounds like my definition of gaming hell. It also reminded me of a thought I had around 10 years ago about how in the future, robotic toys would manipulate kids into buying accessories for them. For example, imagine a Barbie doll who sits around crying all the time because she had no new clothes to wear while all of her friends' Barbies had new outfits. |
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| H+ conference |
[Dec. 4th, 2009|03:55 pm] |
I'll be speaking on computer vision at the Humanity+ conference on Sunday. There will be a live webcast in case you want to spy on me remotely.
http://hplus.eventbrite.com/ |
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| Why rockstars demand that all the brown M&Ms be removed |
[Dec. 3rd, 2009|01:59 pm] |
The legendary "no brown M&Ms" contract clause was indeed real, but the purported motivation for it was not. The M&Ms provision was included in Van Halen's contracts not as an act of caprice, but because it served a practical purpose: to provide an easy way of determining whether the technical specifications of the contract had been thoroughly read (and complied with).
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/music/artists/vanhalen.asp
It's a useful tool for all kinds of contracts. If you want to spot-check compliance, sprinkle in a few random bits. |
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| Fun with credit reports |
[Dec. 1st, 2009|11:24 am] |
I just did my credit report for a potential new landlord. The credit score was good, but it noted the following dings against me:
> The amount owed on your revolving/charge accounts is too high
That's funny. I pay my balance off each month.
> You have too few/too many accounts being reported on your file
Which one is it? Too few or too many? They're keeping me guessing.
> There is a lack of recent (non-mortgage) installment loan information being reported on your credit file
As in, I'm not burdened by debt? Seems like that would be a good thing. Or maybe it means all my debt is with Mafia loan sharks. |
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| Watching my brainwaves |
[Nov. 30th, 2009|06:16 pm] |
After the Knot-Tying workshop at Noisebridge, I ended up chatting with a guy who is developing home EEG systems. He and some friends have used some open source hardware and software to create a system to do simple analysis of brainwaves. The system can distinguish activity levels in the different primary brainwave states as well as activity on the left and right sides of the brain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Comparison_table
I got hooked in and gave it a try.
The data is very messy, but a couple of interesting things came out of it:
- I have a high amount of coordination between the left and right hemispheres. This is more common in left-handed people, who tend to have less specialization of the hemispheres.
- I have constant delta waves when I'm awake. Delta waves are dominant during deep (stage 3 & 4) sleep, and most people don't have them when they are awake. However, when I did my sleep study, they found that I never reach stages 3 and 4 -- all my sleep is stage 1, 2, and REM. Or at least, it was all 1,2, and REM on the night they did the study. There's very little evidence to draw any connection, but it's conceivable that my body makes up for the lack of delta-wave sleep by running it "in the background" while I'm awake. I was also really tired when I did this.
- It's really hard to do specific tasks and analyze brainwave activity at the same time. Looking at the graphs involves a whole bunch of mental processing that, surprise surprise, shows up on the graph. It's a very complicated feedback loop. The cognitive load of looking at the real time brain data could be partially fixed by, for example, giving tactile feedback instead of visual feedback.
I'm going to meet up with him again in a couple of weeks and do some neurofeedback experiments.
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Also, as for knot-tying,
- If your shoelaces untie frequently, you should use a square knot instead of a granny knot. I only learned this about four years ago.
- The trucker hitch is awesome. It's the best burningman packing knot ever. |
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| Dubai's in very deep debt and can't make its payments |
[Nov. 25th, 2009|01:58 pm] |
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When I visited Dubai this past summer I had the sense that they were dramatically overextending themselves. I had no idea just how far it went.
From This article
Dubai will ask creditors of two of its flagship firms for a standstill on debt worth billions of dollars as a first step toward restructuring Dubai World, the conglomerate that spearheaded the emirate’s breakneck growth. The government’s announcement on Wednesday, which also said the consulting firm Deloitte had been appointed to help with the restructuring, sent the cost of insuring Dubai’s debt against default soaring and bond prices tumbling, Reuters reported.
Dubai World has $59 billion of liabilities, its subsidiary Nakheel said in August, a large proportion of Dubai’s total debt of $80 billion. |
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| [travel] Costa Rica trip part 4 - Alajuela |
[Nov. 24th, 2009|12:15 am] |
On the last day of the trip, we stayed in the city of Alajuela near the airport. We chose Alajuela because it was a substantial city close to the airport with relatively few tourists. It was our chance to experience a self-sufficient Costa Rican city as opposed to one dependent on tourism.
This whole adventure was more or less completely unplanned -- we picked Alajuela while making our way back to San Jose and decided to stay there. We spent the day wandering the streets, getting to know various shop owners and exploring the goods on offer at the numerous markets. After an surprisingly expensive lunch at Ceviche del Rey, described by LP as the "best ceviche in town", we went down to the local market and (despite bring full) reordered the exact same dishes at an unpretentious local eatery. The food was almost as good, and the price was about 1/4 what we paid in the other place. There wasn't much to hold a tourist's attention in Alajuela, but it offered an interesting sense of everyday life.
I didn't take out the camera much but there were a couple of memorable scenes. First, do you get the sense that there's a lot of rain here? Or perhaps this is just the low-cost alternative to a system of storm drains. In any case, it makes parallel parking a rather harrowing experience.
Second, I liked this convergence between traditional handmade sign painting and modern technology:
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| [travel] Costa Rica trip part 3 - Beach day |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|11:38 pm] |
After Santa Elena, we entered the totally unstructured plan-as-you-go portion of the trip. We decided to make a very trnasportation-intensive trip out to Paquera, the Curu Reserve, and Tortuga Island.
Tortuga Island (not to be confused with Tortugero, the gathering place of the sea turtles) is a small island with an idyllic sandy beach. On the weekends it's apparently overrun with day-trippers from San Jose, but during the week it's very sparsely populated. The water there was welcomingly warm, at least for the first couple of meters, and the surrounding landscape was beautiful. However, I made the shocking discovery here that unless I hold my lungs very full, I no longer float in water... not even seawater. Apparently I have very little body fat now.
We got the chance to do some snorkeling there as well. The variety of fish life was stunning but the water was too murky to make viewing conditions ideal. The water's murkiness also made diving while snorkeling a bit disorienting because it was impossible to see the surface of the water as I was coming back up.
On land, we extensively explored a mangrove swamp and rainforest. The adaptation of the mangrove is fantastic -- it can grow in shallow salt water, enabling an ecological process that turns shallow tide pools into land. They also make for some nice abstract art. The Curu reserve also contains several colonies of monkeys and the pet monkey mentioned in an earlier entry.
 
  
On the afternoon ferry ride back, we were treated to a glorious sunset.
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| [travel] Costa Rica trip part 2 - Santa Elena / Monteverde |
[Nov. 23rd, 2009|11:04 pm] |
For the second portion of our trip, we hit up Santa Elena, a small town whose present thriving state is owed almost entirely to ecotourism and the hundreds of square miles of rainforest that bring the ecotourists in. In a rare turn of events, many of the locals are pushing the government to *not* pave the roads to ensure that the town remains difficult to access. Even so, it's clear the town has grown substantially over the last 20 years. It was nice to be in a town with real local residents, supermarkets, and restaurants, instead of in an isolated resort. Our Spanish skills started getting a serious workout.
We went from the cheapest room at a nice hotel to the nicest room at a cheap hotel. It was a lovely bi-level loft with four mattresses and gleaming wood paneling. Over the next couple of days we squeezed in a trip out to a coffee plantation, a walk in the Santa Elena cloudforest, a night rainforest tour in which our guide spotted an astounding number of insects, a zip line tour of the jungle canopy, and the most ridiculously complete and beautiful insect collection I've ever seen.
The cloudforest and insect sightings, both outdoors and in the museum, are already photo-documented in my earlier entries, so I'll focus on the zip lines and the coffee tour.
What I find amusingly ironic about a zipline enterprise is that even though it doesn't really get you close to nature at all, it does a great job of preserving large swaths of rainforest. The whole point of the zipline setup is to get you flying through the treetops in an adrenaline-oriented way. However, given that the zipline operators have over 2 miles of ziplines in a single park, they end up needing a lot of land. Since the experience is meant to deliver *nature*, they end up not developing that land, as well as any other land within a mile or two. Thus, you end up with a profitable enterprise with an incentive to keep the rainforest pristine. The local environmental impact of the ziplining is extremely low... it's just a few metal towers and some maintenance trails, and the whizzing tourists might scare a few birds from time to time, but that's about it.
As for the experience itself, it was quite fun. It gave us some really nice visual perspectives on the rainforest and different canopy levels.
 
 
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The coffee plantation tour was an exercise in Spanish skills. All four of us on the tour had some level of SPanish proficiency, so the guide opted to relinquish the role of translator and just let the coffee farmer speak for himself. Getting an induction into the esoteric world of coffee production (it gets as complicated as it does with wine) was interesting, though I was so busy trying to understand all the Spanish that I ended up not being able to think much about the implications of it all. The plantation was small and hit all the eco-buzzwords. In addition to being organic, locally owned etc, it used large fruit trees for shade for the coffee plants, providing a second crop and apparently some other benefits having to do with soil, fertilization, and supporting local wildlife populations.
Apparently light coffee is better than dark coffee because dark coffee comes as a result of roasting at a higher temperature, which obliterates a lot of the variability you get from different species and growing conditions. Light coffee allows you to taste more of the variety in taste that different species and sources of coffee have to offer.
We got to eat coffee beans directly off the plant. They had a sweet flavor on the outside, with a slight hint of coffee. Unroasted beans still had a caffeine kick but a bland and mildly bitter taste.
 
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