Radderz’ Randomness

Ever since I first read about the Uberman sleep cycle back in the early naughties, I have been somewhat obsessed to try it out, mainly due to it’s abnormality, the lack of knowledge about the subject  (and as such prone to lots of biased negative talk) and the massive time benefits this presents.

My main reasoning for doing this experiment is to give me extra time to do things that my present lifestyle just doesn’t allow. As a working professional, my job takes up a fair portion of my life, and on occasions all of it. This extra time is not aimed at gaining more for additional work that needs doing, but to increase the quality of life for things I’ve had to sacrifice as a consequence.

A polyphasic sleep pattern can increase waking time up to around 22 hours, enabling enough time to cook decent meals (I’m a vegetarian, and unfortunately my diet can be effected on occasions whenever I feel too tired to cook), increase the quality of relaxation, and deal with personal tasks which sometimes get postponed and forgotten - I seem to always have a lot of them. By doing this, I can increase my health simply from my willingness to eat healthily and exercise on a daily basis which I currently feel I can’t do due to time constraints or feeling too tired. If you think about it, regular sleeps should be more efficient for your mind, as it does not need to cope with large lengths of time in between whatever it is it needs to do.

Some may say why not just use time management techniques? Well, I guess this is a form of time management technique, I love to be different and attempt things that can improve life or efficiencies that others disregard simply because they’re not standard/normal. People tend to say that it isn’t natural, and that it could have long term damaging effects, however, many animals live this way throughout their lives, and children are actually born polyphasic and remain this way for the first few years of their life until otherwise trained and able to go such large lengths of time between sleeps (eventually reaching the average 16 hours).

There is a certain amount of preparation which needs to be done before attempting a sleep cycle alteration. I have attempted this several times, but all have been half hearted, and if there’s one thing that is pretty obvious, you need full devotion to train your brain to accept a huge change to the fundamental way it works. This is why I’ve decided to make a full blog devoted to the lead up preparation, and cycle by cycle data in order to both help others achieve the same state, and to give me tasks which I can perform step by step while I’m too groggy to be able to think straight. Also, as this is an experiment, some of these step by step tasks are designed to test my mental ability at the start, middle and end of each cycle, and also physical data like weight, hydration, body fat, and food consumption. If there is any other data or tasks which people think may be useful, please let me know.

Below is a list which must be completed over the coming months before I attempt the switch over.

• Stop drinking alchol - Unfortantly, as nice as it is, it probably won’t help and I want to lead a healthy lifestyle too.
• Stop drinking caffine - Juices, smooties and water from now on.
• Arrange a date - Prefreably over a bank holiday to minimise loss of productive time at work (Easter is looking ideal)
• Inform everyone of the change - You can only do this with the support of others. Without it, it can be near on impossible.
• Arange tasks to perform, both general and cycle by cycle for the first fortnight.
• Arrange food to be cooked and eaten. State time when it should be cooked, and which cycles it can be eaten in. Also arrange snacks/smaller meals as more food is required and being unprepared can be a danger while in transition.
• Create a dedicated blog for the experiment.

Personal Personal, Polyphasic sleep, Silly Conventions

Dvorak is an optimized keyboard layout designed to help reduce the movement of the users fingers resulting in increased typing speed and a reduced strain on the fingers preventing repetitive strain injury.

Computer keyboards do not have the constraints QWERTY typewriters once had, therefore Dvorak was made in 1936 by Dr August Dvorak in order to be the most effective layout. Typewriters had to have a layout as such that when a typist was typing quickly, the hammers wouldn’t jam, thus common keys were at opposite sides of the keyboard.

I started using Dvorak as my primary keyboard layout in 2003, and learned it on a qwerty keyboard without rearranging the keys to force myself straight into touch typing (which is still how I type today). However, as a programmer, I have noticed some very awkward combinations when doing anything other then what typewriters were originally designed for, ie not typing words.

First off, you notice it is not optimized for the web. Typing ‘.’ with the ‘www.’ and ‘.com’, ‘.co.uk’ and ‘@’ symbol is a little awkward, but is still not worth worrying about. Cut, Copy and Paste, ‘x’, ‘c’, ‘v’ are all over the place, so having cut and paste as ‘x’ and ‘v’ become a little meaningless, and you do start to get concerned over pressing ‘ctrl-w’ instead of ‘ctrl-v’ by mistake, which is close window, followed by a lot of annoying retyping or navigation in a browser.

Secondly, as a coder, you notice that certain symbol combinations are actually slow to type, and permanently needs the shift key to be pressed/released causing mega slowness. (However is that much different from qwerty?)

Programmer Dvorak helps the second point, converting the top number row to be primarily symbols, with numbers avalible with the shift key, ordered in odds on the left, evens on the right (the originally Dvorak layout). This is available as an additional driver for windows, linux and mac.

Techie Silly Conventions

History of BST

In 1916, During world war I, the official dates for British Summer Time were set by parliament. BST offered the benefit of an extra hour of sunlight during the evening, saving valuable energy through the reduction of demand in electric lighting - among other benefits too.

Normally, BST is +1 hour to GMT through the summer months within the UK. During the second world war however, BDST (British Double Summer Time) existed, which is +2 hours. This put us in line with central Europe, but again had benefits of saving energy while resources were low.

Plan to Change BST

If we can introduce BDST for the war, surely we could do exactly the same to reduce our carbon emissions? In fact, we could actually make a version of BST to be +3-4 GMT (Call it, Energy Saving British Summer Time)

In effect, a change to this degree would mean we would wake up just after dawn (8am ESBST will be 4am GMT), go to work 9-5 (5am-1pm GMT), and spend the evening with a warm sunlight, with it finally setting around midnight - 1am (depending the time of summer).

Social Factors

If we think about it, having the evening with sunlight will reduce certain types of crime, and bring a feeling of living in a safer atmosphere during the what would have been hours of darkness. When people start to leave clubs for example, they will leave during dusk rather then when it is completely dark. ‘Dark streets’ will feel lighter and safer during the evening, and people’s attitudes to them will change.

It will also aid cases of depression, having visible sunlight all day long. It will certainly lighten up people’s attitudes; when they come home from work, and after eating, they can spend more time outside, avoiding indoor activities such as mindless TV or computer usage. In the same vain, it could help the economy, as people in the evening would be more inclined to spend their time out and about. Social events/activities will increase, evening concerts/arts will be more appealing. All in all, this will be a very positive thing.

Energy Savings

By moving the clocks forward one hour during the summer periods, everyone throughout the country uses one hour less electricity for powering lights per day. Lets work out a rough estimate on how much energy we will save on lighting alone:

(Note that this estimate could be slightly on the high side, but we’re not going to take into account the vast amount of power lost through transmission lines)

We know from the 2001 census that there are 21,660,000 occupied residential households.

Lets estimate that the average household uses 3 60watt light bulbs for 3 hours a day. This will equal 0.54kwh per day, or 113.4kWh for the 7 months (210 days).

Now, if we multiply this by the number of households, we get 2,456,244MWh, which will be the equivalent of removing an evil Coal or gas power plant?

This is only lighting. If people start watching less TV in the evenings, there will be additional savings from this, possibly of the equivelent nature.

Enviromental Enviromental, Silly Conventions