嘘とワンダーランド

For about 2 weeks I’ve been sleeping monophasically, trying a few different core durations. What I called “promising” back then, I call “waste of time” now. I see no significant change in my retention rate (95% for old facts, 84% for new facts[1]), but my motivation and ability to concentrate has dropped. I’m getting less done and can’t think straight.
I had hoped that being able to work for >6 hours at a time would improve my ability to program and read, but this isn’t the case. My log shows that the longest time I programmed in one sitting was roughly 1.5 hours. I think that “the flow” is overrated, or at least there are viable alternatives.

Anyway, I might as well go polyphasic again, so I’m back in the game. *sigh* I’d love to do uberman, but I know how life just loves to throw that one can’t-skip event in my way after 3 weeks or so. Sorry, if I had the money to make sure I could just tell everybody to fuck off for a few hours, sure. So it’s everyman again. Let’s hope I have enough discipline, experience and stuff to do to succeed this time. :)

Same bat schedule[2], same bat channel!

[1] Of course the exact number is more indicative of the specific structure and content of the facts, but given a workload of 20 new facts and ~80-100 reviews a day, it should be clear that my memory is working fine.
[2] 3h core at 20:00, naps at 5:00, 10:00, 15:00, optimized with daylight, 8 months of polyphasic experimentation and exams in mind

If time travel is possible, there will be three distinct events that change the evolution of civilization forever:

1. Time travel is discovered. This will lead to two realizations. First, the past is painful to watch. Second, without additional teleportation, time travel is rather useless.
2. Teleportation is discovered. All civilization grinds to a halt as laziness takes over. A new dark age begins.
3. Time travel and teleportation are combined. It is now possible to retroactively punch someone in the face for being stupid. A new age of enlightenment begins.

Every once in a while I’ll stumble on some kind of utterance that is just weird enough that I’m wondering: Has somebody already created a new level of AI that can pass for a human, albeit a retarded one?

From: Frank <…>
Subject: dynamic linking
Newsgroup: de.comp.lang.perl.misc

Schönen Gruß, newsgroup,

Ich heiße Jensen und haette gern gefragt, ob Ihr in perl dynamische
Ablenkung (?) habt?  Wo kann ich merh darueber lesen?

Meine Zwecke sind zweierlei. Es ist nun zwanzig Jahre her, da ich bei
Euch war und ich waer gern mit meinen Freunden in Kontakt gekommen.
Sind unter Euch berliner?

Peace.

It kinda looks like spam, composed of two default parts: First, pick a random topic somewhat related to the group, ask a general question about it. Second, pretend to ask about a friend and get contact information and/or clicks. And it is probably babelfished. But, there is no link. And it has typos. And harvesting answers would be useless. So, wtfuck?

Do spam authors actually make their messages intentionally retarded to look more human? It would make sense, but oh what a killing blow to human supremacists this is…

See this article first. These re-posts are only meant to represent my own experience with polyphasic sleep, in a somewhat distilled form and only pointing out things that are not often mentioned. Common experiences can be found elsewhere. This does not necessarily represent my current views (but may, as those often change).

2009-02-10

Polyphasic sleep brings out two vices you never thought you even had: lack of discipline and impatience. The former is obvious, as you will screw up a lot and only make yourself suffer longer and longer the less disciplined you are. (That I needed a month until my brain stopped feeling like jam might tell you something about me…)
The later, however, is really getting annoying. Except for the short core I can’t skip any time at all anymore. If something takes 6 hours, like a download for example, I will be awake (almost) all the time and have to wait. Every. Minute. Of. It. You see everything pass. Someone just went to bed and you want to talk about something? Prepare to sit there, for 8 hours or more, fully awake. Wrote some email and await an answer? You’ll have memorized 500 digits of π before you get it. You can’t skip anything, can’t just hibernate a few hours. Once the sun went down, you’ll sit in darkness, for 14 hours and more right now. If you are not president by day, superhero by night and mad scientist on the side, you’ll be bored right out of your skull. Your puny hobbies are not enough for The Night That Never Ends, mortal!
(I’m learning a language, study a difficult topic, take drugs, program, watch a shitload of TV and I’ve been, during the last 2 months, seriously considering taking up another language, learning an instrument or getting a job just so I have something to do. This has passed and I’m now extending my former studies into the free time so that I can learn better and a lot faster.)

This is driving me nuts. However, in the end, I’ll be a better person because of it. I’ll learn how to not get distracted by anticipation and spent my time meaningfully. There’ll be a time when I’ll be getting 15 hours of sunlight a day. Until then, I’ll be a gibbering wreck.

See this article first. These re-posts are only meant to represent my own experience with polyphasic sleep, in a somewhat distilled form and only pointing out things that are not often mentioned. Common experiences can be found elsewhere. This does not necessarily represent my current views (but may, as those often change).

2008-12-17

Mood swings. Dream withdrawal. Boredom.

The major enemies of uberman sleep. Result: I overslept every single nap today. Yes, all of them. The first I couldn’t prevent. My brain just ignored everything and slept right through “Dragula”. After this, I just couldn’t be bothered. I knew I failed, I liked the dreams and was just too lazy to get out of bed to do anything useful. Uberman really only works when you are busy enough for two.

2008-12-01

Great. I seem to have two choices: light, sucky sleep and hear the alarm or good, deep sleep, but don’t hear anything. I’m like my father, nothing can wake me up once I’m really asleep.

So, you guessed it, that’s a problem. I’m really unsure how to handle that. I did have functioning naps a while ago.

[you come back another day / and do no wrong]

I read through all my previous posts on sleep again and got some of my fighting spirit back. Shit, I remember now how different I felt on uberman and I miss that now. However, I still have not found a way to combat my sleepiness otoh and my inability to wake up properly when completely gone. I.. just don’t know. More conditioning? Was I too lax? And what about the light? I can’t sleep well when it’s not dark, but I can’t wake up when there is no light. I might have to rig something up, but right now I don’t have the right tools.

At least I think I have found out how to keep me awake during tiredness, but that doesn’t help you when your brain is not cooperating and never let’s you get there because you just sleep through every alarm you can imagine.

Then there is the doubt. At first it’s weak, but it grows stronger every day. “You can never maintain uberman for a long time anyway! Even if you adapt, in a few years you will have to work and more take lessons and so on and will not be able to keep your naps! No one has ever done it! It doesn’t work! It’s amazing, but it is completely incompatible to the rest of the world!” It nags and nags away at your mind, coming up in your worst hours. And I can not get rid of it anymore. I even think it is valid; I really have no clue how I can ever make uberman work once I’m not in university any more. So why all that trouble? Days and days of inhuman effort, only to abandon it anyway in at most 4 years? The Broken Mind of the Revolution – try to change the world and the world just laughs at you, crushes you, makes all work useless.
And you make compromises, think that everyman is also nice and more flexible. You can make it fit almost any work schedule you might have. But it doesn’t feel nice. You feel weak and stupid, wasting so much time on sleep (Come on, you sleep 4 hours! That’s insane! You might as well fall into a coma and sleep all day, lazypants!).
Right now, I hate everything. I hate myself, hate my brain, hate the world. It’s insane. I’m insane.

And then glimpses of hope come up in your mind. It’s once every 4 hours, so it should work, right? Classes only last 90 minutes, so you can nap between them. Work has a lunch break and maybe flexible hours, so that is doable. Even if you have to give up uberman, you gain 2 hours and a lot of energy for some years. Just one year of uberman gives you 730 additional hours, i.e. a whole month, more time compared to everyman. And once you know how to nap, you can change to a different nap schedule without much work. Get rid of the doubt. It does work.

*sigh* Let’s continue with uberman. I’m such a crybaby.

See this article first. These re-posts are only meant to represent my own experience with polyphasic sleep, in a somewhat distilled form and only pointing out things that are not often mentioned. Common experiences can be found elsewhere. This does not necessarily represent my current views (but may, as those often change).

2009-05-20

I’m pissed. So very pissed.

Polyphasic sleep is getting on my nerves. Let me summarize the last 8 (8?!) months.

October. Yay, finally some uberman! Oh god, this is hard! I may have only 2 hours of sleep, but I also only have 2 hours of not-feeling-like-a-zombie. Screw this shit.
November. Experimentation. More experimentation. Even more experimentation. It works! I feel ok! An unexpected event occurs. I’m screwed.
December. It’s futile. Uberman is just not practical. Let’s do everyman! 3 hour core, sleep galore! It works! The excitement wears off, I’m screwed.
January. Can’t think, can’t dream, can’t move. Bang my head against the wall. Some days are perfect, others are hell. Experimentation.
February. Better times, stricter schedule, more experience. Results: underwhelming. I crash, can’t get back up. This doesn’t work.
March. Not enough time. The naps too infrequent, the core too short, the sleep-throughs too frequent. This is just an adaptation problem, it will go away.
April. It didn’t. It’s futile. What about a 90 minute core and 5 naps? It works! Excitement! Uberman-with-a-core works! I study like mad, finish 2/3 of the whole semester in 3 days.
May. Instability. It really is uberman-with-a-core. Didn’t eat right? Oversleep. Did some exercise? Oversleep. Didn’t find a bug in your code? Oversleep. Made the tea a little too strong? Oversleep. Every one destabilizes the schedule. I have 3 in one week, that’s it. Impractical, totally impractical. Better than uberman, though.

And now?

I’m starting to think that everyman is a hoax. Does <em>anyone</em> really do a 3h core and 3-4 naps? Puredoxyk doesn’t. Even if I give her the benefit of a doubt and assume that every time she doesn’t report on it, she sleeps 4 hours, it still averages out to a lot more, at least 5 or 6. Nobody on jorel’s list does it. I never read about anyone who did it for a reasonably long time. Unless I see some strong evidence for it, I will consider a 3 hours core to be bullshit. It works temporarily, yes, but so does cocaine.

Ha ha, I missed those. I’m not planning on writing much on this topic anymore, but a few more sources on the web are always good, especially if they focus on (so far) unusual points. In fact, if you google around for “polyphasic sleep”, you’ll only find one actual criticism (at the Supermemo site) and that one is quite silly in a few points. I believe that the effect on memory is often overlooked and has not been properly tested. I’d love for someone to track their retention rate in a SRS over their adaptation period (which I failed to do in a reliable way, but the data I have supports my point) and see if it ever recovers. I seriously doubt it.
Some people use their new free time to learn more and thus see an improvement in grades and so on, but that is more of an time management issue. You gain time, but your overall time quality decreases significantly. If you are very busy with “worthless” pursuits as a job or raising a child ;), you might profit from having some lower-quality time in contrast to having none at all, but if you already control most of your free time, then I doubt you will see an overall improvement. But I’m really looking forward to more data on that.
Also, muscle recovers seems to suffer, but that is generally acknowledged and not really important for the kind of people that want more free time in the first place.

I will now abandon polyphasic sleep to try something different. Over time I’ve tried many ways to balance the core sleep, but I only saw useful results when I started it at 20:00. This is curious, because Prof. Arguelles does the same, but Claudio Stampi noted in Why We Nap that this was the time most people had the most problems falling asleep at! There might be a serious difference in people here, which would also explain my very different results with polyphasic sleep in general. Regardless, I had some minor success with a 3 hour core at 20:00, but the naps have been very fickle and so I changed to a biphasic pattern and now to a monophasic pattern again because of promising results. I will now use a very similar schedule to Prof. Arguelles, i.e. I will sleep from 20:00 to 1:00. The way I see it is that although I sacrifice one hour, I gain a significantly better retention rate, better muscle recovery, less interruptions during the day and a lot more flexibility. But more on that later, in a few weeks or so.

Anyway, I’ll re-post a few of my old entries from my now de-funct Livejournal soon.

SEPTEM SERMONES AD MORTUOS ends with an interesting anagram that so far has not been deciphered. I’ve spent a day or so trying out a few techniques and I think I figured it out:

“Verschenke hitzige Creatur aus Hahn und Schlangen”, i.e. Abrasax.

(笑)

≧(´▽｀)≦アハハハ

When studying a programming language, I find it useful to look up the background of its creator(s). It will tell you much about its internal design, style and usefulness.

A few examples.

Lisp, and to a lesser degree, Python. You can really tell that John McCarthy and Guido van Rossum have a strong mathematical background. The language is simple, elegant and gives you few, very carefully designed tools. Lisp is maybe the language that is conceptually the most beautiful, yet totally impractical. You probably should write in Lisp, in some ideal world, but you won’t be able to get anything done. It completely clashes with how you actually think and would like to write a program.

C. Ah, a physicist. Simple tools, yes, but completely designed for the task at hand. A good C program may be very powerful, but you always feel you have to study for years until you can get it right. It often feels like black magic. Properly understanding pointers and memory allocation alone can take quite a long time, even just on a conceptional level. You may get the basic idea, but then there are all kinds of traps and exceptions and weird cases were just everything breaks down.
I always feel reminded of quantum physics. It may not be that hard to get the concept of uncertainty at first, but when you look at practical cases, it gets totally messy. You have to use funky equations that bloat and bloat, weird concepts just so you can handle it and get results at all, and when you design an experiment, it will still break down and you’ll spend weeks fixing bugs.
I love the language, but if the universe were written in it, it would have constant leaks, be insanely huge compared to its actually purpose and most of its parts would be all over the place, in seemingly unrelated places. Actually, that does sound quite familiar…

C# and Java. Designed by a committee, led by a software engineer. That really tells you everything you need to know. They are full of cruft (backwards compatibility is one of the worst ideas ever), concepts that sound nice on paper, but have not proven to be really useful and huge, quite often to the point of being slow. Companies and governments favor these, for obvious reasons.

Perl. The only (?) programming language designed by a linguist, which is probably why I love it so much. Actually, it feels a lot like Japanese to me. The set of keywords and basic functions is huge, with a word for each specific idea and fine nuances. Context is important and words can mean very different things depending on how you use them. In fact, because of context, you can often leave out redundant or obvious parts.
It may be the only language to encourage you not to use (explicit) variables unless you think you need to.
Looks reflect purpose, such that weird constructs actually look weird, while common constructs become clean and simple. This empowers you to represent ideas the way you think is best for the job. You can always say things differently, if you want. You can be more explicit when talking to a foreigner, slur and mumble when speaking among friends (or to yourself), emphasize a specific part or just use your own kind of dialect. While this makes it possible to write the most incomprehensible program ever, it also allows you to write poetry.
Of course, over time, this has led to weird exceptions, idioms that may not seem obvious at first and a full-on culture you can not ignore when using the language. But the reason why it’s maybe the most human language is it’s choice of elementary building block: Lisp is build around the list, C focuses on memory and numbers, in Smalltalk everything is an object, but the first thing in Perl is the word. Everything is (kinda) a string and most of it’s features are specifically designed just to handle those in efficient and smart ways. Humans do not think in objects, numbers or lists – our mental stack is way to small for this. We can barely add numbers with more than 4 digits or keep track of more than a few dozen people and our memory is kinda hazy, but we can easily remember and use tens to hundreds of thousands of words in complex structures, with ad hoc grammar and no formal (or even central) definition at all. There is a good reason why you use plain text to explain stuff and only the most twisted of minds would consider a mathematical proof straightforward and intuitive. So why do we build languages mostly like the latter and rarely like the former? I don’t know.