嘘とワンダーランド

Today, I’m an anti-buddhist. You know, like an anti-christ, i.e. someone who perverts all christian ideals? Specifically, I have perverted the 4 Noble Truths and broken all 8 principles of the Noble Eightfold Path. How so?

The 4 Noble Truths teach us about suffering and how to overcome it. In short, suffering is caused by our attachement to the world. By wanting things, we suffer because it is fundamentally impossible to fulfill this desire. I have perverted this, for I craved for a bigger desktop. I have assembled 3 monitors where I previously had only 1. I suffered for this, so much is true. (I have suffered a lot. Linux is my own personal hell. I am repenting for very grave sins, it seems.) But, I have overcome this suffering without letting go. I have achieved my goal – I have 3 working monitors. But to do this, I had to break everything on the Noble Eightfold Path.

All my sins are:

1. Right View – I have forsaken the path of the Console and The One True Display. I have merged 2 monitors into one (via TwinView) and added a third one to watch blasphemous movies while working.
   
2. Right Intention – I wanted more screen and more windows. I did not want a simpler, easier display, but visual bloat instead.
   
3. Right Speech – I have cursed, of course, but I have also lied. I still lie, for every single application I start is a lie – a lie to my xorg-server. It still thinks the monstrosity, the 2-monitors-into-1 is just one screen, but I run a hacked libXinerama instead that tells every application the truth. The server doesn’t know this, it is completely unaware. Only my conspiring GUIs do. [0]
   
4. Right Action – I have broken the holiest of rules – I have downgraded. (I now run X.org 1.6 instead of 1.7.3.)
   
5. Right Livelihood – I am a slave in the worst of professions – I maintain my own libraries, ignoring all advice from my package manager.
   
6. Right Energy – I have spent a whole 3 days setting this up. Do I need to say more?
   
7. Right Mindfulness – I have forgotten the pain of changing my xorg.conf and ignored the past. I will forget today’s lesson and, at some point, patch again.
8. Right Concentration – I have drunken caffeine a-plenty and spent 2 days fiddling with emacs. I was never focused on my ultimate goal, only ever jumping from idea to idea.

Yet, everything works. (Well, except the actual window manager, but this requires patches that are trivial in comparison.) This whole endeavour must have gotten me massive amounts of negative karma.

[0] http://ktown.kde.org/~seli/fakexinerama/ pure awesome-sauce (my modified version: Xinerama.c)

*sigh*

I’m back-paddling on this. I feel I gave emacs a fair chance. I spent a good 3 days getting used to it, setting it all up and I still can’t get it to do what I want.

I’m going back to vim.

There were many things I really liked about emacs. It provides many great features to make coding easier. Integration of other processes, particularly gdb. A better window and buffer handling. Nicer copy&paste (yank cycling ftw!). All those cute modes, like which-function mode (shows the current function you’re in), glasses-mode (pseudo-converts camelCase into proper_names) and so on.

But, just as often, it stands in my way. I don’t want tabs and I’d like emacs to only use spaces, 4 spaces specificially. I spent 3 hours setting this up and it still doesn’t work nicely. Scrolling is fucked up. Visual editing, i.e. being able to move the cursor anywhere in the file, is not possible. And so on and on. About 2/3 of my config right now consists of disabling some GNU feature I don’t want.

I’ve had it, I won’t put up with this any more. Instead, I’ll port all those cool features over to vim. Well, that was pointless…

Of course, this means I don’t need Control and Meta anymore, so I’m back to my old layout. Yadda yadda yadda.

For the last 4 years, I’ve been a vim user. My vim config is hundreds of lines long, my plugin folder is overflowing. For the last year, I’ve been using wmii as my window manager (before that, awesome), its config is similarly a work of art. I’m using my own keyboard layout, with some additional tools to complement it.

This week, all this changed. At first, I changed my monitor setup, but by doing so I had to modify my window manager and long story short, I’m now using Xmonad and I had a big fight, my last one, with vim and I’m now an emacs user, too. But emacs was the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak – I have a meta key problem.

I have way to many of them. I have my normal ASCIIbet, then Shift for capitals, Mod3 for punctuation or programming characters, Mod4 for functions like cursor keys or Return, then Control and Alt for emacs, the Windoze key for my window manager and a special key for my IME. It’s too much! It has now become very cumbersome to type certain things and I have to fix this mess.

Design Principles

1. Hands should move as little as possible and never leave home row. This is a pretty basic requirement, but it prevents me from moving some rarer combinations to the outside of the keyboard.
2. I must not give up any functionality. Specificially, I must still be able to type in (among others) French, German and Japanese, be able to programm efficiently and have enough keys left to handle Xmonad.
3. The computer should do as much work for me as possible. If I can let it figure out what I meant and safe a few keystrokes in the average case, I will do it.

Solutions

First, I use my IME more aggressively than before. I’m currently using scim (with anthy and tables) to input any normal text beyond ASCII. This is pretty normal for Japanese, were you type 黒い猫 (kuroi neko, black cat) by activating Japanese mode, then inputting “kuroineko<SPACE>” and the IME converts this first into syllables (くろいねこ, ku ro i ne ko) and then tries to guess the correct meaning. I have already started using this for German a while ago and now use it for all diacritics. For example, I switch to European mode and then input “Verschw”orung” to get “Verschwörung” (conspiracy). This works pretty well because all diacritics are rare anyway and justify the additional key stroke. Each language (family) has its own mode to keep them simple and because I almost never mix them anyway.

This frees up some keys, and thus, my old basic layout:

basic layout (left normal keys, right with Mod3 = M3)

(A few keys are redundant because they started out in a bad position, then moved to a better one and I saw no need to leave the old one empty. As you can see, the Mod3 level has still quite some open positions.)

I can’t move the punctuation characters inside my IME, because I generally mix them with normal text (typing something like “$editor =~ s/vi[m]/emacs/g”) and the IME would slow this down a lot. Inputting something like “\s” for “$” isn’t that cool and breaks many hotkeys. But, as you can see, Mod3 is used twice and in 2 really good positions, forcing me to put at least some meta keys in the outer corners at the bottom, which sucks.

So instead I decided to group them tighter together and move all characters to the right. This way I only need one Mod3 key. The Mod4 key, formerly right of Space, moves to the right of Left Shift. I can still press it with my left pinky and use the keys on the left. This frees more keys and leads to the following layout:

new layout (normal, mod3, mod4)

This might be a little confusing because I used some lazy abbreviations. The Mod4 level on the left has Backspace, Up, Down, Escape at the top, then Left, Down, Right, Insert and finally, at the bottom, Page Up, Page Down, Return, Tab. On the left are the meta keys Mod3, Mod4 and Win. On the right are Control, Meta and the 漢字 key to activate my IME. All the other keys on the keyboard are unchanged, but I can’t reach them anyway, so I don’t use them (except for numbers).

This arrangement isn’t optimal in the sense that some combos have to be typed by one hand, like ^ as M3 + i, and not all good keys are fully exploited (the left home row is under-used), but this is the best compromise in my opinion. All punctuation on the left side is rare and all frequent ones (and combination, like :) or !=) are easy to reach.

I was also experimenting with separating opening and closing parentheses because emacs (or any other editor) can easily match those anyway, but this doesn’t really improve the setup and makes it a lot more illogical and harder to learn. If it were not for programming, I would actually switch to a pseudo-latin input were similar characters would be merged and the IME would tell them apart, e.g. I would put i, j and y on the same key “i” and let the IME decide which to use. This works all pretty well for normal text, but in virtually any programming language, most letters are used frequently and, as a group, more often than punctuation. Having different layouts for different contexts, however, only makes a big mess.

(You might have wondered why I chose this particular key arrangement. It was originally Neo, a (now broken, see my old rant) German layout. I moved the J, X and Y, and removed all those silly additional levels and German characters, though. If I had to start over, I’d choose something like Dvorak as a base.)

You know, I’m pretty lazy. I don’t want to do anything. I’d be happy to just read cracked.com and tvtropes.org all day. But I’m also a megalomaniac. I wanna know everything. And I mean everything. I wanna understand about the Great Vowel Shift, the colonization of Australia, the evolution of the influenza virus, the performance of text matching… everything. Unfortunately, for now at least, the human brain can’t know everything. You can’t just pour stuff in until you run out of it. Upload Wikipedia and be done with it. You need to actually work for it and study. Slowly, painfully and did I mention slowly?

Sure, you can use a SRS to manage information so that you don’t forget the stuff again. You only learn it once and then do your daily repetitions so it stays in your brain. That’s pretty cool already, but there are two drawbacks: it’s a little boring and, worse, tiring. It’s in fact so tiring that I had to give up an otherwise pretty neat sleeping schedule. I read a few articles and forum posts on this and everyone seems to agree – you can do about 200 repetitions per day, maybe 300. More than that is too tiring, too time-consuming, too boring and maybe just plain impossible. Sure, for a few days you can do more, but I never saw anyone maintain this. You just burn out. (But you can study more, just not via SRS.)

Of course, old repetitions and new facts compete for resources. You can’t just add and add facts. Soon your daily repetitions surpass 200 and you will forget them anyway. But what is the optimal course of action? Is it better to add facts slowly to minimize the risk of burn-out? Soon, university starts again and I’ll have to study for exams. That means adding facts I don’t really wanna learn that much (at least right now), but I’m also learning other things (2 languages, for example). So on one hand, I want to learn as comfortable as possible, but on the other hand, I need to get done in time, so I’d better be fast.

What do you do in such a situation? You run a simulation, of course! I expanded my handy SRS simulator and tested a few possible configurations. I’m just going to show you the 3 most interesting ones:

amount of daily repetitions for 200 days

new facts remaining each day

A few short notes first.

I set the amount of facts to learn to 3400. That’s my current number of new, unseen facts. Don’t ask how I got that many (*shame*, *shame*), but it’s not unusual for many learners. Of course, if you are learning basically forever, there won’t be a “last new fact” – you’ll constantly add new ones. In this case, just look at the first graph and find the plateau for each curve. You will never drop below this.

The 3 configurations are:

• A -> a maximum of 100 repetitions per day; add up to 50 new facts
• B -> a maximum of 200 repetitions per day; add up to 50 new facts
• G -> a maximum of 200 repetitions per day; add up to 200 new facts

The maximum is only respected when adding new facts, not when doing due facts.

Ok, now let’s have a look at the actual graphs.

The first and most obvious thing is that G totally fails at it’s goal. After about a week, the due cards explode right in your face and you’ll have to face up to 350 repetitions per day. And this continues to happen all the time, so you are pretty likely, at some point, to just give up. You feel so bad about the extreme and unexpected workload you’re facing that it becomes counter-productive. So to just “fill up” until you hit your maximum number of comfortable repetitions a day is a really bad idea.

Furthermore, we can see that both A and B are pretty good at keeping the maximum under control, A is pretty inefficient at it. You have lazy and busy days in a pretty regular pattern, but you never max out. Not really that good, but workable nonetheless. However, what you can see is that if you are working through a fixed amount of facts, B gets you into the “lazy phase” much sooner. A has many lazy days, but on average it is actually more work than B, not less.

The second graph shows us how fast we are progressing. It takes G about 50 days to work through all facts, B needs about 80 days and A about 150. Sure, G is pretty fast, but actually not much faster than B, at only about 40% less time. However, it is quite clear that A really is slow. It needs at least twice as long to work through the same amount of facts than the other two approaches.

Conclusion

I think the data allows us to make two important conclusions.

First, do not add facts like crazy. Trying to just add facts until you fall asleep might work for a few days, but very soon you hit the point where all those repetitions burn you out. They would demand up to twice the amount of work you were capable of just a week ago, so most likely, you will just fail to do them and forget everything again. Basically, you end up really tired, demotivated and not much smarter than before. A good waste of your time.

Second, to be lazy, work harder. It might sound counter-intuitive at first, but it makes sense. If you try to be lazy early on by working below your actual threshold, you will, on most days, actually have to work more than you expected. You will learn much slower and spend a lot more time on your repetitions. The reason for this is that you are spreading out your early repetitions, which are by far the hardest. If you work a bit more and get those early repetitions over with, it will get much easier later on. If you work consistently at your threshold, it wil be easier to make a routine out of it and your progress will be faster.

Finally, the simulation allows me to pick some more useful values. If you have another look at the second graph again, you can see that A and G look a bit like stairs, but B is smooth. This means there is an optimal value of new facts per day to pick that consistently maxes out your workload by looking at the slope of the curve. This optimal value, interestingly enough, is about 42. I do not believe this to be a coincidence.

If you start with a bad assumption, you will invariably reach bad conclusions and constantly delude yourself about that fact. The only way to fix this is to regularly question your own basic assumptions about things. The scientific method provides a neat way (in fact, the only way) to do just this. Ask yourself: Is there a different explanation? On what data do you base your decision? Does another interpretation fit, too?

I don’t just claim this, but actually live this way. I want to demonstrate this by changing my opinion about sleep. Frustrated with polyphasic sleep, I have reëvaluated my own assumptions and checked the data. I read more studies and biology texts, looked through my own records and re-read a few polyphasic blogs. And I must conclude that polyphasic sleep, by and large, doesn’t work.

Let’s start at the opposite end – what does work? Well, polyphasic sleep is the best (known) option you have when you can’t have more than 2-4 hours per day of sleep. If you must sleep that little, for example because you are into solo sailing or your newborn child and 2 jobs keep you up all day, than polyphasic sleep is right for you. It minimizes the damage this kind of life will do, but you will still be worse off. You will still be sleep deprived.

Ok, having acknowledged that, let’s start with the criticism. In fact, it’s a very simple criticism because it only involves one point.

Polyphasic sleep destroys your memory.

Sure, you are awake more (if you are lucky, most people aren’t and delude themselves to the fact), but you can’t use the time in any meaningful way. You can’t learn more, in fact, you’ll learn less. All existing studies show that performance is slightly below normal levels, which means you have 4-6 more hours of waketime, but you are actually performing worse than if you had slept them all. Great job. That’s like taking a shortcut, only to drive slower so that you arrive even later.

Why is there not a single polyphasic scientist? No, Tesla was not polyphasic, he crashed regularly. Edison lied about his schedule and, while being mostly polyphasic, didn’t save any time (and he was not a scientist). Buckminster Fuller only slept polyphasically when touring, for the reason I mentioned above.

Why is there not a single polyphasic polyglot? You’d think that someone who is learning multiple languages at the same time would be glad over every single hour per day he can get. Yet, not a single one of them is documented to be polyphasic. Some have tried (mostly early polyglots), no one was happy with it.

Why does no military or space agency advocate polyphasic sleep? There are several studies researching it, but they all document a severe loss of performance and they all advise against it, except when external circumstances force you to be polyphasic, as mentioned earlier.

Why does all data collected via SRS, like for example Supermemo, show that sleeping in big chunks correlates with good performance? If there are working examples of polyphasic sleepers, no one of them has ever demonstrated this via their SRS statistics, and Supermemo captures a lot of those. There isn’t a single example of someone sleeping 4 hours or less per day and still getting a normal retention rate for the same amount of data learned.

There is a simple answer to these questions: Because polyphasic sleep doesn’t work. It’s bullshit. For all the claims of “superhuman” feats, there hasn’t been a single bit of evidence for it. Proponents have made all kinds of claims and assurances, yet have presented nothing. Most of them don’t even seem to be capable of grasping the importance of empirical evidence. It is pseudoscience.

Conclusion

If you don’t care about your memory and you don’t care about being able to learn, sure, go right ahead. If you also keep in mind that the majority of people drop out of polyphasic sleep after a month or less, I would recommend a better alternative: Amphetamines. It has exactly the same amount of advantages (awake at all costs), is easier to use and fucks you up just the same.

I’m now recanting all my previous posts and claims about polyphasic sleep. They are wrong. I have marked the posts accordingly. Don’t sleep polyphasically, yo. If you still think that it works, prove it. And no, “I’ve been doing this for months and I’m fine!!1!” isn’t proof. Get some real data. A SRS is a good starting point. Show that learning for 8 hours or more per day works as least as well as normally and doesn’t destroy your sleep. You won’t be able to, but try all the same. Hint: just log your exact sleeping times and do a few standard performance tests. This alone will probably demonstrate that you are deluding yourself.

So what’s the real alternative? This.

No, seriously. I mean it. I am the Manifestation of Indifference. The Avatar of Doesn’t-Give-A-Shit. Wherever I go, all motivation ceases to be. Hopelessness follows me. My future will not be a bright one.

You want proof? I have proof.

1. Karlsruhe

I started noticing it here, about one year ago. I’m studying computer science in Karlsruhe since 2007 and my year is, by far, the laziest, as far as students are concerned. The year[0] of 2004 has[1] an internet forum, www.unika04.de/forum, with:

35,222 posts. When I’m looking for information, that’s where I go. The year of 2005 has one, too -  www.info.sptotal.de. They have:

15,270 posts. Still alright. The next one, year of 2006, of course has another forum. It’s at info.php-4.info. They have:

15,866 posts. My year, year of 2007, well… it was at www.uka07.de, but right now, it:

.

It had maybe a hundred posts, top, before it closed down. But this is not a case of general dumbing-down. The next year, 2008, has a forum again - info08.de. They already have:

3,605 posts, and the hard courses, the ones in need of discussion, are only just beginning for them.

2. Berlin

Before going to Karlsruhe, I lived and studied in Berlin for a year, namely religious studies and quite a bit of archaeology. The whole field is pretty well represented there, having its own buildings all over the place and quite a bit of money to spend, considering how little attention it generally gets. When I moved there, religious studies and several branches of archaeology had just gotten their own degrees and were not considered something you only minor in. However, students of my year were so disinterested that it was canceled just a year later and got demoted to a minor course again. But only religious study. Egyptian archaeology, for example, is still doing fine.[2]

There was never any organization and nothing got done. Ever.

3. School

But it even goes back to school. My family moved quite a bit and I went to a total of 5 different schools, but my curse becomes most evident at my last school, the OHG in Landau. (Don’t google it.) I got there in grade 8 and basically, what happened is, the teachers had the brilliant! idea of taking all the problematic kids and putting them in the same class. My class. It became quite a bit of a legend, though, and we drove at least two teachers out of school and into therapy[3]. This class was the anti-thesis of learning. To demonstrate this, we decided to tape every test a student had failed with a 6, i.e. the worst possible grade, to a wall. After 3 days, the wall was entirely covered in tests. A week later, we took it down again so that the teachers wouldn’t get too demotivated. Yeah, it was pretty bad, but at least no-one annoyed you and you could just talk or read all day and not get interrupted by those stupid things called “classes”. And the ability to focus and try to write down lyrics from memory while people around you are playing soccer during history class is pretty useful, I have to admit. Nobody can possibly distract you after this.

4. Further Proof

If you’re still not convinced that I’m Procrastination Personified, let me list a few other facts. The first national election I was allowed to vote in got the lowest level of participation since the state got founded. As did the second. I wonder if anyone is even bothering to show up in 4 years. Maybe I shouldn’t so that the Pirate Party can actually win this time [shameless political plug].

My year of birth is mostly remembered for Chernobyl, an act of extreme negligence and the explosion of Challenger. Probably the only good thing to happen in 1986 is the release of Watchmen, a story about powerless and disillusioned superheroes.

The one forum of which I was a regular member, one of the largest in Germany actually, got raided by the police and was never rebooted out of laziness of everyone involved.[4]

Oh, and remember the 5 schools I mentioned earlier? 3 of those closed down because they couldn’t get find enough new students. 1 of them was just completely redone right before I went there and everyone was very optimistic that it would have a bright future. It didn’t last another 2 years.
It gets worse. Two of the towns I lived in don’t exist anymore because nobody cared about living there. Both of them were industrial centers before I was born and played important historical roles. The most awesome coat-of-arms, featuring a bear wielding a pair of axes, didn’t help in the end. Detroit, I feel your pain.
In fact, the whole nation I was born in,  the German Democratic Republic, doesn’t exist anymore because, well, you know why.

Any questions?

Notes

[0] This is first year, not year of graduation.
[1] Everything as of this writing, of course.
[2] No, I’m not bitter.
[3] Seriously.
[4] No names. It’s better this way.

Are you using bitlbee? Are your friends annoying you insisting on asking you nicely to use OTR? Then use this branch: http://khjk.org/bitlbee-otr/

But, what if your friends have a RL aren’t online and you still want to spam send them some nice message? Once OTR established a context, it won’t let go, so you will still send them encrypted messages, but once they come back, they probably won’t be able to read it. Sucks. But! There is hope! Use this small patch: otr.patch

Now bitlbee will only send encrypted messages when the recipient is actually online and otherwise fall back on plaintext. A little bit less secure, a whole lot more convenient. Yay!

(Yeah, sleep again. Didn’t I say I’d write about something else for a change?)

I highly recommend writing down your exact sleep times and level of tiredness every day. It will help you see patterns and prepare for tight spots in advance. However, occasionally, it will also show you when things are not working.

Like with my sleep. For the last 3 months, there is always the same pattern. I adopt a strict sleep pattern. It works great for exactly 6 days, with maybe a slight amount of tiredness here and there. Then, on day 7, I suddenly get hit with all that missing tiredness at once. Once, I was still able to go another day, but most of the time, I just crash on the spot and sleep at least 8 hours. Of course, this is anything but practical. There is nothing I can do to avoid the crash. I have done uberman and it was easier.

I noticed this patterns before, but I’m now confident it will always be there. So it’s not my own incompetence of adapting, but something my brain just does. I never read about another polyphasic sleeper noticing that, though chronically undersleeping and then catching up on the weekend is pretty common. Yet I don’t feel like I’m getting too little sleep – I can function perfectly fine for 20 hours a day, with no caffeine and no concentration problems at all. It’s as if constantly delaying sleep during school made my brain unable to not crash once a week.

So, solutions. I mentioned 2 a few weeks ago, namely incorporating the crash into the schedule or trying to get more sleep per day. I know of several polyphasic sleepers how do crash regularly, generally on the weekend, but they do this once a month, not once a week. So I don’t think this is a good solution. I’m pretty sure crashing that often is a sign of deeper problems. Also, when doing uberman and uberman with a core, I didn’t notice this pattern. Those two worked just fine.
I also get vivid dreams everytime I sleep and feel refreshed afterwards. I make sure it’s dark, avoid sugar or anything else that screws with your awareness and so on. Really, if sleep quality is the problem than it is beyond my powers anyway.

Conclusion? It is possible to be severely sleep deprived without noticing it at all for about a week. Do not feel safe after you had several good days – you might still be doing it wrong. Reassuring, isn’t it? :) Anyway, I’ll try to make the core longer again, hoping to average it out.

Guess what. Yeah. I feel like the counter-example for both sides, with regards to polyphasic sleep. “It is impossible to sleep 4 hours or less per day and be healthy!” Hundreds of people do. “It is impossible not to adapt to polyphasic sleep! Everyone can!” muflax can’t.

Well, this is overly pessimistic. I am polyphasic, for about a year now. I sleep multiple times per day, mostly 4. I sleep, on average, around 6-7 hours per day and go about half the time with 4 hours or less. I almost never feel tired for more than 2 hours a day. Generally speaking, I feel alright-ish and my memory retention is fine. So, polyphasic sleep is at least a partial success and all those results are already better than any sleep schedule I ever had before it. I can do better in any single point, but not in most of them or the total average.

However, I’m not on everyman and I feel I can do better. Call this the engineer syndrome – I am aware of a better solution and I’ll be damned if I can’t implement it. Every time I try to, I learn something new and then fail. But this is ok. I’m getting better at this. And this time around, I genuinely feel I found The Secret(tm).

I started the adaptation on 09/02, 17 days ago. The first 6 days were pure awesome. Everything worked. The core took a day, ok, but every nap worked and after 30 hours in I was never tired – ever. Than came a crash that had nothing to do with my sleep. My study regiment broke down (and I with it). I’m working on fixing the things that caused it (and there is a big-ass rant coming up about it), but because I drifted into a few depressive days I couldn’t find the energy to get up from my core. I was awake, but I just didn’t feel like being awake. And this, of course, destroyed everything. I kinda got back on track 4 days later, but by then it was to late. I couldn’t find back into the schedule. I overslept irregularly. I did a big crash day in hope of recovering enough, but it didn’t work.

I learned two things:

1. Sleeping position is incredibly important, more important than almost any thing I have been doing. I can not stress this enough. For most of my life, I’ve been sleeping on my stomach. This feels most natural to me. But out of frustration and because it’s hard to wear a sleep mask that way, I changed it. Suddenly, I woke up with an amount of energy I had never seen before. It makes little difference for the core (though dreams get more intense), but the naps went from “meh” to “this. IS. POLYPHASIC SLEEP!!k!”. I did experience similar naps on uberman, regardless of position, but never on everyman.  So, seriously, if you are not sleeping on your back – try it. Like, NOW.
(Actually, I suspect a breathing problem (I do have a fucked up chest), though, so it might not affect everyone. Still.)

2. Re-adapting while on a bad schedule doesn’t work, but about a week of monophasic sleep as a reset works fine. If you ever had working monophasic sleep, that is. (puredoxyk, of course, tried polyphasic sleep as a measure to fight her insomnia, among other things. The very concept of insomnia is virtually foreign to me. Unless I am extremely sleep-deprived or on drugs, I can sleep any time, for as long as you want. I did once sleep for 60 hours in a row (with a bathroom break in between). So, totally different starting point for different people.)

And because it worked so great for 5 days, I have enough motivation now to make it work for longer. Possibly forever. So, I’m going to do about a week of monophasic sleep now to reset. Around Friday (09/25), I’m gonna adapt again. I hope to fix the other problems by then so I don’t fail again. :3

Statistics. I love statistics. And graphs. Graphs are cool, too.

It’s funny, actually. I really suck at statistics. I have a hard time understanding probabilities and statistics is probably the one mathematical field I understand the least. But I still love it. I track a lot of data and love reading tables. I have several books full of yearly death statistics, broken down by age, gender, cause, region and so on. Some of the greatest stuff I ever read. Crime statistics are really cool as well.

Anyway, it might come as no surprise to you then that I like correlating personal data. If I do this change in my life, how does it affect me? Is their a correlation between sleep time and happiness? What about nutritional supplements? So I wrote a tool to track and analyze just this. [0]

Enter ashuku. I’m lazy, so let’s just quote the readme:

ashuku is a tool to track a multitude of daily statistics, like mood and
health. Its design goals are simplicity and fast usage.
ashuku can draw graphs [citation needed] and analyze data for correlation.
Data is stored in plain text files in YAML. It’s easy to read for both humans
and machines.

ashuku is named after one of the 5 Wisdom Buddhas, 阿閦如来 (ashuku nyorai).
He is immovable and reflects all emotions like a mirror, showing things as they
really are.

ashuku is strongly influenced by todo.txt.

Dependencies
============

* Python 3 (although the code is probably compatible with Python 2.6)
* PyYAML

Here’s a screenshot. It’s fully customizable, so don’t be afraid of the Japanese UI. It’s in English by default and you can change it however you want. :)

a screenshot

I’ve been using it since 9/12. The data before that is from a different tool and partially incomplete, so there.

You can grab it here: http://github.com/muflax/ashuku

[0] Well, the second one, actually. The first one was a Perl script and… you know what they say about Perl code. It’s  all true, unfortunately.