blivet radio
The Radio weblog of Hal Rager

Wednesday, April 16, 2003

No argument here I'm chronically short of sleep. It shows... "Sleepdep screws you up fierce. It turns out that skipping a few hours' sleep a night will affect your cognition and performance as though you hadn't slept in days. I really think that we're all on the edge of bugfuck and have been since the invention of the electric light. Chronic restriction of sleep periods to 4 h or 6 h per night over 14 consecutive days resulted in significant cumulative, dose-dependent deficits in cognitive performance on all tasks. Subjective sleepiness ratings showed an acute response to sleep restriction but only small further increases on subsequent days, and did not significantly differentiate the 6 h and 4 h conditions. Polysomnographic variables and d power in the non-REM sleep EEG—a putative marker of sleep homeostasis—displayed an acute response to sleep restriction with negligible further changes across the 14 restricted nights. Comparison of chronic sleep restriction to total sleep deprivation showed that the latter resulted in disproportionately large waking neurobehavioral and sleep d power responses relative to how much sleep was lost. A statistical model revealed that, regardless of the mode of sleep deprivation, lapses in behavioral alertness were nearlinearly related to the cumulative duration of wakefulness in excess of 15.84 h (s.e. 0.73 h). Irony moment: I decided to catch up on my blogging instead of going to bed." Article Link Discuss at Boing Boing (via Futurismic) [Boing Boing Blog] 11:15:01 PM    comment   trackback []

The Whole Sky: Pretty Pictures, Hard Data from 6-Year Mapping Project "A diverse and comprehensive array of photographs from the world's first near-infrared all-sky survey has been released for professional and amateur astronomers to explore and study. The mapping project, called the Two Micron All-Sky Survey, imaged the whole sky with a pair of little-known 51-inch (1.3-meter) telescopes, one at Mount Hopkins in Arizona the other at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. (...) "Current understanding of galaxy properties has been strongly biased by the small fraction of hot, young stars that make up much of what we observe in optical-wavelength surveys," Weinberg told SPACE.com. "I anticipate that 2MASS will help answer key questions about local galaxy properties and their distribution."" [space.com] 10:05:03 PM    comment   trackback []

Launch Day Doug, best of luck with your new endeavor. "I'd like to announce the launch of my new business: Arrochar Management & Learning, LLC..." [Erehwon Notebook]. 9:58:48 PM    comment   trackback []