The Japanese word ‘Kuchi zamishi’ is the act of eating when you’re not hungry because your mouth is lonely.
Stages of Sleep
Sleep isn’t uniform. Once we fall asleep, our bodies follow a sleep cycle, lasting 90-120 minutes on average. Our total sleep is made up of several rounds of this cycle. Each cycle contains four stages. The first three stages are known as non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and the final stage is known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Stage 1 NREM
Recognised as the “dozing off” stage, it lasts around one to five minutes. Muscles relax and your heart rate, breathing, and eye movements begin to slow down, as do your brain waves, which are more active when you are awake. It’s easy to wake someone up during this stage, but undisturbed, they can move quickly into stage 2.
Stage 2 NREM
It’s characterized by deeper sleep as your heart rate and breathing rates continue slowing down. Eye movements cease and body temperature decreases. Apart from some brief moments of higher frequency electrical activity, brain waves also remain slow. Stage 2 is typically the longest of the four sleep stages.
Stage 3 NREM
This stage plays an important role in making you feel refreshed and alert the next day. Heartbeat, breathing, and brain wave activity all reach their lowest levels, and the muscles are as relaxed as they will be. This stage lasts longer in initial cycles, decrease in duration over the following cycles.
REM
It occurs ~90 minutes after falling asleep. Your eyes move back and forth rather quickly under your eyelids. Breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure begins to increase. Dreaming typically occurs during REM sleep, and your arms and legs become paralyzed – it’s believed this is intends to prevent us from physically acting out our dreams. The duration of each REM stage increases by cycle, the inverse of stage 3 NREM. Studies linked REM sleep to memory consolidation, the process of converting recent experiences into long-term memories. The duration of the REM stage decrease as we age, causing us to spend more time in the NREM stages.
Moments where we briefly wake during the night, but not remember them, are known as “W” stages.
The Volume of Sound
Decibels increase exponentially since they’re measured logarithmically. Near silence is expressed as 0 dB but a sound measured at 10 dB is actually 10 times louder. If a sound is 20 dB, that’s 100 times louder than near silence. Here’s some context:
• Normal conversation – 60 dB
• Heavy city traffic – 85 dB
• Lawn mower – 90 dB
• Headphones at max volume – 105 dB
• Sirens – 120 dB
• Concerts – 120 dB
• Sporting events – 105 to 130 dB
• Fireworks – 140 to 160 dB
• Firearms – 150 dB and higher
I leapt down this rabbit hole after driving an immensely smooth and silent electric car – I could hear my own breathing. Bear in mind, it was an entry level hatchback. I theorised the road noise, heard from the cabin, might drop further with premium tyres.
Tyres for this car ranged from 68dB – 73dB, which led me to think – why in the world are the 68dB tyres twice as expensive than the 73dB?
It’s because it’s not the same as turning up the tv volume by 5 increments, from 30 to 35. It’s the same as turning the volume up x5, from 30 to 150.
Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast, it is sometimes better to just eat the toast.
Five Dimensions
Vehicle Hubris?
Professor Paul Piff is a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He examines the origins of human kindness and cooperation, and the social consequences of economic inequality.
One of his experiments looked at which drivers stop for pedestrians, depending on the value of the vehicle. He found a correlation between higher value vehicle and their lower likelihood of stopping at pedestrian crossings – despite being legally obliged to do so. Source: BBC News
I haven’t read the research paper and I don’t generally trust clickbait articles. Therefore my thoughts were:
• What thresholds determined a high value and low value vehicle?
• Were cars grouped into certain value groups?
• Were the group sample sizes large and proportionate across groups?
• How many different neighbourhoods and crossings were observed?
• How varied was the sample in terms of observation times?
Plenty
Indoor vertical farms create the perfect environment for plants, reducing the unpredictability of changing climates. No pesticides or GMOs either. It packs 350x more crops in the same space used for traditional farming.
NYC Mesh
Internet feels like a human right now: providing access to information, communication, and life admin tools (at the least). There’s around 1m people in NYC that don’t have access to internet, due to cost barriers driven to the oligopolistic market of providers. They won’t invest in areas where it’s deemed a low return on investment.
NYC Mesh is a community run organisation, run by volunteers, helping people get access to high speed internet. Super nodes are fibre-connected and act as gateways, repeaters then beam internet to neighbourhood nodes, which relay it to a user’s individual router. It becomes a web of interconnected routers and repeaters keeping internet access operational. Users cover the cost of installation if they have the means, it still goes ahead if they don’t. Everything else is run on donations. It’s free for those who can’t financially support the cause.
Security-wise, the mesh router is firewalled from a user’s local network meaning it’s not possible to reach beyond the mesh router to a user’s local access network (LAN). The mesh internet connection and traffic between nodes is encrypted using WPA2.
Traffic Simulation
This website helps you model out and visualise traffic impacts. Variables include the flow of vehicles, politeness of drivers etc.
Fast Fashion Laptops
Framework creates customisable modular laptops. This is antithetical to the modern laptop (planned obsolescence) because it promises to let you personalise, repair, and upgrade it easily – while remaining affordable.
The modular setup means you can replace faulty hardware without having to take it to a specialist. E.g. a cracked screen can be switched out for a fresh one, a defunct speaker or touch pad for a functioning one, or the 4 side inputs can consist of any composition of USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, DisplayPort, or MicroSD ports.
It means we get closer to securing the loop of materials. The whole reduce, reuse, recycle ethos. If it makes the consumer’s life easier, even better.