Our body clocks

Two interesting articles on sleep and body clocks. In the NYTimes, Daniel Randall cites research showing that the idea of getting a continuous eight hour block of sleep each night is a relatively modern invention and possibly suboptimal.

The idea that we should sleep in eight-hour chunks is relatively recent. The world’s population sleeps in various and surprising ways. Millions of Chinese workers continue to put their heads on their desks for a nap of an hour or so after lunch, for example, and daytime napping is common from India to Spain.
One of the first signs that the emphasis on a straight eight-hour sleep had outlived its usefulness arose in the early 1990s, thanks to a history professor at Virginia Tech named A. Roger Ekirch, who spent hours investigating the history of the night and began to notice strange references to sleep. A character in the “Canterbury Tales,” for instance, decides to go back to bed after her “firste sleep.” A doctor in England wrote that the time between the “first sleep” and the “second sleep” was the best time for study and reflection. And one 16th-century French physician concluded that laborers were able to conceive more children because they waited until after their “first sleep” to make love. Professor Ekirch soon learned that he wasn’t the only one who was on to the historical existence of alternate sleep cycles. In a fluke of history, Thomas A. Wehr, a psychiatrist then working at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md., was conducting an experiment in which subjects were deprived of artificial light. Without the illumination and distraction from light bulbs, televisions or computers, the subjects slept through the night, at least at first. But, after a while, Dr. Wehr noticed that subjects began to wake up a little after midnight, lie awake for a couple of hours, and then drift back to sleep again, in the same pattern of segmented sleep that Professor Ekirch saw referenced in historical records and early works of literature.

​The article caught my eye because I've been naturally waking up after about four hours of sleep each night, spending a bit of time reading, then dropping back to sleep for a few hours. Is this my body naturally seeking a split sleep schedule? I'd assumed it was the scourge of keeping my iPad and iPhone near my bed. As soon as any early traffic noise wakes me, my impulse is to grab one of those devices to check my email. But perhaps I'm just finally settling into a more natural sleep pattern?

The other article, in the WSJ, ​cites a wide swath of research on optimal times of day to tackle certain tasks, from working out to sending email to creative thinking. Much of this feels like it could be the subject of a Timothy Ferriss book.

Clean? Or just cleaner?

Pro cycling has tried to tighten up its doping detection processes in the past decade. In 2001 or 2002, it introduced a urine-based test for one of the ​biggest scourges in the sport, artificially synthesized EPO, a hormone used to boost red blood cell production. In 2008, it launched biological passports, a method for testing markers in an athlete's blood in search of statistically  anomalous spikes.

Has it worked?​

​No one knows for sure, but one measurable difference is that pro cyclists have slowed down. This article analyzes results of biological passports in pro cycling and points out a decrease in the number of anomalous results since these tests have gone into place. In Lance Armstrong's heyday, an oft-quoted magic number that a cyclist needed to attain to ascend the podium at a grand tour was 7 W/kg. But the scientists behind this article find that figure to be beyond the reach of a clean cyclist.

That all began with the hypothesis that the power output achievable without doping was limited and could be predicted based on physiology, and that any cyclist who went above this on a long finishing climb in the Tour was probably doing so with the benefit of doping!  That "limit", I suggested, was about 6.2 W/kg, a climbing power output that was very common in the 1990s and early 2000s, but which has NOT been seen since about 2006.

In this Finnish cycling forum, someone published what I believe are top-ranked average power outputs for cyclists racing grand tours from 2000 on (if you can read Finnish and translate, let me know; Chrome's Google Translate function made a mess of the formatting). The last cyclist to achieve an average power output of 6 W/kg or higher was Alberto Contador in the 2009 Tour de France. He won this year's Vuelta Espana with a power output of 5.88 W/Kg.

It's not definitive. Anomalous spikes in energy late in mountain stages would still seem suspicious. But anecdotally, we have seen fewer of those.​ Many people found the Tour de France boring this year because we did not have as many late mountain stage duels between the race leaders, as in years past. Is clean cycling doomed to be less dramatic a spectacle?

Whether it's because cyclists are racing clean now, or whether they've had to significantly cut back their doping, is unclear.​ They are measurably slower.

I personally believe that at least half the professional athletes I watch on TV across all sports are on ​some banned substance of some sort. I thought this during the Olympics, and I think this whenever I watch any professional sporting match (this is just the latest anecdotal evidence). While many of the athletes who've fingered their peers are not seen as trustworthy because they themselves doped, I personally suspect so many athletes dope that it's unlikely that it's clean athletes will be the whistleblowers. The threat of retaliation for a clean athlete who is still competing amidst a pool of dopers is high, but once someone's already been caught and banned, they have much less career risk.

If there's one lesson of economics that has proven solid over the years, it's the theory of incentives. Considering the minuscule odds of succeeding and the power-law distribution of income in professional sports, the economic incentives for doping are enormous, and selection bias would argue that the people we do get to see succeeding on TV are disproportionately weighted towards those who have used such substances. Even if the physical edge granted by such substances is small, the placebo effect and mental edge may be just as valuable. In Tyler Hamilton's book, Lance Armstrong is constantly on edge over what new doping techniques other cyclists might be using to achieve an edge over him.

The larger question at play is whether the social norm of sports as a competition between "clean" athletes competing on some some arbitrarily defined level playing ground is outdated or perhaps even a pipe dream. If clean competition is an unattainable ideal, a farce we've believed in for decades and decades, how far are we prepared to go, how much money are we prepared to spend, to chase after it? Is the reinforcement of fair play in sports so powerful an idea because we think it affects the moral fabric of the rest of society?

Herzog on...The Killers?

So bizarre that Werner Herzong directed this mini-documentary on The Killers in advance of their online concert a week ago.​ What are the odds Herzog had heard any music by The Killers in advance of this gig? I say 2%, plus or minus 2%.

Even if you're not a huge fan of The Killers​, it's worth watching if you're a fan of Werner Herzog's voiceover narration, and really, who isn't? Leave it to Herzog to inject himself in what should be a puff piece for The Killers and questioning the reality of their hometown.

"But this is all fake, this town here, is it? And Las Vegas itself? The Strip? Does it look real to you?"​

At times it feels like Herzog is playing a joke, but it's hard to tell if The Killers were in on it.

I would create a Kickstarter project to raise money for Herzog to narrate my childhood home videos.

Andrei Tarkovsky on FOMO

Andrei Tarkovsky is asked to give advice to young people. This is what he said.​

[It sure seems like he says a lot more than the put into the subtitles, but the brevity adds power to his words. Maybe Russian and English language densities just vary a lot.]​

By the way, you can watch Andrei Rublev online at Hulu.​ I know most of you won't. But for the few of you who do, or who have...right?