Polyphasic Sleep

Under the Quora question "What is something useful I can learn right now in 10 minutes that would be useful for the rest of my life?" Swami Nathan posted a sleep hack called Polyphasic Sleep:

You may know that sleep is divided into five stages. Polyphasic sleep concentrates on the fifth and most important stage of sleep, rapid eye movement (REM.) This is the most beneficial stage of sleep; it is when the brain is most active and is when dreaming occurs. REM is the only stage of sleep that is actually required to survive and function normally. The interesting part of all this is that you only spend 1 to 2 hours in this stage of sleep every night. The other 6 or so hours spent asleep every night are seemingly wasted.

Polyphasic sleep cycles basically cut out the other useless phases, giving you an additional 4 to 6 hours of time awake.

I enjoy my sleep, but perhaps I could get the same pleasure with less time. Here's one polyphasic sleep cycle pattern:

The Siesta

This sleep cycle is actually pretty common around the world in warmer countries such as Latin America, where the temperature is so hot during the middle of the day that people retire to take a short nap after lunch. It involves 6 hours of core sleep and one short 20-30 minute nap. You will find in these countries that most shops close during the early afternoon, as everyone is ‘busy’ taking their siestas!

I'm surprised I don't see any answers from Tim Ferriss in that Quora thread.

Hmmm, it's early afternoon here in San Francisco. I'm going to take a 20 minute siesta.

First generation HUD's

I was really tempted to splurge for pre-order pricing on the Recon Jet, this wearable HUD for cyclists. The idea of being able to see your speed, distance, heartrate, and so on while running or cycling without having to look away from the road is so enticing.

But I had previously purchased something similar, the Oakley Airwave snowboard goggles, and those were such a disappointment, that I'm going to wait until actual users have beta tested this product. The UI was awful, the setup was painful, and in the sun I couldn't see anything in the HUD while snowboarding down the mountain. All these HUD's that require you to focus on a tiny point to the bottom right of your visual field as the digital data comes through a tiny display wedged in at the bottom right of the right lens.

But when we imagine these futuristic displays we always picture data actually being overlayed on top of the glass that we're looking at or through. Some might argue that overlaying data on your glasses is dangerous, but I find shifting the focus of your eyes from the real world to a tiny point at the bottom right of your right eye while in motion (on a snowboard, on your bike) is much more dangerous. At least when you look through your glasses your peripheral vision can still come into play.

Well, a lot of people seem to have ordered the Recon Jet as it sold out of its pre-orders despite a high price so we'll likely have real-world reviews in the near future. I hope it's great, but I suspect it won't be.

Why do traffic circles work some places and not others?

One day as an undergraduate student in a law and economics class, I listened to my professor tell a simple story about traffic rules in a quaint European town. I’ve forgotten where it was—probably somewhere in Holland—but the gist was that the municipality had gotten rid of all stops signs and traffic lights in the town center, and after the change, travel times and accidents both fell.

Almost a decade later, there are numerous examples of small European towns that did away with signal lights and traffic signs and, voila, traffic began to flow better, transit times decreased, and roadways became less dangerous for pedestrians and vehicle passengers alike. The absence of conventional rules improved outcomes.

...

In Haiti, there is no meaningful enforcement of any set of traffic rules. Virtually all road space could be called “shared”—pedestrians, motorcycles, and four-wheel vehicles use the same space everywhere; only the largest intersections have traffic lights; there are no crosswalks and almost no stop signs. Instead of following a rulebook, drivers rely on local, informal norms.

Traffic in Port-au-Prince is horrifying. People do not yield to each other and spontaneously fall into an efficient order, as in England’s Poynton. In Haitian transit, people approach shared space as if they’re homesteaders on an Oklahoma land run. It’s every-man-for-himself, where every man is trying to grab every centimeter of available road space before someone else does. Instead of a free-flowing circle, a roundabout becomes an immobile tangle of tap-taps, traffic jams radiating in all directions.

 Insightful. I'd long taken for granted the idea that doing away with traffic lights would encourage both drivers and pedestrians to be more vigilant and aware, leading to fewer accidents, but I had not considered that the context in which that would work required some established norms which don't exist everywhere.

Also:

Perceptions of risk and consequent trade-offs might explain other differences between countries. “Differences…between high- and low-income countries are probable,” the authors write, “because there may be differences in the hazardousness in the respective road traffic environments, and how much people choose to focus on such risks when there are other unmet needs such as food, stability and protection against diseases.” They suggest that people in low-income countries may “prioritise urgent needs such as food, water and stability over accidental risks such as road traffic accidents.” 

Make behavioral costs clearer

This same basic strategy – expressing the impact of our choices in quantities that really matter to us, rather than in quantities that don't – underlies The Norm Chronicles, a recent book by Michael Blastland and David Spiegelhalter that translates a plethora of everyday hazards into what they call "microlives". Really, this is just a fancy term for "half an hour of life"; a burger, they explain, knocks one microlife off the average adult's expectancy, as do two cigarettes. It's a clever way of adding immediacy to "chronic risks". Those risks, unlike skydiving or playing chicken on the railway tracks, that accumulate so gradually they're easy to ignore. Thinking in microlives also makes it evident that unhealthy, life-shortening choices can be balanced by life-extending ones: the first 20 minutes of exercise each day, for example, adds two. (Further minutes of exercise, sadly, are less beneficial.)

More here.

This would make for a fun or interesting mobile app. Perhaps it could link up to RunKeeper, Moves, Fitbit, or other activity tracking apps to keep a running tally of microlives for you.  Run a few miles, earn enough microlife credits for a burger with all the fixings. Have a few extra beers and a cigarette on your weekly night out with the guys? You've just decreased the chance you'll see your grandchild graduate high school.

Why do we care what happens after we die?

Interestingly, the chief executives paid their employees less after becoming fathers. On average, after chief executives had a child, they paid about $100 less in annual compensation per employee. To be a good provider, the researchers write, it’s all too common for a male chief executive to claim “his firm’s resources for himself and his growing family, at the expense of his employees.”

But there was a twist. When Professor Dahl’s team examined the data more closely, the changes in pay depended on the gender of the child that the chief executives fathered. They reduced wages after having a son, but not after having a daughter.

Daughters apparently soften fathers and evoke more caretaking tendencies. The speculation is that as we brush our daughters’ hair and take them to dance classes, we become gentler, more empathetic and more other-oriented.

From the most emailed piece from the NYTimes today, Why Men Need Women. It goes on to note that men who grew up with more siblings, in particular sisters, were more nurturing and caring. Who knows what type of monster I would be today had I not had two sisters.

I chuckled at this bit: 

In a provocative 2007 presentation in San Francisco, the psychologist Roy Baumeister asked, “Is there anything good about men?” (The short answer, if you haven’t read “Demonic Males,” by Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, is not much.) But our saving grace, Professor Baumeister argues, is that across a wide range of attributes, “men go to extremes more than women.” Men are responsible for the lion’s share of the worst acts of aggression and selfishness, but they also engage in some of the most extreme acts of helping and generosity.

On this point, the economists James Andreoni at the University of California, San Diego, and Lise Vesterlund at the University of Pittsburgh report evidence that whereas many women prefer to share evenly, “men are more likely to be either perfectly selfish or perfectly selfless.” It may be that meaningful contact with women is one of the forces that tilt men toward greater selflessness.

If you haven't read the first linked article, it's a great read.

The idea of empathy being learned or transferred through the practice of using the nurturing instinct (the causality is fuzzy) is an interesting one. 

I'm curious less about the gender results here than the influence of having children generally (the title of this post just uses the NYTimes article as a jumping off point).

It's long been a puzzle to me why a human might act in altruistic ways to future generations when that human will be dead long before the impact of their actions come to bear on the world. You might argue our treatment of the environment is just one example of how we show we don't care, but there are plenty of counterpoints that show that people do care about their legacy or for future generations in ways that are curious from an objective or maybe utilitarian standpoint.

[This, by the way, is a reason why the advice to "live every day like it's your last" is lousy advice as no one would go into work that day and society would collapse.] 

Perhaps having children forces us to have a time horizon that extends beyond our death and as such serves as a built-in defense mechanism for society against short-term destructive behavior on the behalf of its constituents.