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Early Risers Crash Faster Than People Who Stay Up Late (Scientific American)
Early birds may get the best worms—or at least the best garage sale deals—but they also tire out more quickly than night owls do. In a new study researchers Christina Schmidt and Philippe Peigneux, both at the University of Liège in Belgium, and their colleagues first asked 16 extreme early risers and 15 extreme night owls to spend a week following their natural sleep schedule. Then subjects spent two nights in a sleep lab, where they again followed their preferred sleep patterns and underwent cognitive testing twice daily while in a functional MRI scanner.
An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift. Peigneux says faster activation of sleep pressure appears to prevent early birds from fully benefiting from the circadian signal, as evening types do.
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via imgs.xkcd.com
Good morning, Tumblr.
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Particle Physics
by Julie Kane
They say two photons fired through a slit
stay paired together to the end of time;
if one is polarized to change its spin,
the other does a U-turn on a dime,
although they fly apart at speeds of light
and never cross each other’s paths again,
like us, a couple in the seventies,
divorced for almost thirty years since then.
Tonight a Red Sox batter homered twice
to beat the Yankees in their playoff match,
and, sure as I was born in Boston, when
that second ball deflected off the bat,
I knew your thoughts were flying back to me,
though your location was a mystery. -
‘clutch chair’, 2007 - 2008: clutch chair is another project developed by scott jarvie made from 10 000 drinking straws. (via scott jarvie: the atlas chair)
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The $150 Space Camera: MIT Students Beat NASA On Beer-Money Budget
The two students (from MIT, of course) put together a low-budget rig to fly a camera high enough to photograph the curvature of the Earth. Instead of rockets, boosters and expensive control systems, they filled a weather balloon with helium and hung a styrofoam beer cooler underneath to carry a cheap Canon A470 compact camera. Instant hand warmers kept things from freezing up and made sure the batteries stayed warm enough to work.
Of course, all this would be pointless if the guys couldn’t find the rig when it landed, so they dropped a prepaid GPS-equipped cellphone inside the box for tracking. Total cost, including duct tape? $148.
THIS IS SOOOO AWESOME!!!!
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:’) its true
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In spite of sounding incredibly nerdy….
I truly love doing integrals and derivatives, particularly when the product/quotient rule start out monstrously big, and minimize to something beautiful like 1/x
Totally agree with you on this.
! :)
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Fun with Tumblarity -
Remember that little pi animation i posted a few weeks ago? Yeah, that was quite popular with the math geeks (hi, math geeks). More than doubled the ol’ tumblarity almost overnight. Which got me thinking about how long it would take to return to the starting point. I tracked the value a few (okay so kind of several) times a day and here’s the result.
It took about two weeks (8/19 - 9/4) for the tumblarity to crash back to pre-pi values. But there was a break after one week (that big drop in the middle); I suspect due to what appears to be a running average/total/goofy algorithm deal. So on day eight, the mass of reblogs from the first day dropped out of the calculations and the score plummeted. And pretty much all of the stats were based on likes/reblogs of pi.
So what did we learn? A reblog is three points up; posting nothing or posting original content drops it three points at some time interval or new post; a like, either for your post or that you’ve ticked for someone else’s is a point. I haven’t noticed a pattern for gathering new followers (hello again, math geeks and dataviz geeks), but those seem to act as a buffer. So if you get all freaked out by massive drops, just chalk it up to the fact that tumblarity is a very short timespan kind of statistic that doesn’t remember two weeks ago very well. Which is why you have to keep feeding the beast. And why it is evil.
Finally a better understanding of how Tumblarity works. Very interesting.
