Lazytown Classroom

[boredjedi]

I'm going to end up losing sleep over all this

This one is good. Cites the scientific studies and has interviews with Guzey.
Small channel too. Oh looks like he didn't post much after 4 years ago.
1 video 3 years ago. 1 video 1 year ago. This one was 4 years ago when the topic was hot.

[boredjedi]

Interesting BBC segment BJ. Good science often involves debate.

That's why I'm not too particularly fond with the terms science by consensus or settled science.
What I've seen is that it stifles debates. I prefer to say "as far as our current understanding now but that
might change in the near future".

I saw the reference to Mather Walker and his book Why We Sleep. Don't remember ever
coming across that one. So I did my usual research. The rabbit hole of debates heh.
I came across that bbc link from an opinion piece from a Columbia university blog section.
It was in the comment section.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.e...actual-errors/

When I post videos, I don't worry too much about the creators. It's more about the subject matters and the
debates that will ensue.

This one is quiet interesting about an update in Photosynthesis he posted yesterday.

[chuft]

I was really behind in my sleep and was in bed 8.5 hours last night (according to my cpap) until my birds lost their patience and woke me up.


Interesting BBC segment BJ. Good science often involves debate.

A problem with sleep as a subject is that it is not possible to conduct ethical studies which involves excessive sleep deprivation in humans. If lack of sleep is damaging or fatal, there is no way to prove that with a double blind experiment. You can only go by observations of things that happen to occur, almost always outside of controlled laboratory conditions. Of course you will always get bizarre outliers when it comes to those, such as that guy who had a railroad spike go through his brain and survived, or some of these people who are missing virtually all of their brain on scans yet are walking and talking just fine like anybody else.

Many things in science fall into this category. You can't do a controlled experiment to show that dinosaurs evolved and existed, or that black holes eat matter. You have to rely on observations of things you see in nature. Many things in human health would seem like they could be studied in a lab, but in reality, many conditions develop over years or decades and there is no way to study them under controlled conditions. Things like cancer and heart disease fall into this category. You can study short-term things in a lab, such as chemical changes that occur in a few weeks from doing various things, but really long term studies are always observational and not experimental and typically involve a ton of uncontrolled and/or unknown factors.

[boredjedi]

Guzey vs Walker

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3csz3s6

One example:
“the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span”
Isaac Newton was reported to just sleep 4 hours a night and he lived to 84. Not too bad especially in those days.

[chuft]

Stuff like this really makes me want to study Epistemology.

I don't know if you know who John Carpenter is, he made a lot of horror movies like The Thing. His first film was actually a comedy, called Dark Star, about a ship on a long term mission to go around blowing up unstable planets so their star systems can be colonized. It was his student project at UCLA Film School. It has a hilarious Phenomenology scene that you would definitely appreciate. The film was written by and stars Dan O'Bannon, who then went on to write the script for the 1979 Lovecraftian movie Alien. I highly recommend it (I own the DVD).

If I hadn't already read Why We Sleep I wouldn't have had any suspicions about the contents of the video

I think videos can be useful - like showing you how to change the battery in your car key fob - but when they are someone, especially someone without conventional credentials, just making statements (with or without fancy graphics) I don't tend to take them very seriously. The whole thing could just be made up, or contain misinterpreted summaries of other sources, or be accurate in some parts and wrong in others. No science publishing editor or peer review board or history department is reviewing these things for accuracy. Anybody can say anything and throw it out there for free on youtube. Books and academic journals are both more expensive and more reviewed by others prior to publication and much less likely to contain nonsense than some rando in a video.

The only thing I would watch youtube for in terms of "data dumps" is very unimportant stuff like Warhammer 40K lore or the like, or videos from established institutions like the BBC or PBS.

I'm also fascinated by the intersection of free speech and misinformation.

This is a major problem due to the invention of the internet. Before that, "freedom of the press is for those who own one" as the saying goes. Individual speech might be heard in a bar or something but there was no practical way for an individual to spread (mis)information to a mass audience. Now it is possible, and even profitable, thanks to youtube, to make a presentation for no cost and distribute it to, potentially, the whole world, who can watch it at no cost. The same goes for Facebook and Twitter etc. This has created a new problem, as previously, it took resources (especially money) to even try to reach a mass audience, and that meant the people doing it had a vested interest in the accuracy of the content - if it was wrong it could damage the reputation of a publisher or newspaper, or could result in lawsuits.


I have seen several attempts at "totally free speech" environments - ranging from gaming forums to things like 4Chan - and inevitably they are overrun with garbage, insults, racism, sexism, trolls, illegal content, hate speech etc. Reasonable people leave such environments once the downward spiral begins, leaving only those who actually like to wallow in the mud of such content. Free speech is a nice idea but it's kind of like saying anyone is allowed to come into your home. It won't be long before the theory proves more attractive than the reality. Historically in places like bars that are open to the public to hang out and talk, disruptive customers won't be tolerated and will be removed by force; also, false statements made will not be heard by anyone not physically in the room.


The concept of free speech is very much pre-internet. We are in the midst of a giant social experiment to see if it really is a good idea with cheap mass communication. In my experience it is not, I do not stay on forums where "anything goes" and prefer some moderation, even if it is a little less "free." (Freedom from having to wade through garbage content to get to content you want is a new and important freedom in my opinion.)

[chuft]

I recently read Why We Sleep by Mather Walker, PhD. Our understanding of sleep has evolved tremendously in the 20 years since Robert Ekirch (the source in the video) published his findings about biphasic sleep, and while it's true that it may have been in-fashion to wake up in the middle of the night in certain cultures at certain times in history, according to Walker "there is no biological rhythm--of brain activity, neorochemical activity, or metabolic activity--that would hint at a human desire to wake up for several hours in the middle of the night. Instead, the true pattern of biphasic sleep--for which there is anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence, and which remains measurable in all human beings to date--is one consisting of a longer bout of continuous sleep at night, followed by a shorter midafternoon nap."

Hmmm. That seems to contradict this study.

(Hope you use the dark theme like me, or this might be hard to read )


In short photoperiods, human sleep is biphasic

Abstract

SUMMARY Results of a photoperiod experiment show that human sleep can be unconsolidated and polyphasic, like the sleep of other animals. When normal individuals were transferred from a conventional 16-h photoperiod to an experimental 10-h photo-period, their sleep episodes expanded and usually divided into two symmetrical bouts, several hours in duration, with a 1–3 h waking interval between them. The durations of nocturnal melatonin secretion and of the nocturnal phase of rising sleepiness (measured in a constant routine protocol) also expanded, indicating that the timing of internal processes that control sleep and melatonin, such as circadian rhythms, had been modified by the change in photoperiod. Previous work suggests that the experimental results could be simulated with dual-oscillators, entrained separately to dawn and dusk, or with a two-process model, having a lowered threshold for sleep-onset during the scotoperiod.


https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...1992.tb00019.x


and this one

Segmented sleep in a nonelectric, small-scale agricultural society in Madagascar

Conclusions

Sleep in this population is segmented, similar to the “first” sleep and “second” sleep reported in the historical record. Moreover, although average sleep duration and quality were lower than documented in Western populations, circadian rhythms were more stable across days.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/...002/ajhb.22979




Ekirch's research continued to the present. From a 2022 BBC article:



Collectively, this research has also given Ekirch the explanation he had been craving for why much of humanity abandoned the two-sleep system, starting from the early 19th Century. As with other recent shifts in our behaviour, such as a move towards depending on clock-time, the answer was the Industrial Revolution.

"Artificial illumination became more prevalent, and more powerful – first there was gas [lighting], which was introduced for the first time ever in London," says Ekirch, "and then, of course, electric lighting toward the end of the century. And in addition to altering people's circadian rhythms. artificial illumination also naturally allowed people to stay up later."

However, though people weren't going to bed at 21:00 anymore, they still had to wake up at the same time in the morning – so their rest was truncated. Ekirch believes that this made their sleep deeper, because it was compressed.

As well as altering the population's circadian rhythms, the artificial lighting lengthened the first sleep, and shortened the second. "And I was able to trace [this], almost decade by decade, over the course of the 19th Century," says Ekirch.


https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...biphasic-sleep

[BRBFBI]

Stuff like this really makes me want to study Epistemology. If I hadn't already read Why We Sleep I wouldn't have had any suspicions about the contents of the video, although the other uploads by this Youtuber have clickbaity titles in the "forbidden knowledge/what they don't want you to know" vein which is a bit of a turnoff. They obviously have a financial incentive to draw in viewers while also having very little incentive to verify the integrity of their information (and perhaps even a disincentive since shocking facts, even if wrong, get more views). They also uploaded 50 videos in a year (that's almost one a week), so I don't think you could call them passion projects.

I'm also fascinated by the intersection of free speech and misinformation. I'm a big believer in freedom of speech, but also recognize that misinformation can be harmful and is very easy to produce and find an audience for through technology. I strongly believe that neither government NOR technology companies should not be the ones determining what we can see and say. YouTube has already proven they are unable to interpret satire and banished many of the edgier content creators from their platform.

If I don't want to be saved from misinformation by government or corporations then I need a way of dealing with it myself. I feel like I'm a pretty discerning person, but the problem is we all think that.

[BRBFBI]

Anyway, I have almost forgotten to post this one about sleep I had seen when it was uploaded days ago.
That beginning with example of the Hungarian soldier Paul Kern.

I recently read Why We Sleep by Mather Walker, PhD. Our understanding of sleep has evolved tremendously in the 20 years since Robert Ekirch (the source in the video) published his findings about biphasic sleep, and while it's true that it may have been in-fashion to wake up in the middle of the night in certain cultures at certain times in history, according to Walker "there is no biological rhythm--of brain activity, neorochemical activity, or metabolic activity--that would hint at a human desire to wake up for several hours in the middle of the night. Instead, the true pattern of biphasic sleep--for which there is anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence, and which remains measurable in all human beings to date--is one consisting of a longer bout of continuous sleep at night, followed by a shorter midafternoon nap."

[chuft]

Well I've posted elsewhere how Google made their search worse on purpose because people were finding what they were looking for too quickly, and not seeing enough ads.

Now there's an ocean of AI garbage out there too.

[boredjedi]

It went all downhill since 2010. Now it's complete chaos, I have a hard time searching for something useful.

It's gotten even worse just these past 2 years. They keep messing with their search algorithm. With the added Ai in everything. Even youtube this past year has gotten worse.
When watching a music video, I used to get nothing but music videos in the recommended panel. Now, it's a mish mash of everything. Very annoying.
I think it also has something to do with my youtube Watch History turned off once they made it mandatory. Youtube don't like you fighting them.

There we go a full screen post

[LazyPooky]

Recently I was looking at old screenshots of Google search - 2008, 2009 - and searching for LazyTown resulted in information below the link from mostly forums, managed by the websites themselves. Those forums were a great way to get information from. Large amounts of text, lots of knowledge, nice interaction. It went all downhill since 2010. Now it's complete chaos, I have a hard time searching for something useful.

Screenshot came from Ana, I was on MSN with her in 2009.

[chuft]

I was talking about this years ago. We live in the age of lies and nonsense. The internet as I feared is becoming overrun with AI slop and misinformation to go with the existing disinformation coming from bad actors. The internet isn't useless yet but it is headed there fast. People without critical thinking skills and a lot of skepticism, who believe anything they see in a video or read in an article, are going to be profoundly misinformed.

[boredjedi]

AI 101

Speaking of Ai. Here's a content creator mocking all those Ai videos.
We don't blame him right. It's another channel I watch on the regular.
It was uploaded today.
At 15:42 The hands! The hands!

[boredjedi]

Astrophysics

This time the Dipole Repeller

[boredjedi]

Biology

Mirror, mirror on the wall.......