Everyman Polyphasic Sleep- Day Zero

Not to put to fine a point on it, this polyphasic sleeping thing is, well, tough. It has to be expected - sleep deprivation is a funny world at the best of times, and of course is sometimes used for interrogation purposes; I hesitate to call it torture since that word gets bandied around today to describe things which are not in fact torture.

However, not too many people interrogate themselves, and herein lies the fundamental problem - it requires a monumental dose of self-discipline, again something rarer than the proverbial rocking horse shit in today's world, and I am no exception.

The nearest experience to this which I can think of goes back some 10 years or so when I was doing selection and training with the Royal Marines; sleep deprivation was quite a big part of life, especially in the field, and I remember being introduced to the experience of falling asleep whilst standing up!

At least I get to sleep indoors and don't get cold with this experiment.

After much deliberation and changing of plans I've decided to build up to things 'gradually' instead of leaping straight in, in the way a couch potato doesn't go straight into their first full marathon.

 This week will follow the 'everyman' schedule. This involves taking a core sleep of a few hours, with shorter naps spaced out the rest of the time, instead of just short naps at equal intervals. The schedule for this week is: 3 hour core sleep 00.00-03.00, with three half hour naps at 07.00, 11.00 and 19.00. This gives a relatively long drag during the day but then I have to be places some of that time anyway; this way the schedule doesn't have to be tinkered with to accomodate other commitments, which I think was part of where I was going wrong before - there was no consistency.

Next week the core sleep will be cut down by about half an hour, but one day at a time. The intention is to update on this daily, which may prove a motivating factor for staying on schedule this time.
By the by a useful resource for anyone considering this (though I wonder who in their right mind actually would) is available here.

Polyphasic Sleep - Proovime Uuesti..x2..

This represents a concerted effort here at the PMC to try polyphasic sleeping. Polyphasic sleeping, for those who don't know, involves, as its name suggests, sleeping in several phases. Whereas most of us sleep in one huge block, getting several REM cycles into the bargain, polyphasic sleeping cuts that up into chunks. The beginnings of this can be seen in the Spanish-style siesta, which might be called 'Bi-phasic', ie a chunk of core sleep very late at night/early in the morning followed by a couple of hours in the mid-afternoon. Furthermore infants, cats, and old people, exhibit polyphasic sleep patterns whether they realise it or not.

However, and this is the real kicker, just because you sleep seven or eight hours in one go at night, this doesn't mean that you should simply cut that up into, say, four chunks of two hour sleep. This is because the eight hour hibernation many of us take, or try to take (in practice it tends to be shorter during the week and longer at the weekends of course) is very inefficient and, it is argued, can leave us feeling strangely drowsy through much of the day. This certainly is the case for us at the PMC, which is why you never see a post from us in the mid-afternoon!

But with polyphasic, the phases are much shorter, as short as 15 minutes to half an hour! There are different schemes, and some of them have even been given names, most notably 'Dymaxion', named after its proponent, Buckminster Fuller (try saying that quickly!) the father of Geodesics, which involves 30 minute naps every 6 hours, and the aptly named 'Uberman', which would presumably be what you need to be to complete it, which involves 15 mins every four house. They say this latter pattern was also followed by Leonardo da Vinci though I don't think there's any real evidence for this.

We are going to try the Dymaxion, naturally, because it's the hardest! But there is another reason - the naps should be spaced out evenly (eg at 12.00, 16.00, 20.00, 00.00. 04.00 and 08.00 if you were following the Uberman schedule) but, like many people, our schedule simply doesn't permit this - presumably it wouldn't go down to well if we told an English class to get on with a 15 minute exercise whilst we went and had a lie down in the corner.

The Dymaxion schedule, however, just about fits, except in a couple of cases, where we'd have to bring the naps forward by an hour or two. Of more concern is what to do in the wee hours when the whole world is asleep. Fortunately there is some good advice at this blog from someone who actually partook in a polyphasic sleep schedule successfully for some months (most people fizzle out within days). Just to keep it in perspective, Mr. Pavlina was already an exceptionally self-disciplined man, rising every day at about 5a.m. including weekends (!), was a non-smoker, non-drinker of not only alcohol but even coffee, a vegan (he opines that eating products with animal hormones in them can interfere with the body's cycles too, although we're largely vegan here at the PMC too), and had an understanding wife who made things easy(er) for him. Furthermore he was based in Las Vegas where I assume they have year round sunshine, quite different from 57' N or wherever Tallinn is. On the other hand now the days are getting longer here, the white nights might be conducive for the experiment, I know they tended to wreak havoc with our body clock in any case.

In case anyone is interested in what the hell we'd try this for anyway, apart from the relish of a challenge, the main benefits we can see are a huge increase in the amount of time available to one. If you're sleeping 8 hours a night, and you go from that to the Dymaxion schedule (which totals only 2 hours in a 24 period, the Uberman schedule even less at 1 1/2 hours) you've gained approximately 6 hours in a 24 hour period - that translates as 42 hours PER WEEK, like having an extra working week every week!.

Of course you have to offset this against the fact that for much of that time you're likely to resemble a particularly caned, lethargic zombie, but they say that the period of adaptation can be as little as one week, after which levels of alertness are actually higher than before!

The experiment is going to be undergone in the absence of caffeine, except in a real emergency - it may give a short high but will be followed by a crash from which your half hour nap is likely to turn into a 10 hour one, something which could have pretty dire consequences if it happened on a working day. But a can of redbull is the fridge just in case. Alcohol is also an obvious no-no, at least for this week, and we quit smoking some weeks ago. It might be worth eating small meals (but more of them) since a large meal sends one to sleep pretty sharply, one of the prime appeals of sumo training in fact.

Sleep deprivation is a little understood area. It is, it has to be said, a particularly effective form of torture, and the super-human self discipline required, particularly after the first 24 hours or so, may just prove too much for little old us, but it is hoped that regularly posting updates here will act as some kind of incentive.

Just as a parting shot, the subject header for those not conversant in Estonian means 'let's try again' - this is because we really know what we're letting ourselves in for, having tried this before (at Christmas time, when we get about six hours of daylight here) and spectacularly failed, due mainly to the factors mentioned before - lack of discipline, caffeine bingeing, alcohol, overeating (well, it was Christmas) and all-out fatigue, so the prognosis is not good.

But once more into the breach and all that, off for the midday nap right now; the next time we post we'll have had something like 2 hours kip in total!!

Just as a footnote, as Steve Pavlina himself decided, the first day is actually Day -1, since we had a full night's sleep (and then some) last night, so Day 1 will actually be Friday 15th April, although day and night are likely to become relative concepts from hereon in!

Thought For The Day No. 52 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

'There's no 'i' in team, except when it's written in French.'

PMC

Good And Bad Leadership Qualities

..teaching English as a foreign language does very occasionally throw up something interesting; here is a resume of good and bad qualities in any leader, the context being a business English lesson on leadership, naturally enough.

The good points are lifted from here, the bad points came from somewhere we recall not where..

Good ones:

1) Vision - not just having it, which any idiot can do, but doggedly pursuing it, acting and not just visualizing.
2) Integrity - the majority of our leaders probably fall down here.
3) Dedication - remember Roy Castle?! (himself an obnoxious drunk, I seem to remember Victor Lewis-Smith saying).
4) Magnanimity - I couldn't even say it myself initially; essentially giving credit where credit's due and not trying to pass the buck, again something in short supply..
5) Humility - not letting people walk all over you so much as what in modern, inane management-ese would call 'empowering' others.
6) Creativity - yes, thinking outside the box.
7) Openness - even Mikhail Gorbachev was a proponent of this.
8) Fairness - well, yeah.
9) Assertiveness - duh..(don't confuse this with aggressiveness, however)
10) Sense of Humour - in my experience this is the hardest one to cultivate..

Things that good leaders should avoid..(these are no brainers to an even greater extent than the above but worth summarizing, or maybe not..)

1) Too high self-regard.
2) Poor communication skills.
3) Unwillingness to take risks.
4) Indecisiveness.
5) Laissez-Faire attitude.
6) Poor self-discipline.
7) Favouritism.
8) Lying and deceitfulness.
9) Being power-hungry.
10) Seeing the big picture but overlooking the details.
11) Too focused on rules or processes.
12) Authoritarianism.
13) Impulsiveness.
14) Unwillingness to resolve conflicts.
15) Inability to handle criticism.

..Got a boss who exhibits most of the first list and few of the second? Lucky you!

More Cult Info

..Following a previous post, we were interested to find this site, an unofficial (definitely unofficial) precis of Amway. If you're not familiar with this ('Scamway' as I and others like to call it) it's essentially a pyramid scheme, which employs a bait and switch con which tells people they'll be making millions, able to retire in 2-5 years etc. etc., whereas in fact they sign their life away to the cult, get advised to hire a pool of no less than 25 babysitters if they have kids, pour all the hard earned cash into useless training materials etc...In effect it's not about selling, it's about recruiting.

....and it's here in Estonia...

In any event this site is a former Amway distributor, diamond, whatever, who spills the beans and then some. Be sure to check out their responses to Amway's FAQs as well. Being the nasty cult it is, the authors of the site have had to take the precaution of uploading the site at a cyber cafe, hosting the material in Europe even though it's an American site, and other measures, or they would get jumped on with this, that and the other threat, in effect closing them down.

Read for yourself..

Bujinkan Seminar Day Three

...and so it goes, another weekend quiet night in (for us, not sure about the rest of the participants), today everyone was a bit fatigued so went a bit easier, but some useful weapons techniques using knives, bokken, hanbo and bo....take us on at your peril..

Bujinkan Seminar Day Two

..following yesterday's foretaste, today was a full day of Bujinkan, with a good turnout (except from the Tartu school, whence only the head of the school came) and pretty hard work, but useful. On to tomorrow..

Bujinkan Seminar Day One..

...the whole of the PMC have just been to the first installment of the Bujinkan seminar held by Shihan Lauri Jokinen of Finland, a 15th Dan (the highest rating) and we are still alive - found some interesting points of the body which, when an oppo digs his or her fingernails in, cause one to drop to the ground like the proverbial stone (well, like a stone anyway). Unfortunately we can't tell you where they are...you will have to go along to training for that..

...part two update tomorrow..

On This Day 350 Years Ago

..London diarist..

7th April 1661


To White Hall, and there I met with Dr. Fuller of Twickenham, newly come from Ireland; and took him to my Lord's, where he and I dined; and he did give my Lord and me a good account of the condition of Ireland and how it come to pass, through the joyning of the Fanatiques and the Presbyterians, that the latter and the former are in their declaration put together under the names of Fanatiques.

...good to see that some things haven't changed much..

Towards A More Sensible Banking System In Estonia?

The recession of 2008-2010 hit Estonia particularly hard, suffering one of the worst contractions in the EU after several years of extraordinary growth. This can be graphically demonstrated by the fact that, in the peak boom year (2007, just before the crash) banks were prepared to loan out as much through the course of the year as they held in personal deposits (and the total value of loans was about twice that of what was held in deposits).

And people say the banks were reckless?!...hmmm... well they got a lot of properties at knock down prices (since people were unable to keep up with repayments on their mortgages during the recession, the very banks who had given too-easy credit were then getting the houses back and potentially selling them at a profit, thus getting to sell the gold mine and keep the mine, as either Napoleon Hill or W. Clement Stone, I don't remember which, wrote about many years ago). I call it smart myself, don't think they were reckless about their own dealings..

A more recent and relevant truism comes from Robert Kiyosaki - when a bank tells you your home is an asset, they're not lying, they've just omitted to tell you whose asset it is (i.e. the bank's). But I regress...

Today it's very different as the banks reined in their own willingess to grant out loans to something more like a level it should have been in the first place, and loan turnover to February 2011 was only 15% of what they held in deposits.

This was further exacerbated by peoples' willingness to save during the recession years, and total savings (both personal and commercial) in Estonia are today at, I believe, a record level (about 10.5 Billion Euros - in a country of just 1.3 Million people!).

This is slightly puzzling given that inflation towards the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011 was very high (I've been quoted figures as high as 20% though am sceptical - though certainly the lower estimates of 4% seem a bit optimistic too) thus eroding those savings. But there's a natural tendency to hoard here in crisis times, which has served the country well in the past.

Just in case you're wondering where I'm getting these figures from (some of them anyway) or if you're wondering what the hell I'm talking about, and if you can read Estonian, you can see a fuller explanation here..

Brain Puzzler For Today..

Imagine a bacteria which, when having access to a source of food, will double in number every minute. So starting with one, we have two, one minute later, then four a minute after that etc. etc. for as long as there is food available.

Now imagine that scientist bloke off the Muppets puts just a single cell of this bateria (or a single bacterium) into a bottle, with plenty of food, and leave the room. It is 8.00am. When they (he comes back with that annoying Beaker thing) return at 12.00pm, ie. four hours later, they arrive just in time to see the very last scrap of food being devoured, and the bottle being completely saturated, ie. full of bacteria.

Now the question - at what point in time did the bottle become a quarter full?...


....think about it....




.....this can actually be done to the nearest minute...




....if you can't get the solution or can't be arsed, scroll down a bit..




...the time the bottle became a quarter full was 11.58 a.m., ie. only two minutes before the scientists returned!

Well done if you got it, if not, you probably stumbled on the fact that you tried to calculate the answer going from the beginning, with 1, 2, 4, 8, 16...bacteria....and of course it's impossible to say how many bacteria constitute a quarter-full bottle anyway.

The key is to start from the end. If the bottle becomes full at 12.00pm, that means one minute before, at 11.59, it's half full (since the number doubles every minute), and thus a minute before that, it's a quarter full. Therefore, a mere seven minutes before the finish, or 11.53am, the bottle is only 1/128th, or less than one per cent, full.

This has a wider application in fact, and I originally heard about it in the context of pyramid selling, where newcomers were being duped into parting with a lot of money in order to 'get started' in a market that seemed to have had very limited penetration, thus providing very fertile ground for making a lot of sales in comparison with other, more saturated markets. In reality, the market was at 11.53 a.m. or thereabouts, as if by magic it suddenly became quarter, then a half, then completely full, and the hapless would-be salesperson was left scuppered.

On the other hand the mould in the cup I left in the cupboard under the sink seems to be multiplying at an even more rapid rate..

Thought For The Day No. 51: With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

...great example of circular logic..

"If reading were not supposed to be illegal, then it wouldn't be against the law,would it?" 

Anon 

..the correct answer is either yes or no.

Thought For The Day No. 50 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

...psyhologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

Taking the initiative is not a zero-sum game. If you take the last piece of pie or cake, you deprive another person of it who may have wanted it. You take the initiative and, potentially, others can actually benefit from it..

Beware Of Cults

This is an interesting site. Not a blog, but rather a collection of essays focused on alcoholics anonymous, its accompanying 'big book' and '12 steps', its weird, philandering confidence trickster of a founder Bill Wilson (that was his real name, nothing anonymous there) and sinister partner in crime Dr Bob (Robert Holbrook Smith, who also has his full name and photos plastered anonymously all over the place) and other related releventia.

You may wonder why someone who doesn't battle with alcohol, as none of the residents of the PMC do, would want from a site like that, but it is pretty pertinent stuff. Even if you don't know / aren't related to an alcholic, someone who has been a part of AA and its derivatives (NA, AL-ANON, the list goes on) or someone who is connected with the recovery 'industry' in some way, you've probably seen it mooted as an effective 'cure' for alcoholism. The fact is its a lousy cure for alcoholism. In fact it is worse than doing nothing at all (really!).

But the site also explores cult in general (the moonies, scientology - Tom Cruise's and other Hollywood stars' cult of choice, and even Amway) and contains excellent advice and info on propaganda techniques (you need to know these 'cos you'll always get propaganda'ed at, even if you steer clear of any overtly cult org) and debating techniques as well (useful for those late night, beer fuelled 'debates' in the pub of course, well, not if you're an alcoholic however!).

Called the Orange Papers and maintained by a thoughtful, thoroughly diligent, erudite and funny Vietnam Vet, I recommend you take an hour (or three) off when you can to delve into it!

Other relevant sites if this whets your appetite include www.morerevealed.com,  the website of Rational Recovery, several South Park (from whom committed scientologist and voice of the late 'chef' Isaac Hayes quit after their mocking of that cult - funny he had no problem with poking fun at muslims, christians, mormons, jews et al) episodes including 'Bloody Mary' and 'Insheeption', and various youtube clips. Happy viewing and don't let the AA freaks intimidate you into surrendeing your brain!

Friedrich Hayek

..I was  going to eulogize about this titan of economics (all the good people are dead, remember?!) but then spotted this YT clip which seemed to do it somewhat better. I don't usually go or home made supposed-to-be-funny clips, especially where self-penned music is involved, but this is a happy exception. That said rhyming 'Hayek' and 'Kayek' is getting into Blur territory for dubious couplets, but it succeeds despite that ..

Funny Moments In Tallinn #477

Russian speaking person: "St Petersburg - this is not Russia"
Me: "Where is it then, Honduras?"
RSP: "Fuck you".

I thank you..

Remembering The Dead

..much as I dislike the hippy ideal I can always make an exception, everything is not so black and white after all...

Funny Sights In Tallinn No. 768

..actually this one wasn't that funny..

Asshole in 10 year old BMW is gunning for the already well-amber traffic lights, in wet conditions (the snow was temporarily melting at the time). Asshole realizes he's not gonna make it in time, screams off the road into a kind of layby/carpark thing (this is at the junction of Telliskivi and Paldiski for Tallinlased's sake) still at a ridiculous pace, then turns off into the gap which is actually for pedestrians to cross, and blantantly rejoins the road there whilst I'm trying to cross...

Another Regression To Childhood..

...I loved seeing this interview on the BBC's 'sounds of the sixties', ooh, quite a few years ago now when the sixties were less of a faded memoery, and I still do. It features a short excerpt from Pink Floyd, but when they were 'THE Pink Floyd', replete with the late Syd Barrett doing the 'boom boom boom chii chiii' song, long before they ascended to the pantheon of patron sainthood of patronizing, followed by an interview with the even-later-than-Syd Hans Keller, music critic and all rounder (he intriguingly enough was a big football fan, what I wouldn't give to see a clip of him in full flow eulogizing over Jimmy Greaves or whoever; actually I wouldn't give anything but still would like to see it).

Hans interviews Syd together with a very young Roger Waters, in a manner which Victor Lewis-Smith disparaged as patronizing (ironically, see above) but I don't agree; I think that Keller had a sneaky regard for them in spite of it all, and the interview was largely good natured and cooperative on both sides, this was still a few years before punk of course, and Roger and Syd come across as comparatively articulate for the era.

Funny Moments in Tallinn No. 128

...somewhere in Tallinn...

...silver BMW Z4 pulls up and two 'blonde' girls get out dressed somewhat immaculately (residents of Tallinn will know what I'm talking about)...and walk straight into the second hand shop...

Thought For The Day No. 49 - With The Rabbi Anders Weiss

..psychologist, spiritual guru and arbiter of good taste..

Kyle: ..we've all learned that people look for meaning in books, and sometimes, even if it isn't there, they'll try and invent their own meaning.
Stan: Yeah..that's why we all need to avoid books and stick to television.

South Park Se14Ep2 The Tale of Scrotie McBoogerballs

Joke To Start Off The New Year..

..one Israeli Jew to another:

"I only ever read the arab press, not the jewish press".
"why the hell do you do that?"
"because the jewish press is always full of doom and gloom, whereas according to the arab press, we are all really smart, wealthy, and control the whole world like a puppet on a string, so I'd rather read about that!!!"

An oldie but goldie..