Sleep cycle alarm clock4

Here’s some great science for you folks. This iPhone app tracks your movement throughout the night, which differs based on the cycle of sleep you’re in, and uses that to calculate the optimal time to wake you up. I heard about it. I considered it. I realized it would work because I am spending lots of money to learn SCIENCE! And then I decided to file it away in case I ever get an iPod Touch.

        Then I waited a few days and decided to write a tumblr post about it.

        There’s plenty of stuff on their site, and in this review, about how it “works” in terms of the waking you up bit, but none of these have explained the coolest part - how the hell does it work? Here’s the thing - when you’re in the deepest stage of sleep, REM, your body is basically paralysed. Maybe so you don’t act out your dreams or something. At any rate, should you wake up during REM sleep, you’ll feel awful. You cycle through the five stages of sleep in around 90 minutes, so the alarm has a 30 minute leeway before your scheduled awakening to wake you up. If you enter the lightest stage of sleep in that period, it wakes you up. If you’re in REM, it’ll wait for you to pass out of it.

        Gosh, isn’t science fun!?

        Also cool are dawn simulators. Yet another thing from Lifehacker, this site allegedly has a good dawn simulator for $40. Or they would if they weren’t sold out until january 2011. I know it looks horrible, but it probably is legit, all things considered. Just bad web design. If you’re too lazy to read the page: “slowly lights a bedside lamp to simulate dawn. This simulates sunrise and tells your brain that it is time to get up and start the day.” So I guess you plug your lamp into it or whatever which is why it’s not big and fancy.

        I’m kinda tempted by the 205 model though, for $20. Couldn’t hurt. It actually does suck waking up to complete darkness. But. Eh. We’ll see.

        edit for bonus SCIENCE!: The dawn simulator isn’t strictly a light-based alarm clock, rather it’s meant to keep your biological clock ticking properly, which is what leads to Seasonal Affective Disorder Syndrome. AKA you get depressed during the winter because light hitting your retinas makes your body secrete melatonin, which gets your body going for the day - and winter is dark so you don’t get that. Thus the dawn simulator, which serves to get your body producing melatonin at the right time and prime you for waking up.

        This also extends to light getting to your eyes before sleep - it’ll keep your brain from knowing it’s night time and that you need to sleep, getting you all out of whack. So keep your monitor brightness down and stuff.

The lows are low, but the highs are home: Dear Count Victus, I have come across a “distraction-free” writing...4

geni:

lamattgrind:

Dear Count Victus,

I have come across a “distraction-free” writing programme that sounds like your cup of tea. It is dark, minimal, and uses the power of technology to keep you away from distracting technology. It will correct your spelling, and it supports a number of tweaks for writing pros. It…

This is good. Reblogging so I remember to forget to download this, then ask someone what the program was using bad descriptions based on what I barely remember.

It is called Q10 and you can go to lifehacker.com/search for Hive Five distraction free writing to find it.

Also I wrote my second essay (three full pages) in half the time (1.5 hours) my last one took (3 hours) using this thing. I’m not even kidding. It needs a hell of a lot of work, but I’m scared. Very, very scared.

3Generally Inadvisable·Source: lamattgrind

Dear Count Victus,

I have come across a “distraction-free” writing programme that sounds like your cup of tea. It is dark, minimal, and uses the power of technology to keep you away from distracting technology. It will correct your spelling, and it supports a number of tweaks for writing pros. It can also make typewriter noises as you type, giving you the authentic experience of writing in a dark 20th century attic.

It can be downloaded here, though be advised that the version with spelling correction is only available as a portable application. The other versions fail to install.

Sincerely,

Baron Demi

Oh yeah. It’s on now. edit: Also got my invitation thing to Godville. Vael, add the god Lunacy as your friend. Or the hero Demi Victus. I don’t know how it works. As far as the game goes, I see what you mean. It’s like a slower version of Progress...

Oh yeah. It’s on now.

edit: Also got my invitation thing to Godville. Vael, add the god Lunacy as your friend. Or the hero Demi Victus. I don’t know how it works.

As far as the game goes, I see what you mean. It’s like a slower version of Progress Quest, with the addition of some small amount of player influence. I’ll just have to see how PvP works.

Vegan MoFo Day 1: The Compassionate Choice4

remnoca:

Compassion to animals? The harvesting of wheat kills and crops kills more rabbits and field mice than it does to eat farm animals and fish. What is more humane? Getting shredded to bits by a harvester and having guts sprayed all over the wheat and crops or killing an animal quickly and eating it? If vegans want to be compassionate then the only thing they can do is grow their own crops for themselves, surely the effort in that is worth the lives of the animals killed with harvesting, no?

Animals aren’t dumb and they learn pretty quickly not to be where the killer machines are. It’s called observational learning. You don’t need to be murdered by a rumbling death-machine to recognize you should stay out of its way.

        Even if they did, stupidly, live in the fields, and didn’t hide underground to avoid the harvester, then I’m pretty confident there would be less “meat” (by weight) murdered by the harvesting of crops for x meals than eating meat for that same number of meals. Like, say you can get fifteen meals out of a dead cow. Harvesting that many meals worth of pure grains/whatever kind of products would kill less than a cow’s worth of field critters.

        Rabbits don’t even live in crop fields anyway!

        Also, it costs far more money and food in order to eat meat. Animals have to be fed with grain until you kill them and the investment doesn’t pay off. So even if you were to harvest a cow’s weight in wheat, and kill thirty field mice, you would get more food (you can’t eat every part of a cow) and you would save money.

edit: oh right, I did mention that you have to kill critters while getting wheat to feed the meat, but I didn’t emphasize it enough - so here’s your emphasis, you monkeys

3The Limes and Grimes.·Source: lilystranger-blog

9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors4

9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors is a game for the Nintendo DS. It is something that might actually be worth emulating on PC. It combines the text-focused story of visual novels (PC games) with the puzzles of an escape game (PC games, generally flash). The puzzle segments, of which there are 16, take about half an hour each. That’s eight hours of content. Aside from that are sections of pure text - some as long as an hour. I’m going to estimate a dozen hours of content.

So basically this is a choose-your-own-adventure book with puzzles and music, and interjections of science that would be cool to know about, with a story that makes sense. And is good. And the puzzles, apparently, aren’t as horrid as the kind escape games normally feature.

Are you interested yet? Please be interested.

remnoca:

It’ll probably be port throttling, if you can upload on an uncommonly used port then you should be fine.

Give me an uncommonly used port and tell me how to figure out what ports I have been using in FileZilla/FireFTP. And also what ports I am using in Steam and xfire.

3The Limes and Grimes.·Source: vael

net slum: omg I got the job4

geni:

Super alternatively, there’s FireFTP, an FTP client/addon for Firefox. I never use it because I’ve never had a reason to have an FTP client in my browser.

If you’re just looking to back up files, you can use Mozy or Dropbox, or Gmail Drive, which, well, creates a drive out of your Gmail inbox. I wouldn’t use that if your files are really important, though, because Google could cut the cord anytime they wanted to.

FireFTP has the same issue. Starts off uploading fine, then my upload speed drops to below 1 kb/s. I guess they block pretty much any outgoing FTP traffic. Though I wonder if it’s different for people on the residence network. But I can’t get on that.

As far as Mozy and dropbox and stuff, what I’m making is less a backup for myself and more of a repository for others to see. I.e. I upload the awesome notes I have yet to take about my new psychology chapter (learning) and everyone learns some awesome stuff. Also for giving my notes out to people who couldn’t come to class. So it has to be publicly accessible.

3Generally Inadvisable·Source: vael

net slum: omg I got the job4

vael:

$10/hour, starts Monday at 9. Hours are 9-5:30. Get a boost in wage after three months depending on how well you do. Wear collared shirts and no jeans.

WEEEEE HEEEEEEE HEEEEEEEEEE


They’re going to have me on “development” side at first, which means lots of PHP. The boss knows I “prefer”…

omg he got the job I so happy for you

edit: also to people in the know, FileZilla is failing to transfer files for me 80% of the time on my school network, any other options? If I could do some kind of magical drag-and-drop within firefox itself that would be like the ultimate in convenience, plus I’m pretty sure it would get through the network

Though I guess at that point I may as well just have some kind of public dropbox-y thing (note that I know nothing about dropbox because it didn’t sound immediately useful) but anyway.

3net slum

The strength of heart required to face oneself

This is post #200, and I thought I should do something good with it. So I’m finally writing this post. Except now I know I don’t need to write as much as I planned. But that’s the end of this whole thing, so let me start at the beginning.

        I finally finished Persona 4 this summer, and I started over and played through the beginning a bit. I was really inspired to write an amazing essay for Destructoid about the game, the journey of the main player, and just the themes of the game in general. If I were to do that, though, I’d have to replay the game and get quotes and refresh my memory on things to talk about, so I lost the will for it. But I’ll write a little bit and introduce the game. I don’t remember how much this stuff featured in Persona 3, and I have no idea how much (if at all) it’s featured in Persona 1 and Persona 2.

        Everyone in the Persona games has a basic alignment with one of the Tarot deck Arcana, and the main character is always aligned with The Fool. Igor, the master of the Velvet Room who opens your powers to you and guides you on your journey, describes The Fool as “zero,” “empty yet full of infinite potential,” one who could become anything at the end of their journey through life. What this means is that you can be whoever, and whatever, you want to be throughout the game - taking whatever personality you need at the moment to help other people out. As the infinite potential goes, your character is the only one with the ability to “change” Arcana in such a way - everyone else is restricted to their innate Arcana, but your main character simply starts as the Fool and can change Arcana like one changes a mask.

        Everyone also has an innate Persona that represents their inner strength, which is aligned with their Arcana. Some people go blindly through their lives, never coming to terms with the strength they have inside. Perhaps they’re carried along by negative emotions, and never able to overcome them. Maybe they’re too apathetic to reach their own potential. Throughout the game, you change masks as you need in order to help other people reach that potential. It’s just a part of your journey through life. You don’t take any credit, you don’t make a big fuss about it, you just stand aside and support them so they can do what they need to do. With your general social links, you just help people along and at Rank 10 things are more or less resolved.

        It gets a lot better with your party members, because they also unlock the powers of their Personas. Igor describes the power of Persona as (something like) a mask worn to face the hardships of life. Persona 3 had a different system for unlocking Personas, but in Persona 4 everyone had to face a dark, mutated version of their Persona in order to unlock their inner strength. This dark Persona represents the big conflict in their life, something they need to overcome in order to get on with their lives. A weak person might give in, but to accept their problems and acknowledge that this darkness is a part of who they are represents true strength. After facing this part of themselves, they unlock the power of their Persona, and join your party. It might not be perfect, but now they have the strength to face their problems - the strength of heart to face themselves.

        So I thought to myself that I ought to write about a problem in my life that I might not have otherwise faced, and challenge everyone to find the strength of heart to face themselves - if they haven’t already. At first I wanted to write about the breakdown of my relationship with Britt, then the end of my relationship with her (which didn’t end up happening - we’re all fine now), then about my general status with girls. Then I thought about it some more last night, and I thought about the problems the characters in Persona 4 had, and I realized that to claim I needed to face myself would be stupid. I’ve already done that. My big challenge, the jump I needed to make, was the initial overcoming of my depression and associated problems. I’ve already done that. Sure, I’m not perfect yet, but neither were your party members in Persona 4. They still had growing to do, and so do I. That’s just how it is.

        I’ll need a few more level-ups before I’m as good as I’ll get. Maybe at Rank 10 (maxed social link in Persona ¾) I’ll get a shiny evolution. But I’ve already reached Rank 1 (just after facing themselves), and I’m working my way up. So yes, I’ve found the strength of heart to face myself. Have you?