Harder Better Faster Sleeper

I need sleep like Kenny Rogers needed Dolly Parton for 'Islands in the Stream'.

Like Burt Reynolds needed Lori Anderson.

Like Oates needed Hall.

Like Michael Jackson needed Bubbles.

Notice the 80s-enhanced comparisons? More on that later...

Sleep. UC Berkeley just finished a study on sleep deprivation. The data suggests that people who don't get enough sleep can suffer various degrees of emotional imbalance.

"It could even help explain road rage, said Matthew Walker, director of UC Berkeley's Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory and senior author of the study, which was coordinated with researchers from Harvard University.

"One of the functions of sleep is to reset and replenish the emotional integrity of our brain circuits so we can approach the day's emotional challenges in appropriate ways," Walker said. "If you don't get a good night's sleep, you'll be making irrational choices.

In the UC Berkeley study of 26 young adults, half of the subjects were kept awake for 35 hours straight and the other half were allowed a normal night's sleep in that same time period. Then all of the subjects were hooked up to an MRI and shown a series of images, some of them disturbing pictures of graphic violence or gory injuries. Researchers monitored what happened in their brains as each image was shown.

When shown the disturbing images, the sleep-deprived subjects had a significant jump in activity in the amygdala, the section of the brain that puts the body on alert to protect itself. At the same time, activity slowed down in the prefrontal cortex, which controls logical reasoning.

Subjects who had gotten a full night of sleep showed normal brain activity.

What this means for most people is that a sleepless night can cause them to overreact to emotional challenges that they would otherwise be able to tolerate with no trouble, Walker said."

This is sooo true for me. If I don't get enough sleep, I become a cranky, nasty, and volatile person. I'm a racecar running in the red, and all I'm saying is that it's not good to have a racecar in the red. I eat sleep. It's my dessert.

I can go for a couple days with a subpar amount of sleep, but if I don't catch up on the third day, I will be evil incarnate. I will intentionally break unopened rose blooms in my neighbor's yard before I leave for work. I will push someone out of the BART train as the doors are closing so they have to wait for the next train. I will fart on other BART patrons and then walk around, further dispersing the stank. Industry insiders call this move 'crop-dusting'. Once I get to work, I will need to drink a carafe of coffee to be mildly abrasive. I'll sit down at my desk, and ignore emails. Instead, I'll register those colleagues for sweepstakes on sites that vomit spam uncontrollably. At lunch, I'll go outside and kick pigeons. Pray I am not in your midday meeting. I'll doodle to keep from launching spitballs on the whiteboard as you draw out some fantastic metadata management model in which global changes can be effected across hierarchies in multiple parent-children structures. Then I will go home, and be a pleasant person because I know that while I'm tired, at least I can be tired in shorts and a tank-top and play with my son and wash dishes used to serve my wife's savory and delicious meal before I lose consciousness at 8:30pm.

This being said, let's sleep on this: the 80s are back.

On my way to work this morning I listened to the new Kanye West album, Graduation Day, which bleeds Al Pacino-Scarface synth undertones. Then I go on the train, and saw this woman dress like Pat Benatar and sporting the Farrah Fawcett feather hair-do. It wasn't Oct 31. This wasn't a costume. She was going to work. She was making a fashion statement. She was telling everyone on that car that the 80s are back, and she was ready for them.

Maybe Kanye will do an 'Islands in the Stream' remix...meanwhile, check out 'Stronger' for more interpolation on 80s flavor (sampled Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk).

The Police illustrate history repeating itself

So, I haven't been able to post in a while because of this stupid thing called work. Gosh, how I hate work. It gets in the way of the real moments of your life. Stupid money...making me work for you so I can live in house and pay taxes to support a government that at this point is pretty good, although I have serious qualms about its current leadership.

On my way to work, I was thinking of a Police song while listening to the news about the Senate approving the spending bill for the war in Iraq. Dubya has promised to veto it because he says it forces an arbitrary exit date and doesn't support the troops. Meanwhile, the 'war' against terrorism is completely free of any ambiguity and makes complete sense, and it seems that most people don't seem to care because we're more inspired by what happens on Lost or we're more enthusiastic about the competition in American Idol because Sanjaya was voted off.

However, I think we're going to shake off our indifferent malaise, and realize that supporting the troops means bringing them home within a prescribed date. We've got a big mess to help clean up, and I don't think the continuation of large-scale military actions abroad is the best way to help people understand that America is about democracy and freedom. We need smaller scale, black ops insertions where we would execute missions about which we'd feel ashamed to tell our children we had helped execute.

Anyways...the Police song. It's a good one. It smacks of the 80s sound, and even though it's a commentary on the war going on during the Reagan administration, it could just as easily be sung and felt in 2007.

The general scratches his belly and thinks
His pay is good but his officers stink
Guerrilla girl, hard and sweet
A military man would love
to meet

The president looks in the mirror and speaks
His shirts are clean but his country reeks
Unpaid bills
Afghanistan hills

Bombs away
But we're ok
...

The general only wants to teach France to dance
His army life doesn't give him any romance
Guerrilla girl, hard and sweet
A military man would love to meet

The general scratches his belly and thinks
His pay is good but his company stinks
Guerrilla girl, hard and sweet
A military man would love to meet

Bombs away
But were ok
Bombs away
We all obey
...

We need ol' Dubya to obey the American people. We don't support his war, and he needs to listen to the messages that Congress is sending.

You see, George, Congress is supposed to be representative of the people in the 50 states. They're supposed to go to bat for folks who don't have a Karl Rove or Dick Cheney in the back pocket, because Lord knows those guys are evil, but have proven to be very effective in maintaining an iron grip on the rudder while crushing any opposing viewpoint.

Hmm...'iron grip'...'crushing viewpoints'? Sounds like Soviet communism to me. Hey! Karl (Karl Marx? hmmm, I smell something deceptively communistic about this) and Dick, do you happen to be card carrying members of the Communist party? I know...I shouldn't say that...it's not fair to Communists. Sorry guys.

Hmm. It's almost like the current White House administration wants us to emulate the Chinese government...they're no longer really Communists. They're more like Socialists with well-funded banks with G-men patrolling the Internet to make sure that no one is blogging about how they'd like to have more news about the outside world. The message now is, 'we'll let you get rich, but leave the politics to us'.

I digress. What I mean to say is that a song from the 80s, is just as appropriate now as it was then. And, of course, songs from the 60s are still just as relevant now. And the songs, poems, and literature preceding the 60s are just as germane.

History is doomed to repeat itself, but in the meantime, the weapons get bigger and badder. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that we try something different this time around. If we've still a planet in 2008, let's wash the filth away and start clean...well, as clean as we can.

3 people who I think would buy KITT

KITT is for sale. Which means that there are at least 3 people out there who'll throw down some serious money for a car used in the hit 1980s show. Of course, Turbo Boost and Silent Mode won't really work, and the car doesn't really talk...

...BUT...the flashy swooshy red cylon [and Garfunkel] thing in the front is intact...sweet.

The 3 people are:

David Hasselhoff (duh, like he was the star of the show and has a special place in his great big curly-haired heart for the car)

Busta Rhymes (grabbed the title song hook and pimped a fresh remix of "Turn It Up/Fire It Up")U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia (after the 5-4 decision [Scalia in the minority opinion]to allow the EPA to regulate automobile emissions, he'll want to preserve this car in all its non-street legal glory as the car is missing smog equipment)

Who will win? Hmm...Hasselhoff could persuade his German fanbase to reclaim the car for the glory of the Fatherland...Busta could easily outshout anyone in an auction...and Antonin (A-bomb) would first need the case to be brought to the Supreme Court before he could do anything. HA! Stupid process of appeals. It sucks to be you, Judicial Branch! It's all about the Executive Branch. We get to poop on Thomas Edison's stupid invention of checks and balances whenever we feel like it's a matter of national security. It'a a Patriot Act thing, you wouldn't understand.

Plate of Shrimp

Maybe you've seen the movie Repo Man, starring a very young pre-Young Guns Emilio Estevez. There's a part in the movie when Miller, the clean-up guy, and Otto (aka Emilio) are waxing philosophy. Miller says:

lot o' people don't realize what's really going on. They view life as a bunch o' unconnected incidents 'n things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice o' coincidence that lays on top o' everything. Give you an example; show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate o' shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, plate, or shrimp, or plate o' shrimp out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

So, as I sat there ruminating on my plate of shrimp, I thought of some seemingly unconnected current events and wove myself a web of intrigue.

1. The EPA and Google are teaming up to allow online mappers to locate and identify major toxic waste locations. It's basically a matter of Google embedding tools which facilitate the presentation of information provided by the EPA to enable users to find toxic waste sites.

2. TXU, an electric-power company based in Dallas, has announced plans to build eleven new coal plants in Texas by 2011. In case you didn't know, Texas already dumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than any other state in the nation. TXU's new fleet of coal plants would more than double the company's current pollution, spewing 78 million tons of planet-heating pollution each year -- the equivalent of 11 million SUVs. The governor said that conservationists wanted to have people riding in horses and buggies. Do they still make people like that?

3. PCI-E 2.0 is launching. As a refresher, PCI Express -- a modernized sequel to the original PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) that spread to essentially every server and PC since it was introduced in the 1990s -- can transfer 2.5 gigabits per second on each wire, pin or other electrical connection called "lanes" between a computer and a plug-in device. PCI Express 2.0 doubles that rate to 5Gbps, and as with the existing PCIe, multiple lanes can be ganged together.

4. Barack Obama has announced that he's forming a Presidential Exploratory committee, which means that he's most likely going to run for President. I hope for once the Democratic party can consolidate their focus around one candidate so they can effectively retake an administration that has become obsessed with continuing to oil the machinery of capitalism with the blood of the less fortunate, while ignoring the larger environmental issues that encroach on our global community and the gaps which Americans are seeing widen between the haves and have nots. I'm hoping that his external "differences" and "lack of experience" will nurture a more tolerant and thoughtful approach to government, socio-economic roadblocks, and community. We've had enough of the old school hawkish guard who want to bring back an iteration of Ruskies and the Cold War: read Iraw Conflict.

5. Lastly, workers at O'Hare International Airport told the Federal Aviation Administration that they witnessed an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. In brief, "....a flying saucerlike object hovered low...for several minutes before bolting through thick clouds with such intense energy that it left an eerie hole in overcast skies, said some United Airlines employees who observed the phenomenon." Gsradio.net has an mp3 interview of one of the employees. Let me tell you, folks, the intro to the story is wacked, but hey...I just hope it wasn't Tom Cruise flying his OT-8 jet car.

So what does this all mean? We're going to be able to more expediently use technology to locate toxic waste sites, which should be increasing in the next 4 years, unless Mr. Obama can do anything about it unless aliens come down before then, in which case they may be shopping for pets.