Not a Potted Plant

Russell Foster has a good piece in the New Scientist about teenagers and sleeping:

The biology of human sleep timing, like that of other mammals, changes as we age. This has been shown in many studies. As puberty begins, bedtimes and waking times get later. This trend continues until 19.5 years in women and 21 in men. Then it reverses. At 55 we wake at about the time we woke prior to puberty. On average this is two hours earlier than adolescents. This means that for a teenager, a 7 am alarm call is the equivalent of a 5 am start for a person in their 50s.

Precisely why this is so is unclear but the shifts correlate with hormonal changes at puberty and the decline in those hormones as we age.

However, biology is only part of the problem. Additional factors include a more relaxed attitude to bedtimes by parents, a general disregard for the importance of sleep, and access to TVs, DVDs, PCs, gaming devices, cellphones and so on, all of which promote alertness and eat into time available for sleep.

The amount of sleep teenagers get varies between countries, geographic region and social class, but all studies show they are going to bed later and not getting as much sleep as they need because of early school starts.

Whenever this subject comes up, people invariably respond that if you start school later, kids will just sleep later. QED, or something. While there is no doubt some truth to this, the theory has been tested at various places and the ultimate determination is that kids actually do get more sleep if you let them sleep in. And they perform better.

In the United States, at least, we have a very moralistic view of sleep. I got a little pushback on this post, which criticized an employer for needlessly having rigid hours that resulted in a good employee’s termination. NewDealer phrased it thusly:

Being up in the morning is just one of those things adults should be able to do without complaint. If it is important to you to be up in the afternoon or evenings, find a job that let’s you take that shift. Not the other way around.

I see comments of this sort a lot. I used to buy into it a lot more than I do now. Back when I was working for a workaholic boss, I was pushing the boundaries of my capabilities. I was staying up too late and I was getting too little sleep. I was fighting the alarm clock in the morning. Then, by the time the weekend rolled around, I would be asleep by seven and would stay that way until Saturday. At some point I just became fed up with it. So I went to sleep early. I made a rule about never hitting the snooze button (ever!). And it was, in the overall, a pretty easy transition. So if I could do it, why can’t others?

Then I met Clancy. To say that Clancy isn’t lazy would be an understatement. She is one of the more ambitious people that I know and has a tremendous work ethic. Getting up in the morning? Wow, she just struggles like nothing I’ve ever seen before (in anything but an adolescent, anyway). It doesn’t even matter all that much when she goes to sleep. If she goes to sleep early, she still wants to sleep in. She still struggles mightily to get out of bed. Which has always come to me relatively easy. Except for DST. Another reason I hate that convention. It may be “relatively easy” for me, but it helps a lot if it’s not in utter darkness.

It’s earlybirds who run everything, and so it’s no surprise that school starts earlier in the morning than it maybe should. Or that employers are inflexible with their hours. Sometimes, of course, it’s unavoidable because you need people at the office at particular times during the day and there’s inherently little flexibility. Some consider it desirable because it saves daylight hours.
I personally wonder how often it’s just another case of us shooting ourselves in the food in the name of (secular, in this case) virtue.

That the automatic response by a lot of people to studies on this stuff is the assumption that people who have difficulty getting up in the morning (aka teenagers) would just push their bedtime later tells us a lot, I think.

States with the largest and/or most: Vermont, New Mexico, South Dakota, Oregon, Maine, Washington, Arkansas, West Virginia, Idaho, Wyoming.

States with the smallest and/or least: Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Utah, Nebraska, Illinois, Maryland, California, Minnesota, Rhode Island

Our former landlords have informed us that they’re keeping most of the deposit, possibly all of it. On account of our apparent culpability regarding the piping.

On the upshot, the house is getting new piping! Yay.

Health:

[H1] Dave Schuler’s thoughts on obesity are worth reading. Southerners may not be fatter than the average American so much as they are more honest about their fatness.

[H2] Conventional wisdom is that skipping breakfast is a bad dietary strategy. I know that breakfast helped revolutionize my weight-loss efforts. But apparently the conventional wisdom may not be right.

[H3] On the efforts to free the nurses. I think mid-level providers as substitute docs is where this is all going to end up. The trick is going to be to get people to go along.

[H4] Utah is allowing organ donation from prisoners. The article states that it’s a thorny issue. I’m not so sure, though I would be concerned about blood or marrow donation.

Economics:

[E1] This is indeed a really awesome entrepreneur story. I love Sriracha sauce.

[E2] Will “Peak Oil” be solved by methane-hydrate? As Dave Schuler says, interesting times. Chris Nelder has a Everyone should go into STEM!” policy-making. That said, it’s hard to argue with the returns that many (not all, but many) STEM degrees bring in, regardless of whether they end up actually working in STEM or not. The question is whether the degree qualifies you, or it’s the new Rush Stamp.
utm_source=pulsenews”>contrary view, however.

[E4] It’s really quite strange to me how quickly Internet Sales Taxes went from being unthinkable to imminent. I think it’s time, though Dave Schuler is concerned.

America & Beyond:

[A1] One of the interesting things about watching Japanese Animation is their portrayal of American culture. So I got a kick out of this, which posits what our news coverage of other countries might look like in reverse.

[A2] In America, middle Classitude is about attitude more than anything else.

[A3] I’m not sure how I feel about Newtown voters voting down more money for school security. On the merits, i guess I agree. But something feels… odd about it.

[A4] A look at the effects of high speed rail by looking at China. One of which, interestingly, is a dispersed population.

Culture:

[C1] Apparently, the real problem with the hookup culture is that the sex is bad.

[C2] If this causes the downfall of the NCAA, they’ll have it coming. Not because they are evil or even exploitive, but because they are stupid.

[C3] The New York Times (of course) reports on the race for elite colleges and the tradeoff between paying full tuition at one of those or accepting a merit scholarship somewhere less prestigious.

[C4] Megan McArdle and Matt Welch disagree with Garance Franke-Ruta’s assertion that you can’t have major conservative newspapers because their markets are intrinsically liberal. Heck, I’d settle for agreement that the major newspapers at-all reflect their constituencies and yes, in fact, lean to the left. In an ideal world, I don’t think Franke-Ruta is right about the possible existence of major conservative media outlets in large – and largely liberal – cities. In the real world, this is something that conservatives have demonstrated that they can’t pull off under far less challenging circumstances.

Fun:

[F1] There is a lot of psychological muck in the attempts to make Muggle Quidditch a real sport. I mean, the athletes in the picture look fit enough, but I wonder how much of this is as a fallback sport. Or maybe I’m projecting.

[F2] Some awesome engineers in Texas have created Mario Kart… for real!

[F3] Is anyone else familiar with that old cell phone game Snake? Did you kow you can actually win that game?

Technology:

[T1] From Nob, this is a pretty awesome story. Drop off some tablets into Ethiopia with no instructions, and a bunch of illiterate African kids, and within days they are using apps and within five months they hacked the operating system.

[T2] I ran across the Space Jam website a couple years ago. I can’t believe I saw that movie at the theater. Free tickets will get some people to watch some pretty stupid things. Anyway, The Verge has an article on old, relic sites like Space Jam and Dole/Kemp.

[T3] I suppose it is supposed to give me the creeps, but I think this has potential to do some real good. On the city planner end, anyway. I don’t care if Verizon is making a profit, though I would prefer some measures be taken to protect my identity.

[T4] One of the common theories about why PC tails are tanking is that they’re too good. Meaning, they are so good that they don’t need to be upgraded. Dave Schuler has an alternate theory.

[T5] Henry Blodget is excited because he figured out how to make his iPhone battery last all day. I’d gloat, but that’s more than I’ve been able to accomplish with my Android phones regularly. But Android lets me have removable batteries.

[T6] The future of smartglasses.

[T7] T-Mobile is already paying a price for its no-contract philosophy. I guess I can understand where the Washington AG is coming from on this, though I still think it’s lame because T-Mobile is legitimately using a different model, and requiring that they state all of their costs up-front while the others get to tuck theirs in to the contract puts them at a disadvantage.

Today marks the annual Congressionally-mandated ritual of disrespecting the Constitution in the name of pleasing the pious. Continue Reading →