Keeping up

I don't have enough time in a day, do you? I have work-related lists of things to do as well as keeping the home livable. I have a long list of topics I continue to explore (this alone could take all day). Then there's the reading/viewing for fun. O, and being social too. I used to think that I would just reduce my sleep time (you can sleep when you are dead, right?) but then I realized A) I never want to be dead, and B) lack of sleep has been shown to accelerate the death process. OK, I let myself sleep more now.

A little sleep digression: When I was an undergrad at the UW (WA) I hung-out in the physiological psychology department as a respite from my premed curriculum in chemistry and biology. My adviser over there was Steve Woods, a fascinating guy who has had a great career. Steve tackled the sleep issue head-on by his extremely disciplined program (too disciplined for me thanks) of compressing his REM cycles by going to sleep at the same time every night but waking up a minute earlier every day until he was down to less than four hours nightly. The notion was that if you decrease sleep time gradually the REM cycles adjust and the "wasted" time in between is gradually deleted leaving the REM sleep intact. The trick was to never vary, even on weekends. Obviously Steve wasn't a party animal either. He also had an odd metabolism which made him super-sensitive to caffeine, unlike me who could drink coffee late at night and still do a face plant into my textbook. He said he had some coffee once and it kept him up for like two days straight...

Anyway, I don't know how long Steve kept that schedule or if it had any health effects. I heard he has been suffering from some sort of neurological disorder, maybe MS, don't know. Connection? I'm not going to find out. Plenty of D3, melatonin and sleep for this guy.

So, time. I can't wait until we begin to merge with AIs or even basic data interfaces that would allow me to download a day's (year's?) worth of information overnight or near-instantly. Who knows? Eventually it will be. But for now my serial processing of words is too slow by many orders of magnitude. Sigh.