Action Figure Daniel

Category: Notes

  • “A Brief History of Mathematics” by Marcus Du Sautoy

    • Calculus is the math of movement
    • Symmetry is something you do to a shape not the shape itself
    • Gaussian distributions help us understand the mean from a variety of samples
    • Every number is either a prime or can be derived by multiplying two prime numbers
    • The maths enable science to answer questions

  • “Why We Sleep” by Matthew Walker, PhD

    • Sleep disruption plays with your hormones, causing you to be more hungry, and spikes blood sugar
    • Fatigue leads to more car accidents than being intoxicated
    • We use sleep to strengthen memories
    • Most living thing have their own internal clocks
    • Even very little sun light resets our internal rhythm
    • Genetics tend to determine chrono type
      • Owls are not owls by choice
    • Melatonin kicks off sleep but does not actually cause sleep
    • Adenosine accumulate once you are awake
      • Caffeine occupies the adenosine receptors so you do not realize how tired you are
      • Decafe is not caffeine free
      • Adenosine requires sleep to draw down
    • It takes about one day to adjust per hour travelled across time zones
    • Prolonged sleep deprivation can require several days to recover from
    • All psychiatric disorders have bad sleep associated with them
      • Sleep management generally helps treatment
    • Sleep deprivation prevents learning new things
    • We replay memories during dreams at slower speeds than originally experienced
      • (Is this why we relive things in dreams and often are caught running slowly or being stuck)?
    • nREM sleep mostly happens early at night with REM happening mostly later
    • nREM sleep is mostly about pruning memories
    • Waking up early, cuts into REM sleep
    • We have “sleep spindles” that layer in “noise” to help us better ignore real noise in the environment
    • Everything with a brain sleeps
      • Only animals and birds REM sleep
    • Animals that sleep longer tend to sleep better
    • Pinnipeds sleep on land and in water, but only REM on land
    • After sleep deprivation, nREM is the most quickest to recover
    • We can never fully recover missed sleep
    • Sleep deprivation triggers more eating because the mind thinks food is scarce
    • The notion of “second sleep” seems to be more of a fashion, not biology
    • Siestas are great for humans
    • Babies moving in the womb are generally asleep
    • Infant sleep deprivation arrests brain development
    • Put your child to bed when they are drowsy, not after they are asleep
    • Any alcohol in the a woman’s blood affects in utero’s ability to sleep well
    • Teenagers need more, later sleep then adults and older children
    • “No child needs caffeine.”
    • Older adults still need as much sleep, they just struggle to get it
    • nREM helps facts memories best
    • Rocking during sleep allows for deeper sleep
    • “Practice plus sleep makes prefect”
    • People do not know how tired they are
    • Sleep deprivation literally shortens your ability to manage emotions
    • Staying awake all night only burns an extra ~140 calories
    • REM sleep + dreams are critical for healthy mind operation
    • Dreaming of emotional trauma helps dissolve emotions related to those memories
    • Dreams help tune our emotional processing centers
    • REM sleep likes to make bizarre and eclectic connections
    • Sleep deprivation kills us
    • “sleep opportunity” (having an appropriate environment) is different from actual sleep
    • Fading light and cool air control the release of melatonin
    • Sleeping cold is good
    • Sleeping pills disconnect your brain but do not enable healthful sleep
    • The original factory whistle was supposed to wake you up so you could get to work on time
    • Don’t hit the Snooze button! It is a small heart-attack multiple times in the morning
    • “REM sleep stands between rationality and lunacy”
    • Amphetamine is a power “awake drug”
    • Some ADHD are actually sleep deprived
    • A lack of sleep increasing the chances of one being unethical

  • “Jaws” by Sandra Kahn and Paul R Erhlich

    • Orthodontia focuses on aesthetics and not underlining causes
    • Malocclusion is not caused by bad genetics
    • Original American settlers were also called “black mouth” because they were mouth breathers
    • Chewing took up about half of prehistoric lives
    • Chewing tough things counts more than diet for our health
    • Mouth breathing is bad for jaw health
    • We use clothes to symbolize our connection to something bigger than ourselves
    • Weening should focus on chewing unsweetened food
    • We do not know what in tobacco smoke causes lung cancer
    • Mouth breathing bypasses nose filtration
    • Indoors often have more air pollution than outdoors

  • “Drink?” by David Nutt

    • Alcohol is very harmful to society not on an individual level but because its net affect
    • Sweeteners are there to accommodate younger people
    • The effects of alcohol are what allow us to get over the taste
    • Alcohol and Valium work on the same systems to relax us
    • “Vomiting gets rid of enough alcohol to keep you alive”
    • Anxiety and alcoholism go hand-in-hand
    • Withdrawing from alcohol spikes the cortisol
    • Prolactin manages sperm production in men
    • Brain damage from alcohol happens in the first trimester with physical issues coming later
    • Progesterone surges affect memory, “baby brain” is a real thing
    • Exercisers tends to also be drinkers
    • Sailor would soak some gun powder in their rum. If it ignited then it was at least 50% alcohol, this is where “percent proof”
    • Do not drink alcohol when thirsty because you are already dehydrated
    • Drunk harm is often mismatch with the harm people think they do
    • More people die from horse riding than Ecstasy
    • Alcohol has been getting cheaper over time leading to increased use
    • Minimum per-unit pricing trends to lower alcohol consumption, especially from supermarkets

  • “The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe” by Dr. Steven Novella

    • Skeptics accept new ideas as long as their methods support them
    • We have separate memory stores for facts, truthfulness of those facts, and fact sources; this is why we sometime jumble where we heard what
    • Memories are subject to co-fusion, confabulation, and co-opting from others
    • Confidence and vividness have little bearing on accuracy
    • Only the eye’s fovea captures details, it is the size of a postage stamp at an arm’s length, all other details are made up
    • The brain does pre and post processing, enhancing the image based on what we think we are looking at
    • Pareidolia is the brain trying to make sense of noise
    • Beware of defenses that are created on the fly
    • When ranking things we want, if our first choice is not available, we tend to skip the third. Maybe because we already had to dismiss the second when picking the first.
    • “If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.” Ronald Coase
    • Anomaly hunting goes wrong when we ask “what are the odds [this] happening?”. The good question is “What are the odds that any anomaly would happen?”
    • Random data is “clumpy”; expect to see weird things together
    • P values indicates the quality of the data, not the truthiness of the hypothesis
    • Hybrid seeds cannot be replanted because they will have unpredictable gene expression
    • We tend to confuse the knowledge of experts with our own knowledge