Struggling to live life as an owl

Once again, I'm up late writing (it's almost midnight), but that is a natural thing for me to do, given that I don't actually become wide-awake until about 5 PM. That's the way it's been for me for as long as I can remember. Back in college, my grades started going up once I gave up on those 7:40 AM classes, and tilted my day toward the late morning through mid-afternoon. Quite often, I will get to work at about 10, working until seven or eight at night. This allows me to harness more of my peak time to do the challenging job I do (I am a consumer attorney). Several times a month, I find myself at the office writing a legal brief at one in the morning, working quite effectively. It's not that I don't like to sleep. I love to sleep. It's just that I love to sleep in. That's when it feels natural to me. I know that it's not merely a matter of biology. I stay up late because I want to get one more thing done, and then one more thing. I hate to give up the day, even when it turns into the next day. for me, there's no better time for concentrating than the night. For whatevercombination of nature and nurture, the night is my favorite time. I am an owl. Those other kinds of people, those "larks," often look at owls with suspicion, however. Even when owls spend as much time at work as larks, the larks assume that we owls are goofing off in the morning while they are working hard. What about those evening hours while we owls are still hard at work while the larks are long gone? Larks think that this is our own damned fault and the owls should be getting up earlier. I do think this is part of the Larkian thought process. This perceived tension has often provoked me to think about why it is that my schedule is tilted toward the afternoon and evening. Do I choose for it to be this way or am I biologically geared to be an owl? And why is it that so many owls (me included) end up marrying larks?

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The importance of play for adults

In a recent talk at TED, psychiatrist Stuart Brown talked about the vital importance of play. Brown opened his talk by showing an incredible series of photographs demonstrating that a huge hungry polar bear can be seduced into playing with dogs rather than eating them. Like a polar bear, play induces an "altered state" in humans. Play is a great leveler: great differences in power can be overridden by play. In fact, the absence of play is dangerous, as demonstrated by the case histories of mass murderers. Brown describes various kinds of play, including body play (e.g., jumping), object play (manipulating objects), social play, rough-and-tumble play, ritual play and imaginative play (storytelling). These activities simply make us feel better. They are purposeless. In fact, if the purpose is more important than the act of doing these things, they are not "play." As I listened to this list, I was wondering whether sexual play is of the same importance as the other types of play. The study of play is still in its infancy. Historically, this has not been a well-funded area of scientific investigation. Nonetheless, the evidence we already have suggests that play is important for developing cognitively, emotionally and developmentally. We already know that "nothing lights up the brain like play." In fact, the ability to trust is learned through vocal, facial and gestural play signals. As Brown indicates, humans are perhaps the most neotonous species, suggesting a special need for humans to engage in play, whether they are infants or adults. Various animal studies have shown that preventing an animal from playing causes dysfunction. Thus, it seems that play is important for survival. In fact, life without play seems to lead inexorably to depression. When we look back in our history to determine what sorts of activities energized us when we were youngsters, we might deal with see that we have strayed from those things that gave us the pleasure of play. When we explore our personal history, we might find that we are mismatched in terms of career or other activities. [caption id="attachment_5702" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Image by mildegard at dreamstime.com"]Image by mildegard at dreamstime.com[/caption] Brown encourages the audience that they should not set aside time to play. Rather, they (including adults) should infuse every moment of their lives with play. He argues that play is just important for humans as is asleep and dreaming.

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More heavy criticism of Obama’s economic plan

Obama's economic plan is receiving heavy criticism from distinguished economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, James Galbraith, Paul Krugman and many critics from Europe . Many of the critics believe that Tim Geithner and Henry Paulson are far too beholden to Wall Street and the financial sector. The fear is that the toxic debt (much of it based on fraudulent mortgage-backed securities enabled by Wall Street fraud) is being lifted from the banks and dumped onto the U.S. taxpayers because the Obama plan is making the FDIC ultimately responsible. I'm not an economist, but based on these criticisms, this fear seems well-founded. I don't see any reason for Geithner or Paulson to be going to bat for the taxpayers. Most of their friends live on Wall Street. At this same link, you'll see the Nation's view that we need an outsider to clean up this mess. Writer Katina vanden Heuvel even recommend Eliot Spitzer as one of the few people aggressive enough to take on Wall Street before it was a trendy idea. Frankly, I like that idea, based on her stroll down memory lane (pre-Ashley Dupre):

Spitzer took on Wall Street's metastasizing corruption before the meltdown. He defended consumers' and taxpayers' rights. He speaks with passion and clarity about what went wrong and what needs to be done to restore integrity to our system. He is chastened by personal scandal, yet untouched by complicity in Wall Street's public scandals which have obliterated peoples' savings and devastated our country.

What does Spitzer have to say about the economic crisis? That the crisis was not caused by the lack of necessary laws. Rather, the crisis was caused by the lack of good judgment and lack of tenacity to defend the public interest. These things, says Spitzer, cannot be legislated:

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MIT votes open-access regarding scientific papers

According to Wired, Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT. . . [MIT's] faculty voted last week to make all of their papers available for free on the web, the first university-wide policy of its sort. MIT's Hal Abelson argued that this move "changed the power dynamics between scientific publishers and researchers." He pointed out that publishers "have been reluctant to give up control of the informational resources they have." Open access advocates have argued that "the current scientific publishing paradigm is broken because publishers control the scientific record, not academics"

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If you dig a hole straight down, where would you end up?

If you dig a hole straight down, where will you end up? I live in Missouri. I was always told that I would end up in China. Not true. For that to happen, I would need to start digging my hole in Argentina, not in Missouri. How do I know? I used an antipode finder.

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