Alex Herder > Recent Status Updates

I've been doing a marathon of this epic HP fanfiction and I just can't endorse it strongly enough. Honestly, I can't imagine how anyone wouldn't love it and you should check it out too.

Reading this again with my kids, and it's just as fun and exciting as I remember!

She just found out about her husband's infidelities and reacts with little empathy, despite the grace she seems to take for granted for herself and her readers. Then she goes and feeds her kids chicken nuggets. It's incredible how subjective morality is.

The statistics are damning, and Desmond makes a strong case for why we should be concerned about housing in America.

What an amazing book so far! I'm a native Washingtonian, and I went to DC public schools. Despite that, the level of detail here is something every resident of the city should know. The fact that has stood out to me most so far is the story of why DC was located where it is. Apparently, it was a compromise between Madison, Jefferson, and Hamilton the squarely would commit the capital to being a slave-holding City.

Two useful concepts that are stopping me from not finishing this book:

1) Lewis argues individual morality (vs morality based on societal function) is infinitely more important because the afterlife is infinite and societies are finite. This is precisely the best argument *against* promoting a belief in the afterlife.

2) His definition of pantheism (everything is God and God is equally in everything) is my belief!

I've read a number of theology books but this is the first explicitly evangelical one, with the possible exception of The God Delusion. The result is that I feel like I have to read this with a a more critical eye, and it's exhausting. There are so many arguments in here with which I disagree, and I'm thinking about stopping.

REM sleep dreaming seems to offer a kind of self-therapy by integrating experiences into people’s narratives, and blunting traumatic triggers and emotions. For those who aren’t able to do this for whatever reason, I wonder if those people should try other integration techniques, like those offered by LSD, psylocibin, or other entheogens?

With all of this evidence about I’ll health from not sleeping a full nights sleep, I wonder if we have an obligation to restructure society in some way. If working night shifts leads to a 40% increase in cancer diagnosis, should we discourage businesses from being open at night?

Reproductive fitness: short sleeping correlates with smaller testicles, lower testosterone, less ovulation hormone, and decreased libido.

Immune reponse: experiments confirm that sleep deprivation (getting less than 7 or 8 hours) makes it more likely we contract colds and less likely that our bodies will respond to vaccines by producing the appropriate antibodies.

Obesity and diabetes is also more likely with short sleeping. Our hunger hormones are thrown into imbalance with less sleep, presumably because our body is internalizing a threat signal from the lack of sleep, and so we binge on more energy dense foods. We also are less able to process sugars to the point that doctors looking at test results of short sleepers are likely to describe them as prediabetic.

Short sleeping (sleeping less than 8 hours) is strongly correlated with heart disease, hypertension, and more. For these, short sleeping means less growth hormone to repair vessel walls, higher cortisol to stress them, and a marked increase in death. Daylight savings time transitions are associated with more and fewer heart attacks and traffic accidents.

Sleep has an interesting relationship with Alzheimer’s (and maybe other dementia) in that poor sleep is both a causal factor and a symptom. When we sleep, the Glymphatic system purges our brains of toxins through CSF. One of those toxins is amyloid proteins, which build up in brains and prevent quality NREM sleep. With less quality sleep, more amyloids build up. This then manifests as poor memory, with less NREM.

Circadian rhythms change over the course of life. We ought to structure work, school, and our general expectations accordingly. Are there any schools or workplaces who do a good job at this?

REM sleep allows our brains to rehearse life and think through problems. Might be part of why we are such good social animals and may be part of our hominid transition from tree sleeping to ground sleeping. During REM sleep, our bodies are paralyzed.

Listening notes:

Sleep is primarily driven by the adenosine and circadian cycles, which are independent. Circadian is influenced by daylight exposure and melatonin, and varies over ones lifetime. Adenosine is effectively a “time since I woke up” timer and can be temporarily blocked by caffeine.

Sleep contain REM and NREM sleep, which each have their own roles. Both are essential. NREM is what makes memories.