This is an alternative birth method called “lotus birth” or more formally “umbilical non-severance” in which babies are left tethered to the delivered placenta until their cord desiccates and detaches from their body on its own, usually in 3-10 days, while applying salt to the placenta to increase the speed at which it dries. It will eventually fall off, however, after its delivery the placenta is no longer being supplied with the oxygenated blood it needs to survive, and becomes necrotic (dead). This can act as an easy entry point for infectious organisms to enter the neonate, and can result in life-threatening infections. Neither the American College of Obstetrics or the American Academy of Pediatrics have explicit guidance statements as to whether this should be recommended against. AAP has published that there have been multiple case reports of severe infections with various bacteria secondary to this practice.
This should not be confused/conflated with Delayed Cord Clamping, which is waiting 30-60 seconds after the baby’s delivery for some of the residual fetal blood in the placenta to be delivered to the baby’s circulation to prevent anemia. This has good evidence for benefit to the baby, is recommended by ACOG, and is basically standard of care in the US.
Source: ACOG and AAP publications, also I’m a 4th year medical student that has completed OBGYN rotations
I personally wouldn’t recommend it, I’ve seen babies die miserable deaths of sepsis and it’s heartbreaking. But I’m not going into pediatrics or OBGYN so thankfully this isn’t gonna be a discussion I have to have.
Good luck on your match! I’m still in second year, but I’m already reaching out to programs about setting up auditions and whatnot because I’m attending a small/new DO school, so I don’t really have establishment or prestige on my side.
You joke, but there are literally people who eat their own placenta. I know someone who did. Crystals and essential oils and energy healing and all that, you know. I don’t talk about that kind of stuff with her because for some reason we just can’t seem to find common ground lol
There is an assumption that everyone surfing Lemmy are from developed countries. I’m not generalizing the western placenta eating experience to Somalia or Bangladesh
I don’t really understand why you wouldn’t though? Like it’s just an organ, people eat organs all the time. At least this one involved bringing life into the world instead of death.
The only reason not to is if your brain is fucked up enough that you think it’s icky or something.
I’ve heard of people getting placenta pills to deal with the anemia after birth. I don’t plan on having kids and thus have never been interested enough to research it.
The placenta is not pleasant to look at, so I can imagine pills make it more palatable. I don’t think a lot of study has been done on the effects of eating placenta after birth, but it’s technically a separate organ that belongs to the baby.
So no matter how you spin it, they’re eating baby organs.
Ive heard of people using the placenta pills to help reduce postpartum depression. Not sure if that works. But research has been done to show it reduces bleeding after birth if consumed immediately.
Terrible source but its late and im tired: “Postpartum hemorrhage has been controlled by using a small quarter-size piece of placenta placed in the mother’s cheek or chewed by the mother first and then held between her cheek and gum” www.midwiferytoday.com/…/the-power-of-placenta/
Bleeding stops when the uterus shrinks back down so the huge open wound left behind by the placenta becomes a small wound. Oxytocin makes that happen, and you get that by just holding your baby. I don’t know how eating the placenta would contribute.
My money is on it being the elemental power of bullshit. It’s likely the same ingredient that makes homeopathy actually ‘do’ anything: time i.e., it would have happened at that point regardless.
I’m not sure it’s the meat…I think it might be the chemicals in the meat. This isn’t my hill to die on, but you’re totally OK to stick to the modern Dr’s advice if you hemorrhage after childbirth. I can’t think anyone will ever forcefeed you placenta 🙃
I’m a vegan who smokes weed and I think that’s the extent of my woo (though Ron Swanson would certainly disagree, I’m very often struck by how much woo German medical doctors are allowed to push).
I’d want to do it, partly because the large quantity of bioavailable iron calls to me, but also because of the oxytocin and potential bonding effects (if it doesn’t have any, it doesn’t have any: no harm done). I don’t think I want it enough to really push back against a doctor/hospital that didn’t want to allow it, but I might look for one that is open to it.
I have a friend that became one of those people after high school. She made a killing for a few years from whacky people who wanted her to make the placenta into Christmas ornaments… She tried showing me photos of her stretching it over glass balls but I couldn’t stomach it.
To somewhat play devil’s advocate, what’s wrong with a minute? What benefit are you expecting from leaving it on longer?
The long and the short is Delayed Cord Clamping is really the only thing we have data for, and that’s what we should do without evidence something else is better.
I have no evidence, just a general thought that there are millions of years of evolution behind the umbilical cord staying intact for longer than a minute after birth. Some people want to leave it on for a week, why? Maybe that’s a useful instinct.
But most animals don’t leave it intact. They chew through it shortly after birth. You can’t really have a tissue that is sturdy enough to survive tension during fetal development and vaginal delivery that then instantly falls apart, so it has to be manually severed after delivery. The vast majority of mammals don’t let it stay attached for long at all, because their offspring are pretty mobile immediately after birth. From my reading of some of the random websites that recommend this, apparently it was based on the observations of a single species of higher ape (a chimp I think) that doesn’t sever the umbilical cord quickly. But when we have been severing cords as a species for generations and the vast majority of other mammals sever the cord with their teeth, I think the evolutionary biology evidence points towards severing the cord quickly.
Now evolutionary biology isn’t a solid basis for medical practice, but we don’t really have much scientific data at all to base this on at this point. There have been reports of increased rates of serious infections from the practice, which has face validity with the fact that you’re leaving a devascularized piece of tissue attached to the vascular system of neonate with an immature immune system. Outside of infection, there has been some case reports of polycythemia (excessively high red blood cell count) and jaundice in these infants. This makes sense physiologically. While attached to the placenta there is a greater intravascular volume available to the infant, which is the entire basis behind delayed cord cutting. It stands to reason that continuing to allow that extra blood volume to enter the infant would result in polycythemia and jaundice.
I’m not intimately familiar with the foundational literature by which the standard DCC cutoffs of 1 minutes or cessation of umbilical pulsatility were founded upon. There could be a very real argument for saying, should the time be 2 minutes? 5 minutes instead of 1? Or should we at least study it if it hasn’t been already?
In summary, we have a piece of dead/dying tissue attached to a physiologically stressed neonate with an immature immune system. Leaving it attached for days is in contradiction to the vast majority of other mammalian labor behaviors, is inconsistent with the majority of human’s labor history, and has a clear pathological mechanism by which the commonly reported complications can be easily explained. Without some legitimate evidence to actually support benefits or disprove the risks, I think this practice should be discouraged by healthcare professionals.
I’m sorry you’re getting downvotes. I’m betting the bulk are because you’re in c/askscience saying you don’t have any evidence to support your question, but that’s kinda the whole reason to ask a question. You weren’t speculating in a top level comment so I think it’s rude to be downvoting. As far as I can tell you’re asking genuine questions which is kinda the whole point of this community. Fuck the haters, ask questions when you’re curious!
Well they don’t eat it to get it off of the baby. While I’m not a vet or a zoologist, my understanding is they eat it for the nutrients as well as to help remove the scent, and newborn animals are easy prey and targeted by predators.
It’s because a huge amount of business is centered around made up things for going to work.
Things you need to work in an office: suits, dry cleaning for the suits, dress shoes, a car (because public transportation is woefully inadequate for this reason), gas for the car, maintenance for the car, lunch, daycare, a dog walker, you have less time so you are more likely to eat out for dinner, also more likely to hire maids, you are stuck in a commute and radio is awful, so a music subscription, maybe a new phone, and might have to go out for drinks with the coworkers on the way home.
Staying at home, and much of the country on highly limited income, taught us how much we spend on the “privilege” of work. Everyone is still shocked at the emotional and opportunity cost work had, we’re just starting to realize that most of what it sold to us either isn’t real or isn’t needed.
If people don’t go back to work a sea of businesses will fail.
You missed the most important thing. Real estate investments that aren’t allowed to go down in value, which they would if offices became superfluous. Just imagine how many buildings would become “worthless”/could be used for something else.
Yeah, this is BY FAR the biggest reason. Pretty much all the rich people and most big companies have huge investment in portfolios that contain a lot of commercial office spaces. If we were all allowed to work from home those investments would plummet and all the rich people and big companies would take MASSIVE losses on those investments. Which is why all the media and even companies like Zoom are trying to pull a 180 on working from home.
I feel like we need to talk about this more. Their whole model is promoting remote experiences and yet they are also forcing folk back to the office. I can’t think of a reason outside of external pressures that would happen.
In the Wall Street area of Manhattan, some of the biggest buildings are already being converted to apartments. It’s been a trend for a while, because the older buildings are too expensive to rewire for computers/HVAC.
That is a huge pressure, but it’s less obvious why a company in a business unrelated to real estate would want real estate prices high.
The secret is that companies aren’t in the business of making a good or providing a service, they actually are just giant schemes for raising money for “investments”. For example, airlines don’t make their money off of selling tickets, but through prospecting jet fuel. Most companies aren’t as direct and clear about what their business actually is.
Also the link between real estate and all of jobs isn’t very clear and is very abstract. It’s easy to see the costs and interactions with companies forced by working in an office, it’s difficult to see how a building losing value effects anyone.
Pre-pandemic. Maybe 2005 [?] one of the big American news companies assembles a team of financial experts to study various big companies. Then they deicde to apply all that brain power to an average American family. Husband and wife with three kids, two jobs and two cars. Both have middle class jobs. After running the numbers, the experts told the wife to quit her job. The savings on childcare, running the second car, no fast food dinners, etc. more than made up for the second salary.
I don’t have a problem finding dates. I don’t want to date. Men aren’t worth the cost, in my experience. But nice attempt, trying to attack me personally to cover up your misogyny and the misogyny of the “experts”" you quote. Such a “surprising” tactic. Too bad for you that I’m quite comfortable in my choice to live relatively male-free.
Tacking the words “expert” and “study” onto misogynistic propaganda doesn’t make it scientifically rigorous. And even though there is still truth in women making less in general, that’s changing. Women need men less and less every year. Thankfully.
If you look up the actual article you’ll see it went as I wrote. In that particular case, the wife was earning less, so it made sense for her to give up her job.
Anything you’ve added is on you.
If you’re not dating because ‘men aren’t worth it’ that says more about you than it does about the men.
It also illustrates a funny bit of the logic of multicellular non-clonal creatures: the germ line is the species. The other 99.9…% of you is just a fancy delivery mechanism, so it makes sense to add something seemingly super impractical to the anatomy if it slightly helps the sex cells.
Excellent question. From first principles: mars is about 1.5 AU from the sun. Using the intensity equation (inverse square law), Mars should receive about 1/(1.5x1.5) the amount of solar radiation, or about 44% on average.
Earth gets about 1400 W/m² hitting the top of the atmosphere, but most places on earth only see about 1000 W/m² after the column of air absorbs a bunch of it. Martian air absorbs almost nothing (being very thin), so you’d expect to see about 44% of 1400W/m² – or about 600W/m².
A quick Google search for “mars solar intensity” shows a result of 590 W/m², so that is pretty close to accurate, from first principles.
So 60% as bright, if talking pure intensity. As you say, the human eye has a pretty responsive dynamic range, and this is quite an acceptable number.
For point of comparison, this is the difference between the sun at high noon versus the sun at 4pm for most of the world. On Mars, high noon would have a solar intensity more like 4pm on earth. No where close to your darkness experience with the eclipse.
With regards to the eclipse it would depend on how much of the sun is covered though. I’d assume it’d about the same as you’d get during a partial eclipse when the sun is 40% covered?
Since you answered it, I figured I’d add that on the dark sides, Earth and Mars likely have similar light levels(ignoring the moon and light that’s bent through the atmosphere)
There are several ways of approaching that particular question. And none are simple, actually.
First, just to frame why 0/0 is so weird, consider 1/0. Asking “what’s 1/0” is like asking “what number when multiplied by 0 equals 1?” There’s no answer because any number multiplied by zero is zero and no number multiplied by zero is one.
So now on to 0/0. “What’s 0/0” is like asking “what number when multiplied by zero gives zero?” And the answer is “all of them.” 1 times 0 equals 0, so 1 is an answer. But also 2 times 0 is 0. And so is pi. And 8,675,309.
So, you could say that 0/0 doesn’t have a single answer, but rather an infinite number of answers. That’s one way to deal with 0/0.
Another way is with “limits”. They’re a concept usually first introduced in calculus. Speaking a bit vaguely (though it’s definitely worth learning about if you’re curious, and it seems you are), limits are about dealing with “holes” in equasions.
Consider the equasion y=x/x. With only one exception, x/x is always 1, right? (5/5=1, 1,000,000,000/1,000,000,000=1, 0.00001/0.00001=1, etc.) But of course 0/0 is a weird situation for the reasons above.
So limits were invented (by Isaac Newton and a guy named Leibniz) to ask the question “if we got x really close to zero but not exactly zero and kept getting closer and closer to zero, what number would we approach?” And the answer is 1. (The way we say that is “the limit as x approaches zero of x divided by x is one.”)
Sometimes there’s still weirdness, though. If we look at y=x/|x| (where “|x|” means “the absolute value of x” which basically means to remove any negative sign – so if x is -3, |x| is positive 3) when x is positive, x/|x| is positive 1. When x is negative, x/|x| is negative 1. When x is 0, x/|x| still simplifies to 0/0, so it’s still helpful to our original problem. But when we approach x=0 from the negative side, we get “the limit as x approaches 0 from the negative side of x/|x| is -1” and “the limit as x approaches 0 from the positive side is (positive) 1”. So what gives?
Well, the way mathematicians deal with that is just to acknowledge that math is complex and always keep in mind that limits can differ depending which direction you approach them from. They’ll generally consider for their particular application whether approaching from the left or right is more useful. (Or maybe it’s beneficial to keep track of how the equasion works out for both answers.)
I’m sure there are other ways of dealing with 0/0 that I’m not directly aware of and haven’t mentioned here.
So, to wrap up, there are some questions in mathematics (like “what’s 0/0?”) that don’t have a single simple answer. Mathematicians have come up with lots of clever ways to deal with a lot of these cases and which one helps you solve one particular problem may be different than which one helps you solve a different problem. And sometimes “there’s no right answer” is more helpful than using clever tricks. Sometimes the problem can also be restated or the solution worked out in a different way specifically to avoid running into a 0/0.
It’s definitely unfortunate that they don’t teach some of the weirdness of mathematics in school. But something I haven’t even mentioned yet is that all of what I’ve said above assumes a particular “formal system.” And the rules can be quite vastly different if you just tweak a rule here or there. There’s not technically a reason why you couldn’t work in a system which was just like Peano Arithmetic (conventional integer arithmetic) except that 0/0 was by definition (“axiomatically” – kindof “because I said so”) 1. (Or 42, or -10,000, or whatever.) That could have some weird implications for your formal system as a whole (and those implications might render that whole formal system in practice useless, maybe), or maybe not. Who knows! (Probably someone does, but I don’t.) (Edit: looks like howrar knows and it does indeed kindof fuck up the whole formal system. Good to know!)
One spot where mathematicians have just invented new axioms to deal with weirdness is for square roots of negative numbers. The square root of 1 is 1 (or -1), but there’s no number you can multiply by itself to get -1.
…right?
Well, mathematicians just invented something and called it “i” (which stands for “imagionary”) and said “this ‘i’ thing is a thing that exists in our formal system and it’s the answer to ‘what’s the square root of negative one’ just because we say so and let’s see if this lets us solve problems we couldn’t solve before.” And it totally did. The invention(/discovery?) of imagionary numbers was a huge step forwards in mathematics with applications in lots of practical fields. Physics comes to mind in particular.
“Have you tried applying on LinkedIn? Messaging recruiters or hiring managers on LinkedIn?”
“Oh no don’t use LinkedIn, everyone ignores those because of bots, apply directly”
“Put keywords from the job listing in your resume so the algorithm will rank you hire”
“Oh no don’t use words from the listing in your resume or you’ll be flagged as a bot”
“Hire a headhunter to apply to many positions for you”
“Avoid headhunters because when they spam your resume, you’ll get flagged as a bot”
“Complete a tedious and time consuming project for the company and post it on your personal site so they see you’re not a bot already qualified”
“Oh they didn’t even open the link to look at it? Well do one for the next company and the next and the next…”
Looking for a white collar job today is basically an arms race with the net result recruiters spend the bulk of their time weeding out bots, and applicants spend the bulk of their time trying to not look like bots. It’s ridiculous and I kind of wish places just accepted in person applications again.
yeah, people shit on the boomer ‘firm handshake’ thing but at this rate, even as a card-carrying introvert i’d rather take my chances and at least get a feel of the place rather than filling out another godawful application that no one will ever read
One way I was able to land a job was doing the old fashioned “speak to the hiring manager and shake his hand”. She said out of all the online applications (hundreds by the way every month) I was the first person to actually go up there and express interest. Still had to put in the online application, but a week later I interviewed and got the offer.
These businesses love to dehumanize the employee pool when they should realize it’s so easy these days for them to get in the exact same position.
LinkedIn is fine, my past 2 contracts both were off LinkedIn
Yes, include keywords but spread them out, absolutely. Also include them in your cover letter.
Don’t use headhunters, but you can use recruiters.
Pick a specific tech stack to specialize in, one that is popular abd high demand. 100% yes you should have a portfolio using that tech you can link to on your resume or applications. Focus on applying to the smaller but refined pool of jobs that explicitly need the exact tech stack you have in your portfolio.
Example: I specialized in .NET tech stack. C#, azure, EF Core, NUnit, Sql Server, etc etc. The full windows stack.
It’s a super popular stack, and there’s tonnes of demand. I don’t waste my time applying for python or c++ or lua or go or rust jobs. I stick to my stack.
I have many projects on my github using that stack, including install instructions, releases, docker containers, etc etc.
As a result I can talk about the tech used in these stacks extensively, I know them like the back of my hand. I have strong opinions on patterns with them, I can teach others about them, etc.
I despise the current paradigm of mock’ing everything, abstracting everything, and unit testing 100% cide coverage for no logical reason.
Instead I only unit test the following:
Any code I truly want to unit test, because it does something that is iffy on if it works or not, I break out into atomic logic that can very easily unit test.
Code coverage is a business requirement and we already have 100% coverage from integration tests, then I’ll start worrying about unit testing the shit out of stuff.
In other words if you waste time on mindless unit tests to assert that 1+1=2 when you dont have 100% coverage on your integration tests yet, you are wasting time.
In terms of atomic code, consider this example:
<span style="color:#323232;">public class StudentService(IStudentRepository repo)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">{
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> public bool AnyGrade12()
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> {
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> var students = repo.GetStudents();
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> return students.Any(s => s.Grade == 12);
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> }
</span><span style="color:#323232;">}
</span>
This would be very normal as a pattern to see, but I hate it because to test it, now I need to mock a stubbed in IStudentRepository.
Now this is what I consider atomic logic. The rule of thumb is, if the class has no dependencies or all it’s dependencies are atomic, it too is atomic.
Generally it becomes clear all the atomic logic can just be declared as static classes pain-free, and there’s no need to abstract it. It’s trivial to unit test, and you don’t have to mock anything.
Any remaining non-atomic code should end up as anything you simply must integration test against (3rd party api calls, database queries, that sort of stuff)
You’ll also often find many of your atomic functions naturally and smoothly slot into becoming just extension functions.
This approach goes very much against the grain of every dotnet team I’ve worked with, but once I started demoing how it works and they saw how my unit tests became much less convoluted while still hitting ~90% code coverage, some folks started to get on board with the paradigm.
I study circadian rhythms (the process that is responsible for getting us to sleep in the night). Specifically, how circadian rhythms influence how easily we catch diseases, but that part is less relevant to the question.
So since Earth rotates and has day/night cycles, life on Earth evolved to try to predict when the day and night comes. That's what circadian rhythms do. This is really important, since day and night aren't just associated with lightness/darkness. Day and night are associated with a ton of different environmental differences. For instance, it's colder at night, so animals need a way of keeping warm at night. There's more UV light at day, so animals need a way of resisting DNA damage in the day. There's some evidence that the bacteria in the air are different at day vs. at night, so animals will need to have different levels of immune system alertness.
We as humans live in artificial houses with artificial lighting, so we can lose track of why this is really important. But if you've ever went camping or tried to stay out at night you'll probably understand why it's really important for animals to be able to predict the time.
Circadian rhythms end up getting reinforced on a community level, since if it's easier to see in the day, an animal is more likely to forage in the day. Then predators will notice that prey is more plentiful in the day, so it will also be more likely for predators to hunt in the day as well.
Anyways, the end result of all of this is that animals have a huge evolutionary pressure to pick either the day or night to be their active period, which is the time where they look for food and in general just be awake. And whatever they don't pick, that's their rest period, the time where they sleep and recover.
But how do animals know that their circadian rhythms are predicting the correct time? Imagine a mouse in its burrow - it wouldn't be able to tell what time it is just by looking at the sky. And even just stepping out for a second to check would be very dangerous if it ended up being the wrong time. Animals need a way of reading what time it is when their out and about and then correcting their circadian rhythms if the rhythm is inaccurate. There's a lot of different measurements that animals use to read the time, but the key here is that the measurements that they pick must change significantly between day and night. In other words, it must be a very obvious signal, like "oh, I see this signal, so there is no doubt that the time is day."
Vast majority of the time, the most obvious signal ends up behind light. And it makes sense - if you see bright light, that is the clearest indication that it is day outside. So for many animals, light is the primary measure that animals use to read the time.
So to wrap back around to your question, it's not necessarily that light ruins sleep because evolution just decided to go "nae nae," it's because predicting time is incredibly important for keeping animals and humans alive, and up until very recently, light has simply been the easiest and best proxy for the time
And to answer your bonus question, yes, other animals have their sleep messed up by light too
Does this mean humans in far north climates have different methods of determinating sleep times? Because I'm originally from close to the equator and I'm the summer I'll be awake until near midnight when at least we get some dusk, but the nightless days really screw me up
Ah, so this goes more into the nuance of what exactly determines the time of the circadian clock. It is very well documented that animals in the arctic circle still have circadian clocks even if it's perpetual light or dark. I left out for simplicity that the level of light matters - that is to say, if there's a time where it's slightly dimmer and a time that's slightly brighter, that is enough to adjust the circadian clock to the correct time. The adjustment process will be slower and weaker than usual, but it does happen.
Also, I hinted that animals do take in multiple measurements to determine the correct time, and that plays a role in this case. In general, light tends to be the measurement that animals will default to, but where light variation doesn't exist, animals can and do utilize other measurements to determine the time. Eating (among other things) turns out to be a relatively strong signal, so circadian rhythms end up being somewhat self-reinforcing. After all, I would expect that you only eat when you're awake.
But in general, circadian rhythms and the ways that animals adjust their rhythms to the correct time is a huge rabbithole
I live on a quite a northern latitude. Finland, but the very southern end of it. (The Arctic circle only starts about at the most northern 1/3 of Finland)
I'll upload two pictures, taken from the same spot at different times.
Second one is pretty exactly dusk, yeah. Or 8 minutes after, technically.
The first one is dawn. Two hours apart and apparently in the same place, more or less.
And Uusimaa would fit, yeah, but I'm in Varsinais-Suomi. Same thing latitude wise though, but dawn and dusk are two minutes earlier in Helsinki than in Turku.
Due to being a "night owl" myself, I guess I've always been a little doubtful regarding circadian rhythms myself; but your explanation did a great job of boiling it all down to the most significant component parts. Thank you! I really liked your summary!
As a fellow night owl that gets pretty deep into the late night, I've had the idea that it is actually good to have a small percentage of the population awake while most of the others sleep to help keep watch. I don't have any way to prove this, but it's something that I feel makes sense.
I'm pretty sure that's the general hypothesis in the field, but as you might imagine, it'll be very difficult to prove. There was a study done sometime (I don't fully remember when) where researchers collected data on when people go to sleep and when they wake up, and they found that there was a remarkably normal distribution in the population for when people wake up and sleep.
My personal interpretation is that chronotypes (what you call early birds and night owls) are genetic in some way, but I don't specialize in this area, so don't take my word for it
No need to use quotation marks - it is scientifically confirmed that night owls and early birds exist (among a number of other, less-well-known circadian types). We call them chronotypes, and it's an active field of study. Unfortunately it's not something that I specialize in, so I can't comment too much on it.
However, it is very well acknowledged in the field that modern society is built on an early bird schedule and that completely screws over night owls. (To my memory, night owls tend to score lower on tests, pursue higher education less than early birds, tend to be less promoted and generally less successful than early birds. Inversely, night owls tend to do better in evening classes than early birds.)
However, it is very well acknowledged in the field that modern society is built on an early bird schedule and that completely screws over night owls. (To my memory, night owls tend to score lower on tests, pursue higher education less than early birds, tend to be less promoted and generally less successful than early birds. Inversely, night owls tend to do better in evening classes than early birds.)
Makes sense. As a kid up until 4th grade I used to go to school in the afternoon and I used to have good grades, 5th grade onwards I started going to class very early in the morning, my grades plummeted immediately and I started to hate school.
Sorry to piggyback onto your comment, and I know you can't give medical advice, but I wonder if you have any insight into a problem I have with sleep.
I'm early 40s now. One of my earliest memories, aged around 4, is not being able to fall asleep. I've tried EVERYTHING over the years. Sleeping pills are a guarantee if things are getting squirrelly, but give me severe rebound insomnia the next day. When I do fall asleep, it's like I can sleep for way longer than is normal (so either cause of sleep debt or poor sleep quality).
I've always joked that maybe I should be on a planet with a 28 hour day. But I also know that my lack of normal sleep is potentially storing up huge problems like increasing my risk of cancer, heart disease etc.
Melatonin kind of helps. But no matter what I do... My sleep pattern goes out of synch.
I've gone through school, 'normal' 9 to 5 jobs, relationships, all a big struggle as I have to perform at a normal level despite not having slept for 24+ hours fairly regularly.
I can do everything 'right' (no light in the evening, exercise, healthy diet, no excitement in the evening, no caffeine, mild sleep supplements) and still find myself unable to sleep. What the frick is wrong with me... Am I doomed to continue like this? I just want to sleep like a normal human being!
You're right, I can't give medical advice. But having abnormally long or short circadian days is a known thing - called circadian diseases. It's not really my specialty, so I can't comment too much on it, but my understanding is that many of them are genetic. These genetic variations can cause the circadian clock to run slower or faster than normal (which happens to be adjacent to what I study, so I can talk about it in excruciating detail if desired)
The Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome (FASP) is one such genetic circadian disease that gets a lot of attention among the circadian field, but you almost certainly don't have it, since FASP makes your clock run shorter than 24 hours, whereas you seem to imply that yours runs longer.
The key thing to remember is that the circadian clock is not psychological. There is an actual, physical, molecular clock running in your brain and in nearly all the cells in your body. If this clock has imperfections, then that will directly lead to consequences in your circadian rhythms and your sleep cycle. The circadian clock is a real thing that people with the right equipment can measure and read. It wouldn't even be particularly hard - just a blood sample or a swab would be sufficient. To be honest, I myself would like to study your cells to see if there really is anything out of place, but that would probably break so many research and ethics rules.
Anyways, to answer your question, I would recommend getting a medical opinion - it might be worth specifically bringing up that you suspect you have a circadian disease. I'm not too sure about treatment options, since my impression has generally been that we kind of don't have any treatments for circadian diseases. But it's not really my specialty, so maybe there is. My memory is that melatonin is a masking cue, which basically means that it makes you sleep but it doesn't actually affect your circadian clock (which probably explains your poor experience with melatonin).
Thank you so much for the detailed response, I really appreciate it. Over the years I've looked into this a lot but you've given me some really useful new information!
Health care in the UK, especially for lesser known genetic diseases, can be a bit of a lottery... I moved up the country 6 months ago, and within a month had been tested & diagnosed for a generic mutation called FMF (familial Mediterranean fever). My dad / sister both have it but despite nearly a decade of requests I was unable to get a doc to investigate it. So far up here the gp response has been a referral to a website for cognitive behavioural therapy.
I'll push on though and see if there's anything more they can investigate. Thanks again for the info :)
Thanks, I do suspect I have delayed phase sleep disorder. It's good to know I'm not alone. Do you have any coping strategies?
My coping strategy is 'modafinil to keep me from not being a zombie when particularly sleep deprived', and 'zopiclone for if I have been up longer than I should and it's early enough to push me back into normal sleep pattern'. But of course I'm very wary about doing that more than twice in a row, so it's never enough to establish 'normality'.
I'm a shell of a human, haven't been properly employed for some years, never managed a "normal" schedule or any kind of routine really. I used to have a shift job, but then that became impossible to do as well. In the army I got myself a role that allowed me to shift my personal schedules quite a bit.
But yeah, no, it has ruined my life and ever since I told tve doctors I tried weed as a coping strategy (for sleeping and eating, it's good), I can't really get any help from the public doctors, since I live in such a backwards country that weed is still comparable to doing iv-opiates basically.
I take melatonin and zolpidem. Melatonin around midnight so it would always be the same but ambien when I go to bed.
Doesn't really help.
If I lived ina country with less social secvurity, like the US, I probably would've ended up on the streets several years ago. I'd probably have killed myself or some other people by this point.
Now I'm just a wreck of a person waiting of some moronic bureaucratic bullshit while everyone else gets to have a life and I don't.
Tbf mine might be "non-24 and not just a delayed sleep-phase", but despite me now having actual sleep data from more than 6 months, I can't even get the sleep studies place to accept my doctors referral there. Makes me so fking angry I'm gonna have a seizure again
I feel really lucky that I get some government support because I have autism / bipolar. It's not much, but the specific benefit I receive also allows me to do some work... and I'm also very lucky to be self employed in a field I enjoy (writing music). So I'm certainly not rich or even that comfortable, but it does allow me to morph my days and nights to suit my unnatural rhythms.
One thing I find about lack of sleep... it makes me really emotional, grumpy, increases likelihood of a depressive state. For me, it's SO important to almost literally inject happiness. If we have a condition that takes away our happiness, it's really crucial to create happiness in any way possible. Binge funny TV shows, go for a walk, watch some standup comedy, call a friend (not at 2am unless they're also a night owl haha), make some art (doesn't matter if you're good at it), try learning a new skill, play a game, join a volunteering group. Those are my go-to activities, probably different for you.
Also, and I know it'll sound trite, but I got into a couple of things during lockdown that made a big difference to my overall happiness; Buddhist and Stoic philosophy. I'm not a Buddhist, probably never will be. I definitely have a long way to go in applying Stoic principles. But they have really improved my life. Meditation is very hard at first but incredibly beneficial. If I could recommend a couple of books (one is an audiobook and for me was more transformative than Buddhist principles)... if you've never used Audible, you can sign up for a month trial and keep the audiobook you select, no charge if you cancel within 28 days.
Derren Brown - Happy (not sure if you're familiar with this guy, he's a legit mind wizard, almost terrifyingly intelligent and has a long career as a 'mentalist' aka psychological magic)
Thich Nhat Thanh - The Heart Of The Buddha's Teachings
Yeah, sure! This happens to be my field of research.
So I was referring to this particular paper, which unfortunately (to my knowledge) didn't get much follow-up.
Tangentially, there is much other evidence that circadian rhythms have evolved in part to deal with differences in microbial pathogens at the day vs. at night. However, whether it's because the composition of bacteria in the atmosphere is different, or because animals are more likely to get themselves exposed to pathogens when they're foraging, or a mix of both, is unclear. My favorite paper that demonstrates this effect is this one, where the circadian clock affects how strongly the immune system responds to bacteria in the lungs. I'll also include the seminal paper here that first kickstarted the idea that immunology is fundamentally circadian, although frankly I didn't like how the paper was written. It looked at how mice responded to Salmonella infection at the day vs. at night and found a difference in immune response that then led to a difference in how severe the infection got.
To my knowledge, a similar study has never been repeated with other biomes. Which is a shame, since I can almost guarantee that a similar diel cycle exists in virtually every biome.
Yeah, crepuscular animals are weird. They have circadian rhythms (the circadian clock is incredibly well conserved across vertebrates and to a lesser extent, across invertebrates), but I'm not actually entirely sure how their circadian clock work to get them to wake up at dawn/dusk
Yes. It gathers up people from every field working on Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) every two years. It's always very interesting and brings forth a lot on international and interdisciplinary collaborations.
I don’t care if remote workers are less productive (although I’ve seen no evidence that they are).
You can’t convince me that spending an hour every morning travelling to get to an office, in order to sit in front of the exact two screens I have at home, is a good use of my time, nor is spending an hour getting home again.
That’s about 450 hours a year for me. 18 whole days. Those days are mine now, and you’re not having them back.
Yeah when I was originally told I could just work from home forever I invested in a giant monitor and all kinds of tools. Now they changed their mind and want me to go in to an Office with shared desks. No thanks
If we wanted to take the pedantry to the next level, we could get into a metaphysical discussion about whether the word “screen” refers to the physical appliance displaying the content or the content itself. When you “share your screen” in a Teams meeting, you don’t box up your monitor and mail it to your coworkers. 🤔
I have at home, is a good use of my time, nor is spending an hour getting home again.
Yeah, but those are YOUR hours and THEY don’t pay for it, so those hours don’t matter. In fact, it’d be better if you don’t get those hours to yourself. Maybe you’ll have more time to apply to other jobs or something.
What about 2-3 days a week and an extra week or two of PTO to compensate? I’m trying to think of ways to incentivize more office work that will appeal to stingy boomer leadership and the younger ‘fuck offices’ crowd.
My favourite line in the whole thing is right at the end when Commander Jack Ransom (played by Jerry O’Connell) walks past the poster of Lieutenant commander Una Chin-Riley (played by Rebecca Romjin) and calls her “The hottest first officer in Starfleet history.”
I wouldn’t put this on my CV, because employers would likely think I’m taking the piss, but my most saleable asset is that I can take an awful lot of crap before I ultimately walk out.
I know, but I’ve got bills to pay and kids to feed. I worked for 15 years in the same place, it wasn’t horrible until the end. Then I changed it up, working more hours and earning more money but I feel like this place is taking significantly more out of me than the old place did; or maybe I just don’t have as much time to recover now I’ve got 2 kids instead of 1.
I hate my job. I hate how it dictates my life and how despite working a 50 hour week (and my partner working 20 hours) we still barely afford to make rent and feed our kids, but I’m not sure how we’d escape this nightmare short of winning the lottery.
Same. It’s one of my great shames that I just absolutely hate the interview process for tech so much that I put up with a lot of shit to avoid having to look at the job market again.
Same with dating. Not sure what I’d do if me and my SO broke up. Both dating and job interviewing require taking a lot of rejection.
Company I worked for back in the 90's had several large call centers and these tactics were literally in the HR handbook.
They created absolutely hostile and demeaning waiting and interview environments, often deliberately scheduling 100 people to come in at the same hour, to then interview them throughout the day.
But if they were told to come in at 8, the earliest anyone who was a legit candidate would be interviewed was near noon, to then rush the interview because it was lunch time, making the rest wait another hour.
The 4 hours before noon, they'd call in people like once every 30-45 minutes, but these people were plants and would arive 30 minutes before they would be called in.
Out of 100, there were usually only 30 or so left around noon and 20 when they actually started in the afternoon.
And out of those, they'd still only interview half, reschedule the ones they thought looked most desperate, to see if they would come back for another interview.
And the people they did interview that day, if they actually recruited 1 or 2 out of them, it was a special day.
Thing is, they pulled that shit for 1 year and then their reputation preceded them and no one would apply anymore.
The company was American and trying to pull that shit in Belgium.
It didn't work out for them.
Heck, they ended up shutting down most of their European operations not that many years later.
I went to an interview once, got there 15 minutes early so the secretary told my that I got early and the interviewer is nit ready, which is of course fine by me. She told me to sit somewhere and wait. I waited 45 minutes (30 minutes after the interviews should have started) and than just walked a way. On the way out the secretary ask me where I’m going I told her that it’s rude to keep me waited like this and I’m not interested. She tried to convince me and went to get the interviewer, but went anyway when she done that.
Some people think their time is more valuable than others
Obviously too late now, but the move to Austin would have taken a long time, had you thought of accepting the move and in the meantime starting an intense job search in Maryland? That way if you found nothing you at least still had a backup plan in Austin and you weren’t fully out of the job.
Agreed. OP, I’m sorry this has happened to you. I wish you the best.
For others in the future, a crappy 1 room “extended stay” hotel might cost more for housing temporarily, but would likely be more money in your pocket at the end of the month than unemployment. Getting a job is much easier if you have a job already.
Do you guys and the people who upvoted you not have friends and family? I’m baffled by the nonchalant suggestion that someone pick up their life and move across the country thousands of miles from anyone they know, on what is more or less the whims of strangers.
Fly down to Austin, rent a PO Box, have mail diverted back to current house, claim you moved and wait till company notices while looking for a new job.
There are mail services in Texas that give you a street address and will forward the mail to whatever address you choose. No flying needed.
Someone I know keeps residency while spending his year moving from place to place. He doesn’t have a real home and never spends more than a few months in one place so it gives him a place to register his vehicle and keep his driver’s license up to date.
They’re suggesting a temporary move until a new job is sorted, if I understand. While not feasible for everyone, it could be an option for some to avoid being laid off.
First, I wasn’t suggesting it as a permanent move. You live in the other place until you find a job back in your original location, but all the while you’d still have a job, income, and most importantly, health insurance.
Do you guys and the people who upvoted you not have friends and family?
Multiple times during my childhood one of my parents had to move ahead to a different city to take a job while the other parent stayed in the original place until the end of the school year and we’d move.
I’m baffled by the nonchalant suggestion that someone pick up their life and move across the country thousands of miles from anyone they know, on what is more or less the whims of strangers.
You do what you have to do to make ends meet. When there is no easy way you do the hard thing because thats what being an adult is.
Yeah. More people need to be comfortable gaming the system like this. They do it to us so there’s no reason not to do it right back (but double check your contracts!)
I have noticed that working remotely really opened up the job market for me. Instead of being limited to where public transportation can bring me within 45 minutes, I can work for any company within Europe from the comfort of my home office. It makes switching jobs so much easier and I am willing to tolerate much less shit before I quit. That degree of freedom might scare companies. They can’t trap me anymore with the costs of uprooting my life for a better job.
I’ve never worked from home, but it seems to me that even if everything else were kept equal, you just saved an hour and a half commute plus the cost of doing so, every day! When you add in the lower cost of food and healthier diet eating at home and a whole host of other advantages. It’s a huge win! Congrats.
I worked from home for ~6 months full time, my experience was that I will never do it full time again. For me, it was waking up, watch the same four walls for 8 hours, eat dinner, sleep, repeat. Perhaps my office could have been better but because I was working with support and had to be available on the phone, I could not really leave my computer for an extended period of time (except for lunch break).
A lot of people make it out to be heaven, working from home. I really missed having people to talk to. I believe that it would have been a much better experience if I could have worked from home 0-5 days per week as I saw fit. Bad morning? Work from home. Waking up fresh? Go to work. I’m assuming that you can walk or bike to work. Few things are worse than being stuck in traffic or being on a crowed bus/train, or missing the bus with 1 min, having to wait 15 min for the next one, when with the bike I can leave whenever I want.
I think it’s very situational. I’m already a big shut-in. Working full time at home might not be great for my mental health. It’s sad to admit I use work for social contact, but it’s true. If you have good social connections outside of work, great.
All that said, this whole debate is very classist. There are loads of jobs, including mine incidentally, that require physically being there. I mostly haven’t paid attention to this debate because it doesn’t apply to me or the people I know, and probably never will.
Conversely, I found out just how many spoons I was using to function interacting with folks on a daily basis and that the strains my extroverted colleagues were talking about without having people were things I’d just lived with and normalized for my entire life because our society forced you to be around people all of the time.
Give me my four walls, pls. I spend every waking hour on a computer anyway, either working or personal, so it’s going to be four walls one way or another.
One of my sups from my old job was recently complaining that people weren’t required to come in more than two days a week and pushing to increase it because the office is lonely without them. She and people like her are the absolute worst. Main character syndrome doesn’t even begin to describe them and I wish nothing but the worst for them in life tbh
At the same time, the gravity systems are designed by the best engineers in the Federation because they never, ever, give out, even when the rest of the ship is disintegrating.
I used to put that one in the same category as the man-in-suit gorn from TOS: budget/tech restrictions. But even in the latest SNW episode, we see someone waking up on a piece of wreckage with gravity still perfectly fine, while also getting several zero gravity scenes in the same episode.
Aritificial Gravity is probably part of the system that prevents everyone from going splat against the window Maneo style when they leave warp. Without inertial dampening you couldn’t move ships basically at all, so these systems are probably passive.
The inertial dampeners have issues all the time tho, but instead of everyone getting turned into red mist against a surface instantly it just causes them to sway a little and the camera to shake.
Survivor(star)ship bias: There are only episodes about minor issues with the inertial dampeners because major issues with the system would be very short and messy, and not make for good archival training footage for cadets or whatever the Watsonian reason for our Doyalist TV show may be.
I watched most of the first episode but had to leave the couch for real world reasons (tragedy). So far it’s fantastic! Verymuch not Star Trek which is a nice change and unusual for me. Thanks for the recommendation!
I am so sorry for the tragedy that happened to you. I hope, you have people to be with you.
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I'm glad, you liked my recommendation. Many people don't get hooked until the 4th episode or so, so, if you're not entirely convinced, give it some time.
Inertial Dampeners failing means the ship can no longer remain at warp. (Ship would be fine, the meat bags of mostly water would not) Trek is usually pretty consistent about that part.
You should really only need inertial dampeners when changing velocity. You only go splat when the ship's velocity is significantly different from yours. If it slows down before you do, you splat on the forward bulkhead. If it speeds up faster than you, you splat on the aft bulkhead.
I can’t remember which series this is from but I swear I remember them saying that the grav plating still holds a charge even in the event of total power failure. So even when the ship is disabled, gravity will maintain it’s hold for a period of time and then will slowly dissipate
If it was mentioned, it was probably in ENT. They talked a lot more about grav plating in that show than any of the others, probably more than all of them combined.
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