Drugs Eradicate the Need For Sleep 772
MattSparkes writes "New Scientist is running an article on lifestyle drugs that claim to help you function on little or no sleep. I'm dubious, but the interviewee in the article claims they work well. 'Yves (not his real name), a 31-year-old software developer from Seattle, often doesn't have time for a full night's sleep. So he swallows something to make sure he doesn't need one.'" But, sleep is where I'm a Viking!
Hmmm... Not Good (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:pills for everything (Score:1, Interesting)
The real danger... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, there are animals that don't appear to sleep, but actually do (dolphins, for example). What they do is sleep half their body and brain at a time. So there's obviously some benefit, as they've evolved the necessity to remain awake, but still get the sleep they need. (Unless it really happens to be some anomaly of evolution (another strike against creationism), like the appendix or spleen, that affects basically the entire population of living creatures). But I would think the dolphins proved otherwise, since they'd be the first to do away completely with sleep.
But a concern is still the long term side effects. By playing with stuff like this, would it lead to mental insanity later on due to paranoia or schizophrenia? We are, after all, playing with the mental state of mind (I'm sure tired muscles still remain tired even after popping the pills, even though the brain says it's fresh). The fact that the miliary trials concluded that it's only useful to about 48 hours wakefulness seems to imply that it doesn't reduce the need for sleep, just reduces the feelings of the need for sleep/sleepiness. We may end up with a population of zombies in a decade or two's time.
Anyhow, when did pill-popping become fashionable? I fear the day where it's "uncool" to not stick some drug in you as part of your daily routine in order to get through the day (as opposed to treating disease). Or the "there's a drug for everything" mentality.
Re:Not good..... (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea of everyone having an IQ of 300, being able to sleep 4 hours a week, and never getting sick may sound great to some, but where does it stop? After we've reached the point of greatly diminishing returns from drugs, do we turn to machines for enhancment? Do we augment ourselves with embedded computer chips, use genetic engineering to enhance our characteristics, or completely tailor our bodies and minds into something we can't even imagine today?
This may seem far removed from sleep drugs, but I think it is a natural progression
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, worms, jellyfish and other "lower" invertebrates do exhibit periods of inactivity as do even prokaryotes such as bacteria. This period of "inactivity" is often crucial for normal physiological processes to occur. The important thing to note here is that through evolution, "higher" organisms appear to have accumulated a number of circadian clocks related to a variety of physiological functions and the "higher" up an organism is, the more clocks for various functions are accumulated.
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:4, Interesting)
6 nights x 4.5 hours = 27 hours
1 days x 24 hours = 24 hours
Total = 51 hours/week
51 hours/7 days = 7.29 hours per day (just like the rest of us)
The other flip side of a no-sleep drug (Score:5, Interesting)
So this pill will surely have some side-effects, and some of them will likely be negative. Fine.
Now think about the value of your time. You get ~100 years here on Earth and that's all. You are wired to spend about a third of that time unconscious. An entire third of your life will be spent not doing or experiencing anything.
How much effort do you expend just to shave ten minutes off your commute? Or to save three minutes standing in line?
What, then, would 33 extra years be worth?
Re:Sleep debit (Score:3, Interesting)
I know what you mean. I'm coming up on 40, and I've noticed that I sleep less now than I did 5 years ago. Which is scary, because I always assumed that the "getting older = less sleep" thing didn't happen until you were MUCH older.
I guess we're all only as young as we feel, but still older than we think.
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
The appendix and spleen are NOT vestigial organs. While you can survive without them, your immune system is stronger if you keep them.
You can survive without your right arm, therefore it's vestigial, correct?
Statements like that (e.g., the appendix and spleen do not perform necessary functions) make evolutionists look stupid. Please research physiology before you try to prove evolution with misguided "facts."
Re:The bugs! They are crawling up my legs! (Score:5, Interesting)
I was still fairly young then, at the age of 14 or so. I was out with friends on the final night of my experiment and I started to see things and totally freaked out. One of the hallucinations was indeed a miniature pink elephant. As well I thought a tree was a very large spider. I have a terrible fear of spiders. After my friends managed to get me into the house and calmed me down, I suddenly got up and went out into the back yard to jump on the trampoline. It was -10 degree's Celsius or so and I was just wearing Jeans and a T-Shirt. I couldn't tell the difference. All I remember is having them waking me up and having to be rushed to the hospital. I was jumping on the trampoline and slipped. I flew off and cracked my head on a mound of ice. I'm just glad one of the springs didn't break or on the trampoline and hit me in the ass or something. It was fairly cold.
I stayed in the hospital for the night as the thought I may have had a concussion. I still don't remember any of that week. What I told you now is what my friends have told me. I also heard that earlier on in my experiment [first 24 hours I suppose] I had exclaimed to my friends that my toothpaste had started talking to me the next day at school.
Now I enjoy my sleep.
Pills? No thanks. I prefer the natural method of recovering from a hard days work writing code.
Re:Not good..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The other flip side of a no-sleep drug (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
With respect to the risks of sleep -- perhaps. It may be that specializing for night or day is a better overall strategy than trying to be able to operate around the clock. Maybe you're a daytime animal that relies on speed. If you can't see at night that speed is less useful. Maybe you're a nighttime animal that relies on stealth. That stealth is impaired during the day. So, even without sleep, you'd be looking for a safe place to den up during your off time.
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Again, all apochyphal information, I haven't actually done before-and-after measurements. Still, there's a noticable difference, and after the growth spurt her appetite and activity level return to normal. So sleep may be a necessary component of the body's growth/repair mechanisms. It would be interesting to see if people who take this sleep-counteracting compound take longer to heal.
Re:Not good..... (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess it boils down to this:
Is the requirement of sleep enforced by our brains because it is
(a) an irreducibly necessary part of living for physiological or neurochemical reasons, like breathing, or
(b) a behavior that was evolutionarily advantageous in the wild?
If (a), then these kinds of drugs are very troubling. If (b), then I would probably have no more qualms taking these than, say, a pain-killer.
Re:Not good..... (Score:1, Interesting)
drug the followers (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Beyond the acute effects though most mammals pushed through drugs like meth to avoid sleep simply die in studies after a month. The circadian cycle is needed for proper homeostasis. Sleep deprivation causes symptoms of ADHD (ironically, treated with stimulants), obesity via lower leptin and higher ghrelin levels, and a very nasty cycle of altered immune, inflammatory and glial response.
One other interesting thing to note is that the human circadian cycle specifically tracks dawn and dusk, via the CLOCK genes mPer1 and mPer2 -- mPer1 being dawn and mPer2 being dusk. If there is no gradual "dusk" period before sleep, direct changes in gene expression -- outside of sleep deprivation -- result in a persistently lowered level of tyrosine hydroxylase, interfering with dopamine levels. Dopamine is of course a neurotransmitter associated with motivation, goal seeking behavior, wakefulness, attention, etc. So therefore perish the dusk, perish the dopamine. And yet this commonly happens -- artificial lighting, computer / TV screens, etc right up to the moment of sleep destroy melatonin production and any sort of proper expression of mPer2 activity. Over time this results in low cortisol and catecholamine levels during the day (fatigue), higher levels at night (as the melatonin/hormonal peaks become disturbed), and increased hunger/activity during the missing dusk period, as you in essence train the natural oscillation to favor alertness at that time -- when it cannot be sustained.
Taking stimulants, be they modafinil, the neurotoxic ampakines, or amphetamine, only partially reverses some of these things. They increase neurotransmitter and cortisol levels -- but also do this when their levels should be lower! Chronic levels of cortisol alters body composition to favor muscle catabolism (breakdown), fat retention, annihilation of the thyroid hormone T3 into reverse T3 thus fucking up thermogenesis and the metabolism, and causing atrophy of the hippocampus and disruption of memory. This also results in suppression of the immune system, increased inflammatory response, increased stress/anxiety, etc etc.
Do any of these things sound like "happiness" you would take a pill for? Shut down the computer and TV, and artificial lighting sources at least an hour before bed. Relax, in dim light. Train yourself with a normal schedule in sync with the sun. You'll have greater alertness during the day, lower hunger, higher energy, better memory, and sleep better.
We are a nation of stimulus junkies, always wanting to be entertained by something novel, with no thought for relaxation, rest, or recovery. When our novelty seeking behaviors disrupts our normal diurnal behaviors, the answer isn't to take drugs and start the cycle anew, but to perform these behaviors in moderation and balance.
Try turning off your electronic shit a bit early tonight and relaxing before sleep at a normal, consistent time. In a week, you'll be surprised at the huge difference it makes.
Re:Not good..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Also in terms of the stages of sleep mainly REM that is not always the way the body needs to progress through the phases. There is a method of sleeping called polyphasic sleep http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep [wikipedia.org] which can actually change the cycles and steps needed to get to REM sleep. Famous people such as DaVinci and Buckminster Fuller have professed to being on this pattern for years.
Also I know this works because I have actually tried it for 2 months as an experiment. If work permitted napping during the day I would still be on it but unfortunately it does not. There is a great Yahoo group called the uberman mailing list that has a melting pot of people who have tried this method.
So I think that sleep is not such a cut and dry science as some people claim. That is why some people can sleep only 4-5 hours a day and still be immensely productive while other need up to 12. It is a matter of mental brainwaves and like you said evolutionary approach to the sleep genre which will affect people differently.
From a meth addict's perspective (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway the article this drug is about is Modafinil, also known as Provigil, a narcolepsy drug, which I've been prescribed for ADHD. And it does the same damn thing. Your body needs sleep, trust me I know, no matter what it is after two or three days your mind begins to break down. This drug certainly doesn't help with that, and if you RTFA (what are the chances of that?) the software developer in question mentions some of the things I pointed out. This worries me, greatly, because after going through a year of hell I'm now seeing articles like this discussing the potential for a "sleep-free" lifestyle, I have very little doubt in my mind that such a thing is not possible without great damage to the brain.
I am not everyman and I do have an extremely addictive personality, but I've seen friends who don't (have addictive personalities) fall into the same trap as I did under the allusion of "work more, work faster, sleep is for wimps!"
Anyway this is just my experience, but I thought I would share...
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
There was a post here some years back by someone who claimed to be able to do this. He [?] said he only found it useful for long-distance road trips.
As I recall, his method worked through totally relaxing (via self hypnosis) half the body at a time.
Polyphasic/"Uberman" sleeping (Score:4, Interesting)
Polyphasic sleeping accomplishes this by limiting yourself to brief 15-20 minute naps, which are far more efficient than sleeping in large blocks because the brain can be trained to go directly into REM. Unfortunately, this training can take weeks or months (depending on how fastidious you are with your schedule), and the adjustment period can be extremely unpleasant.
A drug like this could be very useful for those of us who do don't experience much physical exertion and sleep very little as it is anyways, but couldn't get past the adjustment hump of the polyphasic cycle [atzok.com].
Re:Not good..... (Score:2, Interesting)
For one month, I worked out at LEAST 6 hours prior to going to sleep. For the next month, I worked out no MORE than 1 hour prior to going to sleep. I showed a VERY noticable improvement when I worked out shortly before going to sleep as opposed to working out long before going to sleep.
It makes sense, if you think about it. Sleeping is like running your body on reduced (and in some people minimal) power...so instead of doing things like interpreting sight and sounds and tastes and touch and smells, you can spend those extra brain cycles repairing, regrowing, reorganizing, etc...
A good friend of mine who went on to be a neurosurgeon once said "sleeping is to your brain as defragmentation is to your hard drive"
Need for sleep (Score:5, Interesting)
Now if you believe (like many) that the brain is no more than a big computing unit, then it must abides by those rules and the sleep is nothing else than the physical manifestation of 'garbage disposal'. Keep it up for too long and it will... crash.
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, but there was the recent research showing that many birds sleep on just one side of their brain at a time.
One thing I thought interesting about the report was that some of their test subjects were cockatiels. We have 'tiels, and we've often seen them apparently asleep, but if you can move to see their other eye, you find it open and alert (while the first one is still closed). Apparently part of what triggered the research was people reporting this sort of thing in their pet birds.
The researchers instrumented the birds' brains (with very light-weight instruments
A curious aspect to this is that birds' eyes are, like ours, wired into both sides of the brain. But the "asleep on one side only" pattern exists, and matches the eyes.
The hypothesis is that birds generally don't need as much sleep as they get, so they stay half-alert to watch out for predators, maintain their grip on their perch, etc. And the alert side can send a wake-up signal to the sleeping side if anything interesting happens.
Re:Not good..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's more effective if I shut the right eye, albeit leading to terror in the passenger seat.
(I also take more-ordinary naps at home, which tend to hover at the edge of sleep. And I'm naturally a *very* light sleeper, and a sunrise person.)
Re:Not good..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Try neurofeedback (Score:3, Interesting)
The nice thing is that you'll know within one or two sessions if it works, no need for months to wait before you know it works. I've seen plenty of kids being more or less 'rescued' from a life with Ritalin, that alone is worth a try..
Re:The bugs! They are crawling up my legs! (Score:3, Interesting)
In my experience, I was acutely aware of my slowed physical state (reaction times were slower and very low motivation for activity). As such, I became very cautious with my movements, and would have never thought to do something like that (walking up stairs was my most strenuous activity during that period). Part of the reason was to conserve energy, but that was only a conscious decision at the start whereas later on it simply became routine.
I do remember losing some sense of touch. Nothing that extreme, though.
The hallucinations were very minor for me (I didn't expect or want them). YMMV, I guess. Sleeping through an entire day after that marathon was disorienting as well. In all, it was a weird week for me.
Re:The Horror - Watch Capitalism Adapt (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, Warren argues that capitalism adapted just as the grandparent predicted: when some women went to work, some families had more disposable income. By and large, those families spent that income on buying houses in better school districts (which are of course more expensive). To compete with those families, and make sure Junior went to a good public school, all the other families had to send the wife to work to snag a house in the good school districts. Of course, that just spurred a bidding war for houses in good school districts, driving the prices up so much that the middle class family had to cut down on luxuries to afford the house in the good school district.
Moral of the story: if you create more wealth (whether by doubling the labor force, doubling the number of hours we work, or whathever), you cause inflation. It's not necessarily a zero-sum game, but it can be, as Warren demonstrates.
Re:Not good..... (Score:4, Interesting)
But once you're dark adapted, you can see well enough to walk around and do quite a lot in conditions that a non-dark adapted person would consider "pitch black". Could you see a black cat sitting still on a black background? Maybe, maybe not. But could you see well enough to run away from a large predator at night without stumbling into a tree? Most likely yes.
Re:The other flip side of a no-sleep drug (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd argue that anything that takes energy to maintain but serves no function would be not be selected for. See: Antibiotic resistance in bacteria where their enviornment does not contain the resistance. Bacteria that are not resistant have more energy for reproduction, thus spread faster.
Selection is all about enviornment, though it's got a lot of interesting wrinkles that prevent us (population geneticists - though I can't call myself a 'real' one, as I do bioinformatics on population genetic data) from fully comprehending how all the inputs/outputs are wired together.
Re:Not good..... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hallucinations. (Score:3, Interesting)
Things I've noticed several times I've went sleep deprived
Day 1) Hard to stay up at "Bedtime".
o Normal functioning
o Memory, Speech, and Physical abilities normal
Day 2) Easy to stay up
o Normal functioning
o Memory, Speech, and physical abilities mostly-normal
o Trouble concentrating on complex mental things, like programming a simple 3d game
Day 3) Easy to stay up
o Normal functioning
o Memory, Speech, anad physical abilities mostly-normal
o Trouble concentrating on complex mental things, like programming a simple 3d game
o Minor issues with memory and extremely complex speech (like most complex poetry or tongue twisters)
Day 4) Tired, can't get comfortable or will fall asleep
o Impaired functioning
o Memory, Speech, and physical abilities considerably lessened
o Can't concentrate longer than a few minutes
o Complex speech is impossible you sound like you had a stroke
o Physically exhausted and "sore"
o Minor visual only halucinations
Day 5) Tired, can't get comfortable or will fall asleep
o Impaired functioning
o Memory, Speech, and physical abilities considerably lessened
o Can't concentrate longer than a few minutes
o Complex speech is impossible you sound like you had a stroke
o Physically exhausted and "sore"
o Hallucinations getting severe with all senses hard to tell from reality
o Diminished appetite
Day 6) Exhausted, effort required to stay awake
o extremely impaired functioning
o Memory, Speech, and Physical abilities are crap
o can't concentrate for over a minute
o speech is going in the crapper
o body is sore like you've worked out for hours
o Hallucinations are so severe you can't tell them from reality at all
o time lag when in conversations
o everything takes on a surreal cast, nothing seems like its normal
o Pissy and angry, snapping at people
o Diminished appetite
Day 7) Exhausted, effort required to stay awake
o extremely impaired functioning
o Memory, Speech, and Physical abilities are crap
o can't concentrate for more than a few seconds
o speech is horrible, monotone, and increasingly rare, very start and stop
o no energy hard to move
o Hallucinations are so severe you can't tell them from reality at all
o time lag when in conversations
o everything takes on a surreal cast, nothing seems like its normal
o Lethargic and slow to respond
o No appetite
Day 8) Exhausted, effort required to stay awake
o extremely impaired functioning
o Memory, Speech, and Physical abilities are crap
o can't concentrate for more than a few seconds
o speech is horrible, monotone, and increasingly rare, very start and stop
o no energy hard to move
o Hallucinations are so severe you can't tell them from reality at all
o time lag when in conversations
o everything takes on a surreal cast, nothing seems like its normal
o Lethargic and slow to respond
o No appetit
Re:From a meth addict's perspective (Score:3, Interesting)
For example, I've found that when I'm trapped at my desk and have to pull an all-nighter, it just doesn't keep me up all night. I think it's because of the lack of general physical movement. For all night sessions, I find working as late as I can (1am or 2am, usually), followed by 2-4 hours of sleep, gives me far more energy for the task than trying to get by with caffeine alone. And I'm far more productive than trying to push through without sleep at all. But your reasoning will get fuzzy, your memory will play tricks on you, and you can get kind of distracted after a while. The longest I stayed up with it was 38 hours straight. At the end of that time, I knew I was in a pretty bad place. I had a glass of wine, faded fast, and hopped into bed. I woke after 5 1/2 hours fairly refreshed. I was kind of out of it the next day, and I wouldn't want to make any important decisions or presentations in that state, but it wasn't bad.
Recently, we decided to remodel the kitchen. We were running behind schedule (who doesn't), I was burning the candle at both ends because of work, and I needed to get part of the plumbing done to get the cabinets in place for the Corian people who were coming in two days. I used a half dose around dinner time and kept going with good energy until 3am. At that point I could have taken more and kept going, but I slept and finished the next night. An important point to note is that Modafinil/Provigil can stave off the urge to sleep, but cannot eliminate the need to sleep.
When I was young and stupid, I would indulge in a variety of drugs for no particular reason. Meth (and I presume the somewhat more legal varieties of amphetamine) are good for focus and staying awake, but along with not eliminating the need for sleep, they also make subtle changes to your brain chemistry. My brother got hooked on meth, took it all the time, thought he was real cool. Then he started talking about "the mob" wanting to kill him, and how every dark sedan he'd see on the road was the FBI keeping an eye on him. When I, my other brother, and some of his friends tried to convince him to get off the drugs, he thought it was some kind of plot. He finally got sent home on a forced vacation and laid off the drugs for a while. It was about 2 weeks before he started questioning his delusions.
It may sound like a joke, but amphetamine psychosis due to chronic use really isn't. It wears off after a couple of weeks, but while you're in it, you're particular form of crazy (my brother became obviously and overtly paranoid) will be absolutely indistinguishable from the real thing (that is, organic and not going away).
Anyway (sorry if I got off-topic), Modafinil definitely does not have these side effects. And it won't leave you burned out or sleeping 24 hours, but prolonged lack of sleep definitely is not good for your brain and you will find yourself misplacing IQ points after a while.
--marmot
Sorry I'm so late to the party (Score:5, Interesting)
The only way to understand sleep / awake is to first understand anabolism / catabolism, balancing metabolic states. Sleep and Awake are balancing metabolic states, nothing more, nothing less. Just because we can exhibit 'behavior' when we are awake does NOT mean that sleep has anything to do the the notion of behavior. And just because we can measure brain activity during periods when we are awake or asleep does NOT mean that sleep is anything more than a metabolic state. Sleep is the Normal, Natural state of any living organism. Awake is just heightened activity and enhanced skills necessary to obtain food and procreate. Making too much of what being awake is is the source of all the confusion and misunderstanding about what sleep is.
High school understanding of the eye is wrong (Score:3, Interesting)
Cones are sensitive to daylight conditions while rods are sensitive to low-light conditions. Your cones are inactive during night lighting conditions and you still construct your visual field in color. As a result of being keyed to daylight, cones are also used for edge perception. As such, you will find it quite impossible to read by moonlight, as reading requires your cones to distinguish very fine edges and your cones are inactive in nigh-light. (regardless of how bright the moon is.)
Rods are particularly good at sensing motion, though not edges. As you may guess, this means humans are better at sensing motion *at night*. As such, you will not be able to tell which claw a bear is swinging at you in your peripheral vision, though you will be able to tell a large object is hurtling toward you. In fact, due to the physical setup of your eye, it is advisable to "look" at objects in night conditions without focusing directly at them. You have a
This setup (being able to distinguish edges and detail better during the day and being better at detecting motion at night) seems to suggest that humans were on the defensive at night and actively engaged in the world during the day.
The human vision system is much more effective (for things that we need to be spending time on) in daylight conditions, I find it *highly* unlikely humans were nocturnal in anything that might resemble recent history.
We also do not detect 3 colors and then construct other colors out of a combination of these. Our S, L and M cones are tuned to respond most agressively to specific wavelengths of light, though they are still responsive to wavelengths that are "near" those. There is even a theory that some women posses a gene (that can only be carried on a second x chromosome) that produces a fourth type of cone. These cones are tuned to detect light in between the wavelengths of the L and M cones, giving these women the ability to distinguish between colors that a tri-chromatic individual would see as identicle. These women are ingeniously deemed "Tetrochromatic superwomen".
Don't be sad if all this contradicts what you were told in high school. High school teachers, by and large, aren't on the bleeding edge of cognitive science.
You don't need REM Sleep (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not good..... (Score:3, Interesting)
In the article you yourself linked, Vermiform Appendix [wikipedia.org] the first paragraph:
In human anatomy, the vermiform appendix (or appendix, pl. appendices) is a blind ended tube connected to the cecum (or internationally, "caecum"). It develops embryologically from the cecum. The term vermiform comes from Latin and means "wormlike in appearance". The cecum is the first pouch-like structure of the colon. The appendix is near the junction of the small intestines and large intestines.
The paragraph you quoted is from further down in the wiki article -
One explanation has been that the appendix is a vestigial structure with no current purpose.[citation needed] The appendix is thought to have descended from an organ in our distant herbivorous ancestors called the cecum (or caecum). The cecum is maintained in modern herbivores, where it houses the bacteria that digest cellulose, a chemically tough carbohydrate that these animals could not otherwise utilize. The human appendix contains no significant number of these bacteria, and cellulose is indigestible to us. It seems likely that the appendix lost this function before our ancestors became recognizably human.
The article is directly contradicting itself. Further, that whole paragraph is lacking citation, and should probably be removed. I'm not debating about the appendix and it's function or lack thereof, here; I'm stating that what Wikipedia says about the cecum is incorrect. Using it as evidence for your argument is fallacious, and you need to find another source.
To check out Wikipedia on the cecum, let's go to Cecum [wikipedia.org] and take a look.
The cecum or caecum (from the Latin caecus meaning blind) is a pouch connected to the ascending colon of the large intestine and the ileum. It is separated from the ileum by the ileocecal valve (ICV) or Bauhin's valve, and is considered to be the beginning of the large intestine.
Which article is correct? Pick up an anatomy book, or try a google for "cecum" and pick anything but Wikipedia. From one of the higher links, Medterms.com [medterms.com]:
Cecum: The cecum (also spelled caecum), the first portion of the large bowel, situated in the lower right quadrant of the abdomen. The cecum receives fecal material from the small bowel (ileum) which opens into it. The appendix is attached to the cecum. The word "cecum" comes from the Latin "caecus" meaning "blind." This refers to the fact that the bottom of the cecum is a blind pouch (a cul de sac) leading nowhere.
My final point: The appendix is not "descended from an organ in our distant herbivorous ancestors called the cecum". We have a cecum in our bodies currently, and it is what the appendix happens to dangle from. This is basic, high school and first-year anatomy. Is that good enough?
Coding for 100 hours without sleep (Score:3, Interesting)
But, I learnt a few things.
My body followed the daily cycles despite not sleeping. Each day I would be at my least attentive between 4am-8am. Then, by mid-day I'd be feeling a lot more awake and alert. I did not hallucinate in any way, but I did feel like crap pretty much all the time.
In hindsight, because I waas so tired during the days, I'd have probably got exactly the same amount of work done if I'd followed the normal cycles and slept during the nights. It definitely doesn't do you any favours to skimp on the sleep.
And on the fifth day, after I handed it in, I slept very well.
Do not try this at home kids.
Re:Not good..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't that kind of like saying that rocks "tend to" not move? Let me give you directions to a place I know that has witnessed many, many rockslides over the years. You can tell me how "tending to" do something means it'll never happen. But be sure to shout
Thinking that it is stupid to throw out the practices of the past without examining the alternatives to see if they are better can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the "thing' involved.
"Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it"
Intentionally ignoring what has been done in the past, and changing for the sake of change, can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the "thing" involved.
Remarkable symmetry, don't you think?
Your own definition of Liberal also notably does not preclude being bound by OTHER things
But then again, I wouldn't know - I "tend to" be conservative.