April 26, 2004

28 hours a day, six days a week.
posted by Korou 20 years ago
  • I don't THINK so.
  • BlueHorse, I think you made your judgement without this vital fact: On the 28-hour day graph, there is no Monday.
  • Wouldn't this make the Sabbath a constantly moving target? Man, that'd be brilliant. So you'd get the weekend right, then say the Sabbath is Tuesday. You've just gotten half a week off. It'd be even better once it moved into the middle of things and started disrupting things there.
  • If we're going to be messing around with this stuff, why not do it more logically? I'd vote for decimalisation of our entire time system. 10 second minutes; 10 minute hours; 10 hour days. Each hour would be longer than our current hour, so that 10 of them would cover the span of our current day. I'm not sure how to tie in 10 day months and 10 month years with the realities of a solar year, but given some private financing, I'd be willing to dedicate myself full time to solving that problem. If it's good enough for Battlestar Galactica, it's good enough for me.
  • How about 21 hours a day, eight days a week? That way you live more days and your life seems longer. And you can go round singing that song all the time.
  • well, as a practicing circadian biologist, i can tell you for certain that trying to decouple yourself from the light-dark cycle will be 100% likely to fuck you right the hell up, clinically speaking. see for reference any one of the thousands of published papers describing shift work and the ill effects it has on the human physiology. the human endogenous circadian rhythm (internal timekeepping system), controlled by the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), is almost exactly 24 hours. this rhythm is kept synchronized by light input to the eyes; any deviation from the light-dark cycle will reset the endogenous clock to correspond with the new light-dark cycle. translation: imagine being jet-lagged for the rest of your natural life. that's what the 28-hour day is trying to do. i'm not even sure that we are physically capable of entraining (that is, synchronizing the internal clock to the external light-dark cycle) to a 28-hour cycle - it's outside the limits of our internal physiology. at no point will your sleep/wake cycle, your activity cycle, brainwaves, digestive system, reproductive system, etc. - just to name a few of the systems that have their own clocks, all tied to the master clock in the SCN - at no point will any of these EVER begin to get in synch with each other, especially not on a cycle that the master clock is unable to entrain to. not to mention the fact that these "slave oscillators" (as peripheral clocks are known) don't all shift in the same direction - some can phase advance (start earlier - think daylight savings in the fall) much easier than they can phase delay (start later - daylight savings, spring). you have no idea how badly this will mess up your system unless you either study this or have done shift work. and you can't "fake it" with electric lighting, not unless you're in a cave (and even then, there are limits - like not being able to make anything significantly longer than a 24-hour cycle work. 25h, maybe... but 28h? no way). besides i doubt we all want to move underground and become morlocks here... there goes that "sun-drenched" weekend. please note that (a) no matter what you do, you can't get more hours of sunlight over the weekend unless you can change the speed at which the earth rotates. note the graph used to show how much more light you get assumes that people don't get up very early - daylight savings already gives us more light suring the summer. and (b) the "serious scientific benefits" link gives you a 404 error. that's some hard hitting evidence there. here's a good overview of the circadian system, including detailed info on how and why messing with the system will screw you up royally. i can vouch for the second two authors, don't know the first one listed.
  • ah crap i knew i would mess that up. reverse my daylight savings descriptions... sorry there. phase advance = daylight savings, spring; phase delay = daylight savings, fall. terminology refers to advancing or delaying the start of your daily activity cycle (relative to the original start time). daily cycle of rest-activity starts with the active phase (alpha) and ends with the rest phase. if i used any terms you aren't familiar with (ie, i forgot to define them in standard english) here's a good list of circadian terminology, defined.
  • / vows to change the speed at which the earth rotates. thank you frogs, circadian rhythms intrigue me. my parrot has no respect for clock changes.
  • Wow, frogs! I nominate you for chief scientist of this nannership.
  • This calls for the elimination of Mondays. I therefore support it. Everyone, Join me in the Coalition Responsible for the Elimination of All Mondays!
  • I'm pretty sure Arthur Dent lived briefly on a planet like this in Mostly Harmless. Only it was 25 hour days, 30 day months and 300 day years. So he got to sleep in an extra hour every day, the months didn't rush by and the year didn't drag along. He also made sandwiches from a Perfectly Normal Beast. /douglas adams
  • Frogs, that was great!
  • What frogs said. Jeezus frickin Christ this is stupid. There are strong philosophical and scientific arguments in favor of the 28 hour day. Serious proponents of the 28 hour day share their views here. ...with, of course, a broken link behind those "strong scientific arguments".
  • (moderately off-topic, but similar) Wasn't there a technique promulgated recently whereby a person could reduce their need for sleep by training themselves to take a series of short naps (20-30 minutes each) periodically throughout the course of a 24-hour day? Of course Google has no mention of it, but I'm positive I read something on it. Personally, I'm holding out for a prescription for Modafinil
  • Fes, the magic phrase missing from your Google search is "da Vinci," who is always cited as the father of the "15 minute nap every 4 hours" method of sleep. According to this:
    The longest experiment of this type was undertaken by Giancarlo Sbragia, a playwright and actor. He tried it for 6 months, and found that he was a wreck psychologically within a few months. His creativity and quality of work suffered, and eventually he went back to a normal sleep cycle. He found his dreams returned, he felt more peaceful, and his work improved. So how did Leonardi Da Vinci do it? He probably didn't! There are notes written later in his life that allude to him spending much time in bed.
    There's another discussion here, which gives this method of napping a name: "Polyphasic sleeping".
  • Only sleeping for twenty minutes every three hours sounds like a fantastic idea. Just look how well it worked out for Kramer.
  • Wow, great stuff frogs! So what in the name of sunshine can I do about Seasonal Affective Depression in the winter? Gack, I purely Dee-totally-damned HATE winter. Fellow Monkeys: You will note that frog's post was much, much more scientific and learned than mine, although just as vehement. But mine was more succinct. Oh yea, shotsy and psyko, remember, that without a Monday, Tuesday becomes the new Monday. Monday, Monday Can't trust that day Monday, Monday Sometimes it just turns out that waaaaaay.
  • holy crap! i must not have posted my post. or maybe i hit "preview" but never posted it. or i posted it on the wrong thread. but anyway modafinil - seems to relieve your need for sleep. but that's not so good as we don't know why sleep occurs in the first place. it seems to clear Something out of the system, and if that Something isn't taken care of you'll die. but we don't know what that Something is yet - probably some buildup product or other, some suspects but no cuplrit yet. so i'd stay away from any arousal-enhancing drug stronger than caffeine until we know more, unless you have a serious problem like narcolepsy (discussed in fes' modafinil link above). this is something i know a bit about - my thesis is focused on orexin, mentioned in the modafinil page; if this gene (or it's receptor) is broken, you are narcoleptic.
  • and bluehorse, sometimes simple is better - i can be long-wonded, 'specially when it's a topic near'n'dear to my heart. :)
  • ah crap i can be long-winded, but i can't for the life of me type worth a damn today.
  • Ah, come on, frogs - so you've got a long wond. Many people find that attractive.
  • [hands banana to frogs]
  • Shoot, frogs, I think you should gather a bunch o'links together and do a FPP. Then we can gather 'round the MonkeyFire and roast Pop Tarts and eat bananas whilst you explain it to us. Fascinating! And how did you get into this particular profession/issue, anyway?
  • Scientific American Frontiers did an episode where they reported on a Dutch (?) scientist observing a subject doing the 20 min sleep 4 hours awake method. It seemed to work for about a week. After that the subject crashed, became comatose while asleep, and couldn't be woken for something like 36 hours. I think we must enact these nature defying tactics immediately! Reading dubstop and Big Calm's comments on Metric time I was instantly reminded of this from the Simpson's episode, "They Saved Lisa's Brain." LISA: "Principal Skinner, how's your transportation project coming?" SKINNER: "Oh excellent, not only are the trains now running on time, they're running on metric time. Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on April 47th, it's the dawn of a new enlightenment."
  • what are the metric diameter's of frog's wonk? /curious george
  • bluehorse - had three labs to interview with when i started grad school. fly lab, lizard.bird lab, circadian rhythm rat lab. i wasn't keen on the bird/lizard thing (prof seemed kind of pushy - later learned that her and i would NOT have meshed well, so good choice there). turned down the fly guy - good stuff but the idea of injecting thousands of tiny fruit-fly maggots a day with different chemicals didn't interest me much. so i went with the rat lab. maybe i ought to do an FPP - i can dump all my circadian goodness on y'all. and show you pictures of our tiny baby ratties. they're rather special, not your typical rat.
  • although to avoid self-linking i guess i'd have to drop the rat photos in the thread comments - i did build the lab website after all...
  • BlueHorse - spread not your scientific drivel. CREAM MARCHES ON! MONDAY SHALL DISAPPEAR FROM THE EARTH 'ERE I REST!
  • frogsy, self-linking is okay, just not as the main link in your post. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what I/we decided. Please post pictures of your rats. I'll try to look at them without squirming. /phobia
  • Hey, I'm sure Monkeys could handle a self-link or two here. After all, it IS in the interest of the bitch-goddess Science. Sounds neet to me! Anybody else interested?
  • I second the motion. But only in asked-for FPPs like this one.