I don't see how it's any better than a comment here. I just wanted clarification as to whether the poster thinks elemental magnesium is a good thing or a bad thing.
I went to the Louvre last year a few days after Christmas which I assume is not tourist season (first time in Paris). It was packed, and the Mona Lisa was surrounded by a sea of people 10 feet thick, most of them waving their phones around in the air on selfie sticks.
I think it's like this all the time. There's a reason they put it in a dead end hallway. The worst for me in this vein was going to Versailles, and being there at the same time as a big tour group of people, seemingly all of whom had a digital camera, an SLR, and a camcorder (this was in 2004...), and all of whom had to capture every significant artifact in each room and then move on. None of them were looking at the things except through their cameras' lenses and screens. There were so many of them that they made the tour pretty miserable for the rest of us.
I thought it was pretty funny. I took a great picture of the mass of people fighting each other to photograph the Mona Lisa. The ones with the iPad are the dorkiest.
I was a night owl when I was younger. Went to bed around 2am and felt like a sack of potatoes for a couple hours in the morning. I have no idea what time I would naturally wake up because I always had to get up earlier than that. I remember sleeping until the afternoon on weekends when I was a teenager. I slept through my fair share of alarms, didn't remember hitting the snooze button, etc.
Sometime in my late 20s after learning enough about health in general I realized that sleep was much more important than most believed and I decided my routine was unhealthy. I dealt with it with similar methods mentioned on other comments. No caffeine in the afternoon, blackout curtains, red lights, limit light when it's dark out, not eating late.
That was about seven years ago, I'm now 35 and I'm not a night owl anymore. Part of it is probably getting older, I've heard that this frequently happens to people as they age. But I noticed the changes within a few months of taking sleep hygiene seriously. A few years ago I threw out my alarm clock because I hadn't set it in a few years (I'm lucky that I really only have to be at work by 10am for a standup so it wouldn't matter if I overslept). I can't remember the last time I woke up later than 7:30am, that's late for me now. Usually it's around 6:30am. I am wide awake when I open my eyes. My main sleep problem now is waking up too early and not being able to fall back asleep. I'll then get tired and go to bed early, and wake up even earlier the next day.
I feel better than I have at any point in my life previously. It's certainly possible that many people here with sleep problems have naturally different rhythms. It's also possible that certain obese people are naturally obese and no amount of diet or exercise changes will fix it. I have personally come to the belief that having a sleep cycle which is not mostly aligned with the natural patterns is unhealthy, regardless of whether it's "natural" or not.
If anyone is interested in specific techniques I have all sorts of little hacks, although I don't have to use many of them anymore.
I had a similar experience a few years ago when I was ~23. If I got in to work at even 10am, I'd still be a total wreck and mornings were hell.
After my boss gave me a bit of a talking to and futzing around with sleep tracking apps and alarms that woke me up at the appropriate point in my sleep cycle for a while I realised that if I just didn't stay up so late I'd feel better.
It was a bit of an adjustment at first and I think f.lux and exercise helped to modify my sleep habits, but I've been feeling tired enough to just want to go to bed at 11pm and haven't used an alarm in years either.
Obviously I'm older than I was when I was a night owl, but given I was able to make the change in a few months, at the prompting from a former boss, I'm less convinced that it's unchangeable.
Reminded me of a great sleep app I used to use. It's called Gentle Alarm and it really is a great hack. I don't know if the authors of the software came up with this idea but it works great.
Here's how it works. If you are woken up when you are deep REM sleep you will feel tired. If you wake up when you are in very light sleep you will not. This is what happens when you wake up naturally. The sleep cycle generally repeats itself every 90 minutes or so but everyone is different. The point is there are times you can wake up when you will feel refreshed, and times when you will feel tired.
Gentle Alarm configures two alarms. It plays a very soft alarm half an hour before your real alarm (all the times and volumes are configurable). If you are in deep sleep at that time you will not wake up to this alarm but if you are in light sleep you will. If you are in deep sleep then in half an hour (or whatever period) you will almost certainly not be in deep sleep. You will then wake up to your normal alarm. The system ensures that you are awake by your alarm time.
I've become convinced that many "night owls" are actually people whose bodies are confused by the intense illumination made possible by electric lighting and electronics, street noise, separation from the sun's set and rise, and other facets of modern life.
I'm not sure I remember any good books. There's quite a bit of info on the web though. Besides bloggers who exclusively focus on sleep, the only communities that take it seriously are athletics and paleo. And there's a lot of other bullshit that comes along with either of those.
Here are some things that have helped me.
It's not just the amount of light around you that matters, the amount of light entering your eye is much more important. Staring at a computer monitor might as well be staring at the sun as far as your brain is concerned. Get off the computer at least two hours before you want to go to bed. You like coding late at night? Sorry, you will have crappy sleep. The same is not necessarily true for watching tv. It is farther away from you and not nearly as much light enters your eye. It still has the same effect, just less.
Get rid of all light in your bedroom. Blackout curtains. A single led light on a piece of electronics will now keep me up at night. Get an alarm clock that lets you turn off the display.
Never do anything in bed except sleep or have sex. Reading in bed for a little while before you go to sleep is fine, reading for hours is not. Do it somewhere else, you are not tired yet. If you have a tv in your bedroom get rid of it (this is very important).
Use f.lux. If you like to read in bed buy a red spectrum book light and read with the lights off. I use a tablet and some app that lets you turn the brightness down very low, low enough that I can't see it with the lights on.
Try supplementing magnesium (I use Natural Calm). I am also convinced that diet plays a big part in all this, but I don't have much more to say than eating healthy will make it (and almost everything else related to health) easier.
To start off, stay up late and force yourself to get up early so that you'll get tired early the next night. Keep forcing yourself to get up early. If you get 4 hours of sleep for a few nights, wake up early and then can't fall asleep at a reasonable time go see a doctor, there may be something wrong with you.
If the reason you're not falling asleep is because you're coding or playing video games or something else that keeps you stimulated, you have to stop that at night. There's just no way around it. You have to start winding your brain down a few hours before you are going to go to bed. Read, watch relaxing tv, talk with your partner or friends.
There's probably a lot more, this is all off the top of my head.
While I agree with the general premise, it appears Harvey Silverglate is a fraud. This came up on HN a while ago and I looked up a few of the cases mentioned. A brief search revealed that these people were all actual criminals and he had grossly misrepresented the cases.
The one I remember had to do with shipping undersized lobster tails. He made it out that a bunch of average restaurant owners were sent to jail for years b/c they broke a foreign export law which was somehow enforceable in America due to a law he had a problem with.
What actually happened was these people had been conspiring to to break environmental law for decade by packaging lobster tails in such a way that inspectors found it difficult to inspect them and made mistakes. They had a whole system for routing their stuff to specific ports that had inspecting facilities that were easy to manipulate. They continued doing this for a year after they were informed they were under a federal investigation, right up until they were all arrested.
They made millions of dollars by poaching undersized lobsters and all of the rules they broke were not vague and specifically made their packaging actions illegal, in order to prevent people from doing exactly what they did.
He's the author of "The Shadow University" which was one of the most disruptive blows that's been struck against the large-endowment administrations in the past few decades.
I actually happen to know one of the subjects of Mr. Silverglate's case studies, Nicholas Hermandorffer, who later wrote his thesis on the topic. In my view, his experience was represented accurately and fully, and Mr. Hermandorffer's accounts were closely aligned with phone records, texts, emails, etc., as well as physical evidence.
He's also head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which ranks universities on their free speech rights, as well as informs students that they sacrifice Constitutional protection to a certain extent living in University housing, as well as provides information on the rights one does retain and how to invoke them.
You seem like somebody with an axe to grind. I wouldn't put too much faith in this guy.
Much the those issues are addressed in various boost libraries. There is one which wraps all the algorithms and containers in range classes so that all the f(c.begin(), c.end(), g) silliness gets replaced with f(c, g). There is another one which makes it easy to create streams of transforming and mapping functions with a F1 -> F2 -> F3 interface.
Outside of jobs where it's pretty easy to hurt someone if you're intoxicated (construction, etc.), my personal theory is that it's all about control.
As far as I know companies use piss tests, which don't detect most hard drugs after a few days. They detect pot for weeks. Hair tests will detect anything forever. They are more expensive but if companies actually cared about not hiring people who do hard drugs they would have to do them.
The only purpose I can see for it is that it is a legal leash they can tie to the employee to exert control on their lives. There's lots of other things companies would like to be able to fire you for, but they're either illegal or impossible to detect. Drug testing is one they're allowed to do.
I can understand drug testing people if they cause an accident, are intoxicated at work, etc. but to do it as a matter of course for employment is just to show you who's boss.
Yup. Read my comment above if you're interested. I had never heard of the guy, but you are being way too easy on him. Presenting the arguments as he does is in my opinion an objective intellectual fraud.
I've found a diplomatic critique to be more effective than a fiery polemic. Also, I've been making the same objection to that guy for many years and I'm a bit tired of it.
I looked up the first one, Violating the Lacey Act.
What they say happened: Two men were sent to prison for 8 years and one woman was sent to prison for 2 years for violating the Lacey Act which makes it illegal for importers to violate any foreign law. They violated a Honduran law which forbade shipping lobster is clear packages. They also mentioned that a small percentage of the lobster tails were slightly underweight.
What really happened: they were smuggling undersize (and hence illegal) lobster tails and using the packaging to conceal their crime. They smuggled an estimated $15M of illegal lobster tails. They routed the shipments through out of the way ports that had poor lobster inspection capabilities. Even after they learned of the federal investigation against them they continued.
The info on the site you linked comes mostly from some Heritage Foundation report. My summary above comes from a news article I found with 5 minutes of googling.
If they lead with that one, I'm not going to bother with the rest.
