The Sleep Lost to History

Modern life and technology have changed the way we eat, live, travel, and work.  One radical fundamental shift that doesn't get a lot of attention is how we sleep.  Not only are most people in the U.S. sleeping on a clean, bug free synthetic matress and pillow in a dedicated room (with only one other person on average no less!), but historians suggest that the standard eight hours of sleep a night is a historical fiction.  References in diaries and other documents reference segmented sleep, or the first and second sleep.  People often slept for an initial four hours, then got up for an hour or two to ready, interpert their dreams, pray, or have sex, only to fall back into sleep for an additional four hours of rest.  Many modern insomnia cases may actually be people reverting to this natural cycle, which has also emerged in sleep stuidies as a natural pattern when people are deprived of artificial light for 14 hours a day. There is even research that our biological clocks work on a cycle slightly longer than 24 hours, perhaps as an evolutionary advantage.

There are some fascinating articles about how the introduction of artificial light changed the pattern of daily life both physically, but also socially. Street lighting came to Paris in 1667, and followed in Lille and Amsterdam within several years.  Coffee houses stayed open later.  Secret underground nighttime religious services by those being prosecuted for their beliefs also normalized the use of the night.  Suddenly, the night became a place with things for reputable people to do, and not just the bastion of burglers.

So next time you wake up in the middle of the night, realize you may just be reverting back to a historical, natural pattern. 200 years isn't long in evolutionary terms for our new sleeping habits.

*You can download a computer program Flux to minimize your exposure to blue light before bed.  It has the added benefit of letting you see the web through rose colored glasses.  Or you can just minimize your screen time for the several hours before bed.  

Radio in a Post Radio World

Radio seems to be a dying art, unless of course you're listening to public radio. Even competing with the TV, Netflix streaming, and the Internets sometimes nothing beats a good radio show.

Try listening to this show about the history of night by historian Robert Ekirch in the dark with some candles. He talks about first and second sleep, and all the things people would do at night during their somabulatory hours.

Or this awesome discussion of patent trolls (hint* includes bonus mequito laser beams).

Of course, if you don't want to listen to radio you can always read about it in Sarah Vowell's Radio On: A Listerner's Diary.   

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

Interesting show on NPR talking about what innovation looks like.  The metaphor of the light bulb going off, or the Eureka! moment paint a picture of ides as singular and original, but in reality innovation may be a more dynamic process of layering findings and ideas.  This notion doesn't fit with the American patent system at all.

The show is quite interesting, particularly the third segemnt which can be found here.

Essentially ideas and innnovation involve three key concepts:

• Ideas are borrowed, shared, and built on others' ideas
• Interaction is key
• Sobriety. It helped when people started drinking coffee or tea instead of getting sauced all day when alcohol was a means of dealing with unsanitarty drinking water.  

Coffee houses served as hubs for the exchange of ideas about politics, philosophy, technology and science. Steve Johnson argues that it wasn't just the lack of alcohol, but the proxemics of the space which supported the interaction of people from different backgrounds and expertise. 

So where do these conversations take place today?  On list serves?  Bulletin boards?  On the Google Bus or on Facebook (haha I joke!)?  If it is Davos and Ted Talks we're in trouble, because these types of settings are self-selecting and filter out the kinds of people who can offer new, outside perspectives.  Even confining interactions to within a private company could prove problematic.  These disruptive insights are valuable, yet they might not make it through the filter. 

Locations don't need to be physical, though there is value in face-to-face exchange.  How do we design spaces for these types of interactions to happen? What about in a society with increasing inequality?  We need to address and think through where good ideas come from if we want to ensure that good ideas can generate even better ones. 

In a Digital 24 World MH 370's Dissapearance Fascinates

Many have complained about the journalistic coverage of missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH 370.  The 24 hour news cycle has gone big on conjecture and rumour, with experts in no way connected to the investigation coming on air to speculate on their thoughts and opinions.  The reporting has reached near hysteria levels, reminiscent of the summer shark attack reporting back in 2001.

No trace of the plane has been found, little information has been confirmed, and the majority of passengers were not American: all factors that would typically predict little coverage by U.S. media.  Despite this, the American media and the public have been widely fixated on the disappearance of the Boeing 777 carrying 239 passengers and crew.

What explains the unusual levels of coverage is that for the average viewer this story is, at its core, about the role of technology in our lives, not an airplane, and not even the passengers.  In a world in which the average viewer can't fathom traveling to grocery store undetected by GPS, convinced that the NSA is listening to their every call, and a soldier in control of a drone is able to kill a target from thousands of miles away, the notion that anything as large as an aircraft can simply disappear is deeply shocking.  The idea that 239 people could be untraceable is unnerving.  As much as citizens are concerned about the fact that we can't seem to go anywhere without anyone noticing, there is also security in knowing that someone can always come to your aid.

Fundamentally, Americans feel so wired and connected to the grid that the idea one can fall off it is both exhilarating and terrifying. That there are areas of the world that are completely inaccessible seems foreign over a hundred years after the closing of the frontier, challenging deeply held and fundamental assumptions about modern society.  We take pervasive electronic surveillance and the intrusion of technology into our lives as an immutable fact--regulating and setting limits on these developments has been dismissed as fantasy outside the realm of possibility, and yet the disappearance of MH 370 demonstrates that these technologies are not yet so pervasive and fixed that we don't have the opportunity as a society to decide what their limits or expansions should be.

The opening of what some have dubbed the electronic frontier, with its restructuring of communication and society, and the tension between freedom and control inherent to technology was supposed to mean that we were in a new era in which we had mastered control of the physical terrain. The revelation that there are still physical limitations to the reach of these technologies suggests there is still time to address what their roles and limits should be not just in areas to which these technologies have not been extended, but also where they have already been accepted into the routines of our daily lives.

The disappearance of flight MH 370 is a very real tragedy for the passengers, crew and families involved, and we need to not lose sight of that.  Wild speculation and rumour don't help. Yet the story also opens the opportunity for a productive dialogue about what it means to live in a truly connected society.  We are still sorting out the role of technology in society and human lives, and we still have decisions to make.  Let's also not lose sight of that opportunity.

Taking a Break from the Cell Phone

I’m on a diet this weekend.  No, I am not watching my calories, but cutting down on cell phone time. Unless I am under a work deadline, I try not to check my email. I leave my phone plugged in the other room, and sometimes (Gasp!) I don’t even take it with me when I leave the house to walk down to town.

What if someone needs to get hold of me?  Well, I’ll be home within the hour, and I don’t know any life saving medical techniques that I could tell them over the phone to save anyone. I guess they can wait? 

Thoreau Provides a Great Housing Bubble Gut Check

“When the [owner] has got his house, he may not be the richer for it, but poorer for it, and it be the house that got him.”  Thoreau

After several hours wallowing in real estate blogs I decided to redirect my energies toward something positive: enjoying my apartment.  I brewed up a cup of French press coffee, which feels like a luxury since I cut back from my standard morning cup, and headed out to the balcony to read in the afternoon sun.  I rested my feet on my patio table in my pjs, plopped on my hat and settled in to read Thoreau’s writing on Shelter.

Shelter is an interesting word.  Thoreau draws a sharp contrast between shelter, which implies a fundamental human need, and a home, which he recognizes activates all sorts of other wants and emotions. Thoreau’s incredibly specific terminology is at its core a fundamental critique of society’s obsession with housing: shelter, he forcefully reminds us, is about keeping the elements at bay, and providing covering at night.  This is pretty radical thinking that is nowhere in evidence on the MLS (or in shelter magazines, a genre that modernly obliterates Thoreau’s careful distinction between wants and needs as it celebrates home décor and the very extravagances Thoreau sought to pare away).

While it may not be practical to look to Thoreau for literal real estate advice, reading him provides a great gut check exercise when you are in need of some perspective.  Besides, can’t you just imagine telling your agent you are looking for “Preferably four walls, a roof, and something that forces me to exchange as little of the thing called life for it?”  Challenging yourself to question needs and wants may allow you to approach your real estate search in a way that lets you better see potential in houses others take a pass on:  do you really need a living room, and a family room, and a dining room, or will a living space with an open flow and a shared dining room work for the way you actually live?  How much space do you really need, and are you buying the square footage for living or for storing stuff?

Rereading Thoreau has given me the clarity to see the insanity of our current local market, and to really feel committed that a much smaller place may work for us.

Don’t get me wrong--I don’t think that everyone needs to live in a small cabin in the woods (and for the record, neither did Thoreau who was very clear that his experiment was less about building a sustainable, alternative model of living than in provoking people to examine their economic lives).  I also understand that the frustration of continually having to scale back your dreams out of financial necessity can reach a breaking point when it runs up against that old thing called human dignity.  But the idea of periodically revisiting your wants and needs is a valuable one, and Thoreau provides a great sounding board even if the man did write his book in the 1840s.

Where to Live

"I'm rich according to the number of things I can do without" -Thoreau


Lately, I have been thinking a lot about where and how to live.  When my husband and I first left LA for Ventura, we were shocked by how much further our housing dollar stretched.  For less than we were paying in LA we could rent by the beach, with a huge balcony and a million dollar view of the ocean.  Fast forward several years and real estate prices and rents have both shot up.  Compared to Santa Barbara and LA, the City of Ventura now seems suprisingly unaffordable.  The fundamentals have shifted, and the math doesn't really make sense. 
So I've been thinking a lot about our options: 

• Stay renting where we are

• Move ten minutes outside of town to a more rural area (but increase my commute and necessitate two cars)

• Move to a cheaper, smaller town like Santa Paula

• Buy a 700 Sq Ft home here in Downtown Ventura

I'm seriously considering all of these options.  The one that seems most interesting at the moment is the small 700 sq ft house with no parking and second bedroom small enough it can only fit a twin bed. 

Hear me out:  a small house might actually work for us since it would let us live in a walkable community, which is really important to us. We like being in the downtown area, and a small house means lower expenses, less stuff, and more freedom to live intentionally.  It's also a five minute walk to the beach.

It would likely mean giving the dining room table back to my parents (it was my grandmother's) to store in their garage, but truthfully it is a piece of furniture on which we store mail.  We eat on our ottomon anyway.

The only reason it really makes sense for us is the location, and the fact that if we are honest withourselves about how we use our home, it could be perfect. 

The house continues to be available becuase we may be the only people insane enough to carefully question what we need versus what we want.