Day: March 9, 2008

Geek Love for Gary Gygax

As a former D&D player myself, and still hooked on fantasy novels and the occasional RPG on the computer, I just had to put up this editorial Geek Love by Adam Rogers, honoring Gary Gygax, who passed away this past week.

Here’s the beginning to pique interest:

GARY GYGAX died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

I’m not talking about the cosmological, Big Bang part. Everyone who reads blogs knows that a flying spaghetti monster made all that. But Mr. Gygax co-created the game Dungeons & Dragons, and on that foundation of role-playing and polyhedral dice he constructed the social and intellectual structure of our world.

Brain Enhancement: Beyond Either/Or

Benedict Carey writes, “Brain Enhancement Is Wrong, Right?” covering the emerging debate on performance-enhancing drugs in academia and other intellectual pursuits.  This debate began in the journal Nature, and exploded since then.  (I’ve covered some similar issues in a previous post, Drugs and Biosociality.) 

Carey poses us this question, “Is prescription tweaking to perform on exams, or prepare presentations and grants, really the same as injecting hormones to chase down a home run record, or win the Tour de France?” 

Whatever our answer to that question is, and it is surely to be a complex answer (more on that in a second), it is clear to me that this is already happening.  In a recent paper, I showed how heavy users already engage in “functional use”—using methamphetamine, a stimulant, to work and play more, to deal with cognitive deficits, and to change their subjective state while continuing to interact in a normal social manner.  While I am almost hesitant to say it, in this matter, drug users are already on the avant-garde. 

Continue reading “Brain Enhancement: Beyond Either/Or”

More on sleep and time: the Letterman effect

Steve Higgins of Of Two Minds has a short post discussing recent research on, as the title says, Is TV changing our circadian rhythms? I think it’s another interesting factor to go into our subject-level dynamic systems model of time and sleep, after discussions by Daniel on Time Globalized and my earlier post on ‘Giant Sleep Machines’ and the Brain (which, now that I read it, sounds like a bit like a cheesy horror movie title).

Higgins discusses the article, ‘Cues for Timing and Coordination: Latitude, Letterman, and Longitude,’ by Daniel S. Hamermesh, Caitlin Knowles Myers, and Mark L. Pocock from the Journal of Labor Economics. I’ve searched for the original paper, and I can’t find it, even through the website of JLE; I’m not going to post this with the little ‘blogging about peer-reviewed research’ logo because I can’t really find the original. I suspect that it might be forthcoming; however, what I think is a working version of the JLE paper can be found through ANU here, and another working paper on a related topic by members of the team can be found here).

To get information about circadian rhythms, the research team used the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey (ATUS), focusing on how Americans divided time among their three most time-consuming activities: work, sleep, and television watching. Comparing the times people spent on these activities and their schedule with the time of sunrise and sunset, Hamermesh and his colleagues were ‘amazed how little daylight matters nowadays, and how much artificial time zones matter.’ (This quote and several others from a short article on the research at PsyOrg.)

Continue reading “More on sleep and time: the Letterman effect”