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saltydorkling:

copperbadge:

aliceopal:

tilthat:

TIL for most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives.

via reddit.com

DELANCEYPLACE.COM 12/18/12 – WE USED TO SLEEP TWICE EACH NIGHT

In today’s selection – for most of history people have had two periods of sleep each night, with the time in between being perhaps the most calm and relaxing part of their lives. Then came the lightbulb. This unexpected “two sleep” phenomenon was uncovered by historian Roger Ekirch when he began to do research for a history of the night:

“Something puzzled [Roger] Ekirch as he leafed through parch­ments ranging from property records to primers on how to spot a ghost. He kept noticing strange references to sleep. In the Canterbury Tales, for instance, one of the characters in ‘The Squire’s Tale’ wakes up in the early morning following her ‘first sleep’ and then goes back to bed. A fifteenth-century medical book, meanwhile, advised readers to spend the ‘first sleep’ on the right side and after that to lie on their left. And a scholar in England wrote that the time between the ‘first sleep” and the ‘second sleep’ was the best time for serious study. Mentions of these two separate types of sleep came one after another, until Ekirch could no longer brush them aside as a curiosity. Sleep, he pieced together, wasn’t always the one long block that we con­sider it today.

“From his cocoon of books in Virginia, Ekirch somehow rediscovered a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast. Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way for an hour or so before going back to sleep until morning – the so-called second sleep. The time between the two bouts of sleep was a natural and expected part of the night and, depending on your needs, was spent praying, reading, contemplating your dreams, urinating, or having sex. The last one was per­haps the most popular. One sixteenth-century French phy­sician concluded that laborers were able to conceive several children because they waited until after the first sleep, when their energy was replenished, to make love. Their wives liked it more, too, he said. The first sleep let men ‘do it better’ and women ‘have more enjoyment.’ …

“About three hun­dred miles away, a psychiatrist was noticing something odd in a research experiment. Thomas Wehr, who worked for the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, was struck by the idea that the ubiquitous artificial light we see every day could have some unknown effect on our sleep habits. On a whim, he deprived subjects of artificial light for up to four­teen hours a day in hopes of re-creating the lighting conditions common to early humans. Without lightbulbs, televisions, or street lamps, the subjects in his study initially did little more at night than sleep. They spent the first few weeks of the experi­ment like kids in a candy store, making up for all of the lost sleep that had accumulated from staying out late at night or showing up at work early in the morning. After a few weeks, the subjects were better rested than perhaps at any other time in their lives.

“That was when the experiment took a strange turn. Soon, the subjects began to stir a little after midnight, lie awake in bed for an hour or so, and then fall back asleep again. It was the same sort of segmented sleep that Ekirch found in the historical records. While sequestered from artificial light, subjects were shedding the sleep habits they had formed over a lifetime. It was as if their bodies were exercising a muscle they never knew they had. The experiment revealed the innate wiring in the brain, unearthed only after the body was sheltered from modern life. Not long after Wehr published a paper about the study, Ekirch contacted him and revealed his own research findings.

“Wehr soon decided to investigate further. Once again, he blocked subjects from exposure to artificial light. This time, however, he drew some of their blood during the night to see whether there was anything more to the period between the first and second sleep than an opportunity for feudal peasants to have good sex. The results showed that the hour humans once spent awake in the middle of the night was probably the most relaxing block of time their lives. Chemically, the body was in a state equivalent to what you might feel after spending a day at a spa. During the time between the two sleeps, the sub­jects’ brains pumped out higher levels of prolactin, a hormone that helps reduce stress and is responsible for the relaxed feel­ing after an orgasm. … The subjects in Wehr’s study described the time between the two halves of sleep as close to a period of meditation.

“Numerous other studies have shown that splitting sleep into two roughly equal halves is something that our bodies will do if we give them a chance. In places of the world where there isn’t artificial light – and all the things that go with it, like computers, movies, and bad reality TV shows – people still sleep this way. In the mid-1960s, anthropologists studying the Tiv culture in central Nigeria found that group members not only practiced segmented sleep, but also used roughly the same terms of first sleep and second sleep. … [Yet] almost two decades after Wehr’s study was published in a medical journal, many sleep researchers – not to mention your average physician – have never heard of it. When patients complain about waking up at roughly the same time in the middle of the night, many physicians will reach for a pen and write a prescription for a sleeping pill, not realizing that they are medicating a condition that was considered normal for thousands of years. Patients, meanwhile, see waking up as a sign that something is wrong.”

This is….wow, this is (somewhat) how I sleep. 

In my early 30s I realized the last few hours of my day, every day, weren’t especially productive and I wasn’t even enjoying them, so I decided to really put in an effort to get a full eight hours of sleep, sometimes more, per night. I go to bed sometime between seven and nine, depending on how tired I feel, and I was waking up around 4, 4:30. 

Then I started naturally waking up around 3:45 without really meaning or wanting to. Now, very often, I go back to sleep around 5:15 or 5:30 in the morning and wake up around 6:30 to start my day. 

When you guys see my comment replies (or reblogs, like this one) early in the morning, I’m literally between first and second sleep and yes, it probably is my most intellectually satisfying period of my day. I’m in it right now. 

Interestingly, while I do use a computer in the evening, most evenings especially in the winter, when it gets dark out early, I don’t bother turning on the lights. In winter my plants are in the kitchen (instead of the sunroom) with no windows, which means I have a grow lamp on them, and since my apartment is open-plan, the grow lamp’s super-bright light is all I need for about 90% of what I do. It turns off at 8pm and back on at 3:30am. So frequently the only artificial light I use is designed to emulate sunlight and goes off around the time I go to bed.

This is so crazy and weird, I’m not sure if I want to try going to bed/getting up even earlier and then napping longer, or if I’m dangerously close to taking a vow not to wear clothing with zippers and growing a long beard. 

So there was about a two month period where I had to live without power and yeah, this happened. My ex-husband and I would fall asleep not long after sun down, sleep, wake up in the middle of the night and yes, usually have sex or chat, then fall back asleep.

I had no idea this was natural, omg. I might start to try and recreate this.

cheeseanonioncrisps:

A lot of ‘humans are weird’ posts play with the idea that humans are one of the few species that actually evolved as a predator and, as such, we are unusually strong and fast— but what if we’re not.

What if we’re tiny?

What if, to the majority of species in the galaxy, ten feet tall is unusually short— it basically only happens due to rare genetic conditions— and the average human is basically cat sized or smaller?

Instead of being terrified by our strength, the aliens’ most pressing concern is how exactly they’re going to communicate with us when we’re all the way down on the ground.

There are experiments, with aliens crouching low or humans standing on high platforms— but it usually ends up being either uncomfortable for the alien or dangerous for the human, or both, and just generally impractical for everyone.

But, while the diplomats and politicians are trying to figure out a dignified and simple solution, the ordinary people who actually have to work with the aliens have found one. Humans are, generally, pretty good climbers, and most species have conveniently places scales, feathers, fur or clothing that can act as a hand or foothold. Sure, some humans have a fear of heights, but those aren’t typically the ones going into space. Besides, climbing on a living alien often feels safer than climbing up a rock or something— at least you know you’ve got somebody to catch you.

Soon it becomes accepted that that’s the way humans travel with aliens— up high, easy to see and hard to tread on (there were quite a few… near misses, in the first few meetings between humans and aliens), balanced on somebody’s shoulder like the overgrown monkeys that we are.

Many humans see this as kind of an insult and absolutely refuse to go along with it, but they aren’t the ones who end up spending a lot of time with aliens— it’s just too inconvenient to talk to somebody all the way down on the ground. The ones that do best are the ones who just treat it like it’s normal, allowing themselves to be carried (at least, it’s ‘carrying’ when the aliens are within earshot. Among themselves, most humans jokingly refer to it as ‘riding’), and passing on tips to their friends about the best ways to ride on different species without damaging feathers, or stepping on sensitive spots (or, in at least one case, ending up with a foot full of poisonous spines…).

The reason they don’t feel patronised by this is that they know, and they know that nearly everyone else in the galaxy knows, that humans are not just pets.

After all, you’d be surprised when a small size comes in handy.

Need somebody to look at the wiring in a small and fairly inaccessible area of the ship? Ask a human.

Need somebody to fix this fairly small and very detailed piece of machinery? Ask a human, they’re so small that their eyes naturally pick up smaller details.

Trapped under rubble and need somebody to crawl through a small gap and get help? Ask a human— most can wriggle through any gap that they can fit their head and shoulders through.

If you’re a friend, humans can be very useful. If, on the other hand, you’re an enemy…

Rumours spread all around the galaxy, of ships that threatened humans or human allies and started experiencing technical problems. Lights going off, wires being cut— in some cases, the cases where the threats were more than just words and humans or friends of humans were killed, life support lines have been severed, or airlocks have mysteriously malfunctioned and whole crews have been sucked out into space.

If the subject comes up, most humans will blame it on “gremlins” and exchange grim smiles when they’re other species friends aren’t looking.

By this point, most ships have a crew of humans, whether they like it or not. Lots of humans, young ones generally, the ones who want to see a bit of the universe but don’t have the money or connections to make it happen any other way, like to stowaway on ships. They’ll hang around the space ports, wait for a ship’s door to open and dart on in. The average human can have quite a nice time scurrying around in the walls of an alien ship, so long as they’re careful not to dislodge anything important.

Normally nobody notices them, and the ones that do tend not  to say anything— it’s generally recognised that having humans on your ship is good luck.

If there are humans on your ship, they say, then anything you lose will be found within a matter of days, sometimes even in your quarters; any minor task you leave out— some dishes that need to be cleaned, a report that needs to be spellchecked, some calculations that need to be done— will be quickly and quietly completed during the night; any small children on the ship, who are still young enough to start to cry in the night, will be soothed almost before their parents even wake, sometimes even by words in their own tongue, spoken clumsily through human vocal chords. If any of the human are engineers (and a lot of them are, and still more of them aren’t, but have picked up quite a few tricks on their travels from humans who are) then minor malfunctions will be fixed before you even notice them, and your ship is significantly less likely to experience any major problems.

The humans are eager to earn their keep, especially when the more grateful aliens start leaving out dishes of human-safe foods for them.

This, again, is considered good luck— especially since the aliens who aren’t kind to the humans often end up losing things, or waking up to find that their fur has been cut, or the report they spent hours on yesterday has mysteriously been deleted.

To human crew members, who work on alien ships out in the open, and have their names on the crew manifest and everything, these small groups of humans are colloquially referred to as ‘ship’s rats’. There’s a sort of uneasy relationship between the two groups. On the one hand, the crew members regard the ship’s rats as spongers and potential nuisances— on the other hand, most human crew members started out as ship’s rats themselves, and now benefit from the respect (and more than a little awe) that the ship’s rats have made most aliens feel for humans. The general arrangement is that ship’s rats try to avoid ships with human crew members and, when they can’t, then they make sure to stay out of the crew members’ way, and the crew members who do see one make sure not to mention them to any alien crew members.

The aliens who know, on the other hand, have gotten into the habit of not calling them by name— mainly because they’re shaky as the legality of this arrangement, and don’t want to admit that anything’s going on. Instead they talk about “the little people” or “the ones in the walls” or, more vaguely, “Them”.

Their human friends— balancing on their shoulders, occasionally scurrying down and arm so as to get to a table, or jumping from one person’s shoulder to another, in order to better follow the conversation— laugh quietly to themselves when they hear this.

Back before the first first contact, lot of people on Earth thought that humans would become space orcs. Little did they know, they’d actually end up as space fae.

Or it would end up like this hahahaha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwLmgUCsvjc

If you’re not in a group and you want to learn how to write characters in that group respectfully and realistically

shiraglassman:

1. Read media by people in the group. Fiction, nonfiction, blog posts – anything from “how my day went today” to 300-page epic adventure novels to history pamphlets. (By people in the group, not just about them. This is important.)

2. Google “How not to write a [the group] character” because the odds are that at least a few people in the group have written blog entries rattling off all their least favorite tropes representing their demographic. I’ve seen lesbians writing about how not to write lesbians, Asians talking about offensively-written Asians, etc. Refraining from writing the overused, negative, one-dimensional tropes listed in posts like this is probably a good start.