Your body’s internal clock is at war with society
Just because you sleep later than your early rising friends doesn’t mean you sleep longer than they do; nor does it make you lazier. And yet, the association between the time of day that a person wakes up and how proactive or driven they are is just one example of the many preconceptions that society upholds regarding sleep and productivity.
But here’s the problem: these expectations might actually be working against us.
In his recently published book, Internal time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag and Why You’re So Tired, German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg provides numerous examples of how social expectations surrounding time may be having a detrimental effect on large sections of the human population. Over on Brain Pickings, Maria Popova walks us through one of Roenneberg’s examples, wherein he examines the clash between adolescents’ sleep cycles and the starting times of typical school days:
Roenneberg points out that in our culture, there is a great disconnect between teenagers’ biological abilities and our social expectations of them, encapsulated in what is known as the disco hypothesis – the notion that if only teens would go to bed earlier, meaning not party until late, they’d be better able to wake up clear-headed and ready for school at the expected time. The data, however, indicate otherwise – adolescents’ internal time is shifted so they don’t find sleep before the small hours of the night.
Here, we brush up against a painfully obtrusive cultural obstacle: School starts early – as early as 7 A.M. in some European countries – and teens are expected to perform well on a schedule not designed with their internal time in mind. As a result, studies have shown that many students show the signs of narcolepsy – a severe sleeping disorder that makes one fall asleep at once when given the chance, immediately entering REM sleep.
In other words: our culture’s tendency to associate early rising with an ideal sleep pattern may be clashing with the biological needs of teenagers. On one hand, studies like this are troubling, because they suggest that we’re standing in the way of our students’ success. At they same time, however, they seem to point to a straightforward solution: simply tailor start-times to better fit the teenagers’ biological clocks:
HBO’s ‘Game Of Thrones’ On Track To Be Crowned Most Pirated Show Of 2012
Brace yourselves, HBO. The pirates are coming.
With its popularity swelling and no easy way to watch for viewers without cable, HBO’s hit series “Game of Thrones” is inspiring massive levels of piracy, according to numbers from the BitTorrent-tracking and analysis firm Big Champagne. By the firm’s rough estimate, the second season of the show has been downloaded more than 25 million times from public torrent trackers since it began in early April, and its piracy hit a new peak following April 30th’s episode, with more than 2.5 million downloads in a day.
“It certainly appears to be the most pirated show of the year,” says John Robinson, a senior media analyst with Big Champagne. He says it’s too early to measure definitively, but the company’s data so far as well as the popularity rankings on download site the Pirate Bay point to “Game of Thrones” as filesharers’ favorite show of 2012. “The fact that it’s consistently at the top of the Pirate Bay’s top one hundred TV show chart seems like a pretty in-your-face leading indicator of the huge volume at which this is being shared.”
According to the BitTorrent-focused blog and measurement site Torrentfreak, the first season of “Game of Thrones” was the second-most pirated show of 2011 behind the sixth season of Showtime’s “Dexter.”
But Big Champagne’s numbers show that downloads of the second season of “Game of Thrones” so far consistently top “Dexter”‘s piracy numbers from the same point in its season last year. (See chart above left.)
It’s worth noting that BitTorrent is just one way that shows are pirated online–I was able to find streaming episodes of Game of Thrones on sites like free-tv-video-online.me and zzstream.com after just a few Google searches. But those streaming options are even tougher to track and measure than BitTorrent.
A frame from the comic strip The Oatmeal, which pointed out how HBO drives 'Game of Thrones' viewers to piracy by making the show tough to watch online.
While “Game of Thrones”‘ filesharing rates are probably driven in part by its appeal to the young, geeky male demographic that’s most prone to using torrent sites, HBO hasn’t helped the problem by making the show tough to watch online for the young and cable-less. The show isn’t available through Hulu or Netflix, iTunes offers only Season 1, and using HBO’s own streaming site HBO Go requires a cable subscription. (The situation was captured in the widely read comic strip The Oatmeal, in which the author attempts the rage-inducing process of trying to watch “Game of Thrones” online before giving up and downloading it from a sleazy porn-ad covered torrent site.)
“This is absolutely a reaction to the show’s not being available elsewhere online,” says Big Champagne’s Robinson. “It’s a very tricky game trying to create this kind of scarcity.”
Source: Forbes
Knights of Badassdom
We got a taste of this movie in a Comic Con interview from July 2011. Director Joe Lynch describe it as, “a little scrappy independant film.”
In an effort to chear up their buddy, some friends drag him to a LARP festival and deal with the consequences of mistakently conjuring up a demon from hell. Cast and crew participated in a boot camp organized by the Westcoast LARP Alliance as training for the film, which features an A-list cast including Summer Glau, Peter Dinklage, Danny Puddi, and Michael Gladis.
Knights of Badassdom was planned for a release in Spring of 2012. But there hasn’t been much in the way of updates since Comic-Con, and Joe Lynch’s blog about the movie has gone completely silent. Rumours are that financial trouble and politices have gotten in the way of the final release… and that it may go direct-to-DVD.
