• 0 Posts
  • 44 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: October 2nd, 2020
  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Have any of you successfully dealt with the early morning awakening side effect of depression?
    11·
    8 days ago

    Below is my general sleep guide.

    From your post these points sound the most relevant:

    • Once in bed, no work/study/planning thoughts. Identify and then free your mind of any thought patterns which keep your mind going. Resolve to address them at another time.
    • You can even pre-allocate a time to resolve them during regular waking hours. eg. before getting into bed, remind yourself that any thoughts which ‘need attention’ will be resolved at ‘12pm tomorrow’ or ‘during your commute’ etc. If they pop up during the night, you already have a precooked answer which doesn’t involve waking your brain up even more.
    • Don’t keep looking at the clock or trying to calculate how many hours of sleep you can get.
    • Avoid looking at phone screen once you’re in bed, if you need to adjust volume use buttons or remote etc with your eyes still closed.

    General

    • Observe if caffeine plays a role, you can eg. avoid it after lunch or after dinner - whatever works for you & your body.

    Late Evening

    • Avoid cold (bluer) colour lighting & use warm (redder) colour lighting from late evening until bed. This is important and melatonin effectiveness is directly controlled by this 1. To put it very very simply, we’ve evolved for redder light = sunset->sleep, bluer = day->awake. Angle of the light can also play a role if you want to go deeper into it.
    • Schedule blue light filters on your phone & computers. Should be standard on modern phones & use something like f.lux for computer 2.

    Before Bed

    • Avoid alcohol, lots of sugar or sugary drinks for at least an hour or so before bed.
    • Some other otc/“natural” sleep aids to consider: l-tryptophan, valarian, hops, passion flower, chammomile. There’s some ‘complex’ products which are basically derived from these kinds of things eg. 3. [Always check anything you take for possible interactions with eachother or medication you’re on].
    • Supplements like magnesium can help reduce effects of muscle tension.
    • Ensure any herbal teas or other foods, drinks etc don’t contain more caffeine than you’d planned for. eg. some chocolates contain caffeine.
    • Showering or bathing just before bed can help you relax.

    In Bed

    • Once in bed, don’t keep looking at the clock or keep trying to calculate how many hours of sleep you can get.
    • No work/study/planning thoughts. Identify and then free your mind of any thought patterns which keep your mind going. Resolve to address them at another time.
    • Is temperature or air flow effecting you? Some people find an oscillating fan can help regulate the airflow & temperature, and the repetition can be soothing.
    • Are sounds keeping you alert or waking you up? Consider fan, white noise machine or rain sounds 4. You can adjust the EQ to mask specific problem sounds, eg. bass for thumps, mids/high for clatter or voices etc.
    • Is light making problems? eg. light from electronics in standby mode, light coming through or around edges of windows, other lights in the house? Identify and cover them or your eyes as needed. Remember blue light is not your friend at this time, blue LEDs might look nice but can mess with the brain chemistry of sleep 1
    • Avoid looking at phone screen once you’re in bed, if you need to adjust volume use buttons with your eyes still closed.

    Sound

    Falling asleep to sounds can sometimes help. Different people like different things on different occasions: music, YT, movies, TV, audio books, ambient soundtracks (rainforest, crackling fire), even boring monotone talking can be good. Avoid any ads if streaming or TV as they’re designed to grab your attention.

    There are music genres almost designed for sleep, various ambient genres can be great especially if they employ low frequency variations and alpha, theta and delta wave type transitions 5. There’s a bit of bs around this, but also some legit bio-entrainment science too. In general find what works for you.

    If listening, consider using your phone & use a sleep timer app on your phone to automatically gradually lower the volume and switch off after a scheduled time, this can help avoid being woken up by it later in the night. Find the timer periods which work for you. Also ensure your alarm will still wake you.

    References

    1 https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article-abstract/88/9/4502/2845835

    2 https://justgetflux.com/

    3 https://www.flordis.com.au/products/redormin-forte/

    4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JyE47-Ykjo [Download rather than stream to avoid interrupts/ads during the night.]

    5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Wave_patterns

  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoScience@lemmy.ml•The ‘publish or perish’ mentality is fuelling research paper retractions – and undermining science
    2·
    12 days ago

    agreed the existing system is deeply flawed and currently on a trajectory to critical failure.

    regarding peer review itself, this is another point. people regard peer review as this binary thing which takes place prior to publication and is like a box which is ticked after publication.

    which is ofc ridiculous, peer review is an ongoing process, meaning many of the important parts take place after publication. fortunately this does happen in a variety of fields and situations, however not being the norm leads to a number of the issues in discussion. further it creates an erroneous mindset that simply because something has been published that its now fully vetted, which is ofc absurd.

    also agreed, the process should be blind. i believe it often already means the reviewer’s identities are hidden, but i also agree the authours should be hidden during the process too.

    don’t see the role as unpaid being a problem though, introducing money would complicate things alot and create even more conflicts of interest and undermine what little integrity the process still has.

    i really love your idea of standardising the process in a network-like protocol. this would actually make an excellent RFC and i’d totally support that.

    on a similar vein, this is why i’ve been advocating for a complete restructuring of support given to reproduction. as you mentioned, the current process is vulnerable to a variety of human network effects. and among other issues with that problem, i also see the broken reproduction system playing a role here.

    as it currently stands, reviewers can request more explanation or data, introduction of changes/additional caveats etc or reject the paper entirely. what this means is a reviewer can only really gauge whether something sounds right, or plausible. and as you correctly identify, certain personalities or flavours of prevailing culture will play a role in the reviewer’s assessment of what merely seems like it’s plausible or correct etc. this has shown to make major breakthroughs more difficult to communicate and face unfair resistance, which has frankly held back society at large.

    whereas if there was an organised system of reproduction it’s no longer left to just a matter of opinion in how something sounds. this is ofc how its supposed to work already, and sometimes does, but all too often does not. imo it would be a great detail to include in your idea for a protocol-based review process.

    i don’t envision this as always being something which must take place prior to publication, it can and should be an ongoing process. where papers could have their classification formerly upgraded over time. currently the only ‘upgrade’ a paper really receives is publicity or number of citations. the flaws of which are yet another discussion again.

  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoScience@lemmy.ml•The ‘publish or perish’ mentality is fuelling research paper retractions – and undermining science
    2·
    15 days ago

    I generally agree. The system is utterly rotten.

    Only thing I’d mention slightly counter to that is peer review - as a process - is still something I believe is useful.

    That is, the process of people with relevant domain expertise critiquing methodology, findings etc. When its done right, it absolutely produces better results which everyone benefits from.

    Where it fails is when cliques and ingroups are resistant to change on principle, which is ofc actually an anti-scientific stance. To put it another way, the best scientist wants to be proven wrong (or less correct) if that is indeed the truth.

    It also fails, as you identify, when the corrupt rot of powerful publishers (who are merely leeches) gate-keep the potential for communicating alternate models.

    It also fails where laypeople parrot popsci talking points without understanding that peer review is far from infallible. Even the best of the best journals still contain errors - any genuine scientist is the first to admit this. Meanwhile popsci enthusiast laypeople think that just because something was printed in any journal, that it must be unequivocally 100.000% truth, and are salivating at the opportunity to label any healthy dose of skepticism as “antiscience” or “conspiracy theorist” etc.

    It also seems to fail when popsci headlines invariably don’t include the caveats all good scientists include with their findings etc.

    Final point which I think would help enormously is its very very difficult to get funding or high worth publications in reproduction. The obsession with novelty is not only unhealthy, it’s unproductive.

    Reproduction is vastly undervalued. Sadly its not easy to get funding or support for ‘merely’ reproducing recent results. There’s two reasons why this should change, firstly it will ofc help with the reproducibility crisis, and it will also afford upcomers excellent opportunities to sharpen their skills, and properly prepare for future ground-breaking work. To put another way, when reading a novel paper you think you understand it. Only when you take it to the lab do you truly understand.

  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•Why does it seem the world is all of a sudden concerned about sexual orientation? Especially America. Did I miss how far we came as a society to see it take a 40 year step backwards?
    2·
    1 month ago

    excellent writeup

    i agree with alot of what you said and will try to hit a few key issues and hope i can add something to the excellent perspective you’ve cast.

    The sad truth is that the right are pandering to homophobia because it’s a vote getter for them not because they really care about it.

    exactly, they know its a very useful mechanism to accumulate power. so imo we should constantly remind ourselves - they’d be doing this anyway. if homosexuality didn’t exist or was non-viable for this, they’d be onto something else. they’d have used any topic to get what they want. (you could ofc have a metadiscussion about why certain topics are more powerful than others. but thats a different discussion).

    anathema to Christian society as it’s been for over a thousand years

    another critical point, as you correctly identified, this is how christianity has become, not what christianity was even purportedly about. if you take the actual words attributed to jesus in the bible, afaict never said a god damn thing about being gay trans whatever. according to their own book - after centuries of fucking with the bible - it STILL says the greatest commandment of all is to love your neighbour as yourself and you can’t judge cos you’re all fuckin sinners afterall.

    so it’s all hypocrisy built upon hypocrisy , basically typical “there are 5 lights” bs. in other words it has all the fingerprints of a propaganda pathology not an expression of positive spirituality.

    Things have changed so much just in my adult lifetime

    yeah to that end i think the OPs timeline of 40 years was a bit optimistic, or we at least have to recognise that represents a cross-section of OPs experience which wasn’t necessarily universal 40 years ago. that said i feel there has been a backslide in the last say 10-15 years)

    conservative people see the ‘gay agenda’ exactly as you see the ‘homophobic agenda’ in that they believe it’s political narrative being pushed just to destabilize morally virtuous power structures to allow corrupt and evil people to take power and steal money.

    tbh i think thats because its probably both at the same time, its a documented soviet technique to covertly fund two sides of an issue to control the outcome. not picking on the soviets btw, just that they did a great job perfecting these kinds of things, wrote it down and then the power structures keeping them secret began to collapse and the methology leaked to the public.

    we see this in a simpler form where corporations invest in pride month and also unironically heavily invest in homophobic organisations, (so i guess it doesn’t always have to be a cold war operation for powerful entities to effect control via seemingly conflicting interests).

    and in what is presumably a less consciously aware context, consider how jk rowling veils her attacks on the trans community behind a thin veneer of “caring about gay people”. i’m strongly of the belief if she’d been born 50 years earlier she’d be jumping on the homophobia bandwagon instead of the currently “trendy” transphobia bandwagon.

    to say another way, not everyone pretending to be our friend has our interests at heart, infact sometimes they’re just trying to accumulate power by taking the positive stance on this issue - probably for no other reason than the negative position won’t currently yield them as big a return.

    and this can lead to eg. conservatives becoming outraged about a stance taken by someone who is vocal and politically motivated, but who has no business speaking on our behalf, then conservatives end up feeling like they’re “under attack from the homosexuals” when it wasn’t even a homosexual who said it!!

    next the conservatives says some hateful thing in retaliation, people respond to that and it spirals…everyone loses (except perhaps the actual perpetrator). this is definitely a flaw in human thinking where our tribalism clouds our perception, we feel under attack and in the heat of the moment incorrectly assess which side someone is taking (or even that there’s only 2 sides, when in life there’s probably rarely ever only 2 sides).

    Companies that shoehorn a poorly written gay character into everything for the sake of inclusivity feel like a pandering cash grab to me but to the homophobic Christian it feels like asymmetric warfare from a deranged and selfish elite hellbent on ruining western society.

    again, its probably both? tbh i don’t think that laziness is the only explanation for the woefully shoehorned characters we’re currently getting. honestly its fucking insulting (to us, not the biggots - though the biggots might feel insulted too?). as you mention its a profitable cash grab, and i’m sure it hasn’t escaped their notice that a certain type of aggressively half-arsed inclusivity will provide alot more value to them from the hysteria it generates vs actually doing it ‘right’ in a sensitive and compassionate way, which might actually lead to healing.

    if healing is what they actually wanted i think it’d look very, very different than how it currently looks. and the kindest interpretation is they’ve realised it’s more profitable short-term to produce hysteria instead of healing.

    compare in contrast to what i still think (despite modern news) was a great example of inclusivity characters with the lesbian main characters in buffy:

    in 1999 no less, it showed a lesbian couple in bed and instead of a cheap sexiness grab, they’re literally sitting up in bed reading & having a mundane conversation. no sexualisation of the lesbian relationship as something existing only for hetero male gratification, or out attacking heteros. just plain, believable real life characters living a boring normal part of their life. so yes i very much agree that the boring normality is a very powerful thing. surely ALOT more positive overall than aggressive hysteria.

    In summary my take-aways are:

    • their MO is to use a scapegoat, they’d be attacking someone vulnerable, regardless of whom

    • not everyone pretending to be our friend actually wants to help us

    • hysteria is sadly apparently more profitable (short term) than healing

    A positive note?

    I honestly have no idea what the best thing for the greater good is

    i really don’t either, though something think how homosexuality has been hijacked in modern perception (by that 1000 years of fake christianity as you mentioned). in eg. parts of ancient societies, men could love men and women could love women, someone could be a third gender, and it wasn’t even a thing to get upset about it, because it was just normal life. why do we suffer when they didn’t even know they were supposed to be suffering?

  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Google & Facebook partner admits it can listen to device microphone to serve ads
    4·
    1 month ago

    happy to get into into these subtopics, but it’s also possible i may not be understanding you properly because i agree with alot of what you just said.

    what are you attributing the close to 0 probability to?

    if you wanna say “whats the probability that CMG was at least partly talking out their arse about their capabilities (and especially any claim they were currently in possession of that capability)?”

    i’d also give it like >90% probability they (CMG) are full of shit. in which case you could say i agree with you (to within say 10% error margin).

    if you’re instead saying the probability is ~100% that audio surveillance capability cannot possibly currently exist outside TLAs because “someone would’ve published it already” then i really cannot agree. (and afaict that ars article does not support that stance either)

  • ganymede@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.ml•Google & Facebook partner admits it can listen to device microphone to serve ads
    4·
    1 month ago

    Not disputing the three letter agencies

    The capability they were claiming to have would make a three letter agency very excited.

    sorry i didn’t understand. didn’t you say you don’t doubt TLAs likely already have this capability?

    oppressive regimes

    most (all?) of whom are operating outside typical legal constraints and likely already have access to the million dollar exploit trade which already exists.

    further, i’m not sure how this changes the landscape anyway? its not without precedent that variations on capabilities can be useful to more than one market segment concurrently?

    trivial to discover and flag as malware

    can you explain further what you mean by this? i’m not sure there’s anything trivial about conclusive analysis of the deep complexities and dependencies of modern smart devices

    Apple and Google would also be very keen to find and squash whatever loophole let’s them record without showing the notification.

    historically we’ve seen google can take over half a decade to address such things, afaict (welcome correction on this) apple’s generally been faster to respond, and i do agree apple’s current public image attire would be contrary to be seen to enable this. [not simping for apple btw, just stating that part of their brand currently seems to be invested in this]

    in reality there are a confluence of many agendas and there’s likely ALOT of global users running non-bleeding edge or other variations on the myriad of sub-system components, regardless of what upstream entities like google implement. if you are aware of any conclusive downstream binary analyses please link

    which if true would have been exposed/validated by security researchers long ago.

    i agree the probability of discovery increases over time. and the landscape is growing more hostile to such activities. yet i’m not aware that a current lack of published discovery is actual proof it’s never happened.

    tbh we have our doubts this leak is directly connected to solid proof “they are listening”.

    but we’re not currently aware of any substantiated reasons to say with certainty “they’re absolutely not listening”