This past week I have been sick… Or at least I was coughing and sneezing quite a bit, though oddly except for that I did not feel sick at all. Indeed, I felt like I had more energy than I had had in many weeks. It was a totally odd feeling and very dangerous.

You see though rationally I knew that if my body was combatting some form of virus I should be doing things to help it along like get more sleep, take medicine, and consume healthy foods and the likes. Only this past week I didn’t feel like doing any of that. Instead I stayed up until 2 to 4 AM most nights, waking up around 6:30, ate my normal diet and didn’t take any medicine at all. And I felt fine the entire time. Better than fine, I felt pretty good except for that damn annoying cough.

Then came friday evening, and it was a colder day than usual and the folly of my ways became clear. And since then I have been feeling quite miserable to the point that last night I could not stay up at all and yet annoyingly despite aspirin and cough syrup and cough drops I kept waking up in the middle of the night hacking and coughing and feeling considerably pain. And more annoyingly in the morning I felt so tired that I overslept and missed my appointment to get my car looked at. I never over sleep, sometimes I awake pretty close to the wire, but not really “over sleep”. This time I overslept by a full two hours.

Alas, so it goes I guess. I guess there’s nothing else for me to do but to stay at home and build a computer this weekend. I’ve been putting it off so this gives me an excuse.

My most recent animation infatuation is with a series called “Avatar” that is amazingly American made and comes on Nickelodeon of all places.  I haven’t seen a show I liked on Nickelodeon since David the Gnome. Yes, that’s right, I liked David the Gnome, thought I think I had to have been something like eight when I used to watch it. And no I don’t have any clue what it was that I liked about that show.

Anyway, Avatar is something quite different. The premise is thus:  Four nations based on the four elements live. Each has a lot of people called “benders” who have control over that nation’s element.  These nations live in harmony rather than destroying each other thanks to the “Avatar” who acts as a mediator between the nations. The avatar is a lucky bastard who can control all 4 elements and on top of that he has some cool “spirit” powers and the knowledge of hundreds of lifetimes because he is reborn repeatedly each time starting off as a different bender-type and then having to go on this journey to learn each of the other three elements so that he can become the Avatar and keep the peace.

Well, you know that crazy situation can’t last, so about a hundred years ago the Fire Nation (big surprise, for once why can’t water be the badguys?) decides that they want to be evil and all powerful so with the help of a comet they take over the world and they slaughter all of the airbenders hence ensuring that the avatar will never be reborn again. The avatar is conspicuously absent during all of this and that serves as one of the great mysteries of the series.

Well a hundred years later, a brother and sister pair, the sister an aspiring waterbender, the brother seemingly completely useless (at this point) stumble across a little kid frozen in the ice with his giant flying bison.  Turns out the kid is an  airbender and  on top of that destined to be the next avatar. And so their journey begins.

The story is, as I have described pretty simple. But that simplicity disguises a very extraordinary piece of artistic story telling. One of the best features of the series is the very detailed and balanced portrayal of the four cultures. Each is very distinctive and fascinating to behold. Unlike far too many anime, the characters do not all look alike.

The action scenes are also really very impressive in this. They way they depict the various powers and techniques capable of being wielded by the benders is extremely impressive. When the benders get into fights with one another it is face paced and so smoothly animated that your eyes end up glued to the screen. You could almost watch the series just to see the fights and not be too disappointed.

The story? Well despite the simplicity of the basic setup it does progress somewhat interestingly. Not a lot of surprises at least in the first season which is all that I have seen but also not a whole lot of completely uninteresting filler episodes either. There’s a lot of character development in here and all of the characters are a lot of fun and pleasant. As of the end of the first season I can’t see any characters I can really say I didn’t like.

The voice acting is quite good too. It’s a really strange feeling to watch an animated series that is all english voice acting and not be cringing at the sounds of the characters voices.  Although I did unfortunately have to cringe at a few points where they re-used voice actors in a very obvious manner. I guess that’s just chalked up to a low budget and a need to focus their money on animating incedibly fight scenes. If so I think they made the right choice.

Overall, I’d have to say this is exactly the kind of series I would have been glued to the screen to watch when I was little refusing to miss a single episode no matter the cost. And yet it is sophisticated enough to hold its appeal for me even now. 

It is good to know that in this post-transformers, post-gargoyles, post-GI Joe, post-thundercats era, kids these days have at least one good action based animation to appreciate besides the evil one that starts with a p.

One might ask if there is a difference between talking about someone behind their back and consulting or confiding in someone about that same other person. The first is sometimes portrayed as a kind of a dirty thing mean, unfair or unjust. We say things like “you should tell it their face” and whatnot. The latter is seen as a normal and regularly practiced thing and sometimes even considered necessary for psychological health and well being. People talk about the need of having “outlets” and the likes. But if an emotionless disconnected external being were to observe both phenomena they would look pretty much exactly the same to him I suspect.

So what is the difference really? The same place the difference between most of our many conjoined concepts lie. In the intentions of the acting entity of course. And that is all there really is to it.

Sometimes I find that I have an idea or a set of thoughts that resonate with me strongly. They seem “important” and I know that I have to write them. When I am occupied and don’t get a chance to immediately write them, those thoughts bounce around in my head evolving and changing for days making me feel more and more desperate to write them.

Then after a while a new thought enters into my head. The thoughts that I have thought start to feel not so important any more. In fact they start to feel somewhat familiar. Indeed I start to think that I have already writen these thoughts and I start to wonder why they bothered me so. The memory of having written grows stronger and stronger until I am totally certain that my words must be recorded somewhere. The memory is almost tactile, like I can remember my fingers typing on te keys that formed the sentences to express he ideas.
 
Only some times I then start to look through my writings to find the writing of the thoughts but I can’t find them. They aren’t anywhere. I don’t know if I’ve written them or not. Sometimes I do find some similar writings but usually substantively different. It’s like I never did really write it. So why did I remember it so well?

Then there are other times, when no writing ideas are floating through my head, I’ll just be searching through my writings and I’ll find to my surprise several essays or emails or blog posts that are almost identical in subject matter or creative inspiration. Indeed I am just shocked that I wrote them both without ever realizing that they were connected.

So here’s the question, which is the reality? And why does my memory never seem to work the way I think it sould?

Certain businesses that shall remain nameless have a tendency to hype the importance of security and how it is the wave of the future. They claim that this is a matter of critical importance for the survival of their company and to ensure the trust and support of their customers.

And yet when the time comes to actually act upon those convictions and do what is necessary to increase the security of their infrastructure, one of their hallmark acts is to give their developers special “security training” in order to be in compliance with such such rule or another for certification for something.  This oh so essential training consists of, get ready for it, a whopping one hour slide show!

No. No follow up meetings. No additional discussion. Yes there’s a hand out and it references some books as “recommendations” but there’s no requirement for the developers to read the hand out let alone the books it mentions.  This training may well occur once a year but it’s always just an hour and it always says pretty much the same thing.

Indeed all that is really expected of the developer is that they sign on the dotted line that certifies that they have received their vaunted “training”.

Now I know developers are amazing beings capable of astounding acts of mental agility, but can you or anyone else really learn anything in a hour? Of course not. One hour is not training. It is a sick joke. A grotesque little trap to ensure that management can try to hold underlings accountable when the shit hits the fan.

Of couse I doubt it will ever work. If there is any egregious violation all this kind of rubber stamp does is to ensure that the workers and the management both get the boot by the higher level of management still trying to CYA. Of course the workers will suffer first, but that is to be expected. But if the auditors or investigators are particularly determined they will no doubt set the blame squarely on the highest level of control and so pretty much everybody is screwed.

So then, I guess I just don’t get it. Why not just pay for real training that will be meaningful, extensive, and might actually result in creating employees who are knowledgible enough that they will be able to prevent risky security breaches in the future? If you can’t afford that, then why waste your developers time with a cheesy “fake” training that doesn’t change anything all except to allow you to lie to people and say your developers are “trained”?

Businesss is so grotesquely about appearences. It often makes me ill.

The thing that I find most interesting about this movie in its historical context is that it has pretty much exactly the same kind of flaw as X-Men 3. Both movies try to include a lot of divergent plot streams and merge them together into one coherent story. Both movies are extremely long and both movies are packed with over the top action sequences. And of course fundamentally both movies are based on fairly cheesy comic book plotlines that didn’t really make a whole lot of sense when they were first imagined years ago.

So the question arises why did I find one of those two movies thoroughly enjoyable and the other pretty darn despicable?

There are a lot of possible answers.  One might say that it has to do with expectations. Perhaps after X-men 3 my expectations were lowered and I was looking for a comic book redemption. But that doesn’t ring true to me. I was looking quite forward to Spider-Man 3 forr some time. I loved the second movie and couldn’t wait for the third. Although I did like X-Men 2 *more* than Spider-Man 2, I can’t see as how in any way I can be have said to have had low expectations for Spider-Man 3. I was excited by the trailers and pretty pumped up about it, so much so that I went to the midnight showing and watched the movie on opening day.

So why then? Perhaps it is the betrayal represented by X-Men 3. A lot of comic book fans consider this the reason the movie was bad. X-Men 3 seemed to pretty much ruin or destroy many of the characters that people loved. Characters lose their powers, die, or (and worst of all) just don’t DO ANYTHING throughout the movie. You wait all this time for a movie to see your favorite characters on the big screen only to see them be pointless accessories to a lame plot line. That’s unforgivable. 

Spider-Man 3 doesn’t have that flaw, though to be fair there are a heck of a lot less characters in the movie to represent. Still all of the major characters have scenes where you can say “that was pretty cool” or “that was a cool line” or whatever. Each character has a lot of screen time and it is a lot of fun to watch them in action.

Of course Spider-Man’s characters aren’t as interesting in general as X-Men’s characters. The villains in Spider-Man have always been pretty lame. Silly Goblins, and Octupuses, and Lizards and what not. Actually one of the triumphs of the Spider-Man movie series is making these particularly lame villains look surprisingly cool and certainly a lot more threatening than you’d think they’d be if you heard about them in abstract. So maybe in this respect it is expecations again. I had high expectations for the characters in X-Men 3 that met with disappointment whereas I had pretty low expectations for the villains at least in Spider-Man 3 but was pleasantly surprised

But I feel that that is not a really good expecation. I really don’t believe that it is might comic-book fandom bias that made me dislike X-Men 3. I really haven’t read a whole lot of the X-Men comics and most of what I have read is more recent stuff like the Ultimate X-Men series and Joss Whedon’s awesome Astonishing X-men series.  And I’m not a person who demands that stories be cannon. I’m fine with them tossing the universe upside down, changing everything if they so please so long as they do it WELL. Want to kill main caracters? Fine. Go ahead and do it. But make their deaths into a good story. Make it mean something. Make the readers care.

That to me is the heart of what makes Spider-Man 3 a success whereas X-Men 3 a failure. Spider-Man 3 was just a better told story altogether. Sure it has lots of different plot lines going on at the same time, but the writers managed to weave them altogether into a consistent whole. There was nothing that made me say wtf what’s going on? There was no point where I was saying to myself “why I am watching this scene it doesn’t make any sense?” or “where are these characters where’d they go?, or “what was the point of introducing that plot twist or having that character in the movie, it would be pretty much the same without it?”  And so on. Almost everything seemed to have a purpose and things pretty much fit together.  I did not feel as if something was missing when the movie was over. It didn’t feel as if it were a hodge podge of random scenes the writers wanted to display without any consistent story line to draw them together.

In a way though maybe in this too, I enjoyed the story because of my expectations.  The story starts off slow you see, it starts to add a little bit of a plot here, a little bit of a plot there, and I can remember distinctly thinking about thirty minutes into the movie “How can they possibly bring together all of these plots into a coherent story? There’s just too much!” And so with my expectatons brought low right there are the beginning I became pleasantly surprised when things did come together a lot better than I could have imagined earlier. Nothing seemed to be left out. It all worked.

More than that though there is a consistency also to the various plots in Spider-Man 3 that made it easier to accept them all being stuck together in one story. Yo see in Spider-Man 3 all of the major characters face pretty much the exact same symbolic tension albeit with different antagonists. Each of the charactes are facing the evil within themselves and that forms the core of the overall story. In a very real sense you aren’t really seeing four different stories. You are seeing one story told through four different characters and it is a story we all have faced ourselves so we can relate to it.

That I really believe is at the heart of why Spider-Man 3 succeeds as an act of story telling. It isn’t the best movie in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a thoroughly enjoyable movie because it has a story that does not disappoint.

Someone once said to me “You should try to earn enough money so that you can do whatever you want.” I’ve heard many a similar statement in the past about the importance of wealth in this society. But it doesn’t ring true to me. I could maybe see the argument of earning as much money as you can so that you can feel secure and not have to fear a sudden unexpected event, but earning enough money to grant you additional freedoms doesn’t make much sense to me.

For one thing, I hate to break it to people, but there is no amount of money that would really let you do ANYTHING you want, and the more I observe it seems that it will do little to help me do what I want.  You won’t earn enough so that you can defy the laws of physics or make one equal to zero or obtain magical powers.  What’s more, no matter how much money you spend right now we simply can’t travel to alternative dimensions (yet), alter our brains so that we can read minds or perform telekinesis  (yet), travel to other wolds and meet alien species (yet), or make ourselves live forever (yet). Nor is it likely that we will gain those capacities any time soon and quite unlikely during our life time. 

Nor can you through wealth ad deterimination change the world in which we live in more realistic ways. You won’t create universal peace. You won’t convince everyone to be more charitable and abandon the darker angels of their nature.  You just won’t end war and crime and unhappiness and create a nirvana on this earth. You won’t through wealth alone save the planet from this relentless trend toward environmental destruction.  Maybe you can help. Your wealth might be spent in ways that make us closer to those extremes, but yor wealth alone won’t be enough and history has shown that many of the poeple who have contributed the most toward bettering the human condition did so without the advantage of being filthy rich. Many were dirt poor. And many of the rich, trough my personal observation, seem to be pushing the world in the opposite direction although usually unknowingly. Because I enjoy airing the platitudes let me just say that the reason is thus: money is power and power corrupts.

But  even on a more personal level the idea fails. People say that by earning enough money they’ll be able to live their dreams, travel the world, and be happy. But what are those dreams really? Are they to be rich and famous and have your creative or intellectual works well accepted and beloved by the world? No guarantee that money alone will get you that. People might hate what you do.The world may reject your works. You might not be very good at anything according to the standards by which society judges.

Are they to  meet someone and fall in love and have a story book wedding and raise good kids you can be proud of?  No guarantee that wealth alone will help you find real lasting love. No guarantee that your children will be anything at all that you might expect them to be. And worst of all there’s no guarantee you will be able to maintain your happiness against the probability of unexpected unstoppable circumstances such economic recession, disease, natural disaster and all the rest. 

Is your dream instead to travel and see and learn all that you can? Do you dream to experience a little bit of everything so that you know your life wasn’t wasted? Well, that’s good and all and money will certainly help with that, but you’ll never experience all that much. You’ll go far and wide and see many things but you’ll miss a whole lot more of very interesting things you can see and learn and experience without the need of great wealth if you just open your eyes and look about you and see all the wonders right here that are there to see.  And neither travel, nor knowledge, nor experience REQUIRE wealth to obtain. You can walk out your door right now and start hitchhiking across the country and I guarantee you’ll see and experience a heck of a lot. Turn on your comptuer and start browsing the web and I  guarantee you’ll learn more than you bargained for. A lot of it will even, perhaps surprisingly, be true. You might have trouble when you want to leave the country without much money but you can probably find a way. After all you don’t need to be a billionaire to get a passport and buy a plane ticket.  You do need money but you don’t need to “earn as much as you can.”

So what value is wealth really? Someone please explain it to me. It doesn’t seem to me to create possibiities at all, just mix around the probabilities a little.

I’d say try to be rich if you want to and enjoy the striving for it and will enjoy being in that state. But don’t try to be rich because you think it will magically transform your life. You’ll be bound for disappointment.

It was months ago now, maybe even over a year, when a friend of mine said some terrible things about a mutal acquaintance while in my presence. The person spoken of was not a friend at all, rather a coworker whom I don’t like very much at all really, but the words spoken were words that struck me as things that no one should say about anyone. Ever.

The words were spoken with a laugh and a kind of “this is half a joke” kind of expression, but the tone was malicious, the sound rang cruel to my ears. Perhaps there were reasons he should have felt that way, or perhaps he could have found better words to express his disagreement that weren’t quite so vile. But the words he chose were chosen I think because of their darkness. It the world of black humour, exaggeratingly cruel words are often used in order to create the comidic effect, to make the language less serious, as if to say “if I really meant this, I would choose my words more carefully, but I am just making a joke.”  Even so.  Some jokes strike me as  they should be off limits. This one in particular made me feel so utterly uncomfortable that I could barely even look at him. I did not like it. Not one bit.

How should I have reacted? Surely something other than the obligatory half-fake laugh that you do just to tell another that you are listening. Surely more than a forced attempt to change the subject to something that we could find a deeper common ground. Should I have defended her? Walked out in righteous anger and protest? And lost a friend in the process?  Certainly since I did not do those things my standing there and saying nothing would have seemed to any observer as tacit approval of the statement made. If a friend of the person spoken of was nearby and over heard it and relayed the words back to her, she would no doubt picture a group of absolute a-holes talking about her behind her back. And she’d come to hate me for it, and I would not blame her in the least.

Perhaps I would have rejected the words more forcefully, only ironically I had had a conversation with this very same friend some time earlier about this very kind of thing and gained a bit of an understanding of it.  He spoke of how sometimes in his life he has interacted with different groups of people and how what is acceptable to “joke” about radically shifts between the groups. He spoke of how he had gotten into deep trouble a number of times in his past for saying something that would have gone over well with the friends he grew up with around people who were deeply offended by it. This was not a small matter for him, but rather something that had been bothering him a great deal. And I think I understand it quite well. Many times I’ve been around different groups of people where the tone of the dialog radically shifted between groups. There are just funamental differences in what is deemed acceptable between various environments.

It’s more than just that though. I can imagine that had this been my very first encounter with him, I might well have warned myself: this is not a person I should become friends with. He is dangerous. My mind would have immediately gone to the possibility and indeed likelihood or so it would have seemed to me at the time, of him at another time talking and saying terrible things about me while not in my presence “jokingly”. But rather it happened at this time, after I already knew him. After I had already experienced dozens of times where he has proven himself to be both Just and Good by any reasonable standard of evaluation. I did not think that these words, however cruel, invalidated all that. No single story, nor single event of language should be enough to completely color one’s opinion of another. We humans are way too complex entities for that to be fair. So first impressions are a load of crap. A defense mechanism gone awry that prevents us from learning the good in people on the basis of a limited information.

Still I feel as if I did something unforgivably terrible by not saying anything at all during that time. It is easy to see why. If I just imagine that the person being spoken of had been a close friend or a family member, how would I have reacted then? Would I have blown my top then? Would I have rejected him as a friend forever? What if I had overheard him speaking to someone else about *me* in a similarly cruel fashion? What then?

There’s no doubt I have created a double standard for myself. To be able to allow dark words go without comment when they are spoken about someone I don’t like by someone I do like but not to be able to do the same should any of the variables change in the slightest is just wrong. To be consistent I should either let the words go in all situations and say “this mere language is not enough for me to conclude anything inherent about the speaker’s nature”,  or I should speak up instead in every circumstance with equal self-righteousness and tell the speaker that their words are cruel and unjust and that they should stop.

Although in practice, I am more likely to go the say nothing route, intellectually I actually lean toward the later for one important reason. Keeping silent doesn’t change the phenomenon at all whereas speaking out potentially can. Speaking out, if you find the right language and the right inflection to be able to convince the person and make them understand why what they are saying is wrong and why it ought to stop, can actually make the person into a better person. If this happened frequently we can all become better people, and the social dialogue of the society would be elevated to speak more of real things and humour, black or not would more rarely turn to the vile.

On the other hand, speaking out can be detrimental too. People are inherently pretty stubborn creatures. They may well reject your attempt to influence their behavior. They may well say “Get over yourself. It was just a joke.” They may even go so far as to stubbornly joke more cruelly and more frequently after being called on it on the grounds that it is their free will to do so and the words they are saying don’t cause any real harm to people. People need to grow thicker skins and not be so easily offended.

And they would have a point too. It’s not solely the grounds of the acting entity to prevent lasting harm from occurring in any interaction. The person effected should also be willing to accept certain things even if they make them a little uncomfortable. If the experiencer doesn’t change at all, we would soon have a world where everyone is offended by everyone and social interaction grinds to a screeching halt.

The argument is sound in the generic but invalid in the specifics. We can argue about political correctness a lot but it will not change the fact that some words really really DO cause real emotional harm. We have to be rational beings who are careful to evaluate the impact of our words and choose them carefully. Sure it sucks to always have to be so alert, but this is a price we pay for being a part of civilization. If you really want to be able to say *whatever* you want, you should go find yourself a little hole in the world where you can exist in perfect privacy for all eternity, for lacking that it is impossible.

This was not the first nor do I suspect will it be the last time that I will hear something spoken that I reject on principle said by a person for whom I have a considerable amount of respect.  Time will tell how I will  next choose to react to it.

Who says high expectations always lead to disappointment? Spider-Man 3 was imho the best of the three! Simply put, very nearly a perfect movie. Comic book movies be redeemed!

It’s a game I’ve played and seen played, to look upon the world and try and find one small thing that if you could make into a reality would set the world on a greater and better course. I call it a “world wish”.  Think of it is as if  you were given near omnipotent powers for just one instance, long enough to make but one substantive change to the world but none other, and you’ve only got a moment to think about it. Act fast! What do you do? What wish would you have fulfilled? You’ve got to be careful too, anything too crazy might make the world a lot worse than it started.

In the talks of Kurt Vonnegut I found one great eample of such a proposal: the wish to have great public schools with class sizes of 12 or smaller. I really can’t beat that one. There’s just no doubt in my mind the world would be an extraordinarily different place if we could manage to implement that and it would be better in virtually every way. I might just modify it slightly so as to ensure that in those classes of 12 or fewer there is a significant amount of diversity of background and culture. That would simply enhance the amount to which students can learn from each other and broaden their perspectives. But even without that caveat, it’s a great proposition with minimal risk and not really all that hard to do.

Mine’s a little more risky, but I’d still think it was worth a shot. Here’s my wish of the moment:  I would make it so that everyone can rest or sleep whenever they are tired and awaken whenever they are rested without any negative consequences, social stigma, or social diadvantage resulting from it.

The consequences of such a shift in culture would be drastic. First, the entire work culture that exists today would be radically instantly transformed. No more nine to five jobs. Rather all businesses would have to be built around perfectly flexible work hours. Indeed the concept of “work hours” would pretty much have to go. Because one day you might get tired in the middle of whatever hours you happen to be working, in which case my rule would make it so that you would immediately be able to get some rest and then you can work again as soon as you are rested.

Most deadlines would have to be rethought and more flexible. Educational institutions would have to find ways to teach people effectively without pushing them beyond their physical limits.

On an individual level, people would, I think, be generally more cheerful and happy. You’d never have to deal with someone who is too grumpy because they didn’t get enough sleep. You’d never have to do anything while your mind is not functioning well enough for you to do it effectively. Would we not be more tolerant of one another? More carefree? Never do we wallow in bitter rage because a deadline is missed. Never do we suffer in silence the condemnation of others because we arrived late to an event. It’s just one less thing to be embarrassed about and one less thing to be worried over. There’d just be no more need to set aside a portion of your mind every day to be devoted to keeping yourself to your schedule.

The caffeine industry would take a huge hit and maybe even collapse if such a change were to come to pass.  And good riddance. Caffeine can cause massive problems. From wikipedia:

“In large amounts, and especially over extended periods of time,
caffeine can lead to a condition known as “caffeinism.” Caffeinism
usually combines “caffeine dependency” with a wide range of unpleasant physical and mental conditions including nervousness, irritability, anxiety, tremulousness, muscle twitching (hyperreflexia), insomnia, headaches, respiratory alkalosis^[51] and heart palpitations.^[52] Furthermore, because caffeine increases the production of stomach acid, high usage over time can lead to peptic ulcers, erosive esophagitis, and gastroesophageal reflux disease.

There are four caffeine-induced psychiatric disorders recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition: caffeine intoxication, caffeine-induced anxiety disorder, caffeine-induced sleep disorder, and caffeine-related disorder not otherwise specified (NOS).

Other side effects of caffeine overuse include: dizziness, tachycardia, blurred vision, drowsiness, dry mouth, flushed dry skin, diuresis, loss of appetite, nausea and stomachaches.”

and:

“Several large studies have shown that caffeine intake is associated with a reduced risk of developing Parkinson’s disease (PD) in men, but studies in women have been inconclusive.”

and:

“However, a different study showed that caffeine could impair short term memory and increase the likelihood of the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.
The study allowed the researchers to suggest that caffeine could aid
short-term memory when the information to be recalled is related to the
current train of thought, but also to hypothesize that caffeine hinders
short-term memory when the train of thought is unrelated.”

and:

“Because adenosine, in part, serves to regulate blood pressure by causing vasodilation,
the increased effects of adenosine due to caffeine withdrawal cause the
blood vessels of the head to dilate, leading to an excess of blood in
the head and causing a headache and nausea. Reduced catecholamine activity may cause feelings of fatigue
and drowsiness. A reduction in serotonin levels when caffeine use is
stopped can cause anxiety, irritability, inability to concentrate and
diminished motivation to initiate or to complete daily tasks; in
extreme cases it may cause mild depression.”

Caffeine might still be used for its good benefits carefully and controlled but no longer would it be a household common element of daily life. Other stimulants would likewise be less relevant except for their medical use.

Alarm clocks would also mostly bite the dust.  And good riddance. They are archaic technology that has been enslaving humanity for far too long. Why should we bound to the evil little ringing boxes demanding that we awaken *instantly* and face our day? Rather people would just be able to wake up when they feel that they have gotten enough sleep and then begin to live their day.

But it’s more than just the physical and emotional negative effects of this super fast break neck paced society we live in that would be eased by eliminating the prohibitions against purely nature driven sleep pattern. Today, the increase in our anxiety that results from excessive sleep deprivation probably has profound economic disadvantages to our society as well. The medical conditions resulting from over-stress would all be eased. The guilt and depression that can result from taking the time to sleep would simply vanish. And when less affected by guilt, anxiety, and fear people will be able to focus on more important things like precision and detail. In other words people would distinguish themselves by the quality of their work more than the quantity of their working and they’d feel better for it.

Sleep is no panacea of course. Sleep alone won’t make anyone happier or more successful, and probably won’t even make you live longer. And there’s risk to creating a world where sleep is not deemed the enemy too. Would science and technology advance more slowly? (and would that necessarily be a bad thing?) Would medical care be weaker?  Or would we have better automated systems to account for our natural tendencies toward sleep? Or would we prioritize better and get the same amount done? Who can say for certain?  But just being able to say “I’m tired, I’m going to get some sleep.” at any given instance and not feeling as if by doing so you are being weak or foolish or wasting your life or failing to meet your obligations or driving in the darkness of the world, or whatever,  yeah I can’t help but feel that that’d be a very good thing.

Sleep when we are tired. Wake when we are rested. Alone, it won’t save the world, but I believe it would be one small change that would definitely worth trying. It might well help a lot.