"The babies who nap in sub-zero temperatures."

"Nowadays most day-care centres in Sweden put children outside to rest. It's common to see rows of prams lined up in the snow at nap-time, with youngsters fast asleep inside."
"When the temperature drops to -15C (5F) we always cover the prams with blankets," says head teacher Brittmarie Carlzon.
Oh! Sub-zero centigrade. It's not that cold!

"Babies clearly slept longer outdoors than indoors," says Marjo Tourula. While indoor naps lasted between one and two hours, outdoor naps lasted from 1.5 to three hours.

"Probably the restriction of movements by clothing could increase the length of sleep, and a cold environment makes swaddling possible without overheating," she says.

Purchases of the day.

From the February 18, 2013 Amazon Associates Earnings Report:

Cottonelle Fresh Care Flushable Moist Wipes - 294 ct. (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $1.51)

(2) GE 12983-6 25 Watt Globe G25 Light Bulb, Crystal Clear, 6-Pack (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $3.12)

ch ching:

Leonard Bernstein - Young People's Concerts / New York Philharmonic (1961) Bernstein (Actor), New York Philharmonic (Actor) | Rated: NR | Format: DVD (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $26.84)

aden + anais Cozy 4-Layer Sleeping Bag-Star Light (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $3.60)

Hamilton Beach Stovetop Slow Cooker - Black/silver (6 Quart) (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $4.21)

Fitbit One Wireless Activity Plus Sleep Tracker (Earnings to the Althouse blog = $7.99)

... and 80 other items purchased — at no additional cost to the buyers — all of which convey the unmistakably soft cozy slow dreamy flushably warm harmonic message: Blog on, Wisconsin blogger. Blog on.

Thank you.

Purchase of the day.

Yesterday. Divatex Home Fashions Microfiber Sheet Set by Divatex Home Fashions. Amazon Associates earnings to Althouse blog: $1.00. Sweet. Sleep well, portal users.

How to read a book a day for a year.

Choose short/easy/audio books.

Actually, I read a book a day and have for years — but it's an audiobook, and most of this reading is done while asleep.

Do you have an reading-related New Year's resolutions? Let's think up some reading projects for the new year. We don't necessarily have to do them. Let's just contemplate them. I've already thought of 2, one of which I plan to do. First:

Maybe a good project would be those "History of..." pages, not just for their most common words — WAR! — but to have had it run through your head, at least once, what happened in all of those places. Do you know how many pages we are talking about? The number of members in the United Nations is not the right answer, but do you know that number? It's 193. Wikipedia lists 206 sovereign states (including those with disputed sovereignty).

Let's make a New Year's resolution: Each day, read one Wikipedia "History of..." page. Will you join me? We'll go in alphabetical order, and I'll prompt you with blog posts.

That will start on New Year's day. Don't worry, I'll make it amusing. Second:

What I like [about "The Great Gatsby"] is that each sentence is good, on its own. Seriously. Test it out. "As my train emerged from the tunnel into sunlight, only the hot whistles of the National Biscuit Company broke the simmering hush at noon." Every sentence is a writer's inspiration....

I feel like starting a blog devoted to individual sentences in "The Great Gatsby," chosen randomly, and continuing until all the sentences have been used up.

With commentary, of course. For example, here's my commentary on the hot-whistle-simmering-hush sentence (responding to a commenter who complained that "trains do not 'emerge' from tunnels. They blast, speed, rip, explode, hurtle. E.B. White and Orwell would have hated the verb 'emerge'):

Now, one reason the train can't "blast" or "explode" from the tunnel — and by the way, oh, you men, with your cocks — is that the "only" sound was the "hot whistle." Otherwise, there was a "hush." That's all very surreal, no? Why didn't the train make any noise? It emerged, because it wasn't a screaming cock blasting through a vagina tunnel, as happens in your (presumably) E.B. White-approved works of fiction. Why was the train silent, why were the whistles hot, why was the hush simmering, why was it noon, why were the whistles biscuit whistles, and why wasn't it the biscuit, rather than the whistle, that was hot?

"Should drowsy driving be prosecuted like drunken driving..."

"... or is nodding off at the wheel simply an accident – like hitting a patch of ice?"

"The anti-fragile is beyond the resilient or robust."

"The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better and better." On that theory:

1. Build cities that won’t just withstand super storms, but gain from them....

2. Let banks fail and abandon economic stabilization practices....

3. Eat like a caveman....

4. Workout like an Olympian. Sleep like a college kid....

5. Be a doer not a thinker....

The author... points to the idea that rich countries have high levels of education and literacy. Therefore, there’s the belief that education leads to wealth, when actually the opposite occurs—countries get rich, and then they get educated. Since studies show that education does not equal GDP, to be anti-fragile, first have skills, and then obtain formal education.

An example given is, “The merchant profession has lots of variance. A dentist has very little.” Although parents want a life of stability for their children, Taleb’s theory would put the odds of success on the merchant in an unpredictable world. “College insulates students from downsides,” he says, “but also prevents brilliance.”

In terms of theory, doing is convex and study is concave. Taleb asks, “Can you study chemistry for a formula for the perfect hummus?” In cooking you can get a big gain from an error (adding lemon or garlic) but you only find out by trial-and-error.

Taleb’s philosophy is also hopeful about our country's mediocre global math and science scores, which he believes, “don’t capture the effectiveness of our citizens on the world,” because we are a country of risk-takers and entrepreneurs.

Here's the book: "Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder," by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (who, according to the linked article is "a notorious jerk." Well, he's got his own way of talking, which I love. (Just bought the book, too.)

Darkmonth.

December is upon us. A string of 31 days in a row with just about 9 hours of sunlight up here in The North. Maybe where you are it's not as dark, but what are you doing to deal with the dark?

What I'm doing this year is adapting my sleeping hours so that I experience every bit of the light. Sunrise took place at 7:10 this morning, but the pre-dawn light arrives much earlier, and I was up at 5, absorbing every trace, even imagined glimmers and mere moonlight.

Last Thursday, after class, walking home at 5...



... I absorb fading twilight....



... over Lake Mendota.

Dolphins can sleep in one brain hemisphere at a time...

... and thereby remain alert continuously.

[A]s the experiment wore on -- three, four, five days straight -- their performance waned only slightly. In fact, the female dolphin was tested for 15 days straight with no apparent effect on performance.

I watched the debate again... and I didn't think Obama was that bad.

Last night — between sleeps — I found the debate in my iPhone and watched it straight through (except for the closing statements). Last week, watching the debate live, I did not think Obama was especially bad, and I was surprised when the liberal pundits, instead of providing the usual spin — ideas about why their candidate was better — all simultaneously collapsed into grief over how horrible Obama was. He was tired, confused, disengaged. It was as if he were not there at all.

And so the aftermath unfolded, with this talking point — which everyone had by the time the debate had ended — got repeated over and over. The New Yorker did a cover depicting the debate with Obama represented as an empty chair.

I watched again to see what I had missed. I was an undecided voter at the time, and to me — you can see it in my live-blogging — Obama seemed low-key and mellow, "rolling out policies, pretty wonkily." That last quote referred to both men. I said: "They're not really attacking each other."

Checking my observations on second viewing, looking to see what all the commentators claim to have seen, my experience was the same. Obama's performance was surely defensible. He didn't hem and haw or pause or look sleepy. He drifted from topic to topic too much and absurdly returned to schools too many times, but it seemed to me he had chosen a strategy, which was to be a decent, thoughtful, moderate guy, perhaps because it would appeal to women (like me) and to moderate undecideds (like me).

Why didn't the commentators who should have defended him defend him on that ground? Even if you think I'm wrong, we're talking about spin. What I'm saying is at least plausible spin, but we didn't hear it. Why? That's the puzzle before me, and I have the answer. There had to have been a coordinated decision to go with the talking point: Obama was terrible. He was tired, disengaged, unprepared. Shocking! But why would Obama's supporters coordinate to tell the story that way? What a weird thing to choose to put in our minds?

Here's why they did it. Romney was so much better than Obama. Romney was vigorous, vividly in command of the facts, principles of economics, free-market ideology. Like Obama, he had a strategy to appeal to moderates, and he jumped into the moderate ground and occupied it — stunningly — with modesty and charm. He radiated competence and readiness to work for us. There he stood, the brilliant candidate, who wants only to help us, knows how to help us, and deeply, passionately cares that we need help. Wow.

Don't let that be the story! Don't look at that! Look at pathetic woeful Obama. He was off his game. That's not good for Obama — as his drop in the polls shows — but it was better than the alternative: talking about how Romney dramatically topped the President — the President, who came to the debate with all the gravitas of the presidency and all the knowledge and understanding that he has through working as the President these last 4 years.

The meme The Bad Obama was — colluding pundits decided — preferable to The Great Romney.

If you try to catch up on sleep over the weekend...

... you will only make it worse.

Paraprosdokian.

"I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long."

That's a Mitch Hedburg joke, and an example of paraprosdokian, "a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part." It's usually done for comic effect, but not always and not in the example that got me reading about paraprosdokian, "He ain't heavy, he's my brother."

"He Ain't Heavy... He's My Brother," is the title of a song, which you probably know from the Hollies' 1969 recording. (The phrase itself seems to go back much further, perhaps to 1884.) I looked up "He Ain't Heavy... He's My Brother" because I couldn't remember who recorded it. (I was thinking The Moody Blues, for some reason.) And the subject came up because, over at the Isthmus forum, they're talking about what's happened to the notorious Wisconsin protester Segway Jeremy. There were reports that he was on his deathbed, and then some confusing contradictions, and somebody linked to this inane montage — "nice tribute" — which uses "He Ain't Heavy... He's My Brother" as the audio track.

It's mostly lefties over there in The Forum, though Meade likes to prod them with questions and jokes (which they either don't get or pretend not to get). Meade is skeptical of the beatification of Jeremy.

Trying to figure out what Moody Blues song I had confused with "He Ain't Heavy... He's My Brother," Meade came up with "Legend of a Mind" — which most people probably think is titled "Timothy Leary's Dead," that being the familiar lyric. Timothy Leary was not dead at the time, but there seems to be some LSD-influenced connection between getting high and being dead, as noted in this morning's post about The Beatles' "She Said She Said."

And now Meade's done a "Legend of a Mind" parody about the mystery of Segway Jeremy.

"Sleepwalking Idaho woman wakes up in Snake River twice..."

She'll be asleep, dreaming of drowning and then wake up to find herself in the river.

Another idea for delaying aging.

At last night's open thread, the Coal Café, our beloved commenter Lem got inspired to look for updates on that story from a couple weeks ago about the burned fire walkers:

I was looking for news of the bed of hot coal walkers we had fun with and how they might be "getting over it"... when Google gave me this..

Bed warmer... The term is also commonly used in the United Kingdom and Australia for a temporary sexual partner, or a relationship of necessity.

This is not to be confused with Shunamitism, the practice of sharing a bed, but not necessarily engaging in sexual relations, with a young maiden, in hope that the shared warmth and moisture would delay aging.

Clicking through on Shunamitism, I see that the idea was that "the heat and moisture of the young woman would transfer to the old man and revitalize him." The term, Shunamitism, goes back to King David, who had a young woman from Shunem (named Abishag) brought to his bed to keep him warm. 1Kings 1,1. And: "Among scientific physicians, both Thomas Sydenham (17th century) and Herman Boerhaave (18th century) prescribed shunamitism for their patients." That's quite a prescription, if you can get it.

ADDED: I'm imagining Shunamitism as a New Age front for a prostitution business.

"Mrs. Helen Althouse, the well-known mysterious Attica sleeper..."

"... had a narrow escaped from death from poisoning this week."

Two men visited Mrs. Althouse Thursday evening, and it is said one of them, while in the sick room, was seen to handle a cup of coffee and milk from which the patient drank occasionally.... The men were unknown to the family, but Mrs. Althouse seemed to know who they were, although she declined to talk about them. Vague talk about money and Mrs. Althouse's husband adds to the mystery. The men are said to be from Syracuse...."

An article published in the NYT on June 24, 1888. If it was mysterious at the time, it's even more mysterious now. How does one become "well-known" for being a "mysterious... sleeper"? Presumably — given that the men were said to be from Syracuse — Attica is Attica, New York... which you probably associate with the prison, the one with the riot and the Al Pacino... but the prison was not built until 1930.

ADDED: Several commenters are piecing together the story. Apparently, the woman's first name was not Helen but Emma. Edutcher found this old newspaper article, which includes some efforts at understanding the woman's condition (falling asleep for 25 days or more). One doctor said: "It is simply a condition of hysteria. The subjects are almost invariably women and of a particular temperament. There must be this temperament. I don to wish to be  understood as ascribing it to outside hypnotic influences." (The doctor was interested in hypnosis as a treatment for hysteria.)

Quaestor suggests Kleine-Levin syndrome — AKA "Sleeping Beauty Syndrome" — which has a Wikipedia page here. There doesn't seem to be much understanding of the cause or the treatment even today. But it's not true that the subjects are mostly women. They are 3 males to 1 female.

It's such an odd thing that we fall asleep and then wake up. We assume that will just happen. We've all had trouble sleeping, I assume, and when that happens we may observe the mystery of sleep. We seem to know how to do it but not how to do it. We don't so much worry that we won't know how to wake up. Outside of the unique problem of dying in one's sleep, we take it for granted that we will wake up. We have the knack. Who knows why?

"Couples may get health benefits simply from sleeping in the same bed, a burgeoning field of study is showing."

Key word: may. 

I'm thinking that the causation "may" go in the opposite direction: Couples are sleeping together because they are already healthy and compatible.



I love this:

In a 2010 study of 29 couples, women who had fewer negative interactions with their partners during the day slept better that night. For men, it was reversed: Better sleep led to fewer negative interactions with their partners the next day.

And:

[O]n the days women said they had more positive interactions with their partners and fewer negative ones, the men slept better at night, too. "Women tend to drive the emotional content of the relationships," says Dr. Troxel, who co-wrote the study. "Husbands may take up a stronger signal" from wives.

There seems to be a contradiction in there, but the conclusion is clear: Men need to get along with their wives.

Anecdote in "What Couples Want to Know But Are Too Shy to Ask" seemed much more interesting at first.

It's in the Wall Street Journal, which does sometimes have articles about sex:

About 10 years ago, Ms. Madsen started to feel unhappy and unfulfilled....

Ms. Madsen went to bed around 8:30, woke up at 5 and liked to have sex at night. Mr. Madsen went to bed at midnight, woke up at 7 and liked it in the morning. When his wife asked him to come to bed earlier, he explained that he was still working. "I acknowledged that we needed to schedule time to have sex more often, but realistically, not much changed," he says.

Some of Ms. Madsen's friends were having extramarital affairs and encouraged her to do the same. "I wanted to feel sexually alive again, too," she says. Instead, she decided to try sex therapy, and several therapists helped her explore her desires. She read erotic books....

It took six months, though, for Ms. Madsen to get up the nerve to talk to her husband about her realization....

Then I read "Pamela [is] an author and blogger about topics including female sexuality" and I wasn't interested in her story anymore. It's not that I'm against blogging (or against other bloggers). It's that I'm reading an article that seemed like it was on a general topic and now it looks like it was built on that anecdote and that anecdote was concocted as material to flesh out a blog. What's all this stuff doing on a blog? Of course, I can answer that question, but the story loses authenticity. What is this relationship, if it was blogged about? Actually, looking at the details of the story, it seems pretty screwy. Or is it banal? She goes to a sex therapist for 6 months before talking to her husband? And she's someone who writes about sex?

(And, by the way, if you like to go to bed at 8:30 — 8:30! — and your husband likes to stay up until midnight, you need to learn about first sleep/second sleep. The interval between the 2 sleeps is a traditional time for having sex.)

Book reviewer's weapon: the Kindle search.

Chez Amazon, a customer review — voted overwhelmingly "helpful" — complains about bad writing in the form of repetition and proves it via search tool. (The book is the huge lady-porn bestseller "Fifty Shades of Grey: Book One.")

According to my Kindle search function, characters roll their eyes 41 times, Ana bites her lip 35 times, Christian's lips "quirk up" 16 times, Christian "cocks his head to one side" 17 times, characters "purse" their lips 15 times, and characters raise their eyebrows a whopping 50 times. Add to that 80 references to Ana's anthropomorphic "subconscious" (which also rolls its eyes and purses its lips, by the way), 58 references to Ana's "inner goddess," and 92 repetitions of Ana saying some form of "oh crap" (which, depending on the severity of the circumstances, can be intensified to "holy crap," "double crap," or the ultimate "triple crap")....

*UPDATE*: Thanks to the many other perturbed readers who have shared their own choices of the most annoyingly overused phrases in this masterpiece. Following up on their suggestions with my ever-useful Kindle search function, I have discovered that Ana says "Jeez" 81 times and "oh my" 72 times. She "blushes" or "flushes" 125 times, including 13 that are "scarlet," 6 that are "crimson," and one that is "stars and stripes red." (I can't even imagine.) Ana "peeks up" at Christian 13 times, and there are 9 references to Christian's "hooded eyes" and 7 to his "long index finger." Christian's "mouth presses into a hard line" 10 times. Characters "murmur" 199 times and "whisper" 195 times (doesn't anyone just talk?), "clamber" on/in/out of things 21 times, and "smirk" 34 times. Finally, in a remarkable bit of symmetry, our hero and heroine exchange 124 "grins" and 124 "frowns"... which, by the way, seems an awful lot of frowning for a woman who experiences "intense," "body-shattering," "delicious," "violent," "all-consuming," "turbulent," "agonizing" and "exhausting" orgasms on just about every page.

I'm exhausted just reading about it. I found the Kindle search tool very useful in examining Obama's "Dreams From My Father" — here and here — in something of a different way, but, thinking about new searches that might prove fruitful, I got distracted by some searches that involved similar "creative writing" tics describing characters. For example, I noticed that people "nodded" 51 times — which is disconcertingly suggestive to those of us — I used to not be one — who nod off while reading.

Why sleep deprivation makes you fat.

"Unfortunately, we have caveman's hard-core wiring... and insufficient sleep in primitive times was read by the body: Danger, store fat."

If the rate of fatal accidents for children and teens has fallen 30% in the past 10 years...

... why has the death by suffocation rate for babies under 1 year old risen 51%?

It's also notable that the death by poisoning rate increased 91% among 15 to 19 year olds. 15 to 19? I'm guessing these unfortunates are ingesting substances voluntarily. Alcohol poisoning counts in this statistic, right?

Let's concentrate on the babies who don't make it past their first year. I thought suffocation precautions had stepped up. Didn't everyone switch to putting the baby to sleep on his back, and aren't there all these rules about the construction of cribs and the dangers of bed clothes and dangling cords? Is it "co-sleeping"?

The reasons bed sharing has increased are multifaceted. For some parents it is about bonding with their baby, and ease of breastfeeding; for some it is a periodic thing, because a child is sick or frightened, or because the parents just happen to fall asleep with the baby in their bed. It also seems to be cultural — the phenomenon is more prevalent among Asian and African-American households. And sometimes it is out of sheer necessity — the family can’t afford a crib....

The American Academy of Pediatrics has been cautioning against [co-sleeping] for years, warning that parents can roll on top of their infants during sleep, or that a pillow can cover a baby’s face or a blanket can get wrapped around the child’s neck, or the child can get wedged between the mattress and the wall...

Or is it murder, undetected?

"I think he showed me a cover of a magazine that said 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.'"

"It was a gun magazine. I just thought it was a fantastic, insane thing to say. A warm gun means you just shot something."

The reference, whether or not intermediately from the magazine, was one of many 1960s riffs on Charles M. Schulz's culturally popular saying, Happiness is a Warm Puppy, which began in the Peanuts comic strip and became a widely sold book.

We've all heard the Beatles song. (It's my longtime personal favorite.) But have you read "Happiness is a Warm Puppy"?

It's a slight book, writes Alan David Doane:

There are perhaps 40 or so concepts visited by Schulz over the course of its orange, pink, red and brown pages, and of course the reader will agree with some and wonder at others. "Happiness is sleeping in your own bed," is one that rings solidly true for me...

"Happiness is some black, orange, yellow, white and pink jelly beans, but no green ones," seems bizarre to me....

"Happiness is one thing to one person and another thing to another person," Schulz finishes up with, showing Linus and Lucy each enjoying their own, separate, things.