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The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

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Re: The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

#51

Post by amonith »

romanovcode wrote: post #46
nly wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your weekday evening social life is non existent?

I would imagine everyone who is 35+ with family has no evening social life. Or am I missing something? Another question, at some point in your life - do you even want an evening social life?

This! It's not even about the family. I think it just gets boring and unnecessarily exhausting after 10+ years so it transforms to trips, mid-day visits at home and various shared hobbies (like you meet with your friends to go bouldering Saturday morning, idk).

Re: The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

#52

Post by peebeebee »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #29
rappatic wrote: post #2

It's so interesting to me that fundamental ways of life like this can go nearly undocumented save passing references. We know a lot more about the annals of Greek history, for example, because that's what was written down. Ekirch took years to rediscover all these references to biphasic sleep because it was so fundamentally normal that historic writers never thought to focus on it. Now, with our obsessive encyclopedi…

> our obsessive encyclopedic documentation ...will bitrot away in 50 years. In 1000, future historians will probably view our period as a curious dark age. (Where are all the books and the monuments??)

You really think this will be an issue? Storage just keeps growing? The entire history of internet will probably be stored in millions of copies on some rice-sized containers somewhere. :D

Re: The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

#53

Post by CalRobert »

elliotec wrote: post #21
CalRobert wrote: post #5

When my wife was pregnant with our first kid I did this for a while. She was exhausted and went to bed early and so did I. Bed at 8, up 1-3, bed 3-7. I got a ton done in those two hours. I remember looking for an e ink display to use with my computer so I could do it by candlelight, to no avail

Wait tell us more about use your computer by candlelight… do you mean like red shift? Most OSes have this built in and there are 3rd party apps that can do candlelight settings

I never found a solution. I ended up using a very red-shifted screen set to a very low light but what I really wanted was e-ink, like a Kindle for instance. The only options I came across were impractically expensive, though. https://shop.dasung.com/products/dasung-25-3-e-ink-monitor-p... for instance, and this was years ago when there were fewer options.

Re: The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

#54

Post by tnel77 »

amonith wrote: post #47
nly wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your weekday evening social life is non existent?

Not OP, but most of the people I know above 30 don't "go out" on weekday evenings nor regular weekends tbh. Even people without kids. Various trips and meets in friends' houses during the day (usually Sunday) is the main form of socializing.

For the most part, going out just sounds awful. The parking, the people, the price for mediocre drinks. I’m good lol.

Re: The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

#56

Post by jmopp »

lmm wrote: post #3

Has this evidence been examined sceptically? I've heard this theory a few times, but it always sounds like one person's obsession, and I struggle to credit it.

I do wonder if the window for observing it empirically has passed. Pretty much everywhere in the world has access to artificial light — even if it is in a cheap, low-tech form like a hand-cranked LED torch. And those people who remain uncontacted have made it clear that they do not wish to be contacted.

Re: The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

#57

Post by vladvasiliu »

amonith wrote: post #47
nly wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your weekday evening social life is non existent?

Not OP, but most of the people I know above 30 don't "go out" on weekday evenings nor regular weekends tbh. Even people without kids. Various trips and meets in friends' houses during the day (usually Sunday) is the main form of socializing.

I'm in the "over 30 without kids" category. I used to do the go to bed / wake up early thing. Used to be great for the same reasons OP mentions.

Then I found there actually were things I wanted to do on weekdays. These tend to happen later in the evening, like 8-9 PM. Think taking up some sport / dance / other kind of class. Clubs usually meet in the evenings, too.

In my neck of the woods, people usually start work around 9:30 and get off around 6:30 - 7. You basically need one hour to get around town, so you can't reasonably hold an event earlier than 8 and expect any amount of people to show up.

Re: The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

#58

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #49
otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our obsessive encyclopedic documentation ...will bitrot away in 50 years. In 1000, future historians will probably view our period as a curious dark age. (Where are all the books and the monuments??)

The government-run national libraries (think Library of Congress and similar) at least have the mandate for long-term archival. Bitrot isn't as much a concern any more - we have data formats worked out these days, with well defined specifications and open standards (PDF/A), so basically as long as computers keep operating on the fundamental principle of bits and bytes, our documents will always be able to be read, an…

> The dark era IMHO more concerns pre-MS Windows computing and everything related to gaming.

It's much worse today, because most of the so-called "archives" are actually stored somewhere "in the cloud", and are one serious economic crisis away from being deleted at the press of a button. (Also an even bigger problem is all the proprietary or unmaintained data formats. We already have issues maintaining this stack of bullshit today, and only a couple decades have passed. Maintaining this for centuries is out of the question.)

Re: The medieval habit of 'two sleeps' (2022)

#59

Post by buserror »

nly wrote: post #44
buserror wrote: post #28

I do that a lot these days. I went to bed around 8:30pm, woke at 4am... It's 6:50 now and I've done a lot of work! It's nice, quiet, I just really crack on. I'm waiting for 8am, then feed + walk the dogs, then I'll go back to bed for 1h or a bit more (tops), and it'll still be early when I wake up again. Most of my colleagues will show up around 10 with bleary eyes while I've done most of the stuff I wanted to do alr…

So your weekday evening social life is non existent?

Pretty much so. Mind you I did a lot (too much) in my 20's and 30's, both amazingly good, and amazingly bad, which means going out at in my little off-the-city town is boring as hell anyway.

I'm much more excited about able to be able to go fishing at 4am in the summer, NOW we're talking ;-)

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