Split sleeping

Who doesn’t know that awkward sleeping pattern where it seems we wake up every five minutes?

You wake with a start. The world around you is pitch black. Your partner is sleeping, provocatively peacefully. You reach for the alarm clock, then curse it. It’s 3am. Again. Why does this keep happening? Is it symptomatic of stress; a sign of something even more sinister? Or perhaps we’re worrying needlessly, manufacturing a “health crisis”?

British professor of circadian neuroscience, Russell Grant Foster, the Director of the Nuffield Laboratory of Ophthalmology and the Head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute (SCNi) found in that the whole reason to write a book.

Foster and his group are credited with key contributions to the discovery of the non-rod, non-cone, photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (pRGCs) in the mammalian retina which provide input to the circadian rhythm system. He has written and co-authored over a hundred scientific publications. He is the co-author with writer and broadcaster Leon Kreitzman of two popular science books on circadian rhythms, Rhythms of Life: The Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing and Seasons of Life: The Biological Rhythms That Enable Living Things to Thrive and Survive. He has also co-written a book titled Sleep: a Very Short Introduction; and Life Time: The New Science of the Body Clock.

“I wanted to say: here’s the science. Now stop worrying about it.”

According to him the human race has never been better set up for sleep. Soft beds, anti-allergy bedding, weighted and electric blankets abound. And yet, believes Foster,

“we’ve become so worried about our sleep – there’s now a real condition called sleep anxiety.”

Read more about it: The truth about ‘split sleeping’ – and what to do if you wake in the middle of the night Forget the mythical eight hours and sleep like our ancestors

Thought on the birthday of an encyclopaedia

I have always been interested in the “what, how and why” of things and wanted to find out more about certain things or events.

Stimulated by the subjects we had in our formation as dancers, we had a class for each subject: history of ballet (or theatrical dance), history of music, history of culture and history of costumes. Though the practical classes were the most important, I loved those courses and later in life I also went studying anthropology.

Whilst I was a dancer I was interested in what went on all over the world and about ballet or theatrical dance (musical, classical and contemporary ballet or dance) I collected dance magazines and newspaper cuttings which after some years became the basics for my Dance Archive, which I gave out of my hand after my serious car accident in 1987, to the Flemish Theatre Institute.

When I was made redundant and I had to go into retirement, I was forced to find another job to provide for my family. In addition to this paid work, I continued to work (unpaid) for my church community and focused on tackling different topics on several blogs.

But by getting older, I noticed that my brain was failing me and that I had to resort to encyclopaedias even more than before to verify facts and dates.

Encyclopaedia means a system or classification of the various branches of knowledge, and whether under the name of “dictionary” or “encyclopaedia” large numbers of reference works have been published and are luckily at my disposal.

A lot has changed since the first alphabetical encyclopaedia was written in English in a work of a London clergyman, John Harris (born about 1667, elected first secretary of the Royal Society on the 30th of November 1709, died on the 7th of September 1719), Lexicon technicum, or an universal English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, London, 1704, fol., 1220 pages, 4 plates, with many diagrams and figures printed in the text. Such alphabetical order makes it so handy to search for things.

Hannah Ashlyn (or Hanashlyn) Krynicki also looks at such works that function as a second brain for us. She writes:

The Encyclopaedia is basically like the internet. It is a slave that reminds me of random useless things and keeps track of all the details that I would otherwise forget.

What should I do with this epic battle scene that didn’t make the cut? Encyclopaedia. Where did I record the laws of succession for Agran? Encyclopaedia. How much older was Sardar than Elkay? Encyclopaedia. {Why I Wrote an Encyclopaedia (and Maybe You Should, Too)}

This 1921 advertisement for the Encyclopedia Americana suggests that other encyclopedias are as out-of-date as the locomotives of 90 years earlier.

Regarding the dance, I had a huge deck of cards with thousands of cards arranged alphabetically. Everything was easy to find in there. But now that all those files have been removed from the house and are accessible to the general public in a specialised library, I have to start my search again at home.

Because everything changes so quickly, some dictionaries and encyclopaedia had to be replaced (or better: supplemented) by more recent contemporary editions. Otherwise, we will very quickly become out of date and unable to keep up with all the new inventions and events.

For lots of writers it is a blessing that we now have the internet to do searches, but to save time we need still those dictionaries and encyclopaedias.

Krynicki her encyclopaedia saves her from having to re-do the same research over and over or scramble through a heap of sticky notes to find where she wrote my main character’s birth year.

Having all the information written down and organized in a place where I can easily find it allows me to focus on writing the actual novel. {How to Stay Organized as a Writer}

This way we, who want to write, need to have our own system next to the provision of printed reference works, dictionaries and encyclopaedia.

Please find out how I find my way in this world of so much printed and published material on the net. > 253 years ago the first edition of my favourite encyclopaedia was published

A cry in the dark by scientists and medics

It is a well-known fact that nature influences people. From all sites of the world, scientists cried out loud to become aware of what we are doing with Planet Earth. Mother Earth also cries, but so many do not want to hear nor see.
More than 200 medical journals from around the world have written an open letter demanding that governments stop climate change.

They believe that a warming planet is the biggest threat to world health. Sound advice or over-reacting? Leave your comments.

More than 230 medical journals have put climate change at the top of the world’s health agenda as the November COP26 climate conference in Glasgow approaches. They have published the biggest joint editorial in history to warn everyone that the greatest threat to public health is failure to keep the global temperature rise below 1.5°C. The signatories include The BMJ, the NEJM, The Lancet and numerous other top journals (with the notable exception of JAMA).

The terms of the editorial are apocalyptic:

“The science is unequivocal; a global increase of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average and the continued loss of biodiversity risk catastrophic harm to health that will be impossible to reverse.”

“Indeed,” they write, “no temperature rise is ‘safe’.”

The role of governments is fundamental, they say. “Governments must make fundamental changes to how our societies and economies are organised and how we live.” Everything has to change: “transport systems, cities, production and distribution of food, markets for financial investments, health systems, and much more”.

And it is going to be very expensive. “Many governments met the threat of the covid-19 pandemic with unprecedented funding. The environmental crisis demands a similar emergency response. Huge investment will be needed, beyond what is being considered or delivered anywhere in the world.”

Missing from the editorial are the nuts and bolts of how global temperatures will impact on health – or simply some guesstimates of how many people will die if the temperature rises 1.5°C.

Climate gadfly Bjorn Lomborg is sceptical of the claims in the letter. He points out that the number of climate-change related deaths has plummeted since 1920:

Over the past hundred years, annual climate-related deaths have declined by more than 96%. In the 1920s, the death count from climate-related disasters was 485,000 on average every year. In the last full decade, 2010-2019, the average was 18,362 dead per year, or 96.2% lower.

He concludes that “we are now much less vulnerable to climate impacts than at any time in the last 100 years. It is possible that climate change has made impacts worse over the last century … but resiliency from higher living standards has entirely swamped any potential climate impact.”

Chances are, this letter will have no impact whatsoever on climate change policy. But it might make people sicker. Experts recently warned of “an impending epidemic of mental health related disorders such as eco-anxiety, climate disaster-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and future-orientated despair.” Nothing makes people suffering from eco-anxiety more anxious than eco-doctors predicting an apocalypse.

Michael Cook  editor of BioEdge

Stephen Hawking who did not believe in a Creator God got a Church funeral

How can it be that the one who protested so much against faith in God would have loved to be receiving a funeral service in a church. The one everybody considered an atheist, brilliant and groundbreaking British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author, who died on Wednesday, March 14 at age 76, got a ‘Christian funeral’.

Shortly following the news of Mr. Hawking’s passing, Texas state representative Briscoe Cain tweeted the following:

“Stephen Hawking now knows the truth about how the universe was actually made. My condolences to his family.”

Was it now his family who tried to save ‘his soul’ and therefore wanted a church service?

The galaxy’s most unlikely celebrity, a brilliant mind trapped in a failing body, a global inspiration to disabled people, and so much more, found like every human being that life has an end. For him it came later than expected. He had a a relentless drive and unquenchable zest for life that has allowed him to achieve so much despite his huge physical challenges. As his daughter Lucy would often say, he was “enormously stubborn”.

Diagnosed with motor neurone disease in 1963 at the age of 21, he was told he’d have only two more years to live. Yet his mind managed to travel light years in the wake of that devastating diagnosis, to help turn cosmology from a fringe subject into perhaps the most compelling of all the sciences, in which he provided profound insights into gravity, space and time few have delivered since Einstein.

Through mutual college friends at a party the year before his devastating diagnosis he met Jane Wilde, a languages student, who he married in 1965. In 1974, aged only 32, he was elected to the Royal Society, the world’s oldest scientific academy. A few days after the birth of his daughter Lucy, in 1970, he had a “Eureka moment” leading up to his realisation that black holes are not so black. He discovered they would bleed off what is now called “Hawking radiation” and gradually evaporate, “to my great surprise”.
By the end of the 1970s, Hawkings had advanced to hold the Lucasian professorship of mathematics at Cambridge, once held by Newton.

In 2012 he reached perhaps his largest audience – at the opening ceremony of the London Paralympics. The following year he became $3m richer as one of the first winners of the Breakthrough prize to recognise theoretical work, in his case the discovery of Hawking Radiation from black holes – which would have earned him a Nobel prize if experimentally confirmed in his lifetime – and his deep contributions to quantum gravity and quantum aspects of the early universe.

The one who was supposed not to live longer than his 20ies got 76. though he was known as an atheist, he got a funeral service in Cambridge. Shortly after 2pm Hawking’s coffin was carried aloft into the church of St Mary the Great, a stone’s throw from Gonville and Caius college where he had been a fellow for more than half a century.

As befits a man who seemed as comfortable with celebrity as he was with the cerebral, Hawking’s funeral drew a starry crowd. The actors Eddie Redmayne – who played Hawking in The Theory of Everything, a film about his life – and Simon Russell Beale, a former student of Gonville and Caius, were in attendance. So, too, were the model Lily Cole and Queen guitarist Brian May.

Can it be that so many understood him wrong by believing he did not believe in God? When he was an atheist, were his children and his wife that too? But then why this charade in a church?

A ‘Seeker‘ probably thinks Hawkings was a believer in God and writes

Hawkings argued that God did not create the Universe.

It does not really matter. In my mind, heaven cannot wait for him. Seventy-Six is a long time that God gave him and there is plenty of room for him in heaven, I can imagine that he will have a grand time conversing with Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, both had faith and believer (sic) in God.

Crowds gathered as the funeral procession passed through the streets of Cambridge. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA

*
Please read:

Locals share their memories at Stephen Hawking’s funeral

The Shameful Mocking of Stephen Hawking

+++

Further related

1. Stephen Hawking has died at age 76.
2. The theory of Hawking comes to an end.
3. Stephen Hawking, Rest in Peace
4. I’m not a robot !
5. Stephen Hawking’s final paper predicts the end of the world
6. A star moves from one world to another!!
7. The Man With a ‘Worm’ Heart.
8. [Changmin IG] 180314 Changmin’s Post on the Passing of Theoretical Physicist Stephen Hawkings
9. The concept of time
10. Thank You Stephen Hawkings
11. to you, who had a theory for everything
12. I first met Stephen Hawking when we were students. His parties were legendary and he always insisted he wasn’t another Einstein
13. Heaven can’t wait for Hawkings
14. Stephen Hawking Quotes – A tribute to the man who has now disappeared into his own black hole.

 

One of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein died

Stephen William Hawking (1942 – 2018) was the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and author of A Brief History of Time which is an international bestseller. He was the Dennis Stanton Avery and Sally Tsui Wong-Avery Director of Research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics and Founder of the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at Cambridge, his other books for the general reader include A Briefer History of Time, the essay collection Black Holes and Baby Universe and The Universe in a Nutshell.

In 1963, Hawking contracted motor neurone disease and was given two years to live. Yet he went on to Cambridge to become a brilliant researcher and Professorial Fellow at Gonville and Caius College. From 1979 to 2009 he held the post of Lucasian Professor at Cambridge, the chair held by Isaac Newton in 1663. Professor Hawking received over a dozen honorary degrees and was awarded the CBE in 1982. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the US National Academy of Science. Stephen Hawking is regarded as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists since Einstein.

Please read > A brief history of Stephen Hawking: A legacy of paradox

+++

Related articles

1. Stephen Hawking (1942-2018)
2. R.I.P. Stephen Hawking ~ 1942 – 2018
3. R.I.P. Stephen Hawking (1942-2018) I woke today to the sad news of the death, at the age of 76, of theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking.
4. RIP, Dr. Stephen Hawking
5. # A beautiful mind,Stephen hawking.
6. The Sun Sets On Stephen HawkingHaiku About Stephen Hawking R.I.P.
7. Professor Stephen Hawking
8. In Memoriam: Stephen Hawking
9. Remembering Stephen Hawking, A Brilliant Human Being
10. Stephen Hawking We lost one of the greatest minds today.
11. Bon Voyage Stephen Hawking
12. Stephen Hawking “We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the universe. That makes us something very special.” –
13. Stephen Hawking- God who?My Top 10 Inspirational Stephen Hawking QuotesStephen Hawking Quotes – A tribute to the man who has now disappeared into his own black hole.
14. Just Realised…Stephen Hawking Died On 14 March 18 Is….
15. Honoring Stephen Hawking
16. In Memoriam: Stephen Hawking It is a heavy beyond leadened heart that has moved me to create this post. One of the brightest lights in our universe
17. A Brief Note on Stephen Hawking
18. “Out, out, brief candle:” An English Professor and Stephen Hawking
19. Stephen Hawking There is nothing left to say…
20. Stephen Hawking Dies Rest In Peace
21. When atheist Stephen Hawking died . . .
22. A Brief History of Stephen Hawking by Time
23. Stephen Hawking on Climate