TED notes: how sleep removes waste, and “a republic, if you can keep it”

Jeff Iliff: One more reason to get a good night’s sleep

  • why is sleep so restorative?
  • sleep is an elegant design for the brain’s waste removal
    • the circulatory system provides nutrients to every body cell
    • every cell creates waste; the lymphatic system removes this but there are no lymphatic cells in the brain
    • how does the brain clear its waste?
    • brain has cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) which removes waste
    • CSF moves along brain blood vessels
    • this only happens when sleeping
    • when the brain sleeps, brain cells shrink, which makes room for CSF to rush through brain and remove waste!
    • when awake, brain is busy, puts off waste removal process until sleep
  • what kinds of waste?
    • amyloid beta (AB) — Alzheimer’s is the accumulation of AB, but this doesn’t prove a lack of sleep is the cause
  • sleep literally “refreshes” the mind!

* * * * *

Lawrence Lessig: We the People, and the Republic we must reclaim

  • USA is an imaginary Lesterland — there’s a general election and a money (the Lester) election
    • in Lesterland only the funders get to vote
  • 0.26% gave $200 or more, 0.05% gave maximum <— the tiniest slice of 1%
  • 132 Americans gave 60% of all Super PAC $$$
  • Congress spends 30-70% of time raising money
    • they develop a “sixth sense” of what those funders want
    • not popular issues 1-10, but 11 to 1000
  • funders don’t do it for public but for PRIVATE interest
  • Republicans might want small government, but for example if they de-regulated Telecoms, response was (after Al Gore proposal): “if we de-regulate them, how in the hell are we going to raise money from them?”
  • an “economy of influence”, feeds on polarization
  • Henry David Thoreau: “there are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one striking at the root”
  • solution: single statute, for a citizen-funded election
    • more funders, smaller amounts, less time spent on fundraising
    • this would shrink K Street
    • political staffers, bureaucrats are a “farm league” for K Street
  • Ben Franklin: “A Republic, if you can keep it”

Here’s a growing list of TED notes (the page can take a few seconds to load).

Books I recently read: The True Believer, Darwin’s Cathedral, Battle Hymn, and more

here-is-new-york-eb-whiteHere’s an ongoing list of finished books.

The below are my favorites since the March update, sorted into the order of “if I only had one month to live where would I start”. I hope you like them, too!

  • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marques (excerpts)
  • Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (for the 2nd time; excerpt)
  • Here is New York by EB White
  • The True Believer by Eric Hoffer (summary)
  • Technology Matters by David Nye (for the 2nd time; here is my summary)
  • Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua (didn’t expect to like it, but I did!)
  • On Writing Well by William Zinsser (review)
  • Darwin’s Cathedral by David Sloan Wilson (summary)

“It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.” – EB White, Here is New York

October quotes: “In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you.” – Hindu saying

Alright Jack Donaghy, follow your heart: Hard Equations and Rational Thinking – Alec Baldwin as Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock

No rigid rules or systems for figuring out “what to do when” can work effectively for more than a few weeks before becoming obsolete – Cal Newport

“Pooh!” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw. “I just wanted to be sure of you.”

If you would like to know how to recognize a prophet, look to him who gives you the knowledge of your own heart. – Persian saying

In the first 30 years of your life, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your life, your habits make you. — Hindu saying that Steve Jobs was fond of (as read in Appletopia)

Old pond…
A frog leaps in
Water’s sound
-Matsuo Basho

Each man’s death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
—John Donne

I’m like my mother: I stereotype, it’s faster. — George Clooney, Up in the Air

Knowledge is limitless. Therefore, there is a minuscule difference between those who know a lot and those who know very little. — Leo Tolstoy

It is time to leave our comfortable rooms, every corner of which we know, and venture forth into eternity — Rilke

when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. — Why the lucky stiff

Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. ― Rainer Maria Rilke.

Make the body capable of doing many things. This will help you to perfect the mind and so to come to the intellectual love of God. – Spinoza, paraphrased by Huxley in The Island

As Balzac says, there goes another novel — Woody Allen in Annie Hall

…to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. — Victor Frankl

We have one party with two wings which represents 4% of the population — Gore Vidal

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books. All the rest is either topical trash or what some call Literature of Ideas, which very often is topical trash coming in huge blocks of plaster that are carefully transmitted from age to age until somebody comes along with a hammer and takes a good crack at Balzac, at Gorki, at Mann. — Vladimir Nabokov

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. — George Orwell

Here is an ongoing collection of my favorite quotes.

Success requires no apologies, the tech founders edition

It ought to be admitted that some performances are considered so essentially noble as to justify the sacrifice of everything else on their behalf. The man who loses his life in the defence of his country is not blamed if thereby his wife and children are left penniless. The man who is engaged in experiments with a view to some great scientific discovery or invention is not blamed afterwards for the poverty that he has made his family endure, provided that his efforts are crowned with ultimate success. If, however, he never succeeds in making the discovery or the invention that he was attempting, public opinion condemns him as a crank, which seems unfair, since no one in such an enterprise can be sure of success in advance. – Bertrand Russell

From The Conquest of Happiness.

TED notes: Kevin Kelly on the internet and Tom Chatfield on video games

Kevin Kelly, the next 5000 days of the web

  • the internet is only 5000 days old, what will the next 5000 days look like?
  • “it’s amazing, and we’re not amazed”
  • we’re basically creating one giant machine, and it’s the strongest/most reliable machine we’ve ever built
  • all our machines are portals into the one machine (every smartphone, every laptop, every IoT)
  • 3 changes: embodiment, re-structuring, co-dependence
    • copies have no value
    • attention is currency
  • humans are the machine’s extended senses
  • we’re linking data; first the connections were machine to machine, then page to page, now data to data
  • we shouldn’t need to port our friends to each social network, the web should just know
  • “to share will be to gain”
  • no bits will live outside the web — early version of software eating the world

* * * * *

Tom Chatfield: 7 ways video games engage the brain

  • it’s amazing that people spend $8B on virtual goods
  • Farmville has 70M players (talk is from 2010)
  • games provide rewards, both individual and collective
  • all about ambition + delight
  • in video games you can measure everything — big data
  • there’s always a “reward schedule”
  • 7 ways to use game lessons in real world
    1. have experience bars to measure progress
    2. set multiple long and short-term aims
    3. they reward effort — get credit for every bit of work/effort
    4. provide rapid, frequent, clear feedback
    5. have element of uncertainty — variable rewards, dopamine
    6. offer windows of enhanced attention
    7. add other people! social, cooperation

Here’s a running list of TED talks and notes (it’s a long page so it could take a few seconds to load).