Sunday, August 19, 2007

Alternate sleep schedules

I was reading an article online regarding alternate sleep schedules, or more importantly, research being done on sleeping less and getting away with it. Time had one article on 'Dymaxion Sleep'. While the article was interesting, I was immediately put off by the name.

The thing is, anytime someone 'invents' a new word, it immediately becomes a distraction from the topic it was intended to describe. What made it even worse was that according to the article, this guy likes this word a lot: many of his inventions are titled 'Dymaxion' this or that. I guess this person cannot think of unique names and is limited to this one in particular.

Most fields of discovery, like biology or astronomy have rules regarding the naming of new things found. Often, it has to be according to rules (ie, must be in latin, broken down by genus, species, etc.) or is ultimately voted on by committee. This prevents things like Planet 'Retard Number 3' from being named or a new species of wild hoobie jaloobies from being discovered.This is a good thing. (As soon as I typed this, I realized that I better google for said planets and creatures, just to be sure.)

Anyway, those are my thoughts on that. The photo is one from a few weeks ago when we took the dog down to the beach. That was a good day, but I did learn that the stroller was not built for sand.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I love the picture but sleep dy... has to go!