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Yes, 202 Funny Star Wars Tees. I’m such a nerd for loving these

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I’ll be teaching a class I’m calling “Quick Bread” this Sunday at the home of the founder of the Institute for Urban Homesteading. It’s not about quickbreads but about making a good, regular loaf of bread as fast as possible.

There are all manner of very affordable one-off classes at IUH. Things like Seed Starting, Cheesemaking, Urban Berry Patch, Butchering, Raising Rabbits, Beekeeping… and the list goes on!

Check out the IUH calendar for the summer

About Sunday’s event from the newsletter:

Hello Lovely IUH newsletter recipients!
Please join me at my open house this coming Sunday

May 16 1-6pm
839 60th Street
Oakland
1 block west of MLK.

Some things to know:
This is an opportunity to see my private garden & urban farm, it is the place that I spend my time to relax, rejuvenate and relate with beings other than human. Traditionally my open houses were annual gatherings for my friends, but since I started the IUH, I have opened my home-space to the wider public. So please be aware than when you come, you are not visiting “The Institute of Urban Homesteading” but the home & garden of founder & director, Ruby Blume. It is rare that I have so many visitors at once so I ask your respect of the space and especially the plants and animals in it. All that said, I wish for you to feel welcome and at home!

If you can bring an offering of snacks, drinks, or a small donation, it will greatly enhance the event and create a culture of sharing. There will be homebrewed beer, lacto-fermented sodas (while they last), goat milk ice cream (perhaps just enough for everyone to have a spoonful, since it is baby goat season and much milk is going to the babies), fresh baked bread with homemade butter and a few other goodies available for enjoyment on a donation basis.

If you can help out with greeting, manning the goodie table and helping people the people flow, please let me know, I need help! If you have a guitar and would like to play some music under the apple tree, that would also be lovely!

And here is the schedule of events. Sadly the puppet show has been canceled but we still have great mini-workshops and ice cream making!

Mini Workshops (suggested donation $5-10, no one turned away)
1:30 pm Quick Bread with Lee Sonko (20 minute segments at 1:30 & 2:30, bread comes out at 3:30)
2pm Micro-Farming: Raising Quail for eggs & meat with K.Ruby Blume
3 pm Quick Bread with Lee Sonko (20 minutes segments at 3 & 4, bread comes out at 5pm)
3:30 Goat Milk Ice-Cream Making with Jeannie & Frankie

Tours will happen on an informal basis.
Self-guided tour available at the front gate.

Donations go to support our scholarship fund and, if there are enough funds to support a free event or two.
If you wish to make a larger donation, it is tax deductible, please inquire to have a letter sent to you for your tax purposes.
Look forward to seeing you!
Ruby

.

I subbed for a class in Physical Computing at San Francisco State University for Michael Shiloh for a few weeks. Michael came back to teach the class again and…

wanted you to know that today in class they said wonderful things about you, that you are a great teacher and were extremely helpful in moving their projects forward.

thanks for doing such a great job!

:-)

My neighbor Cindy is a big part of this event. It’s gonna be amazing! Go and get adobosized!

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It’s an epic battle to make the best adobo. Ever.

Traditional? Nouveau? Doesn’t matter. Whether it’s a much-loved, time-tested family recipe or a modern version transformed by a secret twist or two, the final test is in the taste.

Bragging rights and two sets of prizes (wooden spoon-and-fork sets for proud display on the winners’ kitchen walls) will be decided both by our panel of expert judges and by popular vote.

All attendees will have a chance to taste and vote on each version!

Only 4 more days to buy tickets to this epic battle!

Read more about the competitors below, including the name of their dishes and their inspiration in the kitchen.

Sign up! And there are a whole lot more Filipino Food events going on this weekend. Check them all out. But go to the Throwdown!

http://www.facebook.com/l/d4555;www.asianculinaryforum.org/ACF/Asian_Culinary_Forum_-_2010_Symposium_Adobo_Throwdown.html

A few months ago my second monitor broke, leaving me with just my 19″ monitor. I tried to fix the 17″ monitor but no success. I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with having just the one monitor. I was constantly losing my place because I’d have to switch windows in front of windows in front of windows… and then back again.

Yesterday I went to Best Buy to pick up a monitor. And darn it if they didn’t have a single non-widescreen monitor. They had a fabulous 23″ widescreen but such a thing wouldn’t fit on my desk. Huh, it used to be that CRTs wouldn’t fit on your desk depth-wise, now it’s a sheer matter of vertical square footage.

So I took the Best Buy salesman’s advice and looked on Craigslist. I found a guy selling a 19″ monitor for $30! An HPvs19e. I installed the thing today and ahhhhhhh! It’s like I can see again!

If you are planning on going to Maker Faire (you ARE going to Maker Faire, aren’t you?) you should get the discounted tickets they are offering. It’s $35 for both admission to Maker Faire and a subscription to Make Magazine. That’s like a crazy discount for the two since admission at the door will be $35. Make is the prettiest, most fun and helpful magazine I’ve seen for making things, really!

The discount ticket thing expires tonight, May 12th
http://www.makerfairetickets.com/

Maker Faire is Saturday May 22 10a-8p and Sunday May 23 10a-6p in San Mateo. I highly recommend going early on Saturday when all the Makers will be fresh. Many people start packing up by 5p on Sunday.

Check out the magazine. http://makezine.com/

No, I don’t work for Make, I’m just a huge fan.

PS, if you’d like to volunteer to help setup Maker Faire on Friday May 21st (and would like a free pass for the weekend!) email me back and I’ll hook you up with Binka at Make.

I’d love to get more time to do everything than other people. Here’s a recent discussion between a friend and I about polyphasic sleep. Darn him if he doesn’t make excellent arguments against the possibility of me (or most people) ever doing it.

————————————————–
From Lee
When we were together, I spoke to you about polyphasic sleeping. It was my impression that you believed polyphasic sleeping couldn’t be done because people just aren’t capable of doing it for more than a short period of time (IE like the breatharian argument – no one is a breatharian for more than a few weeks because they die).

Morgan Engel presented at the September 2009 5 Minutes of Fame “A Primer on Polyphasic Sleeping”.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2180170 25 minutes into the video. At 29:00 he says (paraphrased ) “I did it for 6 months and it was great. I taught myself many things with the extra time. I had to stop because my girlfriend thought it was weird”. But also… “it’s really hard to do because to have to live a regimented lifestyle.” That is a popular refrain I’ve seen from others.

If this page (http://trypolyphasic.com/map) is any indication, there are maybe 100-1000 people in the world who say they have successfully done polyphasic sleep.

There’s lots of resources and community around it… this is a good starting point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep

That said, I think a good simple summary would be:
Polyphasic sleep is certainly possible. However, it takes at least as much personal effort as going to a gym regularly. The awkward social aspects add to the difficulty.

Since I’ve never been able to make it to a gym on a regular basis despite trying and knowing that there are many personal benefits (having more energy, improved physical strength, needing less sleep), and I don’t feel a serious desire to attempt this, I’m not going to. At least not right now… ;-)

————————————————–
From my friend
Yeah, I should qualify that a little. I think *most* people can’t do it, but I’m not going to bet against outliers (given 5×10^9 people, lots of room under the tails of the Gaussian.) But I’d really like to see something more objective than self-reporting of “successful”
polyphasers. I think the physical is harder than the social (though the latter is a convenient excuse).

But who knows what’s “normal,” actually:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Slumber%27s+Unexplored+Landscape-a056458799

-J

————————————————–
From Lee
> But who knows what’s “normal,” actually:
> http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Slumber%27s+Unexplored+Landscape-a056458799

Wow. The big thing I got from that article was, “You think you know about sleep? You don’t know ANYTHING about sleep!” Wow. Thanks.

————————————————–

> I think the physical is harder than the social (though the latter is a
> convenient excuse).

Ummm. If the article you quoted had a summary, it would be something like, “While scientific documentation is tentative on the subject, clearly the parameters of sleep are wildly flexible and depend to a great extent on social context.” The social aspect is clearly not “a convenient excuse”, in fact it is a keystone.

There were several examples of polyphasic sleep in the article, though it’s interesting to note that no mention of people getting LESS sleep, just DIFFERENT sleep. Yeah, maybe I’m just trying to split hairs to my advantage; what I want to see is a way to lose less of my life to nonproductive sleep and what the article talks about is getting different sleep. Phoey, if only I could hack sleep to my advantage…

————————————————–

> But I’d really like to see something more objective than
> self-reporting of “successful” polyphasers.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a782431473~db=all

Dr. Claudio Stampi’s research
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myi2sRph69A http://www.sleepingschedules.com/understanding/researchers/stampi/ (in the video a test subject tried the Uberman sleep cycle for 2 months. After a while it started getting hard to wake him but once awake he worked almost at 100% ability and attitude. He was glad to have finished the experiment)

This is possibly telling…. about the same number added as removed from the list each month…
http://jorel314.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/october-and-november-2009-polyphasic-bloggers/
http://jorel314.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/september-2009-polyphasic-bloggers/
http://jorel314.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/august-2009-polyphasic-bloggers/
http://jorel314.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/july-2009-polyphasic-bloggers/

————————————————–
From my friend

> There were several examples of polyphasic sleep in the article, though
> it’s interesting to note that no mention of people getting LESS sleep,
> just DIFFERENT sleep.

Exactly. When = social, how much = biological.

> Yeah, maybe I’m just trying to split hairs to my advantage; what I
> want to see is a way to lose less of my life to nonproductive sleep
> and what the article talks about is getting different sleep. Phoey, if
> only I could hack sleep to my advantage…
>
> ————————————————–
>
>
>> But I’d really like to see something more objective than
>> self-reporting of “successful” polyphasers.
>
> http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a782431473~db=all

Thanks for data. Wow, N=99 might actually be statistically significant.

Still not buying this one, though: “prolonged sustained performance” = only the duration of the race, right? And a mean reduction of total sleep time of a little more than an hour? That’s not particularly rare or novel: we did it during SWARM crunch time, and of course naps will help when you are sleep-deprived for other reasons.

> Dr. Claudio Stampi’s research
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myi2sRph69A
> http://www.sleepingschedules.com/understanding/researchers/stampi/ (in
> the video a test subject tried the Uberman sleep cycle for 2 months.
> After a while it started getting hard to wake him but once awake he
> worked almost at 100% ability and attitude. He was glad to have
> finished the experiment)

This just tells me that the study author has skin in the game. The “Founder and Director of the Chronobiology Research Institute” needs to
have some kind of angle, and his looks like polyphasic sleep.

See http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195383427/ for more detail on institutional bias.

> This is possibly telling…. about the same number added as removed
> from the list each month…
> http://jorel314.wordpress.com/2009/12/07/october-and-november-2009-polyphasic-bloggers/
> http://jorel314.wordpress.com/2009/10/12/september-2009-polyphasic-bloggers/
> http://jorel314.wordpress.com/2009/09/10/august-2009-polyphasic-bloggers/
> http://jorel314.wordpress.com/2009/08/09/july-2009-polyphasic-bloggers/

I still don’t trust self-reporting. Look: if Lance Armstrong can have a resting pulse of 42 when average males are 70, I have no doubt that there are sleep ninjas that can make do with only a few hours. I just haven’t seen any convincing examples that normal chumps like us can “hack sleep” for any length of time while remaining alert, happy, and sane.

So bust out the modafinil and snort that orexin-A

————————————————–
From Lee
First, thanks for a stimulating conversation. :-)

You’ve made some excellent points.

Polyphasic sleep – Possible. Hard. Not fun.

“Possible” – SOME people gain SOME advantage over the course of a FEW months “Hard” – Takes time and training, detracting from the overall effect. Causes real social detriment “Not fun” – Over the course of months and years, people want to do what feels good. Putting desires like sleep and food on hold for long periods wears at a person.

I want to write and think more about the subject but there are only so many hours in a day. Heh, get it? ;-)

If you haven’t played Katamari Damacy, you’re missing a beautifully insane moment in gaming history.

Watch!

I heard this anecdote from a guy at Fire in the Valley.

This is about another friend who will I won’t name here. On a day when there is absolutely no wind he has  propane in a crevasse, the bottom of a little valley and lit it. Since propane is heavier than air, it kind of flows down the river and then he lights it. It doesn’t explode, instead it burns at the interface between the propane and the air. And it’s awesome.

Proposition 13 “Don’t reassess my property when doing and earthquake retrofit” Yes.

Proposition 14 “Only the top 2 candidates make it to the general election.” Hell no! It moves the most important parts of the election to the primary instead of the general election, reinforces the “2 party system” (it’s not, is a MULTI-party system) and kicks smaller parties to the curb.

Proposition 15 “Candidates for the Secretary of State can get free money for the election” No. Umm, why is this only for the Secretary of State position?

Proposition 16 “It takes a 2/3 majority to change to a municipal electric company”. No way. This is obviously PG&E’s secret bid to eliminate their municipal competition. Guys, cut it out ok?

Proposition 17 “Car insurance companies can offer continuous coverage discounts even if people change insurance companies.”  Yes. I like the part about discounts and there’s nothing forcing companies to charge surcharges for lapses in coverage. Free market = good.