Unless acted upon by an external force, a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest.
Truer and more annoying words have never been written. One might wonder why I am writing a post at 5:00 AM. The answer is simple: my body is in motion. I know I would benefit physically and academically by having a regular sleep schedule, but it is just too hard. I do not become tired when I should, nor do I stop being tired when I should.
I say we free ourselves from this antiquated notion that our lives should be scheduled around the rotation of the Earth. Rather, let us schedule everything 2 hours later each day than the last. We would get some kind of weird week in which the cycle completes every 12 days as we currently know them. Every night I could stay awake 2 hours later than the night before, and every morning I could stay asleep 2 hours later than the morning before. I cannot even comprehend how amazing that would be.
But I suppose you people with “normal” sleep schedules would object to that. Fine, continue to torture me. Since I am still not remotely tired but must be at school by noon tomorrow, I shall attempt to bore myself to sleep with an academic paper.
The Geesh man cometh.
I don’t know if that quote is part of your contest, but I would indetify that as Newton’s First Law.
I particularly enjoyed your ongoing struggle with the oppressive parking administration at Lehigh. I have found that parking and driving in general is in fact “gay”. Now that I have passed 57,000 driving miles in 14 months I realized the more parking/highway space there is, the more drivers will coming crawling out of the woodwork. They just completed a new I-95 interchage in D.C. and already it is clogged. The 200 new spaces at Lehigh will be gone before you can get a spot to park in.
Regarding your recent insomnia, there must have been something in the air last night because I could not get to sleep either. Well gotta run! Keep up the website, I am enjoying it.
Comment by Bob G. — April 13, 2006 @ 6:48 am
Oh, I think I can count Newton. In any case, I speak not about “recent insomnia”. This is every day of my life, and my tendancy to remain at rest is just as powerful as my tendancy to remain in motion. To be clear, I wasn’t trying to fall asleep last night. I was just working and, because I did not get tired, had no idea the evening was getting as late as it did.
Comment by chadhogg — April 13, 2006 @ 3:52 pm
There is a problem with your proposed plan, and that is that the human body is conditioned to be tired when it is in darkness and awake when it’s light out. Now obviously you don’t notice this all the time especially since you probably spend most of your time during the night in well lit rooms but actually switching to that schedule would cause large amounts of trouble in the long run. For anecdotal evidence rent the movie Insomnia. In that movie the problem was extra light not extra dark but the concept is the same. Sadly those of us who are not “morning people” are doomed to never get our way.
Comment by Mykroft — April 19, 2006 @ 11:27 am
It also helps that almost everybody’s schedules line up. As for Bob’s comment about more driver’s coming out, that is exactly what happened in New York City. Look up Robert Moses for more information on that.
Comment by michaluk — April 20, 2006 @ 8:36 am
[...] day. (For those unaware, xkcd is by far the greatest webcomic ever devised.) In fact, I first wrote about it more than a year [...]
Pingback by The Blogg » The Earth Should Rotate Slower — September 24, 2007 @ 12:13 pm