Eventually, Early Wraps Around To Late

Has anyone actually graphed Health, Wealth, and Wisdom vs Sleep Schedule?  


For the most part, with the possible exception of wisdom, it seems like all of them are pretty quantifiable metrics that should be able to be plotted.  Somebody just needs to get on that.  


I agree.  We've all heard the old-timey phrase, "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."  Many of us have also heard the Equally Profound Corollary "Early to rise and early to bed makes a man healthy, but socially dead." 

I'll wait here for a second while you watch the rest of the Wheel of Morality video...

So, I thought about this and got to thinking that the phrase was made during a time when the hours of the day were a slightly more rigid concept than they are today. 


There are still 24 hours in a day, dummy.  


Yes, but the activities during those hours are much more fluid than they used to be.  The world has gotten much smaller in the internets age, and people collaborate and communicate all over the world on a much more routine basis than when this phrase was coined.  Incidentally, the phrase is attributed to Benjamin Franklin and his book "Early Rising: A Natural, Social, and Religious Duty."  With people across multiple time zones living and working together much more regularly than they did back in Franklin's time, this makes the concept of "early" very different for every individual. 

Not only are people using different definitions of "early" when it comes to sleep patterns, but people's natural sleep cycles vary significantly, and the traditional concept of 8 hours of sleep per night is just as ambiguous.  On top of that, people of different ages require different amounts of sleep depending on their developmental needs, so early and early may not be best for them, medically. 

So, if we normalize the amount of sleep each person gets, is there a true correlation between start and stop times of sleep with respect to traditionally-defined standards of "early" and the resultant health, wealth, and wisdom of the test subject?  I'm not aware of any such studies being done.  Get on that, science! 

I Need A Siren

Snow tires are off, and war on Mother Nature has been declared!  

Once again, Jeremy is foolish enough to poke the Weather Bear.  The next great blizzard of 2017 should be just around the corner.  War Were Declared

I really don't think it's as bad as all that.  I believe I stated yesterday that it's Spring.  I also did a modicum of research. 

By that, of course, I mean I looked at the weather forecast for the next week, and didn't see any snow and at least one day of 70+degree temperatures.  Therefore, nuts to winter!  I took the snow tires off of my car!  I also had a free hour in which to do it, and that was quite possibly my last chance for a little while, so I took advantage of the opportunity.  It was quite honestly a nice day for it, as well. 

What I'm never quite fully prepared for is just how dirty the job is. 

Sure, this whole cleanliness thing was exacerbated by a minor injury I suffered at the hands of a plumbing project I had completed the day before.  So, as it turns out, when you have threading on a standard copper pipe, for example the kind of copper pipe that you screw a bathtub spout and diverter onto, those threads can be remarkably sharp and can cut through the skin of your thumb rather easily while you're applying teflon tape.  But that's beside the point entirely. 

So, I had a bandaid on my thumb while I'm changing the tires on my car, and that didn't really last all that long.  As soon as that bandaid slips a little bit and you get an entire winter's worth of road grime and brake dust underneath it, all of its adhesive properties go right by the wayside, and you spend more time trying to keep the bandaid on your thumb whlie spinning lug nuts than you do spinning the stupid lug nuts. 

All of that having been said, I completed my task, bum finger and all, and officially declared war on that bitter old crank, Mother Nature.  I've traded my gas mileage for a lack of traction in the snow...let's see what she does about that. 

If You Catch Them All, They Can't Fight Other People's

“But officer…I only broke into the bank vault to catch an Arcanine”  

Ladies and Gentlemen, Jeremy has fallen victim to the scourge that is Pokemon Go.  He may never be seen again.  We now present you the new Blag, "LIR Is In The Office"...

Yeah, no.  

So, on the off chance that you're living under a rock and don't have access to the internets (at which point, I would have to ask how you're reading this, but that's beside the point entirely), you're aware of the new game Pokemon Go.  It's based on the entertainment empire that is Pokemon, a series of fictional POKEt sized MONsters that you are canonically supposed to catch all of.  Then the idea is you force them to train and evolve for the purpose of fighting each other.  Why one of these monsters isn't named Ivan Drago, I may never know.  Then again, there are somewhere north of 800 Pokemon that have been created at this point, so there may very well be an Ivan Drago out there and I'm just not aware of it.  

Either way, the newest thing going is a mobile app which uses every expensive and quickly consumed aspect of your smart phone (ie: battery, GPS, and Data Plan) to alert you to nearby monsters so that you can point your phone's camera at it and take a picture of it...and subsequently catch...or something.  I'm honestly a little fuzzy about how the whole thing works since I've never been all that into Pokemon (if there was a Transformers version of this game back in the late 80's, I'd have been all the heck over it, believe me).  I've discussed the matter with some friends in order to gain a rudimentary understanding of the concept, and have even seen the game in action, in the form of somebody yelling at me because I was driving too fast so they couldn't catch the Pokemon that was apparently sitting on my dashboard.  I'm not making that up.  

The whole concept has gone unbelievably popular in an unbelievably small amount of time.  The game debuted just about a week ago now, and already people have blamed car accidents on the game, people have wandered out into traffic to catch a monster, people have been lured into muggings, and one person found a Dead Body while playing the game.  Good wholesome entertainment here. 

All of this made me start to think about potential locations for Pokemon, and how the locations are determined and controlled.  There exists the possibility that monsters are now located in areas normally off limits to the general public and that there will be some trespassing issues as a result.  Also, areas whose locations are even more strictly controlled (such as my work site which, like many, has digital badge locks on every entry door) may start to see problems with people trying to get in to hunt imaginary digital combatants.  As usual, my brain took things to an extreme, where Pokemon Go can be used as a criminal defense where a cornered bank robber can try to convince the police that he was only in the bank vault to catch a prized legendary Pokemon.  A quick Google search yielded the name Arcanine as a rare Pokemon, so I went with it.  

Happy catching! 

I Don't Want To Get Stepped On

Would giants appear to move quickly or slowly?  Discuss  

How can this possibly be relevant to anything?  

It's not, but it's something that has gone through my mind every now and again.  Especially when I see people running away from giants. 

Does that happen often? 

In movies and TV, yes.  

So, here's the thing.  You see it all the time.  Some movie or TV show, usually a cartoon, you see our hero running away from a giant.  The giant is huge and powerful, yes.  But, they're always remarkably slow.  You don't think about it, but it makes sense that moving something that huge would require a lot of effort, and wouldn't happen very quickly.  So, when our hero darts nimbly to the side and runs through the giants legs, making the giant look silly, you don't give it a second thought.  

However...

Picture yourself as an ant.  Now, look up at a human.  They would appear to be an impossibly large giant, hundreds of feet tall (to scale), with nearly unlimited power.  But, would they be moving slowly?  

If I want to step on an ant, there's roughly nothing that ant can do about it.  If I was a cartoon giant, the little ant would just run to the side as my foot was falling towards him, being able to escape by just reacting more quickly than I could due to my extreme size.  But, I'm not a cartoon giant, and my foot would seem to be moving impossibly fast to an ant, crushing the poor little guy with extreme prejudice before he can blink an eye.  Do ants have eyelids?  Probably not.  You get the idea.  

So, which is it?  And if there were real giants, would you be able to escape?  

Fortunately, you'll have plenty of time to think these things over, as I'm going to be away on business next week, so you're not going to see any updates here.  I know you're all sad, but I'll have an entire week's worth of stories, random thoughts, oxford commas, and witty observations to share with you when I get back.  Until then, please enjoy Youtube or something.  

Jeremy Is In The Office will be Out Of The Office starting Friday, May 27th, returning on monday, June 6th with all new adventures.  Everyone enjoy your Memorial Day and we'll see you when we get back from Europe.