Factory resetting my brain
Here in the US, we have something called daylight savings time. Every fall, we turn our clocks back an hour and every spring we move our clocks forwards an hour. It's a bit pointless and out-dated, but it's one of those US things that you just kinda get used to when you're here (like sales tax, dollar bills, and turning right on red). But for me, it's particularly problematic in one area:
It messes up my sleep schedule in extremely unpredictable ways that are hard to explain.
My normal sleep schedule is pretty interesting already, in that I only really sleep 6.5-7 hours a night. I go to bed at about 2-2:30AM and wake up somewhere around 8:30-9 (Usually whenever the sun rises and blasts my apartment with laser-like solar radiation). Well, what happens with daylight savings time is that I go to bed an hour later than normal that night and the sun rises an hour later that morning. So, I think my body attempts to compensate for that by just making everything bad. Since daylight savings time went into affect, I've been sleeping for roughly 3-4 hours. In the days following daylight savings, I've been waking up at 5AM-6AM and then feeling miserable throughout the day. Since I decided to mostly cut out caffeine about 3 years ago, this turns the misery up from around a 7.6 to a solid 11.
So, I've decided to go with the time-honored but not recommended practice known as a "factory reset". This is where instead of sleeping, you just stay up for two days and then go to bed at your normal time. In theory, it should set your sleep schedule back to normal. In practice, it usually works pretty well but you still feel like garbage for a day or so afterwards.
I was originally going to chronicle this journey, but at some point I became physically incapable of typing anything coherent and, upon further review after I had gotten some sleep, I realized everything I had written was an incoherent mess, so I decided to just say "Yeah it worked". No, I would not recommend it. Please do not attempt this at home, nor at anyone else's home, nor in a hotel, or anywhere that it's possible to sleep or not sleep. Basically, just don't do it. It involved a lot of bouncing between listening to extremely loud music as a way to keep myself from falling asleep at my desk and trying to do productive things like vacuuming, laundry, or cooking. No, I would not recommend cooking while you're super tired.
The final totals: Woke up at 5:45AM on Tuesday the 12th. Stayed awake for roughly 45 hours after going to bed at approximately 2:30AM on Thursday the 13th. I then woke up at 8:30AM after a sleep that felt better than anything I've felt in a very long time.
A Lunar Eclipse
With it being cloudy here during the 2024 Total Solar Eclipse, when I heard there was going to be a total lunar eclipse on March 13th I was overjoyed! Seriously, there's something incredibly awesome about these celestial events and I always want to be there to see them! I love space-related things, and this was no exception!
I decided to stay up a bit late that night in order to not only see the total lunar eclipse, but also attempt to capture it on camera. Totality hit around 2:36AM here, and I was ready with my camera. I got the following picture that I think is REALLY good!
To take the picture actually wasn't that much of a challenge, surprisingly. When shooting celestial objects at night, really the only challenge is getting the camera settings right and even that's actually pretty easy to do! I had the ISO set to 6400, with a 1 second exposure time. I was shooting on a tripod, but I couldn't find my remote shutter so I instead set the camera to use the 10 second self timer to wait for any shake of me hitting the shutter button to calm down. From there, I simply set the focus to infinity, zoomed all the way in, and took a few pictures!
The equipment I used also definitely played a decently large part in this. For the camera body I used a Canon Rebel T6i DSLR. The lens was a 70-200 f/2.8, and I also interposed a generic 2x EF-mount teleconverter between the lens and the body so I could get the extra focal length increase. I did also try my 75-300 f/4 lens with and without the teleconverter, but it didn't really work out all too well because I had to increase the exposure time. Increasing the exposure time lead to the camera capturing a ton of the local light pollution in the area, and the contrast between the moon and the sky was a lot lower to the point you couldn't see the stars anymore.
My only regret here is that I didn't shoot RAW and that the final images have a ton of artifacts even at the camera's lowest compression setting! I could've sworn that I had the camera set to shoot both a jpeg and a RAW, but when I went inside after totality had ended, I discovered that the camera was set to only output jpegs... Still a bit disappointed in myself on that one. Oh well, there's another total lunar eclipse in two years. Hope it's not cloudy next time!
A weird sign
I was recently driving to take a friend somewhere. I had to pass through a semi-rural area, and on the drive I noticed a metallic sign on the side of the road that said something along the lines of "No Nuclear Waste in Rochester" that was super, super faded and only kinda sorta visible. (I wish I would've stopped to take a picture of it, but it was on the side of the highway and it would've been awkward and dangerous to stop). Originally I thought it was due to the nearby nuclear power plant and training center, and that it was a form of protest related to it. But after further research, I was able to link that sign to something much more complex, and to a bit of cold war science and history that I apparently didn't know about!
The sign was apparently in reference to a project from the late 80s known as the "Superconducting Super Collider" (or SSC for short). This was a planned American particle accelerator in the late 80s, and apparently one of the proposed sites to build the SSC was just outside of Rochester where I live! The Rochester site was actually ruled out as a potential site due to local protest rather than due to practicality reasons!
After a bit of digging, I found a really good (and also super long and detailed) documentary by Youtuber BobbyBroccoli about the history of the SSC and how it failed to even be built. Check it out here! Just a warning, this documentary is around 3 hours long, and it will consume an entire evening because it just keeps getting even more interesting as it goes along! It covers US politics, physics, cold war history, and a ton more stuff that is super interesting on so many levels, all presented in a beautifully-executed style!
Song of the week
I'm not shy in admitting that the band OK Go is one of my favorites. On Friday this week, they released a new single! OK Go - Take Me with You
(Epilepsy warning: Their official "visualizer" that I've linked contains repeating patterns and potentially flashing visuals that may be triggering to those who have photosensitive epilepsy. If you're a Spotify subscriber, the audio-only version is available here).
That's all from me for now! Have a great week!