Theperpetualscholar - Wit Beyond Measure

Football stamp issued by Finland in 1952 as part of a sports set to commmemorate the Helsinki Olympics. The 1952 Olympic football Champions were Hungary who beat Yugoslavia 2-0 in the final.  Sweden defeated Germany 2-0 in the third place play-off to take the bronze medal.

Cool Tip

If you are like me and always need to be working on something to keep your anxiety under control, during this quarentine why not helping scientists by looking at pictures of some neat penguins? or even galaxies?  There’s this site call Zooniverse, where you can help on scientific projects by analyzing pictures and data!  Right now my favorite project has returned, called Penguin Watch (where yeah, you get to watch penguins, it’s amazing)

you basically have to analyse photos looking for penguins, their chicks, eggs or even predators and human interaction But there are lots of interesting projects you can help in areas such as biology, physics, history or even art: 

Oh and the best part, some institutions even accept it as volunteering/service hour requirements for graduation and scholarships!! It’s helping me a lot during this time, so I thought it was worth sharing 

The study of life. Biology in Daily Life. 1953.

reasons why i claim to learn latin:

it’s a beautiful language

its historical importance

the literature is brilliant and best enjoyed in its original language

reasons why i actually learn latin:

so when people ask me to say something in latin i can tell them a meme and claim it means something beautiful

so if i ever get a chance to go back in time, i can talk about dumb shit with people like cicero and mark antony

so i can communicate with my brethren, the demons from hell

Monks in masks perform during the Lamaist devil dance ceremony at Tsurpu Monastery, about 70 kilometers of Lhasa, capital of southwest China’s Tibet Autonomous Region, Feb. 23, 2009.

Lasers + Keyboards = All the best things!!! CODE ON. ⚡️⚡️⚡️

MIT Brings Riri Williams to Life in Spring Admissions Video

From the MIT Admissions blog:

Chris asked to meet with me last fall, in late September. We sat down in an office in MIT Admissions. “For the spring admissions video,” he said, “I basically want to make a two-minute trailer for the new Iron Man with Riri Williams.” This sentence, and the conversation that we had afterward, was what would eventually turn into the video you all saw posted on Tuesday… [+]

WΛW  | Twitter : Instagram : Facebook : SoundCloud

#WeAreWakanda

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

THIS BOOK is life changing. (Even Bill Gates thought so!) I learned so much, and not just scientific facts that satisfy my curiosity. My (seemingly defunct) sleep habits have been validated, and I’m now empowered with ways to drastically improve my physical, mental, and emotional health. Ever since finishing the book I’ve been enthusiastically telling others to please read it.

Some things I’ve personally learned:

Being a night owl, early bird, or somewhere in the middle is genetic. We literally can not change this “habit”, because it’s not a habit; it’s a biological function. About 40% of people are early birds, 30% are night owls, and 30% are in the middle. The theory as to why we’ve evolved this way is because as a social species, this natural ability to take turns keeping watch at night improves our survival as a whole. Thus we as a society need to rethink and rework the ways that our world favors early birds and shuns night owls.

All teenagers have a shift in circadian rhythm that is different than young children and adults. They literally can not naturally fall asleep until well past midnight, and thus should not be waken up until after their 8 hours of sleep. What parents–and society–expecting teens to go to bed by 10 pm and wake up by 6 or 7 am for school is like asking an adult to go to bed at 7 or 8 pm, and then wake up at 4 am. Horrible, right? And yes, that chronic sleep-deprivation does have real consequences, such as a link to increased physical and mental illness. 

The natural human sleep schedule is a continuous 7-8 hours at night, and a brief 30 - 60 min nap in the afternoon. Studies have shown that in cultures where this schedule has been suddenly disrupted (like a study in Greece), people with no history of cardiovascular disease suddenly showed a 37% increase in the chance of dying from heart disease (vs those who still maintained a mid-day napping schedule) over the 6-year study period. Yikes. 

Oh, btw, that whole observation in Western Europe about people sleeping in 2 segments in the night (and waking up in the middle to eat, socialize, etc) is not a biological thing, but rather, cultural. That is not how humans have evolved to sleep. 

I think we’re all kind of familiar with knowing that sleep is attached to remembering facts, but sleep is also necessary for learning new facts. Thus a good night’s rest is not just essential for doing well on tomorrow’s exam, but also for remembering tomorrow’s lecture in another class. To put it another way: you retain short-term memories in the hippocampus, but it has a storage limit (like a USB stick). Thus sleep helps move those memories into long-term storage so you can remember them, and by doing so, also frees up that space for new memories. 

Sleep is also essential for learning new motor skills. If you’re having trouble with say, playing a difficult piece on the piano, try again after a full night’s rest. When you’re sleeping, your brain is still actively working perfecting that sequence of piano keys you need to press. Thus the adage of “practice makes perfect” should be amended to “practice and sleep makes perfect”. 

Sleeping 6 hours/night for 10 days straight will cause a cognitive decline equivalent to staying up for 24 hours straight. And for those of us who keeps that exact same sleep schedule and think we’re “fine”, we really don’t realize how not fine we are because we think that’s our baseline normal. If you’ve ever wished to have more energy and be more productive, sleeping more may just be your magical wish-granting-genie.

Every hour in the US someone dies from a car accident caused by someone behind the wheel not getting enough sleep, due to the brain essentially “blacking out” to outside stimulus for a few seconds during a micro-sleep. As a perspective: a drunk driver is merely slow at reacting to say, slamming the brakes; a sleep-deprived driver going through a micro-sleep doesn’t react at all. 

Heart attacks across the US spike significantly the day following daylights savings when everyone loses an hour of sleep. The opposite is true when we gain back that hour in the fall: heart attacks drop the following day. And that’s just one piece of evidence that sleep supports a healthy heart. 

Sleeping 4 hours/night for just six nights increases your blood glucose levels so much you would be classified as pre-diabetic. 

It’s well known that alcohol can disrupt REM sleep. What was interesting is that alcohol-disrupted sleep can interfere with memory (and thus learning) even up to three nights later, even if you get 2 full nights of sleep before consuming alcohol. Therefore, if you have an exam on Monday, drinking on the Friday before will interfere with remembering everything you’ve studied the previous 2 days. 

Blue light, like those emitted from LED lightbulbs and the phone/tablet/computer screen you’re reading this from, stimulates our brain to wake-up and to stay awake. The evolutionary hypothesis for this is that we–and all land animals–evolved from marine life in the ocean, where the only visible light is blue, and therefore our brains recognize blue light as a cue to wake up. 

And that’s just a small fraction of the super interesting life-changing things I gained from this book. So if you found these tid-bits fascinating, I highly suggest checking it out!