Tag Archives: personal

personal, ramblings

Screwing Up the Time Zone

Apologies for the silence, excepting the usual regular posts. No excuses; I just plead life (ie. too much to do) getting in the way. But onward to today’s topic …

So today is one of the two days a year, when we bugger up our time zone – something I’ve written about before in 2008, 2009 and 2012 and probably elsewhere.

Yes, last night the UK switched to British Summer Time and put the clocks forward an hour.

Why? For no good reason that I can understand, and contrary to a lot of scientific research.

Basically what this change does is to mirror the effect of jet lag from flying east. And we know this is much more disruptive than flying west.

But it’s more than that. The disruptions to our circadian cycle can be profound, and possibly last for weeks. This should be worrying when nationally and globally we appear to be more sleep short, and with worse quality sleep, compared with pre-Covid (see, inter alia, here).

There’s a recent short article in The Conversation which summarises much of the evidence on the effects on our circadian cycle. The conclusion is:

These findings suggest the spring transition can have a ripple effect that lasts for weeks. It also suggests we are more finely tuned to the natural world than we might think.

Spring DST may seem like a simple one-hour shift, but for many, it’s much more than that.

We don’t need to keep changing the clocks. We’re not (yet) at war – which is where the clock change originated – and we have much of the technology to manage our working environments; extending, if necessary, to changing the hours we do work.

This whole charade is daft on just so many levels – see my earlier posts.

personal

This Month’s Two Tiny Changes

Each month during 2025 we’re offering two tiny changes which may help improve your life. This month …

  1. Reduce consumption of ultra-processed food. Read the ingredients. Everything is full of emulsifiers, flavourings, colourings, humectants, stabilisers, preservatives, modified starches and sweeteners. If you don’t know what it is, you probably don’t want to eat it.
  2. Follow the “two-minute rule”. If you can complete a task in less than two minutes, do it without delay.
personal

This Month’s Two Tiny Changes

Each month during 2025 we’re offering two tiny changes which may help improve your life. This month …

  1. Put your head under the bedcovers. Life can be overstimulating, but you can reset your brain in just 10-15 minutes by cutting out the world completely.
  2. Get hearing aids. Struggling to hear what’s being said? Get your hearing checked and if needed accept you need hearing aids. It’s so much easier for everyone, and safer, when you can hear well.
personal, science

Worming into Fame?

Well now here’s a turn up for the books. I’m in this week’s New Scientist. Each week in the Back Pages, they print a couple of questions sent in by (named) readers, and answers (or at least ideas of answers) from other readers to earlier questions. And this week they’ve printed a question I sent in a while ago.

The question is printed as:

Some worms regenerate when cut in half laterally, but what would happen if they were cut in half longitudinally?
Keith Marshall, London, UK

Hmmm … I’m not sure this is quite what I meant because “worms” is going to get interpreted as “earthworms” by too many people, especially as the online version has an image of earthworms. Maybe the question is appropriate for “earthworms” and not just the “flatworms” I had intended – I don’t know.

…

But space is limited, so the question as printed is a cut down version of the question I submitted:

There’s a recent report in Scientific American, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/regenerating-deep-sea-worms-harness-live-in-algae-as-they-split-into-three/, of acoel flatworms regenerating when cut in half laterally. The head grows a new tail, but the tail grows two heads and then divides. But what would happen if the worm was cut longitudinally, with each half containing some head and some tail? Would this be viable, or is the presence of (say) a brain a binary requirement?

Nonetheless I shall be very interested to see what the readers come up with over the next few weeks. I’ll try to remember to report back.