Da Vinci Alarm Clocks put your sleep schedule in a binary state

I like to live a binary life. At any given moment, I am either inhaling or exhaling. I am either blinking or not blinking. Talking or not talking. Writing or not writing. Confusion enters when I am either excreting or eating, because sometimes I like to do both, but that's simply a bad habit. Whether is possible for me to not exist is is a matter for philosophers and semanticists, but theoretically, I can either exist or not exist. It's a semblance of micro-structure in an otherwise chaotic life.

I rather like the purity of this Da Vinci Alarm clock concept (so-called because it allows you to easily follow the sleep schedule of Master Leonardo: three and a half hours awake, thirty minutes asleep). It's an externalization of life's inherent binary symmetry of somnolence: you can either be asleep or be awake. There's no in-betweens.

Well, until you do a week of 21 hour days. Then you become confronted with an inherent contradiction: you will be a zombie, neither asleep nor awake, neither alive nor dead.

Da Vinci Alarm Clock [Yanko Design]

Discussion

Take a look at this

#1 posted by dculberson , September 18, 2008 8:00 AM

I tried sleeping twice a day for three hours each time, based on the "sleep cycle" idea that you get your slow wave sleep within the first three hours. It actually worked pretty well, making me feel more rested and energetic, but it's a pain in the ass to schedule around. I gave it up after about a week.

Relation to this post? Oh, right, the Da Vinci thing.

#2 posted by Anonymous , September 18, 2008 8:19 AM

This seems relatively useless and not even very attractive. Any device with an multi alarms including most cell phones and wrist watches should be configurable to do this for you.

A much more difficult and interesting thing would be an alarm which helps you transition from a "normal" 8 hour sleep schedule to this one. I tried moving to this schedule directly and it is very difficult. But there are a number of intermediate patterns between 16/8 and 3.5/0.5 that work and help you transition.

It would be particularly useful given the difficulty of _living_ with a 3.5/0.5 schedule and the fact that just to exist in society you might need to transition on and off somewhat regularly.

#3 posted by The Lizardman