Ben Mann Monthly 2021.09

sleep study, half ironman, more doggie, asyncio,

Purpose

• An index for my memory

• A menu of topics for my next conversation with you

• A faster way to share what I’m excited about without the barrier of writing a complete blog entry on it

• A skimmable way to spread content I found valuable

Photos

Experiments and experiences

• Sleep study

  • Two years ago I complained to my primary care at Kaiser of poor sleep. He sent me home with a self-administered sleep study kit: a watch and a chest strap. Once complete, I received a "borderline" rating, and nothing more was done or suggested. Since then I had turbinate reduction surgery twice, tried a nostril stint, and got prescribed sleeping pills that make me feel groggy the next day almost regardless of dose. This month I drove to Martinez for an overnight sleep study in a special lab environment. They covered me in electrodes scalp to toes, shoved a breathing sensor up my nose, and told me they'd wake me up at midnight to put a CPAP on me. When I woke up at 5am the next day, they told me they were done. Before I put on the device, I had 13-19 hypopnea + apnea events per hour. Five or fewer is the normal limit, so I officially qualified as suffering from sleep apnea. Luckily, they said my blood oxygen levels never dropped below the healthy amount, but it seems likely that this is the cause of my poor sleep for the last few years. After attaching the CPAP, my hypopnea events dropped to 0! There's a machine shortage, but I should have one by end of next month. Afterwards, I talked to my dad, who happens to be a sleep apnea expert. We think I might have had something like this for a while, but it was probably exacerbated by my jaw surgery, in which they moved my lower jaw back by 3mm. That could have been all the breathing margin I had when sleeping on my back. Just a theory though.

• Half Ironman

  • Another entry in the "supposedly fun things I'll never do again" category, I joined this race because Armand asked me to. Expecting Diana to definitely not be interested, I said I'd do it if she did. She agreed, so we trained hard for almost 6 months. The race was cancelled due to the pandemic! Then we got free entry into this year's race. We hardly trained, suffered thoroughly, but succeeded in our primary goal of avoiding lasting injury. In the eight hours it took me to finish, I had plenty of time for reflection and observation. What a waste of resources! Imagine implementing routine flaring in humans, burning off excess energy by the gigajoule. If you showed me a random person, based on their age, apparent body mass index, equipment condition and quality, etc, my accuracy predicting their speed and endurance in the race would be roughly terrible. Some elderly overweight people passed me like I wasn't even moving, while I cruised by young athletic looking folks on all-carbon bikes. Two big mistakes: I bought a wetsuit the week before the race and got a gash on my neck that took two weeks to heal; I bought a bike on Craigslist that seemed ok, but the chain fell off about 10 times and the tube popped. No new gear was my mantra, but I didn't follow it. On the plus side, body glide was perfectly effective for avoiding chafe during the bike and run. Caffeine and calorie strategy worked well: eat enough that you're in a constant state of subtle nausea and subtly having to pee.

• asyncio

  • I'm well versed in the usual threads and processes concurrency techniques, but lately "lightweight" or "green" threads have become popular in a couple of popular languages. In Python, asyncio is now part of the standard library. We started using it for some infra at work, so I spent a day or two reading the docs and playing with it. Generally I'm impressed with the efficiency and usability, but combining asyncio or trio with generators is a terrible idea. My impression is that generators and asyncio are both ways to ask the interpreter to switch contexts; when you combine the two, they have a tendency to step on each others' toes in unpredictable, hard to debug ways. All the tools we're using to using for debugging like pdb and py-spy stop working. So if you're curious, give it a whirl, but avoid generators at all costs! Instead use something like streams (asyncio) or channels (trio). Beware the convoy effect. Reminder that if something seems really hard, you might be barking up the wrong tree.

• Extra doggie

  • Diana met a dog mom while walking Roong-ji and became fast friends, When she want to New York for 10 days, she left her half-rottweiler half-corgi, Nori, with us. The doggos became fast friends and played together constantly. Favorite game: seeing who could open their mouth wider while wrestling. Nori taught Roong-ji the joys of rubbing up against us to ask for petting, jumping up on the couch to ask for petting, and following perfectly when off leash. After Nori left both dogs fell into a deep depression, listlessly passing the days until they could see their star-crossed lover once more.

• Emotion rating {-3, 3}: mean .5, std 1

  • Highs: finally getting diagnosed with sleep apnea, finishing the ironman, catching up with old friends & meeting new ones (pandemic finally over??), starting to get back into a daily routine

  • Lows: still tired, ironman was hard, cancelled a family visit because of wildfire concerns, craigslist bike sucks

Life updates

• ⚡️ Laser #3 & 4

• 👀 Started reading Blindsight

• 🏢 Office opened

• 🏋️ Now weighing in at 174 lbs, close to all-time record of 180. Too much ice cream?

• 🏃 Ran a casual half marathon with Diana to close out her year goal

Content

• 5 point Likert ratings for “I would recommend this content to a friend”, sorted

• The Hidden Girl and Other Stories 4/5

  • Excellent collection of wide-ranging short stories from Ken Liu, who many only have heard of as the translator of the Three Body Problem

  • Favorites: empathy on the blockchain, ex-human AIs fighting for and against humanity's future, post-upload society

• When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number 3/5

  • Yea, don't share photos of your sensitive documents on social media. For that matter, before you take a picture of anything personal ever, think about what's in it! Is your computer screen showing? How about your mail? Put on that tin-foil hat for just a minute 😉

• Yes Man 3/5

  • Cute rom/com in which Jim Carey decides to say yes to pretty much everything and has a great time, meets new people, generally changes his life. Predictable message: "don't always say yes, but often say yes" still felt inspiring.

  • Surprisingly dated, wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test

• John Wick: Chapter 3 2/5

  • Exactly what you'd expect from a John Wick movie: very thin plot tying together excessive, highly choreographed action sequences. Kind of surprising this formula still works...

• What if...? 2/5

  • Animated Marvel series with the superheroes you already know but in alternate timelines. Given the premise, these were extremely uncreative and disappointing. 2/5 instead of 1 purely due to excellent character design and animation.

• Iron Cowboy 1/5

  • Just terrible, please avoid.