Friday, January 27, 2012

The Truth About Sleep and Productivity

As a caring teacher, I couldn't help but try and encourage them to do things to help them be better, happier, healthier, and more productive students. I still can't assign them articles like this, but I hope that my students and whoever else happens across this blog will still take the time to think about this and help themselves out by getting enough sleep every night. It makes a HUGE difference for kids and teens, but also for adults. It's worth it!

The Truth About Sleep and Productivity
By Margaret Heffernan

To be honest, this wasn't really new information for me. But it still is good to be reminded of it and see research on it and an explanation of why it is true.

Some of the important excerpts from it:

  • Lose just one night's sleep and your cognitive capacity is roughly the same as being over the alcohol limit. 
  • Up to around 40 hours a week, we're all pretty productive but, after that, we become less able to deliver reliable, cost-effective work. 
  • After 24 hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of six percent in glucose reaching the brain. (That's why you crave donuts and candy.) 
  • But the loss isn't shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 percent to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we most need for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.

Joy of Cooking

Well, this isn't a book I've read, per se. But it is a book that I got recently and have been spending some time with. There was a groupon to get it at significantly less than it's standard listing price, and I figured that since I love cooking so much (see cooking blog), it would be good to have a classic like this on hand.

Joy of Cooking, 75th Edition
By Irma von Starkloff Rombauer, Marion Rombauer Becker, Ethan Becker

I have definitely used the internet much more than the couple of cookbooks I have, but I thought a standard like this should definitely have a place on my shelf. I've made a few cookie recipes, a pork shoulder roast, and a loaf of bread from it so far, and I do like it. I think the format is a bit different, what with the ingredients listed as you use them and amongst the direction text, but I'm adjusting to it. I'm excited to read more about different things and learn about food from it. It has pretty extensive descriptions at the beginning of each chapter about the food and how to identify different characteristics about it and work with it.

Excerpts from the book summary:
Seventy-five years ago, a St. Louis widow named Irma Rombauer took her life savings and self-published a book called The Joy of Cooking. Her daughter Marion tested recipes and made the illustrations, and they sold their mother-daughter project from Irma's apartment. 
Today, nine revisions later, the Joy of Cooking -- selected by The New York Public Library as one of the 150 most important and influential books of the twentieth century -- has taught tens of millions of people to cook, helped feed and delight millions beyond that, answered countless kitchen and food questions, and averted many a cooking crisis. 
It features a rediscovery of the witty, clear voices of Marion Becker and Irma Rombauer, whose first instructions to the cook were "stand facing the stove." 
JOY remains the greatest teaching cookbook ever written. Reference material gives cooks the precise information they need for success. New illustrations focus on techniques, including everything from knife skills to splitting cake layers, setting a table, and making tamales. This edition also brings back the encyclopedic chapter Know Your Ingredients. The chapter that novices and pros alike have consulted for over thirty years has been revised, expanded, and banded, making it a book within a book. Cooking Methods shows cooks how to braise, steam, roast, sautĂ©, and deep-fry effortlessly, while an all-new Nutrition chapter has the latest thinking on healthy eating -- as well as a large dose of common sense. 

Secret Lives of Great Artists

My mom passed this book on to me a while ago, and although it has taken me forever to read, it is really good and easy.

Secret Lives of Great Artists
Elizabeth Lunday

This is a pretty quirky book, and I've never read anything like it before. Basically, there are about 3-4 pages about each artist featured, in chronological life order, and each artist gets a brief little life and art bio. Unlike most other summaries of artists, this features crazy facts about the different artists, many of which I had no idea before. I think it's beyond just voyeuristic to get to peek into their closet of secrets (most well-known by societies at the time) because it often helps inform the viewing of their art better. Also, getting an understanding of the artist's real life can enhance our understanding not only of the person behind the art, but the society as a whole. And as Art History has always appealed to me as a way to better know a culture and time period, I think it's nice to get that extra glimpse and perspective. Plus, it's an entertaining book...

In the words of the write-up for the book on the publisher's site:


Here are outrageous and uncensored profiles of the world’s greatest artists, complete with hundreds of little-known, politically incorrect, and downright bizarre facts. 
Consider:
• Michelangelo had such repellant body odor that his assistants couldn’t stand working for him.
• Pablo Picasso did jail time for ripping off several statues from the Louvre.
• Gabriel Dante Rossetti’s favorite pet was a wombat that slept on his dining room table.
• Vincent van Gogh sometimes ate paint directly from the tube.
• Georgia O’Keeffe liked to paint in the nude.
• Salvador DalĂ­ concocted a perfume from dung to attract the attention of his future wife. 
With outrageous anecdotes about everyone from Leonardo (accused sodomist) to Caravaggio (convicted murderer) to Edward Hopper (alleged wife beater), Secret Lives of Great Artists is an art history lesson you’ll never forget!