Oliver Sacks put himself into his case studies – what was the cost?

Anyway sorry I didn't keep track of the pages I visited, but here are some of the search results I see now, indicating at least some time wasted exploring something that did not need to be explored if it had been clear that the story was not fully real:

- https://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/mrwatkin/isoc/twins....

- https://www.goertzel.org/dynapsyc/yamaguchi.htm

- https://www.pepijnvanerp.nl/articles/oliver-sackss-twins-and... (pretty good article!)

- https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/2005-42-01/S0273-0979-04-0... (mention by Granville!)

- https://blog.computationalcomplexity.org/2009/09/possibly-re...

- https://www.discovermagazine.com/oliver-sacks-and-the-amazin...

- https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/prime-numbers-mental-calcula...

BTW the same account of the twins (https://archive.is/MmogP) also has several paragraphs revealing major misunderstandings on the part of Sacks, e.g.:

> And yet they are called “calendar calculators”—and it has been inferred and accepted, on next to no grounds, that what is involved is not memory at all, but the use of an unconscious algorithm for calendar calculations. When one recollects how even Carl Friedrich Gauss, at once one of the greatest of mathematicians, and of calculators too, had the utmost difficulty in working out an algorithm for the date of Easter, it is scarcely credible that these twins, incapable of even the simplest arithmetical methods, could have inferred, worked out, and be using, such an algorithm.

[Needless to say, calculating the day of the week for a fixed date is a much easier and completely unrelated problem to that of Easter, “the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon (a mathematical approximation of the first astronomical full moon, on or after 21 March” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter ]

not necessarily - your eyelids aren't perfectly opaque

>also, circadian rhythms were proven to be unaffected even when living in a cave with no natural sunlight - so theres more to sleepiness than just light hitting your eyebaws

yeah, not disputing this. Blue light doesn't have to be the sole determinant to have an effect though

<https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/what-are-whipp...>

Context was a stage performance (not by Devo) roughly 20 years ago, referring to late 1970s / early 1980s youth culture. The song itself was released in 1980:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whip_It_(Devo_song)>

Long form journalism is not a common thing anymore, men (who dominate HN) are not enthusiastic readers anymore, and the cultural conversation that a dead-tree magazine represents is no longer amplified in mass media (as opposed to an era when David Frost and Dick Cavett had primetime shows on TV).

I don't disagree about the reverse snobbery, but IMO people being "not equal to the challenge" isn't the actual problem.

This was just a slog that I felt went nowhere and the points were buried in between rambling information about Sacks and his gay lifestyle, lovers and living in NYC and the gay lifestyle there at the time.

Not only was it not interesting, it was poorly written and hard to read. Sometimes writers just need to stick to the facts instead of trying to write another "The Phenomenology of Spirit" for a "middlebrow magazine".

Writers write, and editors edit, for an audience. HN is definitely not a perfect match for the New Yorker's intended audience.

But most readers of the New Yorker would choke on the kind of stuff that is perfectly aligned with HN's readership, so...

It's the equivalent of those people on Reddit or social media in general who make fun of three-star Michelin restaurants.

I get that sometimes you just want McDonald's, and I don't think there is a definition of better and worse in either of these contexts that doesn't require injecting some kind of taste. But nonetheless.

Pros and cons but often in the old days it was spun out to fill some volume the the printing press was set for like 400 pages in a book. I did Great Expectations at school which had about ten chapters with the main story and then about 60 chapters of irrelevant stuff because Dickens was paid weekly by the chapter.

I was once at a small dinner talk by a well-respected headache specialist, surrounded by a dozen neurologists. He asked, "How many here have chronic headaches?" Every hand went up except mine and the drug rep's.

It’s just quiet whispers in small conferences at the moment, but this is how the breaking of all spells begins. The momentum is & will continue to build, and probably quicker than many imagine (or will like!).