On Sleep Deprivation

I apologize for the brief hiatus here on LGB. Seal, unfortunately, has insisted on finishing his thesis, and with the whole graduation thing coming up, he's got all these plans to move on to bigger and better things. As for myself, eh, I've had a couple of late nights getting work done. It's the sort of thing that can really take the wind out of one's blogging sails. Sleep deprivation is nothing new to most of us, however, and we're all familiar enough with the resulting haze and delirium to avoid such situations whenever possible.

Tony Wright, apparently a sleep researcher of some kind, lacks our aversion to the masochistic. He is currently attempting to break the world record for sleep deprivation. He's got a website and, if you can get it to work, even a webcam. Wright is trying to best the record of Randy Gardner, who, in 1964, at the age of 17, stayed awake for 264 hours, or 11 days. Gardner was himself trying to beat an earlier record, Peter Tripp's 8 day session in 1959. (In an aside maybe yet more familiar to some of our readers, Tripp's 'wakeathon' was apparently entirely fueled by Ritalin, and ended in psychotic hallucinations and paranoid delusions).

Anyway, consider the hiatus over, and good luck in all your insomniac endeavors.