Em ơi! #319: Greek Prefixes Forever

1. For those interested, more on polyphasic sleep here and here.  The idea is that you sleep 20 minutes every four hours (e.g.) instead of 8 hours every 16 hours.  This is quite useful for those of us without enough time to accomplish things, but sadly, it doesn’t seem like it would work well in conjunction with my major hobby (i.e., marathon running, which can require being on one’s feet for 4+ hours).  I was not interested in it sufficiently during the last period of my life in which I could have implemented it (undergrad), so I’ve never tried it.  I really could have used the extra time this summer, but with the two-three week adjustment period being so painful, I couldn’t afford to undergo that and trust that my grades would stay up.  And since having more study/writing time was the whole point of the exercise, well…  My current system of going to bed at 22:00 (which usually means 22:45 or 23:00) and getting up at 6:00 is pretty tenable, but I don’t know that I could do it long-term.

It turns out, believe it or not, that running 5-7 miles per day (up to 16 on the weekend, like yesterday) and biking 17-18 miles per day (my normal commute) takes a lot of sleep to sustain.  Who knew?

2. This site is now accessible via http://pretensesoup.com.  Please update your bookmarks so that if I move to a new server, the transition will be smooth.

3. This comic is filed under RA786.L86 2010, for Public aspects of medicine — Public health.  Hygiene.  Preventative medicine — Personal health and hygiene — Sleep — General Works

4.  This comic was funnier when I began work on it two weeks ago.  But it is based on an actual conversation.

Em ơi! #318: My Vietnamese Class (year 3)

There were actually a couple of errors I figured out in the Vietnamese between the time I inked the damn thing and scanned  it.

Um.  But I’m getting much better.  This is about how I felt during the first two weeks of my course.  Week three, I actually started to be much better at listening comprehension.  This coming week is week four – we have our first final, and I’m providing myself with some fun new challenges.  We’ll see how it goes.

This is classified as:

PL4371.L86 2010

For (deep breath):

Languages of Eastern Asia, Africa, Oceania–Austroasiatic languages–Mon-Khmer (Mon-Anam) languages–Individual languages–Vietnamese. Annamese–General works

Oh man, that was complicated.  And I should have been in bed an hour and a half ago.

Fun fact: Vietnamese has the most speakers of any Austroasiatic language.  I didn’t know this – until recently I thought Vietnamese was Sino-Tibetan.  This means I know one Austroasiatic language, one Sino-Tibetan, one Semitic (sort of), one Romance, and one Germanic.  Hm.  Perhaps I should have taken Italian and Spanish instead of Hebrew and Chinese…