About three weeks ago I finally received my Wakemate. A part of the burgeoning quantified self movement and yet another example of a product made possible by the last half-decade’s debut of cheap silicon accelerometers, it’s exactly the kind of thing you’d expect me to buy.

Wakemate is built on three ideas borrowed from sleep research. First: we experience a recurring cycle of sleep states during a night’s rest. Pretty much everyone’s aware of this, if only because it was part of an episode of Star Trek. Over the course of a night you spend progressively less time in a deep sleep state, and more in light states where dreaming occurs.

Second: these sleep states are measurable using a technique called actigraphy. As this paper explains, during sleep the motion of your non-dominant wrist seems to correlate pretty well with more precise measures of sleep state. You can get a decent measurement of sleep state just by tracking what your left hand is up to.

Third: your level of grogginess upon waking varies depending on which part of your sleep cycle you’re in when your alarm goes off. This is known as sleep inertia, and the WM’s creators have a few paper excerpts about it here.

The Wakemate folks took these three ideas and combined them — in a way sure to elicit much (potentially justified) tongue-clucking from sleep researchers — into a product. Put on a wristband, load a program on your phone, and set a twenty-minute window during which you’d like to wake up. The device keeps watch during that time period for moments when you seem to be in a light sleep state, doing its best to find one and rouse you in a way that minimizes grogginess (if it doesn’t find one, it’ll wake you up at the end of the time window). The idea’s so clever that I barely care whether it works.

Snakebit

I first heard about all of this from my colleague Kevin back in February of last year. It sounded like an interesting idea, and for just $5 you could reserve your place in line for the device (it ultimately cost me $50; it’s now selling for $60). Wakemate is a Y Combinator startup, and its founders went through a semi-hilarious series of problems as they tried to ship their first product. Bad wristbands. Delayed electronics. Problems with Apple certification. The thing finally arrived, months late; the next day I got an email warning me that the included power adapter might burn my house down. And for the first week or so, the app only woke me up at the end of the 20-minute window — at the fail-safe point — seemingly because it wasn’t able to communicate with the wristband (I had to reboot the latter unit multiple times to get the night’s data downloaded). With the exception of the charger (any USB adapter will do), all of these problems have been fixed. But it was a bumpy ride. Kevin still hasn’t received his.

Surprisingly Plausible

Here’s the source data from last Thursday’s sleep, and Wakemate’s classification of that data into sleep states.

This seems kind of reasonable! Check out the huge spike at the beginning of the accelerometer time series. That’s when I was still awake and reading. Over the course of the night I went through about four cycles, spending less time in deep sleep each iteration. You can see four clusters of movement data, too. This isn’t the cleanest night’s worth of data — I didn’t feel like clicking through all of them to find the tidiest — but as I’ve looked at these over the past few weeks, I haven’t yet seen any patterns that seemed implausible either in terms of the reported sleep cycle pattern or its correlation to the underlying movement data.

Does It Work?

At first I was a bit disappointed: the central gimmick of the WM didn’t seem to be working. If anything, I seemed to be groggier than usual when I woke up. But as I already mentioned, I eventually realized that the alarm was only going off at the end of the twenty minute window. I emailed WM’s extremely responsive support line and was told that the issue had already been fixed in software and was just waiting on Apple certification. Happily enough, I was able to download the update by that evening. And although the days since have seen a suspicious number of wakings during the first minute of the alarm period, I’m actually surprised to report that it might be working. I’m still plenty groggy during the minute or two when I futz with the alarm (and report my level of alertness using the software slider). But I’ll be damned if I don’t seem to snap out of it sooner than usual.

On the other hand, this may not have anything to do with the timing of the alarm: it might just be that I’m getting more sleep. Which brings me to the best thing about Wakemate.

Data Porn

I was most excited for the alarm functionality, but the analytics package that WM provides has proven to be its most compelling feature. Your nightly sleep data is uploaded each morning and placed into an attractive interface. You can easily find information about time spent asleep, how long it took you to fall asleep, and how many times you woke up in the night. It’ll also show you how your recent performance in these areas compares to your career average, and to that of the entire population of WM users.

You can also tag each night’s sleep when you set the alarm — did you read before bed? go to the gym? drink alcohol? — and perform comparisons between tags.

Perhaps less helpfully, WM provides a “Sleep Score”. I can’t find any detailed information about how this is calculated — I suspect that this opacity is intentional, both to allow the formula to be tweaked and to keep users from trying to game it. And while it’s sort of amusing to have competitive sleeping leaderboards (how does Justin Sweetman sleep so virtuosically?), the scores seem to me to be basically bullshit. I tend to score highest when I’ve gone to bed late and with alcohol in my system; as you might guess, my scores don’t correlate very well with how rested I feel. You seem to be penalized for “low quality” sleep, even if it means more sleep — in other words, collapsing from exhaustion and sleeping like a corpse for three hours might earn you a higher sleep score than getting a normal night’s rest.

Since I’m on a bit of an Excel kick, here’s a plot of my sleep scores versus minutes asleep (WM recently added the ability to download your data as a CSV, which is nice of them).

Admittedly, I don’t yet really have enough data for that trend line to be meaningful. But I have my suspicions.

Still, I’ve actually found the product to be worthwhile, not just as an interesting exercise in navel-gazing. For instance, it turns out there’s a reason my Sundays aren’t very productive:

I honestly had no idea I was getting so little rest on weekends.

In general, I’d say that it’s been surprising and useful to have the amount of time I spend asleep quantified. I’ve always needed a relatively large amount of rest in order to function. I have nothing but admiration (and jealousy) for those of you who get five hours a night, hop out of bed, write a thousand words and run a half marathon. But I just can’t do it. At the absolute depths of puberty/hibernation my body, when left to its own devices, was helping itself to twelve or thirteen hours of sleep a night. That’s thankfully not necessary any more, but I’m certainly not at my best when I get less than eight hours.

Wakemate has actually been useful for telling me when I’m not taking very good care of myself, and has provided a small but real incentive for paying attention to when I should call it a night. Admittedly, you can see that incentive diminishing in the above graph as the novelty of the WM wears off. Still, I’ve found the information useful.

Anyway, if it sounds appealing, you might want to give it a try — although until I’m more convinced of the alarm’s utility, I’d suggest considering the FitBit as well. I haven’t tried FB, but in addition to sleep analysis it quantifies your activity during the day, which might be interesting. It hasn’t got any anti-sleep-inertia alarm functionality, but perhaps that’ll be added later.

I’m waiting for Windows to finish installing some IE8 debugging software, so perhaps now is a good time to take a breath, open WordPress and note that I am not dead.  I’m just busy.  We’re perilously close to a major launch on the Subsidyscope project.  At the same time, Clay’s taken a month off to get married (see also: awww), leaving me to mind the store at Sunlight in his absence.  It’s flattering and exciting, but hasn’t left a lot of time for bloggy diversions.

But to catch you up briefly: I bought a netbook; Emily and I remain enthralled by Avatar; Halloween preparation is picking up speed*; I am in perpetually-worse shape; Emily’s cat is officially back in Philadelphia as of this morning, and her brother is in DC; and I still can’t reliably listen to the football game from the bus.

The next month is going to include a bunch of travel (Boston! Vermont!) and hopefully a slight becalming of my work life.  And if that happens, perhaps I’ll write more here!  I do miss it, and appreciate those of you who have bothered to keep my humble blog in your RSS reader.

* coffin construction is going well, I have multiple agents investigating sources of animal skulls, and when I leave to pick up lunch in a moment I’m going to see if the corner florist can’t be cajoled into giving me a good rate on dead flowers

Emily and I have been building a coffin.  This is nominally for Halloween, though I realized partway through the process that “he was buried in a novelty coffin he constructed himself” would make a pretty awesome kicker for an obituary.  Of course, that assumes that in the future people still get buried in coffins instead of being cremated to reduce A) crowding on the space-ark or B) the odds of reanimation.  Frankly, that seems unlikely.  But while the coffin’s ultimate fate remains uncertain, it should at least be a workable bar come October 31st.

The process is going pretty well.  We’re using these plans, and while the quoted $25 cost is pretty optimistic, it is relatively affordable as these things go.  At this point we’ve got the boards completely cut; we could assemble it immediately if we wanted.

First, though, I’d like to distress the wood.  There are a lot of techniques for doing this, and we’ve tried several of them on scraps left from the cutting.  I’d like to produce an impossibly-weathered sort of gray plank.  The internet says the lye in oven cleaner ought to manage this, but so far it seems to have done nothing — maybe we have the wrong oven cleaner, or perhaps the board’s pressure-treated nature is interfering with the deadly chemical reaction.  Emily found a method involving vinegar and steel wool, and claims that it shows promise (I remain skeptical).

The only methods that have proven to work are more physical in nature.  First, the wire brush: using a drill and an appropriate abrasive wheel allows one to scrape away the weaker portions of  the wood’s surface, leaving raised ridges and producing a more fibrous, soft sort of finish.  It looks good.

The other method is to char the surface with a propane torch.  It doesn’t produce the gray color I wanted, but the effect is sort of cool, particularly when applied after the wire brush.

Both techniques are fairly labor-intensive, though (particularly the brushing when using only a hand drill).  If anyone has access to an angle grinder or feels like joining me in my garage for some beer, fire and power tools, drop me a line.

I’m back from the beach, and already rapidly spending down the sleep surplus I accrued there. It’s a little bit strange being back. I find it comforting to have a plan on the horizon — something out of the usual routine to look forward to. There are plenty of events looming, but aside from Emily’s birthday none of them yet have definite dates attached. I crave structure! Otherwise it’s too easy for summer to start looking like an air-conditioned march through sunshine and into autumn.

It is nice being back, though, and I’m itching to start work on a few non-Artomatic projects. First, though, I’ve got to make sure things are working properly at AoM — thanks to Victor my piece was saved from malfunction on opening night, but I haven’t yet had a post-opening chance to get down there and confirm that everything’s working the way it ought to be (I tried to last night, but had forgotten that Artomatic is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays).

But here, the nominal reason for the post: my sister Beth (whose birthday is today!) sent along this link, and it’s worth a look. It’s one of those full-browser 360° panoramic photo dealies, in this case showing off Houstonian attractions that might be of interest to Rice students. Of particular interest are the scenes linked to by the thumbnail of the clown face, and the one two spaces to its right. The first shows off the Orange Show, the bizarre visionary art compound created by an eccentric former orange arbitrageur and his commitment to largely incorrect nutrition education. The second is the Beer Can House, a somewhat less deranged but no less impressive work in which a man fashioned thousands (millions?) of beer cans into artistic armor for his home. Both are managed by the organization that Beth works for and are worth a visit if you find yourself in Houston and temporarily unable to spend the time eating more tacos.

I’ve accidentally run current backward through some delicate electronics, gone through a staggering number of voltage regulators and flat-out melted a solenoid, but my Artomatic project seems to be working! There is, of course, still a chance that some hardware aspect of the thing will fail. Or that there’s a hidden software bug that will prevent it from rebooting on schedule. Or that I’ll screw something up when I try to move the log files to a nonvolatile disk location. But for now I’m feeling pretty good about it! If you’re by the Navy Yard Metro in the next month, you should drop by, see some art and ring some bells.

The Artomatic website makes it unfortunately difficult to find when the damn event will actually be open. But the info can be found in this press release. The key details:

May 29 – July 5, 2009

Wednesdays and Thursdays, 5 p.m. – 10 p.m.

Fridays and Saturdays, 12 noon – 1 a.m.

Sundays, 12 noon – 10 p.m.

closed Mondays and Tuesdays.

You can find a map of the location here — Artomatic is in the same building as the Navy Yard Metro entrance that’s closest to the ballpark. My piece is on the fourth floor.

OH YEAH: For those interested, the project’s software is all on GitHub. If you’re wandering in from Google in an effort to figure out how to get Python working on the Fonera with serial and network capabilities, this would be a good place to start.

Progress!

Based on only my sketchy verbal instructions, my dad whipped two of these up in astoundingly little time as I watched dumbly. He also fed me dinner! It was an impressive performance all around, and I’m very grateful. This thing’s about 3′ tall, and it’s what my finished piece will sit upon for display. It’ll be draped in cloth, though, so this is hopefully the last time you’ll see it.

In less positive news:

Upon getting back to the Metro last night I found my rear wheel had been stolen. My current run of bad bike-luck is now impressively long (for those keeping score, the last month has gone flat, flat, flat, flat, wheel, flat, brake cable, shifter cable, trued replacement wheel, stolen other wheel). I suppose I can’t complain too much — this Jamis served me very well and with very few problems for the past 3.5 years (ever since my lovely last bike was stolen from out in front of Logan Hardware). Karmically, I’m doing okay.

But this is still infuriating. The return on a stolen bike wheel is miniscule — the person who took this probably got less than 5% of the retail cost of the components that I’ll now have to rebuy. Worse, I know it’s my fault for being rushed and parking it at a Metro and forgetting my cable. And, well, it just sucks. I try to take these things in stride, but it takes me a couple of days to let go of the anger that being victimized provokes. Last night’s dreams featured some pretty elaborate bicycle-themed revenge fantasies.

I’ve been a little worn down all day. Yesterday Kriston and I set out to begin a batch of homebrewed wheat beer. But we did a bad job of estimating times and got a late start, and the result was a brewing operation that lasted until 3AM.

It seems to have gone fine, though. It wasn’t yet bubbling by the time I left for work, but of course that was only a horrifically small number of hours since it went into the fermenter. By the time I got home from work it was bubbling away happily:

This is a marked improvement from my last brewing attempt, which spewed foam all over the goddamn place. This time the friendly folks at the Philly homebrew store gave me some Belgian Wyeast liquid yeast, and it seems to be a bit better behaved than True Brew’s relatively vigorous stuff.

Want to hear me say “UHHH” several hundred times? Here, this should scratch that itch:

I can’t help cringing when I watch this, but I really did have a good time, and I’m grateful for being given the opportunity to represent Sunlight.

Washington Journal is an impressively high-volume operation — you’re led into the studio and then it’s almost immediately time to go. It’s a little bit disorienting. The fact that the studio turns out to be exactly on the other side of wall on which the green room monitors are located doesn’t help matters. It’s like a video window, man! I appreciated the coffee and the chocolate croissant, but it seems like an even nicer thing to do for your guests would be to minimize the mind-bending spatial revelations that you expose them to.

I can’t say I’m immensely pleased with my performance during the first half of the show, but things did improve as we got further in and moved on to topics that I’ve been working on for more than a couple of days (this recovery.gov stuff has been kind of sudden). By the twenty minute mark I was still acting weird and stilted, but not much more so than I do in real life. If I get another chance to do this maybe I’ll find a way to speak fluidly for more than six syllables at a time — that’s the dream, anyway.

I wish I had more amusing thoughts to share about the experience, but at the time I was too terrified to make many wry observations. Besides, I’m pretty sure that everyone who works in D.C. winds up on Washington Journal eventually — when I signed my name in the guestbook (marking myself as a total n00b, no doubt), I wasn’t at all surprised to see the name of a friend-of-friends that I run into at parties a couple of lines above my own. What I’m trying to say is that you’ll no doubt have a chance to have this experience yourself if you you have both a job in Washington and a collared shirt.

Oh yeah! They gave me a coffee mug! This small piece of proof (the above clip could of course be entirely computer-generated and for all I know is) is now my most prized media-appearance-related mug. Previously this position was held by the mug I received for my appearance at the NBC4 Health & Fitness Expo, which involved walking in and helping myself to a complimentary mug. I think someone was getting crowd shots, though, so it totally counts.

My new wheel is working great — more than 24 hours without a flat! — but on my way to work this morning something happened to my front brake cable. I can still engage the break, but it doesn’t disengage. My current theory is that the cable half-popped somewhere in its housing, maintaining the connection but providing a tangled wire mess that prevents proper braking (I have to pry the levers apart by hand). Back to the Bike Rack! The guys there are going to think I have the cyclist version of Munchausen by Proxy.

I have not been having good bicycle luck. Since Friday I’ve ruptured five innertubes and had two tire levers snap. The flats have forced me to walk through the cold, then the rain, then the cold again; I’ve had to skip appointments and be late to work and walk in bad shoes until my feet ache. My fingers are suffused with brake dust; my hands look like they belong to a Pompeiian mummy.

And yet! I am now so much faster at changing tires, and this feeling of accomplishment almost makes up for all of the hassle. The operation requires finesse, see, and you tend to accidentally hurt yourself and waste time and materials when you’re still getting the hang of it. But now I have the hang of it! I don’t do those things anymore! It’s great!

Well, alright, I’m still wasting materials at a phenomenal clip. But there’s a reliable and thoroughly pleasant honeymoon period of about forty minutes before the newly-installed innertube explodes, and that’s enough for basking. Tomorrow the offending rim goes back to the bike shop and people who objectively know what they’re doing; for now, for me, the subjective experience is going to have to be sufficient.