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Comment by pavel_lishin | Hacker News Reader

> * “Cells don't sleep,” he said in his most quoted anti-sleep rant. “Fish swim in the water all night. Even a horse doesn't sleep. A man doesn't need any sleep.”*

> Yes. Even when my kids sleep crazy amounts of hours I get annoyed. Teenagers can sleep probably for 12 hours straight, and I get so annoyed because I think they are wasting their lives. Why are you wasting your life sleeping? There are so many things that you could be doing. That’s how I see it. So, I don’t like them sleeping for longer than necessary because they are wasting their lives. That’s always been my thing. You have plenty of time to sleep when you die. You might as well embrace life.

It's great that you can get by on four hours, but I'm not wasting my life when I get nine or ten hours of sleep, because without that sleep, I'd be miserable and unproductive. A life spent tired, that's a life wasted.

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This is the typical great man myth that gets promulgated by their publicists to make them seem more than human. As a rule they are either out right lies or greatly exaggerated, other myths of this type is Kennedy reading 1000 words per minute, Napoleon listening to reports, reading a letter and dictating laws all at the same time, or Stalin single handedly designing the first five year plan.

It's almost certainly a myth in Edison's case. Seems like he considered it his brand in a way. Reports from his contemporaries are that he slept much more than he would have liked to admit.

http://www.supermemo.com/articles/polyphasic.htm#Thomas%20Al...

I've always like Prince Shotoku, able to follow ten conversations at the same time.

For speed readers, 1000 wpm is actually pretty standard.

Yeah, no: http://www.slate.com/articles/briefing/articles/2000/02/the_...

1000 words per minute doesn't seem outlandish. My 10 year old already reads at over 300 wpm.

I got married yesterday. If the trend continues tomorrow I will be doubling the number of wives I have every day. I expect to be married to the whole human race by the end of the month.

Your childs increase in reading speed by contrast is highly unimpressive.

Not to ruin the analogy, but wouldn't the number of wives you have just increase by one every day? Because 2 * 0 = 0?

We need more than two data points to get the relationship. It may be that monochr will have a fibonacci progression in the daily number of wives...

Perhaps she was a midwife?

No, you'll have about 30 wives.

Stalin designing the first 5 year plan doesnt sound impressive. It sounds like an idiotic idea resulting from an idiot, with predictably idiotic centrally planned results.

The first 5 year plan was the most successful piece of industrial policy by any country in the world until the Chinese opening of their market. What's even more impressive is that it happened in the middle of the great depression without outside help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_five-year_plan_%28Soviet...

It also created the conditions for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor in which millions of people starved to death :-( .

Where did that first quote come from? Horses sleep (though they can standing up). So do fish, though it's not clear if they use the unihemisphere sleep trick that marine mammals use (so they can keep swimming).

Given the great benefits of being conscious (alertness from predation, etc), there's clearly some biological reason that animals and humans sleep.

It was from Thomas Edison, so from long ago and far from an authority on animal sleeping habits. There are a vast number and variety in species of fish, some appear to do the unisphere thing, some actually go dormant and rest without swimming like zebra danios, while some don't show any signs of resting like mackerel. You can't really generalize too much about the whole lot of them.

Also, horses sleep.

Also, wasn't Edison a huge proponent of cocaine use?

Somehow that seems fitting.

Uh, it's the Edison quote mentioned in the article...

Yeah, it doesn't make much sense. She has a special genetic mutation that lets her get by on less sleep. How does that mean that other people are wasting their time by getting the sleep their bodies need?

Agreed. The level of productivity for most of us who need 8 hours drops substantially when we go above or below that threshold.

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