Last night I had my second sleep study, to ascertain whether I still suffer from sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is a condition usually (but not necessarily) associated with snoring, and it can cause a variety of health problems, not to mention general fatigue. It can also be a problem for whoever the sufferer happens to be sleeping with!

I had my first sleep study some years ago (probably 2002) at a place in Queens, and was diagnosed with mild to moderate sleep apnea.

After the first study, the ear, nose and throat specialist recommended a surgical procedure called an uvulectomy, which I had (see blogs passim; Uvula removula, Uvula No More, Uvulectomy: Before & After and Gagging). I’d also had an operation called septoplasty in the UK in 1998, and a tonsilectomy as a kid.

I was supposed to go back for a second sleep study after the uvulectomy to see if it had worked, but due to a career transition, I lost my health insurance and it never happened. I finally got around to doing the second test last night, more than 3 years later!

The procedure was much the same as last time, but at a different hospital: I arrived at the NYU Sleep Disorder Center in the Bellevue Hospital around 9pm, changed into sleeping clothes, and then a technician (actually a doctor from Kerala in India working as a technician while waiting for his U.S. medical license) attached lots of electrodes to various parts of my body.

Once I was wired up, I went to bed in a grim, airless and windowless room, and performed various exercises as instructed by a disembodied voice coming from an intercom (I was also being monitored by some kind of infra red CCTV camera). The instructions were things like “look left,” “blink 5 times”, “take a deep breath and hold it for 10 seconds,” “breathe deeply through your mouth” etc., and were designed to calibrate the measuring devices and ensure that all the sensors were working OK.

And then I was told I could go to sleep — so I did. But not for long, because it’s pretty uncomfortable sleeping with lots of wires stuck to you and a tube sticking in each nostril, plus I had perhaps the worst foam pillow I’ve ever slept on in my life. It felt like I woke up every 20 minutes or so.

Nonetheless, they woke me up at about 6:30am and told me I’d had 7 hours sleep. They also told me that I hadn’t snored at all throughout the entire night, which was a surprise, and that, according to the monitors, I’d slept fairly well — but that they also weren’t allowed to give me any detailed information, because the data would need to be analyzed by a specialist later that day.

So I showered to rinse out the stubborn conducting gunk they’s put under the electrodes, dressed and went out into a dark, snow-covered New York in search of bacon and eggs for breakfast.

Nobody really knows exactly what Web 2.0 is, but this short video clip, “The Machine is Us/ing Us” provides an interesting and brief overview of some of the things it might be. The music sucks, though.

Thanks to Scyld (not working like a dog for once!) for forwarding this to me.

I went to my first ever fashion show last Friday: Evisu Fall 2007 show at New York Fashion Week. My friend Johnny (see blogs passim), who just moved to New York about a month ago, was the creative director for the show.

It’s hard for me to judge a fashion show because it’s pretty much outside my usual frame of reference, but it certainly seemed like the real thing to me; stick-thin androgynous models walking up and down in exotically-strange clothing while loud music plays and hundreds of cameras flash. It was quick, though — the whole thing was over in 10 minutes.

The party in the studio later that evening was a lot of fun, too.

I recently reconfigured the way my apartment is laid out with lots of help from my friends Claudia & Scyld, and it’s a HUGE improvement; what was previously the almost unused living room is now the bedroom; the former bedroom now has my desk and laptop (thanks to the freedom of wireless networking); and the room at the back that used to be both the dining room and workspace is now a combined dining/living space.

I also turned the unusably small bedroom into a giant walk-in closet, and spent almost $1,000 at Ikea — and you can get a lot of stuff at Ikea for a grand! I got a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, two dining room chairs, a bedside cabinet, a bookshelf, a rug, and numerous other nicknacks like lamps and a mirror and picture frames etc. etc. I bought so much that we couldn’t fit it all in the car, so I had to return some things. I was building furniture every night for a week!

But perhaps the most exciting thing for me was a kitchen cart to put just outside my tiny kitchen, which has effectively tripled the amount of food preparation surface I have, AND allowed me to get this funky little “digital” toaster oven!

I just finished the 30th anniversary edition of Richard Dawkins’ seminal book The Selfish Gene, which apparently caused quite a revolution in thinking about evolutionary biology when it was first published. It was fascinating — although there were a couple of chapters that were a bit of a slog, there are lots of really interesting ideas in there, and Dawkins writing style is clear, interesting and often very witty.

While still firmly rooted in traditional Darwinian natural selection, Dawkins posits a way of thinking about evolution that imbues genes with a metaphorical and singular sense of purpose — their own survival and replication.

He argues that the fundamental engines of life — any life, anywhere in the universe — are what he calls replicators. A replicator is simply any entity that is capable of copying itself with a reasonable degree of fidelity. However, no copying process is completely perfect, such that over time, copying errors — mutations — will occur. Such copying errors give rise to diversity in the population of replicators, Some variant forms will be ill-suited to their environment and will perish before being able to replicate, whereas others will be better suited, and will survive long enough to successfully replicate.

In the case of life on Earth, the replicators are known as genes, and the massive biodiversity of life on our planet has evolved simply to provide vehicles for those genes. The most successful genes — those that have been able to survive and replicate themselves — are the ones that have unwittingly engineered, through natural selection, the most successful vehicles in which to survive until they are able to replicate.

Dawkins also suggests that replicators don’t necessarily need to be confined to organic life; he coined the term “meme,” now in common usage, to describe ideas and concepts that replicate by traveling from mind to mind.

The other beauty of the book is that Dawkins illustrates the utility of his model by explaining and, in most cases, correctly predicting or at least explaining the behaviour of some of the many bizarre and fascinating species on our planet.

Anyway — recommended.

My oldest friend Johnny Diamandis, who I’ve known since we were 5 years old at Lordship Farm JMI school in Letchworth, moved from Hong Kong to New York last week with his wife Emily. That makes three good friends that I’ve know for years from the UK that are now living in New York — which is fantastic!

They’re both excited to be here of course, although Johnny arrived just in time for a brutal -15 degrees C cold snap this week — which was a big shock after 4 years in Hong Kong!

Welcome to NYC, Johnny and Emily!

I haven’t posted to my blog much recently, because at 10 years old I finally hit the 10MB storage quota on the webserver that was hosting it (Earthlink, my ISP, give me 8 x 10MB of free webspace. Unfortunately my blog is now > 10mb).

So, I just moved it to another free webserver, the same one that hosts my website, and changed all the DNS redirects. The homepage for my blog can be found at:

http://blog.tonygill.com/
http://www.tonygill.com/blog/
http://www2.tonygill.com/blog/

Hopefully the migration was fairly smooth, but if you notice any problems, please let me know by emailing me at blogback @ tonygill . com.

I just watched the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” and was simultaneously both saddened and uplifted.

I was saddened because I was forcefully reminded yet again how corporations, despite the fact that they are comprised of and led by human beings, behave in ways that are fundamentally at odds with the long-term interest of the human race.

Practical Zero Emission Vehicles that produce 1/40 of the greenhouse gases of equivalent petrol/gasoline cars are not just feasible — they have existed for over a decade; why would corporate executives at oil and car companies sell out the human race by aggressively suppressing this technology?

Of course the answer is “profits.” But don’t these people have children? Aren’t they concerned that their Faustian bargain makes no long-term sense whatsoever? How do they live with themselves?

I was also disturbed to discover that hydrogen fuel cell technology, which I’d always been a supporter of until watching this movie, actually makes no sense at all, either from an economic standpoint or an environmental one.

And why did the California Air Resource Board scrap the state’s zero emission vehicle mandate? Was it simply because the chair, Alan Lloyd, had a conflict of interests, having also become the chair of the California Fuel Cell Partnership? If so, how does he sleep at night?

On the other hand, I was uplifted by the resolve of the various campaign groups that fought to save General Motor’s ill-fated but well-loved EV1 electric car from it’s murderous creator. Although they ultimately failed to save the car, which GM forcefully repossessed from lessors at the end of the lease agreement, they succeeded in raising public awareness and in demonstrating to GM that there is, in fact, significant consumer demand for Zero Emission Vehicles.

It was also gratifying to see that many of the arguments used against electric vehicles by American car manufacturers are being actively disproved by Japanese car manufacturers, who are making profits by selling hybrid vehicles.

The technologies to dramatically reduce vehicle emissions already exist; electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid vehicles, fuel cell vehicles or alternative “biofuel” vehicles are all proven technologies. What’s needed is the resolve — from both legislators and consumers — to force corporations to make the environmentally-sensitive cars that we want and need. They certainly can’t be trusted to make them otherwise.

At least six people have been hurt by a tornado that hit a street in Kensal Rise in north west London today. This is bizarre and worrying — I don’t remember ever hearing about tornadoes in the UK before. This report in the Guardian Unlimited expresses the concern very succinctly:

Until recently tornados were extremely rare in Britain. But in the last 18 months a number have arrived, prompting warnings that such freak weather events are likely to increase in frequency because of global warming.

10 Downing Street is currently beta testing an online petition system that allows UK citizens to create petitions on any subject that they see fit.

For example, there is a petition to end unfair trade barriers against developing countries and abolish the CAP (Comon Agricultural Policy), which has so far received 394 signatures.

However, there is also a petition to replace the British National Anthem, “God Save the Queen” (a hymn of unknown origin dating from about 1744), with “Gold” by Spandau Ballet (which reached number 2 in the UK national pop music charts in 1983). This petition has received 215 signatures so far.