JovialJman - Why do we sleep?

A father and his child sleeping kind of makes me sleepy.

We all spend about a third of our lives asleep, but why do we even sleep? It is unproductive and a waste of time, are there any good points in the sleeping argument, well we shall discuss just that.

Many surveys have proven that we spend about a third of our time asleep. This is due to the fact that we should try get 8 hours of sleep, which is a third of the day. Sometimes you sleep in and other times you go to bed late, it should all balance out and give you that golden number of 8 hours of sleep. Now this is for the average person however, since there are some that spend as little as 5 hours asleep to feel rested ad others as much as 11 hours.

We know the affect of not sleeping, and anyone who has pulled an all nighter should be able to agree with me here, you feel cranky or irritable the next day and feel exhausted more than normal. After not sleeping for one night you can see such a massive difference, so what if you stayed awake for longer? Well as the list goes after 24 hours without sleep it would be comparable with being legally drunk, slurred speech, some loss of coordination and thinking. 

2 to 3 nights without sleep, you can expect muscle twitches (as your body expects to be asleep by now), blurred vision, impaired judgment, micro sleeps (sleeping for a very short time without knowing it) and nausea. 

After 4 days you will be extremely irritable and start hallucinating with delusional episodes.

from 6 to 8 days, your arms and legs will start to experience tremors. you will have memory lapse and not know who you are. 

9 to 11 days without sleep you will have fragmented thinking episodes, (start a sentence without finishing it) and you will be unresponsive for some time.

When new symptoms appears, the previous ones just get worse so after 9 days without sleep things are really bad.

There are some people who have claimed to not have slept for more than 33 years but non of these have been proven whereas some have been proven to sleep for about 2-4 hours a night and they regarded that as not sleeping at all. The Guinness World Record for staying awake is held by Maureen Weston at 449 hours (that is 18 days, 17 hours) but Guinness does not make or confirm any more records for this, because this may severely impact your health. Scientifically documented record however stands at 264 hours, ( or 11 days), without any use of stimulants of any kind, and this record is held by Randy Gardner, and he was studied by scientist while he under went this experiment.

Now since we know what happens what happens when we don't sleep lets talk about why we must/do sleep. This has gone unanswered for many years as it was a very tough question to answer but studies have recently shown some insight into it. Years before they thought that the brain was telling your body what to do and was giving moisture away in the process and sleeping was the time where the body gave this moisture back to the brain, and they were not very far off.

This Ted video Show a good explanation by Jeff Iliff

If you are at work and cannot watch the video, then I shall try my best to explain. All organs have needs and all of these needs need to be filled for the organ to stay healthy. First it needs a supply of nutrients, which is carried by the blood, all organs get blood via the veins including the brain. Then all the organs needs to get rid of waste material. Now this is done by the lymphatic system, now this system does not go to the head, so the brain must use a different way to get rid of these waste products that are different from any other organ.

Now as Jeff says in the video, it is very beautiful the way it is done. There is a clear liquid that surrounds the brain, and this liquid carries the waste material to the surface of the brain then shoots it into channels that run through the brain again, which is on the outside of the blood vessels, now instead of creating a whole new system, (which space does not allow in the head), it uses a system that is already there to its advantages, after it has traveled through the brain it is deposited into the lymphatic system that is connected to the other organs which in turn puts it into the blood then disposed of.

Now the reason that we sleep is because of that. After we fall asleep our busy minds can take a rest, this allows the vessels in the brain to shrink a bit which allows more space around the blood vessels so the waste material can exist much faster. The reason it doesn't do it while we are awake is due to the fact that our brain needs all the nutrients and space for thinking power to keep us alive in the dangerous world we live in and saves the cleaning of our brain for a time where it can afford to not think.

Speaking of sleep now, I would like to mention that the sleeping habits that we have these days are very different since the invention of artificial lights. Oddball has talked about this topic in this TCSA post but does not contain some new information. A study has been done to show that since our species originated from around the equator, our bodies are very suited of 12 hours of sunlight and 12 hours of darkness. So since we have moved to every corner of the globe (since spheres do apparently have corners) and we travel a lot and are in the presence of artificial light, our sleeping patterns have change drastically.

The natural sleeping pattern is actually sleeping twice per night, going to sleep at about 8 and waking up at 12 then falling asleep again at about 2 and rising with the sun. those 2 hours that are spent awake was used as like a time to talk to your loved ones or just spend like a meditative state in your bed. Those who have reverted back to that pattern, have commented that they felt more awake during the day then they have ever been before. But since of our busy lives I don't think that many people can afford to revert back to that sleeping pattern as it would seem very unproductive, which is why we have the sleeping pattern of a constant 8 hours now.

Anyways, I am off to bed, so please leave a comment on your sleeping pattern and how long you have gone without sleep, down in the comments or on Facebook/Twitter. Please share this with any friends who likes to pull all nighters, or wants to in the future as I am sure they will thank you for showing them the light, (by pointing at the rising sun, Teehee). If you enjoyed today's post, and would like to see more as the are published, please like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left. Thank you for taking the time to read today's post, and I hope you have/had a really awesome day.

Sleep well people

OddballGreg - Total War: Rome 2 (Brilliant War Simulation)

And everyone with even a modicum of OCD, (including me), wants to kill me for the slightly off center subtitle. On the other hand, the practical side of me refuses to move it 5 pixels to the left. Screenshot is of the title screen from the Emperor Edition of Total War: Rome 2.

 Total War: Rome 2 is the most recent Creative Assembly game in the Total War Series, (That's been released so far at least), and is also the most recent cause for my lack of free time for a variety of reasons. As a result, I decided it might be fun to do one of my famous semi-formal reviews on it.

Yesterday, JovialJman spoke about Simulations and the way the reality was starting to be accurately portrayed with computers. Of course, what better opportunity to talk about my most recent timesink: Total War: Rome 2, the grand strategy game from Creative Assembly that revolves around the conquest of the European and North African landscapes which formed part of the Roman empire. (I'll point out that they don't refer to it as a grand strategy game, but I use that as a term for any game that involves the manipulation of a large "World Map" towards goals of victory; ala Paradox Games.) I started playing Rome 2 as a result of the crazy ramblings and tactical soliloquy of one of my other, newer favorite YouTube commentators, DiplexHeated, whom I found while looking for playthrough's of Paradox Games's Hearts of Iron 3.

In my case, I figured it would be more fun to try out the Iceni, a Gallic Brittanic tribe in the lands of what is now the UK. (Later in the campaign I conquered all the British, Scottish and Irish land... effectively forming the UK about 1700 years before it historically did. Give or take.)

 So, before I get into the details, I will point out that I am playing the more recently released "Emperor Edition" of Rome 2, which was released with a large variety of updates, fixes and general extra content, most of which was graciously given to buyers of the original edition for their patience with what can only be described as a "turbulent" launch. For a humorous depiction of just how turbulent I mean, refer to the "Hitler Find Out" video below:

With that out of the way, and you likely in tears from laughter, let me talk about the pro's. Why does Total War: Rome 2 make me stay up far later than I should, and play when I should be writing blog posts or making special Halloween themed graphics? Well, the obvious answer is that it's fun and addictive, clearly preying on my enjoyment of figuring things out.

What's that? "Stop stalling and actually get to the point." you say? Of course, Rome 2 is keeps me absurdly distracted with both of it's game modes, which a fairly interlinked for reasons you'll understand shortly. The first of which is the "Grand Campaign" mode, as shown in some of the earlier screenshots that I have littered throughout this post as I am wont to do with these kinds of reviews.

In this mode, you control the entirety of your empire, managing it's politics, economy, diplomacy and, of course, military, in the hopes of becoming the dominant power on the map and ultimately becoming victorious. Everything from the arrangement of trade, alliances and confederations with your neighbors, to the research of new technologies and expansion of your cities and villages, down to the recruitment, improvement of your armies and a fair bit more is left in your hands; all managed from the isometric view of the world pictured in the screenshots. 

Though the game is turn-based and, admittedly, takes a good minute to process each turn on my frankencomputer, this oddly satisfying bid for domination and supremacy kept me busy for a good 5 hours today, and several tens more this past week that I've been playing. Suffice to say that despite some negative views on what has been called a "dumbed down" game by fans of older games in the Total War series, there is still a great deal of fun to be had with Rome 2.

As it turns out, experience with grand strategy games in general does not make you immune to poor decisions, as the 2 armies denoted by the men with blue flags soon found out. (They died in case you're unsure.)

 Of course, World Domination is not the only thing to keep you busy in Total War: Rome 2. The real meat of the game, (and the thing that made the Total War games famous in the first place), is it's highly accurate model for realtime warfare involving thousands of troops arrayed in their respective cohorts/squads/battalions/whatever you want to call them.

In some of the later screenshots in this post, you'll note that I decided to take a break from the Grand Campaign to try out some of the Historical Battles that come in the game. Of the 3 that I played, I lost 2 and learned that I am really bad at fighting offensively. (Which is part of the "Fun" as Dwarf Fortress would put it.) Between a forest ambush scenario, the siege of Carthage and a fort defense scenario, the only one I was able to win by just a slim margin was the fort defense, which is part of what makes the combat in Rome 2 so interesting.

You see, the Warscape Engine, and the engines previously designed for the older Total War games, are designed to create highly accurate representations of combat with large amounts of forces, thereby making real world combat strategies applicable to the game because of it's accurate representation of the soldiers and the factors that influence them.

At this point, I figured it would be a good idea to show what the technology tree's looked like in the game. Nothing too fancy, but they don't feel redundant at least.

 To be less vague about how this is done, consider one of the battles I fought in the "Grand Campaign" as the Iceni against the Demetae clan. Outnumbered 3 men for ever 2, I decided, having read a great deal of military themed books and taken great interest in various documentaries throughout my life, that the best course of action would be to place all my men up on the nearby hill and force the enemy troops to arduously climb up the hill to reach me.

Having reached the foot of the hill, his men quickly found themselves being pelted heavily by the extended range of my slingers, effectively killing a good 100 of their men before they even managed to get into combat. Those that did make it to the top were severely winded from the steep ascent, and their morale damaged at the sight of their friends dying beside them and the knowledge that at any moment, they could be next.

Not yet broken, their own slingers took up a line at the base of the hill and began pelting their own missiles back up at my mine while their warriors fought. Unfortunately for them, this was the perfect opportunity for my horsemen, in a wedge formation, (which is effective for smashing through ranks of enemies.), to come and utterly decimate his unarmored slingers. Alone and unable to fight back against the agile horsemen, the enemy slinger's morale broke within moments, the surviving men fleeing the field quickly while my own warriors enveloped their enemy atop the hill. Surrounded and without support, the enemy warriors began to die quickly due to attacks coming from all sides, and the death of their general promptly resulted in their surrender.

One moment while I revel in how cool that sounded. (Heehee). Moving on, as you can see, the game's engine allows for the accurate depiction of all the factors that influence a fighting force in the game, from morale, to how tired they are, the equipment that they have, and the effect that losing their leader can have on them. And that's not even everything that can happen. In the earlier mentioned Roman fort defense scenario, use of archers with flaming arrows and onagers allowed me to demoralize the enemy Gauls while holding them at the fort gates, causing more men to flee than what actually died in the combat. (I will point out that I am not actually that good at these games, I just haven't mentioned my blunders yet, such as my inability to regroup my men during a forest ambush, and the fact that I let half my army die to arrow fire from the walls of Carthage during the siege. Truth be told, if I don't choose where I'm going to fight, I'll probably lose.)

Some of the historical battles in Rome 2. I should point out that those earlier mentioned victories in battle were made playing on "Easy". This game is kinda difficult.

 Now, I could continue to give you blow by blow accounts of battles, (Which does sound like fun in all honesty, perhaps I'll do it again sometime.), but I think you've gotten the picture of why I so thoroughly enjoy playing this game, and that's enough for the purposes of this article. All in all, as someone as easily forgiving as me, I have yet to find any real reason to fault Total War: Rome 2, though I am admittedly new to the Total War series. Perhaps the AI isn't the best in the world and maybe the Grand Campaign is allegedly dumbed down from previous iterations, but as a game on it's own, objectively, Total War: Rome 2 is a fun game and definitely worth a go. I would recommend this game to anyone who's a fan of tactical and strategic military combat, as averse to simply running into battle as one guy and killing hundreds of people all on your own. (That can have it's own attractions too sometimes.)

In any case, feel free to check out the additional screenshots and read the side-story that accompanies them at your leisure for a better perspective of what the game looks like. If you enjoyed this article, or have something you wish to add or ask, please be sure to let us know down in the comments below, or via Facebook/Twitter as we here at TCSA love to hear from you guys. Of course, if you happen to have any friends who enjoy large strategy games, consider sharing this article with them too. I am sure they will appreciate it. And if you yourself would like to read more articles like this one, consider liking the Official TCSA Facebook page and/or following us on Twitter using the associated buttons on the bar to the left. Regardless of what you do, I thank you for having taken the time to read this post; hope that you have/had and absolutely FANTASTIC day, and I will speak again soon.

Fair battles my friends.

The siege of Carthago begins, complete with a map of the battlefield and a customary Roman-times themed quote.

A few minutes later, and the most I've done is lobbed several hundred rocks at the enemy walls and siege equipment in the hopes that this will make the impending battle easier. (It didn't really.)

Walls and towers down, the time to charge was getting closer, but I had a strange feeling that this wasn't going to go well.

The land based Roman forces which I had little experience commanding. Though better equipped than the Gauls from earlier, the fact that the Carthaginians got to choose where we fought is probably a good indicator of things to come.

The water based troops of Rome. Most of these guys died before they even drew their swords thanks to enemy Onagers and towers.

Having finally assaulted the city, it can be easily seen by my men's healthbars that the Carthaginians had collected a hefty toll for my entry.

Most of my men killed and maimed, it should come as little surprise that I wasn't happy when I found out the enemy was counter-attacking.

Note to self: War elephants are no joke. Just because your men were confident before the fighting started does not make them any less mashable by elephant tusks and feet. -300 Roman Soldiers in 30 seconds.

The enemy counterattack defeated, my roman troops were in complete shambles as they attempted to kill a squad of elites. (This dis not go so well, especially since my general had died a few minutes ago already)

On the upside, my 36 minute long "Valiant Defeat" did drag almost twice as many of their troops to death as they did mine. I don't think Rome is happy with "my best" though.