From “Organic. It’s Worth It.” Newsletter Vol. 21

If you’ve been on the lookout for reasons to go organic, here is a good one: a new study, which appears in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, found that children who were exposed to organophosphates, pesticides that are prohibited in organic production, before birth were more likely to develop attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than children with lower levels of prenatal exposure.

Prenatal Pesticide Exposures Linked to Attention Disorders in Preschool Children

This new study is part of a growing body of research indicating that exposure to OP pesticides can adversely affect brain development.

Exposure to organophosphate (OP) pesticides before birth can increase susceptibility to attention disorders such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to new research published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives (EHP). The new study is part of a growing body of research indicating that exposure to OP pesticides can adversely affect brain development.

OP pesticides target the nervous systems of insects by affecting the activity of neurotransmitters including acetylcholine, which in humans plays a critical role in brain development and is involved in attention and short-term memory. Exposure to OP compounds may also disrupt DNA replication and the growth of nerve axons and dendrites. Infants and young children are much more vulnerable to OP exposures than adults are because their ability to produce the enzyme that detoxifies OP pesticides is still developing.

Mothers participating in the study were recruited during pregnancy by the Center for the Health Assessment of Mothers and Children of Salinas (CHAMACOS). The Mexican-American women lived in the Salinas Valley, an area of intensive agriculture where more than 235,000 kg of pesticides are applied annually. The researchers analyzed six OP metabolites in urine samples collected from the mothers during pregnancy and from their children several times after birth. The presence of these metabolites indicated exposure to OP pesticides used in the Salinas Valley, such as chlorpyrifos, diazinon, and oxydemeton-methyl.

The children’s behavior was assessed at the ages of 3 and a half years (n = 331) and 5 years (n = 323) using reports from the mothers and standardized psychological tests.

The results indicated that as the concentration of OP metabolites in the urine of pregnant women increased, so did the likelihood that their children’s test scores would be consistent with a clinical diagnosis of ADHD. The association was stronger at age 5 years than at 3 and a half and was more pronounced in boys than in girls. Prenatal exposures had a greater association than did exposures after birth: A tenfold increase in levels of measured pesticide metabolites in the mother’s urine during pregnancy correlated to about a 500% increase in the likelihood of attention issues in their 5-year-olds, whereas a tenfold increase in levels of metabolites in the children’s urine at 5 years of age corresponded to a 30% higher likelihood.

By measuring prenatal exposures and focusing on participants likely to have higher exposures to OP pesticides than the general population, this study complements research published in the June 2010 issue of the journal Pediatrics. In that study, Maryse Bouchard and colleagues measured the same six OP metabolites in 1,139 children aged 8 to 15 years selected from the general U.S. population. They found associations between OP exposure and ADHD even though those children had lower average exposures than did the children in the CHAMACOS study.

The authors of the EHP study suggest that research should continue to investigate whether genetic differences in OP metabolism affect susceptibility to developmental disorders, including ADHD. They state, “given that attention problems of children interfere with learning and social development, finding potential causes that can be remediated are of great public health importance.” A companion article, also released today in EHP, explores potential genetic mechanisms behind effects associated with OP exposure.

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Source: Environmental Health Perspectives (NIEHS)

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Here's a quote from a speech Barkley gave. You can find the whole speech here http://www.greatschools.net/pdfs/2200_7-barktran.pdf?date=4-12-05. I hesitate to post such a long quote but Barkley tends to be pretty enlivening, even if you disagree.

Is Inattentive AD/HD Really Another Type of Disorder?

Now, if you will take the DSM, and use it with those modifications, you’ll be doing a damn good job of diagnosis. Now I want to come back to this group that we call Inattentive AD/HD. We used to call them ADD without Hyperactivity. These days some people are just using the term ADD for them. I don’t like that. Part of the problem with using that term is that that was the old term for AD/HD over 10 years ago, so it creates a lot of labeling confusion. ADD and AD/HD are the same thing. ADD is the earlier, 1987 term—goes all the way back to 1980, in fact, whereas AD/HD is the more recent label.

So let’s talk about this Inattentive type: the kids who come to see us who don’t show problems with hyperactivity, who aren’t impulsive. What do we know about that subtype? We know enough that several of us in the research community have taken to arguing that this is a different disorder. This does not belong in AD/HD. This is not AD/HD. This is a real attention disorder with real information processing deficits, and it has little in common with the other two kinds of AD/HD. The Hyperactive type of AD/HD and the Combined type of AD/HD are the same disorder. You’re just catching it at different developmental stages. Kids start out with Hyperactivity; the attention deficits come within a few years after that, and then they move into being the Combined type. But these children, on the other hand, are a different story all together.

Why do I think this is a different disorder? Why do some of my colleagues agree with it? Why do the rest of my scientific colleagues certainly agree that this is a qualitatively different group of children? Whether you view them as a different subtype or as an entirely different disorder is less of concern to me than that you understand these are not the same kids. They do not have the same risk, the same co-morbidities, the same causes and the same outcome, and it is likely that they do not respond to the same treatments the same way. But we will not know any more about treatment if we don’t view them differently, because everyone will assume as you may do, quite naively, that the treatments for one apply to all the subtypes, and they don’t. We have discovered a new disorder and it does not belong here. It needs its own name and its own criteria and it needs to get out of this category known as the disruptive behavior disorders, because it has no affinity for them. So let me show you why many of
my colleagues are now slowly coming around to an idea that 10 years ago I argued for. This is a different disorder.
Why do I think it’s a different disorder? Because these children come in with the opposite symptoms. Instead of being hyperactive, intrusive, distractable, they’re lethargic, slow-moving, hypoactive, spacey, daydreamy, quiet, passive, withdrawn, confused, in a fog. They are the polar opposite of the AD/HD child in their clinical presentation. This is not an impulsive, disruptive, intrusive, aggressive, emotional, naive child. This is a kid who is staring, daydreaming, confused, and not processing information accurately. This is a real attention deficit, if attention means information processing. These kids have a processing deficit. AD/HD children do not. Do not confuse these two groups. They do not have the same problems with paying attention.

Other things we see in these children: when we bring them into the clinic, and we run them
through a battery of neuropsychological tests, they have deficits in an area we call selective attention. Selective attention is how quickly you can deduce what’s important from unimportant in a spatial array of information, how fast you accurately process information coming at you. AD/HD children have no trouble with selective attention. And by the way, let’s put an end then, to this metaphor for AD/HD that it’s a filtering problem. Because it isn’t. Real AD/HD has no trouble with filtering, selecting information. AD/HD children perceive the world exactly as everybody else does. These children don’t. These kids have a selective attention problem, which by the way explains something that we have found in about six different studies. These kids make more mistakes in academic work than AD/HD children do, many more mistakes. The problem that AD/HD children have is with productivity; number of problems attempted. The problem with these kids is accuracy: the number of errors made. These kids have a real problem with input coming into the brain, how quickly they can handle it, how accurately they can select it out, and deal with it. These children have memory problems. AD/HD children do not. These children have trouble with getting information out of short-term and long-term memory and doing it correctly. It’s especially so for long-term memory, so that they show a very erratic recall of information. AD/HD children, if they have a memory problem, it’s going to be in a very unusual form of memory we’re going to talk about later today. But this is traditional long-term storage, and these children have some trouble with that, probably for the same reason. They’re not getting information out of memory any more accurately than they’re processing information coming into the brain. There are problems with selection, with filtering, with focusing their attention. These children have a very different social profile. The traditional AD/HD child is often a rejected child, because they’re immature and emotional and hotheaded and demanding and controlling and impulsive and often aggressive, so that when we compute a social profile of the AD/HD children they often wind up as being the least liked, the least popular and most likely to fight.

That is their peer group profile. That is what Ken Dodge and his profile of peer acceptance views as the rejected child. And 50 percent or more of AD/HD children are utterly rejected by their peer group; these [inattentive] children, very different picture. These children are overlooked. In Ken Dodge’s taxonomy of social problems, they’re neglected. Why? Because they’re passive, uninvolved. They’re staring, daydreaming, hypoactive, absent-minded, passive. Unengaged is a better term for them. They’re not disliked by the other kids. They’re not rejected by them. The other kids just don’t know them. They’re not engaging. They’re not out there participating. They’re just kind of passive kids. They have more friends than AD/HD children have, actually. These kids tend to be neglected, not rejected. It’s a very different social profile.

Other differences: there is no affinity of this disorder for Oppositional (Defiant) or Conduct Disorder that we can tell. They basically have the same base rates as the normal population. But many AD/HD children are likely to go on to develop Oppositional Disorder and Conduct Disorder. Forty-five to 55 percent of AD/HD children develop Oppositional Disorder by age 7, and another 25-45 percent move up to Conduct Disorder by ages 8 to 12. AD/HD goes with Oppositional and Conduct Disorder. The inattentive group does not. You see another reason why they don’t belong in this group? Those three disorders—AD/HD, ODD, and CD—are all part of a larger category we call the disruptive disorders. The inattentive group isn’t and it shouldn’t be there.

Other differences that we see: by definition, of course, these kids are not impulsive. They don’t have any difficulties with inhibition. These children do not respond to stimulants anywhere near as well as AD/HD hyperactive, impulsive children do. Only about one in five of these children will show a sufficiently therapeutic response to maintain them on medication after an initial period of titration. Oh, you’ll find that about two-thirds of them show mild improvement, but those improvements are not enough to justify calling them clinical responders, therapeutic responders. Ninety-two percent of AD/HD children respond to stimulants. Twenty percent of these children respond to stimulants. And the dosing is different. AD/HD children tend to be better on moderate to high doses. Inattentive children, if they’re going to respond at all, it’s at very light doses, small doses.

So the drug response is different. And that’s all we know. [At this time] there are no other studies of treatment of this group—none. The only studies are five involving medication and mine was the only one that tested multiple doses with a placebo control.

There are only two pages in my parents’ book, Taking Charge of ADHD, on this group, and it tells you what I just told you. This is what we know. These are different kids. This is a different disorder. Stay tuned. We don’t know what to do with them. It’s up to you. You’re just going to have to cobble together some help any way you can and hope that it works, because there is no science beyond what I just told you.

They may have different causes. They certainly have different family histories. Those children tend to come from families where there are more anxiety disorders and learning disabilities. AD/HD children come from families where there’s more AD/HD, Conduct Disorder, antisocial behavior, and substance abuse. The family histories of these two groups are not the same.

Now, we have to be careful here, because the Inattentive group, it turns out, is rather a wastebasket group of kids. First of all, in that group are the true Inattentive kids. But also in that group are AD/HD children who came in one symptom short of being in the Combined group, right? They’ve got six inattention and five hyperactive symptoms, and according to the DSM, if they don’t have six, they’re not in the Combined type. Well, yes they are, and you should think of them as being Combined type children, even if they come up one symptom short. Don’t put those kids into the Inattentive group. The Inattentive group in our clinic is for kids with three symptoms or fewer off of that Hyperactive-Impulsive list. Any more than three and you’re better off thinking of them as what we call sub-threshold Combined type children.

There’s another group, the group that starts out being in the Combined type and by adolescence or adulthood are no longer so hyperactive, but they meet the criteria on the Hyperactive list. Now you would flip them over into the Inattentive type. Don’t do it. You always think of them as Combined type. So, bottom line is this: If any point in your history there was a whiff of problems with inhibition and impulse control, you’re a traditional AD/HD Combined type kid, and it shouldn’t matter what the DSM is telling you about cut-off scores. Clinically that’s how you would approach that child. That’s a Combined type kid. And you reserve this Inattentive group for kids who have never in their lives had trouble with inhibition. Those are the spacey, daydreamy, confused, in a fog, sluggish, hypoactive, slow-moving group. And as long as you conceptualize them that way, you won’t make any clinical mistakes. But if you follow the DSM as it’s written—perhaps you have OCD and you just have to follow all those criteria, just as they’re written—then you’re going to get yourself into some trouble. Because remember, the DSM was not chiseled in stone in Israel. It’s a set of guidelines developed to help make clinical decisions, but it’s to be used with clinical judgment and understanding of the criteria.

Okay, that’s just to resolve some confusion. And by the way, I said the Inattentive group was a wastebasket. Why did I say that? Inattention is nonspecific. Inattention is unhelpful in defining what disorder you have, because most mental disorders produce inattention. So if somebody walks into your clinic and says, you know, I’m having a lot of trouble concentrating, can’t pay attention, can’t finish work, you have no idea what they have. You don’t automatically say, oh, that’s AD/HD, I’ve heard about that. This could be a psychotic. This person could be a substance abuser. This person could have a generalized anxiety disorder or panic attacks or major depression or bipolar illness. How the hell do you know what they have?

For now, just know that the Inattentive type of AD/HD is a real wastebasket category of really inattentive children, along with children who have other disorders that are producing their inattention. There really is an Inattentive group out there, but they have a different disorder, and it’s not AD/HD.

My first digital camera was an Apple with some type of memory that fit into a PCMICA adapter. Pretty basic.

Then I graduated to the Mavica. No view finder made it almost impossible to see what you were outside in bright sunlight. The floppies were a great idea, until Apple came out with the G3 with no floppy. I had to download them on a Dell, burn them on a CDRW and transfer them to my Mac.

In my Canon XT I used a 2GB and 1GB CF cards that came with the camera. Then I bought a couple of 4GB cards. I choose 4GB cards, because I couldn’t see losing more images than that.

I just brought a refurbished XTi from Adorama, (bad idea, because it came out of the box with the sensor out of alignment and I can’t even get their tech guys on the phone. I will never buy anything from them again.), rather than XSi, because it used CF cards and the same battery as my XT. Was supposed to save from buying more CF cards and batteries.

I am waiting for the software to allow me to download and view images on on my 16GB iPod Touch.

Many of the old industrial machines used in various product manufacturing industries, and continued to be serviced and supported throughout the manufacturing world today, especially that of the circuit board drilling equipment and PCB routing machines, along with legacy CNC metal fabrication and CNC plastic machining, mold cutting equipment, and die making machines still use either the 5¼ FDD or 3.5 inch FDD to load operating systems and store part programs on hybrid computers. These hybrid computers are not PC based and have no internal or external hard disk drives, nor are these industrial equipment machines capable of hooking up a hard disk drive through any type of IDE cable connector; since the computers do not have IDE HDD interface capabilities, nor do they have USB connector capabilities either. Other machine fields that are excellent candidates for a new style SDD FDD would include: commercial grade and high-end consumer models embroidery machine equipment, quilting machines, and programmable sewing machines used built-in floppy drives for storing patterns and job programs.

Other industrial machines were designed around the original IBM PC which preceded the “IBM XT” and included 5 ¼ inch floppy drives but no hard disk. There may not be very many of these types of machines still in existence or actively used in production today.

Machines that are still being used in production, but have their own hybrid computers, are typically using a proprietary floppy disk controller for reading and writing to the floppy disk drives. This makes disks written in the proprietary format, unable to be read with the standard PC format floppy drives.

New manufacturing equipment is very expensive. Many of these these older machines are still quite capable of producing products in a production environment, and their owners are not willing to throw them away to buy a brand new machine equipment that will produce the same amount of product, in the same amount of time.

History of the Floppy Disk Drive

Floppy drives have been around since 1971, when IBM was the first to introduce the 80 KB read-only 8-inch FD. Subsequently, IBM, Memorex, and Shugart introduced 8-inch RW SSSD and DSSD floppy drives that reached a storage capacity of 980 KB (CP/M) – 1.2 MB (MS-DOS FAT) in 1977. Then in 1978 the 5¼-inch DD was introduced which had a storage capacity of 360 KB or 800 KB. In 1982 the first 3½-inch HP single sided FDD came on the market with a capacity of 264 KB. 1984 marked the introduction of the Macintosh which used the 3½-inch (DD at release). It had a marked capacity of 1 MB, though it was more like 720 KB (400 KB SS, 800 KB DS on Macintosh, and 880 KB DS on the Amiga computer).

3½-inch and 5¼-inch floppy drives shared the market place from 1982 through the late 1990s and even some industrial equipment manufacturers continued to use 5¼-inch floppy drives just at the turn of the century, though most industrial equipment manufacturers switched to the 3½-inch FDD models long before. The floppy disk drives have now been largely superseded by USB flash drives, CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs.

R&D and Investment Capital by US Industrial Equipment Manufacturers

How did we get into this FDD mess. Part of the reluctance for US industrial equipment manufacturers to design new industrial equipment, with using new style PC based controllers had to do with the costs associated with R&D investments in both hardware and software engineering and design. Also, because of the sizeable R&D investments which many of these companies had made in the past, with specialized dedicated computers that had worked well up until this time in a manufacturing environment, top management was reluctant to spend any more investment capital into designing what was already perceived as a solid engineering design. While US companies sat on their laurels, their foreign manufacturing counterparts had leapfrogged over the controller designs, and started building controllers that were using standard, over the counter, PC based controllers, with software written to run under a Microsoft Windows environment. Now, many of the US manufacturers have been hit hard by the foreign competition and are struggling mightily to compete once again in the world markets.

What we need, is a Floppy Disk Drive Solid State Bridge or FDD SSD

What is happening for many of the end users of this legacy equipment is simply that the floppy drives are wearing out. They are getting old, and with the lack of replacement parts available, the equipment is becoming obsolete. These end users need a floppy disk drive bridge to get them over the hump, especially in these difficult economic times. They need something cheap and easy, that would quickly interface to these old floppy disk drives with a simple FDD plug and play device that requires no software drivers to be installed on the computer. Ideally speaking, it would be based on the solid state drive design similar to the SDD HDD — solid state drive hard disk drive, but for a SDD FDD — solid state drive floppy disk drive hookup.

The demise of the floppy disk drive is making it more difficult to keep aging computer systems operational. Floppies are still used for emergency boot disks on many of these aging systems that lack support for other boot media such as CD-ROMs and USB devices. Even some of the Windows Operating systems such as Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 relied on third party drivers, loaded on floppies. Many of the BIOS and firmware update and restore programs require they be executed from a bootable floppy disk. And if heaven forbid, during a BIOS update something goes wrong, even as of 2008, a floppy disk is required to perform a BIOS recovery after a failed BIOS update attempt.

The music industry still employs many types of electronic equipment that use standard floppy disks as a storage medium. Equipment that is quite functional, and was quite expensive to purchase, and would undoubtedly be prohibitively expensive to replace such items in the music industry as: synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and sequencers, all of which continue to use 3½-inch floppy disks. Other storage options, such as CD-R, CD-RW, network connections, and USB storage devices have taken much longer to mature in this industry. Source: Wikipedia — Floppy Disk Drive.

So, it makes sense to bridge the FDD storage technology gap between the old floppies and the newer storage device options of CDs, DVDs, external HDs, and USB storage devices.

SSD HDD — Solid State Disk Drives For Laptops, Notebooks, and PC & Apple Desktop Computers

Here are some examples of HDD solid state hard drive adapter devices that can be used on computers to replace the internal hard disk drives using an adapter plug and socket to install Compact Flash (CF). Besides the availability of hard drive adapters, a person can replace their internal hard drive with solid state drives. There are SSD HD IDE PATA for the older parallel ATA interface IDE internal hard drives and SSD HD SATA for the newer and faster serial ATA interfaces available too.

The main complaint with pillowtops is that the cheap polyurethane foam used in the top layers rapidly breaks down, forming "compression depressions" . . 2" SuperSoft convoluted SealyFoam, & 1/2" SuperSoft SealyFoam Comfort Layers: 1" SuperSoft SealyFoam, 1/2" SealyFoam, 2" x 1" pressure point materials, 1/2" memory foam.

Latex might be another option
http://latexmattress.nexuswebs.net/

Does It Matter How Grok Slept?

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Since you’ve gone Primal all sorts of strange questions pop into your head. And since you’ve gone Primal life has definitely changed. You wore Vibrams to your last shareholder meeting. The idea of skipping two, or heck, three consecutive meals, seems perfectly reasonable, and your idea of a frozen treat is that local, pastured lamb you’ve got sitting in your chest freezer, deconstructed. You’re even toying with the idea of ditching shampoo. Sheesh. To outsiders, you’re that weird caveman guy who eats steak for lunch and keeps a jar of coconut oil at his desk and thinks he’s living in the Paleolithic, but really, you’re just someone who’s discovered that keeping an ear, an eye, and a foot in our ancestral past makes living in the present that much more fulfilling – and healthy.

But how far do you go? What about sleeping? (Here come those questions…) Should we care how and upon what type of bedding Grok slumbered?

Primal is often about correcting a deficiency, or righting a “wrong.” Heart disease, diabetes, obesity are real, pressing issues for modern man that are not being addressed by our modern diets, so it makes sense to look at the lifestyles of populations (of any era) that did not suffer from these afflictions. If we can establish that modern patterns of sleep are giving us fits – that there is indeed a modern wrong that needs righting – perhaps it makes sense to look to traditional methods of sleeping for relief. So, is sleep an issue for us? Does modern sleep need correcting?

Probably. If you ask Wikipedia, we’ve identified at least seventeen common medical sleep disorders. These are real medical afflictions with fancy polysyllabic names, which make me think that sleep, at least for a significant portion of the population, is dysfunctional. Besides, we’ve all heard the complaints that people have about sleep. They toss and turn, they wake up in the middle of the night, they can’t find a comfortable position, they snore, they wake up with aches and pains. If you ask your coworkers or a random acquaintance how they sleep, I’ll bet half will reply, “Badly.” Why is this?

It’s tough to pin down a single cause for our collective sleep woes. Is it the chronic stress disrupting our hormonal balance, or the SAD? Are thoughts of work weighing heavily on our minds and preventing sleep from taking hold? Or have we forgotten how to position our bodies atop unsuitable bedding? Is it all of the above?

I’m sure it all has an effect, and I’m all about eating the right foods, managing stress, and enjoying life, but today I’m interested in the effects of modern sleep posture and modern bedding. It’s the (seemingly common) tossing and turning that really sets off a red flag, for me, because that seems like the manifestation of your subconscious self actively and vociferously searching for a comfortable position in bed. For the sweet spot. You know what I mean – that perfect position in bed, where your joints align and your spine feels right as you slip effortlessly off into the dream world. Why don’t we find that all the time?

As I’m writing this post, my dog – happy, lazy hound that he is – sleeps. He’s been sleeping for the past two hours without moving. He looks a bit like this. Same position, in fact. But he hasn’t moved at all. Oh, his paws have twitched a few times and his tail has mysteriously wagged, but he’s the picture of comfort. This dude is sleeping well. He found the sweet spot. He always seems to find the sweet spot, no matter where or when he sleeps. Dog bed, hardwood floor, backseat – it doesn’t matter. He makes it work.

I wonder how it comes so easily for animals.

In her book on posture, Esther Gokhale (I’m always tempted to type “Grokhale”) discusses the right way to lie down. Whether you’re in bed, on a cot, or on the floor, the key is to lengthen your spine. You touch ground with your sacrum, lay your palms on the ground, and slowly lower yourself back, taking care to actively lengthen your spine – vertebrae by vertebrae – by pushing through your hands. The result is an oddly awkward feeling; you really do feel longer than normal. It takes a few minutes to get used to it, but it’s an incredibly comfortable way to lie down. The first time I tried it, I fell asleep (inadvertently) in ten minutes. In fact, her method of “long lying” was my biggest takeaway from the book, simply because I wasn’t expecting to learn how to lie down. Posture? Yeah, I see how modern posture is dysfunctional, but I figured lying down was pretty basic stuff that no one could mess up. My sleep is better than ever since adopting her method of lying down. I no longer have to find the sweet spot to get my joints aligned and my spine supported. I am the sweet spot.

Dogs don’t need the Gokhale method, of course. They don’t need to pay attention to spine lengthening or support. They just do it naturally. Look at that canine in the picture again and note how everything lines up effortlessly. Babies and tots are able to sleep just as easily because their ideas of posture aren’t tainted (they don’t even have “ideas” of posture; like dogs, they just lie there… it’s very Zen).

What about bedding?

Research tends to show mixed results when looking at people’s preferences for bed firmness, with some experiencing more pain with firmer beds and less with “medium-firm”. Conventional wisdom (for millennia, in fact) holds that firmer beds are best for back pain (think ascetic monks lying on mats), but the recent research mars that assumption.

Honestly, from my investigation I don’t think the bedding matters too much as long as you’ve got the right sleep posture. I may risk belaboring my analogy further, but I’m going to look at the dog again. He sleeps anywhere and on any surface. He seems to show a preference for lying on something (whether it be a random towel or his fluffy dog bed), but he sleeps just as well on the hardwood floor. Maintaining that perfect sleep posture seems to be key to his success.

I’ve had similar experiences. As long as I’m mindful of the length of my spine, I can stretch out just about anywhere and be comfortable. I figure we were born without beds, so we probably come naturally equipped to flop down and sleep on the ground. At the same time, I prefer sleeping in my bed above hunkering down on the cold hard floor (although the company might have something to do with it), and I suffer no ill effects from it.

Still, I know you guys love to hack just about anything you can, so tomorrow I’ll discuss some alternative sleep postures (and maybe some bedding options).

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