* Wow, you got in a few substantive posts in last night/early morning. I wonder what your sleep pattern is?
I find people’s sleep pattern fascinating. IMO, more high energy the less sleep needed. I don’t think it’s directly related to intelligence, though high energy people usually are intelligent. Nikola Tesla, high energy and rail thin, would sleep just 2 hours a night with brief naps throughout the day (polyphasic). Donald Trump, Martha Stewart, Tony Robbins, Jay Leno, and Madonna sleep 4 hours per night. So did Thomas Edison and Margaret Thatcher. Bill Clinton sleeps 5 to 6 hours per day. Winston Churchill about the same.
* Steve Sailer: I now need about 8.5 hours of sleep to be at my best at blogging, which is a very self-starting thing. On the other hand, as a night person I often get either better or more slapdash as the hour gets later.
Clinton told an interviewer he needed 7 hours per night to be at his best.
* I had never really connected the dots about Sacks’s homosexuality (not that I really ever gave any thought to it) but in one of his valedictory pieces in the NY Times written after he learned that he was terminal he mentioned that his gayness had caused him to become alienated from his Orthodox Jewish parents.
In retrospect he displayed many characteristics of the gay drama queen. He was popular among the general public but most people in his scientific field absolutely detested his self aggrandizing approach. One critic called him “The Man Who Mistook His Patients for a Literary Career”.
Nabokov had a complicated relationship with gayness – publicly he was a homophobe but Nabokov’s brother Sergei (only 11 months apart) was gay and died in a Nazi concentration camp.
