Study: Learning Spanish With Duolingo Can Be More Effective Than College Classes Or Rosetta Stone

Education is quickly moving online, but we haven’t seen all that many studies that actually look into the effectiveness of these new forms of online learning. To see how its program performed, the language learning service Duolingo, founded by CAPTCHA inventor Luis von Ahn, commissioned a study (PDF) into the effectiveness of its program. The result, which even surprised von Ahn: it only takes a Duolingo user 34 hours to learn the equivalent of a first college semester’s worth of Spanish.
A similar study by the same researchers who conducted Duolingo’s study, by the way, found that it took Rosetta Stone users between 55 and 60 hours to learn the same amount of material.
These studies were conducted by Roumen Vesselinov, a Visiting Assistant Professor at Queens College, City University of New York, and John Grego, Professor and Chair of the Statistics Department and the University of South Carolina. While the study was obviously funded by Duolingo, the data collection and analysis was done independently by the researchers.
Using the WebCAPE test for Spanish, a placement test many universities also use for their students, the study found that the average student gained around 91 points over the course of eight weeks and the average participant gained about 8 points per hour of study with Duolingo, though its worth noting that the researchers also found that Duolingo was a little bit more effective for students who started with a very basic knowledge of Spanish than for those who were already more advanced.
The study also found that those learners who said they wanted to brush up on their Spanish for travel registered the largest average gains (17.6 points per hour) and while the majority of participants said they studied for personal interests and school, that group only registered an average gain of 5.7 points per hour.
Being self-motivated enough to learn a language by yourself is obviously hard and it’s no surprise that many participants dropped out or only studied for two hours over the course of the study. A student in a college class, by contrast, may not learn as effectively as the Duolingo users who made it through the program, but chances are most students will make it through the semester with more than 2 hours of instruction and without dropping out. Still, almost 94% of the participants in the study said they would continue to use the product after the end of the eight weeks.
Duolingo is clearly doing something right. Overall, von Ahn tells us, Duolingo now has over 1 million active users and 100,000 daily users. The team’s iPhone app, which launched last December, has been in the top 15 education apps in the App Store since its launch.

"Dog Training in Iraq"

Hilarious photo sequence - : http://imgur.com/a/YGRXs

Extreme Diet Hacking With Tech: How Cheesecake Made Me Leaner And Stronger With Carb Backloading

Never before have I binged on so many delicious desserts, yet been stronger or more ripped. For 3 weeks, I experimented with a cult bodybuilding diet, Carb Backloading, which promises outcomes too good to be true: slam carbs at night after heavy lifting, get slimmer and build muscle. Like all web sensations, there aren’t any large scale studies, and anecdotal reviews never properly control for all the right variables.
Thankfully, a new movement in health innovation, quantified self, has been slowly churning out gadgets that allow number-hungry netizens to more scientifically test lifestyle changes. I measured everything with the latest in health consumer tech, from calorie burn to fat composition to heart health. The results let me bust the pseudo scientific-diet dogma of “Calories deficit = weight loss,” and test how a more methodical approach to health can help users with their diet frenzies.
The results? Despite eating a thousand more calories a day–mostly comprised of sundaes and cheesecake–I’ve maintained my weight, have noticeable ab definition, and increased my strength an average of 37% over all muscle groups.
Here were the tools of the experiment:

• The BodyMedia armband to measure net calories burned (after all, the diet calls for much more exercise, so maybe web reviewers will simply burning more calories)
• Withings scale, which measures fat composition as well as total weight
• A blood panel of all heart and endocrine health, with the help of quantified-self startup, WellnessFX (I was little worried about my Cholesterol going into the experiment).
• A Google spreadsheet, which helped me track my workouts and calories eaten from the convenience of my iPhone.

Here were the big picture results:


I’ve included an explanation of Carb Backloading theory and the methodology of my self-quantified experiment in a lengthy post below.
Carb Backloading Theory

“I used to go to The House of Pies and eat pies at night,” recalls Arnold Schwarzenegger, who believes he and his bodybuilding partner were following the principles of Carb Backloading, even before anyone understood the science, “Instinctively, we just felt like we needed the pie.”
Schwarzenegger’s ravenous sweet tooth was fueled by the first principle of Carb Backloading: for several hours after low-repetition heavy lifting, the body utilizes carbs to stimulate muscle growth rather than store energy in squishy lumps around the waistline. “By shifting when you eat carbs, you can actually control which kind of tissue grows,” explains John Kiefer, the progenitor of Carb Backloading. Indeed, a randomized study of Israeli police officers found that those who ate carbs at night, rather than equally nibbling them throughout the day, dropped more body fat.
The late night binging also helps carb backloaders get through skipping breakfast, which Kiefer claims stops the hormone, cortisol, from signaling the body to burn fat.
The Regimen

Before my sugar happy-readers carve their name into a booth at a Cheesecake Factory, know that Carb Backloading is complicated. First, you’re supposed to exercise at a very inconvenient time of day, 4pm. Early and late workouts require a strategic shift of high fat and protein meals at different points in the day.
Second, only strength workouts will do. I’m a rabid crossfitter, a circuit-style of training with high-rep calisthenics. For Carb Backloading, I had to join a completely different gym for low-rep, olympic lifting and high-intensity interval training (short bursts of near 100% effort for 30 seconds to 2 minutes).
Third: supplements. I downed a post-workout shake with an amino acid, Leucine, which magnifies the insulin spike of crappy desserts roughly an hour after it’s taken. Depending on whether the goal is fat loss or strength, the amount Leucine powder can differ by a single scope. Kiefer also recommends the meathead staple, creatine, along with strategic uses of whey protein and caffeine pre- and post-workout.
To give the theory of Carb Backloading a rigorous test, I ditched creatine and pre-workout whey, since I’d never used them before. If I gained any muscle, I wouldn’t’ know if it was the supplements or the apple fritters. Luckily, I had been dosing Leucine prior to Carb Backolading, so I could safely drink it without ruining the experiment .
In sum, my regimen was to eat pure fat (coconut oil) for late breakfast, savor a protein-rich lunch, followed by 6pm training, then hold a fat-kid circus till I passed out from sugar overload–five days a week. On one-day rest periods sandwiched between two backloading days I ate my normal protein and vegetable-rich diet.
My methodical rhetoric shouldn’t belie how much fun this diet was. I’d stroll into San Francisco’s most notorious guilty pleasures and ask, “What’s your craziest dessert?” Happily skipping down hip Valencia Street, by-standers would double-take as I downed sundaes the size of my head, right before rolling into the next bakery for more fun. On most days, I’d eat until my mind was a drunken haze of sugar overload–and then eat some more.
Dessert is more like crack than Las Vegas: the more of it you experience, the more you want.
The Measures and Results
Despite my editors’ skepticism, this wasn’t just an excuse to sample desserts around San Francisco on the company dime. As proof, I inconveniently documented several key measures (and pics of my binges, to round out the numbers with some well-deserved food porn).
Output:
Strength: As can be seen from the table, I made hefty gains in every muscle group–36% on average. My gains the first week were much larger than the second. I was flat-out exhausted by the third week. Its hard to know whether my first week gains were the result of simply eating more carbs (which I had been starving myself of under my normal diet) or whether I wasn’t doing strength training correctly. Maybe sustained Carb Backloading only works with Creatine or with greater rest periods between workouts.

Weight Loss: I didn’t gain or lose a single pound, staying at 157 pounds for three weeks, probably because I was packing on muscle at the same time as losing fat.
Fat Loss: Roughly 1% of body fat, from 22.5% down to 21%. Noticeable ab definition.
I measured fat loss with the Withings scale, which measures body fat through bioelectric impedance, “injecting a very low-intensity current (absolutely safe and painless) into the feet, and the simultaneous measurement of electrical resistance met by this current”. I found Withings somewhat inconsistent, so I estimated fat loss with the delta between my lowest measurements during my experiment.
Muscle: I definitely packed on some lean muscle. In three weeks, my arms (contracted) grew over an inch in circumference (12 inches to 13.25) and my chest grew an inch, 38 to 39 inches.
Internal Wellness
I was worried that even if Carb Backloading gave me a shiny new body on the outside, it was hollowing out my vital organs. My hypochondria was mostly misguided. A thorough blood panel courtesy of WellnessFX showed that I was in tip-top shape even after taking on a diet that seems like it’s designed to speed up the effects of a terminal illness. My insulin levels were well within good territory and my Hemoglobin A1c, which measures average blood sugar levels, had actually decreased slightly.
LDL-C, so-called “bad cholesterol, had a noticeable 31% spike. But, the nutritional consultant from WellnessFX said that he notices the same increase for other athletes who gain large amounts of muscle. In this case, the cholesterol may be a healthy, natural response. Though, I’m a tad worried about my heart, so I’m temporarily suspending Carb Backloading to bring it back down just in case.
Its also worth noting that Kiefer himself doesn’t recommend Carb Backloading for obese individuals. At 22% body fat, I was borderline acceptable.
Inputs:
Calorie Deficit: For the first week, I tracked every calorie and tried to only eat foods that had nutritional labels. I also tracked my individual calorie burn with the BodyMedia armband, which measures energy output through changes in skin temperature. Other calorie counters, such as the Nike+ Fuelband, can’t measure heavy lifting workouts, since the device doesn’t know the difference between picking up a pencil or an olympic barbell. BodyMedia’s output is a daily graph of minute-by-minute calorie burn like the one below (notice the sustained calorie burn in the evening, during my workouts. The spikes are high intensity interval training).

On binge days, I crammed about 1500 calories worth of ice cream, chocolate, and cake after a workout.
Since I was working out for longer and more frequently, I did end up burning more calories through exercise during Carb Backloading–though not nearly enough to cancel out a pint of Ben and Jerry’s. In total, I netted about 984 calories more a day on binge days, factoring in a fast during the day and enhanced workouts.
In subsequent weeks, I had to eyeball calories, since most of my meals came from tech holiday parties. “I see you’ve found the desserts,” said one Google public relations person, who saw me meticulously stacking carrot cake bites at their holiday party in the shape of the Trader Joes cake I’d eaten the week before (so that I knew I was eating roughly equivalent calories/carbs).
Conclusions:

I’m extraordinarily pleased–and a bit surprised–with Carb Backloading’s results and the tech validates this sentiment. I’d never had a nicer body in my life. That said, the diet is no panacea. It’s very complex, only works for a relatively small portion of the population, and I’m worried about what it’s done to my teeth and heart. More importantly, its effects only lasted for the first week and a half. After 10 days, my strength and fat loss plateaued. Much more experimentation with the types and duration of binges are needed to isolate the effects, at least for my unique snowflake of a body.
Still, it seems clear that the old diet dogmas of calorie restriction and healthy eating don’t necessarily apply to me. Intense exercise changes the way our body processes nutrition and most of documented medical science, with its obsession on obesity, can tell us very little about peak performance. When it comes to self-improvement, a Google spreadsheet and some health tech could be more informative than most medical journals.
For all the complexity, I think Carb Backloading, in some way, will become a permanent part of my regime. During my WellnessFX blood draw, the lab worker asked if I was a personal trainer. That’s a new one for a stocky Midwestern Jewish kid who used to eat bacon bits by the fist-full. That’ll do, Carb Backloading. That’ll do nicely.
Note: this blog post should be not be understood in any way as medical or nutritional advice. I’m simply documenting my experience. Diet changes can have dangerous effects. So, don’t be stupid, consult a doctor before making changes to your diet.

Books by Dr. John. M. Berardi

Most people who come to us want to know one thing: “Where do I begin?”

Well, we’ve helped tens of thousands of people with their nutrition.  And we have them all start in the same place: with the Precision Nutrition System.
Sure, we do offer a host of other products and services – from genetic testing to group coaching and more.  However, everyone does better when they begin by understanding the foundation; the cornerstone of every single product and service we offer.  And that cornerstone is the PN System.

The Precision Nutrition System

The Precision Nutrition System provides you with 10 guidebooks, the Gourmet Nutrition volume 1 cookbook, and a full membership to the PN Member Zone, where you’ll find our online library and the 24/7 private support forums. Organized in an entertaining and instructive format, it’s got everything you need to get the body you want.

For those of you who’ve already taken this first step and are interested in picking up some additional reading material, we’ve created a few additional books to satisfy both your appetite for knowledge, and…well…your appetite for food.

Gourmet Nutrition Volume 2

Containing over 120 recipes to keep your taste buds alive and your body looking great, Gourmet Nutrition Volume 2 is printed in full color with a photo for every recipe to give you plenty of presentation ideas.  And it’s got a host of nutrition strategies in place so you can build the body you want and keep it for life.

The Diet of UFC Champion Georges St-Pierre: How He Transformed Himself

Written by Tim Ferriss Topics: Physical Performance, The 4-Hour Body - 4HB, The 4-Hour Chef - 4HC

Georges St. Pierre, better known to fight fans worldwide as “GSP,” is currently the UFC Welterweight Champion.
His publicly stated goal is to retire as the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world and, at a record of 23-2, ESPN currently ranks him as the #3 pound-for-pound fighter in the world. I think he’ll get there.
His intellect–and consistency–is what separates him from the brawlers. He has a scientific approach to winning.
This isn’t limited to training. He considers nutrition a critical part of his fight prep, just as important as being in the cage. In this respect, 2009 marked an inflection point. That year, after successfully defending his Welterweight title in his second fight against BJ Penn, GSP hired Dr. John Berardi of Precision Nutrition to help him gain lean muscle tissue and improve his recovery abilities. Berardi, in charge of the nutrient science, recommended that GSP hire Jennifer Nickel and Rosario “Ross” Gurreri, two chefs in the Montreal area who worked at Cavalli and Bice restaurants, for his meal preparation.
In the next 8 weeks, GSP gained approximately 12 pounds of lean muscle and bulked up to 195 pounds. His upgraded speed and power helped him to dominate every subsequent opponent, posting a 5-0 record since 2009.
This post will walk you through how GSP ate during his 2009 transformation…
While he no longer has a private chef for everyday meals, GSP still consults with Berardi and still flies Jen and Ross to his hotel the week before a big fight to cook for him and his entourage.
First, we’ll look at GSP’s meal plan.
Second, we’ll look at how your design your own version using Dr. Berardi’s guidelines.

What Does GSP Eat?

Below is the 2009 meal plan designed for GSP by Dr. Berardi.
It’s based it around “anytime” (AT) and “post-workout” (PW) meals. He gave the guidelines to Jen and Ross and they prepared a menu of roughly 30-40 items that adhered to the calorie and macro-nutrient (carbohydrate, protein, and fat) requirements and ratios. Berardi explains the basic approach:
“Georges’ baseline menu is about 3200-3500kcal per day, with around 250 grams of protein, 350 grams of carbs, and 100 grams of fat. PW meals are higher in protein and carbs, while being lower in fat, and eaten right after workouts. AT meals are higher in protein and fat, while being low in carbs.”
The brands and products mentioned are those Berardi recommended for GSP. Though Berardi formulated the original Surge Recovery product while wrapping up his PhD studies in Exercise and Nutritional Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario and Yale University, he has no financial interest in the products.
Editorial note: In the descriptions, I use both “GSP” and “you” interchangeably, assuming that you might want to duplicate this for yourself.
3 Meals Provided by Ross and Jennifer
- 1 lower carb anytime meal to be eaten whenever you like: 650 calories – 60g protein, 40g carbs, 30g fat
- 1 lower carb anytime meal to be eaten whenever you like: 650 calories – 60g protein, 40g carbs, 30g fat
- 1 high-carb post-exercise meal to be eaten immediately after training (a recipe that can be eaten cold):  700 calories – 60g protein, 100g carbs, 10g fat
You’ll find two sample recipes at the end of this post.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons
2 Daily Super Shakes
GSP made sure to drink shakes every day, to get sufficient protein between meals. Here is his plan:
1 super shake at a time, between meals, mixed with almond milk or water. This was used to wash down 4 fish oil capsules
- 1 scoop milk-based protein powder
- 1 scoop greens supplement
- 1 cup frozen mixed berries (use “mixed” to avoid developing food intolerances from eating too much of a single variety) 282 calories – 18g protein, 25g carbs, 12g fat
Berardi’s suggested products: Muscle Milk protein powder from CytoSport, greens+ from Genuine Health, Flameout fish oil capsules from Biotest.
Workout Nutrition
GSP added protein bars in addition to his two daily shakes. Here is his daily feeding schedule.
Before training: ½ protein bar . Recommended Brand: Finibar from Biotest: 125 calories – 7g protein, 20g carbs, 4g fat
During training: 1 workout drink. Recommended brand: Surge Workout Fuel from Biotest: 85 calories – 8g protein, 21g carbs, 0 fat
Immediately after training: 1 workout drink.  Recommended Brand: Surge Recovery from Biotest: 330 calories – 25g protein, 44g carbs, 1g fat. Followed by a post-workout meal 1 hour later.
Optional: 1 Additional Meal
If you’re hungry, eat 1 additional meal per day. It can be whatever you like, as long as it’s lower in carbs and higher in protein and fat. Given GSP’s leanness, he was given more latitude, as Berardi explains:
“The rule was to eat everything on the menu and then, if he wanted anything else, he could have it.  Some days that meant Subway, other days McDonald’s.  It didn’t matter.  As long as he got his required food in each day, he could eat whatever discretionary calories he wanted. He ended up reporting that he had a few extra meals a week.  But he was pretty satisfied from his normal menu, so he didn’t need to use too many discretionary calories.”
Approximate Total Baseline Intake: 3104 calories – 256g protein (30%), 315 carbs (40%), 99g fat (30%)

Q&A With Dr. Berardi–How to Mimic GSP’s Results

What guidelines should someone use if trying to replicate the above?
“When determining a client’s macronutrient split, at Precision Nutrition we use body-type specific guidelines. In essence, we plan someone’s nutrition according to their somatotype, as follows:
Ectomorphs — around 25% p (protein), 55%c (carbs), 20%f (fat)
Mesomorphs — around 30%p, 40%c, 30%f
Endomorphs — around 35%p, 25%c, 40%f”
Definitions:
Ectomorph – Thin build, challenging to put on weight (muscle or fat); Example: long-distance runner.
Mesomorph – Muscular build, can lose or gain muscle easily (fat gain minimal); Example: sprinter or gymnast.
Endomorph – Large build, easy to put on weight (both good and bad); Example: shotputter or football lineman.
“Since GSP is a clear mesomorph, that’s why his split looked like it did. As far as calories, for most people wanting to gain weight, we’d multiply body weight in pounds x 20-22 to determine the total.  This would have put GSP at 3400 to 3700kcal to start with.  However, he was chronically underfed leading up to us working together, so jumping all the way up to 20 or 22 would have probably led to fat gain.  So we chose a multiplier of 18 to start with.  This ended up being perfect for him, based on the outcomes described above.”
How much did GSP weigh when consuming the above?
“We started this plan about 2 months before a training camp when he weighed around 183 lbs.  In the 2 months leading up to camp, the plan took him to about 195 lbs.  At that point his weight stabilized, which was perfect going into camp. We didn’t want him much heavier because it then might be too hard to cut to 170.
In the next 3 months, the diet stayed the same, but the high volume of camp helped him come down to about 188 the week before the fight.  That made the cut to 170 pretty easy.  We did the cut from 188 to 170 in 5 days (from M-F).  Then in 24 hours (from F-Sa), he rehydrated to about 188 lbs for the fight.”

How is the Food Prepared?

In 2009, when the GSP experiment began, Jen had the entire professional kitchen of Bice to herself in the morning and prepared 3 meals for Georges during that time: a post-workout meal (that could be eaten cold, so he could have it directly after his workout), a dinner meal, and a breakfast meal for the next morning. Meal prep took between 2-4 hours.
Jen shopped for 100% organic foods, cooked the meals, and had someone else deliver the meals to Georges’ gym once a day. Georges, having eaten breakfast and workout shakes, would eat the post-workout meal directly after training in the early afternoon. These below answers and suggestions are from Jennifer, who has been a chef for 12 years and now runs a private catering business in Toronto.
Equipment and Methods
First, Jen has the right gear for the job. In Jen’s tool kit are:
- Microplane zester/grater
- 7-9” chefs knives (MAC MTH-80 8″ Chef’s Knife, which “stays sharp longer than any knife I have ever used”)
- Peugeot peppermill
- Kuhn Rikon vegetable peelers
For cooking methods, Jen explains the basics: “It’s important to have access to a stove-top grill (she uses a Le Creuset cast-iron “griddle”) and a bamboo steamer. Having this equipment makes it easy to cook fast meals because they are stationary and easy to clean, so you don’t have to mess around with pots and pans.” These cooking vessels stay on the stovetop and are quickly cleaned on the stovetop so there’s no sink involved.
“For example, if I were making grilled tuna with Asian greens and sweet potato, I would station a steamer and a cast-iron grill on the back burners of my stove, steam the potato first and then use the same steamer to cook the greens. Using equipment like this guarantees that you won’t be slopping extra cooking fat in your frying pan or killing your green vegetables in boiling water. It’s fast and easy.”
Shopping Tips
“In terms of buying fruit, always buy what appears to be heavy for it’s size. And for vegetables, look for bright colors and perky leaves. Fish should have glossy flesh, bright eyes and have the slight aroma of sea water. Meat should be freshly butchered whenever possible and should be devoid of any sulfur-type smell or brownish, greenish tinges.”
Above all, according to Jen, try to incorporate more fresh herbs, spices and vinegars into your shopping list. “It’s amazing how much flavor (not to mention health benefits) you can get from these ingredients without having to add calories.”
Shortcuts
Prepare certain things in bulk so that you have them for the week, something like braised lima beans or lentils, which can be used later in many recipes. “If you store them in their own cooking liquid in an airtight container in the fridge, they have a surprisingly long shelf-life.
“This is an important step for having access to nutritious carbohydrates, especially if you don’t have time to cook them throughout the week. The same beans and legumes can be used for so many different recipes, so that’s a huge time saver.”

How Much does it Cost?

Having a private chef may seem like it would cost a fortune—and a single, full-time person definitely can. Rates (by hour and year) vary widely depending on location, but a good starting point is $50,000 per year. If that’s your preference, you can search here by state for chefs.
But there are other options–you can search on Craigslist or use meal delivery, which is what Phil Caravaggio, CEO of Precision Nutrition, does. He stopped cooking years ago to focus on business and other priorities.
Phil uses Essential Meal Delivery out of Toronto: “The meals cost $13-$17 each. Every week, I call them and tell them my goals (intermittent fasting, Paleo, etc.) and they make a menu based on my food likes and dislikes. Then they’re delivered to my apartment every morning, and I get a bill at the end of the week. I only have them delivered Monday – Friday. I save the weekends for going out and cooking with family and friends.”
Depending on where you live, there are a variety of options: check out Home Cooking for You and Dine In 2Nite, for instance.
For those who want to get a private chef for as little at $5 a meal, there is a real-world Craigslist template in The 4-Hour Workweek. I’ll expand on this in future posts.

Sample GSP Recipes

Grilled Tuna with “Recovery Salad and Soy-Ginger Vinaigrette” – Post-Workout (PW) Meal
Calories: 758 / protein: 60g / carbs: 100 g / fat: 10g
- 160 grams fresh sushi grade yellowfin tuna
- 100 grams cooked lentils
- 190 grams cooked quinoa
- 28 grams shelled edamame beans
- 28 grams shaved red cabbage
- 30 grams dried apricots or prunes, chopped
- 50 grams cherry tomatoes, cut in half
- 28 grams sliced red onion
- 1 teaspooon extra virgin olive oil
- 1 tablespoon light soy sauce
- 1 tablespoon cider vinegar
- 1 teaspoon grated ginger
- 1 tablespoon chopped coriander/cilantro
- 1 tablespoon chopped green onion/scallion
- 1 handful baby spinach
Directions: Set your grill pan to medium heat. Grill the sliced red onion, dry, until it starts to char and wilt. Remove from the pan and chop. Turn your grill pan to high. Prepare the salad: In a large bowl mix together the lentils, quinoa, edamame, cabbage, cherry tomatoes, and chopped red onion. Cover and set aside. Prepare the vinaigrette: in a small bowl mix together the olive oil, soy, vinegar, ginger, coriander, apricots, and green onion.
Grill the tuna evenly on all sides, seasoning with sea salt as you go, until rare or medium rare. Remove from heat immediately and slice into 4-6 thin slices. Mix half of the vinaigrette into the salad. Spoon the salad onto a plate of raw spinach. Plate the sliced tuna on top of the salad and garnish with the remaining vinaigrette.
Steak and Eggs Anytime Meal
Calories: 700 / protein: 60g / carbs: 40g / fat: 30g
- 150 grams mashed steamed sweet potato or squash
- 200 grams of veal tenderloin
The crust/rub for the veal:
- 3 chestnuts, dry roasted, peeled and chopped
- 1 teaspoon old fashioned or dijon mustard
- 1 tablespoon honey
- Salt and fresh cracked pepper
Sauteed topping:
- 1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil
- 50 grams wild mushrooms like chanterelle or matsutake, brushed not rinsed
- 1 teaspoon cider or red wine vinegar
- Fresh herbs like basil, parsley and/or tarragon, roughly chopped
Sides:
- 1 egg or 3 quail eggs
- 5 spears steamed asparagus or broccoli

11 Tricks for Perfect Sleep

"God, what a beautiful beach. Calm. Nice translucent turquoise water. I should really go back to Thailand. I wonder what time it is in Thailand. But... why is there a mangy German Shepherd on my beach? Orange collar. That makes no sense. Kind of looks like John's dog. Actually, I owe John a call. F*ck. Did I put his birthday party in the calendar? Birthdays and clowns. Clowns?! Why the hell am I thinking about clowns???"
And so my internal dialogues continues until 3, 4, or even 6 a.m., rotating through images, ideas, commitments, anxieties and fantasies.
I have insomnia. Horrific onset-insomnia that also afflicts my father and my brother. It's not because we're stressed out, it's not because we're not tired -- it's because we just can't freaking fall asleep.
So, in the interest of finally getting a good night's rest and helping others with insomnia, I tried it all. And I measured. A lot.
It paid off. I can now say that I had insomnia.
The Hidden Third of Life
Is good sleep a simple matter of length, the longer the better? If you've ever needed a nap after sleeping too much, you know it isn't that simple. Let's examine the problem through an easier question to answer: what is bad sleep?

• Taking too long to get to sleep (onset insomnia, my major problem)
• Waking too often throughout the night (middle insomnia)
• Waking early and being unable to get back to sleep (terminal insomnia)

For me, the problem with improving sleep was being unable to measure it. I could record the time when I got into bed and when I woke up, but I couldn't pinpoint when I fell asleep, much less what happened while I was asleep.
The problem with testing these in a proper sleep lab (the test is called a polysomnogram) is that you generally have at least 22 wires attached to you to measure brain activity (EEG), eye movements (EOG), skeletal muscle activation (EMG), heart rhythm (ECG), respiration, and sometimes peripheral pulse oximetry.
Guess what? No one can sleep in a weird lab with 22 wires attached to them on the first night. So the data are terrible. Then they come in the second night after an effective all-nighter and crash like heroin addicts. Double bad data.
Alas, I would need a pocket-sized sleep lab to test them under realistic sleeping conditions, and I was able to do this recently using the Zeo brain-tracking device, video recording of sleep movements, accelerometers, and more.
Here are some of the most important initial findings, ranking sleep from 1-10, 10 being most restful:
1. 8-10 sleep was most dependent on the ratio of REM-to-total sleep, not total REM duration.
The higher the percentage of REM sleep, the more restful the sleep. The higher the REM percent, the better the recall of skills or data acquired in the previous 24 hours. Higher percent REM sleep also correlated to lower average pulse and temperature upon waking. Based on available studies, I expected deep wave to affect the latter two, but the correlation was erratic.
2. I could increase REM percent by extending total sleep time past 9 hours or waking for 5 minutes at approximately 4.5 hours after sleep onset.
Short wakings of 5-10 minutes, particularly one additional waking approximately 6.5 hours after sleep onset, dramatically increased REM percent. It turns out that waking is not necessarily a bad thing, at least when intentional.
3. 200mcg (micrograms) of huperzine-A 30 minutes pre-bed can increase total REM by 20-30 percent
Huperzine-A, an extract of huperzia serrata, slows the breakdown of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine ( ¹). It is a popular nootropic (smart drug), and I have used it in the past to accelerate learning and increase the incidence of lucid dreaming. The increased REM seemingly caused by huperzine-A could explain the increased retention some experience with it. I no longer use huperzine-A except for the first several weeks of language acquisition, no more than three days per week to avoid side-effects, and I do not recommend using it unless you do your homework. Inhibition in the human body usually triggers compensation -- and often delayed side-effects -- somewhere else. The brain is a sensitive instrument, and this drug is contraindicated with a fair number of medications.
4. More than two glasses of wine within four hours of sleep onset decreases deep wave sleep 20-50 percent.
Even four glasses six hours beforehand did not appear to have this effect. Conversely, taking 15+ drops of California Poppy extract appeared to increase deep wave sleep up to 20 percent.
5. Having two tablespoons of organic almond butter (or peanut butter) on celery sticks before bed eliminated at least 50 percent of "feel like shit" 1-3 awakenings.
Ever wonder how you can sleep 8-10 hours and feel tired? Often the culprit is low blood sugar. Make a pre-bed snack part of your nutritional program.
1-2 tablespoons of flaxseed oil (120-240 calories) can be used in combination with the above to further increase cell repair during sleep and thus decrease fatigue. It tastes like a mixture of cat urine and asparagus, so I recommend pinching your nose while consuming it per Dr. Seth Roberts.
Turning Off Monkey Mind
The most important thing, of course, is getting to sleep in the first place. No matter how theoretically restful my sleep should be based on Zeo results, more than 30 minutes of onset insomnia negated it all.
Here are the changes and tools that had the largest and most predictable effects. Some will no doubt be more convenient than others. I excluded drugs from testing to avoid both side-effects and dependencies:
6. 67-70-degree temperature
This was the variable I most experimented with while in Nicaragua for my medical tourism adventure (another story -- I used one hospital trip to pay for a beach vacation), and it was also the variable that had the most consistent effects. Specifically, using a single bed sheet, 67-70-degrees Fahrenheit produced the fastest time to sleep. Warmer temperatures never worked, but as low as 65 would work equally well if I wore socks to keep my feet warm. If you can't control the ambient temperature, testing socks of different thicknesses is the easiest variable to change for tweaking heat loss. No joke.
Ideal temperature is highly individual and a narrow range, so experiment with precise controls.
7. Large fat and protein-dominant meal within 3 hours of sleep
Consumed within 3 hours of bedtime, meals of at least 800mg cholesterol (4 or more large whole eggs) and 40 grams of protein total produced dramatically faster time-to-sleep scores than meals of lower volume or lower protein and fat. Eating two rib-eye steaks, each about ¾ pounds, had the strongest tranquilizer-like effect.
8. Philips goLITE
I bought this travel-sized blue-light(²) emitter for a friend who suffers from seasonal affective disorder (SAD) -- a.k.a. mild to severe depression -- during winter months. It turned out he already had the same device, so I began to use it as a replacement for coffee first thing in the morning. I set it to the side of my laptop, pointing at me at a 15-degree angle for 15 minutes. That evening, my time to sleep was less than 10 minutes for the first time in a week. I was able to replicate the effect 4 nights out of 5.
Though most often used for jet lag or winter depression, the goLITE has been singularly most useful as a corrective sleep tool, even if I wake up late and go to be earlier than usual. Battery life is long and it is, at the size of a small square book, portable enough to take in a carry-on bag.
9. Cold bath one hour prior to bed
The Japanese have longer average lifespans than most other ethnicities, including Americans, whom they beat by more than four years(³). One hypothesis researchers have forwarded is that regular ofuro -- hot baths at bedtime -- increase melatonin release and that this is the mechanism for life extension.
It seemed that the ofuro effect might be related to the subsequent rapid cooling, and not eager to kill my swimmies with hot baths, I opted for the opposite and went direct: cold.
I tested the effect of combining shorter-than-usual 10-minute ice baths one hour prior to bed, timed with a countdown kitchen timer, with low-dose melatonin (1.5 - 3 mg) on regulating both sleep regularity and speed to sleep. The icebath is simple: 2-3 bags of ice from a convenience store ($3-6 USD) put into a half-full bath until the ice is about 80 percent melted. Beginners should start with immersing the lower body only and progress to spending the second five minutes with the upper torso submerged (fold your legs Indian-style at the end of the tub if you don't have room).
The result: it's like getting hit with an elephant tranquilizer, even if the melatonin is omitted. Don't expect it to be pleasant at first.

10. Nightwave
The Nightwave was introduced to me by a good friend named Michael with even worse onset insomnia than mine, which is hard to imagine.
He is not prone to ranting and raving, and he had begun ranting and raving about how he'd found a permanent fix to his sleep problems. It was the Nightwave, a slow-pulsing light the size of a cigarette pack that now helped him get to sleep in less than 7 minutes. Dr. James B. Maas, Weiss Presidential Fellow and Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, is one of several researchers who have endorsed the device.
It does work often, but I found it less consistent than Michael did (his hit rate was near 100 percent). I now travel with the Nightwave but use it is a supplement to the goLITE when needed.

11. Half military crawl position
This was, along with the socks (foot warming) recommendation, a result of polling more than 70,000 Twitter followers for successful treatments for onset insomnia.
To echo Animal House, here's how you assume the position. Lie on your chest with your head on a pillow and facing to the right. Both arms should be straight by your sides, palms up. Now bring your right arm up until the top of your right hand is under your pillow and under your head. Next bring your right knee out to that side until it is bent at approximately 90 degrees.
This is a last-ditch resort that works for one simple reason: you can't move. It's like a self-imposed papoose, which the Inuits and other cultures have used to prevent infants from moving, which calms them. To toss and turn from the half military crawl position, you have to first lifting your entire body off the bed. Less fidgeting results in faster sleep.

¹ It is therefore called an acetylcholinesterase inhibitor. The -ase of acetylcholinesterase indicates it breaks down the word it's attached to
² 50/60 Hz
³ https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2102rank.html
Adapted from The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman Copyright © 2010 by Tim Ferriss. Published by Crown Archetype, a division of Random House, Inc.

How to Successfully Learn a New Language This Year

Be Specific in What You're Aiming For

I find that the biggest problem is the vague or impossible goal itself dragging people down before you even get started. Many people phrase their resolution as "Learn Spanish/French/Japanese" without any qualifiers. What does "Learn Chinese" even mean? Learn it to sound like a native? To order food? To write it? And by when?
What you absolutely need to do is be as specific as possible, both in your target and in your timeline. And make it something absolutely achievable and within a few months from now.
How about you aim to be conversational in six months? Or be able to ask directions in three weeks? Or talk about your life and your work in two months? Or order food in the language by the end of the month? You can aim for an achievable goal within a few months first, rather than working without a good plan of action for when you can "some day" get mistaken for a native speaker. Be specific and realistic about what you want and when you want it.

Stop Thinking of it Academically—The Only "Failure" is Not Doing Anything

A language is not an academic topic that you can pass or fail, but a means of communication. There is no "failure" here, just various degrees of success when you can use that language. Do NOT aim for perfection-or-bust. Even a small success of being able to buy lunch in the language, with bad grammar and not using precisely the right word, is something worth being proud of.

You Can Learn to Speak Well Before You Ever Go To the Country

To really prove to people that you don't need to go to the country to successfully learn a language, I decided to prepare for my upcoming trip to Egypt by spending the last three months immersed in Egyptian Arabic, while hundreds of miles deep inside Brazil. Here is my two month point, and if you subscribe to my blog, you'll see subtitled videos of me using the language with natives while in the country. To prepare for this, I had specific goals, accepted making mistakes as OK, and spoke with natives every day via Skype. I definitely won't lie to you and say that it was easy. I worked really hard and had to feel like an idiot a lot of the time, but it was worth all the struggles and time invested, because now I'm ready to discover this wonderful culture.

Focus on Your Priorities in That Language

Once you have a decent roadmap of where you want to be and when, it's important to focus your time and energy on where your priorities lie. This is why it's simply not possible to describe that "one perfect method" to learn any language that applies to "everybody". As an example, my focus is simple: I want to be able to converse and have real friendships in the language with native speakers. This may seem obvious as a universal goal that every language learner could have, but realistically it isn't, or at least it isn't the absolute priority.
Some people are more passionate about literature in the language, reading comic books / manga, enjoying movies, writing letters, or even learning grammar and the technical workings of various languages. For each of these types of people, I recommend diving into the very things they are so passionate about right from the start. Immerse yourself in that, and it will make other aspects of the language much easier when you come back to them later.
Since my focus is speaking, as I'm a very active traveler (over ten entire years on the road so far, which has been one hell of an education about the world) this means that my priority is speaking. After I succeed in doing this specific aspect of it pretty well, learning to read and write and even work professionally in the language becomes so much more achievable, even for someone like me who barely passed languages in school.

Recommendations For Those with Spoken Priorities

If your main priority is to converse with natives, then please don't lock yourself away alone in a room with a dusty old book. You must speak with real people right now, and ideally every single day for at least a half an hour. Anything else you do should serve the main purpose of preparing for those spoken sessions. I study too of course, but that study is for today's spoken session, not for six months or two years down the road when I'm finally "ready" to use it. No matter what, you'll always be missing a few wordsor have some other aspect to improve on—accept this from the start and get cracking on using the language for real!
If you are not in the country right now, or don't have access to native speakers nearby, two completely free resources that I especially like for this are italki (connect with my profile here) and Verbling. italki lets you schedule a language exchange with someone wanting to learn your language, who is confirmed to be patient and helpful. Verbling lets you be more spontaneous about it, with random connections with native speakers in a chat-roulette style.
Remember: because you're both learning, it's OK to make mistakes! In fact, you should embrace making mistakes, because this is an essential part of learning any language.

A Few More Resources to Help You Progress Quickly

If you live in a major city that has a good international crowd, Meetup.com has many regular language specific gatherings, and I've actually found that Couchsurfing, a site usually associated with budget travel, has one of the most excellent per-language and per-city social searches to get in touch with natives.
Apart from one-on-one time with people, the resources that I use between spoken sessions to prepare and learn better include:

• Anki: a flashcard app for the iPhone (paid in iTunes or free on jailbroken iPhones in Cydia) and Android (free). An open database of pre-made decks cover many excellent word lists you can download in advance.
• Memrise: the vocabulary lists on this site include memory cues with their words, to give you tricks and mnemonics to make it much less likely you'll forget the words.
• Native content: Try an active language learning forum to ask for the best news sites or blogs for the language or dialect you are most interested in. One trick I like to do is flick through the top 100 sites by traffic in Alexa's per country list, to see what sites those in that country genuinely check out regularly. For instance, there is a Spanish equivalent of Reddit called Menéame popular in Spain with tons of great articles to read every day. Stumbleupon also has a language setting to find random nice content in a bunch of languages, tailored to your interests, and you can change your computer and software interface languages too.

Your learning approach naturally adapts to your priorities, which is the opposite of what most one-size-fits-all courses seem to aim for. You have great power to succeed in your language learning project this year. Work hard, adapt your learning approach to your priorities, make it about using your language rather than studying it, and you will get results!
Editor's note: Want even more Lifehacker tips on language learning? Check out this post by reader Gabriel Wyner: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here's How.