Have a good weekend, everybody! I have a three day one, so I’ll be playing lots of Warcraft, of course. I might even take in a movie or something. Here’s your deep thought for this weekend:

As I was going to sleep last night, I realized how freaky sleep is.

Think about it. Technically, I guess scientists would call it an evolutionary adaptation (if you believe in this whole evolutionary thing, which you may not). Microbes and microorganisms are just going all the time, little machines of energy constantly chewing up whatever they chew up and spitting it out in the form of energy and waste. Go go go, until they stop going, and then they’re replaced by something else that does keep going.

But somewhere along the line, some microorganism got it into his head that going into a kind of deep trance when it got dark outside might be beneficial. “Hey,” maybe he (or she) thought, “if I knock myself out half the day, the other half of the day I can really eat and shit like a madman. I can get twice as much done if I sleep for half the day.”

The other microorganisms must have thought he was insane. They probably laughed when they saw him not eating all the time. What’s he doing, they probably asked themselves, in their little microbiotic voices. He’s supposed to be eating. But he showed them the next day when they were only eating at half speed. He won the eating race, all because he got a good night’s sleep.

And now, every night, billions of people around the world go unconscious when it gets dark every night. It seems a little unsafe, actually, turning off your senses at the time when they’re probably most needed, when all the theives and evolutionary predators and monsters come out. But apparently it’s worth it evolutionwise– we work much better and are much more alive during the day because we sleep at night. And we all get to eat twice as fast, just like that little microbe.

That’s what I was thinking about before I fell asleep last night. Have a good weekend.