Mark Henspeter

The scariest finding in this paper: the subjects couldn't tell it was happening. UPenn ran this study on 48 healthy adults. One group slept 8 hours. Another slept 6. Another slept 4. For 14 straight days. They tested cognitive performance every 2 hours from 7:30am to 11:30pm. The 6-hour group's reaction times, working memory, and sustained attention deteriorated on a near-linear curve. By day 14 they were performing at the same level as someone who hadn't slept at all in 48 hours. The 4-hour group hit that threshold by day 6. Here's the part that should unsettle everyone who thinks they "do fine" on 6 hours: the subjects' self-reported sleepiness flatlined after the first few days. Their brains kept getting worse. Their perception of how impaired they were stopped updating. The cognitive decline was invisible to the person experiencing it. The researchers found a hard threshold. Any wakefulness beyond 15.84 hours in a day produces cumulative neurobiological cost. That cost compounds every single day you exceed it and does not reset with a weekend of sleeping in. About 35% of American adults sleep less than 7 hours a night. 40% of those get 6 hours or less. In 1942 that number was 11%. We built an entire professional culture around a sleep schedule that this paper says is functionally equivalent to pulling consecutive all-nighters. "I'm fine on 6 hours" is the most common response to sleep research. The first thing chronic sleep debt destroys is your ability to notice chronic sleep debt.

The oil shock has yet to arrive in the west. Blue line = Global Oil in Transit (left axis, Drops from 1.7B barrels to 1.4): This tracks the total volume of crude physically sailing on tankers globally. It rose steadily through 2025, then in March 2026, there is a cliff-edge collapse of roughly ~300 mb, as empty tankers cannot be reloaded. Red line = OECD Europe + Americas Commercial Crude (right axis, 0.95B barrels): This tracks commercial crude inventories held by Western buyers. Despite the tanker collapse, this line has barely moved — when it finally does, the physical shock will have arrived.

Ford CEO in new interview: “We'll have an all-electric, affordable vehicle to compete with Model Y and Model 3. I think there's nothing else like it on the market. We started a skunkworks team 4 years ago. They were basically Formula 1 and Tesla people. That vehicle is radically different. I'm really excited to show everyone maybe late this year or (early) next year. It will be coming out next year.” (via Spike's Car Radio)

Good News: Android Auto is gaining a charging-route-planner for loads of BEVs!!! Bad News: As it won't pull SoC info from the car it's guessing charge level after the first manual SoC entry.

People use the term energy independence to describe the US being a net exporter. While the term implies isolation from global disruptions, we're still susceptible to the global market, at least in oil. And given pace we're building LNG export, it'll be true of NG at some point.

Effectively all growth in corn production over the last 20 years is for ethanol. ~20 million acres of conservation land, grassland, and soybean rotation was turned into corn monoculture that effectively strip mines the topsoil. Meanwhile it’s the most fertilizer dependent crop with only a 40% uptake rate. So ~1.7 million tons of nitrogen runoff flows into the Mississippi basin annually while also polluting their own water supplies. This runoff ends up expanding the Gulf deadzone, which is also where 40% of domestic seafood comes from. It’s hard to find a worse way to create fuel, with a wicked level of waste and downstream consequences.