> If you give me a lump of coal you give me power.

Did you mean energy here?

My biggest concern in getting an e-bike is the fear of it getting stolen. I live in an European capital where this kind of crime is quite common. Didn't look too deep into insurance options, but still.

Other than that, the idea sounds super nice. I see more and more people using e-bikes here.

Yeah, that's a concern. I've got a Kryptonite for the frame and a beefy cable for the front wheel, and I'm going to get pinlocks for everything I can. I don't think I'd leave it out overnight or be real comfortable leaving it on the street for a whole day, but for meals, stops into stores, etc I think it's protected well enough.

(I'd note also though that there's enough broken glass on the sides of the roads around here that I'm not sure a car is much of a theft deterrent either.)

It was when riding the subway with my noise-cancelling headphones that I realized how good an investment it was. Oh, the bliss.

To me this is fairly dependent on how fast the speaker speaks. Most of the times 1.25x works well. Sometimes 1.5x is too fast.

I find this true on podcasts; I'm normally a 1.3-1.5x person listening to podcasts, except "No Such Thing as a Fish". That one I go slower on, just because they seem to talk quite quickly, comparatively.

Something to factor in here is if you're sleep deprived. I can normally nap for 20 minutes and get said boost, but not when I'm sleep deprived. In that case, it feels way harder to wake up at the 20-minute mark, I also wake up groggy and I feel like napping longer (and that's what normally ends up happening).

You hit the crux of the problem here.

Our brains compensate for sleep deprivation by releasing increased dopamine in the striatum, which is involved in motivation and reward, and the thalamus, which is involved in alertness. On top of that, one of the effects of sleep deprivation is a reduction in your ability to tell how sleep deprived you are.

If you're sleep deprived, you're running on a natural high. If you get just enough sleep to get close to rested, that extra striatum and thalamus dopamine stops, and you also regain your ability to perceive yourself.

That feels really bad. Not only do you forego the high, but you can feel every bit of the lack of rest. It's like the end of a bender. The only good thing is knowing you're making progress back to relatedness.

Seems to tackle the Pareto principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle