
A father knitted his baby’s first year of sleep pattern data into a blanket - kjhughes
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/21/20699484/sleep-blanket-data-visualisation-seung-lee
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carrozo
This reminded me of the quipu:

 _A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca
people used them for collecting data and keeping records, monitoring tax
obligations, properly collecting census records, calendrical information, and
for military organization.[4] The cords stored numeric and other values
encoded as knots, often in a base ten positional system. A quipu could have
only a few or thousands of cords.[5] The configuration of the quipus has been
"compared to string mops."[6] Archaeological evidence has also shown the use
of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps more sturdy, base to
which the color-coded cords would be attached.[7] A relatively small number
have survived._

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu)

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acheron
1st child: September 15, 2019: here is exactly how long Aiden slept that
night!

2nd child: June-August 2021: I think Jayden slept pretty well that summer.

3rd child: 2024-2032: Braden was born and entered third grade.

~~~
mv4
true.

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adyer07
I love that he chose to turn it into a baby blanket - it resonates so much
more than if it was just a print or digital image.

As someone without kids, I also feel like I learned something about baby sleep
by looking at it. Neat to see it turn from randomness into something ordered.

~~~
elliekelly
And how jarring daylight saving time is to a tiny human’s sleep pattern.
(Assuming that’s the big shift at the end/bottom.)

Edit: Looking at the picture closer on twitter it seems like it’s ~28 stitches
which would be almost 3 hours so not DST.

~~~
x1798DE
In the thread he mentions it was a cross country trip and he didn't adjust the
time zone to local time.

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punnerud
What impressed me the most is that he made a webpage to help him do the
knitting.

Example of a dinosaur:
[https://lagomorpho.com/patterntracker/?pattern=patterns/chro...](https://lagomorpho.com/patterntracker/?pattern=patterns/chromedino-l.js)

This should be a product on its own. Take a photo, use some PyTorch and get a
ready made page to help you. Don’t know how many times I have printed A4 paper
or handed my wife the iPad with a zoomed version of the receipt she is
knitting.

~~~
jgrahamc
That's definitely a thing. The knitting world has been pixelating stuff
forever and there have been knitting machines with everything from floppy disk
interfaces to USB-C.

~~~
Symbiote
My mother had a knitting machine interfaced with a BBC Model B over a serial
connection.

It had four colours of wool, and the knitting area was about a metre wide.

It was like this (video), but the program in the machine would automatically
raise and lower the needles according to the wool colour required for each
line.

The result is the first computer program I ever used, age 2 or so, was the
knitting pattern editor. I think it was the simplest drawing/colouring
program, since you just had a large grid with 4 colours.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aEzZ6TdpcQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1aEzZ6TdpcQ)
(I think this is a cheaper machine. My mum's could change the wool colour
automatically: it would beep when this was required, and you dragged the thing
(shuttle?) to the far side, where some mechanical clicking would happen and
the wool in use would be swapped.)

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netfl0
Anyone with kids knows this would be a good source of entropy.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Babies make great random number generators.

~~~
kijin
I dunno, it looks like some three-letter agency compromised this baby around
the middle of the year.

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cperciva
The thing I find most impressive about this isn't the blanket but rather the
data acquisition: How do new parents manage to accurately and consistently
record every time their baby wakes up or falls asleep?

~~~
eirki
There are a couple of apps out there! Although my experience was that I didn't
really have a need for the data when all was said and done. Maybe I should
have picked up knitting..

~~~
kelnos
I'm not a parent, but my sister, and many of my friends, are of the life stage
where they have kids under 5. The amount of tracking I see them do, especially
in the first year of life, is insane. Is there a medical use for it? Do
parents share the data with their pediatricians? If not, what's the point?
Since all these apps are free, I assume it all just feeds some giant data
science model that helps diaper companies advertise better, or something else
utterly annoying like that.

(Then again, I usually use a sleep tracker, and aside from a quick glance in
the morning, never ever look at the data again. But I figure baby tracking has
a decent amount of overhead, and parents are already overworked and overtired
enough as it is...)

~~~
mattkevan
Most tracking isn’t really necessary, though it’s a very uncertain time so it
does make you feel like you’re doing something useful.

Tracking is genuinely useful though when you’ve noticed something and are
trying to gather evidence of a pattern to bring to a healthcare professional -
for example around sleeping or feeding.

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sealthedeal
I am currently in the random scattered spot, cant wait to get some normalcy
around the sleeping patterns. Side note what a great idea, and did he actually
knit this himself?

~~~
Freak_NL
Hang in there. I think mine might have mostly figured out how to sleep from
bedtime to 6:30 now at almost eight months. I hope.

That is, when he doesn't wake himself up by bumping his head on the side of
the crib, or having a nightmare (I guess?), or just being a baby.

~~~
appwiz
Our baby slept for exactly 28 minute stretches day or night. Surprisingly,
moving her sleep time to earlier (7pm) improved the situation. It took weeks
to get her into an evening routine (dark room, changing, soft song, etc) but
that helped flip her sleep bit. YMMV but hang in there.

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shadowoflight
This is the kind of content I’m pleasantly surprised by - it’s both
technically impressive _and_ adorable!

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fovc
Looks like a bifurcation diagram! Order out of chaos

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bifurcation_diagram)

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jolmg
Is it me or does it seem like the first 1 or 2 days there was no sleep at
all... That top margin looks quite a bit wider than the bottom margin.

~~~
gus_massa
The first two days (sometimes) the baby has stomach ache and s/he doesn't
sleep too much and you sleep even less. Most of the times it's only one or two
days, so be brave and try to survive.

The ache can be cured with some massages in the tummy. It's not as easy as it
looks. Ask the nurse in the hospital for help after you tried for 15 or 30
minutes. The nurses know how to make the massages, it's like magic.

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RocketSyntax
first few months look rough

~~~
isoprophlex
You sleep when the baby sleeps, that's how you survive.

Unless you already have a kid that needs your attention, too. Then you really
feel yourself wither away.

~~~
phjesusthatguy3
My daughter (first child) _would not sleep_ on her back. So, after the third
week of each of us getting about 45 minutes of sleep at a time, and against
current best practices, we let her sleep on her stomach. She slept, we slept
in shifts so she wouldn't die on us, and we're all still here 13 years later.

My son (second child) slept from the start. Thankfully.

~~~
xienze
> and against current best practices, we let her sleep on her stomach.

The thing about "best practices" is they always change. My mom told me that
when I was a baby the "best practice" was for a baby to sleep on its stomach
-- otherwise it might aspirate vomit. Both approaches are honestly probably
equally fine...

~~~
zrail
The thing about SIDS is that it's basically a catch-all for every infant death
that can't be explained otherwise. The relative risk is already very low and
didn't really change after the back to sleep campaign started.[1]

If you look into the research there are a number of things that greatly
elevate the relative risk of SIDS. Belly sleeping is, as far as I understand
it, way down on the list but for parents that don't have any of the other risk
factors going on it's _really_ easy to point at and say "if you do this you
will kill your baby because SIDS".

[1]:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3356149/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3356149/)

~~~
vilhelm_s
I don't think it's true that the relative risk didn't change. The Back-to-
Sleep campaign cut down SIDS cases proper to something like a third, and the
overall cases of unexpected infant death to almost half.
([https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/13...](https://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/pediatrics/138/5/e20162940.full.pdf))

The paper you cite seems consistent with that also: although the number of
discrete risk factors was unchanged, the number of SIDS deaths per year fell
to less than half after the BTS campaign, so probably not all the risk factors
are equally risky...

~~~
zrail
I'm not convinced that BTS had anything to do with the drop in SIDS. The BTS
campaign occurred at a time in the US when smoking rates started falling off a
cliff. Between 1990 and 2018 smoking has dropped 42% [1]. Between 1992 and
2017 the rate of SUID (includes SIDS and a handful of other things that used
to be commonly lumped in with SIDS) has dropped... 42% [2].

Yes, correlation does not equal causation. That said, by definition SIDS has
no known cause and smoking has been identified as one of the biggest risk
factors.

Edit to add: one other thing that I think is hard to track. As a parent that
tried to sleep two kids on their backs, they slept _terribly_. In the middle
of the night, in sleep deprivation fueled desperation, the two options we saw
were to put them on their belly or bring them into bed with us. Cosleeping is
a far greater risk factor of SUID than belly sleeping but people make that
choice every day because of the shaming that doctors and nurses put on belly
sleeping.

[1]:
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/07/26/poll-u...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/07/26/poll-
u-s-smoking-rate-falls-to-historic-low-infographic/#701991c83351)

[2]: [https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/sids/data.htm)

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scandox
Sweet. Lovely side project. But. Is this is the HN equivalent of kitten makes
friends with a Panda "human interest" story? I've been reading a lot of
stories where the headline really says it all recently...

~~~
jedimastert
Meh. It's kinds of an interesting data visualization project, so I'll let it
slide.

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iamalva
This is really impressive (I have two weeks baby)

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wil421
He look at me sleeping for 6 house last night (6 week old). My wife has been
tracking feedings, I could probably do something similar.

~~~
mosburn
Taking up new skills that required little to no thought when my girls were
young was the only way I survived mentally on those days you can barely get
going due to their sleep/sick patterns. Some days it was slight progress on a
long project that allowed me to not feel like I was trapped in Groundhog day
getting nothing done.

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tunnuz
Amazing!

