5AM is a bit rough for me, but I get up at 6-6:30AM on a regular basis.

This is me, even on the weekends these days. Sadly, I also have strong night owl tendancies.

ooooooohhhhhh! that's 5AM? people get up then?

Like, up off the couch? Or some other up?

A newly spotted giant cloud of intergalactic plasma is the largest known object in the universe. Spanning 600 million light years, it is three times bigger than the previous cosmic colossus.

Didn't the Enterprise run into this once?

I prefer 5 a.m. to come at the END of my night, rather than the beginning of my day.

I started becoming more of a morning person as I got older (but 8 a.m. is prime for me). The kids seem to rise a little earlier (between 6-7:30 a.m.) which is pushing the limits of what caffeine can do for me.

The only time I get up at 5am is when I'm catching a plane someplace fun, and even then, it's ugly like Medusa on the rag and having a bad hair day.

I got up at 5am once when I drove 1020 miles from Madison to Amherst, MA. I drove 20 hours straight. Then I did the same thing when I drove back (getting up at 4:00 this time).

Don't think I could do that anymore. More to the point, I don't want to.

Hah! Everybody's talking about the tubes:

A Series of Tubes

Via Tyler Cowen and Kottke

Ladies Home Journal's predictions about 2000 written in 1900:

Prediction #22: Store Purchases by Tube. Pneumatic tubes, instead of store wagons, will deliver packages and bundles. These tubes will collect, deliver and transport mail over certain distances, perhaps for hundreds of miles. They will at first connect with the private houses of the wealthy; then with all homes. Great business establishments will extend them to stations, similar to our branch post-offices of today, whence fast automobile vehicles will distribute purchases from house to house.

Prediction #23 is a curious mix of the prescient and wrong. "Ready-cooked meals will be bought from establishments similar to our bakeries of today." This is correct. Prepared food "to go" is now widely available, a concept they didn't really have in 1900 but is well-captured by the idea of being "similar to our bakeries of today." Then things go awry: "They will purchase materials in tremendous wholesale quantities and sell the cooked foods at a price much lower than the cost of individual cooking." In fact, people are just richer today than they were in 1900 and can afford more costly food-acquisition methods, especially if they save time. Interestingly, the premise here that wholesale purchase will make the food cheaper than home-cooking seems based on the idea that ingredients rather than labor are the main cost of prepared foods.

Last, of course, the tubes return: "Food will be served hot or cold to private houses in pneumatic tubes or automobile wagons." The pneumatic tube is a real technology, still in use to some extent today, but it was always more of a niche product than its proponents had hoped.

My previous job I used to get up at 4 a.m to be at work at 5:30 a.m. every day.

You know how our generation bemoans the lack of jetpacks and flying cars that we were promised as children? I wonder if previous generations felt cheated when their supposed future of ubiquitous pneumatic tube wonderment never came to pass....

A newly spotted giant cloud of intergalactic plasma is the largest known object in the universe. Spanning 600 million light years, it is three times bigger than the previous cosmic colossus.

Wow, that is big. That's 6,000 Milky Way's put end to end. The scale of things is space is just mind blowing. I remember doing the calculations for making a scale model of the solar system in our yard which is 150feet long in the long direction. The outer planets were just out, no way to do it. I could just manage to do the inner solar system and make the planets visible dots barely big enough to see. Mercury was questionable though, I wasn't sure I could actually make a dot small enough.