Get your duty off my cycle

I love it when people who know things that I have no clue about get involved in thinking about polyphasic sleep.  From them, you get gems like this one, stolen with permission from anaraug:

Actually at this very moment I thought up something cool that may or may not be related and analogous to polyphasic sleeping. When speaking of signals, a square wave for instance, you can speak of amplitude, frequency, and duty cycle.

Everyone knows what amplitude and frequency are, I hope. Duty cycle is what percent of the time (for a square wave, at least) the signal is high, as compared to low.

For instance, a low duty cycle wave:
-____-____-____-____-____-____

and a high duty cycle wave at the same frequency:

—-_—-_—-_—-_—-_—-_

So the purpose of polyphasic sleep is to allow a low duty cycle by increasing the frequency.

See, now, being a grammalunatic myself, I’d have said that polyphasic sleep increases one’s duty cycle, but see, in a whole functional realm of basic knowledge I’d have been dead wrong.

Good things to know, people.  ;)