Cautionary Signals

Some Found text:

For it will yet be generally acknowledged, that the great loss of valuable life, due to the ill effects of extreme and changeable climates, can be very largely reduced through the beneficent agency of the material called glass.

Commentators on Hacker News are theorising if ChatGPT has seasonal affective disorder…

Found text from the Society for Psychical Research’s Proceedings:

We must postulate unverifiable entities and processes if we cannot get on without them. The task of philosophical deflation, of removing unnecessary metaphysical entities, comes at the end of a science’s progress, not at the beginning; if such writers as Hume and Mach and the modern Logical Positivists had lived in the early seventeenth century, Physics would never have got itself started. In short, we must not be deterred by the fear of talking nonsense. […] The phenomena with which we are concerned are so peculiar, and so unlike those visible and tangible facts which ordinary language is designed to deal with, that the right theory of them is bound to seem nonsense when first propounded.

Winding down with Northwoods Baseball Radio at Foghorn Field. ⚾️

Exploring the radio spectrum; encountering the Shroud of Turin.

Finished an excellent podcast yesterday called Ghost Story. This review in the FT gives a good sense of the story’s fantastic weirdness.

Great interview with Jay Owens on her recent book on dust with Wired. When did dust become a concern?

First of all, it requires you to be able to see the dust well. Electricity is one big factor, or gas lighting—just more lighting in the homes so you can actually see more clearly. Secondly, it’s the expansion of consumerism, and the invention of desire. A home in the Victorian period, if you’re wealthy enough, is quite flouncy, ornate, very different to the quite austere Tudor era. Once you’ve got beautiful mirrors and plates and things like that, dust shows up more. Then thirdly, the public health side and awareness of the dangers of microscopic things. Having an ordered, neat home has always been valorized, but this is the idea that it could be sort of pristinely, spotlessly clean.

Communicating global warming faces the problem of translation, e.g. translating climate to weather. This new piece in Nature Climate Change is a pretty wild attempt to translate across climate, weather, cognition, affects, and … brain regions! Or, in the authors’ words, from “neurons to societal actions”.

This reminded me of a haunting piece on “fire brain” from the Washington Post this the summer:

The Camp Fire study also looked at cognitive functioning within six months to a year after the fire, using the Flanker task, which measures the ability to suppress distractions while focusing on a task. They found a 20 percent deficit among those who had been exposed to wildfires compared with those who had not. “Breathing in particulate matter can lead to inflammatory responses in the body,” Mishra said. ‘That affects brain processes. How it influences brain processes is still a question.” When the researchers looked at brain function underlying specific cognitive functions, they found heightened activity in the left frontal part of the brain that was more pronounced in those exposed to wildfires, she said. “It’s overprocessing all the stimuli coming at you,” Mishra said. “That’s what happens in traumatized brains.”

I’m halfway through my Amateur Radio licence Foundation Course and love the language of “adding intelligence to a signal”. “Driving the radio” is a close second.

As someone who struggles with stuttering, this from Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion struck a chord, particularly the part about reality drifting out of focus:

My stuttering, I need hardly say, placed an obstacle between me and the outside world. It is the first sound that I have trouble in uttering. This first sound is like a key to the door that separates my inner world from the world outside, and I have never known that key to turn smoothly in its lock. Most people, thanks to their easy command of words, can keep this door between the inner world and the outer world wide open, so that the air passes freely between the two; but for me this has been quite impossible. Thick rust has gathered on the key.

When a stutterer is struggling desperately to utter his first sound, he is like a little bird that is trying to extricate itself from thick lime. When finally he manages to free himself, it is too late. To be sure, there are times when the reality of the outer world seems to have been waiting for me, folding its arms as it were, while I was struggling to free myself. But the reality that is waiting for me is not a fresh reality. When finally I reach the outer world after all my efforts, all that I find is a reality that has instantly changed color and gone out of focus—a reality that has lost the freshness that I had considered fitting for myself, and that gives off a half-putrid odor.

Inspired by a recent Reddit thread that showed how to generate product images in the style of a popular candy company, I thought it might be interesting to use Open AI’s image generator to sort of explore the collective unconscious of wind.

I remember hearing or reading somewhere how laundry detergents are advertised with different fragrances depending on location.¹ Like how in the US, you would be able to buy detergent with fragrances such as “Mountain Rain”, “Botanical Rain”, “Rain Water” or “After the Rain”; scents which you would have a harder time selling in the UK, I think. Obviously, these choices reflect some of the cultural values of the potential customers.

In a similar vein, I have gone ahead and generated four product images for the fictional brand “Noribo”, which just launched a new series of gummy bears that taste like wind. These include:

Noribo Air Dance: Breeze Play

Noribo Wind Symphony: Gust Gusto

Noribo Breezy Sweets: Whirlwind Wonder

Noribo Zephyr Breeze: Wind Whirl

Following a certain perceptual habit, I could not help myself from imagining what each of these might taste like. I sense something between liquorice and mint, but wonder if this has more to do with the shape of the candy, its colour, and the ocean breeze hinted at as opposed to anything about wind itself. The last one for an English audience is more explicitly about fragrances the wind might carry, suggesting different herbal and flowery tastes:

Noribo English Gust: Meadow Breeze

To me, this is an interesting exercise in a sort of phenomenology in practice through (fictional) advertising. Advertisers and phenomenologist face one common problem: How do you draw attention out of or away from everyday habits and direct it towards aspects of experience that are more intangible? I think for both, there needs to be a degree of awareness of how experience and attention function to write convincing ad copy or phenomenology.

AI tools might help lever experience out of its habits, reorienting it towards a reflection on itself in the spirit of the phenomenological epoché. But there would need to be another degree of reflection about the underlying logic of these tools and the cultural repertoire on which they draw. To an extent, this can be achieved just by playing subtly with the wording of each prompt.

In an interview with the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast, psychologist Russell T. Hurlburt explains:

I would say that the number one take home message from my work is that you shouldn’t trust your own armchair introspection about your own experience.

In his own research, he instead uses a beeper device which is meant to catch you off-guard, in mid-thought. I wonder what this might mean about the intuitions philosophers follow as they reason through an experience. You don’t tend to catch yourself in mid-thought. It’s more of the opposite: dwelling and reflecting over thought again and again.

For future teaching, I am looking to make zines together with students on the weather. I came across this great static site/css template (by @rowan_m@mastodon.social) to create a zine + website. Using this + glitch.com seems like a good intro to the basics of web publishing too. Thoughts?

This, but unironically

a mastodon instance for tooting about winds

Job alert! 

A 6-month Postdoctoral Award in Environmental Humanities, Media and Art (Winchester/Southampton) has opened up with our Weather Reports research project. It’s very short, but perhaps of help to someone!

Weather cures

#StarTrek

For an ongoing research project, I have been doing some reading on the history of Chinese medicine as it relates to the weather. Reading the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor, I came across these striking analogies measuring out the human pulse through the movement of wind:

When the heart pulse beats vigorously and the strokes are markedly prolonged, the corresponding illness makes the tongue curl up and makes to patient unable to speak. When the pulse beats are soft and scattered like willow blossoms scattering with the wind, it is fitting that one diffuse the encirclement of the corresponding illness.

When the pulse is tardy like willow branches swaying to a light breeze, and slippery, like pebbles rolling in a basin, it means that there are fevers raging within the body.

The German Weather Service showing the extent to which seasons have become out of sync (the inner circle represents 2023 whereas the outer circle represents the multi-year average):

Die #Blätter machen den Abgang", so lautet der Titel des #ThemaDesTages am heutigen Donnerstag bei uns. Mehr unter
➡️ https://dwd.de/DE/wetter/thema_des_tages/2023/11/16.html

Geopolitical weather featured in Nature: “A Russian warship’s sinking is linked to strange weather pattern”:

They found that weather patterns had led to a temperature inversion, with warmer air at higher altitudes and cooler air below it, between Ukrainian radar sources and the warship. Because of this, radar waves could refract off the atmosphere and travel much farther than usual, all the way to the warship.

The actual study was published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

My colleague Catharina Lüder just published this great piece on “Climate-sensing with Trees: How Sensing Comes to Matter in Central Germany” with Weather Matters, building on research we published together in Environment and Planning F (pre-print).

She writes:

When I interviewed council workers and urban planners on their everyday encounters with climate change, scientific evidence was one dominant lead for them to find locally feasible options for dealing with climate change impacts, such as heat in cities. Another point of reference were their own bodily experiences of heat and drought together with visible signs of brown-leaved trees. They sensed climate through a combination of experiences and measurements.

Apparently, the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) has been calculating an “environmental affect” score since 2018, measuring how people respond to environmental change emotionally. The score is calculated based on responses to the following questions:

1. Anthropogenic environmental problems such as the deforestation or the plastic in the oceans outrage me.
2. I am delighted when people simply try out sustainable lifestyles.
3. It worries me when I think about the environmental conditions we are leaving behind for future generations.
4. Climate change also threatens our livelihoods here in Germany.
5. It makes me angry when I see that Germany is failing to meet its climate protection targets.
6. I get annoyed when environmentalists want to tell me how I should live.
7. When it comes to the consequences of climate change, many things are greatly exaggerated.

All these add to a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions. Some questions are added year-on-year. Perhaps the next questionnaire will measure grief as well.