We thought it was our ability to love that made us human, but it turns out it was actually our ability to SELECT EACH IMAGE CONTAINING A BOAT
If you’ve ever jumped into cold water, you’ll know that the human body can be transformed by this extreme change of state. Sure, you might end up listening to the sound of teeth chattering inside your head, but in those moments when your skin screams to adjust, lungs bursting for breath and legs kicking out, you might feel properly alive.
Is there anything else, besides oxygen, which we so instinctively crave? A cold drink of water might keep us quenched and vital. But even a few inches of H2O can cause death by drowning. Is it this compelling tension that makes us yearn for a dip in the sea? All the while knowing that with the one swipe of its foamy white paws, water could undo us.
Our bodies are mostly made up of water and in life as in art we must go with the strongest currents and tidal pulls, while also finding ways to catch or follow quieter, perhaps creative, trickles of our own making.
Battersby, M., 2022. Editorial. Popshot Quarterly, (35).
A grim reminder
An unknown world teems with life
Once a grander sight
The Japanese word ‘Kuchi zamishi’ is the act of eating when you’re not hungry because your mouth is lonely.
Stages of Sleep
Sleep isn’t uniform. Once we fall asleep, our bodies follow a sleep cycle, lasting 90-120 minutes on average. Our total sleep is made up of several rounds of this cycle. Each cycle contains four stages. The first three stages are known as non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, and the final stage is known as rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.
Stage 1 NREM
Recognised as the “dozing off” stage, it lasts around one to five minutes. Muscles relax and your heart rate, breathing, and eye movements begin to slow down, as do your brain waves, which are more active when you are awake. It’s easy to wake someone up during this stage, but undisturbed, they can move quickly into stage 2.
Stage 2 NREM
It’s characterized by deeper sleep as your heart rate and breathing rates continue slowing down. Eye movements cease and body temperature decreases. Apart from some brief moments of higher frequency electrical activity, brain waves also remain slow. Stage 2 is typically the longest of the four sleep stages.
Stage 3 NREM
This stage plays an important role in making you feel refreshed and alert the next day. Heartbeat, breathing, and brain wave activity all reach their lowest levels, and the muscles are as relaxed as they will be. This stage lasts longer in initial cycles, decrease in duration over the following cycles.
REM
It occurs ~90 minutes after falling asleep. Your eyes move back and forth rather quickly under your eyelids. Breathing rate, heart rate, and blood pressure begins to increase. Dreaming typically occurs during REM sleep, and your arms and legs become paralyzed – it’s believed this is intends to prevent us from physically acting out our dreams. The duration of each REM stage increases by cycle, the inverse of stage 3 NREM. Studies linked REM sleep to memory consolidation, the process of converting recent experiences into long-term memories. The duration of the REM stage decrease as we age, causing us to spend more time in the NREM stages.
Moments where we briefly wake during the night, but not remember them, are known as “W” stages.
The Volume of Sound
Decibels increase exponentially since they’re measured logarithmically. Near silence is expressed as 0 dB but a sound measured at 10 dB is actually 10 times louder. If a sound is 20 dB, that’s 100 times louder than near silence. Here’s some context:
• Normal conversation – 60 dB
• Heavy city traffic – 85 dB
• Lawn mower – 90 dB
• Headphones at max volume – 105 dB
• Sirens – 120 dB
• Concerts – 120 dB
• Sporting events – 105 to 130 dB
• Fireworks – 140 to 160 dB
• Firearms – 150 dB and higher
I leapt down this rabbit hole after driving an immensely smooth and silent electric car – I could hear my own breathing. Bear in mind, it was an entry level hatchback. I theorised the road noise, heard from the cabin, might drop further with premium tyres.
Tyres for this car ranged from 68dB – 73dB, which led me to think – why in the world are the 68dB tyres twice as expensive than the 73dB?
It’s because it’s not the same as turning up the tv volume by 5 increments, from 30 to 35. It’s the same as turning the volume up x5, from 30 to 150.
Continually looking for the meaning of life is like looking for the meaning of toast, it is sometimes better to just eat the toast.
Five Dimensions
Vehicle Hubris?
Professor Paul Piff is a social psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He examines the origins of human kindness and cooperation, and the social consequences of economic inequality.
One of his experiments looked at which drivers stop for pedestrians, depending on the value of the vehicle. He found a correlation between higher value vehicle and their lower likelihood of stopping at pedestrian crossings – despite being legally obliged to do so. Source: BBC News
I haven’t read the research paper and I don’t generally trust clickbait articles. Therefore my thoughts were:
• What thresholds determined a high value and low value vehicle?
• Were cars grouped into certain value groups?
• Were the group sample sizes large and proportionate across groups?
• How many different neighbourhoods and crossings were observed?
• How varied was the sample in terms of observation times?