Hello gorgeous friends, welcome to the 💥BLAST! #100: Head in the clouds
🍻 I Miss My Bar recreates your favourite bar’s atmosphere, for those who wish they lived on the set of Cheers. Regular readers will have spotted a fondness for soundscapes around here, be it a forest, an office, or more-or-less anywhere else.
🕵️♀️ The Therapist and the Storyteller: A major shortcoming of AI is that it requires gargantuan amounts of data to synthesise intelligence. It can’t instinctively read the needs of its audience. Machine learning is just brute force ingestion and synthesis of data, whereas the hallmark of human intelligence is to create outcomes with very little data. This piece explores the social human in its most instinctive two roles.
🏢 The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office: A lovely piece from Paul Ford exploring the human geography of office culture, and what better timing to examine such an idea than while we’re all out of it.
🛣 Drive & Listen simulates cruising through the streets of a city of your choosing with the radio on. See also: The Pandemic-Induced Popularity of Google Street View. See also also: Random Street View.
💊 Bring Back the Nervous Breakdown: It used to be okay to admit that the world had simply become too much. The term nervous breakdown first appeared in a 1901 medical treatise for physicians. This idea of a natural response to modern life gained currency through 1920s before cultural ubiquity in the 1930s. Within four decades it was sidelined, which had the positive effect of allowing many people with psychological ailments to gain access to medical treatments that could be effective. But something important was lost.
🥡 Gulp! The secret economics of food delivery: Delivery apps are changing how we eat. Some restaurateurs describe them as an addiction. They know the habit will harm them, but it provides a short-term fix.
🪙 Britain’s Low-Pay Scandal: More than a million low-paid workers have regularly skipped meals during this pandemic, while thousands more miss heating and bills. There’s only one solution to Britain’s endemic poverty pay – a real living wage.
🚬 Yes, People Are Smoking More: Some blame the pandemic for the stress and boredom that have led them to buy more cigarettes.
Head in the clouds
All my books are currently stored, apart from a precious few. Among these is an awkwardly-shaped but otherwise excellent guide to the clouds and the skies compiled by environmental writer Richard Hamblyn titled the The Cloud Book. Superficially, it helps you tell your nimbocumulus from your cumulonimbus, but if you allow your curiosity to wander a little deeper, it begins to unpack what a sighting of a particular formation might mean.
This is by no means the first of its kind; many guides to the skies exist. A particularly attractive example dates from 1896: the Atlas international des Nuages, or International Cloud Atlas. It moved to standardise the language used to describe cloud formations, and employed colour photography—a fledgling technology—to illustrate its subject.
I find clouds fascinating; I’m a window-seat sort of person. Not solely the science, though: they paint a dreamscape that has permeated the arts in all disciplines. Be it a Shelley poem or these extraordinary illustrations by Vietnamese artist Thanh Nhàn Nguyễn, clouds take us away.
But whereas in the romantic era, when you might have taken time simply to watch clouds roll by, a defining characteristic of this era is screentime: looking down at the world through a glass rectangle. Perhaps we’d do well to carve out time just to look up…
