2023 – Page 12 – David Bradley

How to be your own ChatGPT

TL:DR – If you’re working on a creative project, take note of your dreams, they might carry nuggets of inspiration.

The title of this post might have you imagining some kind of AI interface that lets you tap into your subconscious and create output based on prompts you give yourself…will…in a way it is. But the interface isn’t what you think…

When I was writing my book Deceived Wisdom, there were lots of ideas constantly swarming around my brain for weeks and months on end. Sometimes, I’d fall asleep and be dreaming I was still writing at my desk, I’d wake up at 5am and be writing for an hour or two some days before I got on with my regular, non-book commitments.

Some nights though I’d not only be dreaming about writing, but I would think of new ideas for chapters in the book and better still I’d find myself actually writing the introductions to those chapters in the dream. It was weird, they weren’t lucid dreams where I knew I was dreaming within the dream, they were just me in a dream writing and then remembering what I’d written when I woke up.

Often what I remembered was a bit scrambled and needed a lot more work, but sometimes it was almost fully formed and only needed light editing. Maybe I shouldn’t reveal this, my publisher might want to claw back some of the royalties seeing as it was my subconscious that did some of the work. But, when you think about it, where is the “you” that does your creative work anyway? All of it is coming from your subconscious really, your “you” just sees the output from your neural networks.

It also seems to work with music, for me. At the beginning of the first COVID-19 lockdown when performing live with my band C5 was on enforced hiatus, I had a dream that we were all sitting on empty suitcases in an airport, there was a melody that came to me while I was chatting to Jo the other lead singer and I was telling her the chord progression. When I woke up, I grabbed a guitar and noodled about a bit on the chord progression. The lyrics to the song actually morphed into a memory of the dream and the chords changed, but the creative spark came from somewhere deep while I was sleeping. The song became Complications, which you can listen to here.

I wonder whether there really is a reliable way to trigger this dream writing. I know that people often report having more lucid dreams at night if they actually talk about lucid dreams before bedtime, it seems to stimulate the brain. So, maybe just discussing this internal ChatGPT before going to sleep might open a valve and let creativity bubble to the surface while you’re asleep.

The orgasmic heart beat

TL:DR – Sex can double or treble a person’s heart rate, but this is a normal physiological response provided the rate goes back to normal within a few minutes.

Love might make your heart skip a beat, but love-making definitely gets it pumping. Indeed, sexual activity will inevitably raise your bpm, beats per minute, especially as a person approaches orgasm. A friend with a fake FitBit was curious about the trajectory of heart rate during sex and wore his monitor (around his wrist) in the bedroom one night. As he and his missus slid between the sheets, he set it to “other” workout and then synced the output from the monitor to his phone…the morning after.

Photo via Pexels user https://www.pexels.com/@olly/

My friend was astonished to see that his heart ultimately raced up to 156 bpm. That is within what the fitness app refers to as the anaerobic region. He was relieved to see that it fell to a near-normal resting rate within a couple of minutes afterwards though. But, that peak had him worried, especially at his age. So rather sheepishly he asked me, as his go-to-science friend, to check out the numbers.

I assumed he knew that during sexual activity, the body undergoes various physiological changes, including an increase in heart rate. It is normal for the heart rate to increase during sexual arousal and activity, and this increase is generally not a cause for concern in healthy individuals.

Heart rate recorded by a fake fitbit during sex

But, it was the orgasm bpm he was worried out. During orgasm, the heart rate typically reaches its peak, and in some people, it can exceed 180 bpm. However, this increase in heart rate is usually brief and does not pose a significant risk to health. 156 bpm during orgasm is within the normal range for sexual activity. And, the fact that his heart rate quickly returned to around 80 bpm within a couple of minutes is a healthy response and indicates that his cardiovascular system is functioning properly.

Certainly, there would be something to worry about if it had gone very high and stayed at that level for a prolonged period. Moreover, chest tightness and pain, stabbing or shooting pains in the left arm or pain in the neck or jaw would indicate a need to seek medical attention either urgently or sooner, rather than later.

As an aside, my friend finds it amusing that he does a lot more “steps” when he is alone than when he’s with his missus…now…I know some readers are going to think “friend…? Yeah, right!” But, it’s true.

Sexual activity, including arousal and orgasm, causes the release of hormones such as adrenaline, noradrenaline, and dopamine, which can increase heart rate. Additionally, physical activity during sex, such as thrusting or movement, also contributes to the rise in heart rate. The body also experiences increased blood flow during sexual activity, which places an additional demand on the heart to pump blood. All of these factors work together to increase heart rate during sexual activity.

Increased blood flow is necessary during sexual activity to deliver oxygen and nutrients to the muscles and tissues involved in the sexual response. This includes the genitalia, which require increased blood flow to become engorged and maintain an erection in men and to lubricate and swell in women. The increased blood flow also contributes to the overall sensations of sexual arousal and pleasure. Increased blood flow to the genitals facilitates sexual function and satisfaction.

During orgasm, the male heartbeat can exhibit variations. While some individuals may experience a sensation akin to their heart skipping a beat, it’s not a universal occurrence. The physiological response during orgasm involves a complex interplay of various bodily systems, including the cardiovascular system.

Typically, during sexual arousal and orgasm, there’s an increase in heart rate and blood pressure as a result of heightened arousal and the release of adrenaline. This can lead to palpitations or a perceived skipping sensation in some individuals. Additionally, the release of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and oxytocin during orgasm can also impact heart rate and rhythm.

However, it’s important to note that variations in heartbeat during orgasm can differ greatly from person to person, and not everyone may perceive or experience it in the same way. If someone experiences significant irregularities in heartbeat or has concerns about their cardiovascular health during sexual activity, it’s advisable to consult with a healthcare professional for further evaluation and guidance.

How to sing

TL:DR – Some tips on singing from the vocal jazz maestro Pete Churchill.

Years ago, I and a bunch of singing friends did a couple of vocal technique workshops with jazz maestro Pete Churchill. He had lots of words of wisdom to dispense. I put together a cribsheet for our choir and for anyone else who might have a need for singing tips:

Get into the groove, feel the beat, get with the swing, get off the page! [No looking down at scores (and if you really must, not highlighting pens!), watch the musical director and keep an eye for the audience].

Understand the “form” (structure) of the song, don’t count bars, feel the rhythm, and know where the repeats and codas fit

Be aware of what the other singers and musicians are doing, from the top sops and right to the bottom bass via the altos and tenors, if you lose your place you can always revert to the main melody

Be aware of your breath, use your breath, it’s part of your voice, especially in folk/jazz/pop/rock singing as opposed to classical singing, but especially Pete’s type of jazz singing

Use the percussive plosives, the buh, pah, bah sounds for expressive emphasis, but obviously not on every b and p, give your singing dynamics

You can hold the consonants not just the vowels, make them rich, “Fall in Llllllove” sometimes, don’t “Fall in Luuuuuv” every time. This is more of a jazz nuance, but useful to have in the back of your mind for bluesier/jazzier songs

Start your oohs and aahs with a hushed “h” (h)oooooh, (h)aaaaah to protect your voice from hard ah, eh, ooh sounds that clack your vocal folds (cords), this applies to the starts of lines not only to the harmony ooooohs

You can hold vowel notes a little longer by changing the vowel sound as your breath expires, it does work, although I reckon it’s partly psychological but possibly just changes breath rate enough to give you extra time, it also sometimes leads to a bit of vibrato which helps you to sustain a note too because the vibrato, or is it tremolo, is putting in extra energy

Feel and learn the sounds with your mouth, this is an ongoing thing for learning any song…and ties in with the following in terms of expressiveness and knowing a song better

Here’s the non-vocal bonus tip from Pete:

Your eyebrows can transmit emotion to your audience, facial expressions hinge on the eyebrows and you can get away with a bit of exaggeration when singing to engage the audience in the song people expect emotion from singers not deadpan stares, so go for it

We’d all done a couple of classical singing workshops with John Rutter, prior to the Pete Churchill jazz workshops, and some of us had done some classical recording with Karl Jenkins at Abbey Road Studios, as well as sung one of his choral works at the Royal Albert Hall. There were numerous singing tips from those happenings too, they were commonly about dynamics, not looking down, lifting one’s chin to allow a low not to resonate, and other such matters.

During covid lockdown when we couldn’t sing together, we had a chance to chat to various composers and performers on Zoom with our choir, including Mike Batt (The Wombles), Aled Jones (The Snowman hit), Phil Coulter (composer of Puppet on a String), Howard Goodall (choral composer and lots of TV themes, such as Blackadder, QI, Red Dwarf, and the Not the Nine o’Clock News comedy songs), Thomas Hewitt Jones (composer perhaps best (not) known for Silly Song on social media) , and Eric Whitacre (Seal Lullaby etc).

Whitactre had a great tip regarding vocal warmups. He suggested that instead of doing the usual doh-rae-me exercises and arpeggios and stuff, that singers should all just immediately jump into the song they’re hoping to perform. Not full blast from the top, gently, everyone just chugging along on the melody and maybe heading for their harmony parts, but warming up, like gentle jogging before a proper run.

I hope I do utilise some of these experiences and vocal techniques and singing tips in my own live performances with the TyrannoChorus and bigMouth choirs, with my band, C5, and when I perform solo.

Mindfulness. Is there an app for that?

TL:DR – The idea of an app for mindfulness is inherently contradictory, but they may have some use if used mindfully…

The notion of mindfulness is often discussed in light of an apparently epidemic of mental health crises, anxiety, depression, phobias, addictions, and other problems. It is considered a state of being where one is fully present in the moment and aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. The aim of mindfulness is not to exclude external stimuli nor to ignore one’s memories and preclude predictions of the future, but rather to live in the moment, to try to feel satisfied in the moment and to ultimately achieve a comfortable mental state.

A MidJourney image generated by prompting with the following: Can you create an image that visually represents the balance between the benefits and drawbacks of using mindfulness apps? The image should convey the idea that while mindfulness apps can be helpful tools, they also have potential negative consequences. Think about how you can use contrasting colors, shapes, or imagery to represent these opposing forces. — The pros and cons of mindfulness apps

Apparently, there are mobile phone apps that purport to help with mindfulness. The problem with that notion is that mindfulness requires a deep level of self awareness and attention that cannot be achieved through an app or device. In fact, using an app could be a distraction and prevent a person from being fully immersed in the present moment. Bells and whistles, bleeps and beeps are not conducive to mindfulness, it must be said.

The practice of mindfulness involves developing a non-judgemental attitude towards one’s experiences as well as non-attachment from cyclic thoughts and other distractions. It underpins many forms of philosophy and what we might refer to as spiritual practice, such as meditation, yoga, and even some religions including Buddhism. But, it also underpins the practice of what we do not normally consider to be spiritual in the conventional sense, such as taking a walk or indeed any form of exercise or other hobbies and tasks.

One of the big problems with using an app for mindfulness is that the whole practice succumbs to the expectation of achievement or success, which can be counterproductive to the development of non-attachment and a non-judgemental attitude. Instead of focusing on the present moment and accepting one’s experiences as they are, the use of an app can create pressure to meet certain goals or expectations, just as is experienced with fitness tracking apps, social media metrics and similar distractions.

Perhaps more worrying, is the idea that as with fitness apps, an app for mindfulness could reinforce the idea that there is a quick fix for mental health and becoming mindfulness. Mindfulness is not a technique to be mastered, but should best serve your mental health if it becomes a way of life. The practice of mindfulness involves a long-term commitment to being present and aware in one’s daily life. An app can give the impression that mindfulness can be achieved through a few minutes of practice each day, rather than a continual effort to develop a more mindful way of living.

There are other issues such as a person becoming dependent on the technology to achieve a state of mindfulness. Almost inevitably, this is likely to lead to detachment from the present moment and a reduced ability to be mindful without the artificial assistance of an app.

Another issue is the lack of personalization. Mindfulness is a highly personal practice that requires an individualized approach. An app cannot provide the same level of personalization that one might gain from a trained mindfulness teacher who can tailor the practice to an individual’s specific needs and circumstances.

Overall, while phone apps for mindfulness may seem convenient and accessible, they can create a number of negative consequences that can limit an individual’s ability to fully develop their mindfulness practice. It is important to approach mindfulness as a personal, long-term practice that requires a deep level of awareness and commitment, rather than as a quick fix or technique to be mastered.

Having said all that, there are perhaps a few benefits to mindfulness apps that might help a person begin their practice when time, access, and other factors are limited. For instance, an app could fill the gap when access to traditional mindfulness training is unavailable or when commitments and busy schedules make it impossible to attend in-person classes.

An app can act as a guide at any time and in any location, perhaps it is useful that it can prompt someone to carry out their practice and make it easier to incorporate mindfulness into their daily routine in a flexible way. The various apps usefully offer guided instruction and mindfulness exercises that can help individuals develop their mindfulness skills. In addition, tracking progress is not always a bad thing, provided the goals and targets do not themselves become a distraction.

You want the moon on a stick?

TL:DR – Controversy about faked moon photos.

In the wake of controversy regarding Samsung’s purported manipulation and “enhancements” of user moonshots taken on Android phones, I asked MidJourney to “Generate a photorealistic image of the full moon that might have been augmented by controversial mobile phone camera enhancing technology.” Is this better than the faked moonshots users have been reporting? I think so…especially that one bottom-left which looks like a gravitational lensing image superimposted on a mobile phone!

Faked moonshots

If you want to see some real moonshots I’ve taken occasionally with a dSLR and a 600mm zoom, sometimes with a phone attached to my telescope, then follow me on the Sciencebase Instagram for the latest.

Meanwhile, I asked ChatGPT about this controversy using the following prompt:

You are to act as an expert in Android phones and in particular Samsung phones. There has recently been some controversy about the camera technology and how it can “process” a photograph of the moon and enhance it beyond reality. The processing was called out as fake when people were taking photos of low-resolution printouts of a photo of the moon and getting near-perfect higher-resolution output. Please tell me more about this and why it is simply wrong for a company to fake its users’ photos like this.

This is what it had to say:

In recent years, Samsung and other smartphone manufacturers have been adding advanced camera technologies to their devices, including features that can enhance the quality of photographs taken with the device. One such feature is called “Space Zoom,” which is designed to allow users to take photos of faraway objects, such as the moon.

However, there has been controversy surrounding Samsung’s camera technology and its ability to enhance photographs of the moon beyond what is possible with the naked eye. In particular, some users have claimed that Samsung’s camera technology is “faking” the details of the moon by artificially enhancing the image.

It is important to note that any form of photo manipulation or enhancement that misrepresents the reality of the scene being photographed is ethically wrong. It is the responsibility of manufacturers to be transparent with their users about the capabilities and limitations of their camera technology and to ensure that their users are not misled or deceived by the features they offer.

In addition, it is important for users to understand that the quality of a photograph depends on a variety of factors, including lighting conditions, camera settings, and the skill of the photographer. While advanced camera technologies can certainly enhance the quality of a photograph, they cannot create details that do not exist in the original scene being photographed.

Every honey dance

TL:DR – The waggle dance of the honeybee carries more information than scientists previously thought, allowing the bees to find known food sources even if they start their journey from a place other than the hive.

Here’s the buzz…

Scientists and beekeepers have known for years that honeybees have a way of communicating the location of food sources that involves hitting the dancefloor in the hive. The dance that the bees use to communicate is called the waggle dance, and the moves tell other bees where to find food, specifically nectar and pollen-rich flowers. The dance conveys both the distance and direction of the food source, allowing other bees to follow the instructions and find the food.

Honeybee, Apis mellifera, on Green Alkanet flowers

Now, Charles Gallistel of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA and Randolf Menzel of the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, and their colleagues have studied a hive of nearly 2,000 honeybees in Germany. They watched as foragers (always female bees) returned to the hive and recruited other bees to the food source using the waggle dance. But then, they did an interesting experiment. They captured the recruited bees and released them far away from the hive. They tracked the bees’ location using radar and watched to see what they would do.

Even though the bees were released a long way from their home hive, they still flew in the direction indicated by the waggle dance. Moreover, the bees didn’t fly in a straight line, instead, they flew in a direction that was biased towards the true location of the food source. This suggests that the bees were able to use the information in the waggle dance to create a “cognitive map” of the food source’s location. This means they could presumably find the food source from any starting point going from A to Zzzzzz.

This new work published in PNAS suggests that the information contained in the honeybee waggle dance is even richer than was previously thought. This could have important implications for our understanding of how bees navigate and find food, which could have implications for everything from agriculture to conservation.

A foreboding of petrels

TL:DR – The problem of deteriorating plastic waste at sea and how it attracts birds to eat it when they really shouldn’t.

I have just finished reading the latest novel in Steve Burrows’ series of “birder murder” stories. This one was called A Foreboding of Petrels and hinges on apparently unconnected murders on the North Norfolk coast and at an environmental research station in The Antarctic.

The plot of the novel alludes to the Storm Petrel, perhaps the world’s most abundant avian species. It and related species have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell and can detect keystone odourant molecules on the wind. Compounds such as dimethyl sulfide (DMS) are released into atmosphere when other organisms are feasting on algae for instance. The compound thus attracts the predators to the places where their prey are themselves feasting.

A fulmar in flight against a rocky backdrop — The Fulmar is one of the procellariiforms, a group that also includes the petrels

The novel alludes to plastic waste in the oceans and how the combination of algal growth on that plastic waste coupled with degradation of the plastic through the action of seawater and sunlight could lead to the release of the same odourant molecules that attract these birds and lead to them ingesting plastic rather than prey. This is obviously detrimental to the birds’ health. Numerous studies discuss this possibility and provide evidence to support the hypothesis.

DMS carried on the oceanic wind attracts predators, such as petrels, albatrosses, and fulmars, to food sources, and in the modern age, unfortunately, plastic waste. This chemical confusion is seemingly leading some pelagic bird species to ingest a lot of potentially lethal plastic waste instead of food.

Search engine market share

TL:DR – The final launch of Google was in 1997 after it was prototyped in 1995 (the year I launched my first website). It remains the dominant search engine to this day having pretty much seen off all of the competition at the time and pushed down any recent upstarts.

Back in the 1990s, long before Google existed as an official tool, there were several search engines that were my go-to search engines, AltaVista, AllTheWeb, a couple of others. Then along came Google proper in 1997 and changed everything. Everything. If you had a website, which I had done since 1995, you had to rank on Google or nobody would find you.

There was a point in time, when my website did indeed rank. It had a Google PageRank of 9 (out of 10). This ranking was on a par with the BBC and CNN for a time. I ranked on page one of the SERPs (search engine results pages) for almost every key phrase I could’ve wanted to be on page one for and was number one on those pages for a lot of key terms. I used to get a lot of traffic, a lot of unique visitors. But, as the web became increasingly crowded and Google tweaked its algorithms, my site slipped a bit, then a lot. Then along came social media and that changed everything again. Well, not quite everything.

Today, Google remains the dominant force in search. Check the stats, its market share is commonly reported as more than 90 percent. All of the other search engines take a slice of a lot less than 10 percent of the search pie between them. When I look at my site’s stats, visitors from search engines are mainly from google.com and then a load from the various national Googles. Bing gives me less than 2% of my page views, Baidu about 1.5%, and everything else, like Yandex, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, just 1% or less. Google delivers over 90%.

Fundamentally, Google has sustained its reputation for being a reliable and trustworthy search engine. It continually innovates and improves. Morever, it’s made so much money over the years it can continue to invest in itself and move forward where smaller companies might falter and fail. In addition, it has diversified successfully. Even while some of its projects have failed and been shuttered, there are important tools that almost everyone continues to use to this day.

I should point out that I use DuckDuckGo as my go-to search engine these days.

Whooper Swans spread their wings thanks to nature reserves

TL:DR – Even small wetland nature reserves could help boost Whooper Swan wintering populations in the UK.

A new study has shown that protected wildlife areas are crucial for the survival of Whooper Swans, a species of migratory bird. These protected areas are important for species conservation, but it has been uncertain how effective they are when species move between protected and nonprotected areas throughout their lives. The research, conducted by Stuart Bearhop, Richard Sherley, and their colleagues, analyzed data on more than 10,000 Whooper Swans (Cygnus cygnus, also known as the Common Swan) over 30 years at 22 different sites in the UK, three of which are managed as nature reserves.

The study found that although Whooper Swans (pronounced hooper, silent W) were less likely to breed when wintering inside nature reserves than outside of them, their survival rate for all ages was significantly higher and their population growth rates were 30 times higher inside the reserves compared to outside of them. The researchers also noted that there was a net movement of Whooper Swans from nature reserves to areas that were less protected than reserves.

whooper swan

It’s worth adding that the Whoopers we see in England will have migrated from Iceland, Scandinavia, and elsewhere and will head back each spring to their breeding grounds in the far north. There is no expectation that this species, nor the closely related Bewick’s Swan (Cygnus bewickii) would breed on our wetland nature reserves.

The study’s population models projected that the protective effects of nature reserves could double the population of Whooper Swans wintering in the UK by 2030. The authors emphasized that even if protected nature reserves are relatively small and only used for a part of a species’ life cycle, they can still have a significant impact on the populations of migratory bird species that live in them.

These findings highlight the importance of protecting wildlife areas and managing them effectively to support the survival of migratory birds like the Whooper Swan.

There are commonly several hundred Whooper Swans on our patch each winter and thousands slightly farther north.