I like stats a lot, and the particular area I ended up in suits me pretty well. However, I often think if I had it to do over again, the two fields I would have considered more heavily would have been genetic counseling or meteorology/weather in general. The boat has probably sailed on genetic counseling, but I am continually amazed how many weather hobbyists there are out there. Might be a thing I keep getting in to as I continue to age.

So on this (likely) stormy weekend with 53% of the country (including myself) under a winter weather advisory, what are your favorite weather or storm related books/documentaries/resources? What’s your coulda woulda shoulda career?

For myself: I’ve been taking off one day a month at work to do a “nature year” program at the local Audubon society, where you go through the same trails over the course of a year to see how things change with the seasons. It’s more seasonal change than weather change, but here in New England the two are pretty intertwined. This past week we looked for animal tracks and noted the chickadees were already starting their mating calls. Apparently they’re triggered first by the increase in light, then a warmer day. Not gonna be a great weekend for them.

I’m also lucky enough to live pretty close to the major weather observatory in my area, so I’m considering checking out some of their programming. Amusingly, they were supposed to have a session on Nor’easters on Monday night that had to be cancelled due to weather.

I also will probably spend tomorrow reading a book I got my dad a few years ago for his birthday: Mighty Storms of New England: The Hurricanes, Tornadoes, Blizzards, and Floods That Shaped the Region.

Math is the most fun when we put it to use.

So, if you had it to do over again, what would you have done with yourself? And what are you up to tomorrow assuming no disasters strike?

Back when this blog had a more active comment section, one of my favorite activities was crowdsourcing new names for number or data-based errors people made a lot on the internet. Within this, one of my favorite discussions was the one where we came up with the concept of the Hrair Line, defined by our hivemind as “a somewhat arbitrary line past which all numbers seem equally large” (Definition here, original comments discussion here). The name comes from the book Watership Down, where the rabbits call all numbers greater than 4 “hrair”, and the original issue that sparked it was someone claiming that high school football coaches in Texas were making $5 million a year. When it was pointed out that number appeared to be closer to $120,000 a year, they seemed totally unphased. Both of those numbers were too much they explained, and therefore basically equal. Directionally correct, by today’s parlance.

Coming up with this term also led to one of my favorite puns, the “receding hrair line” which is when you act like a number is unfathomably large when it benefits you, but quite reasonable when it doesn’t.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of it at the time, but age is clearly the ultimate example of this. Some of this is clearly just human nature. I suspect all of us recall thinking a teacher was positively ancient when we were younger, only to age a bit and discover that they were actually 35 when we knew them. 70 seems old until you start having parents that age, at which point you realize that’s actually still quite young. We have a running joke at my work that the upper age limit for a transplant is our senior physicians age plus ten years. This also works in reverse, with new college students feeling impossibly old and worldly as opposed to high school students, and the rest of us not being able to tell them apart. I jest a bit here, but I remember feeling all of this myself. It’s part of aging.

Interestingly, this effect gets even worse if you start looking to the past. Someone who was 24 today would be apoplectic if you looked at them and said “well you know, it was really Gen Z who screwed up the housing market and the economy”, and rightfully so. And yet I routinely see people in Gen Z casually reference real estate/economic issues from 1960 and blame it on the Boomers. Well dear, guess how old Boomers were in 1960? And that’s the oldest Boomers (born 1946), that generation wouldn’t finish being born until 1964. There’s an argument of course that “Boomer” should not be taken literally and it just refers to “any old person”, but really, when would you be ok with being blamed for the economic conditions when you were 24? I think most of us, no matter our age would demand the correct people be blamed for things that happened when we were barely adults. It’s like saying millenials created the conditions that caused 9/11 or the 2008 crash or Boomers caused Vietnam or the greatest generation caused WWII, or Gen Z caused COVID. 60-70 years later it may all look about the same but if you were there it’s a pretty big difference.

For a more amusing take on this, I’m reminded of Chuck Klosterman’s book “But what if we’re wrong: thinking about the present as if it were the past“. I don’t necessarily recommend this book because the whole thing feels like smoking too much weed in a college dorm room, but he makes the point that we often collapse hundreds of years of history in to one or two data points, and some day people will do that with our era. Like all of the music of the entire 20th century may just end up being “the Beatles”, and the differences that seem so important to us now will be erased.

That being said, it’s good to remember that your perception of age will be changing throughout your life, in both directions. We tend to condense the memories of our 20s (“oh, everything just sort of works out eventually”) and forget the specifics, and we tend to totally underestimate phases of our lives we haven’t been through yet. We tend to collapse past eras in to one big mush while hyperanalyzing our own. It’s the hrair line: one, two, three, then everything else. It’s so second nature to us it didn’t even occur to me as an example when we first discussed it, but now that I’m thinking about it I think it might be the example. Interesting stuff.

Years ago, Charles Murray came up with something called the Bubble Test, a quiz that was supposed to help you determine how much of a cultural bubble you lived in. At the time, Murray’s thesis was pretty simple: there was a certain (upper) class of Americans that went about their day to day lives never encountering most of the things that another group of Americans encountered constantly. This led people to say things like “no one ever eats at Chili’s” when it was one of the most popular restaurants in the country.

While the Bubble test itself is now likely outdated, I’ve spent a lot of time recently talking to various friends of mine about a new bubble I see developing: the YouTube bubble. Or the TikTok bubble. Whatever you want to call it, as someone currently parenting a 13 year old who hangs out with lots of other people currently parenting 13 year olds (+/-), we are often amazed what a dominate force YouTube and TikTok have become for a huge portion of the population (mostly under a certain age), and yet an equally huge portion of the population has no idea.

Wanna test yourself quickly? Ok:

1. Do you know who Mr Beast is?
2. Do you know what a mukbang video is?
3. Do you understanding livestreaming and bits/superchats?

I actually ask that first one a lot in social situations, and every single person who has children (or is exposed to children) 7-18ish nods immediately yes and anyone who is childless or has smaller children looks clueless. Mr Beast is a 27 year old who is the most subscribed to YouTuber in the world, and the third most subscribed to TikToker in the world. He has substantially more subscribers (over 450 million) than the US has residents (over 350 million), and his most popular video alone ($456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!) is closing in on a billion views.

It’s an interesting test to run in mixed company because people who don’t know who he is are always a bit surprised at exactly how insanely famous (along with a likely $500 million net worth) this man has gotten without them noticing. To be clear, I don’t consider this a deficit on anybody’s part. The nature of fame has changed in the last few decades, and you no longer have to appear on mainstream shows/movies/radio to become famous. What this does mean however, is that there are a lot of these subcultures that get a lot weirder than people expect from the outside.

Which brings me to question 2 and mukbang videos. Mukbang videos, in the simplest sense, are broadcast eating. People sit on camera and talk to their audience while eating a bunch of food. That’s pretty much it. I was thinking of this earlier this week when I discovered that the third most popular true crime YouTube channel (6 million subscribers) got their start doing this while discussing true crime cases. Could you imagine suffering a horrible death in your family and then finding out a YouTuber was discussing it while performatively eating chicken wings? I’m not linking to the videos, but if you want to read her fans discussing how much they miss it here you go.

I think this is interesting for a few reasons. As covered above, this type of fame can create an interesting imbalance in the public: someone can be wildly famous with millions of people and virtually unknown with most others in a way that wasn’t totally possible even 20 years ago. 20 years ago, someone who didn’t know a particular famous person probably didn’t know almost any famous person. Now, it’s possible for someone to watch every new Netflix show/movie and still not know who Mr Beast is. Conversely, I think this has changed some of the nature of fame for these stars themselves.

First, there has been a lot of research in to the mental health of content creators, and it’s not particularly good. I couldn’t find a study that directly compared the mental health of more traditional actors or TV personalities to digital creators, but there’s a few reasons to think the mental health situation for content creators might be worse.

There’s a few reasons for this: algorithms are less predictable than bosses. One change to the way YouTube does things can increase or decrease your stats overnight. People can get strikes on their account for reasons that are often opaque. Competition is fierce and hours are long. With traditional media jobs, if you go to a try out and don’t get the part, the public doesn’t see you. With YouTube, you are still on the platform as long as you want to keep trying. You have all the same pressures a small business owner does, but in this case you are the primary product. A restaurant owner may find someone else who can cook their recipes to give them a day off, a content creator can’t have someone else make their videos for a week. Other creators may start feuds with you to boost their own profiles in a way that you can’t control.

It may not be the biggest change, but one of the most interesting changes to me that many seem unaware of is that changing nature of parasocial relationships. First noted in 1956, a parasocial relationship is basically when a person feels an emotional bond with a person or character they have never met. In the 60 year review of the concept, the authors lead with the example of a student whose aunt dressed up the day two of her favorite TV characters got married because “she didn’t want to let them down”. That’s a parasocial relationship. These relationships are often called “one sided” and can bring their own problems, but the advent of livestreaming brought about a new type of creator/fan interaction: the one and a half sided relationship.

This brings me to the answer to that third question. That last paper takes a look at the livestreaming platform Twitch. The authors start by noting that ” “microcelebrities” via live streaming has shifted the nature of parasocial relationship away from the classic one-sided relationship and towards a “one-and-a-half” sided relationship characterized by the potential for reciprocal communication, strong community affiliation, fandom cultures, wishful identification, high emotional engagement, and increased presence.” During livestreams, fans can submit questions or comments (superchats), give creators gifts, or do other things with their money to get direct shout outs from the creators themselves.

In other words, unlike people who used to have a favorite celebrity they could only ever dream of meeting, people who follow content creators who livestream can regularly interact with them…for a price. This is not just a business model on YouTube, TikTok and Twitch, but is a lot of how OnlyFans works. It’s a rather unsettling set up when you realize that those most prone to extreme parasocial relationship were already those most prone to other addictions. As noted, all of this actually creates more dedicated fan bases than we have seen previously, as they actually are interacting with their favorite celebrity and others in the community regularly.

So what is the point of all of this? Well, as I mentioned in my true crime post, when I started to see these dynamic pop up in my town, I was taken by surprise. Failure to know about the YouTube ecosystem does not exempt you or anything you love from becoming fodder for it. But more than that, when I’ve talked to people about this, they are often in denial about how influential these YouTubers can be (surely I would have heard of them!), how normalized bizarre content can be (no one would ever just watch people eat!), and how dedicated their fans can be (how bad can it be???). That’s not reality, that’s your bubble speaking. If you don’t recognize the name of a YouTuber who has more subscribers than the US has citizens, what makes you think you’d understand the influence of one of the smaller ones?

My point here is that Bubbles like Murray talked about don’t just form based on class or where you live, they can form for all sorts of reasons. I think the next frontier in this is the changing nature of fame and how we process culture. Already with nearly every major event, people are showing up trying desperately to record a viral moment, they see events through the lens of content creators we may have never heard of but that they feel extremely attached to, and they try to push the envelope with trends that seem completely opaque to outside eyes. YouTube is set to surpass Disney in terms of media revenue (excluding parks, etc), and yet due to the less historic and more fractured nature of it’s content, people still think of it as a niche interest. If that’s how you view it, it might be worth poking around taking a look at what you’re not seeing. It’s a wild world out there.

We are now entering the time of year when I become obsessed with daylight gains, an obsession I’ll hold on to through at least February. While January is long and cold it hits a few cool milestones that can brighten up the season.

This weekend for example, we hit perihelion, the day when the earth was closest to the sun. Relatedly, we hit the point where we are gaining daylight in both the morning and the evening. We started gaining back evening light in early December (about 2 weeks before the solstice), but at a slower rate than we were losing morning light. At the solstice this reversed: we kept losing morning light but at a slower rate than we gained evening light. Now we are gaining both evening and morning light, so our overall light gain becomes more noticeable. At least in the Boston area, this means Monday is the first day we gain a full extra minute of sunlight in one day. By the end of January, we’ll be gaining over 2 minutes a day.

A meteorologist on Facebook put up this graphic that shows how much daylight each region of the country can expect to gain total during January:

Obviously the regions that had the shortest days to begin with will gain the fastest, but it’s interesting to see where the cutoffs are.

Overall if you want to track your own daylight gains, this site is the one I use. It gives me some nice data to hold on to as we continue to slog through winter.