Learn tips for using less plastic to help keep our planet clean, from Greenpeace UK’s Head of Oceans, Will McCallum. Then, you’ll learn about whether shapes can be angry, with some help from the spectral centroid. In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following story from Curiosity.com about whether shapes can be angry: https://curiosity.im/32Yz0Gd Additional resources from Will McCallum: “How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time” on Amazon — https://amazon.com Follow Will McCallum @artofactivism on Twitter — https://twitter.com/artofactivism Penguin Random House bio — https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2189047/will-mccallum Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Learn tips for using less plastic to help keep our planet clean, from Greenpeace UK’s Head of Oceans, Will McCallum. Then, you’ll learn about whether shapes can be angry, with some help from the spectral centroid.
In this podcast, Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer discuss the following story from Curiosity.com about whether shapes can be angry: https://curiosity.im/32Yz0Gd
Additional resources from Will McCallum:
Download the FREE 5-star Curiosity app for Android and iOS at https://curiosity.im/podcast-app. And Amazon smart speaker users: you can listen to our podcast as part of your Amazon Alexa Flash Briefing — just click “enable” here: https://curiosity.im/podcast-flash-briefing.
Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/cutting-back-on-plastic-in-your-home-w-will-mccallum-and-how-shapes-can-be-angry
CODY: Hi! We’re here from curiosity-dot-com to help you get smarter in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn tips for using less plastic to help keep our planet clean, from special guest Will McCallum. Then, you’ll learn about whether shapes can be angry.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
Interview Clip 2 - How to cut back on waste [4:06] (Ashley)
ASHLEY: You can help clean up the world’s oceans by using less disposable plastic. And you might be surprised to learn some of the ways you can do that. Yesterday, you learned why it’s so important to cut down on plastic consumption in the first place, and today Will McCallum is back with tips for how you can have a Sustainable September and help the environment even more. He’s the Head of Oceans at Greenpeace UK and author of the new book “How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time.” In the book, he kind of takes you through your house room by room, and sure, everyone knows there’s plastic in your kitchen and in your bathroom. But what can you do to help when it comes to your bedroom?
[CLIP 4:06]
So to recap: switch to using a bar of soap, try to buy cosmetics in tins and non-plastic containers, and pack your lunch whenever you can. And if you’re a parent, use reusable diapers even if it’s just when you’re at home, get second-hand clothes and toys, and above all else, remember that “good” is better than “perfect.” For even more tips, you can pick up Will McCallum’s book, “How to Give Up Plastic: A Guide to Changing the World, One Plastic Bottle at a Time.” You can find a link to that and more in today’s show notes.
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ASHLEY: The ONLY way to get this free pillow, is to text Curious to 84-888. That’s C-U-R-I-O-U-S to 8-4-8-8-8. Message and data rates may apply.
Can Shapes Be Angry? Scientists Put Our Emotional Perception to the Test — https://curiosity.im/32Yz0Gd (Cody)
Can shapes be angry? Think about it: valentine hearts are rounded, but caution signs have hard edges. And if you’re looking at different types of lettering, you’d probably figure that the soft and fluffy looking letters might show up in a children’s nursery, while an angled, spiky design is more likely to show up on a heavy metal album. Well new science suggests the human brain automatically applies emotion to inanimate objects. So, yes, some shapes can be angry — and that has implications for how we perceive everything around us. This makes sense, considering that generaly speaking, humans are really good at detecting emotion. And scientists have known for more than a century that humans associate certain sounds with certain shapes. So for a study published in July 2019, researchers from Harvard University explored that ability to sense emotion to see how it could apply to shapes and sounds. The team’s hunch was that humans of all cultures encode and decode these automatic connections between shapes, sounds, and emotions with a property called the spectral centroid. The spectral centroid is an equation. And the basic idea is that you can break an image or sound into a spectrum of different frequencies. For example, a curvy shape has lower frequencies than a spiky one. Scientists take the average of each shape's frequency spectrum to get its spectral centroid. The team’s hypothetis was that anger and excitement involve high arousal, and you could associate those with spiky shapes and a high spectral centroid. The opposite would be true for sad, peaceful emotions. And they were right! Some of their experiments involved asking participants to draw their emotions. If I asked you to draw shapes for when you were angry or when you were happy, what would you do? Well, if you’re like the participants in this study, you’d draw sharp edges for anger, and rounded ones for sadness. And when scientists calculated the spectral centroids of each shape, they could guess what the emotional label would be with almost 80 percent accuracy. The researchers say that they hope this study can lead to building a deeper understanding of how communication can transcend geographic, cultural, and genetic barriers. So maybe the next time you feel like you can't understand how someone is feeling, you should ask them to draw it for you. Science says you'll understand immediately.
ASHLEY: And now, let’s recap what we learned today.
CODY: Today we learned that you can cut back on plastic use by switching to cosmetics and toiletries in tins and non-plastic containers, packing more lunches, and remembering that you don’t have to have perfect habits all the time to make a real difference.
ASHLEY: And that shapes can be angry, even across cultures. And you can measure that using a thing called the spectral centroid.
[ad lib optional]
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Stay curious!