Book completed

Aesthetics and Psychobiology, by D.E. Berlyne. Okay, I did it - I made myself read the first 100 pages of the book too. There was some good stuff in there. I'll add that his first name was Daniel, and that having read this, I now know that he was thinking that "psychology" would soon be called "psychobiology," hence the title. (This book was published in 1971, and as we all know, he was incorrect about that.)

The reason I read this is because Berlyne did a ton of research on which properties make something capture our attention, or in his words, have "arousal potential." His interest was in art (specifically paintings and music, mostly). And his answers pretty closely match what I've been able to develop in terms of which properties of ideas seem to tend to capture people's attention, so when I write a paper on the topic, I'll be able to build on his work rather than having to invent it out of thin air.

Berlyne died relatively young (age 52, in 1976), apparently from cancer, and thus his career was cut short. Too bad.

Day 539: It's ba-ack

Today's smoke/haze didn't dissipate in the afternoon; it got a bit worse. J. feels ill, and we hope he's just ill from the smoke. My throat is scratchy as well. The particulate levels were actually much higher on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, but today's air smells and tastes a lot more like smoke itself. More wind, please!

This evening, I chatted a bit with our nearest neighbor, to make sure she was okay with the fence coming down between J's house and hers; the fencing people will probably be replacing it in November. She's been there for 17 years and marveled at how old D. is now. Her little dog, Oreo, enjoys having all the cats in our shared driveway but is also a bit afraid of them.