Welcome, everybody, to our Autumn Thompson Lecture Series. I'm very happy to welcome Dragan Fryson here from the University of Washington. Dragan, he got his bachelor degree from the North Carolina State University. Then he did his master's and PhD in Princeton and moved on to a postdoc in Chicago and then got his tenure track precision at the University of Washington, where he stayed ever since. His research areas are climate change research. He applies simplified models to understand processes in the climate systems, especially the effect of water vapor, clouds, and dynamic processes in the Earth system, and also does a lot of outreach. And this will be his topic today. As you can see, what's the usefulness of climate outreach of idealized models? So thanks for coming. All right, yeah, thanks so much. I'm just so happy to be here. This is just such a tremendous honor. Did you get your microphone on? On, yes. All right. All right, there we go, green light. Good, good, good. Yeah, just to say that one more time, because this is very important. This is just a tremendous honor for me. I'm so excited to be here to talk with the ASP postdocs. It was just shining light in the world of research, I think, too, at NCAR. And actually, I went back and forth quite a bit about what I would talk about in this general seminar, but kind of influenced by recent world events, which you can probably guess which ones, right? I wanted to share a part of my career, a part of my life that I don't usually talk about with scientists. I've often kept this part of what I do pretty separate. But I think we need to really talk about how scientists engage with the general public, because we're kind of getting destroyed out there, especially as climate scientists, right? And I think we need to do more outreach. I think we need to talk to each other about how we do outreach, can be done in a lot of different ways. But I'm at least going to tell the stories of how I've done that and then make some connections with idealized modeling research, maybe, that'll kind of spill over into the talk next time. So this is going to be sort of my personal history of making videos, of making music, of making games about climate change. You can maybe start to get a feel for why this is slightly hidden from people, right? Each of these are going to have maybe a key message. One of those key messages is that there's a tremendous amount of incredibly talented people out there who are more than willing to work hard with you to help get the word out. I think we often feel kind of beat up when you see people denying science out there, right? But one of the really great things about this effort for me was to find really, really busy people who are really, really talented, who just want the word to be out about science, too, and will collaborate with you to get it done. And then also that software now makes a lot of communication very, very easy, just a little bit of learning about digital video editing, music editing. And then I'm going to try to make the argument, too, that it actually helps my research. There's no zero-sum game where if you're spending more time doing this than you're spending less time doing this, that actually it's improved my research. And I think there's historical precedent for this, too, that some of the greatest scientific findings in environmental sciences have been motivated by our reach. And then what I'm kind of struggling with and striving for is a goal. I've tried to make this a little bit self-critical, too, is seeking out ways to reach a new audience and make sure that we're not just communicating to a bubble where those folks will clap for you and you'll feel good about yourself, but you're not actually changing anyone's mind. You're preaching to the choir. So what are ways to reach out like that? The modeling part is going to be some of my own experiences building and using simple atmospheric GCMs. In both of these efforts, I think I'd try to make it fun, make the outreach show my joy for doing science. And try to just make cool worlds in GCMs. That's an opportunity we have with an idealized model that we don't have in observations or something. And then what I strive for with that is to continually make sure that that is relevant for the real world by comparing with more comprehensive models or going up and down a modeling hierarchy. And this will spill some into tomorrow's talk, too. So the first thing I want to say, and again, most of this I've never told to anybody, is that I've been doing this my whole career. Like since the beginning of when I started doing environmental sciences, this was an important part of my life. It was largely for me just to kind of keep my sanity, honestly, to it's so rewarding to see schoolchildren understand something new about the weather and be excited by it. So there's that really immediate gratification. And at Princeton, we were going into a lot of schools like in Trenton that don't have science classes anymore in elementary schools because they're failing schools that are only taught to the test all day. So some of those, especially, were really, really rewarding experiences. We talked about extreme weather for those. Did that with my buddy, Ed Gerber. We also coached a local math counts team. Do you all know what math counts is? So it's a math competition for middle school students. And I did it when I was in middle school. It was a really fun way for me to be smart, I guess. So it was fun to work with their team there. In Princeton, there's a lot of very high, like we taught Edward Witton's son, for instance, and field's medalists, children, and stuff like that.  And then another thing I did was co-design something called the game. Does anybody know what the game is, by any chance? There's a Stanford game. It's basically a puzzle solving scavenger hunt. There are a few of these around. But I've always had this really big interest in puzzles. And with math, a lot of researchers even think about their researches. Just cool puzzles, doing things for fun. Yeah, so we'll come back to this in a little while. But I think really there were very early signs that are worth saying about how this was useful for my career even then. Like I was very, very shy in grad school and not very comfortable speaking in front of people. And it really helped me develop those communication skills. And then definitely in those times of graduate school when I was feeling like I wasn't making much progress and wasn't nearly as good as the people who were in higher levels than me and stuff, that doing outreach is good for the soul, I think. Teaching and outreach at UW first, when I first got there, you're required to teach for the first time. Teach your own classes. And it's a lot of work. But in looking back at this retrospectively, you can see how it really influenced my research path quite directly. Like after I taught GFD, I would do a lot of research that applied those GFD concepts to the models I was looking at. To now, my favorite class to teach is the Global Warming for Non-Scientists class that I think has made my research a lot more interdisciplinary. Then another one that they let me at UW teach early was this special topics class, which was very directly related to a class that I took from Isaac Held, who's my PhD advisor, where it's a general circulation class, but the only assignment in the class is to do a project with a model that's some kind of experiment that nobody's ever done before. Because it's not that hard to get into brand new research if you have some unique esoteric, possibly. But if you have some unique tools, right? So yeah. And then another thing is I've tried to incorporate outreach into my teaching. Those are things. None of these were my ideas initially, but writing Wikipedia articles about the ED model is something I've gotten my students to do, undergraduate students. I heard that from another professor at UW. And I think it was pretty successful, specifically that I felt like with one guy in particular that was telling him over and over that your writing is not good, and for him to hear that from the Wikipedia editors. Exactly what I was telling him, right? And that his article got immediately rejected, I think really changed that. I think students of today really care about getting their work, not just doing things for their own benefit. They want to share what they do with the world. So posting little YouTube videos of labs. So this is one example of those that I just looked up from an assignment from four years ago, I think. Yeah, four and a half, five years ago or so. That's just really goofy. It's just a shallow water lab that we put up on YouTube and now it has 3,000 views. So I was really impressed with that. Not even that great of a simulation, right? But pretty low resolution. Yeah, and then writing tweets for extra credit to bring attention to COP21, for instance, is one way done that. The first major outreach endeavor that we took on was the YouTube channel, the UW-Atmos Outreach YouTube channel. Basically, this is an offshoot of the larger departmental outreach group that goes into elementary schools and community events to teach about weather and climate, largely weather, actually. And they typically show these cool demonstrations like can crushing with atmospheric pressure. And the idea basically was to take a small fraction of that time going into schools and make something permanent that can be seen over and over again. And also that it's something that could supplement the classroom visits because the physics of this is really complicated. I kind of doubt that many students really understand how the vacuum is formed and the details of this until they're able to look at it a few times. And I think it can help support the teachers, too. This is just a team of grad students. We meet one hour a week. And I never miss this meeting, just one hour every week. But that means also that when you just spend an hour a week on it, sometimes it's very, very slow processes where we'll take a year to get out a single video. But we just sort of slowly make these things. Here's the cloud in the bottle. You can see that these are pretty goofy, too, right? Like make a story with it and just try to make something that would be fun for that middle school audience to see, right? I told the postdocs this in the meeting, but I always kept this secret. I kind of felt like people wouldn't take me seriously if they knew about this until the dean caught wind of one of our videos and left a comment saying, oh, this is great. And then she invited me to be on a committee about outreach that's college-wide and basically tried to make the claim that everyone should do outreach and that 30 years ago, we had no teaching evaluations. But now it's unheard of that there wouldn't be a teaching evaluation and that pretty soon coming is going to be that about outreach, right? And the chair, Dale Durand, it really was valuable for me to have those higher-up folks say that this was OK to spend some time on and, in fact, kind of celebrate it. If you all are interested in ways that you might be able to get involved, there's this project called More Than Scientists. Wanted to make aware. And there are a lot of bolder folks who have participated in this because there was classes at CU by Becca Saffron, Max Budkoff. So this is Jim Kay, right, and Karen McKinnon. The basic idea is just to have a scientist say that we're people, that so much of the anti-science rhetoric that's out there is very accusatory with scientists, that you're greedy, you're just looking for grant money. So just getting out the message that we're people to is valuable. So this was the headline in GRIST, right, which always sort of has a humorous bant, shocking video shows scientists having feelings. And Eric is great because he made this really low stress. I have a lot of apprehension about saying dumb stuff that's going to be misinterpreted. But he's always given us the final cut of these videos, even, and even has said, we'll take it down at any time if you want. Yeah, so it's been good to have that supported by somebody outside, too. He edits all the videos and gets camera teams to come in and stuff, too. He I think is pretty wealthy. He led the team that developed the three-button mouse at Microsoft and has retired at a pretty young age, just thinks about climate. Now another goofy one. We're getting slightly goofier as we go. Buckle in. There's this big tradition of songwriting about atmospheric sciences at UW. Again, seeing these role models that I really admire participating in this, like Mike Wallace, and Dennis Hartman's always the band leader, and Rob Wood, just a really fun way just to kind of build camaraderie in the department, and so much fun to just play some music every once in a while. We rewrite songs typically about atmospheric science concepts. And this really quickly improved my teaching ratings because I sing in class, and they love it. So now we've been building this repertoire, and every class we sing a song about climate. And it actually is effective as a teaching tool, too, for them to music you remember. That's sort of the point of melody to some extent in epic poems and stuff like that. So Albedo is to the tune of Jackson 5, I'll Be There. So it's Where There's Ice, Albedo, Where There's Cloud, Albedo. And I can tell you that I have the test scores that prove that basically 100% of students get that question right on the test after singing the song, whereas the years when I hadn't sung it, they didn't as well. This is really goofy, but I think a lot of it is just willingness to make a fool out of yourself in front of the big class. Because they especially love it if I botch the song. And then lately, we've been getting them to write extra credit, songs for extra credit that are really just as good as ours. I have the cyclone I'm going to do next week. This one, Catch Long Waves. So we're starting to make music videos about some of these. So this is an example. And oftentimes, I'll help with the science a little bit to make sure it's as clearly stated as possible. But anyway, this is sung by Dresdie. So some of this sort of needs like annotation to understand this idea that polytonic molecules could be greenhouse gases. A lot of tonic molecules are not. So it's kind of showing me in the end or so. Love is at least that people remember it better to see if I botch the song along with the full lecture maybe. Anyway. Yeah, I'll have to keep my guitar solo for another scientific lecture. But yeah. And all this stuff is pretty easy nowadays to do. Like GarageBand that's on every Mac allows you to edit audio pretty well. Super easy. So another thing that we've gotten into is sonification. So sonification has taken numbers and turned it into sound. So this right here is the GarageBand project. You recognize this one? Keeling Curve, right? So up and down to the Keeling Curve. And Judy Tweet has really led this effort. She found all these Python libraries and has been kind of brainstorming ways to take data sets and turn them into sound for a while. We used GarageBand to make the sounds, to do software drummers, to mix. So this is the recent one of these. This came out like a few months ago, I guess. It's starting to get a little bit of a press. You know, here there's a lot of separation sounds that you hear different from the left channel and the right channel. That kind of always said, if you understand the Keeling Curve, kind of understand human impact on the environment. Just a very steady seasonal cycle that just within a few years, you could tell that it was us increasing it, right? At a piece because everything needs to drop the heat. Just hopefully it'll make people consider this stuff.  Could we have phrased the slides differently to reach out better to a broader audience, maybe, you know? But I think you gotta try with this stuff, right? You gotta continually try and reevaluate how that's going with metrics if you can, you know? So, all right, getting weirder and weirder. The new thing that's really taken off and has really actually taken me in a completely new direction with my research as well is this team that makes video games. So it turns out there's a ton of students at UW who wanna work in the game industry. Surprise, surprise, right? In fact, who are making little, you know, demo games for their portfolio in their dorm rooms, right? So just diverting a little bit of that effort into an educational purpose has turned out to be really, really easy to do. And I see this also as just kind of like a one hour meeting per week where we get together a group and, you know, try to get enough voices that gets the science completely right with this stuff and then make something cool with it. So Josh Lawler is a guy who originally had this idea who's an environmental and forest sciences professor. And this is really where I discovered that it's okay to, you know, whereas on the airplane, you gotta kind of like cringe when you say I'm a climate scientist, right?  Including really, really busy people who are, you know, dropping what they're doing to help us out in the information school. This is like a fantastic major where they have to build apps all the time as part of their classes. So we're able to offer course credit for the students to work on these independent study things. And it's great for everybody. And then learning sciences folks who actually know how to, you know, determine whether people learn from digital media and yeah, that's been really fun. And it's changed my teaching too to think about those things. We initially hired two students to make a game. We paid them some as well as course credit and we kind of had a pre-established notion of what we wanted to come out of that project, which was a city builder game where you would reduce the carbon footprint of the city but that all the numbers were from the real world. So if you find, so the carbon you level up by getting to a certain carbon footprint reduction and it's the real carbon footprint of the items and you get the actual money savings of the items. And you have to purchase the new upgrades, right, with their actual cost. And the idea is that if you find the optimal strategy in the game then you can apply that to your real life, right? So you can kind of experiment a lot and then hopefully go home and realize, hey, light bulb, compact for us in light bulb will pay for itself in three months. So we're like hemorrhaging money by not having these in our house, right? So, but this has also been a real lesson for us because it's still not done. It was our first project that we started and we've released four games or so since then because we kind of bit off more than we could chew with it, basically. A really cool thing that kickstarted this group quite a bit that got it from two basically to 15 or so was there's a game jam hosted by NOAA, Smithsonian and the White House which is kind of like a hackathon, do you all know these things where you just get together for a weekend and try to solve a problem really quickly?  It's so cool to think about how to get something done in a very short amount of time and it also showed me how easy it is to do this stuff if you get the right people around. So within 48 hours we finished two games, one of which won first place in the country and won one third and these are them. Basically this final form of both of these, a board game and a digital game were done just within the 48 hours and I went home and was with my family for the weekend while other people spent all night working on it. All I kind of had to do was reserve the room to some extent and bring in some science knowledge. We hosted another game jam. If anybody's interested in running one of these I can point you to the folks who do that at the various agencies. It's really not much of a time commitment. It turns out I figured every location would be open the entire weekend because that's the way I'd done it with the contest in modeling but that's not the case. We were the only one in the country that was open all weekend. Most of them did just six hours during the day. And you can make a lot of progress with these really simple tools in just a few hours and kids know how to use them already. We hosted another one of these game jams about six months later and didn't get as many people to come. I think because now only a thumbs percentage of the students are willing to think about stuff like this. But even without the really good coders we were able to make some things like there's this free tool called twine that basically lets you make choose your own adventure stories. It makes it really easy to make a branching path where you click and go to one and another and it lets you organize it really easily. So these are the two that we made in that that you can check out. This was about water. So these were two games that were initially gonna be the same but ended up being different enough that we made them separate. This is another cool one. This was completely student idea infrared escape. Basically you just play a ray of infrared light that's dodging greenhouse gases. And the higher levels are, higher levels are the higher emission scenarios. So you can really get that feel for, I like this one because it's not so sciencey. It gets across the scientific concept but it's not like some of our other games have a little bit of a tendency to be like lecture reading simulators. And this is just a very, it's an experience that anybody can pick up and they kind of get the gist of it, I hope. We flash little facts about the different layers of the atmosphere as you go through those. So there's still some of that science teacher attempt to push knowledge into their ears or whatever. Yeah, but the takeaway for me for this is that there's a lot of really talented people out there who are just willing to be in a room with you every once in a while and work a lot on their own on these things. And I think it's a great learning experience for them. We were initially making these games for other people but I think by far the people who learned the most are the students who are working on them. That's about coding and team management and collaboration, but also about environmental science because these are folks who largely would not have taken environmental science classes unless this opportunity had come up. So I think it's been a good effort for that. Yeah, so the college has really supported it. The course proposal kind of breeze through the college level and university level. So we have an official course starting in the winter. And then these game jams are really easy and really a lot of kids even know how to use the software already and do their own art. And we had a game jam the other week at the zoo that was one hour and by the end we had characters spinning around on the screen that they were happy with. So it doesn't necessarily take a lot of time. And then finally that we like doing these shorter projects that can be finished relatively quickly. So this has really changed my ideas about research too. We just posted the ad on the web and said, hey, come do games with us and got 40 people to come, right? And it made me think, well, why am I not doing this with what I actually know how to do, right? Why am I not doing this with my research? So I'm trying to get groups of students now, undergrads, that I just meet an hour with a week to work on their own little research projects and no expectation of funding for it, but I will give them class credit for it, right? No really expectation on my part that they'll get papers written for it. But maybe, and you find some that are really, really good that that can happen with. So anyway, it's really changed my idea about how we can collaborate with other people, you know? And how good it is for people to work on their own projects. So the NSF Career Award, you know, so I always had this feeling that I should hide this from other people, right? And kind of still have that concern, right? But I think really the higher ups are saying, no, you need to consider this, right? The broader impact statements and the grants nowadays are very, you know, explicit. And, you know, I feel like to a large extent to NCAR I'm preaching to the choir here, right? This is, y'all are so good at doing educational stuff, right? It's so much of a part of the mission of this place. But the NSF Career is something that recognizes education and outreach in that it's reviewed partially on those criteria. And Dale helped me a lot with that idea. Basic idea is just that everybody knows that evaporation cools you. But late in heating, as a heat source, nobody really experiences that in their everyday life, right? We sweat and evaporation cools us. But most people in my experience don't know this. And our little outreach proposal, which is Dale's idea, was condensation on cold drink cans as a way to show late in heating, that in a really humid environment, that condensation will release heat to the can that will warm it up much quicker. So let's say a millimeter condensation forms on a 12 ounce drink can. If all the, you do the, you know, the calculation, right? Heat capacity of the water. You know, hopefully no matter what kind of chemicals are in the soft drink or beer, it's still mostly water, right? Anyway, you do that calculation with a millimeter condensation, which is pure estimate, right? You get that it should rise by about nine Fahrenheit, just from that small amount of condensation. So let's test it. So we asked for some money to test it. And we found this old mothballed environmental chamber that Peter Hobbs used to use that nobody touched in decades. But it really worked well. It varied the temperature inside it and it was this sealed off environment. We, you know, boiled water on a hot plate and inputted moisture in that way, water vapor in that way, ran in different relative humidities, put the little can in there, right? Started basically always with water in an ice bath that hadn't started to freeze yet, so close to zero C. We got undergrads to work on this. So Stella is now a grad student at University of Illinois in atmospheric sciences. Here's her, we got the main cost of this was a high precision scale. So we could actually measure the condensate before and after. And then we looked at the results. So for 35 degrees C in there, as the relative humidity goes up, right? You get six degree Celsius temperature change after five minutes in a dry environment and about what, almost 12 in a humid environment. So it's basically saying that half of the heating is due to condensation in those really high environments. So it was kind of cool, you know? Yeah, and this is the calculation from the mass of the condensate of how much you should get from latent heating. So it does go in pretty much entirely into the can. There, real work context. This is the audience participation part. Anybody know where most humid day in history was? Don't be shy. I certainly, what? The one of that. Ah, good gas, good gas. Yeah, Dharan, Saudi Arabia, yeah, July 2003. But this actually happens most every year. It gets close to that. There's a dew point of 95, right? When the ambient temperature was 106. So that's some humidity, right? When the winds are in the right direction, so the golf, Persian golf, the winds are blown in the right direction. It's ridiculously humid and that's Dharan, right? So at 104, that real world, record humidity is around here. So you're getting kind of 60% or so of the heating of the can within five minutes to be from condensation instead of just sensible heat flux. So this got covered in the media a lot by far more than any of my serious science studies, right? I think actually our YouTube video helped quite a bit with that. We had it ready with the press release, just a little goofy video that shows the details of the experiment too. So that got posted along with the blog on NBC News, for instance. I was pretty psyched to get in these geek blogs that I really like. Anyway, yeah, so that was cool I think. I think most people got it too. The science writers seem to do a really good job with it, you know? But I think always without reach there's this concern of is this gonna backfire in some ways? Why are you spending all this money studying goofy stuff, right? And in fact, this was quite a bit later, this was like two, more than two years after it, we were in, Senator Jeff Flakes, waste book of government wasteful spending, and can you see down here? The science of beer cozies were on the cover. So yeah, so it happens, right? But I think we were really, really stressed out about this because we got an email on a Friday afternoon from Good Morning America saying, hey, did you know you're in the senator's waste book? And it really panicked. We didn't know that the cover was gonna be this goofy cartoon thing, and basically the whole tone of it is kind of sarcastic. One group did a preemptive assault and tried to explain why their stuff was useful, and I think that ultimately was a very bad idea that just no one really paid attention to this. But I am concerned about these things that can seem very silly, right? Backfire in some ways. So I think a lot about whether to use grant funding to support these, and basically don't to do any of these outreach efforts, despite the fact that the grants kind of want us to, right? I put them in the descriptions, but other than this experiment, we haven't actually asked for funding to do it, and we do most of the stuff on zero budget anyway. So now for the game stuff, we're starting to ask for private funding to get like pro developers to come in. So anyway, that's that. Are we reaching new audiences? Are we preaching to the choir? Are games and music a good way to do this? I really believe there's a book called Don't Be Such a Scientist, talks about how to do science communication with the public. I think we really need to take that message to heart as climate scientists so people won't see us as greedy, dishonest people. We got to fight the good fight, right? I don't believe that we're post-truth. I don't believe that we're post-science, but I think that we got to work really hard to do this, and we're at the front lines of this battle as people who study the earth. So anyway, that's me sharing the stuff that I've never shared before. So cute animal pictures maybe is another way to do this. But anyway, another one that I woke up on Election Day, this is something that I haven't participated in, but one of my grad students has that has made me think about ways to reach other audiences has been this union climate caucus. Our grad students are in a union, and they were actually asked by the King County Labor Council climate caucus. They formed a caucus and said, we want to talk some about climate change. And several of our grad students go and give talks there. It's been tremendously successful. These have been really well-attended events, very broad. They have people coming up after and saying, hey, can I help do outreach at my daughter's school about this? They've talked to the delegates meeting that's like the head of all the individual unions that are around, right? The way they've done the partnership has been climate science from Judy, Miriam from Public Health talks about heat waves and injuries, I'll show a slide from her work. You gotta be careful to some extent to like, are we gonna link this to global warming? No, I mean, I think I have a lot of trust that Judy is gonna tell this stuff in a scientifically accurate way. And then often they get a clean energy lab to talk about solar and wind. And they've said that the questions are about, what kind of jobs are gonna come from this? So there's a lot of issues that are related to this that whether those are gonna be union jobs, right? It's something that's, if we can kind of tell them that, hey, the price of solar is plummeting, the price of wind is getting cheaper than fossil fuels, that this is not gonna turn around with any administration, this is the future. And when they start the talks with, hey, we're union members too, I think that gives a lot of, it's just a good way to relate to people. So here's one of the slides that Miriam shows, just the fact that there is danger from heat, in some places it's way worse than others, that some places in Saudi Arabia, you're not allowed to work in the middle of the day, right? And then there are these big outreach campaigns, like Water Rest Shade, and that we are had certain heat records twice as much as cold records nowadays, right? This is something that should be out there. And also, I think you can make sure that people don't over, you know, like attribute stuff to anthropogenic causes that's really just weather too, when you get a real scientist in the room talking to them. So that was one of those things that was, I think is a real success, and that y'all would be interested in, even though it's not my participation in it. Does it help with research? This is something I learned recently. John Shanklin says that he discovered the ozone layer, ozone hole, because of an outreach event, that they had a big backlog of data that needed to be processed, and they had, yeah, that there had been these scattered reports of the instrument not working down there, but basically it wasn't taken seriously. They put a, gave them a new instrument, and nobody really figured it out with all this backlog of data until there was this outreach event, and there's a great interview with them online where he describes this in detail, that there was an open house where he was trying to prove to people that there's no problem with ozone depletion and discovered the ozone hole. So a lot of times, right, when you talk to the public, you focus on questions that people really care about more instead of just back and forth between scientists, you know, about kind of esoteric things. I really think that my research has improved by these interactions. I think especially like talking with reporters who have really good questions, you know, that's suggested further study to me in several cases. Yeah, and I feel like also when I'm thinking creatively in one aspect of my life, then I'm thinking creatively in other aspects too, and that having some things rolling around in my head can help the creativity and the bigger findings to actually happen. So, and I'm gonna try to make that case for a particular study that we're doing right now in the talk tomorrow. All right, so now to modeling and I'm gonna try to make some connections between idealized modeling and outreach. How much time do I have? I'm just getting to 15 minutes or so. Cool. Yeah, so my modeling philosophy is basically well that first of all models aren't the real world, right? That you can only learn so much from any kind of model, right? But the big advantage is that you can mess around with stuff in them, right? That you can make up cool experiments, turning feedbacks on and off, modifying simplifying boundary conditions, changing parameterizations. All those are things that you can do in models that are unique to that, right? There's some preaching to the choir in the audience here for sure, but I was really, if you haven't read it before, I really recommend reading Isaac's 2005 BAMS paper about this where he makes a biological analogy that in biology there's a hierarchy that appears naturally from really simple one-celled organisms to fruit flies, to mice, to people. And that that hierarchy that's appeared naturally has really accelerated the progress in molecular biology, genome, sort of stuff. And in atmospheric science, you have to build your own, right? Because we only have sort of a few pretty complicated in most cases, right? Data points to look at being paleoclimate, the observational instrumental record and some other planets, right? So we have to make our own with models. But then the problem is, and this is what's, slowed progress on this and gets people, not to believe it, is that you do have to argue that those simplified models are worth studying, right? So it's important to make a case for that. Here are some of the benefits that I've seen. Ease of interpretation, where you're only changing one thing at a time, where you can make clear experiments, right? I think reproducibility is so key for research. That like, that's like a rule of science, right? That you should make it so that everyone can reproduce your stuff. And sometimes models get so complicated that you just can't do that. You can't tell all the parameters that you put in. If the model's constantly changing or whatever, right? Another cool thing is that you can push them really hard and they don't break, you know? So I'll show some examples of that in a second. Easy to diagnose too is a, these are sort of like side benefits, you know? That aren't reasons to use it, but they help, you know? So these can often be really, really fast. Like it sounds like CSM-6 is really, right? CSM-6 is like really slow, because of this clouds or whatever, but you know, the physics of these models that I'm gonna talk about really fly, you know? So that's kind of cool. And they're easy to diagnose, like if you only need to take a zonal mean to represent the full statistical climate, right? That's a side benefit. So for my PhD, I got interested in primitive equation models with simplified physics, with the kind of gold standard being this Helz-Swaraz model. So I'm super, super psyched about the idealized modeling stuff that's happening at NCAR now, that that's gonna be part of the official release, the Amy Clement, Lorenzo Povani effort. And this Helz-Swaraz is gonna be part of that first release, I believe. It actually was kind of ignored other than by numerical analysts for a few years. And then people kind of realized, you can do some really cool physics with this. And this model basically is just this. That's it. That's the entire physics, basically. Just take temperature and relax to an equilibrium temperature, just Newtonian cooling. There's some Rayleigh damping and these have functions that represent them, but just super, super simple, right? And our goal was to make something that also includes latent heating. So this same condensation that the drink can heats up, right? This is just the surface water vapor content in units of Kelvin. So it's just LQ over CP, all right? It's if all of that condensation were, lift it to a place where it's completely dry and then bring it back down. How much is it increased in temperature? So that's like 45K across most of the tropics. Even in the mid-latitudes, it's 30K in places, right? And it's also responsible for half the poured heat transport. I think it's really interesting to think some about what the dry models versus a moist model, what aspects of those are different in order to get realistic storms in both of them, for instance. So anyway, we had that in mind and we made this model called Graham, that Elizabeth seized a lot, for instance. Gray radiation, moist, GCM. Isaac doesn't like acronyms, so we didn't get to call it this until later, but it has a tagline. The tagline is most GCMs have a metric ton of physics. You can get a long way with just a Graham. Anyway, and it kind of is that we're really shooting for that kind of complexity, right? Where it's much, much simpler. It turns out it wasn't that easy to do. We ended up wanting a downward flux of radiation at the surface, for instance, which you can't get from Newtonian cooling, so we had to do gray radiation, which has an upward and downward stream, but no wavelength dependence, right? Just to function the temperature and the prescribed optical depth. We used some of the stuff kind of straight out of the more complicated GCM, like making simplifications when we could. So, Mononobikov, K-profile boundary layer, diffusive, simple convection schemes that at first is just, when you hit 100% relative humidity, you condense, or like simple Betts-Miller type schemes. So it does end up being much more complex than Heltoires, for sure. Like this is the complete parameter set, but I like it because you can do kind of nutty, fun experiments pretty easily. So my thesis was dry limit up to 10 times the moisture content of the planet, which is like ludicrous. It's like maybe the very, we're maybe around the right water vapor content of like the post-snowball hot house, 50K hotter climates or whatever. A cool thing is we ran it under tightened conditions and actually the first one that we tried with it was the one that we published. We did a lot of like parameter tests, but basically with this kind of model that doesn't have many things tied to the Earth's climate, right? It's really easy to apply it to very, very different scenarios and not just not crash, but in this case work the first try, so that was kind of cool. Just so, like kind of the side reason for me to discuss this is I really like to get this into that, you know? Idealized modeling framework and I think there are a lot of cool problems that I haven't studied and probably I'm never gonna really get around to, so I'm gonna tell you all some of these. Some of these that we really never have completely figured out by any means. Like in the dry case, the winds are pretty similar, despite the fact that the Hadley circulation increases by a factor of three in that case. It's kind of like a very similar strength of surface westerlies, location, whereas if you go to higher moisture, it really shifts poleward a lot. The storm tracks are really, really far, poleward, so there's this poleward and upward shift. It's kind of like what happens in global warming simulations. An interesting thing is the Hadley cell boundary is often the same place as the storm tracks and in this case, it is them at all. They're very far apart. The Hadley cell actually narrows in this case and the wave-like, bare-clinic instability type things kind of only happen around 65 North, 65 degrees or so. And it looks like always to us that it was tropical storms that filled the domain in between, so is that actually the case? Like, now is really a time where this could be run at high resolution and that could be a really exciting thing to study because these were often pretty clunky things that were tropical storms, but were these rotating warm core convection centers? Anyway, another cool thing that's inspired some of the research that I'll talk about next time is in these simulations, obviously, the moisture flux increases a lot. The reason it doesn't so much, so this is the Northward moisture flux, so it's a pole word in the mid-latitude storm tracks and it's a equator word, right? Converging within the Hadley cell, right? And it's zero if you're dry because there's no moisture. And this really moist case like really clearly increases its moisture in the mid-latitudes, not as much in the Hadley cell. That's largely because it decelerates a lot and the moisture doesn't change as fast as this parameter. Yeah, but anyway, so what happens to the total pole word transport of heat? It ends up not changing at all, basically. We make other parameter experiments with this model that can change, somewhat at least, changing the rotation rate can give you a big increase in flux by lowering it and a decrease by half, by increasing it. So less than 10% increase, the dry energy flux completely compensates, basically, for the increased moisture flux, so this is that, right? The dry just looks like this and decrease, decrease. So almost nothing in this high moisture case. Yeah, so, I don't know, we wrote little simpler models to try to figure that out and we can check that out. We thought about this in terms of energy balance models and so what do I strive to do with idealized models is really constantly compare up and down the hierarchy like that anything you make is probably gonna be more complicated than we can understand anyway. So modeling the model is a good strategy sometimes, you know? So we used an energy balance model to explain the small changes in flux. When we tried to apply this with GCMs, it said that the radiation that we ignored in the simple model is really important for this and in fact it's dominant in causing the changes. But we were actually able to use the same energy balance model that we used to interpret model without complex radiation to understand it so there can be these cool ways to move up and down that hierarchy and you know, yeah. And then another thing I think with these simple models is I was always really impressed with Isaac not having any ego whatsoever about his own findings. Like his really big papers that have been cited by if I showed him something that was you know, said that that was wrong in some sense, right? Totally didn't care at all. Like it's just about moving it forward. You know, there's no protectiveness of that, you know? So I think when you deal with idealized models, you gotta be ready for that to some extent, you know? You gotta be able to like defend to some extent that those simpler experiments are relevant to some extent. I spent a lot of time doing that, you know? But also it's good if you find a new effect, you know? It means that you got more cool stuff to run, right? There's more cool idealized work to be done that's even more important than what you've done already, right? Anyway, so the conclusions I'll try to tie these together is you know, these fears that I had about sharing my outreach activities, that's just because of the culture and the culture is us, right? Y'all are the future of the culture, right? ASP program, right? So we can change this, you know? And then there was this recognition that really folks do, you know? And promotion and tenure, like our outreach committee went to the promotion and tenure committee and said, you need to value outreach. They said, we do. You might not know that we do, but we totally do. And they did, you know? Yeah, so let's do more. Let's talk about it with each other. Yeah, and we have way, we have a lot of different talents, right? Like there's a lot of ways that you can engage.  That's not one of my talents, so I don't really do that anymore, you know? Asking others for help, there's a lot of support among scientists in other fields to help us with this, and engineers, and you know? And then I think with both of these, it's good to have, it's good to listen, right? When you get together this group of people that what you can do together is better than what anybody could think about individually. And I think that's where a lot of the exciting problems are. And then my final plea, that it'll kind of tie it to the outreaches, you know, I think it's okay to run things that aren't important, even though we're studying a very important thing without a doubt, right? That with idealized modeling, you can really goof around, right? And that that should be good enough, you know? If you also compare them with more comprehensive things, right? So, you know, I think that's sort of part of the tying together, right? Is that with both outreach and with research, I'm trying to make it fun, you know? Because then that gets me wanting to do it the next day, right? Even, yeah, in the face of difficult events. So thank you all for listening, appreciate it. Yeah, we are running a little bit late, so if you have to leave, no problem. We have still some time for questions. Yeah, I really like that you put yourself out there.  Like you said, it's a zero-sum game to most people, right? So I guess I have two questions along those lines. Was it that you, when you got, how did you get in to outreach? How did you break the mold? How did you originally, so when you were interviewing, did you downplay it at all, your interest? And then later, when you got the job, you kind of sort of ramped it up, or how did it work exactly? And then there's a follow-up question. Yeah, yeah, I often really hit it for a very long time, and I kind of still feel like I can only share with certain people, you know? Like I think there is a need for a massive cultural shift that's not gonna happen overnight, but I think there are many more allies out there than you think. Kind of more than anything, I want to just say that I'm an ally, you know? That if anybody wants to talk about outreach stuff, I'm always down for that, you know? And that I can point you to the other folks too, you know? So we're like the underground, right? But yeah, it happened really quickly in some of my interviews that I didn't have teaching experience, just because of the jobs that I had. I was in a program for my PhD, not a department. So all TAs for their classes came from other places. So they're like, you had to really, really work to get any kind of teaching gig at all. I didn't. And then in my postdoc, I didn't have to teach. So I was trying to make the case to people that I could teach. And at some of the places that I interviewed, like U-Dob, it was clear right away that they did value that. And that's part of why I wanted to be there, you know? So it's such a matter of treatment. And they said many times that, like I had put some of these outreach things in the teaching statement.  Yeah, the specific quote was, if you can deal with a room full of elementary school students, then no problem with their undergrad, which of course is very different. So I think there was a lot of respect for that, actually. But what I would really like to change is just this idea that it is absolutely not a zero sum game, that it has definitely improved my research. I don't think everybody's research is like that. Some people have better ways of forming research questions than me that don't require, you know? That's fine, right? But yeah, did that answer? You did. I was in the interest of time, I'll just ask you later other questions I have. So thank you. So thanks, it was really cool to see all the outreach stuff you do. It's a lot of that, it's pretty exciting. I wanted to ask actually about some of the game jam stuff that you did. And specifically, how do you brainstorm ideas for the games? How do you sort of get that mix of some science in there or something you can do in a short period of time that people will be excited to work on? Yeah, I think just having a respectful environment where everybody listens to everybody is really key with that and that with every single one of those, we came out with ideas that were never a single person's idea, you know? Whereas all just building of many different opinions in the room. And I really like that setting of 48 hours to solve a problem, you know? Because it gets immediately to the question of how hard it is to implement these things and what are the simpler ways. So projects get done in hackathons.  The theme of hackathons to some extent is that that's not really allowed. In some of them, like the global game jam, they don't announce the theme, which is very, very specific until people start. And you know, there are different time zone things and you're not allowed to share the theme until every time zone has been able to see it. With the science ones, I think they're a little bit more flexible on that is what I've seen. So they typically announce the big category. So yeah, I don't think in any cases we've actually had any ideas beforehand, you know? But maybe thinking about the category of problems like the one was water. The other, the first one was climate adaptation. So yeah, but it's a really fun experience. And it I think also gets people to speak up, you know? When they know that there's a time pressure, right? That shire person in the room will still come forward and say their things, you know, maybe. I don't know, depends on the group, but that just is a really fun experience to me. Like everybody's an expert when you only have 48 hours to get in. So you have to be an expert. Yeah, there started to be more of these hackathons with science problems too. We just had one of the UW data sciences thing about how to do data analysis in different ways, like data visualization in different ways. And then the Allen Vulcan, Paul Allen, people in Seattle hosted one about ocean, use of ocean data. Yeah, so it definitely, like there's a culture of it with games. People are used to doing hackathons with games, but it's starting to get into broader, broader ways. So I was wondering if you do, if you plan to do outreach with politicians as well. So I have the feeling that many people that don't have any relation with science and that deny climate change are usually following opinions, sometimes come from politicians, sometimes from pressure groups, but unseen how people follow big leaders. And we've seen that recently. Yeah, yeah. How important it is for you group. I think that's so important to do. And I think it's one of those things that I'm feeling like right now, I don't have the talent to do that, in ways that I could sit with a politician and be able to think of that perfect response right away. It's not such in my school yard, and I think the way that I, and that it's not as fun for me, that it's these situations where I get stressed out about it beforehand and then regret saying things in a certain way if I just have one shot. So I really value people who do that and the people who do it well right on. But I think it's okay to do outreach in different ways. That's the way I do so much is by doing the ones that are really fun to me. Gotta take your medicine at some point and hope that there continue to be good folks who can testify with Congress and stuff and go to the Washington state. Like I went to the state legislature one time and watched that happen with a scientist talking to the media. And I don't think it really fits my skills set. I'm good at talking to like less wheeler dealer types. That's sort of a really cop out answer though, because it's so important, right? I don't have any more questions I think. We will have none with you now. And that's thanks to speaker once again.


ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Something happened in Illinois in January 2000 that has never really been explained. A number of UFO sightings occurred in the southwestern part of the state and got a lot of attention, and it wasn't just in Illinois. The sightings gained national attention because there has likely been no other time that so many people witnessed something so unexplainable that it managed to perplex people all over America. The incident involved a number of reliable witnesses, which consisted mostly of police officers from a number of small towns in the area, and led many to believe that something very strange was going on in the skies over Illinois. Even more convincing than mere sightings, the officers maintained radio contact through most of the event, which carefully tracked the progress of the UFO that passed over the area. Adding to this, Scott Air Force Base was only a mile or so out of the flight path of the anomalous craft, and this helped to focus media attention on the event for weeks after it actually occurred. Lebanon, this is a call from Highland PD in reference to a truck driver who just stopped in. He said there was a flying object in the area of Lebanon, it was like a two-story house. It had white lights and red blinking lights, and it was last seen southwest over Lebanon. Could you check the area? They say the truck driver was DUI or anything. 10-4. I'm out. Just a quick question. If I happen to find it, what am I supposed to do with it? If I see it, I'm not saying a word. Also, we advised the last thing that went over Lebanon. This was approximately five minutes ago. It was a military cargo plane. It looked like a C-5. We advised. There's a very bright white light east of town. It looks like it's just east of Summerfield, and it keeps changing colors. I'll go over there and see if it looks like an aircraft. It doesn't look like an aircraft, though. It's not the moon. It's not a star. If you would, would you contact Scott Air Force Base and see if they have anything flying in this area, please? Well, it's a plane or not. It's heading westbound now. You should be really close to Scott now. As a matter of fact, if the Shiloh officer looks up, they can probably see him by now. I see something, but I don't know what the heck it is. It's probably heading to Lambert. That object inside, also.  It's huge. Does it look like a... What does it look like to you? Um, it's kind of V-shaped. It looks like it's possibly headed towards Lambert. That's what Shiloh said when it was heading towards Fairview Vights. Six-double-o-four. This is thirty-nine-twenty-three on County Two. Six-thousand-four. Go ahead. I'm not sure what you're seeing. It appears to be pretty high in the area. When I could first see it with binoculars, you could see it was different colors. No, it appears to be white. Is it very large? It's hard to tell. It's pretty far off in the distance. This object was above me about five hundred feet, and it was huge. Appears. It's probably twenty or thirty thousand. It's about where planes usually are. It's not low at all. Something very strange visited southwestern Illinois on January 5, 2000, but what it was remains a mystery to this day. I'm Darren Marlar, and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar, and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved, and unexplained. Coming up in this episode. If you've ever wanted to play a game of catch with a ghost boy, race of phantom Camaro, or encounter a mythological beast, Clinton Road in New Jersey should be your next destination.  This is not lore or scary storytelling. It's happening now. Imagine a coin rolling past you in a long hallway, yet you are completely alone in the building. For years, mysterious lights of Dover have puzzled observers, and it's been happening for centuries. The strange sighting of a UFO in the year 2000 still has people looking to the skies of southwestern Illinois. But first, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, did you know that she had kept her dead husband's heart for 30 years? We begin with that story. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, to enter contests, to connect with me on social media. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  Mary Shelley is perhaps most well-known for writing the novel Frankenstein. Aside from being the mother of all creating-a-monster stories, she was also the wife of well-known poet Percy Shelley. Percy was still married when he and Mary began their affair in 1814. Perhaps that was a bad omen for what was to come, as all of the following happened over the next four years. Percy and Mary ran off together. Mary returned, bearing Percy's child. That child was born prematurely and later died. Mary's half-sister killed herself. Percy's first wife killed herself. Mary and Percy got married. Mary created Frankenstein during a rained-out retreat with her husband and Lord Byron. Mary's second and third children with Percy died. A fourth child survived. Then, four years after all of the seemingly nonstop drama, Percy drowned in a sailboat accident in 1822. And so, one of the most famous literary couples of all time spent less than 10 years together, mostly broke, dealing with one horrible thing after another. In fact, it is entirely likely that we might not even know much about Percy Shelley if Mary hadn't been so dedicated to seeing his works published. Mary was obviously devoted to her husband in both his life and his death, but assuring her husband's legacy wasn't enough for the Queen of the Grotesque. She also kept a piece of him for herself. Literally. Now, it's not like Mary originally meant to keep the heart saved or anything like that. Percy was actually cremated. We have first-person accounts of people who watched the body burn, and though they might not agree on the size of his heart, all agreed that it refused to burn, possibly because it had become calcified after about with tuberculosis. After fighting to get it back from Percy's friend, Lee Hunt, who claimed that he was keeping it because his love for his friend was greater than any other love, man or woman, Mary Shelley kept the heart for the rest of her life. Now, it's up for debate as to whether she actually carried it around with her, although many claim that she did. Regardless, the heart was definitely found in her desk the year after she died, wrapped in one of the last poems Percy ever wrote to John Keats called Adonize. It's a long piece, but Mick Jagger read a portion of it at the Brian Jones Memorial Concert on July 5, 1969, two days after the drummer for the Rolling Stones drowned in his own swimming pool, and that feels like as good a selection as any from the eulogy to share here. Peace, peace, he is not dead, he doth not sleep. He hath awakened from the dream of life, to his we who lost in stormy visions keep, with phantoms and unprofitable strife, and in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife invulnerable nothings we decay, like corpses in a charnel fear and grief convulse us and consume us day by day, and cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. The one remains, the many change and pass, heaven's light forever shines, earth shadows fly, life like a dome of many colored glass, stains the white radiance of eternity, until death tramples it to fragments, die. If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek, follow where all is fled. If you've ever wanted to play a game of catch with a ghost boy, race a phantom Camaro, or encounter a mythological beast, Clinton Road should be your next destination. Just climb in your car, going with a friend is recommended, and hit the road. Rural New Jersey's Clinton Road will certainly make your skin crawl. A number of haunts and strange buildings are reputed to make Clinton Road their home. Depending on what time of day you drive through, you may encounter one, two, or all of these Clinton Road legends. The Boy on the Bridge Under one of the bridges crossing Clinton Brook, also known as Dead Man's Curve, you can find one of the road's most famous haunts. Rumor has it if you throw a quarter into the water below, then take a few steps back, the quarter will be thrown back by the ghost of a boy who drowned while swimming. In some stories, the ghost shoves the living visitor into the water if they peek too far over the side of the bridge. Ghostly Car Crash Victims There are first-hand accounts of tourists and locals seeing a ghost Camaro driven by the girl who supposedly died in a tragic crash in 1998. This appearance is triggered by a mere mention of the incident. Others claim to have encounters with two park rangers near Terrace Pond who are thought to be the ghosts of two rangers who died while on duty in 1939. Ghost Truck There are countless accounts of phantom vehicles. The majority of the sightings are of pickup trucks, but in some cases, they are only floating headlights not attached to any vehicle. The headlights chase drivers to the end of Clinton Road, then disappear. Strange Creatures From hellhounds to monkeys, a variety of bizarre creatures have supposedly been seen on this road at night. In some cases, people report seeing an unidentifiable hybrid, which vanishes too quickly for them to get a good look. The more exotic sightings are blamed on survivors of jungle habitat, an attraction which housed wild and exotic animals before closing its doors in 1976. A Druidic Temple This oddly shaped stone structure is said to be the place where local Druids practiced their rituals. Legends tell of awful things happening to those who look too closely or come too close to the ruin at the wrong time. In more historical terms, the building is actually the remains of an iron smelter from the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. The site has now been blocked off to prevent any injury caused by exploring such a rundown building. Cross Castle In 1905, Richard Cross built this castle near the Clinton Reservoir for his wife and three children. A few years later, it fell to ruin after a fire destroyed part of it. It has since become a popular destination for hikers and local teenagers looking for secluded places to camp and have parties. Many visitors have reported strange occurrences near the site. These include people who have gone into seizures, bruises which randomly appear after visiting, and strange and disturbing visions after leaving. Satanic symbols have appeared on the inside of the castle's walls in areas that were previously thought to be inaccessible. The Iceman In 1983, a body was found in the woods near Clinton Road. An autopsy showed the man had been murdered as well as something even stranger. Ice crystals had formed in blood vessels near his heart. His internal organs had also decayed at a rate far slower than his skin. After a drawn-out investigation, an arrest was made in 1986 of Richard Kuklinski, also known as the Iceman. Kuklinski was a New Jersey native and a hitman involved in organized crime with a local mafia. Are you brave enough to discover what the legends of Clinton Road have in store for you? Residents of the African country of Malawi are in a state close to panic. Already, several dozen people said they were attacked by midnight vampires that sucked blood from them. People are so frightened that seven Lancers have already been killed by vigilante detachments suspected of being vampiric. The threat has become so serious that UN workers and volunteers from the US Peace Court were withdrawn from Malawi. The hysteria about vampires in Malawi began in September, and it seems that by December it did not abate. Although UN staff decided to return after the heat of September, local residents claim that all of this is not hysteria, not rumors, but real facts. 40-year-old Jamia Balani tells that something alien entered her house and attacked her, and then began to suck her blood. Jamia lives in the village of Angolinglovia, in the south of the country and this village was in the center of vampire hysteria. It's not rumors, it sucked my blood, I know it, she said. I lay on the bed at night and suddenly saw light in the corner under the roof. I could not move a hand or a foot and then something pierced my hand and I felt pain. Jamia, who works selling a ragout of wild peas, says that before she lost consciousness from the loss of blood, she heard a sound as if someone ran on the floor. After that night, the woman was taken to the hospital and she was treated there, taking medicine and vitamins. She did not inform the authorities that she had been attacked, but there are many such cases in and around the district. Here they believe in witchcraft, vampires and black magic, and people crave revenge on those who attacked them. Another victim is the 27-year-old Florence Keelung. She says that she slept at night in her house next to her husband and suddenly saw the light as if a fire had been lit in the house. Then she heard the sound of the half-open door and then a pain in her finger as if a needle had been stuck into it. The entrepreneur Orlando Shepondra miraculously escaped death from a vigilante who saw in his house a sucker of blood. He says that he was lucky they did not manage to get to him. Orlando called the police who drove people away from his house. It does not really matter to them whether you are a vampire or not. They envy the rich and attack anyone and call him a vampire if he has a car, Orlando says. The Malawi National Blood Transfusion Service, the only institution that has a government permit to collect blood from donors for hospitals, says that rumors of vampires have also affected their work. This problem has greatly affected us they say. It prevents us from doing our work and collecting blood from donors. For attacks and attempts of lynching in Malawi, 250 people were arrested and more than 40 in neighboring Mozambique where vampires were rumored to have come from. The situation forced President of Malawi Peter Matarica to intervene. There is no evidence of any attack by vampires, he says, but these false rumors are destabilizing the area. Those who spread such rumors run into our laws. Meanwhile, riots due to vampires have knocked down the country's tourism industry. There are going to be less and less western tourists and so the budget of the poor Malawi is short of a lot of superfluous money. A few weeks ago, I was in the basement of University Hospital in London, Ontario. This is where the physiotherapy department is. I was dropping off information about upcoming knee surgery to one of the therapists. To leave, one must walk down a hallway, go through a set of doors, then cross another hallway diagonally to the doors that lead to the reception area. There is not a high volume of people in these basement corridors. When I left through the first hallway door about to cross the second hallway diagonally, I heard a noise to my right. I identified the sound immediately. It was the sound of a coin that had fallen. I spun my head to the right to see a coin rolling from within an inch of the wall adjacent to me and then rolling across the hallway until it hit the wall across from me where it came to a stop. I was rooted to the concrete looking for a plausible source for this as I thought I was alone. To the left of me, the hallway went for about 60 feet, completely empty, and to the right for at least 100 feet and again, completely devoid of people. There was a folded up wheelchair not far, but that was all. I stood there for a few seconds wondering how this was possible. I finally walked over to the coin and picked it up. It was a Canadian 1964 5 cent piece. The condition was very good and looked to have oddly a very little wear due to circulation. I walked through the door to reception and asked them if the place was haunted and described what had happened. They both found it curious but had no experiences themselves. The date, 1964, has no significance that I can think of and other than its obvious worth neither does a 5 cent coin. Although I set the coin aside in my entry closet when I got home, I saw it there for about a week. I cannot now find it. Perhaps I picked it up and put it in my pocket with other change and spent it, but I don't think I would have been that absent minded. My wife says that she did not pick up the coin either. As I write this, I recall this is not the first time I had coins fall next to me. About ten years ago, I was five minutes into a shower and a 5 cent piece and a 10 cent piece fell next to me on the tile floor. The second unrelated occurrence was two weeks ago. We were sitting at the supper table which doubles as my wife's marking table, she is a high school teacher, and when she lifted up a report to set the table for breakfast, there were two guitar picks underneath it. She asked me and my daughter who was visiting if we had put them there. Neither of us had. I asked her if she recognized the guitar picks and she did. They were hers and had both been sitting on the upright piano for well over a year. We asked the obvious questions about the picks being moved with the papers, but she says that the papers were never near the piano. This is not the first time we have had objects move in the house, but it has been many years since it has happened. The previous odd things were the classic Have You Seen the Car Keys thing. You look all over for them and then they appear in the spot you looked for them at first, a half hour previous. As much as we try not to invite disembodied visitors here, it seems they occasionally cross paths with us anyway. This amount of activity I can tolerate is not scary and makes for interesting conversation. I would not like it to go much further though, at least not at home. When Weird Darkness returns, the strange sighting of a UFO in the year 2000 still has people looking to the skies of southwestern Illinois. But first, for years, mysterious lights of Dover have puzzled observers and it has been happening for centuries. If you or someone you know is struggling with depression, dark thoughts or addiction, please visit the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. There, I have gathered numerous resources to find hope and solutions. For those suffering from thoughts of suicide or self-harm, there is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, as well as the Crisis Text Line. Both have trained counselors at all hours to help those in need, and the page even includes text numbers for those in the US, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland. Those struggling with depression can get help through the Seven Cups website and app, and there is information for anyone to read more about what depression truly is and how to identify it through our friends at ifred.org. There are resources for those who battle addictions, be it drugs, alcohol or self-destructive behavior, along with help for those related to addicts. The page has links to help you find a therapist or counselor, to find help for those who have a family member with Alzheimer's or dementia, help for those in a crisis pregnancy, and more. These resources are always there when you or someone you love needs them on the Hope in the Darkness page at WeirdDarkness.com. For years, mysterious lights of Dover have fascinated enthusiasts interested in unusual and unexplained phenomena. People systematically come each night to a remote area located only 10 miles north of Dover, and not far from Russellville, Arkansas, hoping to see this light phenomenon. If they are lucky, they can observe the so-called Dover lights in a variety of colors, such as orange, yellow, red or blue or simply white. Sometimes the lights are flickering, but it also happens they look like lanterns or flashlights and their brightness can light up the entire valley in the Ozark Mountains. The lights have been observed since the late 1800s and many legends are associated with them. The Dover lights are a phenomenon that even to this day remains a mystery. One popular legend tells a story about a coal mine which collapsed one day, trapping and killing many miners. In this case, the lights symbolize lanterns, which belong to miners who desperately tried to find their way back to their homes. Another one explains the lights as the spirits of ancient Native American warriors and tribal leaders, and yet another tells the story of an elderly and poor couple that had not money to pay for doctors' help. Instead, the doctor was offered a bag of homemade bullets in payment. Years later, after the old couple had both passed away, the doctor was cleaning up his office and accidentally found the long-forgotten bag of bullets. He realized the bullets were not made of lead, but of pure silver and decided to give up his practice and devote his remaining years to a search for that lost silver mine. The light that occasionally appears hovering over the valley is believed to be his lantern that he needs to continue his search from beyond the grave. The Dover lights phenomenon has never been solved despite it has appeared in thick forest of the area since the 1800s. Some believe the Dover lights are nothing but a hoax, and perhaps they are right. Others suggest the phenomenon is the refraction of lights from distant points. However, many eyewitnesses to the Dover lights definitely disagree because the area where lights appear is hardly accessible and the lights have been appearing for many years. Moreover, they cannot be electric lights because there has never been electricity in the area of observations. The lights may also be of supernatural origin, but in that case, it is doubtful that their mysterious origin will ever be solved. As we know, supernatural is something associated with forces we don't understand, and science cannot explain either. Something happened in Illinois in January 2000 that has never really been explained. A number of UFO sightings occurred in the southwestern part of the state and got a lot of attention, and it wasn't just in Illinois. The sightings gained national attention because there has likely been no other time that so many people witnessed something so unexplainable that it managed to perplex people all over America. The incident involved a number of reliable witnesses which consisted mostly of police officers from a number of small towns in the area, and led many to believe that something very strange was going on in the skies over Illinois. Even more convincing than mere sightings, the officers maintained radio contact through most of the event, which carefully tracked the progress of a huge UFO that passed over the area. Adding to this, Scott Air Force Base was only a mile or so out of the flight path of the anomalous craft, and this helped to focus media attention on the event for weeks after it actually occurred. Something very strange visited southwestern Illinois on January 5, 2000, but what it was remains a mystery to this day. The first person to notice anything strange during the early morning hours of that day was Melbourne Knoll, the owner of a miniature golf course in Highland. During the winter months, Knoll worked as a truck driver, making deliveries at all hours of the day and night. He was just returning from a delivery at around 4am and before returning home, he decided to make a quick stop at his miniature golf course just to make sure everything was in order during the off-season. He parked his truck in the back of the building and as he climbed out, he looked up and noticed what he thought was a bright star in the northeastern sky. He didn't give it much thought at the time and went into the building. After a few minutes inside, he left and locked the door behind him. As he walked back to the truck, he again noticed the bright light. This time, he stopped and looked at it more closely. It was then that he realized that the star was actually moving in his general direction. As he watched it, he began to realize that the light was a part of a much larger object. It looked like a giant rectangle in the sky that was roughly the size of a football field. It was very tall and had a set of windows that ran down the side. There were two floors with windows that emitted a very bright light, Noel saw, and as the object got closer, he also spotted a number of dim red lights on the bottom of it. The entire object was black or dark gray in color and he later described the thing as a two-story house in the sky. Noel watched as it moved silently across the sky and as it passed to the southwest, he also spotted more windows across the back of the object. As the ship passed over him, Noel realized that it was moving much slower than a conventional aircraft and it certainly did not look like one. The entire sighting lasted almost five minutes. As the object vanished from sight, Noel promptly climbed into his truck and drove to the Highland police station. He was sure that no one would believe him but hoped that whoever was on duty might be open-minded enough to at least contact a neighboring town's police department and see if the strange object in the sky could be verified. The dispatcher in Highland was skeptical of Noel's account but because he did appear to be rational, agreed to put a call into the police in Lebanon and asked them to be on the lookout for anything unusual. Officer Ed Barton received the call in Lebanon at around 4.15 am. Not surprisingly, he was dubious of the report at first and asked the dispatcher if he was joking. When he was assured that it was a serious call, he drove to the north end of town past Horner Park and onto Whitticus Road. He saw absolutely nothing out of the ordinary but followed the road as it turned to the north and the east toward Illinois Route 4. A short distance along this road, Officer Barton looked up and saw two large, brilliant white lights in the sky. Curious, he now began to drive a little faster. When he arrived at Route 4, he turned south and headed back towards Lebanon, watching the lights from his driver's side window as he sped along. At some point, he stated that the two lights seemed to merge into one, and he turned on his overhead emergency lights, convinced now that the lights in the sky were part of a low-flying aircraft that was experiencing mechanical problems. The more that Barton drove, the more he started to notice details about what he was observing. He first noted that one of what he thought was a round light was actually somewhat long and cigar-shaped. He also saw that the object was not really moving but sitting stationary in the sky above the neighboring town of Summerfield. A few moments later, it began to move again, this time in his direction, and Barton stopped his car.  As far as he could tell, though, it was completely silent. As the dark shape got closer, he could make out more details. It appeared to be a massive, elongated, narrow triangle, and at each corner, he could see a bright white light. The lights never wavered in their intensity and appeared to be pointing straight down. They did not light up the ground, but they were, Barton noted, still very bright. Amidst them, he also saw a smaller red light that was flashing. The ship moved closer and the officer realized that all of the sky above him had now been blotted out by the shape. Even at this close distance, which he guessed at no more than a thousand feet from the ground, the object made no noise. Continued to watch as it turned in a southwesternly direction, never banking like a normal aircraft would, but rotating in the sky, always remaining completely level. Barton now scrambled for his radio and called in to describe what he was seeing. In between transmissions, he saw the aircraft start to pick up speed and travel away from him. As it did, he saw the back portion of it for the first time and would later describe it as rectangular and illuminated with white light. By the time he finished his last call, he told the dispatcher that he estimated the object was now above the town of Shiloh, about eight miles to the southwest. At this time, Officer David Martin of the Shiloh Police Department joined in on the sighting and radioed back that he could indeed see something in the sky. He had been driving along the southern end of town when he saw the mysterious object which he saw moving to the west. Martin saw the three brilliant white lights as well as the flashing red one before he actually saw the dark mass of the ship's body. He thought the object resembled a wide triangle or an arrowhead and as he chased after it, he stuck his head out the window to see if he could hear any sounds coming from it. Like the other witnesses, he heard absolutely no sound. Finally, the craft picked up speed and moved out of the area. By this time, the weird radio transmissions were attracting the attention of other officers on early morning duty in surrounding small towns. While a number of officers would eventually be involved in the sighting, one has to wonder how great the numbers may have been if the craft had appeared in the sky over a large Illinois city rather than a series of sleepy little towns with only a few policemen on duty. One officer who became curious about the affair was Craig Stevens, a cop in nearby Milstatt. After hearing the other calls, he drove to the east end of town in an attempt to see this thing in the sky. He drove around for a time, seeing nothing, and then ended up at Lederkranz Park on the north end of town. He was looking out the windshield of his squad car when he spotted a large, triangular shaped object in the sky. He described it as moving very slow, and he said that it made no noise except for a low decibel buzzing sound that he could barely hear. As he watched, it moved to the north and he saw the white lights and the single red light on the bottom. Stevens called his dispatcher to report that he had seen the object and then grabbed his Polaroid camera and jumped out of the car. He aimed the camera at the object and took a photo. Unfortunately, the cold morning air and the dark of the early morning hours produced only a murky and barely discernible image. Not long after the events that occurred that night became public, the St. Clair County Sheriff's Office released copies of the dispatch tapes from January 5. The transmissions between the officers and dispatchers from the various towns make an eerie addition to the story. Lebanon, this is a call from Highland PD in reference to a truck driver who just stopped in. He said there was a flying object in the area of Lebanon that was like a two-story house. It had white lights and red blinking lights and it was last seen southwest over Lebanon. Could you check the area? I've seen the truck driver was DUI or anything. 10-4, I'm out. Just a quick question, if I happen to find it, what am I supposed to do with it? If I see it, I'm not saying a word. Also, we advised the last thing that went over Lebanon, this was approximately five minutes ago, was a military cargo plane, looked like a C-5. We advised there's a very bright white light east of town. It looks like it's just east of Summerfield, changing colors. I'll go over there and see if it looks like an aircraft. It doesn't look like an aircraft though. It's not a star. If you would, would you contact Scott Air Force Base and see if they have anything flying in this area please? Well, it's a plane or not. It's heading westbound now. It shouldn't be really close to Scott now. As a matter of fact, if the Shiloh officer looks up, they can probably see it by now. I see something, but I don't know what the heck it is. It's probably heading to Lambert. That object in sight also.  Does it look like a... What does it look like to you? Um, it's kind of V-shaped. It looks like it's possibly headed towards Lambert. That's what Shiloh said when it was heading towards Fairview Heights. 6004, this is 3923, County 2. 6004, go ahead. I'm not sure what you're seeing. It appears to be pretty high in the area. When I could first see it with the binoculars, you could see it was different colors. Now, it appears to be white. Is it very large? It's hard to tell. It's pretty far off in the distance. This object was above me about 500 feet and it was huge. This thing appears... It's probably 20 or 30,000. It's about where planes usually are. It's not low at all. The DuPo officer mentioned in the transmission reports was the last officer officially to report seeing the object that morning. After hearing Officer Stephen's radio traffic, he decided to have a look for himself as to whether or not a huge craft was passing over the area. About five minutes after Stephen's sighting, the DuPo officer also saw the array of lights over his town. However, he stated that the lights were at a fairly high altitude and were heading to the north and northeast. In fact, they were now so high that he likely would not have noticed them if not for the radio calls that he'd been listening to. He watched it through binoculars but because of the distance, he really couldn't make out anything other than the red and white lights. He could see nothing of its shape or size. After that, the object disappeared from the sky but landed firmly into the mysterious history of Illinois. What was this bizarre ship? Was it really a UFO that would have passed over Illinois without incident if not for the watchful eyes of a miniature golf course owner and a few small town police officers? If it was, one has to wonder how it could have passed within a mile of Scott Air Force Base without causing some grave concerns on the part of the military. They would later state that they knew nothing of the large ship, leading many to believe that perhaps their denials only hid the fact that this was some sort of test plane and not a mysterious vessel at all. But those who might suggest that the craft came from Scott Air Base can forget about that. My brother was in the Air Force for many years and spent a few of them stationed at Scott. He told me flat out that not only are there no test planes kept at Scott but there would be no place to land anything like what was described that would be away from the public eye. UFO, secret test plane or something else altogether? No one knows but one thing is certain. Those officers certainly saw something in the Illinois sky that night. For now though, what it may have been remains unexplained. Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darron at WeirdDarkness.com. Darron is D-A-R-R-E-N. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases and more merchandise, sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host, and find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on Tell Your Story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. Something is up there. The 2000 UFO invasion of Illinois was written by Troy Taylor. Frankenstein author Mary Shelley kept her dad husband's heart for 30 years was written by Larry Mitchell for DidYouKnowFacts.com. Clinton Road, take a terrifying drive down America's most haunted roadway, was posted online at the lineup. Malawi Vampires was posted at Earth Chronicles. Mysterious Lights of Dover was posted at Message2Eagle.com. Coins and Guitar Picks was posted at YourGhostStories.com. Weird Darkness is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. First Corinthians 15 verse 33. Do not be misled. Bad company corrupts good character. And a final thought. Don't behave as if you are destined to live forever. Marcus Aurelius. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.


Lad McConkie, wide receiver, Georgia. Some people were used to surprise that you chose to come here because you've played so much football. People have seen what you can do. Why come to the senior bowl? It's another chance to compete. And this is football. This is fun. It's not like you're having me do something I don't like. I love doing this and practice one-on-ones, all that stuff. It's fun. And another impression from these scouts and all these coaches, so come out here and do my job and let the rest take care of itself. What have you been working on since the end of the Georgia season? Yeah, so I've been training down at EXO. So it kind of flips a little bit, obviously, doing football and stuff like that. But really, speed training, being explosive, working on combine drills. And I mean, after this, that's what's in my side. That's what I'm a radar. So I attack that even more when I get back after this. What are you hoping to run when you get to the combat? We'll see. Let's see. All right, in the different interview settings, some of which you've already sort of gotten into, what sorts of questions are teams asking you? I mean, so far it's kind of just been basic info. I mean, they just want to know about you. Know what kind of person you are. Know what you came from. Why'd you choose Georgia? And then obviously it's going to start ramping up. But I mean, they really just want to get an idea of you, how you feel on the football field, how you prepare, what you do, game weeks, how you recover, stuff like that. Then obviously your history. So that's something out on you. Seems like one thing that you have the ability to prove is that you can be a slot receiver. You can be an outside receiver. You can play really anywhere. Is that something that Mobile gives you a chance to do? Yeah, definitely. I mean, y'all probably saw me a day working inside and outside. That's something I did at Georgia. So I mean, they did a good job. We got 12 personnel. I'd go in the slot. 11, I'd be more outside. So they moved me all around. So I'm comfortable with it. I've told all the coaches and everybody I've met with, like, I can play inside, I can play outside. Seemed very complete. So one wonders, what does Lad McConkey have to work on to continue to impress NFL teams through this whole process? This is a game of inches. So I always say, as a receiver, you can always work your hands better at the line of scrimmage, at top or outs. Just at second level release and stuff like that. And then being efficient, not fall stepping, not slipping, coming out of breaks. Because I know the window just gets that much more tighter when you get to the next level.


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Well, thanks a lot Chris. It certainly got interesting in that fourth quarter. You don't usually win a game where you give up 40 plus points in the fourth quarter. But you know, Sarah, I think part of the trouble for the Nets has been these learning experiences and games like this have been on the losing side of things. You'd much rather learn about closing games like this and, you know, tightening up things and getting better when you still come away with a win. Yeah, and I think there's a variety of things as you would, regardless to be look at what are the areas that the Nets still continue to need to shore up and areas of which they improved. And there was a lot of positives to take from this game. There was still some of the same issues that have continued to surface in terms of turnovers. And the reason why Miami was potentially in the game in the first place. And I think first and foremost, you know, what we did see was a sense of purpose, a energy and an effort level that it moments. Some of it was just from miscues and you're going to make mistakes. There's going to be areas that, you know, a team like Miami is going to try and take advantage of big game from Bam out of bio. And they hit some timely buckets. But I think there was a consistent level of energy from this Nets team and on self and selflessness, the way they shared the ball offensively in the shop making that I think we have come to to hope for and expect with this group down the stretch. You know, Kyrie Irving had this statement on Instagram. Hey, rock with us. And it's early. Don't worry. I'm paraphrasing. But you know, you all saw it. But Sarah, we saw him play a really great game tonight. Make good decisions all night. Called his own number when he had to in the fourth quarter deferred to Durant when it was the right move in the fourth quarter was scrappy. A lot of 50 50 plays from Kyrie. But you just know in those key moments late, he's fearless. And he showed that again tonight clutch, clutch buckets. And I think though, what impressed me most not only just some of those daggers by Kyrie, but was the effort the 50 50 plays he had some offensive rebounds that were critically showed a level of engagement on the defensive end that was important and how they were rotating. I think everyone played a part. You could look at the numbers of the shots that were made. But think about what Joe Harris did throughout the course of this game. So big time defense and plays by Jeff green. There was moments for everyone and also the fact that there was more balance among the way in which some of these field goal attempts were distributed amongst the roster in the lineup. James Harden was much more of a facilitator. We didn't see him look for his own shot as much. And so I think this is a part of the feel out process for this group. And it circles back to nice to get a win as you continue to learn and draw from the film. And the Nats will play this team again on Monday night. You want to take advantage, right, Sarah? I mean, you're trying to get away from 500 run away from 500. You're facing a Miami Heat team that right now severely understaffed. They're not getting any of those players back on Monday. So learn from tonight. Take advantage and try and build on the victory here. And there's still players. It's a new group. It's an underman group missing some key components. But I think the important thing to remember is there is a level of continuity and consistency with some of these players and also where expulse spolstra and the way he pushed the buttons down the stretch and the opportunity for the Nats to approach how they were playing against his own defense. The man to man the switching the different looks, the coverages. Again, this is all a part of the learning process and how you grow. And I think it's going to be really fun for all of us. And interesting to see what both these teams come back with two days later from now, the adjustments that are made and for the Nats. Can they try and build on the showing and the effort level that they had here tonight? Nats able to make enough plays, hit enough free throws down the stretch to snap the two games skid and get the victories is sent back to you in the studio, Chris.