Hello, everyone. Welcome to Meet the Experts. I'm Katie Wolfson, a science education specialist with the UCAR Center for Science Education at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and we are so excited to have folks joining us today from multiple places across Colorado and Florida today. Thank you so much for joining us from Meet the Experts. Meet the Experts, if this is your first time here, is a monthly Q&A program with different experts here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. So we have so many different jobs here. It's one of my favorite things about working here. We have everything from scientists to engineers to programmers to chefs to artists to teachers. So we have lots of different careers here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. And today, we have a special expert to talk to you today about hurricanes. So before we get into that, and I introduce our expert and bring them on, I just wanted to cover a few housekeeping things. So if you need anything at all during the program, please type that in the chat and I will be watching that. So if you need any tech support, have trouble hearing us, anything like that, please let us know. And then also, if you have any questions at any point during the program, so we'll take questions throughout if you have them based on something you see or you hear, and also we'll have some time for questions at the end. We have about 40 minutes today to talk to our expert. So we're very excited to hear from her as well as to answer your questions. I love getting to connect students from all over the world to our experts here at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. So with that, I am going to go ahead and bring on our expert today.  So Rosimar, can you hear us? I can hear you. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, thanks so much for coming. So Rosimar, I know we have a lot to cover today. And so I was curious if you could maybe start to kick us off with telling us a little bit about what kind of path did you take? How did you become a hurricane scientist? Yes, of course. So I grew up in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico is a small island in the Caribbean. It's a beautiful island. It feels like summer every day. And as it is in the Caribbean, it is exposed to hurricanes. So growing up, I thought of Puerto Rico as being located in the middle of Hurricane Highway. So we're going to see that this map is going to get all cluttered. So the map, the island of Puerto Rico is still there. You cannot see it because there's so many lines covered. And all of those lines are essentially the paths that hurricanes had followed through history. So growing up, I got to experience some of these hurricanes. And every time that we had a hurricane nearby or a hurricane coming to the island, I was always wondering why couldn't the meteorologists tell us for sure if the hurricane was going to come? Or if how strong it was going to be? Say the equivalent if you are thinking like, why can't the meteorologists today tell me whether it's going to rain or not? Right? So that curiosity kind of sparked my interest in meteorology. For me, specifically trying to understand why we couldn't predict hurricanes so well. So I made it my goal to become a meteorologist and go on TV and give the best and most perfect forecast about hurricanes. But it turns out that as I went through my studies, I realized that the science of weather prediction is very, very complex, very complicated. Also standing in front of the camera and giving a weather forecast was very difficult. And so I got to try it a little bit, but then I did some more internships. And I realized that I liked a lot more doing the work behind the scenes, writing computer code and doing research that enable us to improve the tools that weather forecasters use to predict hurricanes. So I went from growing up in Puerto Rico, being very interested in hurricanes. And then as I like to show in a map, I kind of followed a hurricane track by going from Puerto Rico. Then I moved to the United States to get my graduate education in atmospheric sciences. And now I live in the state of Colorado in Boulder, where I work as a hurricane scientist and International Center for Atmospheric Research. So in this place that you can see in this picture, there's lots of scientists working on lots of different problems regarding weather, climate and everything in between. In my case, I live here studying hurricanes. But now in Colorado, we don't get to experience hurricanes, we get to experience other kinds of weather. So I'd like to pause here and I want to get to know the audience as well. So I want to ask, for those of you who are tuning in today, do you experience hurricanes where you live? Or if you don't experience hurricanes, what kind of exciting or perhaps frightening weather do you experience where you live? You can type your answers in the chat. So again, do you experience hurricanes where you live? Or if you don't experience hurricanes, what kind of weather do you experience from day to day? And while the answers are coming in the chat, I will tell you briefly that as a scientist, my work is mostly focused on understanding how hurricanes form, how they become very strong, how they produce a lot of rainfall, and also how they may change in light of our changing climate. So let's see, do we have any answers coming in through the chat? I don't quite see any answers yet, but I'm guessing they might be typing in there. So let us know if you experience hurricanes where you live or other types of weather that are exciting or scary. Or maybe in places you've lived in the past, maybe you've had hurricanes if you lived somewhere else before. So I knew, I know I live here in Colorado now, so I don't have any hurricanes that I'm dealing with, but I did grow up in southern Louisiana, where we definitely had hurricanes coming through each time. And one of our schools says no hurricanes here in Denver, but wind and snow and blizzards are some of those. Hello to our friends very close to us in Denver. Yes, definitely we don't have hurricanes here, but yes, very true. Wind storms, snow storms, and yeah, for those of us who live near to the mountains, wildfires as well. All right. Oh, and those people who live very far in the eastern corner of the Colorado state, they get to experience tornadoes as well in the summer. All right. Thank you for typing in your answers. So I'm going to go ahead now and tell you a little bit about hurricanes. Then I'll tell you about how I study hurricanes, and I'll finish off by telling you how climate change may affect hurricanes. So what is a hurricane? A hurricane is a system of rotating clouds, and these clouds rotate around a center of low pressure. That center is known as the hurricane eye. As you can see in the satellite image, the hurricane eye has relatively no clouds and conditions on the calm. But as we move away from the eye, we see lots and lots of clouds that's associated with lots and lots of rainfall, and also very strong hurricanes, very strong winds. So hurricanes form over ocean waters, and as we will see in the next map, they not only happen on the side of the world, they also happen all around the world, and they get different names depending on where they happen. So broadly speaking, hurricanes are part of the family known as tropical cyclones, and they are named tropical because they happen over tropical waters that are very warm and close to the equator. The regions that are shaded here in orange, sorry, they are the regions where we usually see hurricane formation in the summer months. So the tropical cyclones on this side of the world in America is known as hurricanes, but over Asia, people known them as typhoons, and over Australia and the southern hemisphere, they're simply known as cyclones. Regardless of the name they get, they are the same phenomena, they just get different names depending on where we are in the world. So hurricanes form on those orange regions, and you may be wondering what's so special about those orange regions? Well, it turns out that for a hurricane to form, we need some basic conditions, and it's almost like baking. When you bake, you need your list of ingredients, and you also need the list of steps that you need to follow to bake, whether it's a cookie, a cake, or whatever you're baking, right? So for hurricane to form, we also need some basic ingredients, and those ingredients are warm ocean temperatures, lots of water vapor, weak wind currents, and also rotation. So all of these four conditions need to be in place for a hurricane to form. Now, the steps that a hurricane needs to follow or the atmosphere needs to follow in order to produce a hurricane, those steps are less known. So in the satellite image that you will see now, you can see what scientists kind of understand what the main mechanism says. So we start with just random clouds happening here, and they are everywhere popping in here and there, and now you're going to see that they start organizing around a center, and they start rotating. And so this is kind of like the basic sequence of events, but the precise steps, the details that happen, and why do some systems, speaking from these systems of clouds, and they're able to organize into a hurricane, versus not all systems of clouds are able to organize, those are some very important questions that scientists like me are still trying to wonder about. Now, this is how hurricanes form, then hurricanes can go on and extract energy from the ocean, and they can become very powerful. So how do we know how strong a hurricane is? Hurricanes happen mostly over the oceans, so we can, it's very difficult for us to measure things over the ocean. So instead, we use very powerful airplanes, they're known as the hurricane hunter aircraft, and the people that fly on board them, they're known as the hurricane hunters, and they go on and fly into the hurricane, they launch instruments, and they also have some radars on board. And with all of those instruments, they can measure how strong the winds are. And depending on how strong the winds are, then that information is being used by the hurricane forecasters to tell us this hurricane is a category one, category two, category three, or four or five. And those categories are given mostly or only based on how strong the winds are. For example, this table is telling us that category one hurricanes are associated with strong winds between 74 to 95 miles per hour. If you're wondering how fast that is, here in the state of Colorado, for example, as the fastest we can go, I think it's 70 miles per hours on the highway, and we go very fast, right? That allows us to go very fast from one place to another. They imagine that hurricanes have winds that spin, like they blow much faster than we can go, than the fastest we can go on the highways. So the winds are blowing very, very fast, faster than we can go on highway. So very strong winds. And it's no wonder that because of those very strong winds, hurricanes can be very destructive. So let's talk then about the effects of hurricanes. So I mentioned the winds, they're very strong. And once those winds encounter structures such as houses and buildings, they can cause a lot of destruction, especially if the structures are weak. Here's the picture, for example, showing a lot of damage that happened in the Bahamas during Hurricane Dorian a couple of years ago. But hurricanes are also associated with lots of rainfall. And that rainfall, once it falls and it accumulates in the rivers and the roads, it can create flooding. And here's a picture showing an example of actually a tropical storm. So it was not quite a hurricane yet. It was a tropical cyclone that was about to become a hurricane. But it brought so much rainfall to the island of Dominica that the rainfall accumulated and the river brushed away the road. Other effects of hurricane includes storm surge. So as a hurricane approaches land, its strong winds can push the water from the ocean inland and it can create inundation like we see in that picture. And there are other effects that may be indirect. For example, the very moist conditions and very heavy weight of water can cause landslides in islands and other regions around the world where hurricanes make landfall and there are mountains. So we're talking about meet the experts, but now you all have become experts in hurricanes because I've given you the information about how hurricanes form, how we know how strong they are, and what are some of the effects. So I'd like to ask you to answer a trivia question. And I promise you that there is no grading happening. So no worries about the answer. Please, I would like to know if you can enter in the chat, what part of a hurricane causes the most damage? What part do you think of a hurricane causes the most damage? And here are your options that you can type in the chat. It's either wind, water, landslides, or sharknadoes. So feel free to type A, C, or D on the chat or type the full word or if you think it's some other part that we're not listening here, feel free to type it again as well. So let's see what part of a hurricane causes the most damage. Let's see, waiting for some answers in the chat. Is it wind that causes the most damage? B, water, C, landslides, or D, sharknadoes? I'm definitely worried about those sharknadoes here in Colorado, Rosemar. I don't know about you. And clearly they don't exist. All right, we're going to go ahead and type those in if you have a guess. Here we go, we got a few votes in here. It looks like people are all voting for A for wind as being the causing the most damage from hurricanes. What do you think, Rosemar? That's an excellent answer. We all think that wind is the part that causes the most damage because of course hurricanes are known for diverse strong winds, but it turns out that it's water, not wind that causes the most damage and fatalities during the hurricane. So here we have just a pie chart that shows the percentage of U.S. fatalities that happened in the United States due to a hurricane and they are categorized whether they happened during storm surge, rain, wind, tornado, et cetera. You see lots of blue and all of that is water, whether it's storm surge, rain, or flood. The very powerful effect of water can cause a lot of damage during a hurricane and it turns out that that is what causes the most deaths and fatalities in the U.S. So whether we're talking about a category one or category five hurricane, they are both very strong wind producers, but they can also both have lots and lots of water associated with them and that's not considered in the category. That's why whether it's a category one or category five hurricane, we need to take them very seriously. So I've told you about hurricanes. Now I want to tell you a little bit about how do I study hurricanes? Well, as a scientist, I like to do experiments, right? I like to know how hurricanes evolve, but I also would like to know how would they evolve had conditions being different. For example, what if we have warmer ocean temperatures in the future? What would happen to hurricanes? Well, if I was a biologist or a chemist, perhaps I would have a lab where I could do some experiments and get some immediate results. As a hurricane scientist, I don't get that lab because I only have the one atmosphere. So instead I use supercomputers to create a virtual lab. So a supercomputer is just these, as the name suggests, is this big, big, big computer with lots of power. The supercomputer that we have currently is equivalent to having 34,000 different laptops connected together. Imagine the amount of power that that supercomputer has, right? So with that supercomputer, what I can do is create a virtual laboratory. Essentially, I have a lot of computer code that tells the computer, here are the equations that describe the atmosphere. Here is a hurricane. Here's the ocean temperature. Here's the humidity. What would that hurricane do? How would it evolve? And that gives me a wealth of data that I can analyze to study hurricanes. For example, I'm going to show you a video here where I have created this laboratory. It's a hypothetical world, like our world, the same size, except I have removed all the continents. And perhaps you're wondering why would you like to remove the continents if hurricanes affect the continents? And also I have removed islands every piece of land. Well, doing so allows me to study how hurricanes evolve all the way from their formation to their strengthening all the way to when they weaken and disappear. And that is the beauty of this work is that I get essentially a laboratory. You can see, for example, right now we're zooming in on a group of clouds. They organize and they form into a hurricane. Right now we can clearly see the hurricane and the hurricane eye. And as the hurricane keeps moving, it actually encounters cool waters and it dissipates. It loses its shape of a hurricane. So this kind of work allows me to go into the model and then research essentially how did that hurricane form? What kind of sequence of steps did it follow? What were the atmospheric conditions? And what kind of impacts could have that hurricane brought had there been land? Would it have brought like several inches of rain or tens of inches of rain? How strong would the winds be? So with this lab, I'm able to answer lots of those questions. But I also get to go into the real atmosphere and I get to show you a couple of pictures. I get to go into the real lab, which is the atmosphere. And for that, I fly in very powerful and a very equipped aircraft, like the one you're seeing there. These airplanes have lots of instruments. And amongst those instruments, we have something called a drop some, which you will see shortly. Here is a drop some. It's a weather sensor. So it's a small instrument. As you can see, it has a parachute, because it's launched from the airplane. And as the drop sun is falling, the parachute opens, and then it allows the drop sun to slowly, slowly descend. And if we turn the drop sun around, you can see that it has an instrument. Actually, not many instruments in there, many sensors that are interconnected. And that white line on the right is where the sensors are that can measure how much water vapor there is, how cool or warm the temperature of the atmosphere is, and also how heavy the air is. That's the atmospheric pressure. So those instruments are launched. And that with those sensors, the information is transmitted to us here, in our computers. And we can use that information and analyze it as well to understand how was the atmosphere behaving when a hurricane formed or when it became very strong. And I also get to use other instruments. For example, I also get to launch weather balloons. You're going to get to see a cool video in a minute, where we launch a weather balloon from land. And this cannot be done during a hurricane. As you will see, there is a big, big balloon. It's attached to a parachute. And also as it's being launched and it starts rising, it's pulling with it a small sensor. The sensor is very, very similar to what you just saw with the drop sun. And it can measure again the water vapor, the temperature, as well as how heavy the atmosphere is. And depending on the motion of the balloon, then it can also measure the winds. So launching these weather balloons during hurricanes would be extremely dangerous. That's why we don't do it. Instead, we go on aircraft where we can be safe. And then we launch the drop suns from there. So this is a little bit about my work on hurricanes. I'm also very interested in the topic of climate change and how hurricanes are affected with climate change. And I'll tell you right away that some of these questions are very important, but also very difficult to answer. And as scientists, we don't have all the answers. So if any of you would like to become hurricane scientists, trust me that you'll have plenty of questions to tackle. For example, we're wondering about how does climate change impact hurricanes? And many people would like to know if there will be more hurricanes or if they will be stronger. And it turns out that we don't have all the answers yet, but we do have some hypotheses for some possibilities. So hypothesis is something we think might happen. For example, we believe that we may see stronger hurricanes. As I mentioned before, hurricanes extract their energy from the ocean. So if our climate continues to change and the ocean temperatures continues to rise, then hurricanes can extract a lot more energy and can become very strong, very fast. As an example here, you're looking at a satellite image of Hurricane Laura, which went from being just a group of clouds to a very powerful category four hurricane in a day. And unfortunately, these may be the scenario that we may see in the future with a lot more category fours and category five hurricanes. But as you may remember, when it's not the only effect of hurricanes, we also have hurricane rainfall. And it turns out that another possible impact of climate change is more hurricane rainfall and floods. As the atmosphere warms, it can hold more and more more water droplets. And those water droplets can create lots more clouds and lots more rain that may fall and cause flooding. And related to these, we may also see elevated risk of storm surge. So as the ocean temperatures rise and the sea level rise, we may see storm surge, essentially what I mentioned before and what we'll see in the next slide, which is that as the hurricane approaches land, the winds associated with the hurricane start pushing that water inland. And you will see that in these case where we're destroying animation, the water became so far inland and with so much strength that it destroyed the house. And so in the future, if our ocean waters continue to become warmer and the sea level continues to rise, the very powerful hurricanes may be able to push even more water inland than they do nowadays. So these are some of the possibilities. I would like to tackle some of these questions and would like to study them. And it turns out that just in the next new year, our institution is going to get a new supercomputer. Here's the picture that we just got two days ago of the supercomputer being installed. It's a very exciting time because the supercomputer will be very powerful. And I will use it to do some experiments in which I say, okay, the ocean temperatures have risen by four degrees. Can you tell me what kind of impact would that have on the hurricanes? Will they be stronger? Will they have more rainfall? Will they cause more impacts due to wind or rain? And some some answers to these questions are very, very important because I can pass those answers onto the hurricane, especially as the hurricane forecasters who can prepare to predict those impacts to the hurricanes, but also that information can be passed onto city planners and government officials in order to prepare their communities to build structures that can be prepared to resist the very strong impacts of hurricanes now and in the future. So that's all I wanted to cover from my part. Now I would love to answer any questions that you may all have, whether it be about hurricanes or about my career or anything you'd like to know about hurricane and my work. Thanks so much, Rosemar. That was just fascinating. And I'm super excited to see the brand new photos of the new supercomputer going in. That's very exciting. That's in Cheyenne, Wyoming for those of you. We have an NCAR Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming. So students, feel free to type in the chat any of those questions coming in. We would love to know what you're wondering, maybe some connections maybe that you're making to what you're learning about in class right now. And if you're learning a bit about climate change or hurricanes or anything that we'd love to hear. While we're waiting for those questions to come in Rosemar, I'm curious our scientists and experts here at NCAR come from all sorts of different backgrounds, all sorts of different career paths. Some of them discovered they were passionate about things in grad school or college or high school. Some knew from when they were in first grade that they wanted to study weather or become a computer programmer. So I'm curious for you, like when were you interested in science when you were in school? Or when did you kind of figure out that you wanted to pursue hurricane science? Sure, yeah. So I actually didn't like my science classes. I remember being on seventh grade and telling my dad like, I don't like the science class. And my dad was like, how come you say that science is so interesting. And my dad was not a scientist. He was a math teacher, but he thought science was interesting. But I disagreed back then. In fact, I liked performing arts a lot better. Like I liked acting and dancing and writing and poetry. I liked those things a lot more. And so as I experienced the hurricanes and I thought I want to do something related to performing, but also my mind was very curious about hurricanes. I thought that being a meteorologist, especially being on TV, was the perfect combination because I could learn about hurricanes. I could give good forecasts. But also I could use that passion for the performing arts and the public speaking. But yeah, my career took me in a very different direction. And instead, like my love for math and computer code grew stronger over the years. And that's how I ended up becoming instead the person behind scenes, the person that does the research, trying to improve the models and the tools that we use for hurricane and weather prediction. Well, I'm so glad that you discovered that and came to join us at NCAR. And I think that kind of bringing that creativity and art side, right, is super powerful in science and helps you probably in your job with all your creative thinking and planning for things. Looks like we do have some questions starting to come in from our students. Thanks so much. Keep those coming. We have a question from our friends in Denver asking, who names hurricanes? Oh, that's a good question. So it turns out that hurricanes were not always named. But long, long time ago, soldiers from around the world were writing letters to their relatives and whatnot. And that's how they started actually naming hurricanes in the past. It was really like the soldiers far away from their homes that were naming the hurricanes on behalf of their loved ones. But as the history progressed, it became very clear that naming the hurricanes actually created more awareness. So people started associating this hurricane in particular is named Alan or like Alex. And so it started creating a lot more awareness about what was happening. And so nowadays, there is an institution that they pick a set of names. There is actually six set of names that they want for each year. So every six years, the same list of names repeat, but that institution chooses the names and they make sure that they are can be understood in multiple languages, that they don't mean anything offensive in any other language. And they also make sure that any hurricane that costs lots and lots of damage is removed from the list and it's substituted with a new name. Thanks so much. And I'm going to drop in the chat, a link to the World Meteorological Organization's website. If you want to know more about what those different tropical cyclone names are in different parts of the world and get access to those lists and how they come up with it too. Yeah. All right, we have another question in the chat of can there be a stronger hurricane than a category five? Oh, that's a very good question. So it turns out that some scientists are starting to wonder about that. So the category five hurricane ends with winds stronger than 155 miles per hour. But a couple of years ago, we observed several hurricanes that had winds of 200 miles per hour, which is well above the 155 that is set for category five. Apologies there Rosie Meyer for some reason we got muted on accident there. So can you start that question from the top? Thanks so much for letting us know. Yes. So I was going to say that so far, like we just stopped a category five, anything that is stronger than 155 miles per hour gets labeled as a category five hurricane. But in recent years, we've had very strong hurricanes, for example, hurricane Patricia, which happened in the eastern Pacific Ocean had winds stronger than 200 miles per hours, which is well above 155, right? So yeah, scientists are starting to wonder whether we need to add a category six or not. And so the answer there so far is that category five hurricanes are so rare to begin with that we're just stopping there. There can be hurricanes that have very, very strong winds that could be considered its own category. But for now, we're going to remain with the strongest hurricanes are going to be category five hurricanes. Alright, thank you for those questions. Continue bringing those in. We have another question here. Do you get to travel for your work, Rosie Meyer? I do. It's probably one of my favorite parts of my job. I get to travel for various reasons. So one of them is what I showed you right like going to fly in in the aircraft in the airplanes that go into hurricanes. For that reason, we need to fly. We have to go to the places where hurricanes formed, and they don't happen here right now, right? They don't happen here in Colorado. So I have to fly whether it's to Florida or to Puerto Rico or to around the world. Like I would two months ago, I was just in Cabo Verde, which is an island in Africa. And I get to go to those places for work. I also get to travel in addition to traveling for collecting observations about hurricanes, I also get to do some travel to talk to other scientists. For example, we may gather once a year to just talk about hurricanes, or we may gather once a year to talk about any topic about whether climate and anything in between. And for those reasons, I also get to travel. So yes, lots of travel involved in my work in my job. All right. And I think we have time for one more question. We have a question of what is your favorite part of your job? Good question. I think my favorite part of my job is like getting to discover like I may have an outstanding question. Like I may have a question about, for example, like how did X hurricane became so strong? And so it takes a lot of time and effort to answer those questions. But once I have a question, it's so satisfying and so exciting. So just manipulating the data and getting to discover things in the data and getting to answers to my questions. It's just, it's well, it's very exhausting because it takes lots of effort. But once it happens, just the part of discovery of discovering how something works or discovering how a hurricane moves or how it produces rainfall. That part of discovery is really my favorite part of my job. And I also mentioned the traveling. I most mentioned that, that getting to go to places, not only to see the atmosphere first person firsthand, but also as I travel, I get to meet other people and I get to experience other cultures. And I get to also see how those cultures experience the weather that I study. And so that is very exciting and very satisfying for me. Wonderful. Well, thank you so, so much, Rosemary. Thank you, students, for all of your questions and for taking the time to connect with us today. We had so much fun hearing from you. And thank you, Rosemary, for taking the time to talk with us today and connect with us. I know I'll share with the students that Rosemary, after this is on her way to go receive the Governor's Award for Outstanding Early Career Scientist today. So, so we're really special to have such an amazing expert and congratulations again, Rosemary. So thank you, everybody. Rosemary, do you have any final words you want to share with students before we sign off today? Oh, I just want to share with you that, you know, persevere. The one word that I would advise my young self and any other person is to persevere. Whether it is that you dream to become a scientist or not, maybe you dream of becoming some other kind of profession or artist or whatever it is. Just remember that persevere, keep trying even if it doesn't seem like things are working your way. Just keep trying. Trust me, there is a reward at the end. Awesome. And I'm seeing thanks in the chat. Also someone says, sweet cloud earrings. So we'll have to find out where we can get some of those. Very cool. I want to invite everyone to please return next semester. So in the spring, we will be doing some more Meet the Experts with different experts. We haven't quite announced our list yet, so it's a little bit of a mystery still, but you can check our website because we'll be returning in February 2023 with Meet the Experts. We are planning on going behind the scenes with some supercomputers, learning about scientific teamwork, learning a bit about wildfires and more. So you can check our website, saya.ukar.edu for our Meet the Experts offerings when those get posted in the very near future and also follow us on social media for other programs and events. We are also, since we have some Colorado folks on, I will mention we are back open to the public again at the NCAR Mesa Lab. So you can come on and visit our Visitor Center for free, play in some clouds, see the scientists eat and lunch, hang it out, walk in between meetings. So please, please come visit us. We would love to have you come visit us in Boulder. So thank you again, Rosymar. Thank you, students. And we will see you next time. Have a great day, everybody. Bye.


Hello folks, how are you doing? This session is going to provide a brief overview of a new textbook out from OpenStax College called Introduction to Philosophy. My name is Nathan Smith and I am the Senior Contributing Author on the textbook. The textbook is designed to be a general overview of Intro to Philosophy. It's supposed to meet the basic requirements for a general Intro to Philosophy class and it's designed like most OER to be used either as a supplement, as a main text or to have selections taken and built on. I'll just introduce you to the folks who wrote the book. That's me there. I was joined by several contributing authors on most of the chapters and then a host of reviewers and also people who provided instructor resources, test banks, PowerPoint slides, a comprehensive manual. There's a ton of great stuff here with the textbook like with most of OpenStax textbooks. The thing I want to focus on today is kind of what I think is the unique feature of this Intro to Philosophy textbook. We set out with the goal of creating a textbook that was genuinely multicultural and global in its approach. I think we achieved that. One of the challenges with Philosophy as a discipline is that it has historically not just by default or by omission left out groups of people, but it has actively and through internal justifications of philosophical authors excluded the perspectives of women of non-European cultures. Despite the fact that there are vast histories and very rich traditions of philosophy in certainly the Islamic world as well as India, China, and then even in many indigenous cultures. So what we tried to do with this book was to highlight that, try to bring some of that out. I'll show you a bit of that. In addition we tried to make the book genuinely practical, and I'll show you some of the features that highlight that do that. Some of the things we do in the book are pieces like Think Like a Philosopher, Write Like a Philosopher, Read Like a Philosopher. These are inserts where students can engage in active participation doing philosophy. So they provide like a guide for instructors to kind of give students an overview, or give them a sense of what it is like to do, to do philosophy. Table of Contents, and what you'll see is a fairly typical layout of a table of contents. Introduction, some critical thinking, history of philosophy, and then we touch on the major thematic areas of an intro to philosophy class, logic, metaphysics, epistemology. One thing of note is that we spend a fair bit of time on value theory, normative ethics, applied ethics, political philosophy. That area is the fastest growing area of professional philosophy. So I think it's valuable to spend a fair bit of time on those topics. They also have a pretty practical and interest for students. I want to highlight a few things in this Table of Contents that may be unique. So first when we do the critical thinking, research, and reading and writing chapter this chapter is really focused on the mechanics of thinking. The psychology of thought, cognitive biases as a barrier to good critical thinking. Talk about how to develop good habits of mind. Then we spend a bit of time on research methods and reading and writing philosophy papers. Really practical stuff, like how to find sources on the internet, how to evaluate and fact check those sources when you're searching for things. When we look at the reading philosophy, again some very practical sort of techniques for being a better reader of philosophy. And the same thing when we get to the writing of philosophy. Spend some time with some exercises on how to write a better philosophy paper. Next when we do the history of philosophy you'll see that we spend a fair bit of time on the early history of philosophy which doesn't even get to the Greeks. So we spend time with the indigenous philosophers around the world and looking at African world, North America Aztecs, the Mayans as well as others. We then spend a fair bit of time on the classical Indian tradition and the Chinese tradition. The second history chapter is the one that goes more towards the traditional sort of history of philosophy. We of course start in Egypt but then quickly jump to the Greeks and Romans and then we work our way up through the classical age looking at a variety of influences on scholastic philosophy in Europe. We end with another sort of historical approach. This looks specifically at 20th century historical schools of thought that maybe somewhat less dominant than the Anglo-American analytic tradition that really guides most of the books. So the last thing that I wanted to show you in this book is when we set out to create a book that was more multicultural and inclusive than a traditional philosophy textbook, one of the things we didn't want to do is simply have a section devoted to a particular non-western philosophy. We wanted that view of philosophy to be incorporated throughout the book. So one of the principles we used when introducing concepts is that if a concept could be introduced using a non-western, non-male perspective, then we should use that perspective to introduce the concept. For instance, in epistemology there's a classic problem in the problem of knowledge known as the Gettier problem where a person meets the criteria for knowledge. They have justified true belief, but they don't have what we would normally call knowledge. Interestingly another Indian philosopher, a Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti, has an example that's very similar to Gettier-type examples, so we include that there. Likewise when discussing Descartes' dream argument, for instance, we introduced the dream argument using the Chinese Taoist philosopher Zhang Xiu, who has a sort of a similar, I mean it's a different story, but kind of introduces the concept that we need to get across to students. So the idea here is that we can use excellent examples to illustrate concepts for students that are drawn from a variety of sources and that way we integrate the philosophy of different regions right into the textbook.


Anthony it's the first time in 10 years you've been wearing a different uniform new organization new teammates. What was today like for you? It was a whirlwind right up in Chicago this morning pack up Get on a plane come down here Get this go to my house for a little bit make a pit stop and then come here and The good thing is I'm familiar with Miami and come in and play in here for a long time So it was nice and then the whole new organization everyone was you know walking with open arms and It's a good good way to start and get a win tonight You broke the tie in the six with a four hundred and forty nine foot blast when you hit one like that Does it take some of the pressure off you to produce and allow you to relax a little bit? Yeah, definitely I mean, I don't really remember it. I told the guys I blocked out when I hit it But you know, it's just it's one of those things where you know Jameson pitch really well tonight and getting the win is first and foremost And then getting a couple knocks on top of your first game is definitely helps ease it a little bit, but It was it was overall a long day, but what worth it This team has to gain a lot of ground in the standings, but what do you think this group is capable of? It was just one at a time I think in the first inning there you see us throw 30 pitches on the starting pitcher and just grind at bats and The more you grind at bats with the big boys. Just it lessens up everyone judge judge there three two Grinding at bats. I know you end up punching out, but Left the pitch out over for me to drive. So that's that's a big formula It's just grinding at bats and grind a team of bats your resume speaks for itself But what can Yankees fans expect from you the rest of the season? Just one day at a time just have fun. That's what I try to do try to be as relaxed I can be and I enjoy the moment. I try to just enjoy every moment. I enjoyed this like Like no other today, so it was a lot of fun and I look forward to coming back tomorrow Anthony Thanks to attack congratulations of the win. Appreciate it


When putting the birds outside it's always best to put the naughtiest one out first. These two are naughty. Here's your naughty one.  Merlin, Monty, Vinny. Hello my fellow Snifers, Flighters and Hatchlings. My name is Marlene McCohen and welcome to my channel.  That's Gina Ford, Michael W.T. Riker and Anna Chipman. I'm really excited to have you guys on board for those of you who don't know what that is. The Flighters Club is my Patreon where you can support my work making videos. Love those of you who are here early to this video. Okay, welcome to today's video. Obviously because I'm in bed and still not even like conscious yet. Today we are going to do my morning routine. And there it starts. So in case you are new here this is a channel about me and my birds and my family and animals. It's a lot of fun. But first of all I sleep right next to, yeah you heard it, my bird. But this is not just any bird. This is a really spoiled bird because look at her right now. Here she is. You want to come out Brando? Yes you do. Okay here's why Brando is spoiled. First of all Brando has a cage downstairs. And every night I pretend that I'm going to be putting Brando in the cage. I get her food ready, get her water ready and I put Brando in there to bed. But of course we don't go to bed as early as the birds so we're still up right? So every night before I go to bed and walk upstairs I notice Brando looking under the cage sleeping on the floor so that if I walk by she will be awakened. And then she can just like let me know she wants to come up here. She's even flown up here. Oh my god. I was also squeezing the cat. So yeah that's that. By the way guys I sleep in the men's shirts. So that's my pajamas. This is my engage not cage pajama. I love it. Okay where are you going? We have to show everyone our morning routine. It's hard to show morning routine. Okay so basically as soon as I wake up I wake Brando. Sometimes if Brando wakes up before me or wants to wake up before me then I uncover Brando's cage to start dragging the cover off. And I put her back on the cage to hang up. And then I literally go back to sleep. Just so she gets to be up early in the morning right Brando?  I get snows. Check out how she smells. She smells good for the day. Healthy. I can tell a lot by smell what they ate. How they feel. So that me and Brando will most likely hang out here for a good 20 minutes at least. Good job I ain't got nowhere to be. It's hard to snuggle her with this camera. So then Brando's uncovered and I let her play up there. If I should deem it too early to wake up or if she doesn't give me enough cuddles I literally go back to sleep. And then she's just out. But sometimes when I go back to sleep I'm awoken by a cute bird. Who will come over and give me a kiss. And ugh that's just the best feeling in the world. I'm kind of feeling tired right now.  Especially if it was kind of traumatic.  So I just would sit here and just kind of analyze it and see if there was something I saw on you know Instagram or social media or TV or somewhere that I might have taken from there to put in my dream or if it's something futuristic. So I really try to decipher all that. So I lay here for a good 10 minutes trying to figure that out unless there was nothing noticeable in my dreams that I just kind of moved on. There's Brando. Also about the cat. The cat sleeps in the bed right next to George and I don't get I'm not privy to any of that. I often try to hold the cat captive. Cat doesn't like that because I'm like Elmira and want to squeeze the cat. That's how I got this cat here. But Starbucks is here. She's so cute and Starbucks is not on the bed anymore because George wakes up much earlier than me and he goes downstairs and he wakes up all the birds first. Time to actually get up. Picks up. Next I literally get in the bed with my Sandy.  Let me know. She loves it. I'm gonna hang out here. Look Sandy. I love this dog. He's the only most cutest dog in the world. My cat. Sandy has two beds in here. It's time to go shower. I look at my face and you can tell I clearly ate stuff I was allergic to last night because George was working late downstairs so I could hide what I was eating. Not good for my face but let's recover. Now I make the big decision whether I'm going to wash my hair or not and I go shower with my Brando. If you watch me on Instagram you know there's always a bird in the shower. Not a bird. In the morning there might be one bird. In night there's lots of birds in the shower. Don't forget to watch me on Instagram guys. Okay so this is Brando's little birch. Just a mirror. That's where Brando's gonna be in my shower. Okay so now I'm dressed for the day. Didn't need to show that. I'm actually wearing... I thought that I was putting on a tank top. One of the rainbow crops. But this is the men's tank. It's a size medium so it's a bit too big but I tied it at the bottom here. So this is me just wearing it. I love these because they match everything so they match my pink pants. So that's so far we're dressed. Brando chills right here. And now I decide whether or not to put makeup on. Usually I'm a little more productive when I put makeup on. If I'm going to be just doing like work throughout the day I don't put makeup on because the amount of time it takes me to take it off. Like I spend a lot of time making sure there's not a grain of makeup on me. Just adds to my night routine plus getting the birds to bed and all that. So if I can avoid it I definitely do. But again I don't know if I'm gonna make any other videos today. Like maybe some sit downs for you guys. So I think I might put some makeup on so that I'm kind of ready for anything. I'm also so much more motivated with makeup on. Before makeup I like to get myself a cup of tea. It's gonna be like 10-15 minutes while I do it. So let's go down and make our tea. Say hi to the purchase. So here we have a few of them but I always hate them seeing Brando because then I feel guilty. Sandy wanna go out? Sandy wants to go out. Always forgot about that. Sandy's gotta go out first. Go on. Hey where's Jersey? Gotta find Jersey. Jersey! No, she's not in here. It looks like somebody gave you breakfast. So usually Jersey gives her her breakfast. Look who's here. Look who's here. Let's make some tea. Hello. Who's that beauty bear? Who's that beauty? Vinny is up very late. So he's still sleeping. Hi boobies.  Yeah you come with me. Yeah okay. Really good night time too because there's chamomile in it. No caffeine. So this yellow is gonna keep your pink. Our Jersey birthday behind is very magical. So we're gonna wait for that to turn pink. And I'm going to grab myself a bar. I love these no-cow bars for vegan. I'm really sensitive to dairy. It kind of causes a lot of mucus in my system. So I like these no-cow bars. Peanut butter. And then we go up and put our make up on. I ask each bird which wants to come. I couldn't get it on film. Vinny didn't wanna come. He was my first choice. Oh Sandra wants to be let in. But Cody wanted to come. So Cody's gonna come. Okay so Cody's coming. You can include birds in everything that you do. If you haven't won the one bird you gotta take the opportunity to make sure that you spend time with each one. By just using everything you do as an opportunity. Brandon showered with me. Katie's gonna put on makeup with me. Look how dark pink this is now. Mix it around. I'm excited about it. Okay guys this is not like a fancy makeup routine. This is just like I'm putting on my daily makeup. Just nice enough to be in a sit down video kind of thing. He says 15 minutes and 14 seconds on the screen. Could have done that a lot faster without Cody. And it's just kind of simple makeup routine. That's it. And it's a nice simple look that looks good in photos. If at the end you wanna add a little more shine from the Jeffree Star palette in between my eyes. His blue blood white has been my favorite one so far. I'm not a fancy makeup artist on YouTube or anything. But I'm just doing makeup for me and when I go out I go all out. I've been doing makeup since I was like 10 years old. And my hair is an atrocity I know because I usually love blow-dries because I'm a Leo. If you guys do wanna makeup routine from me it won't be full of so much stuff that I see them do on Instagram. I just like to go for like a look that maybe is glamorous but doesn't require so much caking on. I wanna wash my face just watching them do that on Instagram. So you guys want that? That's what it would be. As you guys saw there was a little concealer. That concealer is so amazing. It made me not need foundation and then a little bit of powder just to lighten up for contour. I added the lines, the contour of dark lines at the end because I thought might as well I forgot to do them whatever. So Cody and I are gonna go downstairs have our tea and decide, you know what I'd say? Do you want some of the touristy spread? I come down here and Cio has the most interesting looking healthy gluten-free breakfast. She's got five grain crackers. She's got some almond butter. Hi Cody, did you call for breakfast? I know. And some bananas on this. So I think I'm gonna try this for breakfast today. I've never been into like rice, what do you call them? Rice cakes, but these look thin and interesting. So I'm gonna try it today. Normally I just eat my bar if George is in here and if he is here he makes me breakfast. And now it gets real. Cio's trying to do stuff. She's got her bird and we have Cody guarding. I know this.  She's like the ninja of the kitchen. She's guarding it. Yeah, looking innocent. We know you're not innocent. Poor Cio just trying to make her tea and she can't. Look at Tony. Ty got a little stressed and pulled out some feathers. Probably, probably from the move. Actually he had recovered and then left him out again. So we moved him downstairs. He think he was sleeping in their room and he couldn't get a good night's sleep. And from here in the morning routine turns into chaos. This is when I start deciding what we're gonna do with the birdies all day. Some of them are going to go outside and play outside. Vinny loves that. He has a little bit of a bully. So he doesn't get to go out with all the other birdies. Sometimes he does. He likes to be inside with his mommy.  These guys like banana. You like the banana? Oh yeah. Okay. Give all the birds some snacks and treats. And give some banana. You want banana? You want to go guard your kitchen? You want to fight for kitchen rights? So either Merlin or Cody is going to have to go in the aviary outside. Cody loves it more. So Cody gets to go out more. But I think today is Merlin's day. Good morning, Merlin. Merlin's so naughty. Did you guys see how well Brando flies? She's bold. Tell them all about your flight. How was it? Same face. It's so cute. I have to be honest. A lot of my days wasted just sniffing birds. Or it's not a waste. When putting the birds outside, it's always best to put the naughtiest one out first. These two are naughty. So those are some that we put out first. And we also put Vinny out first. Because Vinny, I get his carrier and I take him out that way. He loves going outside and he loves going on trips. So he just loves to carry on. He will literally walk right into it and tell me he wants to go outside. Here's your naughty one.  Merlin, Monty, Vinny. The reason I use the carrier for Vinny is because he gets spooked by things easily. Like he doesn't like dogs. I firmly believe like if Vinny flew, he'd fly right back to me. Because that's what he does in the house. But outside is a different ballgame. Because once they get lost, yeah. Do you have stuff to say? What do you want to say about being in there? Bless you. I have a lot of toys waiting. So you can see right there. There's always a lot of cleaning. Next naughtiest, Merlin. Although he looks so innocent right here. And this is all him and Cody. This is their tent. You want to go outside today or you want Cody to go outside? This is a hard decision for me. Rocky, you want to go outside? See who should go outside. Merlin or Cody. Cody, it's time. You like it out there. You want to go outside? I turned the misters on for you. I set up the camera to bring Cody outside. Cody doesn't want to come outside. That's fine. That's her choice. She knows I asked her. She doesn't want to come. So she knows where she's going. So she gets to be inside today. Watch. You want to go outside? No, that means no. So I listen to them. Where's Merlin? Merlin's going. Oh, Merlin's having tea. No wonder you don't want Merlin. They'll leave you just spoiling and rotting with his. Is that warm water? Yeah. Yeah, he likes it. How I like it outside, but he hates it. He's missing something, you know? I know. He has FOMO. He does. All the cockatoos have FOMO. Honestly, that's why I love cockatoos. I relate. It's the best thing. He's like, that's so me right now. I do have FOMO. Yeah. And that's why I relate to Jersey. When she's on the banister and no one's there and she just starts screaming, I'm like, that's me, Jersey. I get it. If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone hear it?  What's going on there? It's raining before it goes too loud. Aren't we all? I see what you're doing. I know exactly what you're doing. I'm on to you.  This is, this is, this is. He's looking at me like, oh my God. He likes it. He's been trying to steal your heart since you got here. He's like, okay, it's okay. Do you want to go outside, Merlin? You are pretty naughty. Okay, that means like, excuse me.  Were you sleeping? I got you sleeping. Look at my baby. Look at my baby. Okay, now that I got the birds somewhat situated, that concludes my morning routine. Besides for the fact that I made myself coffee, it's pretty much afternoon now. And now I'm going to go into my office and work. And these guys, they chill out here. And Leo chills out here and Rocky chills out there. They're all kind of just trained to be out and chill. And so they don't have to be locked up when I'm doing other things. If you guys want to see my routine in the afternoon with my birds, let me know down below. Don't forget to subscribe. I love you guys so much. Bye.


With the holiday shopping season now underway, many area communities are getting into the holiday spirit with a variety of Christmas festivals. In Park Rapids, a 50-year-old spruce has been decked out for their festivities tomorrow night. The celebration centered around the community Christmas tree begins at five, which includes a visit from the big guy himself, Santa Claus, and the city of lights celebration in Niswa. We'll start at 5.45 tomorrow evening and we'll feature Love Lights a Tree, where names of all who are honored and remembered will be read aloud along with the tree lighting in the Niswa Pioneer Village. Details on other community lighting ceremonies are available right there on the Explore Minnesota website.