Leaf peeping is good for the soul

This weekend will be another very nice October weekend featuring nearly wall-to-wall sunshine and seasonably cool or mild temperatures, depending on your perspective, with little frost. Technically, this is the final full weekend of October because next weekend, Halloween falls on a Saturday and then Sunday begins November. There’s been a big storm out in the ocean this week that will be long gone by Friday as we begin the weekend and high pressure builds in from Canada. This time of year, an air mass with high pressure up north is often chilly and temperatures will be a little bit below average on Friday, staying mostly in the low 50s. The forecast morning low temperature across Boston for the next week. Boston GlobeSaturday: Plenty of sunshine, calmer windsThere will be plenty of sunshine both days this weekend and the wind will be generally quite light. Because high pressure will be cresting near or over New England, the gradient will be almost non-existent and that’s one of the reasons for calmer winds. Something called “warm air advection,” which is basically what it sounds like, when warm air starts moving into an area, is going to start taking overon Saturday.

Kymberlee O’Brien is an assistant professor of psychology at William James College and founder of NeuraLight Consulting. Every October, New England’s back roads fill with people who have passed thousands of perfectly good trees to reach the right ones. They crawl along at 15 miles per hour and queue for the same overlook as everyone else. Vermont’s tourism department estimates that 2.5 million visitors spend about $500 million during its foliage season each year. Nobody plans a trip like that for something they merely like. As a psychophysiologist, I’m often asked for the brain science behind the pull. The honest answer starts with an admission: To my knowledge, no study has put people in a brain scanner while they look at autumn foliage. What we have is more modest and more fascinating. Start with color. Psychologists Stephen Palmer and Karen Schloss’s ecological valence theory proposes that we like a color in proportion to how we feel about the things we associate with it. Ripe fruit, firelight, and the harvest table all carry warm associations, and so do the colors they’re made of. Palmer, Schloss, and their colleagues then tested people across the calendar.

I was in middle school in Western New York during the Three Mile Island accident — the most serious nuclear accident in American history. Even from 200 miles away, my parents were glued to the news, and at our Catholic School we prayed for the safety of our Pennsylvania neighbors. After Three Mile Island there were months of congressional hearings on nuclear safety. Where is the congressional oversight now (“US is reviving shuttered nuclear plants to meet growing electricity demand and to power data centers,” Online, Oct. 16)? Why are we starting to slip down the nuclear path again, solely to benefit data center tycoons? The least we can do is ask our members of Congress to put in some basic regulations on data centers and energy. There are several bills in Congress now that would help — H. R. 6983 would require large data centers to generate their own electricity and transition to 100% clean energy; and H. R. 6984 and S. 5640 would require reporting on data centers’ air, water, and energy use. Our Massachusetts delegation, especially Representative Katherine Clark, Democratic minority whip, and Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren should be working for us to support these bills

LETTERSErick Michael fed the pigeons on Boston Common. Stan Grossfeld/Globe StaffI live near the Tufts Medical MBTA station that is under attack by pigeons (“MBTA looks to bring in hawks,” Metro, Oct. 8), but the the source of the problem is that someone is feeding them on an industrial scale. Several times a day someone empties a bag of rice on the plaza. I like the idea of the falcons, but I fear that their endless supply of food may offset the predation. As Pogo Possum said, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”Richard KileyBoston

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