in the third round of the SGM Macau Open. Thoroughly enjoyed another low-scoring day here with Taiichi Ko of Hong Kong shooting a 66. This was his sixth birdie of the round, and he moves into the top eight at 12 under par. Another great week for Taiichi Ko. Didn't quite make the eagle at the last, but he was happy to settle for the birdie. Miguel Tabuena is lying second in the Asian Tour order of merit. He may well close the gap this week, a 66, and he too is at 12 under par. Minwe Kim with his birdie putt at the seventh, and he's in at 14 under par, tied for fourth, whilst J. Wong Eom provided one of the moments of the day with this at the final hole, the par 5 18th, and how well judged was this? In for an eagle, a round of 65. He's at 18 under, and he lies third. The low round of the day came from Pum Saksansin, who had such a good week last week at International Series Singapore. This was a beautiful shot at the seventh. Couldn't have been any better judged. He would roll the putt in for a birdie, and with a string of birdies around the turn, this was the third of four at the ninth. He had actually tied for the lead at the top of the leaderboard with Minwooli. Saksansin would shoot the low round of the day, a 64 for 20 under. But Minwooli, despite being caught around the turn, is still out in front, this a birdie putt at the fifth. And then he came to the last looking to chip in for an eagle. Another splendid day for the Aussie, though, with five birdies and an eagle, and just one drop shot. He would tap in for a 65, and at 22 under par for three rounds, it's Minwooli who leads by two going into the final round.


ably where we're going well here's where it's interesting that and i hope the minister takes cognisance of this community groups they want to put on the display and i have two choices under this legislation the first choice is that if they want to put on a display at any point in the year they can pay a private company to do so because those companies are both exempt from the licensing scheme which is an individuality based one and also exempt from the permitted days of use as prescribed in the bill so justice committee community group puts on a display at any point in the year if they have enough money to do so by paying someone to do it if they don't have enough money to do that then the only way they can put on a display is by doing it during the permitted period of use you're welcome to clarify if i'm wrong they could however put on a display using the individual license of an individual within that group but only during the permitted periods is my understanding of i'm wrong please correct me that member's heart right and members right about the professional displays but for public displays they also exemptions also apply to them and so they are not contained by the permitted days of use that's even worse i mean now i mean we're coming on to the that grouping a later point but we're now in the scenario where anyone could use their status as a community group however that's defined i've tried to define that using the community empowerment act 2015 but there's nothing stopping a group of people saying they are putting on a community display at any point in the year and claiming exemption so we could have displays every day of the year which truly defeats the whole point of what the legislation is trying to achieve happy to give way yeah um i agree with all of that i have two concerns one is the actual purpose even though it's flawed as i understand it was for to deal with individuals not community groups that's the design of the scheme what i thought the minister was going to answer um maybe she could still answer the question is there anything in the bill which is why i think you're suggesting preventing an individual on behalf of a community group don't think there's anything preventing about that but that was at the purpose of the scheme and what concerns me about this as well as i agree with everything you're saying it's all a bit of a mess i'm not sure that i am would be happy to legislate to allow community groups to nominate an individual under this scheme because they're going to buy more fireworks for a start i would have thought for a public display so i do agree that this is an unaddressed issue but i just wondered if you thought it might just negate the actual main purpose albeit flawed yeah i'm happy to concede that i appreciate my amendment as worded might not be the solution to the to the conundrum but i think what it has clearly shown perfectly in this debate is that there still is a conundrum which is unaddressed and i don't know how the government tends to respond to that ahead of stage three but it will need to be fixed or indeed make it or it's up to individuals to bring it back at stage three because this is something that will need to be clarified it does raise the wider issue around the exemptions and the permitted use and the very real scenario that polemic neal raises as a concern is that many individuals within a group will simply use their individual licences to acquire and use and put on the display so it's very much an unregulated environment in that respect other than there's just a lot of people who happen to be using their licences to buy and put on fireworks at the same time in the same place kill surprise what a coincidence it doesn't sound me like a very coordinated approach to how we deal with public displays so i think that's again something i would reflect and ask the government to reflect on the point about raising the age i don't have a view on it i should add i've put in this amendment because i think it's a debate worth having i would be really intrigued a has the government consulted on the specific question i where the public ever asked should we raise the minimum age of the first fireworks from 18 to 21 if that question was asked what the answer was and if it wasn't asked why not if we were to ask it now because this issue is now quite on the public agenda what people would say it's not for me to conject what the public might answer to that but i would say there may be a fair portion of people who may be sympathetic to it more so knowing that the industry themselves are sympathetic to it so i still think there is space for consultation around this issue or at least on the face of the bill or somewhere in legislation to give the government the ability to change that at a future point and i presume that the bill isn't set up in a way that it could be changed at a future point so that the minimum age could be raised for this legislation or other legislation if it became apparent that that was either the will direction travel or something that would benefit society by not passing the amendment or even by not moving it it still doesn't address the issue that that cohort of people between the ages of 16 and 18 to 21 are the group who are most likely to be offenders of the misuse of fireworks so for that reason i have other amendments later about education and so on which i'll come to happy to sum up there can you just confirm your pressing amendment 67 67 i will not move you'll not okay so you just to confirm your withdrawing that amendment indeed thank you i'll call amendment 68 in the name of jaymie green already debated with amendment 67 that jaymie green to move or not move not move okay i'll call amendment 14 in the name of the minister already debated with amendment 58 minister to move formally moved thank you the question is that amendment 14 be agreed to are we all agreed we'll now move on to the next grouping and i call amendment one in the name of pauline mcneill grouped with amendment 69 pauline mcneill to move amendment one and speak to all amendments in the group thank you very much convener so the cost of the license was the subject of considerable questioning and debate at the stage one a number of members were concerned about what the cost of the license he would be and acknowledged that the government themselves are live to that very issue i'm sure and some agreement that some people can't even afford 20 pounds but there is a big difference between 20 and 50 i want to probe this issue and so far as i do think there should be an upper limit on the face of the bill i've suggested 25 but that that's something that i admit is arbitrary but i just thought well it's to go above 25 pounds definitely be something which would be unaffordable for a lot of people it concerns me a little bit that the scheme is designed to pay for itself but yet the committee have got no indication as to what that actually looks like since we don't know how onerous the scheme is is a tick box exercise videotaining exercise then you can't even imagine what the actual cost for the government to run it or to set a see where a scheme that pays for itself would look like it definitely could be prohibitive for many families who can maybe just about afford to buy fireworks who are to consider the additional cost of a firework licence and given quite serious costs for concern that we don't have anything on the face of the bill and there's an argument to say in fact if the principle is to make people think that they have to plan why should there actually be a fee at all is an argument but for me the whole the whole idea is going to fall if we do not get this right so i want to probe this issue and wouldn't really be happy to vote through the bill at stage two or stage three with some serious commitment from from the government on how we address this question amendment 69 seems probably potentially better wording than mine about the rate of inflation so i'll be happy to support it if it's pushed and on that convener i conclude Russell Findlay to speak to amendment 69 and other amendments in the group thank you and understand Pauline McNeill's amendment does much the same thing albeit it specifies a fee which i think is perhaps something that is unusual and not really typical of legislation for all sorts of obvious reasons and i think we've identified we're approaching the same problem with a slightly different solution in that rather than trying to set a fee now that would quickly become out of debt we would seek through this amendment to ensure full consultation with all relevant stakeholders about what would be considered to be an affordable and reasonable sum of money to charge for a licence you know this is dependent on as we know regulations coming in after the event so even outwith in normal times the amount of money that might be charged for this licence could hugely influence the number of people willing to pay for it and to apply for it and if it did become disproportionately expensive and a deterrent to go down the legal route it's got the potential for leading to sort of black market sales and so on and furthermore in respect of future price increases they should be capped by pegging it to whatever mechanism the sort of standard inflation related mechanism that is typical of other legislation i think there's a number of ways of doing that i'm sure the minister can keep me right so that's uh thank you thanks governor again i've got quite a lot of sympathy with these amendments you know i think both Pauline McNeill and Russell family have put you know they don't sound like you know they're coming at these amendments in a you know a hard fashion from from what i picked up obviously Pauline will sum up on that but i think it's a sort of a request to the government to hear more information what they're thinking is on this because it obviously was an area where we had quite a lot of discussion about you know it goes back to a previous point that i made i think the whole purpose of this scheme is to try and get folk on to the license and therefore through the training so the less barriers to that clearly the better you know and you know the higher it's common sense to think that the higher the fee um the more people start dropping off and start you know thinking that they might not go for a license um also i think we've just got to be honest and say we're in the middle of a cost of living crisis you know it's impact in all our constituencies i know that my constituency is is very much impacted in well i'm not any expert on costs and prices and where that where the public might be with that i do agree with Pauline that you know 20 25 pounders seem more reasonable in your mind than somebody thinking 50 pound when they're struggling to heat their homes so on that basis again like other members are interested to hear what the government i think you know this and i know from the session that the minister attended there is something they're very consciously aware of and that this government i have always been consciously aware of across the board in terms of cost of living so thank you thank you jimmy did you want to come in yeah just briefly i mean i i'm sympathetic lots of sympathy in the room today it's very nice but nobody ever votes for my amendments but thanks anyway thanks Russell just as well the sympathy i have is actually the level of the fee i think it sounds like a reasonable number it will be no surprise that putting on the face of primary legislation numbers is difficult and dangerous and probably not sensible however principle might be there and i think there might be a principle for how we work together as a committee ahead of stage three even indeed with the government on how the government will go about setting the fee and the sort of work that will need to go into that which could be on the face of the bill which could address some of the issues that i think all members have raised and i think that's something that we will all work constructively on if the member was minded not to move this one it's still something we should revisit and the second and that falls into the second point as well around the inflationary cap which we sought to achieve in 69 there are other ways of wording it i've seen various pieces of legislation that word it and peg it to different levels of increase and there are number of disposals available to the government to do that and we could do that perhaps in a better way with the government has a problem with the way we've set it out but again all that can be withdrawn and can come back to that but it does kind of paint a wider picture again a pain towards amendment 90 which unfortunately sits in a different grouping around post letter scrutiny but equally could sit very well in here around the process that the government should set out because the policy intention surely is not to put people off getting a licence because to get a licence they need to perform the safety training course get the certificate and then get their licence actually we want as many people as possible to get a licence surely so anything that's prohibitive should be found upon by us all so i think again this is an issue that we could sensibly revisit thank you very much minister thank you convener so i understand that amendments one is 69 i've been lodged to seek to ensure that the license fee and any subsequent changes to the fee level are proportionate and accessible for the people of scotland and i will say that i am sympathetic and potentially understand that perhaps pulling McNeill has seen this set of amendments as a probing amendment in order to discuss this issue further which is totally understandable i don't however consider that this is the most effective way to ensure that a fair license fee is in place so amendment one seeks to set an upper limit on the license fee of 25 pounds and i consider that this preempts the consultation process that is required to be undertaken to seek views on the license fee and it would also mean that an assessment of the running costs would not be able to be undertaken before the limit is placed on the amount meaning that it would not be possible for operational costs to be properly considered when setting the fee and both amendments one and 69 seek to ensure that fee increases are in line with inflation i think there's some technical problems with that and the amendments do not include or refer to the measure to define the rate of inflation and a number of members mentioned that perhaps the face of the bill is problematic for for putting a fee on that and that's because placing a statutory limit on the fee or on the amount of fee increase permitted could in future lead to a protracted process to amend primary legislation legislation to adjust this upper limit or frequent use of secondary legislation to increase the fee in in small increments there is practical issues there as well so convener remain committed to ensuring that the license fee is proportionate and fair and it will be set following wide-ranging consultation which i hope addresses russell finlay's one of the points that he made in his contribution and at a rate that ensures that while robust checks and balances are in place the fee is not our restrictive barrier to the safe and lawful use of fireworks so i'd ask that these amendments are not pressed and if they are i would urge the committee not to vote for them. Thank you minister. Pauline McNeill to wind up and press or withdraw. Thank you very much. I did see that this was a probing amendment and I imagined all the various arguments against it which I acknowledge we wouldn't necessarily want to put it on the face of the bill because I can see the problems with that but I have to confess that the word running costs alarms me and equally what you're asking the committee to do and the parliament to do is still to vote for a bill but we do not know what the running costs will be and the minister doesn't know what the consultation will bring up and I just wondered what would ministers do if the running costs turn out to mean that that between that 20th upper limit of 50 it's nearer 30 or 35 pounds and I'm just wondered if you thought you know you thought about that because where would that leave us and I wondered if at least ministers would what I'm saying is if you do a consultation which I wouldn't want to stand in the way of but as I say concerns me that I would have to do that in good faith because we won't know we have to pass the bill and then you're on the consultation but what if the running costs of the scheme turn out to mean it's higher than 25 pounds I can't imagine ministers would be happy with that so would you then take the view if that was the case you just might have to run the scheme at a loss if you wouldn't mind and given a answer to that I would be I appreciate what the member's saying and it's understandable that she's asking these questions I can't answer the question because we haven't been able to undertake the exercise but I have think I have been clear on the record in saying that I am committed to ensuring that the fee is set a reasonable rate because I very much understand the arguments around making it a barrier so we don't we don't want to do that we want to ensure that people are able to do the right thing thank you and container I'm known it as I said I'm not going to push this amendment I am going to come back at stage three I want to debate this again because what I'm looking from for the government is some comfort any comfort around the issue of the consultation outcome showing that their running costs would be a level which none of us would be happy with and what do we do then I think I hope that we would at least agree that oh everything the licensing scheme it would potentially undermine people's desire to be part of it thank you just to confirm the withdrawing thank you very much members happy with that thank you so I call amendment 69 in the name of Russell Finlay already debated with amendment one Russell Finlay to move or not move not moved not moved thank you I call amendment 47 in the name of Katie Clark already debated with amendment 58 Katie Clark to move or not move not move thank you the question is that section 6 be agreed to are we all agreed thank you we'll now move on to the next grouping and I call amendment 70 in the name of Russell Finlay grouped with amendments as shown in the groupings Russell Finlay to move amendment 70 and speak to all amendments in the group thank you convener so number 70 sits alongside 71 72 73 74 77 what this boils down to is the nature of the convictions that would need to be both disclosed by an applicant and indeed considered upon the granting of a license and it seems to be what what the bill is doing just now is pretty limited and in my view kind of fairly inexplicably limited it only seems to require consideration of convictions in relation to fireworks related offenses now we've already heard that there's a perception or a view that these are underutilised there's very few convictions of that nature and in order to better assess an applicant's suitability a proper picture of any criminal offending would be hugely beneficial now in terms of disclosure we believe that all convictions should be disclosed that does not mean that that would be detrimental to the applicant it just allows for the those making the decision to have a complete picture going back to the decision making process rather than looking through the very narrow lines of what the bill is proposing it should certainly i believe include any conviction consideration of any conviction under solemn proceedings not just those listed and as i said this is not to it's a public safety it's about ensuring applicants are people who proper due consideration is given to their suitability on a case-by-case basis based upon a full information being available to those making the decisions and it's a private process it's not about compromising people or forcing people to disclose their pasts in an inappropriate way so that's essentially the thinking behind these amendments minister to speak to amendment 15 and other amendments in the group thank you convener so i'm bringing forward amendment 15 to remove the disclosure requirement during an application only covering spent convictions to widen this to include any relevant conviction whether that conviction is spent or unspent so the management of offenders scotland act of 2019 reduced the periods in which a conviction becomes spent so for example a fine is considered spent and therefore not needing to be disclosed after 12 months rather than the previous period of five years and for those under 18 when convicted the disclosure period for a six-month prison sentence has been reduced from three and a half years to one and a half years and a fine is from six months instead of two and a half years so following careful consideration during stage one i consider that this amendment is a proportionate and a balanced way to strengthen the effectiveness of the licensing system whilst ensuring that only relevant offences are taken into consideration and i want to make clear that a person having a previous conviction is not a blanket ban on holding a fireworks license and nor will disclosure of these lead to an automatic refusal of a license application so the purpose of this amendment is to allow an informed and a balanced decision to be made on each application so if we move on to mr finlay's amendments i understand that mr finlay wants to ensure that a robust system is in place but i consider that those amendments adjust the wording of the disclosure requirement in a way that i think could potentially cause confusion and doesn't substantively change the requirement on applicants and i don't support them but in relation to the requirement to disclose convictions for offences involving fire i can see the potential value in progressing an amendment to this effect and this would include offences such as willful fire raising and i consider that there is a valid point to be made that it may not be appropriate for those who have demonstrated such past behaviour to be able to hold a fireworks license and so i'd welcome further discussion with mr finlay to explore this point further ahead of stage three in addition in relation to amendment 77 i don't consider this one to be necessary or appropriate to include in legislation and Scottish ministers will of course take into account all disclosed convictions when making an assessment of whether or not to grant a license so i can't support these amendments as they are at the moment so i would encourage mr finlay not to press them and if he does i would encourage the committee not to support them but it's just to clarify to mr finlay that on amendment 74 i would be happy to work with him ahead of stage three to help to create an amendment for stage three which i am able to support at stage three i think that that's a very welcome offer i think that the issue around whether where the misuse of fire has been a factor was quite an obvious one that jumped out is in the first instance for example arson or other types of quite serious misuse of fire but which clearly would should prohibit someone or at least be explicit on their application to help inform that decision but when we thought outside of that block there were clearly other types of behaviours which we felt should be disclosed on the application which may again help inform the decision making process and it strikes me as a scenario where someone as they repeat serial offender of anti-social behaviour whether fireworks have been evolved or not there is a judgment made about whether that person is and i'll use the phrase phrase fit and proper to hold a fireworks license and i think that's what's missing from the essence of this in terms of relevant offences in section four the four offences that the government have explicitly chosen section four fireworks act prior technic art prior technic articles regulation explosive substance and explosive act are all only related to fireworks not addressing the serious issue of anti-social behaviour or other types of quite serious conviction including those convicted on indictment which my colleague also wishes to add i still think that in addition to the misuse of fire as a factor there still could be wider scope for other offences or indeed an ability for those who administer the licenses to take into account other offences and indeed to make it a mandatory requirement to disclose those offences if it's not explicitly the case as it is at the moment because i think those are quite these those can be quite serious offences which should be taken into account which was the point of expanding that list from the four that the minister has come up with to the additional four that we've tried to add in so even if we do not move them i think that still needs to be something that the government could look at ahead of stage three because ultimately it's that fit and proper test which must apply to whether someone is suitable to hold a license or not thank you I don't I can't support the amendments before by Russell family as they stand just now I think that disclosing every offence is unnecessary and possibly far far too intrusive i mean there's tight regulations around the disclosure of offences and it's only in certain scenarios such as appearing at court for sentence and other reasons that you would that someone would need that in it in particularly more more so you know with the minister's amendment which includes spent convictions as well which are amt and are minded to support so that that probably makes it even more important however the later amendments from Russell family I think do have some scope and it's good to hear that the minister in conversation with Jimmy Green there as well you know that they're going to look at that going into stage three i think there is a scope for widening it because you know perhaps it doesn't just need to be firework offences and we can all think of other various offences which might be relevant but i think there's got to be a lot of work done between the government in in in Russell in terms of how that's going to work and where it might infringe on you know other rights in human rights as well and again it goes back to I think I've now said this for about the last three groupings you know it's a lesson in the scheme we want people to take up ultimately and if somebody thinks that you know you know I've got an offence from 20 years ago and they don't really know whether it's going to come up or not they might well be put off applying for it and continue to use fireworks anyway so a lot of work needed to be done there but I definitely welcome it and I do think that it's definitely scope to increase the number of offences. Thank you Gilton. Any other members? Russell Findlay to wind up press or withdrawal? Okay thank you very much. I first of all welcome the minister's amendment in relation to this point convictions I think that makes perfect sense and also welcome her suggestion to look at amendment 74 and broaden the scope because the minister identifies I suppose the most obvious one which is willful fire raising or offenses of that nature. Jamie Greene also identifies those of more general anti-social behaviour of violence and just off the top of my head I can think of things like football related convictions for example or violence against emergency service workers which aren't currently required to be disclosed or considered so I think that's a welcome move and there's work to be done there. Ultimately this is about creating a fair system but one that's robust and not of course as Fulton MacGregor suggested deterring people who are perfectly entitled or legitimate licence holders but nonetheless the consideration of offences that I think just common sense would suggest would be of concern should be considered so thank you. Do you wish to press or withdraw amendment 70? 70 right sorry that's the all convictions I think we press 70. So the question is that amendment 70 be agreed to are we all agreed? We're not agreed therefore we'll move to a vote all those in favour of the amendment please raise your hands thank you all those against raise your hands thank you no abstentions so the result of the vote is that there were four votes for the amendment four votes against there were no abstentions therefore there's an equality of votes and as convener I shall use my casting vote and vote against the amendment so amendment the amendment is therefore not agreed thank you I call amendment 71 in the name of Russell Finlay already debated with amendment 70 Russell Finlay to move or not move move please the question is that amendment 71 be agreed to are we all agreed we're not agreed therefore we will move to a vote all those in favour raise your hands thank you all those against raise your hands there are no abstentions so there were four votes for the amendment four votes against the amendment there is an equality of votes therefore as a convener I shall use my casting vote and vote against the amendment so amendment is therefore not agreed I call amendment 15 in the name of the minister already debated with amendment 70 minister to move formally moved thank you so the question is that amendment 15 be agreed to are we all agreed yes thank you and we'll now move on to the next grouping and I call amendment 16 in the name of the minister grouped with amendments 75 17 and 80 minister to move amendments 16 and speak to all amendments in the group thank you convener the fireworks training course is a core element of the licensing system and it's crucial to achieving the policy objective that those permitted to purchase possess and use fireworks in Scotland have adequate knowledge of how to do so in a safe lawful and appropriate manner following consideration of the committee stage 1 report I considered it appropriate to progress amendment 16 to ensure that the bill makes it explicitly clear that the training course will include information about the law on fireworks and this will include information such as when and where fireworks can be used and the rules around the safe storage of fireworks and amendment 17 ensures that the criteria for a license being granted will also reflect this it's always been the intention that this information would be part of the training course however I hope the specific inclusion of the word lawful provides assurance that the training course will make it clear to people what is and importantly what is not legally permitted in relation to fireworks in Scotland in relation to amendment 75 while I do not consider specific reference to the procurement reform Scotland act of 2014 to be necessary I'd like to reassure Mr Greene and other members of the committee that if such procurement is undertaken for the purposes of the training course all legal requirements will be complied with throughout that process and Mr Greene has also lodged the amendment seeking to enable Scottish ministers to make provision for how the successful completion of a fireworks training course is automatically recorded on a digital license there are no restrictions on such an automatic process being put in place through the system if the license system is capable of this when it's developed I do consider this though to be an operational matter which I think is much better suited to being considered as part of the development and implementation of the licensing system so while I thank Mr Greene for discussing I think I've moved on too far in my pack there I'll stop there convener and I'll return to that in a moment it's been a long morning thanks very much. Jamie Greene to speak to amendment 75 and other amendments in the group thank you convener it's always nice to be thanked for something I haven't said yet already so 1617 I've got no problem if I didn't really quite understand what the amendment does so therefore it must be sensible amendment 75 again you know it simply seeks to ensure that ministers will comply with procurement legislation in regards to the fireworks safety courses I think given there's an expectation that this will be a government led certification licensing scheme I think what we do want to ensure that during that procurement exercise what we do get is come back to bollett moneals point is value for money there's also technologically future proof which means many of the requirements of the license and the scheme can be easily integrated with the certification which is technologically future proof includes transparency and accountability and also has the ability of data sharing where relevant suitable and proportionate as well if the minister has no problem with the wording of the amendment I don't see why we can't put it on the bill it's not controversial and the same goes for amendment 80 I think it will be very helpful indeed if the successful completion of the training safety training is clear on the license itself and not just the requirement of getting a license again if that's not controversial I don't know why it can't be on the face of the bill either I appreciate there is an argument this could be an operational matter but I think what the committee is keen to do is not shove as much of this into secondary legislation as we can where we know it would be beneficial to put it in primary legislation which is what these two I thought quite helpful amendments seek to do any other members wish to speak nope minister to wind up thank you convener so I don't consider these to be the amendments before my screen to be necessary changes to the bill so just give an example on amendment 75 that amendment actually just has no effect this leg as this legislation already applies and it must already be complied with so it has no practical effect so I don't support those amendments for that reason and I move amendment 16 in my name and ask Mr Green not to press his amendments thank you very much so the question is that amendment 16 be agreed to are we all agreed yes yes thank you so I call amendment 48 in the name of Katie Clark already debated with amendment 58 Katie Clark to move or not move not move thank you so I call amendment 72 in the name of Russell Findlay already debated with amendment 70 Russell Findlay to move or not move not moved okay I call amendment 73 in the name of Russell Findlay already debated with amendment 70 Russell Findlay to move or not move not move okay I call amendment 74 in the name of Russell Findlay already debated with amendment 70 Russell Findlay to move or not move okay the question is that section 7 We agreed to and are we all agreed? ok Amendment 75, jamae Green, already debated with amendment 16, jamae green, to move or not move Amendment 49, in the name of Katie Clark, already debated with amendment 58 Katie Clark, to move or not moved The question is section 8 be agreed to when we are all agreed. I will move to our final grouping of the morning, and I call amendment 76 in the name of Jamie Greene grouped with amendments 78 and 79. Jamie Greene to move amendment 76 and speak to all amendments in the group. Amendment 76 puts the burden on Scottish ministers to ensure that the information disclosed by applicants is accurate. Section 9 is quite explicit already in that ministers must check if an application has been received, that the fee has been paid and that the applicant is able to demonstrate that they can possess and use fireworks safely. However, what Section 9 does not do is overtly mandate ministers to verify the accuracy or veracity of the information provided in an application. If it does, it is hidden away somewhere, I cannot find it. The problem with that means that the legal owner is on the applicant to provide truthful information alone, for example about convictions, something that is very discussed. Amendment 76 makes it clear that it is the licence operator where it is the case that ministers of the scheme are the ultimate check and balance of the information being given to them before issuing the licence. The stage 1 report from the committee raised concerns, for example, around any technical legal issues that may arise from data sharing between agencies on the information that is provided. Indeed, it is at the moment still entirely unclear how the licence operator will ensure that true data sharing arrangement takes place. Of course, the more easily and technically competent that is, the easier it will be for ministers to stomach this amendment. On a legal point, I would argue that ministers have a duty to check the veracity of information provided prior to issuing a licence under a scheme that it created and operates as a prerequisite to someone being issued a licence and the subsequent purchase, possession and use of fireworks. That is amendment 76. Amendment 78 will be a talking point, and that requires that the issue of purchasing history to be recorded. The first is the why. I have concerns that, as it stands, there is nothing to permit a single licence holder making multiple purchases to the maximum-allowed volume of fireworks per purchase, not just in one day or in one venue but in multiple. Theoretically, someone could go from store to store to store and then online and then back to retail and purchase effectively what is a stockpile in the case of the white van man scenario. I know that it is not practical and perhaps not even possible to mandate retailers to record and share purchase history data, although that would be an ideal scenario, but I know that the minister will confirm that we cannot do that. The next question is how we solve that problem and how we address that very real potential. What we can do is ensure that the licence holder uploads or records purchase data on their licence if it is technically feasible to do so. Perhaps the amendment could or should say that in another iteration. I know that it would be a fairly insubstantial technical solution that could monitor purchase history, perhaps even anonymously, and highlight red flags with authorities. In the scenario where a white van man seller is using his perfectly legal licence to make repeated and multiple purchases across different venues, different modes, different geographies, it is that at this point it will become apparent that there is a legal activity perhaps taking place. If we are going to use a new fit-for-purpose licensing scheme, then let's get it right from the start and let's make it a scheme that proactively will help the police, trading standards and ministers track and not just track but flag problematic behaviour before it becomes an issue. Now, if the Government doesn't think that this is a good idea or that this is not the right way to do that, I'm open to alternative means, but at the moment it is perfectly possible that someone could use their licence to stockpile and illegally sell use or misuse fireworks. The licence, I don't think, itself will stop people who abuse the system. That will happen anyway, but the use of the data and big data, I think, will quite powerfully prevent such abuse before it actually happens. This might be one way of doing that. Russell Findlay, to speak to amendments 79 and other amendments in the group. Amendments 79 is pretty straightforward and the purpose for seeking to limit the duration of a licence to two years is that, frankly, five years seems to be too long. It seems to be something that could be open to abuse and perhaps encourage the kind of stockpiling or black market behaviour of a licence holder. Furthermore, in five years much can happen with an individual, whereas two years seems to be a reasonable length of time to have a licence. One year might be considered prohibitive. Two years allows for, if it's a friend about bonfire night, two years. A line has to be drawn in the sand somewhere, and I'd be curious to know how five years was arrived at. It may be there's some good reason or proper asserts that's been done that's come up with this, or it might just be someone somewhere's sighted as a good number. I'm so happy to hear the minister's response to that. I'm worried about the onerous nature of the licensing scheme, and therefore have concerns about restricting the period to two years, given the additional cost. I wonder if there would be another way of dealing with that. For example, if somebody was convicted of a fireworks offence-oriented and other offence they might require, there might be an obligation on them to contact the relevant authorities. I'll just put that into the debate as something that we can consider going forward. There is the mechanism to revoke licences that would include certain convictions, but that is subject to further discussion. I wonder if there's a way of having an initial cost of obtaining a licence to set out whatever the number is going to be. Arrived at, and then a renewal cost could be a fraction of that, if indeed there was a two-year limit or such. Amendment 76, in Mr Greene's name, seeks to set a requirement on the Scottish Minister to be satisfied that the information provided in relation to previous convictions revoked licences, and the successfully completed training course is accurate. It's just to clarify that there were no concerns raised during stage 1 that the bill as drafted left any gaps or any issues regarding the information provided during an application, and if that would be considered when the decision is made to grant a licence. So it's always been our intention that this will occur in practice as part of the process of considering and, most importantly, verifying the applications. Section 18 provides regulations about exactly how that information contained in licensing applications is to be verified, and that will allow for a more nuanced and a more detailed approach to be taken. On amendment 78, that sets out that a firework licence will only be valid if it contains information about the licence holder's purchase history. So I don't consider it to be necessary, a necessary condition to require licence holders to upload information on each purchase made by using the licence. This licence will be held by an individual for a period of time, rather than being linked to specific transactions involving fireworks. I don't think that it would be particularly cost effective to incorporate that very specific requirement into the bill with no appreciable benefit to the information that it captures for the most part. If the amendment is accepted, I'm concerned that that could lead to all licences being invalid, for instance, if the purchasing history maybe wasn't able to be uploaded satisfactorily, maybe due to unforeseen circumstances or technical issues or something of that nature. I can't support that amendment for that reason. Amendment 79 in Mr Finlay's name seeks to restrict the length of time that licences can be permitted to no longer than two years. I understand that the length of time a licence is valid for is an issue that the stakeholders have expressed a varied set of opinions on. I think that it is really important that we strike the proportionate balance between robust checks without being overly restrictive and requiring the licence to be renewed on too frequent a basis. The working assumption that we've got at the moment is for the licence to be valid for five years. That was carefully considered during the development of the bill. That has included considering responses to the 2021 consultation and also looking at other licensing schemes in Scotland that are similar. In this case, that would be the air weapons licence, and that's valid for a period of five years. The licence term will ultimately be set out in subsequent regulations, and this amendment would pre-empt the consultation that we're going to undertake to inform the licence term. I think that the consultation is really important because it allows us to get the views of the public and the stakeholders and take them into consideration before we determine what the licence term should be. That amendment would limit the ability also to adapt to future circumstances and change the licence term in a timely manner to either reduce or increase the time period if it's determined, for instance, that that in the future may be more appropriate. I'm not convinced that those amendments are proportionate or necessary or that they strengthen the bill, so I don't support them. First of all, on the 78, I accept that, as a word, the licence may become invalid if purchase history is not recorded. That would be a by-product of a bad solution, but I do disagree that that information is not useful or helpful. I think that it's very helpful and useful. Where it can be captured or make a plea that, as the licence scheme is developed, if technology is available, it would be helpful. We still haven't addressed the issue of how people misuse their licence to make multiple repeated purchases of products in various locations and resources with a view to stop, pile and sell in the illegal market. There's a real possibility that that may happen and it's unclear as to how that will be monitored. This may be a technical solution to monitor that, even if it's not worded properly. Amendment 76, however, is an issue, because the minister, I think, only checked the official report, said that that's how we hope it will work in practice. That's very different from having a legal duty. Section 9 around the grant of fireworks licences is very explicit by stating the legal duty on ministers that they may only grant a fireworks licence if A, a valid application in any fees being received, B, the requirements under section 67 to be met and C, they are satisfied that the applicant can be permitted to possess and use fireworks safely and appropriately. What's missing is that my amendment is that they are satisfied that the information disclosed or provided by the applicant under section 71 is accurate. It's a fairly simple ask. I can't see why it would be rejected. Thank you very much. The question is that amendment 76 be agreed to, are we all agreed? We are not agreed, therefore, we'll move to a vote. Those in favour, please raise your hand. Those against, raise your hand. There are no abstentions. So the number of votes for the amendment is four. The number of votes against the amendment is four. There is an equality of votes, therefore, as convener, I shall use my casting vote and vote against the amendment. So the amendment is therefore not agreed. So I call amendment 17 in the name of the minister, already debated with amendment 16. Minister, to move formally. Moved. Thank you. So the question is that amendment 17 be agreed to, are we all agreed? I call amendment 77 in the name of Russell Finlay, already debated with amendment 70, Russell Finlay to move or not move. The question is that section 9 be agreed to, are we all agreed? I call amendment 78 in the name of Jamie Greene, already debated with amendment 76. Jamie Greene to move or not move. I call amendment 18 in the name of the minister, already debated with amendment 58. Minister, to move formally. Moved. Thank you. The question is that amendment 18 be agreed to, are we all agreed? Yes. Thank you. I call amendment 79 in the name of Russell Finlay, already debated with amendment 76. Russell Finlay to move or not move. I call amendment 80 in the name of Jamie Greene, already debated with amendment 16. Jamie Greene to move or not move. Let me remind myself what it was. Thank you very much. We will pause stage 2 proceedings at this point and resume consideration of amendments to the rest of the bill at our next meeting on Wednesday 1 June. We will also consider several affirmative instruments at our meeting next week. Those will cover criminal justice regulations relating to offences as well as on regulations on legal aid. I thank the minister and the team for attending on the closest meeting.


Today, we're going to look at Egyptian architecture. And we're going to look at it in a kind of generalized way. That is to say, part of it will be historical. Part of it will be geographical. And part of it will have to do with basic organizational principles, basic formal ideas, basic ideas about the landscape, about technology, and building that give character to Egyptian architecture. But the first thing I'd like to do is call your attention to this quote by Ernst Gombrich, who is a great 20th century art historian. In looking at Egyptian art, he notices this. It is one of the greatest things in Egyptian art that all the statues, paintings, and architectural forms seem to fall into place as if they obeyed one law, which the creation of all people seem to obey, a style. Now, Gombrich is talking about a period of over 3,000 years of an architecture following the same stylistic principles. If you think about the way style moves around nowadays, about how quickly things go into style and out of style, it's amazing. I mean, back in the 1980s, you would look at a building, I don't know, by Michael Graves, with columns shaped like the Disney Dwarfs. And you would say, cutting edge, avant-garde, very serious. If you were to see the same building now, you would think, yikes, what were people thinking? How could they ever do that? And I have to say, even now, when you look at certain Frank Gehry buildings, a little bit after the heyday of the swirly, brilliantly colored metals, you think, boy, this is a real period piece. It keeps going that architecture is eclipsed. Style is consumed, and new styles, new brands, new images are presented and equally quickly consumed and discarded. And when Gombrich was writing this, let's say, mid-20th century, this condition was already going on. Style was already something that was so unstable. And so he looked back at something like Egyptian architecture and thought, why can't we do this now? And one response that people in the 20th century had to this desire for a true style. We could represent the cultural and social aspirations of a people was to search for that style. I don't know if any of you have ever heard the term international style. Does that ring a bell? International style is more or less glass box architecture. You take a rectilinear prism, you clad it in glass. This is the style. This is the international style, a style that transcends place, a style that transcends time, a style expressive of the culture. And of course, by now, it's a period piece. You look at that and you see it with the same kind of historical frame that you would see the Disney Dwarf columns and Michael Graves building or the Swirly Medal in a Frank Gehry building. But in Egypt, for thousands and thousands of years, a style obtained and gave character to all the works of art and architecture. And that's kind of amazing. Just to situate Egypt on the map. Here it is. And here's Ur, where we saw our friend the great Ziggurat. This is the Mediterranean. And Egypt is organized in a linear fashion along the Nile River. This is probably no big surprise to any of you. But it's an unusual shape for a country to have. Because unlike, I don't know, say, Ohio, which extends across plains, prairies, this is a linear civilization that clusters along the fertile edge of the Nile River. And in fact, the farther you move away from the Nile, the more hostile the environment is. You have these extensive deserts where no farming can happen. Two great kingdoms emerged in the prehistory of Egypt. Lower Egypt, the delta of the Nile, where it spills into the Mediterranean and becomes fan-shaped, delta-shaped. And upper Egypt, toward the source of the Nile, up toward Nubia. And so these two civilizations in early history came together. And we'll look at that in a moment. But one interesting thing about this kind of orthogonality, the north-south direction of the Nile, is that it's met by another strong giver of form. And that's the east-west path of the sun. So easy to orient in Egypt. You're either walking along the Nile or you're walking along the path of the sun. And because of that, there's a strong preference for orthogonal form. Do you know the word orthogonal? Because I do.  What does the orthodontist do? The orthodontist straightens your teeth, or the orthopedic surgeon straightens something else, something surgically, your bones. So the orthogonal means organized by right angles, organized by 90-degree angles. And if you look at Egyptian art here, and these are ones showing life on the river, you can see that this is not naturalistic representation of life, but a representation strongly conditioned by an orthogonal geometry, by the cardinal axes north-south east-west. Scenes of life on the river, the Nile is incredibly important. In fact, here we see a hieroglyph, an Egyptian hieroglyph, for world. And it's a nice little diagram. It reminds me of the diagrams we were doing last time in class. A circle, and in fact it's a gated circle. If we could see this well, you would see little towers. And east-west, north-south paths subdividing this. So in many ways, that's all you need to understand the organization of form in the Nile. Although it's not quite so clear as all that, because the Nile is not stable. The Nile is subject to seasonal floodings. And when the Nile floods, this marker of territory, this boundary line of property, swells, swallows up the land and disappears. And so because of the instability of the boundaries of the Nile, and because of the desire to tax people for the land that they had, and because of farmers' desire to reclaim their land, even when the boundaries have disappeared, surveying emerged very early on in Egyptian society, and with surveying geometry, kind of profound knowledge of geometry. So here we have Herodotus, historian, who says, this king divided the land so as to give each one a quadrangle of equal size, and on each imposing a tax. But everyone who's part of the river tore anything away, he sent overseers to measure out how much of the land had become smaller in order that the owner might pay on what was left. In this way, it appears to me geometry originated, which then passed to Greece. So geometry, the Egyptians have their kind of clearly delimited terrain, and they have a way to measure it and quantify it, and an increasing sophistication in mathematics and technology. In fact, the word geometry itself, if you break it into its constituent parts, geo and metric is earth measure. So geometry in its origins is the science of measuring the earth. So this precision, this mathematical precision, this desire for the orthogonal and the geometrically clear begins to give form to everything they do. This is a line drawing that represents a relief sculpture inside a tomb, and what the sculptor shows you are workers sculpting giant statues. And it's interesting to look at the scaffolding that they have, because the scaffolding seems to act like a kind of grid that helps the workers over here, and the workers over here, and the workers in upper Egypt, and the workers in lower Egypt collaborate on projects, and the pieces come together, and they all fit. It's kind of unbelievable. And they didn't have sophisticated tools, of course. These are people really with very, very primitive technology available to them. But one trick they used for their geometry and their measuring of the earth was the simple rope, the knotted rope. And again, these are redrawings from things inside of tombs. So we have this as kind of archaeological evidence that really these techniques were adopted. If you take a rope and you knot it into 12 sections, you can then stretch it out and make yourself a triangle, 3, 4, 5. And that's great, because what's so great about the 3, 4, 5 triangle is that you're using simple whole numbers. But with these simple whole numbers, you get a right angle. And I'm proving it to you using mathematics here. This is the Pythagorean triangle, and we have the square of the hypotenuse being equal to the square of the other two sides. So this is a simple technique. And it's a simple technique that you can use at enormous scale for the kind of monumental projects people were using. But in an even more refined way, there was a sense of measure pervading everything that was done. There was a canon. And the word canon here means a rule or a law. And in the case of the Egyptian canon, it means a rule or a law of proportions. Again, this is something some German art historian observed and wrote about that he noticed that there were a number of relief carvings where you could still see this kind of grid work underneath the figure. And it was conserved over thousands and thousands of years so that you would begin to get this kind of proportional figure again and again and again. And that made it possible for these great projects to take place under the control of many overseers and many workers and for everything to fit together. There are other things about Egyptian form that are pretty interesting. And I think if we look at this little statue from 1480 BC, we can see that it really looks quite different from everybody in this room. None of you are little cubic people, for example.  So something different is going on here than the representation or portraiture of human form. Something is happening here that's more driven by ritual than the desire to commemorate the fleeting presences of people on Earth. And here we have a good vocabulary word, hieratic. Hieratic is not the same as hierarchical. Hierarchical means an order of relationships from top to bottom. Hieratic means having to do with ritual, having to do with a kind of formalized behavior or formalized image that has ritual significance. It's also stereometric, another great vocabulary word, not so different from haptic, actually. Stereometric, in my really good definition of it, means something you could make out of cheese. That is to say, if you bought a block of craft cheese or velvita, let's go for the really good brand of cheese, and you wanted to carve art out of the velvita cheese, you would never get a bernini. Wouldn't happen. The cheese would flop. But you could make this out of cheese because it has to do with solid masses. It is haptic. It is stereometric. It is a solid form. It's abstract, and it's subtractive. The intricacies of form are not created through adding things together, but by removing material. Part of things that make it so ritualized, so hieratic, are the extremely formalized organization of parts. It is axial as an axis. It's symmetrical. Both sides reflect around the axis. It's static. This guy does not imply movement, but stasis. It's formulaic. It's almost more like writing than like portraiture. And in fact, if you look at the cube, you can see that on the cube, there is a kind of writing inscribed. So this is sort of a tablet that contains messages. And the image itself is kind of like writing, kind of like a message. So qualities of Egyptian art are really highly formalized. Axial, symmetrical, abstract, stereometric, haptic, subtractive, formulaic, and so forth, just like writing, just like hieroglyphs. We look at hieroglyphs, and we think, how is it that they're not pictures? How can we know that the hieroglyphs are actually telling us something? And one reason we have that information is that this astonishing artifact was uncovered in 1799. It's called the Rosetta Stone. And it has three different languages. On top, I believe it has hieroglyphs. In the middle, it has demotic, which is a kind of shorthand hieroglyphic way of writing grief. And in the bottom, there is classical Greek. And so any good scholar in 1799 or 1822, like Jean Chapeauillon, would be well-schooled in Greek. And so they could look at the Greek, and they could find recurrences of Greek words. They know that the word, let's say, cow happens here, happens here, happens here, and they find it again there. And so using the Rosetta Stone and the correspondence between Greek and hieroglyphs, the code was cracked. And it became possible for scholars and archaeologists to actually read these picture writings, the hieroglyphs, on tombs. And when they read them, it's usually stuff like 20 bushels of grain, 30 jars of olives, five bottles of oil. It's usually really boring. It's usually a kind of inventory of the crops. But occasionally, it's pretty interesting. For example, there is something called the Book of the Dead. And the Book of the Dead was translated from hieroglyph into knowable languages. And it really outlines this idea of the afterlife that animates so much of the art and the architecture of the Egyptians. It has to do with the notion of preserving a vessel that the spirit can reanimate. In fact, the word sculptor in Egypt, Egyptian, means he who keeps alive. So here we see our statue that we looked at before from 1480 BC. And here we see a fifth dynasty statue of Ranafer. Let's say that's about 2,500 BC. But they're more or less the same. It's the same little hairdo. It's the same preference for stereotomy. It's the same severe, motionless geometry. You see this striding pose. So there's a suggestion of movement, but it's not real movement. In fact, this leg is about five inches longer than this leg. But it's a conventionalized pose. And we see it again and again. These are figures moving forward, moving into the afterlife. Here we see statues of a couple of old kingdom pharaohs, Kafre and Menkaure. Notice in parentheses, I have Kifrin and Mycerinas. This will make you nuts. The pharaohs are frequently known by two names. There's the Greek name, which had been conventionally used. Let's say through most of the 20th century and before. And then there's the Egyptian name, which people are increasingly using because that's the real name. So Kafre is also Kifrin. Menkaure is also Mycerinas. Good luck with that. They're both easy to remember. You'll have no trouble with any of them. Either one will be fine for the purposes of this course. Look again at the posture, the impassive expression of the face, the clenched arm at the side. And look at this work by Mr. Picasso. Des Moises d'Avignon from 1906, one of Picasso's most famous paintings, really a painting that launched cubism, that defined the moment at which Picasso moved away from a more traditional kind of image making toward cubism. And you see this guy over here, or this lady over here, who very much reprises the basic posture of an Egyptian statue. Here's a little striding Egyptian guy. The rigid emergence from material that we see here and the adherence to the material in the Egyptian statue. In fact, Picasso uses this to set up a kind of narrative about the development of art from this moment of extreme stasis in Egyptian art through classical deployments of these kind of traditional odorless or nude figures in a full circle back toward what he might see as a more essential or more primitive, more authentic moment that he derives from African masks. So in many ways, it's a full circle. If we talk about this long arc of history from the oldest moment of Egyptian history forward toward the end of Egyptian history, we have more or less 3,000 years of continuous style, but it breaks into three more or less clear periods, Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom, with a couple of periods of pre-dynastic and intermediate periods in between. Old Kingdom is probably the stuff that you're familiar with. This is the time of the great pyramid building. This is the time when the capital was up in the Nile Delta. Middle Kingdom was really a period with lots of squabbling, lots of battles, not so much monumental architecture. But in the New Kingdom, there was a new flourishing of pharaonic power, partly because one pharaoh, Ramses II, lived and ruled for 60 years, which was a tremendously long time to rule. So let's look specifically at Old Kingdom, which is the third to the sixth dynasty. And you might say, well, why do we start with a third dynasty? And the answer is, because we have pre-dynastic stuff. And so the first pharaoh we can identify is King Narmer. And we know him because we can read hieroglyphics, of course. And there is a stone palette called the Palate of Narmer that tells a story. And the story that's told by the Palate of Narmer has to do with the unification of the two Egypts, upper and lower Egypt. If you look at the image here, you see a pointy hat man holding a stick or a staff and subjugating the man who's on his knees. People are swimming below, horus falcons, various gods are overseeing the whole operation. And we know who these people are specifically because their headdresses are associated with upper kingdom and lower kingdom. So pointy hat guy is wearing the crown of upper Egypt. And the other man is wearing the crown of lower Egypt. So back in around 3,100 BC, Narmer, also called Menace, because we like to use multiple names to mess with you, united the two Egypts. And that marks the moment of real consolidation of power and strength and the emergence of these great architectural works. We'd mentioned before when we were talking about translating hieroglyphics that one text that has come down to us is this book of the dead and that really much of Egyptian architecture, much of Egyptian art making, the production of cultural artifacts that are preserved have to do with funerary architecture and funerary art. That's probably because a lot of the everyday architecture, everyday artifacts, weren't built for eternity. You might take a river weeds, weave them together, give yourself a basket. You might take the same kind of, I don't know, papyrus shafts, weave them together, make yourself a little hut. And these things decay. These things get swallowed up by the flooding nile. And new ones take place. But when you are building something to last forever, you make a big effort to build it out of permanent materials. Hence the baked brick and stone clad funerary architecture. And you might even say, hence the mummy, right? You're taking the body and you're finding some way to take the transience and the ephemerality of human flesh and preserve it the same way that stone preserves shelter that would have otherwise been made of decaying materials. So the earliest kind of tombs we have for the Egyptians are called mastabas. And that's the same word as the Egyptian word for table or bench. You know what a bench looks like. So these are flat roofed things. But already in the third dynasty, the ambitions increase under the patronage of King Zoser. And he begins to build for himself a pyramid. We'll look at that in a moment. Let's just say a few more words about mummies, because you don't always get to talk about mummies for heaven's sakes. The body is preserved in this kind of ghoulish manner. And the reason you need the body is that the Egyptian idea about the being is that it has three entities, the ka, the ba, and the ach. And the ka is the spirit, the kind of animated spirit. The ba is the soul. And the ach is the reunification of these two elements that happens after death. So you need to have a vessel that can be the shelter, the new home for the body. And you make the mummy, but you also make statues as kind of backup mummies. So mummification, you all want to know, is a long process. But it's really ideal for Egypt, because it's such a dry climate that you can get the kind of desiccation, the drying out that you need. If you were trying to make mummies someplace like Scotland, it would never happen, because it would be too wet. But you remove the organs, you put them in canopic jars, special jars, and you dry the body in salt, and then you wrap it in bandages. Hundreds of yards of bandages. You put little trinkets and jewels and coins inside the bandages so that when the body is reanimated in the afterlife, it will be able to buy favor. Now, would you think that only really important people get mummified? I don't think so. I think you could mummify your cat if you want to. These are cat mummies at the Louvre, which are some of my favorites. You can also see cat mummies at the British Museum. And many years ago, let's say many years ago, I was in Egypt in the 1970s, long before you guys were even close to being born. And I had this guide take me on a mule across the valley of the kings. And he was an old man, and he claimed to have been with Howard Carter when the tomb of King Tut was found. And he was full of all kinds of anecdotes, you know? Carter, funny guy, King Tut, lots of gold, things that I could have said, actually. But he also said, and I don't know where he got this. I have no authentication of this, that when the railroads came into Egypt, there was no fuel, that you couldn't cut down trees and stoke the engines, because there were no trees. You couldn't mine coal and stoke the engines, because there was no coal. So the abundant source of burnable fuel, according to Ahmed, the mule driver, was mummies. That you had all these minor tombs of minor nobles, and you just threw them in the train and off you went. Who knows? Cat mummies, however. And along with, let's say, a royal burial, you might have lots and lots of grave goods. These are canopic jars that hold the internal organs.  So enough of that. Let's look at some mastabas. These are the bench-like tombs. And you see that they're flat, box-like things, haptic solids with little chambers inside. Here's a plan. So you can see that here's a little chamber where there might be a place offerings. But beyond that chamber, there is a subterranean shaft that leads to the actual resting place of the tomb. So here's the shaft, here's the tomb, et cetera. With the idea of mastaba, we come to another important vocabulary word, and that word is type. And associated with type is typology. These aren't specific to Egyptian art and architecture, but they're words that architects use all the time. Because one of the big tasks in architecture is how can you make something as mute, as built form, carry meaning and be legible and understandable. And one way is through type. So a type is a class or a group of buildings distinguished by shared formal characteristics and derived from the same historical source. So in Egypt, anybody seeing a mastaba would say, huh, dead person there. I know what's going on. Typology is the study of types and formal organizations. And for the purposes of architecture, you can use typology to connect to this body of historically embedded meanings and tweak them toward your own ends. So here we can see a kind of transformation of the type of mastaba into the type of pyramid. Here's our little basic bench-like mastaba. And already here, this is the step pyramid of Zoser, third dynasty king. We see that the mastaba has become a stacking of mastabas so that it begins to resemble a kind of pyramid or a kind of ziggurat. It's an easy shift from this to this. And it's also an easy shift from the step pyramid of Zoser to one of the classical Giza pyramids, where it really is this kind of tapered geometry. Let's look more closely at Zoser's pyramid in Sakara, third dynasty, 2030 BCE. It's a great thing. It's a great thing in the same way that the ziggurat in Ur is a great thing. It really marks itself as a point of difference. You have this large, extending, flat surface of the desert. You get a precinct that already makes it special. And within that precinct, you begin to create concentric terraces and celebrate one point. It also is mountain-like. It's as if nature itself was being replicated in the architectural gesture. Here's a camel in case you were doubting that this was in Egypt. An interesting thing about the step pyramid of Zoser, and notice here we have two spellings for your convenience, DJ-Oser or Zoser. We know the architect. This thing was thought to be so amazing that in 2,630 BC, the architect was deified for conceiving of this thing. Zoser elevated him to the realm of the gods. Otherwise, how could this be done? So we have a couple of names of architects that are preserved to us from Egypt. And that's kind of amazing because we don't have that many specific historical facts. When we look at the Zoser complex, the thing we notice first, of course, is this giant step pyramid. But there are festival courtyards in the precinct, down and through here, all of these little buildings with the pyramid being in the center. And the festival courtyards are very interesting to look at. And one reason they're interesting is how they are articulated.  Articulation means a method of clarifying the relationship of parts to the whole. So when we look at these sheds or these pavilions, we see a series of verticals that begin to create a system of bays. A bay, simply B-A-Y, is the space between two columns. And so instead of saying this is one big lump, we can say this is four bays. It's been articulated. But the method by which these things have been articulated is memetic of nature. But memesis is imitation. And the forms in Sakara at the Hebsed Court, Hebsed as a festival, are all derived from river weeds, derived from these ephemeral grasses that would have been used in ordinary architectural construction. So there's some kind of idea here of preserving the body of the architecture in the same way that the mummy preserves the body of the human, petrifying the ephemeral and making it last forever. Ephemeral, by the way, means something that's very short-lived here for a moment and then decays. So these are some of the column capitals that you get in Egyptian architecture. And they pick up on these forms like the lotus and the papyrus that would grow along the banks of the delta. These are some images of papyrus from frescoes inside of tombs. And you can see the flaring of the papyrus and the flaring of the papyrus column capitals are not so different. We also begin to see a constructional system that's a little bit more sophisticated than taking lumps of heavy stuff and stacking them up, which is maybe what's going on in Ur with the ziggurat and maybe what's going on in the steppe pyramid of Zoser. And that is trabeation. Trabeation is another word for post and beam architecture. So for trabeation, what you need are some vertical supports and some horizontal things to span. And that's simple. That's easy. That's what you did with blocks when you were a little kid. So it's a kind of intuitive thing to do. But the tricky thing with trabeation is what are your materials? What can you use? And we've already mentioned who we were talking about burning mummies to keep the trains running, that they're really, even by this point, even by third dynasty Egypt, not so many trees. So you can't make a truss or you can't use a wooden beam. So what are you going to use to span? And what you're going to use to span is stone. So Egyptian architecture uses stone beams or lintel, L-I-N-T-E-L to span. And that is not a great material for making a beam because stone is brittle. I have here a piece of chalk. Chalk is calcium. Calcium is stone. I need a demonstrator. Sir, will you come here and see if you can break the chalk? I don't think he can. I stone. Try it. Oh my god. It's like a Superman in the class. It snapped right in half. Wait, wait, you're not done yet. Yeah. Push down on this and try to break it.  So you see that stone is incredibly good in compression but incredibly bad in tension, which is what you have with a beam. So because of that, you get a very narrow spacing in Egyptian architecture between the columns because you're spanning the stone. This is one of the little Hebsed huts in this Akara complex. And you can see this kind of elaborate system of radiation that recalls the weaving together of reeds of a river hut. And right down here on the bottom, I've given you a river hut in case you're wondering what a river hut might look like. We spoke about the mastaba as a type and how that type transformed over time and finally gave us the pyramid. And the pyramid, too, had various incarnations. So this is Zosir's pyramid that we've seen before. This is the bent pyramid of Sneferu in Dasur. And finally, the pyramid of Kyaps in Giza, the great pyramids that you're familiar with. And it's a kind of interesting march toward perfection, you might say. If I were to look Corbusier, the great Swiss architect who wrote a lot about architecture, I would say what happened with Zosir is that the type was identified. And Corbus would say the architect is like the engineer. You look for the type, and once you've asked the right question architecturally, you can then begin to perfect the type. So I would say Sneferu's pyramid is getting toward the answer, but whoops, it bends. And one reason it bends is that the angle was too steep, and they could not continue executing it at that angle. And by the time you get to Kyaps, Corbusier would probably say the question was asked, the type was identified, and the type was perfected. I like Sneferu's the best, though. There's something so sweet about the bent pyramid, so kind of ambitious and goofy at the same time. Let's look at Giza for a moment, because I'm sure Giza is the stuff that you guys are yearning to hear about. We have the three great pyramids in Giza, the Kyaps pyramid, the Kifrin pyramid, and the Mysorenes period pyramid, also known as Khufu, Qavre, and Menkaure. This is the fourth dynasty, Egypt. And this is just on the outskirts of Cairo. If any of you ever go to Egypt, you would be crazy not to go take a look at all of this stuff. These are giant things. These are 760 feet tall, the Qafre pyramid, which is the great pyramid. 760 feet tall is enormous. That's like 75-story building. Ridiculous. And you have to say, how was this possible? How was it possible to build this kind of stuff? And in part, you have an absolute monarch in the person of the pharaoh, so you can conscript and enslave as many people as you want. But in part, it was really strategic and clever, because you don't want to conscript everybody. You need the agricultural workers to continue producing food. You also want to keep them busy when the Nile is flooded. You do not want the agricultural workers to start thinking about how much they're being taxed and how they could have a rebellion. So during the time that the Nile was flooded, many of these people who would otherwise be idle were brought aboard for the project of building these things. Also, the flooding of the Nile made it more convenient to transport stone to the construction site. And you have the pyramids. Fabulous. So this is Khufu. And if we look at the temple here, let's say, let's look at the Kifrin, or Khafre temple, over here, we have some interesting ancillary buildings. In fact, all of them have interesting ancillary buildings. These are a lot of mastabas and some queen baby pyramids. The nobles liked to be buried in these piranha complexes, because the idea was if anybody is going to have a lovely time and a smooth voyage to the afterlife, it would be the pharaoh.  So we have all these mastabas, minor noble tombs. But here we also see remnants of something quite particular. This is a valley temple. And the valley temple has to do with this kind of procession, this movement from a, well, this is a causeway story. And the valley temple is down here, where the body is mummified, where the corpse is prepared. And then it makes its way processionally up to the pyramid and is subsequently entombed. So although we think about the Egyptian pyramids as these great haptic objects, these landscape-like artificial mountains, if we look at the whole complex, we begin to see something more spatial, something more processional. We also see the sphinx. Here's the sphinx. Just to give you a sense of the scale, this is the great pyramid in Giza. And this is, nobody's probably been to North Korea, so you don't know what that is. This is some crazy hotel they're building there. But right underneath it is the shard in London, a Norman Foster building that just recently constructed. Has anybody been to London? Have you seen this big pointy thing sticking up? It's giant, right? It is a huge thing. You see it from all over London.  Built by the most sophisticated technology available in the 21st century, this is this thing built 3,000 years ago, or 4,000 years ago, kind of unbelievable. And again, we've seen that. There are all these kind of funny, subterranean passageways. Like the mastaba, the actual burial chamber is underground. But by the time they're building the great tombs in Giza, they're already making fake entryways, because these tombs are getting robbed like crazy. And they have to figure out ways to trick the thieves. In fact, all the great old kingdom tombs that we've discovered so far have been robbed multiple times. So next time, we will be talking about middle and new kingdom Egyptian art and architecture.


We're in South Jefferson County where some citizens burned some trash that got out into some grass, very dry grass. So we brought a lot of dozers in and we have people say here all night it's probably four to five hundred acres here but it jumped. Same thing, wind taken embers from the stump.  We're going to have people here for all day today, tonight, tomorrow watching and making sure we don't have an ember jump. We've got a lot of good friends. We have far street division staff that are well trained and are ready to go. We've got good equipment. We have partners in rural fire departments. There was a house north of us right here, the Highway 15 rural fire department here, volunteer fire department, save that house. So without those partners we can't do our job at the forestry division. We need all sorts of partners but all citizens need to be our partner right now, refrain from burning. Yeah, we're very dry all over the state right now. Low humidity is everywhere. This high wind just makes for large, large fire hazard. Cheerfully speaking, the citizens have done a great job of being aware and not burning and there's burn bans on in 66 of the counties. I haven't checked lately. I bet there's more than that now today. So we, we implore all not to burn anything outdoors at all, not even a barbecue grill with this kind of wind. It's just plain too dangerous. So bush hogging, hitting rocks with a bush hog right now can start a fire in dry grass. Having a hot muffler you've come off of hours drive somewhere and park your car in dry grass, that can start a fire. Flicking a cigarette out of a window right now on any road of any sort is a big no-no. We had a big grass fire over the weekend and that's probably what happened in Jackson County and that was a 1200 acre fire. Lack of rain, low humidity, high winds means bad, bad fire danger. We haven't seen dry times like this in, in about 11 or 12 years. We've now burned over 30,000 acres in Arkansas this year. That's the most since 2011.


Have you ever thought about how a baby becomes an adult? How do so many cell divisions occur, yet all cells still contain the same DNA? Well, the body ensures this through DNA replication. So, what is this process, when does it occur, and why is it important? DNA replication is the process of copying an entire genome in a cell to produce two exact copies. The entire genome's DNA must be replicated before cell division in order to produce functional daughter cells. This can be done relatively easily due to weak hydrogen bonds between strands that allow them to be separated. So, let's explore the way that DNA is replicated. It is replicated semi-conservatively, meaning that the resulting two strands of DNA consist of one old strand and one newly synthesized strand. We can observe this in this simplified diagram of replication, where an enzyme known as DNA polymerase III uses old strands as a template to synthesize new strands. Also, note that the strands are anti-parallel, meaning that they are running parallel to each other but are going in opposite directions. So, how is DNA anti-parallel? Well, it has to do with the sugars in the backbone of DNA, which contain five carbons, four of which are found in a ring. These carbons are assigned numbers one to five, and phosphates are attached to the third carbon and the fifth carbon. The third carbon, or the three prime end, is one of the carbons found in the ring. The fifth carbon, however, or the five prime end, is the carbon attached to the ring. We can see this in the diagram on the right. In DNA, one strand runs from the three prime to five prime end, and another runs from the five prime to three prime end. This characteristic is important to note because replication can only occur in the five prime to three prime direction, and we will investigate the impacts of this later. So, let's have a look at some of the enzymes involved in the process of DNA replication. We have DNA helicase, which helps unwind two strands of DNA, which in turn exposes the nucleotide bases. DNA polymerase III then comes in and reads the strands and synthesizes a new one. Primase actually helps the DNA polymerase locate where to start by placing down primers, which are short chains of DNA. Now remember that these are just a couple of many enzymes involved in this process. Now this slide puts together all of the things that we have learned today about replication. We can see the DNA polymerase III in yellow moving along the strands of DNA, producing two identical DNA strands. Note the semi-conservative nature of this replication, where the DNA polymerase is replicating using the old strand as a template. We can also see helicase unwinding the strands. The most important thing to notice is that both new strands are synthesized in a five prime to three prime direction, meaning that the top strand here can be replicated continuously, whereas the bottom strand has to be replicated in short fragments that are stitched together later. This is what makes a leading strand with continuous replication and a lagging strand with fragmented replication. So, in summary, today we learned about how DNA replication is semi-conservative and we learned about how DNA strands are anti-parallel. We also talked about some of the enzymes involved in this process, such as DNA helicase, DNA polymerase III, and primase. Lastly, we discussed leading and lagging strands and how these occur because of DNA polymerase's limitation in synthesizing a new strand only in a five prime to three prime direction.