Good evening, everyone. Good evening. Welcome to the annual trout lecture of Montana State University Library. My name is Kenning Arlich and I'm the dean of the MSU Library. I want to give a big thank you to the Museum of the Rockies for hosting, and thank you to Montana PBS for live streaming this event for the first time in its history. And remember, your microphone is live. It would help if you just didn't talk until you got up here. Thank you also to the MSU Foundation, which continues to help us raise funds for the trout and salmonid collection as we grow it and digitize it to make it widely available. Our development officer, Jane Howard, is in the audience.  There you are. And Jane and I would welcome conversations with anyone who would like to contribute to our efforts. We're honored to have Tom McGuane as our speaker tonight, and he will be introduced in a few moments. But first, I would like to recognize just a few people in the audience. This lecture series is brought to the public free of charge by the trout and salmonid Lectureship Endowment, which was established in honor of one of Montana's fly-fishing legends, Bud Lilly, who at nearly 91 years of age is with us again tonight. Bud, will you please give us a wave? Bud continues to be a strong supporter of the library's trout and salmonid collection, which was founded 20 years ago. Other great supporters, some of whom have recently donated or promised their own papers to the collection are here tonight. I'd like them to stand and please hold your applause until they're all up. A.K. Best, Ed Engel, John Girac, and Craig and Jackie Matthews. Thank you. And now, to introduce our speaker for the evening, please welcome Dr. Chris Kearns, MSU's vice president for student success, and an avid fisherman himself. Now I know how the warm-up act for the Rolling Stones feels. I told Tom this evening when I met him that it's a little embarrassing to be introducing anyone when you're a fan. And when I look out at the group that's here this evening, I can tell that the trout are worried. Well, welcome to the Museum of the Rockies and this wonderful, this wonderful venue. I hope you're as excited as I am to hear our speaker this evening. In fact, I imagine that most of us here tonight need no introduction to Tom McGuane. That's fortunate, since as one of the true treasures of our treasure state, Tom McGuane has done so many things and has done them so well that any attempt to inventory his many accomplishments in a few brief remarks would otherwise seem hopeless. How do you succinctly convey the scope of someone who is a novelist, short story writer, screenplay author, movie director, cutting-horse champion, conservationist, rancher, outdoor writer, political thinker, surely most importantly for those of us here tonight, someone who's a good deal more than what we would usually mean when we describe a person as an angler. Tom's wide-ranging adventures in his skill with a rod and a fly are well known. But his writing about fishing carries us far beyond geography and technique and it lifts us towards something that we might want to call grace. As he himself observes in the prefatory remarks to his book, The Longest Silence, A Life in Fishing, quote, If you can find no higher ideal than outfishing your buddies, catching something big enough to stuff or winning a trophy, you have a lot of work to do before you are what Isaac Walton would call an angler, close quote. When I first read this remark, I was reminded not of the fishing guides, the how-to manuals of my youth. Those writings that offer us tips and tricks and techniques, I was instead carried back to one of my other heroes of that deeper kind of teaching, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and what he had in mind in the Divinity School Address when he challenged the students of Harvard, hard to think of here in Montana, on a Sunday evening in 1838 when he said this, Truly speaking, it's not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul. What he announces, I must find true in me or reject. And on his word or as his second, be he who he may, I can accept nothing. Like Emerson, I thought, Tom McQueen is provoking his readers in the way only the best of teachers challenges. And when I reflected on his topic tonight, the question, does fishing mean anything? I suddenly realized that I had simply assumed I knew the answer to a question that I had never actually asked, despite the fact that I began fishing with my father and my grandfather at the age of three. Tom McQueen has a rare talent for giving voice to those vivifying hints and suggestions in nature and in life that otherwise might go without saying, that might, without his provocative, his provoking prose, never in fact become part of our conscious experience. So if fishing isn't about winning some ego-driven contest, if it really isn't at its core about success or failure, what is the work that I must do to become more like what Isaac Walton and what Tom would call an angler? When Tom writes about Walton's classic book, The Complete Angler, near the end of the longest silence, he says this, quote, today's faithless reader will be somewhat baffled by the long shelf life of this unreliable fishing manual until he realizes that it's not about how to fish, but how to be, close code. Angling in this larger sense is not about the rhythms of cast and mend, of slack and tightened lines, of catch and release. It is about living more vividly and more true, or at least that's how I read it. Quote, the Bible, Tom writes at the end of his prefatory remarks, quote, tells us to watch and listen. Something like this suggests what fishing ought to be about. Using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves, close code. I can think of no more fitting advice than this beautiful invitation to watch and listen. And to that purpose, I ask you to join me in welcoming to the podium a true angler, Tom McQueen. Thank you. Thank you. Well, I really ought to just leave it at that. This was, you know, I sort of tossed off this title earlier in the summer when we knew that I was going to do this. And I've ever since been trying to live up to it. I said, my wife asked me what the title of the talk was, and I said, does fishing mean anything? And she said, do you know the answer? I pretty well stonewalled her on that one. I heard yesterday somebody said, yes, fishing means something, but it's a secret. And it may remain that way. But let me tell you why, how I got thinking about this. A couple of years ago, we had some of the Iraqi and Afghanistan soldiers who were variously physically and psychologically damaged. And they were visiting in our area. And I talked to some of the people who were leading them around. They had docents and doctors and all sorts of people kind of keeping them whole for this experience of learning to be trout fishermen. And I thought, this is a little far-fetched. We're going to give them a hobby and sort out their problems. It just didn't seem like a great idea. And I kept hearing that it was kind of working. So I thought, well, I'd like to find out a little bit more about that. And so I talked to some of my friends who'd had similar experiences. Many of you probably know Craig Fellen over at Wise River. He was a marine in Vietnam, had a lot of firefights. He made me really understand what firefights were like. He said, you can't believe the level of noise. It's all-encompassing, inescapable noise. And when you're not doing that, you're lying out like a tiger trying to assassinate somebody. At one point, they were bivouacking and digging in. And the Viet Cong had found an abandoned Catholic church and they climbed up to the top of the steeple and they saw where everybody went. And they bombarded them all night long. And when Craig got up in the morning, some of his friends were gone. He said at that point he felt enveloped by an inescapable sadness and that everything that he had loved as a boy before he went to Vietnam was gone. He came back, got out of the army, received the customary shameful reception that Vietnam vets got. And he went up to the Missoula area and he started fishing Lolo Creek. He caught every single fish in Lolo Creek. He watched a guy, an old man coming down the creek with a creel, with trout tails sticking out of it. And he said, can I look in there? When he opened the creel, he knew where every single fish in that creel lived. And he said it was the beginning of an aperture for him to see his way back to the life he'd had before Vietnam. And from that point on he rediscovered his love of life, his love of nature. But without fishing, he says he didn't think he could have ever gotten there. Then I talked to Lefty Cray. I think all of you know who Lefty Cray is. Lefty was a poor boy, was a ward of the town that he grew up in. They'd buy him clothes at Christmas and increase his humiliation by putting him on the front of the newspaper. So he joined the army. And he went almost immediately to the Battle of the Bulge. He was in unending firefights. He was instructed to go up and wipe out a Nazi machine gun nest, which he did, but they were all kids running the machine guns. He came back pretty psychologically beat up and they put him in, he thought he was going on from there to Japan. But the war there was over. So Lefty went into a biological warfare center and he tended a seven-story column of liquid which was distilling anthrax. And in his famous casting arm, he got anthrax and it turned black. And Lefty said, I've got to do something. And he went fishing. And through fishing, he crawled his way back into a fantastic life. Glenn Brackett came to the house one day and he brought Doug Merrick, the great broad builder from the Winston Rod Company. And Doug was very old at the time, pretty decrepit. And do you remember this? Put him out in a sandy spot in the river where he'd be secure. And I looked over and I thought, gee, he looks so contented. He's in the river, his casting stroke is as lovely as ever. But not all that many decades before, he'd been on top of a Nazi freight train warding off Allied strafing. When he came back, he had a long way to dig out. And he dug out through angling. So it's not just a hobby. It's more than that.  We don't know what to call it. We're working on, it's a calling, like the priesthood. So anyway, that's sort of the downside of why I wanted to really think about, could it mean something more than we have acknowledged? Because when I saw those guys from Iraq and Afghanistan staring at the Boulder Road looking for IEDs and looking at the ridgetops for snipers, I thought, man, they've got a long way to go. I don't know if you can get them out of this with a fly rod. But it seems to work. Let me see. Let me look at some of my notes because at my age, you have short-term memory loss. I was going to tell a silly joke about that. I was going to burst into laughter. I was going to say, that's no laughing matter. I was going to burst into laughter. Well, I maybe promise not to say this. And then I was going to say, I can't remember what I'm laughing at. Anyway, in Jack Hemingway, Jack Hemingway was captured by the Germans after parachuting in with his fly rod. If you read his autobiography, you know he seems to think it was worth it. So my father and my grandfather were fly fishermen. And it was not such a delete thing in the back of the day. My grandfather worked for the railroad. And I really looked up to both of them. I looked up to my father. And we had a great sort of family friend, my so-called uncle Ben, who was my father's fishing companion. Years after my father had passed away, I was living down on the Keys. And my uncle Ben came down there and he hired Harry Snow Jr., who was a legendary bonefish guy. He weighed about 350 pounds. And you could always tell where Harry Snow had been fishing because you see all the Diet Coke cans and the mangroves. So anyway, my uncle Ben said, let's go fishing. And we went out and we fished and talked about my dad and other things. And I said to my uncle Ben, I said, my dad was a great fisherman, wasn't he? And there was a long pause. And my uncle Ben said, no, Tommy, he wasn't. And he said, but nobody loved it more. So there was another little fork at the road for me. What makes a great fisherman? Loving it more, seeing more in it, finding more that attaches you to the great themes of life and nature? Or is it developing a high level of skills that allows you to perform others? Now, I tried this trope on a friend of mine, this English guy. And he said, well, what would you say about a guy who was a hunter and he never hit anything? Would you say he was a great shot? And I said, no, I guess it's different. Fishing's different. And I think the philosopher Ortega Gasset said that fishing and hunting are identical because he saw it as part of this primeval predatory activity that people have. When I, James Prosek, who spoke here before, he and I talked. He said, one of the great drives for anglers is to see fish. We're very frustrated to say in a long fight with a fish if we never get it up to where we can see it. And once we've seen it, we're there. And I think most of us from the time we were children wanted to pick them up or look at them and see what they were. Because they're emblematic of the perfection of nature. E.O. Wilson got the same bang out of ants and they led him to one of the highest views, understandings of the universe that we know of. So that's my father. He wasn't a great fisherman. What else? What makes people fish? Nat Reid spoke here a while ago. And I asked Nat, I said, why are you so committed to fishing? What made you spend your life fishing? And he said, well, he said, when I was a kid at Christmas time, friends of our family sent us a salmon that had just been caught for Christmas dinner. And he said, I couldn't believe my eyes. And he said, I never had a thrill like that in my life looking at that fish. And he said, I just wanted to keep trying to look at them, wherever they were. So I took to fishing early on. Not everybody does. Not everybody who loves fishing does. But I crawled to the edge of my aunt's yard in western Massachusetts. And she had a little stream that ran through there. It had a little pool. And I crawled up to it. I was about four years old. And there were brook trout swimming around in there. And I had, apparently, an epileptic seizure. And my mother carried me to the house. And they tried to decide whether they needed to get medical help for me. But I was just pretty overwhelmed. And I thought, well, that's kind of crazy. And maybe that describes why I behaved in certain ways later in life. But then I read the great Russian writer fishing and hunting subject Sergei Oksakov. And he also suffered a seizure at first seeing a salmone. No, I felt absolved. So I want to just read a couple of little things, very short. And then we'll go back to kind of chatting about this. There's always been an attempt to concentrate experience often to the point that the experience is elusive. This has happened to fishing, which ought, in general, to be slow, difficult, and personal. Commercial entities promising bonanzas are really offering to pelletize the experience of fishing. Not long ago, I watched a YouTube of a new fishing technique, which combined using a long soft rod to sling an array of tungsten nymphs upstream of holding water where the apparatus would dredge its way downstream to be picked up and slung again. The demonstrator cried out, I've already got 15 out of this hole. It doesn't strike me as a spiritual experience. I grew up fishing the rivers of northern Michigan, the Pyramarcat, the Pine, the Boardman, the Black, the Pigeon, and I still love to say those names. Under the instruction I got from my elders, one did not use lead in any form. And if those men had heard about tungsten, they would have gone mad. Dry flies, wet flies, and streamers were the orders of the day. Anything more was considered tennis without a net. But no lead. Lead was considered to be contrary to the spirit of things. A person with sinkers in his pocket was considered to be something very, very low, perhaps in the words of my uncle Ben, who had a great turn of phrase, a booger-eating moron. I've got some split shot. I got a level with you people. Trout are not an insurgency. They are not something to be defeated. They are creatures into which we wish to develop a relationship, and it can be the most satisfying to take up a form of fishing for them, which is intentionally limited and enter into a sort of dialogue with them. This is how our old-fashioned dry fly purists saw things. Often we fish not to be productive, but to fish in a way that seems right to us. Where's Archie Best? You're the last of the dry fly purists. Don't buckle! Here's a little story I want to read about a famous old angler that Glenn and I knew pretty well. He's been gone for years, but we've never stopped talking about him. Have we, Glenn? No? Even tonight, right? Bill Shad. Anybody here know Bill Shad? Anybody know who Bill Shad was? He was an unbelievable fisherman. In 1956, fishing in a public river in Northern California, he caught between 6 and 800 steelhead on a fly. He was a... There's never been anybody like him for the kind of fishing that he was best at. And I want to read a little thing I wrote about a time I spent with Bill that where he learned something about the meaning of fishing. I first met Bill Shad in San Francisco, and by the way, Glenn, did you call me the first flower child at the Winston Rod Shop in San Francisco? I'll get you for that. I first met Bill Shad in San Francisco, his hometown in the 60s. It was a summer of love, and Russ Chatham and I had already painted flowers on our Flugermetalus. Bill was one of the greatest anglers who ever lived. Those of you with double-sided wheatly boxes with 100 compartments will be interested to know that Bill kept his flies in the cellophane sleeve from his pack of cigarettes. When he came to fish with me later in Key West, I had a chance to see what he considered a fishing day filled with meaning. He wanted to try permit fishing, which I was then obsessed with. He climbed into my skiff one early spring morning, bringing with him his peculiar tackle, fiberglass rod, unshaped cork grip, taped-on guides, and an assortment of shooting heads, just part of his very broad-based escape from materialism. We ran straight from Key West, and I pulled Bill around behind Woman Key. I found one tailing fish. Bill raised his rod at about 70 feet, and the permit flushed. Bill turned to look at me and said, Huh? Time to move. I ran to the Northwest where I had a favorite finger-flat, long, narrow, covered with crunchy staghorn coral. The tide was falling obliquely across it. We had the light and the conditions seemed ideal. We found tailing permit from one end of the flat to the other. But Bill had perhaps 30 good shots, firing shooting heads with pinpoint accuracy. The permit swam right over the top of his fly, looking for something better. Finally, as Bill threw down his rod in the bottom of the skiff, I was able to hear his famous booming voice at first hand. These goddamn things are not game fish. A game fish has to have a mouth. I didn't know what to do. We lost the tide. The fish were gone. I cranked up and ran around the end of Boca Grande Quay where a cold and unseasonable North wind was blowing. And migrating warblers stopped by the wind. We're falling into the sea on spread wings. Bill saw them first and yelled, We've got to do something. So I motored around on the ocean while Bill hung off the bow and captured dozens of half-drowned little birds in a net. When we gathered the last we could find, we headed back to the beach on Boca Grande, spread them out on the warm sand. One by one, they dried out, took wing, and resumed their migration. Sitting in the sand, we watched them fly away. And Bill said it was one of the best fishing days he had ever had.  And it comes from the word fun because Bill died some years after that surrounded by friends and one of the, maybe the last thing he said was, I can't believe how much fun I've had. So there's that word fun, right? And this little chase that we're involved in here. Does this statement or anything he did suggest that Bill had led a frivolous life or a superficial life? I'm going to bring in my authority on such things. It was a Dutch philosopher, Johann Heisinger, who wrote a book that means a lot to me called Homo Ludens, which translates as Man at Play. I won't belong at this, but please pay close attention. Heisinger said that no other modern language has quite the sense of the English word fun. And he associates the word fun with play while claiming profound aesthetic qualities for it. All field sports, he said, ventilate our monotony and produce a longing for the past as a time when the importance of play was self-evident. And it relieved its practitioners of the need to explain themselves. Heisinger added that in fun and in play, quote, the great instinctive forces of civilized life have their origin. Law and order, commerce and profit, craft and art, poetry, wisdom and science are all rooted in the primeval soil of play. He says that its first characteristic is freedom, a word that shines for every fisherman and man's imperishable need to live in beauty. I think that absolves Bill Shad from Frivolity. We could start by understanding where we fish. We could learn from American Indians who did not view rivers the same way we do, that is, as boundaries, like the Ohio River dividing slave from non-slave states, the East-West Division of the Missouri, the Rio Grande that divides Mexico from the United States. Indians thought in terms of watersheds in which the river was but one component. And they viewed different sections of rivers as other entities in themselves, almost what we would call beets. But they tried to absorb a river in every way they could look at it, isometrically in its parts and in its whole, but they didn't really see them as boundaries between places. Is there a way to persuade people that difficult fishing is good fishing, that there is mortality even with catch and release fishing, and that crowing about your 30 fish day is nothing to be especially proud of? If you put all three of them on Facebook, Facebook kills a lot of fish. Missouri anglers are concerned with the well-being of fish generally, not just where they pursue them, but anywhere they live. Otherwise, it's a greedy crowd, poised to move on of the fishing declines. You hear that the most essential piece of equipment an American fly-fishing can own is a passport. Abandoning home waters because you can spend more in fly farther is a pretty low idea. We had an impressive group of anglers here in Bozeman, maybe we still do, whose passion was downtown Browns. Does anybody know about this little phenomenon? A lot of them were fishing guides. Their quest was to catch big fish inside the city limits. I think this is serious glory. I once saw fish and wildlife shocking a small stream around the Walmart parking lot, and was surprised at the number of flourishing cell monads. I imagine tiptoeing around the pavement with a three-weight and a six-foot liter. Might be fun. I have more admiration for the skill of catching an 18-inch brown in downtown Bozeman than for the herniating Browns I actually did catch, Tierra Del Fuego. I'm an avid spaycaster. It's interesting and frankly helps to pass the time steelhead fishing. Once on the bulkly, two local steelheaders stopped to visit and asked me if I would like to smoke some dope with them. Presumably the infamous BC Bud. When I politely declined one of them in his hoodie, his fanny pack, and his get-or-done baseball cap, said, how in the world can you stand a fish for steelhead, not stoned? There just aren't that many bites, he said. I could have told him that with my 14-foot burkheimer and 650-grain Skagit head, I was already high on narcissistic spaycasting. I have a little section here about the unintended consequences of angling. And I'm thinking this time last spring I was fishing on the west coast of Florida from my skiff, which I leave down there. And I was trying a little place that I hadn't found fish before. This was tarpon fishing. And I staked up on this thing and the fish started coming. And I realized a few of them. I had them around the boat, hooked some, had some long runs and ping-offs. But it was pretty exciting. And I thought, you know, I need to share this news with my friends who are fishing in other parts of Pine Island Sound and are not seeing any fish. So I texted all of them. I told them about the running fish, the running tarpon, the tarpon around the boat, the tarpon in the air, the small tarpon I actually landed. And I sent these all out. And unfortunately, autocorrect changed the word tarpon to tampon. I don't have to flesh that concept out for you, but running tampons, tampons around the boat just wasn't working for me. So another angling hazard. My 10-year-old nephew in Rhode Island caught a bright bass and disengaging it from the Adam Popper plug he caught it on. He managed to bury one of the treble hooks in his hand. My cousin Fred, his father, took him into a nearby hospital where the hook was removed. And he was given a tetanus booster. The nurse administering the shot managed to not only stick my nephew, but she stuck herself. This triggered the AIDS protocol. And my nephew was taken to another room to be grilled about his sex habits and intravenous drug use. After this, the confused little boy was anxious to get back to fishing. But with a reinforced view, there's something really wrong with adults. So with respect to our theme tonight, he'll be looking for the meaning of fishing elsewhere. I want to read to you a little bit here. We now live in an era of unprecedented distraction. Money has been deified. Religion is waning. The digital revolution has raised distraction to warp speed. It's an ominous speed because it's virtually shoving us through our lives, using our craving for information to handle us like livestock. But fishing is something of an antidote, reminding us of the rewards of mindfulness. Years ago, when we rigged up for a fishing session, we idled around the trunk of a car, not an SUV. Probably lighting a cigarette in those years before the Surgeon General's report, and nothing kept mosquitoes off your face better. Chatting, making sure the guides were aligned, strengthening the leader with a bit of inner tube, making wild guesses as to which fly should be first. Usually a non-technical gem on a seven and a half foot forex platel leader. Remember platel leaders? Then is now a success for me and uncertain, but we face failure with greater equanimity because so many other parts of the experience fulfilled us. Roderke Brown said you can really only learn one river in a lifetime, and probably only parts of that river. So what's the rush? The great Nobel Prize Laureate, Laureate J.M. Koets has said, we recognize in the clock the machine that destroyed the wilderness. The uncertainties of fishing undermine all forms of smugness. As to losing fish, remember what Walton said, how can you lose what you never had? But I would like to describe to you a day of diminishing smugness. Three of us were preparing to fish a tricohatch, and these irritating bugs were everywhere. Two of us were garden variety trout nuts, and it rigged up with 15 foot seven X leaders and tiny imitations that we tied on by putting our reading glasses over the top of our flip fogals. The third member of our group was Bob, a six and a half foot Mormon cowboy who fished once in a while and had brought along his glass rod, his short leader, and a large rubber-legged floaty toy for a fly. I won't drag you through this. Bob had a big day. We had tough going. Our knots could have been better, but we didn't fool any fish. Maybe something more impressionistic in the fly department instead of our literal offerings. But because Bob is a cowboy, he made no secret of his triumph over a couple of feet fuss budgets. Huy Fellows said Bob, examining our flies, that stuff is too small for a fish to see. They think it's pollen. For stream-side entomologists, this was below the belt. The trouble with knowing why you fish is that you may find there are others who you don't want to fish with. The nature-driven spiritualist does well to avoid the numbers guy. A friend of mine was pulling a famous tarpon fisherman when he spotted a rare and beautiful wading bird. When he pointed it out to the renowned angler, he was told, that is a bird. That is not a tarpon. Let's start paying attention. I made the mistake of telling the story to one of the new breed of keys guides, the kind in board shorts making gang signs behind the permit just landed. He agreed that it would have been wrong to look at that bird.   But I wanted to talk about women and fishing just a little bit. You know, there are more and more women coming into fly fishing. I believe that they fish a little differently than us guys do. They're not as obsessive about casting straight lines. They're not as obsessive about rushing to the next run. They really look things over. They seem to be, as we old hippies say, in the moment. And it's a mystery, a world mystery, that the biggest Atlantic salmon have almost all been caught by women who probably did much less fishing than the Atlantic salmon fishing than the men. I wanted to tell the story that one of my relatives reveals one side of this. I was in Iceland and I was in a hotel in Reykjavik and I got introduced to a group of English sports older fellows who were lifelong Atlantic salmon fishermen. And one fellow had just lost his mother and she must have been very old because he was quite old and they had been fishing the Alta in Norway for over a century. And his mother was not interested in fishing. His father was a fanatic and the sort of ultimate fish on the Alta River is a 50 pounder. It's this thing that people strive for over their lifetime. And his father had never caught one and one day talked his mother into trying fishing and she would rather read under a tree and she said, I'll go one day for a 50 pounder. That's pretty obvious. So many decades later she's dying and she's in her deathbed and her son, the avid angler is sitting next to the bed and she's in and out of a coma and he's waiting to see if she'll speak to him one more time. And she wakes up a little bit and she looks at him and says you'll never get a 50 pounder. And and she died. I had a little adventure last spring it was impatient to get fishing the river was still in runoff and I was creeping through the brush trying to find some little slick or something that might be fishable and I tangled my foot up on something and then my calf and my other leg kind of hurt so I looked down and learned that I was standing on a rattlesnake. So I thought, well you don't want to get excited about this you'll just spread the poison. And so I kind of shuffled back to my house and my neighbor who lives up the road has a summer place up there as a doctor and he came down and sat with me well we waited to see what was going to happen and cleaned the little fang holes and and then he told me rattlesnake stories about the doctor in California and he said that 80% of the people bitten by venomous snakes in California are either drunk or on drugs but his favorite he had a kind of ghoulish sense of humor his favorite was a guy who got a big diamond back and was mimicking the diamond back his little flickering tongue and it bit him in the middle of the tongue and then he said as though this needed explaining he said to me, that wasn't bright so anyway we lay around there for about an hour and he said well you're lucky it was a dry strike at which point my wife came in the raging Cajun and I said told her everything had happened turned out well and she wanted to go back to the beginning you were standing on a rattlesnake and I said yes that's correct and she said I need well this is just a little anecdotal thing I do want to say this to you before we get toward the end I have lived next to a creek for decades and you begin to sense in freestone creeks what kind of drives them they're very dynamic and they change colors depending on where stuff is running off and you get very sensitive about what makes them work as living things in some ways freestoneers or spate rivers are very interesting that way you can get very caught up in their dynamism and last winter I heard this tremendous rumbling sound in the woods up above my house it sounded literally like a locomotive was coming toward the house and I went down to the edge of the yard and this massive ice which probably is 7 or 8 feet high in about 40 or 50 feet long came rumbling down the river turning it into a brown kind of creamy looking suds and it was so unusual so I called a friend of mine who lives almost next door but actually lives in California and he said we're going to go to the fishing and I thought maybe there's more to it than that so I thought I made a couple of notes to myself and it has to do with this Montana is a snow driven ecosystem long story short and if you stand in a freestone river as it changes through the year it really embeds you profoundly or in this case our biological home place actually operates you could say this about other riverine systems as well as tidal water in any case all are enmeshed in quite broad even planetary systems but fishing is one way in a good way figuring out where you are and I'm still learning my place on earth experiencing nature is something objective but learning as best I can that I'm only a part of it the imaginary firewall that modern man believes exists between himself and nature is truly a malignant fantasy because mankind urgently needs a better approach to its own survival the 20th century was the most war written in history but now that heedless economic competition or what Klausowitz called war by other means has replaced conventional warfare all signs suggest that we are actually at war with the earth itself for today's purposes I can say that unless something is done to reduce the effects of global warming you can kiss cold water fisheries goodbye two years ago I fished the Render River in Russia with a fine man named Sasha excellent fisherman guide who bore the fragility resulting from three tours of duty in the war in Chechnya when I mistakenly asked him about it he fell completely apart he made me see that his recovery was incomplete and his war experience had been more terrible than anything I could picture but then he shook his head and he pointed to the beautiful Render River and said but I'll be okay I'm with the river now thanks a lot


It's really exciting to be here. I've been at these in the past but never in my current role. This is my second week as vice provost for graduate education and postdoctoral affairs. But I've been heavily involved in the energy community as Arun said for quite a number of years. And this is a great summer school. You guys are very privileged to have the opportunity to be exposed to all of the different things you are here in the energy at Stanford and Slack summer school. I'm going to give you a quick welcome. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to say a few words on behalf of graduate education at Stanford. And then we'll go into this fantastic panel that is organized. So you already heard that my own research is in energy.  So I'm going to focus my remarks on things that are relevant to this group. You have a great program. You're one day into it already. You can see about the various learning objectives. This is co-sponsored by multiple organizations, pre-court, institute, Slack. And VPGE office also helps support this particular summer school. And this is one of 10 that we're offering right now this week. So to give you the perspective, the Stanford Graduate Summer Institutes, there are 10 of them. There are 460 students that are taking part this week and post-docs from all seven schools. And there are examples of other courses. I know you had to pick this one when you went online to sign up for it. But some of the other ones are also very interesting. There's one on sustainable agriculture. That's being held at the educational farm. Negotiation at the law school. There's a design thinking and planning your life at the D School. There's one on ethics in academia at the Ethics Center, just to name a few of them. And everybody is going to come together on Monday at a reception. So I encourage you to come. You should have received an invitation for that. You'll be getting another invitation soon. We know you're going to be busy. You're already probably a little overwhelmed by everything going on here at Stanford. But you're going to be doing lots of orientation type of activities. But we do encourage you to come to this reception. You'll get to meet other students who have been part of the various summer schools. So what is VPGE? So this is the office that represents all 9,400 graduate students at Stanford University. We also represent postdocs. We try to expand what's possible in graduate education.  So we compliment what your department, your program, your school offers. We collaborate heavily with all the other units at Stanford to try to make sure that we can support your academic progress and your well-being as you go through our programs here. So we have sort of a holistic view of how we support you. We have five areas of focus which are shown here. So we offer academic guidance. So things that come up related to policy. We don't set policy at the VPGE office. But we can help be a resource to you as policy. We can help with problem solving. We also have a number of programs to foster diversity and inclusion. You can learn about them as you go through. And you can look at our website and see them. We have a very great program on professional development. And I'll come to that in a moment. It's really to help you succeed not just here in graduate school, but also beyond. So we will give you the tools you need. You can take advantage of whichever ones you like to really be successful. We facilitate interdisciplinary learning. For example, this Stanford at Energy and Slack is one of our SGSIs that really helps facilitate learning across boundaries beyond your particular program that you're here for. And also a big role that we do is we award fellowships and funding. So we have a number of fellowships that come through our office. Some of them some of you may be applying for or hear about. We see the competitive SGF fellowships, Dare, Edge. We also support other types of funding, both of faculty and students. So I encourage you to go to the web page, VPGE. We have lots of things on there. But particularly relevant to you as you come into Stanford is to look at what's being offered in some of the courses for autumn quarters. If you go to the professional development link, you can see what's being offered for fall. There are lots of activities that are related to these opportunities, but also things related to new graduate student orientation will be taking part in a number of those as well. So this is something that students have found very useful. It was developed in the VPGE office a few years ago. It's the Graduate Professional Development Framework. It really speaks to the point that you're here to do deep studies in your area of interest, but you also should take advantage of what Stanford has to offer and get broader skill sets that'll help you throughout your career. So you can see if you go to the wheel on the website, you can click on I'm interested in leadership and management or I'm interested in communication. And you can see what the offerings are and each of these. So we really encourage you to take advantage of these learning opportunities throughout your time here at Stanford. Stanford's a big place. It's a great place. You're really, I think, going to enjoy and develop in your time here. Here's where we are now, the energy at Stanford and Slack course. Here's the VPGE office. It's building 310. It's right next to the church in the quad. Come by at any time and visit us. But this is a very big campus and the one wonderful thing about Stanford has very porous boundaries. So you're here for one department and one program, but you should take advantage of everything that Stanford has to offer that's interesting to you. And we hope that you meet many people. You learn, you network with lots of different folks from all around the campus in different fields. So it's really one of the strengths of Stanford. You can take courses outside of your program. You can do research with people outside of your program. And within. You can get involved in student activities all across campus. So let me say a little bit about what it's like to be a graduate student at Stanford. I was a graduate student at Stanford myself actually. I got my PhD in chemistry here a number of years ago. And some things are the same and other things have completely changed. First of all, the campus has a million new buildings. That's really changed. This building wasn't here. This is about a four-year-old building that you're in. But the number of resources available around campus has really, really expanded. And we are here to serve our student populations. So it differs from being an undergraduate when you're a graduate student. You are going to be much more independent in deciding what you want to do. You take much more initiative. You're really the captain of your own ship. And you're going to have a lot of freedom. Now that comes with the good and the bad. Every path is going to be different. You can't just follow what your classmates are doing, because you might be doing something very different. Of course, you can look to your peers for inspiration. You should look to your academic advisors as well for information.  And grad school can be challenging. Undergrad is challenging, too. It's really meant to challenge you intellectually as you pursue your interests. But many graduate students struggle periodically. There are ups and downs in graduate school. You might encounter difficulty. You might be unsure. Is this really what I want to be doing? These are all normal to experience in graduate school. And there are lots of resources to help you through all of the various times in school. There's a really robust network.  But then we have lots of other groups further out throughout the university that are here to help you. For example, if you live in on-campus or subsidized housing, you have your community associate. And you have always the VPGE office. And there's also the Graduate Life Office, which is very valuable to graduate students. We're all here to help. You have already probably come across the energy.stanford.edu website. It's a fantastic website. Thanks to a pre-court for helping facilitate this. You can see that there's energy research and activities all across campus. You can take courses, seminars, internships. You can get career information. There's really no shortage of opportunities to look things up all across. There is a ton of research going on in energy. There are over 225 faculty and staff who do research. And you could see it across energy broadly described. Everything from environmental impacts to deep technology to efficiency of energy use and so on. So you can look and search this database and really take advantage of these things. There are lots of independent interdisciplinary centers. The Tomcat Center, which Arun mentioned that I directed until a week ago, was one of them. But there are many others. And you can find your particular interest in the energy sphere in one of them. They focus on different things. Some of them have deep research. Some are more academic. Some have policy. Some are related to innovation and startups. So you can find what you want anywhere. And I think the difficult thing, the biggest challenge, I think for new students at Stanford is narrowing down what you're going to do given all the opportunities. Because there are really so many different things. But take advantage when you're new here to see what's out there. And then you'll start to focus on what you really want to do. So let me welcome you again. This is the summer school, but it's going to launch the rest of your graduate work here. You have great opportunities lie ahead. But take the initiative, ask questions. People are really here to help you. Do not be shy about asking faculty and staff for help at any time. And we hope to see you at the reception on Monday. And I will now welcome you one last time and turn it over to this panel.


All right, lady. What is this? Hey everybody and welcome to show and tell. It's me Lady Aida with me is Mr. Lady Aida We're here at the Aida Food Factory not a green screen. This is the fact that we do all of our manufacturing And kidding and and assembly and coding and stuff Nobody else is here. It's just us in the factory. So we're maskless because we're Vaccinating we live together, but why you're bored of us what you want to see is everybody from the community Come by and show them what they're working on. So we're gonna kick it off with Kevin from Digi key What are you up to Kevin? Hey guys, how are you doing? How's everybody good? Good good So just a quick thing that I've been working on I've been doing a lot more 3d printing lately And I've learned a thing or ten from Noah and Pedro. They seem to know everything which is great So make sure and watch their 3d hangouts But I did start using octoprint this week or not this week like last week and started playing around with it and this week I added the Aida Fruit Neopixel strip to it, which is a Deal breaker because I kept shutting the light off in my office when I was when I would leave and I'm trying to do time-lapse videos and It would go dark. So the time-lapse didn't turn out very well so anyway being able to use octoprint and Directly integrate it with the Aida Fruit Neopixel strip has been Really great. It's been a lot of a lot of fun to get its work with a Raspberry Pi and very interesting and I've really enjoyed it It must be fun It must be fun that you can just like go to the Digikey factory and pick up Neopixels. Whatever you want Oh, yeah, it's a Digikey factories right across town and it you know, it's like a candy store for So yeah, I love it. It's been great Next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna try and figure out with one of the many thousands of Aida Fruit boards and Integrate a sensor to it so it'll sense the light when I turn the light off and I'll automatically turn white LEDs on Good idea. That's right. We just got We have one of the new iOS devices that has a LiDAR Oh, yeah on it And so I haven't seen a lot of examples yet, but we're gonna figure out like how can you scan something in real life? Get the file out. There's apps that do that and then print it. So Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, we'll try to do that. We'll let you know how it works out It'll be on the show until sounds good Thanks guys take care Next up it's Scott Scott's map. Hello, so Unrelated to circuit python. I don't know if I showed this or not, but this is fiber deserts net It's a project. I've been working on in my evenings for I don't know a few weeks now The idea is that it should help find areas in the US where people don't have fiber internet They have cable or they even have DSL. So this is kind of the current version of it and The red areas are the places that people don't have fiber and the more red it is with density So this is kind of what I was playing around with But it doesn't have it just has Washington here is what I did and I had to switch tech So I've got this new demo. This is New York and I don't have the broadband data here yet But you can see that I'm able to do the same like hover over all of the regions. It's so nice and It changes the regions depending on your zoom level So it'll do counties and then as you get zoom closer You'll do like census tracks and then census blocks and census blocks are the units that the FCC reports all this stuff and that's kind of why it's centered like that and I just wanted to do a shout-out because the project that I'm switching to you for this is actually I think called data set spelled like cassette. So d a t a s e t t e It's a Python project and it it blurs the line between like static hosting and databases where you ship a SQLite database with your code and You can have like as many copies of that as you want And it has these cool properties that it has this default interface where you can actually just do SQL from the databases that are running on your server So it's a really neat project. I wanted to show it off for folks And I'm adding some extensions that handle all of the all of this like GISC data to it So next step is to figure out how to get the side panel so you can see all the data about a particular block and then also like Joining it in and styling it so you can find the areas that are most interesting All right. Well, just like the last round of municipal projects keep coming back and showing Some of the progress and then you're gonna be doing your deep dive sort of Python stuff. Yep Yeah, I've been making lots of Progress on the workflow stuff. It's not quite showable, but I'll definitely show it next week. Hopefully fully functioning Even if it's just a little duct duct tape I love the metro data analysis I love when people are like I want this data and like if you think about it 20 years ago There was no way to get any information like this about the your city-state country now It's like it's cool. It's like getting GIS data getting these agencies to to publish the data in a way that can use it They know that if they just give you the data somebody else is gonna make that right and for like the broadband stuff like there's been a couple of rounds already of like rural funds and They've not been spent that well in my opinion because they're spent usually on DSL And like people are getting DSL in 2020, which is just absurd to me So that's one of the things I want to highlight here is like oh, you're in this area And so and so got paid twenty five hundred dollars a household or a person to run you 10 megabits down and one up DSL like that you're sharing with like everybody else on your block, right? Yeah, so like instead I think my opinion is that we should just pay for fiber to folks because that's a better long long-term investment And that's why it's fiber desert. It's not broadband Okay, so that makes sense Data set and sequel light fans in the chat. So yeah up some links in there and then we'll do catch up with you on Friday, right? Oh, yeah And then the two weeks after that I will not be streaming because I'm going on vacation. So just a heads up for folks. Yay Hey, all right. Thank you so much. Let's go to no Pedro. No Pedro. What you got going on this week? Hey folks Hey, yeah, so we wanted to show a prototype type of something that Dylan came up with so she had this cool Jeopardy game Brennan the CPV Because I love our many remember from reading rainbow is gonna be hosting July 26th through Internet say 26 to 30th. So we wanted to make sure we You know ready for that So there's a controller here that you push to get the I guess the players ready And there'll be three of these I can play along so you do whatever question We'll just watch it during the show do a little shout out that we do and then you know You get the answer and a little lot the stem speaker handles us some sound effects, and then you can reset that like that And then have the next player here the next question and go up So all bunch of wires, but it's all gonna fit within this little three printed box We have the CPV inside here And then the stem of speaker will go on the bottom and then this guy's just that fits on top with the diffusion The color like whatever player you'll have different colors on there And that is a prototyping and then I wanted to show off some key cap stuff since Yeah real quick just want to share I milled some of these key caps There's a 3d printed lemon cat lemon pad from a couple weeks ago So just wanted to print some of these key caps sorry mill some of these key caps in this hard wood So we got a couple of these really nice key caps in the shop So I've been using this as like a reference point to see like how can I mill the stem? That's really the most important piece about it hard to focus, but whatever what you're gonna do So I did do that and I ran through some some failures here So this design didn't end up working too well. So I kind of reworked it. So that's more of an enclosed bit here See that I'm sorry about the focus, but It were it ended up working out pretty well I also want to do some like multi material Maybe it can mill this out of some some HDPE or some aluminum and kind of press fit in there But so far it seems to be working pretty good And then we have some other kind of different shape ideas because like the whole point was to kind of make something that wasn't a square Yeah, so I've seen see milling learning learning some different things. Okay. Cool. And folks tune in to your show This couple has the longest running 3d printing show on the internet So you got it. I'll take 3d hangouts for 300 Thanks Let's go to know let's go to John Park John Park. What's going on? Hey, hello, so I also have some yeah, I got some bongo cat going on here I showed this yesterday and and you might be showing a clip later I don't know but the thing I'm showing on here is actually this feather wing which is a Two key switch feather wing and one of the things I want to point out is that since I was using this yesterday and I was actually knocking keys off when I was using it. I 3d printed a little switch plate and Essentially the switches click into this and they give each other a little bit of stability You usually keyboards have these a metal stamped plate or something like that so I've added that here and then I've also been working on a Fun little remake of a popular project in the mechanical keyboard community That's called the 2% milk and it's a two two key macro pad and it's in a milk carton So I designed my own version of that model that fits a feather and our feather wings So this one I've got our in our 52 840 in there a little space for USB a little space for reset And then a couple of keys and you can see there again. I've got a key plate holding those switches in nicely so they'll Be nice and stable nice and solid as you use them They won't wiggle out because these are socketed so these switches are sitting in a little socket They're not soldered in and then the third thing Of my of my keyboard stuff going on today's I showed this really huge novelty Key cap and key and I've modeled and printed a little stand for it here So we can still sort of see its innards and I just got in today some of our eight millimeter Diffused neopixels and I hooked that up to it. So now I can do some lighting effects when you press it This one's Not doing anything right now. It's not gonna like shut off my computer which is good I've disabled the USB output, but normally we can use this to output USB And now I can also do some cool lighting effects with that big juicy neopixel That's what I got going on. It's so chunky. We'll be playing some of your videos tonight I'm asking engineer and then tomorrow's JP's workshop and more. Yeah, come on by for more fun. Okay, clicky click click John Let's go to your dragon. Oh, hello there the eyes have it I thought you know, I thought my eye days were behind me like we were done But actually on the weekend I had some questions from someone who like actually makes like monster stuff and They wanted to use the monster mask in in a project of theirs and you know this this board. It's wonderful It's so slim, but even then this um, you know the Elton John frames around the eyes were problematic for them it was still it was still too chunky for what they were doing and So I think Lamar showed these on a it's not out yet one time But we were both looking at at these round TFT displays and Anyway, I got the the the eyeball code Working on a itsy-bitsy M4 it took like surprisingly little work and These these displays because they don't have the big frame around them. Hopefully that will fit Inside their their monster application Better so that was just a weekend project that I did and I thought I'd show it Aren't they Thank you so much will be you Next up we're gonna go to Brent Brent what you got going on Hello, um this past week. I've been working on a different whipper snapper and we're getting close to finishing it towards a beta which is really exciting and one of the difficulties is how we're getting it to people and Like with a different I or do we know we distributed it like we had this configuration file and if you're using a Air lift on your board you would uncomment a line you would comment a line if you're using phono or ethernet and With circuit Python and all the work done in circuit Python. I thought that we can make it a little bit easier so Like I have a board over here and It's a metro M4 airlift and if I connect it You'll see a whipper volume mount Just like the circuit Python volume. Oh And that volume contains a secret start Jason and I'm not clicking it because it has my keys on it But what it looks like I have like a templated version And if it doesn't exist still make it already is you can store your IO username and your IO key and In addition to that you can store what type of network interface you're using So if you have like an ESP 32 s2 With native Wi-Fi built-in all you need is your SSID and password, right? But if you have a phono, you need Like your GSM ID in addition to a lot of other different Like properties that aren't available like through this native Wi-Fi interface So it'll let us like add different interfaces for different board types, and that's what I've been working on Very cool. You're making it too easy. We'll get that feedback later. So we'll deal with it All right. I love I love teeny USB making mass storage a thing Yeah All right. Thank you, Brent. Next up. We're gonna go to Shawn Okay, got the double digit key. What's going on Shawn? Yeah Oh, you're on mute, but There we go. I got it. I'm actually not repping digit key. This is my own project That I would get working last time and I got it working And I know I've shown this off before On a previous show until This is a great you got a great set up here Thanks. You've got my ultra wide and then my secondary I know just like I need one on this side with the vertical so I can do more code, right? And um, so what I've got here is the the feather stm Uh f405 and I was doing tensorflow light for micros on it by hand by converting stuff to a um, basically a spectrogram and then using uh a convolutional neural network to look for Spoken words from it. However is I've updated it to Edge impulse where I've just uploaded all of my samples and use their stuff which computes the mel frequency Sceptre coefficients, which are slower, but they did all sorts of optimization So now it runs happily in an stm 32f 405 and it works way better. So Here we go. So I've got still full control. Yep. Hadouken Oh Oh, you can't hadouken Oh, it's not listening. Here we go. Hadouken There we go Let's if I remember the actual combo, right? All right, sweet. All right. Good work. Thanks So that was um, try that's cool custom voice commands are really really really hard to do And it's not internet connected and it's an edge device You know, that's what one of the things that we always try to explain the folks why why we're interested in this Collectively as people who do electronics because you don't have to have a giant cloud computer with an always on microphone In your house You trained all the models and now it lives on that. So exactly everything's all the voice stuff's being run right here on this Little microcontroller. That's it. All right. Good work. Thank you. Thanks for having me Hadouken I don't know that constantly now All right, good work Sean. All right You are the street fighter. Uh, okay next up we're gonna go to bill. Hey bill Hey guys, how are you? All right, bill. What'd you get going on this week? I got I got weird stuff this week So what I've spent most of the week on has been working with dan halbert to get the uh, custom The scripture is working and they work So you can go into boot.pi In this case, I took a known good xbox adaptive controller gamepad I was able to manually enable it and it totally worked and the xbox doesn't freak out And I'm not having to use a custom build the circuit put circuit python. So that's awesome Um, he then made a mistake and asked me what would be next and I told him This eye gaze bar and it has multiple reports within one the scripture Which is gonna blow apart his stuff. So now now we're working on that. So that's what we're working on working on How's the customizable usb so far though? Is it have you been able to do the xac stuff or is that still yeah The xac stuff is great. In fact, it's very simple. You put in the this figuring out the descriptor shots But that's not your that's not your problem. Um Once you know the descriptor loading it in is easy We are gonna change this in that i'm gonna need to give him If there are multiple report IDs, I need to tell them what they are So he's gonna add that in that's gonna require a little change before 7o comes out But with that that's only for the next step for the current thing of I need a gamepad that is weird because xbox adaptive controller is weird It works perfectly and it's easy. It's super easy You put it in boot.py you have to remember to do a hard reset every once in a while and like that's it just works I saw how like accessibility technology. It's like you used to just be like, okay How can we like work with people and and like make you know diagrams and cards and now it's like, okay You have to know hid 3d printing Yeah, operating systems boot style keyboard configure like it's just so intense It's cool because like we actually can make this stuff It is it is very cool what we can do with python So I was never a python guy before I started working with you guys Uh, but what you can do with python and like 50 lines of python you can do ridiculous things right now Um, the thing that I wanted to show you Is something that I was asked for I only change what I'm looking at here. So This is what I want to show you. I don't think I've ever shown it here before but I should have because it's been over a year So this is actually I'm going to change go back to my camera for a second here so This is actually what I'm going to be making a bunch of I got a request from a large Company that won't be named that they're doing it an outreach event And they wanted something where they could teach people how to solder and they said do you have any kits or anything? That would be useful afterwards and they happen to have a lot of xbox adaptive controllers in their company um, and so this is something we designed a while ago that takes in Uh, this joystick, which is one of the so I took your design the more. Yeah I added two two jacks to it so that you don't have to do any wiring because Before that it looked like this with glue with little tiny wires So I made this design a while ago, but it really um, it was really kind of brutal to manufacture So I wanted to show this to uh, Noah and Pedro. I went into fusion And I made a negative of the board So you can literally just pop this thing on And you've got a dig for doing all your soldering. Isn't that great? That's all I did in fusion what was literally go in and and extrude down the um, the parts just I I can show you over here making jigs is usually the hardest part of manufacturing, but you are like Yeah, so so if you want to show show my screen for a second, I can show you guys this. Um So what I what I did was I took the the part because when we make part that I'm pretty sure um The Reese Brothers do the same thing They lay out their parts right because you can download all these parts You lay them out and then you build your case around it, right? So you build the top around it and you build the bottom around it And what I did was I just flipped it over. I turned off the knob flipped it over and projected parts into A jig right so if you look at the sketches um And turn the sketches on here right I projected in the parts And then I just added some space around them and pushed them down And it was super easy to make a jig that would hold that I did it took a couple of test prints But now I can give them the board the joystick the two switches and a and one jig For per table and they can crank these things out as just a you know way to practice soldering And I love this idea of making the jig with a 3d printer This is so cool. All right. Yeah, you should yeah work with another page Or maybe publish this up or or you know Yeah, we can make a guide on it. Absolutely. All right. We're gonna go out a lot of other people. So we gotta go, but uh Thank you so much. Good to see you All right for everyone else if you can keep it to like a minute and a half We have a full house tonight. We'll be more people showed up even okay, so let's go to eddie next. Hey eddie Hey, hello, what you got going on? Yeah. Oh cool So I shared this on the channel the other day, but uh, I'm building this is for the omega zero that I've been promoting Congrats on your efforts. We've been retweeting and been watching all the progress. Good work. Thank you. Thank you so much So this is running circuit python and this is to automate my garage But what's new here that I didn't share last time is Now I added the raspberry pi zero here And before this was sending all the information to the mqtt server on adafruit So that's where I owe and I can actually share can I share my screen so you guys can see the back All right, just keep it to you know a little bit under a minute so I can get everybody else and I'll uh As soon as I see it come up here all out. It's a big up So this is where the data was going before to the adafruit. Uh, can you see the Oh Okay, I guess it's not gonna allow me to do it Yes, anyway, so this is sending the data I have sensors that measure temperature humidity And a bunch of stuff on my garage So this is all sending it through this stack and then from the adafruit I owe back and I can trigger my to open and close my garage But also I can monitor the temperature and all that information from the dashboard Now the reason I changed now and added a raspberry pi zero in the between Is because I wanted to have real-time information. So I made a Mobile app so I can also see everything in real time Which I was able to do it through the back and on adafruit I owe but I wanted a little bit more control because I want to add different devices that tells me Home when the doors are stayed open like so I have left my garage open overnight a few times So I'm preventing that so this thing automatically detected this open and it will automatically close the garage It worked. I agree But thank you so much. I just wanted to share this Please feel free to drop links on where people can find out uh more as well. Thank you All right, thank you so much.  So we got a lot of folks at tavis. Hey tavis Hey Just project So I've been messing around with nixie tubes lately. So the first thing I did was these little dice that you roll Shake it. Oh, this is so dangerous Each one's a die. Yeah To give you a result So after I did this I made this little board so I could make Not have to hand wire everything and then Built this guy So my my pops did the artwork. Oh nice. Cool And uh, he's got two russian nixie tubes in the top And you guys's made led display the eyes And your soundboard is making the sounds Oh, this is great. This is great. I'm creeped out But also So if the top ones are some kind of Nixie tubes used for probably some kind of measuring device. I would ask probably measuring other nixie tubes Awesome I'm so it's reflecting Yeah, no, we can see it if uh, if and when you get around to taking some photos of it Can you uh, send me an email pt data for it so I could post these up on our blog? Yeah, yeah, and I'm good. I was gonna make a little youtube video to Yeah on my channel send send all that over and we'll do we'll do a blog post that looks beautiful. Awesome. Okay. Nicely done Next up we're gonna go to Mike. Hello. Hey, Mike. Hey, how you doing? Long time Let me go and share my screen here And then after mike will go to stewart then mark and we should get done just in time if everyone keeps it to like a minute ish all right After this sitting around for multiple months for the after the ate a box came New one came how to use it. So this is cycle 25 for all the ham radio guys and people wondering about that Sun runs an 11 year cycle So those from bad to really great then it's like sliding down and starts over again. So this shows the Info and depending on those numbers. I say get on the radio or get back to work Cool So I've done a couple of cool things because I didn't see it I have both the it sleeps four hours at a time But if you press one of the buttons, it will wake up on that. So I have both types of alarms working on here And I didn't see any example code that clearly showed how to do that Also, what I have is a battery alert. So if the battery voltage gets below 3.3 I wake up. I Say battery low beep 10 times and I wake up every two hours as we plug it into the usb c port For the events there are all the solar events And if you press it, it you know how this thing works takes a lot of update It will show right now. It's really rough But as soon as this thing decides to update there we go It it's just printing the raw first entry of the jason file that's published by noah cool I need to get a public And then it's your flash once more So you can go back to refresh or events So Examples that are using both time alarm time alarm and button alarm If not, maybe I can polish up do something and publish this on the learn site Yeah, we had a lot of ham radio people who'd love to do That well, I thought let's see sin Of course it's on github. There's the link Okay, cool. Thank you so much. Thank you All right, we're good to see you again. Yeah 73. All right. We're gonna go to Stuart and then mark back to back take away Stuart Oh, can you hear me? Yeah Yeah, so I was get ready for my uh vaccine. I guess sometime this month So I decided to make what everybody else was making cool. This is a remix from uh, No, uh, no knowing his brother. This is great. So what I did was um as the that's the um The qt pie 2040. Yeah, and the uh the o-leg and Use some laser cnc Laser cnc here and here for that and for the back I'm covering all the wires. What I did was I I got the back stl converted to spg and cut the Did a cut out from the creak cut From a light stock paper so I can cover the wires and things like that Once you turn it on it does a vaccine. I don't know if you can see it and This is a vaccine a vaccine And then it blinks the uh, the uh, the uh neopixels I love this project because when people imagine like vaccine passports in their heads They're like it's gonna be like this and you and you built it so good All right, so thank you so much super cyberpunk. All right mark place out All right mark and marks You can show uh my screen. Yeah So this was an old land trend that I grabbed at a friends when we were having campfire one day It was one of those free days when there was stuff on the street And this was probably 10 years ago. So I have since been working on it And I can stop sharing this and show the brand new one Which has now been restored The next step is to try to find plastic to replace the plastic on the inside So if anyone knows flexible plastic I can get in here Please let me know and then of course to put leds in it because why else would you build something? It almost looks like you got good reasons in new york. There is these like stained glass water towers They were art projects. Essentially. Um, it was that reminds me of that because it looks like a Um, but the flexible uh The flexible film that you use for uh lights might work. Yeah, it's pet g. Yeah Okay, that's very flexible I've learned a lot about plastics in the last two days. Yeah, just go go to the plastic shop They'll have they'll have sheets of it. It scratches easily, but it's super cheap. Yeah All right, well very cool mark. Thank you so much for coming by and sharing your very good find Hey, thanks a lot. I love we recycling. All right. Upcycling. That's it full house tonight. Thank you so much everybody This is our favorite half an hour every week show and tell we're here 7 30 p.m. Eastern time every Wednesday Next up asking engineers starts a matter of seconds. Yes. Bye everybody. See you on the other side