I love your story about Julie, who is the woman who works in the emergency department during the day and her day job in a hospital. But she volunteers with the OWL research group, and she says it helps her with compassion fatigue. And she says, you know, I could really use an owl right now. I loved that phrase. How does that help her? How do we need an owl right now? Well, I think Julie deals with a lot of trauma and death in her work at the ER. And she told me that there's something so vibrantly alive and exciting about owls. She feels this same kind of weird, she's drawn to this weird mix, you know, that just as cute as can be. She works mostly banding northern saw-wit owls. They are about the cutest owls on the planet.  They're just adorable. And yet, you know, they have these talons, they're really fierce hunters, and they're just so enchanting, so alive that they really take her completely out of herself, out of her difficult world in the hospital, and put her into the woods at night, in the world of these owls.


Jamal Khair or Yeleki is still very much in the news. The hearing on the victim of the Euroband Nation protest kicked off on Monday at the Lake Estate Magistrate Court, Agwa, in Lagos. Family members, witnesses, different councils and the Corona Inquest Magistrate were present. Plus TV Africa's correspondent, Destiny Mormont, was there. The Corona Inquest resumes hearing on Monday after it was adjourned on the third of August, exactly a month after the Euroband Nation protest. Five witnesses show up. The mother of the deceased and two other witnesses have a count of what happened. Council to the deceased speaks under need for the hearing to be concluded before the final ride. The Corona doesn't have full information in respect to the status of the Corona Inquest. But he has promised that before the next agenda date, he shall make the findings and contact the Chief Attorney of Lagos State to see if they are done with the cops so that the cops could be released for burial. When asked for the release of the cops by the Council to the family, the Inquest says he will inform the Chief Medical Examiner to release the cops to be buried. Family members narrate their pain and expectations. Anything that government should do for me, God is there now, and we call places for everybody. We want more protection because we don't want situation whereby people will be barging in and you know, asking much questions that are not going to end, you know, for security reasons. The boss of the deceased and a resident of the area would testify as witnesses in the hearing speak to Plus TV Africa. I was called that day, that a stray bullet had hit her, Jimoke Uyeleke, and I came there, met a lifeless body there. Since the gunshot, we heard that they were from police. The conclusion is the police must have killed her. The Inquest requests for more time so as to give a comprehensive hearing. The case has been adjourned till September 6th for video evidence and more witness accounts. Jimoke Uyeleke died from a stray bullet at the Ghani Fawemi Park axis of Ojota on July 3rd, 2021. Destiny Momo for Plus TV Africa.


Can you hear me? Yeah. So, yeah. Okay. So, I'd like to talk to you about a simple way of modeling normal common active oscillations. I want to mention that this project was developed here in Trieste during my PhD. And yes, so let's start. So, in nature, there are a lot of examples of systems which oscillate actively, meaning that they develop oscillating dynamics by consumption of energy and production of entropy. You can find it, for example, in circadian rhythm, heart beating, also the fact that the modulation of canary singing. And also, there are some really nice recent examples on the dynamics of sitting and standing of milkhouse and also in the cell crawling in wet environment. So, what we've learned from previous talks is that whenever you go screen these types of dynamics, you end up with system which are non-marcovian in a sense that the waiting times between two states of the system satisfy non-monotone waiting time distribution. And, okay, here I mean it's done from experiment. So, this is something that we have to keep in mind for modeling this type of oscillation. But the model that we are interested in is one of the systems that we are interested in in the case of air bundles, spontaneous oscillation of the bullfrogs air bundle. So, inside the inner ear of the air bundle, in particular inside its sacros, so I don't know how this works. Yes, sometimes when this happens you just go and press the button there. Laser, yes. Laser should work, that should work. Okay, thanks. Okay, inside the sacros of the inner ear of the bullfrog, there is an epithelium of ear cells. And each of these cells has on its top this kind of cylindrical structure which is called air bundle. This air bundle consists of microtubules which are linked by some elastic proteins which are called tiplings. And it has like a preferred symmetry plane along which the size of these microtubules increases and also in this plane the tip of the this air bundle is able to oscillate. And here you display some typical oscillating trajectory of the system. So, usually this type of, the description of this type of system relies on some microscopic mean field theory. Mean field theory, let's say, description where you have non-linear, oops, sorry, non-linear and coupled differential equations. So, very complicated stuff. What we, every month is try to mimic, let's say, the behavior of these trajectories by introducing a simpler model. So, the model that we consider is, let's say, a generalization of the Orson-Ulembeck process. So, this is just thermal noise. This is the quadratic potential from which the particle moves. Here, the center of the potential is itself a stochastic process. So, this is the quantum stochastic process which takes two value, plus and minus C0. And the time in each of the two states is drawn from some weight in time distribution which in general can be any type. So, in this case, in this sense, the system is non-marcogan. However, the fact that we have simple quadratic potential makes the dynamics linear. So, the equations are linear. So, this means that you can calculate but they are difficult basically. So, this year we show a typical trajectory of this type of dynamic. So, you have an alternate relaxation towards the two minima of the potential. So, as you see, the potential switches between the two times. There is also a change in energy associated to each switch. And the particle relaxes between these two minima. So, just to give a simple description of how one handles this type of process, let's stick to the simplest case which is the Markovian case where the weight in time distribution is just an exponential distribution. In this case, the switching between the two states happens with a constant rate r in time. And we can characterize a state of the system by simply looking at the sign of the minimum of the potential, the sigma, and the particle position x. So, the density of the two species is just the evolution of the density of the two species. So, this is described by a standard, let's say, focal-plank operator plus this exchange term where you have, let's say, a rate of exchange of particles between the two species. So, this type of equation were derived already in the context of lamentable particles in combining potential, et cetera. But if you want to generalize this type of procedure to a non-Markovian system, you have to use a renewal approach which is not, let's say, okay. So, to solve the dynamic, calculate the stationary distribution of this equation, you see that it just depends on two parameters, which are this chi, which tells you basically how much the two centers of the potential are distinguishable with respect to thermal fluctuation. And this zeta, which is just the ratio of the two timescale of the system, namely the relaxation timescale inside the trap and the time between two consecutive switches. So, this can be generalized also for non-Markovian case. Already at the Markovian level, one can distinguish two types of trajectories. One is a property by stable trajectory which comes from a bimodal stationary probability distribution and another type of trajectory which is noisy in the sense that it has just some fluctuation around the average of the two centers. And this corresponds to an immodal probability density. So, here is just displayed the phase diagram. You can immediately guess that when the two centers are far enough with respect to thermal fluctuation, you are in a bimodal state and also you have to reset much slower than the time that it takes for the particle to relax inside the potential. So, you can do this analytically for the Markovian case, but what is interesting is that the model is linear so it doesn't fully recovers all the cases of the bullfrog because the bullfrog has a part in the phase diagram which is purely non-linear and it has to be patched with this type of model. So, as I was saying before, we are interested in cases where psi is a non-decreasing function and so for this purpose we introduce a gamma distribution. So, in the case, the gamma distribution has two parameters, one theta which takes into account the exponential of the k of the distribution over time and then there is another parameter k where basically how much your system will be non-Markovian. So, in the case of k equal one you retrieve the exponential distribution and you can see that the type of oscillation are not very regular and this can be seen also at the level of the power spectral density by noticing that there is no time scale in the system so there is no peak in the power spectrum. So, this is a comparison between analytical formulas and numerics. While, if you consider instead within time distribution with a proper time scale then you see that oscillation are more regular and also the power spectrum develops a peak and so the system is properly oscillating. This is also, once again, a comparison between analytics and numerics. I would like to give some formulas. The power spectrum with power spectral density as was also introduced before can be calculated by taking the free transform of the autocorrelation function and we see that in this linear system the full power spectrum is connected to the power spectrum of the process C so the center of the potential and with this we can calculate explicitly in the Laplace transform. As you can see this depends only on the Laplace transforms of the within time distribution and on the average period of oscillations and if you plug this inside here you get the full power spectrum and this is general for any within time distribution. Okay. So, we want now to fit data from the oscillation of our friend Alfred. We have we have done this for three species of bullfrogs. So, first we fit as you can see the weight in time distribution for example and then we see how we can basically retrieve the the physics of this oscillation. So, here is the fit of the autocorrelation function, the power spectrum and here is just the stationary density. So, we do this with the other two species Manfred and Lothar and okay also here we find a good agreement. So, we fit this with a symmetric model but of course in general these are not the symmetric but still we get a really good agreement at this level of say approximation. So, finally we want to characterize if you want the energetics of this type of system we are adding the statistics of the work. Here the work is just calculated as the variation of the energy with respect to our external parameter which is this C the center of the potential and the contribution to the work come only when this variation of the process is non-zero which means that this happens only in correspondence of our switch. So, this allows to simplify the calculation and once again we can calculate the average work. As you can see this average work scales linearly in time because of large division principle basically and we can extract the average stationary power. Once again this depends only on the weight in time distribution the process form of the weight in time distribution calculated as some typical time scales and also once again with respect to the period of oscillation. Finally we use our inferred parameters from the trajectory to calculate the the the dissipated power per cycle and we find that so the average energy dissipated per cycle and we see that it is of the order of 10 ATP which is something that we expect from experiments and also we had some bounds which were calculated at the level of the macroscopic model for the system. So, with this I thank you for your attention and I just conclude by seeing that we've just introduced this simple model, the minimal model to describe active oscillation and we see how even though it's a normal curve and it's still solvable. Questions? Yes. So, what is the requirement in the weight in time distribution to get regular oscillation? Sorry, I've not heard. Is there a necessary condition on the weight in time distribution to get regular oscillation? You mean a relevant application, sir? Like regular oscillation. Ah, okay. Yeah, it just to have a peak basically. So, you have to have a time scale which tells you let's say on average after how much time do you have to do it and I have a second question. When you fit your data do you get like similar parameters for one species or like good variations between an individual in the same species? Well, I mean also I mean probably they're not even made for the same type of you know, air bundle because for each type for different air bundles you have different characteristic frequencies so I mean it's not the same frequency, they're different here the frequency are different so the peaks of the spectrum are different because you take also of course different species but also let's say different air bundles. Thank you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yes, exactly. For me species in the sense different animals. Sorry. So maybe I missed something related question is that you had this exponent k sigma in the waiting time distribution. Yes. So how much does it vary from Alfred to Manfred to Lothar? Okay. Okay, yes. So usually they vary of the order of maximum one order of market. So for example. It's not universal. No. Biologically relevant question. Is there a correlation between the fitness and shape of the frog and the dissipation? So do the frogs that dissipate more are they thinner, more sporty? I don't know. Maybe if they don't do sports they're like less healthy and they heal. I don't know. You had this three history. That was the question. That's better because it has to stay there. I don't know. Are there other questions? Yes. So to what extent do you think like picturing this as a like refractory time is a good so is this like a refractory time that prevents like switches from happening immediately after you refractory time in the sense that you have to wait at least some time before this. Is there a reason why this wouldn't switch immediately because of some No. We don't consider that. Okay. And my follow up question is I mean you were saying this is effectively has the same sort of mathematical structure of run and tumble in a harmonic potential. Do you know if similar analysis with non-Markovian different waiting time distributions I don't know. I know just about exponential. Okay. So I think this is the first time. I don't know. I looked for it but I've not found it. Well there are some similar things in resetting but not in this context. Thank you. So you know that for this system there was this model by Julia and co-workers. Is there something really wrong with the model that motivated you to propose another one? It's just that this is simpler. It's as simple as that. We need something that is like and then this is also more general in this simplicity because it just keeps minimal elements on these deep types of oscillations and so you can in principle adapt it to other models. But there is no interpretation microscopic interpretation for this model. Have you considered what happens to your process if you present an external stimulus as it would be the case in the... So how it responds to noise? Yeah. It should be doable. It should be doable. Yeah. Are there any questions in the chat box? There is a month. No. Okay, so in that case let's thank all these speakers of the session and we go for lunch. I think we have the group picture, right? So we have to go where? Upstairs? So comb, dress properly, you know, these things.


From the Computer History Museum in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering food IT, fork to farm. Brought to you by Western Digital. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Food IT Show at the Computer History Museum. Excited to leave the set, take a walk over to the small kind of expo hall and look at some of the crazy innovations that they're showing here. And we're really excited to have Deepak Sikhar. He's the founder and CEO of Chalbotics. Welcome. Thank you. But you've got kind of an interesting thing here. We have Sally, the automated salad robot. So first off, tell us a little bit about Sally. Sally is our first product. We build robots for food service. With Sally, you can walk up to Sally's touch screen and you can customize your salad the way you want. You've got more than 1000 options for building your salad and Sally automatically makes the salads for you and she puts everything into a bowl and she uses robotics technology for doing that so that you get precise weight of each ingredient in the salad.  You work the front keypad and it assembles the salad for you. Right, that's the simplified version of it. Yeah. Okay, great. So what's the main benefits to the...  Is this for me at home? Probably not. It's awfully big for my counter, but is it for commercial applications, restaurant applications? Where's some of the applications? There's actually a lot of markets this can address. With restaurants, we are working with some fast food restaurant makers right now, restaurant chains right now and they like it because today in their chains, they've got four types of salads, each having 500 calories or more and they're not able to attract a lot of demographics like women and families because these people don't always like to eat 1000 calorie burgers and with Sally, they can actually put 1000 salads on their restaurant's menu. You know the exact calories of your salad. You can customize things the way you want and the labor cost goes down as well. You know the exact weight of each ingredient. So you're seeing interest from the restaurant space for that. You're also seeing interest in cafeterias, in offices and universities. The value there is you get food 24-7 and many engineers who work late at night like I do, we like to get food to lunch at 11 PM or midnight and Sally doesn't need to sleep. She's available 24-7 and not just that, not many offices can afford to have a cafeteria. So a cafeteria makes sense today only if you've got more than 500 employees and a lot of offices out there don't have 500 employees. So with something like Sally, they can put it even into these small offices and Sally is a cafeteria which offers fresh food and so we're seeing a lot of interest in that market as well. You're seeing interest in convenience stores because a lot of them are losing tobacco revenue right now and if they put a Sally there, people can get fresh healthy food 24-7 over a period of a day or two and that's valuable as well. Okay, so you just do the machine though, we talked earlier, you don't have a service to reload the lettuce and those types of things. So how do people kind of manage that part of the process? With restaurants, they can go and refill Sally by themselves with other applications like office cafeterias and all. If there's a cafeteria, they can refill the machine. If there's no cafeteria, we actually partner with companies, we partner with companies like Compass Group which actually go and refill vending machines and now they're getting into fresh food as well and those people would take the fresh food from their commissary and they would go and refill it. And so yeah, we work with our partners to service a lot of these applications. So I have to say it reminds me of the Coke machine that you see popping up all over because it's got, it's got 20 bins that can be wet or dry but you've got prefabricated combinations of salads as well as you can make your own and you always have the little calorie counter that tells you whatever you're making, that's what it says. So it's really a lot of variety with really not that many inputs. Yeah, the variety is what is pretty interesting because there are lots of surveys which show millennials love customizable food and this provides mass customization. In fact, I had a guy from Coca-Cola come this morning at this show and he called this the freestyle for salads. So yeah. And then obviously the data component, the cloud component, how does that map in? Cause clearly that's a big piece of the puzzle. Yeah, we actually collect data on what type of salads are sold and we provide that to our customers as well. So if there's a small isolated restaurant somewhere in San Jose and they want to know what salads are popular, if they use one of our Sally machines, we tell them, hey, this is what happened all across the Bay Area. These are the kinds of salads which customers like and they can use that intelligence to craft better, higher selling salads in their own restaurant. Okay, great. Well, if you're not really a salad aficionado like me, you've got the choice to have the chef's established salad. So deep back, I'm going to kick you out and we're going to invite Kelly Olazar up. She's the chef, Kelly, come on up. So this is Kelly Olazar, you work for Chowbotics and you're the one that designs a fancy salad. I am. I enjoy coming up with all these fun, nutritious recipes that keep employees energized and ready to keep going. Now what's nice is that you can establish a recipe and this will give the exact proportions, the exact mixes of the different things that you want to put together to make a certain kind of a salad. Yeah, Sally's incredibly user friendly. So any chef out there that's come up with a great recipe and wants to showcase it as like a last minute lunch special or they want to showcase it that evening for a dinner special, you name it, he's about a minute or a minute and a half to go ahead and pre-program a new salad. So I imagine that there's got to be applications beyond salad, you probably make things beyond salad. Can you put other types of food in the bins? We've been working and discussing the different possibilities, definitely on the horizon. We love to be able to do like poke dispensing out of it and other cold food applications. And then when we do get into hot food applications, we've been discussing those possibilities as well. Okay, before I let you go, what's the best salad that Sally's currently making up? My favorite salad is the California love. I'm a kale lover, so I got to go for that one. I like to add cheese to it and then I use hot sauce as the dressing. And does the data supported that that's the most popular one or that's just your personal favorite? That's my personal favorite. The most popular one supported by the data will definitely be our chicken bot salad. Chicken bot salad. What's the bot in a chicken bot salad? It's a fun play on the name, which Cowabotics. So we got chicken bot and then we also have a powered chow. Very good, all right. So Kelly, thanks for taking a few minutes. So again, Jeff Rick, we're here with Sally. Sally can't speak, so we had Kelly talk, we had Deepak talk. Really interesting innovation, whether it's speed, portion control, or just another way to get a healthy snack to the folks and you don't have enough employee to hire your own Google chef, you can get Kelly, she comes with Sally. So thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day. Of course, thank you. All right, and thank you too. A Deepak off camera, cool invention. It's Sally from Cowabotics. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching theCUBE from FoodIT here at the Computers Museum. Thanks for watching.


One of my favorite ways to demonstrate sort of the use of nested lists is through the application of Image processing now the way to think about image processing, especially when we're dealing with Sort of colors is mixing of colors Now this is where we first have to do a little bit of terminology because we're very used to paint, right? you know I happen to have just a Clear water bottle and I happen to have some three colors or GB red green blue now The issue is that when we're mixing something like dyes Let's say for example. I mix red in to my clear palette for a second If we're just working off of the mixing of dyes What we're doing is we're actually doing something known as a subtractive color model, right? I've removed some of the light That is potentially going to be How's the best way to describe this? The only thing currently being absorbed is the red light spectrum and so as a result we see red light But the issue comes in that as I begin to add in more colors And let's actually just say I add in blue for a second As I add in blue and assume I am because I'm not holding the bottle up as I add in that blue dye Yes, I'm getting it's kind of purple But I'm getting a very purple color because now blue light and red light are being absorbed but the issue is that this is getting darker and Just to finish it all when I add finally that that green mixture into this one too The same kind of effect is going on and as I add color to sort of my my Palette this is getting darker and darker until it's just absorbing all of the light spectrums The issue is that light is not like this when we add color to light We actually are doing an additive color model And so let's say for example if I started with red light. Well, if I'm just Shooting out red light. I'm just going to see red light But if I were to add green light to that what we're actually going to get is that mix And in fact, we're going to now see yellow light as a result instead of the mixing of red and green to produce brown And that's the same kind of thing if I add red light and blue light I'm not getting purple, but I'm getting sort of a lighter Pinkish known as magenta and the same kind of thing comes in when I were to add all three of those colors rather than getting a black Because I'm now absorbing everything. I'm reflecting all different light spectrums and that's actually what produces our white light Okay, so why do we need that to know sort of just that part first? Well, when we're dealing with image processing, we're not dealing with the mixing of dyes We're not mixing colors and slowly some things get darker. We're actually making them brighter So this is actually where we get into the idea of sort of pixels and the color spectrum on pixels Now they typically operate off of eight bits And if we were to go all the way back to binary representation, we can represent 256 numbers using eight bits or 0 to 255 And so we're starting to think about different colors. So say for example Mario over here Let me use a different color than blue to illustrate this We'll go red if I'm looking at the sky For example Well, it is some combination of red green and blue light that is producing sort of this Color of blue and that is represented red green blue or RGB so With this sort of representation the red even though, you know, it is not a red Blue or a red color. It does still have a little red in it. And so we can say that. Oh, well, it's gonna give me We're gonna say it's gonna have a value of 80 And then the green is gonna have you know a halfway point It's gonna have a color of 128 and then we're going full max on the blue 255 and it's through this combination of RGB that we do in fact now get sort of that blue and the same kind of thing goes on There's two separate colors of green going on here a darker and a lighter green They are also being represented by RGB's and you can see that the green value is The largest of the three going on there Another point though is that you could take a look and see that. Oh, well that happens to be just a number of rows and Going left to right. We're dealing with just a whole number of columns and Every single row in every single column is just a teeny tiny little square even smaller than what I'm working off of That we would represent as a pixel And each one of those teeny tiny little squares needs to have an R a G and a B and it is through the Combination of that red that green that blue that as you can see with this gif as they go They increase and decrease we start to see different colors. So as blue begins to increase if red is also Fully maxed out then we get a magenta, but if we add all of them maxed out We get white light as we remove the red. I'm just kind of following along. We get sort of this cyan color Now the point I was showing off just a moment ago is when we're dealing with these rows and columns This is a little different than how we learned geometry, right? In your geometry class, you typically talked about some origin point where zero was like always at the center And oh you could have negative values Going on there because you needed to know negative values Well, there is no negative technically in an image, right? What's the negative one pixel of my my graphic? It doesn't exist So this is some of those points that we have to think about another one is that when we're dealing with our Y axis, we've always assumed or always playoff this and this is something that even I you know working in image processing I forget sometimes why we always assume and think of as going up. So, you know, this is the one This is the two. This is the three But if we're dealing with images and we're treating them very similar to how we were working off of a nested list We're talking about this as being our first or our zero throw and then our first row two row three row four row Five row etc all the way down So as a result our positive Y values are actually going Down instead so the the larger Number and why instead of it being really high up there. It's actually really low down there X stays the same It is still just left to right in our world. So this would still be our one still be our two three four and five So you can sort of see that this X if we're playing off of my sort of Analogy, yes, it's a rectangle, but work with me would be effectively at the two row at the two sort of column if you will So with that in mind again We can take any one of those points and we can start to make different color combinations And if we work off of just a hard, this is the only color You know, I'm only doing red and yes We get these very bold bright colors that we're all very Commonly seeing you know going on there and then we get some Combination of them both so red and green would produce yellow But it is through again some combination of the red green and blue that we get all of these nicer You know softer colors that you would you know study color theory to know why like this yellow is better than that yellow I don't I don't know Okay, so we now have done a deep dive on color theory. You're all experts in painting or painting with light So how do we start to take this application and apply it to? Python and nested lists So the way to think about this is again, we're dealing with a multi-dimensional list So in our case, this is still a row with some Indices attached to it or some row with indices attached to it In some column so in theory these are just kind of going on there as Well, and they're all separated by commas and one of the wonderful things about this is we could do math Right, they're just numbers and math is just playing with numbers So something like grayscaling an image well if I can traverse all of these indices Well, this just happens to be three numbers and if I were to add those three numbers together and divide them by three so See that's a ten two Carry the one let me just cheat and do this skip ahead if you don't want to do math, but Come on You're watching a programming video. So of course you want to do math So we're dealing with a 12 carry the two 12 13 So one two four five So five thirty two divided by three. That's one three two Drop that down. So that's a seven seven twenty one Two two roughly speaking a seven seven seven. I'm not going to Use Decimal places here, but roughly speaking I could say oh well, let me just put a seven seven seven in the RGB values And once again the way to think about what will happen is if I increase all of these colors to We'll have to wait a second if I increase all of these colors to be the same value I'm going to have some variation of either White or black and so two fifty five two fifty five two fifty five we get a white Color that's changing really quickly We're doing that again with grayscale if we did that with all of our pixels Not just that one that I was working off of but all of them you could see that again There's that one seven seven and I threw it together in all the in the red green and blue And so we get some kind of gray and if I did that with every single pixel I would just get once again a grayscaled variation And so you can see that in effect. So this happens to be Montreal Convention Center I was taking it while I was there if I were to average each pixel and then replace that average with that color That's exactly what I would get Okay. All right now. Let's do it. Let me So There's a lot going on here, and I will actually walk through it as we go through it so the big ways to think about this is The first thing we are operating with is something known as the pill library pill is a Python image library, but the entire purpose is to take pictures png files jpeg files and Convert them into the nested lists that we need to work off of now It isn't just as fancy as a nested list. It goes into a little bit more of the object world But we can start to work off of it The next line is dealing with just what my file name is going to be I happen to have That's not what I wanted I happen to have an image in My little folder called peppers and if I were to look at that it's a Plethora of peppers reds and green peppers and you know banana peppers, but that's all it is just a bunch of peppers So I'm just going to go ahead and call that as a variable That way I can work off of this and we'll deal with file IO a little later on But the idea here is now I need to store that file that digital ones and zeros in my computer Or in my program and I can do that using the pill library. So in this case image open will Say, oh well, give me the file path and here's the file path and okay. I have my image now This has a number of different Settings and functions and behaviors and states Associated with it for example the width and the height of the image stored as a list So I can extract out say for example the width by doing IMG dot size and then Square brackets zero that'll give me the width The width of the image and then the height of the image same thing image dot or IMG dot size square bracket One that'll give me the height of the image now once again. This is stored very much in a nested list Situation it's not 100% the same as when we're just dealing with nested lists But it still has rows and columns and so for this first line of code We're dealing with traversing each row and you can see so I've got a variable I'm gonna call row and I am creating a range from the zero to wherever the height is remember y starts at the top or Why zero starts at the top and goes down as we traverse through the image and then same kind of thing I have something for the columns going to on with my image. So for each row for each row go through each pixel Over and over and over again Now we do need to extract out colors and we can do that by doing a few things now to start This is known as unpacking a variable or a list and the entire idea to this is if I were to just let me comment all of this out and just print Get the color at that particular row and column or that pixel I'm just going to see a List of numbers, right? My reds in my greens in my blues at any particular pixel The problem is that well, you know, I know that they're always going to be RGB red green blue And so what I can do in Python is I can do something known as unpacking them red green blue Now what this is going to do is again if I look at that first pixel 101 0 0 what I'm effectively saying is take that 101 and put it in the red variable take that 0 put in the green variable take that other 0 put in the blue variable and same kind of thing if I were to print red green and blue I Should see the 101 0 0 What did I do wrong? Oh? One too many races. I still see the 101 0 0 Well, guess what now that we have those numbers at those pixels We can play with math. We can do any calculation that we happen to want so What I happen to have here is just taking for example each one of those pixels and Saying only give me 75% of that value nothing terribly crazy. I'm you know making some weird You know darkening Image filter, but not doing anything outlandish and so now I take those and I create a new list Or tuple as it is called With that new color with that new red that new green that new blue now this last little 255 is just representing Transparency how transparent do I want this particular pixel? 255 not transparent at all. It is very opaque So not see-through is what I'm trying to get out there And then I'm just coming in and saying oh well Let's take whatever new color I've created and at that same row and column make that the new color for that particular pixel and so when I magically take my Peppers image with the green and red well the red and green peppers and I run this I Should get the nice little notification and I'll get this. This is Hideous, I don't like this color at all, but you can see it's like got a hint of red going on there But not quite grayscale. Well, let's actually take that idea of grayscale, right? We we showed that we can do it. So let's produce a gray or gray Either way works and then say red plus green Plus blue Divide it by three take that gray Save it run it. Oh got a float. Ah did this earlier. So it is only expecting an integer number So whatever we get again just like when I did it by hand on the PowerPoints, you know, we are going to ignore Decimal places so we're gonna just drop that by turning it into an integer and What we should see is a grayscale version of our peppers And that's exactly what we get and we can continue on with this through a number of different ways So for example just to skip ahead you can do other types of mathematical notations So for example blurring an image very similar You just take sort of the the pixel that you're currently at say for example, you wanted to be right here I want to blur a an image Then I would just look at my neighboring pixels and do the exact same average instead of doing RGB and dividing by three take all my two my reds take all these reds for example add them together and divide them by zero or in this case nine You do that for again, then the green and then the blue and you would get a blur effect And that's where you could play with some again This is more showing you applications, but the idea would be well now if I worked off of something like a radius Or how big do I make that box? How many pixels do I average around me? I could work off of different blur filters. So our one pixel blur filter Doesn't do much of a change especially for a high resolution image But if we were to increase that to something like 10 pixels now you can see though Well, we're starting to get a blur and if we continue on and we did something like a hundred pixels In my case, we're dealing off of something that is alright You know not 100% but we're still seeing sort of the colors going on there You can even go even crazier. I know that Instagram and you know snapchats and Tiktoks have gone crazy and sepia is no longer the the coolest filter in the world I think it's making yourself look like a Pixar person, whatever But if I wanted to do something like sepia, I just take my old red and if I follow this formula of taking the old red times it by 0.393 and old green in fact, you know Let's just throw this on there and see what we've got. I've got it on the opposite screen here So you don't have to worry So new red is again gonna be red times 0.33 plus green times 0.769 Plus blue times 0.189 Let's just make the new red new green new blue and then let's see old red. That's a little lower a little lower 168 and then the new 22 534 1 3 boom Okay, so we've just gone in we've done this crazy new formula of sepia, so new red new green and New blue so once again we take it we can pile and run our program Did it yeah same kind of thing forgot to convert it into integers afterwards So we were to take that boom boom Save that run that Congratulations. Here's my sepia filter for the peppers image Go forth and create the new Instagram and when Facebook buys you out. I'm expecting like I don't know 1%


Okay, okay. So have you been on TikTok or not that much a little bit. Yeah, I'll say you they talk about you often on TikTok Yeah, that's why I can't stay over there.    What do you see now since you clearly have the master plan? What do you see for the future? I ain't got a future.  I'm a real artist Hey guys, it's Enrique from talk of the town. Thanks for watching. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube to see more


Welcome to Pukipondas, the podcast where I explore big questions with brilliant people. Today's question is, how can we help more men to speak up about rape? And I'm in conversation with Ross McGill. Hi Pukie, hello everyone, my name is Ross McGill. I've been a teacher in London for 25 to 30 years, I've lost count. That's evolved into a blogger, stroke author and I'm currently conducting my doctoral research at the University of Cambridge. And I'm not talking to you about any of the things that you are mostly known for. So you're like one of the most influential teachers in the world, but I want to talk to you today about how we can help men to speak up more about rape. And you really bravely blogged about this some time ago now and I've been wanting to talk to you about it for a while. I was thinking about it a couple of days ago because I think it was two summers ago that I blogged about it openly and said I was a survivor of sexual abuse. And I've gone through, well, I was actually going through the process with the police at the time, but I guess part of me coming out publicly was part of my own therapy. To be able to talk to people, you know, being able to talk to you like this openly now was something I would never have done two years ago and it happened to me in our 13s. That's 35 years ago, 34, 35 years ago. And it's pretty something that I'd never spoke to about anybody about other than, you know, best mates, girlfriends, what, you know, my wife type stuff. And it was at that point I told my mother for the first time as well. So, yeah, two years ago, I think when I came out. And what inspired you to, you know, kind of dig into it a couple of years ago? I mean, it's been something that's been part of your life for a very, very, very long time before you kind of came out about it. I think I know always as a teacher, having the six-week summer period gave me downtime cognitively just to relax, to sleep, to eat, to see friends. But then when the days became blurred and you didn't know what day it was, you know, when you have such a long week break, you really start to switch off and relax. And it was at that point I often explored this demon. And it wouldn't be other than just thinking about it or squashing it back under the carpet. But more importantly, in the last few years, we've had a lot more stories in the press. So, I think specifically Chelsea Football Club, Barry Bonnell rings and the name rings a bell. And a few others, and I think working freelance now, I'll have a lot more time on trains to listen to the radio as I go to different jobs. So, I've had a lot more thinking and reflection time more than I've ever had in my entire adult life. So, it's given me a lot more space to think about me professionally and personally. So, I think those are the two biggest factors, plus all the news stories. And as the more people talked about it and the more men specifically or footballers who'd gone to clubs as kids and have been under the influence of coaches, I guess it gave me more reassurance that it wasn't just me, that it was okay to talk about it, those types of things. So, that process was probably going on for about five or six years beforehand. And I knew I was getting close to a point where I was going to start to talk about it publicly. Yeah. And do you think it's like completely leading question, harder for men to talk about this than women? Because this is sadly an experience that you and I share, but I think my take on it would be it's easier for me to stand up and say, you know, this happens to me. Well, I think it's hard for everyone, full stop. But the research I've at least I'm picked for my area is that men don't speak up. You know, I remember when I disclosed online what one thing I hadn't anticipated was the flurry of responses privately with other people disclosing to me. And, you know, I wasn't ready for that. You know, and I wanted to come to my aid quickly and say sign, you know, don't try to solve theirs. Just sign posting to people and, you know, be obese. I guess a signal or a beacon that you can do it and use my example. So, you know, I was for my my issue. I was I got a lot of responses from men. I think one man stood out probably 50, 60 years. He's kept silent. He just wanted to say it to me privately. And then I got I think I've got the recording somewhere on my laptop. A lady got in touch. She was in tears on a voicemail and said, my son's just spoken to me. He's he's read your blog. He's a teacher, etc. He's just disclosed and it was her husband, his father. So, you know, it was a wide range of stuff that I got, you know, and women getting in touch with me with horrific stories in comparison to my experiences. So, yeah, that was one thing I hadn't prepared for the flurry of responses. But you can see how the ripple effect of speaking out gives other people confidence to either speak out themselves or to know that whether they're not ready to deal with it, that there are other people who've gone through the same scenarios. So when you did decide to speak out about it, then you weren't I kind of assumed you partly did it knowing that that would give people the space to talk their own truth and, you know, set set that path. Yeah, I don't I'd so many things go on in my head. Could be and I think when I try to rewind now, I think when I blogged, I'd already gone through my telling my family. I kind of had a little roadmap in my head of consequences, but actually I had so many occasions where I was going to speak to my mother about it for the last 10 years, you know, a little walk around the park together, but I never did it. And there's a funny. It was a bit of a funny situation that actually made me do it. But when I spoke to my mother, then I told my three brothers and extended family and then I blogged about it and I think I've shared it a couple of times on my personal and professional Twitter and on the blog. And I'm not and I'm actually on my personal Facebook, but I've never really gone back to it and I might tweet it out. Haven't had just spoken to you today about it as a kind of annual thing, but I know it's an important signpost of people, but I hadn't really thought about everyone else. I was too busy dealing with myself. Yeah. Um, but the same time I was going through the police investigation process. So I had to be quite cautious. I guess of saying too much. Um, what I could say what I couldn't say. I wasn't, I wasn't really sure. So I didn't want to put the investigation at risk. I suppose not really known what would happen because that investigation concluded now. Yeah. Yeah, it included it probably took. Um, three of, in fact, I can't remember anything between three months to a year. I think the process took. Yeah. And what did your mum say? It sounds like it was really tough to it was I'd wildly overestimated it just like, you know, most loving mums would do. You should have told me years ago. We would have dealt with it there and then give me a cut all that type of stuff. And then I think once that shot was over over the next day, week, month or so, it was more kind of digging deep questions. And when I said I was going to the police, my mother did what she could to help and dig out any bits of evidence. Um, but yeah, the actual, so I'd gone, I think my niece was having a christening for her young son. So I'd gone up, I'd traveled from London up north where I am now to attend the christening party. Um, and I was staying with my brother and sister-in-law and I'd parked my car on their street overnight and my car was stolen. I remember your car being stolen overnight. So because I woke up frustrated, not only that all our belongings inside the car was gone for a weekend and my son's trumpet and things like that and the car was stolen that I'd also gone to up for the christening to pull my mum for one side because I was at this process with the police and stuff where it was brewing and I needed to say something soon because I also thought in a few months I might want to write about it as part of therapy. Um, so the car being stolen really affected the morning for me personally on the day of the family event. And I think I was about 20, 30 minutes away from where the event was from where we were staying. So long story short, I had to get a higher car but the higher car would only deliver to where my mother lived coincidentally to where I was located for this for where we were staying for the weekend. So I had to get a taxi from Halifax to Rochdale and I found myself and my mum for an hour or so while I was waiting for the car to the what's it called the higher car to be shipped to us and with the frustration of the car and stolen I thought right now is it and I said, mom, I've got to tell you something and I spat it out and that was it and yeah, a huge weight off my shoulders. You know, I should have told my mum one 30 years ago. Why didn't you? Um, well, I was only 13. So I had I wouldn't I wasn't a very confident child. I moved to seven states go different schools in my family and I was always a shy kid anyway, but I think moving probably made me shy than normal. Um, I wouldn't say I was a very articulate soul and I guess like anything, you don't know if it's right or wrong. You then question was it yourself? Did you lead the person on and then after the events gone, I guess you go a bit numb to it and you know, everyone's different. Every scenario family is different. Although we were a loving family and you know, very warm and given and loving stuff. I just don't know if I had the capacity to express it. I think and I then didn't really deal with it until my first relationship when I was 18 or 19 and then, you know, without getting too embarrassed and started to have one or two problems in the bedroom and started to identify what might have been the reasons for that. And I think I would have associated the the abuse to it. So then, you know, relation key relationships, close relationships. I'd kind of disclose, but by then it had happened and I still wasn't aware of what I should have done and no one ever ever said, why did you say XYZ or that I can remember? So I guess it just became part of what happened in my life and that was it and moving to different places. I guess I was never really reminded of the location or the event itself. And I remember just two or three times of my adult life going back to this particular location just through one holiday to work and whatever else and thinking, oh, that happened. I need to deal with that. And as you get a bit more wiser, you know, guessing my 30s and 40s, right? That was wrong. I need to let the police know. Um, but in my twenties, I probably blurred it out as I was trying to identify myself as who I am as a young man growing up, breaking away from family, going to university, that type of stuff that we all do. Then in my 30s, I guess I probably blurred it out through alcohol, you know, drinking things like that.  I guess my late 30s, early 40s really has put me in a very strong position to be able to talk about it or have no excuse not to just whether I chose to or not. Um, so yeah, here we are on 46 now. So, uh, 33 bit of math, 33 years later. Did you worry what people would think? Yeah, of course. You know, the whole range of did you lead the person on your dirty? What's wrong with you? Oh, that's why you've got one or two issues.  Um, you know, from all comments from your mates to school kids that have worked with, you know, you get one or two kids.  So if they say something and you think, oh, sir, you're weird, you kind of think, well, is that because of the event that happened to me that makes me a particular character? Um, so you're always self-analyzing and doubting your ability, your character and trying to attribute it to this event that you've got locked deeper in your psyche. That's a demon that you need to resolve. But, um, in 20 years ago, some of that, I was, you know, a weary teacher not feeling very well during the kind of winter season going in for a checkup for a cold or tonsillitis. And in there, um, toilets, the male toilets, there was a post out with a green badge. I'm sure you've seen it. The We See You badge by Survivors UK. And for me, that was a beacon of light moment because it first exposed me to a community of men who had been abused, raped and everything else. And, uh, I didn't do anything about it. I think I might have wrote the website. I made a note and this was before mobile phones. Um, but I remember the badge and the color and then I think I saw it two or three times again throughout the next 10, 15 years. And then I think, um, as I started to get active on social media, I probably came across the account or started to do my own investigations and hashtags and what have you. And, uh, I just touched base for them and I think I must have reached out. And then I got, they posted me a little green lapel badge and that also part of my own process was to put it on my jacket. For two reasons. One, it was a badge that really meant something to me, the first badge in my life.  And of course they make a difference and mean things, but when you find something really, it's the only thing that I think in my life that's made of me really meant something that I wore on my lapel. Um, and I'm saying that out loud.  Excuse my language. Um, I need to wear it all the time. Um, so I take it on and off, but I know when I first wore it, I also knew that someone one day would ask me what it was for. And I had to be prepared for that moment and, and fun enough, it came. But I think I managed to get out and about around the streets of London and no one said a thing and I wouldn't expect anyone to do. And I think I passed one or one or two people wearing the once as well. Um, but the funny thing is I was just about to leave home and my wife had one of her friends round from the school run and she, she just said, what's that? And I had to respond and say it out aloud in front of my wife as well for the first time to anybody. And it was a real moment. Um, but I did it and I said it to someone else out loud. I guess it was a bit of a shock to them, but I managed to kind of articulate what the badge was for with the kind of undercurrent that it was representing me and my experience without having to go into details and I can't remember the conversation ended, but literally I kind of grabbed me bag and off I went on the tube to my next job, but it was, uh, that was also a landmark moment for me to be able to talk to someone totally new about it. And then I went to one or two events. I think teaching awards also down in London where I wore it and I remember someone else in a group actually. This was a group version. Uh, I was talking about teaching awards and the winners and you know, I was being a judge and then someone joined the group and said, Oh, what's that badge? And I had to then say it publicly to about 10 people. So there's the whole is learning to deal. I guess it was learning to deal with when and when not to say it what to say and what not to say and to also gauge over an else's response. You don't want to create shock on other people, but you also want the badges there to raise awareness and to also bust a stereotype that a six foot four inch male very successful in the teaching community has also gone through this experience. So I bust your myths and perceptions about a strong white male. What do you think would enable more people to speak up? Because it seems from what you said that when you were first open about it that you had lots of people who confided in you and that was perhaps the first time they told anyone what what might make a difference there? Do you think is it more people being brave like you to talk about it? I think it definitely helps. You know, I think the stories the reporting on the news, but you know, being given the time in the day to listen to those news reports.  Rarely do I get a chance to buy a book of stamps and listen to the news. Nevermind, talk about my demons. So everyone's got their own different circumstances and scenarios and time of their life when they talk about stuff.  I think a lot of us take reassurance from other people who have similar highs and lows in our lives. As a kind of marker indicator that it's okay. We need to talk about it for whatever, whatever, whatever it is. And I think we can we can never talk about anything enough in terms of, you know, adversity and minorities and people that are victim to war and whatever else. So the answer is yes. How I guess through news report stories, Joe blogs, people like myself talking about it and people just going out of the way to rather than just me always promote my blogs and my resources go out of my way to share other people's stories sometimes particularly when given my audience and the amount of people that I follow occasionally rather than just tweeting about teaching just share someone's story. But the challenge for us all is we're consumed with so much content now. A lot of it becomes a bit noisy. So it's very hard to be heard and filter important messages. But there's a lot of companies out there that can help. So survivors UK was in my case and I'm sure there's others and survivors UK is a London based kind of organization for men victims of abuse. I still don't know who the version is for men across the country. I'm sure there's a name or something I've forgotten about but I think there's a need for that particularly in my case and others. You know more funding and stuff like that. But you know we all we fund you know given the virus now and two trillion pounds of debt and all the other issues we have to face. It's just you know there's there's children in need. There's people without food. It's all everything's a priority isn't it. Yeah it's a challenge isn't it. Do you think there's a role for for schools I mean in terms of creating an environment where if this has happened to one of their pupils that they can go and talk to someone seek some help. Well the interesting thing I wrote on my blog when I talked about it there that I'd organize a safeguarding event and I was sitting next to a teacher who our line managed and the lady in the room said the safeguarding lead said there'll be someone in this room a teacher who will have been sexually abused or raped. And the person next to me went yeah right under his breath and I kind of wanted as a school leader I should have pulled him out on it but because he was also my line manager and I hadn't yet dealt with my own. It us I stopped myself and I never lived that moment down personally in profession because I'd let I've let that person's myth perpetuate as a school leader number one in terms of calling out and to personally not dealing with it myself. It's just like you'd see you know a racism comment that time. So I feel very disappointed with myself at that moment but I wrote about it and thought well if we've got teachers in our system with those types of views for whether it is you know racism, sexual abuse what have you or even men being raped or sexually abused which people you know all the myths between men and women and men on men and women and women etc. We've got a lot of work to do so safe gardens always a top priority for schools particularly with children but there are lots of issues you'll be very surprised when you won't be but some listeners might be and there are a lot of issues within the staff profession itself. You know a lot of issues that schools have to resolve with the colleagues that they employ sometimes between colleagues never mind colleagues with historical events that they might emerge during their career within that school of college. But I think whether as ever as schools do you know good work in terms of helping kids navigate their way in the world you know condoms all those types of things that we do with sex education but exposing kids delicately to other things that they may not believe to exist you know man on man you know etc. etc. Busting a few perceptions but it's a delicate fit fine line as to as and when and then you've also got the parents to consider about what shouldn't shouldn't be taught in schools and all those types of things but safeguard absolutely number one priority. And do you think it is always the right thing for someone to speak out of something like this has happened to them or do you think there is a time when you might not. Probably yes and no I guess as an answer to the question. You know what's the event is it under investigation what can you say publicly what can't put the investigation at risk. Does it put the individual in danger. There's so many scenarios. I guess if I just talk about my own experience I was ready to talk about it is what's frustrating you know think of comments from Boris Johnson or even people that I've spoken to why wait 33 years. It's because everyone takes a certain time to process. And of course you've got you know episodic memory where it might fade over time. The evidence disappears all that type of stuff. And then you've got I might tell in the truth you know and also so you got all that to deal with as well but I think you have to respect the person whatever time of their life they decide to disclose. You know we all have mental health we all have different ways of processing things articulating things. And I'm an eloquent well educated man you know if I had ADHD or couldn't speak or as deaf and the same thing happened then it's going to be even more of a challenge and I'm sure there are a lot of people out there with those circumstances. So I think you know likes to people listening myself who are continuing to a podcast has got a reliable Wi-Fi connection and can put two words together compared to those vulnerable kids or adults out there living in poverty where those things may be happening and they do not have that network or that cultural capital to be able to talk about it. Those are the people you know we need to help everyone who are victims of sexual abuse and rape but those those should be our priority and I know the government have got an industry of experts and systems in place but there's never enough of everything as I said earlier about funding but I don't know if that's answered the question or not but I guess every situation has to be taken on an individual basis individual context that there's the law that has to apply and I think it has to be adapted to suits the context of the individual in the circumstance I suppose Was it a hard decision for you to go to the police about it because I say that's one where which our stories really differ. My therapist encouraged me to go to the police although it was many many many years hence because I'm pretty sure I could track down the man who raped me but it wasn't something I felt in any way able to do and I carry quite a lot of guilt because there's always that fear well what if he went and did it again or you know that well I I knew part of my little kind of pipeline of therapy process was that there was a slim chance that they would ever find him or that anything would be done because there was no evidence other than me and him in a room you know no other evidence DNA and whatever else all gone so I knew the chance of slim but I knew I were also another episode was looking through my mother's photographs I remember seen a photograph of him and think that is him in my heart sank when I saw it so I I made a log of the photograph where it was and at some point I mentioned to my mother who's this and XYZ and a name because I had a name in my head but it was totally a different name I think the police spoke to my wife I don't know the person's name I actually got the name wrong I'd given them a nickname but just part my healing I didn't want to know the real name because I just didn't want to do anything silly on the internet or anything like that but I part of the pipe loan was to report it to the police just in case they could connect their place of work because within a year and that there was a chance that they could search some databases of employment you know age male that type of stuff so they they did find him but my method was simply if I could give him one uncomfortable night's sleep known that the police had knocked their door with this accusation and that I had reported it more importantly a man because my father died in 2004 and I regret never telling him when it happened or telling him before he passed away and plus I wasn't at his death bed when he's passed away so I was adamant also to make sure that my mother knew and she's 75 but the interesting thing about my story was that my where I lived was a an annex or a building in the Salvation on a location of a homeless hospital or a children's home or a a fisherman's hostile type thing so as I would come home I'd go through the entrance up the building into our house which was secure but you think of all the safeguard and risk and DBS checks that we have today I know that I am not the only person child dare say within the Salvation Army who's been susceptible which is quite horrific really but I'm sure there's a lot of more you know you hear a lot of cases of 70s and 80s emerging because social media people see each other plus we people are of certain age get to a place where intellectually they have the now the capacity to have process it and now talk about it and have the the blog in platform to have their story shared so do think there's a certain era on a generation that can now but going back to my point about the police I just wanted to have it locked and I didn't want my mother and father more importantly to blame themselves for it happening to me under their nose so it was the classic although he wasn't a friend of the family or anything he was an employee under my father of the Salvation Army on a location where blame myself for not being a more aware or savvy because we had loads of Saturday jobs you know from milk and the goats to mucking out the cow pigs to paint and decorate him to clean and out the toilet size to do all these types of things before I went off the university so so that was another big reason for not telling my parents and also when I did tell my mother not happening and did it feel like the right thing once you'd kind of go on to the police and it must be quite difficult going through that process of yeah I mean I had to go through it all again it was a lot more rigorous yeah and under camera surveillance interviews all sorts of things at times when you didn't want to do it so they said you know interviewing here at this time under with this camera in these two people you need to come next week so whether you're ready or not you had to do it so so there was all that and not obviously fitting that in as a freelancer you know you work as and when you've got a job trying to fit that into appointments and not making an income was also a bit of a challenge but you go to my pin tweet on at Ross McGill I think I've tried to reply historically as and when different events happened just so I had a mental record of what was going on as and when I was dealing with it or when I was on a bad day or things like that so and did you go to therapy as well because you kind of refer to this as your kind of therapeutic process but did you did you actually get I have been offered it a lot of people have said I think I've talked about it personally to myself to my wife to others now and I see that and even though I would I know I would benefit from a professional therapist but I also know that I don't need it I don't I don't know if I'm in denial I feel much happier in my life I feel that I've said what I need to say I've done what I need to do I mentally feels stable our healthy diet I drink moderately you know trying to analyze all my own influences than factors and scenarios as to am I doing okay but that's not to say in 5 10 years or if something serious happens in my life health or bereavement that I might not go off the rails but it's a yes and no answer that's fair enough and I think the thing with with all of this really is that I think we're never kind of we're always on a journey aren't me I guess and that's it you've done your a lot of therapy and yet they're still that uncomfortable nurse I think for both of us I don't think either of us could just sit here and tell the story of what happened to us without it evoking something really deep and difficult the sorry go you know I I know once you know if I think about my father occasionally I'd break down in tears or there was a there was supposed to be a kind of teacher event for male mental health about I think last summer and sadly no one signed up for the tickets which also indicates that either people are interested in male mental health you know parting with their money or people don't want to go to that event because we've got two or three really important male speakers in the education sector plus me to talk about and this was also where I part of my healing process to talk about this publicly and I know when I've trying to think of the events where I might have said it in conversation and I've definitely said at key notes or training events where I've dealt with my own mental health and I've left it really like that yeah where people that know will know what I mean whereas other people might not or can go off and investigate but I've I've said that in that kind of way and I guess and do you said before that you had you know now you kind of look at yourself and you feel you're in a you're in a good place you're in a healthy place but that you had historically kind of numbed it through alcohol or or other things are you happy to talk about that a little bit that's yeah I can Freddie 10 1 minutes and then we'll go to the part and have to say that question again sorry just saying that you'd mentioned before that you had in the past kind of try to numb this through alcohol or or other means well I think looking back I'd numb in probably the right word but I think I make sure reason Salvation Army background Christian no exposure to drugs and alcohol arriving from you know North England to Southeast London in the 90s was pretty hardcore stuff you know I remember having the rip taken out me for wearing well wearing a Blackpool football club t-shirt you get the rip taken out of me anytime but I think in terms of fashion moving to Southeast London you know near Camden market that type of stuff and I was quite naive and and I think also moving to London gave me a bit more I also interestingly moving to the furthest part away from home I was probably desperate either to identify my own identity away from the Salish army and I managed to stay away from drugs and alcohol for two or three years of university so I was on a four-year B ed so in the fourth year and even though I didn't need a student loan I took one out to get a bit of finance and I guess it was beer money people call it don't know so at a good last year and and then the football team were finally quite happy if I had a pint here or there but I guess throughout the you know on an NQT salary in London there wasn't much left to buy a loaf of bread never mind buying a pint of beer but in my 30s I suppose when I started to earn a bit more as a middle leader and have a bit of more disposable income that's probably where I start to go out and enjoy myself on a Saturday and would I'd go out clubbing we made so we would start to maybe drink a little bit too much much more than nations or anything but when you start to experience being very drunk and you've never really had those sensations before not saying you hallucinate but certainly when you're drunk you certainly think in a different way and behave and if you're on your own and I you know all my family's been up north of 30 years so when you're living in a bed sit or a a one bed flat on your own you know trying to establish to some relationships or a family but you know single on and off for a long time into my early 30s so it was good 10 15 years of being a singleton bachelor in London and then starting to earn a good salary so you would go out with your mates because you're you're out on the look you know all those types of things and you pick up a drink here or there you know and drinking alcohol so ties in with your mood and you know being a teacher exhausted working you're not also eating during the day proper meals and you're going out on a Friday night and drinking many many pints of beer can see how it starts to really affect your health and your mental health and then if that becomes a routine it's a habit then isn't it you're doing it every week and I did probably for about five or 10 years I'll probably define myself as a binge drinker where I wouldn't touch anything during the working week plus also working in a DT workshop where if you're cutting wood in front of children on a bandsaw one little slip of the finger hung over there goes your finger so there was a bit of a risk as a DT teacher going to work with a hangover being a middle being a head of department response for other teachers you know all those types of things I'm not saying I did anything foolish but the all those thoughts anything trying to think of a word that would against the law but I've done what most young people would do that want to have a play around with alcohol and the party and things at that but I would say late 20s early 30s there was a danger where I was probably numb in the pain of either dealing with my loneliness in terms of relationships and my past and just living trying to live and survive in London and get some sense of family and home things are a lot better now yeah things are and it's hard work and it's you know it's it's just like like the blog and podcast whatever it's constant investment so you know I'm bit wiser now and I think all the advice I've been given to myself throughout the years about relationships I've been I've been someone loves you and a child and you know cat and dog and stuff one it's expensive so you can't work to have these things but you invest in your relationships how are you cuddle kiss every day these things make a big difference to a successful home environment and I'm trying to think how best to articulate it's it's you gotta look long-term you know it it's one silly mistake whether you know God forbid that I turn around and slap my wife in the face or I do something silly on a night out it's all destroyed in seconds so you've gotta you know I've come this far I'm not gonna let it go but you know life gets in the way car crashes bereavements fires whatever else and then and there you know things really decisions and if you've got a bit of history and some mental health going things to resolve it can throw you off the rails at any time and then distort your family you know whether your family distorts you or your fat you distort the family and so I treat I shouldn't say I treat but I look at my family my circumstances I have at home the same as I approached my blogging in my my my businesses that when people asking when I say I'm constantly tinker in the website every day or a tweet or a blog and although I haven't blogged or written anything for four weeks I'm taking time off I guess I'm re investing in the 12 years work where I have whereas on a Saturday night in my late 30s and 40s instead of going to the pub on a Saturday night I was blogging and I've done that for the last 12 years and so that's now where I'm reaping that reward so it's the same with family relationships you have to invest every day continually consistently consistently to reap the benefits and if something you need to constantly top up so it's like all of us when we live live listen to our grandparents stories and words of wisdom how do you live so long drink one glass of red wine a day that type of stuff whether the myths or facts consistent investments in the things that are important to you I think add up and I think also I think back to this particular topic I think the constant reminders whether I wanted them or not whether it's something in the news someone someone said something of red it's that constant reminder that there's a demon here I need to resolve and I've probably have many people to thank that I've had the capacity in the mental space to be able to deal with it yeah I guess I also have to thank my family my parents who you know working class background etc have given me you know the important things in life to be able to reflect and to talk and to be polite and say thank you to get to a position where I have the mental awareness and the reflection to be able to deal with it without breaking down or not we now to like I mentioned earlier someone with some learning difficulties or people not not the network around me to be able to deal with it and have you been able to come to a place of forgiveness of the man who raped you that's a good question I haven't never thought about that and the answers no I'm not I've not got to that point so I'll probably reflect on that question after we finish the podcast but I don't know what I would do and what I would say you have to come back to me for that one and you know I've been grown up to forgive people I know when I see anything on the news particularly within the teaching profession my immediate reaction is filth kind of lock them up type stuff which is not helpful I know but I find it so what's everything moves inside of me when using a child and I think I'm not yet in that position where I can forgive or be compassionate about people that do that to young people no your little boy wants to go to the park so is there a thought that you'd like to leave people with I guess just make when you already take time to talk to people would be you know at least can you talk to yourself I suppose but it's a it's a tough one that and because everyone's got their own circumstances and stories but I guess there's fine there'll be one person it's about finding the right person who's willing to listen and give you that advice and it doesn't necessarily I believe have to be a qualified professional I think that might come a bit later but that good friend or that listening ear or often someone that you don't know like you go to a conference and you end up talking to a total stranger about your deepest and that's just a great place to have a sounding board and I think those things help so though I've never gone to a kind of an event that's aligned with this particular topic I've always gone to teacher type conferences but the certain people you're drawn to and you start ended up having a really deep and meaningful conversation where you think or where did that come from out of nowhere within five minutes so you make very important connections with people and we all do so you find the right people that you can talk about certain issues with so I guess that would be my advice is talk talk to the right people when it's when it's the time