Live from Madrid, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Welcome back to Madrid, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. And this is day one of HPE Discover Madrid. Susan Blocker is here. She's the vice president of portfolio marketing at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. And Bruce Trevarthin joins her. He's the CEO and founder, I believe, of BlairX.  Thank you, Dave. Thanks for coming on. All right, so Susan, big show for you guys. We have these six months cadence of big messages and customer shows. So what are we going to hear this afternoon at the keynote? Wow, I'll tell you, we've got a lot of exciting news to talk about. First of all, the way customers are consuming IT is really changing. Cloud is changing the game. We got some amazing announcements to talk about around how we're going to help customers in the hybrid IT space consume IT differently. We're going to talk about how we're helping them manage across multi-cloud environments. We're going to talk about bringing artificial intelligence and machine learning to the data center, which is really transformational. So lots of exciting news here. Good, okay. So yeah, we'll be covering the keynotes here just actually in about a half hour or so. We kick off Meg, Antonio, a new leader. So we're going to hear from him. We've been hearing from him for some time now. And so, looking forward to hearing from him as well. Okay, Bruce, it's been a while since we talked about BlairX. Tell us what's transpired in the last couple of years. Set up BlairX, what you guys are all about and what's new. Sure, so Cloud Service Provider based out of New Zealand. Multiple platforms giving us that resilience. You know, the sort of general cloud, everyone knows what cloud is these days. But really for us, the journey, it just continues. You know, we keep, from a strategy point of view, we keep looking at where is cloud adoption at? Where is cloud going? You know, are these hyperscale providers going to enter every country and every market and really sort of make us sort of in-country boutique operators less relevant? So you're always asking that question and then you sort of hit with this new wave of expectation down from the clients. And hybrid IT has been the big push in the last 12 months. And what's really encouraging for us when we get hit with this new sort of level of interest and a slight tangent on this managed services delivery is that HP are already thinking the same way and they've already come up with a product line that's going to plug that gap. So we work very closely with HP with their edge line and their OEM team globally to deliver HP hardware on customer side or on premise. And then we put our own software on that and we link it back into the core V-Grid environment. And that really, for a customer, they keep those workloads on site where they need to be. And then you've got that public cloud environment for the disaster recovery and the workloads that don't need to be on site. So let's unpack that a little bit. Tagline, Hewlett Packard Enterprise uses, we make hybrid IT simple. That's the objective. That's right. IT is complicated, hybrid IT is complicated. What's the starting point to make it simple, Bruce, from your perspective? Is it make the infrastructure as invisible as possible? Is it bringing a cloud operating model? Maybe you talk about those steps. I mean, one of the first things we try to do to make it simple is we don't mention cloud. And we talk ultimately about what workloads are the customer consuming and where they belong. And so we're invariably seeing more and more workloads that really shouldn't go centralized in a data center. They should be on site. So GPU-accelerated desktops for oil and gas research or some of our clients doing 3D engineering in a CAD design work. You can put that in a data center and we have, but then you're at the mercy of the fiber connection, the speed of the fiber connection, the resilience of the fiber connection and the cost, absolutely. And so keeping some of those workloads on site just makes sense. But how can you then leverage the benefit of that centralized IT in the event of a disaster if all of your workloads are actually on site? And that's where it's got to be hybrid. That's where you can have those workloads on site. But all your files and all that capability are still mirrored in the cloud environment. So if you have a fiber cut, then you can use a cellular network to get there or if you have an onsite disaster, then you can spin up the equivalent resource in the data center, but on demand rather than dedicated to you. So we like to say that customers want or the way that we summarize it, Wikibon is customers want the cloud experience where the data demands. Because we do talk about cloud. Because we do talk about cloud periodically. So what do you, well, but you have to because at the end of the day, it's driving a new way of thinking, not just about the technology, but how you solve business problems. And it comes back to how do you think about the business problem differently? I love New Zealand. I've been there a couple of times, worked with a lot of customers in a minute that you said New Zealand was like, right. How do the clouds, the cloud experience, how are you solving problems differently than you did a few years ago because of not only the HPE partnership, but thinking differently about these problems. Thinking differently is definitely something you have to do to stay relevant, right, and to keep up with the market. Almost 10 years ago, we thought what we felt was a little differently when we adopted HPE3PA. And that really was a technology that gave us the ability to change our mind regarding storage. Spin forward now to 2017. In April this year, we put in our first HPE Synergy Platform. This month, we're just putting in our second HPE Synergy Platform. And Synergy gives us for compute what HPE3PA gave us for storage. The ability to change our mind to be programmatic or autonomous with the deployment of resources for a customer need. And so for our public cloud environment, that's basically spinning up compute nodes as required for the demand within the clusters. But it also introduces, by way of the technology capability, a new channel or a new revenue opportunity. Because now we can actually programatically spin up compute nodes of any flavor for a customer in a private cloud environment. So this is physical tend to the customer opposed to virtual cloud. And so that's, we can do that just as easily as we can at VM because of Synergy. For sure. And that's really exciting. I think what Bruce is really representing here is that he can focus on business outcomes for his customers.  It's transparent, but underneath that is really differentiated capability and value like the ability to spin up and spin down composable infrastructure on demand. Like the ability to bring world-class security to that infrastructure. So all of those things are underpinning, you know, the services that Layer X is able to deliver. So I would think part of making hybrid IT simple is not just throwing a bunch of products at your customers. Right. We heard in the last financial call that HPE is changing the way it reports. It's going to report hybrid IT, which is essentially your portfolio. Exactly. So server storage, networking, and relevant services around that. And software. And software that powers all that. So talk about how you're going to market and how that, if that aligns with, are you guys want to borrow? Yeah, well think about it from the Layer, let's talk about it from the Layer X perspective. When you look at Synergy, that is not a piece of hardware. That is truly software defined intelligence built into innovative hardware based on our Gen 10 server platform, which in and of itself is the world's most secure industry standard server platform because we have built in silicon root of trust and things like that. So what you get is all of that put together, all of that integrated. That software defined intelligence, the technology innovation, the infrastructure innovation, and wrapper with the services that both support the Layer X company and their customers. Maybe talk about your customers a bit more. What are they really pushing you hard to do? What are the big challenges they face and how are you addressing those? One of the most common conversations with cloud is obviously cost. Everyone's trying to commoditize this resource to the end of the degree every day. But the VGrid, which is our brand for our cloud platform, the VGrid position really is around performance and reliability, and we back that up through HPE hardware platforms and the software stack that enables that. But our customers are really driving us to make sure that we stay relevant not only with that performance and reliability, but still on cost. Even though we are giving them enterprise and beyond capabilities as an SMB, cost is still a major factor for an SMB. And so for us to keep those overheads low, we need automation. We're not going to go and put in no disrespect to the product line, but we're not going to go and put in maybe an Apollo or a cloud line solution. We're going to stick with Synergy and previously ProLiant because of the added value wrapped around that that actually gives us the peace of mind and the operational efficiency with our engineering team to get the work done far more effectively. Now with Synergy, it takes it out to a whole new level because this is all composable now. My CTO mentioned to me the other day they just put in a new 8450 three-part and he said all I had to do was create the CPGs in the three-part and one of you did the rest. It was like I didn't have to go in and all these other steps they used to have to do. So it saves time and time is expensive. Not only from a human resource point of view but go to market speed. Well, converged hardware was about having a common set of support technologies. The whole motion of hyperconverged is starting to converge the actual administrative tasks. But when I remember the last time that I was in New Zealand talking with large users, was a real emphasis on analytics because of New Zealand being an island with great resources in some respects and less resources than others, energy, telecommunications. How is the modern economy of New Zealand with some of the constraints that it faces driving the use of digital technology to lift up industry services and the quality of life in New Zealand? So we're seeing that in very far-reaching kind of industry verticals and more so now with obviously IOT has become a pretty hot topic. But IOT backed by all of the smart and on-demand composable architecture is really making a difference to primary industries, making them more productive, more effective, more efficient. But really the customers in New Zealand we're a nation of early adopters. We have 96% of our companies are six or less people. And so we're dealing with SMBs that have to box above their weight, they have to adapt, they have to do more with less, you know all these cliches that really encumber the average small company and we have a lot of them. So the demands from an IT perspective are give me what my enterprise counterparts have but at a per user or per resource unit per month kind of model. So Cloud just makes so much sense for that. Susan, a big takeaways from Madrid. What do you want the world to walk away with? Well I think first of all when we say we're going to help make hybrid IT simple what we're talking about and really exemplified with the Layer X is we're talking about from the edge to the core to the cloud. So really end to end. The other really exciting thing that we're here talking about is AI, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning. And you talked about it in the context of edge computing and IoT which is obviously super hot but we are also bringing AI to the data center. So as we look at- In other words making data center operations IT operations better. Making the data center autonomous, self healing, self managing and so this is the new as we look at the automobile industry, autonomous cars, right? We'll think about how that's going to be applied to autonomous data centers. That's what we're going to be talking about. Shoes for the cobbler's children. You got it. Well and think about the impact that has on the business where you're allowing people not to spend money on whatever, loan provisioning, server management but really focusing on some other more strategic aspects of their business. Whether it's digital transformation, AI, other data oriented activities. Exactly. Sometimes the data has to be here and you want to make sure that when the data's there it has the same, that the same services are available to the business. Yes. To take advantage of that asset where it is. Real time analytics for the data that matters to our customers at the edge and in the cloud as well as applying that same AI to the telemetry of the data center and using that to make the data center more efficient, more effective, more autonomous and self healing. Awesome. So key notes are coming up very shortly. We'll be running those on our Twitch channel. Twitch.com slash Silicon Angle. You can check those out at obviously at HPE as well, HPE.com. Susan and Bruce, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. I really appreciate your time. No problem. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back after the key notes. This is theCUBE. We're live from HPE Discover, Madrid.


Here we are in our custom zero home page going into the new company file we set up in a prior presentation that being get great guitars we're going to duplicate some tabs to put some reports in like we do every time right click in the tab up top to duplicate it right click in the tab up top again to duplicate it again let's go back to the tab to the middle I counting drop down up top we want to be opening up our balance sheet report as it is thinking I'm going to tab to the right I counting drop down again this time open up the income statement or profit and loss back to the middle tab hitting the drop down on the range we're going to have a custom range we're going to go to the drop down we want to have our own custom home on the range over here we're going to have it on December 31st 2023 and have it up to date up to date home on the range tab and to the right this one looks good for the income statement let's go to the first tab now and now we're going to imagine we're receiving payments for invoices that were issued in a prior presentation so remember the flow here I'm going to jump over to a flow chart this is a QuickBooks desktop flow chart but we're just looking at the normal flow of an accounting cycle and in essence the sales cycle which is this middle area remember that it depends on the industry that you are in so if you had a very basic industry like you just collect money from YouTube or something then you'd probably just have a deposit coming through the bank feeds that you would record as revenue once you receive it using the deposit form to record the revenue however if you have a cash register or something it gets more complex because although still on a cashed based system you now have to collect the cash most likely group it or the credit cards receipts and whatnot in such a way that you can deposit into the bank so that you have the internal controls of checking your cash register to your sales receipts and whatnot and that the deposits going into the bank in the same format that it will be on the bank statements so you can reconcile if you're in an industry like a bookkeeping firm a law firm where you do the work first and then invoice the client then of course we're going to enter the invoice and a lot of e-business is is going to need an invoice these days because that often is the form to facilitate the sales transaction when we email out the invoice so we've sent out the invoice now we're going to be receiving the payment so you can think of that as a deposit type of form that is going to be happening when we receive the payment now usually if you're in a system where you're getting one payment per invoice then it's usually fairly easy for us to then receive the payment and deposit it directly into the checking account so for example if you send out an invoice and you would expect some kind of electronic transfer or something like that and you receive the payment for that dollar amount of the invoice that goes into your bank account then we can record the receive payment as basically a deposit at that point in time however we could imagine more complex situations where we're we're going to get paid on the invoice or multiple invoices get paid for example or maybe they pay us through some other kind of payment platform like a payment port or a credit card or something like that and then the credit card company is going to be the intermediary receiving the payments and when they group the payments that actually hit our bank account they might have multiple invoices that they've received payment on and put one lump sum into the bank account so that's one of the common issues that come into play with our receivables in our sale cycle is the grouping of the money that's going to go into our bank account on our books in the same grouping in format on the bank statement so that we can do bank uh wrecks and reconciliations so in order to deal with that issue sometimes you might create an intermediary clearing account which you might set up another checking account for example to have a holding account that you can put your money in and then when it gets grouped either cash grouped together or credit card payments grouped together to actually go into your checking account you can then take it out of the clearing account and put it into the checking account in the format that matches what's on the bank statement so we're going to practice that middle step which can be a little bit confusing of a step and something you have to think through to see whether or not you need to have that middle step or not when you're at when you're at a cash register you can clearly see why that might be the case if you're collecting cash payments and or credit card payments right because if you're selling five dollar items all day long you're going to be collecting the cash when you go to the bank you're going to deposit not a hundred five dollar transactions but one lump sum transaction for the sum of the day's sales so that means that the bank statement's going to show that one lump sum and you would like your books to reflect the same thing so you're going to have this clearing account that can help you to facilitate that that process so let me show you let's see this in zero let's go on over what i'm going to do first is go to the accounting drop down and let's look at our chart of accounts and i'd like to add a clearing account which i'm going to set up as basically a bank type of account and it's the money that's just going to go in and out of the clearing account so that we can then group it if we need to into the checking account when it hits the checking account one other thing i just want to mention before we dive into that is the bank feeds you might think about how the bank feeds are going to fit into this you could try to wait till something clears the bank you invoice someone if they're going to pay you electronically you could try to wait till it clears the bank to then to then match the bank feed deposit to the invoice you could you could kind of test that out but again that will be difficult to do if for example you receive multiple invoices and whatever whatever platform is facilitating the sale like a credit card or something groups the payments together you won't be able to do that as easily so you're going to want to think how the bank feeds are going to fit into your system if you're invoicing clients because the invoice is a non-cash kind of transaction so we'll talk more about that when we get to the bank feeds uh course or section but just want to point that out all right so we're going to add a bank account here i'm going to add a bank account now it's going to make me try to connect it i don't really want to connect it i just want to add it so i'm going to say this is going to be let's just say chase i'm just going to type in an account but it's really just going to be a clearing account chase uh chase us all right that's just a bank so i'm just going to put something there so and then i'm going to skip the the check-in because i don't want to put up uh an account there account name is going to be the cash clearing clearing account you could come up with a more creative name like undeposited funds or funds to be deposited or whatever you want to call it and we're going to call it uh every day okay and then account number they're going to make me put something here so i'll put something there i don't know the code i want to use yet so maybe i'll just see if they let me post it without it and then i'll put it in in a second us dollars good save it and continue at poor five or so there we have it now i can look at the code which is the account number here so the checking account is one one zero zero so it should probably be under that so let's say one one one zero let's say i'm going to edit this and put a code one one one zero for the account number code and i will say uh let's save it and this it's i put the day to day i think it's good there okay let's save it so there we have it all right so now we're ready to go we can now collect on the invoices so we entered invoices last time we could track the invoices by hitting the drop down uh up top and i go to invoices we can also track the invoices under the contacts but this is kind of our list of invoices if i go to this tab these are the invoices that are awaiting payment so we expect to be paid in whatever format we're expecting payment now this is the format we expect payment gets a little confusing these days because you might be expecting electronic payment they might send you a check you might give them multiple options to pay you you might be using other platforms to help to facilitate the payment so whatever the process is you're going to need to make sure that you're able to track the receipt of the payment obviously and then when it's going to be hitting you know the checking account and then we're going to record the received payment here which will decrease the accounts receivable and the other side is going to go into the in our case the clearing account and then we'll put it into the checking account from the clearing account so we're going to choose the payment here now we're going to be picking uh mr anderson so we want to make sure that we're in the awaiting payment you could actually go into it here if you just have a payment on one of them and then down below where it says receive payment you got the amount paid the date uh the paid to and we're going to put it into our clearing account where you can put it into the checking account and reference number so that's one way that we can do it the other way is possibly a little bit faster and if you had multiple amounts you were receiving for example if I had multiple


Live from New York City, it's theCUBE at Big Data NYC 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Juan Disco, with support from EMC, Mark Logic and TerraData. With hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly. Welcome to the Big Apple, everybody. This is Dave Vellante and we are here live all week at Hadoop World and Strada and we call this Big Data NYC. As you know, this is our fifth year at Hadoop World and Jeff Kelly and I are really pleased to be here. Our other co-host John Furrier is back in Palo Alto working the crowd chat stream, but we've got a big set of events going on this week. We really have three things. Really, theCUBE is going to be broadcasting on today, Thursday and Friday. We are live at the Hilton Times Square at three o'clock today or four o'clock today, rather, we've got a capital markets event. We're inviting a number of our Wall Street clients and other friends and Jeff Kelly is going to be giving a presentation, releasing never before seen data on the big data market and then this evening at six o'clock we have the Cube party celebrating five years of Cube. Can you believe it? It's been five years, Jeff, that we started and I remember in 2010 getting the call from John Furrier saying, hey, we're doing Hadoop World. Get your butt to New York City and really the market has evolved in an amazing way since then. Hadoop back then was, most people didn't know what Hadoop was. What's Hadoop? That's a funny sounding word and it really has been a lightning in a bottle, hasn't it? It sure has. The ecosystem's exploded over the last five years and we're seeing this pressure being put on the industry heavyweights in the data management space by this crop of new and emerging companies that are leveraging things like Hadoop and open source software and a new commodity hardware scale out approach to data management, collectively called Big Data and it's really exciting. What evidence do you have that the pressure is being put on the big guys? I mean, what can you share with us that's sort of signs or examples of that? Well, Dave, as you know, we talked to hundreds of big data practitioners and data management practitioners, data warehouse managers and they consistently tell us that they are struggling with their data warehouse installations. They're starting to buckle under the pressure of increasing data volumes and data velocity. They're expensive. They don't allow for the flexibility that companies need today to really compete at the speed of business. So what we're hearing consistently from practitioners is that they're looking to these new and emerging methods of processing, storing, analyzing data to help them better compete. It's impacting the traditional world of data management in that a lot of these companies are baselining their spend in the EDW space. They're carving off a portion of their spend and putting that in R&D and things like Hadoop to try to figure this out because the reality is, despite the hunger for a new approach, this stuff is really hard. There's no question about that. But we are seeing a shift happening and it's real. So we're going to be unpacking this all week and one of the things that we're going to be looking at is really the effect of Hadoop and big data on the traditional enterprise software business but also how to play the big data space because the reality, Jeff, is there aren't a lot of public companies in the big data space. You've essentially got Splunk, Tableau and ClickTech and they're kind of sort of outliers to big data. You wouldn't call them sort of core big data even though Tableau's symbol is data. But there's not a lot of ways to play big data. So we're going to talk about that in the Capital Markets event and you've got some really interesting angles and I'll give you a little tidbit. The premise of the angle that Jeff's going to talk about today is really that big data practitioners are going to create more value than the supply side. But how do you find those people that are really good at doing big data? So that's something that we're going to look at. We've got people on the ground at the Javits Center trolling the floor, just talking to all the folks there, the practitioners, the technologists, listening in on the keynotes. So they'll be reporting back all day. We've also got wall-to-wall coverage of many of the practitioners, the technologists and the companies in this big data space that we'll be interviewing, getting their perspectives on what's happening. And then of course, as I say, we have the big CUBE event tonight celebrating five years of CUBE. So Jeff, I want to ask you, where are we at with big data? We've gone from the what is it to the how do I use it to what's all this scoop and hive and flume and yarn stuff. Are we finally in the stage of production where companies are delivering ROI on their big data spend? Well, yeah, I think we're past that early phase where as you said, people were just trying to figure out what some of these terms meant. Our data shows that early adopters, big data practitioners are starting to move workloads into production. Some feedback we got from our most recent adoption survey, 31% of practitioners told us they are supporting production applications with Hadoop and NoSQL and other big data systems. Another 28% or so, POC still kind of kicking the tires trying to understand how it works and where it's going to fit in the organization. But still a large chunk, 41% or so, evaluating the technology. So we're getting there, we're starting to cross the chasm as it's known, but I think it's still fairly early days. And from an ROI perspective, as I mentioned earlier, and it sounds simple, but the fact is this stuff is still really hard. And most practitioners that we talk to, the average I should say, are not realizing the full return on their investment yet at this point. You know, part of that's the nature of where they are in the life cycle. In terms of these investments are still pretty early and it's gonna take time to achieve that ROI. But the other thing is they're struggling with aligning things like IT in the business. There's a lot of data and technology related challenges. There's people in process related challenges. But the interesting thing that we see is that there are a handful of companies that are doing this and doing it well and making a profit. And you know, we think that those are the companies you wanna focus on from an investment perspective in terms of placing your bets in big data. So we're gonna be digging into those all week, Thursday and Friday today. We're gonna, you know, if John Furrier were here, if no doubt we'd Jeff be having discussions about who are the horses on the track. So we're gonna have those. John is on CrowdChat, so he'll be chiming in. Is there gonna be a red hat of Hadoop? Is your data warehouse a dinosaur? How can you take advantage of this emerging technology? How do you find the skill sets? Those are the things that we'll be talking about. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE, we're live from Big Data NYC. We're right back.


Well, welcome everybody. Welcome fellow students and panelists. This is our third in the Science Circle series of panel discussions in voice. So, hopefully everyone here is able to hear me and the panelists in voice. A little bit of change of pace this weekend instead of, you know, the heavy topics that we did the last two sessions, science versus religion and the Fermi paradox, which were heavy, heavy duty. We're going to lighten things up a little bit this time. And our topic is favorite, favorite science fiction movies. This is a topic that could easily sort of digress into just a bull session. So I wanted to try to establish a couple of parameters to maybe try to impose some structure on it. So one of the things I want the panelists to keep in mind is for the movies they've chosen, I would like to ask them to tell us a little bit about what they like about the science in the movies. I'm still getting a little feedback from taglines microphone. I hope that's not bothering everyone. And then, in addition to what they like about the science in the movies, I thought we should discuss sort of what is it about the movies that inspire us to think about science or to think about nature.  There, that's better. That was distracting to me because I'm hearing it in my headset, so it sounds loud. So to begin with, I would like to introduce our panelists. And then I want to go sort of down the row and ask each of them to say a few words about themselves. Tell us a little bit about who you are, what your interest in science is, I guess any sort of patient or credentials or whatever you might have that you think the helpful for the audience to know, something like that. Comments about that. So our panelists going from my left is Syzygy, asymptote, tagline, and Mike Shaw, who I think are all of them are familiar to the science circle students. So Syzygy, let me start with you. Why don't you just say a few words about yourself. Yes, thank you, Berrigan. I appreciate the work you do here. And I do enjoy being on the panel, but if someone else would like to be on the panel in the future, I urge people to consider being on the panel. I agree. Okay, in real life, my name is William F. Wall. I'm an astronomy researcher and a professor at the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics, and Electronics in Tbilisi. So recently we've been the lead institution of Large Millimeter Wave Telescope. It's a national lab right now. So I study interstellar molecular clouds on large scale scales of many parsecs. I teach graduate courses and I also give public talks in Mexico and I've given them in Canada on the LMT. After one of my talks, one woman from the audience approached me and said, proclaimed triumphantly that she understood. And what that means is that she's been having trouble understanding scientific talks for at least some of the time and it raises an interesting question. I mean, how well do scientists communicate their messages to inside their fields, public, if not quite good enough, consider that in conjunction with inadequate science education schools, that leads to widespread scientific illiteracy. And this is a problem that I want to address and that's one of the reasons I'm participating in the Science Circle. But this leads me to science fiction because science fiction, good science fiction can educate us and we love stories and it helps weave science into a culture. But science fiction can also diagnose the scientific illiteracy of the society because what passes for science fiction in popular culture shows a severe ignorance of science. It inspires us, that's right Shantel, but it's an indication of a severe ignorance of science. If you have movies and television programs, we saw this science fiction. And I like fantasy too, but not science. Good science fiction sparks our imaginations. It can spark real innovation sometimes. Science fiction already about the future helps us to understand how to survive in a sometimes violent universe, how to deal with each other and other beings, how to live inside our own heads. It can also make us question the very nature of reality. Matrix is one example of that. And it can do so in the way that no other genre can because fantasy, for example, is not real, but science fiction could become real, potentially real. And the three movies that I chose to talk about, they're not perfect, but they are science fiction. One is Extinction with Michael Penya. It's on Netflix. And Eye Robot, which is an amalgamation of Isaac Asimov stories with Will Smith and Bridget Moynihan. And Gadica is about how genetics can affect or not affect human culture with Ethan Hawke. Outstanding, yeah. Those are all excellent choices. I'm actually not familiar with Extinction. I'm going to have to check that out on Netflix. I appreciate those comments. This is, gee, that's fantastic. Tagline, why don't you share a little bit about yourself? Okay, I'm a compulsively private person, so I go by tagline here. But I will say that I have a background in mathematics and not currently, but in the past. My academic involvement biggest was on being on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. I'm a physician. And nowadays I do pretty much what I want. All right. That's all I have to say about that. Just a little bit about the movies you selected. Well, the first to comment on the idea of science fiction, I had an epic fail today. I'd made up 64 slides, including slides to illustrate or show images from the choices of the gentlemen here. But I couldn't get it to work. So this will all be verbal. But people that like sci-fi have imagination, so we should be able to overcome that. Science fiction is speculative fiction. I think of it as coming from literature and coming from human kind of innate linguistic ability to tell stories. And further to imagine what you're not able to do or see, but to be able to live it in your mind. It can also be described as a type of writing about imagined developments in science, advanced science and tech, space flight, time travel, extraterrestrial life, and that sort of thing. But especially their effect on life and the future. Now, I had two quotes I wanted to share with you. One was by Robert Schultz. Science fiction can be described as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology. I think that is really insightful. The changes in science and technology and how we keep up with it is at the heart of science fiction, I think. Science fiction began, modern science fiction began with the, in most people's view, with the publication of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in the early 19th century. In 1828, she published The Last Man, which was also sci-fi and it was about the outcome of or consequences of a massive plague. And that's been used quite a lot. Stephen King did a book that was made into a television movie called The Stand about a devastating plague, for example. So that's, that kind of apocalyptic fiction has been with us and been on our mind for quite a while. But Isaac Asimov in 75, at the same year that Robert Schultz made his statement about the nature of science fiction, he said, science fiction is anything published as science fiction. Asimov was a biochemist, but a prolific writer. Also he was Russian and I like Brooklyn a lot. That's where he passed away, 92. One side shows were in chronological order. 1951, the day the earth stood still, 1978 invasion of the body snatchers, 1986, the fly with Jeff Goldblum and 2004, the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. And I've always loved literature or cultural experiences that helped me understand what it is to be human. And the exploration of consequences of the presumptions that they impose upon us in sci-fi really explore that. It's pretty striking to me how easily people can go with the flow and I suggested presumption like the very idea that you could have a teleporter or be disassembled into elementary particles or atoms and then reassembled. And okay, I can go with that. And then you follow through the story. On the other hand, it at its extreme reflects extreme gullibility of humankind as we see people willing to believe most anything these days, as long as it tends to agree with their prejudices. So those are my choices. I can tell more about them in a bit, but I'll let off. Okay, that's fine. Very good. Very interesting selection of movies in particular. Classics all. And let's move right along and Mike, tell us a little bit about yourself and your movies you picked. All right. Let's see. I'll move my microphone just a little bit. So we don't get any reading. There we go. Okay, well, I was born in the Eastern townships of Southern Quebec, Canada. You should go and visit for the fall foliage. Stay for the wineries apple cider and maple syrup. I went to got my bachelor degree in chemistry at a school called Mount Allison University. It's at the tip of the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick, Canada. It's famous for its nine meter vertical tides. I have a PhD in organometallic chemistry from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver from 1993. And I moved to University of Vermont where I was a postdoctoral fellow and then a lecturer. Again, organometallic electrochemistry. Gary jargon words. Sorry. Very simple concept basically looking at the chemistry of species which contain a metal attached to a carbon atom. In 1998 I started at Southern Illinois University of the Edwardsville as an assistant professor. I've been there ever since. Worked the way up the chain. I've been chair. Glad that's over. And right now they call me distinguished research professor, but probably not after they talk to me twice. So, you know, I've had a good career. In the middle of it, there's funding. There have been wonderful, wonderful students. I think I've had something about about 25 master's students and maybe 40 undergraduate students work with me for the in the past 20 years. And one of the wonderful things is to see how popular culture influences their expectations of their for their lives and careers. And so the movies I've chosen kind of reflect that there's two movies that I chose. And my reasoning was that since we're looking at science fiction movies that could happen with what we know now. That that was a good criteria for me. So the first is Europa report and Europa reports on Netflix. It's a story told through a series of flashbacks, log entries and interviews about the first crew of people sent to study Europa. They experienced a lot of setbacks along the way that test them and leave them with no communication to Earth. They decide to finish their mission and they find a way to send back the amazing results they find. But that's the good news and the bad news, no survivors. The second movie was X Machina. It's on Amazon Prime, maybe other places.  And basically assessing her sentience like a Turing test during the events of the film Caleb's humanity is tested. I'm still trying to figure out if the end of the film represents the beginning of the singularity. It's a very Westworld type of movie. So these two I actually think are very solid science fiction where I don't think that there's any leap of faith that has to happen. I don't think there's any technology that's out of our reach to make these things possible. You know, as Tagline said teleporters that, you know, we could disassemble something molecule by molecule, but then we might reassemble it into a smoking heap, which would be unfortunate if that had been a person and faster than light travel has its own problems as well. So that's where I'll end and I think we can start with a good discussion between us. Yeah, fantastic. These are all great movies. I suppose I should also tell a little bit about myself. In real life. I'm Matthew Burr. I have some science background. My father was a chemist with Rockwell International. He also during in the 60s during the Apollo and Gemini programs in California. Brother is also a biologist. And I worked in labs a lot in high school and college. Ended up working in a lab at MIT with my brother, my oldest brother and the lab of James Buchanan, who I'm sure is now retired, but when I was 19, I got to present. The work of that laboratory at a scientific meeting in San Diego. I was at college at use and Diego at the time. So that was kind of a highlight of my science career. And I also did graduate work at Baylor College of Medicine. Which is how I ended up access. And so I had ambitions to be a working scientist all through my youth. But when I was actually in graduate school, I had something of a midlife crisis at 25 where I kind of freaked out at the prospects of trying to make a living in academia. So guess what? I bailed out and went to law school. That's refuge of the scoundrel. I've been a, just in my technical background, I'd be patent attorney. I've been a patent and trademark attorney. But I've always maintained my, I do at least keep up with it as a lay person. And let me see. So the movies I picked, let me see if I can pull up my list. And I have to say, I've thought about more movies. I just came up with a couple, you know, I thought we should at least mention 2001, a space Odyssey. I feel like that's a classic sci-fi movie. I'm a little bit surprised it hadn't been already picked, but I think that should be on our list. Another one, a little more obscure is called surrogates. It's from 2009 with Bruce Willis. I'm actually not even sure it's available. I think you might be able to see it on YouTube for $2 or $3. But I enjoy that movie a lot. And I also added an honorable mention that I think maybe is not on our official list. But I wanted, I thought Steven Spielberg should be represented in our list because he's done some seminal sci-fi movies. But the one I picked was Ready Player One, his most recent one. I actually particularly like because I liked the fiction of life in a virtual world and would like to have relationships in a virtual world with people you only know through their avatars. I thought the movie didn't have that. So I wanted to give that an honorable mention. So let's see. Why don't we, let me take a look, is there, let me kind of poll the audience perhaps. Is there anything, any particular movie that we mentioned so far that our students would like us to do? Like us to delve into perhaps right away? Oh, someone mentioned Narnia in local chat. I did want to mention that I specifically wanted to exclude fantasy like Lord of the Rings and Narnia and Harry Potter and things like that. You know, unless you could make a strong case about that they have something to say about science. But I thought we should limit our discussion to, if no one minds, I kind of would like to open up maybe with a discussion of Gadica. I think that that's a movie maybe people have not seen in a while and I recently rewatched it about a year or so ago. And I actually was much more impressed with it in rewatching it than was when I bought in the theaters. It really has a pretty gripping story about the social impacts of genetic engineering. And so if no one objects, let me open up the discussion to Gadica. Sure, I suppose I should jump in here since I introduced that one. Yeah, I'll tell you what I do like about it and what I don't like about it. But let me describe the movie a little bit first is that it is a society that's probably not too far in the future. And it's not really a meritocracy anymore. It's more that you get what you get. You get good positions in corporations or universities or wherever based on your genes. And yes, you do have to have skills in those areas, but it's mostly because of your genes. Do you have a genetic predisposition for certain types of jobs of employment? It's genetic engineering. What I liked about it is the science seemed a little simplistic to me. What I liked about it was that people just had to go somewhere and have their genes read and then they could figure out what their medical problems are going to be. That is potentially a good thing as it can help you in the future. But the problem is that you are also classified, put into a pigeonhole. And that's the part that I don't like and I'm wondering if that's what's going to happen in the future. Will we roll like that? Perhaps not. The movie itself was making a very strong statement about nature versus nurture. They were saying that this main character played not, he was considered one of God. He was not a child, so he was genetically defective and should not be trying to become an astronaut. But he was able to borrow someone else's genetic material, his roommate basically, a tabled man, who had extremely good genes but could not do anything. So it was kind of ironic that the one with great genes couldn't aspire to the position that he was supposedly ideal for. But this genetically defective child could do this because he did it by sheer will and hiding his genetic material. He was always cleaning his keyboard. There was also a murder in the movie which they were looking for who committed murder and they figured they could find his genes and they thought they were trying to identify who was the one who had those genes. So they figured he was the one who committed the murder because he was genetically inferior. They couldn't identify who it was at first and they never really did it by the end of the movie. But it turned out to be one of the instructors who was genetically superior and he's the one who committed the murder. Throughout this movie they were making a very bold statement that your personality and who you are is not totally dictated by your genes. I did like the message, it came across a little too heavily but I did like the message. Isn't there one of the most vivid scenes, there's a couple of vivid scenes in that, you know, one where the wheelchair guy is tied by crawling up the stairs of his apartment to hide. Yeah, I like that. Sorry, you're going to say more. Well that's very gripping. But I guess the one I was actually really thinking of, isn't there a scene where he has to go through a checkpoint I think like to get into work? And of course they sampled the DNA at the checkpoint to I guess make sure you're authorized.  Do you remember that at all? Yes, I do remember that.  That's right. And while he was going through the checkpoint he had to remove his contact lenses, otherwise they would know, when they check him they would know he had contact lenses and was trying to be someone else. And also there was a scene where he was climbing up the staircase. The interesting thing about that staircase was it was a spiral staircase. It looked like a double helix. It looked like, I mean it was a metaphor. He was trying to climb up and he was trying to achieve in a metaphorical sense. He was trying to aspire to his own genetic potential by crawling up that staircase. Oh, I love that. I never picked up on that the first time. But yeah, that's a great detail to pick out. May I comment? Yes, please go ahead. I thought that was wonderfully artistic. There were several shots with Jude Law sitting in his wheelchair with the spiral double helix staircase or stairwell, I guess staircase behind him. And it showed the idea of all this genetic parameters as qualifying for quality of humanness being imposed upon people. The other thing about Jude Law in that he was the ubermensch who had all the physical skills, the extraordinary intelligence and excellent genetic makeup. He had thrown it away. He had caused his handicap. He had broken his spine by throwing himself in front of a bus, I think, in despondence. And that along with a point where the Ethan Hawke against his brother, they had swimming contests and he managed to beat his brother. And who was genetically superior. And his brother finally asked him, how did you do that? And he said, I, you know, he didn't save anything for the trip back. They would swim out into the harbor and then swim back. He swam with everything he had to get to the goal and dealt with any shortcoming later, even if he might drown. And the extraordinary thing about this statement was that this idea of superior beings with better genes doesn't beat heart and determination and will, as Sergey mentioned. And it's a great movie. Yeah, those are excellent points. I mean, the swimming, the swimming scenes or at least a couple of those scenes where they're racing against each other and seeing who can get further. I think that that was a little bit overdone. I'm not entirely sure that willpower can beat up genes completely, but it was a good point. And I'd forgotten that the character played by Jude Law had broken his own back. And that's another excellent point that even though you have superior genes, supposedly, you may not feel comfortable in society and which values you. You may feel valued by that society. You may be valued in the wrong way. So you become despondent. And that I found a little bit inconsistent was if this is a medically advanced society that can measure your characteristic soul so precisely, then wouldn't they also have the capability of repair? It struck me as a little bit inconsistent. Very interesting. So I'd like to bring up a couple points. You know, a hallmark of a good science fiction movie is that it stands test of time and has some predictive character to it. So Gadica is old enough so that we can actually look at some of the predictions that it made in terms of our own society right now. If you look at genetic testing services, things like 23andMe and the other ones that are out there. Fast sequencing of genetic testing is essentially here. Back when this movie was made, the Human Genome Project was a huge undertaking to sequence one individual's DNA basically took years. Now such things can happen in a very short amount of time and perhaps not as short as depicted in the movie. The other part is that we now have better gene editing techniques. Things such as CRISPR are now a reality and are beginning to be used in ways that align with what we see in this movie. So one of the things about Gadica that is wonderful in one sense is that it's highly predictive. But I hope it doesn't predict that particular society. Fascinating. That's just fascinating. You know, it strikes me hearing you mentioned the gene editing that, you know, if gene editing does turn out to be as powerful as its promise holds, you know, selecting a population for superior genes could become irrelevant. You don't need to really select for simply engineer people with great effect. It may be quite possible that in four or five generations from now, pretty much everyone will be sort of engineered by gene editing to have all of the characteristics that are desired. That is an interesting scenario that you bring up. It raises, I mean, will that result in a utopia or a dystopia, as Vic has mentioned? Could the gene editing be used to change certain things that you probably shouldn't change? Like you want someone who is super intelligent, but at the same time they lose certain other abilities like how to socialize properly, how to avoid certain impulses that are dangerous as one example. Yes. By achieving one characteristic, you might affect other characteristics, you know, sort of in the way that domesticating dogs causes their ears to flop and their tails to curl, or something like that, yeah, so that certain traits are linked to other traits. They're very unharmed. They're very difficult to untang. Well, I would like to get back to Mike's point. I mean, he's right. We can read genetic sequences now. But the problem is if you use different companies to find out what your genetic background is, Eastern European or Asian or whatever, it turns out that the different companies give somewhat different results. So there's a problem with the calibration of the method. So yes, you can do this now, but it has to be a long way from doing things accurately and consistently. And a related point is that much of this information is now kind of publicly available when people get their genetic sequencing done and upload it to sites that then police agencies can use to track down your relatives who might have done something nefarious. Yes, that is very interesting. Forgive me, I'm going to exploit my role as moderator and ask us to move on a little bit because we have limited time, and I do want to discuss some of the other movies. It occurs to me looking at our list that perhaps we can discuss iRobot, the Matrix, and even 2001, a Space Odyssey, perhaps together since each of them relate to sort of machine intelligence or have elements of machine intelligence. So that group of three, I think we could sort of discuss together. One thing I wanted to mention about 2001, a Space Odyssey, and one reason it's one of my favorite movies, is for the one single scene when Dave is dismantling Hal, and Hal says, Stop, Dave, I'm afraid. And that was in 1969, and I always felt that that moment where Hal was afraid was just a seminal moment in science fiction of the machine who is utterly self-aware and is terrified at losing. Yes, and he sings at the end. Yes, indeed he does.  I actually like all of the movies, and I also feel that that story resolved itself really well because, you know, in the first movie, Neo gets inside, who is it? Is it Agent Smith? And destroys him, but Agent Smith comes back, and now he is a program without any purpose.  The concept of purpose permeates the whole mythology of the Matrix. And by losing his purpose, Agent Smith becomes a danger to the machines. So in the third movie, Neo and the machines form a common cause to defeat Agent Smith. And I thought that was just a very elegant way to resolve that storyline because the machines could not tolerate a rogue program who had no purpose. And at the same time, Neo, by defeating Agent J, could liberate the humans. So I thought that was a very interesting twist to the Matrix. I've seen iRobot, I did not love iRobot, but it did have some excellent moments in it, but perhaps the other panelists can maybe comment on iRobot. And with that, maybe, Mike, why don't we start with you if you would like to have any comments on it? Sure. The set of movies is in a fine tradition, starting with Frankenstein. And then the short story called Rossum's Universal Robots, where we get the word robot from, and then all of Asimov's work. One of the things about Asimov is that with his three laws of robotics, his robots tended to be a little more benign than what we see in 2001, and Hal is simply acting logically with his primary goal being the mission. And in Ex Machina, where Eva is acting towards her self-interest, self-preservation. And I would also include in this list the Westworld TV series, if I may, because, again, there is self-preservation. So without some constraints on AI behavior, in fiction it seems like a lot of the time the AIs do what we fear and treat us like we treat each other. You don't see how one can have anything approximating intelligence without self-realization. And if you have self-realization, then you have, it seems to me, by necessity, a sense of survival, whatever it takes. And that's where you can have a lot of danger. There seems to be a lot of anxiety in Silicon Valley about the threat of artificial intelligence. I'm not sure I fully grasp what they're afraid of. Do any of you guys have any insights about that? From what I've heard, I listened to certain programs on the radio like Crooks and Quarks on CBC Radio, and they have experts talking about AI and its possible dangers. The thing about AI is that it's like a computer program. If you don't, you do your computer program correctly, you can end up making silly mistakes, but that's part of a manufacturing process, and you slip your decimal point, kind of something instead of one of something, or 10,000 instead of 100. So you have to do your programming very carefully with AI. You don't make any mistakes, like you want to make a scenario, I heard, is you want a robot that's very good at making paperclips, and suddenly it goes out of control with everything, including human beings, dogs, rocks, trees, and paperclips. You have to be programming very carefully. Yes, that's the old no-man conundrum. I have to destroy everything that is imperfect. But you yourself are imperfect, no-man! Another comment. When you think of the complexity of the computer programming to create anything approximating artificial intelligence, it's an immense job to debug it. And fundamentally anything created by human beings, especially having a focus not being focused on other unintended or untoward consequences, will result rather not so much in artificial intelligence, but in artificial stupidity at some point. There is a lot of criticism nowadays about the reliance on algorithms. So many online processes are controlled by algorithms, job hiring, and YouTube recommendation lists, for example, that come under intense criticism for their reliance on algorithms, which turn out to be, you know, socially destructive. And that is coming under a lot of scrutiny nowadays. So you were mentioning the Matrix. We started this round of discussion with you talking about the Matrix. So I'll tell you something. I'll give you a couple of my views on the Matrix. One is, as I mentioned before, there are fantasies and there's science fiction. And the great thing about the Matrix is you could actually roll those two together, because within the person's mind, I mean, that's what's happening in the Matrix, where basically someone's mind is in some simulated scenario, like we are here almost. Not as good as in the Matrix. But you can have fantasy within your science fiction. But I found that particularly interesting. I don't question the nature of reality. Are we all in the Matrix? Right. One of the issues, I think the single biggest flaw in the Matrix is the entire premise that humans are grown to provide energy for the machines. I think there's a thermodynamics issue there where the energy it takes to grow the humans exceeds the energy that they produce. Yes, that's very insightful, because I was going to mention that as a matter of fact. The whole energy scheme that they've come up with doesn't really make sense. You don't need to create human beings. Human beings are extremely complex organisms, and what you can do is you can use something similar like a lead acid battery and you get plenty of energy without producing a human being. For a human being, you have to create food, which means you have to grow crops, or you have to create at least synthetically. How do you create the energy? Where do you get the energy from for the food? Because the skies were scorched, as they said, so there's no sunlight for energy. So they did have a thermal fusion source. So that would help, but then why do you need the humans on top of that? It was a little bit contrived. Right. But if you gloss over that, it does create an extremely interesting premise to kind of explore, you know, not just whether humans are, whether the human reality is quote-unquote real, but I actually also, as I mentioned earlier, I really sort of liked the issue of purpose, sort of what sort of values does machine intelligence have? In the matrix, one of the key values of the machine intelligence is purpose, that every program has a purpose, kind of like a paperclip bending robot purpose. And I thought that was an insightful value to give the machines. Yeah, that's true, but I was also thinking that, as I said, the whole energy scheme is contrived, as you mentioned, but another thing that's contrived is that if somehow they're killed in the matrix, their bodies are killed, that doesn't make sense.  You could have it designed that way, but it would seem to me that these people who are no longer in the plant, as they call it, that are separate in this marine, in this hovercraft, you could have them who are accessing the matrix from outside the plant. You could have that circuit deactivated so that no one's in danger. I mean, that seems like an obvious thing to do, and they keep that in there because it's more dramatic. It's one of those premises that allows them fictional liberty. One other point I wanted to add quickly for the copper tops as an energy source, 25% of human metabolism is spent in cerebral activity. So if these individuals were very, very inactive, they might help with figuring the energetics, but it was not something you would want to try to sell as an engineering project. Yes, that's true. I was also thinking about iRobot. There were some comments about iRobot, the movie with Will Smith. I think it wasn't really true to Isaac Asimov's stories, and I'm afraid I have to disagree there. Let's start with the three laws of robotics. Does everyone know the three laws of robotics? Go ahead and summarize them for these two. The first law is that no robot may harm or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The second law is that a robot must obey the orders given it by a human being unless it conflicts with the first law. The third law is that a robot must protect its own existence unless it conflicts with the first laws. Based on those, the movie iRobot would seem a little bit far-fetched, but Isaac Asimov actually, I mean, this was actually a combination of his different stories, and in his later stories on the robots, he does point out that there is a problem with the first three laws, that it can lead to sort of a revolution in the sense that we saw in the movie, because he was saying there could be a zeroth law, which is that robots must protect humanity, and they must protect humanity, and not, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. So then if you consider that, then suddenly the first law is not strictly adhered to, because now you can kill a human being if it's better for all of humanity. And that was what was happening essentially in the movie. Fascinating. That presents robots with the same sort of moral dilemmas that humans face. If you're on the train track, and there's a split, and there's one person on one branch, and a crowd of people on the other, which path do you take, and now intelligent robots have to face that same moral dilemma that humans do. Yes, exactly. Since I might as well leap into the hole here. Yeah, I mean, there's a theme, and let's see, I am a robot and also an extinction. Extinction, I don't want to be... The problem with describing these movies is a spoiler for those who may want to watch the movies. So I won't go into too much detail on extinction. It's on Netflix, and what I really liked about it was, well, you'll have to watch it to see it, but without the... About a very large population of synthetic people as they were called, androids, or robots. It raises the question, they were treated by the humans extremely poorly. So it raises a very important question, because in the future, I mean, already in Japan, you have very human looking robots, androids. How do we treat them? Do we give them rights as other human beings? Do we treat them like dirt because they're merely possessions? I mean, to me, it seems to feed into this question about how we treat people from other ethnic groups. I mean, racism, bigotry. It seems to me that it's like an extension of that. You can argue that, you know, these things aren't even human, so we shouldn't... Whoever wish don't even have to treat them well. I agree with that, because the way you treat someone or something will affect you, not just the thing you're affecting. So it's an interesting question that's raised by this movie. Yes, and, you know, it's reminiscent of the Next Generation episode, where Picard has to prove that data is a sentient being. It kind of establishes the principle of an artificial life form. So we're almost out of time, and I hate this. I knew we would run out of time before we were finished talking. I'm going to exercise my prerogative as the moderator to also give a plug for surrogates, because I think many people may not have seen that, but just very briefly, the reason I love it is because in the premise of surrogates is that completely life-like androids can be driven by people sitting in a gaming chair in their house. And the advantages of moving through the world with a completely realistic android avatar in the real world, it's basically an extension of second life migrated into the real world, where avatars are now androids. But the benefits of this become so obvious that, in fact, it's made a law that everyone has to have a surrogate, an android that they move through, and everyone is sitting at home in these really complex gaming chairs moving through the world in their robots.  And also very interesting because there's a real, there's a fun mystery to it.  And this threatens the entire social order that has been constructed around the surrogates. And so he's trying to track down the technology. Yes, a little bit like the Matrix, so I really like the mystery part of it. So I think anyone who enjoys second life, I think we'll really get a kick out of surrogates, but it would be like if we were moving through the world in surrogate and... May I make a final point? Yes, please. The four movies I had wanted to talk about some, I would like to just say about two of them. 1951, The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was the first of that movie. It was redone with Canary's, I guess. And it and the invasion of the body snatchers in 1978 were good examples of science fiction as responses of humankind to technological changes or new challenges as civilization progresses or makes new confrontational challenges for themselves with discoveries.  It was just business. Klaatu shows up with his killer police robot, Gort, and he gets shot promptly by the authorities in Washington because he holds up a gift for the president and at any rate, he's here to warn humankind that if they don't live peacefully, their planet will be destroyed. And he had to figure out a way to get them to listen. It was a wonderful movie. It's quite dated in its style, but Michael Rennie was the British actor who played Klaatu and he was an extraordinary actor, in my opinion. The invasion of the body snatchers also was a social statement and political statement. This exotic, beautiful flower shows up on the ground. It's part of a systematic reign of aliens in the forms of flowers that seem attractive and people will take them home and plant them. And then when they sleep, tendrils come out of the flower and start to envelop the person and they are replaced. And you think of the Charlottesville marchers yelling, Jews will not replace us and that sort of thing. The invasion of the body snatchers, the 1978 version was a remake of a 1953 version. Both of them really reflect xenophobia and fear of aliens coming in and making us disappear or become irrelevant and it's the same stuff we're dealing with now toward people that are different, quote, tribes, unquote. So yes, absolutely. The original one was about McCarthyism, but the idea of fear of other tribes or tribal thinking in humans is pretty much still with us. And I made a mistake in a sense. I showed that to my daughter when she was eight and my two other children were out. So we sat and watched invasion of the body snatchers and she would never sleep in a room with a flower in it again. So my bad. I really encourage those two films and I'm finished. Thank you. Okay, I just wanted to make a request to the group. Suggestions to the group that might consider that this seems to be a very rich topic, science fiction in general. One of the topics I recall is science fiction books and so on. We might have another session on science fiction movies again some day I think most people would like them. Absolutely. You read my mind. We should have a part two. Yeah, sometime. It doesn't have to be next time, but we need to try that. Another suggestion is, as I said before, I think the difference between science fiction and fantasy is really important and I think what we should do is have a session where we talk about that. Why the difference is important and give examples of things on each side and why we think that something is science fiction. Yes, I love that idea. I was going to show, I had a definition of fantasy to contrast it with the definition of science fiction. And the fantasy definition I was going to use was that it's a form of literary genre in which a plot cannot occur in the real world. It usually involves witchcraft, magic, taking place on an undiscovered planet or in an unknown world. The theme and setting have combinations of technology and architecture and language, often set in European medieval age type arrangements. But these are the sorts of movies with the talking animals. It's a good point about fantasies being about magic, but the thing is you have to define magic. How does that differ from science? I sort of have a definition for that, but we don't want to talk about that now. Maybe we want to talk about that during the panel session of that someday. Good point. Yes, thank you all. This was just super enjoyable. I'm a little concerned. I think we've really gone over our time though. I did want to maybe give Chantal a chance to promote the next panel discussion, which will happen in a number. The topic is going to be the Cambrian Explosion and the History of Life, which I think will be a rich topic for discussion. Students will enjoy if you want to about a call for anyone who would be in the panel to discuss the Cambrian Explosion and the History of Life to contact me. And then also give Chantal an opportunity to take care of any group business. Thank you, Berrigan. Thanks to Chantal and Jess. And I appreciate Chantal's chance to be on the panel. Yes, thanks again, Berrigan. Thanks to the panel members, Mike and Tagline. I appreciate your presence here. And thanks to everyone else. Yes, definitely. Thanks everyone. And thanks to the audience who took part of their Saturday to join us. Yes, I agree. I really enjoyed the audience participation in the nearby chat. It really added a lot to our discussion, I think. So, all right, I guess with that, I will adjourn this edition of our Science Circle panel discussions and look forward to seeing you all next time.


Hey everyone, Drew with GeoArm and I'm back to talk to you about changing the language in the Geo Alarm Control Panel. Very very easy to do. At this moment of the filming of this video, there are currently only two languages that are able to be used. It's going to be English or Spanish. But if you want to change that, all you're going to do is go ahead and hit the hamburger icon in the top left hand corner, enter your master code, mine is 1234, you're going to select panel. At that point, you can change the language from English to Spanish right here. Okay, I'm going to go back to English because I don't read Spanish that well, but you can flip the language there. It's very very easy to do on the Geo Alarm Control Panel. So you hit the back arrow to exit out of programming and that is how you do it. If you guys have any questions or comments, please leave them below. Take care and have a great day. Please like and subscribe to our page for helpful programming and installation videos.


Welcome back to Conversations with Carrie. I want to talk to you today about my latest blog. And y'all gonna have to excuse me. I have an invisible line.  It has been over a year. I'm just ready to have this out of my mouth so I can have my teeth back and not have a list. But I will say I like what it did for my smile. But anyway, I recently wrote a blog and I wanted to kind of share it on here around the road less traveled. And this actually came out of I was working out doing my Peloton workout. And one of the instructors was like, who are you when things get hard? And this is as I'm literally on the treadmill. She had us on 12 and a half incline. And I wanted to hold on to the bar so hard. Because I'm like, I'm tired. And I just felt like I'm just, listen, working out this this Christmas season has been a little challenging for me. But I was doing a hike on Thanksgiving morning. And there was like so many families out like I mean, everybody named mama must have had the same idea. Like let's go on the hike to this like local reservoir and enjoy the sunshine. It was like a beautiful day. But anyway, and I've done this hike several times.  And as I'm going around, I see for the first time, I saw these little like paths that ventured out from the path I was on. Now keep in mind, the path I was on was paved in some areas. It got like a little dirt, but like it was mainly a paved road. It was wide. I know exactly the route I wanted to take and how to get there. And I don't know why I've never noticed this before, but off to the side, I would see like a little dirt path that would take me off in a different direction. And the first one I saw was a really steep hill.  But then I was like, I don't know where it's gonna take me. I don't know what's on the other side of the hill. It was so steep. I couldn't even see the other side. And I was like, Yeah, nah, I'm doing that. I'm not I'm not doing that. So I was like left alone, talked to myself out of it. And I was like, you know, kept on going. I was feeling good. I was like, No, I know this path. I know this path is paved. It's safe. I'm gonna stay on this path. And then I came across another one. Now this time the path was actually flat, but it curved around this bend. And there was like some trees and stuff. And I didn't know where it curves around to now keep in mind. I've also never been on this path before. And I was like, and I thought for a second, like, can I just go on that path? But I was like, who's gonna be on it?   And I'm like, I can be safer here. So I kept walking. But as I kept walking, and I didn't take either one of these paths, I felt like a conviction from the Lord, because I was choosing the safer route. I didn't want to take the harder way, or I didn't want to take the unknown way.  Chow, and I'm like, I love the Lord. He will talk to you at any time. And I realized one of the reasons I didn't want to take those paths, because I was like, maybe they're harder. I felt like I liked my version of hard. I was okay with my, my paved road where I saw other people on. But you know what, in this walk of Christianity and living for the Lord, he's gonna take you on some paths that it's gonna be you and him. And I've had so many seasons like that. And you would think by now I would be prepared for it. But I realized that sometimes I go towards what's easy. I go towards what's comfortable. And that was conviction for me. I was like, Lord, forgive me for not being willing. And I know that you might be like, carry your over spiritualizing your workout. Listen, the Lord will talk to you whenever, wherever, whatever way he wants to. Okay. And he just kind of told me like, listen, I'm going to need you to trust me no matter what the path looks like. You're going to have to know that I'm with you. And just as Proverbs three, five, six talks about not leaning to your own understanding, but acknowledging God in all your ways so he can direct and lead your path. That's what came to mind. I was like, I'm going to have to allow the Lord to lead me no matter what. So my challenge to you is who are you when things get hard? Do you take the easy route? Like I did. Do you take the safer route? Like I did because I'm like, I know what that is. Or do you think to yourself, Lord, you've got me as long as you're with me, the hard will be worth it. The hard because I don't know. I don't know what I missed out that day. I'm actually going to go back to that path and take one of those maybe both of those paths. Because I'm like, what did I miss out on? Maybe I missed on burning a few more calories or just a beautiful view of the Bay. I'm not sure, but I feel like as long as I know the God is with me, I want to actually show him Lord, I'll be willing to take the unknown paths. I'll be willing to go on the road less traveled as long as you're with me. Because I have in this walk, so many times had to surrender what I thought things were going to look like and what I thought that, you know, I wanted it to be. And instead just be like, you know what, Lord, lead me. I think it was Tasha Cobb's Leonard who once talks about and want her CDs about how she just walks in the fog and the Lord is her light and like, you know, he's her fog light. And at first I was like, child, I don't even know where I'm going. But no, I get it now. It's like, I want to go on the paths maybe they're less traveled that may not seem safer. But I know that Lord is with me. So I'm safe. I have provision for the vision. That's what my pastor preached to her recently. And I was like, yes, the Lord will give me provision for the vision. Because it's his vision. Everything I'm everything I'm doing is for him. And he's not going to leave me down the path and just leave me there. I have felt like that once before I was like, Lord, like, how did you let me get this far down the road? But truly it was my own desires that were leading me. And this time I'm like, Lord, no, I want to be led by you. I want the Holy Spirit Spirit is promising. And I know that he's with me. And I can go on any path that he has set for me. So again, I think as you finish out this this year, finish out 2023, think to yourself, who am I when things get hard? Will I take the road less traveled? Or will I take the easy, safer route? All right, y'all, check out this blog also on carrylee.com. But be sure to like and subscribe here and let me know who are you when things get hard. See you next time.