Live from San Jose, California, it's the Cube, happy adaptive flash launch brought to you by Nimble Storage. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back, and we're here live in Silicon Valley for the Nimble Storage exclusive coverage of their product launch. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. It's the Cube, flagship program we go out for the advanced extractive system of noise. My co-host is David Fleuer from wikibon.org. Our next guest is Ryan Miller, technology architect with Millie Min. Welcome to the Cube. Thank you. See you up on stage given the testimonial. So what was the main thing that got you attracted to the value proposition that you were talking about? Yeah, so Nimble, providing both the performance and the cost, it's a huge thing for us to be able to do a lot with a little, and that goes both in the framework that they're providing for IOPS and capacity, but also physical rack space, being able to consolidate our co-location facilities, things like that. Describe your role, your purview within your organization, and so the folks can understand the context of that. Sure, so within our group we develop software for benefits administration, 401k pension plan, what not, and so we develop the software that we host and manage internally. So we're responsible for everything from the SDLC that's involved there with the infrastructure and everything about that. We're implementing the Nimble to achieve a couple different aspects. Historically we've dealt with data warehousing, but also with hypervisor, virtualization, file systems, things like that, where we've slowly consolidated some things to it, but we also have some legacy storage facilities that we need to again continue that consolidation effort. Go ahead David. So what was the business requirement you had? What was the business function that you had that you required? And what made you look at Nimble storage or any other storage? Yeah, initially we had, like I said earlier, there was a Greenfield opportunity for a data warehouse type platform that we needed a lot of throughput. We didn't exactly know what we needed performance wise. We knew there was a lot of capacity needs, and the traditional method of how we deployed the storage was going to be very cumbersome, very expensive, and just not very efficient. So we're looking for another opportunity to leverage something more modern, something a little bit more space conscious and also conscious of the cost of deploying it. So you said data warehouses, can you give a little more detail about what you were trying to do there? So in our transactional databases, we needed to get the data off onto another platform that we could report it on. So we have a detail process that was extracting that data and loading it into another environment and manipulating it a lot, so a lot of input output, a lot of data churn, and finally presented it into a reporting side database. We did that for all our environments, development tests, pre-production production, so we've got a lot of varying times of when we need that performance, but also a lot of that churn creates havoc on the traditional systems where we're just bottlenecked by the, you know, the Firebird Channel type Iops that we were accustomed to. So that was the challenge? Yeah, 10GIGS, because he was new for us, getting off the Firebird Channel and deploying all new networks for that, dedicated for it, and really being able to utilize that throughput, but at the network level, at the host level, and at the storage level all the way through right now. So what was it about the Nimble storage that was particularly useful in this data warehouse, ETL environment? I think the unpredictability initially of what our I.O. requirements were. Nimble was able to extend the ceiling, so to speak, to allow us to be more flexible in what we were deploying the system for. The ability to have a lot of storage, but also have the capacity for performance, that flash, we were able to expand our flash capacity on it and upgrade the CPU capability as well. In those 10GIG interfaces, all of that allowed for the storage platform to no longer become or be the buffer, or the bottleneck. So that then allowed us to focus on our efforts to optimize the process, the software that we had, and then the translations and whatnot. So storage, was it time to innocence, isn't it? If you're a storage person, you're always the cause of every problem, so you have to prove you're innocence. That came down significantly. Absolutely. And we're a smaller group within our technology group itself, so we had to do everything. And having yet another technology platform that needed dedicated resources, or duplicate resources so that you had a little bit of overlap, was another cost factor.  So from a business perspective, you've eliminated storage as one of the bottlenecks there. What impact does that have on the development teams themselves? I mean, you're doing this for a purpose to develop stuff, get it out to your customers, or get new services out to your consultants. What impact has it had on that ability to deliver stuff more quickly to your customers? It has allowed us to more rapidly expand our needs, whatever it may be. Troubleshooting, if we need copies of data, we can do that very easily. If we need to expand it or change the way that we're processing it so that it allows the developers to optimize their logic a little bit better, so that we're no longer blaming the storage. We can blame other things now. We can focus on optimizing that. So ultimately, we found these other issues and we're able to optimize those and actually give reason and justification to optimize them, to spend time researching it and making those things better. Now we got a better product, right? And we're not focused on, you know, it could be a number of different issues. We don't know where to start necessarily. Now we know it's not this, it's not that, and we can focus on these other things. You eliminated storage as a reason in the development shop. That's a pretty good feeling, isn't it? Right, absolutely. What about InfoSight? Does that help to you at all? Yeah, InfoSight, I've been with Nimble before it existed and so I saw the evolution of it. They've continued to add more data to it than I could ever really imagine would be needed initially, but now I understand why it's there and being able to see from the basics of here we are, here's the trajectory, this is what we're going to need to, you know, we are actually touching capacity on our flash or not and those upgrade the type of needs, but also being able to compare the different types of workloads, seeing where we're optimizing our compression usage or data usage, where our data protection isn't there, where it isn't meeting our SLAs or whatever. It's a nice single pane of glass to really see our systems along with others within the company to see how we compare amongst them. Fantastic. So if there's one feature that they were going to take away from you, from your Nimble storage, which is the one that you would hang on to and not allow them to take? Interesting. You know, I've leveraged the in-place upgrades quite a bit and looking forward to the 700 series, being able to do that is a very powerful feature I think, but ultimately the snapshots that built within the platform, that took away a burden completely, especially with our data warehouse project, being able to back up, you know, the terabytes upon terabytes of data, get it off and manage that versus, because it's a secondary set of data. Our primary data has already got the traditional backup system currently still and so it solved an issue where we no longer had to deal with the third party or anything. The backups are there, they're replicated off-site and that's good. So that's a really good feature that we need. Ryan, we got to go. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts with us. We'll give you the final word. Share with the folks out there. They had a lot of customer success we had Rod on earlier. So share with the folks out there in your own words. Why is Nimble so great? Why are they doing so well from a product technology and company standpoint? I think one of their main advantages is that they got to start from scratch. They got to really rethink the way the hardware is utilized. They're not backfilling and trying to deal with legacy and you got some really smart guys on the team. Everybody's very smart and the way that they've leveraged it and optimized it, nobody else can do this. Obviously they've patented everything here. They've gone public. The rocket ship is in orbit. Exactly. They're doing it right. They thought it outright and they're moving forward with it and taking into account all of the different needs of our customers. Thanks for coming on. Dave and I love to hear from practitioners, people in the trenches actually implementing it, not the vendors and their story. Obviously validated. Thanks for coming. We'll be right back with our next guest here on the ground live in Silicon Valley. The Nimble Store has exclusive coverage of their new product launch. We'll be right back after this short break.


In the pursuit of success, we're usually taught that we need more fans, more followers, and more subscribers. We need more sales, more customers. In other words, we're always needing more people to do what we want them to do. I want you to subscribe. I want you to like this thing. I want you to join my email list. I want you to buy my thing. It's always more self-centeredness, in other words. And maybe that's why so many of us dislike marketing, dislike how business is often done, especially online. The drawback is also there for the business owner who's doing that, for the marketer who's doing that, because the person who is always pursuing more is always in competition with all the other very cunning marketers, very clever and sometimes not very ethical business owners who are also trying to get more.  Well, I hope that I can show you a different way. I talk about what I call authentic business.  He's a leash with me today. I'm on the walk by myself. And so I'm going to have to watch him while I do these videos. So authentic business is about being authentic to our deeper self, our higher self.  And that is how authentic business can be done as well. And I think that's how authentic businesses succeed is instead of always seeking more fans and more subscribers, more sales, we focus on bringing more love, bringing more caring into business and into how we relate to our audience. And this is in everything. Bring more caring and love and your authentic self into your content, which is what I try to do. Bring more caring and love into understanding your audience. If you care so much about your audience, that means you want to understand them better and how to serve them better. So instead of thinking, gosh, I need, if only I had 10,000 email subscribers, if only I had a million fans or something like that, what about your existing email subscribers? What if you have your existing network? What about your existing fans and people who care enough to follow your content, even if it's a few? Can you, are you willing to care enough about them, to get to know them because they are a representative of your future fans and all the people who could follow your content, buy your products and services, or do you care enough to have conversations with the few, get to know them better, see how you can better serve them, see how they are not being served by the businesses that they buy from. See what kinds of problems they have, they're going through that they're trying to find a solution for. Because if you care enough to know those things, you can create the product or service that they need, or you can find somebody who is providing a better product or service that they themselves, that your audience isn't aware of yet, and you can earn some money from sharing those products and services. So instead of more fans, more followers, etc., let's aim to care more and you will enjoy your business more and everybody truly will win.


Hello everyone and welcome. My name is Melissa Armel and I am the Stock Swoosh. And today I wanted to talk to you about toughness, strength. These are very important qualities. And right now, during these times, a lot of people have to be strong. If you get overwhelmed and stressed out by being at home and going through all of the things, especially if you have children or you're working from home and you don't normally do it, it really can take a toll on your physical and mental health. And I think people have to, they have two choices during times like this. They can either get stronger and recognize and feel their own inner strength or they can get weaker, okay? And it's interesting because Governor Cuomo today was talking about the fact that in tough times, you really get to know a person to see how they act when things are tough. It's different when you know people, when everything's going great, how people act, especially when your relationships, actually, he gave a great lecture today, he talked about it during his press conference and he was saying, especially when you're in a relationship with someone and you can tell what they're really, persons really, really like when tough times come upon you because you can really see them, the strength and character of a person and whether or not they're strong or weak.  And a lot of people are very stressed out about their financial situation right now with their jobs not knowing when they're going back to work. Maybe they are off work, maybe they got laid off. Some people are on unemployment, some people working from home and that's not ideal. And even some people in certain industries, they may be working from home but they are worried about the future of their jobs based on when this is all gonna end, which nobody really knows. And how this is going to affect your overall economy going into the rest of 2020. So I know that everybody is going through this and we're really all going through it together because we really, this is many, many unknowns. But the fact is that during these times, you have to be strong. So go inside and actually muster up the courage because it's courage that you need during times like this and also faith. And the faith comes from what? It could be religious faith or it could just be faith in yourself. So have faith and gain the courage to be able to move forward into tomorrow, the next day, the next week, the next month, whatever happens to come. Because none of this is your fault, okay? You need to continue to stay strong in your life for yourself, most importantly, and your family. And you've got to learn how to come out through times like this to become stronger and not become weak. You don't wanna be weak going through this because you're not gonna be better off than in the end. So find a way to muster the courage to be strong, strong, strong. And part of that is staying healthy, getting a good night's sleep, any right, staying focused and thinking very, very positive thoughts. So take care everyone, stay safe during these times right now and most importantly, stay strong, physically strong and emotionally strong. Have a great night everyone.


Hi, I'm Jim Wells and I'm a member of the Best of Us Investors Network. I hope you will join us and become a part of our community. This is my 18th video with the Best of Us Investors Network. My first video was on the area of decentralization because I felt it was so important to understand the main goal really of Satoshi Nakamoto's, which he believed in a peer-to-peer, decentralized world network or currency. The thumbnail was the Bitcoin revolution. My talk was about the goal of decentralization. Cardano in Africa is making this goal a reality. The people of Africa have been slaved to centralization. They have had no way to have an identity, a bank account, process payments or engage in finance. 78% of the world are not connected to the internet. 1 billion people are unbanked. The highest percentage of people are in the continent of Africa. It is by far the most underdeveloped place in the world. Cardano is paving the way for equal access for consideration of people in participating in the global economy. Cardano is being adopted in Africa and is delivering on their promises. People can have their own permissionless banks and identity. This is decentralization the way it was meant to be. We'll be right back. Best of Us Investors presents Jim Wells. An internet online Hong Kong, IOHK, which is basically the research team behind Cardano, has improved blockchain technology and the quality of integration in Africa. They have made a huge investment in education and research through blockchain technology. The government of Ethiopia has closed a deal with the Ministry of Education. Cardano is going to include 5 million students using a technology called Prism Integration in the Cardano blockchain. Every student will have a digital ID called a DID, D-I-D, that will carry with them throughout their academic lives. This ID can then be used for payments, property and voting and all other matters of their economic life. This will work and be inspired in the system for 107 million Ethiopians to have IDs. This is an aligned goal with the Ethiopian government and Cardano. So actually a country is working with the blockchain technology in Africa. A little bit different than what's happening in the US right now. IOHK is a teleprism digital ID with a mobile phone will enable authorities to create a tamper-proof record of educational performance for 5 million students, 3,500 schools and 750,000 teachers to interact with government services. Schools will be able to monitor attendance, students will be able to digitally connect to their schools for learning. Their data and grades will be secured, stored and shared with universities and employers. Once they have IDs, the IDs of the key for identity so that they are recognized in the country and on the global scale, practical applications to provide banking and insurance for financial inclusions. They will even be able to build a credit history. The other project that they are working on that was announced was WorldMobile, the first mobile network built on the Cardano blockchain. It's launching in Zanzibar and Tanzania. Data that's half the price and twice as fast. A remote village in Tanzania is a living example that when communities have the power to connect themselves, they can do remarkable things. After a year, local fishermen have grown their businesses, quintupled their profits and tripled their shops and barbs. The whole idea is to promote open finance, loans and insurance. They coined the term real-fi. They're actually helping with true finance and connecting them to banks and financial institutions in that area, in Tanzania. So, connecting the unconnected is the whole mantra behind WorldMobile. Once you've connected the unconnected, you can give everyone a digital ID through the Ateloprism app, it's an app that you actually download on your phone, and then they are able to be banked. And that is the next goal, to bank the unbanked. Access through their mobile devices to finance markets and trading. You should be excited about this if you are interested in cryptocurrency. That is the whole goal of decentralization and really what the main goal of cryptocurrency really was. All the way back to Satoshi Nakamoto, this is what he talked about. Peer-to-peer ecosystem, global network where you don't have to depend on banks, that you have your own identity, that you're able to send it anywhere in the world and to be a part of the free market system. This plan is decentralized from any type of corruption of government with the approval of the African government. It's a bottom-up plan that works through the people. In addition, they've also combined with Singularity.net and iCog Labs. Singularity is into AI and advanced robotics. And Cardano are working together with Singularity. They're actually sharing office space. They're using technology, Singularity is using technology to grow crops through the use of robotics and blockchain. They announced the AGI token will be on the Cardano blockchain. Cardano is making inroads to businesses and people in the community of Africa. There is a project called Grow Cardano, Grow Africa. And all the projects that I've mentioned before are basically being promoted by the people and the businesses and the infrastructure of Ethiopia and Tanzania and other parts of Africa. They're also involved in the Save the Children organization. There is a mission-driven pool that has donated over $500 million in Cardano in ADA tokens. Through the COTI partnership, partnership with COTI, they help third parties like Save the Children to receive and execute crypto payments. They went on to talk about, there was an actual panel in Cardano, Africa in the video that talked about, it was a panel that talked about where they saw Africa going by the year 2025. Charles Hoskinson was on the panel along with other people that are basically involved in the peer review of Cardano. Data supports the long-term economic development, literacy rates and connectivity. Big industries and institutions are coming into Africa. The Cardano protocol is looking at people looking to solve problems along with their technology. The world is all about collaboration. Cardano has a business plan and matches the world. Open finance to farmers at lower rates than the banks can currently offer. That is one of their goals. The Prime Minister of Africa is actually a cryptographer. So he buys in to everything Cardano is doing and he understands how good it is to connect their country. I would bet on a young country that is filled with optimism and growing. They also launched a website called Africa.Cardano.org. The purpose of this website is for people to learn how to use the Haskell program to actually use smart contracts. This is supposed to be extremely user-friendly, much more easy to use than the current smart contracts that are being issued on Ethereum. Charles Hoskinson believes that as this technology grows, in the next five years, these promises that Cardano has made can be turned into a brand new business model with advanced languages like Haskell for everyone and are all being validated by peer review. Do you want to be about investing in a culture that is building and making lives better? Cardano IOHK are doing things with intelligence, collaboration, and morality. They are using a systematic process to implement Cardano, ADA, and Africa. They are using their people and infrastructure to support their system. How can you not support the fact that they are being charitable and improving people's lives? They are also doing a great job of promoting how and what they are doing through Cardano 360, Cardano Africa, and all their support networks and their plans moving forward. In addition, their third-generation technology is more advanced in being utilized in a country where it is intended to be used. They are also educating people on how to use their technology. I believe this is going to spread through Africa and third-world countries like a wildfire. In addition, from an investment standpoint, over 70% of Cardano's ADA token is staked. I believe most people see and understand that Cardano is a long-term investment. It doesn't make it bulletproof. However, in comparison to other cryptocurrencies, I see it as being much less volatile. In addition, Cardano will be launching smart contracts with their project Alonzo very soon. It was already my second biggest holding after Bitcoin, and I just made another substantial buy. If there is a pullback, I am ready to buy more. If you are looking for an entry point, I would encourage you to check out Dan from Crypto Capital Venture. He has his own YouTube channel. He does an excellent job of technical analysis on both Cardano and Bitcoin. He also reports on Cardano News and just recently did an interview with the CEO of Codi. I believe in this mission, the proof-of-stake concept, and I believe in Cardano and Africa is doing what the cryptocurrency ecosystem was created for. I encourage you to join the Best of Us Investors Network, become a part of our Discord, and give me your thoughts and ideas, and become a part of us. We'll see you soon.


talked today about a few key figures at work at Bell Labs, mostly during the 60s, but a little bit earlier as well, who kind of embody the spirit of Keeper v. Weird. So I work for Thoughtbot. This is my Twitter, this is my email, and this is where I'm from. So those two have been to Denver. If you land at the airport, you're in for a treat. Wonderful horse, just kind of waiting to greet you. So something I should also mention is all these stories take place in the best day of the country. Of course, I'm talking about New Jersey. All these stories take place in the old headquarters of Bell Lab. Wow, that is a terrible word pollution. In Murrah Hill, New Jersey. And for those who don't know, Bell Labs is a research lab founded in the 1920s that made huge development in the field of computers, electronics, engineering, and communication technologies. Some of the many things created and invented at Bell Labs include lasers, transistors, evidence for the Big Bang Theory found through radio astronomy, UNIX-C, C++, so many other things. And if I could choose one person to represent Keeper v. Weird, it'd be this man, Claude Shannon. He was the father of information theory. He was a mathematical engineer who created the founding groundwork for modern computing as we know it. He made huge impacts on the world of computers and engineering with communication and information theory, compression. He developed compression, cryptography, artificial intelligence, and even automatic artillery during World War II. He was considered to be a brilliant man by his peers, his teachers, everyone he came across. But he was kind of an eccentric guy. He had a lot of hobbies, like juggling, unicycle writing, building or solving Rubik's cubes. He played the clarinet. He also enjoyed gambling, but from a completely nerdy perspective, he just really enjoyed math. And he would be found during the breaks at Bell Labs, basically doing as many hobbies as he could, just sort of to pass the time. He would ride down the halls of Bell Labs on his unicycle. He would, he once had a pogo stick phase where he was riding up and down the halls on a pogo stick. He also tried to incorporate a lot of engineering into his hobbies. So this picture that you see here, which is a little bit frightening, this is a juggling machine that he created when he was during, when he had his juggling phase. He even went so far as to start writing a paper about juggling and all the sciences and physics behind it. But, so he was really into chess and he often challenged his coworkers to chess games and often beat them because he was sort of obsessed with chess during that phase. He wrote a paper describing a chess machine that could make the best decisions at each point of the game and could theoretically beat the best chess player in the world. And while chess wasn't an important problem to solve, his argument was that a machine that could solve a chess game, that could win a chess game, could also solve other problems that they encountered at work. Like intelligently routing lines of communication to make phone calls or to make sure that phone calls were routed as fast as possible. And he also theorized that this machine that could win chess games could also make decisions to translate languages. These are problems that are still encountered today in a lot of companies, tech companies that deal with these things. He also made other, he didn't make other electronic games and these games were a place for Shannon to explore machine-human interaction, which he was really fascinated by. And the way he would test this was, he would test this on humans and he constantly trolled his coworkers a little bit who designed games to, and make his coworkers play them. And occasionally he would design games that would pause or just take a very long time to make a decision, kind of giving the player who's playing against the computer a false sense of security. So it would make the player think that they made a really good move and perhaps letting their guard down and perhaps losing even faster. So he received, one Christmas, he received an erector set from his wife. For those who don't know, an erector set is kind of, they're kind of like Legos, but they're made of metal and they come with bolts that, and so you can create these little machines and they also come with mechanical parts like pulleys and wheels and gears and also electric motors. And so he received this set and he was immediately making stuff. What he created at home was a little robotic turtle that could walk around and of course when the turtle hit a wall it would turn around. So he was already acknowledging that machines can kind of work by themselves. And this led to his electronic mouse experiments which he spent a lot of time doing research on at Bell Labs. This electric mouse was made with the same, sorry, was made with the same hardware as telephone searching technology. And this mouse needed to go find cheese in this maze that was powered by electric relays. When it couldn't find the piece, it couldn't always find the piece of cheese very quickly. It would kind of follow this crazy path that you see in the top right left corner. But it would eventually find its way out. And after it learned how to get its way out he could place the mouse any point in the maze and the mouse would be able to find its way out quickly. So this was actually one of the first examples of artificial intelligence. And this was just through an experiment that he decided to put together. And it also made his coworkers and a lot of his peers at Bell Labs see the potential of machines and computers. These experiments that Shannon did helped shape Shannon's writings on information technologies and help formalize a study into legitimate science. Shannon's bosses and the legal department and the accounting department at Bell Labs were less excited about these experiments because they couldn't see the value in doing machines that could play chess or electric mice or other of Shannon's crazy experiments. He eventually left Bell Labs after he was offered a position at MIT even though he really enjoyed working at Bell Labs and enjoyed the people that he was surrounded by because at MIT he had the freedom to experiment and play during his work days without pressure from the higher ups. Without Shannon's curiosity and creativity computers may be totally different tools from what they are today. I'm gonna fast forward many years of computer development to the 1960s and I wanna talk about A. Michael Knowle. During the 1960s, Bell Labs graphics departments pushed forward the development of computer graphics much further than it had ever been before. Before that time computers were mostly used in research labs by scientists and many of the computers of that time didn't even have displays. But Knowle had this vision of computers being used beyond the labs. So he focused a lot on, so to prove his point, he focused on using the computer to create visual pieces of art. The screenshot I showed before and this piece that you see on the screen is a piece called Gaussian quadratic. If you're wondering where the name comes from, the lines you see here are calculated on an XY plane with a quadratic formula. The Y coordinate increases by one after every iteration but the X coordinate is a random number generated by a random number on the Gaussian distribution which kind of looks like a bell curve, thus the name Gaussian quadratic. And if the X or Y coordinates get too large, they just wrap around and create this, they just wrap around the canvas. And Knowle plays with this concept a lot. He plays around with different increments, different random distributions and different ways to create pieces of art. Something I found pretty interesting about Knowle and his writings is that he makes arguments for artists to do their art with the computer. Knowle was actually considered one of the first computer artists of his time and it's implied in his writing that he got a lot of pushback from artists questioning whether or not his mathematical prints were actually considered art. And to sort of defend his point, he uses an influence from another artist. This is a piece of art called Current by Bridget Riley who does a lot of geometric arts. Who does a lot of geometric art. And this was done entirely by hand. Knowle mentions how much easier this particular drawing would be done, would have been for the artists if they used a computer and a bit of math because the idea of the art lives in the artist's mind and they just need to get it out on paper. These days, it's completely normal for an artist to use a computer as a medium for their art. And according to Knowle, computers were never meant to affect the creativity of an artist. I really enjoyed this quote that he gives. The creative process takes place in the mind of the artist. The final painting is only the artist's tradition of his mental image. Knowle was also curious about how computer displays could show 3D shapes. He'd played around with 2D shapes for a very long time and he wondered if the human eye could actually perceive or could be tricked to perceive 3D images on a flat screen. So his next step was to start creating 3D drawings and he tried a lot of variations. And like a scientist, he did a lot of testing. So he presented these pictures to over two many subjects and let them write the picture in order of aesthetics and categorize the computer drawings as 2D and 3D. And what he thought was 2D, what he thought represented 3D was totally different from what most people perceived as 3D. And he also, using the rankings of aesthetic pleasingness, he was able to basically use or test art and help him find the best pieces of art to display in the gallery. And after he was successfully able to produce 3D images on the screen, he decided he wanted to create a series of 3D images and create movies. And so the sequence that you see above turns into this, this sort of hypercube that just moves over and over. And he kind of became obsessed with making movies for a while and he created a couple opening sequences for a few documentaries using these graphics that he creates just using math. Null was also inspired by New York City Ballet in the production of a Stravinsky Ballet and wondered how to incorporate computers into ballet. He wrote an article called Choreography and Computers where he just talks about this hypothetical performance, dance performance and the problems with trying to incorporate computers in dance without using prerecorded dance movements and while still trying to capture the spirit of life performance. The picture that you see here is screenshots from his prototype where he would control dancers using external control. These stick figures that you see on the stage or on the stage where the dancers on the performance side would be projected. His writings make it clear that the motivations for creating these pieces of art and for exploring other areas of art and trying to incorporate computers with them was to lessen the divide between humans and computers and make them less intimidating to people who didn't usually work with them. He imagined a world where not only scientists would be using computers to do their job but artists as well. And these pieces of art helped let artists understand the advancement of computer graphics and opened the world to them. He opened up the world of computer animation and computer user experience during this time. His works of art and his passion for computer art have had a profound impact on how we use computers today. While Noel was trying to incorporate computers into visual art, other artists were also trying to incorporate technology into their art. This is just a piece of a larger piece of art called Omashe New York created in 1960 by an artist named John Tung Lee with a Bellat engineer, Bill Hoover. And I'm just gonna go play a clip. So what you see here is actually a machine that's just breaking down and it's actually on fire right now. So that was an entirely intentional, entirely, let me go stop this. So Omashe New York was about a machine that could theoretically destroy itself. It's literally made from garbage found in New Jersey and also made with electric circuits that were designed to short-circuit and burn itself out. And so what you see here is the machine catching on fire and that was not entirely supposed to happen but it was kind of like in this fortunate accident. I think that's actually the fire department that were caught. And so while this piece of art was displaying an actual failure of technology as this was breaking down, it wasn't supposed, it was actually supposed to be symbolic of New York City like it was New York City, the artist wanted to represent New York City as this unpredictable and machine that was constantly overloading itself in a self-destructive way. And so there's a reference. And so this machine, this piece of art is actually a reference. So the engineer who worked on this piece of art, Billy Glover, mentioned that there's a direct reference to Claude Shannon in this piece of modern art.   So in 1966, several years after homage to New York, Billy Glover and another engineer at Bell Labs, named Droshenberg, found an EAT or Experiments in Art and Technology. I also want to mention that Bell Labs completely funded this group and were really supportive of this group. This group allowed artists to attend the labs after hours and work on pieces of art using Bell Labs technology with the assistance of Bell Labs engineer employees. And so it got engineers involved in modern art as well. And there were classes offered for artists to learn something about computer basics and to get familiar with the things that Bell Labs is working with. One of the major outcomes from EAT was a show called Nine Evenings Theater and Engineering. It featured 10 artists, 30-ish engineers who worked on the projects, presenting avant-garde theater, dance, and new pieces. One of the pieces that was premiered that night was John Cage's Variation Seven. This piece mostly uses amplifiers and recording devices. However, there was no prerecorded audio. John Cage wanted all the artists to walk around and collect sounds from the audience. They also used FM radios and tried to find live feeds that they could incorporate into the music. It was, or noise. And there were actually also open phone calls to various places in the city. Like they had phones that were just hanging off points in the city. And the performers and the piece would actually take those sounds and try to alter them so they would sound even crazier. And there was one performance on this piece that actually required a brainwave reader and the artist tried to modify sounds through that. And there was also an interactive component. All the performers of this piece walked around the stage and they triggered these sensors that would trigger lights and sound generators. And so this would increase the randomness and uniqueness of each performance, which John Cage was a huge fan of. If those of you who know, four minutes and 33 seconds, his piece was basically the audience's reactions to a performer just walking on stage and doing nothing. So it definitely incorporated the spirit of John Cage. Another really cool piece that came from that night is called Vendanian, which I might have pronounced it wrong, I'm sorry. But a Vendanian is a instrument kind of like an accordion. And so what they did with this instrument, there's in an accordion, there's a lot of different buttons, there's air chambers, and they attach, engineers at the labs attach a bunch of sensors and circuits to this instrument. And these, whenever the instrument would play, it would trigger these electronic signals and direct them into amplifiers or light sources. And while that was happening, other performers were controlling custom devices that engineers at Bell Labs designed. One of the most notable ones, I think, was this small remote custom light board that allowed the performer to draw on the light and then it would show up on the screen. And I can show you a picture, it's a top picture right there. And that's the inside of the instrument. That's kind of how they got all those electric signals. So so many technologies that were being developed and had been developed at Bell Labs and elsewhere were used for the first time in this way on stage. And it allowed for, and it was kind of like this new thing, cage pieces used wireless FM transmitters and various open telephone lines for the first time on stage. David Tudor's piece modified a lot of the existing television technology to produce his piece. And there was another piece, a dance piece that used an infrared camera to capture dancers dancing in complete darkness, but it would be transmitted to another device and displayed. So this group continued to produce more pieces and smaller shows, and all of the projects, what they had in common was that they were filled with this technological optimism, focusing on the theoretical possibilities of technologies and pushing the known limits of engineering. And what's amazing is that Bell Labs was successful for so many years because it let engineers, mathematicians, and scientists collaborate in their fields of expertise in one place. And this was essentially doing the same thing, but branching out into modern art. And so it opened up so many more possibilities. We all have things that are weird about us, passions that lie outside of our regular jobs, outside of our computers. I mean, why else would we be at this conference called Keeper Be Weird? The engineers that I talked about were all incredibly brilliant people, but more importantly, they were all optimistic and curious. They took their outside passions and applied it to their jobs, pushing the limits of computers, and they helped shape them into the tools that they are today. Bringing code together with their outside passions helps us keep that optimism for our craft and brings fresh perspective to problem solving. So I hope learning about these historic figures and these stories encourages you all to bring your own weird to your code.