Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the fourth program behind the designs. We're excited to have you all here. This lunchtime discussion is an opportunity for our curators, conservators, and educators, and other specialists to come together for conversations around our collection and exhibitions. And it's also an opportunity for you, the audience, to ask questions. So please put all of your questions in the Q&A part of Zoom. So not the chat, but the Q&A part of Zoom. And just a little advanced warning that our next program will take place on September 14th. And we'll focus on textiles in our collection by the mid-century designer, Dorothy Libas, who's also the subject of a 2022 exhibition.  A big thank you, as always, to Phoebe Moore and to Emily Brillion, who are helping with today's program. I will be moderating the discussion or the Q&A at the end. So please, again, put your questions in the chat. So I'm going to turn it over in a second to Andrea Lips, who's Associate Curator of Contemporary Design at Cooper Hewitt and Jennifer Lee, our guest, who's an emoji activist, a documentary producer, and CEO of Plimpton, a literary studio that works on innovative publishing projects. And they are going to be delving into emojis. And as a bonus for everyone joining us today, you should have received a link to the documentary Emoji Nation, which is making the Film Festival Circuit that was produced by Jennifer. And the link you'll receive is Good Through World Emoji Day, which is on July 17. So over to you, Andrea and Jennifer. Yay. Hi. Good afternoon. Thank you, Matilda, for the introduction. And thanks to Jenny for joining me today as we unpack some stories behind Emoji. Thanks to all of you for joining us here in virtual space. So I think the thing which is so interesting about Emoji is that they really don't need much explanation or introduction. I mean, even if you don't have a mobile device or use a platform that includes the Emoji keyboard, you likely have come across Emoji. I mean, the movie Emoji Stories, which Jenny and Adobe generously made available to each attendee here. And if you have not yet watched it, I hope that you will. I mean, even that movie opens by showing us how Emoji have moved out of virtual space and into the real world. I mean, they are Emoji are made into pillows and toys. They adorn hats and shirts and socks and coffee mugs. I mean, my five-year-old knows about Emoji as does my 76-year-old father. So they are ubiquitous and a part of our everyday lives. And at the very least, we know about them if we don't already just use them regularly. So our talk today is foregrounded by the fact that Cooper Hewitt has acquired the person with headscarf Emoji and the inner skin tone couple Emoji into our collection. We began that work in 2019. We accession them in very early 2020, pre-pandemic. And all of that brings us to Jenny and me here today talking about one of our favorite things to talk about together, which is Emoji.  So what is this about? What is Emoji Nation? So I'm a co-founder with Ying Liu who is a great designer and actually famous for designing the Twitter fail well. We were shocked that there was no dumpling Emoji as Chinese American women who, you know, texts a lot about food. And so in our indignation, we founded an organization called Emoji Nation which advocates for more inclusive and representative Emoji. And so, you know, what the organization does and I'll get into more detail is it's sort of the interface between humans who want Emoji and the bureaucracy that creates them and gets them onto your phone. You know, and it's interesting because I think that idea of inclusion and representation shouldn't be such a novel idea.  So I would love for you to get us started, Jenny. Just tell us a little bit about the history of Emoji. How do these pictograms hit our devices? Let us start. Let's see. Boom, all right. So it's about Emoji Nation and our movie which you guys can get a link to, you know, thanks to the sponsorship of Adobe who very generously both helped us allow us on the premise to help shoot the documentary and then also, you know, sponsored educational museums and screenings. So, so one's a question. One of the questions is where do Emoji come from? And that I actually did not know any of this in 2015. When I first started, I had no idea. I barely used Emoji, but I fell down this big rabbit hole. After discovering there was no dumpling Emoji and like decided there was something wrong with the world and I would fix it, that, you know, dumplings were universal in all forms, you know, pierogi, empanadas, yosa, momos. Emoji were universal. And the fact that those did not intersect meant the world was broken. So I Googled and I found that actually that Emoji are actually regulated by this thing called the Unicode Consortium, which is dominated by large US multinational companies. These include Netflix and IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, Google, Apple, Facebook, Salesforce. These are the main, main full voting members of Unicode of the ones that are not US multinational companies. The two dominant ones are SAP, which is a German software company and then the government of Oman. So these are the entities that kind of have voting power over your Emoji. So they pay actually now at this point it's $21,000 a year to have membership. And I was very kind of bothered by that when I first discovered it, but then found this little loophole, which is up for $75. You can join Unicode as an individual person on your credit card. It does not give you any voting rights, but it allows you to be on the mailing list and it allows you to sort of attend meetings.  And so I just took a bus or no, I took the caltering basically to Apple offices. And what I found was this is a room where it happens. These are the people who at that point, this is 2015, decide what emoji become what emoji. These were your emoji decision makers. And I just felt like they weren't the most representative groups for demographics. Like they skewed older, they skewed engineering, they skewed male, they skewed white-ish. What's that with a lot of other immigrant engineers kind of in the pool? So in terms of curating a global visual language, I was like, oh, I don't think this is the right process. So we start, that's one of the reasons we started Emoji Nation in part because I heard their debates, you know, in terms of like, should there be an emoji? Well, what kind of being red being, black being, you know, different cultures of different beings. And so in 2014, 15, we just like, they decide not to have a bean emoji. So as part of that, you know, you learn how to, how emoji become emoji. So literally, it's a process where anyone can submit, like literally anyone, as long as you kind of do the homework, it has a sort of the vibe of doing a very detailed high school lab report. So let's say you come up with an idea, then you basically write a proposal. The proposal gets submitted to the emoji subcommittee and they sometimes have feedback. And if they have feedback, it goes back to you and you have to adjust it. And then it kind of goes around and around and around until it feels like it wants to kick it up to the full committee, which is a Unicode technical committee. So what are the factors for inclusion? Some of them include, you know, is there popular demand? Is the terms frequently used? So for like animals, you can often show that there's a man for like a flamingo or that, you know, peacocks have our national bird for many countries. You know, there's sort of a plus if there's multiple usages and meanings in terms of an image. So for example, like an owl is not only a bird, but it can mean wise or a fox is not only fox, but it can often mean like crafty. A key thing is can you recognize it at emoji sizes? The thing is when you squeeze it down to such a small image, there are many things that actually can't be expressed, both because the image is small or the concept is just too abstract, right? So like, you know, ambition would be sort of like an important kind of concept, but very hard to distinguish or like represent visually. And then they, for a while there, they really, you know, privileged things that filled gaps. So there was at one point a red, yellow, green, blue, purple, heart, but no orange. So orange obviously kind of got elevated to make a complete rainbow set. So things that kind of strike against emoji inclusion, one is it's too specific, too narrow, like it's a very specific kind of dog or very specific, you know, kind of bird. If it's redundant, so an example is we once had a turkey, we have like a live turkey emoji and someone wanted to cook turkey emoji and we're like, hmm, that's actually fine. Like you can, you just need one turkey emoji. Again, this idea of being visually discernible, one thing we've been trying to get is kimchi kind of past, but it's just hard. Like kimchi, little red cabbage is really hard at emoji sizes. And then something that's actually really key is there are no logos, brands, deities or celebrities. So you can't get a Donald Trump emoji.  You can't get a Muhammad emoji for many reasons. So once it gets picked up to the full technical committee, it votes, you know, basically once a year to approve a set of emoji that will be released, you know, the next of basically the following year and then once it gets approved, it gets passed to the tech companies who then put it on the whole, you know, all the devices. And that entire process takes out 18 to 24 months, which is very long, very long. You have to have a lot of kind of persistence to get it through. And so one of the questions is like, why, why does the Unicode consortium control emoji? And that's actually kind of very counterintuitive. So originally emoji started on Japanese carriers, one of the big, you know, first sets was a $9.99 from DoCoMo. These are the ones that were actually collected in the Museum of Modern Art back in 2016, I think. So, you know, they, all the different carriers basically had their emoji. And so that means that you could basically only message with the same carrier. So basically if you were at the equivalent of like, if you were AT&T, you could only share emoji among AT&T people, Verizon equivalent, you know, had their emoji. So what happened was when the US tech companies like Apple and Google started selling phones, Japanese folks really wanted emoji. And so they realized that they had to unify their sets across all the different platforms. So they went to Unicode for help. And part of that is because Unicode's mission is to enable everyone speaking every language on earth to be able to use their language on the computer and smartphone. And they really do think of this as a human's right rights issue, because that's from point of your language is not preserved or it can't be transmitted digitally. It will get lost, you know, in either because you can't type, you can't send email, you know, you can't send texts or you can't save and make digital files. And so it kind of did a big sweep where it just unifies, you know, like Chinese, Japanese, Korean characters and, you know, Cyrillic and Arabic and English. And even sort of at this point, you know, they had hieroglyphics kind of wrapped in. So Unicode basically look at emoji and you're like, oh, we know how to like digitize things and standardize things. So let's do it. So one of the, you know, just to give you some broader overview of Unicode, they are known for emoji, but in fact, they do lots of different things, including making everything on your, internationalizing your computer, right? Like helping to know, like if you're in France, you should be using euros and the date format should look like this or the, you know, time format should look like this. And so these are the kinds of things they create a lot of libraries and sort of resources to make things very specific. So it took three years, 2010, they came out with, this is the original set from Apple. It took a long time for them to unify and make the set. So they were kind of hanging out on like in the back of the keyboard. I mean, they were in Unicode, but it doesn't mean that people were using them until Apple and iOS basically added emoji to the iPhone. And then you can kind of just kind of see this explosion is turning 2011. So that is how we ended up where we are today, which is that I really felt like it hit a nerve that in some ways emoji were discovered rather than invented to see that kind of like visceral, like straight line growth means that you really tapped into a human need. Yeah, totally. And it's interesting because your role on the emoji sum committee is the reason that you and I met because I had been eyeing emoji that were part of earlier emoji version releases. And I was seeking to connect with folks who could help me do that. And along the way, you and I got introduced, we started a conversation and I think that quite immediately I knew that I wanted to try to acquire the hijab emoji and the inner skin tone couple emoji, that emoji nation had been instrumental in shepherding.  So from your telling, how did the hijab emoji proposal come into your orbit? Yeah, so I had actually been thinking for a long time that we need a hijab emoji, but whereas I had a lot of moral authority in getting the dumpling emoji through along with, take out box and fortune cookies and chopsticks because I had a lot of background in Asian food, I did not have any moral authority to be the one to offer the hijab emoji. So I had actually been like kind of like asking around, like asking friends of friends, like, do you know anyone who would want to work on a hijab emoji? And, you know, people are like kind of interested, but to go through this kind of bureaucratic process takes a lot of endurance. And so you can only kind of like rally people in a volunteer capacity so much. And then in August of 2015, no, 2016, in August 2016, this proposal, the one I'm showing there, just sort of arrives, oh, was it August? It's, I guess it's no, no, oh, I guess we redid it, so to update it, but kind of in that time, like fall of 2016, we saw this emoji proposal come through and it was from a 15-year-old Saudi Arabian girl who really wanted a hijab emoji to represent herself. And it was actually like a pretty solid proposal. I mean, when, actually when she first sent it, there was no age, so I didn't know if this was like, it was a grandma or was it a professor or who it was. And so I emailed back to ask her how old, or I think I was probably more tasteful as like, can you tell me about yourself?  And she said she was a 15-year-old high school student. I was like, yes, this is amazing. So her name is Ray Roof Alhumadi and we worked with her to sort of shape the proposal. You know, first we had some designers on our team that helped kind of like, we worked through all these different versions of like, what should a hijab emoji be like? Like, should it really be a hijab emoji? Should it be called headscarf? It's because there was this push for gender parity. Should we have both a woman in a headscarf and a man in a headscarf? So, you know, do we want to encode a human with the sort of hijab or do we just only want to do the hijab by itself? You know, like there are a lot of hats. So we went through lots of different iterations. This is the version that we kind of covered all our bases. And ultimately the ones that I ended up on your phone kind of look like this. And there was kind of a lot of debate about what color you want the hijab to be. And you can see the different vendors went with different colors. Apple went with purple. Oops, okay, that's the first one. And then the inner skin tone couple. Yeah, so one of the most, I think one of the hardest technical proposals that like we at Emoji Nation kind of worked through was doing inner skin tone. So for a long time, okay, so for the first time there was like only yellow skin tone, right? Which was supposed to be just like generic human. And in part that's because Emoji came from Japan which people were kind of like basically the same color ish, right? And you can see the Japanese view of the world in a couple of ways, right?  They were just all yellow.  And then like a Westerner which is just expresses blonde. Like so there was just like a blonde emoji. And the way that we do it now or many places do it now, they do it like with a ponytail like someone who's a little bit younger. So that was a worldview. You were like generic human, you were Chinese, you were Indian or you were blonde. And in that as Emoji kind of explored the world many people felt very dissatisfied with the yellow emoji skin colors because while it was technically not supposed to be any color and therefore all colors in reality because of our associations with the Simpsons and just like yellowness, like it really kind of felt default white. And so there was a entrepreneur mother from Houston in Katrina Parrot who wanted skin tone emoji because her daughter just came home one day and said, it'd be really great to get skin tone or emoji that looked like me. And her mom, Katrina was like, that's great honey, what are emoji? But she, so she started from ground zero not knowing what emoji were but then like also found like Unicode and like wrote a very sophisticated proposal that is how we got skin tone. So there are five skin tones, you know, it's basically one Fitzpatrick, one and two, three, four, five, six. This is based on a dermatological system. So for a long time they, so what they did was they just basically just slapped like skin coloring on an emoji, which is weird in certain ways because it was almost like a color fill. So I have many black friends that complained to me that like even the palms of the black hands are the same brown compared to like the rest of hand where that's like actually not the case and feet are also the issue. So it's really just like a color fill not necessarily representative like what these body parts look like in real life. So for a long time we only could add skin tones to one human or one hand. So anything that had more than one human. So that's wrestling, that's the two ladies in the dancing, you know, the dancing bunnies, that's like the handshake. Because you can only add one color, the platforms decided not to make any of those have skin tones because it would kind of imply you could only, it was like a segregated world that you could only like wrestle with people who were the same color with you. You could only shake hands with people who were the same color with you. You know, you can only dance with people who were the same color with as you. So this is a problem for all kinds of reasons and we basically felt like the couple emoji was very important in sort of expressing reality in the diversity of couples and love. And so Tinder randomly, because I had a friend whose company was bought by Tinder and then he introduced me to some marketing person and that marketing person had this idea with their kind of comms team to support. They were interested in just like getting Tinder involved around emoji and we were brainstorming and they felt very strongly about inter skin tone or interracial couples because there has been quite a lot of academic work that shows that when online dating in all its various forms arrives in a community, the interracial marriage and dating rates go up. And so they felt like it was a social cause that was both professionally meaningful to them as an organization and also just like socially meaningful. So we helped design these proposals which are actually really complex because before you could just do long press and you had one, you just got all the colors pop up and now you're choosing two colors.  Like, how do you do it? Maybe you long press and you choose one going up, up and down and one going sideways or all the different ways. And she convinced the platforms that this was something feasible, right? Cause sometimes they'll be like, oh, that's too hard to implement but to their credit, Apple, Google and all the other platforms got behind this concept. And now we have interracial or inter-technically inter-stand-home couples and one of the writers who worked on it, a woman named Melissa Thermador who's from New York originally black American now lives in England with her husband who's from India felt a cry when she first saw the emoji that could represent her husband and her because she felt seen. And it's kind of really powerful to know that something you've worked on has caused people to cry, has moved people to that point. Yeah. And that's what's so interesting about emoji is I think sometimes people tend to write them off. They seem so informal, just a part of our everyday digital conversations and whatnot. But I mean, it really is codifying representation which is incredibly powerful. And for us at the museum, what was so interesting is we really felt that these two examples, the hijab emoji, the interskintone couple emoji told different but very resonant stories that press into their acquisition. And so what was interesting though, and you and I kind of worked through this a little bit was thinking about how to acquire emoji. And so we decided to acquire the guidance images which were, for instance, those first three for the hijab emoji, the initial designs of those emoji that will eventually hit our keyboard. So we acquired those. We went beyond that. We did a lot of designer interviews. We interviewed you, of course, Jenny. We interviewed Rayouf. We interviewed Afi, who is the designer behind these. We acquired the PDF proposals. We have screen recordings and screenshots taken from varying devices and platforms showing the emoji and you. So, but what's interesting also is this idea that I imagine the emoji subcommittee at Unicode Consortium. I mean, they have to be very selective about what they put on the keyboard because ultimately there isn't just endless space for everything under the sun. I mean, the museum also has to be selective, of course, about what digital history we acquire and preserve since our resources also are ultimately limited in all of this. So, I think what's really interesting though is how with your participation now on the emoji subcommittee and your work with Emoji Nation and really just raising awareness around this process itself, bringing people in and producing the emoji story, which is such a fun movie. I mean, we really are seeing emoji grow in inclusion of cultures and identities and such that are on the emoji keyboard. I mean, I think it's pretty apparent but I mean, for you, for instance, why was it so important for emoji to represent us? Yeah, so it has one of the things that you see on the emoji subcommittee as the proposals come in is, remember I mentioned, you really need a driving passion to get an emoji through. And I remember one time someone complained on Twitter when they saw the hijab emoji, you know, like, I mean, most of the world was like super pro hijab emoji but you got your trolls and one person was like, well, what about a baseball cap emoji? This is on Twitter, right? And I was like, well, you wanna work on a baseball cap emoji, like we can help you. And then I think they were just like, yeah, you know, like can't be bothered, right? And so you see the sort of interesting thing where like some things could be an emoji and we actually did eventually do the baseball cap emoji for an interesting reason because we wanted multiple headwear to move through the emoji process with the hijab. So it wasn't just a hijab, it was like, oh, it's a hijab. And then the baseball cap. So the ones that are most ferment often have to do with issues of identity.   One of the more interesting ones are also non-gender binary people. One of the interesting things when we started sort of adding like genders to a lot of things was that in order to differentiate, the female forms got more feminine looking and the male emoji got more masculine looking. And specifically within Apple, the way they do that is sort of indicated with a mustache. So then there were people who didn't, who felt like not included in that like dichotomy. And so Paul Hunt from Adobe actually helped push the first like non-gender binary emoji, which, you know, is really important in many ways because in our language, we often use gender neutral forms like doctor or teacher or professor or pilot, for example. They're at least in English, there's no gender associated, but when you wanted to represent an emoji, suddenly you were forced to kind of to choose what do I want to do a female pilot or a male pilot or a female professor or a male professor. So you were kind of kind of forcing the visual silos for many terms that were gender neutral, like adult. Adult is not actually necessarily male or female. So what I realized kind of over time is that these people wanted to represent themselves in part because, and it's my hypothesis, emoji are very good in terms of like representing emotions, you have all the little smiling faces, representing like kind of like verbs, which are like actions, so swimming and biking, running, even like snowboarding, fencing. It's pretty good on certain kinds of adjectives and, you know, on objects that are nouns. So like, you know, boat, clock, gun, those kinds of things. But as a language, one of the things that it really lacks, and it's kind of very fundamental, it can't say the word I very well and it can't say the word you, yeah, very well. I think we've kind of adapted to that idea. I think we fixed the ability to say you soon, but I is the most fundamental kind of word and concept for many, in many languages in a spoken form, right? Like, you know, in Chinese it's wall, you know, and in Spanish it's yo and then in French it's, you know. And so when you are forced into a pictorial representation of a quote, language, you suddenly need something that looks like you. And I think what everyone was trying to do is trying to get their representation to of themselves in the digital world that, and just because of the way that emoji have evolved, those are emoji that have like certain kinds of hair colors or certain kinds of skin color or certain kinds of like, you know, kind of gender kind of features. And I like to say, you know, there's so much attention and obsession in a very good way about what happens on the big screen.  But so you obsess about the big screen, but in many ways what happens on the small screen in terms of representation is just as important if not more important, because it's so intimate in terms of day to day communication and how do you represent your emotions and your state of being and, you know, where you come from. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. So listen, we are moving into our Q and A session. And one of the things I wanna do is invite all of our attendees, if you have a question about an emoji, like you just, you don't know what the heck this thing is, post that emoji into the chat or potentially even into the Q and A, but the chat would be better so we all can see it. And Jenny, who is our resident emoji expert can tell us a little bit more about that emoji and perhaps what it means. I do have to say Jenny, I actually got a text in the midst of a meeting from a colleague. Like maybe last month I think it was when the new emoji version had come out and the way that it appeared on my screen was like a little smiley face with clouds. Yes, yes, yes. That's sad. It's you, that was part of her. And it's a, so one thing actually that's very interesting from an emoji perspective is you can get into this, but technically many emoji are actually not singleton characters. They're sort of secretly like concatenated in the background. So a good example for that is rainbow flag, which is actually, there's no single character rainbow flag. It is actually a rainbow glued together using like a ligature with a white flag. So if you squish those together, the operating system is like, oh, I'm gonna render that as a rainbow flag. And you see this actually with a lot of the occupations as well. So like chef, there's no singleton chef character.  I think it's with the frying pan and you squish those together and you get a chef.  So I like to say they're almost like compound words, but in the form of a motif. And the thing about the clouds, so 2021, so the ones in 2020 that have kind of arrived in your phones in 2021, I think it's 2021. So essentially we lost half a year on emoji regulation in part because of COVID, like much of the world kind of lost a lot of time. And as a result, the only ones that we could introduce this last round that just came through were also concatenations. So the cloud one is a smiley face and flattening it with clouds. That makes sense. Like we couldn't introduce like new inventive characters because that gets much more deeper into like the infrastructure of operating systems, but sort of like just taking two characters when they're like glued together and just rendering in a certain way is a much lighter lift from a operating system standpoint. That was so interesting. So I have to tell you Hilda Jarrah actually posted an emoji into the Q&A, Jenny. So if you want to take a look there, what is that? I honestly, I don't even remember ever. Oh, in the Q&A. Oh, whoa, so many. Oh, there we go. Sorry, I was like scrolling. Yes, okay, Hilda, this is one. Okay, so Hilda, can other people see it or only me? No, only we can see it. So Hilda, if it's possible to post that into the chat to all panelists and attendees, then everyone can see this. So this is a very, it looks like a very jagged and sharp McDonald's M that's like walking. So it's basically just something like this, but it is yellow. That also perplexed me to the point that I spent some time Googling it. It's a very strange symbol. It's basically a musical symbol used in Japanese music. So not in sort of like our Western style with the sharps and the dots and whatever, but it's used in Japanese music. And as a result, since emoji were originally Japanese and the first set was sort of unifying three sets of different Japanese carriers into basic, I think that set of like 600 and 700 original kind of Unicode emoji. Many of those have a lot of Japanese cultural references that may not make sense to a Western audience. So like there's one that we call like tofu on fire, which is basically red tulip with a little white box in it. And that's sort of a name tag for school. There's also like a green shaped emoji that means new driver in Japan, but obviously doesn't mean very much here.  So that is one of the kind of interesting legacies of a global language that came originally from one culture. And because we have this world that wants an emoji, always an emoji, like you can't like remove the underlying code for an emoji in Unicode because it's like getting rid of the letter B, for example. Things will always kind of persist on the keyboard. They just, we just get more and more of them. There is a little bit of a subtlety in that you can change the image associated with an emoji concept. And you saw this a couple of years ago when there was a gun emoji that looked like a gun after a couple of law cases where the emoji was used in situations that essentially escalate into homicide.  So some question of whether or not like emoji were used as a threat. And maybe would these people still be alive they hadn't texted using like the gun emoji? Apple was the first platform to move and change like the gray gun emoji into basically a water pistol. I mean, he just like unilaterally did that by himself into this little gray pistol, sorry into this little green like water pistol. And that was actually really confusing for a while because Apple had done this, but like if you were on Android or Microsoft, you did not have that. So you could be like jokingly like let's go, let's get it apart for a water fight, like a water drop and then the green water pistol. And on the other side, if you got it on an Android device, it would be like water and then like a gun. I mean, it would be a very weird kind of not cross compatible messaging etiquette. So all the other platforms also moved basically to a water gun representation. That makes sense. So that yellow weird thing is largely a function of just like because emoji were originally Japanese. Oh, we have so many emoji. Okay. I want to get to some of the questions. Sorry. If you don't mind asking or answering a couple of these, let me go back to Camille. Do you think emoji will be accepted in academic institutions or formal organizations in the future? How do you think the future of emoji will be? So I'm going to try to answer this in many different ways. So from an academic standpoint, there is a lot of academic research across many different fields. Like obviously there's linguistics, there's sociology, there is computer science. Psychology was one. So we actually, I help run a conference, an academic conference every year or academic workshop probably every year. And we asked for submissions from all fields. And what's so interesting is to see the vast diversity of top areas where people are thinking about emoji, like whether or not emoji and race, like there was a great paper looking at the use of skin tone emojis with hand gestures and like which ones, which emoji, what the distribution for the skin colors were for each emoji like hand gestures, I think. So it turns out there was for thumbs up and like the fist, those skewed actually more towards the darker skin tones relative to like the average distribution. In terms of formal organizations, I will give one example, which is that a couple of years ago, the New York Times started using emoji in its headlines, which is really as, I've been reported there for a long time. So for them to decide that, I think is sort of one of the benchmarks of like something becoming very official. And it's not just the New York Times. I think there've been a couple, I think USA Today might have done it at a certain point, but what was interesting when I saw that article in the New York Times, you could see it on the Times website, but when Google crawled the website, I guess didn't have the ability to like save an emoji character in a headline. So when it displayed it in like the Google Newsy part, it dropped the emoji from the headline. So in many ways, I do think that emoji are becoming very like part of the establishment and institutionalized in ways that we, Uniga probably would not have imagined when they first kind of standardized them back in 2010-ish. Another question, we have quite a few in here. Do different countries have their own emoji? For example, in Israel, are there Orthodox Jewish emojis? So one, right now, there is one universal Unicode system for emojis. So in terms of what is technically an emoji, and the way I like to say it is like, can you send it in the subject line of an email as a sort of kind of filter? Like, so it's different from sending a sticker or one of those an emoji type things that Apple has made very popular in recent years. There right now is one global system in part because for better or for worse, the digital communications in the world is dominated by handful large US tech companies, right? It's Microsoft. It is Microsoft, Android, or at Google, Apple. There's some companies out of China that actually have had their own ecosystems. But as a result, they like to do things in a very standardized way. That being said, if you kind of Google Taiwan flag in China, I've never seen this firsthand because I haven't been in China, but my understanding is that you cannot use the Taiwan flag in the China version of the iOS operating or in iOS.  And when someone kind of sends it to you, you get I think a blank box. So I think that's really significant for many reasons. Obviously, if that is true, it partially responds to government pressure. But in terms of the underlying emoji system in theories unified, but obviously different countries have different reactions to what they want or don't want their citizens to see. So for example, Russia a couple of years ago got, I mean, Russia, the government actually got very historical about the gay family emoji that was sort of added to the keyboards because they considered it, I think homosexual propaganda to youth. And there was a big kerfuffle that was covered in the press at that time. And you can see, so it's tricky trying to come up with a common unified system across entire world visually when they're different kind of senses of what isn't appropriate socially in different cultures. Have there been emoji that have been removed from circulation? Yeah, so this sort of kind of speaks to what I mentioned before that once an emoji always an emoji that you can never remove the underlying code because once unicode encodes something, it exists in everything that was like previously encoded. And so they can only build upwards, not down because otherwise you would break things that were written in like a previous version of unicode. But that being said, what unicode has or not unicode, what the vendors have done. So this is not unicode, but it's like the Apple's Microsoft Googles of the world. They can revamp whatever image that is associated with that description of an emoji. So I mentioned the gun. Another one is the vaccine. So for the syringe, sorry, it's actually technically it's a syringe emoji. And for a long time it was just like a blood drops on the syringe. And because worldwide we are now very, very focused on syringes and vaccines. The revamped version is sort of a no blood. So it looks much more neutral and it's supposed to be vaccine. Likewise, there was always a mask emoji. This also speaks to the Japanese legacies. They love wearing masks.  But in the new version, if you look at your keyboards these days, it's a smiling emoji that just happens to be wearing a mask. So it is very happy about the fact that it's wearing a mask these days. So you can revamp the images that are associated with it. And that's actually, you know, that happens on these sort of piecemeal basises, but also like generationally, you just see an entire like visual upgrade. It happened once I think in 2016, when it went from like older versions to like the more realistic ones that we see on Apple today. Can you track emoji usage? Like one of the top 10 most popular emoji and most popular. So there's a lot of different statistical tracking of emoji usages. So one is a little bit out of date, but very popular for a while was emoji tracker. I think it's emoji tracker.com, which is basically looked on what emoji we're being used at on Twitter for a while. And I actually don't know if they fully updated it. For a while, there was kind of getting out of date. So any kind of super new emoji wouldn't be included in the system because just the way that they had hard coded, it was sort of like a fixed moment in time. I think there was enough pressure. I hope they've updated it. So that's one. The other thing is the platforms themselves actually have also upgraded, also keep track both, I think on a real time basis and maybe as a sort of like over a longer period of time. So there is actually a chart that they update not every year, cause that's like pretty hard. Let's say like every two years that looks at emoji frequency. And so one of the most interesting things is faced with tears of joy. The one that has like smiling, but also crying. Very strange, people love it. It's actually worse as a, you know, a couple of years ago, 9.9% of all emoji sent was that one emoji, which I think is like absolutely stunning. Cause it does certainly just represent my emoji usage. And then number two was heart, the red heart. So those were like, and that was at six. So 10% was just like faced with tears of joy. Then came the heart emoji. And then like, and then it's total power law down. Like those two like stand out and then it falls really, really rapidly. So we are in the midst of updating the most recent statistics because every year when you add a new emoji, you want to see how they're doing. Like, are we doing a good job of adding emoji to people are actually using? You know, I am of the school of thought that every emoji has its day. Like we helped pass what the microbe emoji back in 2016 because just as part of a scientific set that we did with GE. And, you know, it was kind of hanging out on the emoji keyboard. No one's really paying attention to it.   But then like when we were really emphasizing washing our hands in the early days of COVID, you know, lockdown soap emoji selling became really, really popular as well. So, you know, I, there are different philosophies of thought on, you know, emoji passage. So one is like, we should just do more of what they want. They like, they like to use smiley faces. They like to use hand gestures. They like to use hearts. They like to use flowers. So we should like favor those. And, you know, whereas I think every, every emoji can have a shot. Like it can have it stay in the sun, but you just need the situation for when it's and let me come as like very popular and in demand. Great. So I'm going to ask one more question. And this one I was also going to, I was thinking about too, where did the emoji fit into this paradigm? So I assume we were talking about the emoji that Apple allows for customization. That became, I don't know, very popular, but was introduced a couple of years ago. And this is part of a larger phenomenon where like people can take like little images of that represent themselves and customize them.  You can also do it on like Bitmoji. Like my sister used to send me a lot of Bitmoji of like herself kind of like saying, hooray, your happy birthday and all that kind of stuff. So what we, as I mentioned before, what we were seeing and I'm sure the, you know, Apple and Google as companies were seeing was this a huge demand that people really wanted to customize their emoji for them. And honestly, Unicode is not the way to go through it because of just, I mean, had we known maybe they would have designed the system a long time ago, but just a combinatoric like growth of like hair color and gender and like skin tone and eye color would have been just absolutely explosive. So I think Memoji was the platform, Memoji like things where the platform's way of trying to address that demand without going through the laborious process of getting like a sort of framework approved in Unicode. So I think, you know, and that takes sort of offloads the pressure on Unicode to do like variations. Like, you know, we have, so you have like bearded emoji and we have white haired emoji, but do we need a white haired bearded emoji? You know that kind of thing where you start just combining things that gets pretty like Terry. So whereas, you know, Memoji, they're not actually emoji, they're just like stickers.  What I think is really interesting is you see the smiley face emoji as templates, their actions, their emotions, but then your backwards filling them into just normal humans again. Thank you very much. So there's a couple other questions that we didn't get to, but maybe you can answer them in the Q&A, Jennifer, but really appreciate your being here and for shutting light on emoji. And thank you, Andrea, for also talking about our collection and collecting those emoji. So that was your exploration and your discovery. So thank you for that. And so we look forward to seeing you all at the next event in September and we'll be sending out a link probably sometime in August. So thank you.


Hello and welcome to the drum history podcast. I am yours Bart van der Zee and today there is no guest it's just gonna be me because it is December 26th right now, and you know, it's the holidays and it's just like one of those things where couldn't really get anyone scheduled and everything Got booked out a couple weeks and instead of just not releasing one I figured I would do kind of a shorter one on an interesting topic Which is Ted Reed who wrote syncopation and there's not a lot of info to constitute a whole episode, but perfect timing to do it here and I got some info online from a Very reliable source that I found and and then I figured maybe we'd talk about some other just drum history stuff that I could update you guys about and Some cool things happening in the future and all that good stuff so this episode about Ted Reed was recommended by Mike Talbot a While back I'm sure and I posted on drumforum.org in July of 2021 and It's just a great place to go to see if there's anyone out there who you know knows information that you really just I just couldn't find anything And I'm I dig pretty deep for all the drum videos and stuff and I really just couldn't find anything Except actually someone else commented and there's this it kind of leads you to think that Ted Reed is this research fellow in the Carlton research unit of innovation Science and environment at Carlton University. I Think that's what I thought too and someone posted that as well and it just doesn't if it physically is not possible with the timing of it because when syncopation was written and When Ted Reed was born, I mean he would be like a hundred fifty years old doing this My math is awful there, but um anyway, so that's not who he is if you Google it that kind of directs you to that But that just isn't who he is so anyway Jda is the username of the gentleman who helped a lot and provided all this information That I'm about to basically just read from him and he asked that his username get used instead of a real name or anything So he's Jda. So most people know what the book syncopation is From when they're learning drums. It's a very just one of those books That's like, you know great for a beginner and also you can find stuff in it to play at any stage of your drumming You know career so the full name is progressive steps to syncopation for the modern drummer by Ted Reed published by Alfred at least at this version that I'm looking at Very famous book and again, it's just you see the guy on the cover Who I believe is looks like he's playing a Gladstone snare drum with a really cool snare stand. That's like Almost like it's for a statue, but So Ted Reed as a person though, let's just here's information that Jda provided born September 6th 1908 in Nesco peck, Pennsylvania Served in the US Air Force during World War two Was a renowned musician who played the drums and as we probably could have guessed was also a drum instructor Which probably was how we put together such a I guess I would say an efficient and like straightforward book So I would look at it early in his career He performed in Wilkes bar with several orchestras conducted by Guy Hall Ralph Paul Eddie Gilligan Ray Calabrese and the Donlan brothers He also played in the 109th Field Artillery Band and the Alexander Band in 1940 he moved to New York City where he performed with several orchestras conducted by Enoch light Vincent Lopez Meyer Davis Lester Lainan Milt Hurth trio and Radio City Music Hall He also played with numerous celebrities including Bob Hope Victor Borg or Borg Sorry, if I'm saying it wrong Buddy Hackett Carol Channing Gordon McCree and Esther Williams. He also worked with NBC TV and W OR Radio in New York City and with Musak Records Corp in 1948 he began teaching drums and rhythm classes at his studio and store in Manhattan, New York City He wrote several drum instruction books from 1951 to 1970 his book syncopation was voted number one by the world drum book critics in 1970 he moved to Clearwater, Florida where he wrote three drum technique books He was a member of Musicians Union local 140 Wilkes bar and local 802 New York City for more than 60 years He was also a member of Holy Trinity Lutheran Church Kingston And he like I said was born in 1908 and he lived until December 20th 1996 so Kind of anti-climactic because that's basically it but That's more information than I've been able to find anywhere else about this, you know amazing drummer and Really talented guy. So he also wrote a bunch of articles as far as I can tell I think he wrote a little bit for modern drummer probably kind of obviously in his later years There are videos that Jda on drumforum.org suspects is Ted Reed playing with Milt Hearth Trio Which I'm going to share those on the description of this so you can click and play them and yeah, that's basically it for Ted Reed I know for me. I was taking lessons with Barry James who was on the show before who became a very good friend who was George Lawrence Stones I Think I believe he's his last living student and Barry's a great guy, but Barry when I started taking lessons with him He sent me a copy of syncopation. He sent me a copy of stick control and I love stick control, but I really I don't know. I felt syncopation worked really well for me and when I was growing up I had a teacher who I thought was kind of original and had these kind of like what looked like hand-drawn Notes and it was you know really easy to read and it was awesome and then it turned out It kind of was just basically the I think he was just copying pages from syncopation Which you know, we've all done we've all copied some pages here and there But yeah, so that's Ted Reed if anyone has any more information then let me know but You know, that's basically it And I guess on that note too now I can just start talking about some random stuff. That's drum history related So thank you again to Mike Talbot for suggesting that which leads me to say that thank you so much to everyone this year As we're wrapping up 2021 Thanks to everyone who has Suggested episodes and I mean, it's a lot of people I would say maybe every third day I get at least a suggestion or two Which is awesome and I am trying to figure out now a better system of keeping track of everything because I Do write down everyone's notes and I have a list on my phone in notes, you know on an iPhone And it works pretty well But it really is easy to lose track of stuff or like someone will say something. That's a great idea And it's like I read it and I mean I'm gonna I'm a human So I read it and I'm like cooking dinner and I'm like, oh man That's an awesome idea and I like forget to write it down or something because again It happens out of 130 episodes over three years So anyway, trying to figure out a better system just to make sure I don't miss anyone And if I did ever miss anyone then I'm sorry and I didn't do it on purpose And I've tried to correct it. I have gone back and retroactively recorded in people's names and just Reuploaded it which you might not have even heard because it wouldn't show up unless you Kind of cleared your browsing history or whatever on your phone and then it would re-download Just because I don't want to leave anyone out. So another thing I wanted to mention too is if anyone out there is like I just think it's a good tip that if you're ever looking for a Certain episode sometimes people say you should do an episode on like Ludwig and I'm like, okay, that's Be sure to go back and look at episode like six or seven or whatever because once you're on 130 episodes it actually gets harder to find the older episodes and In my case a lot of the earlier episodes were like the really specific like Slingerland and the big brands So the tip that I would say is if you go to my website drumhistorypodcast.com Under episodes There's a search bar and I use it to be like did I do that or you know? Let me find some more information or let me send this episode to someone There's a search bar and you can search in you can type in symbols or Like and then and then Sabian, Piste, Istanbul, Agap, like all these different episodes will come up because it'll pull the keyword So if you want Ludwig, tons of episodes will pop up because I think I use the keyword in a lot of it So so anyway, that's just a little trick to just finding these old episodes that I that I think it's good to know because sometimes people use them for research and all that good stuff and Another thing too is obviously a lot of you know this but this year joined up with the drum click podcast network Which is Ben Hilzinger and Chris from big fat snare drum put it together It's been awesome so far Ben is basically finding us advertising which you you there's no way around it You literally to do something for so long that takes so much time. You have to be able to make money at it That's just the way the world works and Ben has been doing a good job of placing ads So whenever you hear an ad on the show, I mean just know it literally like that's what's keeping it going because like The time that you're putting in the show is like time that you're not working or making money doing something else So, you know the drum click podcast network consists of drum candy podcast with Mike Dawson Sarah Hagen backstage, which is awesome.  We've been Fortunate enough to I've met most everyone in person. I need to meet Sarah still but besides that everyone else has actually kind of hung out a little bit at the different drum shows and It's just been really cool, and I hope that happens more in 2022 This year, I guess what I all would it be I went to the music city drum show Which was a lot of fun and then I went to pay sick for one day, which I wish it was more but It was just awesome to see everyone and I think we're all ready to get back to Drum shows and just gives us something cool to do. Oh and that the Chicago drum show, which was really cool as well. So Yeah, and I hope to go to more next year and I guess I'm trying to think about other stuff to tell you guys So I went to that Rolling Stones show Thanks to Don McCauley who you know is a great friend and he was he was Charlie Watts drum tech Which Charlie is just you know greatly missed rest in peace to Charlie Watts I was fortunate enough to get a meet him in 2019 and It was different seeing the Stones. I've only that was I've only seen him twice now one with Charlie one with Steve Jordan It was different, but it was awesome. It was just like I was I mean he's an amazing drummer, but it was It was kind of sad I mean for me from meeting Charlie and just the connection with the show and that like once in a lifetime opportunity of like Hanging out with him backstage and getting to go on the stage and like touch his drums And then you know that was like the last tour he was on before he passed away. So it was just different I had fun though. I mean it was let me just preface all that with it. It's always awesome I mean to get such a cool thing. We were down my brother and I were down in the pit I won Spencer who was on episode a hundred here Detroit is really cool The Stones were just awesome. It was great extremely tight I think Steve Jordan just was like there and made it happen and it was like He knew his role was to just play the songs. I think they Did a good job of like Introducing everyone, but it was definitely like the instead of like the four of them going up with their arms around each other It was like the three of them. It wasn't a thing where Steve Jordan's like now. I'm in here It was very tasteful. I'm sure tons of you guys listening have seen it as well And I hope you liked it too. So lots of cool stuff coming up in the future That some episodes get in booked. There's going to be a John Bonham History that is happening very soon. I'm gonna do a episode about get back The Beatles and I guess it's called considered a documentary a movie That was just so cool. I watched it twice Which my wife thinks I'm crazy that I watched it that much, but I'm sure the Beatles fans listening understand it So I'm gonna talk to Gary Astridge about that He got both those episodes actually got postponed a couple weeks and that's sort of Obviously, I'm not saying it's those guys fault, but that sort of pushed me back a little bit. So now I'm doing this solo episode just to get something out there, but I guess last and Not least I just want to thank the patreon members who have joined and it's just been awesome I've been doing those bonus episodes and it's cool to have however many I've always forget it's like 30 or 40 people on there Because it just you kind of forget and then you go. Oh, wow nice an extra X amount of dollars and then also I got to say Thank you to dream symbols. I mean They're just unbelievably they have literally it's just a direct I they tell me what to you know, hey, maybe record something about a symbol bag It's then yeah, okay Go ahead and record a little bit and then I do it and I send them an invoice and they pay me and it just is like I said It's a direct It is literally what is making this possible after this long and actually before I you know forget I want to mention too that I'm I'm working right now on expanding more into The world of YouTube because I've been on there for a while and I just up upload these Episodes just with a still image, which I realized I should probably be doing more videos and pictures and stuff But again, it takes a lot of time So I hit the subscriber amount where you can actually get like monetization On YouTube so I guess just look out for more Content on YouTube. I want to do I'm saying it out loud so I probably need to do it, but I want to do like condensed five-minute video versions of Histories of like Ludwig and Slingerland and I know that's a lot to fit in five minutes But I could then direct to the longer episode, but And also just maybe re-upload some of the episodes with images that go along the way Anyway, other stuff going on. I my wife is pregnant just throwing that out there having a baby boy In May I believe so that's exciting Harry my son is two and he's he's a good boy. He's a two-year-old. There are definitely some some mom. He's he's You know above all a very good good little guy, but man two-year-olds It is it is a thing that is it is real But yeah, and Abby my wife. She's doing well. She's like I said pregnant, which is Tough at times, but she's she's doing great Yeah, just I'm up on the third floor of my house Which doesn't have heater AC up here and no insulation which insulation is gonna be $6,000 I think because COVID so I got to wait and you know, hopefully that comes down But I got a new desk chair here at the drum history, you know Central and I guarantee people have probably heard some creaking of my old chair over the last three years so that will be no more because it's a real actual desk chair that isn't supposed to make noise so Anywho, it's just good to talk to you guys a little more, you know candidly and not be so Specific on an episode like like, you know, things typically are which I which I like for the main episodes But it's nice just to say hey and talk to everyone like normal. So I hope everyone has a great holiday season and 2022 let's hope that everything is getting better It seems like it I just hope it will let's let's believe it at that I think everything will get better and we can all hang out at some drum shows and some concerts In the upcoming year. So again, if this is the first episode you're listening to then this is a probably a weird one to listen to but Thank you very much for the people who have supported the show and who have listened from the beginning And who just send me these emails saying how much they enjoy it It's really cool, and I just love it. I've made some great friends really truly You know both digital and in real life and a mix of digital and in real life, you know one transitions into the other So, yeah, thank you again to Jda for providing all that great information on Ted read And like I said, that's kind of a hopefully that wasn't it, you know let down because there's not really much to it But but that was basically it So if I find out more about him as a person and the biography maybe I'll throw it in somewhere else But you know that's not much there to work with so Yeah, on that note, I hope everyone has a great You know start to 2022 and things will return to normal here in the next week or two with the show and That's it. Thank you for listening If you like this podcast find me on social media at drum history and please share rate and leave a review and let me know Topics that you would like to learn about the future Until next time keep on learning


The best kind of doors are the doors you have to explain. All right. Welcome, welcome to Unhinged with the door dork. I almost forgot my own name, the door dork. We're door hard run nerds get together, we knock and we slam on different door fells. We learn, we laugh. Sometimes we even cry, but most importantly, we have fun while we dork out on some doors. Hopefully learn a little bit why we go along the way. Today, we do have a very special guest, Mr. Dan Glover. Dan Glover, why don't you introduce yourself, tell us what you do, and then maybe a fun fact. Sure. I'm Dan Glover. I'm a product manager with outside of the door group. Been with the door group. This will be starting my 19th year.  But they have doors too, but it works in a completely different manner. So basically responsible for product development and all fun things from concept to customer for the door group and a fun fact. For 30 years, I've been a Kentucky Colonel. So, I guess I technically have to be called Colonel Glover, but only probably in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. So don't share that too much because it can get ribbed a little. So, which I don't mind. Well, Colonel Glover, welcome to the show. Now, Dan, coming from automotive too, that social media question that's been going around, are there more doors or wheels? You're like prime to answer this question. Well, it depends on whether you're talking light vehicle or heavy vehicle. Heavy vehicle, it's easy because you get 18 wheels. So that's obvious, but it depends on the design. You know, am I a three-door coupe? Usually it's wheels. I would say that's a safe bet. Okay. I'm personally Team Doors myself, but I know probably the minority. I think most people voted towards wheels, especially once they learned like Lego manufacturers, like some on billion wheels every year. I'm Team Doors because it's what pays the bills. That's right. And as always, you know her, you love her. This is Mia Merrill. I think she's on the left of my screen, but welcome Mia. You have another fun fact for us? I do. I was the editor of the yearbook, my senior year of high school. So I guess it's fitting that I've now moved into the digital space to produce this channel. Each one also yearbook. What? Maybe have an awesome yearbook. Oh, yeah. Or at least a door hardware nerd's yearbook. There you go. There you go. That'd be cool to do like throwback pictures. I put on my nerd glasses for you, Mia, because that is definitely a nerdy thing to do as the editor of the yearbook. And then I think I'm sharing another fun fact so the community can get to know us a little bit more as well. Fun fact about me is I used to be a Boy Scout. Never got my Eagle though. I was so close and I regret not getting that before I turned 18. But one thing I learned in the Scouts was how to start fire without a match. And I've been match-free since 2007. Yeah. I just made a wee blows as far as I got. I couldn't start a fire. So that was out. We blows, I'm a Scout. So close, so close. Good times. Yeah, so match-free. If you ever guys need starting a fire in a survivor situation, hopefully you have me along because yeah, okay. So for those who don't know how Unhinge works, I will share my screen. We'll show some kind of door hardware fail, door fail in this case and we'll react, knock on it, give any helpful tips and then give it a score, a knocking score. One being not so knocking bad and 10 being pretty knocking bad. Let's get this written up. Let's call the A-H-J Fire Marshal, get someone here to take care of this. How does that sound? You guys ready? Oh, absolutely. Okay, you guys ready for door number one, door number one. Oh, no. What's behind door number one? Oh, I saw somebody just share this. Yes, I started following Locksmith Journal after you posted something about it the other day. If you aren't following him, you probably should on Facebook. It's this random myth in Texas that just documents what he finds out on the road every day. It's brilliant and it's funny to see what he runs into but here's the first door. What do you guys think? I think it's wonderful. You've got an in-swing and an out-swing door in the same opening. It's just amazing. So which one goes to the restroom? Am I in the restroom or when it's closed or am I in the restroom now? I just don't understand them. But I do like it has a retainer at the bottom so you can at least keep it from swinging on somebody. Knowing context here. So this was like an old vault door, right? That leads to the bathroom. I'd be totally freaked out to go in there like because I'd be getting trapped in. Like, no, thank you. This would freak me out. I think it is cool like historically that they preserved it. I would be nervous. Yeah, especially because I can't really see how, if it did somehow close, I don't see any way to get out. That's kind of a problem, especially if all the latches go. Yeah, what kind of emergency egress did they have if that door happened to close or someone like decided to close you in there? That's probably a really heavy door in the first place to try to get out of. Like it looks like stainless framing around it. That's pretty nice. A little nice aesthetic feature. I know Sandy and Matini would be happy and we have an aesthetic play. I like the contrasting colors. Mia plays off of that. So you have a green appeal to those that are in the sustainability world. Can't tell what's on the other door. And I don't know if that's a light or if that's a mirror, which is another weird thing to have in a bathroom, but maybe it's blacked out with some tape. You just don't know for privacy. Maybe it's one way, two way mirror. I mean, you never know. Yeah, if it's a bathroom door, I hope that it's coming up for private sake at least. Yeah, I mean, they could have stalls in there. And so you have the light so that you can not open the door on somebody specifically. Yeah, still going into like a vault door would freak me out. Maybe it's a bathroom in a fallout shelter so that if it gets really bad, you can be safe from a nuclear disaster inside and outside. If you know what I'm saying. Bathroom slash tornado shelter slash. There you go. Okay, we're ready, we're good. So not too knocking bad, but I thought it was a really cool application for a restroom door. So I guess what we ranked that, what a three to four probably.  Historically it's great that they preserved, you know, I'm sure that maybe in an historic building that was been converted or upgraded and repurposed. So this is an ultimate repurpose of a vault. So I don't know how you plumbed it. Well, other than a lot of times it's just a vault door applied to a standard wall sometimes. And when people break in, they tend to not try and go through the wall, which might be the easier access, but I didn't want to share any burglar tips with my fellow criminals out there, but a boy scout would figure that out, right? Mia would be improvising. I think now that I know more about doors, that yes, I would try to break through the wall as opposed to my walls not holding anyone back. So. Yeah, I think this is pretty low, especially if they just kept it there for historic purposes and it doesn't function. I don't see any rail violations here. So I think it would be, you know, I don't think it impedes anything. It's probably like a one or a two. And it's very purposeful because it's either or, if you look at the signage, it looks like it accommodates any gender. So you're good, including handicaps. So that's good. And I don't see the ADA violations, so we're good. Yeah, as long as that door doesn't close, there's no ADA. Exactly, yeah, with caveats, right? Right. That vault door ever closes. I don't know. Yeah, that's not ADA compliant, if they close it. Got it propped open for good, hopefully. Yeah. Okay, let's jump into the next one. If you wanna be featured on a future episode of Unhinged, or if you have a photo to submit, leave a comment down below.


There's a lot of talk about machines taking our jobs and robots, automation. It's all very concerning, but I do see it a little bit differently. I don't want to cast this as a us versus them human against the machine sort of drama or dilemma. I actually see that we need to work more closely with machines in our future. Rather than seeing machines as our opponent, what we ought to think about again is what machines do well, which they do, a lot of things much better than we do, but also bear in mind what do we as humans do better than machines? And if we concentrate on that, it becomes a different story for us to think about. Humans are very good at some things, and we often think of our big, relatively big brain developing for cognitive tasks and cognitive complex tasks and thermodynamics, etc. But it turns out other neuroscientists believe that our big brain was developed for complex tasks that were social in nature. Who owns the tribe? Where are the resources? How do we create intertribal peace? These are very complex problems that require a big brain, and our human development shows that we're able to do this. The question is, can we keep those human skills of collaboration, asking questions, curiosity, empathy? Can we keep those alive in an age where machines are much more pervasive? Humans have always used tools, and so to some extent we might argue that the current batch of technologies are just an extension of that. But there are some unique dangers. So for example, if we look at things like social mediation or the amount of screen time that we use, etc., that's taking us into a realm where we as humans are sacrificing some of our unique characteristics. For example, we know that social media, like the platforms that we all participate in, are actually not good for social empathy. We provide great information about ourselves, but we're not necessarily connecting with others in a meaningful way, not really understanding or wanting to know what others have done when we're taking pictures of our meals or our kids or whatever. So to some extent that might seem trivial, but it means that in a day-to-day sense, the media are weaning us away from the things that we as humans again do well, collaboration, empathy, and raising questions. If it were a straight-out competition where machines took our jobs, then that would be one thing. But in actual fact, we know that we will be working with machines. Very few jobs can be fully automated, so only a very small percentage. So most of us are going to be working with machines, and here's another risk.  So their interface is the things they require of us, the way they capture our attention. If that makes us worse as human beings, that's another problem. In the first industrial revolution, humans basically had to fit around the machines. The machines were installed, and people worked around them literally. And over the years, that's become more ergonomically sensible, safer indeed, et cetera. But now in this era, we should be able to work with machines in an entirely different framework. I mean, people need to be smart and fussy consumers of technology, especially at work. So for example, if an interface doesn't work well, we need to push back and demand that it works well for the purpose we're doing with it, and again, keeping the part of our work that's human, very much preserved and sacred, not moving around the machinery. And in this case, by machinery, I mean software, I mean interfaces, the visual screen applications that we might be working with, we again need to see this as a collaborative effort with machines or co-evolution, if you will, between our abilities and our intent and what the machines can do, constantly insisting that they become more natural, more supportive, and more effective alongside us. I believe personally that technology can actually make us better humans, in part because it gives us something to compare ourselves to and to remind us what it is to be human. Although again, I think that gets blurred in our fast-paced day-to-day life. But if we start thinking about what it means to be truly human, we can work and develop that. I mean, I've spent 40 years trying to develop human beings with and without technology. It's not an easy process, but it's really a process that's worth the time and effort. Gary Kasparov, who famously was beaten by IBM's Big Blue at chess, he's a chess master. He, in reflecting on that episode of his life, he had this great optimism and that human machines are going to do what they do well, in his case, beat him at chess, but we as humans still have great characteristics. And he says, you know, machines have processes and humans have passion. Machines can do analytics and answer questions, but it's the humans who ask the best questions.


What's up guys, Isaac here, and I've got another good book for you guys another book recommendation This was one of my favorites of all time, and that is the 50th law By Robert Green and 50 cent and you won't believe how many times I've read this one I've read this one at least three to four times. I think and I've got the hardcover. I've got the audio. I've got the Digital version I've gone through it all because there's so much insight in this book now You see a lot of people are discouraged from reading this book because they see that it's co-authored by 50 cent And all people have a certain Perception or idea of 50 cent based off what they see in the media based off what I see on MTV They might think it's just some dumb thug dumb hip-hop head But if you read this book One of the first things that I guess highlight is how intelligent 50 cent really is and how much wisdom he has right? You see a lot of people don't know that when he was eight years old. He actually lost his Mother he never knew his father his mom got murdered when he was eight. So he was basically set to Live by himself or and figure out how to survive by himself and how to get what he wanted and a way out of the ghetto for him Initially was drug dealing But then he realized that that probably wasn't the best idea as a lot of his friends were dying a lot of them were going to jail So he moves moved over to the music industry started doing some mixtapes to the mixtape campaign Where M&M finally saw him and you know the story is there's a lot of adversity a lot of Triumph incredibly inspirational, but there's a lot of insight into this book as well Robert Green does not fail to deliver in this book much like in the four yellows of power much like in day three strategies of war of Seduction, he's always using cases in history and Showing you how the law applies to that. So this book is about fearlessness Conquering your fears and he uses a lot of 50 cent story a lot of cases in history So there's a lot to gain out of it now one of my favorite chapters in this book and What I'm going to talk about in this video is Chapter 10, which is the last chapter which is confront your mortality. So I'll read what it says here in The face of our inevitable mortality. We can do one of two things We can attempt to avoid the thought at all costs clinging to the illusion that we have all the time in the world or We can confront this reality accept and even embrace it Converting our consciousness of death into something positive and active in adopting such a fearless philosophy We gain a sense of proportion Became become able to separate what is petty from what is truly important Knowing our days to be numbered we have a sense of urgency and mission We can appreciate life all the more for its impermanence If we can overcome the fear of death, then there is nothing left to fear And I love that chapter That's just the intro. I Really think that a lot of people kind of put death or Trying out to think about death because you know to a lot of people it's painful Unless they're forced to think about death unless they're forced by a sudden death of a family member or a near-death experience On their behalf, that's the only time that they really are awakened to the idea of them dying That's why a lot of people doing all this dumb stuff, you know, like maybe Driving down the road at 200 k's per hour or kill me is powering Do all kinds of ridiculous things because a lot of people are far removed from the concept of death Death is something that's in movies. That's that's far away. That's in Game of Thrones Doesn't happen in real life until they're forced to see it now me Part of my life philosophy is I always always always come back to death. I always have This ticking noise in the back of my head tick tock tick tock is ever so Silent ever so quiet in the background. You can almost not hear it But it's always a reminder. There's always a sense of urgency in my time in life That's why I don't spend a lot of time doing a lot of bullshit A lot of people ask me why it's why it's so easy for me to be disciplined Why I can spend so much time reading or myself improvement or work on this YouTube channel or Studying for my mechanical engineering degree is because I understand the value of life That's why for me it's hard to camp outside the Apple store for a day or two to get the latest Apple phone That's not important to me. I know the value of life because there's always the reminder of death in the back of my head partly because of red books like this partly because of stoic philosophy and negative visualization stuff like that, but Don't get it confused and think that it's some sort of weird Fixation with death, but I understand the reality of it.  It really Drives you to do what it takes not to worry about the petty bullshit as Robert Green says Not to worry about the things are not important.  Other things other people will spend a lot of conscious effort on a lot of their energy on It doesn't faze you because you understand the value of your time.  Tell me what you think. Hey, we guys That's the end of the video. Hope you liked that. Peace like Comment subscribe and all that good stuff. See you next time. Peace


From DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com, I'm Darren Marlar and this is your Daily Dose of Weird News. Our phones and various other devices are causing poor posture as users are spending one to three hours each day hunched over their phones and that's leading to back-and-spine problems. We're actually turning into a society of mindless walkers – how long before we start craving brains? Dottie Wahlberg painted forward recently to a waitress at a North Carolina waffle house. The new kids on the block star left a $2,000 tip on an $82 bill at the waffle house in Charlotte. Wahlberg wrote on Facebook, �My mom waited tables and my dad tended bar for years, so when I walk into a waffle house and the staff treats me like a king, you better believe I treat them like queens.� I'm sure he meant that better than it came out though. John Mellonkamp's son, Speck, was arrested for public intoxication and fighting in Indiana on Saturday night. He fights authority, but authority always wins. The marital bed, once a symbol of holy matrimony, may someday be a relic of the past. Nearly 25% of married couples in the United States now sleep in separate beds according to the National Sleep Foundation. Separate sleeping arrangements are so popular that the National Association of Home Builders says it expects 60% of custom homes to have dual master bedrooms by this year. Barbara Tober, the former chairwoman of the Museum of Arts and Design, told The New York Times recently that �not that we don't love each other, but at a certain point you just want to have your own room.� Well, yeah, with the snoring, the hogging of the covers, the cold feet, the passing of gas, of course you'd want to get away from that. And that's just talking about the family dog.  Well, of course he's a former boxing champion. Now he can't even beat up a girl without biting her. Two adult men drowned in the Ongoazi River in Africa while they were being baptized. Victory Christian Center pastor Samuel Cummingua later said, �Following the incident, we've agreed on some measures that will ensure the safety of our followers during baptism in the rivers.� Cummingua added that churches were considering increasing the number of ministers at baptisms. They'd also only baptize one person at a time, while others are kept at a safe distance and will choose a time when the water is calm enough for the ritual. Last year, six children died during an early morning baptism in a stream. And in January 2015, two elderly Pentecostal church pastors drowned in a river in South Africa where they had gone to baptize four junior church members. This is truly a sad story, but do these people not realize you can baptize other places like swimming pools, big bathtubs, a pond? A woman trying to smuggle electronics into China was caught. She had 102 smartphones and 15 luxury watches strapped to her body. Airport security first became suspicious when she said, �I�ll be back in an Austrian accent.� As their wives and girlfriends know all too well, guys like to make a big fuss when they�re feeling under the weather, don�t we all? Now scientists are saying that man flu may not be a myth, and that guys really do get illnesses worse than gals. It�s all because women have a more powerful immune system than men, thanks to their hormones. I don�t know if this is actually true, but I am certainly going to claim it the next time I get the sniffles. Finland has set the world record for the largest group of skittie dippers. 789 people went swimming naked for five minutes. If you�re thinking about breaking the record, there you go. 789 people swimming naked for five minutes. Although there is speculation that half of those swimmers were just Director Michael Moore taking a beach vacation. An Israeli student whose grandparents survived the Holocaust has admitted to stealing items from the Auschwitz death camp for an art project. Rotem Bides visited the former Nazi Germany camp in Poland several times and removed items, including a sign forbidding people from taking anything. But perhaps most ironic of all, she says she did it to fight Holocaust deniers. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum called the acts outrageous and demanded the object�s return. More than a million people, mostly Jews, were killed at Auschwitz during World War II. The objects from Auschwitz, which also include shards of glass, small bowls, a metal screw and soil, formed part of the 27-year-old�s final project. Perhaps even more outrageous, Bides' supervisor at Biteboro College, the Israeli artist Michael Neumann, said that she did not see anything wrong with what Bides had done, adding, �The way I see it, she succeeds in creating a unique encounter between art and an event that has passed and has been wrapped in a lot of words, symbols and representations.� So apparently Israeli colleges don�t have ethics classes. Rosie O'Donnell has created an uproar by promoting an online game where players can push Donald Trump off a cliff. Somewhere, Kathy Griffin is saying, �Thank you, Rosie.� Police in suburban Cleveland say a fast-food restaurant customer angry about the way his sandwich tasted and looked threatened to shoot somebody over it. Police say the 20-year-old man complained that the egg on his sandwich at a steak and shake was runny and slimy and looked like spit. You know the best way to ensure that you will get spit on your sandwich? Threaten the staff with a gun, saying it looks like spit is in your sandwich. Trust me, you are not going to want what comes back to you in that sandwich. Grapes and the wine made from them can help protect your skin from sun damage. According to researchers at the University of Barcelona, the flavonoids in grapes can stop the chemical reaction that causes skin to die. Says biochemist Maria Cascante who directed the study, �This supports the idea of using these products to protect the skin from cell damage and death caused by solar radiation. This works because if you drink enough wine, you just have zero desire to leave the house.� A flood has destroyed all the cash in a safe at Fox River State Bank in Wisconsin. So you name the bank after a river, your bank is located right on the bank of said river and you are surprised you get flood damage? A woman in Taiwan divorced her husband after he kept ignoring her text messages. I am having a hard time seeing who the winner is in this story. The woman who got away from her apathetic husband or the husband who got away from the woman who wouldn�t stop texting him 100 times a day. The study suggests that sleepwalking is apparently a surprisingly common phenomenon in American households. Scientists from Stanford University School of Medicine found that about 3.6 percent of U.S. adults are prone to sleepwalking, which is a higher proportion than previously thought. Nocturnal wandering is also tied to certain psychiatric conditions such as depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder. And getting gooned out on Ambien. Good news, people with broken hearts. Stocking of your X on Facebook is totally normal. A study reveals that 88% of spurned lovers track their Xs on Facebook and 31% of respondents have changed their profile picture in an attempt to make their Xs jealous. It is good to know social media has brought out the responsible adult in all of us, isn�t it? Please support my channel by sharing the daily dose of weird news on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other social networks. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and be sure to subscribe if you want to see more. And click that little bell icon next to the subscribe button to be notified when I post new videos. You can find even more weird news that I didn�t have time for at DailyDoseOfWeirdNews.com. I�m Darren Marlar, and I�ll see you next time, weirdos!


Play an active part in the Premier Higher Education IT event by submitting a proposal by January 15, 2015 to present at the EDUCAUSE annual conference to be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, and online. Proposals are being accepted for face-to-face pre-conference seminars to be held on Tuesday, October 27, in Indianapolis. These half- or full-day seminars actively engage participants for a content-driven experience. EDUCAUSE is also accepting proposals for conference sessions to be held Wednesday, October 28 through Friday, October 30, in Indianapolis and online, with poster sessions taking place in the afternoon of Wednesday, October 28. Sessions should be interactive and can be offered face-to-face, online, or both. In order to prepare for submitting a proposal for either a seminar or session, first be sure to complete these following steps. Create or update your EDUCAUSE profile. Explore the presenter's concierge website. Examine the domain descriptions. Preview the submission form and select a session delivery format, a required element only for session proposals. The six domains for the 2015 EDUCAUSE annual conference include advancing the academic mission, including teaching and learning, analytics, business intelligence and data management for planning, digital scholarship, libraries, publishing, curation, and open access, enterprise service delivery, leading and partnering strategically across the academy, and risk management. There are five session delivery choices. The program committee encourages you to consider a presentation format that will engage your colleagues in discussion and learning beyond the simple dissemination of information. Included in these delivery choices are facilitated content, point-counterpoint debates, multi-campus perspective panels or talk show format, interactive presentations. These four formats all run 50 minutes in duration. Poster sessions will run 60 minutes in duration. Presenters can select to be considered for multiple presentation formats, including face-to-face, both face-to-face and online as a webcast, or online only in the virtual environment. Those submitting session proposals will be asked about their presentation preference. Proposal continuity is extremely important as you design your presentation and compose your proposal considering the following components. Your title, abstract, description, outcomes, and participation strategies. Each of these components should support your presentation and be unique. Avoid repeating the same wording in each component. Instead, provide strong, supporting information that will help highlight the key elements of your presentation. Attendees tell us their most memorable session experiences weave together a clear narrative with discussion, interaction, and thought-provoking commentary around a story, theme, or project. For more advice on crafting your proposal for maximum impact, visit the EDUCAUSE Presenter Concierge linked on the annual conference website. When you are ready to submit your proposal, use the online submission process on the EDUCAUSE website. This site includes extended details on the information you just reviewed, links to proposal submission forms, and contact information for additional questions. The deadline for proposals is January 15, 2015. We look forward to your participation at the EDUCAUSE 2015 annual conference.