I would like to pretend that I'm reading from my laptop because I'm so environmentally conscious and I'm good, but actually it's because I never finished in time to actually print out a presentation ever. About a million years ago when I was in graduate school, one of my colleagues came in one day and she said, what happened last night? Some missionaries from your church knocked on my door and they started talking about how you could be with your family forever. Like that was a good thing. A novice to transhumanist thinking and writing can have a little bit the same response. They're talking about human beings becoming smarter and living longer, as if that was a good thing. Most of us are lucky enough to have experiences that help us imagine why one might want to live with one's family forever, although some of us will also know why one might not want to. I want to think carefully today about why we might want to be smarter or live longer and about how that why should matter. Since I know far less than all of you about transhumanism, I want to start about talking some things I might know more about than some of you. German literature and music and depression.  First, let's see, Baroque music. I'm going to go backwards. One of the features of Baroque music, the one that we usually think of as defining the genre, is ornamentation. Singers and instrumentalists were licensed and encouraged to augment what was written in the score with trills and mordents and appoggiaturas and doubled cadences and accents and all kinds of other things that you see notated there. But all of this happened above the basso continuo or figured base, which was a very strict system by which actually this picture is too blurry for you to see it, but above the bottom score that you can see numbers and those quite strictly defined the chord progression that has to come out and how the baseline should progress through a piece. The history of this form of accompaniment is what I want to think about today. It's almost certain that this strict and independent baseline arose as a means of coordinating polychoral works, that is, works that were composed for two or more choirs, usually for especially festive occasions, or sometimes to highlight architectural features of churches. They'd place choirs in all the niftiest spots in the building and then they'd all sing together and people would look around at the building. But in order to keep that together, they'd have instrumentalists in the center that at first were just doubling the choral parts and those parts would be all written out precisely for the instrumentalists, the way that they were for the singers, and they kept the the celebration from flying apart. Eventually the bass would continue which supported and augmented the other vocal or instrumental parts instead of merely doubling them, developed and this form of just notating briefly the form of the chord with a number, allowed a sort of freedom within the form that that eventually made it possible for the the bass to not just keep keep things together, but to provide enough of an underlying texture that you could have a solo instrument or a solo singer doing all kinds of interesting melodic things, but with enough from the from the bass to make it sound rich. I think if this works we might even be able to hear some of it. Let's see. No. Okay well we don't have to, you guys have all heard the Bach Easter oratorio right? Anybody want to sing it? Okay don't worry you have to sing later later on in this presentation so there it is. Oh okay well never mind. I'm a humanist. I don't do this stuff. That's all right we'll we'll get back. You can imagine you've heard enough Bach to know you know the singers doing their trills and the and the bass going neatly. So ultimately the possibilities opened by having this independent and predictable bass line led to monotic forms of music that could support a soloist. That leads to cantatas that incorporate soloists as well as new chorale forms and eventually to opera and sort of everything that comes after that. Those forms eventually become too rich and complicated for figured bass to fully realize and so the more complex orchestrations of the classical and subsequent musical styles require once again a fully notated part for the bass instruments along with the rest of the orchestra and chorus. So there's this wonderful progress of musical innovation and celebration outstripping the extant forms developing new forms and then again overflowing those new forms and reaching back for the old forms newly understood which give expression to new ideas. We could if we were being sweeping in grandiose and oversimplifying a lot trace a similar progression in literature. The German Baroque literature becomes obsessed both with form and with breaking that form at the same time. This is a passage from the opening of one chapter of Martin Opitz's book Das Buch der deutschen Poetry which was sort of the first attempt at codifying a German literary theory. He starts off by saying this well with this statement he says although I've taken upon myself at the request of other noble minded people to say something about German poetics and through that to better propagate our language yet I am not of the opinion that somebody may be turned into a poet by means of rules and regulations. So he is at least humble about his project but his project is essentially he says that he's going to describe the purpose of poetry and its historical and cultural context. He's going to give a typology of poetry giving the genres and their most appropriate applications. He's going to define poetic style. He's going to iterate rhyme and meter with examples of the sonnet and ode and verse forms and he prescribes the use of Alexandrines as opposed to the low form of Knüttelweiß which is this older German rhyming verse of four ambic feet. He thinks there should be strict adherence to meter measured by the natural stress in the word. The use of pure rhyme only and the absolute exclusion of foreign words. So despite his belief that you can't make a poet out of rules and regulations he does his best to make enough rules that one could become a poet. He achieves all those aims in a book that's about 20 pages long which German literature students really appreciate since later people take lots more pages to do that. At the same time or just a few years after Opus's book was published came this novel called say that three times fast. And this is the first depending on who you ask it's the first Bildungsroman or it's a sort of proto Bildungsroman the form that becomes that. And it takes as the major plot device the development of a single character which is a new thing. So this guy, this Abenteuerliche means adventuresome, this adventuresome odd, odd gesture sort of going through life and it makes comments on politics and social convention and all kinds of things but all through the lens of this sort of innocent guy bumbling through the world and becoming less naive and more sophisticated. This idea even though it's loose and kind of when you read this book it just seems like it's episodic. It's just a bunch of stories even sort of fanciful tales but this seeing a series of things through the eyes of one character is new-ish at least in German literature at that point and it becomes you know of course as we know the the form for most novels right character driven describes many novels and it's even the forerunner of what we have in the sort of declining form of the novel as the memoir right so we can thank or blame Simplitismus for that. But there form is exploded. There's no there's there's nothing that rhymes there's no structure to the story none of the conventions of books up until that time are observed and it's it's very exciting it sort of catches German writers and and all of the 18th and 19th century everybody reads this everybody refers to it it's a sort of seminal moment in in German literature and recognized as a moment where despite the interest and obsession with with form and with German language and privileging the vernacular everything opens up everything is open at that moment and so and and that leads to sort of everything that comes after in much the same way that the figured base both explodes the form and then reforms and and leads to to big things afterwards the next sort of moment in German literature that people know about is Strömendran which is the precursor of Romanticism and it's it's good to taking this form of Simplitismus to its its logical extreme and and creating this character who is all feeling and no rationality and no forethought and no social convention and this guy named Werther wears clothes that are wildly unconventional he wears yellow pants which is for some reason just wildly what's the word just it's it's wildly provocative for Germans these yellow pants and his blue blazer and he is desperately in love and kills himself because he just can't stand the overflowing of his feelings and and this leads believe it or not to a rash of suicides of young German men in yellow pants it's it's actually becomes a real problem so this this overflowing of feeling it's a thing and this this is the precursor the the introduction the beginning of Romanticism which at one point Friedrich Schlegel who's considered sort of the founder of the father of German Romanticism is asked by a friend to to send him a definition of Romanticism and he says I can't it's 125 pages long and that I guess wouldn't fit in the mail back in the day but a few years later he did manage to write this succinct definition of what Romantic poetry was trying to be succinct ish um so this is for those of you who read German because it's really fun and great but here's a sort of loose translation Romantic poetry is a progressive universal poetry her task is not only to reunify all of the sundered forms of poetry and to bring poetry into communion with philosophy and rhetoric it will and should also blend even meld poetry and prose appreciation and criticism art poetry and nature poetry to make living poetry living and social and to make life and society poetic it should poetize humor and fill and satisfy the forms of art with all the stuff of life itself it should contain everything in a system of art down to the sigh the kiss that the child author breathes out in her artless song other forms of writing are finished and can now only be completely dismembered but the Romantic form is still becoming its mode of being is that it is eternally becoming can never be complete it cannot be exhausted by any theory so there's this sense that everything that has come before is spent is inadequate to the overflowing feeling in the life force of these new funda kindre and yet despite rebelling against formalist classicism the romantics ended up needing form too they turned to folk music and folk tales and fairy tales which they saw as somehow less artificial than other kinds of art but what's interesting here is the sense apparently present in almost every new artistic moment that tries to define itself that life and life feeling have somehow um sorry just skipped a page four six um have have somehow overflowed the conventional forms that the new generation's sorrows and joys and loves or appreciation of beauty have somehow escaped the bounds of the expressive forms that everyone else knew before them this moment of excess and abundance that I want us to notice um this discussion of excessive feeling in German literature leads us of course to the topic of depression um Andrew Solomon the great writer who wrote the noonday demon which is the most beautiful and optimistic book you will ever read about depression um says that depression is the flaw in love to be creatures who love we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose life is fraught with sorrows we are each of us held in the solitude of an autonomous body time passes what has been will never be again pain is the first experience of world helplessness I know he must have studied German at some point nobody else would put world helplessness together as a compound word um and it never leaves us perhaps depression can be best described as emotional pain that forces itself upon us against our will and then breaks free of its externals grief is depression in proportion to circumstance depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance I'm interested um here in this notion of feeling um in this case pain that escapes its externals and um becomes disproportionate um Solomon doesn't really um doesn't explain um where it is he derives this sense of what the what the proportion to circumstance would be what what does it mean to have grief in proportion or out of proportion to circumstance why do we have this sense that that feeling should somehow correspond on some scale um to our experience I mean we we do I think we walk around with this sense and a lot of the time when we're unhappy it's because we think we're not feeling the right way for what's going on around us but but where where do we have that that notion of coincidence um but but there is here in Solomon's um comparison of grief and depression this assumption that there's a proper proportion of circumstance and feeling and that we get into trouble when there's an excess of feeling when grief slips out of the cultural occasions and rituals we have created to contain it um but what what makes us afraid um then or fearful or in pain is not um not the fear of death he talks about how you know if we are going to love then we are going to be afraid of death because death will take away the the things that we love um but it's not really death that that is the problem here but the the surface the surface of love this excess of feeling whose expression we cannot contain um in Goethe's Faust to return for a second to German um to stuff I know um the the the uh the thing that is going to make him become human again to lose his bet with the devil that makes him omnipotent is if he if he experiences a moment that he enjoys so much that he loves so much that he asks for the moment to stay for a while though you are so beautiful and and if he says that to a moment of human expression of human love then he will lose his exalted status that he's gained by bargaining with the devil so there's there's this sense that that capturing that moment that of intense feeling is the thing that that makes us most human um but we all labor under this idea that somehow there's a correct proportion of life and feeling and that if we could just keep things in equilibrium and and not be overcome by um that excess of feeling we we everything would be fine um then again maybe it's not all of us who who want that equilibrium um writers especially poets and musicians are all about this excess of feeling it's their stock in trade and um one of the most common responses to the excess of feeling is either to try to invent a new form or explode an old one to make room for this abundance of sentiment that they always think is the new discovery of their generation um of course it's not right jesus even in the you know a couple of millennia ago talks about the idea that that new wine and old bottles don't go together um but there's what's constant is this felt need to capture the part of humanity of humaneness that's always overflowing um human art is always after this excessive meaning and capturing it in a way that can be communicated most of the time words are inadequate are as inadequate as sonata form for this kind of communication so we reach for metaphor and even for synesthesia the sort of conflation of of various sentences um billy collins lampoons this tendency in his delightful poem litany um which you probably all know but i'm going to read because comic relief is necessary uh in disquisitions about german literature um his poem is called uh litany and it starts off with a quotation from somebody named jean cliquillon who who says you are the bread and the knife the crystal goblet and the wine and then collins says you are the bread and the knife the crystal goblet and the wine you are the dew on the morning grass and the burning wheel of the sun you are the white apron of the baker and the marsh birds suddenly in flight however you are not the wind in the orchard the plums on the counter or the house of cards and you are certainly not the pine scented air there is just no way that you are the pine scented air it's possible that you are the fish under the bridge maybe even the pigeon on the general's head but you are not even close to being the field of cornflowers at dusk and a quick look in the mirror will show that you are neither the boots in the corner nor the boat asleep in its boathouse it might interest you to know speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world that i am the sound of rain on the roof i also happen to be the shooting star the evening paper blowing down an alley and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table i am also the moon in the trees and the blind woman's teacup but don't worry i am not the bread and the knife you are still the bread and the knife you will always be the bread and the knife not to mention the crystal goblet and somehow the wine so like art religion is concerned with these moments of access with the places where human feeling seems to escape is proper bounds in the religious context we call it we often call it transcendence without really quite specifying what it is we are transcending the ordinary the normal the proportional or dreaded favorite word of Mormons the appropriate unlike art religion doesn't usually try to explain or express this excess in human terms it attributes excess to the divine makes it originate outside of the human heart or postpones its iteration to an afterlife this is the moment where i i i might if i'm feeling really brave try to get who sings in here you're you're all we can sing this right all right who's got perfect pitch anybody got an s of course you do of course you have a pitch pipe okay so can you see all right all right i'll leave don't sing like Mormons sing faster i knew you could do it so that that's romanticism in a religious context right this moment of being lost in wonder love and praise that's that's how we that's how we do religious excess of feeling right um the title of my talk uh well let's just say religion calls this excess of feeling miraculous it's really interesting that that mica talked about miracles because you can see where we're where we're going here um and but we religion calls the inexplicable miraculous and leaves it at that right the title of my talk comes from a poem of um Richard Wilbur who is a professor at Wesleyan university for a long time and i think this perfectly captures the impulse of religion to deal with excess is miracle says saint john tells how at cana's wedding feast the water pots poured wine in such amount that by his sober count there were a hundred gallons at the least it made no earthly sense unless to show how whatsoever love elects to bless brims to a sweet excess that can without depletion overflow which is to say that what love sees is true that this world's fullness is not made but found life hungers to abound and pour out its plenty for such as you um of course as many transhumanist thinkers have been at pains to point out religion is not just about what to do with a surfeit of happiness and love it excuses all excesses of feeling including anger vengefulness and lust with reference to extra human beings the devil made me do it or worse god told me to do it as justification for slavery sexism even genocide religious attempts to cope with and suppress perceived excesses of feeling or feelings that are unusual or difficult have a long history of provoking tribalism persecution inquisition and war um so these moments of of feeling of feeling escaping demand attention and it seems to me that um in preferring the rational over the emotional and preferring the secular to the religious um among transhumanists that that that we miss something important that we that we allied questions that that have to be answered somehow and so far at least no form either literary or musical or artistic or scientific has managed to describe the human experience in a way that doesn't leave a remainder a little bit left of life's hunger to abound seems to me that whether we find that remainder frustrating or joyous will make an enormous difference in the rational systems and practices we try to create do we want to improve the human condition because we find death too fearsome to bear or is it because we believe that love can cast out that fear um this is the embarrassing point in my talk where I confess that I am so ignorant of the state of play and transhumanist thought that I initially turned to wikipedia to map out a crash course for myself uh one helpful page listed several works of fiction that might be considered transhumanist along with helpful one line summaries of their major plot lines or themes several of the suggested books were described as quote utopia or dystopia depending on your point of view now far be it from me the token humanists to cast stones here but that struck me as decidedly unsciency and actually provided a port of entry for me into this unfamiliar work I was looking for ways that point of view might matter in transhumanist thought projects or experience or experiments um there's a moment in margaret at what's a handmade tale and I know you're all going to tell me in the q and a that that's not really transhumanism and it's it's okay um but there's this moment where the protagonist is speaking with one of the overlords of the dystopia and he reveals the fundamental rationale by which well-intentioned people had managed to make life a living hell for most of the population particularly the female half of the population but for most of everyone towards the end of the novel the narrator of fred has seduced her commander into an illicitly and dangerously humane relationship they do things like playing scrabble and reading magazines together and most dangerous of all just talking eventually she gets him to tell her about why and how the world changed from the one she remembered which is roughly um life in the 80s or 90s in a medium sized post feminist american city and his chilling explanation explanation is this you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs we thought we could do it better but better never means better for everyone it always means worse for some and that I think is a fundamental dividing line between utopia and dystopia is life is goodness scarce or abundant everything depends on how we answer this question do we want to live longer and be smarter because we sense life's hunger to abound or because we are afraid of death are we trying to multiply joy or merely escape grief it seems to me that Mormonism has particularly rich strains of both impulses the fear of death and the longing for life to continue in its overflowing goodness we don't need to look farther than the founding prophet Joseph Smith for an embodied lesson in how these feelings coexist even in the same consciousness uh samuel brown has poignantly argued that earliest Mormonism was compelled and even obsessed with death um he quotes Joseph Smith at a funeral sermon for adam arcs saying all men know that all men must die what is the object of our coming into existence then falling away to be here no more this is a subject we ought to study more than any other which we ought to study day and night he expressed similar sentiments on many occasions his funeral sermons were the locus of much of joseph's most elaborate theological work sometimes he seemed to want to keep the feelings evoked by the contemplation of death bounded in some sort of rational proportion faithful to the religious reasoning he was working out so he said at another funeral when we lose a near and dear friend upon whom we have set our hearts it should be a caution to us not to set our affections too firmly upon others knowing that they may in like manner be taken from us our affection should be placed upon god and his work more intensely than our on our fellow beings but then he contradicts himself again right of course you all know the place in the doctrine covenants where he says that we should live together in love in so much that we shall weep for those who are who mourn so like most of us Joseph wasn't entirely able able to pull off the equanimity he believed his religious convictions ought to provide in yet another funeral sermon for jesse barnes he said when i heard of the death of our beloved brother barnes it would not have affected me so much if i had the opportunity of burying him in the land of zion i've said father i desire to die here among the saints but if this is not thy will and i go hence and die wilt thou find some kind friend to bring my body back and gather up my friends who have fallen in foreign lands and bring them up hither that we may all lie together and may we contemplate these things so yes if we learn how to live and how to die when we lie down we contemplate how we may rise in the morning and it is pleasing for friends to lie down together locked in the arms of love to sleep and wake in each other's embrace and renew their conversation so they're his his yearning for the earthly the physical the actual togetherness of friends sort of escapes the the notion that that death would would take people away who can't can't ultimately bear it even though he he tries to um his human affection and care for his friends and especially for his family constantly overflowed the bounds of the religious forms he was creating um see for instance these accounts of his feelings when he organized the church and baptized his own father um these are really beautiful i hope you can see that um so this is from um lucy max smith's account of the founding of the church and the part on the left is her unpublished manuscript and then the the version on the right is the one that she published but look at the parts that that don't appear in the published version she says joseph stood on the shore when his father came out of the water and as he took him by the hand he cried out oh my god i have lived to see my father baptized into the true church of jesus christ and he covered his face and wept and um and sobbed upon his father's bosom like a child wept aloud for joy as joseph old when he became beheld his father coming up into the land of egypt um and then in the diary of joseph night he says there's one thing i will mention that evening that old brother smith and martin harris was baptized joseph was filled to the spirit to a great degree to see his father and mr harris that he had been with so much he burst out with great with grief and joy and seemed as though the world could not hold him he went out into the lot and appeared to want to get out of sight of everybody and would sob and cry and seem to be so full that he could not live oliver and i went after him and came to him and after a while he came in but he was the most wrought upon that i ever saw any man his joy seemed to be full um so while joseph would go on to try to systematize and codify the enduring familial frameworks for human affection i love these accounts of the founding moment of the mormon church already in his first attempt to make a religious system and ordinances out of his revelatory experiences joseph complicated affection for his father completely overflows the bounds of decorum and even of language seems to me that mormonism has ever since that moment existed in a constant struggle between the need to systematize and organize the church create a religion and the equally urgent need to imbue these reasoned and appropriate forms of religious expression with the kinds of transcendent messy sobbing joy that overwhelmed joseph when he baptized baptized his father it seems to me that we are and have been for a few decades in a mormon moment where the comfort of systems and rules and authority as christopher was talking about has has mostly overtaken the longing for the uncontainable excess that also inheres in mormonism's optimistic insistence on human beings expansive and even godly potentialities i find a delicious and sort of provocative irony in the ways that the mormon transhumanist project though itself eager and optimistic about technological and scientific modes of systematizing also might rediscover the exuberant and inventorsome spirit that animated these earliest mormons of mormonism like the romantic poets trying to dismember the old forms in order to reanimate them the ideas that you are pursuing can be constructive and invigorating to the old forms of mormonism but turning away for a second from mormonism i want to close with a practical example of how working in a framework of abundance might change real world events and practice many of you will have seen this news report in the last couple of days this i'm going to just read it from the smithsonian magazine's blog um why would scientists revive a thousand-year-old medical recipe for a fallow smelling concoction they suspected it could have very real benefits and it turns out they were right an anglo-saxon brew kills methicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus or mursa when microbiologist fraya harrison chatted with christina lee an anglo-saxon medievalist she was intrigued by a nasty sounding recipe involves leech book a thousand-year-old compendium of medical advice and proportion and potions the recipe was recommended to fight infected eyelash follicles involves crop leak and garlic of equal quantities take wine and bullock skull mix with the leak let stand nine days in the brass vessel etc and and so intrigued by this possibility they actually made up a batch of this stuff let it sit in the lab for nine days and then tried it out on some mursa bacteria on mouse skin and it killed about 90 of it which is as good or better than the rate for the the best conventional antibiotics we have now we often speak in university and medical and technological context of of scarcity right we cut funding to arts and humanities in favor of stem fields and that seems like a pretty rational thing to do there's you know science is practical it they make stuff and you know i love a lot of medievalists but most of the time what they do seems as practical as an extended montipython sketch right which is not to say that it's useless the world would be impoverished without them and we need the irrational and exuberant abundance of the useless the silly the impractical the religious the kiss that the child poet breathes out in her artless song both are religious striving towards salvation and our scientific technological transhumanist striving towards better lives here and now depend on whether or not we are able to believe that better can in fact mean better for everyone that life hungers to a bound and pour out its plenty such poor it's plenty out for such as you and for all of us for the most expansive definition of us that we can conceive otherwise i can just make you sing some more got that was fun yeah yeah sure um i this is my seventh year of editing a dialogue i'm almost done void peterson will take over next year and subscriptions have um have increased slightly um really slightly over the last um over that time period um which in an age when most print publications are are falling precipitously feels pretty good i think uh the trouble that we and you know most print publications are facing is that um people don't read um long form anything anymore and the other interesting thing is that i think um dialogue and sunstone and some of those independent publications for a long time um served a function that was outside of their content that was external to their content and we didn't really realize it but but what dialogue said over and over and over again to people as it arrived in the mailbox was you're not alone um and that was really the most important content of dialogue for decades i think and um and that message is now available online all the time you know 24 hours a day in whatever um you know constellation or ideological flavor you would like it and blogs just do that community function much better so um it's it uh it's been it's been interesting to try to sort of find our way into those sort of short form conversations and try to say well yes but you know actually this this wheel you're reinventing someone else built a really good one about 25 years ago and you could just go over here and read it so um you know i think we're facing mostly the same the same struggles that most print publications are and i see it as a problem of form not so much of ideology i i feel like ideologically the church is that the climate in Mormonism is is good for for what we're trying to do a dialogue and yeah one two three oh that's easy um oh sure um yeah he he just asked me how to um how to deal with the problem of earth scarce resources um in in 10 words or less basically um so or and how that conflicts with this idea that there is abundance right with you know the the Mormon way to say it is that there's enough and to spare um i think that um most of our greediest most destructive consumption um comes out of this sense that there's not enough and that we better grab all we can and then some more just in case um and it it seems to me that at least in my own life when i really am opera i mean i don't i'm not sure that i do this with physical resources i'm thinking now more in terms of feeling and um but i i think it works i think it translates into the physical world that um that when i'm uh less worried about getting more stuff and more grateful i mean the the paradigm of abundance right leads to a sense of gratitude and fullness and when you have that sense of fullness then you don't need stuff to fill up the empty spaces and um i mean that's a really sort of facile um gloss but but i do think that that most of this sort of most destructive western consumption comes from this sense of trying to fill a lack somehow um with with stuff that ultimately doesn't fill it and that leads to more and more consumption so just breaking out of that paradigm i think maybe would go a long ways thanks and also i am quite late to say maybe this is actually what the mission of the mta is one of the things that i really despair of when i live in northern california i tell is um when i see um i'll just call them the first ones um who are who have the means and the determination to work on the technological underpinnings that could be the basis for this journey that's very often i see personalities that is one of the kind of commanding positions with the most resource personalities that i really are it spawns the question that you asked in the very beginning is this a good thing and and so most of the books that i've read i've read quite a few um when they come to say you know and what will we do once we become immortal and data and so on and and one of the books that i recently read by marquine rothblood says well of course there will still be movies after all they'll all be there and so you'll want to get together with your cyber friend at information code package all day and watch movies and what else do you like to do if you like to play cards sure you could do that and she lists like a dozen things that i mean or you know like going bowling you know and that's what you can come up with well it seems that the people who are working on it often have an emotional that and i i don't mean this insulting to anybody who's experienced but we're just close to autistic there's no there there there's a fascination with procedure there's a fascination with the process there's an assumption that we simply want more of this stuff which my son's like right now a hotel and and so i isn't the mission of groups like this to actually try to inform things that don't pay because there is no shortage believing a mighty worker people who say we need more no we've got a billion of them and they all do the same thing it's a it's all apps they live in apps world and they get funding for that and we're trying to find people who want to do things like spread emotional wealth there's no market for it but we're saying but that's the best thing that we can do with this stuff so or what we're saying in this conference is that we're announcing that that is the point and that we're trying to find a way to leverage this minority viewpoint which doesn't have a lot of power and money is that what this is? Should it be Christine? Well i'm going to mostly defer to Lincoln because you are way out of my depth there but but i'll just say that that maybe um maybe the mission ought to be to yeah um um great okay um so um the question was about sort of the the personalities maybe leaders in the transhumanist movement people who have the resources and the technical skill to make some of these things happen seem sometimes to not have an emotionally or spiritually rich vision of of what they're trying to create that they're fascinated by the technological possibilities and sometimes lose sight of the humanist ones is that fair okay um and i think that that may be the the right approach to that question is not to not to try and proselytize to people whose temperaments are different than ours but but to just make room for more for more kinds of people to you know do insane things like inviting me here to give this talk and you know getting me thereby to you know watch a bunch of Kurzweil TED talks and um you know learn a little bit about this stuff and and see if there's a way in for for other kinds of visions you know make sure that the medievalist is talking to the microbiologist all right there's another one be be gentle that's the only place that word exists in the English language so great okay so um let me try to restate that one so um language is insufficient we can't really articulate the most important spiritual truths of our lives like atonement in in language we we reach for words like infinite and incomprehensible supernal to describe this thing because we we can't translate it into practical terms and and and i i seemed to be arguing and i think i was that um that it's good anyway to keep reaching for these for these terms um and and why so what do we get from from still trying to express to f the ineffable as it were right um to uh you know to say the thing that can't be said um so um i think we let me let me uh joseph smith talked once about trying to escape the narrow crooked prison of words and um he had this sense all the time and you i think in the doctor in covenants you read it all the time that he's sort of he he says over you know we saw these things we can't record them we we don't under in the book of Mormon you know all these things like they can't be uttered and um but we have to try right i mean that's we're built as humans so that's why we do metaphors that's why um you know billy collins laughs at at the ways that we talk to our beloved but we still do it and it means something to us we like hearing those metaphors and so um i i think it's just that that language is is all we have i mean we we can reckon and part of what um the romantics offer that's useful is to say language isn't you know to just acknowledge that the form the form won't hold and that um that that we're always aiming at something too big um for us to manage um i actually think that maybe the baroque is a better um a better example um you know there are these moments and i here i'm going to be lost for words too but many of you probably know this experience of um listening or i have it most often when playing Bach where you know it's a it's a perfect fugue there's nothing there's nothing outside of the form and yet all of a sudden there's this space that opens up in that melody that just um it and i don't know how to describe it other than that a sort of space that happens between between the bars between the the rigid form that there's just suddenly this sense of expansion and um i think i think that's why we keep reaching for better words to describe what we're trying to do we're hoping that eventually will come on the form that that escapes itself um and lets us feel that space in in the form um but yeah i sorry i'm i i don't know but yeah that we need more more forms an abundance of forms and eventually we get something like what we need


Trevor Lawrence's entire career, except he switches teams every season. In his opening season, the Jaguars just barely missed the playoffs going nine and eight. So he heads to the San Francisco 49ers, where they make it all the way to the NFC Championship, but lose to the Philadelphia Eagles, who went on to play the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl. Next, he heads to the Raiders for a quick first round exit to the Cincinnati Bengals. And in 2025, he heads to the Kansas City Chiefs, where they head to the Super Bowl versus the Green Bay Packers and smoke them. Trevor Lawrence wins Super Bowl MVP. In 2026, he joins the Cincinnati Bengals, but barely misses the playoffs once again. In 2027, he's a Green Bay Packer and loses in the NFC Championship. Shocker. And 2028 was a miraculous season with the Houston Texans. T-Law wins NFL MVP Super Bowl MVP and gets another ring against the Falcons.


Hello, my name is Jennifer Weiser. I've just completed the iSchool program and I am thrilled to have my MLIS. I am also honored to be this year's recipient of the 2017 Directors' Award for Excellence in Intellectual Inquiry. For this acknowledgement, I would like to thank Director Sandra Hirsch, the Student Awards and Scholarship Committee, and the faculty. Over the past three years, my iSchool instructors provided wonderful opportunities to explore and dive into the world of libraries and information. And through my coursework, I developed a sense of my librarian identity, and I know that when I seek future employment, I will look for workplaces that foster curiosity and support a culture of learning. As I embark on my new career, it's very affirming to have received this award. Thank you.


Hello everyone and Happy Black History Month. My name is Nicole Ballard and I am the president of the African American Heritage Society of Long Beach where we have our resource area located at Burnett Neighborhood Library. I am a mommy to three boys and a wife of 18 years to Ryan Ballard president of the Long Beach Public Library Foundation. Today we are going to read Max and the Tagalong Moon by Floyd Cooper. Are you ready? One night as Max was leaving grandpa's house he reached up to give grandpa a big hug goodbye. In the sky behind grandpa appeared a big fine moon.  Grandpa and Max gazed quietly at the big moon together as it embraced them in soft yellow light. Max smiled at the moon and grandpa then climbed into the car. Bye bye grandpa. Bye bye moon. As the car pulled away Max kept his eyes on grandpa until he disappeared from sight and all he saw was the moon. Max kept his eyes on that moon waiting for it to disappear too. The long ride home was swervy curvy this way and that all the way and the moon seemed to tag along. Max giggled as he watched the beautiful bright orb flicker through the passing trees trailing behind the car as it traveled home this way and that plain peekaboo. Up a hill down a hill the moon was ever there over a bridge around a curve the moon bounced along around a tree passed a field of sleeping cows the moon stayed quietly with Max. Isn't that such a beautiful scenery? Through a small town with roundabout streets Max gazed as the moon kept up at the mouth of a tunnel and out the other end. Max smiled when he saw the moon there waiting. Dark clouds tumbled across the night sky. The stars and nightingales all faded away. Do you see the moon fading away? Where do you think it's going? Max searched the darkness and wondered where is the moon? Grandpa said it would always shine for me. Finally home Max took one last look up at the empty night sky. I guess that old moon couldn't shine for me all the way home. Where do you think the moon is? Max is looking upstairs in bed. The room was dark. Max felt alone. He missed Grandpa. He missed that tag along moon. Then slowly very slowly Max's bedroom began to fill with a soft yellow glow. The clouds faded away and the moon peeked through. Max gazed up at that magic ball of light and thought about what grandpa said. That old moon will always shine for me on and on. Max knew then that whenever he saw the moon he would think of grandpa on and on and he slept soundly embraced in soft yellow light. The end. Now how did you like that book?


I went back, well, I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Think Tech Tech Talks and time to time we check in with the TELUS Arrest, our side pack. And we're gonna do that again today.  I start getting scared as soon as you come on the screen. So why don't you come on and talk about the developments, that's the wrong word, the negative developments, the scary developments about ransomware so I can get scared? Well, Jay, you know, the best part about fear is it also maybe puts us into action. Right, otherwise we get complacent. And ransomware is one of those things that, you know, people thought they got it all covered. Yeah, you know, they got a good backup. They got things figured out. And unfortunately, a new study came out from the FBI and the FBI every year releases something called the IC3, Internet Crime and Complaint Centers, annual, you know, kind of what their numbers look like. You know, what are people reporting to the FBI? How much is it costing them? It's a data report. And on that report, it says, hey, you know, good news. Ransomware payments are down 38%. So that means that these bad guys are losing money. They're not making the same kind of money they used to. But unfortunately. It seems to mean that. But why do I feel there's a big but? And that's the big but. Unfortunately, these guys are also pretty smart. And they're highly motivated and well funded. So now they're getting a little bit more creative about ransomware and how they're going to deploy it. And so they've deployed double extortion and triple extortion tactics. So I'd like to kind of talk about those so we can. Yeah, please. What do you mean by that? Well, think about what ransomware is. Let's kind of do a review session. So ransomware came out roughly around 2018. And it had peppered billboards across Thailand and UK where it locked up public transit systems. And in fact, we saw most recently colonial pipeline had a ransomware incident. And what that does is that they take encryption, the same kind of encryption that you have on your credit card on a smart chip or, you know, even on this video stream is probably encrypted. And it takes that encryption and it applies it to all your files on your computer, right? So far so good. Everything is encrypted without the key, you can't get to your files. And so they put up this fancy message that says, hey, it's a time bomb. You've got three days to pay us in Bitcoin. Otherwise, we take all the files and we send a remote wipe and we erase everything. And so businesses work out, why is this? Well, if we get ransomware, we certainly don't want our files to get lost, do we? So they put in good backup plans and offsite backup plans and all kinds of other fancy things. And it became kind of a cat and mouse game where bad guys would get inside of your computer network and then disable the backups and then deploy the ransomware.  So these bad guys have continued to evolve their tactics. And so now we have double extortion. So they deploy the single extortion tactic, which is ransomware. And so they lock up the files after getting inside by either clicking on an accidental email or going to a website or any number of ways they get in. And after that, they silently, before locking up your files, they take them all away. They all download them over our wonderful high speed, fiber internet connections that we have.  Well, that requires high bandwidth. Well, that high bandwidth can also be used to exfiltrate or suck away and copy the data away. And they'll let the business know after all the data's been stolen. Well, we're going to lock up your computers and you got to pay us for that. And then we're going to take this data and we're going to leak it out there unless you pay us as well. So they have your data. Now, in some companies, it's not such a big deal, right?   And in fact, I'm talking about real breaches here, by the way. So everything from floor shops to vehicle service centers, data breach there as well. Vehicle service centers, you know, who cares when you add an oil change on your car? Big deal, right? But imagine if it's a healthcare provider or if it's a credit card company or a bank.  That kind of stuff, once it gets leaked, pretty bad. So that is a double extortion technique. And then we get to triple extortion. So triple extortion, this is the new stuff.  So they're punishing you for failing to pay the ransom and they leak your, you know, your important data. Is that the way it works? Yeah, they leak it or sell it. And up to this point, they were really just thinking about just, they weren't really digging into the data to find out what was in there that they could even add, you know, do anything to put the pressure on. You gotta remember, everything here is designed to put the pressure on the victim to pay. They want money, it's just plain and simple. And anyway, if they can get it by putting on more and more pressure, that's where the problems happen. Now, here's the problem with extortion in general. The FBI does not recommend that you pay the ransom. And it is because what's to stop them from demanding more and demanding more, right? And there's some interesting developments happening now with crypto up until this point, there was this kind of false perception that Bitcoin was untraceable, which by the definition of the blockchain, you've done plenty of, you know, crypto episodes on ThinkTech. I'm sure you've gone over a blockchain. You can probably put a link to that in our show notes. But the idea is that blockchain technology is public. That's the whole point. And there are ways where they can start connecting the dots and figure out in their investigations where this money's ending up. So the idea of paying an untraceable Bitcoin, yeah, it's not so untraceable as it used to be. So we're talking about double extortion here, right?  They want money to get them back. Triple extortion and reputation damage, that's where it gets really interesting. So when it comes to triple extortion, they can do the first two, right? Steal the data, hold the data hostage and threaten to release it, but they can also attack the network. So we've seen this on major retailers. This is where it becomes a problem. They can flood the public sites with so much data that the sites can't respond. We saw something similar to this with Hawaiian Airlines a few months back. We've seen this, I believe, with Burberry and a few other big e-commerce retailers. Is that like denial of service? Exactly, it's a DDoS attack. And here's what's insidious about it, this is fun. So there are, what's the best way to put it? Kind of like an outsourced, like let's say you want to DDoS a company like a bank. Well, it's really hard to kind of take over maybe 3,000 or 4,000 computers to coordinate an attack like this where they can all flood a single place with packets. So the bad guys have found ways to take over a few thousand computer networks and then sell access by the minute. They say, hey, look, you wanna flood this place? No problem, 15 minutes, great. Let's do it.  So it's been completely commoditized. And in those DDoS attacks- You have to pay to use your own system. It's like a special subscription to use your own system. Yeah, think of it like DoorDash for attacking your victims. Why bother going down to the local eatery and picking up the food yourself? You can just go on there with an app and someone will take care of it for you. Isn't that good? They get to be your partner. Yeah, exactly. So it becomes denial of service as a service, really. DDoS is a service. Well, you said at the outset that the stats were down, but that didn't resolve the problem. But it sounds like when you have these three levels of attack, the stats of damage and ransom are up, no? How do you reconcile those stats? Sure thing. So this kind of the triple attack that I'm describing here, this is the new playbook for 2023. We haven't really seen this last year. This is all the new stuff they're doing. And then these, for example, with these denial of service attacks, this sounds serious there. They throw packets, think of them like basketballs. They throw packets at an airlines website so people can't book airplane tickets or they throw it in e-commerce sites so it essentially grinds their sales to a halt. But inside each of those packets, each of those basketballs, if they were to open them up, which friends and guys do, they'll see a little note. And then that note, it'll say, hey, we're attacking you. Here's what you pay and where to send the money for us to stop. Well, if blockchain isn't available anymore, where do you send the money? It is available and it's still what they use. So, you know, there's no way you can like write a cashier's check and send it out. So help me rectify the fact that the stats of attacks are down, but there's three levels of ransomware. And so something maybe, what is the connection? Well, you know, that's kind of the history. So every year it's been going up until last year when it went down about 38%. Because everyone got wise, right? Business owners decided to put together a business continuity plan, backup plans, moved a lot of stuff to the cloud. They said, oh, we're not gonna store this stuff on site anymore, it's too vulnerable. And so because of that, last year payments were down.  Organized crime means that they have quotas. They have KPIs and metrics. These guys need to make their money from victims. They need to attack networks, find a way to do it. So they've been getting really creative. So I suspect that based on these new strategies, and we haven't even gone through all of them yet, based on these new strategies, numbers are gonna be way up this year because they're getting mean. Like these are really mean strategies. And so they're reacting to the reduction last year by improving, tuning up their systems to be more destructive this year. Correct, exactly. Wow, so D. Wiz, I wanna talk for a minute about the Colonial Pipeline Affair, which you and I talked about. We touched on that a lot of a few months ago. In that case, the FBI was happy to report that they had gotten some of the ransom back, but not all of it. And I really wonder what happened there because I'm not convinced that that demonstrates that the FBI knows in full how to deal with this. What happened? From what I remember, they were able to retrieve some of it by going back through the public ledger, as they described. That's how they were able to point out exactly what happened, like where that money went. And it went to a group, the name escapes me just this minute, but it went to a Russian hacking group. Why am I not surprised? Well, exactly. Now here's the funny part. A few, this was maybe six months ago, something like that. That same group was arrested by Russian authorities. And that same group then was put to work using similar attack patterns out in the wild against other critical infrastructure projects in the Ukraine. So the question remains, like the official release was, hey, look, the US, we did you guys a favor. These are the bad guys that took down colonial pipeline. Russia has nothing to do with this. So we're arresting them because it's the right thing to do. But then isn't it interesting that those same attack patterns that were able to infiltrate colonial pipeline then are being used against Ukraine. So maybe. There's always the possibility of propaganda. By the way, the group was called Dark Side. Dark Side, that's it. There's so many of them, and they're funny too. Well, let's get to the big question. We have a few minutes left, we're about halfway through our discussion. And the big question is we, United States has a lot of very sophisticated computer programmers and telecommunications guys and switch guys, if you will, who can monitor what's going in and out through the internet. And they're not only in Silicon Valley these days, they're in other places too, like New York. Why can't we also up the ante? Why don't we see prosecutions on this? It's interesting that I guess it was some group that was involved in a mass murder within the last couple of days, was tried and sentenced for some extraordinary number of lifetimes, hundreds of years in jail. I guess it wasn't a death sentence, but it was multiple lifetimes. Instead of myself, that's interesting because we have seen so many of them get off the hook. And then I thought of white collar crime. Where a lot of these guys get off the hook. For one reason or another, it's not treated as all that serious. And the judge and the jury was like, ah, it's white collar crime. Let's give them a few months or a couple of years in jail. I want to volunteer for you, Attila, to be on that jury because I treat this stuff as really, really serious and really destructive. And I think the justice system doesn't. And I think what should happen here is when you catch somebody, you lay into them as a major sentence or a lifetime. Unfortunately, that's neither the law nor the fact. But I wonder, you know, you don't hear about any prosecution. If you called up the attorney general of the state of Hawaii and you asked them, how many prosecutions have you done for ransomware?  And so I think the FBI is close to that. But why can't we catch them? Well, you know, Jay, there's different degrees of crime, in my opinion. There are some crimes that, you know, they're financially motivated. And in the end, no one really gets physically hurt. You know, there are a lot of these companies, such as Colonial Pipeline. Yeah, it costs them a few million bucks and a lot of issues with PR and et cetera.  You know, they were unable to deliver jet fuel. There was... How about the hospitals? How about the hospitals that have been subjected to ransomware? I mean, people probably got sicker or died because of the ransomware and the time factor. Would you consider that more serious? Yeah, so far there's only been one confirmed death due to this and that was in Europe. This was a couple of years ago, specifically with a hospital ransomware. And during COVID time, like hospitals were kind of off limits for hackers. Now it's back, you know, they're after them just the same. But you know, there's a lot of cyber crime out there that's probably not appropriate for this show to talk about where there are really people being harmed by them. And that's the focus of these investigations. When they involve children, when they involve drugs, when they involve people's lives, being in danger. That's where the real focus goes. All of us here, you know, talking about this, you know, ransomware and computer being locked up, that's the real kind of happy side of cyber crime. And I like to stay there because it's kind of depressing the other side.  And they do, they do catch those guys. That's where the focus goes. Why don't we hear about it? Why don't we hear about a prosecution and a sentence? If you like, I can send you some links. They do occur. You know, probably one of the more famous ones was the arrest of an individual who ran Silk Road. That was a drugs assassination human trafficking website on the dark web. Since then it doesn't more popped up. There've been more arrests, more coordinated arrests all around the world for this. Those are the guys they're really after. What we're really focusing on is how do we minimize business interruptions so that you can go on with your happy life? You know, that's the end of it. Well, my life will become less and less happy as these guys get more sophisticated. And I think it's a real challenge. You know, we have seen, for example, in the political arena, we have seen, you know, the media tell us that the Justice Department, the FBI is investigating and it takes a while, it takes a while. And it's lining up a prosecution, it takes a while. So far, you know, in certain cases, it's taken years and years when we all saw what happened on television. Okay, so that's one phenomenon of the times in which we live. The other phenomenon is the phenomenon in Congress where Congress, you know, here's these people that testify about tech issues, social media issues, and they don't understand. There's nobody in the room that understands. They can't even frame up a question to a tech CEO.  So I see two factors that stand in the way of immediate, you know, justice delayed is justice denied, right? I see two factors. One is they don't, the investigative and prosecutorial authorities don't understand for that matter, the lawmakers don't understand. And the other, of course, is that, you know, so it takes, the other is that it takes a long time under our justice system to make that investigation even longer if you don't understand and to actually hit home on it. And I wonder if, you know, and that's really not sustainable because this is getting worse and it's getting more threatening to business and to individuals. What can we do? And here's the second major question I'm gonna ask you. What about AI? AI is what, six or seven months old at least in the public sphere. AI should be able to, I'm sure that the organized crime guys are using it or wanna use it or have plans to use it. But what about the rest of us? Can't we use AI to defend ourselves? Well, you know, you have a couple of questions there. I can guarantee you right now, each of us right now in our inbox have email messages that have been generated by AI. Positively, it's out there. So, you know, it's been out for some time and kind of like on these newer forms of attacks like for example, like these Klopp ransomware groups, what they do is they're taking some of the exfiltrated data and they're reaching out to clients. So like you would be a customer and then they put the pressure on the customers making the company look bad. So they'll reach out to you and say, for example, hey, you know, we've locked up Netflix's infrastructure and they're refusing to pay. Those are bad, that's a bad company. You should put pressure on them as a customer of theirs. But let's go back to like what you can actually do about some of this.  And it's not just like, hey, I got two factor authentication. Cause by the way, if you do two factor authentication protects you like a hundred times better than if you didn't have it. Yes, there are ways around two factor but for the majority of folks out there who are going to be listening to this or hopefully listening to this two factor authentication getting that multi factor QR code based, right? With the rotator app, not just the text message that's the best type of two factor. But also, so what we see is this. A company has a CFO and they have let's say a bunch of engineers and those architects and engineers are in operation. CFO is doing money stuff, right? CFO gets an email, clicks on the email, install something on our computer and that computer then looks around and sees what she has access to. And they say, well, let's see, we have some QuickBooks files here and it reaches out to the operations and it sees that there's all these wonderful engineering diagrams of I don't know, let's say the rail or electric grid or sewer system. And it says, wow, this is some really interesting data.  What, do you see the problem with what occurred here? The CFO should not have had access to the operations engineering and architectural files. This is called least privilege. At least privilege is something that's just so overlooked in the everyday working operations. Folks only need access to what they need to do their job. And when there is an interaction. Need to know existence from the early part of the 20th century. So start there, anyone listening should start really there. What are the effective permission structures that you have inside your organizations to the files that you need to do your job? We just, I was just reading about a breach just earlier today and that's exactly what they had done. They had air gap different parts of their network. So when a bad guy digging into them, they just got into the sales database. So it was like a few like, you know, emails and stuff. They couldn't actually penetrate into the main architecture of their network. Cause if they had, then a lot of customers would have been down. So that's what you want to do is really think about how you architect access and who has access to what inside of your company. Cause if everyone has access to everything, it takes one bad move to destroy the entire company. It reminds me of the submarine with watertight compartments. So if one floods, the other doesn't. And I think that's the concept here. The other thing I want to mention to you and see your reaction just today, I got an email about the Ukrainians. You know, they are very smart on computers. And I'm not sure if that's intrinsic or they have help from elsewhere, but what they were apparently able to do, and this is actually amusing. They were able to reach the wife of a Russian pilot by email. And using various, what do you want to call it? Psychological gambits on the email. With her, they organized a party. A party of all the Russian wives of the pilot in Russia who were attacking Ukraine. And they used facial recognition from that party to identify all the pilots. And now they created their own intelligence through this, you know, this breach in the wives of the pilots. It's really smart and amusing, but it's also, it's heavyweight intelligence too. And that facial recognition is probably AI. And some of the stuff they were doing in order to achieve this project was likewise AI. And I'll tell you, one of our software vendors is from Kyiv. And we hold on to that vendor because we want to support Kyiv. But the reality is they're pretty sharp. And so my point to you is that, you know, one good programmer or one cell of programmers appropriately trained and motivated can do enormous good or enormous, enormous destruction. Do you agree with that? Yeah, exactly. You know, the argument I've heard about AI, which is interesting, is that, you know, everyone's seen the Terminator movies where AI comes to a certain point where it decides that humanity is no longer needed, right? And I don't know how many movies have been made about this same thing, iRobot and all these. So the idea is that you have an AI that you think is going to on its own decide that we're no longer necessary. When in truth, AI just does what we tell it to do. And the destruction that we're going to do to ourselves through AI will be far greater than anything that the AI could do to us. Us pointing AI at each other has weapons and using it as you just described as methods to break inside of networks to get inside of things. And in fact, there's new things now that are occurring where the AI is being pushed to the limit work and now hack software. So they were able to successfully generate license keys for like a Windows 95 activation by decoding its algorithm. So these things are starting to occur where password hacking, getting inside of networks, creating software that can break inside of other devices on the network on the fly. All these are things that are already being tested with AI. And we're only on version, what, the ChatGPT-4. I mean, wait till we get to ChatGPT-10. 5.1, 5.1. Oh, 5.1's out now? Wait, no, I'm sorry. That's mid-journey, it's 5.1. Oh, well, what happens two years from now? We're on a much more advanced version. And where do you set up the guardrails? And how do you stop someone from picking up their own AI, self-hosting it and taking the guardrails off and letting it do whatever it wants to do? Well, we do have a couple of minutes and I would like to spend them with you now that we're on AI. There's a fellow named Sam Altman who testified in Congress a few days ago and he is the progenitor of open AI. Open AI, yeah. Yeah. And quite remarkable, what he said to Congress was you need to regulate us because we are dangerous. And I said to myself, well, does Congress understand enough to regulate anybody about this? This is very sophisticated stuff. The people who invented it, the people who are developing it and taking it to the next level of very sophisticated smart guys, whether they finished Harvard or not. And the problem that I see is that how exactly do you regulate it? What do you do? Give licenses? Boy, that would be a First Amendment issue, wouldn't it? What do you do to control the dark side of AI? Any thoughts? Well, it's interesting about regulation. I was listening to another podcast and we're talking about COVID-19 and smallpox and horsepox. These are all really terrifying diseases where the gene sequencing is available, like on the internet. And what used to take millions of dollars and a highly skilled group of people can now be done with some graduate students for $20,000. So who's to stop any nation-state or private company from weaponizing a version of COVID-19, right? Or bringing back the plague or some awful genetic thing that could hurt us. And here's my point behind bringing this up, is that is not illegal. You could generate your own disease and release it. Well, if it's released, it's bad, but you could make your own, and that is not illegal. And that should be highly regulated. And that's something that has got decades of information and billions of dollars in science behind it, major corporate interests. That's not regulated. How are you going to regulate AI? That's my question. It's Congress's question, too. I hope they take him seriously. This guy, Sam Altman, of Open AI. But the other thing that came up that is very, very interesting this week in the paper is that some AI developer in one of the big tech companies that I forget which one said that he had come to believe that AI could be made tension. And we've seen articles along that line over the past few months about AI expressing feelings. I'm angry at you, Attila. You have provoked my anger. And where did that come from? This is like out of Space Odyssey 2001. You know I can't do that for you, Hal. And so you have actual scientists, people, engineer people in the AI realm saying they believe that AI is tensioned now, depending what the form is, or it will become capable of becoming tension. And that is as scary as it gets, isn't it? Could be. I mean, the Turing test is really, that's what that comes about. I mean, Alan Turing created this test in the 70s or 80s where, or maybe it was 60s. It was somewhere mid-century. And the Turing test looks at a computer program and says, can we fool someone into believing that this is real person for three minutes or more? Right? And when it comes to AI, I mean, yes, it is very convincing. But we're also a more savvy society now than we've ever been. So it is hard to tell whether it is tension or not. But I mean, you're going back to a philosophical question that's thousands of years old. We're talking about SART.  How do you know this is not a dream? I don't know. But I can tell you this, that AI is only going to be as smart as we train it to be. So if we put it in front of a lot of people with a lot of negative intent, then it will become a negatively behaving AI. If we put it in front of a positive group of people and ask it to do really creative things, it will continue to do that even better. So it is a learning machine. This is a machine learning device. This is not a, we're building consciousness here. And in the end, it could be the smartest machine in the room and capable of giving the best answers. But it may not have the true emotion that we all have as human beings. We'll see. I mean, we're just moving so fast. We will have further discussion on that issue even in the next few months. And we'll hear various sides of the question. And who knows where it goes. But I suggest to you that the good guys and the bad guys will both be able to get their hands on it. One of the big tech companies that is playing with AI gave away their code recently. I'm not sure why they did that. That just asks for trouble. And it's also against their own economic self-interest to do that. But I suppose they had a reason for it. Are you familiar with that? Yeah, there's a number of them out there. I know one of them that was accidentally leaked was Facebook's version. And there are self-hosted versions. It's out in the wild. And yeah, they are being trained. However, their operators deem them to be trained. But they can train them to attack network so they can train them to defend them. There's the training is where it comes in. Now, ChatGPT has become so popular because lots of people used it and it got really well-trained. And so each successive version has gotten better and better at generating content. A small thing, a small thing. I have to write a lot for think tech. I have to write text. And I thought I could write. I thought I could write. But lately, I take my writing and I make my writing as good as I can possibly make it. I use the right words, grammatically and all that. And then I feed it into ChatGPT. And I say rewrite this for me or summarize this for me. And it does instantly. And you know what, Attila? It's always better. I can never do as well. So here's the problem with that. If you put that on a blog, now the search engines have the ability to detect whether the content was created by ChatGPT or not, or any sort of AI. And so it's a probability scale. But if you're hitting like 95% probability that whatever you just created has been augmented by AI, your SEO goes way down. The folks that are going to be coming to think tech are going to be bots, not real people. So on our blog, for instance, it's all not written by ChatGPT. It's fine. I have a couple typos in there every once in a while. That's a real person. It's me writing them all. These weekly emails that you read from me. So there is some value in that. I think there's going to become a divide at some point where there may be some pride in having something that's completely human-generated, because having things not be human-generated, computer-generated might just be not the same. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is fascinating. And we know that until you and me, we're going to have further discussion about this. I'm going to leave you with one thought, though. OK, go. This just came out last week. The industry that's going to be most affected by AI is legal. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, let me offer a thought that I've had since this came up. So you have one AI lawyer writing one side of the case. You have another AI lawyer writing the other side of the case. And you have a third AI judge who writes the decision about the case. I suppose you could put them all together and say, give me justice. That's really scary. But I leave you with a thought, too, from now on until when I have that GBT rewrite my work, I am going to add, would you please include some strategical typos in your product so nobody will know? What do you think? It's possible. OK. You got to go. Thank you very much. As always, really appreciate you coming out until we'll talk again soon. Thanks, Jay. Stay safe out there. Stay safe. That's my line. Stay safe.


The appeal committee raised by APC on the Oshun state governorship primaries explained why it chewed out the petition of an aspirant Moshud D.O.T. that's against the choice of Governor Buyega Oyeh-Tola as a candidate for July 16th elections. According to the panel, D.O.T. did not punish the committee with any particular or any of the issues raised in his petition. The verdict of the committee was contained in a report signed by the ex-governor and other members of the committee. The judgment was based on massive and peaceful voter turnout at February 19th direct primaries in which Oyeh-Tola imagine victorious.


U.S. NS Carson City concluded its participation in exercise Baltops 2018 with a tactical exercise in the Baltic Sea. U.S. NS Carson City tremendous platform tremendous capabilities we are embarked not only for command and control but there's boats there's unmanned underwater vehicles there's dive equipment and so Carson City is optimal to load those assets in one port quickly move them to another port to offload and conduct follow-on operations either a shore or a float. Reporting from U.S. NS Carson City I'm Petty Officer Austin Ingram


Hello, welcome to SSUnitech. So, see this side. And this is continuation of SSIS tutorial. So today we gonna discuss about what is the row count transformation and how we can use it. In our last video we have discussed about the project parameter and package level parameters. And how we can use it inside the dataflow task. So today we gonna discuss about row count. If you haven't watched previous video of this video series. So I would strongly recommend to watch that video. So let's start with the row count. So what is row count? So row count transformation is used to count the rows as they pass through dataflow task and stores final count into a variable. Basically row count transformation is used for the auditing purpose. So here as we can see, first of all we have to use a dataflow task and inside dataflow task we are going to get the values from flat file source. And then we have to use a row count transformation where we can count the number of rows that is going to pass from flat file source. And we will store that count into a variable. And then by using script task we will see that count. So let's start with this case study. So go to on ssgd and here I am going to create one more package and rename this package with row count. So this is our row count. And as we have discussed, we need to use a dataflow task. So this is our dataflow task. Double click on this. It will directly move to dataflow panel. So inside dataflow panel, we are going to get the values from flat file. So our source is flat file. So we can drag and drop this flat file source and need to make the connection for this flat file source. Double click on this. Then it will ask for flat file connection manager. Then click on me. So it will open flat file connection manager editor window. Here we need to select the file. We can browse and we can select our file. This is our file. Click on open and go to one columns. As we can see we are getting the value. So click on OK. Then click on OK. So we have done our source part. Now we need to use transformation. So row count transformation is a label inside the common. Here we can see row count. So we can drag and drop row count and we can map. Now we need to declare a variable where we will store the value for this count. Go to one variable. Add a variable. Here we need to specify count and value should be integer. So we have done. Go ahead and now double click on this row count. Then we can see it will ask for variable. From which variable we want to store the values. So we want to store in this variable. Click on OK. So we have done our row count transformation. Now we need to check the value. Then go to on control flow panel. So inside this control flow panel we have to use script task. By using we can see the output. Now map and double click on this script task. Then it will ask for scripting language. I am going to use sysart and we have option for bb as well. Here we have two options. First is read only variable. Second is read and write only variables. So I am going to use read only variable. Click on this. Then we can select our user count. Then click on OK. Then we need to click on this edit script. Once we will click then it will take few seconds. Then it will open a script. So inside this script we have main block. So inside this main we need to specify our code. So we can use message box dot so then dts dot variables inside the bracket. We need to specify our variable dot value dot to string. So we have done our code and this code will be available on the description of this video. So you can copy if you need. Then close it. Click on OK. So now I am going to execute this package. So as we can see 32. So if we can see our flat file then it should have 32 rows. So here we can see. So we have total 32 rows. So these 32 rows are going to display by row count transformation. So I hope you have understand how we can use the row count transformation. How we can use in real time scenario. Once we will cover auditing of the package then we can understand the real time use of row count. So thank you so much for watching this video. If you like this video please subscribe our channel to get many more videos.


Hi everyone, Daniela from Kay Array here! We all love subwoofers! When we are at the concert, we all want that punch, that energy coming from the subs. But unfortunately, very often subwoofers are not deployed and are not configured in the proper way, as a consequence, deep cancellations take place in the audience areas and many people are not going to enjoy most of the low frequencies. At the same time, this stage is often too loud and full of unwanted low frequencies. Well, fortunately, there are several techniques that can help to manage the energy radiated by the subwoofers in order to get a better coverage of the audience's areas and at the same time to keep the stage quiet and clean. These techniques include the electronic arc, the en-fire, the pressure gradient cardioid configuration and many others. We have analyzed and simulated all these techniques in a webinar dedicated to subwoofer configuration. So, if you want to know more about these techniques and you want to learn how to simulate these configurations in the new 3D acoustical simulation software developed by KRA, I strongly recommend that you watch our entire webinar dedicated to subwoofer configurations. As always, you find it on our website www.k-ra.com in the K Academy section. Our webinars are free to watch and available in multiple languages, so I really hope you enjoy it and see you soon for another video.


Pressurized intraperitoneal aerosol chemotherapy is a procedure involving the administration of intraperitoneal chemotherapy in aerosolized form through laparoscopy. It enables superior distribution and depth of penetration of chemotherapy. Pre procedure, you are asked to undergo blood tests and body scans. The doctor may advise you to stop certain medications a few days before the procedure. On the day of the procedure, you are administered general anesthesia after which the surgeon inserts tubes via small incisions into the peritoneal cavity. First, small tissue samples of the tumor are retrieved. Then chemotherapy in the form of aerosol under pressure is sprayed inside the abdominal cavity with a special instrument capped open for 10 minutes and left for 13 minutes. At the end of the procedure, the pressure is released and the gas aspirated and the skin incisions are closed. The entire procedure takes about 90 minutes. Post procedure, you may be asked to stay in the hospital for 1-2 days depending on your recovery.


I work in a drug store. In the United States, it takes a lot of years of study. I think it's something like six years. It's a long process to become a pharmacist. Yeah, it's the same thing here. We studied for six years in college. Did you find a job easily? Yeah. I'm quite good with the sales and stuff. So what do you watch on VOA on the Voice of America? Do you watch our programs? I mean, do you listen to our programs? Yeah, of course. I found out about it on the NBC Facebook page. I jumped on the opportunity. I said to myself, I've got to be on the show. It's a really fun show.  I mean, different cultures, different accents. It's quite a good show. I really love it.