Hello, welcome back. In the last class we have just seen the concepts of depth of focus and depth of field and then we moved on to the concept of contrast and then we looked at the meaning of the very definition of the contrast and then we just started discussing about the lens defects. So, we will again start look back that the classification of the lens defect. If you look at it I just mentioned lens defects are basically of two types one is on-axis aberrations other one is off-axis aberrations and then we have a distortion which is also going to impair the quality of the images. So, I started off describing the first defect and very important defect spherical aberration yesterday. So, let us look back and look at this defect again. I mentioned that the spherical aberration is a very difficult aberration to eliminate for any lens because this aberration causes because of the spherical nature of the lens. So, let us look at the review the remarks again once again it is still worth it. The aberration is caused by the spherical shape of the lens surfaces it is more severe the greater the aperture of the lens and it occurs for the most positions of an axial object point, but for certain positions it becomes 0. Such aberration free object and image points are aplanotic points the for the spherical surface one pair of such points lies at a distance nr and r by n from the center of the curvature where r is the radius of curvature. As I mentioned yesterday this parameter aplanotic points is used to fabricate a high power objective lenses. So, this aberration can be largely but not completely eliminated by use of combinations of converging and diverging lenses of different refractive index. We will see that in detail when we complete all the definitions of the defects and then we will see how it can be overcome by the combinations of different lenses which have different optical characteristics. So, the one the image which is shown in the right hand side here what I have just try to bring to your attention is what happens to this spherical aberration when you view the specimen with the cover slip. Yesterday we have seen that the numerical aperture and and it is a light grasping power of an objective lens with oil immersion for a dry lens as well as immersion lens as well as a bare sample a sample with the cover slip. Normally if you look at this image what you have seen is normally this cover slip on the specimen is kept at a specific thickness about 0.17 mm and if you do not have this a designed 0.17 mm distance of a cover slip or if you have an arbitrary length or thickness of the cover slip then what happens to this spherical aberration that is what is being illustrated here and if you look at carefully thus the rays which is emanating from the specimen surfaces just get diffracted or rather I would say refracted from this cover slip in this manner and then if you trace this they refracted ray and then these two rays are differing with the distance of H1. You can see that if you trace this ray and it falls here and if you trace this ray R2 it falls here and these two rays are emanating from the surface of the length H1. On the other hand if you if you just allow the rays to pass through a cross slip which is of arbitrary length than the 0.17 mm then you can see that the refracted ray goes like this that is R1 and R2 and if you trace their path optical path they differ in the range of H2 which is much higher than the H1. Obviously the quality of the image will be much affected because of this optical path difference between the a standard cover slip thickness versus an arbitrary cover slip thickness. So now we will move on to the next defect called astigmatism and curvature of field. Look at this image carefully as I mentioned this is off axis aberration and if you look at the schematic you have this optical axis and then you have this lens here and there are two different planes are defined here that is the tangential plane t, t dash and then and sagittal plane ss dash and you see that if you let me read the remarks first and then we will come back to the description of the effect of this image quality effect of this defect on the image quality we will discuss after going through this remarks. Astigmatism is a defect in which the images of points of of the optic axis are drawn out into blood lines or discs. So like this this is the discs two discs we are talking about it increases with the distance from the optic axis and causes poor definition of images formed away from the axis. So as the distance increases from the optic axis the image quality also will go back. So let us now come back to this schematic again. So you have this what this the the line passing through this t, t prime form an image t it that is a tangential image and then the rays which are passing through ss prime plane form an image is. So you can see that in a tangential image the tangential lines are sharp and then radial lines are unsharped on the other hand if you look at the sagittal image that is this this ss prime plane image the radical sorry the radial lines are sharp and tangential lines are unsharped. So the circle of least confusion lies between these two images and the correction is done once these two circles are brought together but still the image will be lying on the curvature of the surface. You can appreciate that the the tangential image lie in a sagittal plane and the sagittal image lie in a tangential plane. So this is a very nice schematic to appreciate the defect of astigmatism and we will see the curvature of field the curvature of the image field arises from the change in focal length of the lens as the position of the point on the lens moves away from the optic axis and it depends on the lens geometry and refractive index. We will also see when we look at the correction of this objective lenses how this curvature of the image is also being taken care. The next defect is coma and distortion and before we look into the description let us look at the preliminary remarks coma causes the image of a non axial point to be reproduced as an elongated coma shape lying in a direction perpendicular to the optic axis. It is a form of asymmetrical spherical aberration affecting non axial object points. You can see that your non axial points are appearing as I1, I2, I3 and then this forms an elongated coma shape perpendicular to the optic axis like this that causes an image distortion and it is a kind of asymmetrical spherical aberration okay. The correction is achieved by figuring the lens surfaces so that the ratio of sine angle of incident divided by sine angle of emergent refracted ray is constant. We will discuss this again when we talk about a correction of lenses and the distortion which we have seen in the introductory slide of the lens defects is arising because of variation in the magnification with the distance of the object point from the optic axis that means the magnification is varying with the distance of the object from the optic axis that is from this optic axis as you move from the optic axis the magnification changes and it occurs in both objectives and eyepieces and more common in later and it is difficult to eliminate completely. So you have to live with some defects the next aberration which we are going to talk about is chromatic aberration it is very different from what we have discussed the previous ones arises when the light is non-monochromatic whatever the defects which we have discussed before you talk about coma or astigmatism or spherical aberration they they occurs when we use monochromatic radiation and this one that arises when the light is non-monochromatic you have to remember this is very important point. So let us look at the remarks when the white light is focused by a lens light of different wavelength is brought to focus at different distances from the center of the lens violet light being focused closer to the lens than the red light. So we are talking about the visible spectrum that means your violet light will have a different wavelength compared to the red light so they are all being focused at different different distances and it occurs because the refractive index of a transparent isotropic material is greater for light of shorter wavelength than for the light of longer wavelength this you already know and so the effect of this aberration is like if you have an image the periphery of your image is filled with a different color that means every color will focus at a different different focal point so you will see that the periphery of your image is filled with a color fringes it will appear like a color fringes we will see how to correct this So we will now summarize this lens defects and we will see how they are characterized or corrected based upon the different degree of corrections. So the objective the most important critical component in the optical microscope is made up of number of glass lenses and sometimes fluoride lenses also lenses are subjected to spherical and chromatic aberrations minimization and correction of these undesirable physical effects greatly aided by modern computational techniques is possible and objectives are classified according to the degree of correction that is a chromates fluorides they are also called semi apochromates apochromates like that lenses are usually coated in order to increase the light transmission. Now let us see some of the typical characteristic of objective lenses is stable here look at this table carefully as I mentioned depending upon the degree of corrections they are being classified and you see that yam is a magnification and this is a type of objectives and you have the medium and this is the working distance WD is a working distance in millimeter this is numerical aperture D minimum is the minimum resorbable distance this is depth of focus in meters and B stands for brightness. So you see that depending as the magnification increases and then how this values are changing okay and then you can also see that how the refractive index also influence the other parameters especially depth of focus and minimum resorbable distance and so on. So it gives you a broad idea about what kind of corrections we can make or we can take up and then probably I will just show you some of the correction which is made on a blackboard. So let us try to give one example how this correction is being made let us write like this different kinds of glass different relative dispersion dispersion mu. So let us in fact it is reciprocal reciprocal relative dispersion mu is defined as Nd-1 divided by Nf-Nc where Nd is refractive index of sodium d line and Nf is the refractive index of hydrogen f line Nc is the refractive index of hydrogen you can also note down this values 589.3 nanometers 486.1 nanometer 656.3 nanometers. So I am just giving you this because you should know how this correction is made and what is the basis these are all spectral values and then different kind of glass will have a different reciprocal relative dispersion mu which is defined by this formula and for example you can take you can take example a crown glass will have around 60 mu value of 60 and a flint glass will have the value of 38. So consequently these two lenses can be combined we will write these two lenses combined weaker diverging lens of flint glass so that chromatic abrasion cancels for certain lambda. So this is one case study how this correction is done in the case of chromatic abrasion there is a parameter called reciprocal relative dispersion mu and this value for characteristic of different lenses so for the crown glass it is 60 for a flint glass it is 38. So these two can be combined because with a weaker diverging lens of a flint glass and that will correct the abrasion chromatic abrasion for certain lambda so we can also draw some schematic how that corrected doublet will look like so you have this lens and then so this is a crown glass and this is a flint glass this is an a chromatic doublet. So I just gave an example how this corrections are being made it gives you an idea so similarly all those listed in that table follows certain procedures to take care of the kind of correction which is required or the degree of corrections which is required and based on which these subjective lenses are classified. So now we will move on to the next item that is eyepieces and oculars I just want to mention the important functions of these eyepieces we have talked a lot about objective lenses because they are very critical and important as I mentioned in the last slide. So let us have some idea about what these eyepieces are doing in a microscope they are also called an oculars and eyepieces have three main functions and they are to examine and magnify the primary image and they are also to correct the residual chromatic aberration and especially for photo micrography and they are to flatten the field of view with just which we have seen that is a problem and correct astigmatism. So these are the three primary functions of an eyepieces a single lens eyepiece would produce a cone of rays with an angle greater than that which the eye can accept so that the eye would be unable to view the entire field simultaneously consequently all eyepieces consist of two lenses the field lens and the eye lens there are several types of eyepiece depending upon the degree of correction required and the uses to which they are to be potent. So similar to objective lenses you have in eyepieces also have different types based upon the degree of corrections and as you know that depending upon the kind of sophistication one one require to build a microscope the combination of an objective eyepiece or ocular being selected if you recall that table which we have shown that you know the kind of useful magnification which produces the combination of these two apertures now you will get an idea how a quality of a microscope is decided and how these two lenses where objectives and eyepieces are being selected okay. So now we will move on to some other important parts of microscope I would like to talk about this few filters for adjusting the intensity and the wavelength of illumination look at this slide and for getting a full brightness illumination is also an very important aspect of it and if you most of you you will see that in some of the microscopes you will have lot of color filters just after the illumination source I am going to show you and you should know what are these filters doing so this is about that so look at this plot this is percentage transmission versus wavelength plot you have a short pause a band pause a long pause the name itself tells that the filters for isolating the wavelength of illumination short pause long pause filter sometimes called edge filters block or transmit wavelengths at a specific cutoff wavelength you can see that it is 50% cutoff it is peak transmission and the band pause filters exhibit broad band or a short band transmission centered on the particular band of wavelength here you can see that and this filter performance is defined by the central wavelength and by the full width at half maximum this is full width at half maximum so another term for full width half maximum is half band width so let us look at some more remarks on this filters neutral density filters regulate light intensity whereas colored glass filters and interference filters are used to isolate specific colors or bands of wavelengths there are two classes of filters that regulate the transmission wavelength edge filters and band pause filters edge filters are classified as being either long pause that transmit long wavelengths and block short ones or short pause which transmit a shorter wavelengths so I think this is a kind of introduction to these kind what are the filters and what are their primary functions are we will now move on to another important filter an interference filter look at this slide and what you are seeing is an action of an interference filter we will be using this filter in one of the variants of the optical microscope called differential interference contrast microscope so let us look at this function of this interference filter you have the incident wave coming here and some of them are raise are reflected are modified by interference and some of them are transmitted and we have to know how it is done correctly so you see that the two metallic layers are coated on the dielectric material in a such a way that they are optical path length is lambda by 2 so when the wave incident wave which comes and enters this filter perpendicular to the phase and only those wavelengths will be allowed to pass through and then rest of them will be reflected back since all the transmitted waves are in the phase they will be allowed to constructively interfere and then and becomes a transmitted wave so this is the function of these interference filter we will see the usage of this filter much more detail when we actually take up the variant of this microscope in the coming lectures let us see few more remarks on this filters interference filters often have a steeper cut in and cut off transmission boundaries than the colored glass filters and therefore are frequently encountered in a fluorescence microscope where sharply defined bandwidths are required interference filters are optically planar sheets of glass coated with dielectric substances in multiple layers each it could be lambda by 2 or lambda by 4 thick which act as selectively reinforcing and blocking the transmission of specific wavelengths through constructive and destructive interference this is what just I mentioned so this is about the interference filter we will now look at the another important parameter called optical path length we will be using this concept in one of the again another variant of the optical microscopy so let us see what is this optical path length the number of vibrations experienced by a wave traveling between two points in optics the optical path length OPL through an object or space is the product of refractive index N and the thickness T of the object or intervening medium so OPL is equal to N times T that is optical path length is a product of thickness and the refractive index of the medium if the propagation medium is homogeneous the number of vibrations of a wave of a wavelength lambda contained in the optical path is determined as number of vibration is equal to N times T divided by lambda the overall optical path length expressed as the number of vibrations and including the portions in air and in glass is thus described as number of vibrations equal to N1 T1 divided by lambda 1 plus N2 T2 divided by lambda 2 where the subscripts 1 and 2 referred to the parameters of the surrounding medium and the lens as we will encounter later on the optical path length difference between the two rays passing through a medium versus through an object plus medium is given by delta equal to N2 minus N1 times T so as I mentioned we will be using this parameter in one of the variant of the optical microscope which I will be discussing it that is why I have introduced this concept we will now see the general description of light microscope so what I have done is if you look at all the three classes I have taken some of the cons fundamental concepts which you required to understand before we get into the use this light optical microscope I hope it will be it was it will be useful to in order to understand the the functions of different variants of optical microscopes so now what I am going to do is I am going to just describe what a general light microscope does and I will just disc I will also take you to the lab and then show some of the videos of actual light microscopes which we have in our laboratory so let us look at the description of a light microscope why do we use this light microscope so examination in the as polished condition which is generally advisable will reveal the structure features such as shrinkage or gas porosity cracks inclusion of foreign matter and for that we need to do something called etching I will be dealing with it in much more detail when I when I talk about a sample preparation for all this microscopy techniques however you just look at the initial remarks etching with an appropriate chemical reagent is used to reveal the arrangement and size of grains phase morphology compositional gradients sometimes called coring orientation related edge pits and the effects of plastic deformation these are all only a some of the features which I have just mentioned but in reality we will see how how much we can use this or how effectively we can use this microscopic techniques for various applications in material science and and so on. So we have something called a bright field illumination light is reflected back towards the objective from the reflective surfaces causing them to appear bright and then you also have a dark field illumination reverses this effect and causing the grain boundaries to appear appear bright. So I will just take up this to I mean the actual microscopic part when we discuss a specific application and this is just to give you an idea of what kind of method even in a light microscope a basic imaging techniques one is bright field illumination another is a dark field illumination and the image quality is depending upon the degree of chemical attack is sensitive to the crystal orientation and an etched polycrystalline aggregate will often display its grain structure clearly. So we will also talk about this etching behavior we will see what is etching and then how it affects the image quality and so on in a in a coming class and this is just to give you an introduction about this microscope you have an objective you have the specimen here it is a schematic of an etched surface and you see that light is being reflected at a different orientation because due to their different orientation of the grain we will see actually the experiments. Now you can look at this references very important references you can follow for this course one is fundamentals of light microscopy and electronic imaging by Douglas B Murphy 2001 Wiley List International USA and second important reference optical microscopy of materials by Heinz 1984 international textbook company UK. You can also refer this inflexible video of material characterization surfaces interfaces thin films by Richard Brunel Choll's events and Shawn Wilson Butterworth's Raymond Pulf Heinzmann Boston USA you can also read this transmission electron microscopy by DB Williams and Barry Carter Springer USA for some of the basic concepts of optics then the physical metallurgy and advanced materials by R. E. Smallman and A. H. W. Nagan Elsevier publication you can also go through the website www.microscopy.com so now what I am going to do is I am just going to introduce you to the some of the microscopes what is coming on the screen is a typical metallurgical microscope. So one is there are two basic types of microscopes one is vertical type another is inverted type so what you are now seeing is an inverted optical microscope. I will just show some of the main parts which we have talked about like this is specimen stage this is a vertical since a vertical microscope it is a the specimen stage will be on the top and these are all oculars and eyepiece just we have we have now read about quite a bit on this how the eyepiece will appear and this is a CCD camera which is being attached to this microscope and these are all some of the polarizing lenses and apertures I will talk about this little later is one of the variants as I mentioned that time we will use this I mean apertures and you see that now the elimination is coming from the bottom and then you keep your sample on this light and what now you are seeing is an another vertical simple type microscope is a standard microscope in any of the metallurgical laboratory you see that ocular and you see objectives usually you will have 3 to 5 objectives is there and this is again another microscope which is attached with the image analysis system or it is having come interfaced with the computer you can clearly see that the objective lenses now as I mentioned you can also you are also observing that you know some of the letters are written on the objective which is which they talk about the magnification some refractive index and whether it is a oil or a dry all those informations are given on this objectives usually it is with it comes with 5x 10x 20x and 40x so and then sometimes 50x and you can it goes up to 100x also depending upon the microscopic system so this is a tool which is called a leveling press to make the solid specimen in a same level using this plasticizer so I am just describing this assuming that we will be using only the solid metal piece to examine under the microscope not necessarily the case we will see the other materials how it is being viewed in the other type of microscope optical microscope and this is how the solid metal piece is leveled using this a leveling press and then it will it will be placed on this microscope as you can see that I will get into the details of all this preparations in a separate class just I am just introducing how the microscope will look like and how people use it and for those who have not come across this kind of an experience so you can see that now the specimen is being loaded in this stage specimen stage and then you choose the appropriate I mean objective lens you can start with a lowest magnification to highest magnification you can slowly move from lowest temperature to the highest temperature and the magnification is multiplication of these 2 for example you have about 5x here and then here it is 10 so it is 50 if you choose 50 here it is 500 something like that so here again for image grabbing you have the CCD camera attached to this and now what you are now seeing this is another type of microscope is called transmission optical microscope which is very different from what you have just seen before that is one is vertical another is you know inverted microscope you have here you have 2 type of illumination attached to it one is mercury lamp and another is halogen lamp on the top so I will just describe this microscopic parts so that you will get familiar with what are the important things you need to understand what is that being shown here is it is a polarizer and when you do not use that polarizing mode then it will be a slot for a bright field mode and then you also have a kind of a condenser aperture lenses in this which is having a different different I will talk about it in much more elaborately in the next class thank you.


Escorted by American and Dutch bombers, Princess Juliana of the Netherlands flies to inspect Dutch Guiana. The princess is the first member of the royal family to visit the Dutch colony in the New World. Over Netherlands territory in the Caribbean, natives salute the princess with a V for victory. Guiled to Paramaribo, capital of Dutch Guiana, the princess receives an enthusiastic reception. She reviews contingents of Dutch and American troops on guard in this area. Units of women's auxiliaries parade for the princess. Market women in native dress furnish a colorful aspect of the popular demonstration. Everywhere Juliana goes, flowers are strewn in her path. It's a quaint custom of the country that the princess, who walks upon a native bandana, brings luck to herself and to the owner. At Fort Amsterdam, chieftains of the Bush tribes come to pay their respects. Throughout the entire colony, Princess Juliana is inspired by the loyalty shown to the House of Orange, full of the Pacific Ocean, is filmed by a marine cameraman on air patrol. The tiny island of Nile of Foo, almost blotted from view as rivers of red hot lava send huge clouds of smoke billowing skyward. Unable to find anchorage in the deep waters offshore, call the place Tin Can Island, because mail is floated ashore in Tin Can's. A Polynesian village on the island has been abandoned. Features fury providing a spectacle of turbulent grandeur, eastern state of Washington. Brought in from summer grazing lands, they are moved to new pastures for the winter. The trail takes them across Grand Coulee Dam. A custom to wartime restrictions against tourists agree that the grass is always greener on the other side of the dam, so the herd goes over to find new quarters. A picture of pastoral beauty filmed against one of the engineering wonders of the world. Introducing Canada's Mr. and Mrs. Lairier. In English, lairier means happy, and papa and mama have 17 growing reasons for happiness. From Jeanette, 22, to Gilles, just two years old, they all work on papa's 100-acre farm. They harvest their own wheat and grow their own vegetables. Fresh milk from their own cows are sold to the local market for shipment to the armed forces. They spin and weave their own colorful Catalonia rugs. On wash day, true to French-Canadian tradition, the laundry is hung in the front yard, so neighbors will know the household is a cleanly one. Yes, everybody works on the lairier farm. Right now, little brother probably thinks he's doing more than his share. United States Navy Task Force moves against the last major Japanese base in the Solomon Islands, Bougainville, an enemy air and naval station from which men and weapons once were attacking Allied positions in the South Pacific. The fleet puts into Empress Augusta Bay. Admiral Wilkinson and Marine General van der Grifft, hero of Guadalcanal, direct the landing operations. Camouflaged Marines and Navy construction battalions prepare to go over the side, the incoming forces. But Coast Guard and Navy barge crews keep pouring reinforcements ashore. Enemy positions in the hills beyond the beach, perhaps from the sky. Air is hurled against the invasion boats, but still they come in. The world-dressed veterans of Guadalcanal and Tulagi, they establish a beachhead in the face of a Japanese force numbering more than 40,000 troops. Tons and pillboxes are silent and shattered. Enemy dead lie in slit trenches that have become their graves. United Nations forces 260 miles from Rabaul. Gateway to Japan's last strategic outpost in the South Pacific.


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Well, the day has, uh, the day has finally come. I now have 50,000 subscribers. That is, man, that's a lot.  But, you know, I honestly just want to take a minute to thank all you guys because I never would have expected this to happen. Uh, at least not more than a couple of months ago, because I think in the past few months it really has settled in that, yeah, I have a big following and this is going to continue to grow for the foreseeable future. So I just really want to thank all you guys because without you I'd have to go back to having a real job.  So, yeah, just thanks a lot for listening to what I have to say. And so, to celebrate, I am doing a Q&A. So, uh, I think you should understand how these work by now. I just asked people to send in questions and they did, and now I'm going to answer them. So, let's get started. And just so you know, some of these questions were some that sort of blended into one another, so I just combined them, or they were similar to one another, so I combined them. And, obviously, I didn't have time to get to every single one of them, so I just chose the ones that I thought were best. Anyways, a whole lot of people wanted to know, what are your political beliefs? Uh, I'm an anarchist, which I know that might sound kind of weird, but that is a, well, that's just what I think. Uh, a.k.a. libertarian socialism, that's also a thing. Basically, I just want to get rid of the states, the nation-state, get rid of all that shit, but also get rid of capitalism and explaining it beyond that would take a very long time. I'd encourage you to all look it up on your own, because even if you disagree, you should at least know what it is, I think. What's a trope you really like, but most people don't? What's a trope you like, despite it being problematic? Uh, a trope that I really like that a lot of people seem to not be a big fan of, is just low magic fantasy. Like, other than A Song of Ice and Fire, I can't think of very many fantasy series out there that have had magic just not take up a big role in the story. And I don't know, I just find it really fascinating every time I've read about it, so I really like that. And I don't know if other people don't like it or other people don't hate it, but it's not a very popular thing, so I just like that. And as for a trope I like, despite it being kind of problematic, is races that have different abilities or traits. Like, you see this a lot in fantasy, but you occasionally will get it in sci-fi as well, just races that have specific abilities. You know, some of them are smarter than others, they have their personalities kind of preset just based on their genetics. That has some unfortunate implications for the real world, but it's still really cool, especially in RPGs and stuff, because then you have actual reason to choose different races when you play. What was the most painful single line you've ever read? So that one was in Elixir, and you can actually see in my review of it, I bring up this line. And it is when Clalys' friend is talking to her, and she's saying like, Hey, this other dude whose name escapes me, is in love with you, and Clalys is like, Hey, he's like my brother, that'd be weird. And so her friend says, Hey, I read Flowers in the Attic, it was kind of hot. And that just... God, that should not exist. It should not. What is the best YA novel slash series that you have read? The Demonada, that's actually just my favorite series in general. It's The Demonada by Darren Shan, who also wrote the Cirque de Freak books, if you didn't know that. And they are... they're kind of weird, and it's difficult to describe exactly why I love them so much. But the short version is just that they are... they start off as kind of a standard, kid discovers hidden magical world story, and then it just gets really, really dark and fucked up from there. What is the first story that you wrote? Uh, when I was around 8 or 9, I wrote something which, looking back, is definitely fan fiction. It was just a self-insert Pokemon thing about me being a Pokemon trainer. And it's lost to time by now, but, you know, I had it then, and it's no longer around. So that... but yeah, that's the first thing I ever wrote. The first, like, serious actual story I wrote all the way through and finished. Uh, it was actually on my fiction press account, and that one is also a really shitty self-insert, but that one's about a demon who just kills dudes.  What are your thoughts on using audiobooks rather than reading the book? You know, I've never really used audiobooks before, and I keep meaning to try it out. Just one of these days, probably sometime in the near future, I'm gonna try it just to see if I like it or not. Uh, but I just, at the moment, I can't, uh, I can't say anything about it because I've never done it. Why is your fashion sense so awful?  What's one thing you think would improve most fantasy stories? Man, there are a lot of things out there that I think could be used to improve fantasy stories, but the one biggest thing that would make stories at least a little bit more original would be to just have less world saving in there. Because think about it, pretty much all of them, whether I like them or not, they always, always, always involve saving the world. And this is, this goes across genres as well, but like, if they just had smaller scale stories which didn't affect everything out there and were just focused on like, okay, maybe one city or one small group of people, that would be a lot more interesting. At the very least it would be more original and it would be less obvious where things are going to turn out. What genres of music do you like? Do you have a favorite band or composer? I mean, I listen to a lot of different types of music, like a lot of different disparate types of music too. Like I will list basically everything except country music I'll listen to at some point. And I don't really have a favorite band or composer. I just, I don't know, in the past year I've been listening to a lot of metal music so I guess we'll throw that in there. What do the symbols on your forearm tattoo represent? You know, I realized a little while ago that even though I've shown this on camera before, I've never actually said what it says. And I'll put up a picture here. It says, the most important step a person can take is always the next one and that's a quote from The Way of Kings, which, you know, Stormlight Archive, I've already read that, talked about how much I love those books. And yeah, that quote just really resonated with me. It really, well, it's motivational, it's inspiring, so I figured, yeah, let's pay some money, get it permanently etched into my skin. Since you have dipped your toes here and there, will you make more overtly political content in the future? You know, yes, I probably will, but I'll probably be doing it infrequently. The other thing is the past couple of months I've been doing it much more than I initially wanted to. And it's not that I dislike doing it or anything, it's just that if you do it too much, then that becomes like your entire brand. And that's just what you're known for and that's what people expect from you. And honestly, you get attacked a lot more online for it, which it's just kind of exhausting. So while I don't mind doing it, I have been doing it like once a month since around November. And yeah, I'll probably just be cutting back a little bit. Do you watch other Booktubers review books? Sometimes, but not all that often, just because Booktube is like very focused on YA stuff. And while I don't hate YA, I have been a little harsh on it in the past, but I don't read it all that often anymore, especially not new releases. And so I just don't watch it all that much. But if I happen upon seeing like, hey, a review of this book and I'm kind of interested in it, or it's from a genre that I'm interested in or something I want to get into, then I'll check that out. And obviously, if it's the really long, ranty ones, kind of like what I do, like that is half an hour or an hour long, I like watching those even if I'm not at all interested in the book, just because it's funny to watch people lose their minds about stuff. What's your job now? What job do you want? What job did you want as a little kid? My job now is this. I talk to a camera and say things to people, and for whatever reason they listen to me, so... Alright. And what job do I want and what job do I want as a little kid? Those are the same answer. I just want to be a writer, you know? I know it's probably not uncommon or all that surprising given my interests and what I talk about and stuff, but that's just what I want to do. That's the only thing I've ever had a lot of passion for, especially when I was younger. And I know it's not all that likely, so I do have, like, you know, other career plans in minds that I can work on, either before I do that or if I never wind up making that. Excuse me. But, yeah, that is my dream job. Are you writing a book or planning to? If so, can you tell us anything about it? So, yes, I do write fairly frequently, but I don't really talk about it in public because one, that feels like it's just attention seeking on one hand, and two, it just kinda... I've noticed that sometimes when people talk about, hey, I'm working on this and here's all the details about it, then that makes them feel as accomplished as if they actually did it and then they can't find the motivation to keep doing it, so I try to avoid talking about my works in progress. And at the same time, while, yes, I have written, like, full-length novels before and finished them, it's been a while since I finished one because I have a bad habit of working on multiple things at once and then I only get so far into it and it's just, you know, it's not great. But, yes, at the moment, my last full novel I wrote was supposed to be part of this wider universe where it'd be like a bunch of different stuff which you can read on their own, but they all take place in the same world because I spent a really long time crafting the setting and I was like, well, I want to use it so there's that. But I haven't worked on that in a little while and so at the moment I'm kinda jumping between three different projects. There's an alternate history timeline that I'm working on which I'll probably post online eventually whenever I get around to finishing it and then there is something called Beggar Night that I've been working on and that's, like I was saying, low-magic fantasy. It's just about this kid that scams his way into training to become a knight and then runs into trouble along the way and then the third one, I actually don't have a title for it because I'm not great at coming up with titles, but it's basically about witches, like what if witches were real and lived in our modern world but everyone knew about it. They weren't a secret or anything so they had laws around what witches have to do and laws to protect people and all that but then it becomes a civil rights issue and all that sort of thing. So yeah, it's a little bit of a vague concept because it's still pretty early on but I do have fun working on that one and I have a couple of other projects that I either have set aside for now or I just don't work on all that often because I don't know, my brain just doesn't like to focus on things for a long period of time and that's probably a bad habit that I'm trying to get out of but you know, it is what it is. Which is your favorite accidentally funny book? That is Elixir, the Elixir trilogy which I, you know, I did a whole video on that before so I'm not going to go into too much detail here and while that is definitely my most hated book series, it's still really funny at times. What part of the video making process do you enjoy the most? I enjoy scripting the most because, you know, I just like having all these ideas, getting them out and then sort of once they're on the page I can iron them out a little bit, smooth out the wrinkles and sometimes I'll even surprise myself by the conclusions I come to or I'll change my own mind just by thinking about things more and it's a lot of fun. My least favorite part of video making is the editing. I just, I really don't like editing at all. It's, I don't know, just sitting there for hours at a time, cutting up clips and watching the same bits over and over again. Sometimes while I'm editing I can get like a funny joke or something in there which is, you know, that's fun, I enjoy doing that but for the most part it's just a slog.  So yeah, those are the three big things. Do you play D&D? If so, do you like to DM or play? What's your favorite race and class to play? Yes, I do play D&D and that's the main RPG that I've played. I've played a couple others, like I've played Shadowrun, I've played Pathfinder but mostly I've played D&D with my friends. And I mostly like to play. I've been trying to get more into DMing lately but just, you know how it is, our group already has one and he's happy doing it and sometimes it just takes a lot of energy to DM stuff and a lot of time to DM stuff which I just don't have so it, you know, it is what it is. And what's your favorite race and class to play? I don't really have a favorite class. My favorite race is definitely human because you can use them for pretty much anything you want especially variant humans because then you get an extra feat, in fact character creation. But favorite class, I don't really have one especially because there's a couple I still haven't played a campaign as but if I really had to choose one right now, like gun to my head I would say cleric and that's mostly because just like human you can choose to do pretty much anything you want with cleric and so I just enjoy that. What are the books you dislike that everyone loves and the books you love that everyone hates? The books that I hate, just hate hate hate that everyone else seems to like is The Lovely Bones and I've talked about that enough I talked about it in my most hated books video way long ago and just watch that because I'm not getting into it but everyone seems to like The Lovely Bones and say it's like deep and has all this meaning it's not and it doesn't and I hate it. A book that I love that everyone seems to dislike is An Emperor in the Ashes like that whole trilogy or not trilogy that whole series so far like it seems that the people who are really focused on YA think it's fine most of the time and the people that aren't don't like it which honestly I just I try to wrap my mind around that I don't quite get it I just really like those books What made you criticize people's world building? So that is a little bit more of a difficult question to answer than you might think so basically when I first started my channel and for almost two years I got like no attention for it and I was just doing it for fun I was pretty much only doing reviews of stuff I very rarely branched out and in my head I was constantly thinking about like okay well what if I tried doing like some video essay type stuff like talking about the themes of this and exploring different ideas and such which is a lot more of what I do now and I was just thinking about that sort of thing and one day I was like reading An Emperor in the Ashes or rather I was reading A Torch Against the Night which is the second book and it was just kind of bothering me how what's her name? Helena? Helene? Oh shit I forgot well you know I'll put her name up here but she just mentioned how there were six million marshals in the empire and that just seemed really small considering that it's supposed to be a big continent spanning empire and so I just thought about it I ran some numbers I looked in the books for details and yeah it seemed weird so then I just wound up writing down the whole script about the world building for that and put it out and at first it didn't get much attention but I had a lot of fun doing it so I made a couple others and then those got big and here I am so basically why do I criticize people's world building it's just something I thought about one day and started doing what are the best books to read to get into fantasy so I personally would recommend some fantasy that's easier to get into to start off with like I wouldn't recommend you start off with something like the Stormlight Archive because that's just really dense and has a lot of information has a very steep learning curve for the world and such and I also wouldn't recommend the stuff that's a little bit more meta and a little bit more subversive of the whole fantasy genre so I wouldn't really recommend Mistborn I wouldn't really recommend Wheel of Time for that I would recommend just like some traditional fantasy that's easier to get into and I don't particularly like the Lord of the Rings books so I would say Green Rider is a pretty good one for normal if you're just trying to get into beginner fantasy stuff and by the way I have read that book before and I am re-reading it now I'm gonna review it soon so don't worry Harry Potter is also a good one although that's like a specific subset of fantasy and I'm pretty sure most of you have read it anyways but nonetheless it's a good entry point I think and Aragon because Aragon is doesn't do a whole lot original doesn't do a whole lot new but it does it very well I feel and so and you know it is written for younger audiences so it's much easier to read there's not really anything that's like inappropriate or anything in there so I think those three are good starters to get into fantasy and then you can get into more advanced stuff and more subversive stuff if you were a god what would you be the god of? I would be the god of atheism what is a book you used to love and now hate slash the other way around you know I'm gonna have to put the Obama-Biden mysteries on there because those two books man they were really really fun reading them and this was kind of an issue when I read the second one but basically when they first came out Joe Biden was kind of just a retired politician like he was just a guy who used to be the vice president and kind of said and did some weird shit but now he's like actually excuse me he's actually running for president and there's a very real chance that he might be president a year from now and so I can't really just look at him as oh this funny uncle dude anymore like I have to look at him critically and just think well I like that but I don't like that I'm not a big fan of that so just looking back I can't really get into them anymore even though they are pretty funny what is your favorite kind of genre fiction most hated kind of genre fiction and what kinds of genre fiction will you never touch so I'll answer that last one first never touch I don't think there's any genre that I would never ever touch because I've read a lot in my life and I've read stuff from different genres and obviously there's some that I prefer over others but you know I've read mysteries before I've read the occasional thriller I've read romance and stuff like there's nothing out there that I would never touch but as for what my favorite kind is I had to think really hard about this I guess at the moment it would be heroic slash epic fantasy and I know that those are different things but there's enough overlap between them that for this instance I'm going to consider them the same so heroic slash epic fantasy for the time being however I do go through periods where I will read a whole bunch of one type and then move on to a different type and read a whole bunch of that like basically ever since this channel started getting big I've been reading a whole lot of fantasy stuff and that might give off the impression that that's mostly what I've been reading before like no before that I've read a whole bunch of young adult stuff and before that I've read a whole bunch of science fiction and space opera stuff so you know it's just it is what it is I will probably be moving away from fantasy in the near future but who knows and as for my most hated kind of genre fiction hate is a strong word but romance I'm just I'm not a big fan of it because I think it works great as a subplot sometimes and I think it can work decently well in realistic fiction like if it's just a smaller part of a bigger story about these people's lives it can work fine but when it's like the kind of paperback dime store books that you find like that your aunt likes to read a lot and it has the dude with the ripped shirt on the cover carrying a woman in his arms like that kind of just dumb and I get that it's supposed to just be wish fulfillment and stuff but it's not wish fulfillment for me and so it just comes across as being stupid most of the time what trends do you think will become more popular in fantasy in the new decade so for the past in maybe 20 years we've really seen fantasy go in a very dark direction and that's not to say that nothing that's more traditional and less dark hasn't come out because plenty of it has it's just that all the big stuff is focused on being very very dark most of the big stuff I should say is focused on being very very dark so I think that once people start to get tired of that which they might be doing now I think we're going to start swinging back in the lighthearted direction because people are going to be just getting kind of tired of all the constant violence and rape and oh everyone's a bad guy and it's hard to like anybody and I don't know if we're going to be getting back to just like traditional fantasy stories which I kind of hope we don't but I think we will be getting into more lighthearted fantasy stories do you like nonfiction books if so what types history mostly like I don't read a whole lot of that but whenever I do it's pretty much just history stuff are there any other art forms you are interested in other than books oh yeah totally like I am a huge gamer I play video games a lot and I just don't talk about it that much online because quite frankly the gaming community is cancer and I just can't stand them but yeah as an art form they're very interesting because you know you're actually interacting with things and it's much more immersive than most other types so and while I do think it's in a bit of a rut nowadays because well at the end of the day it's about making money I do still think that there's good stuff out there being made there's still fun playing various things and just yeah I like it as an art form and then film I was a huge film buff a couple of years ago not so much anymore now but like I used to be super into examining all the minutia of different things and I don't do that as much now I still am a movie fan I still go out and see them plenty and this applies to television as well just because you know film TV whatever the point is I like both of those and I have thought about making short films and stuff before but I've always gotten lazy and just stopped because at the end of the day I just don't have the same passion for that as I do for reading and writing and then anime as well I'm not as big a fan of that as I used to be you might be noticing a pattern here but yeah I've been part of different fan bases over my life and books are pretty much the only one that I've stuck with forever but yeah I'm getting a little bit more back into that because I'm watching it with my friends and stuff but yeah those are the big three ones and obviously I've occasionally gotten into other stuff but those are all the things other than books that I have been interested in and been a part of the fan base for at least a while have you ever read light novels if you haven't are you planning to start reading one anytime soon I have read a couple of light novels before I'm not a big fan of them honestly like I just they'll have some really neat ideas in there but they're written in a very strange manner which I just don't like and I mean I like the artwork at least there's that and a lot of them are just wish fulfillment for teenage boys which gets old quick once you're no longer a teenage boy and honestly I was starting to get tired of it even when I was a teenage boy so like just yeah at the end of the day and I know there are light novels that aren't like that I get it but a lot of them are and I just don't have the patience to sift through that much and try and look for something that's better especially because even if it is better it'll still have all the other issues that I dislike about the art form so just yeah not a big fan of them what are your thoughts on the sequel trilogy and or Star Wars legends I think that the sequel trilogy is really really good up until Rise of Skywalker and even then Rise of Skywalker isn't the worst thing ever like the story wise it's kind of a mess and it tries to retcon stuff from the previous movie but you know at the end of the day film is about more than just the storyline it's also about the acting it's about the cinematography it's about the action scenes and the fight choreography and all that's also important to the enjoyment of it and I think most of that is pretty good it's just the storyline that is terrible so yeah so it's good until Rise of Skywalker and even then Rise of Skywalker isn't the worst as for the legends I haven't read all of them because there's just so much out there but I like a lot of it but you know it gets pretty dumb sometimes and it feels more like fan fiction that was written by well not professionals then stuff that was written by professionals but you know I've seen worse what is the best movie adaptation of a book in your opinion so I had to think about this one for a while actually because I was thinking like well there are some movies that do a very good job of getting the story out there but the story that's in the book isn't that great and then there's others where they actually change things but they make it better like I did a whole video on beautiful creatures a little while ago that was basically talking about that but after thinking about it for a while I decided the Maze Runner is the best movie adaptation like the whole series because granted the storyline and the setting of those books isn't great to begin with and the movie makes them make even less sense but it takes a bunch of characters which for the most part just didn't have that much personality and weren't that good and it makes them very good it gives some very good actors to play them and it has some extremely great action scenes as well and so while the movies still have their issues as well I think that they took a book series which is solid but not really all that memorable and turn them into something that is just really really enjoyable to watch even if again it's not that great of the books you've read which one deserves to be made into a show slash movie so this one's cheating a little bit but the Berserk manga deserves to be made into a proper anime because they've tried to do it like four fucking times now it's always been bad it deserves a proper anime adaptation and that's all for today so I just want to thank you guys for watching thanks a whole bunch for getting me to 50,000 that's still weird to think about like if I told myself five years ago that this would be happening I wouldn't have believed it but you know here we are it's great and I'm happy to be here and thanks for watching please like and comment and subscribe and thanks to all my patrons but thanks especially to my $10 up patrons brother Santotis I've been saying Santotis for a while sorry about that Christopher Hawkins Joseph Pendergraft and of course Tobacco Crow you guys are pretty great and if you are not a patron consider giving me money and getting your name put up here and if you don't have money then like I said just like and subscribe and all that see you later bye


Would you give up every Duncan in New England for Tom Brady to come back? No. He's dead to me. Oh, no way! Yeah. He gave you everything. He's dead to me. I would cheat my tuckers. Tuckers are forever Tom Brady's careers are over.  And I love Tom Brady. I'm a buck for it. Yeah, I would. I miss Tom so much. I don't really like tuckers that much. I love Tom Brady, so I'll give up nothing.


Okay. I wanted to thank the organizers for inviting me here today. I'm going to switch gears a little bit. I will be talking about genetics and identity, but I will be building off of a study that I've been conducting with consumers of 23andMe, the company that Joanna represents and described in an earlier session. And what I'm going to talk about is actually a good segue into the next session because I will be talking about ancestry testing in the context of health results. So as an anthropologist and someone who has been very interested in research ethics, I put this up here just to give a sense of that science and technology we know are dynamic, but that the value that we derive from that must be understood within the social and moral context. And to think about the ways in which genetics enters into the social landscape, in particular the significance of the gene in understanding how consumers, the public, takes up this type of information. And I would suggest that genetic information has the allure of specificity and technological precision. We've heard those words used over and over again today. That individuals often turn to genetic information to validate one's sense of self and predict one's future. And that perhaps most importantly, genetic information may trump other sources of information for identity formation. And ancestry, genetic ancestry testing I think really builds on this idea of discovery. I mean here we have a, this is just from African ancestry, but it talks about this answer that presumably the consumer would want to find out. And it is about this idea of self-discovery. Dorothy Nelkin talked about this a while ago, but really tries to think about how genetics might change our conceptions of family, for example, one social group. And to think about the ways in which DNA, its durability, the seemingly permanent significance of DNA may change our cultural ideas about what a family is. The summer, I've been very interested in the ways in which the media picks up on some of the genetic ancestry research. And this is from the New York Times. And it's talking about a study that was conducted by a group in California and the original papers in Plas Biology. But you'll see that the headline reads, genetics reveal Europe is one big family. And underneath it, I don't know if you can tell, but it's a picture of a group in reference to a neo-Nazi trial that's been occurring. And the article starts out by saying, from Ireland to Turkey, Europeans are all related, sharing a link with ancestors who live, who were alive just 1,000 years ago according to a new genetic study. Research by scientists in California is further evidence that neat distinctions between various European peoples are largely artificial and that they are all one big family. It goes on to talk about that recent research has focused on the shared legacy of Europeans. And this is in contrast to earlier theories that focused on differences, but alludes to how persistent ideas about racial difference continue to be a source of prejudice and violent crime. And I think this juxtaposition is an interesting one and perhaps can help us think about how genetic identity might be coming online in terms of how the public might be interpreting some of this information. Now, potentiality, I put it in the title, it's a concept that has been helpful to me in thinking about the power of genomics or genomic information and here I've tried to define it, potential defined as embedded with latent qualities that may realize future utility or revelation is often interpreted as synonymous with possibility, capability and power that suggests a potency that evokes both desire and fear over how to translate biology into promise. So for the last several years, perhaps since the Human Genome Project, the completion of the Human Genome Project, we have been talking about the type of promise that this new biology is supposed to deliver on and I think a lot of our ideas are built around this idea of potentiality and what that information can provide to us. I think, because of before I get into some of the research results from my study, I wanted to also put up Catherine Nash's quote about geneticization of identity and in particular how the interpretation of genetic knowledge might create new definitions of gender, race and relative that either reinforce reshape or perhaps challenge existing notions of collective identity and personhood and I think that's a question that perhaps we can begin to answer with the ways in which genetic information is being interpreted by the public. So in the other aspect that I wanted us to think about today is just the way in which genetic ancestry testing has been depicted at least in the past as recreational and some of the limits in thinking about that framework. Particularly I think personal genetics has primed an expectation that this is both recreation and recreation in the sense of oneself and the recovery of one's unknown ancestors and I want us to think about the different stakeholders that are involved in that process in particular thinking about the ways in which genetic ancestry involves an engagement with concepts of difference, ethnicity, race, genetic variation and what the play is in terms of that recreation or recreation using genetic information. Okay so the study is funded through the National Human Genome Research Institute, the ethical and legal and social implications program. It is what I'm presenting here is part of just one part of a study that's entitled social networking and personal genomics. One of the research questions that we were interested in is the reasons why individuals decide to purchase personal genetic testing. What do they do with it? What do they expect to get out of it? How do they interpret their results and who do they share that information with? I don't have time to go into all the details of the study but if you wanted to go to the website and learn more there's more information there. So just to give you a sense of the folks that we were speaking with, this is, I'm sorry it's really small, but the average age of the folks that we talked with and we conducted surveys and extended interviews with these individuals was around 40, early 40s, 80% identified as white, the medium income was between 50 to 100,000, over 50% had advanced degrees, 75% described their health as excellent or very good and I think this somewhat dovetails with the general population for 23andMe in terms of their consumer base. We asked them why they were getting testing and I should say that I think you heard that 23andMe offers a broad spectrum of genetic test results including ancestry, disease related risk, carrier status, drug response, genetics with respect to drug response and behavioral traits and what not. So for the folks that we spoke with, ancestry seemed to be the primary reason followed by interest in disease results and I think this quote is probably fairly emblematic of some of the reactions that people had to their ancestry results in the sense that they felt they were part of a living history and you see here, suddenly I feel like I'm living history but there's a strange feeling too because now I also feel like I'm not myself anymore, I feel like I'm just a piece of everyone else who lived in the past so that's been a real interesting sidebar in terms of identity. If anyone has some kind of ego problem, listen to this and they'll find out they're really just a compilation of many other people who live before I'm part of a team, I'm part of a worldwide team. Okay, so interesting in sense of giving perspective to one's self in terms of one's own personal history. We also asked our respondents to answer this question. We presented an individual who identifies as African American receives genetic ancestry test results that indicate that she has 0% African ancestry, 87% European and 13% Asian ancestry. I would classify her as and we gave them a bunch of choices and you'll see here that 16% said well what she said is what she is African American, 2% said Asian American, 18% European American but you'll see a lot of people said other and we were curious we allowed them to write in what they thought other what was their response and interestingly and I think this is this is emblematic of that group the first the lab probably had a mix up she really is African American but then there are other kind of more complex responses saying mixed race I don't think it's up to me to decide many people believe race is a social construct others talked about cultural identity we you know it's not about racial blood quantum we can't leave that we can leave that at the drinking fountain I would call her Eurasian and then this last one about well it depends on the context okay what we would call them what would we call this person how would we classify and I thought that was really interesting in terms of kind of the complexity in which people are taking up perhaps their their hybridity in terms of the results that they are getting back another way in which ancestry results are given back by 23 me is ancestry painting and this is this is a demo picture but it gives you a sense of the ways in which the chromosome is painted and it's painted by continental affiliation I guess Europe Asia Africa and not genotype and one response I think and I think this is also emblematic of some of the things that we were hearing from folks is this person who who talks about their European genes and and she says it's it's really it really is beautiful and she's talking about the ancestry painting I showed my family all the different parts of my genes that came from Africa I noticed that on one of the chromosomes well it seems a large region anyway anyway I mean it extends further than other parts is European and I was thinking I wish I could find out what those European genes do I think that I understand why I have European genes in me given my history and all but what do they do so it's interesting to me that this seems to be an example of the viewing of a racial category onto a chromosomal segment and this idea that functionality should somehow be part of that and I think we should be attuned to the ways in which people perhaps are conflating some of these ideas about race genes and and what do they do and here I just I remind us of Troy Duster's work and his around the reification of race and he he he advises us to think about the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and I think that's particularly helpful in in this context where there is a tendency to assume that categories of thought coincide with the object character of the empirical world that we take them for granted for being something that perhaps is meant to be a heuristic okay so I'm just going to describe one person story with her genetic ancestry testing her family's experience as an illustration I think of kind of the limits of recreation thinking about genetic ancestry is only recreation and so in the spring of 2010 I met Helen who's a mother of three and she she was very interested in genetic ancestry testing she chose 23 and me because she says that she felt that it was it was filled with happy colors quote straightforward information non-threatening presentation of results and so she was interested primarily in genealogy but she also thought that the health results that they were that she was going to get back was an added bonus so when we sat down to talk to her when I sat down to talk to her about her results she said she summarized them as you know I my results are fairly benign I didn't have much information in terms of disease risk that was remarkable she in fact somewhat dismissed her results but was most interested in her ancestry information but they failed to show the specificity that she assumed would that she would receive she would describe her results as pretty much 100% European and she was not surprised that her maternal haplotype originated in central Europe but she was hoping that her genetic results would settle a long time argument she had with her sister about the exact location of their quote family village she was disappointed that her results did not provide an answer okay so a few weeks later I meet Helen again and I'm I learn that she has decided to buy her daughter who's a high school senior a 23 me kit for her birthday and the reason why is she thinks that it would be a rare opportunity to teach her daughter some genetics and to give her a chance to discover her genetic ancestry she thought this was particularly relevant for her family she explained that that she was a typical white American married to a man who was born in China so her her children were mixed and her hope was that genetic testing would give her daughter some quote fun in discovering her mixed heritage heritage and give her a sense of who she is and quote what also appealed to her was the ability to test her child in the privacy of DTC personal genetic testing where they're they they would receive their results and no one else had needed to know about them she also it was was attracted to this fun mode of self-discovery so three months later she told me that her daughter who was tested received her results and when I asked her how things turned out she said things haven't turned out like she thought they would she talks about how they had decided beforehand that Helen the mother would have the password and she would log in for the results first to make sure that there wasn't anything that she should be concerned about which she did and she didn't find anything but then she said when she gave the password to her daughter she she was surprised and she says sorry I'm gonna skip these at first I thought we were fine nothing jumped out at me and you know from the list with all of the red arrows I thought few what a relief and she's talking here about her health information her health disease risk information but then she and she's referring to a daughter came to me really upset later that day actually she was in tears and pulled me over to the screen and pointed at her results it was her Parkinson's page and it said that she was almost three times the risk of the average person I was really confused because I hadn't seen this before and I knew I wouldn't have missed something like this I thought I had I thought had they updated her results and then I realized what she had done she had clicked on Asian so the the option that you have in some of these in this company is that you do at the and you you are asked to identify yourself and when Sarah sorry Helen originally looked at her daughter's results she had assumed that the daughter would characterize herself as European but what the daughter had done has gone in and it clicked on Asian and it changed her results and which is interesting because of the idea that that on the one hand there is this this this notion that we can create and profess our own identity but it can when it rubs up against a history I would say of using race as the major prism in biomedical research and in clinical medicine we come back to these big categories and I think that this is something that we should should be mindful of as we think about genetic ancestry testing and the way in which it travels so just in summary I would suggest that genetic explanations of difference are powerful narratives for identity formation and that in interpreting genetic data we must be mindful of the confounding and conflation of genes ancestry race and disease how difference is that how difference is imbued with meaning depends on the social context and historical framings and that it's important to understand the allure of genetic specificity in what Nelkin and Lindy have described as the DNA mystique and the illusion of precision and certainty when we think about this idea of creating oneself discovering oneself and being able to define oneself and I'll just end there I was told that we're not going to have time for questions so what we'll do we're taking a break we will stay up here and people who want to talk to us will be right here okay and then the next session we will pick this up with the notion of genetics and health thank you very much 15 minutes


Iran actually used to be our closest ally in the region. Then in 1953, the Iranian people elected a leader, Mohamed Mosadday, who was not friendly towards the U.S. in return, the U.S. and Britain helped to spearhead a coup in Iran that brought the last Shah of Iran, Mohamed Reza Shah, to power. This is the man that was eventually overthrown in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. He was incredibly cruel to his people. His secret police were repressive and brutal. And so the Iranian Revolution was, in many ways, a reaction to the U.S. instigated regime change from years before. So this is the background to the animosity between the U.S. and Iran.