have a huge library with far too many books. My wife's concerned that the floor might give out in our house and so we recently brought an engineer in to see what's going on and he said don't bring any more books into your house. But I have a lot of Jewish books that I've read and you know most books on Judaism the great majority of them will present the nuts and bolts of the different elements of Judaism. When books basically attempt to present what Judaism is they go through all of the do's and don'ts and the nuts and bolts. We know that the word Torah literally means teaching or instruction and these books about Judaism will explicate what Judaism instructs us to do and often discuss the rationale of these practices and traditionally we know that there are 613 mitzvot or directives in the Torah and it's a very broad menu that includes everything from family life to civil law to dietary regulations, holidays, there are teachings about the treatment of animals, how we are to dress, what to do when someone dies, how to pray and agricultural laws in the holy land. There's a lot of stuff in the Torah but one of the shortcomings of many of these books and many discussions in general about Judaism is the failure to develop an overall perspective on what Judaism is. What is the big picture? What is it all about Alfie? And I think that is what I'm going to try to accomplish with you tonight. It's one thing to know all of the elements of Judaism to list all the things that Jews do when we don't do, to list all the beliefs of Judaism, to try and arrange all of the things that are part of Judaism but what is Judaism? What is the big picture? What is it all about? Where do all of these practices lead and how do they fit in? Meaning if we have a vision of what Judaism is what hopefully will happen is we'll understand how every different element fits into that big picture. What are the general goals that drive each of Judaism's parts? So there are many parts of Judaism but they're all heading somewhere and what I'm going to try to share with you tonight is an understanding of where everything is heading. Where does everything fit in? What is the forest beyond the trees? There are many trees in Judaism but it's sometimes very easy to miss the forest for the trees. Some people refer to Judaism as a religion, some people refer to Judaism as a way of life but really what is critical to understand is what is Judaism all about? Where is it heading? What are the essential goals that direct the entire enterprise and what is the ultimate agenda of Judaism? What is it all about? Torah is a path. We call Jewish law halacha, the path, the way to go. But where is this path heading? Where is it leading us? This Shabbat is the portion of the Torah of Noach. We'll be reading the story of Noah. Last week we began right after 52 weeks of the year. We conclude the entire five books of Moses and last Shabbat we began again within the beginning. This coming Shabbat will be Shabbat of Noach and there's a Midrash, a rabbinic teaching. It's found in the Midrash Tanchuma to the beginning of the portion of Noach which teaches that the Torah is written with black fire on white fire. We're told that the Torah that we have is composed of black fire written on white fire. The black fire you could say are the discrete forms of Judaism. They're institutions, the laws, the practices, the things that we read about.  There is a white fire to each element of Judaism. So for example there's a white fire of Shabbat because you can get very caught up with the details of Shabbat observance. What do we do on Shabbat? What don't we do? But those are the practices, that's the black fire.  What's it all about? We achieve that, what's it all about, by the black fire. The black fire, the laws, the discrete practices, is how we achieve the goals, the spirit, the agenda.  There is a white fire of Kashrut. So it's not just the Jews avoid certain foods and eat certain foods and eat certain foods in certain ways.  There's a white fire of Stakhov giving charity. There's a white fire of circumcision. There's a white fire of every single thing we do in Judaism. But tonight we're going to try to uncover the white fire, the spirit of Judaism in general, of the overarching enterprise of Judaism. Ramosah Chaim Lutzato, the Ramchal, who's one of our greatest sages, wrote a systematic work to explore the nature of Jewish theology almost 300 years ago. It's called the Derech Hashem, translated into English as the way of God. And he writes in his introduction the importance of understanding details in light of the general concept. I'll share with you what he says. When one knows a number of things and understands how they are categorized and systematically interrelated, then he has a great advantage over one who has the same knowledge without such distinction. It is very much like the difference between looking at a well-arranged garden planted in rows and patterns and seeing a wild thicket or forest growing in confusion. When an individual is confronted by many details and does not know how they relate to one another or their true place in a general system, then his inquisitive intellect is given nothing more than a difficult, unsatisfying burden. He may struggle with it, but he will tire and grow weary long before he attains any gratification. Each detail will arouse his curiosity, but not having access to the concept as a whole to the big picture, he will remain frustrated. If one wishes to understand something, it is therefore very important that he will be aware of other things associated with it, as well as its place among them, how the system interrelates. Without this, one's longing for truth will be frustrated and he will be pained by his unsatisfied desire. The exact opposite is true when one knows something in relation to its context, in relation to the big picture. Since he sees it within its framework, he can go on to grasp other concepts associated with it, and his success will bring him pleasure and elation, sort of a fanciful and beautiful poetic way of saying that it's very, very helpful for us to see the big picture in anything we're trying to understand. I had a teacher, one of my first Jewish teachers, who's by Shlomo Rizkin, and he used to tell us about the two important critical personalities in the Bible. He would speak of the priest and the prophet, and he would compare the priest and the prophet to the black fire and the white fire. Because who was the priest? The priest was someone who became a priest only because they descended genealogically from Aaron, the first priest. And you became a priest simply by your pedigree, by your family line. It was inherited. That was the priest. And the priest had to wear certain vestments, certain garments when he served as a priest. And if you read the Bible, the Bible is very, very precise about how these garments are constructed. Very particular, very exacting, very precise. And if the priest was not wearing these garments, they were not able to serve as a priest. The prophet, on the other hand, did not descend genealogically. For example, the greatest prophet we had was Moses. And Moses had two sons, but we never hear from them. They never became anything significant because prophecy is not a function of pedigree. You become a prophet because you have arisen charismatic among the people. You were seen as a leader. And the people see you as someone that can impart inspiration. And the prophet did not have to wear any special outfit.  He wore burlap sack and he had, he just didn't have any cool outfits that he wore. And there was no requirement that a prophet dress in any particular way. And the reason behind these two characters, and the difference between them, is because the priest represents the black fire of Judaism. The priest is concerned with the details. The priest is concerned that we have a continuity, that throughout the generations, the details of Judaism will remain constant. It's an incredible thing that on a Friday night, when a family sits down at the Shabbat table, they pick up a cup of wine, and they say the exact same words that were probably said 2,000 years ago when people observe the Shabbat. And it's an incredible thing to know that I'm touching that kind of practice that will God willing be done in 2,000 years from now. When we open up this Ark, and we take out those scrolls, they're not written on a PDF document, they're not written on an LED device. They're written on the same kind of animal skins that were written 3,000 years ago. And that Torah is the same Torah, literally, that our ancestors had 3,000 years ago and that God willing, they'll be reading out of the same kind of a scroll in 3,000 years from now. When we put on phylacteries, we're putting on the same exact boxes with the same scriptures that were worn for thousands of years and that will God willing be worn for thousands of years. The practices of Judaism essentially remain constant throughout the generations. And that's the job of the priests. You know, I used to work when I was first in rabbinical school in a synagogue in Porchester, New York. And I came in there over the summer, I was going to be working for the High Holidays, and they had written a new prayer book for the High Holidays in this synagogue. Because they wanted it to be relevant. And they put together articles from the New York Times and they had songs that were popular songs. And they thought this is going to really relate to people. And when I came there, the edition that they had published was in boxes collecting cobwebs and dust for three years. Because a wise person once said that the most relevant thing in the world is today's global male, but the most irrelevant thing in the world is yesterday's global male. And so the impulse that we might have to update Judaism and to tamper with its forms in order to make it more relevant is a disaster. Because the power itself of these forms of the black fire is that they are our ability to touch eternity. We're touching something that goes beyond time. It was here thousands of years ago will be here in thousands of years. And that was a job of the priest who was very tied into exact detail and descended genealogically. But the great danger of having a religion based upon static forms is exactly that. That when you do something over and over and over again, the same thing, the same, you know, the fellow comes home at night, what, meatloaf again? You know, you get meatloaf for 4,000 meals in a row, it's going to get stale.  It could get stale. And that's where the prophet comes in. The prophet was there to arise every generation, not because they were the son of a prophet. But the prophet was someone that arose charismaticly, because they were tuned into that generation. They connected with the zeitgeist of that generation. They were sensitive to the to the tenor of the times. And the prophet in each generation was there to charge those forms, those ancient forms with new meanings.  What we'll try to do tonight from our 21st century perspective is take a peek at what the white fire of Judaism is all about. And I think we'll see surprisingly, it really hasn't changed in all these centuries. There's a rabbi whom I've clashed with several times in the past. His name is Rabbi Shmueli Boteach. However, I think that in one of his books, he composes one of the best summaries of the essence of Judaism that I've seen. In 1999, Shmueli Boteach wrote a book called An Intelligent Person's Guide to Judaism. A little pretentious as a title, but he writes that Judaism is the following. It is a holistic set of inextricably linked values, which together comprise a state of the art system for human potential. And he goes on to observe that Judaism is not seen in light, in this light, meaning when Judaism is not seen in this light and often seen as an arcane and obsolete ritual, this accounts for its sad and unjust decline. And he proposes that we have to see Judaism for what it really is, which for him, and I believe he's right on this, its basic goal is Shleimut. The Hebrew word we'd say is Shleimut. In English, we could translate this as wholeness, completeness, perfection, or really self actualization. The Torah's basic goal is to help us become who we are capable of becoming, of self actualizing, and not just each one of us as individuals, but by extension, the world at large. Judaism's goals are both for the individual and for society. Tonight, what I'm hoping to do is to flesh out with you what exactly this entails. And in the coming weeks, God willing, how the various practices and institutions of Judaism fit into the paradigm we'll be looking at tonight. Let's begin. The Babylonian Talmud, tractate Brachot 63A, page 63, side A, asks, what is a small portion of Scripture that all the foundations are dependent on? I mean, can you isolate one small passage in the Bible, which really sums up everything? And the Talmud quotes a verse from the book of Proverbs chapter three, verse six, which says, Bechol drachecha do'ayhu. In all of your ways, know him. The Torah chronicles God's relationship to our world and specifically his relationship with the people of Israel. That's basically what the Bible has. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God redeems the Jewish people from the Egyptian slavery. God reveals his Torah to us at Mount Sinai. And God continues to communicate to us through his prophets and to guide us through history. That's what the Bible tells us about God. But Judaism is primarily concerned with our knowing God. According to the Talmudic passage I just quoted above, this should be the entire focus of everything that we do. Bechol drachecha do'ayhu. In all of your ways, come to know him, God. All of you have heard of a famous Jewish philosopher and legalist, Moses Maimonides. He lived between 1135 and 1204. He had a son that was not quite as famous, Rabbeinu Avraham Ben Harambam. He's called Abraham son of the Rambeinu. And he wrote a wonderful book which just recently was translated into English called Hamaspik Le Ovde Hashem. Not going to bother translating because it's difficult to translate. He wrote this book in 1230. It's basically a presentation of Jewish spirituality. And the major theme of this work is that the highest goal of our life is to develop a personal, experiential relationship with God. What he calls to encounter God, to have an encounter with God. His father, the Rambeinu Maimonides, wrote in his introduction to Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers. It's a small little book called Shmone Prokim, the eight chapters. Maimonides writes that one should constantly place before his eyes a single goal, which is to apprehend God to the extent of a human's ability. Maimonides goes on to say that this is the level that God requires of us to pursue. As he said in the Torah, the book of Deuteronomy chapter six, verse five, and you shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart and all your soul. The intent of this is that every part of our soul should be directed toward one end, which is to love God. A more contemporary source for this very same idea is from a book called the Nisivos Shalom, the Pathways of Equanimity, written by the late Slalom of Rabbi Shalom Noach Brasovsky in 1988. And in the first chapter of his second volume, he wrote that the goal and purpose of the entirety of the Torah and its commandments is to achieve an attachment, he calls it dveikut, is to achieve an attachment to God and a feeling of his closeness. Now the word dveikut is used very frequently in the book of Deuteronomy to describe what the goal of our life should be. The goal of our life should be attachment to God. And we should seek this constantly and we should realize that this is a very daring term for the Bible to say that we should try to attach ourselves to God. We know that in the story of creation after Adam and Eve were created, God sort of steps back and says, therefore now every man will ultimately leave his mother and father and attach himself to his wife, the dveikut, the very same word. So the very same word that the Bible uses in Genesis for that incredible intimacy between a man and his wife, dveikut, in modern Hebrew, dveikut is glue. It's glue. That's the same word that the Bible uses describe how we are to come close to God to that degree of attachment. We're all familiar that when we perform a commandment of the Torah, we say a blessing, a brachah. And every brachah has the same formula. We say, asher kiddishanu be mitzvotav. Let's think for a few moments about what these words might also mean. We usually translate it as, asher kiddishanu, that God sanctified us. Not sure what that means necessarily. You could say that God made us holy. He made us kadoosh. So God made us holy or sanctified us be mitzvotav with his commandments. But let's reflect a little bit deeper. Our sages point out the word mitzvah does not simply mean commandment. The word mitzvah comes etymologically from the root of tsevet, or tsafta, which means a connector or a binder. So we're not simply performing commandments. The Torah is not merely dos and don'ts. The Torah is a system of connections to God.  When a couple stands under the chuppah to get married, the man says to his bride, haray at mekodeshetli, you are sanctified to me. So on one level, what we're saying when we do a mitzvah is we're saying, really, God, you wedded us. You married us. You came that close to us through these things that you commanded us that are connectors that help us connect to you. Right, Brzovsky, the slanam-e-rebi continues in the passage that we began just above. He says, and our holy books teach that all of the commandments of the Torah are guidance. Every commandment of the Torah is guidance on how to attach ourselves to God. Now, the $64,000 question is, well, how does it actually work? Right? That's what we'll have to do in the coming weeks. Meaning, how does each of these things we do in Judaism attach us to God? I want to explore one question before we move on. And that's a delicate question. Where does this leave? Where does our discussion up until now? Where does this leave those who don't believe in God? Or who are unsure of God? Or who might be questioning or cynical or not clear? So let me share with you a few thoughts. The Jerusalem Talmud in Tractate Chagiga teaches something astounding. They attribute the following statement to God. They have God saying the following, better that they, the Jewish people, abandon me, but follow my Torah. Better they abandon me, but at least follow my Torah. And then Talmud goes on to say, because by following the Torah and the Torah's laws, the spiritual light that's contained in the Torah will ultimately inspire people to embrace God. But the Talmud accepts the possibility that not everyone may necessarily believe in God. And so the Talmud says, okay, but follow the Torah anyway. Live your life as if there were a God. It's very interesting, by the way. The Torah never commands us to love our parents. There's no commandment to love our parents. There are commandments to honor them, to revere them, which you're ultimately saying, relate to your parents as if you love them. If you love them, how would you act towards them? But there's no direct commandment to love our parents. And so the Talmud is saying here that if you have difficulty with God, that's okay. It happens. But if you at least try to encounter the Torah, you're doing something worthwhile anyway. And it might ultimately lead you to God himself. Another thought, the Slalom Merebi, who we just discussed a few moments ago in his first volume of the Nishevosh Shalom, writes that the commandment to believe in God, that's a strange commandment, right? Because how does God command us to believe in him? It's a little bit weird. Because if a person already believes in God, they don't need to be commanded to believe in God. And if a person doesn't believe in God, you can't just tell them to turn it on like a faucet. So he struggles to understand what exactly is the commandment to believe in God. And he says that really when you understand it at its most basic level, the commandment to believe in God is at its core a directive to seek God, to work on trying to come to faith in him. So for the believer, the commandment says, you know what? Try to go to deeper levels of faith. Work on your faith. Don't just stick through life with the same level of faith you have when you were eight years old. Try to become more sophisticated and more deep in your faith. Work on the relationship. But for the person who doesn't believe in God, the commandment is saying, seek. Try. Try to approach belief. Work on it and maybe you'll get there. I once heard an amazing teaching from Rabbi Noah Weinberg of Blessed Memory. He was explaining a midrash which I have not yet been able to track down. And the midrash discusses the first real world war. We think it was in 1914 or whatever it was. Actually the first world war was many thousands of year before that. The book of Genesis tells us that there were four huge kings that had a war against five huge kings. And the four kings beat up on the five kings. That was the first world war. And in the war Abraham's nephew was captured. And Abraham goes to try and rescue his nephew. He has to go up and fight the victors of this war. Abraham, with a small group of people, has to go up and fight the winners of the first world war. And he's victorious. He rescues his nephew. Right after this, God says to Abraham, don't be afraid Abraham. Fear not, for your reward shall be very great. And anyone that studies the Bible is perplexed by this because you would think, when should God come in and reassure Abraham that he shouldn't be afraid? God should come to reassure him before he goes to battle. I mean you would be terrified if you had to fight against the winners of the first world war. But no, God doesn't come to reassure him before that. After he's victorious, God says to Abraham, don't be afraid. Your reward is going to be very great. So what is Abraham afraid of? So Rabbi Weinberg says there's a midrash which says that Abraham was afraid that God was going to punish him for all the years that Abraham didn't believe in God. Well, when did Abraham start to believe in God? So according to one opinion in the midrash, Abraham was three years old. According to another opinion in the midrash, Abraham was 48 years old. So how do you resolve this? So some of the commentaries point out he was three years old when he began to think about God and explore God, but he was 48 years old when he nailed it, went, oh, now I've got it. And Abraham was afraid that for all those intervening years, all those years where he wasn't able to sign on the dotted line, all those years when he wasn't certain, maybe God's going to hold it against me. And God says, no, on the contrary, don't be afraid, Abraham, because you'll be greatly rewarded, meaning for all those years you were struggling to come to know me and you were seeking me and you were working at it, you'll be greatly rewarded because in many ways the search is even more delicious than the find. I should point out one further thing, that many people have difficulties with God because they have very distorted views of what God is and who God is. You know, the market of Meserich, very famous Hasidic teacher, the disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, was once met by an atheist who said, rabbi, I don't believe in God. And the market said to him, I want you to know something. The very same God that you don't believe in, I don't believe in that God either. So it's quite possible that the God, that the atheist is rejecting, is not really God. It's a very distorted view of God. If you think that God is some cranky old man up in the heavens that always says no, that's not God. And that would be worth rejecting. We're fortunate we had a great Jew here in Toronto who moved to Israel. His name in Toronto was David Wolinsky, now his name is David Aaron. He's written many, many books that are directed specifically to dealing with this issue of helping people develop a more healthy and accurate and sophisticated understanding of who God really is. So I would say there is hope for the person who is not sure about God. But let's go a little bit deeper. Why is it so important to connect with God? Why is connecting with God significant? So there was a wonderful book we mentioned before by the Ramchal Moshechaim Lutzato called The Derich Hashem, The Way of God. And he asks a very, very basic question. Why did God create the world? I mean if we're trying to figure out what is life all about, this is the most basic question. Why did God create everything? Why did God put us here? Why am I here? Why are we all here? What are we doing here? So this book attempts to deal with this question. And the Ramchal suggests that God created the world as an act of love. It says in the book of Psalms, Olam chesed ibanei, the world is created out of loving kindness. You know in the beginning of the Bible after each day of creation there's a refrain. It says, Vayar Elohim kitov, and God saw that it was good. We have it six times and God saw that it was good and God saw that it was good. There's a commentary by Revakov Tsi Mecklenburg who is from Germany. I think I've been to the 1800s and he says that's not really the accurate translation. He says Vayar is really the causative and the better way of translating this verse is not that God saw that it was good because on some level it's a little bit weird. You mean God created something and then he has to say, oh that's pretty good, like what, he's going to get it wrong? So he says Vayar Elohim kitov really means that God caused it to be seen. God caused it to be seen. He told because he is good. Meaning why did God bring it into existence? Because God is good. God creates out of love. When someone loves they want to give, not to take. So creation is an act of giving and that's what the Ramchal says in his book, that the world was created as an act of love and he created the world as a vehicle upon which he could give to an other. That's why God created the world. God wanted a vehicle to which he could give to which he could bestow goodness. And the Ramchal says that if God is going to give it must be the greatest good possible. God's going to give you something. It's not going to be a second class gift. It's going to be the greatest good possible. Anything less would not be godly. So what is the greatest good? What is the greatest good imaginable in the world? What's the greatest good, the ultimate good that God can give and bestow upon his creation? So the Ramchal teaches that the ultimate good is God himself. And the ultimate good and the greatest good that God is able to give is himself. The Ramchal wrote another famous book called the Missilat-e-Sharim, The Pathway of the Upright. And he writes in the first chapter of this book, the following. He says mankind was only created to take delight in God. That's why we were put here. Believe it or not, we were not put here for dark chocolate, even though it's a wonderful thing. But that's not why we were put here, ultimately. We were put here for something much, much greater and pleasurable than dark chocolate. He says mankind was only created to take delight in God and benefit from the radiance of his presence. For this is the true delight and the greatest pleasure of all pleasures that can possibly exist. We live in a world where there are many pleasures. We all know this. Many things that we all enjoy and take pleasure in. But they're all created by God and God is the source of all pleasure. So if we find the world we're living in pleasurable, imagine connecting with the source of all these pleasures. All other pleasures in the world ultimately pale in comparison to God himself and all of these pleasures point beyond themselves to God. You know, look, I think God doesn't expect more of kids. Maybe kids, for example, need to be told if you don't brush your teeth, you're not going to have dessert tomorrow. Maybe kids need to relate to cookies and candy. But hopefully as we get older, we begin to get more sophisticated in our palette and we learn to delight in more sophisticated pleasures. And maybe when we're six years old, playing gold, go fish and old maid is pleasurable. But I don't know many people that are 40 that play old maid and go fish. They want to play poker or gin rummy or maybe chess. But people as they get older, try hopefully to reach higher and higher levels of what could be pleasurable. To get stuck at a more premature level is sad. It's sad for someone in their 60s to be experiencing in the world on a level where they really have been there already 40, 50 years before that. Hopefully people will understand that we're put in this world where all of these pleasures are pointing beyond themselves to their Creator. But let's go a little bit further. If we're looking for the big picture as a way of putting Judaism into perspective, we have to understand more about ourselves. According to the Torah, the 50, 70 or 90 years that we spend living in this world is only the very, very tip of the iceberg in terms of our lives. It's a mistake to think that our life is exhausted by the 60, 70, 80, 90 years we spend running around on planet Earth. The essence of who we are is not our body. It's an important thing to understand. I am not my body. The essence of who we are is our personality, our soul, our nishama. And our soul comes into a physical body for a very short sojourn on planet Earth. We're not here for a very long time. But our soul is not physical. It is spiritual and our soul continues to exist long after our body is buried in the ground. We'll discuss this idea of life after life in a few weeks. But we refer to this existence as olam haba, the world to come. And the Ramchal explains that while we are able to connect to God in this world, we are able to do that. And to achieve very sublime levels of pleasure in that connection, he says the real and permanent true experience of the pleasure of connecting with God will be in the spiritual realm of the world to come. The great caveat is this. Our entire ability to experience the bliss of the world to come is totally dependent on how we prepare for it in this life. This life experience now, these short few years that we spend here is critical because we're setting this stage for our eternal existence in the spiritual world. We shouldn't dismiss these 70 or 80 years because they pale in comparison to eternity. There's another major focus of Judaism which we'll see is inextricably bound up with the first. The first major concern of Judaism is establishing a connection to God. But the Babylonian Talmud in tract H. Shabbat, page 31a, has a famous story where a non-Jew comes to convert to Judaism. And he says that he wants to convert to Judaism and he says that he wants to convert to Judaism on the condition that the rabbis will teach him the entire Torah while he stands on one foot. And that's chutzpah for you. So he basically is saying, I got 30 seconds, tell me everything you know. So Shammai, the great sage, chases him away. He says, you have a lot of nerve. Get out of here. But Hillel says to him, I'll take you on. And Hillel says, you want to understand the entire Torah while I stand on one foot?  He says, that's the whole Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study it. So Hillel seems to be explaining, if you want to understand, Hillel says, the big picture of Judaism, of the Torah, is how we relate to other people, how we get along with other people, and how we treat other people. And he says something amazing. The rest of the Torah is commentary. So if you want to understand why we don't eat pork, that's somehow connected to, don't do things that annoy other people. And if you want to understand the holiday of Passover, according to Hillel, that's connected to this principle of what is hateful to you, don't do to your neighbor. We're going to have to understand that. Leviticus chapter 19 verse 18, love your neighbor as yourself. Rabbi Akiva said in the Talmud, this is the major principle of the Torah. Rabbi Akiva, one of our greatest sages says, you want to know the greatest principle of the Torah? Love your neighbor as yourself. The Midrash teaches something significant. And it's a very bold statement, because it sort of doesn't hedge its bets. The Midrash says, lonitna Torah elah. Whenever you have this construction of, something was not given elah, except, it means this is the only reason it was given. Lonitna Torah elah. Letzarev pahem eshabrios. The Torah was only given to refine and purify people. That's why the Torah was given, to refine us, to purify us. I've taught this next idea many times, but it's worth hearing again. The Torah describes the creation of human beings, as different from the creation of everything else in the world. Everything else in the world, God said, let there be light, let there be dogs, let there be trees. That's how everything was created. When it comes to the human being, the Torah says, let us make man. That's a departure. Let us make man who is God speaking to. So there are many answers given to this question. Some people say, God was speaking to the angels, and God is consulting with the angels, when man is being created. Because the Talmud says, God wants to teach us, human beings, proper behavior. And we're learning here that you shouldn't just rule autocratically and make unilateral decisions. You should consult your underlings. That's one possibility. We're learning an ethical lesson, when God consults with the angels. He doesn't need their advice, but God takes them into the process. Let us make man. Another answer given is that God is speaking in the royal we. Like the Queen of England says, let us go for a walk. She's not now multiple personality disordered. She speaks like that because she's the Queen of England. Or the editor of a newspaper writes in what they call the editorial we. In our esteemed opinion, it's one person writing. But in the Bible, the King sometimes will speak in the first person plural. So God, as the King of the world says, let us create man. Third possibility was suggested by the Baal Shem Tov. And he says something amazing. He says that God here is addressing each human being who will ever live. God is speaking to each person in the history of the world who will ever live. And God is basically saying the following. God is saying, you know what, when it comes to the creation of everything in the world, I can do it unilaterally. I can make pigs by saying, let there be pigs. I can make stars by saying, let there be stars. But God is saying, I cannot create a human being unilaterally. I can give you people the raw ingredients. I can give you a body and a soul. But what you ultimately become is a function of what you, each human being does with those raw ingredients. So God cannot make you or myself. God can give us the tools. God can give us a body and a soul. But God is speaking to every single one of us and says, let us make a man. God is speaking to you and to me. And God is inviting us to become part of the process of the creation of who we are. And God is inviting each of us to create the masterpiece of a human being. Each one of us can be a masterpiece. That's the challenge. And so the Baal Shem Tov says that that really is why we're here in this world. We're here to create ourselves. We're here to create ourselves. God said, I can't do it for you. You've got to become a human being through your own work. The Goan of Vilna, one of the greatest minds that we had about 300 years ago, wrote a little tiny book called the Evan Shlema. It's not well known. But it's a book about the basics of Judaism. And the Vilna Goan and many other sages say the same thing. He writes in the book in the first chapter that the main purpose of our life is to constantly work at improving our character traits and to overcome our negative traits. He says that's the main reason we're put into this world. And he says anyone who does not work on perfecting their character traits is wasting their life. So again, from this perspective, the entire Torah, everything in the Torah is there to help us perfect our character traits. And I'm going to conclude by making one final observation tonight.  I've described tonight a lot about the individual getting close to God, the individual working on their character traits. But the Torah has an agenda that goes beyond this. The Torah is also focused on the perfection of world. The Torah is concerned with the ultimate perfection of the entire world, not just the individual but society. A huge focus of Judaism seeks, a huge focus, seeks not only to connect the individual Jew with God, but that ultimately the entire world should come to God. For example, in our prayers, every prayer service in the Jewish prayer book ends with the 14th chapter in the book of Zechariah. Every Jewish prayer service ends with a prayer called Alaynu. And Alaynu ends with this prophecy that one day by Yom HaHub, and that day God will be one and his name will be one. Rashi explains something interesting. We say at least twice a day, Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ahad. It's a very, very well known passage in the Bible, very misunderstood. When you try to parse the words, it's a little bit goofy. Shema Yisrael, listen Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, the Lord is our God, Adonai Ahad, the Lord is one. It has the name of God three times in a row. I mean, if I was the editor, I would have just said Shema Yisrael Adonai Ahad. Listen Israel, God is one. What's this Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Ahad? It's a little bit awkward. And Rashi explains that really there's a word there that's sort of to be understood. And that's the word ye will be. The way Rashi reads the Shema is Shema Yisrael, listen Jews. Right now, Adonai Eloheinu, the Lord is our God. Ultimately, God will be one. As the prophet Zachariah says, in that day God will be one and his name will be one. And this messianic vision of a perfected world extends not only to connecting every human being to God, but it extends to the ethical realm as well. That all of humanity will come to live together in peace with each other. That is the great messianic vision of Judaism. And to a great extent, that's one of the major themes, meta-themes, that drives all of Judaism. That we're here, each individual, to perfect themselves. And the Torah system of laws is here to help each of us connect to God, to connect to ourselves, to become who we could be. But the Torah was also given to the Jewish people. The Torah says we're to be a goi kadosh, a holy nation. Not simply holy individuals who are living their own private life unconcerned with the world. The Torah was given to a nation. And so we as a Jewish people have a role to perfect not just ourselves as individuals, but to ultimately perfect the entire world. God willing, it'll happen soon in our days.


Hey guys, welcome back to another week of what's for dinner My name is Andrea with food inventory adventures in food and in my household There's me my husband and our one-year-old little boy this week We are kicking off another week of what's for dinner with a new recipe. It is tortellini carbonara So in my skillet here, I have some bacon that I have fried up and to it I am adding some heavy whipping cream And this is gonna be so good So traditionally in a carbonara, it has the raw egg that you toss with pasta This does not have any egg in it at all. So I guess it's not really a carbonara, but it sounds really good So I've got my heavy whipping cream in there. I'm gonna add some parsley and Some grated Parmesan Gonna give that a stir and I've already prepared my tortellini and it is this from This package from Aldi and it was a dollar 19, which is a steel so I'm gonna let this melt down just a little bit Okay, so the cheese has melted and now I'm just going to add my tortellini that I've already prepared And I'm just going to let this warm all the way through So here it is and Howard and I tried it and it is so good I mean really how could anything with bacon and cheese be bad? This is delicious I will definitely be making this again and with it. We are just having a side of Garlic bread and this is from Tom thumb. I already threw away the box But it's their brand and we buy it all the time It's so good and then we are having a chopped Caesar salad kit with it And it is from Aldi here. It is in the bowl and then this is it and we really like these a lot as well So anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we'll see you guys next time Hey guys, so for dinner tonight I took the easy route and I grabbed some stuff from our freezer that we needed to use up anyway So we are having these fish sticks from Trader Joe's I popped them into my air fryer and then we are also having this mac and cheese from Trader Joe's This is probably my favorite frozen mac and cheese of all time and This box has two servings in it So Howard and I are splitting it and then I also made some frozen corn the frozen corn is from Sam's And it is members mark version It's the kind that comes in the big bag and it has about six bags I think a frozen corn you can pop them in the microwave and steam them Which is what I did or you can cook it on the stove top So this is my second time making this corn the first time I did make it on the stove top this time I did steam it and to me it's not my favorite corn because it's not very sweet So I probably would not buy this again, but anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight And we'll see you guys next time Hey guys, so for dinner tonight I am making some roasted chicken and homemade mashed potatoes and I thought I would pop on really quickly and show you How I make my mashed potatoes so in my pot. I have two pounds of Potatoes that I cubed and I boiled and heavily salted water and then to that I am adding one cup of warm heavy whipping cream. I just warmed it up in the microwave And then I'm also going to add in a half a stick of unsalted butter That's also softened in that room temperature and then I am just going to mash away All right guys, and that's it. That's all there is to it now If you want you can add in some pepper, but Howard's not a big black pepper fan So I probably won't add that in if you want to add in additional salt you can but again Like I said, I heavily salted my potato water So I don't need any of that so let me get everything plated up And I will show you our plates So I have pulled the chicken out of the oven. These are two humongous Lay quarters and I just roasted them and so here they are and then with it We are having these creamed green beans that I picked up from Trader Joe's and let me grab the box here is What the box looks like Howard and I just tried them and they're really not that great I mean, I could have skipped these They are cheesy, but there's not much flavor not much to them at all And then of course here are the mashed potatoes that I made as well So one thing I think I may have forgotten to mention when I was making the mashed potatoes is that you do want to make sure that your Butter is at room temperature and that your whipping cream is Warm as well because when you use cold ingredients on these warm potatoes They can seize up and when your ingredients are warm that makes the potatoes nice and fluffy So anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we'll see you guys next time Hey guys, so for dinner tonight I decided to use up some stuff for my pantry and I had this in my pantry. It's new to us We haven't tried it before you can make it with sausage Chicken or seafood and I had a big bag of shrimp in my freezer that I needed to use So that is what we're using and so I am serving it with a scoop of jasmine rice on top and some Green onions Howard and I tried it and we're not crazy about it. It's okay. It has a really Strong seafood taste and it's not from the shrimp. I think it's from the from the roux I probably wouldn't purchase it again, but again, I'm just using up stuff in my pantry So this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we'll see you guys next time Hey guys, so for dinner tonight, I'm making chicken cordon bleu pot pie This is a recipe that I made up Howard and I aren't big fans of the Traditional pot pies with the peas in the carrots because we don't like peas and carrots So I came up with this recipe So let me show you what you're going to need you are going to need some chicken some broccoli some ham potatoes Swiss cheese and Some Alfredo sauce now. I happen to have the basil Alfredo sauce in my pantry Plain works just fine So let's get started Okay, so in my bowl, I'm adding my chicken and Broccoli now broccoli is not part of the traditional dish But I like it so I can add some bulk to the pot pie traditionally chicken cordon bleu is a chicken breast with ham and Swiss cheese so but I'm gonna add some broccoli and Like I said, this is a recipe that I made up So I will Add the recipe in the description box and I'm gonna add my ham the ham I had left over from Thanksgiving and I just pan fried it to brown it up and get rid of some of the moisture in it and Going to add in my Swiss cheese and this is grated Swiss cheese and Then I'm going to add in a potato. I just have one medium potato here Like I said potatoes aren't traditional to this, but I just like it for the bulk And Going to add my Alfredo sauce. I Don't add any additional salt to this because there's enough in the ham and the Alfredo sauce and that's enough for us All right guys, so now I'm going to put the filling into the pie crust So I did par bake my bottom pie crust. I am using this pie crust from Aldi I've never used it before typically I stick with Pillsbury, but someone told me this is really good So I'm going to give it a try so I par baked it for about 15 minutes and now I'm going to add in the filling All right, so I'm going to pop this in the oven for about an hour an hour 25 minutes whenever it's golden brown and of course I will bring you guys back when it's finished So here is the pot pie it ended up baking this for about an hour in 10 minutes Let it cool for about 15 minutes and I cut out a slice so that you could see the inside So here it is and here is a piece on the plate I will say I did try the pie crust and I definitely prefer the Pillsbury pie crust To me the Pillsbury pie crust is a little bit flakier Has a little bit of a sweeter kind of taste to it. This was okay I don't think I'd buy it again. I don't think So anyway, this is what we are having for dinner tonight and we'll see you guys next time


Hi, everyone. You didn't have to say hi. I just assumed you are welcoming. Okay, so I have a lot of material here and a very short time to go over it, so pardon me if I'm moving extremely quickly. So I'm Alison Parrish. I am a poet, computer programmer, and artist, and my talk is called Lossy Text Compression for some reason. So I am 34 years old and I've been a computer programmer forever, but until recently I didn't understand JPEG compression. Then one day I was reading over the Wikipedia page and I realized, wait, I have somehow learned through osmosis enough about trigonometry and linear algebra that actually most of this makes sense without me really trying just a factor of me being 34 years old and being in computer programming for a long time. And all I could think was, oh my god, that is so clever and really, really, really cool. And a few hours after that I tweeted this, everything is different now that I know a text is nothing but a waveform in high-dimensional semantic space I can see through time. So I want to show you some of the experiments that led me to this conclusion. So first I have to explain a little bit about JPEG compression, or at least what I think is the really interesting part of JPEG compression. This is a graph of a list of 25 values randomly generated with a random walk. To represent these values we need to keep track of 25 floating point numbers, right? The goal of data compression, of course, is to represent the same list of values as precisely as possible using fewer values. The tricky way to do this is to use something called the discrete cosine transform. I think there's going to be a better talk about this later today. So if my explanation doesn't make sense, you'll have a second chance. The key inside of discrete cosine transform is that any list of values can be represented instead as the sum of a series of cosine functions at different frequencies. The DCT for a given list of values has the same number of values as the original list. Here's a graph of the DCT vector for the original list of values that I just showed you. It shows the coefficient for the cosine functions at each frequency. Stick with me here, people. Here's a graph of the actual waveforms of their corresponding frequencies. If you were to sum the values of all the waveforms together, you'd get the original graph. I have a little animation here that should be happening. Yeah, so there's... The original values are successfully adding together the values of the waveform, starting with the lowest frequency cosines. The red line is the original list of values, the light gray lines are the coefficients, and the black line is the approximation. As you can see, as you add in more coefficients, the approximation gets more accurate. The trick of using DCT to compress data is that the lower frequency components usually carry more information than the higher frequency ones. So if you look at the approximation of the data, this is just with the first 10 coefficients, you can see it's pretty much the same thing. It's really close to the original values, but only using 10 numbers instead of 25. So as long as you're okay with being a little bit inaccurate, you can represent the original 25 values by just storing a few values from the start of the DCT. This is what is meant by lossy compression. JPEG compression uses DCTs too, except it uses a two-dimensional cosine function. This is a little animation that I stole from Wikipedia. If you perform a DCT on an 8x8 matrix of pixels, you can throw away most of the resulting vector and still be able to reconstruct a reasonable facsimile of the image. You can increase the compression without losing a lot of fidelity just by throwing away the higher frequency coefficients. This is really cool. So because I am a poet when I finally understood how this part of JPEG compression works, I thought to myself, I will apply this procedure to text and see what strange things result. But the question arises, how do I convert a text into a vector? There are a number of ways, and the first thing that I tried was the simplest thing I could think of. Let's just convert each letter to the number corresponding to its position in the alphabet. So here's the source text that I'm going to use for the rest of this talk. It's the first three verses of Genesis from the King James Version of the Bible. I normalized it to remove punctuation and convert all letters to lower case. The Python function there converts that text to a series of numbers between 0 and 26. The 0 represents a space. In other words, a series of numerical values, which I've graphed here. I performed the DCT on that series of values, and we discovered that the first three verses of Genesis can be represented as the sum of these cosine functions, which is pretty cool. This is actually just the first 30 cosine functions. This is all 192, if you were curious. So let's write some poetry. Now that I have some texts as a series of numbers, and I have the DCT of that series, I can compress the text in a lossy way and attempt to approximate the original with only a subset of the coefficients from the DCT. I'll use this function to convert the numbers in the inverted DCT back into texts, reconstructing, approximating the text. Here's what it looks like. That's a little small on this slide. I'm graphing the values from the source text in red with the values in the inverse DCT in black with the difference between the two, graphed in light gray. The original texts in the transcribed approximation are beneath the graph. This graph shows what it looks like when you're using all 192 coefficients. So as you'd expect, it reproduces it with 100% fidelity. Now here's what it looks like with the first four coefficients missing. So this is a 2% compression ratio. The approximated text is still recognizable, but it's pretty messed up. And here's 50% compression. The text is now pretty much unrecognizable. They could still track some of the similarities, if you look closely enough. This is an excellent poem to read out loud, by the way, if you'll indulge me. What was the first chapter of the Bible is now the first chapter of the Necronomicon. By the time we're down to just the four lowest frequency coefficients, all we have left is a long high-pitched laugh. Here's a little animation that shows all of the intermediary steps, which took me a long time to do in NumPy, so I hope you enjoy it. So that was a lot of fun, but I'm not done. There are more ways to convert a text into a vector. The previous example was about how words are written. Another experiment would be to compress not the bytes of the letters themselves, but the meaning of the underlying words. So to do that, we need to have some way to represent the meaning of words with a vector. In natural language processing, the word for this, for a word represented as a vector, is a word embedding. I'm experimenting with word-to-vec word embeddings, which were created by some Google researchers. This is what a vector for a word looks like in word-to-vec. It has 300 dimensions. This is the word light. One of the interesting consequences of how word-to-vec vectors work is that words that have similar meanings are close to each other in terms of Euclidean distance in the vector space. So this code shows that the vectors for two related words like dog and puppy are closer than the vectors for two unrelated words like apocas and mastodon. If you build a quad tree or a KD tree, you can fairly efficiently find words that are similar to a given word. Like you see here, the words for the vectors closest to the vector for light are light, sunlight, lights, glow, glare, lightening, or lighting. You can also use this technique to find the word closest to an arbitrary point in vector space, which is important for what I'm about to show you. So here's how I'm going to lossily compress the meaning of the text. I'm going to create a list of the word-to-vec vectors for each word in the source text, still the first chapter of Genesis, which gives me a 39 by 300 vector. This function converts that vector back into words by finding the words in the word-to-vec vector space closest to the given vectors. With the unmodified vector, as you can see here, it just returns the original source text. So now what I'm going to do, this is the fun part, I'm going to find the DCT of that list of word-to-vec vectors. DCT works just as well on data with 300 dimensions, as it does on data with one or two dimensions. Hopefully you can see where I'm going with this. So then I can approximate the meaning of the original source text using only the first few coefficients of the word-to-vec DCT. It turns out that with this particular source text, you can leave out about 80% of the coefficients before the approximated text is different from the source text. So here's an example at about 91% compression, only 27 of the 300 coefficients are present here. As you can see, the text is weird. It says, against the start, got out, numbers, the Godot, plat, the earth, plat, the earth was without form, plat void, plat darkness was perma-ban, the face of the improvement, plat, the spirit of God ported perma-ban, the face of the deceased. So it's still basically the same text, but the words have been strangely replaced with words that are related in meaning or distribution. If you only use one of the coefficients to reconstruct the text, compressing its meaning by 99%, the first verse of Genesis is just diary and measuring, diary, measuring, diary, measuring, which is actually a really poetic summary of the first chapter of the Bible. Here's another animation that shows the whole process. This graph is showing the Euclidean distance between the reconstructed vector and the original, which also took me, this took less time because I learned how to do it the first time. So in the description of this talk, I promised to talk about the practical implications of all this. And the truth is that I don't really know enough to suggest how it might be useful, but the fact that the meaning of the approximated vectors is pretty close to the meaning of the originals, that means to me that maybe you could use this in low memory environments where you don't really care about the original tokens of the text, but you still want to use word embeddings. You can reduce the dimensionality there. It also strikes me that if you had different word embeddings and maybe you found a different way to perform this process, you could use this for actual text summarization, you could feed in a text, compress it, and the stuff that's left is basically what the text means. As a poet, my eyes have been open to the possibilities of text as a waveform, so I'm interested in doing more experiments with that. What happens when you put a low pass filter on this or add reverb or delay or put autotune on a text? What would that even mean in this context? That's all I have. Thank you.


Assistant Professor Civil Engineering Department, Dubloy T. Solapur, I am here to discuss with you on topic setting time test on cement and ice specifications. Learning outcomes of today's session, at the end of this session students will be able to describe codal specifications for initial and final setting time test on cement. They will be able to perform initial and final setting time test on cement in laboratory. In actual construction with cement products, which are cement products, cement paste, mortar and concrete, these are the cement products and certain time is required for mixing, transporting, placing, compacting and finishing of the cement products. After addition of water, some time is required for these particular activities. So during this time, these cement products which should be in plastic condition, they should remain in plastic condition and this time interval for which cement products remain in plastic condition is known as initial setting time. So that working of this particular paste or mortar or concrete is possible. Then what is final setting time? Once the concrete is placed in final position, it is compacted, finished, then it should lose its plasticity and this should be possible or this should become at the earliest possible time which will lead to least vulnerability of this particular concrete or this product to external destructive agencies. So this time interval is known as final setting time of cement. Now IS4031 part 5, 1988, this particular IS code is devoted for setting time test on cement and setting time test on cement is performed using Vicats apartus. Now this particular code specifies or gives criteria for exact determination of initial and final setting time. So what is initial setting time? Initial setting time of concrete is the time period between addition of water to cement till the time at 1 mm square section needle penetrate to a 0.5 to 7 mm from the bottom of the Vicat mould. So this particular initial setting time needle which is devised by Vicat is having 1 mm square section and this particular needle should penetrate in the mould of cement paste and this penetration should be between 5 to 7 mm from bottom of the mould. Now what is final setting time? Final setting time is that time period between the time water is added to cement and the time at which this 1 mm square section needle makes an impression on the paste in the mould but the attachment does not make any impression. Now see for final setting time different needle is there in which there is a pointed part, but there is annular attachment to this needle. The point the final setting time will be that time at which this needle will be able to make impression on the paste but the attachment will fail to do so. So that is taken as final setting time of that particular cement. Now specifications are given by IS<PHONE_NUMBER>9 for different grades of cement for example for OPC these all three codes give setting time for all the three grades of cement as initial setting time not less than 30 minutes and final setting time not more than 600 minutes. Why initial setting time not less than 30 minutes? Because if quick setting is there it will not be possible to work with this particular cement and sufficient time should be available for workers to place the cement at position and final setting time so as to avoid damage or destruction of concrete if the setting prolongs beyond 600 minutes that means 10 hours. So this is maximum limit. Now let us see the procedure of setting time test. Objective to find initial and final setting time of cement. Apartus used Vicats, Apartus with initial setting time and final setting time needles. Here you can see Vicats Apartus here there is mold these are different needles initial setting time needle final setting time needle this is plunger required for consistency test this is glass plate. Now this particular test shall be conducted at a temperature of 27 plus or minus 2 degree centigrade and the relative humidity of the laboratory should be 65 plus or minus 5 percent. Now let us see step by step procedure. So first step is taking 400 gram of cement weighing accurately on a balance then addition of 0.85 p of water by weight of cement where p is standard consistency of the cement paste. The mixing time should not be less than 3 minutes and not more than 5 minutes. So mixing time is also fixed it should not be less than 3 minutes and not more than 5 minutes. This particular mixture is filled in the Vicat mold now and which is this mold is kept on non porous glass plate. Now this mold is shaken in order to expel any air if is present there so that the cement paste will be wireless and the trouble should be used for gauging this particular cement. Now for initial setting time test what is done the needle of initial setting time whose cross section is 1 mm square is fitted here in the Vicat separters. And now it is brought in contact with the surface of the mold and released quickly. Now once it is released initially this particular needle will penetrate completely remember because cement is wet. But as time passes cement will harden its setting will start and what will happen the penetration of the needle will not be complete. So when this penetration is between 5 to 7 mm from bottom that particular time is noted down the penetration of the needle when 5 to 7 mm from the bottom of the mold is there. That particular time is recorded and the time from addition of water to cement to this particular moment is reported as initial setting time of that particular cement. And this initial setting time should not be less than 30 minutes remember minimum setting time of cement should be 30 minutes. Now let us say final setting time test for determining final setting time test what is done this needle is replaced now replaced with final setting time needle. And this particular needle is having pointed needle in between at the center and annular attachment around it. Now when this particular cement will be called cement paste will be called to be finally set when the needle is needle makes some impression on the paste but the annular attachment fails to do so. So that particular moment is picked up and it is reported as final setting time of cement adding time is measured from addition of water to cement to this particular moment. And remember the final setting time should not be more than 600 minutes that means 10 hours. So there is maximum limit on final setting time this should be noted down. Now here are few revue questions friends solve them as specified by IS 4031 part 5 setting for setting time test on cement amount of water to be added in cement is equal to you have to pick up the correct answer. And second question is according to specifications by IS 269 1989 initial setting time of OPC should not be less than dash minutes and final setting time not more than dash minutes. So solve these two questions write your answers we will pause a while here. Here are the answers answer of question number 1 correct option is B 0.85 P is the correct answer and answer of second question is C option number C 30 minutes and 600 minutes. So initial setting time should not be less than 30 minutes and final setting time should not be more than 600 minutes these are the correct answers. Now here are here is a list of IS code which are used for different tests on cement. So these IS codes are used for different tests on cement here you can see part 5 is used for setting time test. Now these are the IS codes which give specifications of different tests on cement. So these three IS codes are meant for three different grades of cement. These are the references for today's session. Thank you.


Hei, tunggu, tunggu. Hei, mula lagi. Saya ingat skrip saya. Jadi, sejak saya telah melakukannya, sebab saya telah melakukannya, saya sebenarnya... saya melakukannya di rumah untuk 2 tahun untuk melakukannya. Jadi, ini adalah kali pertama saya menunjukkan kepada publik. Saya telah menunjukkan kepada Sao Xiong 1 tahun lalu, tetapi dia tidak sangat menikmati. Dia berkata, saya perlu melakukannya untuk melakukannya. Tidak, tidak. Ini adalah pengalaman finansial. Okey. Apa pun. Jadi, ini adalah publik. Okey, saya akan melakukannya... keadaan CPF, keadaan transaksi dan... keadaan OCBC. Okey. Sebelum itu, semuanya akan melakukannya. Jadi, ini adalah sesuatu yang saya telah melakukannya untuk melakukannya. Untuk melakukannya, saya akan melakukannya dengan... pengalaman finansial. Okey, jadi ini adalah... adalah sebuah penjara. Ini adalah penjara untuk CLI. Baiklah. Bagaimana anda akan mempunyai penjara untuk... beberapa perkara lain? Seperti kota, bukan? Jadi, ini sebenarnya ada... sebuah syintaks yang menghargai. Okey. Okey, jadi ini adalah sebuah jenis yang sudah terbuka. Jadi, ini adalah sebuah jen kodi. Okey, jadi, ada dua alasan untuk edited ini. Ada... yakin, coba-lah... pilihan ekonomi yang mendorong. Saya bermakna, pilihan pilihan pilihan kota. Dan ada pilihan pilihan kemas. Jadi, dengan pilihan pilihan... ada sebuah tulang yang terhubung. Jadi, ini adalah seperti... setiap bulan, anda dapat sebenarnya melihat... pengalaman untuk itu. Pilihan penjara anda. Dan... you know... perzulat kemalaman tanpa kemalaman... adalah profit dan anda boleh mencari net worth dan overall cash minus debt. Okey, jadi ini adalah data yang benar-benar. Just in case anyone is wondering. I didn't get like 18 million in October out of nowhere. I estimated that like a lottery, like a windfall, right? So yeah, you can actually move between your years easily. Like this is 2019 as obviously no data yet. So this gets to December, right? Hey, you can also drill down for example in. Yeah, I want to see, right? Like why from September to October? There's an income increase of 18 million. So essentially, okay, there's an 18 million gift to my account in October. So you can actually drill down. So I think you were complaining about ledger CLI. Like hard to remember the syntax, right? So I had the same problem. Like I love ledger CLI. So everything here is ledger CLI. But I have a, I find very irritating to have to like type, you know? Because like git, I'm okay, you know typing. But somehow with ledger, you need like a long, long time to get used to it. But so I made this, we react. So this whole thing is react. Okay, what's next? Okay, you can also drill down on like say other things like expenses. But I'm not going to do that since it's quite obvious. You can also drill down on like accounts, right? Like asset minus liabilities equals net worth, right? So, yeah. So all of this, right? There's no database here. So all of this is past like real time, right? So for example, yeah, I'll get to that. Okay, but let me just show something else. Okay, so another aspect is you can actually do multi commodity, right? So for example in, you know, just click this. So your network maybe, you know, 200,000 in cash, 5 in Apple shares and some other things like bought at different times, which means it has actually different values. And it couldn't even have it in like any commodity like ships.  The price is like, okay, one ship 1080 and I have two ships. So anyway, if you come back to this, it actually translate back to $6 or US dollar. It doesn't really bother what dollar it is, but this is $6. There's actually USD as well. Okay, that's also the date scoper. You can actually, like for example, this is like my, okay, this is not a good thing. Like for example, income, right? So this is the income for me, but if I want to know like my 2018 income, we just click on year and it shows me the 2018 income. So this is like, I was saying, like it's real, it's real time. So I can actually go anywhere here. We'll do it at the bottom, but I can actually, okay, come here home. Say if I, you know, somehow I got some other windfall in May of 2018, right? I can actually just...  I haven't even imported. Oh, it's fine. Okay, 2018, December 25. So I just want to show you this very quickly. Assets, savings. Okay, so this is a ledger c-tax, right? But typically you won't want to do this. Okay, so I got another million, right? Income gift in, sorry, in probably better for May. So, see the moment I save it, right? There's this, they actually share the same reduct state. You know, you use reduct, right? So this is a reduct state, that is a reduct state. Okay, I mean, that is a different, how do you call that? Like the view of, you know, that actually eats from the same reduct state. Okay, so now I'm going to import. So like I was mentioning in the title of the present, the demo. Okay, so you can actually import OCBC sample. It's not as easy as you think, right? Like, okay, it actually does all of this already. If you see, it's not as, it's not a CSV file, but OCBC sample. I mean, it's a CSV file but it's a little bit unique. Okay, anyway, probably better with this. Ya, so, ya, you see, it's not like CSV, right? There's a lot of like, you know, stuff like this. And there's like stuff like actually two line. So you can't really use a CSV processor. But anyway, I'll talk about how I do it later. But here, you can actually change commodity. It actually recognizes your, your sheep and all that. Okay, and you can actually change the accounts that it, that you can assign to. So now I confirm, it goes here. The moment I say, right, realize that like, you see, all of the other, you know, it changes as well. Okay? So, if I try to import again, right? You see here, there's actually this hash here. Okay? So when I import again, right, it actually uses the hash to make sure that there's no duplicate. So, it will suggest to you not to include it, right? So, ya. So it works with the CPF PDF file as well. Yeah, so every is NPM here. So I didn't like have a lot of, so I use a lot of NPM. Like, ya, just to do this. But the PDF, if they change the schema, then the whole thing will break, right? Ah, yes. Ya. All right. If like, Ya, there's a third party NPM package that I use. Ya, there's a third party NPM package that I use. I can't remember what package already. So, even the OCBC one has like some form of NPM. Ya, there's like some parsing involved as well. It's not just a CSV common, common, I think. It's like actually proper parsing. Okay. Okay, I have, I have the the source. Okay, there's a keyf importer as well. I can import keyf as well. Keyf or chief, okay. So, ya, I have one minute left. Okay. Okay, so interest of time. This is the keyf thing. So, there's a, I actually made it easy for anyone who wants to create their own importer, right? There's a, I've documented it here. So, like the features are here as well. There's a website that you can go to. Ya. So, you can actually click on documentation and download it here. So, all these features are documented here and how to create all extensions is actually here. So, there's like pre-made packages on GitHub, I mean, on NPM that you can just require and then you can just start.  And it actually shows you how to actually get your, what I call extension, right? All of these are extensions into this file. Okay, I have 23 questions. Sorry. Is it open source? The part, the parsing, the, what's that called? The extension and all that is open source. The OCBC parser and the CPF parser is not yet open source because it's like super messy yet, but the PDF parsing part is open source. Can you kind of let us still it or put it on the website or something? Ya, ya. So, it's actually on this website. Because I would love love to use OCBC thing. Ah, okay. Ya, everything here is on here. It's just that some are still in binary and actually, sorry. Some are still in binary, but the source code is actually here. github.com slash pudenmi. Ah, okay. So, you want to build it as a product that people will... It's my side project. So, I plan to make it like sublime text like that. Ya, so, maybe not totally open source. Mostly because there's a lot of effort already and it's like super messy still yet, but ya, I don't know what's the plan yet. I don't want to say it honestly, but... Donate me. Ya, donate me. Okay. Ya, because then people will feel like better because it will be open source and they will say give you money. Ya, ya, ya. Ya. Because it's super useful. Ya. It's super useful for practical situations. Ya. One thing that I did, actually a few months ago, I actually sent this to the author of Fish Ledger, Simon Michael. And he really liked it as well. And he actually encouraged me to open source it as well. So, ya, I'll think about it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.


Hello friends, let's talk about differently-abled. I'm Jo, your friendly neighborhood, amputee and disabled person. And every once in a while, people will throw around this phrase differently-abled instead of disabled because we shouldn't say disabled because isn't that kind of bad? No, false, good try though. Honestly, differently-abled kind of makes me want a low key throw up because it's so patronizing. Being disabled is not a bad thing. I am a person with a disability. I'm missing a leg. I can't walk without metal parts and pieces strapped onto me. And that's alright. Saying that I'm differently-abled as if I am not missing a leg, as if this is not a reality carries the implication that being disabled is bad in some way. People with disabilities are aware that they are disabled. We don't need any patronizing terms made up. We try to make us feel better about it.


And I'm gonna try something I've never tried before. I'm gonna use my Instapot and I'm gonna make a Boston butt. Let's do it. We're gonna remove our strings so now we can lay it out and get more surface area. Grab your big bottle of Dano's original. That's the green top. And we're gonna sprinkle generously. Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop. Throw it in. Don't forget about the Dano's left behind. Throw that in. Last thing, we're gonna add about a cup of pork stock. You know it's really not pork stock but I would like to know why don't they make it? So it cooked for two and it's set for one. Ooh, yep. We did good. It's hard to grab because it's just falling apart. Let's see what this really tastes like using just Dano's and a little bit of broth. I'd say it could probably use a little bit more salt but other than that, there's all kinds of flavor going on. There's already salt in the pork. You could add more salt to it if you want. It really doesn't need it. It tastes great. There you have it folks. Some really easy, simple pulled pork. Now make sure you hit that follow button and see what we do with the next.


The Inter-Party Advisory Council, IPAC, has raised alert over alleged email state governments in position of 55 million Naira on opposition political parties and their candidates before carrying out any political campaigns in the state. Speaking in Norway, IPAC chairman Anthony Achaneko says there is nowhere in the world where a government in power imposes such heavy tax on opposition political parties and their candidates before allowing them to campaign. Anthony says if the government continues with the taxation plan, all the opposition parties will have no other choice than to approach the court. This is what they call the permit fee. Look at it here, look at it, look at the figure, the figure is 54 million Naira plus other sundry charges plus other sundry charges and again lastly they said that they reserve after paying all these 54.7 million that the agency reserve their rights to ask you to do or not. Very obnoxious. We haven't seen this kind of thing before. It has never existed anywhere in email states. It has never existed anywhere in email states since 1999 at least we know and we ran a election in 2019 and we knew what happened. Even those who contested for presidency presidential election in email state did not pay as much as 54 million Naira. With all these strategies that government is coming up with in the name of policy in making sure that our voices are not heard will be completely resisted. In as much as the electoral act as amended in 2022 and the provisional in the INEC guideline do not bar us from making proper advertisement, selling our candidates, propounding and propagating our ideas and making sure that people buy into our views and ideas and making sure that we'll be able to realize the changes that people are yearning for. We will not be cowed, we will not hesitate to challenge that incompetent provisional in a competent court that has jurisdiction to protect some of these matters. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


The DOJ and the EU looking at calls to break up Google. Do they work together? I think that there's a lot going on here. There's a lot of moving pieces. Number one, the ad market is not what it was 10 years ago. And I think if this kind of decision was being talked about 10 years ago, then this would be a different conversation. Google is in a position where they probably desperately want to protect the fact that they have this kind of system because the goose that laid the golden egg in terms of Internet advertising dollars does not lay at the frequency that it once did. And so that increases their ability to want to make sure that it keeps going on forever. Maybe they do spin it off and they have a preferential relationship with it. I would say the thing to look for is whether or not politicians look at this as a cause du jour to start ringing the bell. This should happen sooner rather than later.


PBX1 and PBX2 are two proteins that are present in all vertebrate embryos but have different functions depending on their location. In some cases, they work together to control the expression of genes involved in the development of specific body parts such as the hindlimb. They also interact with another protein called hand2, which helps them target certain areas of the embryo. This allows them to direct the formation of the hindlimb in a way that is unique from other body parts. This article was authored by Marta Losa, Iros Barossi, Marco Osterwalder, and others.


Hello everyone today we are going to discuss on the topic foundations of business intelligence. Let us see learning outcome at the end of the session students will be able to describe the capabilities and value of database management system. Capabilities of database management system discusses the three main capabilities of a database management system. Its data definition capability, data dictionary and data manipulation language. To describe what characteristics of data would be stored by a data dictionary that is for example name, description, size, type, format, other properties of the field. If you say for large company a data dictionary might also store characteristics such as usage, ownership, authorization, security and users. Here we discuss about data manipulation language it is the tool that request operation such as select, join to be performed on the data. If the user wants to data from the database so they have to perform select operations and join operations which retrieve a data from the database. Here we see the example of an structure query language that is SQL query. There are two relations one is part and another is supplier. Here relation means table and in SQL language we say it is relation. So there are two relations one is part and another is supplier. So part and supplier these two relations we required for retrieving a data from the database. So in the part relations the fields are part number then part name then unit price and supplier number. In the supplier table supplier number supplier name supplier street supplier city supplier state and supplier zip. Continuing of the same example of an SQL query this relation shows an example SQL statement that would be used to retrieve data from a database. In this case the SQL statement is retrieving records from the part table whose part number is either 137 or 150. So we have to relate what each phrase of this statement is doing. For example the statement says to take the columns as a part number part name supplier number supplier name from the two tables part and supplier. When the conditions are true the records will be retrieved from these two tables. Then database approach to data management this describes activities involved in describing a databases. To create an efficient database you must know what the relationships are among the various data elements. The types of data that will be stored and how the organization will need to manage the data. Here we should note that the conceptual database design is concerned with how the data elements will be grouped. What data in what tables will make the most efficient organizations. That is very very important in this database approach to data management. Where the users store the data into the databases and user performs using some select operations and join operations to retrieve and combine the data from the two tables. Here first we see the unnormalized relation in order. While the data are in the database tables when the data are involved in the database table the data are all in unnormalized relation. So in this diagram it describes the activities involved in designing a database. To create an efficient database we must know what the relationships are among the various data elements. The types of data that will be stored and how the organization will need to manage the data. Here we should note the conceptual database design is concerned with how the data elements will be grouped. What data in what tables will make the most efficient organization. So normalized tables we have created from the order database. So this shows the normalized tables. Here the order table has been broken down into four smaller related tables. Notice that the order table contains only two unique attributes order number and order rate. The multiple atoms ordered are stored using the line atom table. The normalization means the very little data has to be duplicated when creating orders. Most of the information can be retrieved by using keys to the part and separatables. It is important to note that the relation database systems try to enforce referential integrity rules to ensure that relationship between coupled tables remains consistent. When one table has a foreign key that points to another table you may not add a record to the table. Here we considering is a primary key and foreign key. Primary key shows a unique values in the column and foreign key shows the the record which is the column which is existing in the other table and which also shows the unique values from the two tables. The tables with the foreign key unless there is a corresponding record in the linked table. For example, foreign key supply number links the part table to the supplier table. Referential integrity means that a new part cannot be added to the part table without a valid supplier number existing in the supplier table. It also means that if a supplier is deleted any corresponding parts must be deleted also. Now we go for relational database. This relational database system is the relational database management system which manages a data in the databases. In the discussion about designing the databases one technique database designers use in modeling the structure of the data is to use an entity relationship diagram that is called as the ER diagram. The symbols on the diagram illustrate the types of relationship between entities and we have to discuss the types of relationship there are between entities that is one to one, one to many and many to many. So in this diagram there are four figures. Figure A contains one to one diagram, four figure B contains one to many diagrams, many to one diagrams and many to many diagrams. Then entity relationship diagram shows an example of an example of ER which shows that order can contain many line atoms. A part can be ordered many times and appear many times as a line atom in a single order. Each line atom can contain only one part. Each part can have only one supplier but many parts can be provided by the same supplier in this diagram. After discussing so many things so there is a question based on whatever we have discussed up till now. The question is what different types of relationships there are between entities? The answer one to one, one to many and many to many. Now we go for business intelligence. This discusses the role of business intelligence in helping firms make better decisions. This uses the example of Harage Entertainment. For instance the Harage Entertainment the second largest gambling company in its industry continually analyzes data about its customers gathered when people play its slot machines or users or use Harage Cassins and hotels. Harage marketing department uses this information to build a detailed gambling profile based on a particular customer's ongoing value to the company. The information guides management decisions about how to cultivate the most profitable customers, encourage those customers to spend more and attract more customers with high revenue generating potential. Business intelligence has improved Harage profits so much that it has become the centerpiece of the firm's business strategy. So this diagram illustrates the process of transforming data into business intelligence. The business intelligence tools do not necessarily find clear cut answers but can find patterns and relationships in data that can greatly improve business decisions and offer insight into the business environment. In this diagram it shows as database, data warehouse and business intelligence diagram where the informations are processed from the database to the data warehouse and the people take the decisions properly in their business environment. Based on this discussion there is a question, what are the types of information obtainable from data mining? The answer is associations, sequences, classification and clustering and forecasting. So there are 5 types of information obtainable from data mining where we use these data mining tools in the business intelligence. For all these contents these are the references. Thank you.


and Four of Wines. What are those? Find out in this video. Oh, welcome back to Exotic Wine Travel. I am your host, Matthew Horkey, coming to you live, actually not live, but coming to you from the Villa Familia in Austria, Croatia. We're staying here for a little while during this lockdown phase, lockdown part of the world, and we're going to be shooting a couple of videos from this location. That's why you show a little highlight clip in the beginning. But the topic of this video is Amphora wines. What is that? What is an Amphora? Well, Amphora is a clay vessel, a terracotta vessel that was traditionally used by the, I mean, Chinese were using them, but also the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans to transport wine all across the Mediterranean. But the production of wines in Amphora can be traced back to Georgia, in the Caucasus region, to a lesser extent, Armenia, neighboring Armenia. In Georgia, they call them Quaveri. In Armenia, they call them Caras. So what happens? Traditionally, the best known Amphora wines are orange wines or amber wines. That's the style that originated in Georgia. That's a white wine. White wine grapes made like a red wine. Basically, they throw the skin, this pulp, and the stems in the Amphora, in the Georgian Quaveri, where it ferments, mass rates, has this golden amber-light color. This may be traced back 6,000, even 8,000 years ago. You know, we actually began our wine career with a book on the wines of Turkey, Armenia, and Georgia. So that was our first introduction to Quaveri wines or Amphora based wines. But now you can see them made all over the world. You may find them in America, Australia, Chile, Thailand, I've even seen before, all over Europe, especially in Croatia. I have this great producer, Tomas, that does a lot, even sparkling wine made in Amphora, Italy, especially Spain, Portugal, Slovenia, Austria, basically, even Slovakia. In Portugal, they actually have an Appalachian dedicated to Amphora wines, what are called Vignod Italia. That's what we have here. These wines are becoming really trendy right now, especially the orange or amber wines made in Amphora. But I'm finding myself lately drawn more towards reds that are made in Amphora. I had a brilliant San Giovese from El Borro made in Amphora. The Vignod Italia was just in Alentejo last year, spent a week there, tasted some brilliant wines out of the Italia. This is an interesting wine. We actually got sent. This is a Georgian man living in the UK, but makes multiple Ciano, takes the grapes from Italy and makes them in Georgian Quaveri in the UK. Where can you find these wines? These are geeky type wines. So you're going to only find them in specialty shops or you'll have to order them from the internet. And a lot of times, since they're made in such tiny quantities, sometimes they're only sold at the cellar door. What you can expect from these types of wines, for me, I usually want to see texture. I usually want to see texture. And some people say the Amphoras, the Quaveri's, the Caross do give off some flavors, some mineral clay type notes. I haven't picked that up as much, but I want to feel texture. Usually these wines are un-fined, unfiltered, and generally they're a little bit more expensive. The best deals I've seen are some of the small producers in Georgia or some of the Vinho de Tadia in Portugal. So let me know, do you enjoy wines from Amphora?  Do you have some favorite producers? What? Shoring just distracted me. So let me know in the comment section below. And guys, if you liked this video, please subscribe to our YouTube channel, Exotic Wine Travel, and I will see you at the next episode.