Good, somebody in the back knows what they're doing. All right, so it's my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Dr. Keita Okuda. Dr. Okuda joined Amano Enzyme in 2008. He has a PhD degree in molecular biology from Nagoya University. He has been engaged in the development of industrial enzymes. He has interest in advanced technologies to create innovative enzymes for sustainable industry. He believes that the development of innovative enzymes will contribute to circular economy. Among his research interests are industrial enzyme application, molecular biology of enzyme engineering, and introduction of advanced technologies into enzyme design. Thank you very much, Pam. Kind of introduction. And I'm honored to be the speaker today. As Mr. Amano mentioned in the beginning, it is Memorial Day for Amano to sponsor host their first North America Japan Enzyme technology symposium. Then I'm going to talk about enzyme application for plant-based food. Then before we get started, I would like to introduce about Amano Enzyme. We actually have long history. We originally founded it more than 120 years ago. Then we've been focusing on the enzyme business over 70 years now, which is long. Then this is the picture, the R&D center in Japan. Very clean, green, and quiet. Very nice to work. And this here, this shows our global network, Amano Group. In the U.S., we based in the Chicago area, the west suburb. I actually was working here for five years. Then there we have the branding facility, where all the enzymes shipped from Japan. Then we branded here, then distributed to the customer in North America and South America. Then in terms of manufacturing, production mostly happens in Japan and China. Then we also have office in Thailand and the U.K. I mean, that's how we interact with customers over in the world. And as an enzyme company, we believe enzymes have millions of possibilities. So we produce the enzymes from the microorganisms. Then on the left, if necessary, we go to Tropical Forest to collect the soil sample. With that, right now our microorganism library, the strain is over 16,000, which is a lot. And finally, this is the last slide about Amano enzyme. Our company slogan is, change the future with enzymes that surprises the world. We have three synergies. The first is about business, where we have customers in the medical area as well as the food area. So that helps us understand the market widely and globally. The second is about the production system. So we produce enzymes with the koji, the solid fermentation and liquid fermentation. Then this allows us to have the variety of unique enzymes. Then finally, the other one is the biotechnology. So we keep developing the modern and classical biotechnology. So then with these three synergies, so we can make this happen. So then today I will introduce the three enzymes and their applications. The first enzyme I'd like to introduce is the protein glutaminase 500, the PG 500 for improving the plant protein functionalities. The PG is an enzyme that catalyzed glutamin residue in protein to the glutamate. I mean, here what I'd like to emphasize is the PG 500 does not leave the protein, the chain. It's just changed the charge of the protein. So with that reaction, the protein conformation changes. The more water molecule has access to the protein, which contributes to improving the solubility and emulsifying property. Again, the PG 500 delivers multiple benefits to the daily alternative application. For example, improve the protein solubility, multiple, and handling. So let's take a look for each. Regarding solubility, here we tested out four different protein sources, like pea protein, chickpea, soy, and rice protein. Then what we did is the 10% solution was prepared and incubated with PG 500 with this condition. After the incubation, we just corrected the solubility reaction to measure the absorbance at 280, which indicates the protein content in the solution. Then on the right, as you can see, the PG treated sample, which is the green bar. So all of the protein sources increased solubility by 15% to 50%. So this means you can put more solubility protein in your finished product. Then about second thing, the mouth peel. In order to evaluate the mouth peel, we conducted the tribology test with the support of NISO, who is a food research company in Netherlands. The tribology is a technique that explains the oral food structure and the mouth peel by measuring the lubrication properties. The coefficient of friction was measured at different speeds. Then here, the lower the value means the smoother the mouth peel. Then PG treated soy milk showed the lower coefficient of friction. Then in the meantime, our sensory test also confirmed the smoother mouth peel in the PG treated soy milk. So the tribology explained the mouth peel of the plant-based milk. Then this is the last slide about the PG 500. As I mentioned earlier, the PG has just changed the charge of the protein. Then in terms of the isoelectric point, with PG treatment, the isoelectric point is slightly shifted to acidic pH. So then like this, one of the advantages for this change is the prevent cardling. I think some of you may have seen the plant-based milk like almond and auto milk start the cardling when mixed with coffee. One of the reasons is pH. Usually, the typical isoelectric point of plant protein is 5 to 6, and coffee is pH 5.5. So once you get the pH on this range, the cardling starts. However, with PG 500 treatment, you won't see this. So let me play the video. Yes, on the left is no PG treatment. Then right side is PG treated. You see the control sample immediately start the cardling. On the other hand, the PG 500 stayed homogeneous. That's all for the PG 500. Today, I only introduced a three-point, but the PG 500 has more, delivers more advantages. So I hope you test PG 500 on your hands. So then the second topic I'm going to talk about is masking beanie flavor with cyclo-dexy-stream gluconotransferase, CGT. The pea protein and soy protein are the great ingredients, having the nice characteristics for the plant-based meat application. However, the one with the downside is beanie flavor. So far, 20 to 30 compounds are identified having the beanie flavor. For example, the n-hexano and one octan-3 and benzaldehyde. So people try to reduce the beanie flavor from a mono. So our idea is to trap the beanie flavor with the cyclo-dexy-stream. Cyclo-dexy-stream is a cyclic oligosaccharide with six to eight glucose molecules. And it's very popular compound as a masking agent. Then we thought the beanie flavor compound might be trapped with the cyclo-dexy-stream because the inside of the cyclo-dexy-stream is the hydrophobic and mostly the beanie flavor compound also the hydrophobic. Then to check the proof of concept, we just added alpha and beta cyclo-dexy-stream to the plant-based party-making process. So then volatile compounds were measured, analyzed with the GC-MS. On the left, the green is alpha-CD treated sample. The beta is the light blue one. Then as you can see, the alpha-CD is very effective to reduce the hexano, heptano. So this type of long-chain compounds. Then on the other hand, beta-CD is very effective for the benzaldehyde. So this type of the more bulky compounds. From us, these findings make sense because when you look at the size inside the alpha-CD and the long-chain aldehyde, it's about the same. Same thing with the beta-CD and the aromatic ring right here. So proof of concept is checked for the next step to be label-friendly. We think it is possible to produce the cyclo-dexy-stream from the starch because if the enzyme is not active in the finished product, it is considered processing aid and you don't need to label it. Then from our product list, we confirmed our CGT, the product name is Conchline. It's produced a good amount of cyclo-dexy-stream from the starch. With this result, we just incorporate the enzymatic process to the party-making process where the starch and CGT enzymes are added to the formulation. Then making the parties. The same thing, the volatile compound analyzed with the GCMS. On the left, you can see that most of the volatile compounds are reduced with the CGT treatment about half. On the right, we just picked up the two compounds, the Hexanard and Benz aldehyde, showing the smaller lower peak with the CGT treatment. Then just in case, we did the sensory test to see if there is any difference in the flavor. Our sensory panelist clearly shows the significant reduction in beanie flavor. We successfully developed a clean label of clay by masking the system with the enzymatic process. This is the last topic about the salt reduction. The salt reduction is a general concern. The WHO, back in 2020, they agreed to reduce the sodium intake by 30% by 2025. They recommend two grams of sodium intake per day. However, right now, the average is estimated at 4.3 grams, which is way too high. If the target is achieved, 7 million lives will be saved according to them. Then, however, this year, 2023, the last March, they reported that we are really behind the target. As an enzyme company, we think enzyme can help reduce the sodium intake by increasing the savory flavor, umami flavor. The enzyme I'd like to introduce here is the Mamizyme Pulse M.A. This is a branded enzyme containing two different types of the proteins and glutaminase. With Mamizyme treatment, the proteins initially break down, partially break down with the end proteins.  Finally, the glutaminase is converted to the glutaminase to increase the umami flavor, savory flavor. What we did is just to get the vegetable broth from the market, then treat it with the Mamizyme enzyme. After that, adding the sodium, just adjusting the same level of the salt level, 0.5%. Then did the sensory test. Then our trained panelists detected the significant increase in umami, kokumi, and solitiness. After this, we just in case checked the sodium level in the sample to see if the enzyme treatment increased the sodium. It came out the sodium level is the same, no enzyme treatment and the Mamizyme treatment is the same. Meanwhile, the glutamate is increased with the Mamizyme treatment, which makes sense. Therefore, the next step, so we try to understand how much salt reduction can be achieved with the Mamizyme treatment. Here, we prepared five different samples. On the left, this is the 0.5% of salt, but no enzyme. This is saltiness rating. Here is the one. So this is a reference sample. Then our sensory panelists rated these treated samples compared to the reference samples. When you look at the 0.5% of the salt with treatment, they rated at around 1.25%. This means the 25% of the solitiness is enhanced with the Mamizyme treatment. Then if you look at the 0.4% of the salt, they rated this sample around one. This means technically, it is possible to contribute the salt reduction by 20%. I hope it's going to be a big plus for the human health. I think that's all from my side and thanks for the attention. Thank you. You were speaking about cycle dextrin and reduction of beanie flavor and treatment with CGT. You showed some figures that the beanie value reduced and savory went up. Is this because of the actual savory note creation or the relative values are changing? I think it's just to mask the beanie flavor. Then the sensory panelists can detect the more Mami flavor. This time, enzyme treatment does not produce any Mami flavor. Just to reduce the supply of the beanness. Thank you, Dr. Okuda, for your presentation today. It's my pleasure to introduce our next speaker.


In this video we are going to continue the study of functions. So in this video we want to look into how can we add more than one parameter to a function and how can we pass more than just one argument to a function in a meaningful way. So let's go ahead and create a new file and call it arguments. That's a good term. So let's go ahead and define our function that we, for the example that we used to work with in this course. So again the example is that we are given a list of numbers and we want to find the average of all the even numbers in the list. So let's go ahead and define first of our numbers list as the number 7, 11, 8, 5, 3, 12, 2, 6, 9, 10, 1 and 4. So these are the numbers from 1 through 12 in no particular order. So let's also briefly recap of how we define a function. So we do that with a dev statement and we are going to call the function as before average evens and for now the function will also only take one parameter as its input and we call it numbers just as before. Let's also quickly remind ourselves that we always want to write a good doc string. So calculate the average of all even numbers in a list. Let's specify the arguments that we path into the function. So it's numbers and it's supposed to be a list of integers, the whole numbers to be averaged and then the function finally returns the average which happens to be a floating point number. Now let's remind ourselves of how we solved the problem in our second solution approach. What we first did is we created a new list that contained only the even numbers. So let's do that. We are going to write a list comprehension and we're going to write n for n in numbers. If n divided, modulo divided by 2 has a rest of 0. That means we only keep all the numbers if they are even and we assign this new list to a local variable called evens. So in a previous video we learned about the scoping rules and we learned that the variable evens only exists inside a function as it is being executed. And then in the second line we're going ahead and we're going to write average will be set to the sum of the evens divided by the length of the evens, the number of the even numbers. And then we must not forget to also return the average at the end of the function otherwise the function would not give anything back. Let's try it out. So our first test case is we call the function average evens and we pass it our numbers list. It is 7.0 and it is and then also let's make a quick second example. Let's call the function again and let's create a list object on the fly and pass it the numbers 40, 41, 42, 43 and 44 and that should give us an average of 42.0. So let's work with a variant. So the variant goes like this, so let's write it here, variant. The average may be scaled before it is returned. So this looks like a toy example but let's say if we are given a list and we filter out some things we could think of that as a statistical application that eliminates some outliers. And then the averaging is basically just finding a statistic and the scaling that we now introduce for the first time, this could for example be let's assume that the functions are prices in euros and you want to convert them after averaging into dollars and converting from one currency into another would be basically scaling. So that is it looks like a toy example here but really we could easily find business application for that as well. So what do we want to do? So what we need in this function is we need to specify a second parameter that allows us to scale the function. So let's do that. Let's go ahead and add a second parameter here on the parameters list. Let's simply call it scalar and the scalar going to be a float or an integer. So we could view a float as a generalization of integers. That is why I don't have to specify float integer here. And then we say simply multiplies the average. So now that is it and let's now go into the code here and all we have to do to make this work is we go ahead in the last line where it says return average. We will simply add the scalar and we say scalar times average. So before that we have not seen that that we could actually have a full expression here next to the return statement. So far we have only used individual names, variables that are returned but it nothing prevents us from spelling out some expression here. That is not just a variable. So we could do some operation here just like we do with the multiplication. Okay, so let's go ahead and define the new function and by running the cell again this will overwrite the old average events object. Therefore, calling average events is now referring to the new function. However, if we call it now with only one parameter, like here numbers, we are going to get a type error, okay? And that is due to the fact that we are not passing in enough arguments. So we need to pass in one argument for every parameter that we define in the function here. So how could we fix that? Well, one way is to simply pass it a second argument. For example, let's say we want to double the average. So let's simply pass in a two and then we get back 14.0. And if we wanted to do the same here in the second example, then we would get back 84.0, okay? So that works. What is the downside of this? Well, one of the downsides here is that after a while, let's say we write down the function to our code base and then after a while we look at it, we may not know what the two here means by just reading the function call, okay? And then what we would have to do is we would have to go back to the function and into the source code where we define the function and we would have to look up what the second parameter means, okay? So in other words, it would be nice if we could somehow call the function in a different way. And there is, of course, the possibility to do that. So what we could do instead is we could go ahead and call the average events functions, pass it as the first argument, still our numbers list. And as the second argument, we don't just pass in the argument by position, but we specify it by keyword, that is the technical term. So we could also say scalar equals two, and this will also work, okay? So the first two code cells here, they are examples where we pass in all the arguments as so-called positional arguments. So let's maybe quickly write this down. This is called positional arguments. And the second way here, this is kind of a mixed approach. And we have one positional argument and another one, which is called a keyword argument and a keyword argument. And the keyword is just the name of the parameter, scalar, okay? So by saying scalar equals, we say we pass in the argument two by keyword, by the keyword scalar. Of course, what we could also have done is we could also have written numbers equals numbers, okay? So we could pass in both arguments by keyword, that works. And whenever we do that, whenever we pass in all the arguments by keyword, we could actually go ahead and change the order, okay? So Python is smart enough to figure out that the order is different because we give every argument a keyword by which we pass it in. However, one thing we must not do, we must not pass in the first argument by keyword and the second one by position. So in other words, all the positional arguments must come before the keyword arguments, okay? That's just a rule. And then that means let's put it back into the form where we had it before, just like this. Okay, so this is basically the two ways of how we can pass an argument to a function either by keyword or by position. And my recommendation is sometimes for functions like average events, it is kind of intuitive, kind of natural to expect that the first argument is some sort of list of numbers because otherwise the function just would not make sense by talking by its name. So the first argument, yeah, we could really pass it in by position without any double meaning or without foregoing some of the readability. However, for the second argument, I would really argue that writing the function call like this by specifying the keyword is a lot better because then even in a month from now when we look at this code, at this function call, we know exactly what the two means, okay? We don't have to guess. And that is of course important. Okay, so let's continue here with what else can we do? So sometimes you want the user of the function, so the person that calls the function, you want to force them to use the second way, to use the keyword way. How could you do that? There is in recent versions of Python a nice little syntax. We can simply go ahead and put a star in between the two parameters here. And what that does is any parameter that comes after the star must be passed in by keyword. Okay, that is basically what it does. Other than that, the keyword, the asterisk here or the star symbol does not do anything else really. Okay, in a future video, we will learn what the star symbol here does in addition to that. But for now, let's just keep it simple and say any parameter that comes after the star must pass in by position. And we call them keyword only arguments because they can only be passed in by keywords. Okay, so let's go down here and let's call the function again and this works, right? Because we are using a keyword here. However, if you go back here, then this does not work anymore, okay? Because maybe that's right here, but the second argument must be passed in by keyword. Okay, so that is why we get a type error here because we have to use a keyword now for the second argument. Okay, now you would say that, okay, maybe this is a bit too much because if I, let's say, call the second function, let's say, just for to make a point here, let's say I want to go ahead and I don't want to scale the average, I would have to pass in a one by keyword, otherwise I would get this error. So what else could we do here? Well, what we could do is we could specify a default value and let's make a one here for scalar. And this now means that whenever we don't specify scalar, then it automatically is set to one. And that is often something that you do for parameters that you don't often need to specify, okay? We give it a default value. And then what we could do is we could go down here and we could just leave the one away and now the function works by calling it with only one argument. However, if we want to go ahead and give it a second argument for the scalar parameter, we must not do that by position, we can only do that by keyword. So you now may wonder why would we do that? So what is the advantage of that? And the advantage is that we as the writer of the function, so as the person that defines the function, we can now force the user of the function, the person who calls the function, which often happens to be the same person, right? Oftentimes we are doing both, but we can force the caller of the function to be explicit, okay? And one of the rules in Python, one of the best practices is we better are explicit than implicit. So we oftentimes, when we are in doubt, we often want to spell something out so that later on when in the future, we read our code, it is still explicit and we understand what is going on, okay? So that's the advantage of using this syntax here. Okay, so these are the various ways of how we can go ahead and call a function. So we can specify as many parameters as we want. I would recommend to not go, let's say anywhere beyond five or six, otherwise it is most likely that your function will do too much in just one function. You should keep your function small and simple to understand and that means also don't give them too many parameters and more often than not, a function that you built will have one or two natural, so to say parameters and a couple of them that are not so natural and it basically is a good practice for the not so natural parameters to give a default value and to require a user to use keyword arguments if they want to change the value, so if they want to differ from the default value, okay? So these are a couple of ways of how we can call a function and yeah, so this is it for this video.


John Daner as Paladin San Francisco 1875 the Carlton Hotel headquarters of the man called Paladin miss Wong Miss Wong Couldn't you wait and do that later? Mr. Paladin, but this is day for cleaning windows in your room Well, it's rather annoying while I'm trying to read the newspaper Say we must keep up schedule She find a miss Wong not clean window will be very bad. Oh much trouble come back this afternoon and do them How about the rules to clean this afternoon? Look miss Wong just tell the lady in charge of the guest in this room didn't want his windows clean She not understand most guests are out of room by 10 o'clock in the morning All right You win I'll be downstairs to read with the most helpful for me strong If hey boy comes up looking for me tell him. I'm in the lobby Oh Good morning, sir. Oh good morning a boy was just coming to your room these telegram come for you. Thanks Looks like the one I've been waiting for from Jack Regan.  Yes, that's the one he lives up in Oroville. Let's see Oh, he want you to take a job. Yes I'm to meet his foreman in Yuba City the day after tomorrow That means I'll have to take the afternoon stage. Would you make reservations? Hey boy? Yes, sir And send mr. Regan my answer his address is there.  I Met his foreman Luke Williams the night I checked into the hotel in Yuba City The plans for secrecy were set If by any chance our mission was discovered by the outlaws that held up the other shipments We were to protect each other and see that the money got to Regan safely The next morning I rented a horse Picked up the money at the bank tied the leather money bagged my saddle and met Williams at the edge of town We rode the first five miles in watchful silence Hey, there's a crick up ahead We can water the horses and rest the spell if you like good Hey, tell me how much is Regan paying you? That's a private arrangement He owes me a gourd full I ain't been paid in three months. That's all All right, I guess he's had a pretty rough time of it lately Losing two payrolls Maybe but it was his own fault He sent a couple of green horns up there both times Last time one of them got a self-killed I told Regan he should have sent me in the first place How long have you been with them? About two years, but you won't find me there two more You know, I've been looking for another spot. I might even get a spread of my own Takes a lot of money to start a place of your own. I know I've been saving The old man's promised me back wages when we deliver this payroll. I see Oh boy Yep, how much further to the ranch or say another two hours I wouldn't worry about that if I was you what ranch don't try nothing Neither one of you I'll splatter you all over that creek. I drop your guns to the ground. You've got a good memory loop You know this man. Yeah ranch carnival Thought you was locked up in Sacramento. I was Now I ain't Didn't take you long to pick up where you left off Not when I got old buddies around to keep me in touch with what's going on up in Oroville How'd you break jail? Ain't no jail gonna hold me for long. You should have known that loop. What do you want with us?  You get it just like he did why You want the money you could have taken it without killing him.   You're good to see you son Well, you must have grown a foot tall She was wrong Where is your mom? Let's go in and see her me not exactly son. What did you bring me a present not this time But I'll be getting you a lot of presents from now on You see Well sure net I want you going outside for a little bit. Well, so's me in your parking talk and grown-up talk You hear me Ned Well, now you said you was gonna catch some fish for supper Ned. We're gonna need some extra so you better get started Why did you ever come back? This is my house Why shouldn't I come back not no more it ain't it's mine. It's mine and Ned's You lost your family more than a year ago when you didn't come back when you didn't keep your promise now Lily may you know Why I couldn't come back. I know they put you in jail and I know why they did it That's what I'm talking about But I was only doing it for you and Ned if they hadn't caught up with me Well, that bank money would have set us up for life.  Well, I don't want that kind of life no more You said the same thing in which tough or we came out here How long that money last? Took more than I thought you'll never stop lying and thieve and rance carnival. You know it Now I know it. There's nothing left between you and me Now I want you to clear out of here Right now You've got kind of strong headed since you've been working in that saloon, didn't you? Had you knew about that I heard But what you expect me to do starved to death out here without money to buy even a turnip you could have got a decent job The wife of rance carnival a decent job in Aureville Well, maybe you should have heard more while you was listening. I Couldn't even get a job washing clothes in this town. They's afraid I'd steal them being the wife of a thief No, sir, the saloon was the only place I could get a job At least I had enough looks left for that Things are gonna be different from now on I Got lots of money for us right here in this satchel You and me is gonna start all over again. Lily me. I don't know where you got that money ranks And I don't know how you got out of jail But I do know it wasn't the right way And I want you to leave Ned and me alone Just leave and stay away from you talking to the wind Lily me I come back to claim what's mine.  I found my way back to the main trail Wasn't too long before a wagon came by and the man took me into Orville And I'll send a couple of hands up to get Luke. We'll give him a nice funeral Mr. Regan, what do you know about this ranch carnival? Only what I've heard Didn't know he was a killer though got his reputation as a thief Well, he must have had a personal grudge against Luke That's strange How's that? Well, Luke mentioned to me about a month ago that carnival's wife was working in the Paradise Slewn in town Seen as how he felt sorry for his wife. Yeah Must have had a few talks with her Carnival moved into Orville a couple of years ago with his wife and son and bought a place on the other side of town Didn't take long for the people around here to catch up to him though You think he'd come back to see his wife? No, he wouldn't do that. I Hear she claims to have given him up for good No, no, he's too smart to do that He knows that's the first place they'd look for him. I wonder I Think I'll write out and have a talk with her I don't know how to do any good. Mr. Regan I'm gonna do everything I can to get that money back to you. I know you will paladin That's why I hired you gift sets by Yardley Almost Christmas no time to lose lots and lots of gifts to choose Is it too late? Give her a gift set by Yardley For her there's a beautiful array of all-new Yardley gifts from $1.50 to $13.50 For instance, there's the Yardley soap chest with two cakes each of delicate English lavender Romantic crushed carnation and glamorous red roses its price 350 or there's a red roses cologne and dusting powder set only four dollars all prices plus tax Yardley at all fine stores Give him give her a gift set by Yardley Son Catch many fish in this stream not too so far. I get me one more. I'll be through for the day good Thought I'd never seen you before. I'm looking for a mrs. Carnival's place. You know where it is Reckon I do I live there.  Yes, sir We live up around a bend there take far Come see my mom. Yeah, is she at home? She's there your paw.  No, if you was I catch fish for you. Well, that'd mean you'd have to catch two more. Yes, sir Well, you never can tell your mother might ask me to stay for supper. She minds case. She does. Yeah, that's right Well, that's mighty thoughtful of you son Come on boy before I reached the house I dismounted and crawled up to the back door being careful to stay out of sight As it turned out, I wouldn't have been noticed. It was a heated argument going on inside between Rance and his wife Don't go for your gun, Rance. I think I'd still be walking to Yuba City Should have known not to leave you alive I'm grateful to you for that, but it doesn't undo the murder you did commit You see in Rance killed a man. Yes, ma'am, and he took the Regan payroll money Jack Regan's money. That's right Who did kill? Never mind, mister. Who was it? Regan's foreman, Luke Williams Williams? Yeah, Luke is dead Your husband's gonna hang for it.   Well, you might as well blame me. I loved him more than I ever loved you And if you hadn't come back when you did, we'd have been gone and you never would have found us Don't you have any respect for your son? How'd you think he'd feel having another man for his father? If you cared for that boy at all, you'd have given up your rotten ways a long time ago Where's the money, Rance? I didn't bring it with me. Oh, stop your lying for once. It's right there, mister It's on the table. Lily Mae, you're not gonna have that money, mister. Oh, no, you're... I'm sorry, Mrs. Carnival It's just as well that he's dead If you'd have taken him away, I'd be fearing that he'd get back to him somehow before they could hang him I don't want Ned to know about this But you won't be able to keep it from him now If you heard those shots, he'll be coming up to the house to see what happened Yes, I know. What'll I tell him? He never understands. Oh, I think he will If not now, maybe later If you tell him the truth about his father What was the truth? Everything Rance did was for his son At least, that's what he said Oh, Mr. Palady. Good morning. Hey, boy. You just arrived on stage. Yeah What are you doing behind the desk? Desk clerk asked me to take over why he had breakfast. You leave you back here I take it upstairs when clerk return. All right Now I'm going up and take a nice deep hot bath. Oh, are you very tired, Mr. Palady? Dusty from that miserable stage.  Hey, that sounds good. You do that. He saw Miss Wong, why are you in such a hurry? Oh great emergency, Mr. Palady. No hot water on second floor. All guests cream at miss Wong. Well, you shouldn't let that upset you But miss Wong cannot help it must go to basement and see man in charge of furnace You know, some people can certainly be inconsiderate They come to stay at the Carlton Hotel One of the few places in San Francisco with modern convenience modern like hot water hot And if something goes wrong, they act as if they've been used to hot water for years Excuse me, please Miss Wong, did you say the second floor? That's my floor Miss Wong and My sinuses haven't you heard about dressed and dressed and decongestant tablets for real relief from Coles misery and sinus congestion Dress stand is the revolutionary three-layer tablet Which for the first time makes it possible to unite certain medically proven ingredients into one fast-acting uncoated tablet Dress stand not only helps drain all eight sinus cavities critical areas of colds infection But circulating through the blood dress stands decongestant reaches all congested areas shrinks all swollen membranes relieves pressure and pain an Exclusive anti-allergent helps keep breathing passages dry and clear pain relievers reduce body aches fever Vitamin C helps build body resistance. This is dressed and today dressed and is widely imitated But the exclusive dress stand formula cannot be duplicated. There's nothing nothing like dressed and decongestant tablets gun will travel Created by Herb Meadow and Sam Rolfe is produced and directed in Hollywood by Frank Paris and Stars John Daner as Paladin with Ben Wright as Hayboy and Virginia Greg as Miss Wong Tonight's story was specially written for have gun will travel by mr. Paris featured in the cast were Lillian by F Jack Moyles Dick Beals Ralph Moody and Vic Perrin This is Hugh Douglas inviting you to join us again next week when CBS radio presents have gun will travel


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I'm going to read this, I don't think there can be one nation only a negligible portion of Israel is willing for an all-together state. The core idea of Judaism is, quote, the chosen people and not necessarily listening to Judaism, Judaism fanatics, their lifestyles incompatible with disbelievers, but that's not all Jews, that's not all Jews. The Zionists have fooled the world into thinking all Jews are Zionists, all Jews are not Zionists.  German government just seized, froze the bank account of Jews for just peace. Why? Because those Jews are some of the hardcore, most anti-Zionist people you've ever met. Because they know Zionism is fanaticism, they know that the Zionists are destroying Israel. They're bad for Jews. So I think Jews, Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, I think everyone can live together in peace. We just have to deal with the fanatics. Ideally, if you have Zionists that are pretending to be Jews, then the Jewish culture, the Jewish people should deal with them. You have Muslim fanatics and the Muslims should deal with them. You have Christian fanatics and the Christians should deal with them.    That's what you do. That's what you do. You can sit down and talk to them, but if they continue to do it, you need to deal with them. Otherwise you're going to have the wrath of the neighborhood coming after you. Or rightfully so, rightfully so. What do you do with mad dogs? You put them down. Right?


Good evening. Thank you. As president of the Australian Academy of Humanities, I'm very pleased to welcome you here tonight to this public lecture to be given by Simon Winchester. I wish to acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and pay our respects to the elders of the Nanagual people, past and present. It's upon their ancestral lands that this theatre in the Manning Clark building is built and it is right and proper that we pay our respects to the knowledge embedded forever within Aboriginal custodianship of country. I am just going to be very very brief in this particular occasion. I want to introduce Kate Burridge who's going to be chairing this session but my role is just to thank a number of people who've been involved in this particular event tonight with Simon Winchester and with his visit more generally. So I wanted to thank once again Professor Ian Young, the ANU Vice Chancellor, Professor Ray Francis, Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Professor Simon Maddox, Vice Chancellor and President of Charles Darwin University and also Professor Giselle Burns, Pro Vice Chancellor for the Faculty of Law, Education, Business and Arts at Charles Darwin University. Dr Alex Byrne, the Director of the State Library of New South Wales and Harper Collins Publishers. I should explain perhaps that the reason why there are so many people and a number of those people are not in Canberra and not here tonight is because Simon has been very generous in agreeing to give talks in a number of other cities. So Melbourne, Sydney and then in Darwin. Not only has he done that, but he's been doing a number of radio broadcasts so he's been extremely busy already. So we're extremely grateful to him for that. So that's the end of my role. It is just for me to introduce Professor Kate Burridge from Monash University and a symposium convener who's going to introduce Simon and then chair this session tonight. So thank you, thank you. Thank you very much. Can I just start by saying that when the theme of the Academy Symposium was first proposed, so that's dictionaries, encyclopedias and atlases, the name Simon Winchester came up naturally too as someone who's well written extensively and also wonderfully on many different aspects of this idea of well, looking things up. In fact, the title of the symposium is Look It Up and so it's looking at different works of reference in old and new formats, in traditional and non-traditional formats and I suppose different ways of accessing and different ways of delivering and sharing knowledge. So Simon's books often deal directly with these works, but also I think his works, his books and there are well over 20 of these, aren't there Simon? And many more in the pipeline. They are also themselves wonderful examples of delivering knowledge. So delivering knowledge that is really very meticulously researched and also brought together in a very entertaining way in these works of narrative nonfiction. The Surgeon of Crowthorne and the Meaning of Everything remain, I think, among my favourites. I mean, I always knew that the business of dictionary making was exciting and we had evidence of that this afternoon, particularly with the Greek Dictionary Wars, but I think what was it, a tale of murder and madness and the love of words, which was the subtitle of The Surgeon of Crowthorne. I mean that took lexicography to a whole new level of exciting. We're still waiting for that movie, Simon, and which role Mel Gibson is going to play? Well, but seriously, it is extremely difficult to do justice to Simon's very impressive CV in just the couple of minutes that I have. But there is a wonderful bio on the web, which makes for great bedtime reading, I can tell you. It starts off with a spectacularly destructive science experiment, which I think got you expelled from school, is that right? And then there are tales of, well, sledding in uncharted parts of West Greenland ice caps and tales, marvellous tales of travel and journalism. And let's not forget those 20-something books, which have earned Simon many awards from universities and also, I think it was in 2006, an OBE. I don't think Simon Winchester sleeps, but I hope he sleeps on long-haul flights because he's only just arrived and it's been a grueling schedule since he landed yesterday. But I don't want to eat into your time, so please, thank you for coming all this way and please let's welcome Simon Winchester. Well, thank you very much, and this is an enormous honor to be here, a great delight. I, incidentally, on a radio program earlier today and also at tea, I was asking the question, what is the only English word that becomes its plural with the addition of the letter C? And the people in the radio station didn't seem to know, but a very nice chap from Adelaide, who may be in the audience and said that he would work it out and raise his hand to tell me what the answer is, but he appears either not to be here or not to have... Oh, and did you work it out? Would you like... Well, I'll tell you what, I'll announce it at the end of the talk in that case, but it's something if you get really bored during this, you must think about it. It's a short word, don't anyone scream it out now, the only word in the English language that becomes its plural with the addition of the letter C. So, when I had to come up with a description of this talk, I said it would be about pedants, precision and the Pacific, and I think pedants, because that day, as almost every day, I get angry emails from pedants who I hate. But when you write a book about dictionaries, inevitably someone is going to pick you up on something, and for me it's always the same two words or the one that really bothers them is my use of the word fulsome. So, I think on this particular day, someone... Well, I won't name the town he wrote from, but something in Ohio.  And you know he'd opened the Webster's Third International and got their definition from the 1930s, and I needed to say to him very politely that English is a descriptive, not a prescriptive language, and the meanings change and blah, blah, blah. So I was angry, I think, or irritated, and then Kate said, what are you going to talk about? So I said, pedantry, and so... But there isn't going to be a great deal about pedantry. But looking it up, there'll be a lot about the Pacific and a lot about precision as well, which is something I'm very interested in. But because the theme of the conference is looking up, I thought I would begin this with a short story related to the serendipitous joys of looking things up. This was something that happened to me in 1982, when you may remember some of you, a movie called Paris, Texas, by a man called Vim Vendors, which I thought was exquisite and wonderful film. And I went to see it, I was living in New York at the time, I think, and I wanted to look up where Paris, Texas was. So I opened, I had at the time, as I still have now, a new edition of the Times Comprehensive Atlas, which I still maintain. I hope it's not a sacrilege to say so. The best Atlas you can buy. And I'm looking up Paris, Texas. And as I was looking down the columns, I happened to notice a great agglomeration under the PA of 18 places all called Paradise in America. And I thought, that is wonderful. I immediately lost interest in where Paris, Texas was. Switched three columns over to Paradise. And this was at a time when particularly English magazine editors spent money like drunken sailors. And so I rang one almost immediately. I said, I think he was at the Illustrated London News, a magazine which no longer exists, presumably, because they were spending money like drunken sailors. And I said, Joe, I think his name was, this is Simon here in New York. I've just noticed that there are 18 towns in America called Paradise. And I just left it at that for a few seconds. And he said, I suppose you want to go and see them all and work out why they're called Paradise and are they still Paradise. And I said, yeah, that's the general idea. He said, it does sound a rather good story, doesn't it? Why don't you, how long do you think it'll take? And I said, a couple of months. And he said, fine, OK, off you go. And so I got this assignment. And I did, indeed, go to every single town in America called Paradise. There are, as I mentioned, 18 of them, beginning with the most easterly is Paradise, Florida, which is a retirement community, more a gateway to Paradise, I think, than Paradise itself. And then there's Paradise, Pennsylvania, which is on, I don't know if you know, it's Amish country, Route 43. And it's right next to the town of Intercourse, Pennsylvania. And of course, for a prurient British audience that believes that the way to Paradise is through Intercourse, this was absolute perfection. And it turned out that every single one of these Paradises had been ruined by one or other aspect of modern American life, except one. And that one was Paradise, Kansas, which is a small wheat-growing town about 50 miles northwest of Salina, Kansas, which is, therefore, almost exactly in the center of the continental, or the contiguous, 48 states. So it had great symbolism for me. And so I went there and, as always, turned up at the post office and said, hello, I'm an English journalist. And I'm writing about all the towns in America called Paradise. And the postmaster, who was a woman because postmasters in America can be of either gender and are still called postmasters, said, oh, you must, in that case, go and stay with the patriarchs of this town who are, believe it or not, John and Mary Angel. So I went to, I'm absolutely serious. And if you look in the Paradise phone book, they're still there. But the most marvelous moment was, and I tell this story when I describe the American book that I've just written, was it was one of the many reasons that made me fall in love with the United States, was that after I'd been staying with John and Mary for a couple of days, they had a cherry tree down the bottom of the garden. And I'd expressed some fondness for cherries. And so Mary baked me an apple pie. And I think the moment when I really believed that I was going to be eternally fond of the United States was the evening that I sat on the terrace eating cherry pie with the angels in Paradise. Nothing can get much better than that. So what I thought I would do this evening, and I cleared it with Kate ahead of time, was to talk about structure in books, and in these narrative non-fiction books that I've taken to writing recently. The early books in this genre, things, as you very kindly mentioned, like The Surgeon of Crothorn, or The Professor and the Madman, as it's known in America. And the book on William Smith on the map, The Change the World, and The Man Who Loved China about this extraordinary character, Joseph Needham. The structure of those books is relatively simple, because the biographies that Chappie's Mourn does something extraordinary and then dies. So there's a fairly simple narrative structure. But I found it quite interesting to take on bigger topics. And the big ones, and I'm going to talk specifically about the three most recent, The Atlantic Ocean, The United States, and the book I'm working on now, The Pacific Ocean, sort of going to be a trilogy, I think, ultimately, they present organizational problems and all these challenges anyway. So I thought I'd briefly sketch how I went about writing these and trying to put all this massive information into a moderately coherent structure. They're not reference books, of course, so there's no question of a need to look anything up. You've got an index that allows you to do that. But to present all this information in a form that is accessible and interesting and perhaps somewhat different from the way such books, text books, anyway, are normally structured. So let's start with The Atlantic. I put the proposal to my publisher that I, it's rather a hackneyed belief, I suppose that the Mediterranean is the classical sea of the inland sea of the classical world. The Atlantic is the inland sea of today's world and the Pacific is the inland sea of tomorrow's world. So that's the starting point. I wasn't interested in or competent enough to do The Mediterranean, but on the other hand, I lived in America, so why not have a bash at doing the Atlantic, which was so hugely important in the construction of America. So I spent, as I normally do in this kind of process, a year or a year and a half traveling around the ocean and getting heaps and heaps of books and atlases and Admiralty charts and things like that. And then when I've assembled all this information, there's the question of how exactly to write it. And I've always maintained that there are three key elements to a readable, not necessarily successful, but a readable non-fiction book. The first, the most important thing is the idea. I mean, the idea behind the book has a natural sort of primacy to it. Fine writing is great. It's nice if you can write it beautifully. That's lovely and you strive to do such a thing, but it's not the second most important thing. The second most important thing is, in my view, the structure. It's got to be well organized. I mean, you can write lyrically about a brilliant idea, but if the structure's all to breakfast time, people will go to sleep. It's simply rather like the famous Stephen Hawking book that, short, brief history of time, if you remember, people put a dollar bill on page 53 because no one ever got to page 53 because it was so hopelessly organized. So I had to try and come up with a structure for the Atlantic and I didn't really know how to. I didn't address it when I wrote the original proposal that got me the contract to do it. I just sort of vaguely said, this is an important ocean. How does one write about it? So I was flying on one particular day, I remember, back from London, back home to New York, and I was reading or had in my briefcase a copy of an anthology of poetry by David Owen, a former British foreign secretary now, Lord Owen, and it was called Seven Ages. And he had organized all the poetry that he had come to love over his life according to the Seven Ages of Man from Shakespeare's As You Like It, All the Worlds are Staged, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, the number of acts being Seven Ages. And then it goes on from there, the infant mulling and puking in his nurse's arms and all the rest of it. I thought in a sort of epiphany on that plane journey that that possibly would be the way to organize this book on the Atlantic Ocean. So I got back to New York and I looked at all my notes, and yes, indeed, it would be possible. So taking those Seven Ages, the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the old man, and return to childhood, it seemed quite legitimate to corral various bits of the Atlantic story into those seven categories. And so the infancy would indeed be the geological infancy of the ocean and write about its creation and the moving of the continents and so forth. Schoolboy would be the learning about the ocean, so the early expeditions, like the challenger expedition and so forth, to chart it and learn about it as a schoolchild would learn about it. Then there was the lover. Now, the lover was a slightly difficult one because it was slightly out of order in what I wanted to do had I thought about it in a different way. But that was humankind's romantic view of the Atlantic Ocean and so that was the painting and the music and the architecture and so forth. And I had to sort of choose what I thought were architecturally emblematic cities that sat on the Atlantic and so Rio and Cape Town and Liverpool. The most beautiful to me, the one that really represents the man's romantic attraction to the Atlantic Ocean writ in stone is the capital of the island of St. Helena where Napoleon was exiled Jamestown, which is just a wonderful 17th century confection of just exquisite buildings, all reflecting the ocean in which it lies. So I could deal with music and art, so JMW Turner and all these people that did wonderful Winslow Homer, of course, that did all these paintings about the Atlantic. Then the soldier, well, that was a great deal easier because that's all about the development of warfare and how wooden hulled ships gave way to the great sea battles which were first staged in the Atlantic and then all the other violent things that happened in the Atlantic Ocean and so piracy and the slave trade and all that sort of nasty stuff. And then justice, well, that could be all about trade and the rules, the law of the sea and material like that. And the old man, well, the old man gets careless and doesn't treat the sea as it should be. So it was pollution and overfishing and the degradation of the sea undermans sort of poor invigilation. And then return to childhood is the sea striking back, so bad weather generation, rising sea levels, climate change and all that sort of stuff. So it actually held together pretty well. I mean, when I advanced the idea to my editor, he was somewhat taken aback. I mean, to look at the Atlantic Ocean through the prism of a 17th century or late 16th century Shakespearean play was a little bit eccentric, but mercifully the reviewers were kind. And so this gave me some leeway. I thought when I came to write the next book which was the book that's out now on the United States. So much the same thing happened so the Atlantic had been published and I now get this contract to write a book about America. Now, I had become an American citizen in 2011 on July the fourth and on the afterdeck of the USS Constitution which was a nice sort of homage to the Atlantic Ocean. But I then thought, well, you know, I'm in love with this country thanks to things like Cherry Pie and Paradise Kansas with the angels, let's write a book about it. So I did a lot of traveling and I collected a lot of books much as I did with the Atlantic. And once again then was had this challenge of how to organize it. And the initial thought, I mean, before the organizational structure came to mind was first of all, what sort of a book to write? And one of the things I thought was I love railway trains. So I did think of crossing America from coast to coast on what are called class three railways which are the little mom and pop freight lines and you can go from Maine to California but my editor reasonably enough said that that would end up being a book about railway trains and it wouldn't really be a book about America. And then I thought that what I really was interested in was this notion of unity, how an immense continental entity like the United States, despite being a huge sort of mongrel collection of every race and every language and every religious persuasion and every kind of view imaginable had managed to hold itself together since 1776 with obviously unpleasantness in the 1860s in a way that most other great continental entities had not. So Europe, classic example of course, not everyone loses the euro, everyone jabbers away in a variety of different languages, constantly having wars with each other. If you try to plug an electric razor into your socket in the bathroom in Stockholm, you'll need something completely different in Madrid and you have things like Scotland attempting recently too or thinking about leaving the United Kingdom. So clearly Europe isn't as united as it should be, Russia clearly or Soviet Union. Mother Russia is not united. Dear old Canada, lovely, but it does have this great block of grumpy or occasionally grumpy Francophone people in the middles, endlessly threatening to split the country into three. Australia of course, great success, but slightly smaller population. But how has America done it? I mean China obviously is united really only by force of arms or force of the state. So I thought I'd be fascinating to write a book about how America physically, how the connective tissue was spun and created to bind the country into one. And so I was in my study creating a list of all the people that I thought had been involved in a big way or in a less important or forgotten way in helping to knit the country together. And my wife came into my study one day and said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I've made a list and there are sort of 40 or 50 people on it. And I read her names, the names of the people I'd come across. And she said, oh, so you're writing a book about the men who united the states. And I said, my God, what a brilliant title. I mean, honestly, thank you darling, that was so sweet. But she said, you're going to get a lot of flack of course, because it's only men. And indeed I have to just to forstall any hostile questions. In the story of the physical uniting of the states, it really is a story that does only involve men. The only one woman really is Sakha Jweer, the Shoshone Indian guide who helped the Lewis and Clark expedition. And Pocahontas makes a sort of cameo appearance. But otherwise, I mean in abstract ideas, plenty of women of course are involved. But in the physical uniting of the country, it is all men. So once my wife had departed, I kept assembling the list. And I eventually got to about 200 people, I suppose. So there was a question then of how do you organize that? And obviously you could arrange them alphabetically, but I'm just like reading the phone book.  You could do it chronologically, but then that would be incredibly complex because different achievements would appear in different eras and it just would be a complete mess. And then I was writing to a friend of mine. I used to live in China for quite a long time. And I was writing to a friend in Shanghai and he wrote back and we were talking about the elements of classical Chinese or Eastern civilization. And obviously all of you will know when you're in India, there are sort of four classical elements. And as you go eastwards and cross the Mekong, it becomes generally five. And a variety of what those five actually are. But in China, they're nearly always the same five. And those five are wood, earth, water, fire, and metal. And it suddenly seemed to me in rather the same way as that sort of epiphany I had on the transatlantic plane, that it would be possible to organize these 200 men with their various achievements along the lines of these five classical elements. So for instance, when Lewis and Clark, and I sort of begin the story with the decision, well, once the Louisiana purchase had been achieved in 1803, and then Jefferson decided to send Lewis out across America to see what he had just bought basically from the French. It occurred to me that those early expeditions had a great deal to do with wood. So Jefferson, for instance, Jefferson's the key. He's sitting in Monticello. He's absolutely obsessed with many things. But one of the things he's obsessed with is gardening and trees. He loved trees. And indeed, four of the trees that he actually planted himself were only felled in Monticello about three years ago. The evidence, the legacy of his arboreal fascination is all around with these marvellous alleys of oak trees and their apple trees, and all sorts of beautiful, beautiful trees. So I imagined him sitting on the West Terrace of Monticello looking over the gardens that he's created and all these beautiful trees. And in front of him is this enormous wall about 2,000 feet high of the eastern spurs of the Blue Ridge Mountains, over which he has never traveled. I mean, he's been across the Atlantic because, of course, he was in Paris. But he never went west. He had this fascination with what might lie across the Blue Ridge Mountains. And he had just read to his enormous irritation this book published in London in 1802 by Mackenzie, who was the first man ever to cross the North American continent. And he eventually painted his name with a mixture of bare grease and vermilion powder on a rock outside what is now the town of Bellacoola in British Columbia, and wrote a book about going from the Great Lakes to British Columbia. And Jefferson read this thing on the terrace. I mean, he talks in his diaries about reading this book and being furious, you know, how a Canadian crosses this continent, it's an impertinence. And he calls in his secretary, Mary Weather Lewis, and says, Lewis, I want you to cross the country and, mercifully, everyone, at least as far as Jeffers is concerned, now completely forgotten. Mackenzie and everyone remembers Lewis and Clark, the Great Expedition. But if you think of them, they, well, Lewis, first of all, crossed from this magnificent garden, crossed the forests of the Blue Ridge, met his friend, old friend, Clark. They sailed down the tributaries ultimately to the Missouri, well, the Ohio River, then to the Mississippi, and up the Mississippi, and then turned left, went up the Missouri, in wooden canoes, and they built camps, surrounded them with wooden palisades. They had wooden fires to keep out the animals and so forth. So wood is a constant feature of the very, very earliest exploration of the United States. So it seemed reasonable to corral all that into a chapter under the heading of wood, and then earth. Well, once we've established, as Lewis and Clark and the other explorers did, the topography of the country, where the Rockies were, where the Sierra were, where the Great Rivers and Lakes were, then it was a question of what they were made of, and what, in other words, was the underpinning, where was the gold in Suttus Mill in California or the silver in Nevada, the farmlands in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. So the early geologists, the people who, particularly the ones that worked in the West, and lured with these stories of what they had found, the settlers who went on the Mormon Trail and the Santa Fe Trail and the California Trail and who populated the West of America. In that story, generally, geologists were hugely important, and I used to be a sort of geologist once in my life, so this was relatively familiar territory. And then they were incorporated into that the four great surveys, which discovered the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and, well, the most famous of them all is called the 40th Parallel Survey, done by an extraordinary man called Clarence King, but that's a separate, wonderful story, but a very different story, surveying the land between Sacramento and Cheyenne. So all of these people could be put under the category of Earth. So then there was water. Well, once again, it seemed to work quite nicely because the early American settlers on the East Coast, they would venture into the hinterland by going in canoes themselves, up the rivers, the Susquehanna and the James and the Potomac and the Hudson, and after 60 or 70 miles of paddling, they would inevitably come to waterfalls and rapids where they would stop because they clearly couldn't carry their canoes, but it would take them a long time. So they built little settlements there and they built settlements that would become eventually towns, so Fredericksburg and Jamestown and Washington, D.C. and Richmond, not Jamestown, but Richmond, and on the Hudson Albany. And once they had settled there and decided they wanted to begin trading with the people further upstream, then to get round the rapids, they built little canals and they became quite good at learning how to build canals. And then having acquired that knowledge, they would then start to build real and proper canals which would change the face of America forever. The first of the big ones was the Manchester Canal, which came down from New Hampshire to essentially make Boston, the big mercantile capital that then it turned into. The most important of all canals, the Erie Canal, which was constructed in the 1820s, which brought trade goods down from the Great Lakes to this stripling city, which then became, of course, the mightiest of all cities, New York. And then the not particularly elegantly named a Chicago sanitary canal, which was built ostensibly, well, initially not just ostensibly to move Chicago's sewage, which had been pumped eastwards into the lake. And, of course, in summer, that olfactory unpleasantness. So they decided to build a canal and send it westwards into the tributaries of the Mississippian. No one sort of cared about that. And so that linked Chicago to, via the Mississippi to the Gulf, which changed both the character of Chicago and the city of New Orleans at the southern end of the Mississippi. So all of those stories could quite neatly go into under water. And then fire. Well, it's all very well to conduct trade in the 1820s and 1830s by taking your goods in a canal behind a horse, clip-cropping along three or four miles an hour, pulling a barge. It was very economical, much better than it had been before. But James Watt had invented steam engine over in the United Kingdom, in Scotland. And suddenly the application of that technology, first of all, to building steam-powered boats to go out the canals and the rivers and then to power railway trains. And ultimately different kinds of fire-breathing devices would be invented to power motor cars and aeroplanes and things like that. So faster, and of course America is all about speed, swifter commerce relied initially and probably still to this day on things that are related to fire. So all of that could go under the category of fire. And then finally, the fifth one, metal, well, sort of self-explanatory when you think about it, the copper conducting wire of the telegraph and then the telephone and then the distribution of electricity, which is usually important, particularly during the 1930s, and then radio and then television and then the internet. So it all seemed to be quite neat and then massively, not only these five categories allowed me to put these 200 or so names into them, but also they were all in chronological order that things related to earth came after wood and things related to metal came after fire. So I took the idea down to my editor in New York and he gulped much as he had done with the Atlantic and said, well, I just don't know how Americans are going to like being seen through the prism of ancient Chinese philosophy but give it a whirl, why not? So that's how I wrote the book. And mercifully, the critics liked it and it sold extremely well in America and I've just signed two copies today. So apparently it sells in the paperback anyway in Australia. So that was, I've got to keep an eye on the clock. Now I'm doing this book on the Pacific and the Pacific very complicated. So big, of course, I mean bigger than you could put all the continents into the Pacific. It is so gigantic and all-encompassing. Doesn't have a, at least from my perspective, I know I'm going to get shouted out by people that will go on about Polynesian navigation, which I actually do write about. But it's history, it's human history, at least from a Western point of view, is perhaps not as rich and interesting as the history which gave us John Cabot and Lee Verickson and Columbus and all those people. So I decided that I would start, that I wouldn't write a book about the Pacific which was all-encompassing. I didn't want to begin it at the year dot. I wanted to begin it later and I thought actually the interesting aspect of the Pacific was the modern Pacific. So I had to decide when to start the story and so I thought, well, post-war. So it seemed to me that perhaps the surrender of the Japanese on the Missouri in September 1945 would work or perhaps the founding of the People's Republic of China in October 1949 might work. But then there was a marvelous sort of serendipitous moment when I decided that, when I was looking at, I'm sure you all know this, but it's now unfashionable of course to talk about things happening AD and BC because we're not all Christians. There was this attempt to reform BC by turning it into BCE before Christian era or before common era, but the scientific community didn't much care for that either and came up in the end with this notion of BP. So you talk about a glaciation occurring 10,000 years BP, BP standing for before present. But the question is, when is present? Well, present was defined in 1965 by a group of radiochemists who said that this was the moment, it was the 1st of January, 1950. And that reason for choosing that date because before 1950, it was possible to conduct carbon-14 dating tests and they would be accurate. We knew how much carbon-14 there was in the atmosphere. We knew it decayed and it's half-life 5,730 years. So knowing that baseline, it was possible to calculate the age of anything up to about 60,000 years. But after the 1st of January, 1950, there was such an enormous amount of nuclear atmospheric testing as it happens most of it in the Pacific, with the Americans, of course, in Bikini and Inuitok, the British Christmas Island, the French Marreroa, British again, of course, in Wimmera here. So the Pacific was hugely polluted, but the crucial, I mean, we all know about nuclear weapons producing strontium-90 and radioactive iodine and things, but they also produce a gigantic amount of carbon-14. So this meant that the baseline of carbon-14 was tremendously distorted from 1950 onwards. And to get accurate measurements of anything's age, you had to induce a different algorithm almost every month because of the rate of nuclear testing. So in the end, they decided that dates should be counted backwards from the 1st of January, 1950. So BP before present or before physics or before purity was ended. So that was my starting point. And now I'm on chapter four of the book. And what I decided to do was forget seven ages of man's structure, forget classical Chinese, give it a somewhat more conventional structure, look at, make a great big list of everything that seemed to me important and interesting that happened in the Pacific from 1950 to the present day and select 12 of them, 12 a slightly arbitrary number, but each of these would be a chapter. 12 events that seemed to be token something more important that said something quite important about the Pacific Ocean. So I've done chapters one, two, three, and I'm just under four. So chapter one was about an event. You may not think of it much as an event, but on the 12th of August, 1955, so these events are in chronological order, in Winnipeg and also in Minneapolis, electronic shops sold, I think they were $45 each, small box type thing, the TR 55, the first ever transistor radio. And if you looked at the tuning dial, it said Tokyo Tushin Kaigyo, Tokyo Telecommunications Corporation. But if you looked above it, tiny little letters was a newly invented word, and that was the word Sony. It was the beginning of the Sony Corporation and this amazingly clever man, not Akio Morita, everyone knows him, but he was a very nice and flamboyant salesman, but the technical guy, a man called Ibuka, he invented these things, he invented the Walkman, he invented the Trinitron, and so the whole universe of Japanese or Asian consumer electronics began at that moment in 1955. So that seemed to be an important trend, obviously it moved from Japan to Korea and it's moved now from Korea because Samsung's in trouble and it's now the Chinese who are doing it, but that was the beginning of this massive onrush of container ships going from Yokohama to Seattle and San Francisco. So that's chapter one, chapter two, I'm talking about, and I actually get into Australia here, events that brought all sorts of people into what one might call a Pound Pacific Communion and that it begins also with a Japanese story. I didn't want to make this too heavily Japanese, but the first two chapters got a lot of Japan in them relating to the whole internment issue of the American citizens of Japanese origin and what happened to them after the internment was over. But I also chose things like Yvonne Gulagong's appearance at Wimbledon when she beat Margaret Court in I think it was 1959 or maybe 1960 and talk about the North American Indians taking over the island of Alcatraz, various attempts by people to become incorporated into this Pound Pacific community. Chapter three, you may think this is trivial but I thought it was important to have some lighter chapters into leaving the more ponderous chapters is 1959, August the 23rd. I think it was the release in America of the movie, Gidget. May think it's trivial, but actually it had an enormous economic effect on making surfing a huge worldwide phenomenon, 20 million people now surf. There's a gigantic industry in it, although it started in, first of all, Tahiti and then became popular among the very socially stratified in Hawaii. It wasn't until Jack London wrote about it in 1906 and that it started to be practiced in Redondo Beach in California. But it was still then a sort of marginal sport but Gidget and then the formation of the Beach Boys in 1961 made it hugely popular. So that seemed another Pacific phenomenon and then chapter four, the one that I'll be starting to write when I get home next week will be about the capture of the USS Pueblo in 1968. So each date is a little bit later, which is one of those episodes which sort of marks North Korea down as being a perpetual irritant in the Pacific. And then after that I'll get on to things like, I very much want to write about Australia and how she's become such an important regional power in the Pacific. And I thought that the two events that both in the 1970s that I'd use was the opening of the Sydney Opera House and the sacking of Goff Whitlam. And so it moves on and it ends and this, and I must really be careful about my time. The last chapter is about the Hokulea. I don't know how many of you know about the Hokulea but it's this 62 foot long Hawaiian wa. The wa is the Hawaiian word for canoe. It was built in the 1970s and under the tutelage of a man called Miao Piaolug, who lived in Satawal in the Caroline Islands, the last surviving Polynesian who knew non-instrumental navigation, how to get from A to B by using only the stars, the feeling of the swell, the migration of birds. And they succeeded. They took Hokulea from Maui to Tahiti in 1972, I think. And now they've learned to do it very well. So they set out on May the 17th, I think it was this year, to go completely around the world. And there's a crew, all ways of about 30 people on it. They changed the crew every few weeks. They just raised the North Cape, that's Cape Rainiger, I think, of New Zealand about a week ago. I think they're going to be here at Christmas or they may be in New Zealand at Christmas. Then they're coming here. They're going through the Indian Ocean. They haven't quite decided whether to try and go through Suez or to go around the Wild Coast and around Cape of Good Hope, cross the Atlantic, where presumably they'll stop in Jamestown, my favorite city in St. Helena, and then head up to the Chesapeake and go and see President Obama. Probably the only piece of good news he'll have for a while that his own people, Hawaiian people, are obviously incredibly clever and skilled but an old fashioned form of navigation, which of course is completely given way now to GPS and compasses and sextants and all things like that.  It'll take about three and a half years. But if you don't know anything about it, I advise or urge you to go to the Polynesian Voyaging Society and revel in the success of these wonderful, wonderful young Hawaiian people who are doing this. So that is how this Pacific book I hope will be finished. It's got to be delivered on March the 31st, we'll end. But then that leads me on to the next and the final thing I want to say, which is what I want to write next, which is a history of precision. Precision I think is a fascinating aspect of modern human life. It really began in 1787 with a man called Henry Maudsley during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution who produced what was by the lights of the time anyway, the first piece of perfectly flat steel and a micrometer to measure its flatness and then a perfectly spherical piece of steel. And that enabled the cutting of accurate gears and the making of certain that the machinery of the Industrial Revolution was precise and efficient and accurate. And that led to our current love affair with all things precise, except I wonder, and I think the book will ruminate on this, whether actually our love affair with machines and precision is altogether a good thing. And the Polynesians in their little canoe are demonstrating that it is possible to achieve things in a very imprecise heuristic way, if you like. So ultimately I want to sort of question in this book and I haven't even thought about the structure yet, whether societies that worship titanium are necessarily happier, more content and satisfying satisfactory societies than societies that let's say worship bamboo. So that'll be the next book. So as you can see, one book sort of tends to lead organically into another, but the key to making them readable, and of course it's up to the reviewers and the readers to decide whether I've nailed it or not, is the structure. The idea is the key, nice writing is obviously an ambition, but the structure is hugely important. Now that's sort of the end of what I want to say, except I want to go back a little tiny bit to talk about three words that I like. And one of them is this wonderfully imprecise definition in Johnson's dictionary of 1755 of the word elephant. So I'm going to read it to you because I think it's so delicious. And then I'm going to tell you about one other word, which I like, a very imprecise definition, and then my favourite word of all time. So this is the definition, and you've got to remember in 1755, of course Samuel Johnson, he'd probably never seen an elephant, the channel tunnel wasn't built. So it's unlikely that London, he was writing in Fleet Street, was exactly awash with these animals. So he had to sort of guess, and this is what he came up with. The largest of all quadrupeds, whose sagacity, faithfulness, prudence, and even understanding many surprising relations are given. The animal is not carnivorous, but feeds on hay, herbs, and all sorts of pulse. And it's said to be extremely long life. It is naturally very gentle, but when enraged, no creature is more terrible. He is supplied with a trunk or long hollow cartilage like a large trumpet, which hangs between his teeth and serves him for hands. With one blow with his trunk, he can kill a camel or a horse and will raise a prodigious weight with it. His teeth are the ivory so well known in Europe, some of which have been seen as large as a man's thigh and a fathom in length. Wild elephants are taken with the help of a female ready for the male. She is confined to a narrow place around which pits are dug, and these being covered with a little earth scattered over hurdles, the male elephant falls easily into the snare. In copulation, and clearly he, Samuel Johnson realized that to get the readers, you've got to get a bit of sex into everything.  I don't think so, somehow.  But such is his pudicity, and Johnson falls into the great snare himself of lexicography, which is, you must never include in the definition any word less familiar than the one you're attempting to define. And I suggest that not many people looking at the world elephant will know what pudicity means, but it comes from the same root as pudendum, that of which we are shy. So it's such is his shyness that he never covers the female so long as anyone appears in sight. So he obviously made the whole thing up, because no one... So I liked that. The other thing I like is my favorite single volume dictionary is Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, great for crosswords and things like that. But it also has buried deep within it what are called chamberisms, which are slight attempts at lexicographic wit. And I think the nicest one is the definition of eclair. And I'm sure you all know that eclair is the French word for lightning, which is a reasonable thing to think of. But the definition of eclair in chambers is a cake long in dimension, but short in duration. I think it's absolutely brilliant. And the last word, and my favorite, it's not so much the word that it's my favorite, but it's the definition. It's how marvelous the English language is that it encompasses such a thing in the word... And it's a Dutch word, I should say, originally, malmerocking, M-A-L-L-E-M-A-R-O-K-I-N-G. Malmerocking. The definition of malmerocking in the earliest edition, the earliest edition that I have of Chambers 20th Century Dictionary, and it's crucial because there's another definition later, is malmerocking means the carousing of drunken semen on ice-bound Greenland whaling ships. I mean, really. Oh, they're malmerocking again. I mean, but the crucial thing is that in the latest edition, it came out about 15 years ago, Chambers 20th Century, they've changed the definition very slightly. And it says malmerocking, the carousing of drunken semen on ice-bound whaling ships. They've left out the word Greenland. And this allowed a wonderful editor on The Guardian, who I was working for at the time, to write an editorial Saturday tongue-in-cheek saying he's just read the new edition of Chambers, and he notices to his great alarm that the phenomenon known as malmerocking has now unleashed itself from its native Greenland and appears now to be spreading all over the world. It must be stopped immediately, as I indeed must stop this talk. So thank you very much indeed. That was wonderful, Simon, and lovely to get the insights into the books that everyone in this room have been enjoying. And we'll soon be enjoying in the case of the Pacific. November, I think. If I get it in on time, yeah. Now, you're happy to take some questions? Yes, of course, absolutely. If I could ask you, I'm sure there are lots of questions. If you could wait until the microphone gets to you, there is one microphone circulating somewhere. So, yes, please. Owen, has anyone come up with the answer to what the English word beginning? Yes, you've got it. Very good, congratulations. The word singular word is die, and the plural is dice. So sorry about that. Sorry? Oh, you see, very good. But what's the singular? There is no singular of et cetera. Maybe there are no questions. Oh, there's a question, our president. I just wondered, in giving the stories that you've just told us about the three books in terms of the Atlantic America and the current book, and the Surgeon of Crowthorne is a very different book, it seems, in that regard. It seems to start with a story. And I'd just be interested for you just to tell us a little bit about how you came up with the structure for that particular book. Well, how I came up with the structure for the surgeon, it seemed to me that the introduction to that was the moment that James Murray, the editor of the OED, went to meet the man with whom he had been corresponding for 30 years from the village of Crowthorne in Berkshire. Under the belief that this man was a surgeon, an educated surgeon, living peacefully in Crowthorne. And so he went by train, he was irritated that this person would never come to the celebrations they held in Oxford when they'd completed a letter or a fascicle in the dictionary. They'd always invite him, they'd always invite all the volunteers, but W. C. Minor never came. And he'd write and say, I'm sorry, I cannot get away. Little did they know. And so there was this wonderful moment and he describes it in his diaries. When he took the train down, he rode a tricycle through Oxford and he had a great long beard and people would cat-call as he raced down the streets to the station and then got on the train to Redding, changed, went to Crowthorne. There was a landow clip-clopped through the lanes of rural Berkshire and deposited him at this great Victorian mansion where a servant ushered him upstairs into an office of a man, a book-lined office. And Murray bowed and said, very good afternoon to you, sir. I am James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. And you, sir, after 30 years of my questing, must be my longtime contributor, W. C. Minor. And the man behind the desk said, I regret that this is not the case. My name is Orange. I'm the warden of the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane, which is what this building is. W. C. Minor is indeed here. But there are three things you should know about him.  And I don't know which of those things was the worst. And I shall take you to him directly. And doors were opened and the two men met and they looked as if Murray was approaching a mirror because the man who he was greeting looked almost identical, bald, long, white beard, tall. And they embraced and they remained friendly for the rest of their individual lives. So that was the obvious way to begin it, just to lure the reader in, if you like. And then it was a question of trying to relate the history of early OED making, so the Philological Society and the Committee for Unorganized Words and then the decision to make the dictionary and interleave that with W. C. Minor's life in, first of all, in Ceylon or Sri Lanka. And then he's coming to England and then he's murdering this Irish chap and being put in prison and then go back to the dictionary so that the two things are following each other until they merge with the realization that in this lunatic asylum was this extraordinary contributor to the dictionary and from that point on, the story of Murray and Minor was then perfectly interleaved. So it's sort of an easy and relatively logical thing. The one thing I will say, which angers a lot of people, was how easy that book was to write. Once I'd got the files in Broadmoor, which had been restricted for many years and there were 11 linear feet of files. The book only took six weeks to write, so it was a very... And there was one wonderful moment, I should perhaps tell you about, sounds rather... I knew that something, I'm sure many of you that have read the book will remember this, rather gruesome incident. His work for the dictionary declined severely in 1902. He'd been gaily sending thousands of citations to Oxford, but then he stopped. They were in the middle of the letter Q, I think. And they were all very perplexed and Murray would write everything all right and he said, I've not been very well. So no one quite knew what had gone wrong and then I was looking through the notes one day and all this was before typewriters. So all the notes were in beautiful copper plate handwriting, except suddenly I came across a piece of paper on which one of the guards had written in pencil. It was still pretty nice handwriting, but written in pencil, which was unusual. And it was one of the guards said, Dr. Miner came to the South Gate at 9.15 this morning, shouting out, quick, quick, I need a doctor. Why pray? What seems to be the problem? Dr.  And well, then obviously I attended to him and called the doctor and all the rest of it. So you can imagine the delight, I mean, I felt, holding this piece of paper, which answered the question, because obviously that would take your eye off the ball as it were. And so that even, I did a bit more research on how it was, how he actually achieved this. And then went up to Oxford that evening and went into the OED, the main editorial room, and sort of announced in a rather loud and pompous way. I've discovered why his work rate fell off in 1902 and everyone went silent and I told them and they were, I mean, thunderstruck, but they were delighted, they at last knew. And so then I went to the train to go back to London that night. And at the ticket office, there were two very elderly women who were lexicographers who worked on the OED who weren't in the hall when I made this sort of announcement.  So we all trooped into the train, which was one of these sort of open plan, sort of commuter trains full of men who had been up in Oxford for the day, commercial people involved with motorcars and things. And so they were all sitting there and I have this, I suppose, maybe I was very excited when my voice was booming a lot.  And then with one fells, cutting it off. And at this moment, all the men, there was a sudden crossing of legs. All the people listening to this story. But the women, these elderly ladies who were going down to the theater that night, there, you could see the lexicographical gears grinding in their heads. And they said, and I swear, it makes the story better anyway, but I swear they said it in unison. They said, oh, auto-peotomy. And then one of them said, peotomy, of course, is the amputation of the penis, but auto-peotomy is doing it yourself. And we believe, don't we, that that is a neologism. And if you can write an illustrative sentence in your book, incorporating the word auto-peotomy, then it'll be put in the third edition of the OED. And your fame will be eternal. A vital change of the American edition? Yes, it was called The Surgeon of Crowthorne in Britain and the Commonwealth, of course. And the Folio Society has just produced an edition calling it The Surgeon of Crowthorne, which was my title, because he was a surgeon. The Broadmoor was in Crowthorne. It seemed a sort of jagged sort of, it seemed very appropriate to the story. But my editor in America, Larry Ashmead, now a long dead, said, what the hell's a Crowthorne? No one in America's gonna know what a Crowthorne is. So we'll change it to the Professor and the Madman. But I said, there's no Professor in the story.  He says, no, we'll see. And so, three million copies later, I'm perfectly happy with the title. But it's not precise. It's accurate, but it's not precise. Or rather, it's not accurate, but it is precise. Well, obviously one of your interests is the impact of technology. You spoke of the coming of all these Sony gadgets and so forth. So this prompts the question, our habits of looking things up have changed profoundly in just a few years. Sort of rummaging around town trying to find that reference book. We're just a few taps and we're looking up. Have you any thoughts on what's that's doing to our psyche? How that's changing our sense of the way in which knowledge is organized? Well, all I can say is sort of rather obvious things, which it imparts a lot of information, but that doesn't give us much knowledge and it certainly doesn't give us any wisdom. So I don't like it. I mean, I use it, of course, but I have a, as I dare say most of you, you're at this conference. After all, I have a gigantic collection of Atlas is a huge collection of dictionaries and I try my level best to use them if only because of the tactile pleasure, of course, but also the chance of serendipity. And I know this is perhaps an overused word, but you just don't have it when you're, I mean, I have the OED and I've got the OED online. And sure, I can find the definition of any word instantly online and it is a bit of a pain to actually go to the volume and leaf through it, but I find if I do that, the potential for joy is so much greater. So for me, as someone who searches for joy, I like the old fashioned way, but... Well, exactly, that's precisely the point. It would never, never have happened. So, but it's no use beating against the tide, really. And of course, this, the question whether the OED will actually ever be published again in hard book form, it's going to be published, they say, the third edition in 2037. And it will be at least 40 volumes if it's a hardback book. I probably won't be here in 2037, but I would certainly buy it as a book. But quite honestly, I doubt if they'll produce it in any other version than online. So it's a sad but inevitable consequence of the invention of the transistor. Just to sort of tie up the beginning and the end of the books you've talked about, though obviously there are lots of others of your books that you haven't talked about. But do you worry that the OED encourages lack of precision? That's to say, I have some obsessions about words in fur and imply. Obama used in fur incorrectly. Really? Yes. I shall never vote for him again. When he spoke to the University of Queensland the other day. And complementary and complementary. You can find complementary meaning a free gift. In the ultimate dictionary. And this is because dictionaries are not prescriptive, as you said right at the beginning. But they are duty bound by the methodology of creating the dictionary to record all incorrect usages. I'm not sure that I think that's as great a problem in dictionaries as it is with thesauruses or thesauri. I've got to be careful speaking to you. I taught briefly at the University of Chicago in 2002, I think it was. And the students loved using Roger or whatever available thesaurus there was. And a chap was writing an essay in which he was talking about potting a geranium. And he was commenting on how his fingers once he had done this were earthy. But for some reason he decided that the word earthy which I think you and I and George Orwell and everyone that loves old words would think is a perfectly acceptable word. But no, he didn't want to use it. And so he turned not to his own brain or anything but to Roger. And the essay that he submitted to me said I planted the geranium and then looked with horror at my hands which were cathonic. C-H-T-H-O-N-I-C. So I think that danger not only of not being able to tell infer and imply and complementary and complementary affects students who rely too much on the thesaurus which I think is the greater villain, quite honestly. Could I ask you please, have you got any specific criteria for these 12 events that you're going to cover? The criteria were really whether I thought and this is very much an editorial judgment call and I may be lambasted for it were events that as I mentioned earlier betoken something of much greater significance which affected or infected the whole ocean. So I think, for instance, one can reasonably say that the sport of surfing which is originally I mean there was some argument but that's basically only believed by people that believe in Thor Heierdahl's theory which is now obviously discredited by genetics that it is a pacific sport or a pastime that originated in the pacific and now has spread itself around the world. That seems to me to be a legitimate phenomenon of the modern pacific which is important enough to include in the book. The persistent, irritant, irritating behavior of North Korea is something that affects us all and makes us realize that Asia Pacific is something that we ought to take cognizance of. So for instance also but I wanted these events to be interesting in and of themselves. As an example, I think chapter 6 or 7 is the burning and sinking in 1972 in Hong Kong harbour of the liner, the Queen Elizabeth that was sabotage and an insurance job basically but it was the beginning, it seemed to me of the end of European imperialism in the pacific. So we have the withdrawal from Fiji and Tonga the Solomon Islands which at the time were all British possessions Hong Kong in 1997 the American withdrawal from Indochina after the end of the Vietnam War the French withdrawal. So generally speaking all the Europeans started pulling out, of course there are relics there's pit can and the French possessions but generally speaking the European influence allowing the pacific to develop on its own with its own people under the guidance of its own people was an event that could be symbolized in a hundred different ways but I chose the burning of the Queen Elizabeth an incident which is forgotten but nonetheless when you look at it carefully it's dramatic and fascinating as a way of leading into this story so what I've tried to do then is to put at the head of each chapter an event that I thought rather like the first few pages of the search and of Crowthorne would beckon the reader into the chapter I think it's important and I'm an old journalist so I want to grab the reader by the throat and lead him into the chapter slightly dry as dust thesis to begin each chapter I want an event of some interest someone does need his dinner thank you sweetly put Simon Winchester very much thank you very much