Hi my name is Deepak, actually I just want to share my experience in the KMC Ambedkar Circle where my dad got admitted for minor heart attack. We hail from a small town, Puthur, in the morning of the day my dad felt some chest pain and stomach pain and we initially thought it's a because of the gastric or acidity but then later we got to know it's because of the ECG there in the local hospital that it's a he had minor heart attack and we wanted to seek for a better option. So we contacted the KMC, why we contacted KMC is because my friend had a good experience there in the previous in his previous experience so he had suggested to go for that. So we called through the contact of Dr. G2 Radhakrishnan, we booked the ambulance and like within 10 minutes they reached the local hospital in Puthur and from there the ambulance like it reached to the KMC Ambedkar Circle in one and one hour it was around 11.30 in the night on the day and here the hospital the emergency cell received as well and immediately they assigned a doctor, we had a reference to Dr. Narasimh Pai who is a cardiologist specialist and his assistants like took care of them after that and then they moved to a surveillance room where they were continuously monitoring for that entire night. Next day morning doctor came and we did an angiogram and got to know like there was a plot in the small plot in the heart and suggested to go for angioplasty and it was done like within a well time so around 11 o'clock with the angiogram and angiography and then within like 30 to 45 minutes angioplasty also finished and then he moved to ICU and later once he moved to ICU the conditions were well settled and all the readings were fine and the way they handled in the initial time they also called as a golden time which was really nice because it was a late night and they managed it really well and also we came with the very uncertain condition we didn't know what happened because it was very new experience for me but because of the hospitality of the hospital and the health workers here they made it go in a very flow and we were not in any anxiety or something throughout the process and now my dad is recovering and within like one 24 hours they moved to a normal ward and now we'll be staying here for another three days for the observations the experience was really good and I really thank the entire management for providing such an experience nice experience thank you


Consumers now have already made the shift where they see their wardrobe as an asset. When you think about your wardrobe, there's some inherent value. You know that some of those pieces are still worth something on an aftermarket. That transition to getting customers to see their wardrobe as an asset has happened. What we need to do is make sure that the bottom 50% of their wardrobe, the items that they don't think still have value, that those items don't get put in a garbage bag and just dropped off at Salvation Army. We need to make that shift to where there's value ascribed to any item in the wardrobe. What helps to enable consumer and post-consumer recycling? And in almost every single market, it's a rebate. And so if I knew no matter how old it was, I could always earn $2, $3 back and be rewarded for recycling, I would put everything in a bin and take it to the right place. My strong belief is that the circular economy works when you create an economy, when you create a market for it. And when you allow customers and consumers to benefit from that market and engage in it.


Just how powerful is nuclear energy? Uranium pellets like this one fuel all nuclear energy in Canada. Just eight of these is enough to power your house for an entire year. It's about the same amount of energy as 400 kilograms of coal, or about 0.5 cubic meters of coal pieces, 410 litres of oil which would fill about two and a half of these small pools, or about 350 cubic meters of natural gas which would fill about eight of these train cars. So how do all of these give us power? The main idea behind most power plants is to produce heat. This heat is used to boil water, produce steam, turn a turbine, and power an electrical generator. The only difference is how the heat itself is produced. Fossil fuel stations use coal, oil or natural gas to produce heat, while nuclear stations use the heat from nuclear reactions. Energy from nuclear reactions comes from an atom's nucleus when it splits. The job of the nuclear reactor is to capture this energy. In a nuclear reactor, the radioactive element of uranium is compacted into fuel pellets and then placed into fuel bundles. So this is a fuel bundle. This is what gets put into the core of the reactor to produce the nuclear reaction. It includes uranium pellets that are stacked into these tubes here. As the uranium releases energy through nuclear reactions, water that flows around the fuel bundles is heated. This water surrounding the fuel bundle acts as a coolant to remove the heat from the reactor up through the pipes to the steam generator. The steam turns the turbine to generate electricity and heads out through the electricity grid. In Canada, all reactors are CanDo designs engineered by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited in partnership with Ontario Power Generation, GE Canada and over 100 other Canadian manufacturing and engineering companies. CanDo is an acronym that stands for Canada Deuterium Uranium Reactors. Its innovative Canadian design makes use of natural uranium and an isotope of hydrogen called deuterium. So there are a lot of CanDo reactors in Ontario. It's a big part of the energy portfolio of the province. There's one reactor in New Brunswick and there was one in Quebec. On an international level, you can find CanDo reactors in Romania, South Korea, China, Argentina and also there are CanDo-like reactors in India and Pakistan. An important feature of the CanDo reactor design is the use of deuterium oxide, also called heavy water. A water molecule is made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. In heavy water, the hydrogen atoms have been enriched with an extra neutron to create what is called deuterium. The heavy water is called a moderator because it surrounds the fuel bundles and moderates the neutron flow inside the reactions. When all the parts of this nuclear reactor come together, a thick layer of concrete shielding helps contain the energy. So you see how small this fuel bundle is. This is enough to produce sufficient energy to supply a house for a family of four, all the electricity that we need for 100 years.


and welcome to Books, Books, Books, a talk show on books that we think you should know about. I'm your host, Mihaila Stoops, and today's book is The List of Us, True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth by Sam Quinones. My guest today is Ken Shaw. He's a 36 years law enforcement veteran who spent most of his career in drug enforcement and drug policy. Currently, Kent is the executive director for Western States Information Network, an entity that supports law enforcement agencies in the states of California, Washington, Oregon, Alaska, and Hawaii. And prior to this appointment, Kent was the chief for California Drug, I'm sorry, California Department of Justice, Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement and Bureau of Investigation. Kent, thank you so much for joining me today and for recommending such a good book. My pleasure and thank you very much for having me. Well, let's just dive into it. First, let's start this discussion with the first question and that is why the author calls it a opioid epidemic. Yeah, I think it's just really because of the sheer scope of the issue as it grew. And again, Sam addresses this issue really in his first book, which was Dreamland, which addressed specifically the opioid epidemic issue, really the diversion of legitimate legal pharmaceutical drugs that were being diverted into the black market. And he touches upon that in his book in a number of different places, which I think is important to do so because obviously that largely has given the segue to the issue that we're now experiencing with the synthetic drugs and fentanyl and methamphetamine. And so there also has been some developments in the courts after the post-production of Dreamland in terms of addressing some of the internal communications which were obtained through a lot of those prosecutorial efforts and the settlements that took place. They actually see those internal communications as confirmed that more or less that these companies were in fact profiting off the misery of this issue as these drugs were being overprescribed and flowing into the black market and resulting in just horrific outcomes in terms of addiction and death. So I got quite an education on drugs, I have to say. I've learned that we basically have moved from drugs that were produced from plants to synthetic drugs and designer drugs that are produced in labs from chemicals. And the author states that just in 2020 alone, 17 new designer drugs or synthetic drugs were identified. I can only assume that there's been even more since then and they come with their specific challenges and sets of issues. Yeah, I mean, if nothing else, these organizations are brilliant business people, right? And they're always figuring out the way to build a better mousetrap and to increase their profits. And so the reality is that a lot of the, particularly early in my career in terms of drug enforcement, we were dealing with these what you could refer to as plant-based products. I mean, cocaine comes from the coca plant and heroin coming from the poppy and also marijuana obviously being grown. And so, but we long, particularly here in California, dealt with methamphetamine, which of course is in synthetic drug. But I think these organizations have learned that rather being relegated to dealing with growing, which was vulnerable to a lot of attack by law enforcement and your seasonal issues and things of that nature, if you go to synthetic where you can manufacture it in a warehouse somewhere, you have a virtually unlimited production capabilities and a year-round basis. And so that's really why we see this segue going from as the people were really addicted to products that were coming from plant-based to these synthetic products which have then taken their place. And then of course, methamphetamine, they talk about a resurgence of it. It never really went away, but it's really kind of a whole new product in terms of what's taking place now. And the production that used to historically take place in the United States and California and places like super lab where it was being manufactured by hundreds of pounds and other places in the Midwest where they were using smaller, like what they call shake and bake, small amounts. But nonetheless, that was happening here and then that shifted back down to Mexico. And so that's really what we're confronting these days. So fentanyl was discovered in the seventies in Belgium and then China started producing it in mass quantities. In 2019, fentanyl was, I mean, China outlawed it. So now it's not okay to produce fentanyl in China but they produce other substances similar to it. They cannot ship it to the US, they send it to Mexico. So Mexico is again, the preferred route of drug traffickers. So we have two culprits so far. We have China, we have Mexico, but we also have the US demand for these drugs and also a supply that is always available and always enticing. Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of those connections, the international ones really were already established. Even if you go back to when a way of manufacturing methamphetamine more than a decade ago, which was the ephedrine reduction process, which used pseudo-ephedrine or ephedrine, pure ephedrine, a lot of those chemicals were being imported into Mexico via not only China, but India and Germany. So the Mexican cartels had long reached out and established those relationships in other places throughout Europe to access the basic precursors and chemicals that they needed. Of course, the most prominent route for smuggling those drugs once they're manufactured is coming out of Mexico into the Southwest border. And so as they moved and took the manufacturing, for example, of methamphetamine and brought that back down into Mexico, that was a shift there. And then they also increased all that production capability for the fentanyl now to come in and seize upon the growing opioid epidemic that existed. And it was a perfect storm for them to be able to seize that opportunity and for where they're producing now. And it's a matter also of marketing these substances. Most recently, we saw on the news that you have fentanyl pills that look like smarties, like candy, which some could take by mistake, for instance. And there's also a matter of, like once the drugs are in the West, there's stories in the book of kids that order these pills online on Snapchat because the messages disappear quickly and nobody could track those or at least the parents can't. And the pills get delivered at the kid's house at 3 a.m. Yeah, sad but true, but yes. And as I mentioned earlier, in terms of there being brilliant business folks, marketing is a big component of that. And the pills that they smuggle into this country here will look virtually identical to pharmaceutical grade pills. They'll make them look like Xanax or Oxycontin pills or any of the other ones with the same markings on them from the manufacturers here in the United States that certain numbers on them, the coloring that they do is they use pill presses down there to manufacture these. And of course, these pills don't have any of the legitimate substance that they purport to, they're full of fentanyl and other binders and things of that nature. But as you mentioned, we see this at different times. We've seen it also with nothing fun. I mean, when it was colored, I don't know if that was popularized because of the movie Breaking Bad where the lead manufacturer on that show, his signature was blue methamphetamine. There's times that they'll manufacture that. And so with these pills, we saw this big wave of these kind of rainbow colors and things that they know will be more attractive. And yeah, and unfortunately, these folks can readily go on to social media sites. And in order, it just like they're going to their favorite fast food restaurant and looking at a menu and seeing all the wonderful, colorful things that they'll be able to order. Of course, they have no idea of what is gonna be delivered to them and they're going to consume. And that's really the issue is, Sam touches upon it in the book where he said that he spoke with folks that had been heroin addicts for decades. And I certainly encountered a lot of those folks in my career, but they were able to maintain what they did. They had to get up and get well in the morning to avoid withdrawals, but by and large that are able to function, they knew how to get along. But when fentanyl comes along, a lot of those long chronic users were dying very quickly. Some literally within the first couple of uses of the drug. And so it's to the point now where, and as the DEA has their kind of slogan that they have out now, one pill can kill and that's the truth. Some of these people aren't chronic users. They may have only used for the first time and that may be all it takes, particularly when they're naive levels to deal with addiction. So what's a parent supposed to do? I'm a parent of a teenager and what am I supposed to do to prepare my daughter to warn her about this?  They probably contain some deadly level of substance. And there's no consistency in terms of one pill to the next. You could have two pills sitting next to each other look identical, but they could be very different. And to, again, people who are naive opioid users, these things are extremely dangerous. And also when you're used in conjunction with other things like alcohol and other substances that just kind of expoach, it's that they increase dramatically the effects that you have from one substance being put in combination with others. And so really that's a big part of it because if you look at that three-legged stool, prevention is absolutely credible keeping people from ever becoming in the grips of addiction, but in this case from perhaps using for the first time and then never living to see another day. One of the interesting things that I read in this book is among many, but there's quite a bit of research or information on neuroscience and addiction. And I've learned that 30% of us are genetically inclined to be addicted to something. It could be a substance or it could be a type of feeling or emotion. And that once one is dependent on one substance, he or she is primed to become dependent on another substance. So it seemed like one thing is gonna lead to another. And I'm surprised that the author doesn't talk much about marijuana in this book and I wonder why. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. I mean, if you think about it, just think of alcohol that, somebody who's under the influence of alcohol that lowers your inhibitions, you're far more likely and people probably have those unfortunate stories of goofy things they did when they were intoxicated on alcohol, they wouldn't have done otherwise. And so these drugs all do the same thing. They lower your ability to reason, that part of your brain, the cerebral cortex, the decision making parts of your brain. And these other drugs in particular, we talk about fentanyl and then the methamphetamine, they rewire your reward pathways and they change the way that you think. And Sam talked about it in here that folks actually lose their memory, their ability sometimes to communicate. It completely changes that. And that brain chemistry takes long, long periods of times to try and overcome that for those folks to come back to some reasonable level. Sam touched a little bit on marijuana in here in terms of kind of the cautionary tale of the legalization aspect or the decriminalization. And we've seen this first marijuana being legalized for the purposes, medicinal purposes, and now we see the spreading trend for recreational purposes. And I think that is shown kind of as a bellwether because we all warned, of course those who tried to pass those laws or initiatives told everybody that this would be the silver bullet that would end gangs being involved in marijuana and the cartels would no longer be involved. And this would, of course, have nothing, but the opposite has come to be is that the black market is flourishing now perhaps even more so than it was before in the marijuana industry. And more young people seek treatment for the addiction to marijuana than they do any other substance, controlled substance. And so the issue being is that, the two biggest killers are legal substances, tobacco and alcohol. And so if you have something that is more readily available, it is going to be a bigger problem. And that's just the reality of it. And we're seeing that happening even in the marijuana industry now. And so he touches briefly upon that when he addresses those issues. But I know that the focus of this book specifically for him was the synthetic aspect of the fentanyl and the methamphetamine in terms of how that is having its profound impact on really our society and how we wove it into the explanation for the growing homeless issue that we have with these tent cities all over and how it's correlated. Yeah, that was a very interesting approach in the book, the correlation between drug abuse and homelessness and also what was even more interesting to me, the correlation between the police, number of police shootings and the use of P2P meth, which is a substance that makes people paranoid, act erratically uncontrollable. I haven't heard of this kind of ideas before where there's a correlation between the two. And I wonder what do you think about it? Yeah, there's no doubt that there's often discussion of the chicken and the egg argument. People look to these vast homeless issues that we have that really have been dramatically increasing and not only just in the major metropolitan areas but other parts around the country. And then the issue people say, well, of course, housing cost or two exorbitant that's driving people to homelessness is a legitimate issue. But they also say, you know, we don't have the mental health services and I think that's legitimate as well. But the reality is that a lot of the folks and as Sam pointed out, folks that he interviewed, including some of the research that he did and certainly been my experience, that a lot of these folks are not people who have mental health issues before. It's psychosis and issues that are being generated from their drug abuse, you see what you're saying. They've even found that these people, once they get off it and they get into long-term treatment or long-term recovery and they haven't used for some period of time that all of those symptoms that they had before go away. So unfortunately, the issue that we're experiencing a lot of the stuff are folks that it's really kind of a drug-driven issue really more so than anything else. There's kind of those two distinct populations that I think it was the mayor of a war, Colorado, who went out and did an experiment. He was a, he went out and posed as a homeless veteran, he wasn't in fact a veteran but he wasn't homeless. And he found that the population was divided between two areas, one was those in the shelter. Those people who voluntarily went there, who there's rules that are there, you have to follow in terms of cure or curfew, no drug use, don't commit crimes. He said he felt extremely safe, he didn't ever saw any violence. He felt very comfortable in those locations. And then he went to the tent cities and it was completely the opposite. It was violence, it was rapid drug use. He had stuff stolen from him. He said he felt scared to death the whole time he was there. And he discovered that the populations never talked to each other. He never found anybody in a shelter who had ever been in a tent city and nobody in a tent city had been there. And the issue is they try and find these solutions that it's like a one fit all. And these are distinct different issues than people who may be lost or job and are trying to get back on their feet and are going to a shelter versus somebody who's living intentionally in a tent city and has no interest of ever getting out of that. And it seems that recovery is quite challenging and just sending people to traditional jail may not be enough that they actually need more support. And there's some places that have experimented with that by having a special jail where the inmates get activities and classes and they're taught all over again. So at the end of the day, as Sam points out it is the community that's going to fix this. And some of our viewers may ask why is this called, why is this book called The Least of Us? Well, the impressive part and I recommend our viewers to at least read the one chapter before last which is titled The Least of Us. And the wording actually comes from the Bible from Matthew where Jesus is quoted saying in as much as you have done it onto one of the Least of These, my brethren, you've done it onto me. So the idea is that we the community can help solve this crisis and these people are victims in our community and we're gonna have to deal with it. Yeah, absolutely. And you touched on a great topic so I served on an alcohol and drug advisory board in the county here in California and all my colleagues that were on that board were substance abuse treatment folks. And as is the case oftentimes they were all in long-term recovery. They make the best folks, right? They've been there, they've done it and they're terrific at the job that they do. But when some of these propositions were being passed to decriminalize the personal use quantities of some of these controlled substances they were very supportive of it and I cautioned them. I said, look, if you think about it how are most of the people coming to your facilities being referred there? They're not voluntarily going there. The people who are in the grips of addiction and trying to hit the bottom they're being referred there because of the criminal justice system, the vast majority of them. I said, when that goes away you won't have people coming to your facility and that is in fact what ended up happening. And so in Sam touches on it I never spent my career trying to put drug users in jail. I went after traffickers and dealers and people were involved in violent crimes and jail isn't necessarily the place just for somebody who's using. Of course they're committing a host of other crimes when they're under influence and sometimes violent ones but the jail facilities are doing a better job and more needs to be done in terms of providing services to support them and even wraparound services to give them so they can have a license when they get out and some basic job skills and things of that nature. But treatment is an important component of this whole thing and we have a saying, law enforcement we're going to deal with some of these very unexplicable problems. We say, we're not going to arrest our way out of this. Well, guess what? Sam had said in the book we're not going to treat our way out of this issue either. It's going to take a holistic approach in these communities to address these issues from all these problems. And as I mentioned earlier it's a three-legged problem or stool. It's prevention, it's treatment and it's enforcement. And if you take any one of those away it's a recipe for disaster. And so drug courts have been very successful in terms of people committing crimes. They can hold that over their head. There needs to be some level of accountability to get those folks into treatment because it doesn't work the first time, the second, third or sometimes even the fourth or fifth but they need to have that accountability and somebody to force them into that area so those folks can separate their brain from the drugs and get it to some level of commitment or treatment away from that issue and to start recovery. And it's going to take really looking at this issue from all three of those perspectives. And as the data shows, we cannot wait until these addicts hit rock bottom because with fentanyl around us that rock bottom may be death. So again, we need to do everything we can as early as possible, including prevention and education. So I wanna thank you again for joining me today and for recommending this book. It is a tremendous read and I wholeheartedly recommend it to all our viewers. It's gonna be an education in many perspectives. So thank you again, Kent for joining me. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Glad to share, but what I have to share. Wonderful. Well, until next time to our viewers, read as many books as you can and learn as many things as you can. A hui hou. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.


This is one of the most iconic and well-known images of Roman Vizhniki when on his book a vanished world What does the image mean and what does and what does the book mean? They have a global significance, but they're also very particular Yeah, so he's from Visni Apsa, which is in Carpathian Ruthenia, which is sort of Ukraine today and was Divided up between various new countries after World War one and it's iconic because I mean the portraiture is just perfect the way it's sort of centered and the way he's both leaning the hand on the cane and His head in his hands and sort of this deep thoughtful Pose and he's a you know, he's an elder of this. He's an elder of this community and so You know, it signifies of course this community itself For Vishniak Vishniak represent the this you know this part of the community is sort of deeply religious and deeply pious Roman Vishniak once he arrives in the United States sets up the studio in the studio photography or travels to Princeton to To take portraits of Albert Einstein Who apparently stated that is portrait by portraits by Vishniak were among his favorites and It's a different type of both Jewish American and global iconography here, right? Right? But there's two things They're both at this particular point relatively elderly Jewish men From different parts of Europe very clearly, but both Learned in their own way. They're both deep in thought and so there are you wouldn't expect someone from this You know this village elder essentially of the small town elder from the shtetl and I said to have much in common But the way Vishniak has portrayed them. I think one can say that they actually do have something in common and of course We know that both of their worlds came to to an end Yes, and I remember when I exhibited these images I in fact put them one next to the other for a very same reason Roman Vishniak Takes many many photographs of storks It's something that could be surprising But if we relate this to materials in the Vishniak archives things he wrote we see that There is not only a poetry in in how he describes a Living animal, but there is really a humanist gaze on science That will also see reflected in a more scientific taxonomic gaze on human beings So he's a man of the two cultures combined Science and humanities he writes about the stork that the wings of the planing bird are the prototype of our aeroplane wings gliding and sailing birds were the models for inventors and He talks about the struggle of the flight of the stork in Details in his notes and these notes are in his archives type written at the same time with the same setting type setting as reflections on Paris the city of Paris being looked at from the point of view from the eyes of a gargoyle in Notre-Dame and as well as Reflection on the toils of of the European Jews He writes about Jews in the same way that he writes about stork and their and their struggle in flight And he writes four million human beings different to despair by humiliation suffering and destitution Hope to be saved if not for themselves then for their children that they may grow up to live and work in a better world He doesn't express any knowledge of the systematic extermination of European Jewry But needless to say he's fully aware of the systematic persecution of European Jewry So we're at a point yet where for him personally That knowledge is not there And then there's still sort of a glimmer of hope and perhaps you know tied to the glimmer of hope You know with the with the picture of the stork that the stork will still be able to make its ascent and Remain in the air So he still sees a possibility at this particular point and doesn't realize that there is none a Man of the two cultures combined science and humanistic Scientific and humanistic gaze all at once Roman vision who was a pioneer in microscopic photography the vision Collection now with the Magnus includes around 1500 prints plus negatives and other materials and his own reflections about animals and Also microscopic objects which are photographed in stark contracts with his black and white photos in color And that we hope will unleash Numerous paths of research on the use of Berkeley campus many of his photographs depict children He'd voted a whole book to Jewish children, but he photographs children in many communities in many ways and Especially children who are also readers kind of like his photographs of Eastern Europe and Jewish children in the header What's a header John? Like it's sort of the religious elementary school But almost I mean there's a Disproportionate representation of Jews reading both children and adults and even the picture of Einstein is reading So Jews as sort of a reading civilization is the way he he wished to portray them And Irrespective of what country they're in or where they're from whether they're from Germany like Einstein or whether You know Carpathian Ruthenia or whether they're now in America Reading what looks like an English language book. They're nonetheless reading in New York Just as it did in Europe vision turns his gaze to Immigrant communities This is just a short set of many negatives and prints I've worked at it in Chinatown, New York City in 1940 and they're among the first External documents of visual documents of Chinatown at the time and they show both the breadth of his interests but also the the depth in which he's able to pursue the focus of Documenting marginalized people around the world Roman visionic Travel to Israel several times and what we're looking at here are slides of a trip done in October November of 1967 shortly after the Six-Day War we have no prints in the archive But we have many many transparencies many many slides He gives a wide-ranging even in just this few Images a one ranging wide-ranging portrait of Israel and especially Jerusalem the old city which had just been Acquired reacquired for access to Jews after the Six-Day War and also there there is again the the topic of Elderly Jewish or in this case even Samaritan men with with ritual texts and and and bearded elderly men And also one of the things that's most noticeable is that he's known of course for these stunning and Striking black-and-white photos and these are in color So it sort of represents a dawn as it were a brightness of a possible future as opposed to The recording the sort of visual recording of photographs of a civilization that's on the brink This is a civilization on the brink of a new future And so these seem to be you know these are in color And so they're also very striking but there are these very intimate portraits again of both Jews and non-Jews And self-portraits as well and so So we see him in in action roaming the the the roads of Israel What's interesting and very important about these images is that there's no real public documentation of vision in Israel So it just this gives us a sense of the potentiality of this archive And how many more roads we need to take in order to document the extraordinary work of this photographer


So firstly, it's been a great privilege to be the jury chair here at these awards and I've been really impressed by the range of companies that have submitted entries, not just in FMCG, but across a whole lot of other categories, financial services, across consumer durables, electronics, telecom, so many sectors that have submitted awards and I think that's fantastic that everybody is seeing the power of digital. The other thing that I think has been really fantastic is the level of creativity that has been shown and the use of technology, both of which get better and better each year. So if I could ask of marketers a few things, I guess the first thing would really be despite the emergence of technology, first principles are really important and the campaigns that stood out in the campaigns that seem to have done really well are the ones that have true consumer insight at their heart. If you keep the consumer at the heart of what you do, I think regardless of what is the media of advertising, the likelihood of your winning tends to be higher. I think the second thing I would love to see is for marketers to get a little bit braver in their use of technology. I do feel that as a community, maybe the marketing folks can do a little bit more to be at the cutting edge of technology, use it better. There's just so much out there that we can try as a collective. So these would be the two things that it would be great to see more of.


I will probably skip several details, nevertheless I will certainly like to introduce some ideas. The reason is that they are really important and sometimes these topics are considered to be advanced topics, which is really unfortunate because Relativistic Quantum theory means it's Dirac formulated this in 1928. So nobody over here was born at that time, including me, who is older than everybody else. So this is really not really modern in some sense. Okay, it has been there for a long time and it is important that our students who will be competing with others in their age group are familiar with these techniques because otherwise they will not be able to compete in international times. So these need to be introduced and once again I will like to thank the NPTEL administration, the leadership and the technology support which is absolutely superb and we had some introduction to topics and atomic physics. Dr. Arvind told you how to do spectroscopy with quantum mechanics and how quantum mechanics actually takes you, enables you to carry out observations and understand the physical universe around us because that's what spectroscopy is about. So one thing I would like to point out is Relativistic Quantum Mechanics because there is often a belief that quantum mechanics is important for tiny objects, microscopic objects. Relativity is important for those objects which are moving very fast, not at the speed of light, nothing goes at the speed of light except light itself but that objects which go at what we call as Relativistic speeds like 0.6 times the speed of light or 0.8 times the speed of light and so on. Now both of these notions are incorrect because quantum mechanics is applicable to everything no matter what the size is. When we introduced quantum mechanics we said that okay it is because you cannot measure position and momentum you know these are not compatible. Did we say that what is the size of the object? What is the volume of the object? What is the mass of the object? We never refer to these parameters and therefore quantum mechanics is applicable to everything to this object to large sized objects like you and me including me which is larger than anybody else and also the Earth itself the galaxies and you can write the Schrodinger equation for a galaxy and do astronomy using quantum theory because it is not at all a requirement that quantum mechanics should be used only for microscopic objects for all the microscopic phenomena for everything that happens over your quantum mechanics is applicable not only applicable it is necessary it is mandatory it is required the reason you are sitting on your chairs and not falling through the floor for example is because of certain interactions at the floor and these interactions for their completeness require a quantum description okay there are electrons and charges in the floor material in your feet and so on and unless all the interactions between them are correctly taken into account which includes the Coulomb interaction they include the exchange interaction the Fermi direct statistics okay so unless all of these interactions are taken into account correctly you will not be able to account for the fact that this object is not falling through the table okay so quantum mechanics is applicable to everything likewise relativity is applicable to everything not just to objects which are moving at relativistic speeds if an object is at rest it doesn't mean that it is free from relativistic effects I mentioned the sodium atom spectrum the spin orbit splitting between the 3p 3 half under 3p 1 half level that splitting will hold good for a sodium atom even if you bring it to a halt okay in laser cooling that's what you do you bring an alkali atom to some sort of a rest or as goes to rest as you can get and it will have the spin of its splitting and there is no way you can account for the spin of an electron without relativistic effects so these are some of the things that I would like to highlight very quickly so you have the Schrodinger equation over here and the Schrodinger equation as you can see has got the distance term okay V is a function of R and distance undergoes Lawrence contraction okay so the Schrodinger equation is not Lawrence invariant and that is the reason you need a relativistic formulation of quantum mechanics so you already realize that you need state vectors to describe the state of a system but then you also need the evolution of the state of the system to be described by an equation which is relativistically invariant which is Lawrence invariant which is what for electrons is the Dirac equation and events then take place in a four-dimensional world which we often call as the Minkowski world it all of the space-time continuum so I will not be going through all of this in detail because we are toward the end of the day but all of these points are discussed at considerable length in the two courses on atomic physics so in in different modules you know so some part is in module number three some and some other module but if you integrate you will find all of these ideas discussed at great length so quantization is not about discreteness it is about you know treating these quantum dynamical variables as operators representing the state of the system by vectors in a Hilbert space and then developing the algebra further to extract physical properties and when you do this you have to also take into account the Lawrence invariant so when you quantize momentum and instead of momentum we introduce operator gradient right minus i cross gradient was our operator for momentum and what is momentum momentum is mass and velocity dr by dt so it is a ratio of space over time and neither space nor time is Lawrence invariant okay so you have to have a more refined idea about these parameters before you quantize because quantization will involve having a appropriate operators for the momentum and what would be be these operators has to has to be introduced correctly and precisely so it takes a little while to do that so I won't get into these details but invite you to the full lectures which are integrated in this course so it has got some important consequences so I let I'm going to skip several slides but I would like to highlight one important aspect over here that if you consider this metric this p mu p mu and this is manifestly Lawrence invariant and this is what you would use to quantize the system so the momentum that you will be referring to would be coming from a relationship which is Lawrence invariant and this has got some important upshots you deal with the mass m and what is this mass m okay so there is a very famous equation e equal to mc square which is not correct okay it is not correct the correct equation is gamma mc square and you can see this very easily because if you put if you apply this equation for a photon which whose rest mass is zero the e equal to mc square would give zero energy for a photon and you would wonder what happened to that h mu which we have been using for the energy of the photon right so e equal to mc square is not correct and one really has to use equal to gamma mc square where gamma is root of one over root of one minus v square by c square and then you can expand this as a power series and then get various terms you get the rest mass and then rest mass energy and then you get the relativistic kinetic energy and so on so I won't go into these details but you will find that this equal to mc square will not give you the correct expression for the photon but if you use gamma mc square what does it give you for a photon for a photon m is zero so the numerator goes to zero but v is equal to c so the denominator also goes to zero so it doesn't give you a wrong answer it gives you an indeterminate quantity and it tells you that this is not the way to get the energy of the photon okay whereas equal to mc square would give you a wrong answer and an indeterminate answer is a better answer than a wrong answer because when it is indeterminate we learn that okay this is not the way to get the expression for the energy of the photon what you should do to get the energy of the photon is to use the relativistically invariant relationship and that will give you for the photon e equal to pc and that is no surprise because energy being associated with my initials is no coincidence at all and that is the correct expression for energy it will give you h nu as you should get right so so what has to do these things very carefully very rigorously and some of these things are often skipped out in many courses at the undergraduate level or even in the msc courses so i will not both of these details but then we have to we require a correct equation which is relativistically invariant to describe the state of the system and how it evolves with time which is the fundamental question in mechanics and that is done for an electron using the dirac equation so let me skip all of this but let me flash the dirac equation here it is at the very top of the slide what is in this red box over here is the dirac equation and what we call as the standard form and all along we have been saying that the electron has got an angular momentum which we call as orbital angular momentum we said that it has nothing to do with an orbit okay what is it it is an angular momentum which satisfies certain commutation rules and from that angular momentum we can get a magnetic moment and you see that magnetic moment in the z-man effect right and that's not the only magnetic moment you see in the z-man effect you see an additional source of the magnetic moment which must come from an additional source of angular momentum which is the spin angular momentum which we insisted has nothing to do with the kind of spin that you talk about when you talk about the earth's rotation or the spinning of a top right so if electron spin is not spin in this sense if orbital angular momentum has nothing to do with orbits of the sense then where does this spin come from so it comes from the dirac equation it comes from the relativistic dirac equation and here you have the dirac equation in front of you and do you see the spin over here do you see the do you see the spin orbit interaction the spin orbit interaction which we used in explaining the z-man effect and the anomalous z-man effect there was an s dot l term where is this s dot l in the dirac equation yet we argue that it is there and you have to dig into the dirac equation to find it okay and the way to do this is to carry out certain transformations of the dirac Hamiltonian and these transformations are known as fully Wodai's transformations which were worked out not so recently 1950 so there is nothing modern about this okay and this is the quantum mechanics that students really need to learn there is nothing new about it there is nothing advanced about it because it is quite old quantum mechanics it's more than 60 years old and for any student who is doing a masters in physics he has to know this so that he can really do some competitive physics which is at the very frontier of research in physics so one has to be introduced to what are known as the fully Wodai's transformations and what the fully Wodai's and transformations do is to carry out the dirac equation which is here so you write the dirac equation in a form which looks so similar to that of the Schrodinger equation but you carry out a transformation which are known as fully Wodai's and transformation and you carry out a transformation once and twice and three times and then rewrite the dirac equation in a form which in which after three fully Wodai's and transformations the H triple prime which is the third Hamiltonian in this sense has got this form and now you see the sigma dot L or the S dot L spin orbit coupling and you see the electron spin coming nicely out of the dirac equation but not unless you subject it to all of these transformations so these are some of the things that we deal with in these courses on atomic physics and the subsequent follow-up course which is called as the theory of atomic collisions and spectroscopy so it is abbreviated as TACS for theory of atomic collisions and spectroscopy but it rhymes as stacks and students normally say that okay this is a course which acts as them so it is again not a coincidence that it is called a stack so anyhow we also deal with how an atom is to be probed now can you if you have a target whatever how would you probe it you will probe it with something right so what will you probe it with you can probe it with light by electromagnetic radiation or you can fire some particles like electrons positrons or anything so is there anything else that you can think of either elementary particles or composite elementary particles like atoms or alpha particles or even molecules you can fire molecules and so on and when you do light you will say that you're doing spectroscopy when you do it with material particles you say that you're doing quantum collisions and these two are actually two facets of essentially the same physics so spectroscopy and quantum collisions are really not really two separate things you can see from this picture so if you look at the final state over here you have got an ion and an electron and you can get this final state through electron ions scattering experiment like this but you can also take a neutral atom and photo ionize it okay an electromagnetic shine electromagnetic energy on that and a photon is absorbed leaves an ion and an electron is kicked out so you'll you'll get a final state in which you have got an ion and an electron but you the initial ingredients are completely different in one case it is an electron and an ion in the other case it is a neutral atom and a photon so if you come this way you're doing spectroscopy if you come this way you're doing quantum collisions and it is not surprising that you should have the same final state in this case because these two processes are related to each other through a symmetry and this symmetry is what is called as the time reversal symmetry and it is not the same thing as t going to minus t as we saw in classical mechanics but it was all right for classical mechanics but when you do it in quantum theory you have to do more than that that t going to minus t is usually accompanied by the wave function undergoing complex conjugation so these are some details that I will not discuss at length we are toward the end of the day but you have the quantum collision and for organization processes related to each other through time reversal symmetry so we deal with quantum collisions the essential idea is how are you what kind of boundary conditions are you using over left and there are boundary conditions which are known as outgoing wave boundary conditions and in going wave boundary conditions so you you often say that e to the ikr by r is a spherically outgoing wave and it is meaningless to say that it is an outgoing wave without specifying what is the time dependence of this wave function and for a stationary state it is e to the minus i omega t so when you plug in the time dependence you have got the phase which goes as kr minus omega t and the surface of constant phase will have dr by dt to be a positive quantity so that the radial distance will increase which is what makes it a spherically outgoing wave so if you impose the in going wave boundary conditions you can get the solution for quantum collisions so these are determined they also determine the normalization of the wave function so these are several aspects that we deal with in these courses you can write the solutions not just as a differential equation like we do using the Schrodinger equation you can use the integral equation using the green's functions with appropriate boundary conditions and when you do that you get the Lippman Schrodinger equation for potential scattering you can develop sub approximation schemes like the bond approximation which is not just one approximation but it is a series of approximation so it is called as the bond series or bond approximations plural as I like to call it which comes from this multiple scattering process so these are some of the details that we discussed we also get the solution for the Coulomb scattering for which the usual methods of scattering really break down although it is a simple potential the one-over-all potential is the most common one and the simplest one as one might think but it does require some special techniques using solving the problem using parabolic quantum coordinates and some techniques from contour integration so these have also been dealt with in this course and then we deal with a very fascinating topic which is that of resonances and this I believe is an extremely important topic there are different kinds of resonances there are the shape resonances there are the final fresh bag resonances and the techniques are important not just in atomic physics but in all branches of physics in fact some of these techniques were developed by Wigner in the context of nuclear physics there are resonances and then there is shape analysis of these resonances Fano's paper has more citations than most other papers in literature so the bright Wigner relationship for resonances on the Fano analysis and so on so we have dealt with some of these topics then these resonance profiles because they have very many different kinds of shapes so these can be analyzed using the Fano parameterization of the resonances we also deal with second quantization because these are powerful techniques and when you deal with a many electron atom you will need to go beyond the Hartree fog to take into account the electron correlations and when it becomes necessary to do that it becomes important to use methods of second quantization and then going for approximations is something that you cannot escape from okay because if you're dealing in classical mechanics even with a three-party problem you do not have analytical solutions which is why Poincaré and so on they ran into this theory of chaos okay the non-linear dynamics and the whole theory of chaos emerged from the fact that you could not get stability of the three-body system it became chaotic so when you deal with quantum phenomena forget the three bodies even for one single particle you need the uncertain de-principle and you cannot avoid statistical mechanics for that okay so like I said you need quantum mechanics not just for microscopic phenomena but they are applicable to objects of all sizes including earth sun galaxies you need relativity not just to deal with objects which are moving at speed of light but even for objects which are at rest because an electron at rest will have an intrinsic angular momentum which is a spin a sodium atom at rest will have the spin orbit interaction which will give you the d1 d2 lines okay and likewise you need statistical mechanics not just because you have a large number of objects and you have to do averaging to get the average properties like temperature and so on as we do in classical thermodynamics but you need statistical mechanics even for single particles for which you have uncertainty principle but not just for a single particle even for vacuum okay and brown said it in his book that if you are looking for exact solutions having no body at all is already too many so you need powerful methods and you need methods of second quantization because to get electron correlation which is a many electron problem for any atom and atom will have got n number of electrons a molecule has those many a bulk matter you talk about the electron properties of materials say that okay here is a metal this is a dielectric this is an insulator and so on and you try to explain it in terms of the chronic penny model a single particle Schrodinger equation so there are serious limitations because even if you take a small piece of any solid the number of electrons over there may just think of the Avogadro number and then every atom will have got so many electrons so you really have a large number of electrons and you cannot solve this problem exactly you need approximation methods and to develop these approximation methods you need methods of second quantization so you work with electron creation and destruction operators write the Hamiltonian in the second quantized formulation and then develop these approximations a very famous approximation is the random phase approximation which was developed by Bowman pines and people in condensed matter physics may be familiar with it this is the one which gives rise to these plasma on excitations okay so these are the collective oscillations of an electron gas and these are extremely important in modern technology in nano science and so on one has to understand these processes one also makes use of diagrammatic perturbation theory there are other ways of getting developing these approximations using Feynman diagrams and so on which also we provide a brief introduction to so we deal with this boom pines method of canonical transformations then we introduce the Dyson chronology operator and so on so doing the second quantization and using adiabatic switches to control these correlations so these are fairly sophisticated techniques but then they are not really modern they have been there for a long time and anybody who is graduating with a degree in physics with a master of science in physics needs to have a very good acquaintance with these techniques so these are some of the methods which we introduce for its applications and atomic physics but they have applications not just in atomic physics but also in all domains of physics including nuclear physics and this matter physics and so on so these are the get to be quite complicated but then it is not very difficult to handle these terms if you introduce some tricks and these tricks appear in terms of the Feynman diagrams and they make it very easy to deal with what looks like very complicated terms so we provide a little bit of introduction to that so I think I will stop here I will be happy to take some questions and then we will have an open session in which everybody can not just ask questions but also comment on how some of these things could have been done better your suggestions are always welcome and like Andrew and Patap said that we could you know develop collaborative courses for your students in your colleges so thank you all very much we offer physics courses to engineering students and then we also have programs which train scientists so the physics department for example offers what is called as a dual degree program which includes a bachelor of science and the master of science so this is an integrated bsms program so the intake is from the jee and they do not join a b-tech program but instead they join a bsms program and then we also offer a degree in engineering physics which is a b-tech in engineering physics and all the physics courses are offered to them but a good number of physics courses are taken by engineering students there are some which are mandatory there are some courses which are mandatory and there are some courses which are elective but a combination of these courses does provide an opportunity to all students whether he's a student of the dual degree program or a student of engineering to take all kinds of physics courses which are not just the basic core courses like ph 101 and so on which is taken by everybody but also electives and atomic physics condensed matter physics particle physics cosmology strain theory so all of these courses are available to both bsms students to b-tech and engineering physics and also to any student who is doing any engineering degree including civil engineering ocean engineering electrical engineering no matter what branch he goes for she or he can take these courses any other question as a matter of fact the undergraduate teaching is a very large part of the teaching program at it madras and one of the programs which we all enjoy very much yes yes yes so we have a very strong component of undergraduate teaching it's a lot of work and a lot of fun any other question or comment was the lunch all right well you need to give us some feedback so please please feel free to comment on anything whether it was the lunch or the coffee or the lectures or anything so actually yes the NPTEL has already prepared these certificates and I think you just have to collect them from the administrative staff these certificates are ready I believe and before you leave the premises do pick up your participation certificate and I want to personally thank each one of you for spending your entire day over here I realize that it may have been tiring but I certainly enjoyed it and I hope that you have something nice to take back home I'm sure that NPTEL is interested in reaching out to the physics faculty or not just to physics but also to other disciplines because there are courses in other branches of science and engineering and also fine arts like English literature even music you have seen that there are some courses so yes NPTEL will be making some of the some of the other attempt and Pratap and Andrew have already given some idea about it and they will be the best person to contact for details but I'm sure they do have a very positive initiative in this direction yes we have the NPTEL staff over here first of all every exam is an objective exam okay because there is nothing subjective that you can write in science okay so every exam is essentially an objective exam it doesn't necessarily mean that the questions will be fill in the blanks or fake true or false kind of statement so it will be a combination of those and whenever students ask me this question I always tell them that till I set the question paper I will not know what the question paper will be like and I think the student has to be ready for any kind of question it will basically test what you have learned so I don't think that that is the question which is which one should even worry about it is best to discourage students from raising such questions because they are actually asking for the question paper so so let's not get into that it will usually it is a mix of you know different formats and depending on you know whether you have one hour for the exam or two hours for the exam or three hours for the exam we usually design a test which will be a mix of various formats but that's just a matter of formatting a question because almost any question you can you know flip and format it in some other form so that that's an issue which is just of formatting a question and seeking an answer but all the questions will require an objective answer there's absolutely no doubt about it yes any other question or comment yes yes well right to them right to them you're to them because mean they look after the NPTEL administration and if you write to me I will forward your letter to them so you're quite free to write to me as well but essentially yes sure sure so so any college which is interested in this should write to NPTEL if you write to me I will get the answers from the NPTEL and they will be in the position to take a decision and then work out the logistics but in principle yes it is certainly possible for teachers to come down to your college and interact with the students directly it's certainly possible details will depend on what exactly the proposal is and so on so I think the devil is in the detail so let's let it come but yes I'm sure there will be a very positive response from the NPTEL NPTEL is all about reaching out so I'm sure that the NPTEL administration will do everything that is possible to meet these courses and the instruction and the material which is generated become easily accessible to whoever wants it so that's the whole philosophy of the program absolutely yeah the way we should put the quantum mechanics is very nice it needs a CG coefficient and a quantum mechanics yeah and the next lecture the next problem will be taking spectroscopy he won't explain that how the quantum are coming yeah absolutely they're just starts with jim and the spectroscopy because the nice connection begins with quantum and spectroscopy very cool he said you have done it will be useful so that you're actually the teachers should not say I don't know yeah you have to just go to the store absolutely yes really very properly yes sure absolutely yeah thank you for arranging on making knowledgeable that some workshop is useful for the teacher so we should take it right thanks a lot for that well thanks to NPTEL for providing the infrastructure and the facilities for that so very thankful to all of you


Questions that I most frequently asked about gun ownership include what gun should I buy as a personal carry gun. I'm getting a concealed carry permit and I need a pistol. Another question is what the best home defense gun is. The first thing that I would think about would be the primary way that you plan to use this gun. If you are going to be carrying it on your person as a concealed gun then there are some considerations that otherwise we don't care about so much. Namely the size and the weight. So if we're gonna use a gun for anything I think the first thing we need to think about is are we gonna be able to hit what it is that we're shooting at and not miss and hit something behind that target perhaps a person that we don't want to hurt or a building or something like that. So we want to be able to hit our target even if there's an emergency that we have to save our lives by shooting someone we still want to be able to hit them and not miss shots. The most common and I would even say up 95% of the reason that most people miss their shots has to do with anticipation of the gun kicking. So they either heal the gun or they anticipate and push low left that's the most common one.   Now if you practice a lot then you can overcome the the lightweight issues and if you're shooting two, three, four hundred shots a week and you do that consistently for some months on end you're gonna be pretty good even with a lightweight gun. Most of us don't shoot that much though. So that is the first big consideration. Now when it comes to actually carrying on your person are you gonna do that? Are you gonna add an extra several pounds or even a pound attached to your body that's cold if it's made of metal or even plastic it gets cold in the winter rubs against your skin it has a bulge is just kind of digs into your body. Are you really gonna do that? If you do I applaud you. It's wonderful please please do carry concealed maybe you'll be able to protect yourself or someone else someday it's a great thing. The truth is the vast majority of people with concealed carry permits do not carry a gun concealed on their person even 50% of the time much less 100% of the time most people don't do it at all that gun is kept on the bed stand or under the pillow or in the center console of the vehicle or in a backpack or a purse or something like that. So if we're gonna keep the gun in a place that isn't rubbing against us we're not jogging with it bouncing against our body then that kind of gets rid of the need for it to be small or lightweight that means we can have a bigger heavier gun that we're gonna shoot better with. So this is the most important thing to consider in my opinion now most gun sales folks are gonna suggest that for the inexperienced shooter especially a woman that they're gonna be best off getting a light-framed little tiny 38 caliber revolver because it's easy for them to figure it out is what's frequently said. That is a bit demeaning but the you know somewhat true for both men and women if you aren't gonna go out and shoot at least monthly but if you're gonna wait a few years between your shots it is harder to work a semi-automatic gun and clear malfunctions and reload and do all those things it is a bit more complicated it's not very complicated but a little bit more than a revolver so that is a factor personally I like I like pistols I like semi-automatics that's that's my favorite so if we've kind of decided we're gonna lean toward a heavier metal gun so not a Glock or a little plastic Ruger or any of the other brands all the brands have the little lightweight plasticky polymer guns if we've decided we want a heavier gun that is made of metal and is a little bit bigger easier to hold in our hand then we have to ask about caliber what caliber do we want 22 caliber 9 millimeter 380 2545 ACP most people in the self-defense industry trainers will agree that the best size is the largest that you can comfortably shoot well so what we mean by this is if you have big strong hands and you enjoy the recoil of a gun and you can shoot a 45 ACP really well even under stress then that's a perfect size for you if you can only shoot a 9 millimeter then that's a great size for you if you can only shoot a 22 caliber now this is where we really start to separate separate our paths many trainers will say a 22 is just too small for personal protection I agree that a 22 is not as good as a 9 millimeter which is not as good as a 45 ACP which is not as good as a 500 Smith and Wesson Magnum which is not as good as a 20 millimeter howitzer however the 22 caliber long rifle handgun is better than a wet q-tip and a wet q-tip is better than a sticky note so as we look at all this all the different options for personal protection yeah a knife is better than that wet q-tip so maybe a knife would fit somewhere between the 22 caliber and the wet q-tip there it's a scale it's not a guess or no thing if you are comfortable shooting a 22 caliber but when you've tried shooting a 9 millimeter or a 38 special it scares you and you just don't want to touch the gun you're not going to go and practice with it because it's not fun it hurts your hand and it jolts and you just hate it well then that that gun's too big you should probably go back down to a 22 caliber maybe in time you'll work your way up to a larger caliber but for now maybe that 22 is better no it's not going to do as good of a job at stopping a 300 pound leather jacket wearing drunk guy as a 45 caliber ACP however if you're comfortable shooting it and you're actually gonna be able to hit the guy a couple times unlike the 45 ACP that you're afraid to pick up well 22 caliber is better for now and now we'll get into a really sticky topic what about brands what is the best brand of gun you know as long as it's not a high point it's probably okay there are some cheapo guns that have been made high point is just one of them but they're these little Saturday night specials that are not the greatest guns however as long as you're spending at least $400 on a used gun or 500 on a new gun you're probably gonna get a pretty good gun so I'm not really gonna get into all the different brands and and you know everybody has a preference for Chevy Mercedes yes some are better than others but they're all pretty good most important thing is to narrow down the size the weight the caliber and then go to gun stores feel different guns see what feels right in your hand for me I don't like plastic glocks they just glocks are not good for my hand I don't shoot well with them I'm not a good enough shooter to shoot well the Glock some people absolutely love them and shoot way better than I can so it's not Glock's fault it just doesn't work for my hand for me 1911 models in many different brands are what feels best I shoot best with an STI 9 millimeter 1911 for me that's what's best for you it's probably something else so feel a bunch of different guns if you get a chance to shoot them you know come out on a shooting experience with us or just hires for a couple hours a private pistol and let's try a lot of different guns and of course we have you know I don't know dozen dozen and a half guns we don't have all many hundreds of this but enough to give you a good idea so we'd welcome you to do that and finally let's address the other question what is the best gun for home defense if you're not going to practice shooting much then I would suggest that probably the best gun for home defense would be a pump action 12 gauge shotgun or if that's too much kick a 20 gauge pump action shotgun the sound of the pumping is a universally known sound that will probably discourage someone from coming to attack you and if it doesn't you're probably not going to be as likely to miss with a shotgun with many little BBs coming out of it as you would be with a pistol so that is definitely worth considering and you can check the web page we have a firearms consultation service so if you do want more advice I'm happy to get more detailed and help you find one that's perfect for your unique situation just let us know and we'll get something scheduled and make sure you get the perfect gun please do write back with questions comments and we'll hone in on the perfect gun for you