Welcome back to operating system. So yeah midterm didn't turn out too bad. Did it? so everything is returned to you as of someone godly hour this morning, so Seem to go alright average. It's like 75 plus a little bit by now might up also be up to like 76. Maybe I'm not sure Anyone want to check that?  There's not that many questions left But turned out it was like that Scheduling question that most people got right so grades went up and yeah, it's good All right, so any concerns about the midterm yet? 76 all right, we've hit the threshold. So yeah pretty good All right today we get to talk about page replacement so This is your computer's memory hierarchy some of these things might be new generally we're mostly concerned about these top fours or what in ours what's in computers most of the All the days now so the top you have your CPU on it. It has registers. There's not that many of them They're really really fast and well, there's not that many of them. So the capacity is pretty low Below that there's a CPU cache like the L1 the L2 and the L3 cache on your CPU There's more capacity. It's not as fast as registers, but it's faster than anything else Pass up after you run out of cash Well, there's RAM or your memory and that's where our virtual memory system comes into place and Well that Capacity most people probably have like 16 32 gigs of RAM Goes up from there and then after you run out of memory. Well, you have non-volatile memory Probably so that's like you're really fast SSDs that are in most computers nowadays They're like terabytes or maybe 512 gigs something like that They don't cost as much per gigabyte as RAM, but they're a bit slower then pass that you might have like SSDs like bigger drives or like thumb drives that have more capacity, but they're slower Pass that you have those spinning hard drives like the original iPod that you may or may not have ever seen in your life And pass that there is tape drives that you have I guarantee never seen in your life How many of you have seen VHS tape in your life? Yeah, it looks like this thing. It has like two things and then spin around and there's like a physical tape on that thing Yeah, well, that's why they're called tape things. So there's a version of that to store massive amounts of data That's not just a crappy movie from the 90s, I guess Before that whenever VHS tapes were used So they'll store like terabytes and terabytes and it will be dirt cheap, but it will be insanely slow and people like Google will use this for like archival storage of things that You likely will never access but they want to keep it around and they'll just be like a giant room full of those tapes And if you want to access it There's actually a machine that goes and grabs the tapes and like manually loads it to read the data from it It's really really slow, but hey if you want to store like petabytes of data, it's dirt cheap So you'll probably never see that. So yeah, we probably end on most of our computers around here All right any questions about that. So now we need to play some illusion So if you're designing these systems the reason we have this giant hierarchy is because we want to hide it from the user and ideally we want every level of that to have the speed of the layer above that and The capacity of the layer below that so RAM is not actually that fast But if we read a bunch of it and cache it on the CPU It can look a lot faster than you can physically read RAM from the device if we read the Write things in the cache and reuse it over again And then ideally you want to have the capacity of the layer below it so you get the best of both worlds so in that case If we do something like this we can actually use more memory across all of our processes Then we actually physically have in the machine So if you only have eight gigs of RAM and you have you know Two tabs open in Google Chrome and that uses 10 gigs of RAM Well, you might notice that might have happened before before and it doesn't crash It still works, but doesn't really make sense So what it does is Something called demand paging so we can use memory as a cache for the file system and also we could map memory pages to system blocks and Like actually on the drive whenever we're reading files and that way well Demand paging is that M-map idea we had before we could kind of just figure out what pages and memory map to what on the Disk and not actually read the disk until you actually use them and then you know you access a page It's referencing a block on the disk then we read it in from the disk What could also happen is well on the disk you might run out of physical pages and You don't have anywhere to put it and you don't want to be out of memory So what you can do is you can make something called swap space on the hard drive itself And you map that physical page and store it on the hard drive Temporarily and free up that block in physical memory, and then you can use it for something else So this is called swap space if we've used windows I assume most of you use windows or have used windows so in your C drive There's like a something called a page file if you enable hidden files So that page file is that swap space So that file will be used whenever you run out of physical memory and you need to start putting pages Temporarily on the hard drive, so that's called swap space and if you run H top on your virtual machine under the memory thing There's another thing that says swap space Likely that'll just be zero because it's not being used But if you start using really RAM intensive things it will start filling up and it will start going slower Because while it's moving memory to disk and moving it back and forth So a questions about that so swap space basically just throwing Memory pages to the disk if we actually run out of physical memory that way you can well you can The total memory usage across all your processes can actually be more than the amount of physical RAM You actually have it's just going to probably be slower So if you like context switch and all of your memory pages are on disk Well, you're going to have to load them from disk back in the memory Throw some things out and it might be really slow So that process of picking something to throw out and move back to this to move in another page Well, that's what we get to talk about today. That is called page replacement So a processes Working set should fit in physical memory of what that means is so the working set is given an amount of time Probably from when you got context switched in to when you got context switched out The working set is the number of pages your process uses in that amount of time So if your working set is in physical memory Well, then you don't have to swap to disk everything is going to be nice and fast if Your working set is bigger than the amount of physical pages you can fit into memory Then it's probably going to be slow and the worst case it can do something called thrashing And what thrashing is is while you can't fit all your working set into memory at one time So you're constantly going to be moving pages to the disk and then loading pages a different page from the disk back in the memory and then You execute a little more access a new page and then you do it again You move it back to you move a different page to disk load another one back in and things will suddenly get really really slow Because well instead of accessing Physical RAM directly you are doing hard drive accesses, which are going to be a lot slower and This is why sometimes If you really really care about performance because all that is invisible You don't actually really know unless you're paying attention to like your operating system metrics of like how much swap space is being used The your process is just going to go slower and you're not going to really notice it unless someone complains So if you really care about performance and you're something like Google well What you might prefer is just you would rather just run out of memory Get an error in your process and have it be dead and then you'll know like oh well I need to go buy more RAM if you're Google you probably prefer to just buy more RAM than just randomly have a process Like goes slow or you just allocate more RAM to your virtual machine or something like that to resolve the issue And you just get rid of swap entirely So sometimes people do that now if you really care about performance.  Yeah, it would just go like Like it would just kind of sound like it's grinding because it's constantly accessing when it probably shouldn't be So yeah Likely that's where they coming up because well as you have noticed in this course. We're not very creative with names alright So we get to talk about page replacement algorithms Should pay attention because this process you will probably do on your final But it's pretty boring so we can just go through it So page replacement typically you assume that you have a finite amount of pages and physical memory and Your process will just assume one process. You're accessing memory so you need to bring things in from disk into main memory and Typically you will have more pages you're using than actually fit So you actually have to make a decision which page to throw out of memory and onto disk in order to load a new one in So we'll go over three algorithms today and talk about four So the optimal thing to do would be if you can look into the future and see all the page accesses a process makes Well, ideally you replace the page that won't be used in the longest So I maximize the amount of hits I get where things are already in physical memory so that's the optimal thing you can do but of course you can't implement that because in General you can't predict what a process will do The next algorithm, which is not really an algorithm is instead of just Making a decision of what page to effect. I just pick a random one and just move that one back to the disk Turns out it's not that bad But we don't really have to discuss anything and how could I evaluate to tell you on exam do the random algorithm? Yeah, that would be fun All right, the other thing we could do is the old trustworthy thing of first in first out So I could just replace the oldest page first replace it with the new page Simple to implement. We can all do FIFO. Hopefully at this point same ideas with scheduling The last one is least recently used So instead of looking into the future I look back into the past and the idea behind that is I replace the page that hasn't been used in the longest time Because likely if you have just used the page you will likely reuse the page because while your process is running You access the variable that's on page likely you will read or write that variable again So you'll act you're more likely to access the same page So that's why we do least recently used So how we evaluate all these things it's kind of similar to our scheduling questions, but a bit easier We assume our physical memory holds in this case We'll do four pages and then we access the pages in this following order So we just give the numbers so we access them in this order And then we assume all these pages are initially on disk We just context switched in this process and we have to load it from disk into memory and This is the order we will use for all the examples in the lecture in order to actually compare them with each other and for this Unlike scheduling where you have to find like average waiting time average response time and the number of context switches for this It's just number of page faults that happen. So let's work to do so Here we'll start off by doing the optimal algorithm which should maximize the number of page hits we have and Minimize the number of page faults we have So in this case how I draw all of these things is each box here represents a memory access and Inside of the box is what is currently in physical memory so initially that block box is supposed to be empty and then above the box I Draw in or I write the number that we're accessing at this step So in this case we access page one because it is the first one It is not in memory yet. So we have to read it from disk into memory So it goes into this box and because we had to Page fault and read it in from disk I put it in red and that way at the end to count the number of page faults Or things we had to read in from this you just count the number of red numbers So in this case this will be fairly boring. So if I access page two Well, it's not in memory. I have to read it into memory in this case I can fit four pages into memory. So I wouldn't just get rid of page one that wouldn't make any sense So I read it in now in memory. I have page one two and in this case. I just read in page two any questions about that Hopefully fairly straightforward. What should happen if I access page three? Yeah page fault loads it into memory We load it Next one's gonna be the same thing the first four steps are always quite boring. So after Step four now physical memory is full in this silly example So page one two three and four are currently in physical memory and my next access in is to page one What happens in this case? Yeah, it's already in physical memory. So that's great. I don't have to read it from disk Don't have to do anything. So in that case, I just rewrite the same boxes Nothing's in red because it was essentially a hit. All right. What about page two? Is that a hit? That is also a hit All right now when we access page five is not currently in memory and memory is full. Yep. I dropped four in this case Yep. Yeah, so that's skipping ahead. So in this case I have to pick one of these to actually evict if I'm doing the optimal thing, which one should I drop? Well for so why should I drop four? Well, the optimal thing is to look into the future and see which page isn't going to be used in the longest So starting at this access I look into the future. Well, it accesses page one next So I shouldn't get rid of page one then accesses page two I also shouldn't get rid of page two then accesses page three. So I shouldn't get rid of page three So the only thing that's left to get rid of is page four. So I get rid of page four So in that case I replace page four with page five So everyone good on that? All right now what happens if I access page one Well, that should be a hit because well, I looked in the future and the next three should all be hits So page one That's a hit page two also a hit because that's still in physical memory Access page three also a hit now. I access page four. What should I get rid of now? Yeah, so in this case as long as I don't get rid of five it doesn't matter So as long as I don't get rid of five It's fine. So in this case all this is assume. I hate one So I'll just get rid of one. So I replace one with four But of course we could have replaced two or three because well, it's over at that point So then we access page five. It's still there because we did the optimal thing So how many page faults do we have for this optimal algorithm? Six so you just count the number of red You can do that on the exam if you want or circle it or do whatever you feel like underline it Doesn't matter. So six page faults. Yep Yeah, so this is just so we have to move things in and out of memory if Your whole memory had four pages and there are four kilobytes That means you have like 16 kilobytes of memory Which I guess with the thing in the 70s But yeah, if I asked you to do this now you have thousands and thousands of millions of pages So only using Google Chrome will get you to this point of having to move things in and out So it's just for these questions realistically, right? We take millions of pages to finally fill up main memory Yeah, yeah, these could also Remember when we end mapped like a file So these could actually represent a file if these memory pages didn't actually represent a file They were just part of the program that was running and we just threw them to disk because we ran out of memory So they could either represent real files or we just ran out of memory All right, so six page faults remember same sequence optimal six page faults Same thing but for FIFO so we can make this lecture go fast. So can I skip the first four steps? All right, so we can speed run this lecture one two three four So we fill it up any questions about that. We have our four page faults. We can't get rid of all right So we access page one that's a hit right everyone agree Access page two Also a hit. All right. This looks the same as before. So now the difference is we access page five So if our algorithm is first in first out, what do I boot out to? Load five into memory One because one is the first thing I loaded. So that was the first thing in first thing out FIFO So I replace one with five and that is a page fault. All right So it turns out I probably made a poor decision. So now I access page one, which I just threw back onto the disk Now what should I get rid of for page one? Two, which will prove also to be a poor decision So now I access page two Which I just threw to the disk. That was a poor decision. What do I replace for page two? three Also a poor decision. All right So now I have this now. I'm accessing page three. Ah What do I throw out now? Page four So I throw page four out and then you can also see this pattern with first in first out You can see there's nice diagonal lines of red numbers. So if it's first in first out, it'll just look like diagonal line So you can really speed run this if you wanted to Because yeah, it's just kind of silly. All right. So now we access page four. What do I get rid of? Page five. All right. Now I access page five. What do I get rid of? what How many page faults did I have? 10 that was a pretty poor effort on my part, right? so Now let's think about this. So This would probably be a lot better if I could fit five pages in memory, right? I'd only have five page faults in total because I can fit everything So if I have more physical memory, I have less page faults Right that makes sense to everyone So the up is the opposite true. So if I have less physical memory, I should have more page faults, right? That would make sense All right, that makes sense. We all agree on that All right, let's make sure So we'll do the same thing, but we'll decrease the number of Frames or pages we can fit in physical memory from four to three So same thing, but we can fit less So we have our first three accesses where we just they have to be page faults We load it into physical memory now we access page four. What do I throw out? page one Wow, that was a bad decision already So I throw a page four and my next access is to page one. What do I throw out? Page two another bad decision. So I'm five for five now So now we access page two It's not in memory. What do I throw out? Three all right, that brings us up to six for six for page fault. So yeah, it's not looking good You guys look like you were right now. We access page five. What do I throw out? Four by waterfall method. It has to be four. All right So throw up page four Now it turns around so now if I access page one, it's in memory. So that's a hit access page two That's a hit Now I access page three. What do I have to throw out for page three? Page one right So now I throw up page one Ooh, that was bad. So now I access page four. What do I have to throw up for page four? Two so finally I access page five and that's a hit How many page faults is that? Nine that was better. That was less page faults than before. So Seems weird, right? So the solution is well You know, if I want to make my program go faster, I just take out some memory and it goes faster. So This has a name Yeah, we have nine page faults. So that has a name. It's called Belladies Anomaly and it says that Contrary to what you believe if you have more page frames. So you have more memory that means you have more page faults and this is a problem specifically for FIFO algorithms doesn't exist for Least recently used or any stack-based algorithms. We will see slightly later and in fact There was a paper in 2010 that some math people wrote in Greek that I can't understand That summarizes the solution if you want you can read the paper Basically, they concluded that Given a FIFO algorithm, I can just construct any arbitrary sequence of page accesses that can Cause any page fault ratio I want. So given a page fault ratio They can come up with a sequence that will cause that ratio Doesn't matter how many pages there are So for other algorithms, they behave how you expect Increasing the number of page frames decreases the number of page faults So you don't get penalized for having more memory, which is what you would expect But if you use FIFO for this specific problem, it has this issue, which is also why Hey, we probably shouldn't use FIFO because this is pretty dumb Yeah Yeah, so this is in specific circumstances. So in general, you don't know how a program behaves So it could not do this in the real world, but they were like, yeah We can just construct arbitrary sequences that can do this But in the real world, you don't control what pages of process accesses So this may or may not happen in the real world, but you could implement it But you might run into this where like you have more memory and you have more page faults And you have to be like Why the hell did that happen? Well, you got unlucky basically and why'd you get unlucky? Well, a bunch of math people can prove to you that sequences can happen with any page fault ratio And again, don't ask me about the details of math or anything I can't do that Greek stuff. It looks like gibberish. I can read C All right So now we can do our last one of the day Wow, we're really speedrunning this So this is least recently used We'll go back up to four physical pages And for all of these, we can use FIFO to break ties But ties will only happen if we have multiple processes running at the same time And then, you know, it's essentially like a data-race problem, all that fun stuff So for the purposes of this course, I'll just assume a single process and we don't have to talk about ties So same situation we had before, we had that weird three-pages thing So memory can hold four pages We had the same accesses Now we're going to use least recently used, which looked backwards into the past So first four accesses are going to be the same no matter what Because we have to load them into memory Access page one, page one, that's a page hit already in memory Access page two, that's a hit already in memory Now we access page five So now I have to choose a page one, two, three, or four to throw out of memory And replace it using least recently used So which one should I throw out? Three So if I look backwards in the past, I used two most recently, so I shouldn't get rid of two Before that, I used one, so I shouldn't get rid of one And then after that, I used four, so I shouldn't get rid of four So the last page standing that I kick out is three So I replace page three with page five, and this is what it looks like So it looks like we made a good decision So if we access page one, that is a hit If we access page two, that is also a hit Now we access page three So now we have to choose something to throw out What am I going to throw out? Four So in this case, I will throw out four Because while I can't throw out two, it was used least recently I can't throw out one, and I can't throw out five, so that leaves four So I have to get rid of four for three Turns out that was a bad mistake, because while I couldn't look into the future Turns out we're accessing page four next So if I access page four next, what do I get rid of? Five So I look at the past, I can't get rid of one, two, or three That leaves five, which is a poor decision Because now I access page five, now what do I get rid of? One So I can't get rid of four, three, or two So I have to get rid of one, so I have to get rid of one, replace it with five Now, how many page faults do we have? Eight Eight So, optimal was six, our first faithful was ten, our smaller one was nine This is eight, slightly better Alright, any questions about that? So that's our algorithms for today Yay So, oh yep, so random depends So this, least recently used typically works really well with like real program usage Because typically if I use a variable X, I'm going to read it soon anyways So I probably actually, typically if you use something you'll use it again So least recently used, for most sane programs works pretty well But if you have a program that just randomly accesses memory just in random places This isn't going to work very well And also if you implement it, well how would I implement something like this? Least recently used? Yeah Yeah, you could have a counter for each What about implementing using link lists or something like that So if it's just used, I put to the front and then the least recently used will be the thing at the back If I just keep on refreshing it, right? So we could implement this but those are both kind of slow to do And well, if the program does random things anyways, I can pick a random number like that So random decisions are actually pretty fast, so probably faster So, if I try to implement least recently used and say I have a counter for everything Well, that seems like it's kind of impractical to actually implement Because if I read a variable, that means I've accessed something, right? So I read like a byte and then suddenly after I read a byte, I have to add a counter to something Which is going to be more than one byte, so suddenly things are eight times slower Probably not a good idea Also if I put a counter on stuff, I'd probably have to search all of the pages in memory Which is also going to be really slow So, turns out if you try to implement least recently used, it's kind of impractical So if I implement it in hardware and say I have a specific counter for each page in memory Well, each time I even change or read a single byte Well, I have to essentially save that counter to whatever I'm using to keep track of that page And that's going to be, that's going to take some time, going to be fairly slow And then if I want to replace things, well, I have to look at all the timestamps And see what is the oldest timestamp and then evict that one That's like O-N, so the more memory I have the slower that's going to be So I probably don't actually want to do that And if I implement it in software using linked lists, it has the same problem So technically, if you're a computer science person, this seems kind of fast Because they're like constant operations So if you do a page reference, so if I access any byte, all I do is move this page to the end of the list So I move it to the front of the list because it was just used I'll just assume the most recently used thing is at the beginning of the list Then eventually it will fade to the back Then for replacement, that's also constant time Because, well, I just picked the thing at the back of the list And that's the oldest page, so I evict that one But if you actually try to implement that, that means even if I access one byte Well, we've all used linked lists before So to do that constant time operation, I probably need like up to six pointer changes Of reading and writing pointer values So it seems kind of bad that I read one byte and then I have to read and write six pointers That's probably a bad idea And also imagine that you have multiple cores running So if you have one linked list that's keeping track of all the pages Well, would you have a data race for that linked list if you had multiple cores? Yeah, you would have data races for that So you would have to have a mutex around it And then it's even going to be even slower than those few pointer updates So if you actually try to implement least recently used It would be way too slow to actually implement and no one that does it Yeah, so you could use an array or something like that But that still speeds it up It's still going to pale in comparison to reading a single byte Because this is something I have to do every single time I read even a byte So if it's something that you do that's more than a byte, it's probably going to be too slow So what we can do is we do the typical thing we do if we encounter a hard problem We just change the problem and make it easier So least recently used is actually kind of an approximation of the optimal algorithm We can't implement the optimal algorithm So we use least recently used to kind of approximate that So just take it one step further So we can approximate least recently used So we can actually implement an approximation of the approximation So there's lots of different ways to approximate least recently used So we can actually implement it So specifically in this course we'll be looking at something called the clock algorithm Which will be next lecture But there's also like least frequently used So it relaxes it a bit instead of the most recently used It just keeps track of the number of times you reference it Or if you've referenced it at all There's one with two cues that try and speed it up a bit in hardware There's adaptive replacement caches We just throw some caches on it There's all sorts of different strategies It's kind of like scheduling where there's all different trade-offs you can make If you make something really complicated Well it takes longer to run And sometimes it might make a bad decision anyway So you may as well have just made a poor decision faster So any questions about anything we saw? So we can speed run Alright So what we saw today optimal So don't use, make sure we maximize the page hits we have Just replace whatever is used furthest in the future And we could also just do random page replacement It actually works surprisingly well in practice Because unlike FIFO which just kind of sucks It avoids the worst case because well it just makes a random decision Instead of always making a poor decision like FIFO It can randomly sometimes make a good decision Kind of avoids the worst case if you simulate it It actually turns out to not be absolutely terrible FIFO, easy to implement but has that weird anomaly Where hey I have more physical memory And I have more page faults, that's not good And then we round it off with least recently used Gets closer to optimal but really expensive to implement And we will figure out an implementation in the next lecture So with that remember 4 and 4 year


My name is Kelly Crocker and I'm one of the ministers here and today I am joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly S. Ruth Jackson, the FUS Children and Teen Choirs, and our him leaders today are our two combined adult choirs. I'm also joined by the worship team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, Heather Thorpe, Daniel Carnes, and Stephen Gregorius. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, our community, and our world. For those here with us in person, it is a joy to be with you. We ask that you keep your mask on the entire time you're here with us in the building and not to sing along with the hymns, but we do encourage you to hum. Immediately following the postlude, we ask you to come and meet us outside and we're happy to say that once again, coffee will be available after today's service, so we hope to see you out there.  And for those of you joining us virtually today, we're so glad that you are with us and we hope you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following the 11 o'clock service. The information for joining can be found on the home page of our website, fussMadison.org, as well as on the slide that will be seen again after the postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after today's service and we encourage you to take a moment to learn more about our upcoming programs and activities. And I invite you now to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. In this quiet hour, may our spirits be renewed. In this gathering of friends, may we be ready to extend ourselves to those in need and with trust to receive the hand that is offered. In this community of ideals, may we remember the principles that guide us and reflect upon those things that give meaning to our lives, renewing our dedication to serve the highest that we know. In this time of worship, may our minds be open to new truth and our hearts be receptive to love as we give thanks for this life we are blessed to share. And now I invite you to join with me in the words of aspiration for the kindling of our chalice flame. Blessed is the fire that burns deep in the soul. It is the flame of the human spirit touched into being by the mystery of life.  It is the fire of love burning deep in the human heart, the divine glow in every life. One moment and heart. That I'm most familiar with is a Russian folk tale, although there are versions of this story that are told in many different places and many different cultures. But in this story, there is a farming family, a father and a mother and a few children. And one day the father was out in the field tilling the soil. And he came across a very surprising and pleasant sort of surprise to get because he was digging in the soil and he found a golden mortar. Mortar is like a sort of a stone or in this case gold bowl that you might use to crush various herbs and seasoning and that sort of stuff. If you had something to crush in the mortar with, that is. Now so he had this golden bowl and he thought this is such an important and surprising thing to have found. Now I'm going to go take this to the local magistrate and that'll be a way of sort of showing my good faith and my good intentions and I'll win some points with the person who's in charge of our whole town and area. If I go give this thing that I found to the magistrate. And his daughter who it must be said was a very clever person said, Father I wish that you wouldn't do that because if you go and you give the golden mortar to the magistrate he's going to ask you where the pestle is. The pestle is that thing that you use to crush the herbs in the mortar. So it's sort of like well you have the one half whereas the other half of it. But the father didn't listen to his daughter and he went to the magistrate and he showed him the golden mortar and thought that he was going to win some points and some good favor. And the magistrate asked him, well where's the pestle? And because the farmer didn't have an answer to that he put the farmer in jail. Now eventually the family heard about this and the son went down to the magistrate and said you have my father in jail please release him. We need him at home obviously and he hasn't actually done anything wrong. The magistrate said alright I will let your father go if you can answer me a riddle. He said what is the fastest thing? What is the sweetest thing? And what is the richest thing? And the son scratched his head and he said well can you give me some time to think about it? And he went home to the family and explained the problem to them and he puzzled about it and the mother puzzled about it. But the daughter who again remember was a very clever person said I have the answer and she explained it to the son, to the brother and had him say it back to her a few times to make sure that he had it down and then she sent him back to the magistrate. And the magistrate said alright so what's your answer? He said well the fastest thing the fastest thing of course is thought because thought moves faster than anyone can run or any horse can ride from here to there and back and forth just like that. And the sweetest thing well the sweetest thing is sleep because nothing feels better than sleep when you need it. And the richest thing is the earth because everything that we have comes from it all the produce of our fields come from the earth so that's the answer. And the magistrate agreed alright you're correct and sent him back home. But the magistrate spent some time thinking about this and thought you know that young man I don't really believe that he came with those answers on his own because he seemed to not have any clue about what the answers were when I asked him the question to begin with. So eventually he asked around town and found out that really the clever person in this household was the daughter and he sent word to her and said I'm going to put you to the test. Here is a basket of eggs. I want all of these eggs to be hatched into chickens and cooked into a fine feast by tomorrow. So she received the basket of eggs she thought about it for a little while and she went to the storehouse and she got just a handful of wheat just wheat grains and she sent that back to the magistrate with a message saying I will do what you ask of me as soon as you can plant all of this wheat and grow it up into and process it into flour and make it into bread for me by tomorrow.  So the magistrate knew that he'd been outsmarted. He asked one more time he sent word to her he said you must come attend to me because I am the magistrate I'm in charge of this town you have to come and see me but I will require of you that you cannot walk here and you cannot ride a horse in order to get here and you cannot show up naked but you also can't be wearing any clothes and so that was the message that the daughter received and she thought about it for a little while and she got the family goat which is not a horse and also isn't walking she got the family goat and she got a fishing net from her father and she wrapped herself up in the fishing net and she rode to the magistrate and she looked rather silly but she did complete his requirement so at the end of all this out of all of these tests out of all of these different things that had been asked of her she had answered everyone successfully and done such a brilliant job that no one could question that she was the most clever person in that town now there's a traditional ending to this story and the traditional ending to this story is that as a reward for how clever she was the magistrate married her but I think that we could probably imagine for ourselves a better reward for this woman than to be married to someone who, well, among other things was very mean to her father and seemed to be troubling her a lot with unnecessary questions and you know what? I bet that she could think of a better reward than that too I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains and strengthens our community here as well as our outreach offering recipient and this week that recipient is the Urban League of Greater Madison whose mission is to ensure that African-Americans and other community members are educated, employed and empowered to live well, advance professionally and contribute to the common good in the 21st century the Urban League's services include after-school and summer programming for low-income youth and potential first-generation college students as well as free job training, placement and coaching for adult-seeking employment and an award-winning program for supporting low-income families and becoming homeowners so you will see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website fussmedicine.org and you'll see our text to give information there as well for those of you here in person there are baskets located at all the doors we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together This little... A plucky little program run by dedicated teachers on a shoestring budget that was committed to teaching important ideas and concepts in a hands-on way and each year the faculty would somehow scrape together the funds needed to take a class of public school kids who as a group were no more privileged or academically distinguished than any other group of school children in the city where I grew up out into the country for a weekend we would go up to a camp in the forested hills of upstate New York and we spent our time there experiencing the natural world and studying it recording everything that we could about it during the day we would measure the distance of forest paths and survey the hillside surrounding the cabin where we were staying we would collect newts, little salamanders from the pond nearby and record their length and weight and number of spots before returning them to the wild we were practicing collecting data and processing it finding out what was the median, what was the mean, what was the mode and at night one of our instructors would get out his telescope we would look at the stars far enough away from the city lights that we could actually see a good number of them I have never been a great stargazer I don't make it a point to stay up nights and marvel at the vault of the heavens but I am drawn to the truth that the stars represent that we are sitting on a planet spinning around a great nuclear furnace adrift in a vast sea of almost emptiness that this void is somehow also filled with an impossible, uncountable number of other such furnaces so far away that some which burned out hundreds of years are still gracing us with the light that they cast before dying that the great swirling cloud of gas and dust that flew out from the force of the universe's beginning and congealed into our sun also provided the stuff of the planet on which we live and the tiny fragments of matter that make up every part of every one of us has always spoken to me since those nights looking out at space now I have a good friend who hates that sort of thing contemplating the vastness of the universe revealed to us in the night sky thinking about it makes him feel insignificant and unimportant a speck on a speck circling another speck in an infinite sea of specks he is not alone in that feeling the renowned biologist Ursula Goodenough talks about the struggle she had with stargazing after learning about the history and nature of the universe in her first physics courses camping in the Colorado wilderness she looked out at the stars and was so overwhelmed with terror that she had to turn over and bury her face in the pillow the scope was just too big to handle and the inevitable truth that one day a real but incredibly long time from today our own sun will go out as all stars do that idea filled her with despair Ursula's solution to this feeling was to embrace the mysterious character of the universe seeing existence as a question that could not be answered left her feeling free to live in and enjoy it and learn what she could about its laws and composition but her experience is just one expression of a common dichotomy in the human reaction to the deep and sometimes incredibly weird insights of modern science as we come to understand life, the universe and everything the human response, the feeling that follows from that knowledge moves back and forth between a sense of wonder and a sense of meaninglessness as Unitarian Universalists our faith commits itself to scientific inquiry and is long held that reasons should be employed in all elements of human life including religion our tradition articulates seven principles and six sources and the fifth source is humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science and warn against idolatries of the mind and spirit considering anything in the light of reason requires us to admit the limits of what we know and the places where we are uncertain in a world where many people associate religion with absolute truth our willingness to embrace mystery and tolerate doubt can seem like a weakness but our loyalty to reason and our willingness to be changed by it is actually one of our greatest strengths because sometimes study and exploration and experiment lead to conclusions we might never have expected the turn what we had previously thought about the world on its head now and in ages past our religious tradition has attracted people committed to the study of the natural world one of these ancestors was a woman named Mariah Mitchell who practiced as both a Quaker and a Unitarian and was an early female pioneer in the modern field of astronomy she made a name for herself by discovering a comet and went on to become something of a world traveler talking her way into the observatory in the Vatican despite authorities there who did not want to allow a woman onto the premises as a traveling intellectual and instructor at Vassar College then a women-only institution Mariah championed the cause of women's rights her study made the basic equality of women to men apparent to her as both possessed similar faculties and capabilities this gave her unshakable confidence in her own rights and the rights of women our faith has not always held has not always been so committed to feminism in the way that it is today it's a position arrived at over time under the influence of insights like Mariah's we can trace our movement's commitment to the rights of women and of people of color, of lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual people and indeed to every cause any of us has ever taken up as a matter of social justice to the influence of people like her as human beings in particular as Unitarian Universalists we have a responsibility to be willing to change our assumptions when they are proven to be wrong whether wrong in the empirical sense or more importantly in the moral sense our reverence for reason has not only caused people with questioning minds to join with us it has strengthened us by creating the possibility and indeed the requirement that our religious practices and values must change and grow according to reason's demands I spent a lot of my time moving in circles with folks who are not in the religious mainstream of American life, shall we say and when a Muslim or a Jew or a Hindu or a Buddhist or an atheist finds out that I have this fancy academic degree called a master of divinity the single most common question that I get is can you explain the trinity to me? the trinity of course is the doctrinal position held by almost all forms of organized Christianity that there is one God who has three parts the father, the son, son being Jesus and the Holy Spirit so then I have to explain to them that the Unitarian in Unitarian Universalist originally means someone who doesn't believe in the trinity so I'm probably not the best person to explain and justify a theological position that my own tradition has historically opposed though when I explain this to classes of new perspective you use I also hasten to point out that because our faith has expanded its own boundaries over time it is not impermissible to be a Trinitarian Unitarian Universalist and there are some few of them out there they exist this is largely due to the influence that reason applied to our most cherished values has had on who we are we have become more tolerant and inclusive under that influence even of some positions which were once our very antithesis now when in our tradition we talk about the arguments against the trinity it's usually brief and straightforward it just doesn't stand up to intellectual reason one plus one plus one equals three not one I bring this up because I think it's a very clear example of the difference between intellectual reasoning and moral reasoning the intellectual argument against the trinity is persuasive enough to me it's not a doctrine that I believe in but it also doesn't really matter to me all religions entail belief in things that are either contradictory or impossible to verify as fact and when I say all religions understand that I do very much include our own the inherent worth and dignity of every person is something I believe in and neither a product of nor subject to change by factual evidence alone but the process of reasoning of questioning assumptions and changing positions based on logical argument and new information applies to moral questions as well as to intellectual ones and there are moral arguments against the trinity these are the ones that actually matter to me personally the most famous is what is called the scandal of the incarnation basically if the teacher Jesus was God made flesh and his brief life two thousand years ago was the only time that this has ever taken place then that unavoidably implies that God has some special preference for everything about that one life a preference for a certain point in time a certain place on earth a certain language to teach in and most troubling of all a certain gender to experience the idea of a God who would prefer being a man to being a woman is morally troubling and morally offensive to me hence the scandal of the incarnation the intellectual versus moral reasoning is even clearer on the other side of our name universalist historically has meant someone who believes either that there is no hell or there is a hell but nobody goes there or there is a hell and some people go there but nobody stays there forever and a fairly common argument against hell among us today is that the idea of an afterlife itself doesn't make sense or at least can't be verified so no belief in hell because no belief in any particular afterlife at all this is an intellectual argument that a universe in which the natural order of... this is an intellectual argument, a head centered argument but there is also a heart based argument that a universe in which the natural order of things is that at least some people will spend an eternity experiencing inescapable torture is an evil universe it is a morally abhorrent way for existence to be ordered and the belief that the cosmos is ordered in that way can be used to excuse and justify the most heinous sorts of wrong towards anyone you might imagine to be destined for hell anyway when we say as a movement that we heed the guidance of reason it is not only an intellectual commitment to seek to understand the universe through science it is also a declaration that we are morally accountable to the principles we espouse and the values we claim to hold and that what we do and what we say and even what we believe is always subject to being reappraised and reexamined on the basis of our highest shared good in 1633 the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was summoned to Rome by the Inquisition to defend himself against the charge of heresy he stood accused of holding Copernican views the then quite radical idea that the earth revolves around the sun and of trying to convince others of his same position through his writings in Europe in the 1630s this was a very serious crime the church still taught that the sun revolved around the earth and the contradiction of that doctrine could be answered with imprisonment or even death of this crime he was convicted and found vehemently suspect of heresy Galileo was ultimately sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life prohibited from publishing any further writings and required to recite the seven penitent Psalms at least once each week for the three years following his conviction even before he could begin this punishment before he would be released from prison Galileo first had to officially recant declaring the view of the cosmos he had articulated and championed in the past to be both odious and wrong this he did in order to preserve himself against any further punishment including the very real threat of torture Galileo declared before the court that the sun revolves around the earth while the earth remains perfectly still and so the story goes that once he had been released and his jailers were out of earshot he made a small addition to what he'd said of the earth in court and yet it moves it is fitting perhaps that this story is most likely apocryphal there's no contemporary record of Galileo's ever having said and yet it moves still the phrase does seem to have been associated with him even before his death people whether they'd heard the words from him or not had by then already come to associate him with the plight of facts before the power of political authorities it is well attested however that he did say I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use Galileo was not a Unitarian or a Universalist so far as history records but in this statement he was perfectly in line with our tradition we human beings have the capacity to observe our surroundings to inquire after the causes of our circumstances to advance ideas and to test them whether we have the capacities, whether we have these capacities by the grace of the natural processes of life by the gift of a divine architect or purely by indifferent chance we ought to use them to better understand ourselves and our world and to better our world and ourselves from the significant if passing success of flat earthers, moon landing conspiracists, and the QAnon cult there would seem to be something in our species also that is ever ready to ignore the facts before us Upton Sinclair observed it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it while Thomas Paine wrote to argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt is like administering medicine to the dead or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture Jane Austen expressed both ideas even more succinctly how quick come the reasons for approving what we like yet just because it seems unpopular in these days to bring reason to bear on our ideas and our beliefs does not mean we should shirk our religious duty to do so it only makes it all the more important that we do Oliver Cromwell once wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland saying, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken the American jurist Billings learned hand a pined centuries later I should like to have that written over the portals of every church every school and every courthouse and may I say of every legislative body in the United States less the extremely distinctive and colorful metaphor this describes one of the pillars of the scientific method a willingness to entertain the idea that one could be wrong in order to test and retest hypotheses remain open to new evidence I can live said the famous 20th century physicist Richard Feynman with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong passage in the Rig Veda one of the sacred texts of Hinduism which translates as who knows for certain who shall hear declare it whence was it born whence came creation the gods are later than this world's formation who then can know the origins of the world none knows whence creation arose and whether he has or has not made it he who surveys it from the lofty skies only he knows or perhaps he knows not the Rig Veda is a collection of hymns religious songs of praise and transcendence and contemplation so take heart that ours is hardly the first or only religious voice to admit uncertainty and the unanswerable nature of certain questions nor is ours the first or the only to continue to contemplate those questions anyway choirs it is so very good to see their faces and hear their voices again each week we gather here bringing with us the cares and the hurts and the joys of recent days we share all these knowing they are held in love and support and community we light a candle of joy and celebration for Chuck Zuprinsky who joins his wife in the gladness of their son Craig's remarriage to the same wonderful woman in Nashville last week and Chuck tells us this remarriage is a COVID thing so congratulations once again to you all we light a candle for Mary Bergen and her brother Fred Mary asks for our positive thoughts for Fred who at the age of 81 broke a hip three days after moving to Madison Fred remains hospitalized 25 days later because of rehab facility rejections Fred's Medicaid status and lifelong cognitive challenges are working against him and we're sending Mary our love and support and a candle of gratitude from Marla Shoup for all the love and concern that people are holding for Joy Wiggart as we love and support her now in hospice care Joy our hearts are with you today and always and we light one last candle for all the sorrows and all the celebrations that live in the sanctuaries of our hearts may we hold them all in love in gratitude and in hope from one another let these be our thoughts of that which is most holy lies within the human person and if the greatest power in the world shines flickering and uncertain from each individual heart then it is easy to see the value of human associations dedicated to nurturing that light, the couple, the family, the religious community for the power of good in any one of us must at times waiver but when a group together is dedicated to nurturing the power of good it is rare for the light to grow dim in all individuals at the same moment so we borrow courage and wisdom from one another to warm us and keep us until we're together again


Welcome to Sheboygan County Government, working for you. My name's Adam Payne, Sheboygan County Administrator and co-host of this program with Chairman Mike Van der Steen. And as you know, every month we try to bring a different department to you to talk about the programs, the services they provide, a lot going on in Sheboygan County Government. And some of you may not be aware that we have a Sheboygan County Coroner. And today we're very pleased that Mr. Dave Lafine's with us. Welcome, Dave. Thank you. Dave, please begin by sharing a little bit about yourself and when you first became the County Coroner. Sure. Well, I'm a Sheboygan native, born and raised here in Sheboygan, educated in Sheboygan. I became the coroner in 1987. So I'm finishing my 24th year as a Sheboygan County Coroner. I'm married. I have two married children and three grandchildren and one that's on the way and do a Christmas. So since 1987, since 1987, and what are the qualifications to become Coroner? Well, actually, Adam, there are no qualifications. If you wanted to become County Coroner, you could or Mike wanted to become County Coroner. All you need is to in the state of Wisconsin, Sheboygan County, because of our size of our population size of 100,000, you need a minimum of 500 names to get your name on the fall ballot. And if you have named 500 names, your name is on there. And if you get more votes than anybody else, you're the Coroner. However, by profession, I'm a registered nurse. And I certainly can't imagine anyone wanting or accepting or even being fully capable of doing this job without some sort of medical background. Going back in the history of Sheboygan County Coroner system, we've had physicians. We've had pharmacists in the field. A lot of the people that were here before me have long tenure. Dr. Kilderbrand was in for, I believe, 20 years. Dr. Simonson was in around 20 years. I think right now I've had the longest tenure. But that nutshell, that's it. You do not need qualifications that, however, I believe is going to be subject to change in the near future. They're looking at adapting some type of criteria for the Coroner's office. And it's rather remarkable to just hear you say that. I'm sure there were some folks who are watching this who thought, you've got to be kidding me. I mean, the Coroner has very important responsibilities. And you're called 24-7. What are some of the responsibilities that day in, day out that you take care of? Well, the responsibilities of the Coroner essentially are to pronounce death and to determine the cause and the manner of death. Everything in the Coroner's office is based on state statutes. And state statutes indicate that any homicide, any suicide, any death that involves fellow player or suspicious nature are required that the Coroner or the medical examiner investigates that death. So we would pronounce the death. We would certify that it was a natural death or accidental death or homicide. We would fill out the death certificate to the fact of what the cause was. And again, you may win through an election because you're popular or look good or whatever that may be. But when it comes to the serious task of pronouncing someone dead and determining the cause of that death, there must be some training involved, things that you do or your staff do to build up that skill set. Sure, as a state coroner's association, our organization offers training several times a year. My staff and I have all taken advanced training. The acronym ABM guy is American Board of Medical Death Investigators. So we have advanced training into the different facets of death investigation, forensic deaths, photography of the death scene, different things like that. How many employees do you have working for you? I have a total of five deputies besides myself. And you all distribute the workload, take turns going on calls? How does that normally work? Well, it's set up. I take pretty much of the lion's share. I have deputies because the coroner position is not a full-time position. So I have, as we joke about, I have a real job in that being a registered nurse. But we take turns being on call. My deputies will cover during the day while I'm at my regular job, and then I'll cover PMs and nights. I generally take a lot of the weekends and holidays so they can be with their families. But as things are progressing and I'm getting into it into my 24th year, they're kind of taking a little bit more over and doing a little bit more. But the county never goes uncovered. Now, as you mentioned, you're in an elected corner. You've been elected since 1987. And my understanding is you can either have an elected corner or you can have a medical examiner. Correct. What's the difference? How does that work? Difference educational-wise, there is none. The difference comes in, counties with populations of over 500,000 are mandated to have a medical examiner system. That's an appointed system by the county government. They would appoint an individual to be the medical examiner. Counties under 500,000 have the option of either being going with the elected system as we have in Sheboygan or appointing a medical examiner. There are out of the 72 counties, it's probably split 50-50, where in actuality we only have Madison, Dane, and maybe one other county that meets the 500,000 requirement. So they do it as a business sense of the county how they want to prefer to handle that. Any idea what the rationale is for why if you happen to have a population of over 500,000, it has to be an appointed individual versus under. You get the choice? No. I really don't. If you're an appointed, you work at the discretion of the county board. As an elected, I'm at the discretion of the populace, so technically I guess I cannot be fired. I mean, there are circumstances where you could be fired gross misconduct such as that, but that's with any office. Right, right. Very good. And last question, and I'll turn it over to Mike. As you said, you take this different training to determine what caused the death. What type of tools do you use to avail yourself of, I mean, I got to imagine that there can be situations that you can't just look at the person and determine that. You need to do some serious testing and serious investigation. Please share an example or two of how you proceed. You, as a tool that we have, it would be autopsies. And autopsies is used to determine a cause and manner of death, and an autopsy is performed by a pathologist. The coroner's office orders the autopsy, in fact, we maybe even would assist on the autopsy, but a pathologist is the only person can that perform an autopsy. To digress a little bit, in the medical examiner system, a lot of them are pathologists. So they have, they're pathologists, they pronounce the death. They have the option of going into an autopsy at the same day. Very good. Very good. Thank you. Dave, though everybody may not want to have a coroner show up on their doorstep, death is a part of life and it impacts us all. Can you tell us a little bit more about the specifics that you and your staff get involved with? I understand there's like different manners of death that you qualify things as. Right. On the death certificate, death is either a natural death, a homicide, a suicide, accidental, or undetermined. As a coroner, we are mandated or required to investigate all deaths other than natural deaths. So if there's been a murder or a homicide, we have to investigate that by law. Suicides, we have to investigate that by law. Accidental deaths, we have to investigate that by law. The fifth one is an undetermined and that's not used frequently, but there are times when you've exhausted all resources, you've exhausted x-rays, you've exhausted toxicology or lab studies of the blood and other body fluids trying to determine the cause of death, you've exhausted the autopsy aspect and sometimes someone dies and you just can't say why. There are probably the most common form would be someone would have an arrhythmia, an interruption in the heart rate. You can't see an arrhythmia, you can see a myocardial infarction where you have actual damage to the heart, but you cannot see an arrhythmia, an arrhythmia is an interruption. So it breaks up the heart rate. Just like a simple example would be you turn a light switch on, you turn the light switch off and at some point in time that light may not go, the bulb burns out, that's an interruption. Same thing can happen to the heart and you can't always tell even after you've exhausted all your studies. How many deaths do we usually have in Sheboygan County in a year? We probably have close to 2,000 deaths in Sheboygan County, however my office investigates probably around 500 of them, so about one fourth. In what instances are you required to conduct an investigation to determine the death? As I said earlier, anything that's other than a natural death.  A traffic accident where you want to determine whether the accident caused the death or the person died of natural causes and that led to the accident. Dave, you had mentioned just before we started taping this program that a real simplistic way to determine whether or not it's a death that you follow up on or investigate, whether it's in an institution or out of an institution, I think that's a real nice way of clarifying. Sure. All simple way to do it is all deaths, non-institutional deaths are deaths that a coroner or medical examiner would investigate. Any institutional death, such as a hospital where a person has had a fractured hip, that is reportable to the coroner.  So there are still institutional deaths that are reported to the coroner and require our investigation. But if it's a hospice or a nursing home or a hospital, that's another issue. Hospice deaths, even though they're under the care of hospice, if they're in the home, non-institutional death, we go. The exception would be in Sheboygan County, we're fortunate enough to have the Sharon S. Richardson Hospice Program. If they die at the Sharon S. Richardson Hospice Facility, we do not go unless they meet the criteria of a fall, of a fracture, a head trauma, but there are still times when we go there also. Nursing home deaths, if they haven't been seen by their primary physician in the last 30 days, we go to those. If there's any injury or choking episodes, sometimes you're elderly. In their frailty, they may choke on the food, so you may have a situation where you have a choking death. Dave, people in Sheboygan may not be aware of the fact that we have a county morgue. You tell us where that's located and how often the morgue is used. Sure. The Sheboygan County morgue is located in the lower level of the courthouse. And as far as usage, I've always been a conservative corner. We only do autopsies when we absolutely have to. What I love to do in autopsies on every death, oh absolutely, there's nothing better than to find out the root cause because this is an educated guess in some instances. You take the doctor, you take the medical notes, you take, look at the medication, you look at what was going on in their life before they passed, but you would still like to do an autopsy on a lot of them, but that would be cost prohibitive. If you look at 200 deaths in Sheboygan County or even the 500 we see and the cost of the autopsy, Adam would not be real happy with me and my budget. So we're conservative. We don't ignore them, but we do them when they're absolutely necessary. Now I understand that Sheboygan recently invested some money in remodeling and modernizing the morgue. Could you tell us a little bit about what that's entailed and why that was important to you and your department? Sure. The morgue was put in when the county courthouse was built and I believe that was in the 30s. At that time they had the office space for the coroner, they had the actual, the morgue, they had what we call a tray refrigeration unit. The facilities were quite old, needed updating, the ventilation system was poor and we upgraded, we put in a walk-in, what we call a walk-in cooler where when the body is brought into the morgue placed on a cart, it stays on that cart until the funeral makes the removal. So we do the autopsy right on that cart. We have a ventilating system, state of the art ventilating system that exchanges the air in the morgue numerous times per hour. I don't know the exact amount of times it changes, but a state of the art. We now have office space back for the coroner. We have record storage area now. And another use for the morgue, I'll digress into that Adam, is tissue procurement or tissue harvesting, not to be confused with organ donation. Organ donation is when someone was involved in an accident or an injury or was in a hospital where they're maintained on life supports and it's determined that they have reached brain death and they will not recover. They are a candidate for organ donation, heart, liver, kidneys, thing is you have to maintain perfusion of these bodily organs through artificial support. Tissue harvesting or tissue donation can be done on a deceased person up to a certain time frame after death if the conditions or environment is right and refrigeration is one of those requirements and a time frame of less than 18 hours or 12 hours in most cases. We have now have the facilities where we can do that where the harvest team comes in from Milwaukee or Madison. We have a changing area for them. We have locker area for them that their clothing is secured or their personal items are secured before they had to leave the morgue, go into a public restroom, change clothing. It worked but it was certainly not a good situation. Tissue donation is a gift that people can give. You can use, take skin, take bone, you can take connective tissue, there's different things they can do. Human for burn victims, cancer victims, bone for individuals with bone cancer, connective tissue for joints, heart valves they can take, different body parts that they can use. Everything when the tissue procurement people come in everything is done in a sterile manner although the morgue is not as an operating room is a certain sterile or cleanliness closest thing they can get to it. They have everything they do is under sterile technique, gowns, mask, sterile sheets, sterile towels, gloves. The body is treated with utmost respect and it's a wonderful, wonderful gift. Tissue donation can provide gifts for 30 to 40 other individuals. Well it's good to know that you've got a facility that you can use in that manner. With that I'll turn it back over to Adam. One of your deputies who took the lead on your behalf with the morgue and his name is... That would be Bob Culhanick, my chief deputy coroner. I really think he deserves a shout out because he did a nice job on your behalf and on behalf of your staff to make the case to the county board and of course Chairman Van Der Steen was very supportive and I'll never forget when he came to the finance committee. Can you say his full name again? Robert Culhanick. Culhanick. When he came in he had photos and if you could imagine an outdated morgue from as you said the 30s with a tray situation where he described you know people and I'm one of them. We're a little bigger and heavier than we may have been in the 30s and 40s and he described situations where you literally had to crawl into the cooler and sometimes over the body to remove it because the cooler and the sliding mechanism just wasn't built for today's use. Right. I just thought he did a terrific job making the case and I'm just proud of the fact that the board supported it during tough economic times and we now have a morgue that is more conducive to the needs of this community and provides you with a better working environment so I thank you for your leadership on that and again Chairman Van Der Steen and the county board deserve credit for that as well. Absolutely. Moving right along once you go through this process and I hope folks are appreciating that Dave is one of the most interesting departments I have to work with. These are unique conversations that most of us don't get to have every day and of course Dave knows the stuff inside and out and is highly qualified to do what he does. Once you've gone into the scene and dealt with the situation as respectfully as you can and with the loved ones that may or may not be there and perhaps you've done it on an autopsy perhaps not but what happens after you've made your determination of cause of death? Could you walk us through the next steps? It all depends on the situation where it's at Adam if it's a home death after we've been there can't you had a chance to talk with the family explain what we've found what our thought process is what our anticipated result is going to be as far as the cause doesn't matter when the family is ready we give the funeral home a call. Funeral home will come take the the deceased to the funeral home they will set up time with the family the next day and go through that process with them. If it's a traffic example a traffic scene where we maybe don't have necks of kin right off right away we'll we'll make a removal of that body and we'll take that body to the county morgue until we can notify necks of kin nursing homes or hospitals families most often there or they're notified and the same thing when when we've talked to them and everything is said and done the funeral home again is called and there again your work still isn't done then the body needs to be cremated or buried what are the the four forms of sure it's called the disposition disposition you know a common common disposition is earth burial or entombment at one of the mausoleums third one would be cremation and the fourth is scientific donation. Scientific donation is when someone donates their body to science for either Alzheimer's study of the brain or this general study for med students to have the opportunity to to look at a body do an autopsy of the body find out different things about the organs invaluable gift there also and when when the the medical institutions are done with the body the body is cremated and the ashes are returned to the the family but not all corner cases or I should see not all deaths or burials there are some that are cremations not all cremations are necessarily corner cases so if it doesn't happen to be a corner case in the beginning it becomes an investigation because once the body is cremated there is no going back and and exhuming the body for further studies or investigation or taking the body out of the mausoleum so we investigate the cause and manner of the death of what physician X has put down on that death certificate we make sure that the body has no trauma that is not consistent you know with the situation prior to death so we investigate that also and what's the general trend out there are you seeing more people choosing to cremate loved ones or is there a well we out of those just probably out of the two roughly two thousand fifteen hundred to two thousand deaths in Sheboygan County we have about 450 cremations so that leaves probably two-thirds that are either burial or entombment only have a couple of minutes remaining and as you said since 1987 tremendous run of public service to this community of a position as Mike mentioned earlier that not everyone is necessarily looking for you to walk to their doorstep but when they have a loved one that needs you there I'm sure they're they're pleased to have you there what have you found most rewarding about the job why did you run for it to begin with it was my sense of community service not necessarily feel for it not everybody can do it as you said I've been very fortunate that my staff is very professional in how they handle things we can go to a home and we do our job with the utmost care and consideration we've left with families we've cried with families probably the most rewarding every once in a while maybe four or five times you you're gonna thank you know what I mean I just very touching hardest thing little children just to hold that child and tell their parents I'm sorry right and as we speak or tape this program there's a young girl perhaps out in Lake Michigan that's a situation where you would be called absolutely right right well thank you Dave for your 23 years of service with Sheboygan County is County Corner and the staff that you have and the and the important work that you do we certainly appreciate it thank you if you have questions don't hesitate to contact your County Corner Dave Lafine I'm sure he'll be happy to talk to you and and if you've dealt with Mr. Lafine in the past send a thank-you note as you can tell he takes his work very seriously and it's very important work next month we're going to have another department head here also takes his job very seriously in that Sheriff Mike Helpeke law enforcement the Coroner's Office certainly have to coordinate from time to time and Sheriff Helpeke has done a very good job during his tenure as Sheriff and we look forward to hearing from him and hearing more about the challenges that law enforcement has so until then on behalf of Chairman Mike Vanderstien and the County Board thanks for joining us