M-C-B-H, Marine Corps Base, Hawaii, wow, exciting. Okay, and we have today as Spiros, Spiros... Spiros Kumparakis. Kumparakis, of course, I knew that, all right? And we have Megan. Megan is Megan Ostrom, that's easier. Thank you for joining us today. You guys are in the environmental effort at Kanihoi. So I have some questions for you. Welcome to the show. So why is Megan not in uniform? And Megan, you can still salute me if you wish. Well, Jay, it's great to see you again. Aloha, thank you for having me. Megan, I'm back here with you today. I think we first met a couple of years ago and I really appreciated that Megan is one of our civilian Marines who help ensure the continuity and the kind of connection to Hawaii. And I'll let Megan talk a little bit about herself, but she does a fantastic job of not only knowing how to make sure we connect with the community, but also how to lead our efforts to be part of the community. So this is about community then, your environmental efforts are about community. And I mean, the military has to avoid aggravating the community. It has to protect the environment. Marines are no exception. And Kaniyoi is right there and this is Christine Kaniyoi Bay, which is really an icon of environment. So it's very important what you do. So, but let me ask, you know, Spiros, what do you do? Is this all you do? Are you the commander? What is your situation? Well, Jay, I'm the commander of Marine Corps Base Hawaii and that's actually about eight properties across two islands. It includes Camp Smith, our Pulao Range over at Ava Beach, a small Pearl City Annex and Manana Housing there in the Pearl City area. And it also includes Bellows Training Area out by Waimanalo. Most people recognize Marine Corps Base Hawaii as the old Marine Corps Air Station, Kaniyoi Bay, but it's actually more than that. And as the commanding officer of the base, we have kind of core missions. We like to say that our mission is to project power from our 7,800 foot runway that's located here in Kaniyoi Bay. We produce readiness and we do that through our training and the training ranges we maintain. We promote resiliency. So what is that resiliency for our Marines, our sailors and their families, as well as our civilians who work for us. And then ultimately we protect our resources. So as you see in the emblem just over my head here, it's surrounded by those four Ps that we talk about. And today we're going to talk a little bit about how we protect resources and promote resiliency about half of our mission. It is I who should be saluting you, Spiro. This is last time, I am always impressed to talk to commanders, especially Kaniyoi, which is iconic in there, like forever and it's provided Marines to go anywhere in the Pacific region. That is really fantastic. How do you like your job? How can I get your job? It's a really good job, Jay. I would first say the first thing you have to do is go back in time, just a couple of years, choose Marine Corps and then be fortunate enough to survive some pretty interesting jobs that I probably should have gotten fired for and then be lucky enough to be selected for what I think is probably one of the best jobs in the Marine Corps.  It's where Marines and sailors prepare for war or those things that happen less than war. And it also is in a place with an incredible culture. The Mokapu Peninsula here at Kaniyoi Bay connected to both Kailua, Kaniyoi Bay and even Heia as the peninsula was part of Heia and its original aqua. As you learn about that and as folks like Megan have helped teach me over the last two and a half years, it just reminds you how special it is and why it's important to protect our resources because it is the only earth we've got. And if we don't really think about how we protect our resources, then what are we all actually doing here to make sure that we can have a better tomorrow for our next generation? All right, and also it's got great Mongolian barbecue. It does in the Friday night, Mongolian barbecue still goes there at the jewel of the Pacific, at the Marine Corps Base Hawaii Officers Club. And the lounge is still a pretty fun place to be on a first Friday. And your picture is there except you're in marine dress, right? Yeah, I am a little bit more dressed up in the way too many pictures around the base of me. Okay, thank you, it's really, it's always fun to talk to commanders.  Well, Megan, what do you do for Spiros? So my role here at Marine Corps Base Hawaii for colonels, Kuparakis is really encroachment management and being aware and ready to manage those factors that can potentially negatively impact the ability of the Marines to be ready for deployment when they are called upon to whatever part of the world that they need to serve their mission. Encroachment factors have traditionally been thought of as those things that are right up against our fence line that can prevent Marines from reaching their readiness goals. So that could be development outside the fence line or within our airspace that negatively affects our aircraft. But kind of going back to what we talked a little bit about at the very start of the call with community, we look at encroachment really at a broader scale and how we are in our community together. And it's not just how we are as Marines here on the base, operating on the base, the Marines are part of the community, part of that external community outside of the base as well. And I'm sorry, I have a... So it's a confluence in sorts. One hand, you want to prevent encroachment. And Spiros, we had just some of this conversation before, I think, in response last time. So it's two things. It's you want to prevent encroachment to avoid any interference with the Marine readiness and training.  So it's kind of an intersection of those two things. Spiros, can you help us with the intersection? How do those two things intersect? Well, see, one of the biggest things we try to do is have a space to conduct training. And we understand that a lot of our training is impactful on our community. We have a fantastic training range down at Waimanalo in the vicinity of Waimanalo called the Marine Corps Training Aerospace. That's a perfect example of where the two come together. So we have an agreement with the city and county and there on the weekends at Bellows, we allow the city and county to take ownership so that around 12 o'clock on a Friday until about zero eight in the morning on a Monday, that Marine Corps training landing error where we will conduct amphibious operations is actually turned over to the city and county and managed there on the weekend. And we appreciate that type of relationship. And I think that's a good example of the confluence of kind of resiliency encroachment where we say, let's be good stewards. Let's make sure we've got a place that we can conduct an amphibious raid and amphibious landing. But when we're not training on it, how do we make sure that there's access appropriate and controlled access to that beautiful resource for families to go and have a great time on the weekend? I think that's a great example. And Megan has also continued to look for examples like that as we think about not just encroachment at the fence line. We don't want a large building to grow up next to a base because a nefarious actor might want to look inside the base and see what's going on. That's kind of what most people think of when they think of encroachment, but we think of it more holistically. What about a watershed area that if there was development or growth or environmental damage to a watershed that leads to the Board of Water Supplies water supply that then leads to the base? Well, that's an area that we would really like to collaborate with the city, county, the state and our federal delegation to say, let's think about how we protect that resource, which is important to all of us, so that ultimately as it flows down to the base and we're buying that water from Board of Water Supply, we feel comfortable and safe that that resiliency is there. So that's the kind of difference as someone who came from the mainland who spent a lot of time on kind of East Coast DC, you might see it as its defense line, but here it's about a collaborative effort with the community for resiliency of the community because we're definitely not alone when crisis happens and whether it's a hurricane, a tsunami or an attack, just as we remembered yesterday and December 7th, the 81st anniversary, it impacts the entire community when there's an event and so we want to be part of that conversation and we think we've got resources that can help. Oh, wow, I've had a lot of questions. So suppose, let me start with this. Let me go to Megan because I'll give her equal time. I hope that's okay. So Megan, what kind of factors are environmental factors that you want to deal with? They may have also the intersectional effect of affecting readiness, but there might be five factors that affect the environment and people get concerned about the environment and of course we all are concerned about the environment. So what can you do at Coneoie? What can you do as the environmental person at Coneoie to preserve the environment? So we have a lot of exciting programs that are available to us with our Approachment Management Program and many of these programs are not only available to us here in Marine Corps Base Hawaii, but they're available to us in our community as well and actually predominantly intended for use outside of the fence line of installation properties. One of those programs is the readiness and environmental protection integration program, the REPI program, which you may be familiar with. And that program is a partnership opportunity. It's a partnership program that's funded through Congress. Money goes to the Office of the Secretary of Defense where money is appropriated for conservation projects predominantly outside of military installations and those conservation projects largely focus on there's more landscape level type concerns, environmental concerns. Here at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, we're concerned about threatened and endangered species, which we are federally required to protect and enhance their habitat so that we can continue our mission. We're required to look at resiliency, like the Colonel was speaking to regarding water. So what can we do to protect our upper watersheds so that it is maintained with those native species that continue to act like a sponge and absorb so that our aquifers can be recharged and the community as a whole can have fresh drinking water. Cultural resources are also something that are vitally important to us here at Marine Corps Base Hawaii. On our installation, we are honored to be the caretakers of many different sacred cultural sites and resources. And- Oh, is that so on Kaniyia Base? On the base, yes. Oh, wow, that's incredible. And likewise, it's very important that we care for those, but through some of these federal programs, we want to help the community and the state and the city and county and federal entities that are doing that excellent preservation work outside of our gates as well so that there's continuity throughout the community as a whole protecting all of our resources together as a collective. Okay, so does that mean that you go out with a shovel sometimes and move the earth around or do you hire contractors to do that? Do you speak with the city and county? Do you speak with the state government, ELNR?   Is that a part of your job?  If I'm in my office and people can find me easily, I'm not doing my job right, actually. There'll be a note on my door that says, call cell phone. And a big part of that is not just me getting out there connecting with people, it's making sure that our commanding officer is building those relationships in a meaningful and authentic way. It's making sure that our Marines are out in the community building those relationships. And yes, at some times it could be lifting a shovel. Other times it's a meeting. It's about inviting the community on to our installation properties as well with that controlled appropriate access and how we work together collectively. So you have a budget where you can hire a contractor. On behalf of the Marine Corps, where you can get things done through environmental projects, am I right? So I'll take this one. I wish I had an unlimited budget, but obviously we have constraints, the fiscal constraints, and even something like a continuing resolution can slow down our progress as we're trying to move forward. But what I will say is that, as we look at three key elements, it's our natural resources, our cultural resources, and our historical resources on the base because we also have the importance of a place like Hangar 101, which was attacked on December 7th, 1941, and the very first Medal of Honor was given to, at the time, Chief Petty Officer John Finn, important location that's actually a historic landmark, and then the cultural resources that can date back over 600 years. And so those are the type of things that we want to protect. So we do have a fairly large environmental compliance team that are civilian Marines and contractors. We've got PhDs, we've got archeologists, and we have folks who have well studied and well versed in kind of native Hawaiian culture to make sure that we're not misstepping. And they're on site at job, so if we bring in a contractor to do work on the airfield to do repaving, they'll actually be an archeologist who will be on site so that if we were to find an archeological, something of archeological significance, say EVI or the Bones of Ancestors, we'll stop. And then we'll start to work very closely with our partners like DLNR, Bishop Museum, so many other, and the native Hawaiian organizations that we traditionally work with who have connections to the Mokapu Peninsula so that we don't do any missteps and anything wrong with the cultural resources of this base. That's very wise.  If I leave the base and I'm off base, I have to dress up, so I can wear this on base, but if I'm stopped and walking through town, and you, or Jay, if you see a Marine walking through town in this uniform, you can tell him, Colonel Kuparaka said, that's not accurate, that's not a Liberty uniform, and you need to get in a more dressy uniform the next time you're out in town. Yeah, I don't have to put him on a reporter or anything, do I? Just a nice, subtle, tactful reminder is all we ask. Tell him, I was in the Coast Guard 50 years ago, and maybe that'll affect my influence. So, you know, back in the day, and I guess it's not that easy to get out there for an ordinary person, but I visited the firing range, and the firing range is actually in the write-up for this discussion. The firing range is really beautiful at the far end there, at the right-hand side, I guess that's the east side of the base, and you've got trained Marines to fire weapons, there it is. But I suppose there's an environmental impact on that. What can you do to minimize that impact if there is one, Megan? Well, as Colonel spoke about earlier, our environmental team that we have here on the base, they monitor for, you know, we do actually happen to have a red-footed booby colony that is thriving in the middle of our live fire range there in the colony, and is growing. And as part of, you know, kind of that balance of having to sustain training and keep Marines ready, we also have that responsibility for environmental stewardship, and as that we have measures in place that protect those birds and allow them to continue to live and thrive in the area. We also have measures in place for operational range clearance program that keeps our ranges in a sustained factor, so we regularly clean those ranges, maintain those ranges for the overall use and enjoyment of our military readiness and our overall environment.  Oh, I was just gonna add a surprising secondary effect from having a range like that. So the small island right behind that's not part of Marine Corps Base Hawaii is Mokomonu. Because we conduct firing, people can't visit it on a normal basis. And as a result of us conducting training on the Ulapal Crater, we have cultural sites and natural resources that are actually thriving because we don't allow humans to go when we're firing weapons. And so that reduction of contact has made for some very special places. So it's interesting that because we bomb inside of a very tight window and square or we shoot weapons into a very tight window and square, we're actually doing more to protect a larger area behind it because people don't have access. And the same holds true. And that's why we have to do that operational range clearance on a cyclical basis so that we can remove old either unexploded ordnance or lead material so it doesn't leach or move outside of our very, very controlled impact areas. How do you keep the booby birds out of the line of fire? By the way, I have a small Yorkshire terrier and she would probably help you if you needed somebody to bark them away. But how do you keep them out of the line of fire? The boobies love a certain spot up by battery Pennsylvania. And we've tried over the past probably 10, 15 years to move them in a direction that would keep them away from the direct line of fire. And they will not, they have their spot. They really like it. And so we have actually moved our range ever so slightly and changed our impact areas so as not to impact them. We've actually added cannons that fire water suppression to keep any fires that might happen from hitting them and keeping them safe as well. So I think the mitigation has really worked and they are thriving in a spot that I don't know why they're thriving so much. Good, outstanding, they also have an iconic quality about the booby birds. Although they can be a nuisance, I know when you fly to the South Pacific Islands, they're a risk in terms of getting into your engines and so far speaking of which, I remember the time it was called Coney O'aille Marine Corps Air Base. You referred to some aircraft a little while ago. Are there still aircraft flying in and out of Coney O'aille or is that history? How has it changed and how will it change? So we're really excited right now. So traditionally, this had been a maritime patrol base for the Navy with the PBY Catalinas and its original state. A few years ago, we had the P3s, those squadrons have all deactivated and now we have a permanent detachment of P8s that fly in and out, which is a fantastic detachment. So they're not actually home-based here. The home-based aircraft, the Navy used to have two C40s for logistics and then the Navy also has HSM-37, which is their 60 Romeo's, which deploy with the ships out of Pearl Harbor. Now for the Marine Corps, our two biggest squadrons are two VMMs, which are the V-22 Osprey squadrons. Those are our two largest squadrons. We used to have the 53 Sea Stallions and the HMLA, which is a light attack helicopters. Those two squadrons have deactivated this year. We're going through an environmental process right now through the NEPA process for the National Environmental Policy Act. We're conducting an environmental assessment, looking at the historical as well as the cultural and the natural resources to see if bringing in C-130s and MQ-9s would be appropriate to home-based here. And so we're reviewing that process, but within the plan, the comment on the Marine Corps believes he needs aircraft that can't not to fly around Hawaii, but to deploy from Hawaii. And so we think that if this were to be approved and we move forward with it, that now you would have aircraft like C-130s or K-130s, which can do refuel operations and equipment that can leave from Hawaii and go to Guam and the rest of the first and second island chain in the Pacific, as well as MQ-9s. And we're not looking at an attack variant. We're looking at a sensor variant that could loiter for many, many hours over some of our friends in the Pacific and let them know that we just want to know what they're doing. Yeah, I suppose if you had C-130s, you could resupply. They're applying the pipelines. Well, the V-22 can actually be refueled off of the K-130. So that V-22 that's local here can actually fly. And twice in the last two years, we've flown V-22s from Australia back to Hawaii and from Hawaii all the way to Guam. And we had support from one of the Coast Guard, KC-130Js that are now out at Barber's Point and they flew along with us to get to Guam. So it's a great maritime team right now. Yes, oh, I'm happy to hear that. So Megan, how do you deal with people in the environment outside the base and say planes? You wanna fly planes over my head? How do you deal with that? It's a lot of education, a lot of conversations and really helping people understand the mission as to why we train, where we train and the need for our Marines and Airmen and Sailors and everything to be ready. And once you start having those conversations and you kind of explain it in that manner and not in a passive way, but in a more personal way, like attending neighborhood board meetings, going to Native Hawaiian Civic Club meetings or other community civic organization meetings, inviting people onto our installation to meet our pilots and our operators. Our community understands what we need to do and why we need to do it. And part of that too is us also understanding how we are in a community and that, yes, the Marine Corps does have an effect on the community and being mindful of each other's needs, requests and that it's going to be a give and take. But it's a continual conversation that we have together. It's not something that happens in a vacuum or in a silo. It's something that we will continually work through as a community. I hope that conversation actually includes the notion of patriotism to the United States. But I think that's a driving feature, at least for me, all you got to do is say, this is in the interest of the United States and I'm yours. And I think a lot of people could react that way, just help us for the country, man, the country. It's not a question of you and your NIMBY, it's the country. Do you use that particular line of discussion? I think what we tend to focus on is there is a mission, there's a reason behind everything we do. And if there's a perception that we're doing it because we're jewelry writing around the island, we want to make sure we explain the why. There's a reason why a Marine will fly at night on MVGs to prepare for the most difficult flying they'll ever do. That's very difficult training and they've got to get through those wickets. And if they don't train that way, then I don't want to send them into combat. And so we appreciate the patience that folks have with us. And when they do have questions, we're more than willing to answer them and hopefully answer them in a way that makes sense. Respectful conversations are always good. It doesn't mean you're going to win over a critic, but it does hopefully mean we have a dialogue that we can continue to discuss things in the future. If you have any hard cases, send them to me and I'll explain the patriotism angle, okay? The other thing is, okay, so we have kind of a pivot. Obama was talking about it a few years ago and it's certainly coming true now for a lot of good geopolitical reasons. And Hawaii has to be strong, it has to be well staffed essentially with the military. Very important that we have the military present and functioning here in Oahu and all through the islands. So people say that in the future, there'll be more. And the pivot goes for a while. And assuming that, how does that change things for Kaneo'i Marine Corps base? Because you might see more troops there. You might see more of a mission, more training, more of a hub, if you will, of military activity in the Pacific. Has that looked to you, Colonel? Well, I think we're already there. I think our commandant, General Berger, who was actually stationed here, understood the importance of Hawaii and over three years ago, started coming up with something called force design. And so we're already two years into that force design. I think the units and the type of fighting we'll do will be different. They may be smaller, a little more agile and need to be able to get into places quickly. So when we talk about MQ-9s and KC-130s, and then we talk about this group called the Third Marine Latoral Regiment, which was the old Third Marine Regiment, it's already redesignated and we're looking at how they conduct training. They deployed as an MLR out to the Philippines last year or earlier this year at Balakantan. They'll deploy again to the Philippines to build that continued relationship as Balakantan, shoulder to shoulder. And they're a unit that does something other than just close with, destroy the enemy by fire maneuver. We're bringing in new systems like anti-ship missiles that can be fired from the shore. We're looking at integrating sensor packages that give target quality data so that if a commander needed to punch a hole in the side of a ship, you don't have to just think about another ship doing it, but Marines could actually do that on the commander's behalf. Wow. So we've been through a couple of wars in Middle East, Central Asia, and the Marines have been there, they're always there. And I wonder how that's changed not only the rules of engagement, but the manner of engagement and thus the training for engagement. Have you seen that? I'm sure you have seen it in your career about how a Marine force, large or small, operates differently in a world that's different. Well, I think the first thing is we've got a lot of great experience from Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. And we wanna take those lessons learned and apply them to a different dynamic. The rules of engagement will be different in the Pacific. I think the biggest thing that's different is the number of allies that we have that are in harm's way, if you will. And the type of weapon system a potential adversary has. It makes the stakes very, very high. It doesn't give you the dominance in the air that you might have had over Iraq or Afghanistan. And so it makes us think about how we're going to deploy and create what we call the stand-in force. The Marines who are located in Hawaii, most of their bosses are in Japan. They are part of the stand-in force. And we don't do anything without our partner, the Japanese, without the Australians, without our New Zealand partners, and our growing and continued relationship with the Philippines. And of course, Korea, our only place that's actually on the continent, we have Marine bases and Army bases there in Korea. And so it's a dangerous neighborhood. And the biggest danger is probably a natural disaster. And so while we have to think about competition and fighting against a pure threat, we also have to think about the continued and most likely action, which is the United States and its assets coming to save people's lives after a natural disaster. And so we want to be prepared for all of those types of operations. And that kind of drives the size of force you want here in Hawaii. And the other thing Hawaii provides, it's a path through location. We call it a regional support activity. So not only do we need to be prepared to send Marines away, but as a Marine expeditionary unit flows through from California or aircraft come through, this should be a place where they can rest for a few minutes, rearm, and then get them to where they need to go to conduct the missions of the United States. And I think that holds true for the entire joint force, for the Navy, for the Air Force, for the Coast Guard, for us in the Army, it truly is the middle Pacific that provides that regional support activity. Now people always wonder, they wonder whether in the case of, for example, extreme weather or some other kind of natural disaster. Or worse, whether the military in Hawaii will be there to help the civilians. And I take it from what you're saying, the answer to that is yes. And that we need not be concerned that if some, for example, a hurricane hits Hawaii, which is likely to do one of these days, that the Marines and all the other services as well, will stand up and help people even in a time of great distress, am I right? You're correct, we actually have plans ready and teams ready to do those direct support to civilian authority missions, disk emissions here in Hawaii. And our base becomes an important hub, as well as the Army and Navy and Air Force bases become important hubs to support our local authorities. And I'd say the other piece to this, to come back to the environment, you know, our President, our Secretary of the Navy, our Secretary of Defense have all talked about climate change. And I would say the Department of Defense and the military here at Marine Corps Base Hawaii, we understand that the climate is changing. And so we have to build a resilient base with the appropriate funding to make sure that we can survive as tides continue to rise as types of weather events become more erratic and less, you know, more difficult to forecast. We need to make sure that we're looking at, you know, engineering with nature in mind so that we have that resiliency so that if we are hit, our bases are those resilient places for the community. Yeah, it's like when you fly in a plane and the oxygen mask is supposed to come down over your head, the adults should put it on first so that the adult can help the child. That's the same thing. You have to be ready to help us and you're not gonna be ready unless you're not only sustainable, but also resilient. But I would be remiss if I did not ask Megan about the base, the base, the Caleole Marine Corps base. It is beautiful. It has always been beautiful. It is a long tradition of being beautiful. And when you drive through the base and you see such care, such attention to every open space and every building, every sign, every roadway, is it still like that, Megan? And what do you have to do with that? Are you down there mowing the lawn too? That would be fun from time to time to jump on one of those riding mowers. I think that might be more enjoyable than responding to email. But, you know, I have been fortunate enough to have been born and raised here in Wynward O'ahu and now continuing to live here and work just down the road for my parents, raise my kids here now. And every day I drive in and I get to, you know, come through Kailua onto a little bit of the H3 and look out, didn't see Kaneohe Bay on one side, Kailua Bay on the other and drive and look at the Nuupia ponds, which are beautiful. And Marine Corps Base Hawaii has spent over 20 years restoring those ponds. When I was young, those ponds were completely choked out with mangrove and you couldn't see any of the open water. The habitat wasn't there for the endangered native water bird species. Now that habitat is there and it's thriving and that's in thanks to the Marine Corps. And it doesn't mean that, you know, that they're done. The work continues. The environmental improvement here continues. The team is never stopping to explore those opportunities here on the base and then in partnership with the community as to how can we continue to keep this place beautiful and make it beautiful for the years to come while the Marine Corps are the stewards of this peninsula. You know, as Bureau, I just remembered that one of your predecessors, a couple of commanders ago was like so into environment and energy, it'll clean energy that, you know, I was on the energy policy forum at the time. This commander was like everywhere. And he was famous within the energy community. Do you remember who that might be? He retired a long time ago, but it was quite something the way the Marines were presenting on clean energy at the time. So I don't know which commander it was off the top of my head, but I've talked to several of the commanders than whether it be my predecessor, Colonel Lioness, his predecessor, Kid Colleen and Toaster Anacarico. There's just a lot of history and tradition of the base commanders. In fact, I still talk to many of them. There one is Babar, he was a fantastic commander here. It was the first Colonel who was selected on a board to be the commander, Babar Rice was his name. And so I get a chance to meet them every once in a while and we talk about just how things are going. Clean energy, energy reduction, any way that we can reduce the demand on HECO and the local community is fantastic. But at the same time, we also have ACs that aren't only running in our housing, but go down to server farms to make sure that servers are gonna stay cold enough to keep a data center open. And those types of things and keeping very, very sensitive equipment and large aircraft or large technical equipment in an air conditioned space, that uses up a lot of energy. So for me, it's not just about the environment, but it also costs us a significant amount of money to the taxpayer per year. So we do it and we look for opportunities, not just because it's the right thing to do, but it's the right thing on so many levels, both for the environment, as well as to the bottom line and the taxpayer's dollars that we're charged with managing. You know, I asked you before how I could get your job. I'm even more focused on that now. You must love your job.  And it's great. I love the job because we're surrounded by incredible people who love this place more than I do because they grew up here and they wanna make sure it's taken care of. And then the question is leaders, right? We always ask ourselves, are we listening to our people? Are we listening to the community? Are we taking the advice? And then how do we make decisions that in a very short amount of time as a commander, create positive change in the right direction? And so the good news is we've got such a great team. The bad news is budgetary constraints only allow you so much discretionary spending. And so as we look to that little discretionary we have, we wanna put it in the right places. And we think protecting our base and the environment and the resiliency of our community is a really good place to invest taxpayers' dollars. Megan, how much of that do you agree with? I completely agree with it. And adding on top of that is that's where our partnerships come into play. So earlier you were asking, well, who do we work with? And it's the Department of Land and Natural Resources. It's the city and county of Honolulu. It's the University of Hawaii and the research and innovation that they're doing here on our installation with, you know, wave energy testing locations offshore. And then, you know, we've got Hawaii, it's due to marine biology, you know, right in our backyard as well that we partner with. It's looking at that resiliency in the community. So we on the peninsula, we are dependent on resources coming in from the outside. So there are programs, you know, thanks to our federal delegation who advocate for these things in Washington, DC, where there are grants available to our military communities to help with resiliency, for energy resiliency, for our water infrastructure, for our roadways, because this base is sustained not only by Marines, but by their civilian workforce who live in Kaneohe, Kailua, some even, you know, over the mountain in Ewa. And we all depend on having those resources available to us to be ready to serve in our own way. And we have to second that.  I have to second that, you know, as we work with all levels of elected officials from our neighborhood boards up to the federal delegation, we've seen it time and time again and I've seen it in the last two and a half years. Our federal delegation is doing a fantastic job to explain to the rest of the United States why Hawaii is important. And when they do that, it helps, it actually comes back to help not just the local community, but the readiness of the military forces here and the command and control from, you know, Admiral Acollino and Indo Pecom all the way down to a Lance Corporal who needs to be ready to get on a plane tonight, just in case there's something going wrong in the world. And Hawaii supports that. So going back to your comment about patriotism, that that's really what it's about. Do we have Lance Corporals ready to follow an Admiral's orders to go make the world a better place? And who does an ally want, who wants to have an ally that also doesn't care about the environment? And I think when you look across the world at how other countries are taking care of their own resources and how we take care of ours, it is a factor that makes us the ally of choice in the world. Thank you both and thank you for your service. Okay, Spiro, Megan, it's been a great discussion. Really appreciate it. Thank you for joining us today on Think Tech. I hope we can meet again soon. The Colonel and me, we have a thing going. We're gonna do this again and again. Jay, I just wanna thank you again. And I still remember the comment you told me. It was very, it really hit home with me.    We want that. We look to you for that. Thank you both so much. Aloha. All right, Jay. Aloha. Thank you. 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.


Greetings everyone, welcome to this embedded Linux conference Europe session. So today I'll be talking about supporting hardware accelerated video encoding with Mainline. This is especially about stateless codecs, which are not yet supported in Mainline. So we're going to see that with the Hentro H1 example that I'm going to give many more details about throughout this talk. But first let's begin with a bit of details about me. So I'm Paul, I work at Butlin as an embedded Linux engineer where I do some expertise, especially development. I also give a training about graphics display and rendering. So I try to work with open source as in contributing many of my changes to upstream as much as possible. I've worked on the Sidious VPU driver for the decoding part in v4l2, so I worked on MPEG2 and H265. Also did some work to the SunFry DRM driver which supports all-winner SOCs, just like the Sidious driver. So recently I also worked on MyPice CSI2, which is kind of a recent interface for cameras. I live in Toulouse in the southwest of France where one of our office is located. So let's begin with H264 encoding. So first of why do we need to encode video? Well, the fact is that pictures are pretty big and they take quite some size in memory. So if we make a quick calculation for a 10 minute example at 1920 x 1080, take a 32 bits per pixel frame buffer for that. We want to have 30 frames per second and we make the calculation that would be about 142 gigabytes just to store that 10 minute video. So we definitely want to compress that and reduce this size which is kind of the core point of video encoding. So the idea is that we're going to use lots of different methods to kind of compress the data, reduce the size, but keep in mind that doing this requires some heavy calculation so there's always some overhead to encoding and decoding. And there's of course the main concern of encoding which is keeping a good visual quality for a given size. So there's a trade-off here that we want to keep under control to kind of have a result that suits the use case that we have. So there are very different ways to encode videos, lots of different formats. So these are called video codecs. I've given just a few examples here. So H264 is one of those video codecs. They contain both compressed video data which is the actual data that is used to recalculate or create the frame, but also some metadata that kind of explains how the frame was encoded and so how it should be decoded. So this is kind of an encoder or decoder pipeline configuration metadata that is definitely necessary because there are lots of different ways to encode H264, there are lots of different features that can be used or not. So lots of conditionals here that all need to be kind of laid out with the metadata. Just the codec data itself is called the bitstream and this pretty much contains all of the video data that is compressed. And this bitstream is put into a bigger container which has this video data which might also have some audio or some subtitles for example. And this is what makes an actual video file that you can use on your computer. So H264 is known as many different names. It was standardized by ITUT as H264 but it also was standardized by ISO as MPEG4AVC aka MPEG4.10. So MPEG4 itself can actually mean lots of different things. So this is why we're going to talk about H264 or AVC just to make things clear. It's really used a lot nowadays on the web especially but just for streaming generally or just video transmission that can be compressed. It's really everywhere now. So it's used for the TV with an interlaced station where you only update half of the lines at a time but mostly what we're going to look at today is progressive mode where pictures of frames and not just fields of interlaced content. So H264 has lots of compression features some of which can be kind of complex to implement or that might require lots of logic. There are different profiles of H264 that each kind of enable a subset of features. So for example the baseline profile is quite simple and is a good fit for easy kind of implementations and high profile requires lots more logic and has more features and more flexibility to encode videos efficiently. There's also a concept of limits to set the maximum kind of bit rates for the video. It's also about dimensions. And there are some annex specifications as well. For example SVC for scalability so you can add more temporal content or spatial or better quality so basically you add extra data that you can decide to decode or not. MVC is another extension to show multiple views in the video so this is mostly used for stereoscopy which is basically 3D where you have to show one different view to each eye. So those are the main extensions that are used. So H264 has specific semantics and basically specific units which are called network abstraction layer units that each have a data header basically with a specific type that is specified which kind of indicates what the data of the unit is. So for example there are some metadata in ALU such as the sequence parameter set, SPS. So this is metadata for the whole sequence as also the PPS for each picture. So this is for the metadata and we can also find actual coded video data which is called the slice data. It's important to keep in mind that the metadata is just a series of bits that needs to be understood according to the syntax of H264 which is really bit aligned and often conditional. There is a specific format called NXB which will basically put a prefix before the beginning of each NALU so that it's easier to just find the start of the next one. One important idea in H264 is macro blocks which are basically subdivisions of the picture into blocks of 16 times 16 pixels. These are grouped as slices so basically the coded information in the coded slice data NALU will be composed of data about macro blocks. And there are different types of slices which we're going to talk about just next. Okay, so let's look at some compression techniques that are used in H264 beginning with color sub-sampling. So this is the idea that we're going to affect less bits to color information versus luminosity information just because the human eyes are less sensitive to a difference in color than they are in luminosity. So this is done using an appropriate color space, for example YUV-REC709. So we're basically going to convert a regular RGB image in sRGB color space to this YUV-REC709 color space which uses a YUV color model that splits the components between luminosity and two chrominance channels. And we're basically going to sub-sample the chrominance channels. For example with 420 we're going to sub-sample horizontally and vertically by two. So we can basically divide by four the number of bits per pixel on each of the chroma planes or components. So in the end this gives us 12 bits per pixel which kind of reduces the size by two if we have a 24 bits per pixel sRGB input. So this is great because it's not really very noticeable to the eye. So this works kind of well. So another compression technique that is at the core of H264 encoding is quantization. So the idea of quantization is that each macro block is converted into frequency domain using a discrete cosine transform operation. So this is just a frequency-based representation of the picture in 2D. And then we're going to apply a quantization step which is just a number that we will use to divide each of the frequency-space coefficients before rounding them and just keeping those quantized values. So the idea is that the bigger the quantization step, the more we lose quality basically. We lose information on the frequency-space coefficients. The quantization step itself is indexed by a quantization parameter which we can use just to control the quality of the encoding. So another compression technique in H264 is intra-coding which is basically using redundancy within a picture like a wall that would have a constant color without much changes. And so we're basically going to use prediction patterns for example with directions just to deduce the values of the neighboring pixels from the previous pixels. So this is just one way to reduce the amount of information that we need to transmit. So another important compression technique in H264 uses the fact that in videos subsequent picture are often mostly the same in the sense that only a small part of the picture will change or something will move but not the whole scene at once and the background often remains the same. So instead of coding the information of each picture each time we're just going to code the difference between the pictures. In order to do this motion vectors are calculated to also indicate the movement of parts of previous pictures. So at the code time these pictures will be used as references to calculate the next picture with the difference between the two pictures. This is called inter-picture prediction. That's information to carry so this is good for compression. Motion vectors are calculated between the picture and indicates kind of how a part of the image will move or change in the following frames. So in order to do this the references need to be kept decoded in memory. This is a visualization of motion vectors using ffplay from ffmpeg. So this basically indicates how the elements of the pictures have moved from the previous frames as they were calculated with just the motion vectors. More specifically there are two types of inter-frame prediction in H264. The first one is called backwards prediction and it's used in B slices. This one will just use up to 16 of the previous pictures and there is bi-directional prediction which is in B slices. And this one will use the previous pictures but can also use following pictures which need to be placed before the B frame in bitstream order. So in this case the display order will be different from the bitstream order because the B frame will be decoded after the B frame but displayed before it. In order to do this an inter-coded picture needs to be present first. This kind of sequence is called a group of pictures where we have an inter-picture starting and then inter-predicted frames such as B frames or B frames. Keep in mind that using bi-directional inter-prediction will produce some latency because you have to reorder the bitstream to have the B frame after the B frame that it depends on. So you will basically create some extra latency when decoding. The last type of compression techniques that we're going to see is just entropic compression which is a very common form of compression that will just assign shorter symbols to frequent occurrences in the input data. So this is a kind of looseness compression that works pretty well for video. There are basically two main types of entropic coding that is used for the quantitized desperate cosine transform coefficients. So the basic one that is used in default is the context adaptive variable length coding CAVLC. But there's also a more advanced way that is enabled at least in high profile which is called context adaptive binary arithmetic coding or CAVLC. So the first one is some kind of Huffman coding while the second one is arithmetic coding which is more complex but provides better results. So one of the key aspects in H.264 encoding is called rate control. So this is basically controlling the trade-off between the quality and the bitstream size. So there are lots of things to take in account when doing this and it really depends on the use case and what we want to do. There are different rate control modes that apply different policies which will basically all control the quantization parameter QP which basically determines the quality of the output. In the first mode CQP we just have a constant QP for every frame so we have a constant quality and that's pretty simple. In CRF we have instead a constant quality which is not the QP directly but just some parameter that will be used to find the most appropriate QP for example in iframes which will have a slightly lower QP to have more quality and then that will be a bit higher in predictive frames because it's less important that they have good quality. Then there is CBR where we try to keep a constant bit-rate across a group of pictures and ABR which is kind of the same idea but over the whole sequence so over the whole video file which can be kind of hard if you don't analyze the sequence first. So this is a good fit for example for storing movies in a given size while CBR is good for streaming where you want to have a constant bit-rate CRF is kind of a good way to keep a constant quality. So for example to archive a video or something like this and CQP is basically not a very good fit and it's best to use CRF. In order to evaluate the quality we can use a PSNR metric which is a pseudo signal to nose ratio so this will just give us a number that indicates how much quality we have on the signal when we compare it to a reference. So now I'm going to show you a video where we use CRF mode and we just increase CRF so we just worsen the quality as time goes. So we're going to look at the CQP, we're going to look at the signal to nose ratio and we're going to look at the size of that single frame encode. Starting from about 24 I can notice the difference and now the quality is significantly worsening which each increase of the CRF. So we can see the size that is getting lower and lower but the quality is also really bad. So now we're going to look at the Entro H1 H264 encoder so we're going to look at the hardware a bit closer. So the Entro H1 is kind of a common hardware H264 encoder it can also do VP8 and JPEG. It is found in a few embedded ARM serks lots of rock chips actually rock chips use the Entro H1 a lot on many many of its socks but it's also found on one of NXP socks the IMX8MM not the double M because the single M doesn't have this encoder. Depending on the version it can do 1080p at 30 or 60 frames per second with lots of H264 profiles including high and main and it can also do MVC stereo so it can encode 3D but I haven't used it for that. So just a quick a block diagram from the IMX8MM manual we can see basically different blocks that are used for the encoding which kind of are the different steps of the encoding techniques that I've described before. So the H1 is a stateless hardware implementation meaning that it has no microcontroller no firmware running it's just hardware just logic. So as we could see in the diagram it has a preprocessor that can do lots of things including like cropping rotation scaling color space conversion and also image stabilization which I haven't tried yet either. So it will speed out slice NL use so this means no metadata it needs to be recreated and there are some constraints on specific parameters so these are just examples that I found. So these values in the SPS and PPS need to be set precisely to that otherwise the slice NLU isn't going to decode correctly and it's not going to work. It doesn't do B slices on the INP so this is kind of a good fit for camera based recording where you don't want to have the extra latency of making a B frame so it's easier to just do GOPs with IPPPPP and IPPPPP and that's kind of how it goes so no support for B slices there. It will take references for B slices that need to be stored in specific reconstruction buffers so you cannot use the input buffers you have to use kind of the decoded version of the encoded stream because that's what's used for the enter frame prediction you cannot use the input so you kind of also have to allocate specific reconstruction buffers to keep the decoded references around. If you want to use a cab back that's supported but you also have to provide lots of values in tables in a specific DMA buffer. So the H1 has some internal rate control mechanisms which are kind of more advanced than just controlling QP. QP itself is set to a base value and you can also set a min and max that will be kind of the clipping points throughout all of the operation of the internal rate control mechanisms. They are not actually used anymore but I'm still going to describe them just because it took me quite some time to kind of get around them. So the first one is called mean absolute difference. It's basically about setting a threshold for differences in the pixels of the input and output. So you can basically set a threshold value and if that value is reached at some point during the encoding process it's just going to apply a delta to the QP that you can configure. Then the more advanced mechanism is the checkpoints mechanism. The idea is basically that you configure checkpoints at each regular number of macro blocks. So you might want to split it evenly across the number of macro blocks with up to 10 checkpoints. So at each checkpoints it will basically calculate the number of non-zero coincidation coefficients that it has so far and you actually give it a target for this number of non-zero coefficients. Then it will calculate the difference between the target and the count and then it will evaluate the difference between the target and the count that will give it an error and you can basically put different del tests of QP depending on the error. So this kind of allows you to dynamically increase or decrease quality depending on the number of coefficients that you already have. So in my experience this kind of helped with the encoding process especially for constant bit rates. And the way that it works is that there is some feedback data that you can use to basically make this a control loop when controlling these different thresholds and different errors and levels. Quickly the feedback data of the H1 is the following. So you have the sum of the QP of each macro block which you can use given the number of macro blocks to have some kind of average QP which can be useful. You have the number of total non-zero coincidation coefficients so that's kind of at the final checkpoint at the end of the process. Then you get the value at each checkpoint which you can use to kind of give a future target in the checkpoint method. There's also the number of macro blocks under the MAD threshold. Okay so now let's take a look at the integration of this hardware encoder with v4l2. I'm going to start with stateful encoding which doesn't concern our hardware but it's kind of what was already implemented to handle h264 encoding. So there's a specific pixel format for the h264 bitstream. With stateful encoding it produces both the slice data and the metadata but in our case we only have the sliceNL use so no metadata. There are a few drivers that currently implement this using the v4l2m2m framework. They use some generic v4l2 controls to configure the encoder. For example the profile, the level but also some specific features like the entropy mode also to configure rate control like the bitrate mode or the specific bitrate. And some specific drivers also have specific controls like this one for the MFC driver. So usually in these stateful implementations we have a microcontroller with a firmware that will basically do all the states and reference management as well as all the rate control implementation. So this isn't such a good fit for encoder because there are lots of features that are currently not in the v4l2 API that are needed for stateless support. So on the intro h1 lots of parameters can be set to kind of control the encoding and which feature to use but some of those also need to be set to specific values for the bitstream to be valid. So we can't just take any kind of pps or sps or slice header. Now in the stateless case the state is tracked a bit by v4l2 and a lot by user space so we're using the media request API just like in stateless decoding to tie the buffers and the parameters which are also v4l2 controls. We need to take care of the reconstruction buffers that need to be attached to the input buffers and we also need to take care about the references that we need to use. Now rate control in the stateless case can basically be implemented by the v4l2 driver which will read the feedback data itself and apply some algorithm to do rate control or it can be left to user space by providing the feedback data as v4l2 controls for example and let user space kind of deal with that feedback data. There is already some existing h1 reference code out there for example on chromium os where it's used with a downstream kernel driver that is pretty much stateless. There's also user space implementation for the rate control part especially which is available as a libv4l2 plugin implementation. Then on the other hand there is rockchip that has its own implementation for its own downstream kernel which is called mpp and it also supports the h1 which is used a lot in rockchip. So the approach that was taken to support this encoder was to use the mainline hentro driver which is in staging that supports a decoding with the hentro g1 which is kind of the decoder counterpart to the h1 and the two are often found together. So I worked on adding h264 encoding to that driver basically by looking at the chromium os and mpp implementations and kind of following the same logic. I kind of simplified the rate control algorithm but doesn't give such bad results so I'm not too unhappy about it. It was done using the media request API so really just the same as what the hentro driver was always using for the decoding part. The rate control which was constant bitrate was implemented fully in user space so the feedback data was provided through controls and retrieved from user space after each encoder run. So if you want to look it up it's on github.com slash bootlin on our Linux tree. There's a hentro h264 encoding branch where we have the kernel patches and I've also pushed the user space site which is mostly the rate control implementation and just a generic test tool for the hentro encoder. This is what the user space API looks like so we have the encode parameters that take values fields from NALUs so we have the slice parameters the pps parameters also a single timestamp for reference. Then on the right side we can see rate control encode parameters with qpe and the different thresholds and deltas and etc and we also have the encode feedback which is what we get from the registers of the h1 encoder. So this works but the structures are not very generic and they are only listing parameters and fields that are quite specific to the hentro so instead of that a more generic v4l2 control-based approach would be to kind of reuse the existing stateful controls and add extra ones for the things that could be missing or the features that can be configured and that currently don't have controls but also add specific controls to handle references and then for rate control there are two major approaches which could work. The first one would be to do it in user space which would require generic controls but this is quite possible because we don't actually have to use the internal hentro-specific rate control mechanisms. Just providing the qpe and being able to control the slice type or the size of the gop and things like this could be enough. And we could also provide some generic feedback data like the number of non-zero coefficients or the qpe sum. These look like things that can be generic and that can also be obtained on other hardware. The downside is that it might encourage proprietary implementations so for example vendors that would only contribute that driver without any user space implementation for rate control and then kind of do their own proprietary magic which wouldn't work in the free world. Doing it in the kernel instead would be probably easier for user space but would also have some downsides like not providing user space fine control over what's going on and the internal implementations might be a bit rough but it could probably reuse the existing referral to controls for rate control. So this is just some feedback about first implementation that has some issues and that cannot be accepted as is but this kind of gives some ideas about what I think would work for a proper interface for status encoders. So this is a discussion that I'm definitely interested in having so that we can eventually clean up that Hentro encoder code and bring it upstream with a nice interface that may also affect other hardware like the all-winner encoder which is also stateless. If you have more information about hardware that also falls in the stateless category and if you have details about what the register interface looks like or some ideas about what a good API to support it would be that's quite welcome. Okay so that's it for me thank you for attending this talk it's been a great pleasure. Now if you have questions or just remarks or things that you would like to discuss I'm available so feel free. Thanks again and otherwise see you next time and have a great day.


Big win the night for Stevenson 55 53 over number 24 Albright joined now by the head coach the Mustangs coach Jackie Boswell Coach you guys had a tough week obviously coming into this one You're facing one of the best teams in the country What did your team do tonight to dig in and come up with maybe the biggest win of the year? Well, I mean again We've been showing it all year that we definitely have it have it in us And you know this time of the year is all about your mental preparation and how tough you can be And all these games are going to be like this, you know now at the stretch and it's anybody's tournament We just got to keep ourselves in there and you know tonight's game obviously helps But it can't be the end all be all we got to now get back to work tomorrow and keep moving forward I'm really proud of their effort and You know we got some kids coming up with some big rebounds I thought our defense was really good to be able they average like 79 a game or something and we held them to 53 points so we got to just keep relying on our defense and You know our offense got it together a little bit today and just enough today, so that was good There's a big stretch there at the end of the second quarter that really kind of stretched things out How much confidence did you guys have in the locker room because of that that this team was going to be capable of doing this? Well, I think they were feeling pretty good.  I thought as well and You know, but again It was just those key ones and you know couldn't be more proud of our team for some of the stops that we got tonight All right, obviously Brandy Hall there in the closing seconds It's a scramble situation, right like you need your biggest players to come up in the biggest moments I can only imagine the pride that you have for Brandy coming up with that shot Well, I haven't the utmost respect for her because I'm not gonna lie to you when that ball was rolling in the corner And she picked it up almost called the time out But when she got free you gotta let her shoot it, you know I mean, there's nothing I could have drawn up that would have been a better shot than that She takes that shot every day at practice and got a letter you gotta let her do it Maybe celebrate this one a little bit longer because you have the weekend off and you get to enjoy it a bit And then wait until next Wednesday, right? Like get to enjoy this one. Yeah, maybe maybe a couple minutes Coach congratulations on a massive win. Thank you. She's Jackie Boswell. I'm Glenn Clark. Go Mustang sports.com


Okay, so this is another complication that remember that the income tax code for individual taxes is typically a cash-based system You get the deduction in other words when you pay it, which is simple. It's easy to audit It's easy to track however also easy to manipulate, which is why when we talk about like Businesses they're required to use an accrual system and they're held to that accrual system with an audit, right? That's what we do for corporations. We can't basically have an audit of every individual's taxes Therefore, we want to keep it simple cashed based system and then the iris might Randomly audit people which they can then follow the money fairly easily However, people will come up with plans then to distort when they're gonna try to get the deduction Meaning I would rather have the deduction sooner rather than later in general and some years I might have more income than other years which because of the progressive practice System will result in higher tax rates So if in this year I have a higher tax rate Then I think I'm gonna have next year because I earned more money I might be looking for more deductions this year one of the bright ideas I might come up with is that hey look why don't I just Say to my mortgage company I'm gonna pay you all of the interest on the loan Upfront and then I'm gonna pay the principal later. Is that okay? Well, it would be okay with the bank if they were if they were allowed to do that Maybe because that might mean they get an upfront payment sooner, but the iris is gonna say no you can't do that You can't you can't just you can't just That would be like prepaying the rent like if you're gonna prepay the rent on your office building for the next ten years And I paid it today, and I got to deduct the whole thing today Because I paid it today Well, you can't really do that because you're you didn't use the office building So now the iris is gonna have to kind of limit that from happening and say well You can't you can't do this whole prepayment thing to try to distort and take the deduction earlier than you otherwise would All right you schedule a to deduct qualified home mortgage interest and investment interest So we'll talk a little bit more specifically on some of those categories and a future presentation


This question is from Riddhima. Namaskaram, Sadhguru. Thanks for being there every day for the last 40 days. I am a little scared that now we won't be having this darshan. How can I access you? You had mentioned that you are available beyond space, but I'm just not sure what to do to experience your presence all the time. So what is presence and what is a person are two different things. Presence is a universal thing. It's not mine or yours. There is a phenomenal presence always. It's like there is air. Because there is air, a flower blossoms. Maybe most people who are not from this part of the world wouldn't have seen this flower. This is one of the most fragrant flowers. So the flower blossoms throws its fragrance into the air and in a way it becomes the flower's presence.  By itself it cannot do this. Because there is air, it rides it. So presence doesn't belong to me or you. Question is only, can you become available to it? Can you ride it a little bit? Well, even filth has its own presence. A flower has its own presence. So we're just letting our qualities ride on the fundamental presence. Those who become concrete blocks, not just physically, in every way, they think this is it. They need a virus, really. When either your physical body becomes either very strong or maybe very beautiful or your mind becomes very strong and it thinks it's very smart and intelligent, then it becomes an entity of its own, like this. It doesn't feel the presence upon which our life is riding. It is thinking all by itself. Suddenly the fear of virus, little, beginning to understand this is not so much of a solid block. If somebody sneezes, you may die. Yes. If you want to scare people around you, I know somebody will just cut this and say, Sadhguru has got coronavirus. If you... Once the lockdown is over, you're standing in a queue, everything is a queue on long queues because six feet space, everywhere, your bank, your grocery store, wherever you go, long queue. If you want to find your way quickly, all you have to do is cough. People behind you will be still there, but people in front of you will move away. You can go... Only thing is, by the time you go to the top of the queue, they may pick you up and take you away.  Fourteen days, quarantine, imprisonment, whatever you want to call it. At fourteen days you're in somebody's control because you do not know how to manage yourself. So, presence is always there. A certain quality to the presence is what we are trying to create so that something that you know, you can recognize. Something that you do not know, once in a way you may feel it. At certain moments in one's life, somebody may feel just the sheer presence of existence. It is so phenomenal and its magnitude is like a zillion, zillion, zillion times more than who we are. So, how one doesn't feel it is a miracle. But once in a way somebody may touch that. But there may not be... It may be asymptomatic. Because of that, you don't feel the air, though you're always breathing it. But a flower, you're feeling the fragrance. But actually you're just feeling the air with a little tinge of something. So in that sense, this is what a personal presence means, that you create a little tinge to it. You're also riding on that. Presence is not yours. It is cosmic, it is universal. You're also riding on it. But because others cannot feel it normally, because it's everywhere, if it was in one place and not in another place, they would have all found it. Because it's everywhere, people don't feel it, so you create a quality to it. Well, it's available through the day, but we have created certain times of the day. Don't ask me why there's a whole history to it, someday I will tell you. It's a long story. Why it is six-twenty morning evening. Only certain kind of people are doing morning presence, because they are on a specific kind of sadhana. Others are all doing evening six-twenty.  No, no, only Indians understand what is four-twenty. It's not just time. So all you have to do is, two hours skip, you must do, to six-twenty. At this time, we made it, set it up in such a way, it is strong. You see, in the evening, flowers are there throughout the day, but in the evening, their fragrance is lit till strong, for that one-one-and-a-half hours, just like that. For about forty minutes, it's strong. Twenty minutes is very strong. Up to forty minutes is pretty strong. So, there is, I think, in the downloadable app, there is a presence, how to do it. Just go through that. Well, Darshan is not over.  Now you can close your eyes and enjoy the presence. It'll be more wonderful, I'm telling you. Instead of all this gossip, you can just close your eyes and enjoy the presence. I will be there for you, definitely.


I'm Matthew Whittick. I'm an associate professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Maryland. I also serve as the medical director at the Maryland Proton Treatment Center. I specialize in treating patients with head and neck cancer. In general, these are cancers that arise from the bottom of the brain. They go all the way down to the collarbone. I went to medical school at Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia and I stayed on there to receive my residency degree in radiation oncology. I did a one-year internal medicine fellowship at Lankana Hospital outside of Philadelphia. Subsequent to that, I was an assistant professor in head and neck radiation oncology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I was recruited here from the University of Wisconsin in 2020 to take over the head and neck radiation position here. The combination of radiology, curative intent treatments, and very close patient relationships sort of drove me towards the radiation oncology field. So there are different types of radiation that we use. There are things called electrons that we use. We use photons or x-rays and one of the newer advanced forms is called proton therapy. Proton therapy is just an advanced form of radiation that allows us to deliver dose in a little bit of a different manner. The main difference is it reduces the overall dose to the patient. So you could see how this is very important for example for a pediatric patient who would need to have their spine treated for example. With x-rays it goes in and out of the body and so everything in front and behind the spine gets a lot of radiation. Long-term that can cause cardiac issues, it can cause secondary cancers. So with protons the beauty is if you treat the spine the dose stays in the spine so the rest of the organs aren't affected. So there are very many many instances when proton therapy may be advantageous for patients. That being said I've treated a lot of patients with x-rays and had great results. So the best thing is to come see one of the specialists that treat with photons and protons and let us help guide you in that decision-making. Bottom line I think there has to be a lot of trust between patients and their physicians. I pride myself in developing a very good rapport with my patients and I think they really appreciate that. And so coming from a very scientific edge to the waiting room where I can talk to the patients and make sure they understand exactly what we're trying to do so that they're comfortable with their treatment I think is one great thing patients will find when they meet with me.