Hello everyone. Thanks for joining me today. I believe this is like the last session of the summit, so I'm actually surprised with the amount of people in the room. So today I'm gonna talk about the Terraform and how we use to provision our infrastructure on top of OpenStack Cloud. Quick introduction, my name is Mikira Gubenko with Mirantis. My main focus is automating things, like provision of infrastructure and application deployment. So let's quickly review the agenda for today. We'll talk about what is infrastructure as code. Everyone is probably already doing it, but I'll just remind some key principles. I'll introduce Terraform as a tool we use in our team to manage infrastructure as code. We'll talk about how to actually write the Terraform code, what building blocks it has. State management and team collaboration is a topic that we were struggling the most in the beginning, so I'll address that. I also describe how we structure our Terraform code for multi-environment use case, and of course nobody's perfect, so I'll talk about the dark side of using Terraform. And we'll wrap up things with the Q&A session. All right, so what is infrastructure as code? I like the definition from Keith Morris, who's the author of the great book with the same name infrastructure as code. He states that it is in an approach to infrastructure automation based on practices from the software development.  The key principles are using the configuration definition files where you declaratively describe how your infrastructure should be looking like. Things like VMs, images, networks, volumes, et cetera. Version control should be the source of the truth for everything. It has all the possible benefits, things like it's easy to track changes, easy to collaborate, easy to roll back, et cetera. You always test your application when you roll it to production, and the same approach should be applied to the infrastructure, so every change should be extensively validated. And you should push your changes more frequently. It's always easier to provision couple VMs now than provision them later with a whole bunch and other changes. What this gives us is we will be able to build our environment the same way as assembly lines manufacture products. We will have consistent and predictable result, and our environments will look the same exactly as we wanted. Since no human intervention will be needed, the process will be fast and efficient and repeatable. All your infrastructure pieces should be easily replaceable and disposable, so there is no things such as don't touch that server anymore. And since 100% engineers I know hate to write documentation, the documentation will be captured in form of definition files, code snippets, and scripts. So what are our options of applying infrastructure as code on OpenStack Cloud? The recent OpenStack survey shows that OpenStack CLI clients are still the number one approach to provisioned resources. So basically developers put this OpenStack server, create a noble boot commands into the ad hoc scripts, put them in the repo, and that's how they provision their infrastructure. But these scripts miss core features like idempotency, templating, simultaneous run, dependencies, et cetera. Tools like Ansible and Chef are more focused on managing the configuration files so we're talking about the servers that are already provisioned. OpenStack Heat Project is closer to what we were looking for, but unfortunately it's locked into the OpenStack Cloud and I think many of you already have hybrid clouds and if you want to use AWS or Google Cloud, you will need another tool for it. And it also does not separate the planning phase and execution phases, so you cannot validate your changes before you apply it. And then there is Terraform, which we'll describe a bit deeper. So what is Terraform? Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Configuration definition files provide Terraform information on what resources it needs to provision for a single application or your entire data center. The basic workflow working with Terraform looks like this. Basically it consists of three steps. First step, of course you'll write your code.  Then you run Terraform plan, which will generate the execution plan that it will need to run to reach the desired state that you described. And then you run Terraform apply, which will basically go and provision those resources. And after it provisioned those resources, it will create a so-called state file where it will store the information of what resources it created and what's basically managed through Terraform. All right, now brace yourself. A lot of code slides are coming, so I hope you will be able to see them just fine. So imagine our Hello World application. Terraform parses .tf files within the directory you run it in. So we create the Hello World .tf file and with this content in it. First, we specify the provider, in our case OpenStack, of course, where we supplied parameters such as Keystone, URL, tenant name, tenant password, username, et cetera. For the resources, we edit OpenStack compute instance, which is basically AVM, and supplied it with the things you need when you boot VM through OpenStack, things like image ID, flavor ID, keeper, network, et cetera. In addition to that, we created a resource for floating IP and specified the pool where to allocate it from. And the last we created association between this floating IP and the VM we created. Now we can run Terraform plan, which is going to go and compare the local state of things with the state of things in the actual cloud and create execution plan on how it will reach the desired state. So in our case, it suggests to add two resources, floating IP and association with floating IP, because the instance was already created before. So after that, after you reviewed this execution plan, you can basically apply this. So it will go and create those resources. That easy. So what building blocks does Terraform has? The first thing is providers. As I said before, this Terraform tool is vendor agnostic, which means you can use endless number of providers, things like AWS, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Bitbucket, et cetera. So you can basically manage your multi-cloud, multi-environment application through the single tool, even from the single repo. Resources are the components of your infrastructure. As I said, for OpenStack, you can create instance, floating IPs, sender volumes, et cetera. Variables define the parameterization for your Terraform code and Terraform supports strings, maps, lists, as possible types of variables. The outputs define the way to highlight some of the variables, to highlight some of the variables when you run Terraform apply. So basically, in our Hello World example, I want to know what floating IP will be assigned to the EVM, because I didn't know it before I ran it. The provisioners are the way to run some scripts after you provision certain resources. So for example, if you provisioned the VM, you want to bootstrap it, or you want to clean up resources before the VM destruction. I would say the most useful ones are remote exec and null resource, and the remote exec will run the script on the just provisioned resource, for example, VM, and the null resource can run those scripts on any resource within the current environment. I think that Terraform provisioners won't replace configuration management tools, things like Ansible and Puppet, but you can easily hook them up using the specified provisioners. And then there is modules. Modules are the self-contained packages of Terraform code, which are used for code usability. If you work with at least one programming language, you know what modules are for, and Terraform modules can be stored in different sources. The most popular one, of course, is local deer, and you can also grab it from GitHub or S3 object storage. And nested modules are supported too, so you can nest one module and the other, so to structure your code even more to organize it better. Let's look inside the module. It's the same code we used to provision the resources, but we added some additional variables to it. And after this, we can execute this code multiple times just using the module statement and as the source specify this module directory. And what it will do for us, it will create these three HAProxy nodes and seven node nodes using the same piece of code. All right, state management and team collaboration. As I said, we struggled with it at the beginning, it was our team, and I'll explain why. So as I said, Terraform apply creates a so-called state file where it stores the resources that are managed through Terraform. So in case you are working alone on the code, you can just go with the local file and it will work fine. But once you add more engineers to the team, there's two problems. You will have to sync your state file between you two, or how many people, and so everyone will be running the Terraform apply against the fresh version of the file. The second problem is you want to make sure that you don't run Terraform together at the same time, so you will have to create some kind of locking mechanisms to prevent that. And within our team, we evolved this rule. So if only one or two person work with Terraform code, we suggest just to store it in the object store, yeah, Terraform supports remote storage to store object store, to store the state file, and object store is one of them. You can use Swift or Amazon S3. And what it gives us, it will be a single source of truth for everyone, so you don't need to sync that file between team members. It always stores in the same storage. It also can be versioned and encrypted. Some of you might ask why don't you just use Git? The problem with Git is that it's easy to forget to push or pull changes of the state file, and it still will end up that you are running Terraform apply against the obsolete version of the state file, which can break your infrastructure. So if you want or two people, you can use it in object store and coordinate between you two how you run it and when you run it. So if your team is bigger, maybe two to five people, I suggest to coordinate using the change requests. So basically everyone in a team aware of when you run it and what changes you introduce into the environment. And if your team is even bigger, I suggest that there should not be any human intervention in running Terraform apply, so you can use any CI system for it. In our team, we created this Jenkins pipeline that based on the commit will go and run Terraform apply and stop right there. Then operator will go review the changes in the Jenkins so he will review the Terraform plan. And if he approves the change, Jenkins pipeline will go and apply it. So that's how we sold it for our use case. And we were playing with the system for quite a while, like building some workarounds here and there. And then this happens. So in 0.9, HashiCorp introduced state locking in Terraform. So this basically it gives you ability to local all the rights if somebody already run in the Terraform apply. But unfortunately not all the back ends are supported yet. So if it's not supported, and I believe the Amazon S3 is the best place to store it and use locking in DynamoDB. With all that said, I still believe that CI system is the better choice to go right now. It's more reliable and safe way to run those Terraform applies. So with storing state file remotely and building those Jenkins pipeline, solved us some problems, but another problem we were having is isolation. When you first start with Terraform, you're tempted to create all of your configuration within the single file, all the set of files within the same directory. But what it will do, it will create the single state file for all of your infrastructure. And if you are working with the multiple environments, the whole concept of the environment that it should be isolated as much as possible. And if you are running the same code for every environment, it's breaking that rule. So we decided to go with this directory layout. We basically create the separate directory for each environment to store the code. But in addition to that, we also isolate services. So for example, our MySQL service has its own infrastructure state file. The front end up has its own state file. What this gives us is that if someone makes a mistake with the code, you can break on this single service and it will shrink your blessed radius of the damage. Okay, the dark side. So while working with Terraform, we discovered some disadvantages or things we didn't like.   So isolation is one of the steps to solve it and to address that. It's still young. So you'll hit the box here and there and the compatibility between even minor versions, sometimes not that good. So you should consider that when you upgrade your Terraform binary. I personally believe that Terraform has steep learning curve, especially because of the interpolation syntax it has. I didn't even touch it in my presentation. So go figure out yourself. I think it will surprise you. Which brings another point is that, yes, you will have to learn additional language, which is HashiCorp configuration language. Terraform tends to store every possible piece of resources it provisioned to the state file. So you will have to think about how to encrypt your state file so those sensitive credentials will not be seen by anyone. And the last part is, of course there is no rollback. So you should double check your changes, made some code reviews and be careful when you run Terraform applies. Because it can break things up. That's it from me. Thanks for your time and I'm ready for some Q&A session and microphones right there. So you said there's no rollback. Is rolling back your plan file, your Terraform file, and then applying a second time the other gotchas there? So by saying no rollback, imagine if you change the image ID on your resource, it will go and just reprevision those VMs that we're using this resource. So if you provision 10 VMs with the older image and then you go and replace the image and run Terraform apply it, it will basically wipe all the VMs. So that's what I was saying when I said like, there's no rollback. So you cannot rollback wiped VMs or volumes. But yeah, the one thing I like about Terraform that you can easily apply incremental changes, which are like, if you need additional VM you just go to Terraform code and when you run Terraform apply it, we'll incrementally add this VM without touching the previous resources. So what happens exactly if the resource, the virtual machine is not mentioned in the state file? Terraform just won't touch it, right? Yes, the state file just describes of the resources what Terraform should manage and if resource is not in that file, it won't touch it. So let's say if you are provisioning a brand new stack every time you do the release and then after that you are wiping the old stack, it's less scary solution. Can you reiterate the... Well basically if your deployment is done by provisioning a brand new stack next to the previous stack, this step does not hurt the previous stack, right? Yeah. And then once you are confident your new stack is working you can destroy the old stack. Yes, that's one of the ways to address that. Okay. And how does destruction go?  Are you sure? And then it will go and wipe everything. So that easy. Thank you. Unity async. So there's a couple of things there. There's like, I don't remember the name of the tool. I'm just curious, like, your practical experience. My practical experience, we just used this CI pipeline with the Terraform plan and that's how we test it. But there are some tools that can address the testing itself. You're probably talking about test kitchen. Yes, yes. I think I mentioned one of the advantages is the multi-cloud provider support. How portable is your plans from one cloud provider to another AWS to OpenStack? Unfortunately, you will have to manage all those environments with separate code because the resources names are different for each environment. So for OpenStack, the resource name will be OpenStackInstance and for AWS, it will be AWS instance. So it's not portable. But it will still, it still gives you ability to store everything within a single repo project. Is it not possible to... I believe not. That's too bad. Hi. Another question about the update. Does Terraform have an ability to apply something like a slow rolling update to clustered services? Or is it gonna go out and just try to update all of them simultaneously? I believe you can specify, when you run Terraform apply, you can specify as additional variable the resource you want to run it on. So basically, if you want to run the update on the set of the machines, you can do that using CLI. Can you have it automatically roll through or do you have to do that as an operator? I don't think so. You probably will need to create some kind of a wrapper that will go and do like canary deployment or some sort. Thank you. You probably forgot to mention that Terraform is able to import resources from your current stack. But it's very painful operation, I don't know if you've experienced with this. But if you have any stack of any size, you have to import every single resource manually. Yeah, that's also one of the big things because it's usually easier to build a new stack than import the previous resources to Terraform. So... And there was a question about the resources that don't exist in your state file if a resource already exists but doesn't exist in your state file, you probably want to import it inside the state file. And I also wanted to mention that the feature, the thing you mentioned that if you don't run a plan before apply, it can have unimaginable consequences and that makes Terraform basically unusable for CI-CD pipelines because what we do is we run Terraform plan in our GitLab pipeline, then the pipeline is paused until someone comes, examines the... Yeah, that's the same idea we use. So you don't have any solution for this? You still need this guy that checks the pipeline? Yeah, yeah. Okay. A question on the state file. You said that it will store your credentials in plain text in the state file. Does Terraform have any built-in method to encrypt or decrypt the state file or is that something we have to handle as a separate job? So I didn't try it, but there is some plugin on the GitHub someone wrote to somehow encrypt it, but I didn't try it yet. I don't, I mean, it was doing it like a couple months ago, at least for AWS resources for sure. For Amazon, I don't remember the component like a SQL database. It was storing the credentials inside. And there is a bug for it and it's still not addressed. Thank you very much. Thank you. My other question is, whether you can have runtime configurable features, like for example, virtual machine would generate a secret key and then the secret key would be passed to a different virtual machine configuration, or maybe even on the fly during the application, go to some URL, pick up something from there and then use within the configuration. So as I said, in my presentation, there is thing called provisioners, which you can put everything there, like it's basically bar script or something and you can go and do anything you want, even on the local machine, like on the machine you are actually running Terraform or remote resources on the machines that was just provisioned. I believe that's one way. Thank you, just to cook one more. So Terraform can do both virtual machines on OpenStack and for example, Kubernetes containers. Yes. Regarding the locking with the DynamoDB, is there any plans to use something else that might be more OpenStack friendly than having the AWS? As I said, just use this CI system like Jenkins. Would you say that OpenStack integration with Terraform is good enough? Is it stable, is it production ready when you want to create something it's actually created? Yes, actually it's good and we use it in our production and it has, I would say it has everything needed usually. So things like instances, load balancers, security groups, keepers, images. So it supports all resources in OpenStack. Yeah. Okay, thank you. I wouldn't share this opinion with you. I didn't say it's production ready because at least you cannot import OpenStack instances. It's still not implemented. But if we are talking about like a new environment. And during I think two or three months I'm using it, I hit around seven or eight bucks that I reported to Terraform developers but to say something good about them if you report any issue to GitHub, they usually fix it in one or two days. But sometimes when you see the fix, you really say to like, oh shit, they committed 100 lines of codes and merge it in several hours without any review and they pull it to two master and then another day they find another bug. It's like, we call it a hipster company because those people that are writing Terraform, it's right in go. And I don't want to sound like someone who doesn't like Terraform. I like it very much, but it needs one or two years to finish. Sure. And it changes rapidly. And as a side note, I think like their main use case is AWS and AWS support is like phenomenal. It's stable and all resources are supported almost. So, but yeah. Any other questions? Thank you.


Making effective policy often means balancing highly interacting but diverse objectives. Striking the right balance can unlock synergies that promote progress on multiple goals. Failing to do so can restrict progress and see momentum lost. The 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals is designed as an integrated and indivisible framework. Since progress on one target can affect other SDGs positively or negatively, the goals and targets cannot be treated as isolated entities, but their interactions must inform implementation strategies. The international policy community have recognised this need for systemic approaches to SDG implementation. SEI has responded to this challenge by developing the SDG Synergies Tool. It helps to record, visualise and analyse how multiple targets interact as a system in a given context. SDG Synergies is a practical tool for understanding how goals and targets interact using systems thinking. SDG Synergies was originally designed to support governments in implementing the 2030 Agenda. It can also be customised to include other agendas or policy areas. The tool facilitates a structured participatory process in which stakeholders discuss and assess how the goals interact in the given context. Their assessments are entered into a cross-impact matrix, which forms the basis for subsequent analysis. In the tool, there are multiple options to analyse and view the system, including from the perspective of a selected goal. The options are developed in particular to inform prioritisation of goals to maximise progress on the agenda as a whole. There are options that can guide cross-sectoral collaboration. Network analysis techniques are embedded in the tool to provide these insights. The SDG Synergies Tool is interactive and easy to use. Intuitive analysis and visualisations facilitate dialogue and learning between participants and provide an overview of how policy objectives, such as the SDGs, interact as a system. The tool can be used for global, national or subnational studies, supporting policy-making processes at any level. For more information, please visit www.sdgsynergies.org or www.sei.org and download the guiding manual.


I work as a home caregiver for a local agency in Kentucky. I'm not a nurse, though I have some basic training in CPR and first aid, and I'm going through classes so I'm able to render some level of help to our clients that need fiscal assistance. For the most part, though, my job is to check in on people, help them do chores they have difficulty doing on their own, like getting groceries or doing laundry, and drive them to appointments as needed. The story I'm about to tell you has been changed enough that I'm not violating client confidentiality, but I assure you that the core elements of it are true. About three months ago, I started seeing a new client, Peter Phelps. When I reviewed his case file, I learned that Peter was a 55-year-old man who lacked a right arm due to a birth defect. This wasn't the reason for his home care, but rather that he was in the last stages of liver failure due to chronic alcoholism. His physical condition was deteriorating fast, and my supervisor told me that he was probably a stop-gap client, which was what they called it when we were only providing services until home nursing or hospice started up. In Peter's case, he already had a nurse checking in on him twice a week, and my job was primarily to get him groceries, prepare meals, and do some light cleaning the three days a week I visited him. I liked Peter from the first time I met him. He had a dry sense of humor, and while there was a sadness that lingered about him most at the time, he seemed very kind too. We would chat as I folded towels or swept the floor, and by the second week I found myself sometimes staying a few minutes over my time just to finish whatever we were talking about. He seemed more interested in hearing stories from me than telling them, and I noticed that when he did tell me something, it was almost always from someone else's life rather than his own. I've done this job long enough to know that some people are very private or aren't comfortable talking about themselves, particularly with people they barely know. So I didn't find it at all strange that I knew very little about Peter's past even though I'd spent hours talking to him. What did surprise me was the question he asked one afternoon as I was finishing up a round of dusting. Do you want to know what happened to my arm? He gestured to the empty space at his right shoulder, and while I knew what he meant, I didn't know why he was asking. I tried to keep my tone light as I responded. I think I remember reading in your file that you were born without it, right? I felt uncomfortable, and I was worried about hurting his feelings or saying the wrong thing about something I thought might be a sensitive subject. He was quiet for a moment, and I began to think the conversation might be over, but then I saw him shake his head out of the corner of my eye. No, no, I know that's what they say. What your file says, what everyone says, but that's not so. It's going to sound crazy, but if you want to hear about it, I'll tell you. If not, we can talk about something else. I turned to look at him and he was smiling. I believed him that he would be fine either way, but I could also see that he hoped I'd say yes. He wanted to talk to somebody about whatever weirdness this was. So, against my better judgment, I told him to tell me what really happened to his missing right arm. I know going into this that you probably won't believe me. That's okay. I got used to people not believing me when I was a kid. After a few arguments with my family and a few trips to a shrink, I learned to keep my lips zipped on that topic most of the time. As an adult, you're only the second person I've ever tried to tell this story to. The first was this girl I was dating when I was, what, 25? Her name was Abigail. She was a beautiful girl inside and out, and there was a time when I thought she was the one for me. Wanted to marry her, the whole nine yards. Then I made the mistake of confiding in her, telling her what I'm about to tell you. Have you ever watched someone fall out of love with you?  I hope not, you're young, but I hope you never do. I saw it when I was telling her this story, and it's, as you'd guess, a pretty terrible thing to see. It wasn't until much later that I realized I had done both me and Abigail a service and telling her my secret. She loved me, sure, but not that much. Enough to listen. Enough to not laugh. Enough to wait another month before she found some other reason that we needed time apart. To spare me the embarrassment of her telling me she wasn't going to stick with some lunatic that thought a monster took his arm. I'm sorry, I'm getting off topic. The point is I'm past worrying about what people think. Maybe I am crazy after all. But crazy or not, I have enough sense to know I'll likely be dead in six months, and you may be one of the last friendly faces I ever run across, and I don't need you to believe me. I just need you to listen and not make fun of me. Okay? Good. When I was 12 years old, I lived with my parents in a small town called Westerfield. It's about three hours east of here, and I doubt you've ever been or ever heard of it.  Back then, we had a two theater movie theater, a few chain restaurants, and more than our share of farms around, but not much in the way of fun for boys looking for a good time without getting into bad trouble. I had been friends with Jack Paulson and Steve Marks since third grade, and we weren't really bad kids. We would occasionally throw rocks at the trains as they passed through town or trespass on a dare, but nothing like some of the boys we knew. We never heard anybody or anything. We were just bored. That's part of what always made Halloween such a great time for us. We were getting older, and we knew our time for trick-or-treating was getting close to an end. And we still liked candy, but it wasn't like we couldn't get it any other way. I think that the reason we loved Halloween so much was because it gave us a way of holding on to being a kid a bit longer, something to be excited for, to look forward to. And if part of that was the trick-or-treating, part of it was us trying to tell each other scary stories, both as entertainment and in an attempt to freak each other out. It never really worked. We knew the stories weren't real, and if I'm being honest, we did a fairly bad job of telling them in the first place. But none of that stopped us. Every year without fail, we would circulate several stories of how a dead body was found over at this abandoned house or how so-and-so's aunt had once seen a ghost levitate her living room table.  Then Jack told us about the thing in Amerson Park. He had heard about it from his brother, who was older and in the military. A few days earlier, the brother had been home on leave and was talking to Jack about different places he and his friends hung out at, meaning me and Steve, though Jack's brother didn't know our names. He told Jack to stay away from Amerson Park, especially at night. That there was a strange homeless man that lived there, and Jack's brother had heard he was dangerous. By itself, that might have kept us away. But then his brother had added that, according to some people, the man wasn't really alive and was haunting the place. Whatever Jack's brother's intention, his warning immediately made Amerson Park the most intriguing place in town. The park was small and rarely used, tucked away in an older part of town that was full of closed stores and ramshackle houses, as far as I knew, I'd only been to the park once, and it was with my parents when I was younger. There was a small creek that ran through the property, covered at one point by a wooden bridge that had probably once been charming, but now looked like it was held together by termites and mold. The outing with my parents had ended when my father realized it didn't live up to memories from his own youth, and me and my friends had never had a reason to go so far outside of our normal stopping grounds to visit. Until now, that was... The plan was simple. We were allowed to go out trick-or-treating by ourselves between 6 and 8 p.m., so long as we stuck together, didn't eat any candy until we got home and it was checked, and weren't out past 8. We were cool. We figured it would be about a 30 minute fast walk outside of our normal trick-or-treat circuit to get to the park in another 30 to get back. Allowing time to explore, we should still have a good 30 minutes for trick-or-treating after we were back closer to our neighborhood. The only real point of contention was the last. Did we trick-or-treat before or after? Jack and I wanted to do the park first while Steve wanted to prioritize candy. Steve's eyes had been big as dinner plates when Jack had told us about the man in the park, so I suspected he was hoping to distract us long enough with trick-or-treating that we abandoned the park idea altogether. But, majority ruled, and to the park, we went. It was just getting dark when we arrived, and as we walked down a cracked asphalt path and shined our plastic flashlights on the overgrown grass and rampant bushes everywhere, I was surprised at how much worse it looked than in my memory. Whatever half-hearted efforts had been made in the past to maintain the park seem to have been given up now as though a decision had been reached to just let the space return to nature through the slow process of urban decay. We were getting close to the splintery skeleton of the bridge when Steve poked me in the rims. Look over there. He whispered, his hand out tight on my arm. I think it's the man. I turned my light towards where he was looking and illuminated an old, rusted-out water fountain that was next to the path farther ahead. Jack snickered, good-looking out, Steve. Let us know if you see any rabid squirrels or trashcan monsters too. I laughed a little, but it was forced. I didn't really think there was some dangerous man out there, much less a ghost, but I had to admit the park was creepy, unsettling even. I wasn't willing to be made fun of by asking to leave before we were done looking around, but I did pick up my pace. If we made it all the way through, I reasoned, we could all go home without the danger of being called a chicken. Looking back on it, I think some dim part of me realized we were being followed early on. Some primitive instinct that recognized that something wasn't right, but it wasn't until we were passing under the bridge that I heard the rustle of someone walking a few feet behind us. I still don't know why I didn't just bolt right then, but for whatever reason I stopped and turned. My friends lurched to a halt and spun around as well, with Jack letting out a gasp as he saw what was behind us. It looked like a man, but it wasn't a man. The outline was that of a large person wearing a big poncho or hooded overcoat. So if you just caught a glimpse, you would think it was just a tall, broad-chested man out for a walk, but when I shined my light on it, it was made of rot. I saw mounds of dirt run through with worms and maggots, bits of trash stuck to the decaying carcasses of mice and birds, strings of brown icor wound tight around hot, red meat that never stopped moving and pulsing as it slid around on what approximated the thing's chest and face. Its eyes were irregular circles of broken green glass, and the bits of bottle seemed to shine with some dull inner light as it regarded us. But none of that was the worst of it. When it opened its mouth to speak, I saw it had long, thin teeth of silver. It took me a moment to realize what they were. Hypodermic needles. I have something to offer. Its voice was deep and roaring like the wind of an angry storm. We all took a step back, that it matched with a shambling step forward. Or do you mean to waste my time? We ran. Of course we ran. I could hear it behind us, somehow moving, somehow gaining on us as we tried to make it out of the park. Its footfalls were heavy and squelching, and when I realized they were getting closer, I looked back just as it reached Steve. I saw it when it closed a wriggling, oozing hand on Steve's shoulder, and I heard the start of Steve's terrified wail as he registered the contact. But then the scream was cut off because Steve wasn't there anymore. Let me be very clear on this point. It wasn't as though I lost sight of him or he turned and went a different way.  I even heard a faint popping sound as air rushed in to fill the void his absence created. The sight of it almost made me stop dead in my tracks. It made no sense. What had happened to him? It was as if my brain wanted to reconcile what it had just seen before it could go back to the pressing business of running away from the horror that was chasing us. But I caught myself and I didn't stop. I just slowed down for a couple of seconds. That was just enough time for Jack to plow into me and knock us both down. I had the breath knocked out of me, but my fear and panic had reasserted itself and I was immediately pushing myself up to run again. That's when I heard another small popping sound right behind me. I looked back to see that Jack was gone now too. The monster was standing over me, its green eyes blazing as it scraped its metal teeth back and forth. Do you have something to offer?   No, all I have is this. I held out the empty trick or treat bag in my right hand. I had lost my flashlight when Jack ran into me so I really had nothing else to offer the thing. Or so I thought. It suddenly shot out its hands and gripped my right arm and after a moment of tingling pain, it was gone. My arm, all the way up to the shoulder, was just gone. I watched an amazed horror as the empty bag fluttered to the ground now that it had no hand to support it. Reaching up, I touched my shoulder, finding only smooth skin where the start of my arm should be. It was as though it had never been there at all. When I looked back up, I saw the creature giving me a terrible, shining smile. With that, it turned and walked back into the shadows where it disappeared. I ran all the way back home and I didn't stop running until I was crying in my mother's arms while my father called the police. They believed me that I'd been attacked but they didn't understand the rest. The stuff about the monster was clearly because I was in shock but how did they explain these other people I was making up or how I now claimed I had always had a right arm before that night? Because Jack Paulson and Steve Marks weren't just missing. They didn't exist at all anymore. Just like my arm, no one had any memory or evidence of my two best friends ever existing, not even their own families. Even my own memory of Jack had gaps and I think it's because I actually saw Steve disappear but only heard when the thing got Jack. But I was the only one that remembered them at all. For weeks I kept waiting for something to change, for someone to tell the truth or suddenly remember them again, but it never happened. Instead I spent the next several years getting increasingly intensive therapy as my parents drew away from me more and more. Eventually I learned to lie and keep the truth of what happened to myself. Well, except for Abigail but we know how that turned out. I'm ashamed to say that I lied to myself for a number of years too.  That the best way of getting past it was to accept that I was wrong and that the world was right. Problem was I never really believed it. In my heart, I've always known what happened to my friends. What I don't know is why or how. I don't know what that thing is and I don't want to know. I never went back, never tried to investigate, nothing like that. In part because I didn't think I'd get anywhere. In part because even today, I'm still terrified of that thing. Anyway, that's the real story of how I lost my arm. Thank you for listening and not laughing or calling a doctor.  Four weeks later, Peter was dead. He wanted to be cremated with his ashes to go to his mother an elderly woman who was still alive and living in Westerfield. He had no other family or friends and his mother was too feeble to come get the remains. So I volunteered to carry them down the next day for a small service she was going to have in his honor. The trip down was uneventful and the service was nice if very sparsely attended. At the end, I gave his mother a brief hug and told her again how much Peter had meant to me, surprising myself by realizing it was the truth. He had been a good friend and while I didn't believe his crazy story about Amerson Park, I did think the world was a worse place without him in it. It was late afternoon as I turned out onto the highway that would take me home. Peter was right. I'd never been to Westerfield before and as I traveled through it, I found myself imagining Peter growing up there. The thing was, I kept imagining him with Jack and Steve. I knew it was just a mental trick. I knew next to nothing about his childhood and what I did know came from him and included these fictional friends. It was only natural that I would insert them into my own Amerson Park. The sign was small and rusted with such a pronounced lean that the name and arrow were barely legible from the road. But I felt my heart leap when it caught my eye and before I knew it, I was backing up a few feet to make the turn down into a decrepit part of Old Westerfield. As I drove slowly down the patchy stretch of street, I told myself that visiting the park was a good way of honoring the part of Peter that he had to keep hidden from the world. And that was true. But I also wanted to see the park for myself, prove to myself that it was just a story. So I parked outside a chain link fence that was rusted to the point of collapse and made my way into the park. It was getting dark, but I could still see well enough to make out the main features. It was surprisingly close to the way I had imagined it when Peter was telling me his story. I saw the path they had walked, the remnants of the water fountain Steve had been scared of, and in the distance, the silhouette of what had once been a small wooden walking bridge. I threaded my way gingerly through the tall grass, my fear of getting snake bit, walking hand in hand with my nervousness at being in this place. My goal was to make it to the bridge, look under it, maybe take a picture or two, and then leave before full night came on. The air was already turning cooler and the October light was fading faster than I'd expected. And I was getting close to the bridge, but it was already getting harder to make it out in the growing pool of shadows. That's when one of the shadows stepped away from the rest.  I slowed to a stop, my brain frantically trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for what I was seeing, but then I saw them, its glowing green glass eyes burning in the moving darkness of its head like twin lanterns. And below that, I thought I saw the pale glint of silver in the failing autumn sun. I ran, I ran and didn't look back, jumping the fence and driving away before that terrible thing could reach me, touch me, take me away. I drove without stopping until I got home, almost wrecking more than once in my frantic desire to just get away from that place and what lived there. That was a few days ago. And I think I may be safe. I also think I might be going insane. You see, I keep having memories that can't be right. I remember having a girlfriend. I think her name was Angelica and I have several snippets of spending time with her, loving her even. There are times when I can picture her face or imagine what her voice was like. There are times when I can almost remember things I did with her. Our first date, bowling, meeting her parents, her going with me to Peter's funeral. It's probably all on my head. I'm a big believer that people can trick themselves into believing just about anything. Missing arms, monsters under the bridge, girlfriends that no longer exist. I probably just need to take some time off and get my head right. Maybe then I'll stop imagining I heard her scream as I scrambled over the fence at Amerson Park, never looking back to see what happened to her. Maybe then I won't remember feeling that brief change in the air as a void at my back was created and then filled. Maybe then I can stop looking out of my windows every night, half expecting to see green glass shining at me from somewhere in the dark, waiting patiently to finish some terrible transaction. Maybe.


The last universal common ancestor, Luka, was the first single-cell organism that all other life forms descended from. It had both a metabolism and an evolvable genome, which allowed it to pass down its traits to future generations. The genome contained parasites, which are now found in every living thing. These parasites can be thought of as eugenetic vampires, because they take resources away from the host without providing any benefit. However, these parasites also provide an advantage by allowing the host to adapt more quickly to changing environments. In this paper, the authors proposed a new model of nested parasitism, where multiple parasites work together to form a complex system that allows hosts to survive and adapt to their environment. This article was authored by Bernard Conrad, Christian Acelli, and Magnus Piravino.


something that we should do here. Try this to unmute. Yes? Please speak. Can you hear me now? Very good. Okay, thank you. Okay, go ahead, Ming. Okay, thank you. So dear friends. So hello, I'm Min Ma from Chihua University. I'm honored to give a talk online. I noticed that I'm the very first one. I'm going to talk about online talk for this workshop. Very lucky. And I'm a testing person. And I've left to set the organizers for the very kind invitation. And all the contents I'm going to talk today haven't been published. So I also noted that I'm the last one. So one before lunch. So I'll try to make it quick and sorry for the delay. So let's start. So the idea of my talk is about friction between different solid and it's titled as transversency and temperature dependence for the sleep loss of water on supportive graphene and FTPS. Sorry to interrupt you. We could not see your presentation actually. Sorry, which one? Can you see me now? Can you see the presentation? I'm sharing my student can you see it? So I can continue right? Can you see my screen? Hello. Yes, we can see your screen. Okay. Okay. So first of all, those of you who is not familiar with this one.  So as shown in this figure. So this figure is a psychometric window for the velocity profile. When the liquid is just lying on a solid surface. And it shows three typical states, no sleep, partial sleep and perfect sleep. So when we talk about the partial sleep, it means that the velocity of the liquid next to solid surface does not equal to the velocity of solid. And this is termed as a sleep. And in fact, about 200 years ago, neighbor already gave a definition of the sleep loss for Newtonian equations. Because we are talking about the frictions and the relation between sleep and friction is very straightforward. You may just think about this force balance between the friction between solid and surface and the friction within the liquid. And then we found that, and we can easily find that the sleep loss is equal to the ratio between the liquid viscosity and the friction coefficient. So that it will say that the sleep loss considerably describes the friction at the solid liquid interface. And because we are using the continuum mechanics, and the first of all, we need to know the applicable range. And this is based on the following assumption, which is called continuum assumptions. And this assumption says that for given system, if the characteristic time of momentum diffusion is larger than the characteristic time of the molecular motion, then we are safe. So for water, this critical length will be about one nanometer. And generally speaking, if we are looking at a broader scale, we found that for a simple surface, in terms of simple surface, so we compare to those surface with structure. And the water on those simple surface, the sleep loss will be between 0.1 nanometer to 10 nanometers. So we are talking about things happened, of the phenomenon that happened on nanoscale. And because this is a nanoscale, so it mainly has applications in the following small scale operators. For example, the micro applications, the transport across membrane and oil explorations, and also cheap cooling. And so you can see that in different fields, it all shows great applications. And because sleep loss is very important, there are already many studies about this topic, especially for water on graphene-related surface, because it shows very interesting phenomenon. And for example, in this paper published on Nature, about six years ago, people found a sleep loss of about 60 nanometers when water flowing through graphite nanochannels. And later, when water flowing through graphene nanochannels, the sleep loss reduced to 16 nanometers. And later, a French group, and they measured the dependence of the sleep loss on the radius of the criminal tubes, and they found a very nice decrease when the radius of the tubes increases. And also, not surprisingly, 10 years ago, people measured the sleep loss of water on graphene surface, and with an average sleep loss of about a few nanometers. Although there are many studies about this topic, but surprisingly, we found that there is, that is the dependence of sleep loss for water on the types of supporting substrates and thickness of covenants layers. And this is very important, because we know that in practical applications, these graphene layers, or fuel layer graphene, must be supported by certain substrates. And usually, we are interested in fuel layer graphene because it shows exotic behaviors, and so this is why we are interested in this topic. And to this end, we start our own experiment. So the method we use is a very traditional one. It's called the colloid-prote FM, and the figure A is the schematic of the system. So we have an FM tip, and there is a micro sphere attached on the tip, and the whole system is immersed in the liquid, and then there is a substrate, and there is a fuel layer graphene. So we approach the sphere to the surface and the retraction, and we record the force and the velocity, and then we can get figure B. And the figure B is the y-axis is the force exerted on the tip, and the axis is the separation between the micro sphere and the surface. This can be calculated by integrating the velocity. This is raw data. And further on, we do one more step. We convert it to the axis, and the axis remains separation, but the y-axis will be the ratio between the velocity, the vertical velocity, and the force exerted on the FM tip. And then surprisingly, so what we find will be that if you do the linear fitting for approaching the, for the approaching stage, and then do, you do extrapolate to the x-axis, and this one, this intersection will be the sequence. This is straightforward because the y-axis is to the left of the equation, and when this is equal to zero, so because LS must be positive, and is what we are interested in, so H must be negative, and this is the intersection. And details can be found in these references. And before we show the marrying results, we want to elaborate more about the characterizations because doing experiments is very important to make sure the system you are marrying is what we are thinking. So this is figure A is the surface of the macro sphere. So we are using the inverse scan AFM, and this is a typical surface morphology of the sphere. So we can see that within the scale of few hundred nanometers, the surface of the sphere is very smooth. It's about less than 1 nanometers. And also, the two supporting substrates we are using is silica and OTS, and so we measure the contact angle and make sure that the y being hydrophilic and y being hydrophobic, and this also the values agree with existing reports. And the most important surface is the fuel air graphene and to this end, so we measured, as shown in figure C, the morphology as well as the chemistry of the surface with optical and AFM and RMA. And with all this together, it shows that within the range of 20 by 20 micrometers, the RMS roughness is very small, and also we found no detectable effects. So now coming to our marrying results. So figure A shows the slip length versus the approaching velocity for different substrates. That means, so the graphene in different layers either on silica or OTS. So despite all the details, we find that the slip length is, in fact, this is, they are all vertical lengths, so that means the horizontal length, sorry, so that means the slip length is independent of the velocities. And also we measure the slip length for bare silica and bare OTS, and so our marrying results are in good agreement with existing reports. And now come into one of our most important results, as shown in figure B here. So in figure B, the X axis is the number of layers, all we can call it thickness of graphene, and the Y axis will be the slip length. And here the blue one is for those system where the OTS is covered by filial graphene, and for the red one is the silica covered by filial graphene. So first of all, what we see is that for OTS, the slip length gradually decreases and somehow saturates with a number of layers, larger than three, and also for the silica, the slip length increases and saturates to the same value. And this value, we measure it, and we found that this slip length is the same, and also it agrees with existing data reported for slip lengths of water on HOPG, but here we are making sure, we are sure that the surface is very smooth and is of a single crystalline. So by noticing this, sorry, and the dependence of slip lengths on the thickness of graphene layers, and here we term it as translucency, and maybe one, several papers already come into a mind, come to your mind, which is the whiting translucency. We will talk about it later. And the first question will be that is this translucency caused by the changes in roughness. So in order to answer this question, so we took very careful and intensive measurement on the roughness of the surface, and as here we show some of the key measurement, and from figure A to figure C, it shows the morphology of the graphene with one layer to layer or three layer supported on silica. First, just by eyes, because we are using the same legend. So just by eyes, you will see that there are negligible qualitative difference. And if you do the quantitative estimations and showing figure D here, we will notice that the X axis is a thickness of layers. And the Y axis are RMS or peak to valley values. They all of them, they does not change with the number of layers. And this is in direct contrast to the slip loss. And also, if you do the Fourier transformations of either of these morphologies, you will find that the peak period is the main period is larger than five micrometers. With the corresponding magnitude less than one nanometers and existing theoretical studies already shows that such small roughness will not introduce errors in the environment. So as a conclusion, so we can say that the slip loss translucency is not caused by the change in roughness. So, since roughness is not caused, so what are the possible reasons. And to this end, we noticed that about 10 years ago there are many studies about wetting translucency for water on filiography, and that was founded due to the addition energy. And to this end, we follow their concept. If we can assume that the interaction between liquid and solid additives and the friction follow the Green Cooper relation, then we can relate the slip loss to the addition energy. And also, if we further assume that the density of water along the z direction follow the Boltzmann distributions, then we can calculate this quantity here. And here, this figure shows our results, calculation results. So here, again, the x-axis is thickness, y-axis is the slip loss. And the black data is from our experiment, and the red data is from our theory. And I want to emphasize here that we only have one fitting parameter here, which is kappa, and one and only one fitting parameters. So, we can see that this good agreement shows that the translucency of slip loss shares the same mechanisms as that of contact angle, which is due to the translucency of addition energy, which is very good because we got a reasonable explanation for our observations. But then another question is that, is slip loss decided by the contact angle only? Because here it seems that it shares the same mechanism for the translucency. And to this end, we notice that when you consider the slip loss, its dependence on temperature, you find something very interesting. So figure A is a theoretical study shows that for hydrophobic surface, the slip loss decreases as the temperature increases, and for hydrophilic, it increases. However, later, another theoretical studies found just the opposite directions, where slip loss increases for hydrophobic surface. And what is more interesting is that later, recently, a paper published another scale already, also shows that sometimes if you're considering also this is a theoretical paper, considering the slip loss for water on hydrophilic and hydrophobic surface, they can show the same trend. So what all this study shows that is there is the temperature dependence of slip loss is controversial and without any explanations. And to understand this, first of all, we also carried our own environment, and this is our results. So we found that for water slip on two layer graphene supported by Celica, the slip loss always decreases, doesn't matter of the velocities. And, but meanwhile, we also noticed that existing literature reported that the contact angle is independent of temperature when the temperature is below in the boiling point, which is the case for our systems. So that means the dependence of slip loss and contact angle on temperature should share different mechanisms. So in other words, the sequence does not depend on the contact angle only. And in order to understand this, so because cyclones and temperatures are independent, so we used energy barrier. So, and here, we are very familiar with this theory proposed by Lideric Bacay, and he was able to link this slip loss to the energy barrier for the water molecule sliding on the solid surface. And this is very nice one. And the further we notice, if you use the theory from my notion, which is half a decade ago, you can further relate the energy barrier to the following quantum quantities. And with all these tedious calculations, in the end, you will be able to derive suction equation. This equation shows that the slip loss is proportional to this ratio, which is a pre coefficient. And what is the most important is that all these five quantities in this part, they can be calculated separately and independently. And with all this, in this figure, we compare our experimental value, the black dots, to our theoretical predictions with only one fitting parameter, which is the pre-coefficient kappa t here. And we can see that somehow we get a reasonable agreement. However, this is good, but also one problem, because here we only found a negative correlation between slip loss and temperature, and I already show that existing theoretical studies show that sometimes it can be positive. So could the positive relation be observed in experiments? And because the indication shows that this somehow has something to do with the wetting properties, so we further measure the dependence of the slip loss for water on FBTS. And this is a hydrophobic surface with a contact angle about 115. And here, if we first found the same decreased tendency for the slip loss versus temperature, but interestingly that if we are using solutions in that water, the solution we use is sodium chloride. And then at smaller concentrations, this is negative, but as a larger concentration, this becomes positive. So this is interesting. And this can be further clearly seen if you plot in this way. The axis is inverse temperature, and the one axis is a logarithm, a non-aliase. And in this case, first of all, you see a very clear trend where they follow linearly dependent, and this is a very strong indication shows that this slip is a read process. Because this is a read process, so we can use the very famous read process theory, and for this theory, generally it tells a very simple thing for our system that is to say for liquid molecule moving along a solid surface, the molecule needs to cross an edge barrier, as shown in this schematic. And with the trivial derivations, you will be able to link the slip loss to these quantities. So in this batch of quantities, so this all has terms that are the partition functions under different conditions, and these four terms that are the system properties. What is important is these two energy barriers, and this E0 will be this barrier, that is the barrier the molecules need to cross over when it slides on the solid surface at 0K. And this E0L is the energy barrier for a single molecule, liquid molecule moving inside bulk liquid at 0K. And with this, we can further rate it in this form, and which seems to be very simple, to be simpler. And with these equations, we can do fitting, right? And so this is the figure we already show, and if we use this equation and fitting to this data set shows a very nice inner dependence, and we can get the value of the difference between the two energy barriers. And with similar derivations, it will be trivial to show that for the friction coefficient between liquid and solid, it is also a rate process, and it follows these relations. And then this is our experimental data, and by doing the fitting, you can extract the values for E0, which is the energy barrier for the water molecule sliding across the solid surface. And with these two, and then you can calculate E0, and E0 is already an tablet value, because it's for bulk liquid. And what we found that is, if we compared with the tablet values and the relative arrow for the estimated E0 is less than 20%. And somehow this is a good indication to show the validity of our theoretical explanations. And so all this just tells one simple thing, which is the monotocity of the dependence for the sequence on temperature is determined just by the difference between two energy barriers. And to understand this theory on molecular scale to provide an atomic picture, we also perform four atomic MD simulations, as shown here. So here you have the silica surface, you have FDTIs, and these are the solutions, so the chloride. And by doing the conducting with an MIT ensemble, we can get the equilibrium configurations, and you can do the statistics. And by doing very nice statistics for the energy barriers, with concentrations being zero, being 0.1 molar and being one molar. And you can estimate the DERTE also from MD simulations and as shown in Figure D here. So in Figure D, the x-axis is a concentration of the solution, so y-axis is the energy barrier is zero. So this is the experiment, and this is directly calculated from our MD simulations. Somehow we got a reasonable agreement between the experiment and MD simulations. We're also relating that the atomic picture we have in mind, which is inspired by the theory you should host. So we can get an overall picture about the dependence of the influence on temperature. So the key, the variable we have is the concentration of the solution. So when the solution of the concentration increases, so first the concentration of dissolved ions on the solid surface increases, and this will increase the energy barrier is zero. And meanwhile, when the concentration increases in our range studies, the viscosity almost remains constant, and this indicates that this E0L almost remains constant. And then that is to say, for this difference, this term is a constant, and this term is increasing as a concentration increases. So the sign of this difference then will gradually changes from positive to negative. And then with the theory we show above this dependence, the monotony will change from minus to positive, a very simple understanding. So with all this, I would like to give a summary of our work. So first, our results provide the first set of experimental reference values for the sequence of water on supported field layer graphene. And second, we found transparency for the sequence of water on supported graphene for the system above. And also, we show that the controversy with the dependence of sleep loss of water on temperature can be understood by the rate process where the difference between two energy barrier is a key. And the last is that the key quantity is zero, because this is a kinetic process and the energy barrier is very important. And this one can be estimated by measuring the dependence of sleep loss on temperature. And in the future, we are interested in the three, four in three aspects. The first is the quantitative relation between energy barrier and concentration of the solution. And second is to apply the method to other systems, all for other, for various solace and solutions. Last, but not least, the two establishing connections to fields such as civil diversity and nano-phoretics. And also, for example, recently, a very, very interesting quantum friction between water and field layer graphene. And with all this, I would like to thank you all for listening and thanks for your patience and welcome any questions. Thank you very much, Ming. Thanks for questions. Please, Mingmar, there are some online questions. Can you see the chatting room? Yes, it's a very fundamental question, so it's a physical meaning. I think you actually explained quite clearly what the slip length was in the very first slide. So I guess whoever it was was distracted at that time. Any further questions? We seem to have no questions, no further questions. I think we thank Professor Ma again and thank you.


World War II ends companies that used to make airplanes need a new project. How about camping trailers, checking out the Fleet Cabin Car in this edition of Science Alive. And I'm with Emily Gan, she's an assistant curator here at the museum. Hello Emily. Hi. So what are we standing in front of? So we're in front of here a 1947 Fleet Cabin Car. And what's special about the Fleet Cabin Car? Well this one's special for a number of reasons. So Fleet used to manufacture aircraft and after the war, the Second World War, it bridged over into the civilian market and started manufacturing trailers. Because the war ended, nobody needed their aircraft anymore? Yeah, so well I mean the demand for aircraft wasn't as high. Fleet had a large staff with lots of skills so it decided to transfer that skill into making the Cabin Car. And when you look at it, there is kind of an aircraft look to it. Yeah, you can sort of envision this being almost like a wing. Right, and made of wood? Yes, so teardrops, which is what this trailer is designed to look like, made use of sort of like the four by eight piece of plywood, was really lightweight, it was marketed as being really roomy inside, and then it sold for a third of the price of comparable trailers in the late 40s. So you're talking about being roomy inside, you still couldn't stand up in it? No, and I think someone like your height would probably be really uncomfortable, whereas someone my height would sort of day at the spa. I think you just find it cozy. Yeah, I mean yeah. So it has room, lots of room for storage, it was sort of multi-purpose, we've got ads showing people sort of sitting up and reading or knitting, and then also two people laying in the bed. So you could sort of live in the space and also sleep in the space. Cool, and how many of these did they make? So Fleet thought that they would have the market for about 50,000 of these, and at one point they were turning out about 20 a day. Yeah, but the big bar that they hoped for didn't have the financial backing to do the buying that they had hoped for, and Fleet had invested so much that they sort of had to stop production right away. Now this one is the 477th, we have that on the cereal plate, and the donor who gave this to the museum actually wasn't able to find any that were in this good of a condition. Wow, and made of wood outdoors a lot? Yeah, so there's that sort of conundrum that something that's made of wood in the rain or even on the roads isn't going to really withstand that sort of environment. I read something that said it had to be lacquered every year, so that's a lot of time and commitment. That'd be quite a family project. Yeah, so that was sort of one of the big downfalls. Another was that in the 1950s you saw this boom in big trailers, so a small teardrop trailer really wasn't what people were looking for. Now the teardrop design, is it stuck in the 40s and 50s? Are we ever going to see this again? Yeah, luckily we're actually seeing a resurgence of teardrops. So those same factors that made it really marketable in the 40s, that it was easy to maintain, lightweight, that's what people are looking for today in some of their trailers. Absolutely. Emily Gann is just a curator here at the museum. Thank you for telling us about the fleet car. Thank you very much.


Decades ago, I found myself citing Professor Berman a great deal. Here at the University of Chicago, we got to invite a guest once for a prestigious seminar, and we chose John Whitty, because we liked exactly what he was doing. I had been there for a couple of addresses, and that's before there was a center, but you could see that the energy was building up, that this was a place where this could happen. It had the encouragement of faculty and background. So when it was announced, I think, we historians like things neat, and I think it came with the new century, 2000. And so when that came, I guess I was ready to go. I've had a lifelong interest in children and the child. And one day, John Whitty and Don Browning sat me down and said, we have a new project, and we'd like you to take part in it. And if you took part in it, what your accent would be. And I instantly blurted out, because I always cared about it, I'd like to work on the mystery of the child.  We had four sons. We had two foster children when we adopted. I have a stepdaughter and three great grandchildren, nine grandchildren.  This year, we had seven boys, age nine to 14, at the table for a whole year. And it's just buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. And we worked out a lot of covenants, how we would interact with it. And it always impressed me how much imagination they bring and how hard we worked to kill it off, how much wonder is a part of their life and how we try to push them into a certain groove. This is a book against super control. It's against the notion that because we're older and bigger, we're able to determine everything about their life. And they fight back with their only instrument, which is to have a tantrum. And you can never negotiate during a tantrum. We always tell our kids, you know, get over it. When you're over your snit, come back in and we'll have fun, which we would do. Most of these childcare manuals assume that you have to have control, whether the teacher or the parent. I don't mean malicious control, I don't mean the whip, but I mean that you have to have it figured out. The more you think about children, the more you find that they won't ever have it thought out so that this, the concept of mystery, which runs through the book, goes back to a French philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, who says, problems have solutions. You may not always reach them. You could move the biggest building in Chicago, the Sears Tower, if you had enough money. The problem is getting enough money and big enough cranes, but you could do it. I can't control the imagination of a child without killing off what's wonderful about a child. I have to say it could not have happened had I not been in that project. I could not have written it by punching Google or going to the library or having a research assistant or just reading, reading, reading. It's really born of that weekly dialogue, I think 19 of them. When you walk into an interdisciplinary situation, you are either at a place where no one has any concept of it and they stumble around or at a place where there's been an encouragement of it, where the leaders know. John Whitty and the team and so on have done that on other projects so they're ready to go and they know how to play that interplay of specialty and general. Therefore, we had a lot going for us. As far as I'm concerned, I have a double vision of interdisciplinarity. First of all, it's interdisciplinarity. That is, it has to be disciplined. It's not mush. It's not everybody skimming the surface. So it's very important that everybody in the room was really good at something. Students are fortunate when there's something interdisciplinary going on if they respect the disciplines because that's when scholars make themselves vulnerable to each other. What's a project on the child and the temptation is to assume that everybody is about a child is somebody in mid-career of education or psychology or counseling or something like that. And I think to have somebody around who's not known for this but who picks up what you do by studying history for a long time was probably an asset.  You are not put down when things go bad because you've seen it. First of all, everybody right about dies and have utopianism or mere optimism. You're born a realist and you've seen terrible things happen. Thirty years war. Third of Europe is killed. Black death, half of Europe dies. And the next generation, they have new children, they're coming up and these kids dance and they have poetry and so on. And I think the historian brings a little of that sense. You're not going to be done in. And I would often raise it that way with the group. Again, because they had to work on a problem, it's pretty easy to go down. And I would often say, you could do all that, but you also have to account for where do all the good kids come from. Because there are a lot of good kids. The programs I was at in the large auditorium in the law school, they're not just law students and divinity students, it's the town if they could get in when President Carter's there just jammed. And this wouldn't happen if there weren't a center. And now the larger world, I have tremendous interest in at the October 24th, the 26th event, wrapping up these years. I'm going to talk about the future of law as religion, the future of religion as law. These are two zones of life that are tentacular and interweb. They're just locked together. You don't make a move in America in religion without being aware that separation of church and state means this or doesn't mean that. A church or a synagogue can't change the parking lot without going to the zoning board.  You better be sure that what's tax exempt is rightly tax exempt. Meanwhile, the legal profession around the world is finding, think of all the things you can't do in the Islamic world because of the law. Well, Emery has somebody there who knows that, and that helps. There are plenty of places in the U.S. where there are good individual scholars of this field, though this center always draws on it and brings them in. But there's no place where that convergence and concentration of energies, and that's what's always excited me about it. While the Emery Law School has always done a good deal on the international, wonderful two volumes on human rights, for example, it's unmatched. So you can't say you have the center to do that, but with the center there now, we just can't think about any of these questions without immediately doing things globally. I think all 19 of ours were domestic. They were chosen on those grounds. You can't do everything at once. But when we have President Carter there in these public programs, he quickly reminds us. And he and Dr. Faggy, who was another one of our guests, marshal a team to get rid of riverbindness or working on Guinea worm. Horrible stuff. Even those parabolic references let us know there's another world out there. Now, we can address individual problems, HIV, AIDS, and so on. But I think to have a sustained, interrelated thing, I'd like to see it do more on going global. It has access to it. We have the talent. We have people from other nations. If immigration allows them in or allows them to stay where they are here or helps them carry it back, which is more important to the places they came from, I would think that would be one of the major emphasis I'd work on in the future. What I really had fun with was chatting with them all after the day that President Carter was on the first time. And he was telling the story. All of a sudden he turned to this room of students and 200 divinity students and everybody else. And he said, Now, if I know Marty, this project is going to end with 19 books. Who of you are going to change the world? And then he pulled out of his pocket. He said, this afternoon we need 20 people in Genesis Project. We need so many people. He had a whole list of projects with prostitutes, with homeless, with all these things. We need to go, by the way, a month later when we had another public program, I never did that in my life, but a former president asked us to, so I did. And now I'm hooked. That's how he recruits. But when we went back to the snacks at half-time and after, and whenever we talk about it, that question really burned in people's mind. This project ended 19 books. How are you going to change the world? Now, if Frank Alexander goes back to Flint, Michigan, where he studies the laws for the homeless, and draws together 10 or 20 people, which he's likely to do, they're going to change the world.


Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today, we're going to talk about four particular reads that I wanted to highlight for you. Now, in these reading vlogs, I'd like to include a bunch of stuff, but then I realized if it's like too many, it probably won't be as engaging and a lot of people won't tune in for like 20 minutes of me talking about different manga volumes. So if I keep it concise to just four really cool ones, I'd figure you'd tune in for the whole thing. All right. So the first one that we're going to talk about is Breakfast with My Two-Tailed Cat Volume 1. This is published by Seven Seas Entertainment and it is written and drawn by Aishimizu. Now, this combines a lot of elements that I really love. Yokai, food manga, Slice of Life storytelling. This manga tells the story of Soichiro who wanted to retire to the countryside with his wife. And unfortunately, after a year, his wife ended up passing away, sadly. So now, he is by himself with their pet cat, called Ni. And Ni, at his older age, decided to, instead of venturing on with his departed mother, decided to transform himself into a nekomata Yokai so that he could spend time with Soichiro and not leave him to grieve by himself in loneliness and despair and to spend some quality time together, enjoying yummy foods, cozy times, and just relaxing afternoons in the countryside. What is not to love about that description?  So he can be that crutch, that emotional support for the ailing husband. And that is essentially all you need to know about this manga. The majority of it, 95% of it, it is so heartwarming and it never failed to put a smile on my face. With each chapter, I loved it more and more. It is utterly charming. I love the panorama of the countryside with the contrast of having this gigantic cat walking around in its hind legs or sometimes on all fours with his master along. It is so funny, wacky, and nice, and I cannot recommend it enough. Obviously, I know it's not going to be for everybody. This is the type of book where you just sit back and relax as you experience sort of the slow take on life with characters that aren't looking for a grand adventure, they're looking for stuff that we're looking for. Happiness and living out our lives in peace and tranquility. Let's keep talking about food manga. Now we're going to talk about Pass the Monster Meet My Lady. Volume 1, this is by Chika Mizube, Kanata Hoshi, and Peperon as the designer, that's a cool nickname there. This is a fantasy romance series published by Kodansha and it involves not only romance and several fantastical elements, but a lot of food manga tropes. This was one of my most anticipated books of 2023, believe it or not, and I am happy to report that I really enjoyed it and I'm looking forward to volume 2. There are a couple mysteries at the end that I was a little annoyed because I did not get the answer right away, so I need volume 2 to find out what is happening with several characters. So in this manga we are following the character of Malfiera who has a bad reputation amongst the royals for her eccentricness and love of monster meat. A lot of people are comfortable eating your standard proteins and all that and she finds beauty and taste in the other creatures that are out there in this world that people would not want to consume and that makes her look kind of freakish to a lot of people and I found that it was a really nice topic where you have a character that is misjudged and critiqued for this and it ended up reminding me that at the end of the day that is what makes you special and you shouldn't really conform to whatever society wants you to do.  That is what makes us unique, that is what makes us such beautiful people all around and we see this in the form of Malfiera wanting to try the different monster meats. There is a little bit more to it as you start reading but the main part of this book is the meeting between Malfiera at a banquet with the Blood Mad Duke of Galbraith, his name being Aristide. So what I liked about the Blood Mad Duke as he is known in the land is that he goes into this blood frenzy trying to destroy these monsters and all that and they really make him out to be this crazed war-loving individual which is interesting because now you have two protagonists who are misjudged or labeled as freaks if you will when they're really just regular people with unique taste to them. Obviously the Duke is not as scary as you first see him but that's the first impressions that you get from the people there. I love the display here of the action scenes and how everything's laid out. It's really fun, character designs are lovely, really well drawn, great attention to detail when it comes to the weaponry, the costumes, the wardrobe I should say and the monster designs. That's an important aspect that I feel could go unnoticed by a lot of people because they're focused on the quirky romance that forms when Malfiera meets the Duke but you see some of the images here with the monsters and they look really good too. The food looks tasty which is the highest compliment you can give a food-centric manga. One more step comes stand by my side. This is by Torio Montaqueda and it is published by Yenpress. I was really intrigued by this. The cover spoke to me. The plot description sounded interesting because this is a collection of short stories. The first one here is when the time comes which talks about this young princess who is captured and on a two month period what happens to the princess with her captors and her fascination with an individual that is helping her across the ordeal. You don't know who he is. She doesn't know either because she's blindfolded but the relationship that forms she knows obviously that at first it might not be a good person but this fascination grows and sort of potentially transforms into a blind romance. The ending of that short story I thought was extremely powerful and really set the tone for the rest of the book. This was an amazing way to start off this collection and I'm being super vague because again these are short stories and I don't want to ruin the fun. There are other stories here that are quirkier sillier and some that are downright creepy and mysterious. Believe me when I say if you want good manga on your shelf buy this book. I think this is a quintessential short story collection that everybody should own. It is really well written but most importantly it is beautifully drawn. Great attention to detail to expressions movement and if there's one take from this freaking video is that you need to get one more step come stand by my side. Loved this book. Cannot recommend it enough. And now the final book that we're going to talk about on this mini reading vlog is one of my most anticipated books of 2023. I was so excited the moment it was announced by Titan Comics or Titan Manga. It is The Great Yokai War Guardians, volume one art by Sanami Suzuki and of course written by Yusuke Watanabe. This is an adaptation of the screenplay for the movie of the same name by Mika and that is The Great Yokai War Guardians and this is the first volume of three adapting that story. So essentially you have this character here K Watanabe who is your regular middle school kid. Unfortunately his father passed away due to an unfortunate accident so he lives with his mother and younger brother. The family dynamic isn't the best. He still has resentment over what happened and thinks that his father's passing is his younger brother's fault even though he knows that's not really it and he's just venting and applying that grief and sorrow towards his dislike of his younger brother. It's within that setting that our main story takes place. You have this villainous force that is awakening these ancient yokai beings like prehistoric creatures and now they're yokai spirits and are being transformed into kaiju sized opponents and they're just roaming around going straight through Japan and if they're not stopped they are literally going to crush everything in sight. Our main protagonist happens to be the descendant of a long line of warriors from ancient Japan and they are able to communicate with spirits, yokai, yurei, you name it and a whole bunch of yokai appear and gather k for the idea of him being the new warrior and picking up the destined sword so that he can fight destroy these kaiju monsters and evildoers and bring peace to Japan. It is a very simple action heavy premise but where this manga adaptation succeeds is in its earnestness of presenting the story of a reluctant hero in the face of adversity while also combining beloved elements of Japanese folklore like the yokai which is something that I'm very passionate about. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it on one of these videos certainly on social media but I do have a TikTok account called Creature Gaiden where I just talk about yokai. If you want to follow me there I'd appreciate it. I do that for fun that's a hobby to the hobby if you will but yeah I really like yokai monsters a whole lot. Along the way there are a lot of villainous characters that appear obviously the nature of yokai means that they are tricksters and aren't necessarily good or bad. The art is phenomenal I love the character designs and some of the paneling and black inks here look fantastic. There are shots of all the yokai looking great where our main protagonist realizes like oh these are real the yokai are real and here we have the night parade of 100 demons it's all real so yeah this is a lot of fun not as action packed obviously because this is the first part of the story but it does get more intense as the plot thickens so I highly recommend it if you want something fun lighthearted but filled with great art and great attention to folklore and history of one specific nation this being Japan I highly recommend picking up the great yokai war guardians volume one. All right that's gonna be it thank you everybody for tuning in I hope you enjoyed this mini winter reading vlog next time we're gonna go over some different books and I like the format of four volumes I think it's nice not too long of a video and I get to geek out about these cool new acquisitions for the collection so thank you everybody for tuning in thank you so much for liking commenting subscribing and being a part of manga geekdom that's gonna be it for now god bless stay safe out there I will catch all of you on our next video