So, I'd like to introduce our speaker today, which is a member of the Geography Department, as well as the U.S. Geological Survey, wearing two hats, which is neat, and oversees the Palinology Lab, which is even more wonderful, David Wall. And he is also a member of our, I don't know what your title is, but you're part of our open group. And so today, he's going to be presenting some of his current research that he is doing in Mesoamerica in the Maya Lomans, as the title says, and he's going to be telling us about climate and land use change in the Maya Lomans, I'm assuming in the past. That's right. Good. Okay, well, welcome, David. Thank you so much for starting our computer off. All right. Thank you, Christine. Yeah, thank you guys all for coming out. As Christine said, I've been doing some work in the Maya Lomans going on about 20 years now. And so I'm actually really excited to take this opportunity to step back and kind of synthesize the work that I've been doing, looking at environmental change, climate change, pretty much throughout the Holocene, but really kind of focusing in on questions that revolve around cultural trajectory in the Maya region in the Maya Lomans. And so what I'm going to do is basically start off with the background of the Maya Lomans, kind of the physical components of it, touch on some of the cultural history and the archeology of the areas that I've been working on. And then I'll go a little bit through the field work techniques and lab methods that we use and then get into the data. And I'm actually going to wrap up with a very new, pretty exciting find that we have that looks like we might be able to link the sediment record to a warfare event and the epigraphic record, which is kind of first of its kind, certainly in the New World, linking written record to changing environments. So before I get started, I just want to kind of point out this is definitely a multi- institutional, multi-collaborative effort.  He passed away, unfortunately, in March. It was really critical in my development of interest in prehistoric agriculture and environmental change in Mesoamerica. Other than that, working with a lot of different folks, archeologists, Richard Hansen is the director of the Mirador Project, Francisco Stradibeli, director of the Holmo Project, and a whole list of folks that have contributed data, contributed time and effort to what I'm going to be showing you guys today. Okay, so this map here, just to really quickly situate ourselves geographically, the Maya Lomans essentially is all of the area of this map of the Yucatan Peninsula that's off of this volcanic axis to the south here. And the Yucatan Peninsula is this very large tertiary limestone platform that uplifted. And it's really dominated, aside from the granitic intrusion here of the Maya Mountains, it's dominated by karst topography, so this limestone topography. And that really means two things for the point of this talk. One is water bodies are really in surface water is pretty scarce, right? You have this limestone, it's very porous rock, a lot of the water percolates through. So you don't have a lot of lakes and you don't have a lot of rivers. There's a lot of subterranean rivers and there's sinkholes and cenotes, and lakes are not so common up in the heart of the karst platform here. And so basically what that draws to mind are two things. One is the possibility of water shortages and drought in the past, affecting the Maya, which I'll touch on. And the other is in terms of my work, I'm looking for permanent standing bodies of water. So in a sense, it kind of catches catch can. It's not like you can just go down and find a spot right next to a site that you're interested in exploring the history of and just start coring. Precipitation is highly seasonal today. So there's essentially a six month drought every year down here. So we get a big wet season from late May, early June, through to sometime in November. And then it really kind of shuts off. And there's some winter rain that can kind of come through from the northern latitudes, but you really get a very stark dry season down here. If you've ever been out there in the dry season, water procurement can be an issue when you're not in a town. And it's also, there's a very steep precipitation gradient. So down in the southern part of the peninsula, we get about two and a half meters of rain during that wet period. It's very wet, very moist, and it drops off as one moves up towards the northwest corner. Here's the really the driest part. It can drop as low as, you know, 500 millimeters a year, which is barely enough to support rain fed agriculture. Along that precipitation gradient, we see vegetation gradient. So in the south, we've got big, high, close canopy, tropical evergreen forest. And as one moves north, we move out of that. Height of the canopy comes down, starts opening up a bit, get more of an understory. You start seeing a lot of deciduousness on the big forest trees. They drop their leaves in the dry season, likely a pollination strategy. They flower also when the leaves are dropped. And then that just grades down. The canopy comes down as one moves north, and then finally up in the northern part of the peninsula, it's this leguminous thorn scrub. It's really just kind of an open, very low canopy, maybe 10, 15 feet. Lots of undergrowth, lots of scrubby vegetation. Okay, so zooming in on the center part of that, here we're looking at the northern part of Guatemala, the Petén District. And this is where I've been doing all my work. And I'm just going to kind of tee off by talking about this area that's up here in the very north central part of Petén. It's known as the Mirador Basin. It's not really a basin. I'm not going to get into that right now, but it's a very important area in terms of early Maya development. And it's a really incredible area. It's about 2,200 square kilometers of roadless wilderness. So Richard Hansen has been doing his best to try to keep this kind of unimpacted. It's part of the Maya Biosphere Reserve. But importantly, out within this area, there are a number of very large, very early Mayan sites. So these sites listed here are all pre-classic sites. They date to the initial settlement can show up in the middle pre-classic, but really kind of had their boom in the late pre-classic. And the namesake site for the Mirador Basin is El Mirador. And it's really an incredible place. It's very large. This is an artist's reconstruction. Terry Rutledge drew this for National Geographic. It's kind of giving an idea of the scale. I should point out that Nakbe is about 12 kilometers away. Recently, there's been a big effort to fly LiDAR down in the Maya Lowlands. And it's just been an absolute game changer. It's incredible. It's basically, the last couple of decades, the total station mapping is, the further they'd push out into the forest, it was just settlement all the way. If people were not down in a marsh or in a wetland doing the mapping, there were structures everywhere. And so now the LiDAR is showing that it looks like El Mirador and Nakbe were likely connected. I mean, there are causeways that connect them, but now we're just seeing continuous settlement. And it's massive. And El Mirador has very large structures. This pyramid right here is called El Tigre. This one in the background is Ladonta. It's only about 70 meters high, but it's arguably the largest pyramid in the world in terms of cubic meters of fill. So 2,800,000 cubic meters of fill.  It's just, it's incredibly large. So just to kind of hit on that point some more. So Tigre, which I showed is the second largest pyramid at El Mirador. If you were to pick up El Tigre and drop it in downtown Tikal, it would basically cover the Great Plaza and the entire North Acropolis. So this is one pyramid at El Mirador for comparison with kind of the downtown region of this classic period site of Tikal. So again, here's Mirador and its heyday around 80, 100, late pre-classic. Everything's going fine and this is what El Mirador looks like today, right? So we've got Ladonta off in the background. Here's El Tigre, there's Los Monos, another pyramid there, which that kind of stark contrast kind of raises this question, which I think pretty much anyone going far back in time who's ever wandered into one of these sites asked themselves, what happened? What is going on here? What happened to the people who lived here? And so there are a number of different collapse theories. I have collapse in quotes because it implies, I don't know, a rapidity that I don't think we have constrained in terms of the rate at which places were abandoned. It's something that I've actually tried to do some work on and get at. But we do know there was widespread abandonment. There was widespread abandonment at the end of the classic period and it looks like there were abandonments prior to that at the end of the late classic, possibly before. And so I've kind of broken these collapse theories out into two main categories here. You can think of non-environmental ones. I do want to say this before I push forward. It's pretty easy to see that these are intertwined, right? Like we're not going to pull one of these out and say this is the singular cause or even the primary cause. We can look at warfare and that's going to be linked to collapse of trade routes. You can have warfare increased because of climate variability. There's an interwoven connection between all of these theories. But here we have them. These are kind of the major ideas around what may have caused this abandonment in the southern Maya Lolan. Warfare is a very prominent theory. There's a lot of evidence. Arthur Demarest has done a lot of work down in the Pitesh Batun region showing increased warfare, increased frequency, intensity of warfare during the terminal classic period. It's not entirely clear how much is inner polity versus revolt. There's some kind of scapegoat king models where the peasants may be rising up because they're unhappy with, you know, the king has pitched himself as having a connection to the gods and then, oh, there's a drought and people might overthrow the elites. But there is plenty of evidence for warfare. We have drawings of it. We have epigraphy. We have war statements. There's several war statements, burning, chopping, entering the cities. But other than that, there's evidence of fortifications. There's not a lot of firm archeological evidence for what warfare meant on the ground. And I'm going to loop back to this as I kind of close out the talk. Other theories here, collapse of trade routes, which again could be linked to warfare. A lot of the trade routes were likely on waterways. So again, if we have climatic variability, things are getting drier. That could feed into that overpopulation. I'm not even going to get into environmental change. So climate variability, drought. I'll be talking about this. There's kind of a prominent theory that multi-decadal droughts during the terminal classic period may have played a role in the trajectories down here. Environmental degradation, another one. And finally, disease is a compelling idea. There's very little evidence, no evidence for it. It's a mechanism that would explain widespread abandonment across the kind of geographic scales we're talking about. Again, some of these are easier to test, these hypotheses than others. And like I said, I'm working on lake sediment cores. They can get a lot of these environmental questions here in terms of climate variability, environmental change. And so if I kind of frame the research questions that I'm working under, one of them would be what's the occupational slash agricultural history of this region? So with the lake sediment cores, we have a lot of preservation of materials, of fossil materials, different chemical signatures that can do much to augment the archaeological record. You know, we're in the human tropics here. There's not a lot of cultural material preserved. We're able to, if we can link a sediment sequence to a site or to an area, it can actually add a lot, actually deeper in time. So I put this slash agricultural here because we're able to actually look at agricultural activity pretty clearly in the sediment record. And so we can look at settlement and abandonment through this lens of evidence of nearby agricultural history or activity. What were the environmental impacts of pre-Hispanic settlement? So again, looking at this notion of environmental degradation, what can we say about when we know people are here, what do we see happening on the landscape? What can we say about that? And then finally, looking at these drought hypotheses, is there any evidence for climate variability associated with periods where we see demographic decline or population transitions near the sites that we're working at? Okay, so here's the Yucatan Peninsula again. And so in order to answer those questions, what I've done is basically set out to create a network of sites across the southern Maya Lolan. So these are all published records. We have a handful of other cores in the coolers down in Menlo Park. And we also have other sites targeted for future work. But the idea here is, you know, the Maya Lolan's are a pretty heterogeneous environment. And by creating a network of sites, we're able to kind of parse out what might be a local signal from a more regional signal. So when we see kind of coherence in the transitions of these records across a bigger geographic space, we can say more about regional processes than local ones. And so these are all kind of acronyms for these lakes that we're working on. This is Lago Puerto Arturo. This is Lago Pashban. And Guadazacatol. Laguna Eknaub. And Laguna Ya Loach. And I've also highlighted some other very well-dated, good paleoclimate records, the locations of these sites on this map as well. So this is a speleothem from Sabna. Lake Chichan Kenab, which was kind of the original lake sediment core that pushed the drought hypothesis forward. Punta Laguna, another lake sediment core. All of these notably coming from the northern Maya Lolan's. And then we have a speleothem from down here in southern Belize, Yaqbalam, that has again a very well-dated sequence that we're going to look at as we move forward here. Okay, so in terms of doing the fieldwork, it's always exciting.  Usually they're in the wet season, so we push our way through the mud. A lot more fun when you get to drive. This always cracks me up. So you break down out there. So we snapped our leaf springs. And these guys, it took us five minutes to be back on the road. So we went out in the jungle, carved off a stick, lifted the truck up, propped it in there, and we move on. You know, there's no stopping the train when you're that far out there. So the end of the road's usually a very small village. Get out here, in this case, it's Karmalita. And that's where phase two starts. We get all the equipment loaded onto mules and push off for another 40 mile walk through the forest. Again, it's the wet season, often basically wading through water in the low lying areas. But we're aiming for the field camp, which again, a lot of you guys probably have experienced with these types of field camps. They're pretty significant production. So in the case of Hanson's group out at Mirador, he's often hosting two to 300 people out there for two to three months. It's a big operation. It's very remote. And this is basically civilization when we're out there. We've got the lab set up, we've got the kitchen, our little camp zone for the summer. But as I mentioned, the lakes are kind of few and far between. So this is base camp for me. We basically put the gear back on the horses and then get the machetes out and push another day or three further out to get to the lakes. Carrying our coring platform, which I've named the Fitzcarral, though. Everything breaks down and fits on the mules. Get that constructed, get it out and anchor it into a lake. It's pretty common to find old mahogany dugout canoes tucked in the reeds, which we take advantage of if we can find them. And so then our coring itself is done with a Livingston piston core. So it's all hand-operated equipment. It's not mechanized. We always use plastic liner tubes to kind of maintain the integrity of the cores to get them out of the jungle and back to the lab. But we basically load the barrel up and just push it down into the mud. The clay's pretty stiff in patins, so sometimes it takes, you know, a fair amount of pushing to get a good 40-centimeter section. So, but at the end of the day, if all goes well, you've pushed through the entire sediment sequence. In this case, we have seven meters of mud. Here's the sediment-water interface showing nice and clear there. Seven meters down and then a replicate core that basically catches the junctions of each of these sections. So we have complete recovery going all the way down. Then we get them back to the lab and we do essentially as many different analyses as we can on the core. So a big one that we use, Christine mentioned that we have the pollen lab over in geography, is pollen analysis, reconstruct the vegetation, mostly in the watershed nearby the lake. We can enumerate charcoal fragments and reconstruct fire histories and see how that interplays with the vegetation history. We look at physical properties. We look at what the sediment is composed of. Like here we have these carbonate bands that are interbeted with organic rich material. We do these analyses that kind of parse out how much clay is in the core, how much organic material, magnetic susceptibilities of proxy for erosion. So it's a torriginous material coming into the lake has its own magnetic signature. We do stable isotope analysis on organic matter to look at what types of plants we're growing in and around the lake. We also do analyses on carbonate to look at hydroclimate variability in the past. And age control is provided by radiometric dating. So we do lead 210 on the surface sediments and a lot of radiocarbon dating. This is something that we've really been emphasizing and pushing forward a lot on the need for very high resolution and accurate age control and age depth modeling. So there's some nice statistical packages that have come out recently, Clam and Bacon and more recently one called Plum where you can put in your radiocarbon ages and get the distribution, the probabilities of an age really kind of constrained because you're able to add in some more variables in terms of where those samples came from. And then we always do resolution, digital photography and X-rays to just get a nice archive of the records of the sediment material. Okay, so I just want to say one thing about ZiaPollin before I push forward into the data. ZiaPollin is an incredibly important tool for us because of some characteristics that it has. One is once you move out of the highlands in Mexico and western Guatemala where Teosinte currently grows, we don't have any Zia growing in the wild down in the lowlands here in Guatemala. It's a completely domesticated plant, corn is anyway, and it has to be planted to grow. So it's not growing in the wild and importantly it's identifiable down to the species level. So most pollen taxa, unfortunately, especially in the tropics you can only get down to the family level which causes some lack of resolution in terms of our ability to interpret what those pollen types can tell us. And yet others can go down to the generic level but here we have this ability because Zia has been selected for so long the corn pollen itself is really dramatically different than other grass pollen and so there's a number of characteristics that allow us to identify it. It doesn't travel very far from the parent plant so all of those combined means that when you see ZiaPollin in the sediment we know we have a very clear indicator of nearby agriculture. People are there, they're planting corn and it's nearby. And so that's a very powerful tool that we've used in terms of trying to reconstruct as I mentioned earlier these agricultural and settlement histories. Okay so I'm just going to show this this lake here is I'm going to be showing a lot of data from Lago Porto Arturo. It's kind of a mid-sized lake, it's about one and a half square kilometers, this crescent shape of very deep water out in the middle of nowhere. I was a little alarmed to see the clandestine airstrip near it after I got out from the jungle but nonetheless it's got a very shallow the whole centered area likely a delta that formed through its history that's just dominated by emergent sedges and that's going to come into the story in a little bit. It also has an island on it that was just rife with classic period artifacts and tipped over stelae but this is a site that has a record that goes back about 8,700 years so we've got kind of a pre-settlement pre-agricultural run-up to the transitions that we see. Alright so turning to the data here what we've got here are the pollen curves I've got these two profiles here grouped together represent several of those families I mentioned that together represent high forest the forest taxa we have grasses weedy taxa the kinapods and asters mostly agricultural weeds anytime there's a white inlay that's ambrosia, ragweed which is a very common agricultural weed and over here we have the corn pollen now I'm starting this I truncated this so this record goes back as I mentioned to 8,700 years and what we see over and over again in this area is coming out of the glacial period probably around 11,000 years ago the forests moved in and dominated so from this point down we really have a domination of high forest in all of the records not that there's that many that actually go back through the entire Holocene but what we see is starting around 5,000 years ago we start seeing a decrease in forest taxa and there's a big debate as to whether that was driven by climate change things getting drier or the initial arrival of people and agriculturalists and that's a whole other seminar to dive into the data on that but what we can look at here is starting around 4,600 or so years ago we have our first corn pollen showing up in the record and along with that we start seeing at least with this group of families of forest species a decrease a long slow decrease heading up into the middle part of the early pre-classic and so this is kind of the initial evidence of folks moving into the area predating settlement at Knock Bay which is the oldest settlement we have up in the Mirador area and then starting shortly after 3,500 years ago we get really kind of more consistent presence of corn and we see this very stark and clear decrease in forest taxa through this period and it's coupled with this increase in grasses and increase in weedy taxa and this inverse relationship between agricultural weeds and evidence of an open environment, disturbed environment with closed canopy forest taxa is something we can think of as an ecological signature for settlement and conversely when it all reverses here we can see it as an ecological signature of abandonment and so what we've got here is basically a 2,500 year record of settlement around Lago Puerto Arturo one unknown right now with tropical palinology and palinology in general we don't really know how regional this record is, we don't know how far out from the lake we can actually extrapolate these data and say this is representative of Shulnaal which is one of the nearby sites or El Akiyote but what we do see here is that fitting quite well with the sequence of myocrinology we've got this period of a lot of disturbance through here within that we look at magnetic susceptibility as I mentioned is a proxy for erosion and we see kind of coherence with big peaks of magnetic susceptibility coming in where we see peaks of disturbance indicators in terms of the palinology and then also that's where we have the presence of the corn pollen and this is pretty early on this is around 3,000 years ago and so you know likely caused by well one major factor I think why we see so much more erosion early on so you notice here this is 2,000 BP this is a transition to the classic period and there's far less erosion happening and that's likely tied to the fact that when people first came into the area there was a lot of soil developed it hadn't really been disturbed by humans at least in a way that would really open up the forest and allow for it to erode down into the lake basins what was causing that opening we don't know a ton about agricultural strategies in the area in terms of swidden or slash and burn versus more intensive methods like terracing or raised or ditched fields especially that early on but there was likely some swidden agricultural happening so we've got opening of the forest possibly on the slopes around the lake leading to that I will say I mentioned that LiDAR earlier is again, blowing this wide open people have been looking for evidence of raised and ditched fields in the low-lying Bajos of the central part of the Yucatan Peninsula for decades and now it's showing up quite clearly canals across the Bajos terraces all over the place it's really really exciting time to be interested in prehistoric my agricultural strategies so this is one possible cause of that erosion we see a lot of disturbance forest opening the other thing I want to point out this is again Terry Rutledge's reconstruction of El Mirador but you'll notice the city is basically paved in lime plaster and that is not artistic license out at Mirador we have plaster floors that are decimeters thick in sequences coming up from the late pre-classic up through the late classic and that production of lime plaster had an impact on the environment in a way that is often overlooked Tom Schreiner who is actually an affiliate of RF at one point did his dissertation ethnographic research looking at quantifying the amount of fuel would needed to create calcium hydroxide to get the quick line so everything was weighed all on the input side and everything was weighed on the output side and the punchline from his dissertation was it something on the order 2.6 square kilometers would have had to have been clear cut to pave El Tigre one time and so it's unlikely they did that but if you think about the fuel would needed to pave El Tigre one time and then consider that it has about five coats of plaster on it and that's just one structure of hundreds and all of the water catchment plastering that was done throughout the cities the deforestation we see these kind of low forest values through here kind of come into more perspective regardless of what type of agricultural strategies that we were being utilized at the time okay so looking back at this sequence of these pollen profiles here we can also see what looks like pretty clear evidence of a decline in disturbance near the lake notably here at the end of the classic very abrupt this is the abandonment of the area permanent we see no more corn through the rest of the record no more weedy taxa grasses drop off precipitously I think there's about 160 years between that data point and that one so the forest bounce back amazingly quick we don't have the taxonomic resolution to know what sort of species difference there was from the pre-disturbance forest down here and what came back but I think I was pretty surprised to see this and this is replicated across most of these sites but anyways interestingly we have some compelling evidence for abandonment at the lake pre-classic transition which there's also archaeological evidence for at El Meridor a lot of those pre-classic sites were abandoned at the end of the late pre-classic you guys probably know more about this than I do but I understand there's a lot of cultural transitions at the end of the middle pre-classic into the late pre-classic in terms of pottery styles you know the onset of the notion of divine kingship and these types of things and so seeing what looks like another demographic decline and transition right around that switch from middle to late pre-classic as well is an interesting find so looking specifically at this classic to post-classic transition one of the things I've tried to do is to get a very good age control on that and try to constrain that ecological signature of settlement and abandonment across these sites and that's what we're looking at here so this red shaded area shows from these three sites basically the last corn pollen present at Iguata Zacotal up through the last one that I found at Laguna Yaloche and the idea is to try to get at how rapid this collapse was you know with the archaeological record we're looking at the last inscription that has happened to survive right and so that's fraught with obvious problems in terms of just preservation in terms of piecing together the sequence of abandonment through the myelolins I'm not sure I've done much better here we have about 140 year period radiocarbon has its own ranges and you can't really constrain it tightly but again we see that very clear decrease in grasses and increase in forest taxa coming right at the last appearance of zeo pollen in the record so again this is that kind of signature of abandonment or classic period abandonment in the area okay so turning to climate which has been a hot topic in the myelolins so in 1995 Dave Hodel who was at the University of Florida at the time published a paper in Nature got the cover of Nature from a sediment corridor that he worked up in the northern myelolins from Lake Chichang Kanab and it's an isotope based record also looking at other precipitates and densities of precipitates in the record of gypsum but we're going to just quickly kind of talk through how this isotope work the model behind looking at isotopes and carbonates for hydroclimate variability so the basic ideas here we got kind of three main isotopes of oxygen 16, 17 and 18 oh 16 is by far the most abundant 99.9 something percent so when we have a lot of precipitation and very little evaporation it's the water I should back up this is a very simple simple system there are a lot of variables that can make this model very noisy some of them are minimized by the fact that we're down in the tropics and we can assume relatively stable temperature and relatively stable moisture source but so when we have a closed basin system where evaporation is the prime mechanism for lowering lake level that's the idea behind this model that we're working on here so again we've got a lot of precipitation very low evaporation kind of wet climate lake levels high the ratio of oh 18, oh 16 is going to be very low so you have it's enriched in oh 16 so oh 16 is lighter so when we have evaporation that is evaporated out and so as lake levels drop through evaporation we see an increase or an enrichment of oh 18 and you can see the system is pushed even further here the beauty is we can look at any carbonate material has oxygen in it and that's a snapshot of what the lake water ratios of oxygen isotopes were at the time so we can look at fossil shell material and reconstruct hydro climate variability to a certain degree using these techniques so again Puerto Arturo we've got this 8700 year record and it shows this nice sequence of we know that because of the Earth-Sun relationships this is called the thermal maximum in the northern hemisphere this mid-holstein period and we would expect to see more moisture down here and that's exactly what we see so we see again we've got wetter conditions with the lighter values here and drier with the heavier values so we've got this whole period of more moisture than what follows and then starting around 6200 years ago we start seeing this trajectory towards drier conditions so we've got this decreasing moisture interestingly this is right when we see corn agricultural coming into the area through this whole period so the late Holocene is characterized by these relatively dry conditions so one of the nice things about using a multiproxy approach is from the same lake you can produce data sets to test your findings and that's exactly what we did here so I mentioned that that shallow delta in Lago Puerto Arturo that's currently dominated by sedges well what we've done here is ratioed the sedge pollen Cyperaceae with water lily pollen which water lily prefers deeper water 2-3 meters deep gets its root down through that and also relatively clear water and if we think of that as a lake level proxy as well as our delta 018 we can see that these actually track pretty well so we can essentially lean on this as a pretty good lake level reconstruction at least from Lago Puerto Arturo I'm going to put a really noisy diagram up here but I think it's worth talking through so this is that same curve here in red is the Lago Puerto Arturo isotope curve and what I've done is I've plotted it against a sea surface temperature reconstruction from the Gulf of Mexico where we have warm water penetrating in the loop current up into the Gulf of Mexico where again if we've got a big warm pool in the Gulf of Mexico we expect more precip more moisture in the air similarly in the eastern Atlantic sea surface temperature reconstruction warmer as wetter you get more basically just more loading of the atmosphere with water and so I'll talk about these two first so what we see here is really quite an amazing correlation neither of these age curves are tuned to the other this is based on the original age model output from the original data sets very tight correlation with Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures and eastern Atlantic SSTs and that all kind of plays into our understanding is synoptic climate drivers which is a big question with the Maya area what's driving climate variability so early to mid-holocene the Atlantic there's a very tight coupling between lake level Puerto Otero and sea surface temperatures across the tropical north Atlantic and what we start seeing is around 4,000 to 3,500 or so years ago as the ITCZ starts to move south I mentioned those Earth-Sun relationships with that thermal the ITCC is moving south and what looks like happens at this point is we start to see more inso-activity so and this is played out across records that I'm working on in the western U.S. and others in terms of reconstructing the history of El Niño it looks like it really began expressing itself strongly as both El Niños and La Niñas in the late Holocene so you know basically over the last 3,000 years and so what it looks like in terms of bringing it back to the mile world with the late pre-classic and classic period we have much more of a Pacific influence and therefore increased variability this inso variability is much stronger and higher frequency than climates from before so this is again kind of showing that around 3,500 years ago we've got this increased eastern tropical Pacific influence in terms of climate that's happening on the Yucatan Peninsula so if we want to look at the records of climate reconstructions we can compare across the entire Maya Lolan so this is the whole Yucatan Peninsula here so again this is Lago Pertoroturo this is only going back 3,000 years Yaloche another site that I worked on had a very distinct band of carbonate precipitating out Puta Laguna and Chichankinabra those lakes from the northern Yucatan Peninsula this is Dave Hodel and Jason Curtis's work that really kind of put these terminal classic droughts on the map Saab Nas is Martín Elizalde Peleo Speleothem reconstruction and then Yaak Balum and we can see that what started with this one record right here in 1995 there is indeed evidence of drier conditions through this terminal classic period from you know around 800 to 1000 AD the Speleothem's the age control in them are much better than the radiocarbon dated lake sediments and so these are really interesting it's interesting to see that you know this peak of dry conditions comes a little later than what we see elsewhere again we're paleoclimatologists we're really trying to rectify these to suss them out to see what these signals mean are they time synchronous are they reproducible you know notably at Pertoroturo there isn't a this isn't the biggest dry indicator here at the late classic period and to me that's telling of the variability just on the landscape with precip I also highlighted a couple other you know I mentioned that what looked like in the pollen record demographic shift right here at the late pre classic classic transition there's some evidence for drier conditions there there's archeological evidence as well up near Mirador and then also just this larger peak down here in the middle pre classic so we again we do have replicability in this term is terminal classic droughts how much they played a role in the abandonment is it's difficult to say one of the things that I've looked at is the persistence of corn pollen at the sites that I've worked at at least and the corn pollen is persistent through the peak of dry conditions that we see here you know up closer to you know 1,000 to you know 900 BP so people are there beyond these droughts I don't know if we can say that perhaps the droughts were causing issues you know there may have been social breakdown or you know socioeconomic changes and the corn pollen I'm seeing is just the last remnants of the last folks that hung around or perhaps you know things didn't really start breaking down until after the drought it's difficult to say it is of interest to note that following the drought in nearly all the signals is a very dramatic not so much here but shift to extremely wet conditions and so this is kind of where my mind is with this stuff right now is that this is when the corn pollen falls out is when you see this post multi-decadal droughts shifting to extremely wet conditions and it might just be too much variability right these increased variability that we see in the in the late Holocene that I was talking about so that's kind of where we are with climate so I'm going to dive into the world of Maya warfare here which is not something I know a ton about this is all relatively new but as we've been developing our most recent sediment core we have this finding that kind of led me down this path and what I'm understanding and what I'm being told by the archaeologists that I'm working with is that very little is known about the reality of pre-Hispanic Maya warfare right so we have drawings that depict it we know there are captives taken you know big school of thought that suggests that these were mostly you know small scale raids or they were mostly focused on the elites so most of the archaeological evidence that we have is tied to the royal compounds or very rapidly built fortifications around the royal compounds you know Arthur Demarest again has a lot of evidence from Cancun and around the Petesh Batun region showing massacres essentially of royals of elites all of them dating to the terminal classic you know post-800 AD and that's led him to develop this kind of this idea that increased warfare you know may have played a role in the abandonment we see that I think his model is mostly focused on as royal families grew and more and more princes were being anointed and they all each went and took their own little fiefdom that you know basically trade routes got tight resources got tight and warfare basically increased but other than that you know we've got epigraphic data we have war statements which I'm going to touch on but there's a handful from the classic period from the late classic period Poulouille is one which means burning another one is chopping another one is entering so there's a lot of epigraphic data that says on this date we entered that city and so we know that a battle took place but we really don't know much about what that means and so what we're going to look at here is a tale of two cities of Weitz-Nah and Naranjo and so I have been working at a lake near Weitz-Nah so a classic period site it sits up on top you can kind of see this one of these big escarpments you see these trending escarpments in the impotent so it sits on the top of one of those escarpments in fact I think Weitz-Nah means like mountain house or something it's an amazing view from up there you can just look out across this whole low-lying Bajo so there's about a hundred meter escarpment this red line here shows the watershed for Laguna Econab and Laguna Econab sits at the bottom of this very steep escarpment and so all these black dots are structures at Francisco Estrada Valley has mapped in so this is kind of the scenario we're looking at and one of the reasons we targeted this lake was because it sits right at the base of the cliff below Weitz-Nah and likely all of the sediment washing off that cliff is going to tell us the story of what happened up here in the city and so we got a seven meter core that was the one I showed you guys earlier in those plastic tubes and it turns out it has not surprisingly an incredibly high accumulation rate so this is how many centimeters per year accumulating you know kind of through the lake classic kind of peeking here in the lake classic a greater than a centimeter and a half per year and for comparison the range was 20 to 40 years per centimeter of sediment so that was the resolution we could look at here we're diving in into a much higher resolution accumulation rate and looking at the sediment itself what we're looking at here is influx of clay and influx of organic matter and carbon nitrogen isotope so both of these are what's washing into the lake in basically mass per unit area per unit time so it's grams per centimeter square per year and carbon nitrogen is a tool that we can use to look at what type of organic material is in the sediment so heavier values indicate more terriginous terrestrial plants and values of 10 and less indicate algal blooms in the lake right and so most lakes somewhere along that spectrum but what we can see is that during this classic period particularly during this peak of erosion that's coming in between 650 and 700 AD that we have tons of erosion coming in lots of activity there's tons of corn pollen kind of pouring through there and filling the lake up rapidly so I mentioned we do charcoal reconstructions and so this is our charcoal influx curve for the entire 1700 year record from ECNOB and what stands out is this one peak right here at 780 and it stands out not only because it's twice as large as any of the other peaks but the sediment itself was just loaded with massive pieces of charcoal unlike anything I've seen in any lake I've worked on 5 millimeters long you know this is from that level this is what another level looks like a typical level of charcoal or counting you know the entire cubic centimeter of sediment and you might have you know 50 or 80 or 100 charcoal fragments this is just loaded with charcoal and it's a 3 centimeter thick horizon of it so it's just this massive deposition of charcoal that we happen to find a seed in so we're able to get a direct radiocarbon date from 316 centimeters down and so if we just calibrate that radiocarbon date the median probability is basically 710 and when we plug it into our age model using CLAM again these kind of statistical age modeling tools I mentioned that really kind of they take the fact that you've got an age below and an age above and helps constrain where the line is going to go through the probability distribution CLAM kind of put this age at 693 so I'm looking at all these data here we have the abandonment 700 AD it's a little bit early for these terminal classic droughts what's happening here well Francisco and Alexandre Toko Binine who I mentioned is an epigrapher we're out in 2016 excavating wheat's gnaw and so they found two stelae and on stelae 2 there was a nice clear emblem glyph for wheat's gnaw so we now know what the ancient Maya called wheat's gnaw which was Balam Joel which I think means Jaguar Ear but what's exciting about that along with the stelae they have excavated most of wheat's gnaw at least the big monuments at wheat's gnaw and all of them show signs of intense burning so the royal palace Francisco notes is basically the plaster is burned off the walls it's the hottest fire he's seen inside a structure they were just out there this summer excavating as far as they could to the east they watched our up here all of it basically burned and not rebuilt so I understand there's some questions around ritual burning of structures when maybe another building phase is going to happen and I think that's something we're going to need to sort out but I think what we're looking at is likely the invasion of wheat's gnaw by Noranjo so I mentioned these war statements so it's not uncommon for there to be emblem glyphs and place names on stelae that nobody knows where they are because it's so rare to find an emblem glyph in the city or in the site that it's at so as soon as we had Balamjoal in our pocket Alex has done a ton of work here and he knew immediately that the king of Noranjo basically bragged about going in and burning wheat's gnaw on May 21st, 697 AD so now we have for the first time ever what we think is a picture of what Poulouie looks like so there's literature on this where people are saying well the burning, it was probably maybe they burned the royal palace maybe it was this kind of ritualistic they went in, it was a raid they got some captives instead what we think we're looking at is basically this is the charcoal curve up against that erosion influx, the clay influx and then there's an erosion point for the decline there so we start seeing things dropping off corn pollen is present pretty consistently for another hundred years but clearly there was a demographic shift things began to decline at 700 AD at this burn horizon people persisted until I think corn pollen falls out of the record completely around 1000 AD and so this is interesting evidence that perhaps these battles that we see these war statements for were more widespread, they involved more of the population and had broader impacts than elites on elites in these battles amongst the royal palaces I think the Maya have this long coming out of a long period it started with the peaceful forest dwellers and I think it's been a long time kind of shaking the notion that they were out there kind of doing something, you know so again this is a really exciting find we're kind of still putting the final touches on what we think it means what we've got what we think is the first very clear environmental evidence for the impacts of a discrete event and linking between the sediment record, the paleo record and the epigraphy so that's it, thank you oh thank you yep so I've had diatomists look for diatoms in these lakes but because of the extremely basic nature of the water they don't preserve well which is a real shame every time I get a new core I send samples off hoping that they will be present really they're really thin and not very useful, diagnostic clam is just the name for I don't know what it stands for if it's even an acronym but it's an age modeling software so you can basically input your raw radiocarbon dates with the depths that they're found in and clam will basically run several Monte Carlo iterations through the entire string of radiocarbon dates and the probability associated with them and you can have it go through 30,000 times and it will pick the most common path through the distributions of the radiocarbon dates bacon is another one that's very useful where you can tell it I have a stratigraphic break here I have no reason to believe the sedimentation rate is the same above and below this break so it allows some more freedom for how the line gets fit but it's really bringing us forward with pinning down as much as we can the error that's associated with radiocarbon dates when we create these age depth models because it's the single most important thing when you're looking at all of these changes if you're kind of floating in time it's frustrating so it's moving forward but to answer your question I'm not sure exactly what clam stands for yeah you know today is really great climate change is there any evidence information you see that man's activity has any causal effect on climate change or is it so minimal that it would be the climate change that's actually a great question and yes there is so what happens in this area when you have solar radiation close canopy tropical forest is very dark and it's just going to absorb a lot of heat and that heat is going to be you know convecting and raising the air above the forest and causing precipitation clear cut the forest or cut the forest I should say and have a lot of grasses come in you've changed that albedo you've changed the lightness of the surface and a lot of that radiation is bouncing away decreasing the heat the convection potential and yes people Ben Cook has modeled that he's at NASA out on the east coast attempted to quantify it so looking at if we have large areas of very open forest rather than what was there before how does that affect the precipitation and so he's worked out some models looking at a very clear decrease in precip associated with that changing albedo with the vegetation and it's a fascinating threat right so we see corn coming in as things are getting drier and so there's this kind of chicken or the egg thing you know Roger Byrne was really big on looking at you know there's a lot of talk about the droughts I pointed this out things get very wet after those droughts too much precip in this area is also a big problem for pre historic or pre-Hispanic agriculture you know you get a lot of mold you get pests you get more weeds if the dry season is shorter you might not get a chance to burn your slash you know and so this idea that you see corn coming in and really spreading out pretty rapidly throughout the Yucatan Peninsula around 5,000 years ago that's when we were coming out of that very moist thermal maximum but again it's this chicken or the egg thing was it people came in and they started opening the forest and then you know at least with our discrete records we're seeing that drying it's likely a combination of two of my feeling is the big you know the ITCZ moving south and those big changes in the synoptic patterns are really what drove it and I think the dryer conditions of the late Halcyon really kind of opened up and eased the ability to kind of penetrate into the forest yeah so do you used to show how long or is that very common update that it was yeah so corn it has to be planted and tended to grow it's if you've ever tried to grow it it's like it needs the red carpet treatment fertilizer weeding it watering it so if it's it's unlikely that corn just kind of continue to grow in the fields after the fields were abandoned to your point though there's a possibility that and this is another kind of unknown with palinology that corn pollen may be reworked so corn pollen could maybe be in the soils we this is where I'm at with pollen analysis in general how long does pollen live on the soil surface or not live how long can it persist on the soil surface and so some of that might be material washing into the lake after the abandonment may be bringing in some pollen but it's pretty unlikely you can actually see pollen's pretty fragile when it's not deposited and encased in the sediment of a lake and so it gets pretty beat up it gets abraded so if it does if it is reworked and old it has holes in it you know the fungus and stuff starts eating it but so to your question it's unlikely that it was kind of persisting on its own but there's a chance that some of the pollen signal might be earlier stuff coming in later so to speak yeah kind of a similar question how do you account for accretion of these sediments on the lake floor I guess how do you account for the travel of the sediments through the water column to their final location of deposition yeah another great question that's something we think about when we choose our coring location so if you think there's different types of morphologies of lakes but typically there's a deep point in the lake and that's called the depot center and more material is going to make it into that depot center if it gets deposited on the slopes hopefully relatively quickly after it was initially deposited and so you actually have a higher sedimentation rate in the deepest part of the lake because this is called sediment focusing happens that's what we go for because the higher the sedimentation rate the less years there are in a centimeter sample the higher temporal resolution we have but there are stream inputs that can be bringing charcoal charcoal can sit on the soils for thousands of years so charcoal has some pitfalls right so you could have a massive rainfall event if you're coring right by a stream input it could be bringing charcoal in from the you know it's been sitting around the soils for decades or centuries but yeah ideally and people do this when they're working on lakes that you can drive up to and hang out in camp for a couple weeks you can actually quantify that and study it and put sediment traps out hauling traps out and push it through a wet season and a dry season and see where the diatom blooms are and where do the little carbonate critters grow those are all variables that are best constrained kind of hard when I've got two weeks at the lake before my food runs out but yeah short answer is you know we basically you want to pick a site that's further away from direct stream input I shoot for closed basin lakes because that simplifies that the hydrologic model greatly and then looking for the deeper part of the lake so you can kind of get the thickest sediment package let's say thank you again alright


Welcome back to come again TV the only place on YouTube. We're all geek culture collides. I'm Shannon and today on the show We're taking a look at the Ghostbusters after life Hasbro plasma series lucky As we see it is for ages four and up. We've got the no ghost logo there in the bottom corner We got lucky's name patch. We have the flight suit display on the box on the side of the box We have the art deco versions of the main characters.  Let's go ahead and open it up and take a look at luck All right, so lucky does come with everything seen here. We have the proton pack the proton one We got a proton stream. We got the remote control ghost trap and we got the Sentinel terror dogs head Articulation on the Sentinel terror dogs head.  It goes up and down And that's about it. So we'll go and move him off to the side and We'll take a look at the proton pack It does appear to be the exact same proton pack that came with Trevor So we'll go ahead and move that out of the way. We'll go ahead and plug it in Plug the proton wand in Since we've already gone over this with Trevor No real need to go over it now One thing one difference is That this one does come with a proton stream, which we will go over once we put it on Lucky's back And it does come with a remote control ghost trap rolls pretty nice Fact rules really nice rules kind of like a hot wheels car So let's go and move that out of the way Well first we'll go over the detail So there's a side There's the top Does have a handle There's the front There's the other side There's the bottom and the back Now this proton string Just a second So this proton string appears to be a lot different than the wave one proton string as you can see The electricity around it Looks a little bit better, it's a little bit tighter doesn't move around quite so much It's connected Unlike the wave one and it's purple. It's got purple electricity instead of blue So we'll go ahead and move this one out that out And let's go ahead and take a look at Lucky so Unlike with Trevor she does have Her flight suit put on properly And zipped all the way up With the legs tucked into the boots she does not Okay, she is wearing it looks like standard issue Tactical boots Maybe there's something there ones that she bought at hot topic who knows but she is wearing boots and they are tucked in She's got the belt she's got the elbow pads No name tag. Okay. Her head does turn a lot better Then Trevor's Goes up and down side to side That is on a ball joint arms Go out to there Go all the way around Elbows on a ratchet Just a single ratchet joint Hands swivel at the wrist She does have a little bit of waist articulation Just like with Trevor it feels like it might be on a rubber band similar to the LG I Joe figures So I'm not gonna push it that much Her legs out to there Okay, and they do swivel at the hips like Elvis double Knee joint and she does have ankle articulation as you can see So now let's go ahead and put her proton pack on her after You guys get a nice little Well, we'll take a minute to appreciate All the detail of the figure and then we'll put the proton pack on her And attach the proton string. Okay, so now let's go ahead And we'll attach the proton pack So just like with Trevor and the other Ghostbusters you simply detach it unpeg it from the side here from the left hand side put this arm out and You're gonna slide it on and over then The pack The peg of the pack plugs right into her back and then you just Peg the side in place right and Just like with Trevor Proton one does attach To the pack just like that But I wouldn't much rather have my Ghostbusters holding their proton ones. So we're gonna Do it the easy way We're gonna slide Just through here Then we're gonna plug it in on this one And now the proton string And that does make it Later forward a little bit So there we have the Ghostbusters of the half-broad Ghostbusters The series way to Ghostbusters afterlife Hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, give us a like, subscribe, comment, and share with your family and friends Tomorrow on the show, we'll be taking with a podcast Have a good one guys If you enjoyed that video make sure you hit the subscribe button right there So you stay up to date on all things geek culture Also, go ahead and check out one of these two playlists on the side for more videos just like the one you just watched I'm Shannon for Comic NTV the only place on YouTube where all geek culture collides. Take care Geeks


We have general questions. Question number one, Graham Dey. Thank you, Presiding Officer. To ask the Scottish Government what planning it is carrying out regarding the additional powers proposed in the Scotland bill. Cabinet Secretary, John Swinney. The Scottish Government is committed to using these new powers to create a fairer and more prosperous country for everyone who lives here. We set out early policy priorities in the programme for government for 2015-16, which was published in September this year, and are committed to an open and consultative process in developing policies for the new powers in the bill. The Government will not recommend that the Parliament approve the bill until a fair fiscal framework has been agreed. Graham Dey. Thank you. As the cabinet secretary is aware, it is proposed that control over the winter fuel allowance will come to this Parliament. He will also be aware that, down at Westminster, my MP colleague Mike Weir has sought over many years to secure early payment of this allowance to recipients who live off-grid in rural areas, so that they can, for example, purchase fuel oil when it is cheaper to do so. Can I ask him if the Scottish Government will consider taking such a step to help ease the financial pressures on people such as he and I represent and alleviate rural fuel poverty? Cabinet Secretary. I am aware of Mr Weir's efforts in this respect. Obviously, this is a point of detail about the operation of winter fuel allowance, which the Government will be very happy to consider. We are taking forward an on-going discussion through the fairer Scotland process, which has been presided over by the Cabinet Secretary for Social Justice, Alex Neil, on how effective winter fuel payment can be at particular stages in the year to support individuals. We will, of course, consider carefully the suggestion that has been made in this question as part of the wider consultation on the implementation of the new powers under the Smith commission. Question 2. The name of Michael McMahon has not been lodged. The member has provided an explanation. Question 3. To ask the Scottish Government when it will introduce the new peer-approved clinical system to replace the individual patient treatment request system. Cabinet Secretary, Shona Robison. As a pilot of the peer-approved clinical system has already been introduced, the initial outcomes from this pilot will inform further roll-out. As the member will be aware, the revised individual patient treatment request system has provided substantially increased access ahead of a body of decisions from the Scottish Medicines Consortium under their new process. I thank the cabinet secretary for her reply. However, I am led to believe that this was promised for me in 2015. As the individual patient treatment request system has been extended, with the new guidance to drop exceptionally what monitoring has the Scottish Government done to ensure that the postcode lottery has been eliminated? Of course, we keep a very close eye on these matters. As we review the new SMC process, which, as I have said previously, we said we would do at the end of a year and we are doing now, we will have an opportunity to look at all of these matters. It is important to note that the reformed individual patient treatment request system has seen some great improvements in patient access across Scotland ahead of the body of decisions from SMC. For example, in 2012-13, before any policy changes were made, around 50 patients in Scotland accessed ultra-orphan and end-of-life drugs through this route. In 2014-15, the equivalent number was around 500. That is why further changes have been carefully tested before roll-out. I think that it is in everyone's interest if patient access is facilitated through good quality submissions, with a fair offering on price from the pharmaceutical industry to SMC. As I said, the review of the new approach is providing a good opportunity to look at the impact of those changes. Question 4, in the name of Ken Macintosh, has not been lodged. The member has explained to me. Question 5, John Mason. To ask the Scottish Government whether it considers that the three Glasgow colleges each receive a fair share of the region's resources. It is for the Scottish Funding Council to assess regional needs and to determine the appropriate funding allocations for Glasgow and its three colleges, consistent with the region's jointly agreed curriculum plan. John Mason. I thank the cabinet secretary for that response. I think that there has been a concern expressed in some areas that because City of Glasgow has a new building and requires to fill them and draw in students to that college, that it could be detrimental to Clyde and Kelvin colleges. I just would appreciate her assurance that Clyde and Kelvin colleges will receive the resources that they need. The Glasgow curriculum plan, which all three Glasgow colleges signed up to, indicates an overall 2.5 per cent increase in provision in community locations. Therefore, I would expect that Glasgow Clyde and Kelvin colleges would expect their funding allocations to reflect that and to be sufficient to support that. It is also worth mentioning that Kelvin college is building on its very successful youth access programme, working with a wide range of community partners in college and community settings to provide a range of courses available to 12 to 19-year-olds. To ask the Scottish Government what the impact of the closure of the 4th road bridge is on communities in the north-east. The impact of the closure of this significant piece of national infrastructure has been felt across Scotland. The Scottish Government recognises this and I give my assurance that we are using every resource available to minimise the duration of the closure and to get the bridge reopened at the earliest opportunity. In the meantime, we are working with our partners to minimise the impact of the closure and I would again like to thank the travelling public, commuters and local communities for their continued patience whilst work to reopen the 4th road bridge continues. Lewis MacDonald. I thank the minister for that answer. He will be aware that hauliers are facing extra costs of as much as £95 per vehicle per trip for runs between Aberdeen and Edinburgh and between north-east Scotland and north-east England. Given that those added costs are greater than the return they would expect to make on those runs, can the minister tell us when the Scottish Government anticipates making decisions on compensation for hauliers facing such unforeseen losses? They have adapted very well to the bad news from the 4th bridge. Can they expect some good news for Christmas? Presiding Officer, I think that the first priority and surely on this everyone would be agreed that the priority has to be to get the bridge reopened as quickly as possible. That is the best possible mitigation for the current disruption by reopening the bridge. All efforts are on that at the moment. The Deputy First Minister has held talks with businesses to hear their issues and their concerns. During the period of closure there has been the priority route as well for goods vehicles to support industry and business at this time. There has been on-going liaison with the haulage association. In fact, I had the chair or was it the chief executive of the road haulage association in the control room at the bridge to talk about the issues of importance to them. We will continue to engage, monitor the situation, mitigate the impact but remain totally focused in getting the 4th road bridge open as quickly as possible. I absolutely agree that the first priority must be to get the bridge open and the confirmation of the 4th of January is where we are working to. Nevertheless, there are businesses in Fife and elsewhere who are feeling the difficulties of financial burden as a result of that. It is important that the minister indicates that we are going to be working with businesses to look at how they can be assisted over this period. I thank Alex Rowley for his comment and his praise of me in terms of the travel plan that has been delivered by Transport Scotland and our key partners. Of course, the amendments to our travel plan were welcomed by business organisations, showing that during the closure this Government is listening and responding to the pressures on business. However, the one major piece of action that everyone is calling for us to deliver is the reopening of the 4th road bridge. That is exactly what I am focused on and what this Government and our agencies are focused on. John Scott has always declared in interest what impact has the closure of the 4th bridge had on farmers and livestock haulage and delivery of animal feedstocks in the run-up to Christmas, particularly bearing in mind the impact that flooding has had on this area and has been so affected by the livestock industry in the north-east and the south as well. John Scott raises a reasonable point. A number of sectors have been affected because of the closure, but that is why we have been engaging with businesses. Other interventions that I have helped that I did not mention earlier would also include the relaxation of drivers hours as well. Every action that is possible has been taken to support business. Animal welfare was considered as part of the wide range of actions. As well as understanding the impact, we will look at that. It remains our priority to get the bridge reopened as quickly as possible. Since there is such interest in the matter, I can report to the chamber that the works on the 4th road bridge are very much on track. The minister will be aware that the closure of the A985 during the week has had a huge detrimental impact on small businesses in my constituency, such as the wall garden. The result is that staff have been laid off. Normally they would be expecting to serve 130 meals a day during the busy Christmas period. Last week on Wednesday they had just seven customers on Thursday 11 and on Friday it was 18. This has had an knock-on effect on suppliers too. I am pleased that restrictions are being lifted from next Wednesday. I ask the minister once again whether he will act now to remove the restrictions on the A985 during outside peak periods.  The matter of compensation is a wider point, but you see the question started off by Lewis MacDonald asking what extra prioritisation would be given to the haulage industry. I outline what that is and then Kara Hilton complains about the prioritisation for that industry in the A985. The Government has taken the right interventions to support business, to support communities, to mitigate the impact during the necessary closure of the fourth road bridge. I appreciate the impact that it has had on local communities. That is why we have been engaging with Fife Council and local communities during this period of disruption. We will continue to do that and remain focused on the objective to get the bridge reopened as quickly as possible, because that will give the greatest relief to those communities who have been affected during the closure. I, for one, welcome the way that the minister has risen to this significant challenge. There are obviously real challenges to go on, but when the closure is on going at the moment, the minister also provides some opportunity to do other work to the bridge. Could you give us an indication of what other things are currently going on while the bridge is closed? I appreciate the praise from Bruce Crawford. Maybe that is not as surprising by the praise that has been reaped upon me by Alec Rowley, who has praised my handling of the travel action plan. I can confirm to the chamber that we and our operating company have taken every opportunity during the period of closure to undertake further works and take advantage of this closure to bring forward and accelerate work that we may be scheduled later on. We have undertaken a range of works by taking advantage of the opportunity of the closure. Surely that will be welcomed by members as being the right interventions and proactive. To ask the Scottish Government what steps it is taking to deal with delayed discharge in Edinburgh. The Scottish Government is working closely with NHS Lothian and Edinburgh City Council to reduce the length of time people are waiting to be discharged from hospital. The partnership is finalising an action plan that will see a reduction in delays over the short to medium term. The latest census shows an 11 per cent reduction in delays over three days from the previous month. She will be aware that delayed discharge has caused real distress to older people and their families in my constituency and across Edinburgh. Later today I will meet the chief executives of NHS Lothian and the City of Edinburgh Council to discuss what more can be done to address this issue. What more can the Scottish Government do to develop the range of services that will reduce hospital admissions and ensure timely discharge back to the community in order to fulfil her commitment, her clear commitment to eradicate delayed discharge? The Edinburgh partnership will receive £8.19 million over three years from the £100 million of delayed discharge funding that was announced. That funding goes towards developing a range of community-based services aimed at avoiding unnecessary hospital admission and ensuring timely discharge. He will also be aware that yesterday the Deputy First Minister announced our intention to invest a further £250 million per year through health and social care partnerships, which will make a real difference. I am very clear that there are some partnerships, including Edinburgh, that have a further distance to travel. My officials particularly are working very closely with the Edinburgh partnership to make sure that more rapid progress is made and I can keep the member informed about that. Edinburgh has by far the highest number of delayed discharges in Scotland than some time ago asked for specific social care funding to deal with its specific circumstances, but is it not the case that the social care money announced yesterday to which she referred will disappear and be pale into insignificance beside the 7 per cent cut to local government funding, which is five and a half times the percentage cut to the budget overall? Is it not the case that neither social care nor education will be protected in this unprecedented slaughter of local government? I am a little disappointed at Malcolm Chisholm, who is normally far more accurate than he has just been. There is not a 7 per cent reduction to local government funding. I can assure Malcolm Chisholm that the £250 million that we have announced for social care will ensure that it delivers additional benefit to social care. It is very important that this very large injection of resource gets to the places that it needs to get to and delivers the change and the reform that the Deputy First Minister outlined yesterday. That is real action from this Government, focused on doing what we know needs to be done. I would have thought that Malcolm Chisholm of all people would have recognised and welcomed that. To ask the Scottish Government what plans it has to invest in flood defences for areas deemed to be at risk. The Scottish Government is committed to investing in flood protection. Since 2008, we have provided funding of £42 million per year via the General Capital Grant to enable local authorities to invest in flood protection schemes. As the member will be aware of what was announced yesterday in the settlement on the Scottish budget statement, on a like-for-like basis with the 2015-16 capital settlement, there has been a small cash increase in the 2016-17 capital settlement to local authorities. That will be reflected in the amount of funding that will be available to local authorities to invest in flood protection work over the next few years. I thank the Minister for the confirmation yesterday that the £4 million Barnett element of spending on flooding will be allocated to Scottish local authorities. The other mention in the budget is the line that the Government will begin to implement Scotland's first round of flood risk management plans and focus work at local level to reduce the level of flood risk. However, balance is with a budget line at the level 3 figures of £9.1 million, which has unchanged from last year. Does that reflect an adequate level of urgency? In terms of the announcement that was made yesterday, we are providing £3.94 million to those local authority areas, most affected by the severe flooding that was caused by Storm Desmond, in order to help them to support flood-hit local households and businesses. Of that £3.94 million, Scottish Borders Council received £1.94 million, because it suffered the most severe impacts from the storm desmond. Perth and Kinross received £1.2 million in recognition of the impact of the storm desmond and the extensive scale of the significant damage that was suffered in Elyth earlier this year. De Friesen Galloway received £700,000 and Lestillian Council received £60,000 and South Lanarkshire Council £40,000. Local authorities will be able to provide each flood-affected household or business with a grant of £1,500 to reimburse them for the opportunity cost of not receiving the full benefit of services that pay for through council tax business rates, while absent from their homes or businesses have their trading disrupted. I welcome yesterday's budget announcement about flooding and in order to particularly help my constituents in South Scotland who are affected in Hoyt, Newcastleton and elsewhere like Dumfries, could the minister explain the timing of this money that will go to the local authorities, how it will be distributed and how it will relate to other monies that are already there so that there's a proper co-ordination of flood defences including natural defences for the future? I can't say to the member that in terms of for South Lanarkshire Council they will be receiving £40,000 and I'm very happy to send more details to the member in writing about that.


How did you ruin his life, answer into his name? I started out ruining his life when he was young. How did you do that? You unclean spirit answer, how did you ruin his life? When did you enter his life? I've done my things. When? When did you enter his life? Holy Ghost, fire in Jesus' name! Holy Ghost, fire in the mighty name of Jesus Christ. You unclean spirit, how did you enter his life? Thro' pornography. Going through it was talking to myself, was fighting people for no reason. I've been trying to get out here and everything, man. It's just been so hard. And my mind and my schizophrenia was just eating me alive, you know.  Well, before I got here, I said, Lord, I'm coming here to claim my miracle. I'm claiming it, you know, in the name of Jesus.     From the top of your head to the soles of your feet. Fire, fire, fire, fire, fire, fire. In Jesus' name.  In Jesus' name. In Jesus' name. You are free. In Jesus' name. This has really opened up a door for me, you know. And I think, and I think Jesus, you know.


time for Chevrolets 4th Central Update. Giannis Antitocopo avoiding a major injury according to multiple reports. His left Achilles tendon is fully intact and the Bucs stars return to play will depend on how quickly his left calf strain heals. But he is going to miss the remaining three games of the regular season. He's going to receive daily treatment. Giannis left last night's victory over the Celtics in the third quarter after crumpling to the floor while grabbing at his left leg. The Bucs have already reached a spot in the playoffs though. Their seed is yet to be determined. The Bucs hold a one and a half game lead on the Orlando Magic and New York Knicks for the number two seed in the Eastern Conference. The Bucs were already on shaky ground. The injury to Giannis Antitocopo is like a bulldozer. Further clearing the path to the finals for the Celtics between the Bucs injury and chemistry issues. You got the Knicks who are banged up. Joel Embiid's playing on like one good knee in Miami. It's a team that's once the finals or bust for the Celtics. There is no good reason this team should not plow its way through the Eastern Conference to face the winner in the West for the NBA title. There is an argument to be made that not winning it all would be disappointing but not a failure for the Celtics. I disagree but the arguments are sound. There is no argument that anything less than a finals appearance would be an epic failure for this Celtic squad. It would be a complete fail end of story. The path is paved. It's time for a story line presented by Fnatic Sports Book. You can earn up to 5% fan cash on your bets, spend fan cash on jerseys, fan gear, bonus bets and more plus get a personalized offer every day with power hour rewards. Scan the QR code on the bottom right of the screen to download the app. Here are the odds to win the Eastern Conference. I just call it the Celtics Conference because that's kind of what it is. Celtics minus 160. It's still plus 350, Philly plus 750, Caps plus 1100, Miami next and plus 1200, Nix just below that at plus 1500. Welcome in the guys. Instead of what I was going to, we got Phil Perry, we got our Celtics insider Chris Forsberg joining us by zoom. Okay, so I think that there are very few threats in the Eastern Conference now including the Bucks but we ask both of you for your top 5 biggest threats in the East. Forsberg, you want to read your list or do you remember your list? Do you have it? Do you want to just tell us who's on her? Help me out. Let me go through. There was a bunch of asterisks on it but I believe I've had. There are a lot of asterisks. You got Bucks. You got Bucks. Yep. But if Yanis is healthy. If Yanis is healthy. Yep, there you go. There you go. You got it. 76ers, if indeed is healthy. Heat, if Tyler Hero is healthy. Nix, if OGN and Nobby is fully healthy and that's where the magic in there for fun because they have been a pest in past seasons but they're out like this is pretty obvious. They're really good and there's no reason they shouldn't be in the NBA finals. All right, so there are Chris's 5 biggest competitors in the East. Time now for the big board built for America built forward proud. Here are Phil's top Eastern Conference threats to the South Fix. He's doing a little drum roll here. Look at that. Southex are first. Milwaukee is second. Philly is third. Nix are fourth. Indiana, fifth. Miami not even making the list. I feel like you just sort of made this list to make it, Phil. I'm not sure you believe any of those other guys. What are you talking about? Indiana Pacers, the way they play, the pace with which they play. If they get hot and the Celtics get cold, that's a threat. Jalen Brunson to me, one of the best guards in basketball. I know Julius Randall is hurt, but the Nix are a real threat. The 6ers you've got a former MVP, the Bucks you've got a former MVP. Those are all legitimate threats. The heat, get out of here with the heat. Chris Forsberg, their time is done. Caleb Barton's not there to get away from his witchcraft anymore. They're a different team. Jimmy Butler's another year older. I actually want the Celtics to face the heat, because number one I think they beat them pretty soundly. And number two you just get past that boogeyman. They're in your rearview mirror and you don't worry about them. The number one threat to the Celtics not winning the Eastern Conference is the Celtics themselves. It is the easy answer. I am stunned the Celtics didn't make Chris Forsberg's list because he has been as critical as anyone of how they have handled late game situations. I'm kicking myself now. That was a brilliant move. Checkmate, Phil Perry, you picked it. We say this every year though, don't we? That the only team that can stop the Celtics is themselves and every year the Celtics kind of get in their own way. I'm with you, right? Like roll it back to 22. The turnovers the running out of gas because you went too long on series last year. Too many long series. So when I hear Jim Azul on the radio today talking about having to take care of series early is not messing around having that game last week where they sort of dummied up a close out game. Look, they're aware of their own shortcomings and like feel like I go back to it. You're 100% correct. It's almost disrespectful to say there's a threat list in the East that goes beyond the team itself. Yeah, I mean but it's that way because even though they've talked about it before Chris they haven't been able to get over that help. I do wonder though and I'm not even sure I believe this question that I'm asking but the 76ers have been pretty good since Joelle and Bede came back and I know that the 76ers It's the 6ers. I know but at some point is it going to... Okay, let me put it to you this way, Forestberg. People probably say about the Celtics, it's the Celtics. They always find a way to manage to shoot themselves in their own foot just like the 76ers do. Isn't there a time or a place when both will one or both will get over the hump? No. I'm sorry, I just have no faith in the 6ers. Maxi's had a really good year and Bede on one leg isn't enough and I think that's what it ultimately comes down to is when we sit here and we say like oh like you'd have to catch lightning in a bottle if you're a team like the Heat again you'd have to be fully healthy even if you're the Bucs who have had some success here in the regular season against the Celtics to me it just comes down to the Heat, like the other teams just have too many glaring weaknesses that the Celtics can exploit and in a series they will hone in on them and so yeah, like is the potential there for the Celtics to make their lives more difficult than they need to be and could that eventually catch up to them in the NBA finals against a good team? Absolutely. But no, I just can't look at the rest of the East, it's not a threat. The Yanis injury is such a big factor in all this training, especially because it looked like Yanis and Lillard and that pick and roll really sort of found something in the last few weeks here and you worry about that in the postseason and I also, if I'm the Celtics, while I agree with Chris, they're really deep, we know they're really talented, where they don't have a ton of depth is in the front court and if Chris Stapp's poor Zingus, we've been saying it since the moment he was acquired, right, if he stays healthy, if he stays healthy, if he stays healthy, he's been able to stay healthy for the most part you just always have that little bugaboo line, oh boy, if this guy goes down, that really changes who they can be come the postseason. And to Joe Missoula's credit, he has done a good job of making sure Chris Stapp's poor Zingus stays healthy and managing him in the right way, which obviously it's not all that difficult during the postseason because there's more off days, but it is still a challenge and a grind if you get into seven games series.


Moving to a new country is brave. You are taking risks and you are comfortable with ambiguity. Growing up, my dad was an entrepreneur. He passed away when I was eight and I was watching the family trying to take over the business and watching from afar, my startup entrepreneurial mindset started. It was a great motivation for me to start myself from scratch in a new country. When I was 19, I moved to Australia. I started as an international education agent. While I was in this field, my brother, Moe, was starting to take more freelance jobs. We realized that I could help with making some sales and business planning. This is when MoeWorks started. After a few months of good traction and great vision, we decided to work in MoeWorks full-time, take the risk and invest our own money in it. We are on a mission to unlock the gap between international entrepreneurs and local entrepreneurs in order to advance the startup ecosystem and innovation in Australia. We believe that diversity is an essential element of any successful business. Having a diverse team, you have diverse of thoughts, diverse of perspective, which will be reflected into the product and service that you are bringing to the market. HatchQuota started in 2015 out of MoeWorks. We pride ourselves to be the early adopters and leaders to help migrants and refugees unlock their talent in the startup ecosystem. International students, migrants, refugees arrive to Australia with great talents. An organization like HatchQuota can help utilize those talents into helping the economy evolve and advance. Our community have 3,300 members today. We are creating jobs, boosting the economy, as well as raising the Australian brand internationally as a world-class startup ecosystem. From my experience, I have made several mistakes and those mistakes are easily avoidable if someone have just given me direction at that stage. The Playbook is a product that we are very proud to have produced through the support of Launchvik, the Victorian startup agency. We have it in five languages and it allows aspiring entrepreneurs to access the knowledge to start a startup. If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail. However, a business plan is a dynamic document and with real data, real traction, you can update and improve moving forward. The most rewarding part in my job is seeing how our work is transforming the life of the entrepreneurs we work with and how the startups we are helping are solving words problem. So that's very important to us. The other part is changing the narrative and the perception about migrants and refugees in society. Instead of looking at them as a burden into the economy, people who are coming here to take from the country, we want to show and prove day by day with our work that we are here to contribute, to advance Australia and to become great around the world.


Well, how do y'all, uh, is, ah-ees? Well, it is Friday? No, it's Thursday. Wishful thinking! Look! There's a Doyle in a cage! Let's get him! Let's get him! Come on, buddy! Let's get the buddy! There he is! There he is! Oh, sorry, yeah, I got no boots. I have my new Sorrel boots on. I talked about these, I don't know, a couple of days ago. I'm walking kind of funny because they're really, really tight because, um, they haven't been, like, stretched out. But, I mean, they fit. They're, like, good in the length, but the width is, like, tight. But I'd rather have it tight than too loose because right now the boots that I currently have are way too loose. But anyway, so let me show you the boots real quick. So here are my boots. I've got huge, huge calves and ankles. So normally when you get boots, like, it'll be way tighter together. But, um, yeah, it's my new boots. They're very cute. I really, really like them. They are by Sorrel. And let me see if I can get the info for you guys. There's the info right there. I will link them below if you guys are interested. Um, it says it's good, like, up to 40 degrees, like negative 40 degrees or something. Let's see. What does it say? Hold on. Um, yeah, temperature rating. They're waterproof and good for negative 40 degrees Celsius and 40 degrees Fahrenheit. So, or negative 40 degrees. So I normally wear, like, a seven and a half or eight in shoe and I always tend to go up at least a half size in boots just so I can wear a thicker sock or whatever. So I got these in an eight and a half. But the grips on them, like, I'm walking around on my normal, like, my floor and, like, they're, like, they're, like, squeaky. But it's good because the grips on these are way better than the other boots. Let me show you the other boot treads.  These are my other boot treads. They're, like, smooth. These ones are not. Yeah, like, I don't know. Can you guys see? Yeah, these ones are not. So they're awesome. All right, well, I'm gonna go take these boots on a walk with the doodle wherever he is. Oh, there he is. And, um, I will see you guys in just a little bit. All right, so I am back with the walk, back with the walk. Oh my gosh, back from the walk. I just took the makeup off of the face and the boots are in the entryway. And I will say they're a little bit big. But like I said, I bought them big. That's my own fault. And the heel is a little bit too narrow, but that's okay. I will end up breaking them in while, you know, I'm walking and stuff like that. I was actually thinking, and I might do this over the weekend, is take, like, big, like a big mug like this and put it in there because the heel is just like really, really narrow. And I think it's just because it's been sitting in the packaging in the box for quite a while is why it's like that. So anyway, that's what's going on there. So I really love the boots. Anyway, I got this little ditty in the mail. And yes, I can show you this side. It doesn't have my address on it. So this is exciting. As you guys know, I have been like cleaning out and clearing out my house and getting rid of things. And this is like coming at the perfect time. It says we need your usable clothing and small household items. And this is the place I normally donate to, which is why they send me postcards all the time. It is the Minnesota Epilepsy Foundation. And they are picking up on Tuesday, December 18th. So I am going to call them. I'm actually going to stick the postcard in my purse. I will give them a call. I am at work tomorrow and schedule a pickup because I have all that other stuff up in my loft, as well as this stuff as well. Not the lighting, not the stuff on the bench, but the stuff on the ground. I have a lot of stuff, y'all.  So I might be adding to the pile. But yeah, I've got a lot of clothes and a lot of like, I've got a ton of bedding from my other bed that's no longer there because I have an office now. Just a lot of stuff that I'm like, why am I keeping this? It doesn't like actually make sense of why I'm keeping certain things. I don't know, whatever. But I'm gonna have a little bit of wheat pasta this evening with a little bit of marinara. Just something easy and hot because I'm really cold right now. Really cold. So I'm just gonna have that for dinner. I don't really feel like making anything extravagantly exciting, not that I normally do, but makes my life easier. Just like a little red pasta sauce. We're good to go. A little cracked pepper. It's my jam, y'all. It is my jam. So anyway, my water is boiling and I am going to have some dinner quick. And then I will check in with you guys in a little bit and I might get to editing. That's my goal. It is seven o'clock and I'm hoping to start at least by 8 30 to edit at least one video for you guys tonight. That's the goal. And then over the weekend, I'll have more time to catch up on the vlogmas edits.  So anyway, I am going to get to it and I will see you all in a little bit. All right, so I am gonna say goodbye to the vlog. I know that nothing that exciting happened today besides my new boots. I got new boots and Doyle has decided to join me up here. Kind of reluctantly, I might add, but nevertheless, he's sitting with me. I'm making him. Bad mother. Mm-hmm. Making him. I am editing a video as well.  It's a little after 8 o'clock. So yeah, this is basically going to be my night. I might edit another video. I might not. I haven't really decided yet. Depends on how this edit goes. Sometimes YouTube can be like really, really fast and sometimes it could be very, very slow. So that is what's going on here. Oh, the heat vent just turned on. So I think he wants to get down. Do you want to get down? Do you want to get down? Do you want to go lay on your heat vent? Okay. Okay, I'll put you down. I'll put you down. There you go. The heat vent, just for frame of reference, is right here by my feet. So he likes to go lay on that. He'll be on that in a little bit. All right, but that's it. Thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today. Sorry, this one was a little bit shorter. Maybe it's short. Maybe it's long. I don't know. I won't know until I edit it. But yeah, I will see you guys tomorrow. Tomorrow's Friday. I'm so excited. Fridays are my favorite. And I will just see you guys then. And Doyle will see you then too. Doyle, you guys say goodbye? Pa? Pa? No? No tricks? Are you done with your tricks? Can I have a pa? Pa? Oh, you thought about it. That's as good as you're going to get today. All right. See you later guys. Bye. Well, folks, it's time to kick it old school.