Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Burns, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly online event. Yes, we are a webinar. You can call us that. We won't be too offended by that. But we cover anything that may be of interest to librarians. The show is free and open to anyone to watch, both our live show here on Wednesday mornings or our recordings, which are all available on our website if you're not able to join us here on Wednesdays. We'd go live on Wednesdays at 10 a.m. Central Time. And then all of our recordings going back to the very first one, which is in January 2009, are all available on our website for you to watch if you want to. We do a mixture of things here, presentations, interviews, book reviews, mini-training sessions. Basically anything that would be of interest to librarians, we're happy to have it on the show. And we do have commission, Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do presentations. And we do have guest speakers sometimes. And today we have a mixture of that. We have next to me here, to my left, is Mary Jo Ryan, who's here from the Nebraska Library Commission. And across from me is Rod Wagner, also from the Library Commission. And then in the middle is our guest for this morning, Tyler Hansen, who is our new state poet, new as of last year really, so not brand new, but November. And we're going to be chatting with her this morning about the whole program and how it's all going and how libraries can get involved. So I'm going to hand over to you guys to take over. And thank you, Krista. Well, to start things off, it's a very special honor for us to have Nebraska State Poet, Tyler Hansen with us today. Welcome. Thank you. Just a few preliminaries. It was on November 14 last year when Governor Heinemann announced, Tyler's appointment as Nebraska State Poet for a three-year term, excuse me, five-year term. I was looking at the three on 2013. Five-year term beginning at December 1, 2013. That announcement, I'm sure, was followed by a lot of activity on Twila's part to put into motion various activities as Nebraska State Poet. Another very special event came up in January, January 13, a very special event was held at the Capitol to introduce Twila. First Lady of Nebraska, Sally Gannon, introduced Twila on that day as the Nebraska State Poet. It was also an opportunity to congratulate, to welcome, to honor also the candidates who were also considered for the appointment. But as I recall, that was a very full room that afternoon. It was a lot of fun. Standing room only. Standing room only is absolutely right. It was great. And that's a pretty large room, so that was fun. I want to give some very special recognition to colleagues with the Nebraska Arts Council and Humanities Nebraska who provided some really great leadership in bringing the process together that led to Twila's appointment. And that happened many months ago and involved the Nebraska Arts Council, Humanities Nebraska and Nebraska Library Commission as three organizations working together with the governor's office to carry out a process that involved also the recruitment and appointment of a selection committee to consider nominations to meet with people who were selected as candidates for the appointment and so forth. So a big thank you to for some very great work on their part. Twila is the third, essentially, State Poet. John G. Nyhart was the Poet Laureate, appointed back in 1921, and he served in that capacity for many years. Later the process was changed and Governor Thone appointed Bill Clefcorn to serve as Nebraska State Poet. And he did so for many years until his death a few years ago. And following Mr. Clefcorn's death, there was a gap. We didn't have a State Poet for a while and then the process was launched that led to Twila's appointment. So that's where we are in brief. Well, Twila, maybe you could give us a few ideas about what's been happening since this all began and how this has been for you and some experiences you've had. Well, it's been, it's settling down a little bit now in May, but at the beginning there was just a flurry of activity, not social media, but media attention, radio, filming, interviews, calls for information and over the phone kind of things. And lots of, there was an article in the Lincoln Journal Star, for example. I was interviewed by the Omaha World Herald and my hometown newspaper, Lyons Mirror Sun. And so there just was a lot of media attention. The Elle Magazine from Journal Star, Nebraska Wesleyan Archways Magazine, and the latest is Nebraska Life Magazine did an article. So literally it's just been a flurry of activity there. That has settled down some. I've had lots of invitations to speak to groups, which is great. This is something I've been doing for a couple of decades now is giving workshops and readings through Humanities Nebraska. And I've recently added a program through the Nebraska Arts Council. So I have two programs essentially. One is a workshop and the other is a reading discussion. And those, we will show you the websites for those in a little bit. I've also, I've started a Facebook page for the State Poet. And you can find that by just typing in Twila Hansen, Nebraska State Poet, and you'll get it. It'll come up. I started that December 1st and I have well over 650 followers, which is awesome. And I try to post things that are relevant to writers, especially poets on there. During National Poetry Month, I featured poets who are going to be presenting at the book festival, for example, at the end of April. So that was a lot of fun and I still find websites or publications or events that people might be interested in. I've posted my schedule on there and so it's just, you can go there. I don't really have an active website. I do have a website through Humanities Nebraska, but really the social media is where I'm posting most of my stuff. So that's been happening and I have some plans for the future if you want to talk about that. I am hoping to get a website through the university. This is still in the works for access to Nebraska poets and Nebraska poetry. But I would have to work through them and this is all very preliminary, but the director is in favor of this. So that's a good sign. That's a great idea. So there's going to be some collaboration from a lot of people on this. But to do a real website in their mode will take a couple of years. So I'm hoping by like in three years from now we'll have an active website that people across the state or anyone really can access current and past Nebraska writers. We'll start with poetry, but it's in conjunction with the Nebraska State Poet kind of thing. That's great. And when you were talking about the programs, these are things that schools and libraries can apply to have you funded to come out and do a program in the school or in the library. That's right. I've gone to, I've for 20 years, over 20 years, I've done readings and workshops in schools, libraries and community groups all across the state. I mean, I've been, you know, from Shadroom down to Peru State College and everywhere in between all over the state. I've really have traveled the state already. And with all sorts of different age groups, elementary, secondary, adults. Absolutely. The schools, mostly it would be middle school, although a friend of mine, we went to Loomis Public Schools and we, in two days, we had every grade. Wow. In our class, we brought them in, in groups. It was a lot of fun. And it really shows that poetry speaks to every age. Right. And I did this with a fiction writer, Karen Shoemaker, my friend. So at that point, we were, we were able to get into more schools. That was exciting. Not so much all that recently, but libraries are a source that I really would like to tap into. Because in one case, I went to Lexington last two years ago, maybe, and they brought in a couple of high schools, Lexington and another school. So it was a high school workshop and the room was filled. We had like 50, 60 students in there. Wow. And I conducted a workshop there. How do those librarians, libraries, get in touch with you to ask you about some type of an event? Right. Well, on Humanities Nebraska, and I believe in Nebraska Arts Council, my home phone number is published. And so it's a public kind of thing. But they could also contact me through email. And the way it works is they have to contact me first with their event and make sure I'm available and willing to do it. It's not required. My only requirements are that I promote and encourage appreciation of poetry and literature in Nebraska. And also to encourage the emerging generation of writers. So going to the schools and working with young people is really ideal in this position. And so if a, like say a library's got an event coming up and they think this would make a great program for it, they would first contact you to let you know when the event is and just to check your schedule and see if you're able. And then they look into, after talking to you, that you might have a suggestion as to whether they would look into Humanities Nebraska funding or the Arts Council Nebraska Touring Program funding, just depending on the conversation. Right, depending on what they have in mind. They all have to be, I believe, either school or a nonprofit group. So in order to get that kind of funding. I've done lots of readings and things that were not funded by them in the past and now, especially when people have their own funding. But it's just, it's a negotiation process. And I think libraries are used to this because they've, a lot of libraries have applied for these Humanities Nebraska Speakers Bureau events. But maybe they haven't done anything with the Touring Program from the Arts Council. So it's good to call twilight first. Yeah, thank you. Do any of you have any questions? You know, as Krista mentioned, that you can type your questions in the question box. Or you can type a request to have your microphone muted and talk to us, which would be even more fun. And I just want to remind everyone, people who have been on that Tender Show regularly know this, all the links and URLs that we're mentioning will be included in the show recording afterwards. I'm putting them into our delicious account as we're speaking. So you'll be able to get access to all of them there. And any news articles I found too, I found the Omaha one. Oh good, excellent. To add to the ones we already had out there. Did you find the Lincoln Journal article? Yes, yep, that's our beautiful, beautiful. Yeah, friend of mine laminated that. That was really nice. You don't see that nice lamination all the time, do you? Not anymore. Did you want me to read a poem? We do want you to read a poem. I was just going to ask you to do that. I thought you never asked. And this is kind of to ask, answer a question that we had a note on. Where do your ideas for poems come from? And literally they can come out of anything, thin air. I read a lot. I get a lot of my ideas from the newspaper of all places because people do say weird things. And that's kind of sticking your mind like it reminds you of something or like science. I really, I have a science background. So I'm very interested in science. So, but anyway, it can come out anywhere.  And I started playing around with words, which is one of the name of one of my programs in the past with humanities. We're playing around with words in this. So this comes out of that. And I have an epigraph from the poet Mary Oliver who says, you never know where a sentence will take you. Morning walk. Before sunrise under the halogen hunter's moon, an autumn morning stretches ahead of me a rhythm. Shy stars over the city, the inky dark, the concrete path on which I pound out duty, conjure up fantasy, those old tensions. In the street, vehicles sounding their singular verb, speed. On the other side at seasons end, the syntax of wheat field, muslin consonants remaining, its vowels of harvest long gone. At times I'd like to stick out my thumb, that potent comma, to risk all for a sentence into the unknown. Who knows where it might lead to those other lives scattering in each direction. But soon enough, a string of nouns pulls me back, keeps me moving on the straight and parallel, leads me home again. Where through my wild yard at first light, the quick red fox bounds. Its fluffy tail, the ultimate dash, the unanswered question. Where gathering blackbirds as if on cubes swirl up sudden, excess ellipses peppering the sky. Wow. Thank you. So that poem literally I started playing around with words that have to do with language. It's just fun. Yeah. You know, you get caught up in it. So you make notes and you play around and you combine it with nature and there you go. Yeah. That was great. Thank you. And that's from Potato Soup. That's a collection of... Nebraska Book Award. Yeah, I was going to say that's a Nebraska Book Award winner for poetry. 2004. 2004. It's from the Backwaters Press. In working with kids, anything surprise you? You've done that before of course, but in your new activities as state poet. I know there was a group of school kids at the event in January and they even presented you a poem. Yes, the School Across the Street. Is that St. Mary's? St. Mary's School. They had one of the classes came to the celebration of the New State Poet and they presented me... Oh, I should have brought that, but it was a wonderful little booklet. Congratulations.  So I'm still waiting for that invitation. Oh. But that was delightful. I was really pleased to see that group there. And I'm always surprised when I give workshops. What I do in my workshops, I focus on process instead of product. And so we'll do spontaneous writing. And the spontaneous writing, even though some students say, oh, that isn't how I write. I don't like to write like that. I write fantasy and I don't do this or one thing or another. They surprise themselves by what they can write out of a writing exercise. So surprise is something we like. Surprise is a good thing. Yes. You're part of a community of some very fine Nebraska writers. How do you see your role as state pool and kind of promoting other Nebraska writers? Right. I think that's important. And one of the things I want to do on my Facebook page is actually create greater community. So every chance I get, I'm trying to put links to other how it's like if there's a... For example, my friends Lucy Adkins and Becky Breed have a publication on writing in communities. That's the title of their publication. And it's just one of independent publishers award, which is a national award, which is just awesome. So I put that on my Facebook page. And it's things like that that we need to celebrate in our state because we are... There's a lot of writers, but we're most of us know each other and we learn from each other. So I think that's really important. And I see my role as a state poet to celebrate these kind of... Oh, for example, I did post the Young Writers Camp at the university this summer. And Omaha has the Fine Lines Young Writers Camp, which is... David Martin from Omaha has been conducting this workshop in Omaha for 15 years. So it's an ongoing, long-time event. Those are the kind of things I want to bring together. So if you have an idea and anyone out there listening to this broadcast has an idea of something that Twila might want to share with that whole writing community in Nebraska, just share that with Twila. And later on in the broadcast, we'll have her email address up so you can share the information. And she'll share it. Yeah, send me a website or a post. Well, it has to be an image or a link. They won't allow you to put word documents up, but I can link to a website or I can... If you're showing that Facebook page right there. This is Twila's Facebook page we're showing right now. You can see she linked to Nebraska Life Magazine, which is a link to a website. And then here's a link to a video about the Young Writers Camp. So it can be... And there's the silver medal winner for... To Lucy and Becky. Yeah. They won it with the IPI award. I think it's great. You're kind of publishing. It's fabulous. Yeah. And so those are the kind of things that we want to get out to more people. And I think social media is the way to go because it can go out kind of quickly. And I get a lot of views on those postings. Yeah. And comments. And comments. Yay. That keeps the community discussion going. Right. Yeah. That's right. So Twila, would you like to read something else for us? Sure. I brought three of my books that are currently in... They're still available. My first three books are not available. They're sold out or whatever, not circulation anymore. Although some libraries have them. I checked to see on WorldCat. And then any of you can do that too. And I know that the Heritage Room, the Jane Pope-Geske Heritage Room of Nebraska Authors at Lincoln City Libraries at Bennett Martin Library, they have them all. Yes. They have all the books. They do. So you can... There are still ways to get them. They're out there. They're libraries. Libraries. And this book is actually available online through UNL Digital Commons. And this is Prairie Talk or Prairie Sweets, I'm sorry. Prairie Sweets. That's kind of an odd picture of it. But what this is is a collaboration between me and poems by me and drawings by Dr. Paul Johnsgard, who's an oriapologist. World renowned. World renowned. And he and I put together a collection and we donated our work to Spring Creek Prairie Audubon Center down by Denton, Nebraska. And so they sell this as a fundraiser in their workshop or in their gift shop. But anyway, it was a fun collaboration because Dr. Johnsgard is an excellent artist. And he had a lot of drawings that he put with my short poems. And then when I ran out of poems, I said, well, what other drawings do you have? They all deal with tallgrass prairie. And so he says, oh, I've got lots of drawings.  So this one I'm going to read is the lightning bug. He had already drawn this lightning bug. But he said, you know, you see lightning bugs at night. And he says, so I made it night. Lots of ink. He was a delight to work with. And this is called. I was going to ask before you read. You mentioned the digital commons. This book is in UNL, Digital Commons. Krista, we'll put that in the deletion. Yeah, I just found it. Yeah, I went looking for it. So yeah, that's the link directly to this online. It will be in the notes afterwards too. And is it that similar in the book? Or is it? I found a PDF. Yeah, it's a PDF of it. Just exactly as that, but just in as a PDF. And I have two of my out of print books are on there too. If you just type my name in. That one's under John's guard, but I have my own page, I guess. Okay, I'll read this poem called lightning bugs. What better show for mortals bursting with rivers of free light playing out above the darkened grass? Night opens the blue folds of the silk. Like stars blinking, they row awake. Countless beetles, their abdomens brimming with luminescence out from under snags and black leaves into the brief and cinnamon air. Over pond and blade in their appetite they bring us fire restoring a spark of salvation to our crumpled lives. These mysterious gatherers, these silent signalers, these copious lightning bugs of childhood delight. I think we all remember the first time they were made a few times in your childhood when we collected them for the mason jars. Oh yeah. Right? I think everyone did that. Pressure. And if you're from California, you come back to Nebraska just to do that. I don't think they have lightning bugs. No, they don't. It's too dry. Yeah, too dry. They do not get that opportunity until they come visit Aunt Mary Jo in Nebraska. That's right. They don't have cardinals either. They are not over on the other side of the mountains, I guess. Isn't that interesting? That is interesting. But you would know that with your background. Yes. You could probably tell us lots about the plants we have here that we're so fortunate to have that they don't have too. Yeah. Plants creep into me writing for some reason. I bet. I bet. You'll have to read us one with the plants creeping in. Actually, I see in the digital comments and I was looking you up there, you said that there's things here about organic farming. Right. That from your other previous slide. Yeah. Right. Right. My background, my education background is in horticulture and sustainable agriculture. So I've had work experience in those. Including a long-term stint at Nebraska Wesleyan University. Have you done any collaborations with Benjamin Rowe? I haven't. I haven't. But you're right. That would be a great time. He's on my radar. Very much. Yeah. He's a great guy. Yeah. Very serious advocate for native plants, which I am too. Let's see, what else are we going to talk about here? Well, of course, one of the things that we wanted to really highlight is the role of the state poet in inspiring an emerging generation of new writers. Right. And the writing workshops, that's one way of doing that. Have you thought of other kinds of ideas about that? Well, when we have, at some point when we have a website where it might become active even, where we would have access to current writers, I'm hoping to do some kind of, call it a webinar.  And to travel for one person to travel to the other end of the state is a long way to it. But if it could be some kind of a media like this where you could tape it, and maybe they could show it when it was convenient for them. I'm interested in that kind of thing. But I want to pursue this other, I'm slowly pursuing it. Let's put it this way, when you work with a lot of other people, it takes time. Sure, yeah. And so I'm starting with this one where we're going to have a pilot project, I hope, of five Nebraska writers from each of the kind of regions in Nebraska. Start with that, and see how that goes. And I'm talking about this all very preliminary at this point, but yeah. That's how things get started. That's right. We start a rumor, maybe. True. I look firmly for that. Put it out there, it'll happen. Yeah, but I think that would really help like libraries, for example, if you would like to bring together, I know at Lexington they were hoping to start, and if you're out there, start a writers group at the library for anyone who wanted to join it. And I think it's a great way to get people into the library. Libraries are so much different than they were in our younger years, our younger years. Right. A lot more than books now. So getting people in their community, creating community, I think is an awesome idea. And where schools have another agenda altogether, maybe they don't have the resources or the time to really pursue that. There might be a writers group at the school, but I'm not sure. After school, probably. In the after school. We are seeing some very exciting things in high schools with this louder than a bomb, how it's slam poetry, and it's taking off like wildfire. I think it's been spread all across the state, and it's a very, it's a performance poetry thing, and young people love it. And there's a ton of energy when you attend one of those events, isn't it? Yeah, it's very exciting. It is very exciting. I think it's a new wave of that kind of poetry, which gets people engaged. And I know there are teachers and librarians in Lincoln that I'm familiar with that are working in this area, lots of great students doing great projects. And the comments, some of the comments are that these students may not have, they kind of came out of their shell or something and they're out there, they're out there. And which is very exciting that the teachers weren't expecting that from their students. Yeah, very cool. Yeah, it's very cool. I like that. And well, so why is poetry important anyway? I've been asked that question, and I had to think about it. Well, one of the questions I got was, well, why is poetry relevant today? We're all about social media. We're Instagram and tweets, and everything has sped up. And poetry makes you slow down and contemplate. So when people go to a poetry reading, they love to be read too, but they may not pick up a book of poetry, but maybe they become engaged that way. And it is a form of slowing down and paying attention. It's a great use of language, in my opinion. It builds writing skills. If you study poetry, write poetry, you have to say the most in the least amount of space. And I think that helps you with your writing skills. It opens people to the world of literature. If you read other poets, there's, you know, poets have been writing for a long time, and I don't think they're going away anytime soon. I really believe that poetry helps you understand other people, especially if you read your poetry to a group, for example, and helps you understand each other. The human experience is all there in poetry. So that's why I think it's relevant. Don Welch talked about that in his presentation at the Nebraska Book Festival recently. That's right. You were there. I was there. Did you have any experiences like you talked about? His was, as a result, a beginner working with a classroom. Right. And he did the Poets in the Schools program through Nebraska Arts Council, which is no longer in effect. But he went to a lot of schools. I love that what he presented recently was that he highlighted like a grade school student, a middle school student, a high school student. And he quoted them and told the stories. And that's another thing poetry can do is tell stories. And so I like it in that respect. But Don Welch, you know, has been an educator for 50 years. Yes. And he has really done a great thing for Nebraska. We writers consider him to be one of the godfathers, the great writers of Nebraska. But yes, he's done a wonderful job. And it was a delight to hear his stories. I mean, they were very humbling stories. And if you're interested in some of those stories, we do have those on the Nebraska Center for the Book Facebook page. We have a little video that Rex took for us. And we put it up on the Facebook page. And it's just got one of these stories that he told during his presentation. It's quite delightful. Yes. So you mentioned writing in a group. Like, for example, say a library wanted to start a writer's group, either for adults or for school-age people, depending on what they think the need is in their community or the interest is. Have you ever been part of a writer's group yourself? How'd that work? Well, I'm in two writers groups right now. There's the Wesleyan Writers Group, which I joined, I'm going to say 30 years ago. Oh. Is that sponsored by the college then? No, it isn't. Yeah, it started 30 years. I can't remember. Wow. It hasn't been quite that long. But almost. Geez. Time flies. Anyway, so it's been going on a long time. And of course, we had one of our great Nebraska poet, Godfather's in there as one of the members was Bill Klefkorn. And he was my first writing teacher. So that was very exciting to me to become a part of that writer's group. And actually after he and Leon Satterfield passed away in 2011, we stopped meeting for a whole year. We didn't think we could go on. But we carried on. And we meet once, well, now we meet once every other month. And the rule is to bring something new that you've written. And it's more than just Wesleyan personnel. I haven't worked there for a long time, but it's loosely associated with Wesleyan. And it's a great way to try out new writing, to bounce something off of other people. That's the other thing, creating community. Try your work out on other people, you know, unless you're Emily Dickinson and want to stick all of your poems in the drawer. Most of us are trying to communicate with others and see how the ideas work in our poems. So building trust is kind of important, because you're going to be reading that work out to those folks, probably, or they're going to read it and talk about it. We're going to discuss it. Although I must say that once you start writing poetry and send your work out, for example, or read it to a group, you have to develop a little bit of a thick skin about your writing. If you're terribly sensitive about something, it's probably not ready for prime time. Too personal at this point. Too personal. The writer's group I'm in is five women, and we call ourselves the Prairie Trout. And yeah, it's just kind of one of those exotic things. And we have a lot of fun. It's a serious writing group, and we're all published out there, so it's more of a working writer's group. And again, you meet regularly, share your work, get feedback. That's right. It's wonderful. The rule there is you bring anything you've written in the last month, but if you don't have anything, that's fine too. It's just more or less we've got some work to share. So if a librarian was thinking about, they might like to start this kind of a group, they would bring together people who are interested by getting the word out that people could come, try and get them comfortable with each other, maybe give them a writing exercise to begin with. And then just start suggesting they bring what they're working on. Right. That's a great way to get started. In fact, if you wanted to try that and have a prompt, or everybody working on the same thing, and it's spontaneous writing, it can generate some very interesting work. And then you do get comfortable. Everybody's working on the same thing, everybody reads what they write. It helps you kind of get comfortable, like you said. The trust starts to build. So in a young person's writer's group, for example, they may not want their parents in it, for example. Or it's in a small town, everybody knows everybody. But yeah, that's a way to get started, and then it can build from there. You can say, well, if somebody wants to say, well, I'm working on this other thing that I'd kind of like to get your ideas on. Sometimes these things evolve, and maybe that's the best way, just have it evolve organically. Maybe it'll just be a drop-in thing. Well, not everybody, the same group is there every week. That might work, too. So is there a source for writing exercises? This would be something you could have on your website once you get going, and people could share their responses to it. But at this point, say a librarian's trying to start something like this. Is there a good source for them? Yeah, poets and writers who get on their websites, they will send out every week writing prompts for both poetry and fiction and nonfiction. And they're very well known, and they have a magazine, poets and writers, but their online sources are really fabulous. I mean, they have well-known poets or profile, and you can look up a poem of Ted Coosers, for example, on poets and writers, and they'll have several of his poems. So another writing exercise I highly recommend is to read a poem, any poem, and then respond to it, answer it, refute it, write your own, use the title, write your own poem underneath it, use the language out of that poem, an idea in the poem, a notion or an attitude, make your own poem. It's the easiest writing exercise on earth. So if you want to just start with somebody's poem and say it's one out of one of my books, then just write your own from it. Oh, that would be fun. Another fun thing to do in an interactive website, is you can suggest one and have people start giving you theirs. You can do that on Facebook, couldn't you? You could. You could. And so I often will read a poem and then I'll, in a writing group or in a workshop or something. And I'll say, okay, now, what would you write? Use your experience here or substitute your own language, or where will this go? That was one of the things I always thought about Twitter, is that I don't understand why it hasn't evolved into something that poets use to communicate with each other in poetry. Because 140 characters. It forces you to use the right words if you spend time on it. If you just dash something off, click, click, click, click, click, click, but if you did, it would be kind of a fun way for poets to communicate with each other. Right, exactly. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug. That's a big difference. The right words. The poets are all about the right words. Cool. Your book, Dirt Size, is one of my favorites. Thank you. You collaborated with Linda Hesse from South Dakota. How did that come about? The two of you worked together. Yeah. Okay, so Linda Hesse, she's Swedish, so it's Havelström. She's a rancher-writer from western South Dakota, southwestern, right outside the Black Hills, on the plains. Beautiful area. I met her at Nebraska Muslims. She came there as a speaker. We hit it off. We had the same kind of farm ranch background, the rural background. We had the same kind of sensibilities. She's mostly a prose writer, but she's always written poetry. She's actually published a book or two of poetry, but she makes her living as a writer, basically. She has this beautiful ranch, two houses on the ranch, and one is the original ranch house. Wow. That's where she conducts writing retreats for women. You can get on windbreakhouse.com. Yeah. And you can negotiate with her to stay there, and she will help you with your writing. So the photo on the cover of the book? That is from her ranch. Oh, I want to help you get that close. My husband took this photo when we were up there one time, but it reminded me so much of the hills in northeast Nebraska where I grew up on the farm. I'm going to try and get as close as I can to that. I'll try to hold it steady. Because it is so beautiful. Thank you. And the cover? Here, I'm going to hold it like this. There we go. You can just see that just forever, sky, land. And it kind of fades to denim on the back, which that was very deliberate. The artist did a great job. But anyway, yes. And so this book is a collection, 50 of her poems, Linda's, and 50 of mine. So it's really almost like two books in one. And it wasn't a collaboration in the sense that we negotiated which poems or wrote poems together or traded back and forth. It's just that we trusted each other to put some of our poems together on that kind of loose ranch and farm theme. But of course there's so much more than just that. It's a, I guess, compilation of a lot of different attitudes here. And if you wanted, I'd read a poem out of here. Let's do it. This was called Work. And the epigraph comes from NPR News, which says, the honey bee can fly nearly five billion miles on one gallon of honey. I mean, talk about where do poems come from. I heard that on NPR News, and I'm going, there's a poem in there. So this is called Work. On spring days, you could hear it, buzzing cloud back and forth between fence row and hives. Over the regosa roses and the field, 40 acres of clover with its billions of tiny blues. My father grinned as he opened a top, brushed aside the bodies, pried out a frame oozing with sweetness. My hands on the extractor handle sticky with the great efficiency and substance of their labor. Worker bees, like my farmer father, combed those fields for a harvest of gold. Some years crop failure and bad luck, weather affected supply and yield. All that labor translated into a meager existence, a tightening of the belts. Worker bees kick out the drones to protect their winter food. Back then, all we needed was whatever we raised, planted, butchered, and preserved. There were no guarantees. We took care of the land. The land took care of us. All honey bees need is pollen and nectar, an unspoiled spring-fed creek, the occasional gentle hand to encourage them on. Extremely timely and all we know about bees right now, isn't it? That's right, exactly right. Everything in your life, I think, I believe, is food for poetry. When I heard the NPR news, the little tidbit there, I thought, okay, I know a poem. I could write about my dad keeping bees. That experience, you know, is now beekeepers are so much different. Everything is kind of industrialized. Hopefully, but the smaller farmers, the more sustainable farms are keeping bees on their land, which we need bees. And that, again, is another Nebraska Book Award poetry. It is. 2012. Is that right? 2012. The book was published in 2012, I believe. That's right. So anyway, it's fun, and this was a fun project put together so she invented every little thing that we're just so compatible. It was a lot of fun. I've actually collaborated with artists, art books, very limited production art books. Karen Koontz, the printmaker from UNL. She now has a studio called Consolation Studio, the 21st and O in Lincoln. And she is a world-famous printmaker. It's just very exciting we did. She did a wonderful print in Philadelphia when she was in residence there, and then she asked me for a poem, so that was a great collaboration. That's really cool. So I recommend another exercise is to go to an art museum and find something that speaks to you. There's a story in a painting or a sculpture or whatever. John Janavy, who teaches, who is retired from the university, he taught biology, would regularly have his biology one-on-one students go to Sheldon Art Gallery, our museum, and just look at the paintings and write something. There's some kind of nature going on in some of these poems, and we just wanted them to write about it, which I thought was awesome. Writers can get inspiration from so many places. The Quilt Museum would be a great one to go to. A lot of communities have art museums, like Mona out at Carney. Museum of Nebraska Art, that would be a great place for a writer's group to meet. It would, yes. That would be a wonderful place. Or to take a field trip from the Carney Library. It's not that far. It's not that far. That's right. So, there's poetry everywhere. Well, and I guess we just want to really encourage our listeners to think about programs that they might want to sponsor, that Tyler would be interested in hearing about, possibly be able to do. I wanted to point out that if you go to the Nebraska Arts Council website, that this is kind of a long URL, but you can find it here. This is where they have the Twyla Hansen Program. Any ideas? Poetry, reading, and discussion. And then Twyla actually reads her original and accessible poems and discusses how the landscape of the Great Plains has inspired, influenced, and shaped her writing. And this is where you would find more about that particular program. And then the next address, Humanities Nebraska's address. This is the Humanities Nebraska Program. And the name of the program is for the love of words, poetry, prose, and the creative writing process. And again, this is a writing workshop. It's a writing workshop that focuses on the creative process for both poetry and short prose. So these are the locations for more information on these things. And again, you don't have to jot these down. This will all be on our website where we keep this recorded archive for you. And then we have Christine Walsh, who's the assistant director at the Carney Public Library. Hi, Christine. Thanks for the plugs for Mona and the Carney Public Library. So we'll have links to those included as well. And then, Twyla, you've got some things coming up. I do. I have a few things on the books right now. I'm going to go into September. I'm doing, I'm presenting at the senior college, which they do a little different than UNL. UNL has an OLLI program and I presented there this earlier this last month. But I'm going out there to, they have like senior college, which is like, I think it's like a month or a semester long. Oh, really? Is it residential or most of the people local? I think most of the people are local. But anyway, so I'm giving a presentation with Dr. Charles Peake out there and an evening reading. I'm sure it's at the college and that's September 23rd. And then in September 27th, I'm going to the adult conference of the Plum Creek Literacy Festival. That's ensured. And so I'm going to be giving a workshop out there. And I've also been contacted by the Nebraska Press Women Association. I think I'll be going to York for a presentation there. I'm not sure that's open to the public, but there's different things that come up and if they're public, I will post them on my Facebook page. Oh, good. That's the best place to stay in touch. And so you can get on to the Facebook page and you can like it, which means you will follow and get the postings. So that's a great way to stay in touch. Or you can contact me by email or by phone. Just to remind you, there are some other these articles that are available that you might want to learn more about what's going on with Twyla. But again, I do think that the best connection is your Facebook page right now. It is. And on Facebook you can also send a message privately, directly to me and that's happened quite a few times. And then I can give them my Gmail account if they have more sensitive questions or they can even call me if they need to. So just a reminder, we are going to stay on for a little bit longer. So if anybody's got any questions, we want to be sure and get to them. You can type them into the chat box on the right hand side of your screen. Or if you have a microphone, you can just ask us to unmute your microphone and we'll actually talk to you person to person. So do you want me to close with a poem? I do want you to close with a poem. And you can close with more than one if you want to. We had asked the question earlier about how you might incorporate some of your horticultural background. Obviously the bees, that if there's anything else you want to talk about plants and their ability to inspire poetry. Well, I do have one of these called lettuce. Lettuce. Not the most romantic of plants. Well, you know, the biggest challenge for a writer is to take a very common topic. Like I've written a poem about potatoes. So it was a call actually a challenge, but take the most common thing and what can you possibly write about it. That's new. That's a great challenge for writers. Writers love challenges. Okay, so this is called lettuce. A luxury once reserved for nobility, so esteemed any Greek slave caught eating it was given 30 lashes. The emperor, Augustus, regularly ate it at the end of a meal. Later, Domitian would prefer it as an appetizer. Today, early, step out to your garden and simply harvest. Gathering proof that nature is benign and generous. It's of the genus Lactuca meaning milk. When cut, losing milk produces a later mild cousin to the wild prickly native. Look under the leafy canopy where gnats and mosquitoes rest where soil splatters upward from late night showers. The plants rise delicate and tender from their composted beds, greens, reds, sweet, buttery, smooth, broad, frilly. The leaf lettuce is to taste early summer. It's pale colors, it's temperatures, the earth, the air, the temporary rain. So that is a horticulture poem against that. Thank you. It makes you wonder how come lettuce would be a delicacy I know because of the taste, but it grows so easily. It's like so many foods when it was first discovered as a food. It was unknown. It's like the tomato which is a member of the deadly nightshade family. So you don't really want to eat the nightshade plant. And they thought it was poison. They were afraid, so they fed it to probably the people that worked for them first. It's like a servant class the tasters. Here, taste this. You don't die, but I'm going to eat it. So it's interesting. I'm interested in history and how things are the story behind the story. That makes for good poetry. Beautiful. Want to read a final poem for us? We've got time. I know it doesn't have to be final. But at least for this hour. Closing. The right word. The right word. This one is a short poem comes out of an experience I had for a few years as a writer in residence going down the Oregon Trail with teachers out of Hastings College and at the end we would climb the mountain in Wyoming. So this is the title of this is On Medicine Vote Peak Wyoming and the epigraph says USGS Marker 12,013 feet. On a clear day you can see forever almost south to jagged peaks in Colorado west and north to more Rockies and basins east to the Laramie range and beyond with a slow descent on to the plains the ground below frost lines spread out like a geological feast igneous sedimentary metamorphic underlying rocks revealing some of Earth's least known stories the horizon plain tricks on your perceptions it's witchery of light and shadow glacial carved lakes snow fields and quartzite the wind steady in your face you in thin air heavy weighing heavy concepts of time and nature and what came before and what will after so you simply take it in crunch and salt and all your brain can grasp the grin of your body climbing bringing you almost two years. Thank you. Thanks for asking me. It's fun. We've been talking with the Nebraska State Poet and I guess one of the things we want to encourage everybody to do is to think about how poetry fits in with the programming and the activities that you're involved in and to contact Twyla if you have some ideas. Thank you. Anything else for the good of the group? Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you everyone. Thank you for being here with us and joining us this morning. This is great and Rod and Mary Joe for hosting and thank you everyone for attending. The show has been recorded as usual and I think I captured all the different URLs and articles and websites that were mentioned so they will be included in the show notes as well afterwards. There we go. We'll be back with another episode of Encompass Live and when the recording is available probably later this afternoon we'll let you know. It will be right here. Yes, it will be here. Right below here is where we have our archived Encompass Live sessions on our websites. You can go there for all of our recordings from previous shows. That will wrap it up for this morning. I hope you'll sign up and join us next week and our topic is doing smart social media. We'll find out. Well, there's a lot of things out there and people have been using it for a long time. You mentioned Twitter and we've been showing off to Facebook but what do you count when you really do them well? Do you need to think about it ahead of time? Don't just jump in head first and don't know what you're doing. Maurice Coleman who is, he hosts the TS4Training podcast. He's on the ALA Learning Roundtable and he's a training, he's also a mover and shaker and he's also the training, what's his title here, technical trainer at Hartford County Public Library in Maryland and he goes around in the country doing these kinds of trainings and he's going to be on the line with us to tell us how to do our social media really well and get things out there. You're mentioning that you use it and you think it's a great way to get people connected in doing things and so if you've been doing it maybe and you want to know a little more, if you can do it better or you've just been thinking about it and your library Mo will be with us to tell us all about that next week. Cool, that sounds great. And if you are on Facebook, yes, Encompass Live is on Facebook too. So you can go ahead and like our Facebook page there. We do post notices of when new sessions are coming. I do reminders for the session that was just starting up this morning. I had a little post and when our recordings are available, I post in here as well. So that you can know when it's actually ready on our website. And then that, that will wrap it up for this morning. Thank you very much for attending and we'll see you next time. Thank you, Kristen. Bye bye. Bye everyone. Bye bye.


This time we're going to be building a data path for a load word instruction. So a load word instruction wants to go fetch some data out of memory and store that back into a register. So there's a few things that are going to happen here. I will start with my instruction memory because this will tell me what my base address is, what the offset from that base address is, as well as where the destination is, where I should store my data. Now I will need to get the base address out of a register, so I'll go ahead and add my registers. That will give me a source and it will also give me a destination. Next I need to add the base address to my offset, which means I'll need an ALU and I can pass my base address into my ALU and the offset comes out of the instruction itself. Now I've calculated my target address and I need to go fetch that data out of memory. So I need a data memory now and my ALU contains the location of the piece of data that I want. So I can go over to memory, I can fetch that piece of data and then I can send it back to the registers. But as with the previous two examples, I don't just want to run one load word instruction, I'd like to be able to run lots of them. So I'm going to put in a program counter to index my instruction memory and then we're going to make sure that we can update this program counter. So each time through my loop I'll add four to my program counter and that will allow me to get the next instruction out of instruction memory. Then for each load word instruction I get, I get a base address and an offset. I pass both of those to my ALU to calculate my target address. I use that to go fetch some piece of data out of data memory and then I store that back to the selected register. And that's it.


John Walsh and the crew of America's Most Wanted visited Coast Guard Center Key West February 24th to film an episode of the show. I spoke with John Walsh about the partnership between the Coast Guard and America's Most Wanted and this is what he had to say. We've been on for 21 years and caught over a thousand fugitives in 31 countries and we partnered up with the Coast Guard 21 years ago. I've done many, many shows with the Coast Guard. They're a tremendous partner because they do a lot of things that I don't think the public knows about. I think the public has this misconception that when a boater gets in trouble, the Coast Guard is going to search for more or find them. The Coast Guard does a million other things. Looking for terrorists, drug smugglers, chasing down human traffickers. Coast Guard is a dangerous, tough job and they've been great partners with us for 21 years. I think that the men and women of the Coast Guard do an incredible job of keeping America safe. They really are part of that task force that protects our borders and I like the average American since thank you. Thank you for your sacrifice, being away from your home, all the dangerous, dangerous things you do. Your dedication to America is a lot safer because of the Coast Guard. It's been one of the most exciting things that I've done in 21 years is to ride on Coast Guard ships, to work with the Coast Guard, to go in your helicopters, to go in your interdiction boats. It gives me a huge perspective of how dangerous the job is. And today I got to stand on this crazy wild submersible here and look at what these drug lords do to get drugs into this country and what you guys, the men and women of the Coast Guard, do to make America safer. It's really kind of a humbling experience riding with the Coast Guard. Go Coast Guard.


When you're looking at heat exchanger problems, quite often it's beneficial to write out the temperature distribution as a function of position within the heat exchanger and acknowledging there are different types of configurations that we have. Quite often this is assuming that we have a double pipe type configuration, but it does help the student of heat transfer get an idea in terms of what is happening within the heat exchanger. So we're going to sketch out a couple, one with parallel flow and then the other with counter flow and take a look at what is happening to the temperatures as the fluid goes through those units. So what we have here is a schematic showing the case of parallel flow and we have a couple of different temperatures on here and first of all you'll notice the inlet to the heat exchanger is over here and we have our hot fluid coming in and a cold fluid coming in and typically what we'll do is we will label this t-hot in and this t-cold in and then this will be t-hot out and t-cold out and we will also have different temperature differentials one here and sometimes we will call that delta t at the beginning of the heat exchanger and then this delta t over here is delta t at location l. So that is the case of parallel flow with a parallel heat exchanger. Now let's take a look at what happens with counter flow. Now when we have a counter flow heat exchanger a couple of things that you will notice. First of all if you look at the cold fluid so it's coming in over here it can actually exit the heat exchanger at a temperature that is higher than the exit temperature of the hot fluid. So that is one thing when you have counter flow and if we look back on parallel flow that is not possible. The temperature of the fluid exiting for the cold stream is never going to rise above the temperature exiting for the hot stream. If you have a heat exchanger of infinite area they will come to the same temperature you'll get thermal equilibrium you never have a heat exchanger that way but theoretically you could think of it. However when we look at counter flow we actually can have the cold fluid going to a higher temperature than the hot fluid exiting and again we have temperature labels and nomenclatures. So for this one I would call this one t hot in and this would be t hot out and then this would be t cold in and t cold out and so that's a nomenclature that you'll see up here when I'm solving problems in an upcoming lecture and again we have temperature differentials here this would be delta t at zero and this here would be delta t at l. So those are cases of parallel flow counter flow. There are two other conditions that we can have when we're looking at the temperature distribution and those pertain to whether or not we have the fluid going through a phase change. So let's take a look at those two right now. So the first unit that we're going to look at this is a condensing unit and you recall from earlier lectures we've looked at the process of condensing and what is happening here is our cold fluid stream is entering so that would be t cold in t cold out and as our other fluid is going through a phase change process the cold fluid is heating up and consequently again we can have so and what you'll notice is t hot in t hot out could be an either one but it's not going to change because we're going through a phase change whenever we go through a phase change the temperature is constant so that's what a condensing unit would look like and I guess this could also be t hot in and that could be t hot in as well so it could be either way what we have here this is our delta t at zero and then this here is our delta t at l so that's a condensing unit and then finally the last one that we'll look at for the temperature distribution is that when we have boiling and so we can see when we have boiling what is happening is we have a fluid and it's losing energy so that would be t hot in t hot out and it is losing energy which is causing the phase change of the other fluid stream and so that would be at the saturation temperature I'll just do t sat but that would be the cold fluid stream in or out and what do we have we have temperature differentials here just like before so those are temperature diagrams sometimes it helps to draw them out I don't always do it because after solving a lot of these problems you start to just kind of you get a little sloppy I guess you could say but I will write them out when I solve the problems in the lectures okay so those are different temperature diagrams again they're helpful when you're trying to figure out what's going on in a heat exchanger and I do realize that when you get to the different types of arrangements like shell and tube heat exchangers or if you have aerial cooling units cross flow exchangers things can be a little bit more complex but still these diagrams do kind of give you some help in terms of understanding how the temperatures are with respect to one another for what we call the hot fluid and the cold fluid as well as the inlet and the exit temperatures for both of those fluid streams so those are temperature distributions what we're going to do in the next segment we're going to take a look at the overall heat transfer coefficient which is quite often used in heat exchangers and we will use it later on when we do the NTU analysis effectiveness NTU analysis but that will be what we'll be covering in the next segment


the State of Clean Energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewen. And our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, which is a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, of which I am a part of. So today I'm very happy to welcome Toby Kincaid, who is a thinker. And because he's a thinker, he's also an inventor, an author, and most recently the publisher of Green Hydrogen Today magazine and, most important, my friend for over 30 years. So Aloha and welcome to the show, Toby. Aloha, Commander. Good to be with you. So we want to tap into the brain trust today and talk a little bit about water and its role in our energy system. And it's pretty significant. And I think because of your thinker status, we're taking a slightly different angle on water. Everybody knows what water is. But they might not know how it's used in the energy system. And I think we have a unique take on it. So let's roll it. Let's start with the first slide. Let's discuss all the ways that water is connected to our energy system. So I'm going to let you lead off, Toby. And if I think of anything, I'll jump in and ask another question. Hi, hi. Well, water is life. You can't have life without water. It's universal and obviously vital. And through humanity, through our civilization, we've been very intimate with water. Water has been key to everything that we do. Of course, from agriculture, it waters our crops. But from an energy standpoint, the history of water and its relationship with human beings and our relationship with water is incredible. So in the slide, I tried to capture some of the key ways that we use water. And it goes way back. The first evidence of water wheels, which is using moving water, that kinetic energy, dates back to 10,000 BC. So we're in the Neolithic. And the ancient Chinese, there's some evidence in Persia, but the Chinese particularly, we're using this thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago. And that's been an amazing legacy that we've brought all the way to the modern times. And another way that we use water is we boil water. And we've been boiling water as a steam engine for, well, 300 years. But what's interesting is James Watt, circa 1750, if you look at number two there, boiling water, he realized, hey, instead of heating up and cooling down the same cylinder, why not have a place that's always hot? That's the boiler. And another place that's always cold, that's the condenser. And so he realized, hey, you can circulate water, water would go into the boiler, turn to steam, it expands, it does work, it pushes a piston or turns a turbine. And then what comes out of it is still steam.  So what James Watt figured out is, hey, we need a condenser here so we can take the water, that steam and condense it back down into liquid water. And then that can be fed back into the boiler and we have this site. So how does that condenser work, Toby? Well, there's a couple of styles. There's a single use and double use. But the thing is, we've been doing this now for, well, as I say, nearly 300 years. And the use of water is they normally just pour it over the condenser, which the steam is going through. And then that heat is absorbed by that water. And then the steam will relax down back into water internally. So, but it's just the extraordinary amount of water. And I know that we're going to be talking about in the United States, we use something like 300 billion gallons of water a day, a lot of water. But when it comes to a percentage, I'm sorry. I think you said that was like 41% of the water. Well, he asked now of all that water, how do we use it? Well, you would think agriculture would be kind of the largest demand. It takes only 2% of all the water to run our livestock and watering our crops. But there's actually a single item that's even large. 44% of all the water used in the United States does one thing. It cools thermal power plants. And that's kind of staggering, actually. That's a lot of water. Oh, and I know you wanted to talk about what's going on in the world with water. So, you know, India is having a drought, China is having a drought. There's floods going on in, of course, Mississippi. And I'll turn it over to you to keep going on that theme because water is a disaster at the moment for most humans. And then we better fix it. Yeah. So, I heard the other day that the rivers and streams in Europe are getting so hot, they can't use them for cooling these thermal plants because the delta T, the difference in the temperature is not enough to make, you know, those condensers condense efficiently. So, it's a real problem, apart from the fact that some of the rivers are drying up and we've seen in our Southwest here in the U.S. and Arizona and Nevada, you know, some of our lakes and streams and rivers are actually drying up. So, it's a heck of a deal whereas other states have more water than they really want. At the moment, yeah, Mississippi particularly. But it's amazing. Like you say, you know, the Colorado River, 40 million people depend on that river for water and you have Lake Powell in the upper basin and you have Lake Mead in the lower basin and Lake Mead is like something like 40 feet above Deadpool. And when you reach Deadpool, it's exactly what it sounds like. You can't move water, you can't make electricity, you can't irrigate. It becomes a Deadpool. And so, water is vital, of course, in our modern life. So, you know, another way that we use water is number three, which is kind of a 20th century idea. And this is where most of the utility storage happens, is where they pump water from a lower reservoir up to a higher reservoir and then when you need it, let it run down through a penstock or a pipe and turn a turbine. So, we've used moving water. That's kinetic energy. We've been boiling water. That's number two. Number three is kind of using potential energy as we pump that water up and then let it move down again. But now there's an exciting fourth way to use water. There it is. This is my favorite subject in the world because of what it can bring to the world or what it could mean. And so, in the fourth way that we use water, this is what I call water dissociation. And what we're going to do is in number four, if it's a little crowded, but you'll see that we use an electrolyzer and a fuel cell in the same power block, which is the same kind of cement pad where you put all your power conditioning equipment. And in this way, we actually can create a hydrogen battery. Now, that's two words you never hear together in the same sentence talking about the same thing. But in this case, it becomes a water, a hydrogen battery, because we're taking water. We're now going to add energy through an electrolyzer and split the water into hydrogen and oxygen. You keep them separate so that you store that energy. And then when you want energy, they come back together in the fuel cell. They release that energy and they return back to water. So you see in this kind of scratching, this is patent pending US and international. It's being developed now by a company in Portland called EV4, which owns EV Global. They bring an enormous expertise. The chief engineer, Hans Vandermeer, brilliant, very capable. But he's now developing this power block so that we can put it to use. But it's an amazing kind of 21st century take that we can use water more or less like an energy spring. We stretch it out when we separate it into oxygen and hydrogen, and we snap it back together in a fuel cell, creating electricity and water again. So water is your starting point and water is your finishing point. Yes, the perfect cycle. So you're not, and the point is you're not throwing that water away.  It's not like, what did you say, 33 billion gallons? Well, it's, well, we use 300 billion a day in total for the country, but you could see 44% of that is 160 billion gallons a day to cool down power plants. And that water is wasted. It gets evaporated. It gets contaminated. It's an enormous amount of water worldwide. Now we've been doing, we've been using steam engines for 300 years, and it's kind of time to maybe see if we could find a better way. And when we look at the life cycle or the round trip between going from water into the electrolyzer and out again to the fuel cell producing electricity and then back to water, that has a higher round trip efficiency than a steam engine. And so that would be a better way. So for example, to your point, a nuclear power plant of one gigawatt drinks 12 million gallons of water an hour if it's a single use. Sometimes they have some some recycling strategies, but often it's a single use. 12 million gallons an hour for a gigawatt. That's a lot of power, but that's a lot of water. And so if we go to this 21st century water-based electrochemical engine, then we don't have a thermal engine and we don't need to use all that water to cool down the condenser on steam engines, which is centuries old. It may have been viable in 1850, 1870, 1890, maybe even a good idea in the 1920s perhaps, but now in our modern world, no, we have to be a little more sensible with that. Let's talk about weight then range. So we're not talking about the weight we all put on during COVID. Why don't you explain the slide there? Sure. Last time we spoke we talked about the round trip efficiency or system efficiency in using renewable to power battery electric vehicles versus using renewable to make clean hydrogen and use that as the battery and then either dispense it directly when you want to have a fuel cell vehicle or use it to run a fuel cell to run the DC fast charge. So when we look at this next slide, what we're kind of looking at is kind of a graph that kind of tells the tale, I think. And that is when you want to increase range on a battery electric car. The only thing you could really do is, well, add batteries. Batteries are heavy. You know, lithium ions, very light, but the 85 kilowatt hour battery is about a thousand pounds. So what we see here in this graph is if you want to extend range, the battery has no choice but to add more battery, which means more weight. And by the way, when you charge a battery, they say please go from 20 percent at the discharge all the way up to 80 percent. So that gives you about 60 percent of the battery to use. And the other 40 percent is really there to support the 60 percent you are using. So if you have to keep adding batteries, this has a profound effect on system efficiency. But also you just have very heavy vehicles. It's kind of dead weight. And that's important because in a vehicle, 60 percent of the work done is to move the air out of the way. So the aerodynamics are obviously important. But the second biggest factor is rolling resistance. And that's a function of weight. You know, a dump truck doesn't roll very far unpowered. A bicycle, you'll be able to roll quite a bit away. So it's that rolling resistance. That's why when you compare it with a fuel cell, you know, a big truck, we're adding seven kilograms, maybe the tank itself. You can't even measure the difference in weight.  And I just wanted to mention that because it makes a big difference. So if you see on the left under battery, I drew a little car on a little light truck and maybe you could do some other vehicles in a demonstrative way. But in a practical sense, when we go to a fuel cell like a vehicle, you can run anything. Cars, trucks, buses, vans, trains, planes, trains and automobiles. We can run any kind of machine with the same station. That's what I really admire in what you're doing on the big island. Using solar energy to make green electrons. You then run the electrolyzer making green molecules. And you have a public transit from sunlight and water. I think the whole world could learn something from that. So inside, I'm just trying to remind everyone on the left hand column, the left side, that's the 20th century. We have toxins spewing out everything that we do. We have it when we dig, when we frack, when we strip mine, everything that we're doing with the oil wells and the pipelines and railroads and all of the processes that are constantly emitting all of these toxins. So in the middle of the sketch, you see the earth and there's humanity saying hello. And to the right of him is, or her, is the sun, solar energy, wind, wind energy and water. And just with those elements, just with those things, we can bring it into this hydrogen battery, this universal standardized power block, which fits in between renewable energy and humans. This renewable energy is kind of intermittent, changes all the time. But human beings, we're on demand. If we want something, we turn the switch on like this on, we push the accelerator, the car goes forward. We're very much on demand kind of species, kind of civilization. So there has to be something in between that variability and our constant and on demand needs. And that is storage. And the hydrogen battery really seems to be the best storage around because it has 100 times the specific energy density, that's by weight, 100 times over lithium ion. Now, lithium ion is a pretty good power density. You can short them, the battery across the motor and you get great traction. It's really fun, great. But the energy density in lithium ion is just not enough to run these large machines or long ranges that we need. So what's kind of need about this universal hydrogen battery is now you can provide both. So if you used to be kind of a little bit of a war against the two sides because they're arguing, whereas the batteries don't have enough materials to do it. So I think the fuel cell argument has a point. But now with this charging center, you can have both. So it's really kind of a universal platform. So I just saw a news report today that the governor of California is telling people not to charge their battery electric vehicles. So because they're expecting a heat wave and that the draw of electricity to keep air conditioners going is going to overload the grid and they can't afford to have the battery electric vehicles plugged in. Of course, we don't have that problem with your universal station because we can still charge battery electric vehicles. I'm not knocking battery electric vehicles, by the way, because fuel cell electric cars have batteries in them and they have their place. And in some applications, battery electric vehicle might make a lot of sense. But what I like about your universal charging station is you can either fuel vehicles, fuel cell electric vehicles, or you can charge them using the same system. So it's and it's all has to do thanks to water that you can drag the hydrogen or the water use it for a useful purpose. And then it reverts back to water again. The perfect cycle. So the future of energy. So again, this kind of just puts it into me a very straightforward manner. We're starting with it's just one, two, three, we're going to start with solar wind and water. That's going to so that E with the little negative sign that's electricity and water that goes into this power block. The water is separated into hydrogen oxygen. The oxygen is typically vented. You could keep it if you're a fish farmer or a welder or a hospital, that'd be fine. But just like in your system, the hydrogen comes out of the electrolyzer usually comes out a little bit wet. So it goes through a desiccant to dry it. Then it goes through a filter to remove everything else. And once you have pure hydrogen, it's very safe to work with, then you compress it and put it in the tank. Now, what's coming out of this hydrogen battery is electricity through the fuel cell. If you want it on demand or and or hydrogen fuel, if that's what you wish for your construction equipment or mining equipment or agricultural equipment. And so what we see with just these two outputs, electricity and hydrogen fuel, you can power everything we do in our modern world. And in that graph at the very top, but the on the right hand side, you'll see kind of residential commercial industrial loads. So we can do a built environment that HVAC, heating ventilating air conditioning, we can certainly power those, we can power every kind of vehicle type from light duty to medium duty to heavy duty, the garbage trucks that you talk about and bringing your municipality up to speed with converting to fuel cells. That's exactly in line. That's just what we should do. And then at the bottom of that chart, you'll see kind of the big kind of gorillas in the room. We don't really talk about much. And that is the pillars of civilization, which are steel, cement, ammonia. You know, we have almost 8 billion people. Unfortunately, I'm not a big fan of fertilizer because I'd like to see organic, but it doesn't matter what I'm a fan of. We're talking about the survival of millions of people here. So we make a lot of fertilizer, we need fertilizer. I wish that we would be a little more sophisticated in the micro nutrients that are required by plants. So we kind of scorch it with this kind of fertilizer. But nevertheless, we're talking about a lot of people's lives. So those are the big heavy lifting things that we do as a civilization and that we have done for three centuries burning carbon. We don't need it. Once again, it's water that allows us to do this. Amazing. Yeah. That's kind of the angle we're following on this show. It's brilliant. Water is, well, it's us. It's life. And right now, we're not managing water very well.  So for those out there who are advocating for nuclear energy, a lot of people saying bring nuclear back, I'd say, wait, wait, wait, you know, it's the most expensive. That's kind of a problem. There's a lot of cement. That's a lot of CO2. That's a problem. But at the end of the day, folks, you've got to get past the steam engine. The past is the steam engine, not the future. So all that water that it drinks is why we need to move on to better technology. And what's funny about this is that the electrolyzers and fuel cells have been known for about 200 years. And there have been moments when history could have embraced this, but there's so much money to be made with a hole in the ground giving you something that you sell to everybody that it's been pushed away and pushed away and pushed away. And so now finally, I think the world is really, everything has kind of come to the right place. We have pioneers like you who have demonstrated how you can take sunlight and water and make public transit. That's pretty incredible. And that's what we need to be applying because that's what's going to allow our children's children to survive. Because right now the world is clearly becoming unlivable. The heat waves are extraordinary. Last year in Portland, we had the driest April ever recorded. And then this April was the wettest ever recorded. Back to back. Two years. That's crazy. That's the mayor of Crazy Town. Let's talk about toxicity and non-toxicity. Once again, the theme is, you know, well, I'll let you talk about it. Well, the theme is water and how we're going to keep using fresh water. And so what you have here on the left is our world. It's the oil world that's supposed to be a mountain under the oil rig that's been chopped off and there's a dump truck taking a coal down and it gets put on a train. And then they take it to a remote far away place, ideally. And then they burn it. And you burn it to heat that water up. And then as we described our old friend, the boiler and the condenser. And then you'll see in that drawing, there's a river of water that you need to cool down that condenser basically. And we do all of that so that we can put electricity in a wire and bring it to your home on the right hand side. We throw the water away. Well, I guess some of it ends up, if it does end up actually in a river, it can be used for agriculture for the downstream. It can, but there's problems. You know, when you put it back into a river or a stream, it's hot. So it affects the critters and the fish that are sensitive to temperature. Yeah. So there's really a kind of a downside all the way around. Let's just leave the water being water instead of wasting it. And most of it gets evaporated and it's just thousands, thousands, thousands of gallons an hour just being run away. So on this picture, you see in the upper part, that's the way of the world. This is what we do. And the idea of burning fuel and spewing toxins and then using all this water to cool it. Oh boy, this, this is not, well, it's not sensible. We can't go on doing this. And on the bottom, we have a contrast because now you start with solar, wind and water like we've been talking about. You put it in this universal power block and then you have electricity for the house or hydrogen fuel that you could use for a variety of purposes. So when you compare the two, the idea is just, you know, wow. And I'm just trying to get everyone to, I hope, see that this is just no future in it and we should really get on this with the utmost dispatch. Well, I think people aren't waking up. I mean, somebody when I first came to HMEI a long time ago now said, what's it going to take to get hydrogen?  Otherwise, you know, people are really comfortable. They get used to it and they accept it. But we're seeing such radical movements now in our energy system that, you know, a lot of people say, well, we're waking up, you know, to what the issue is. And of course, the war in Ukraine and the cutting off of Russian gas, I mean, that's smoking people up about the security of supply. We talk about that in Hawaii all the time about the fact what happens when the oil tankers don't show up, you know. And now they're showing up with much more expensive oil. So what are we doing? We're going to bump up and we're cutting out coal. So our electrical prices, our costs are going to go up by at least 7%. So far, advertised as 7%, but maybe more. So yeah, now we're starting to feel the pain. And hopefully, that'll motivate people to do something about it. And we have a solution. You know, it's not like we're helpless and the sky is falling. We just have to do it. And we have that technology here in Hawaii, thanks to the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, and the people that supported it. And thanks to leadership, like on the Big Island in particular, our mayor over there, who is really promoting public transportation and converting that over to a hydrogen system. In fact, they just won an award of $23 million from the Federal Transit Administration to purchase six fuel cell electric buses, full-size buses, 40-footers, carry 40 passenger buses. And so there you go. We're on the way. We're on the roll. Riley Sado is looking at the landfill as potential energy to make hydrogen so we can use our waste-to-hydrogen plant. So we have those solutions. And we just have to like do it and give it the right priority in kinds of things we pay money for. So I've had my little rant. So let's talk a little bit more about your universal station, charging station, but not too much because we've heard a lot about it already. This last slide is just a kind of a representation of what we're doing in Oregon, but what could be done all over the world. And that is the fleet managers. These are the unsung heroes of the world, fleet managers. They manage fleets. And here you see Oregon and there's the PDX fleet. So I just put a couple of types. Again, you have all these types of vehicles. And so the fleet managers are kind of going crazy pulling their hair out saying, how do we, everyone tells us we need to transition, but how are we going to do it? How are we going to transition these fossil fuel vehicles to a clean vehicle when the infrastructure, we don't know which one we want to use. And that's why this universal charging station is so vital because it works for everyone. It'll work anywhere, deserts, mountains. It doesn't matter what country you're in. If you have sunlight and water, sunlight, wind and water or landfills, I love the concept of waste streams into revenue streams. That's brilliant. I think Riley calls it turning trash into gold. There you go. Yeah. This is the right attitude. This is what we need to do. So you bring up a really important point though, Toby. And that's when you say fleets, because that's the quickest way to transition is because you have one guy who might buy 20, 30, 40, maybe 150 vehicles all at once. And so you use your hydrogen station. That way you can build up the demand for hydrogen faster. You don't have to rely on the government to subsidize it because then it becomes profitable and then the business community will take over. So that's absolutely the way to go in my opinion. And I think we're going to see that on the big island soon. So I think we're almost out of time now. And we're going to have to wrap it up. So I want to give you a little plug on the back end. So that's Toby's magazine. Tell us about your magazine quickly, Toby, because we're almost out of time. Sure. Well, I developed a green hydrogen app. And as an app, I list all the companies that under fuel cells and electrolyzers. So it's like an industry directory. And we have other features like a green hydrogen jobs and green hydrogen stocks. So it's really a tool for people to connect in the industry. But it's in the format of a magazine. It's available on the Apple App Store and Google Play. Just search green hydrogen. You'll find me. That's our logo. And I hope you'll download it. It's free to download. You'll get a preview of the different issues if you want to download the full 130 page issue. It's like $3.99. Support the channel. Thank you for doing so. And I hope you enjoyed it. It's a lot of effort and a great joy because we get to talk about people like you and what you're doing to move us from where we are to where we really need to be. So bravo. Well, I buy it every three months. So it's a great magazine. So thanks for taking that initiative, Toby. And I think that we're going to have to leave it there. So you've been watching Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, and we've been talking about water and our energy system in a kind of a different way. I still managed to sneak the hydrogen such thing in quite a while, I thought. And we've been talking to Toby Kincaid, who is a thinker, author, inventor, and publisher of green hydrogen today. So Toby, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your thoughts with us today. Thank you. We'll be back in two weeks with another show at Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy, Aloha. And donate to us at think.kawaii.com. Mahalo.