Sometimes, time plays an important role in strategic situations. Things take step one after the other, and not only do they do, but the actors know that they will and that influences how they behave. So the year was 1519, and Nan Cortez, Spaniard, was leading a flotilla of 11 boats, and about 600 men about to invade a continent later to be known as America. They were vastly outnumbered and were well aware of the heavy odds they were facing. And as is famously known, as they landed, Cortez ordered that all the boats be burnt. There's some controversy whether this was done in complete coordination and agreement with his men, or it was sprung on them. But either way, it's clear what the logic behind it was. The Cortez knew that as they faced these daunting odds, the men would be tempted to turn back, board the boats, and flee. And by removing that option, that increased their fighting resolve going forward. And so, again, there's not only the fact that time passes between actions, but that one reasons about that fact and impacts how the strategic situation unfolds. We see it not only when there are multiple agents involved, but even in a single decision maker here, it's not only Cortez and his men, the two actors, or the two sets of actors who somehow actions are intertwined, but even when there's a single actor, the fact that time unfolds can impact the situation. Here's another famous historical tale in this case of Ulysses and the Sirens. Ulysses is captaining his boats and about to pass through the Straits of the Sirens. And as is commonly known, the Sirens' song are so seductive that they would cause any person in particular Ulysses to do things that are not in his own best interest. He would jump into the sea, he would crash the boat against the rocks. And so what he does, according to the tale, he orders all his men to first put their wax in the ears so they will not be seduced by the song. He himself, who in fact wants to hear the song knowing that he would not be able to withstand the seduction, orders his men to tie him to the mast and should he possibly get free from the ties to restrain him with his swords. And so it comes to pass. They sail through the Straits. When he hears the Sirens' song, he goes temporarily insane and tries to escape from the bonds and fails. And all is good. So here again is a single actor in this case, Ulysses, reasoning about the future, thinking about what will the situation be and taking action now to impact what the strategic situation will look like in the future. To model such a situation, we turn to games in extensive form, as the term is called, sometimes simply known as game trees.


Thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute for our program. This is Robert Morales with celebrating the Russian writer Vladimir Sorotin, author of Toloria, in conversation with the translator and also tonight as a interpreter, Max Lawman. I'm Laura Shepard, Director of the Minister of the Mechanics Institute. And tonight we're very proud to present this event with quick, doggy, up high, and New York reading the books. Of course, we've all seen your lifting programs, so I hope that you'll enjoy all of the events that are happening in the next 10 days, also in the city. And please, for your survey, and at the end of the evening, if you could put your survey in the basket that's at the front door, I really appreciate it. I also want to thank Jen Boehr and Jamie Rill, and also to the panelists for our collaboration. If you're new to the Mechanics Institute, you were founded in 1854, and were one of several systems of violence, literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. So, our general and its library, which is on the second and third floors, our chess club, which is down the hallway, and there's a chest that is going on tonight. And our literary programs and our similar film series, which is on the front of the audience. So visit our website, and please join us for our events. We'll follow by Q&A with your audience, and also folks with you on sale after a program, and you will have your folks on by the office. Vladimir Serovin's book is very controversial. He is a political revocateur, one of Russia's most controversial writers of exile. His new book, Toloria, offers a cautionary tale set in the future to help disturb them with warring zealots and tribal birds. Vladimir Serovin was born in a small town outside of Moscow in 1855. He's trained as an engineer at the Moscow Institute of Oil and Gas, but turned to art and writing, becoming a major presence in Moscow underground in 1980. His work was banded in Soviet Union, with his first novel, The Cube, which is also available from the New York Review of the Review of West Massachusetts, and was published by R. Cain Emery, dissident Andre Sinyasi in France in 1985. In 1992, Serovka's Therefore Hearts was shortlisted for the Russian Book of Prize, but was also very controversial as well as his Blue Lord, which caused demonstrations in the streets. In 2001, he received the Andre Belly Award for Outstanding Contributions to Russian Literature, and his work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He is also a screenwriter and also has written for opera and plays in short stories, and has won the Academy Award for several of his works. He is currently living in the Nukovar, the Nukovar, part of the Axis of the Perfect Place, and also in Berlin. Max Lawden is a novelist, musician, and translator. His translations of Vladimir Serovka's stories have appeared in the New Yorker and N-plus morning. In addition to eight Serovka's books, forthcoming from the New York Review of Book Classics and Dolby Archive Press, he is translating two books by Jonathan Littell and his work from New York. So please welcome our esteemed guest, Vladimir Serovka, and Max Lawden. So basically, we're going to read it, we've got 40 minutes, so we're going to talk a little bit about sort of the work we've done, introduced it a little, and then we're going to read a news story that is not available anywhere. So that should be pretty fun. But basically, to begin with, we were sort of thinking we'd talk a little bit about how the reception of the work has been different, given that we're dealing with two radically different periods, where sort of at the same time putting out the latest novels, and then the very early novels. And if you know what you guys work, you know, there's a very big difference. So therefore, it's quite an extreme book, whereas Gloria is a little bit more gentle and nice. It's also quite extreme. So, Vladimir, how does it feel to you to be dealing with these two radically different periods in your work being released to the English world at once? Better we should say a few words, but not all again. Yeah, yeah.  But at the end of the day, I was going to be an artist. But at the end of the day, I was going to be an artist. I was going to be an artist. I was going to be an artist. The state exerted a lot of pressure on us back then, including in terms of profession. So I didn't actually get into art school, but I got into the Institute of Foil and Gas. It was right next door. My dad worked there and helped not to get into the art. Well, actually, in the end, I had to be an artist. Well, studying at the Institute, I did continue to occupy myself with drawing and graphics. And the later years of my study, I began to work professionally with designer. In general fashion, I would work down the sort of surreal drawing. And once a woman, my dentist said that one of her patients was an artist and he drew these sort of very strange pictures. And she offered to show my works. She showed them that I said that I made my way falling into Moscow. And into a circle of people who do something forbidden, free and original. So I began to visit the locket workshop as well as other artists I met with writers at the underground, and I began to try to write something nice. I tried this out as a teenager before. I've written this fantastic story. Not fantastic, it isn't very good. Including one ironic story. He told me so easily that I hadn't actually said that I translated it from English. And I made his way to our school. After that it seemed to me that literature is a very easy occupation, so I continued to draw. So it was in the underground that I sort of recall my own literary experience. And that which I did other members of the underground. That's how it all began. If we're to speak of the early facts, they were essentially coming out of source art. What is source art? You know what it is, of course. So it's the motherland of pop art. So it's his pop art need with Soviet visual propaganda. I began to do this with official Soviet literature using the method of socialist realism. If we're talking about the early stories that were in front of us next year, these stories in general were binary bombs. The first part of the text began as a hundred percent socialist realism. And then these characters as it were lost their minds. After the Soviet Union fell of course socialist realism also collapsed. I didn't write novels for seven years back then. Because life was changing very fast and a writer could touch up. And then entirely different texts began to be born, which were totally unconnected to social skills. So, but that's interesting because I think a lot of you've spoken about this before we've talked about it on this tour even that your own career is sort of like a binary bomb right where you have the early texts and then you have the later texts which almost become a little bit more dimensional in a sense because they're more continually operating within the Russian tradition. They're a little bit less conventional, a little bit more kind. But it's interesting to think about the transition because obviously what you just described is up to Lular right. So what happened from Lular to Luria, what that tenure here is interesting to me. So when we look at from Lular to Piafis to then the blizzard, you know, how do you, do you think there was as much of a change in that tenure period as there were, as there was from the early texts to Lular, or is it sort of a similar where you are operating in a similar mode the whole time. It's difficult to speak of an entire period of course. And this is given that my principle is that every book should be written in some style and should have its own geological and intent. It's as if they're written by a different writer that said. There are a lot of them. So that's why I think it's great. 90s. Maybe because of that credit to my homeland in the 90s that the stroke and the real writer because he doesn't have his own constant and consistent style. But avoiding or getting away if they're refracting a constant style actually is my style. It's difficult to say why it is this way. It's the writer's kitchen which is a fairly dark drawer as it were. And basically, every writer can make out very little within himself. And other writers can see a writer and not extend as well.  Well for talking about because I think we're going to read the story pretty soon. It's a short program. It's interesting to think about then, if you can characterize I mean if you can characterize at all to change that because you're very good at explaining what happens between 1980 and 2000 right from 2000 onwards you don't that's when the writer's kitchen becomes very dusty for you. Because you understand your method very well with any of your career and obviously trying helps with that and distance but we're going to read it for context and new stories from a collection that came up. And what would you say changed between, let's say, blue lard and this, can you say, or what changes the way and how does it feel, is there a difference in the feeling of how you write and the intention and the target or is it just. Well, I was born in the Soviet Union. And then I lived in the period of his death. And then I came to the period of the Putin's reaction. So you understand, I was born in the Soviet Union, then lived through the period of collapse, then came the period of Putin's reaction. And so that these three periods, of course they influence literature and me to and that's perhaps I want to post a certain difference. Of course, I might excuse myself for this, but that's just the way it is. Um, so I guess we might as well just read this story now. Yeah. So this story is called prisms space from a new collection, and I won't be on English for a while so exclusive. Corus of the Cube. It's in her old love affair. It's necessary to love for the hundredth time. This is the stress of research. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Prisms morning begins monstrously, not having managed to properly wake up. She must make a tormented choice between cone and cube. These are two of her friends with benefits have been for a long time. And it's indispensable that she made this choice for the team on him time, accompanied by stress and tears. Who would you prefer today, cones rough translucent surface which exudes the aroma of the subtropics with the promise of unexpected heavy pennies under a waterfall or cubes chill smooth faces which are reminiscent of an impending kiss in the frost embraces the northern lights and a secret wish made of ice. Those are flows with delery, chuckles shells fish and streams of mad joys cube the witches with the calm sustained well being of the flame and the fireplace of an ancestral castle surrounded by snow covered tourists of a whistling descent from the mountains of comfy northern tales of unfolding life spaces totally new far from hustle bustle and unpredictability, all of which structure the world expanding out like an alpine valley into an infinite defined space which means neither walks nor disappointments. Prism amidst a maximum of the selection process. There's nothing more horrifying than this. She swallows a little pink sphere and washes it down with water. Little sphere makes the problem of choosing between cold and cube not quite so bitter as it removes the aftertaste of catastrophes in the process. I'll choose in the shower. Prism besides. Prism feels it. The ideal clarity of it in a powerful day. The overwhelming clarity of the perfect situation. It depends on these extraordinary conditions of life. In the mountains, the work of each and every one of its abilities is a pleasure to give to the earth. A warm water in the earth, on top of the cube. The cube is still an interesting cube. It breathes air. Of course, there is no need to tell the truth. Suddenly, there is a burning joy, a burning love. Of course. But it does not do such a thing in itself. With the power and appreciation of everything that is suddenly powerful, it likes it so clearly and accurately. She never makes her selection in bed, only in the shower on the toilet for doing her morning stretches. After sitting on the toilet for a little while, she takes a shower and chooses cube. She pronounces. And cube immediately enters the shower and braces Prism and presses her to him. Prism senses his ideal planes, his mighty volume, his bewitching weightiness, and his conspicuousness.  Warm water pours down onto cube and prism. I guess I'd say cube is more interesting than comb, Prism besides. Of course, he lacks unpredictability, spontaneity, joy both hot and sudden, plus that burning and lava of cash. On the other hand, he fills me with such self confidence, such strength to overcome everything that's unpredictably dangerous. His faces are so clear and precise, but his corners are so mercilessly sharp and regular, that I immediately become stronger and more filled with self worth as an individual. Cube exudes protection, he strengthens me and expands the horizons of my confidence. After the shower, cube has a strong and flexible structure. It stretches, it stretches, it twists, it rises to its beauty, to its main body, above the ice, and it is soft and light. After stretching, Prism is given a point. Their bond is harmonious, it has a long relationship with the rest of the world. After a relationship, they can have an interesting conversation with each other. He reports only what makes it impossible for them to understand each other. He likes to tell about new, pleasant travels, many places already known, when it comes to the joy of meeting other people. The Fjordy castle on the edge of the hill. For cute, fluffy dogs, walking on a boat, on a fishing boat, a book. In the fjordy corners of the people, under the strong personal presence of clean, the most clean world, the sea of water, healing of wounds on the shoulders, and the sand. A crackling, rough, stone. After the shower, cube helps her to stretch and unwind, stretches, twists, pulling and twirling the musklet. After the shower cube helps her to stretch and unwind, stretches, twists, pulling and twirling the musklet of her young, beautiful body with his guidance. And he is wise and consistent. After the stretching, prism gives herself to cube. The intimacy is harmonious. It's a lengthy pleasure, growing and growing like the famous Fuller. A breakfast after their intimacy. A cube is a smart and interesting conversation. He informs prism only of that which doesn't force her to imagine the unimaginable or to lose herself in thought, which also might make her lose herself. He loves to tell her of new pleasant travels, but only in places already known to prism. Places where the joy of recognition awaits her. Two boards, a castle on edge, a cliff, two cute shaggy dogs, a boat trip, fishing, a picnic on Massey boulders, a national dish, a company by a strong national beverage washed down with the purest mountain water in the world. Evening intercourse on the skins of Fuller foxes, wood crackling in the fireplace. She drinks Moroccan coffee flavored with the freshest of cranes from cube's northern land. She's grateful to him. She agrees to a trip up north. After acquiring her consent, cube vanishes. After a long day of prism, comfortable and safe car, she moves to a quiet town in space. When she's in the office of a company, which is already very few after her death, the prism takes its place. To her they begin to enter a complex, diverse form and size of geological figures. There are large, well-established branches, protruding fingers. There are smaller ones, though small and small. Most of all, the prism takes its place in a complex, complex, diverse form and size of figures. So begins prism's work there. In a safe, comfortable car, she moves to the noisy urban space. Once in the office of the company, she's been ahead of for eight years since the death of her father, Sylinder. Prism goes into her own office. Her subordinates begin to come in to see her, geometric figures of various sizes and shapes. There are big ones with intricate faces, protuberances and depressions. Then there are smaller ones, then there are very small and simple ones. Most of them are like that. Prism occupies herself with her figures intently, all day, putting them together, coupling them or pulling them apart. The figures interact with one another. Prism makes sure that this interaction is harmonious and brings both her and the company to stable topics.  And she eventually is going to meet up with her. She's visited her mother, who's very ill. She goes to a gallery opening, at the gallery opening. She meets Tetrachet Drone. Tetrachet Drone? Yes, there's a lot of registrants. And they strike up a bit of a romance. The whole night she goes to the night club. Tetrachet is happy to meet her. On the other hand, she's already covered with a lot of dust. She gets over with the whole process. She gets in touch with her mother. Tetrachet treats her with a cocktail. Then she invites her to dance. She doesn't dance at all. She doesn't dance. She whispers nice words to her. She has a lot of ideas about her future. She hears her success in business. She says that many of her friends will envy her beauty and beauty. The prism is growing. They are still there. That's what makes her smell the prism. In the past, the prism loved to do things. And now it's time to stop. I'm going to go to the night club. At midnight, she gets driven to a trendy club. Meet her with great joy. His faces are already covered over with a different dusting. He shimmers in the light of the rays. He shines. He says that he can't get enough of her prism. He goes to the bar and sits down at the counter. Tetrachet treats prism to various cocktails. Then asks her to dance with them. They dance. During the dance scene, Tetrachet whispers pleasant words into prism's ear. He can't get enough of her figure. He hears all about her success in business. He informs her that many famous figures are jealous of her brains and beauty. Tetrachet invites her to snort some white powder. Prism used to adore doing this. But she's become more cautious. She takes care of her nervous system, which is why she refuses. This writer offers her to be a stranger. This is agreed upon. They go through some kind of pain. Tetrachet becomes more cautious. She takes care of her nervous system. This bothers her. She offers her to be a stranger. Thank you. Then Tetrachet invites her to smoke some weed. She agrees to this. They pass into the smoking room and roll at joints. Prism's having fun. They dance some more. Tetrachet embraces her delicately palpating under places. Prism is turned on. She invites Tetrachet to come home with her. He tenderly kisses her upper corner in gratitude. Prism's having fun at home. Tetrachet is full of energy. He brings prism to the body. He kisses her upper corner in gratitude. Prism is a pleasure from the legs. He kisses her delicately. Because he is sleeping in his room. He prefers to rest in loneliness. Tetrachet understands that. He leaves her alone. He kisses Prism in the room. Looch. Once they're at Prism's house they make love. Petra Hedron is young and full of energy. He brings Prism to a whole series of orgasms, then comes himself and elics Prism's lower face as a sign of gratitude. Prism is pleasantly exhausted. She kisses Petra Hedron, then asks him to leave telling him to leave because she always sleeps on her own and prefers to wake up. Petra Hedron gets it. He leaves her house. Falling asleep, Prism commands the raid. The bedroom's gloomy space, the thinnest ray of light begins to shine her. It comes to rest upon Prism's bosom. Now refracted, it breaks up into the seven colors of the rainbow and inside of Prism. They fill Prism's interior space shimmeringly. Prism falls asleep, satiated, doing audience questions. I would also like to say though, just a sign that I think there's quite a lot of variety in the 20 years of work that is, well really it's 40 years of work that's going to be coming out in the next five or six years, but even so we're talking about the early work versus the later work. Even with the later work, there's quite a bit of variety and for those of you who've read the book already, you can probably already feel that this story is quite a bit different from Tellurio, which is quite a bit different from the Blizzom, which is quite a bit different from, I don't know, Dr. Gar, a very big one which has been coming from NYR being three years. So read all of them and find out about the very many different writers inside of what you know and all the various different books they've written, which have certain similarities, but not too many. You can take questions and I'll bring a microphone to you. This question is for Max. In the Tellurio, I found a variety of different accents and manners of speaking. Some of them seemed to have always been sort of in the interruption and some of them approximated like working twice, nine, and there's more. So the question is obviously, you know, there's an architecture in the back in Russia. How did you make that transition or where are they coming from in the first place? I actually think I'm very lucky because as Nabokov said, English and Russian are two geniuses, and I think they're very rich literary languages with a lot of parallels between them. So I don't, I mean, I know a few other languages that I'm not quite as well versed in literary tradition, but for example, we're dealing with the working class, dialect, which really we're dealing with this sort of plain spoken narrative, which might be represented in English tradition by something like Faulkner or part of the we have a rich tradition of that. So when Vladimir plays with something like that, and I see that he's riffing on a certain tradition of Russian writers, I can kind of reach into my own reading experience and look for an equivalent and then just play with it. So I think it's pretty much a one-to-one similarity in terms of the benefits if Vladimir would say it.  But I think so the equivalences are pretty direct, I think. And I think we're lucky, I'm lucky that English has so many literary languages to match up with Russian ones. I mean, I kind of wish I'd written it afterward. This is a funny story about Ezra Pound, who showed the contos to Mussolini. Now if you've read the contos, you know that they're very, very, very dense and unreadable. And he showed them to Mussolini, and Mussolini didn't want to meet with him in the first place and was trying to push off the meeting and said, oh, this crazy American poet is doing these radio shows. No one can understand this. He wants to show me his book.  And Pound showed the contos and Mussolini looked at it for two seconds and he said, my question would be the candidate, which means like, oh, what a cool little thing. And Pound, of course, famously wrote a whole section of the contos saying the great man had understood it before anyone else. And so I kind of was going with that mentality, but not writing it afterward, thinking of speak for itself, not to Mussolini, I would hope, but you know, to normal readers. But I wish I'd written it afterward, but I think it was going to be a reassuring story to explain some of these choices in the next five minutes. So it's a good question. Well, so I'm very honored to be in your presence and really amazing to be here. But I think like all the like giants of Russian literary world, you most precisely predicted like how the Russia is going to happen. Like our attitude, the Russian speakers towards the writers is much more, you know, for the Parisians than we would consider you prophets on some concerns. And I'm sorry, I'm wearing away from the literary two more political things, but like any official job, all the day of official, like, are you like excited? Basically, okay, it's kind of short. You think Russia is going to fall apart, or is it going to become like day of official? I'm sorry, it's a dull problem and I think I need to go. Thank you. One pretty human road is probably a hang of fantasy. Oh man, then that year's passing could he begin to write differently about it, and not just critics. There was the impression that this book was being read in the Kremlin as, let's say, an instruction manual. As a writer, of course, I was happy we could do everything that was not true that I'd written, but as a citizen I was absolutely horrified. Well, it should be said that every writer has a certain internal antenna. It captures the vibrations of society. Every writer has a kind of internal antenna and picks up the vibration in society. Perhaps I picked up certain vibrations and then wrote this book which also I have to say was pretty unexpected for me too. But it wasn't any sort of active prophecy because the first intentional acts of prophecy are not possible. Okay, which was published a while ago, but for our strategy, I think in 2020. That is very much available. I saw it just now in city lights. Day of the impression. Oh, okay. Translate. My main question is how you've been able to write in the last eight months, or the seven years that you mentioned past between the fall of the Soviet Union. So right again, I'm experiencing a similar professional. Was nice to listen. I'm going to hear from you. I see. Is that with me. You know, my wife and I left Russia just a few days before this brutal senseless war in Ukraine began by accident. Naturally, I didn't expect to do this incidentally go quite so far. I didn't expect this. I didn't expect this war. And I have to say that these eight months have passed and I can't write a single verse. I can't write a single line. When the war is coming, when it comes to you and Ukraine, who is better to be silent?  And we're being said that it's a general rule war and novels about war are read after the war. So we're going to say that it's a war. So yeah, pros isn't happening right now but in the invitation for the articles. I'm going to say that And then I think that the system was absolutely incredible. And the question is how did the idea of the film come about? How did it come about? And where did it come from? Great translation. You said that the idea of the film was an unexpected book for you and for everyone else. So my question is how did this book happen and how did you end up writing? In fact, I don't know. The fact that something happened to me, in fact, naturally something had accumulated inside me, it often happens with writers, but there was one show, let's say, that did come to pass. There was a dog. Those years I had a dog with it. We can imagine it's a very refined animal. And one day I started wanting to play a trick on the dog. And I bought this enormous bull bone or beef bone at a market in Manukov with a bit of beef on it. So I came back home, and I was lying down on the roof of a snowy snow. I threw this bull bone and the cow came out. I thought, what am I going to do with this bull bone? Almost the same size as mine.  And I sort of thought, what is this dog going to do? The bull is about the same size as the dog. And at that moment the dog suddenly made a circle around the bull bone. I thought, let it be this big, some kind of ritual dance. It was something beautiful and impressive. And at that moment the dog did a sort of ritual dance around the bull bone. And then there was something enchanting and refined, but also something medicine. And you could have done such a dance before. And I was just totally shocked by this. The option is definitely a silky set. And right after that I sat down to write the distribution. I was just wondering when you first started to write it. The genesis of it, does it come from a character that you imagine, or a line of dialogue, or a situation? It's a very subtle thing. The beginning of the genesis of the genesis of the bull. It's a very delicate business. It's like coming into being in a crystal and oversaturated substance. And it tends to happen at an unexpected moment. It's a very complex business. You can post it as much as possible. But it has to be oversaturated. It has to be oversaturated. The dog wasn't the oversaturated substance, it was just a little thing. You have to straw the broken camel's back. You have the accumulation that the straw creates the camel's back. It's hard to explain. Thanks for the cool things. Creation is a divine process after all. Please forgive me for a non-literary question. You speak in as much detail as you would care to do about your pregnosis of how this senseless, brutal war will end. I think it will end with a victory, Frank. Any questions? You said you didn't mean to prohibit the future of your pregnosis of some pregnosis. I think it's a good thing that if you just try not to do it, do you think that if you are living somewhere else in the world, maybe in the last important time, I feel something familiar? Yeah, I think it's a different person. You would be speaking in a different language. Any of your works directly influenced or inspired by another book you have read? The thing is all of the books I've read, all of the books I've read, is a sort of ocean that does, of course, influence me with its tides in and out. But to pick one thing out of that ocean is quite difficult. I can only say that I've always been attracted to literature, where in re-use the breath of metaphysics. I'm very indifferent to ballet, so pretty first for my reason. I like hard literary drugs. So all those names, which I think you understood all except for Ulysses, which is the definition, that's hard literary drugs. Thank you very much. It's a great program tonight. It's an incredible deep dive, it's the past, present, future, fantasy, political critique, satire, it's so layered and bodacious, so I hope you'll buy a copy. And therefore re-use is also cool. It's also got a lot of illustrations. Very shocking.


So this is the mesh video, I got a mesh on this car with this guy, a mesh on this car with this guy, and a little thing I learned today, you can mount these in a window by rolling them up part way, and hopefully this doesn't turn into one of those fail videos where we see the windows break. So we're going to be meshing two cars together at a distance, ouch, I ran into them here, and the shop is way over there, and they're already meshed and linked, so then we're going to hop from Marvin's car to Steve's car, and we're going to watch a YouTube video and make a phone call to show just how well these meshes work with Unify. So I have finally at the same time some of these pros and the standard Unify mesh units, and I want to do some comparison for them. So this video is one about meshing, two about the comparison between why you'd want to buy the more expensive one versus the smaller one. There's a pretty substantial size difference, spec wise, yes, they're very, very similar, but these devices, which actually are, although being rather large, have more antennas in them, but don't weigh much more than this one here, there's not a substantial weight difference. But to make sure that these don't fly off in a windstorm, they do have a much more solid mount, they are a lot heavier duty in terms of that, actually the mount itself is even metal, and I'll get you a proper review soon of this device itself on its own. So today we just want to talk about Unify, how we'll set up mesh, and a performance comparison head to head with these mounted, and I'm going to show you how we have this set up for our test bench and how our test scenario, we're actually going to spend it outside today, it's beautiful out, and then we're going to talk about how the meshing works and why you would want to mesh or why you wouldn't want to mesh and what the differences are in those configurations to help with your Wi-Fi planning. Alright, so let's start with the test scenarios here. So here's our fancy testing rig that we have outside of our office. Happens to be in front of our building are these poles, which are convenient because these are really easy to mount to the poles. So we zip-tied the AC Mesh Pro and one of the standard Unify AC Meshes right here. The tags that you see on them are the last two digits of the MAC address, that way when we're connecting and meshing I understand which one I'm connected to when I'm going over all the screenshots and that later. This is just a really easy way to do it, don't ignore the simplicity of it, but it works. So we put them at roughly the same position, but purposely we're not turning them out at the same time. Because do a subjective test, if you had them both on at the same time, you create a different issue while they're kind of fighting with each other because when you're designing a wireless network, don't put two just right next to each other, it's not necessarily going to be the ideal way to do it, so you don't want one to work against the other one or cause any interference. So we're going to test them each individually, so we'll plug in one and we're going to go all the way across the street and we'll show you the scenario there. We got to figure out exactly how long that is, I'll know before I get over there. Then we'll have the distance and we're going to do exactly the same test with both of these at that same distance across the street. So we'll unplug one, swap it to the other, plug it in so our testing share is exacting as can be. One of the problems with wireless is the little factors make a big difference in things like that. We are going across the street, so one factor we're going to have to wait is for traffic to clear. Because I did notice in the preliminary testing of stuff this video that cars cause about a 4% variance when they go by. Like in a truck, it's about 5% or 6% when they go by. You'll just watch various small dips in the Wi-Fi. Thought it was interesting. The network's the 4077. Because it's a mesh network. M-E-S-A, spider. All right, so we are here across the street and we have it connected. My link is roughly 61% on the link quality. We're measured by Wavemon, which is the tool I'm using here in this. And I'm going to do a quick ping test because one of the important things is that you have a low ping. And the reason why is because a lot of people, myself included, I like standing outside and using my phone for things like phone calls. And if you have a really high ping time, that's where you'll start having problems with the phone. So, ping-wise, we're getting no packet loss, 16 packets received, 16 packet sent, and a round trip average. Looks like it's nine. It's hard for me to see the screen here. You can see this on the edited version of the video. Now, we're going to go ahead and do a speed test as well. And right now, we're testing this on the standard Unify AC mesh. This is not the pro. So the first sample is going to be with the AC mesh. We're going to stand at the same place and actually keep the camera rolling here. And we're going to call Marvin and tell him to plug it back the other way. Now, this is a speed test across my network. So it looks like I'm averaging about five megs, five megabit back and forth across. So go ahead and call Marvin and tell him to do the switch. So now we're doing a test of the pro model. And for whatever reason, it's actually a couple percent lower on the link quality as measured by wave mine here. But let's actually do the test again. So last time, we were at 5.8, 4.5 megabits. As you see here on the screen, let's do the same test again. All right, so speed-wise, we've definitely seen a big increase here. Now, I'm still on the 2.4, as I was for both of these. So even though the link quality, as measured by the Wi-Fi device here, we actually see a little bit of a speed increase with the pro. So that is nice. And that is one of the features that they have on there. So at least we've got an now subjective me standing here between this distance, between the two devices, mounted on the same pole, inches apart, turned on and off each time. So there's your first test with the AC pro versus the standard mesh. So let's go over to the meshing part. So now we're having fun. We're going to mesh the cars together. Yes. All right, so we're in the car now. And we're across the street. And we've got Marvin over here with a mesh. Steve with a mesh and a window. Steve's stuck it in a window here. And now this is the next step in this, is making sure that this works. And I have my laptop here. And I'm going to go ahead and do a speed test. And I'm going to do a screen check. It's really hard to turn recording on and off. But the reason we're doing it in step by step. So this is a one hop mesh. This mesh that I'm in the car with, and Marvin's got another one, is doing a test. How fast are we, Steve? 30 megabytes a second, 33. 33. So we're in a pretty good distance from the shop. I'll post a distance right here, because we're going to measure it all after we do the video. So it's working. It's linked. And you can see the shop right over there. Well, you can kind of see shops way in a distance. Yeah, if it wasn't so blown out. So now what we're going to do is we're going to drive this vehicle. Marvin's going to hang out here at the party store. Tough job today, right Marvin? I know, right? I might, yeah. I might just run in and grab, you know, a little something to put in my coffee. 27.9 megabits. I looked at the transfer payload. So what is it? 27.9 megabits per second. Okay. We read the transfer payload. Yeah. Not bad. Okay. So now we know the speed at which we're linked and it's working fine. We're one hop in. Now we're going to go two hops in because we're going to leave Marvin here at the party store and we're going to go over a little further away. So it's going to hop from our office to Marvin's car because he has power in his car. And then we're going to hop it there. Now the base station is the pro, the mesh pro. And then we're, each link station are just the standard unify outdoor mesh units. All right. Let's roll, Steve. Hello. All right. We're recording and I got Marvin on a speakerphone here because we're using the VoIP system to hops out. So we've made it across. We're still getting four to five meg. Kind of depends a little bit when we move the car around here. So we're hopping from the store where it has the mesh pro to Marvin's car, which just has a standard mesh to Steve's car here, which has a standard mesh. And then we're making a phone call with Marvin. Hi, Marvin. So we've done two hops this time. Jump, jump. Two hops this time. So there's no latency. The phone works perfectly fine because I could talk about like pings and speed and all that's fun, but the ultimate is does it work? Does the latency? So yes, not only are we meshed and there's a big truck that just went between us that didn't seem to stock it. That's a big truck. Yeah, wow. Fun note that truck is a trailer, is made by one of our customers and the truck was probably delivering to one of our other customers. Fun note, anyways, not to digress, but this is kind of the proof of concept of the mesh. So how's my voice sound, Marvin? You sound fine. I mean, I don't really hear any latency or there's not much cutting out or anything. Yeah, and that's the kind of point if you didn't hear what Marvin said, he can hear me and I can hear him. And it's kind of the proof of concept of the mesh. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Let's pull some YouTube up on my phone too. I'm gonna hang up Marvin so I can watch YouTube. Okay. So the link speed and link that is not as a big of a deal on my system here, but we will do is pull up some YouTube. I know this great YouTube channel. They don't do wifi real well, but they have a lot of good tech tips. Oh wait, that's a different channel. But YouTube plays perfectly fine over the mesh. So we can sit here in Steve's car. Hopped twice. Whoops. Watch YouTube and full screen, 1080. It's, yeah. Okay, now it switched. Took a second to switch to 1080. So does the meshes work? Yes, do they work really, really well? I'm really impressed with them. Even the car setup that we have, which is weird, but definitely works. So it's an easy way to test the maximum potential distance. Yeah, we've pushed these right to the edge. Ideally, if you're setting these up, you're gonna have a little bit of closer than we do. And we'll put the distances and kind of give you an overview. I'm gonna do a debrief after we get back out of the car. But this is the mesh system and I'm really impressed with it. So we've now meshed the cars together and because I can actually take my laptop about another, what, two or 300 feet away from the car, I can go way over there in a parking lot somewhere with my laptop and still have it. So these things are definitely really cool. All right, let's jump to the debrief. All right, so let's start with kind of an overview of like a top-down view of how we were doing this. So this is our building. And for the very first test we did, we were standing over here by this bush. So we were standing in this parking lot right here down in a corner. And then when we got in the cars, this is when we did the speed test where I'm standing with the laptop. Then we went from here to the party store, which is kind of across the street from us, but that's being a pretty good distance here. Then that's where Marvin was parked and then we parked a vehicle over here and there's the checkers. We call it rallies if you don't know that it kind of like the same company, not that that's relevant at all. That's the fast food place that I was joking that I could walk over to and still have Wi-Fi. So we hopped it from here to here to here. And this was the Unify AC Mesh Pro and this was your Unify AC Mesh, Unify AC Mesh and me and Steve with the laptop sitting way over here in the parking lot. In case you're wondering, let me put it down a 3D view. There's that building right there and there's that building right there in the video that I was, while I'm still editing, now this is the end part of the video. This is the, so I can finish this up and wrap this up. But we are really impressed with how well these worked. Now, this comes back down to which one do you wanna buy, which one is a good decision? Well, if you start with the Mesh Pro, it has a little bit more power, more antenna, so more things can mesh to it and we were able to get better thorough put from that device. So from a planning standpoint, when you're setting these up, they make a really good choice for using as your main primary ones. They will mesh with each other. We didn't bother testing that because each one of these that we're gonna put in are gonna be hard lined in. And anytime you have an option of either a mesh network or hard line, always go hard line first. And the reason I'm saying that is because you want always a solid wire connection from the switch, from the routing equipment, the switch to the device. That's the way you're gonna get the absolute best performance. That being said, we know that's not always possible, so meshes are popular. And Unify has done a wonderful job with their mesh. The performance we had off these meshes, especially because we were at the distance greater than they had recommended for a mesh network and still able to make a phone call and we had from my phone connected to our network, then went out of our network and called Marvin on a cell phone, so I was using Zoiper for that. No latency issues. Well, there was a slight one when Marvin paused because he realized I was supposed to talk just kind of joking, teasing that he had a brain latency issue there because he was coming up with a proper joke, I guess. But these two models are great.  They're all listed on Unify's website. But both of these are outdoor, both of them are waterproof. They have mesh in the name, but I don't want you to think that that's the only feature they have. They will work as standard Wi-FIs or they can mesh. And this is kind of a setup here. By the way, these will mesh too, even though they don't have mesh in the name. And this is kind of a neat thing that Unify has done with their controller software, and this is what makes it that much, just really cool design.  So we had one wired and connected, and it's what represented Marvin's car, and this represents the one that was in Steve's car. So now we're two hops out. And obviously you're going to lose a certain amount of speed. You have, anytime you start going over wired connections, it's not like running standard hardline copper. But even at two hops out, phone calls are working, YouTube at 1080 was working, and we were at a maximum distance. These are working really, really well. So let's talk about the Unify software and how it's configured. This is really cool. So we had, I added a couple of them to this network for the meshing, and you see the status here says connected wireless versus connected, and I know it's kind of small to read. It's, I don't think this, I guess it will kind of zoom in. Maybe that helps a little bit. It says connected wireless, connected wireless, connected. The difference is, and we were meshing these together, and how you do that, let me just sort of start over so you close it. So we're gonna take this one here. By default, they don't come this way, and you may have noticed this is not a Unify APC mesh. Just like I said, there are other devices do support it as well. So we're gonna go here to the mesh Marvin, this one that was in Marvin's car, config, wireless uplink, allow meshing to other access points. It's labeled as a beta feature, but it works really, really well. So here we're gonna allow meshing, and if you want, you can manually configure the uplink priorities and choose which device you'd prefer it to uplink as well, to as well. Now, that's actually a neat feature that way you could, if you know one's closer instead of letting it decide which one it should link to, you can do it. If not, it auto-magically does it, which I think is really cool. When you wanna program these, because out of the box, when you first provision them, they don't have that box enabled, you do still provision them the same way. So you're gonna plug them in, get them set up, adopt them into the network, and once they're adopted and networking to go into the config, wireless uplink, and turn that on, and once they're turned on and it provisions and it's fine connected, just unplug the network cable and it works, that's all you gotta do. Nothing else that needs to be done to make that work. So, pretty straightforward, works really well. Like I said, the distances we got were impressive at just how far away we were to go with those and they just, no problems at all during any of the testing, you notice this one just got unplugged. They're probably unplugging it, they don't know I'm doing a video. If you didn't notice on the very beginning of the video, I laid these all out at a desk in our tech area and they also are working in that tech area right now. So, hopefully this was helpful, give you an idea of the performance that you get with these, really impressed with them. Despite minor differences, they're both really good performers, these little ones I would probably say make great for the edge settings and mesh them to the bigger Unify AC mesh pros, but both of them excellent performance out of there. Obviously with the mesh pro, you have a few more features, you get a little bit more thorough put, go check out the specs that they have on there so you can kind of get an idea of those little details and read through all the coverage on there. But yeah, these are top notch and I may do a specific review just on the devices that take a closer look physically at them. Obviously this one also has the dual gigabit ethernet ports so you can do bridging and get even more speed than you could get out of one of these, but yeah. Top notch devices, we've done some installs, we've been doing more installs with these, this equipment is solid, definitely highly recommended and definitely fun meshing around in cars and creating a mesh of cars working and things like that. And if you're wondering, part of the fun besides the humor of doing it in a car was also because we wanted to see the distance and it was an easy way, hey, there's a power adapter in Steve's Jeep, so we just kept driving further around until we're like, it still works? And that definitely was impressive how far away we got. So, all right, hopefully you enjoyed this video and hopefully it makes sense to you. Got questions and whatnot, comments, leave them below and I'll look for more upcoming Unify videos. Yeah, their stuff's outstanding and they just keep adding cooler and cooler features to it. 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This research paper investigates the effects of different types of antibiotics on the protome of carbapenem-resistant Acinitobacter bominini, Crab. The authors found that different antibiotics induced different levels of resistance in Crab, leading to unique resistance. This suggests that it may be possible to develop more effective treatments for Crab by targeting specific lactamases. This article was authored by Trey Hylia, Bogdan M. Benin, Chuanchi Sun, and others.


First of all, good afternoon everybody and thank you very much Terry for hosting me here today and to such a distinguished audience from policy makers, to intellectuals, from business community. I hope that this session will be useful and informative for you so I would make myself very brief in my remarks and give more time for the Q&A in order to address any of the questions or anything to be clarified from my side. And I would like also to thank the government of Morocco for making this gathering happen and hosting all this number of people which we had the honour to host last year in Doha. World Policy Conference has become one of the most important events in the world of policy and international affairs. I just wanted to start today with one very simple question here why the Middle East is an important region. For ages, the Middle East was the source of civilisations, was the root of languages and the origin of different faith, it was the international trade hub where it was connecting east to west and the west to east where the people can connect and can engage. And the key word for this was the coexistence and the engagement of people from different backgrounds from different ethnicities. Now the situation is termed and reverted, unfortunately we don't want this to revert to the dark ages where we have, where we before used to be the source of enlightenment, we don't want to become the source of turbulence for the world. I believe most of the international challenges now are happening in that region, in the Middle East where you have a different ongoing conflicts from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Yemen, a humanitarian catastrophe there, Libya, a turbulent situation where it's spilling over everywhere in Europe and in Africa and the sub-Sahara area, the issue which is still ongoing in Iraq and unfortunately the most horrifying situation in the recent history what's happening now in Syria where it's a continuous seven years of conflicts. And this conflict which was just started with a decent demand from the normal people asking for justice, asking for their rights, asking for some reforms and unfortunately they were confronted with military action and bombardment and now the situation has changed from the people situation and the crisis of people to a crisis of terrorism, a crisis of extremism. In all of we are going to look at all those conflicts we will find there are different narratives. And normally they are using the religion as a scapegoat for those narratives but if we are going to look at all of them we will find one common theme here. And the common theme is that those who want power, who seek power always create crisis. When we are looking at one example of Syria as I've just mentioned here we see that the government want to preserve power that's why they are creating the crisis of people where more than 500,000 people being killed, more than 12 million being displaced and all this is just for the sake of power, for the sake of power. The extremism are just nurturing there because of to achieve an influence there. It's not, they are not having the religion as the vision to achieve a religious state. Their vision is a political vision. They are using the religion here as a scapegoat for them to achieve this political vision. So it is all about game of power, game of influence here. Now the same theme which is applied everywhere. We see that the most stable and the most promising region in the Middle East was the Gulf countries where it has been the center of stability. It was the role model and the example for the cooperation in the collective security to achieve one common objective to maintain the security of the region and to have more prosperous future and more economic, better economic integration for the future of the people. This is, I'm sure everybody will recognize that I'm talking about the Gulf region which was just like this before few months ago. When a crisis started out of nothing without any basis, we have seen suddenly that the Gulf countries, the GCC as an organization and specifically Qatar has becoming to the front page of every and each media outlet talking about the Middle East. A crisis which is happening in one of the most stable regions which is happening in a region which is considered the source of energy in the world when it comes to oil, to LNG, to economic prosperity. A region which is really situated in very complicated neighborhood. It's just turning to another crisis within the same region. What are the motives of those crises? If I'm going to ask anyone here, everybody is going to talk about different motives. Even me, who is the foreign minister of Qatar whom I should know very well what is the reason of this crisis. I cannot give you a clear answer because I cannot judge and I cannot assess on behalf of others. I cannot stay guessing on behalf of countries which they are not willing to talk to me yet. This crisis, it's all started with a cyber attack. No one can imagine the effect and the spillover of the cyber crimes which is now becoming a phenomenon everywhere in Europe, in the United States, in Asia and now in the GCC. There is something wrong, ongoing, with all those conflicts. Why the international system couldn't solve and couldn't prevent any of those crises from happening? Aren't we in the age of preventive diplomacy? Aren't we in the age of engagement and dialogue? Or we are just reverting back to the age of confrontation, to the age of different war? Qatar has been always calling for dialogue for different conflicts. Qatar has been always acted as a platform for peace, as a peace broker. Qatar has brokered more than 10 peace deals in this region because we believe in dialogue. We believe that engagement is the best way forward to provide a solution for any crisis. Although the crisis has been created for those who seek power, but we believe that dialogue is the best way forward. There is another failure in the international system we found that cannot address the needs of the civilians and the protection of the civilians from becoming part of any political conflict. When we see that the civilians cannot be protected in different conflict zones, in Syria, in Yemen, in Libya, and now in Qatar. Although it's not the same difficulties our people are facing, the same difficulties which are faced by the Syrians or the Yemeni or the Libyans or the Iraqi, but they are facing some difficulties when their family is teared up because of a political conflict. When we have more than 26,000 human rights violations, it is a serious thing to provide a protection. It is our role and our obligation as a government to provide a protection for our own people. So, why there is nothing and there is no mechanism in the international order in the 21st century to prevent this from happening? Why there is no any enforcement mechanism to protect our people, the Qatari people, the Syrian people, the people of the world, to protect the humanity from such escalation? So, I believe this is a very important global challenge which I hope that such a gathering here for different politicians and different intellectuals come up with some recommendations for the international community to come together and really to face and confront the law of force to the force of law, to empower the law enforcement mechanisms, to empower the system itself in order to prevent and to protect our people. I don't want to take much time explaining about our situation, but we believe that our situation is just similar to the other situations. Yes, it's not on the same level and we hope to never reach this level of tension and we hope that it will be recovered and solved very soon, not because we see that there are a lot of challenges within, but the challenges is really facing the entire region and we believe that this region cannot afford more crises. So, if we are talking about a region which is not affording an additional crisis, we are talking about a needless crisis without any foundation and we hope that the wisdom one day will prevail and the countries who are trying to avoid the engagement, avoid talking, avoid addressing any of the security concerns which is our security concern if it's the same claim they are claiming. And come to the table and solve the issue. We have to learn from history. We cannot learn by experience. The entire world witnessed the same conflicts, the same crises everywhere and took years and years and at the end, none of them has been solved in a battlefield, none of them has been solved in a confrontation, all of them being solved around the table and we hope that all the crises in the Middle East will be solved around the table. Thank you.