Hey, how's it going? Thanks for staying for the closing minutes. This is basically just a talk about the thing, but also a little bit about this crazy idea of maps and how exactly they work and the things that you see that you don't usually realize that go into them if you want to follow along the URLs right there. So this weird hexagonal signal that we've redesigned a few times means Mapbox, which is a company in America. And it's basically 30 people in a garage and, well, 10 of those people around the world, two dogs. We do open source tools. So this one in particular was kind of our own energy plus a grant. And they're relatively big open source projects that we hope that a lot of people use. And in a lot of cases, people do use them. And then also, the part where we actually try to feed ourselves is in cloud hosting of maps. But what I'm talking about is tile mill. So it's an open source tool that we designed for creating tiled maps that makes this relatively tricky process somewhat more approachable. And it's really to modernize the idea of cartography. Cartography is, of course, ages old. As you would read downstairs, Mercator invented the projection for sea captains to navigate their ships. And now it's very popular on the internet. But for the first 25 years or so, maps didn't really change very much because there are only three or four companies, which were all kind of boring. And then Google changed maps tremendously within the realm of about two or three years. And then a lot of companies finally realized that this could be like a creative realm. Part of the problem with maps is that people view them like fonts. They don't see them as kind of movable, mungible things that you can design. It's more like just choosing which font. It's also a thing that you can download and you can use and learn. How we made it was that the Knight Foundation funded a 2.0 version, which we converted into coffee, tears, and thyme, which eventually yielded code. It looks like this. If you're a programmer, you could think of it as a REPL, like a read, eval, print loop in which you write stuff. It reads it, it creates a map, and you're able to know what you did right, what you did wrong, whether it looks ugly, or whether it doesn't. And it's very, very simple. It's meant to be kind of like a Microsoft paint for maps more than an opinionated tool, which really comes out in the fact that we just sent it off into the wild. And a lot of really unusual things that we wouldn't expect came back, which is super exciting. I get to see a lot of them. But first, why? So we started making maps. Development seed predated this company, and they did a lot of big data portals. It was in DC. You just get sucked into it. It's like being in LA. You have to work on movies. So we worked on NGO and government type stuff. And all of this involved maps. Because maps are obviously, they're one of the most simplest visualizations that you can convince yourself to be true.  Of course, it's a sphere, not a map. But the same thing doesn't really happen with other types of things except for stacks of money. But the thing that we ran into is that maps are kind of a heap of technology and concepts. They're like a very, very deep topic, which takes a really, really long time to learn. We found that cartographers had to be kind of like these geniuses who knew about really arcane data formats and file formats and math and geometry and languages. We've launched a few maps in Arabic. And it's really hard to do line spacing and breaks in Arabic, especially when nobody knows it on staff. And just crazy stuff. And so the process really used to look like what you would picture when you're kind of up at 2 AM trying to finish a coding project. You have like 40 windows up. And you have errors in some of them and not sure which ones are current, et cetera. It was also, yeah, it was just a technical heap. It was terrible. Which makes it extremely hard to actually turn this into something that's sustainable or encourage more people to do it. Because you know that there's so much pain. And you have to hire somebody who wants to work for six months just struggling. And so kind of on that point, here's the part where I actually have an opinion. There's this question that was asked, thank God. It's so much easier to talk when you're being asked a question. What are we missing because of the tools we're using? I think the main thing is voices. Not to be all kind of like, we are the world about it. But the real problem that I see with visualization is that Sophie Pughill do it. And the visualization that people do do is so limited. If we talk about people being able to understand nothing more than a bar chart, we should really think about what people have actually made. Most people have only made bar charts in Excel. And it's very, very hard to understand things that you have not actually made. This is why we do master's paintings in art class. It's because you're mimicking the creation of a thing in order to understand the thing. And you don't get there just by browsing InfoVis sites. And so the idea behind TileMill, for instance, is to make more map makers. It isn't like it is the most powerful tool in the world. It's more that it makes something that is previously something for 30 dudes with MacBooks into something that thousands of people can do. So maps, what are they made of? Let's see. This is the first time that I've used Spaces feature on my computer because it's really terrible. Maps are, I made this infographic. This is how maps are made. The world is a sphere.  And that's what we call a map because the problem with spheres, obviously, is that you can't see behind them. And so you can't, you know, you got to do it. And then beyond that, they have to be multi-scale. So we take one tile and a tile, meaning 256 by 256 pixel image. And so this might look like that, very, very simple. If you go in one zoom level, it's four tiles. If you go in 2, 16, 256, then the numbers start getting very, very large. And then you're very, very close to a thing. If you're a math nerd, this is just two to the power of z. It's really uninteresting. And so basically, these are the two operations that you have. You have just data. You're turning it into a flat surface. And then you're doing something that's extremely multi-scale about it. And by multi-scale, I mean that at this level, we're only seeing countries. At this level, we're seeing countries with names and then borders and then streams and then towns, major highways, slight highways, buildings, residential streets, railroads, and then finally, building names. Google Maps usually shows about three levels of roads at a time, which is super weird because you never really realize it until you think about it. Anyway, so the principles of how Tile Mill works, it's basically made to be not scary. The main problem that we saw was that previous things were scary. And so you can either try to make things non-scary by putting lots of knobs on them, or you can try to make them familiar. Tile Mill tries to make it familiar by making maps seem like building a web page or working with a spreadsheet. It was also all about just being really, really simple and to make things look pretty and to really treat maps as just kind of drawing. And then I feel like I would be derelict if I didn't say the word D3 at some point in the stock. The end result of Tile Mill is images. The reason why is that the image on the left is made from one megabit of data, and the image on the right is made from 400 gigabytes of data. And your browser can read both of them, which so just to prove that this isn't just kind of a personal grudge against D3 because it's the best. I've recently been building this, which is a D3 map of the world that you can edit and you can change things. And you can just vandalize this data a lot if you really want and then save it to OpenStreetMap. I won't because I have a reputation on the internet. So images, because they're simple, because they're images, computers, love rasters, they're square. The process, this is the first of my embarrassing pencil drawings to be in this. You use Tile Mill on your laptop. And so I was actually going to do this run through, but I feel like it would be better just to do it. So I think, as Sean said earlier, after you work with something for a while, you get quite bored of just working with the normal stuff. So instead of doing a map of places, I'll do a map of stars. There is this really, really excellent, let's see. I have this somewhere. This is kind of the bad thing about working in temp directories all the time. And if this doesn't work, I can always just use the cool stuff, which I will call 0.03. Oh, OK. Here we go. Just needed a projection. So right now, these are stars, but they're on the world. Obviously, that's not real. There is no world on stars. They don't really have much to do with each other. They're subsets. So I'll just make them stars on a black background, make this window really large. And as you can see, it's basically like an interface in which you can take data and styles on the right and turn them onto pictures on the left, which are extremely, extremely multi-scale, with this metaphor of zooming, just ruling everything. And so these stars have a little bit of data attached to them. Speaking of which, this is from the AstroNexus project, which is incredible. It's just like star science nerds. I love them. So I'll just make all stars with color greater than 0, make those cyan. And so now you can kind of see these basic things that we can understand about stars. And then let's see. What are they? So this also has names.  Yeah, cool. So I'll add labels to these stars. See that text name is name. And text face name is Helvetica bold. I don't really, I'm not a text guy. Sorry, I hate all fonts, as my friend used to say. And so now we have this, and let's let all these guys overlap, which will be extremely ugly. And let's make them white. So as you can see, this is the known universe of stars. Usually you would think of the multi-scale of a map being really interesting, because you can see cities or something like that. But here it's that, obviously, if you were in the awesome planetarium earlier, we're just a very, very small dot in this actual gigantic universe of things. And so this is about our constellation as we zoom in. This is like a few hundred megabyte database. Let's see. Yeah, so you can see. And I don't really know whether this is just that things are grouped around our sun or whether we know things that are nearby. But here's basically like our little guy. You can see Betelgeuse. You can see all those various awesome little planets. And then you can very easily just kind of select an area of this and turn it into a SVG, PDF, MB tiles, file, whatever you want to do. And make it zoomable on the internet. Let's see. Actually, in this demo, I'll just show you the end slide. This is a really fantastic project by Sean Gillies that I used called Pleiades, which is a map of the ancient world. And so these are all the places that were existent in Roman times and were destroyed. They were the best. And so as I showed briefly, the inputs and outputs of Tile Mill are meant to be open. In some ways, they have to be open because Tile Mill is an open source piece of software. So we aren't going to integrate with evil proprietary things on either side. As far as how exactly we developed it, it's kind of this question of whether we want something to be extremely easy via knobs or whether we want it to be learnable. And I kind of air it on the side of learnable. Basically, if you mess up, it teaches you, but it does not forgive. So if you type in polygon fill with 1L, it says you should probably write polygon fill with 2Ls. It does the same kind of thing with autocomplete. And the language is relatively simple. You can get really crazy with it, but it's basically like a superset of CSS that is applied to maps instead of web pages. And it's also self-documenting. So instead of CSS where you have, well, actually, CSS has thousands and thousands of properties now. This has a few hundred, but there is documentation for all of them, which I mostly wrote. And here's just kind of the layout of a web map that we actually created. And so basically the big point of these CSS style sheets is that when you think of Z-index and HTML, this is kind of the next level of Z-index, in which very, very often we have much, much, much, much more as far as layers than that. Let's see, I'm gonna switch to showing the new stuff depending on, let's see, I think I have an internet connection. Okay, so, well, I'll show data. Okay, so data, blah, blah, blah. Data sucks, it's the worst thing of all time. So if you work in another industry like audio or, you know, text or if you work in graphics, you always have like PSDs and you have JSON and you have MOBI files. Like, okay, eBooks suck, but you have Calibrian, it just converts between all those things and you don't have to worry about it. Whereas Geospatial data has kind of stagnated for years upon years and it's just horrible. All of the file formats don't have adoption or support or anything. So we just supported all of them, which doesn't really fix the problem, but it does kind of. It also helps with the problem that basically all of our maps are really based upon OpenStreetMap at some point. If you haven't heard of OpenStreetMap, it's what I was vandalizing earlier in this presentation. It is this fantastic project which is basically an open source map of the world. The importance of OpenStreetMap is, of course, without it, most people would not be able to make maps. The extremely stifled geo-industry that you see right now would just be Google Bing and nothing else. Probably not Bing now. But, sorry guys. And so, you know, it's basically like a map of the world as you would expect. It's very similar to Google Maps, except this map is notably much uglier because it was designed by nerds. I like these red colors are pure red, unfortunately. But the big feature is that instead of any other kind of mapping portal, you can replace the WW with the word planet and it goes to this page where you can download the entire thing. Maps are very, very big. It's a very, very, very, very large set of data. I've made a bunch of visualizations, but all of them really say the same thing. It's a lot of data.  It's not exactly there, but it's getting there. And so, let's see. The thing that sucks about this is that it's 28 gigabytes, but it's around 300 to 400 gigabytes on disk, and it takes two days to import on an SSD machine. So unless you have like a lot of money to throw around, it really, really, really, really sucks to use, or if you're mapping a very small area. And so, I'll just jump very rapidly to a demo of some crazy new stuff. This is TileMill 2. And so, similar to TileMill 1, as far as interface, since our interfaces are so minimal, there's really not much to do here, you know, unless this was dark and this was, I don't really care. But the difference is that this has the entire world. And so, let's say that I'm, sorry, I automatically zoomed to DC. So, let's say that I change the background color and I change water to something ridiculous. So, it's rendered on the fly, and it's changed everywhere. And so, if you were to go to Italy, to some random lake, it's the same. And it's not any kind of post-processing, it's actually just like an on-the-fly database backed by lots of, well, not that many buzzwords. I could actually probably say them in like one or two sentences. Mostly protocol buffers, and then really, really, really smart simplification of features, and really fast servers. And so, basically, you know, since you have all these kind of attributes, you can do much more intense things. You can say line with zero for all major roads. And hide all major roads, hide all streets, all limited streets, and make all buildings red. And so, basically, Tile Mill 2 is kind of like our problem. The main problem that Tile Mill 1 could not fix is history, unfortunately. Like, you're integrating against horrible, horrible formats that have been around for way too long and don't scale. And so, we basically just wanted to fix that. Like Tile Mill 1, Tile Mill 2 is also a BSD, which is an open-source license, which basically means that if you're competing with us, you can rename it CatMill and sell it for money if you want to. Nobody has so far, so we're assuming that it's not a problem. And so, as far as publishing this, kind of like the big question is that if you were to go to an existing map conference or to a GIS department end of the year type thing where people show what they've been working on for four or five months, most of what you'll see are printed out maps on those classic kind of styrofoam boards. Like, usually three maps because there are three sides to the board. And then a paragraph of text. And this is kind of what map publishing tended towards for quite a while. It thought about scale in a very limited way. It was very much about these kind of classical ideas of context, like North Arrows. This is the ArcGIS North Arrow selector. And notice it scrolls. And they're all North Arrows, which is kind of weird. I've always wondered about, like there are plenty of projections in which like North is not the thing that you care about. But it's always North Arrows, both named and is. Whereas TileMill is really created to be web-first. So like the main thing that it focuses on is actually like zoomable map tiles that you can put on the internet. And that are actually interactive in a very useful way. And it kind of shows this in that the style language treats zoom levels as first-class options. And that when you're exporting, you're choosing basically like a 3D cube. Map tiles are the MP3s of maps, says Mike Magersky. Basically like they're the common format. And since maps make these certain assumptions, since they assume that map tiles cover specific areas of the world, that there are specific zoom levels, et cetera, you can stack them on top of each other. Which is really interesting. Like they're this insane compatibility point in an industry that has historically hated compatibility in every form. And I'm not really sure why exactly.  In order to fix this, in order to fix one of the problems of map tiles though, so to go back to that really to this thing, do you have that many files on your computer? You probably shouldn't, it'll break. And this was a problem for us for quite a while. Basically computers are not made for lots of files. If you've done CS, they're basically using, they're usually using a B tree and they run out. And so we created this really, really simple file format called MB tiles, which just packs them all into a tiny little file. When we released it, a lot of people were really afraid because it's a new file format. And it was released by a company, oh God. But it's just an SQLite database with image data in it. It's four lines to extract. And I wrote the tool to extract it, like the day after just to make people less afraid. Under the hood, second drawing. Let's see, these are the things to memorize really, really quickly if you're interested in the technical side. Tile Mill relies on hundreds and hundreds of open source libraries, but these are like the first down things that it relies on. A lot of these are very, very specific, but I obviously made the first two big because those are the ones that you should remember. Mapnic is kind of like the big, it's like the D3 of tiled maps to throw in D3 for the second time. It's extremely fast and extremely successful. It's open source licensed under the LGPL, et cetera. And then of course, Node.js is unnecessarily fast for 99% of use cases. It allows you to use JavaScript, which everyone loves. Obviously, this is probably raising a few eyebrows about why we're using Node.js, and this is an application that's in my bar. So this is a web app to, if I just pull up the address of that web app, it's the same thing. It's just a native wrapper on all platforms that people can kind of treat it as a native app. Again, kind of on the dialogue of making people less afraid, we found that really, really, really small things like that. The difference between something that's on your home screen, on an iPad versus something that's in a web browser is really massive for the way that people actually understand a project. But obviously, it's super, super fun to actually just develop something where you can look at a map and right click a tile. That's downloading data sources. And that's using new features. I really should not be a developer for this software. Because all the maps that I make are using things that get merged and then unmerge. So for instance, this map, it's just a tile in a web map, which you can copy and paste and you can add into your projects. It's, I mean, like depending on what level of like crazy wizardry you want to get down to, it's a very transparent interface that you can actually learn from. And if you're trying to build something like this for some other use case, like I would love if somebody built this from music. Please copy it. We already got the grant and did it, so you might as well. Let's see. Yeah, so I haven't shown any examples of maps that were made with tile, except for my own, which are actually the ugliest ever created. So let's show some cooler ones. Well, this one's my own. Okay, so as Amanda brought up, you can't really avoid reference to Joy Division's albums in any kind of visualization talk. And so this is a map called Shadow Play. After that song, of course. Computationally, it's very simple. It's just a line going across the map. If it detects that it's on a continent, then it has more noise. Otherwise, it's just a sine curve. This guy, we actually hired him eventually, but he was mapping out Occupy networks around the world. And they had like a really, really fantastic database. Occupy did a really bizarrely awesome job as far as organizing. And 8-bit map, of course. I think that they're one of those things that somebody did them about five years ago, and then Google did them last year, and everyone was like, er, which is fine. You have less ability to copy when you're big. And so a pirate map was developed, obviously, by one of our lead cartographers. And you can see that he's a real artist. It has really awesome fonts. There are some monsters in random parts of it. And he replaces some of the words with pirate words. Some of the less ridiculous things that have been made with it are the FCC's maps, which are actually, I don't know, if you really want a use case for how bizarre and opinionated data can be, this is a pretty good one. Because they're advertising maximum advertised download speed, but their data reporting is so bad that they published a lot of maps just to prove how bad their data reporting was so that they could, you know, basically put the pressure on people who were not doing their jobs. And it worked. Map of Iceland. Iceland. And a different projection than Mercator, which is just beautiful. This is the guy who wrote the CSS language with me.  And this one, my heartbeat is the width and the color of the line. And so you can see that on the XY plane in DC is basically the hill. And I live in Columbia Heights, which a lot of people figured out on the internet. But which is basically there. You can see kind of like a cross shape around it. And so like going up and down is where I'm actually like working hard. But you know, it's sad. Like speaking of which, like people not being able to do visualization, like this is kind of a weird thing. Like I made this map and I think it's relatively pretty and like a lot of people thought it was pretty. But I'm a very bad runner. And a lot of people like a year later after I published everything were able to make theirs and it just was embarrassing. It was like, you know, people training for marathons.  And it's just, it's kind of, it's, I found it to be a little bit, not only embarrassing, but like a little bit odd that the people who's actual data to visualize and who's actual attachment to the craft were not able to do it first. I wish they were. And I wish that like, you know, this was just one of many at the beginning. And then one of the weirder examples is that Craigslist made maps and we kind of looked at them and we were just like, wait. Which is cool. You know, they're great people. And so like Craigslist just basically did it themselves.  So we didn't hear from them very much, but they just kind of used Tylenol on their own. And they started from one of the open examples and just did it, which is pretty awesome. You know, like obviously transitioning from, from Development Seed being a contracting company to Mapbox trying to do products, it's very weird when somebody first uses your open source project to do something that previously they would have paid you for. But it's also like this extremely awesome feeling that like you've actually created something that does not need you to sit next to somebody or even be on a really boring conference call with them. And they can just do it. You know, you're like that, that finally has legs. Tylenol too, I already showed. Rendering the world is really hard, et cetera. Use vector tiles. And that's, let's see, I just have a lot of time for questions, right? Cool. Oh, yep. So the watercolor maps are stamens. Oh, yeah, these guys are actually made all in Tylenol. So we merged Tylenol, got raster compositing modes. And so you can do quite nice things in it in which you could say that something's comp-op is overlay, I think is valid. I don't remember these really offhand. But you can basically just save something and overlay over black, maths. But yeah, so you can combine layers and just add arbitrary composite operations to them. There we go. That's real overlaying. Looks the same. Sure. Let's see, I actually, I didn't really pan through these tabs, but this is just locations. Obviously, like every nerd, I track my location with the GPS unit and so on. No, I should. Oh, God, if only. This is how much of New York would have been illegal to carry a gun in if a law had been passed that was on the books. Anyway, where our map data is. And then this one's a maze. This one's more on like the kind of insane slash like, just, I don't know, I was in a very weird place. I seriously did this at like 2 a.m. And then it was one of those things where you wake up and a really good idea just seems weird. But it is solvable. And yeah, it's like several million units. And it, let's see, yeah. So it opens over here and it gets out over here. And you can easily, you know, you can easily write a robot that would get through it. Nobody has, I guess, I don't know, either it's hard or other people have a better sense of priorities than I do. Probably the latter. You can also use some other random let's see, images. Here's a map of Super Mario, brothers. Which actually, this is all just thanks to the internet. People have made these game maps of every old game ever. It's quite awesome. You can use it for gigantic images, just like space images, this one of the galaxy. But you know, obviously, like a lot of the times these NASA images, they don't actually give them to you as large as you would want them. Or, you know, my expectation of large is way too big. And let's see, you can flip the world and sort countries by size. Greenland is really big. Both on maps and in real life.  Let's see, yeah. And then, you know, Voronai polygons around bus stops in Denver. So basically like, what's the closest bus stop to you in a certain direction? And also, so I should not take credit for these kind of crazy geometrical things. Please, please, please use Shapely. The name is so bad to Google. But Shapely is this Python package that makes all this super, super accessible and it's made by Sean Gillies and it's a fantastic piece of software. But I wrote some docs for it. Just Google for Shapely and Fiona.  I feel like Santiago already went here, so. See, he also already went here. Anything else? Yep. Yeah, so it's kind of a, it's a hard question because basically like if you think of map data and like what maps do is that they tile it out. And so if you take a really naive approach, this tile of data will be 400 gigabytes, which is way too large. You would never want to do that. And so in order to actually tile this out, we need to make certain assumptions.  And then from there on, you have to make quite a few relatively tricky geometrical calls. Like this tile connects to this tile so the roads need to end in exactly the same place. And they need to be simplified according to the zoom level so that you aren't storing more than one pixel of precision for each jump of a node. As far as all of this is under the Mapnic repo. And so you can pretty much just check out everything that we've done. I mean, the same for absolutely anything that Mapbox has done except for our hosted application, which is exceedingly boring, I guarantee it. Yep. Yeah. I'm sure, I'm sure not, but yeah, actually, so the weird thing about like building an SVG map renderer is that within this task of building an editor, we kind of did. And so let me zoom to somewhere that will be quick to download on conference wifi. Like SVG is a very interesting technology, I would say. It makes very, very simple things difficult and it makes some very, very, very, very, very hard things. Simple. Basically like here, for instance, these are one-way roads. There are five lines on top of each other for a halo, a stroke, the interior stroke, a hit radius and one-way markers. It's insane. And they, thank you. Awesome. Cool. Yeah, we should talk. I also have a long wish list as far as the markers back and text geometry? Text geometry? Yeah. And make it work in Firefox, please. Oh, come on. We've actually gotten like five or six browser bugs already fixed because we discovered them here. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, the hardest part of maps is labels. So without figuring out how long they are, you can't do it very well.  But if you were to look at this and, oh God, no, no. Like if you were to look at Photoshop, for example, it's just as expensive as it's ever been and it's terrible. The thing hasn't changed, it hasn't been like Photoshop has gotten simpler or less expensive. It's actually gotten as expensive and way more complicated for no reason and it's way worse. Really the deal is that we have better alternatives in a lot of industries and sometimes like those alternatives become so popular that we think of them as the thing. As far as why GIS software kind of suffered, it's basically the same thing as Photoshop. You have like a market of pro photographers and like those photographers love Photoshop. It's an extremely powerful tool. Whereas like if you have smaller niche use cases, like a lot of farmers just need to figure out where exactly their crop polygons are. That doesn't require ArcGIS or Photoshop or anything like that. It just requires a very simple tool and those farmers don't have a lot of cash to give you, unfortunately.


Really a cornerstone of economic progress, of economic prosperity is trade. Trade allows for specialization. It allows for all of us to benefit from the productive abilities of 8 billion people on planet Earth. It allows for the state of living we have, you know, this is trade between individuals, but of course trade globally between individuals. Trade is the most important feature of the world economy over the last 200 years, you know, freedom within countries and then trade globally which has allowed the kind of increase in wealth that we have experienced and that we are experiencing today and it is responsible for much of the quality and standard of living that we have today. 80% of the trade that is done internationally by volume and 50% of the value of trade travels on boats, mainly 105,000 container ships, tankers, freight vessels that are out in the ocean pretty much all the time. The trade routes that make it possible for this trade to happen, you know, exist because of certain geopolitical realities. The first wave of globalization that hit the world in the 19th century was basically made possible and protected by the British fleet. It is the Britain who kept the sea lanes open that allowed for trade throughout the world, the spices from Asia to, you know, put aside colonialism with or without colonialism. It is what allowed trade to become global. The opening of the Suez Canal was a major feat and a major shortcut from Asia to Europe. There's only so much you can carry by camel. There's only so much you can carry in trucks and railroads from Asia to Europe can do either of those to get to the United States without shipping global trade grains to a halt. A standard of living quality of life collapses and I'm not exaggerating, collapses. We become much poorer, all of us. In the 19th century was the British Navy that kept this trade moving. In the 20th century and into the 21st century, it has been the American Navy that has kept these ships and these moving and these trade routes open. Certainly since World War II, the United States has been the dominant naval power in the world and its mission. This is why we have a fleet in Asia. We have a fleet in the Mediterranean. We have a fleet in the Arabian Sea. Its mission is to keep the trade routes open to facilitate this trade. But as America has gotten weaker, as other countries like Russia and China have become much more willing to challenge America because of its weakness, not because of its weakness on the seas, not because of its military weakness, not because of the weakness of its weapons, but because of the weakness of our will to engage that fleet, those weapons, to engage in defending those sea lanes. I mean, it took years to clean up the mess of Somali pirates when it was 20 years ago. It shouldn't have been long at all. It should have been trivial. It was less than 20 years ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago. America has been tested more and more and viewed more and more as a paper tiger. And you're seeing this. You're seeing this all over the world, really. Right now in the headlines, of course, are the Houthis basically closing down the Red Sea and passage towards the Suez Canal. We're seeing, though, that is not the only hotspot in terms of global trade. The Black Sea, an important shipping route, particularly from Ukraine and Russian ports, out towards parts of Europe and to Africa and to the rest of the world, is basically a battle zone filled with mines and battleships. The Baltic Sea. Baltic Sea, this would be north of Germany and Poland, west of Lithuania, Latvia. The Baltic Sea now is kind of a shadowy place. It's, of course, filled with pipelines and cables and a bunch of different powers are struggling to dominate the area and to figure out what to do. And, of course, Asia. Right now, off the coast of China, in the waters of the China Sea, in the western Pacific, you're seeing one of the largest concentrations of navies we have seen certainly since World War II. Not only are the Chinese deploying more and more ships, a bigger and bigger navy, but the United States is deploying significant forces. China is trying to intimidate Taiwan. We get to the Taiwanese election in a minute trying to intimidate the Philippines, trying to intimidate all its neighbors. Any United States is there to say, uh-uh, we're not going to allow you to dominate the space and to strangle global trade. Indeed, a second carrier group just left San Diego heading towards western Pacific, unscheduled. This was not a scheduled send, so America is amassing naval troops off the coast of China, one could say. I don't think, certainly since the end of the Cold War, but maybe even pre-Cold Wars, there ever been so much tension across the world in the oceans of the world. Now, I've been talking about this for a long time. I've been saying for the past couple of years, I think that the United States better be investing in its navy. It better be improving its naval capabilities. It better be increasing its capacity both to deploy forces on the sea, but also to defend them against missiles, anti-ship missiles and the likes. Whether that happens or not, we will see. The United States is still behind in deploying the latest class of aircraft carrier. We've only got one of the new class out there, the Ford, two others. One should be deployed sometime in 2025. I'm not sure what the next one is going to be deployed. We'll get the DEI. DEI is not affecting the US Navy. What's affecting the US Navy is a lack of political commitment, the fact that our shipbuilders and so on in our procurement offices in the military are incompetent and therefore drive budgets through the roof. There's probably a lot of corruption going on. Of course, what really is lacking is political will from the top. Our inability to deploy those forces and really the class case right now is with the Houthis. Houthis, of course, have closed the Red Sea in solidarity with the Palestinians as if they care. There's nothing to do with solidarity with the Palestinians. It has everything to do with the joint shared common hatred of Israel in a sense by the Houthis, by the Iranian overlords, that they can get away with it. That they can do whatever they want in this world because America is weak and we'll get to, even Israel maybe is weak, we'll get to that in a minute. And therefore they can stop shipping. They can close the Suez Canal. They can close the Red Sea and nobody will do anything about it. On Thursday and over the weekend the United States and Britain responded militarily after weeks, weeks of doing nothing other than shooting missiles out of the sky but doing nothing in terms of actually taking out responding militarily in an offensive way to the Houthis. They took out some of their capabilities to launch missiles but it was a pinprick. The Houthis don't have much military capabilities. They are a weak opponent. I wouldn't want to put troops on the ground because they're pretty good at guerrilla warfare if you will but in terms of actually missile projection, rockets, launching attacks against boats, they are weak. The United States not only has the capacity to shoot the missiles out of the air but they have even the capacity to from the air destroy, destroy completely the Houthis capability of launching anything. All that's needed is the will to use that capability, the Americans capability, to destroy the Houthis. But all we did was a half measure, a pinprick, something insignificant. It won't make much difference. It's the same thing every president has done for the last 40 years, nothing substantial, nothing regarding the real threat. Remember the Houthis just get their orders from the Iranians. The Iranians are scot-free. We do nothing to them. The next few days we'll see how the Houthis respond to the U.S. attack. We'll see if the U.S. continues to attack. We'll see if the Iranians want to engage further. Generally, generally, I think it's important to note, the Iranians don't want a war with the United States. They know exactly what the outcome of that will be. Just like Hezbollah in the North in Israel doesn't want a war with Israel. They know exactly what the outcome would be. What they want is to bug Israel.  What they want is to distract from the war in Gaza. What they want is to show that they can kill Israelis with impunity. What they don't want is a full-fledged war, which is exactly what Israel is not giving them, which is a massive strategic mistake. Iran doesn't want a full-fledged war with the United States. They want to obstruct their operations in Iraq. They want to kill as many Americans as they can in Syria. They want to injure as many troops as they can. They want to stop the shipping lanes. They want to obstruct and interfere and bug and harass and show the world how weak America is.  And they know America is not going to give them a war because they've been doing this for a long time. They know America will not give them a war. They were killing Americans during the Trump administration. Trump killed Soleimani. Great. Iran can handle that. That's not going to change their global plans. Did anybody go to war with Iran? No. Biden is going to go to war with Iran? No. So they're just going to continue to do this, continue to kill Americans, continue to harass, continue to disrupt, continue to destroy the capacity of the U.S. Navy to defend the shipping lanes. Now this has implications that go way beyond the Suez Canal and the Red Sea because it basically sends a message to all the rogue regimes in the world out there, to all the pirates all over the world. The U.S. is weak. Its Navy will not deploy. The U.S. is not committed to protecting the sea lanes. And therefore it's a freefall for pirates and it's a freefall for the bad guys of the world. And if we allow trade to collapse, as I said, we're basically allowing western civilization as an economy at least to collapse. And we know that there are many people within our countries and outside of our countries who are just waiting for the opportunity to pillage what we have, to destroy what we have. And part of that will come when economies are collapsing. So what's at stake with the Houthis? What's at stake around the world? What's at stake in the ocean? It is our way of life. It's our quality of life and standard of living. And people don't seem to care. Republicans don't want intervention. The left doesn't want intervention. Nobody wants to actually protect, trade, global trade, and do what's necessary to keep it facilitated.  And yet women, the Houthis side now, isn't it cool to be on the side of Houthis, not realizing the barbarity of these people? It truly is stunning, because what is being revealed since October 7th in the West is not so much the anti-Semitism, not the hatred of Israel. We all knew that. What's really been revealed since October 7th is the sheer utter hatred of so many people in the West, of the West, of America, the hatred of Americans from America.  They hate the West. It's only explanation for supporting the Houthis. It's self-hatred. Of course, they will also be the people who are, you know, they will not survive the coming collapse when there is one. They will not survive it. It truly is stunning and unbelievable when you see these demonstrations yelling for Hamas and for the Houthis and what that means and what that signifies and who they're standing with. Who are they standing with?


at 5 p.m., so we're called to order and just remember this is a site visit so we can't take any testimony which is here to look we can talk about it we can't like make decisions or take official testimony for the record right we can talk as we're looking so you know this is on okay was there a car coming you said all right well let's get started I thought Alfred was joining us but I don't see him now this doesn't have any there's no official recognition of this is where chafe enforced is am I correct there's no sign that anybody's ever put up okay because it says no trespassing or so it says no trespassing right so it's just the left side of the road so so why does it this is the town's right of way hey guys everybody's talking all at once so if we're gonna be on the same page with where we are and what we're looking at it'd be good to do it together oh this is the town right of way this this road is a town class four class four road which is somewhere in here is the property line so I think Neil said that the town forest is on the left side of this road oh it says no hunting so whose property is on the right side do we know I'm not sure who does on that it's one of the adjacent property owners I think that it might be it might be Jay Lecaire I know he owns property up here and he said his property boarded mine on the top edge okay are you on this road other end oh the other end of peeking okay all right here hi how are you and you are watch it Rick okay so what I understand is the town forest Neil said starts down there at the corner kind of at the bumper of John's car the town this is a class four road I don't know what the right and the town forest is on the left and the property on the right is owned by I don't know if Jay Lecaire I know that he owns property here somewhere a woman on this land here you go down further and his is on the right and comes back out up there okay so are these the mark I want to use other marks that Alfred put up for parking okay so do we think oh this must be the yeah so Jerome these are the four these are look like the stakes that Alfred put in for a parking area which doesn't so the town forest is here yeah yeah right yeah I don't know I was curious about it my guess is it some kind of tax for because it just shows up on the town record that's a long time ago and they didn't just become a they back in the age they took wood off it for poor people that had no firewood yeah because I pulled some of the wood out for them and they blocked it up put it in the old town shed where the where the town hall you know not town office yeah they used to be an old garage right the town office they filled that up with a mess of wood and gave it out to people that needed wood oh here comes Alfred they might have gotten it from tax sale years ago but they've owned it so I think this is where you mark for the parking spots and this is enough this is enough area for what do we say six parking areas it takes 54 feet 54 feet per air per foot wide they want parking area nine foot so if you're backing in here 54 feet okay so for each for each witness so for each vehicle it would be nine feet six in a row fit yeah yeah and that's what that is okay given the fact that six cars wasn't exactly yeah we've kind of term it yeah right I'm on George Road so you have to go all the way through here hit peeking brook go up a little bit and take a lap okay hi can I just get your name for the record Tyler Clark now are you a property owner yeah right here 602 Chapin Road okay so we're just looking at the parking area this is where the road commissioner yep blocked it off marked it off all right does anybody want to walk a little further see I think just leave it I don't know we'd have to talk about that again okay now these are posted no trespassing on so must be just that side right but but the hope would be I think maybe I'm just thinking myself but the most important people in oh because there's all kinds of sticks and everything tree about to tip over well I don't know how far we really need to go I don't know how far we need really need to go the whole idea was to see about a parking area yeah it's beautiful it's really beautiful and John noticed that it must be having been mowed so who would so would somebody travel on this to get to which road you can't take a regular vehicle because you couldn't grow that good oh okay so you but somebody with an ATV or something could right well and there's there's a spot as you're going down the hill on the right hand side the bank is all eroded and it's all washed out get down a little further and there's no stone culvert there and it's no culvert washed out okay so it's not like you're gonna take a so it's not like you're gonna be able to take ATVs all the way through right because of the washed out culvert and stuff I mean they might try it I'm sure you can get through with an ATV or a dirt bike okay so I don't think anybody is I think it just doesn't grow very good there's not much fertility and there's lots of leaves looks like it's all my roads that are in the woods they look like that maybe Jay Jay owns land down here is like his land comes out right down here is that Jay love care look here yeah is this his land over here too you know yeah I don't know if he bought this land that the people on I told you you can see his marker right here on the right somewhere is and he owns all the way down to me stale's land I believe on the right hand side okay but not just far down yeah Larry are there any okay so I got it right yeah I got right score for me I got a name of a tree right the ash tree with they have that they have that um ash borer yeah yeah all right let's head back Tom do you know how many acres the town you know how many acres the town owns maybe 20 20 maybe 20.5 or something like that I know it's 20 at least one find that out for you we could ask yeah we can ask off of that and I guess the question I have too is would it just be driving at your own risk or are we going to I mean that's not a decision that we can make today but I just wonder are we gonna have parking area mode or you just drive in and cameras have been stolen so I guess my question is and I'm waiting for Alfred the neighbors worried about runoff I don't I mean it's already the Alfred so the neighbors mentioned something about being concerned about runoff is that would we be looking at just leaving this like this mowing it what I mean hi nice to see you okay Kelly that what was your name Kyle boost and what was your name so we just we're looking at this is the road commissioner marked off where you can see these stakes and we just walked a little further down beautiful what would this just be mowed I mean we grade it and well I guess we'd have to see what the conservation commission is thinking and like I said this is a site visit so we just have to be careful what we talk about so I don't we'd have to obviously talk about this at a meeting at another time right but I don't know about plowing it in the winter I just had a little part of this I should kneel correct me if I get this wrong but at the last conservation commission meeting we had a long discussion about this though it as it resolved itself I think we actually agreed that we didn't want to recommend pursuing the winter access right that okay require all of that work and problems they just start small the smallest possible road access you know a modest little welds built a parking area here that you know protects from runoff and all and and then just and just just see I mean that if it so if it wasn't winter access that would mean it would be graded and so that it's level and mode and there's no intention to well I think that you know there's going to be times in the spring of the year yeah well we can always I mean the state the state says you can't go on trails certain times in the year when it's all muddy and all that right true true yeah all right so I think unless there's any more questions we can head back out so what do we do with our little one-lane road all the way out here you have to turn around and this parking area would have to be here okay how about passing by when you meet cars on a road is a very narrow past three road I mean when we meet neighbors one of us has to pull right and when when all this whole housing development was going in that was a point that I brought up and Margaret Bowen was on the review board back then and mr. Scribner that put all those houses in brought them twenty five hundred dollars if my memory serves me correctly the town twenty five hundred dollars to upgrade the road I said twenty five hundred dollars isn't gonna buy a culvert and a loaded gravel no it's actually not well so I was at the hearing and what Don Singleton did the road commissioner then was he by agreement they got a written agreement that the developer would pay for the upgrade cost because Don the commissioner did not trust that the developer whatever reason was gonna bring it up the proper standards to build the road to our specs and he didn't want the back and forth because he opposed this development so not a compromise so the compromise was that the town would do the upgrading and then build the developer and I think they held back the permits to the development until that bill was paid right and then it's in everybody's so this was this road with all that was decided before the development went in and the folks who bought into the development bought into it knowing that there will be that way it wasn't a surprise didn't happen after it was done yeah I'm not talking about from where it's taking road and down through there I'm talking all the way back yeah just a class three itself is pretty narrow I know because Blackberry had to develop a whole thing yeah I think it was seven thousand dollars yeah we're nine thousand it's still weren't a truck a little gravel no it was not no he didn't want to do anything yeah how much material there were some other issues he wasn't paying taxes on the lots he didn't sell there was all sorts of stuff he's a piece of work took his money all right you ready to head back? oh yeah oh yeah Mark? I think that regardless of what we do here if it's going to be a quiet parking area we're gonna have to cut some of these trees to to widen that at least from here to Blackberry Ridge a little bit because it's just not you're not going to get a car in there in and out of there different times of the year so you would work with the tree warden who happens to be here and you'll make her to mark the trees and you know is that what you aren't the orange flags on this side are kind of like where you imagined yeah sure well and I think that's to be determined about the winter use you know I mean Larry remembers and I I do remember that at discussion now I think you know at least some of the brushy the smaller stuff would have to be cleared out just so everybody's up to this point Alfred well from here out for the yeah yeah because I saw a couple more orange are those ones you put on? yeah okay you're gonna die anyway I'm just wondering like what the conservation commission needs if that would you know that current area is that you know sufficient for a couple cars I mean that's what hunters do right now so you know instead of developing a new area are you thinking to put it down now yeah you know we're kind of widings and then the class four road continues down but there's like an opening right there that you're talking about on this road yeah just down another 100 yards or so we want to look at that and it wouldn't really be like needed to be developed but if there's truly just going to be a few people using it here and there that's what hunters do right now I don't know that we want to put a parking area that far in well why don't we check it out and make a decision based on what we see developing it would just be kind of using that natural and given that it's a low enough population of people coming here you know well why don't we just walk if it's a hundred yards why don't we just watch more yeah I can I can point out where it is yeah and this is we're going to see this the property line it's so near there's another road down here is that what you said and this goes down to the old class four road that we're on there on the right yeah there's an opening on the left that if you were going to come down there's a structure so it's just easy to come around but would we yeah but would we want people driving further down um that's my question yeah why would why why would we want people to drive further down while we're here figured out show is this it right here this is this is one yep and then there's one further down but but I guess my question is that means that people have to drive further down this road I mean they can currently drive down this road right now so it's just a matter of awareness of it there's a little bit of an issue more of an issue with water runoff down this steeper slope yeah too that because we if you it's not huge one but this is flatter well it's flatter up hills there hills coming down with dumping water into this the parking area and this is flatter it doesn't have that problem well this is going to drain into this you're going to end up draining down into this road that's more what I'd be worried about well it's probably what's the advantage to here I don't know I think the other site would be close to the road would be probably better personally that would be more level yeah it is but I think we're doing to this point about the runoff I think it's important that you see it that would cut that's what we are okay so that's all we're doing that's why this is that's why this is called a site visit okay right so okay let's go all right thank you for sure yeah it's a good idea yeah this figured while you're here yep no that's good rick did you take a picture of that yeah that's uh yeah that's pylus beautiful yeah he's been working on that so he's right down there okay yeah that's right so that's been his kind of weekend project no she doesn't have any separation anxiety like my dogs do but you go to the current count the other town force will you always church no one goes bike riders go oh really I'm didn't steal it by the way I don't know if we've met I think yeah I think I yeah okay I remember you yes but I couldn't remember your name oh yeah yeah I've never been back no well this is why it's nice to do it now because because it's summer it was just hot and buggy yeah no it's well they're everywhere this is a long one yeah so there's one tree that works here I thought I saw a couple more little orange shapes okay now do you see a lot of wildlife like bear and moose do you very cool well we're not fragmenting it fragmenting it would mean dividing it up from the car for dry for walking but you knew this was here with the house right yeah yeah what is spectacular about it well it's it's a beautiful hardwood forest mostly uh-huh but with areas where in season it's just a sea of ferns and things uh-huh um and in a spectacular steep ridge is more or less the west boundary okay yeah um and so it's in you know and it's like if you haven't been in the woods before and you like the woods you know you're gonna get excited when you see it for the first time okay I gotta I gotta walk the whole thing yeah for sure by the way my friend Rob went and hiked by himself the town forest trails yesterday you know everything he said was so well signed he didn't have any trouble so I wanted him to be kind of go out by himself without me to just see you know as a guinea pig to see if he could figure it out and he said it was easy peasy you know the only thing he suggested was you know having more signage at the end of the north spur which we don't know about just to make sure because he he could you know without the signs adequate signage he couldn't tell where it kind of ended he walked out there or where he shouldn't have yeah well I mean I would think that's a big no trespassing sign right there but the time we're done this weekend it'll be well signed um now Tyler Clark you're here right look at the old town which one on the on what side of the road so he's the one with the granite male clothes right there is 602 Chapin and which one is he he's here right yeah he's he must be with the straggler yeah yeah he's a tall guy wearing a hat and Dale Laferrier he doesn't look here he lives on George Road he's George and George Road does this so this road if you took it all the way this will go to Peek and Brook to Peek and Brook pretty close to the George road okay other side is just like a paved turn around yeah that's already established okay and Denise his land does come up yeah he lives on George Road but he owns a lot of the land if you go down on that area now who's this we're talking about now I mean I've only been here yeah yeah well over here now oh yeah I was back in there hey Jimmy yeah and I got a little here we are right here this is the okay this is George Road that comes through here yeah that might be it I think it is somewhere in between those two yeah because that's there the guy that owns property and a little like cabin right there and and that's on this abutting side to the town forest right so he's kind of got back until it goes to Doug Lilly's and he's the back uh back perimeter of the town forest oh gotcha where they where the hill slopes up till like yes yeah yeah Doug's is on the top and he's the farmer up on Lightning Ridge Road yeah okay right this is alternative site three oops sorry well and of course you can't see it yeah now I wish I had one well I'm famous all right this is not bad yeah do you and it's nice and flat yeah it sounds to me yeah but what do I know use the one right I was getting acclimated to kind of who lives where and well that's good I'm sorry to interrupt you yeah no that's fine Alfred would people be able to like drive in park and then that you know so you so it could you could have parking on that side parking on that side and still have room enough in the middle for people to back out right that makes sense right yeah this is a better site pretty easy yeah okay I would say site three that was the conservation solutions but right oh that that was the conservation commission's choice okay you you agree that this could be a better site what does Neil think in the country Neil Neil and Larry what do you think the conservation commission I guess I thought Alfred had designated the parking area but he you guys designated the parking area down there what about a parking area here yeah easier wider sure it's less trees the thing and yeah I don't I think we probably just kind of walked in and said oh that seems like their place yeah okay yeah well we took a picture of it and where did he go I don't know he held up a sign to show that this would be like alternate site three because we had this other site that the neighbors showed us and then the original site so this is site three yeah Kyle boo Kyle boo Kyle boo is that brother's milk is it so I got it spelled wrong it's most people are just gonna walk along I don't know the question that's pretty why it's beautiful again he's gonna be on these rail rides and you know that you've ever been out there that's right all right we're ready to head back no it'll cut it do you think John J's place and then the next one out yeah I think it's better not the neighbors might have more of a concern they wanted to wait for you down yeah he's on the trails you know and you can see why this makes more sense for our people that's why I said you know way way down there people gonna have to drive all the way down back and forth you know when the tow truck has to come in to pull them out this is closer right all right let's head back so we can get this done you like this site uh I think it's I think it's um yeah I certainly looks to be more level right the the slope is a problem I mean there's gonna be drainage you can drain it that way if well no you're it's not gonna you'd have to cut a huge amount out of here I'm not saying you don't do it I just tell you what you're gonna get a natural tracking water that way I mean from this road and from water runs downhill that's it dies it's guys gonna go this is a way you Tyler you're not gonna I frankly I don't think you're gonna find a place to run get water around the top that's what water does um minimal capture mostly water in the back how do you know when people aren't saying you know writing me emails saying God but if only I could have a parking area I come down here I frankly don't think anyone's gonna be here I think it's gonna I think it ran to two or three cars oh really yeah we used to come in here until the I mean people gotta find it first I mean trickering bog and parking lots empty all the time unless it's a special event right all the time that's very well and that's a that's a fancy place that's a very well known as a destination right yeah right really yeah and it's promoted by a nature conservancy yeah observation yeah and it's empty all the time and that's it's on lightning grid roads yeah well word passes and that's all all right you guys ready to head back so we can adjourn we're gonna close the meeting yeah we're gonna you're ready to head back so we can adjourn come on come on cheddar I don't know yet we'll post it on the agenda I don't know I think it's probably just all right there's nothing else what time is it please remember of the day I'm select for you all right are you I move we adjourned okay we can do it just yeah okay all those in favor say hi hi okay we're adjourned thank you everyone beautiful day for a walk thank you


Now I want you to observe, is it happening once in three months? Is it happening once in nine months?  Spiritual process is telling you how you can get away from these cycles. The same pattern of things keep happening over a period of time. The same kind of emotion that situation we go across is same. How to come out of that pattern in life? So, it's good at least you notice the same patterns are happening repeating itself. Most people don't even see that. They keep repeating the same cycles in different scenery and they think they're okay. It's good of you, at least if you're noticing it, the scenery may change. Life scenery will anyway change.  Next time it happened to you, you were in college, so the scenery was different. Next time it happened to you, you were in a job.  But the same things are happening if you closely observe your life. Suppose you're going to Coimbatore from Isha Yoga Center and you saw outside there was Semmedu. You know the Semmedu? No, Semmedu. Irutupalam, that's a nice name.   Now there's no danger, they put a bridge. There was a time when you had to go through, you know, some dangerous waters and you were driving happily towards Coimbatore. Again Irutupalam came. Oh, again Irutupalam, it's okay, bad luck. And again you keep driving after some time, again Irutupalam came. Ah, something, you know, but coincidence. Again Irutupalam came. You must know that you are in Irutu, Irutu. If four times the same town is coming on the way to Coimbatore, that means you're going in circles. That means you're not going anywhere, listen to it. If you're looking at human life as just body, yes, body is getting somewhere, we know where it's getting. You know where your body is getting? Where's your body going? To the grave. Whether it's full moon or no moon, whether it's night or day, body is going ten seconds closer to grave, twenty seconds now. As I'm talking, you're getting closer to grave physically. That's all that's happening. If you exist here as a physical entity, that's all that's happening. And if you exist here only as physical entity, slowly you will see life will be play, then it becomes pleasure, then it becomes so many things, then every joint hurts and then it gets terrified because it's coming to an end. Physical life, this is a progression. You don't have to go through it to know it. You can… you have enough intelligence to sit here and see it. But our fortune is we are not just physical, we have other dimensions to us. In terms of your mental status, either it can continue to grow or it can go in circles. In terms of your emotional status, it can continue to grow or it can go in cycles. Other dimensions, you may not be aware yet, but even there you can go in cycles or you can go somewhere. Now, when you say, I notice that my life is going in cycles, you're essentially talking about the situations around you. More than that, you're talking about your own mental and emotional states going through the same cycles. Some of the ladies, with all your respect, I'm saying this, some of the ladies may observe this better than the men because their mental and emotional cycles are shorter. Every month at a certain time of the month, at least many of them go through a certain level of mental and emotional states which are repetitive because every month it's being repeated, they clearly know it's happening because of this. Because of a certain physiological situation, it is creating a certain psychological situation is something that they can clearly notice. But unfortunately, you don't have menstrual cycles. I'm saying unfortunately, because if there was such a strong reminder, you wouldn't miss it because your cycles are of a different kind. You can close your eyes to it. You can go through life the same way without noticing it. Women are blessed because they cannot miss it, they can notice it that this is happening to them. Men have to be much more aware, they need to do much more work because otherwise you will think you're going somewhere, but every time you're going to iru tupalam, iru tupalam, iru tupalam, thinking you're going somewhere. Physiologically, there is a strong reminder in the female body. The strong reminder that is there in the female body is not a curse. It is a blessing if you know how to use it because any olatile situation, any destabilized situation is a possibility. It's a possibility for change. When there is a set process, you can't change things so easily. When there is a periodic destabilization of the system, there is a great possibility for changing. But anyway, if you are going through cycles, everything in this system is cyclical, isn't it? The earth is going in cycles, the moon is going in cycles, everything is cyclical. If you do not stand up with a certain level of awareness and a certain level of determination and a sense of going somewhere, you will naturally become a part of the cycles. There are various kinds of cycles happening. The longest cycle that's happening here is 144 years. Once in 144 years, certain things happen in the solar system for which we have 144 years, we have a Kumbh Mela. We were fortunate that in our lifetime we witnessed that. The next cycle is twelve-and-a-quarter years, which all of us see. The others are much shorter. There are three-year cycles, there are eighteen-months, sixteen-months cycles, there are other kinds of cycles, all these cycles, depending upon how unaware you are, how destabilized you are, how unfocused you are, you become available to those cycles. If you are completely scattered, you become available to the smallest cycle. If you are little focused, you become available to longer cycles. But everybody is subject to these cycles. These cycles can mean a bondage or these cycles can also mean transcendence. That from one cycle of life to another, you transcend or you repeat the same cycle. That depends on who you are. When so many people, the difference between astrology and spirituality is just this. This is an unpopular subject that I'm taking on. Astrology is trying to tell you how these cycles bind you. Spiritual process is telling you how you can get away from these cycles. We are not denying the cycles.  The cycles are definitely there. But we are looking at the possibilities as to how you can slip away from these cycles. If you live by the cycles, being conscious of the cycles, your life will have a certain equanimity, a certain level of success, certain level of well-being, certain level of prosperity. If you break the cycle, if you are constantly looking how to become free from the cycle, you are looking for your liberation. Are you looking for just well-being or are you looking for liberation? That's the question. Accordingly you must live. So right now, if your life is going into cycles, repetitiveness, that you're repeatedly coming to Eritre Palam, you understand you're not going to reach anywhere like this. It's time to change the pattern. Now I want you to observe, is it happening monthly? I'm sure for you it's not monthly. Is it happening once in three months? Is it happening once in nine months? Is it happening once in sixteen to eighteen months? Is it happening once in three to three-and-a-quarter years? Is it happening in once in twelve years? I want you to notice this. Now you don't start imagining all kinds of things, but it is happening.  It is just happening, whether you're able to notice it or not, it's happening.  If you are conscious, even physical situations around you will repeat themselves. It's so uncanny. It's so uncanny that even physical situations happen exactly the same way. If it's manifesting every three months, we can push it to nine months. If it's manifesting every nine months, we can push it to eighteen months. Eighteen months, we can push it to three years. We can push it to twelve years. Or we can push it to one hundred and forty-four years. Or above all, instead of trying to dodge these cycles, we can ride these cycles. I have been riding my cycles. Every time it comes, my life changes. And it will change dramatically in the next four to six months.


Welcome everyone to the Learning New Podcast, your best source for educational insights and trends. I'm Chris, your host. Today's special guest is Rachel. Rachel is a sixth grade teacher. She teaches ELA and social studies in Ohio. Rachel is a rock star teacher here to share with you how she differentiates instruction, how she leverages technology, and how she personalizes learning for students. Rachel, welcome to the show. Well, thanks for having me, Chris. We are so excited you are here just to be sharing some awesome insights into how you use CSOT and how you are just becoming a better teacher with this tool in your hands. We'll kick off with the easy question, just kind of set our baseline here. Tell me about a time that you successfully differentiated instruction to meet your students' needs. What kind of things really worked for you when you did that? Well, CSOT is absolutely phenomenal for differentiating resources for all of your students. Actually, like right now, I have a student in my class that really struggles with writing. He goes through occupational therapy and such. And so with a lot of our writing assignments or activities that we do, I will put them in CSOT so that he can use, you know, like the video chat features or draw a picture to just show his understanding. And that has been huge for him, such a game changer, where he's feeling like he's being like thriving and his grades are showing that. So that's just one easy way that you can differentiate. Yeah. So good. So good. And I'm sure even that student enjoys having some of that freedom, but you also get better information about what that student actually knows when you use those tools. Absolutely. It's just ever since I started using that for this student, just the depth of background knowledge that he has, it's just like night and day difference between what I previously thought early on in the school year to what he really, truly knows. And, you know, I just can't wait to just see how much further he grows using CSOT as a tool. So awesome. So awesome. So you talked a little bit about some quick techniques and how you use it. Can you walk me through how you approach planning and some of those teacher backends? How do you start to think about what you put out there in your, you know, your lesson plan design and all those things to help to differentiate this content for your students? Great question. I guess I, first of all, I need to focus in on what specific things do I want to gather from my students? If it's a formative assessment or an activity, what what standard or what goal do I have for my students? And then I look at the needs of my students. I have students in my class currently that are labeled as gifted students, and then those that are reading well below grade level. So within the planning process, you know, focus in on what's the overall goal?  And, you know, some of them aren't that fun, quite honest. So, you know, just finding ways if it's a game or in a little activity, or even just draw me a picture of a word that has this root word in it. That way it allows all the students to be successful, but then you can always extend it more for those students that need a little bit more of a push or a challenge where, you know, you tell me of like a handful of root word words that we could use. And, you know, is there another way that you can use this tool, like create a commercial, or, you know, write a story or a letter within CESA where you could use all those skills. So it's just such a versatile tool that it's really great and easy for planning for teachers. And it's fun. The kids think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. So I love it. Exactly. I love that. I love how you're flipping the script on students and really, you know, allowing them to drive their learning and drive their understanding as they start to move forward in your classroom. I think, you know, I as a student would love to have more of that when I was a, when I was a student elementary school. Yes. Yes. Definitely. So good.  Are there any other things that you think about as a teacher and as a professional to just make sure that that's balanced all the time? You know, you're really engaging all your students with technology and still delivering on all those standards that you need to. Right. It's, you know, as a teacher, especially in the 21st century with all of these tools available, you know, we have to make sure that we're balancing just perfectly because we're not here to like just entertain and, you know, do all these activities. You know, we want our students to learn and grow and to become lifelong learners. So, you know, it is a challenge at times to figure out, how do I balance that where I can still introduce things and it's fun and engaging, but also, you know, the kids might not understand, oh, I'm meeting this standard and that standard, but, you know, down the road they're going to understand, whoa, I learned this in sixth grade or whatever grade it may be. So, it is kind of a challenge at times to try to balance it out, but I think from my experience, if I focus on the overall goal, whatever it might be, if I want my students just to be able to sign their name in cursive, we can work on that skill using a lot of resources and CSaw, you know, is a wonderful tool for that or just demonstrating math skills and things like that. So, having that overall goal and then, you know, you can throw in the fun and sprinkle it in. So, you don't always have to be that great entertainer on 24-7 for your students, but, you know, it's okay to have fun in class and, you know, I think that's the greatest thing about all these tools that are available right now within like CSaw is that even the assessment portions of it that you can set up, the students think it's a game and they're like, oh, I'm learning from this. It's just like, yes, I planned it that way, kids. It's great. So, yeah, it's just trying to find that magical balance and it's going to be, you know, there's days where you crash and burn and you're going to need to just have the fun or on the flip side, like, no, we got to focus in, but, you know, it just takes some time and some tweaking and, you know, there's so many resources available within just that one program to make it a lot easier for teachers. Absolutely. And I heard you say hints of this throughout your response there is like you were in the 21st century and we also need to make sure that our students are gaining these technology skills because, I mean, you and I both know when they walk out of buildings and out of schools, they probably have a cell phone or a tablet or a smart TV or something in front of them that is going to be on the same lines as how you use technology, how you balance technology for yourself and how to make sure that you're using it productively. And so I think that your focus and making sure that, like you said, it's perfectly balanced is the best of both worlds. You can deliver on your content while teaching students how to productively use technology in their classroom so that they can walk out of your school and or move to the next grade and so on and so forth and, you know, continue to contribute to that as they move. Absolutely. Yes. And I think that's a huge skill, you know, for students of this age and, you know, even younger too, just understanding, you know, what can I use my technology for? Like, can I create this great stuff to show my learning but also using it appropriately and at the right times? And I think, you know, that's a thing that a lot of students are, you know, learning and, you know, some struggle with. I mean, sixth graders love their cell phones. So, you know, it's just an ongoing process, but it's kind of exciting to see when the light bulb they have like clicks like, oh, I can use this technology in so many ways to reach this outcome that I have. And it's just like one of the greatest things that I see within my classroom is when you see those light bulbs kind of go off with those students. And I just love that. That's awesome. That is so good. I want to come back to the academics you talked about and you hinted a little bit this about assessing. Can you just share with the audience and people listening like what is your process for assessing this student learning, especially when you're differentiating? And how does CISA really help you to make that more efficient and or just more streamlined in your classroom? Sure. Well, recently, you know, I tested out the new assessment feature on CISA with the AI, generating the quiz that I had for my language arts class. And it did such a phenomenal job. I was I'm still kind of new to the AI game. But I was just blown away how fast and easy that was and how it was like perfectly aligned with everything that we were doing in class. And so with this quiz that I use, I was testing out there's the drag and drop feature, but I use like the let's check for understanding where the students can click on it to see, did I get this correct? Or did I not?  And I use that as a formative assessment because I loved how I could create varying questions and how the AI kind of created a lot of great questions for me that met at all my students levels for, you know, my lower readers and struggling writers. They, you know, we had a lot of picture prompts that were posted and that helped them a lot. And my more like advanced or gifted readers and writers, they were able to write sentences and, you know, find the correct words with, you know, three, four roots in them. And it really did help them. But I loved the feature with the checking because I could see how many times a student had to redo one particular question. And so from that data, I was able to pull those students that, you know, we're really struggling with certain areas. So then I can really pinpoint what they needed. And so I'm really excited to use that more often to drive, you know, small group instruction, or, you know, hey, we just need to like build this up before we have this final assessment and growing. So it was just so cool to be able to use that. And it took like grand total of like 10 minutes tops for all my students to do this. And so it was just such a cool feature. But I just loved all the data that came from that because it totally drove my instruction for the next few days of school. That's so good. So good. It's so encouraging to hear stories of how teachers can gain back teaching minutes. Yes. I know that there's no greater time than having that right now where teachers need more and more minutes in their classroom to teach and to deliver instruction. So it always warms my teacher hard to hear that you feel that you're gaining back minutes to really deliver instruction that matters for kids. Yes, it was, I had to check my watch like, wait, I was not expecting this to take this less amount of time, but it did. Okay, that's really awesome.  And it is. We have just a couple more questions left. I want to pitch to you our loopy question, which is just a fun question that will have our audience members also maybe get a little laugh out of. Can you just share with us if you had to choose like one pet? If you if you had all the pets in the whole world and you were like, I need to pick my favorite pet. What would that be? And you can be as specific or as broad as you want to. Oh man, that is a very intense question. My kids are very much into going to the zoo. So they want all the animals that are at the zoo. I would probably if space was not a problem, I'd probably go with an elephant. Yeah, they're just so cool. They're so cool. That's awesome. Yeah, I love that you really thought outside of the box with the elephant. I think, you know, you could put the the old adage to the test, you know, an elephant's memory never fails and some things like that. And they love to eat peanuts. But I think it's definitely a conversation point to have when you have guests over too. So good. We're going to close up here since we're almost at time. I just want to make sure that anybody who's listening, anybody who's going to be tuned into this later, that they can leave our episode with just some practical tips, tricks and next steps for them. So if you had somebody who's who's new to CSI and or new to teaching, what advice would you give to this teacher and so that they can learn how to really effectively differentiate instruction using CSI? What are some, you know, one, two, three different tips and tricks that they can start with so that they can really start to get to the point that you are right now down the road with understanding CSI and what this really can do for students. Perfect. Well, when I introduce CSI to teachers around my district or outside of district, teacher friends throughout Midwest, I always tell them to start with just one feature and just play around with it in your classroom. So and it's kind of fun when you introduce that for the first time for students that have never been on CSI. So I, for me, I always like the drawing tool and I'll let the kids just just draw me a picture, just whatever is on your mind or a great one to do is if you do like a read aloud or a first chapter Friday, have the students hop on with the drawing tool and just have them draw what they are visualizing as you read or as you listen to an audio book. Just those little things that they're not taking away from your classroom time, but it can add a lot more to not only like understanding what the students know, but you know, it can kind of boost up like background knowledge that your students already have that maybe you didn't know. So there's so many cool things on the drawing tool and you know, the kids love like the glow pen feature because they're like, whoa, it's like glow in the dark. I'm like, yeah. So that is one area that I would, you know, just focus on doing that. And then from there, you know, think of just one quick easy little activity that they can do, you know, if you're working on cursive, have them try to write a word that you're focusing on in cursive or, you know, write out a math problem and then you can add in the recording, have them explain what they're doing for this equation and why they're solving it this way. So there's just so many very useful and amazing tools within just that little feature of CSaw that can really give a lot of insight for teachers on what their students know and what they need to grow. So good.  You know, they can really be authentic and they're true selves too to be able to share that. Right. Yep. Well, that is our time, Rachel. I just want to say thank you so much for everything that you do every day for these students. Thank you for taking time out of your day to be here and share some amazing CSaw expertise with everybody who's tuning in. I know that they are going to walk away with some really practical next steps and some powerful tips that they can use to start to differentiate, excuse me, their instruction in their classroom. So thank you, thank you so much, Rachel. Well, thanks again for having me. I really appreciate it.