Okay, so welcome everybody to this third lecture. Today I'm going to talk about a very specific application of the thermodynamics that we have learned so far. But before I do that, I'm going to demonstrate to you that this is a two-way learning experience because I learned something yesterday and I did a bit more research on that and I'll show you what I mean. So this slide here is what I used to illustrate an ideal solution. So we are plotting activity versus mole fraction and I explained to you that activity is like an effective concentration because by adding something else you might make the molecules of the solvent more agitated and therefore there will be more active than in proportion to the concentration. And I said that I found a paper in which a magnesium oxide and nickel oxide solution demonstrates ideal behavior that means the activity is proportional directly is equal to the mole fraction as opposed to a magnesium oxide and manganese oxide solution where the activity is greater than the concentration. Now during the question and answers, Professor Chakrabati, Neuropam Chakrabati, pointed out that, you know, neodymium, preseodymium also has an ideal solution. So I looked up that paper. So just before I say that, so the authors of this paper suggested that, you know, if the misfit here between the magnesium oxide and the nickel oxide is small, then you tend to get an ideal solution with good mixing. Whereas when the misfit between these two oxide molecules is large, you get non-ideal behavior. So in the case of neodymium and preseodymium, they both have a hexagonal lattice. They both have the same number of valence electrons. You know, valence electrons determine chemical activity. And their metallic radii are pretty similar as are their densities and the atomic volumes are remarkably close to each other. And they have similar electron negativity. So these guys, London and Poole, did experiments in which they made a series of preseodymium, neodymium alloys and dissolved them in liquid tin to measure the change in enthalpy. And what they found was that the change in enthalpy doesn't vary significantly between going from a pure preseodymium to pure neodymium and the alloys in between, which essentially means that the enthalpy of mixing is close to zero. So this truly is an ideal solution. And in many respects, it's consistent with the oxide story, where you know, if the misfit between the two kinds of atoms is quite small in many parameters, then you tend to get an ideal solution. And in this paper, they actually chose this system after looking at the parameters which are similar for both of these elements. So that was quite interesting. And, you know, I've already taken advantage of neuropharm suggestion and incorporated it into this lecture. So people say, you know, teaching is an exciting thing to do because you not only teach but you learn and that's absolutely true. Right. I'm going to go on to the main story today now. And I'll begin by showing you the difference between what we call a solution and a compound. So a compound has a very narrowly defined chemical composition, because when you deviate from that composition, you get a rapid rise in free energy. But it's not exact, you know, there is a certain amount of variation. So if you think about, for example, cementite, which is conventionally said to be F3C, in fact, the composition can vary, the carbon concentration can vary a little bit. And therefore we get a free energy curve which looks like this. But it doesn't vary as much as what we call a solution, which is possible over a wide range of chemical compositions. Okay. Yeah, so I'm going to talk about a solution that is produced not by melting the constituents and solidifying, but by a different technique altogether. And that is a process known as mechanical alloying, which was invented by Benjamin, who was at Inko Alloys. And his goal was to replace nickel containing thorium oxide, because the oxide particles are added in order to give creep resistance, nickel containing thorium oxide, with nickel containing yttrium oxide. Now, both thorium oxide and yttrium oxide are extremely stable at high temperatures and have a very little solution inside nickel. So even when you use the alloy at high temperatures in service, the dispersion that you introduce will work well. Now the way in which the thorium oxide is introduced into the nickel is that you add thorium to the nickel, and then you internally oxidize it. And that's a that's a messy process. And thorium can be radioactive. Okay. So I believe when I visited the BABA, BABA Atomic Research Center, they work a lot on thorium, because India has about 25% of the world's thorium. So he wanted to introduce yttrium oxide, but there's no way you can do that by adding yttrium to the melt and then solidifying, because it oxidizes extremely rapidly. I mean, that's why it's a very stable oxide. So he decided, okay, supposing I take a powder of yttrium and various elemental metals and put them into a ball mill.  So in this case, we are basically damaging the powder so intensely by these cast iron balls impacting with the powder particles and welding them and fracturing them and welding them and fracturing them, that eventually it should make a solid solution. Okay. The yttrium oxide won't go into solution, but the rest of the material will. So what do you do with the powder after you made it? Well, you put it into a can, right? So that means the powder is in perhaps a mild steel can, and you extrude it hot to basically consolidate the powder into a solid object. And this is showing you extrusion of stainless steel. So you can make a solid object from powder by extrusion, which is basically a compaction of all the powders and removing. You almost get to 100% density. And in the case of this particular alloy, which has a large amount of chromium for oxidation resistance and also aluminum for oxidation resistance and titanium in the form of oxides and yttrium in the form of oxides. After the mechanical alloying process, this is the structure that you're left with. There are extremely fine grains of very, very large dislocation density. So it's going to be an extremely hard extruded material, even though it's hot extruded. And you can see there are myriads of these small yttrium oxide particles dispersed throughout the microstructure. So there is a very large driving force for recrystallization. And you can do the same thing. So this is a commercial alloy called MA956. And in this case, it's ferritic. This is a nickel-based alloy, where we have the chromium and aluminum again for oxidation resistance, titanium, tungsten, and the yttrium particles, which you can see more clearly here. And again, this is a very fine structure and there's a large driving force for recrystallization. Now, when you extrude this material, there's a tendency for the particles to align along the extrusion direction. So when you get recrystallization, the grains are not going to be isotropic. And that can be an advantage if you're thinking about creep resistance. You want to grow the grains along the stress axis because that reduces normal grain boundaries where creep damage can happen. And we want large grain structures from the recrystallization process. Now, I'll show you some images. But before I do that, supposing that I wanted to create a tube out of this material, which would have a grain structure, which is helical, because I want to also get a good hoop properties as well as longitudinal properties. Then there is equipment which would twist the tube. And then when you recrystallize this in a temperature gradient, you get these very large grains doing a helical path around the tube. So this is where we were working on producing these tubes for biological incinerators. And you can even make the grains grow circumferential around the tube. So here, for example, the grains are going circumferentially around the tube. And just to show you how bizarre the microstructures can be, if you take the as extruded material and you bend it, then obviously along the neutral axis, there's a zero stress, but you've deformed the surrounding regions to a greater extent. And then when you recrystallize, you can see the effect of the different levels of plasticity due to the bending. And this is the neutral axis here. So the material is very good in the sense that you can produce grain structures which are very desirable for specific purposes. It's an incredibly expensive material because you're producing large quantities by a mechanical alloying process, which is a very, very noisy process. But currently, there are many projects on this material because of the fusion reactor.  So the helium produced by transmutation inside the steel, if you don't have lots and lots of nucleation sites, then the material would swell.  Similarly, a pore inside the steel can hold a lot more gas when it's small than when it's large. So if you have lots and lots of nuclei for bubbles, then you hold a lot more gas in very small cavities. And therefore, the material doesn't swell during irradiation. Okay. Now, this is not the only mechanical alloying process that is important. You can get mechanical alloying in other contexts. So this is a bearing here. Okay. And these are the rolling elements of the bearings. This is a section cut from the bearing. And, you know, the load loading on this inner ring here is basically like this, that you have a rolling element on the ring, and it exerts a contact pressure at any point during the rotation of the bearing.  So there will be some cracks which form. But remember, the load that we are applying is like a compression and a torsion. Okay. And that's why we don't require a huge toughness in these materials. I'm showing you here a crack in a very large bearing. It's a wind turbine bearing. And you see these white regions here. Basically, you've got a crack and the faces of the crack beat against each other. Every time a rolling element goes over that surface. And that beating is exactly what mixes up the microstructure completely. So if you have any carbides there that dissolve and you produce the so-called white etching matter, which is effectively a mechanically alloyed system. Okay. So you can get the same phenomenon in many different contexts. Now, I've asked you to assume that we have formed a solution by this process. Okay. But how do we know that mechanical processing leads to a true solution? What are the techniques that we can use to determine that? Well, the obvious method is to use an instrument called an atom probe field ion microscope. And it looks like this. You basically have a very sharp tip of your material. Apply a very large electrical field. And then you have an imaging gas which ionizes when it touches an atom. And therefore it spreads out in the electrical field giving you a magnification of something like 10 million. So here is an image from the mechanically alloyed material where each dot is actually an individual atom. Okay. So we are looking at a very high magnification. Now you also see this long object here, which is basically a time of flight mass spectrometer. So we can pull out an atom and measure its time of flight. And from that we can actually get chemical information per atom. Okay. So I'm now going to show you what the chemical map looks like for this material M956, which is mechanically alloyed. And of course it contains many elements, but I'll just show you ion and chromium for the sake of gravity. So here we are. We are looking at 50 ion clusters, although it can be one at a time. But if I showed you a plot of just one atom at a time, then it would go from 100 to 0, 100 to 0, 100 to 0. Okay. So I'm showing you 50 ion clusters. And this is what the distribution of ion atoms looks like. And this is what the distribution of chromium atoms looks like. So I want you to think now, does this represent a homogeneous solution? Okay. You've got all these peaks and troughs. Does this represent a homogeneous solution? Now, the obvious answer might be no. But I think we cannot think like that because when we have a large number of atoms and we pick out a few, you're likely, even for a random distribution of atoms, to get these variations like this. Okay. So we have to take account of the fact that we're looking at individual atoms. So the way to do this is to compare this distribution of concentrations with a binomial distribution for 50 ion clusters. And here you are. These are the comparisons for ion, chromium, and aluminium. The black bars here are the atom probe data. And the white bars represent binomial, what you would expect from a binomial distribution. And you can see that there's a fairly good match in all three cases between the calculated distribution on the basis of a random solution and the measurement. And this is a quite important demonstration because, you know, ion and chromium belong to a system, ion chromium alloys belong to a system where there's a tendency for the clustering of atoms. Okay. So chromium atoms would tend to segregate into chromium rich regions and that can lead to a phenomenon known as 475 degrees C embrittlement in the long term. But here, by mechanical alloying, you have actually produced an absolutely true solution. And just to remind you from the previous lecture, the probability of finding an A bond is the concentration of A times the concentration of A because this is the probability of finding one atom and this is a probability of finding another atom. And similarly for B, XB times XB. And the probability of AB bonds is two times the chance of finding an A atom and a chance of finding a B atom assuming that we have a random distribution. So now I can compare from my atom probe data, which is sequential, and show you that, you know, the measured quantities and the calculated quantities are so incredibly close to each other, the aluminium and calculated and measured. Okay. So we can truly conclude that this material has formed a solid solution. Okay. Simply by using mechanical force. Right. Let me just have a drink of water. So it's good in a series of lectures to remind you of what we've done before. So this is a big chunk of A and equally big chunk of B in the proportion 1 minus X and X. And this is the free energy of pure A and the free energy of pure B. And we are looking at a composition here. And the free energy of this mechanical mixture, where, you know, the atoms are not really feeling the presence of the B atoms is simply a weighted mean of the pure terms here. Okay. So we are just taking an average of A and an average of B. And I explained to you that when we take this and we form a solid solution, there is a reduction in free energy because for one thing, you know, the configuration entropy favors a random mixture. Okay. So the free energy of a solution will be different from that of a mechanical mixture. Now, this is all very well when we have put, you know, chromium inside molten iron and there's a liquid and then we form a solid alloy. But here we're not doing that. We are actually starting with large chunks of A and B, breaking them down into smaller and smaller and smaller chunks, and then obtaining a solution. So we need to divide this process up into a whole series of stages. So here, for example, is what I mean. We start with the separate A and B, put them together, and then we severely deform them together until, you know, breaks up into ever smaller particles, ever smaller particles, and eventually a solution. So we need to calculate now what is the configurational energy, configurational entropy change in going from here to here, here to here, and here to here. No longer dealing with atoms. Okay. We're dealing with particles. So if you remember the number of configurations when we had an atomic mixture was the total number of atoms factorial divided by the atoms of B factorial and the atoms of A factorial. All we have to do is to express these terms in terms of particles rather than atoms. So here is the term where we take the concentration of A and divide by the number of atoms in the particle of A. So that reduces this number quite dramatically, right, because, you know, you're likely to have millions if not billions of atoms in a chunk of material. And similarly, the concentration of B divided by the number of atoms in a particle of B. And that gives us the total number of particles here, which is like this term. At the bottom, we have the total number of particles of A factorial, right, and the total number of particles of B factorial here. So we've done a small modification of our calculation of the number of part number of configurations, because we no longer have atoms, but we have particles which consist of so many atoms per particle. Okay, so nothing complicated here. Now I need to take the logarithm of this, and, you know, we use Sterling's approximation to do that. And we come up with an equation for configurational entropy, which looks like this. And it's a longer equation here, okay. But if I set MA and MB to be a single atom, right, so there's only one atom per particle, then it reduces to our standard equation there, okay. Okay, so we've got the configurational entropy, and we can work out the evolution of the configurational entropy as the particles go from large chunks to smaller and smaller chunks. So the next question to ask is when do the A atoms and B atoms actually feel at each other's presence? That means that when they start to behave somewhat like a solution. Of course, when they're single atom particles, that's different, but is there a particular size of a particle at which, you know, the presence of other particles becomes important? Now, just to put this into context, you know, a typical driving force for a transformation might be something like 10 joules per mole, right? So we need to work out at what point will these particles feel a mixing free energy of 10 joules per mole, assuming, you know, that it's an ideal solution. And here I have a plot, okay, assuming it's an ideal solution, this is the atoms per particle, and this is 10 joules per mole. So the particles begin to behave differently when their size is approximately a thousand atoms, okay. About that, it really doesn't matter. You can still treat it as a mechanical mixture. Now, of course, this may not be an ideal solution. So we need to think about enthalpy. And just to remind you, we had the enthalpy of mixing as the concentration of A times the concentration of B, coordination number, avogados number, and omega, which takes account of the change in energy when we break an air bond, a BB bond, and create two AB bonds, okay. However, once again, you see this is the equation for the final solution. It doesn't represent the different stages in the evolution of the solution, because only the atoms at the interfaces between the two different kinds of particles actually see each other. These atoms don't care about the presence of the black atoms on this side. Okay, so we've got to scale this function by the number of atoms that lie within that interface region. So we have to multiply it by the thickness of that interface, and two because it's on both sides. And Sv is the amount of surface, that means the amount of interface per unit volume that you've created. And this term actually is the chemical component of interfacial energy, this term here. You know, if you've got different atoms on each side, so even if this was absolutely perfectly coherent, you would have an interfacial energy, which corresponds to this. And this is the amount of interface we have per unit volume. So this is quite interesting now. So we've got an enthalpy of mixing, but it only applies to the atoms at the boundary, because the other atoms are separated, and therefore they don't have a chemical interaction with the other species. Now, this is the chemical component, and I said to you that, you know, if this is perfectly coherent, that means there is no structure in the interface, but that's very, very unlikely. There will be some sort of a defect structure in the interface. So we also need to take account of the structural component of interfacial energy. And that is much simpler. You have the amount of surface per unit volume multiplied by the interfacial energy per unit area. So that gives you the energy of the interfaces. And this is just a molar volume. We immediately face a problem. Okay. Okay. What this is saying is that as our particles become finer and finer, this term increases indefinitely, because, you know, the amount of surface per unit volume scales with one upon the particle size. So the amount of surface will increase indefinitely as the particle size begins to get smaller. If that is the case, then the cost here is enormous. And there is no way that you can form a solid solution. That is what this equation is predicting. So there's something missing in the theory, because we've already demonstrated that we have a true solid solution. And I now want you to think completely differently. You've probably done nucleation theory. And nucleation is necessary because when you have a small particle and an interface around it, the amount of surface per unit volume is large. And it is overwhelms the chemical driving force. Now, nucleation is easiest if the interfacial energy is small. In other words, particles that are able to form a coherent interface will nucleate at the expense of particles that are not able to form a coherent interface, even though there might be metastable phases. A classic example is the aluminum copper system, where you get these GP zones and then the theta prime and so on. And finally, the stable theta, which has an incoherent interface with the aluminum. So at nucleation, you go from a coherent to a semi-coherent and finally to an incoherent interface when the particle is large enough. What we've got to do is to think in the opposite sense that when we start with large particles in the mechanical alloying process, they are going to be incoherent, because you can't sustain coherency over large length scales, unless it's a perfectly coherent interface, which is very unlikely. Now, as we make the particles smaller, they will gain coherency. This is exactly the opposite of what happens in a nucleation sequence, where you lose coherency as the particle grows. So as this grows smaller, we will gain coherency until it eventually becomes fully coherent. After all, you cannot have an interface around a single atom. So it makes complete common sense. So in that equation, the interfacial energy cannot be constant. It's got to decrease as a function of particle size. Otherwise, it's impossible to form a solution. So now we have a complete picture of the structural and chemical components of interfacial energy contributing to the enthalpy of mixing. And we have the configurational entropy as a function of particle size as well. And both both enthalpy terms and entropy terms are a function of particle size. So I'll show you a graph now of the free energy of mixing as a function of particle size. So here we are starting with the large particle. And as we make the particles smaller and smaller, the free energy actually rises. You can see this is zero. So all this is positive. And then it decreases in this manner. Now, if you think about this, this is exactly the opposite of the nucleation barrier. Here, the free energy is rising because the interfacial energy is not decreasing sufficiently as the particles become smaller. And eventually, when it starts, you start to get some sort of coherency, you begin to gain from the fact that the atoms can be more intimately mixed. So this is exactly the opposite of a nucleation barrier. It will be hard during the mechanical processing to go below this sort of a size for the parameters that I've used. Now, there's one more assumption here. And that is that we've got an enthalpy of mixing, which means that unlike atoms attract. There's a minus sign here. This is the regular solution constant. Now, supposing that the atoms don't like to be next to unlike atoms, then the plot looks somewhat different. At fairly large particle sizes, we still have that barrier that I talked about, because the interfacial energy is not decreasing fast enough as the particle size becomes bigger. But then we have a second barrier when we get to the point where the particles feel each other's presence. And that is because the clusters of atoms have to be disrupted by the mechanical alloying process. And until those are disrupted, you don't get this decrease in pre-energy. So there are actually two barriers to the formation of an ion chrome mechanically alloyed solid solution. So these are quite interesting results, but you need to think completely opposite of nucleation theory. Okay. So we had this as our entropy of mixing and this as the free energy of mixing. I'm now talking about a solution that is already formed and you get a free energy curve which looks like this. Now, if I differentiate this equation with respect to x, then you'll find that the slope at x equals 0 has to be minus infinity and the slope at x equals 1 plus infinity. So you'll find many textbooks. We say, look, you need to draw your free energy curves so that at the pure element axes, they have infinite slope but a finite intercept, which corresponds to mu note, the free energy of the pure component. Again, this is actually missing something, right? Infinite quantities make one feel uncomfortable. And what we have to do is not treat composition as a continuous variable. It is not a continuous variable. The smallest change corresponds to one atom being added. So in fact, you know, you don't have infinite slope. I'm exaggerating here because I can't do the illustration for one atom, but you will have a finite slope at both ends because the smallest change in concentration that you can make is by one atom. So that paradox of infinite slopes at the pure axis also disappears when you think about a solution as consisting of discrete atoms. So this mechanical allowing process is revealing both from a fundamental point of view and it produces useful materials which are extremely expensive, but in some circumstances, you have to have those materials. So if you have a finite material, you can use those materials. So it's not material which is for mass production and consumption, but for very specific applications where you can't do without, for example, the dispersion of the yttrium oxide particles. I'm going to show you another very interesting application of mechanical alloy and that relates to a different kind of a problem. Now most of us think of austenite as being non-magnetic. You know, if you take a magnet and you touch an austenitic stainless steel, unless it contains some ferrite, it's not likely to get attached to the magnet. But actually, you know, if you go deep into the subject, you'll find that any lump of austenite actually has two kinds of austenite within it, two electronic states. One of them has a high volume and has a high magnetic moment, something like two Bohr magnetons per ion atom, and is ferromagnetic. And the other one is a low volume and low magnetic moment and anti-ferromagnetic. And we have experimental proof for this. So these both of these states exist in the same austenite and the proportions of high volume and low volume austenite change as you alter the temperature. The high volume state is more dominant at higher temperatures. So what this means is that even though each of these forms has the same expansion coefficient as ferrite, a very low expansion coefficient, because the proportions of these two forms of austenite are changing when you heat the material, the expansion coefficient of austenite as a whole is much bigger. And this rules it out for many power plant applications, where even though austenitic steels have a good creep resistance, their thermal expansion coefficient is too large and you get thermal fatigue as a consequence. So you won't find a thick walled stainless steel in any steam generating power plant, for example, because the expansion coefficient of austenite is something like 1.8 times 10 to the minus 6 per degree centigrade, whereas that of ferrite is something like 1.15 times 10 to the minus 6, almost the same as that of nickel. So there's an overall expansion and the expansion coefficient is much greater than that of ferrite. And just by intuitive thinking, you might think, okay, austenite is a closed back structure and therefore its expansion coefficient should be smaller. But it's not because of this two state issue. Now, there are many, many experimental data which prove this and we can even preserve the low volume and the high volume forms in isolation. For example, if we take pure iron and precipitate it inside copper, it will retain the FCC structure to cryogenic temperatures and we can measure the nil temperature for the antiferromagnetism and so on. So one particular experiment is quite clever. Supposing that we took copper which has a larger lattice parameter than austenite and we formed an alloy between iron and copper, then you would effectively put the iron into a larger lattice parameter material and therefore it should have a high magnetic moment per ion atom, whereas if we make the concentration of iron too large, then it's not going to adopt the lattice parameter of the copper and therefore we'll end up with a low magnetic moment per ion atom. But iron and copper are not missable, are not at temperatures below about, I think, 800 degrees centigrade. There's almost no solubility of copper in iron and iron in copper. So how can we make these solutions? Well, another feature of mechanical alloying is when you have to force elements together, you can do that, okay, whether or not they have solubility in each other or in the liquid states. So these experiments were done where mechanically alloyed iron, copper alloys were produced at a low concentration of iron and a large concentration of iron. Sure enough at the low concentration where the iron is in a large lattice parameter material, we end up with a large magnetic moment per ion atom, whereas at large ion concentrations, the magnetic moment per ion atom is much smaller. So in today's lecture, I've demonstrated to you that only from the material that we've learned in the first two lectures, okay, nothing else. We can actually apply it to study real materials which are of practical importance both in materials engineering and from a fundamental point of view. So if someday you need to make a strange alloy, which the phase diagrams tell you should not be possible, this is a technique that you can use. And the ball mill that I showed you, you can actually get laboratory sized ball mills, you can make them yourselves, put ball bearings inside instead of cast iron balls, but industrial scale ball mills also exist to produce larger quantities of material. The only issue I suppose is the consolidation part where you would need some help with either extrusion or hot ice pressing or something which doesn't allow the atoms to move about too much during the process. Okay, so that's the end of today's lecture.


MSM offers rare glimpse into how bad things are really going for Ukrainian forces. While everyone's focused on the latest mass shooting in the US, the Washington Post published what may be the first acknowledgement from the mainstream Western media that Ukraine's war against Russia has not been nearly the cakewalk they've been leading the public to believe. In a new article titled Ukrainian Volunteer Fighters in the East feel abandoned, WAPO reports that contrary to the triumphant narratives the western world is being spoon fed, many troops in eastern Ukraine have been surviving on one potato per day and deserting their posts because they feel their leaders have turned their backs on them and they're being sent to certain death. Stuck in their trenches, the Ukrainian volunteers lived off a potato per day as Russian forces pounded them with artillery and grad rockets on a key eastern frontline. Outnumbered, untrained, and clutching only light weapons, the men prayed for the barrage to end, the Washington Post reports citing multiple named sources. Ukrainian leaders have projected and nurtured a public image of military invulnerability of their volunteer and professional forces triumphantly standing up to the Russian onslaught, the article reads, but the experience of Lapko and his group of volunteers offers a rare and more realistic portrait of the conflict and Ukraine's struggle to halt the Russian advance in parts of Donbas. Ukraine, like Russia, has provided scant information about deaths, injuries, or losses of military equipment, but after three months of war, this company of 120 men is down to 54 because of deaths, injuries, and desertions. Wapo reports that volunteer troops in that part of the country quickly found themselves in the crosshairs of war, feeling abandoned by their military superiors and struggling to survive. We are being sent to certain deaths, said one volunteer. We are not alone in this, we are many. Hours after the post interviewed Lapko and Khrus, members of Ukraine's military security service arrived at their hotel and detained some of their men, accusing them of desertion, Wapo reports. The men contend that they were the ones who were deserted. Some commentators have remarked on the fact that at long last we're seeing some realistic coverage of this war in the mainstream press. First major US media I've seen report catastrophic condition of Ukrainian forces collapsing Ukrainian morale on the front. Seems obvious we should know the truth about a war our government is so deeply invested in, tweeted journalist Mark Ames, a frequent critic of the mass media blackout on conditions in the Ukrainian military. This might be the first article in mainstream publication that punctures the PR spin and secrecy of the foreign military that the US is subsidizing. Two commanders were arrested after they spoke to the Washington Post, painting an extremely grim picture, tweeted journalist Michael Tracy. This is indeed a major break from standard mainstream reporting on this conflict, which is normally more in line with this recent Newsweek article titled, Putin's elite soldiers getting wiped out as Russia makes mistakes, sourced entirely in unevidenced claims by the British government and the military industrial complex funded neocon think tank institute for the study of war. So anyway, there it is.  These big brave sofa warriors have been on social media demanding that Ukrainians keep fighting in this way until they've secured total victory over Russia and reclaimed Crimea in the Donbas, tweeting, Slava Ukraine with their little blue and yellow flag emojis during the commercial breaks of their favorite TV show in between mouthfuls of funyons. Westerners would be a lot less cavalier about demanding a foreign population keep fighting until total victory if they truly understood the horrors of war. Unfortunately, there's a propaganda machine of unprecedented sophistication that has spent generations preventing them from obtaining that very understanding. That's why they're so happy to throw endless Ukrainian lives into the gears of the imperial war machine. And that's why Wapo the Wapo article we are discussing here is receiving very little mainstream attention online as of this writing. It will be dismissed and ignored by empire managers in their brainwashed flock with a hmm you just can't hire a good cannon fodder these days. There's no real reckoning with exactly what's happening and exactly what these people are being called on to put themselves through. In the children's crayon drawing version of this war that lives in the heads of western so-called centrists, this is a team of heroic good guys, righteously beating the tar out of the hordes of bad guys because that's what happens in the movies and on TV. But this is not the movies, and this is not TV. People are dying in a US proxy war that was deliberately provoked by the US centralized empire, and behind all the narratives and spin they are ultimately doing so for nothing more noble than the agenda to secure US unipolar hegemony. Many of the blue and yellow flag waivers are well-intentioned and really do think they are advocating for Ukrainian freedom and sovereignty. But in reality all they've been cheering for is Ukrainian subservience and enslavement to the empire, Ukrainian death, Ukrainian suffering, and the continuation of a dangerous proxy war between nuclear superpowers that threatens the life of everyone on Earth.


0.45, 7.92, negative 0.06, and the list goes on forever. These numbers may not seem unusual at first glance, but here are some facts that may surprise you. This set of numbers has no expectation. This set of numbers also has no variance. This set of numbers never converges. Welcome to the Cauchy distribution. I'm going to use some computer simulation to compare standard distributions to the Cauchy. Here are a few convergence plots. Each of these panes represent samples from different distributions. The x-axis represents the number of draws made from a distribution. The y-axis represents the mean of those samples. I iterated 50 times for each sample size. That is why there's multiple lines. On the left, I have the shape of the distributions that generated these convergence plots. All the convergence plots look very similar. They start wide, then taper down as the number of samples increase. What I think is wild is that the distributions I pulled from to generate these plots look very different. This phenomenon is known as the central limit theorem. Large enough samples from any distribution will end up looking like a normal distribution. The exception is the Cauchy distribution. The Cauchy distribution is a pathological distribution. Where other distributions have a defined expectation, the Cauchy does not. It refuses to obey or conform to the central limit theorem and will never converge no matter how large the samples. I'm going to go into the math a little here. A practical definition of convergence requires three things. A sample mean, a population mean, a threshold. Here is a rough definition of convergence. As a larger sample is taken, then means of those larger samples are nearly guaranteed to be smaller than some arbitrarily small threshold. Here is a visual representation of this definition. For the uniform distribution, here are a plot of different thresholds. It is clear that for some of these thresholds, the probability is going to be one. As the threshold gets smaller, more samples are needed to have the assurance that the sample mean will meet the population mean. This is how things should look. This is how things do look for all distributions. But this is how the Cauchy distribution compares. The probability that the difference in the sample mean and the population is less than the threshold is never one. And grabbing more samples doesn't change the story. The numbers I showed at the beginning of the video are draws from the Cauchy distribution. Without a convergence in probability, it is impossible to take an average. I mean, you can average the sample, but it says nothing about the population average. So what are the most stubborn numbers? The infinite string of values generated from the Cauchy distribution. Thanks for watching.


And what do you think about the moves the front office made and some of the additions that are coming here as reinforcements? Excited about I haven't seen all the moves we made, you know getting ready for the game I haven't really checked in too much, but I know tonight. I'll be you know checking Twitter and seeing what what's going on I know especially for the guys that we got from Oakland I'm excited about I had a chance to face them, you know quite a few times over the years and I'm looking forward to seeing them in pinstripes. That's for sure I think Montes will help this team and help this rotation down the stretch. It's just a dominant starter Been a dominant starter for quite a while now and he's got some ridiculous stuff and I'm just happy that I don't have to face that down the road again Just a good heater split or combo, you know, he makes it that slider in there as well Um, just he works the edge as well.  It's not afraid to throw inside and Um, you know kind of throw, you know, most guys with splitters have don't have a good feel for it But he's got a great feel for that splitter, which you know kind of keeps you honest a little bit. So No, he's just a guy that's got the Velo, but also can work the corners Oh, like I've said every single day is My teammate for the ones that you know help me out this year And I'm trying to just match their energy and match what they're doing Especially when you got DJ the major the top of the lineup, you know hitting close to 300 and Constantly on base constant working the count Um, you know constantly, you know getting me up there with guys on base guys in his corn position You know, it helps everybody and the man behind you in the lineup, Anthony Rizzo Particularly in the first sitting's gotten you off to a lot of big leads early Yeah, no, he's he's been great. Um, especially being able to jump out like that Especially after the um, the loss last night and then coming out here and getting three, you know on a great starter like like Marco, it's uh That was a big time for us Such a great start anyway, I mean more than the start now When you look at the attendee and mantas and the two relievers you got in how much better can this team even be? Oh, you can you can always improve. Um, there's ways to improve. I don't think anybody in this room I don't think this team is satisfied with what we've done so far. You know, we got not to a great start, but um You know, we kind of as a team, you know did our part and I think the front office is you know doing their part now When a team when your front office goes out and gets you guys what you need as you guys are playing so well, what's that feel like for you guys? Oh It's it's a good feeling. Yeah It's it's it's tough to describe because you know, usually don't focus on that. We just focus on playing but Um, you know, kind of getting that back in from the front office knowing that hey, you guys put yourself in position You know to be in a good spot going down the stretch into the postseason You know, we're going to give you a couple give you a couple pieces to kind of You know boost you guys a little bit and you know fill some holes where we need them Aaron being player of the week back in the back weeks. What does that mean to you? Oh, it's great. Uh I said I'm trying not to think too much about it. Like I said, it's uh more excited about the win we got today than anything and um I got I got nothing What does it have to do about jose's offense this season? Trevi wow Just consistent, you know big moments. He's coming through for us.  He's a tough at bat, you know Anywhere he's at in the line of beauty. He's at the bottom of the lineup, you know Getting a chance to turn the lineup over and get dj and all of us up That's that's what makes for a winning ballclub. You know, so it's just been impressive to watch Um, impressive to ask him. He's another guy. He's a catcher. So he sees a lot of pitches But also getting a chance to pick his brain. Hey, would you see that last that batter? What was he throwing? What was the pitch doing? You know, he's Knowledge of blowing is always on top of it


Happy Halloween everyone. In honor of today's spooky spirit, I thought it would be fun to tackle a quick topic that seems relevant for today. It actually occurred to me when we were making the Cine Dojo Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episode. Part of that episode was talking about the challenges that the actors had performing the martial arts moves in those horrendously difficult outfits, and then I realized there'd be a potentially interesting topic to talk about. Performing martial arts in costumes. I mean Batman does it, so how hard can it be right? Well, as it turns out, quite hard. And there's a reason that we see it in the comics and movies only.  So in this episode, we're gonna take a quick glance at some of the limitations that we might not think about when it comes to some of our favorite characters fighting and some serious bad-ass outfits. So let's just recap real quick. If you guys have not seen the Cine Dojo episode yet on Ninja Turtles, please click the link below. We're going into this far deeper detail, but basically, as cool as those outfits looked, those actors and martial artists had some serious challenges. They were extremely hot. They had mechanical gears moving around their head. They couldn't see. They were provided isolates just under the bandanas, but it really didn't provide enough vision, so those actors had to fight blindly. A movie like that, you've got a big challenge because those suits tear. They're not meant for repeated emotions. So they do wear down. They have to be repaired. There's also limitations. They had to switch out different heads for certain moves, you know, make certain lighter versions for the other moves. Now a movie like Mortal Kombat kind of plays on different lines. You've got a variety of outfits there. Most of them are not that restrictive, but take a look at like Kano, for example. He's got the big mechanical eye, which in real life was just a prosthetic over the actor's eye, much like the Terminator. At the very least, you lose depth of perception for that. Then you've got Goro, who was a poor actor with a giant animatronic rig on his shoulder, so not only did he not see what he was doing, he was only controlling the lower half of the body, but he had to walk and move and turn, navigate steps naturally as if he had full control of the animatronics. So these are very big challenges and the movie looked awesome, but there's a lot of movie magic that goes into producing an effect like that. But then we have a movie like X-Men, you know, they dropped the tights in the spandex and multicolored outfits from the comics, and they went with the darker leather outfits for the movies. But the funny thing is, those were even more restrictive. The actors often mentioned how hard it was to move. They could barely walk. There's even a funny outtake and clip from the original X-Men movie where the actors had to leap over this little tiny wall, and they couldn't even do that. They couldn't get their legs up because it was just too binding. So leather doesn't flex and move as well as some people might think it does, and that honestly is an easy transition. Let's go right into Batman. He's going to be a pinnacle of discussion here. You've got Batman, you've got a guy, especially in the Michael Keaton movies and the earlier movies. He wears full body armor, which is latex rubber.  He wears capes. He can't turn his head. Okay, there's a lot to work with here. In the movie they make it look awesome. You've got stunt actors, you've got Batman, he's doing flips, he's doing fighting moves, he's doing jumps, all that rolls. The realistic thing though is, there wasn't one outfit for that. In the Batman movies, they had a whole variety of capes. They had capes that were meant just for walking, capes that were lighter that could billow in the fan to look like it's in the wind, capes for underwater, capes for fighting, tear away capes, all sorts of stuff. And in the newer movies, the capes were even animated. So, depending on the situation, they had to switch out the costume. Same thing with the head. He couldn't turn his head. I mean, the famous Michael Keaton mining. Can you imagine trying to fight like that? And I don't know about any of you, but when I wear a mask, like a Halloween mask, the first thing I notice is I completely lose my peripheral vision. You've got little eye holes to look out of. Yeah, okay, I can see straight ahead, but I can't see anything to saw and out. That's really not conducive to crime fighting when you're leaping off buildings and fighting guys who are shooting at you. And that body armor. Okay, Batman's body armor was tough, but wear a big giant armored vest piece and try to roll in that or do a flip in that. Obviously shots like that, stunt actors were wearing lighter, more flexible materials that the camera quite couldn't see. So when you're watching a movie like that, they're constantly switching out pieces that will work for that particular scene because one suit doesn't work. Now the Christopher Nolan Batman movies do address some of this in that in the second movie, Dark Knight, they made him be able to turn his head for the reason that Batman wanted to see better and turn his head. He also wanted to be able to move better because he actually addressed the suit being too bulky for him to fight in. I actually like that detail. So in the story, he traded the suit in for one that was more flexible with lesser plates, but of course it was more vulnerable. That at least was a nod towards the acknowledgement of how ridiculous the original Batman suits were even though they looked awesome on screen. And realistically, they just didn't really work. They're not feasible. And when it comes to capes, capes, I'll be the first to admit, I love capes. They look awesome. They're fun to wear, but they are not really conducive to fighting. If anything, they're more of a hindrance because think about it. They snag, they can bind you up, they can be heavy, they can actually get in your face. Ever try to roll while wearing a cape? That's why in real life when actual people wore capes, they usually, they were removed before fighting or stuff gets torn. So capes, as cool as they look, they are not practical for real life combat. So since we're talking about Batman and Alphys, I do want to point out a fun project we did with a very good friend of ours a few years back. His name is Carlos and he's actually a pretty well-known cosplayer and he's a big Batman fan and we did a video skit with him, which you'll find the link below. Go check it out if it's kind of funny.  It's a black version of the silver suit, but he had it made and it looks fantastic. He looks like he stepped right off the screen. The funny thing though was, this is his motion he could do. He couldn't move. He walked. He kind of could barely bend his knees and this is actually a one-point time. We were trying to direct them.  And he goes, what makes you think I'm even capable of moving like that? The whole extent of motion he could do was just bending his arm a little bit because it was so binding and so tight. It looked awesome, but it couldn't function for Jack. So that's just something to think about is just how these suits play. They're for looks. They're not for functions. So go check that out. Also, there'll be a link to some pictures. He also has a really awesome, awesome Batman suit. It's a medieval Batman suit made out of leather. It's a lot more pliable, a lot more flexible, so he can move around in it. He's actually known for this suit. So definitely go check it out. Again, the pictures are below. Now here's another consideration. We're moving to days where there's CG. So a lot of stunts are being replaced by animation, but that doesn't always mean that there's no actors performing something in suits. We've got motion capture suits. When we had the original Ninja Turtle movies have these big bulky full latex rubber suits, the new movies have actors and these giant padded gray with sensors on them for their motion capture. This still poses some challenges. Not only do they have to move in something that's bulky, they have to move in certain ways that the computer can register their motion, that the sensors are properly aligned and there's still a lot of post-production work to go into that. So that's still a lot of work and there's still different considerations and movie magic that goes into that. And some movies will go only for CG. Like, you know, you see a lot of the Marvel movies in Spider-Man. Sometimes they opt for just computer animated stunts because multiple reasons for budget, for safety, or they just can't get a choreograph a suit that's going to work that well for that kind of stunt when they can animate it easier. When you're watching a movie, whatever the characters are wearing, there's a good chance that you really wouldn't be able to perform it for real because it's first, second, and third purpose is to look good on camera.  A couple of reasons for this. The primary reason is you've got Robert Downey Jr. in your movie, you're paying for him, you want to see his freaking face. So a lot of times they will take the mask off to show the actor's face. They did it with Batman, they did it with Spider-Man. But other times too is sometimes the character, the mask can be a hindrance. Most of the time, Tony Stark, what does he do? He uses his visor so he can talk, he can interact, he can see better. You see them do that a lot. Spider-Man takes it off in emergencies. Batman even ripped it off in Batman Returns so he can actually interact a little bit better with Catwoman and become more humanized. So these masks do have limits. And I enjoy it when the movies actually kind of address these limits and the characters take a step to remedy it or get around it. Now, this also might be why movies like John Wick, why Keanu Reeves wears a suit because obviously, you know, that's easier to move around in. Unless of course you've tried to fight in a suit. I don't know about you, but suits tend to have, you know, again, they're meant for looks. They're not meant to be combat attire. So they bind and especially like the shoulder area, they will tear. They're really not meant for that. But I guess it doesn't really matter anyway because remember the part where I said a lot of CG actors are used in these ace? Yeah, they'll use a little bit more than you think. Even in John Wick, there's a lot of sequences that look like the actors are completely doing the stunts, but in reality, the scenery is completely animated, the effects are animated, the props are animated. You've got the actors maybe doing the motion, but they've got CG versions of themselves animated over it and you can't tell. So we're at a stage now where performing stunts in costumes is getting to the point where it's easier just to animate it out. So yeah, it's being used more than you think it is. So once again, costumes are made for look, not functionality. And you know, especially growing up, I've always loved Halloween, even going to Halloween parties. If I'm able to do it that year, I would make an elaborate costume if I can. I've had costumes where such as this one, really cool pumpkin mask. A couple years ago, I dressed up as I wanted to be the spirit of Halloween. So I wore this pumpkin mask. I had a hood on it. I wore bony gloves, a whole shroud, and I wanted to take this up a notch. It's a mask look cool. It actually articulates so that when you open your mouth, the jaw actually, you know, sneers and it moves. I didn't like the eyes. I'm like, oh, I can do better with the eyes. And what I ended up doing was I took a pair of sunglasses apart and I actually put the lenses in the eye so it was dark. And I got red LED lights behind it so it would actually pulsate in flair. It looked awesome, but ask me how much I could see. Nothing. So I was basically walking around blind for the most part. I kind of could see blurs and shapes, but you know, I've got a LED light right here flashing outwards through sunglasses at night through a mask. You want to ask me to fight like that? This thing's coming right off because there's no way.   And you know, we grabbed any piece of costume that we could just to look cool on camera. And we're in South Florida and it gets hot down here.  It gets uncomfortable. These things are not meant to actually fight in. So that's the reality of it. You know, real life is not like the superheroes on the comic book page. This is, we don't have real Batman running around with capes jumping from roof off the rooftop because it just doesn't exist. It's not realistic. So although interestingly enough, we are going to circle back to talk about one that kind of was, but that's for another topic, another day. Thank you all for watching. I hope you all have a very safe and happy Halloween. Love, have fun and be safe everyone. Trick or treat.


Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante with Wikibond.org and I'm here with Jeff Kelly who's my co-host today, John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE and founder of SiliconANGLE is on the West Coast with some personal commitments, but I've seen a few tweets from him and John will shout out to you, wish you were here, but Jeff's happy that you're not. So, I'm sure John is watching theCUBE when he's not on theCUBE. So, fire off a few questions on Twitter, I'm at Dave Vellante, he's at Jeffrey F. Kelly. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE's continuous production. We're here live at the Tableau Customer Conference. We go to these events, we extract the signal from the noise, we bring the smartest guests that are at these shows and really find out how they're applying technology to create a business capability. It's not just about the tech itself, we always hear about people processing technology. Practitioners will tell you that technology is sometimes the easiest part of the equation, it's the people in process that are more challenging. Steve Keller is here, he's a staff software engineer at Citrix, we're going to talk about how they deal with data and the life cycle of data. Steve, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, I'm glad to be here. So, we all know Citrix as we were talking off camera, we were at Citrix Synergy a couple of years ago, great event, a wonderful company, you guys do a lot of really interesting things, cloud, end user computing, all kinds of software as a service capabilities. Talk about your role inside of Citrix as a developer and we'll get into the whole visualization and tableau thing. Sounds great. Well, let me first start by saying that the organization that I'm in is called Lifecycle Maintenance and the role that we play is we are right next to the code when it comes to providing customer fixes. So, our role is when we have situations that come in, when we have problems that can't be addressed by the first and second level support, we actually take care of those problems, make the code fixes, test them and then provide them to our customers. So, that's the role. Specifically, I play a really unique role within that organization and I'm actually a Microsoft liaison. So, as you know, we're very close partners with Microsoft and so in that, we need to bring the technologies in early to make sure our products are ready and compatible and then also, as we run into issues along the way, we have to filter those back to Microsoft. So, that's the role I play, kind of with our teams in Redmond, as well as our teams in the development areas, I kind of work between those. Yeah, because people, they're used to flipping through, especially executives, you know, just print me their copy and I'll flip through it. Sure. So, there's a whole sort of different mindset that has to occur there and as you say, you're sort of learning now. What surprises have you seen, you know, positive or negative, bringing in Tableau and this whole visualization culture that you're trying to drive? What surprised you the most? The thing that surprised me the most, I would say a couple of things. First, the simplicity. The simplicity not only of laying out the visualization, the dragging and dropping of data elements, but the simplicity of the variety of data connections that I can make. So, that's another thing, just simplicity there and then the value behind utilizing a given graphic or a given chart as a filter for the others. I think that's been the biggest surprise of how valuable that is and the ability to utilize that to answer your questions interactively. So, as we go forward, you know, Tableau of course, recently gone public and there's a lot of attention in the media, they're doing quite well on Wall Street, but you know, of course, they're always, they're still going to be under pressure to innovate as well. Of course. You know, if you could, what would be on your to-do list for Tableau? What are some of the things you'd like to see from their application? What are some of the key things that would make your job even easier? Well, you know, like I've mentioned, I'm kind of new to this, so I'm just learning how to use what's there and I think they've done a very good job of putting instructional videos out there as things come out. I think those are invaluable. I've used those incredibly much so that would be the one thing going forward, keep that up because that has been very helpful. I can point folks to that and you know, example visualizations and showing how they're doing things and the context with which they fit, that's invaluable. So I think as we grow and learn that, we'll realize what more we want and what more we need. So right now, unfortunately, I can't really say, hey, I'd like to have this, this and this because I don't think I know enough but I would say these are the things that are being done well now and keep that up. Is that how you got started in terms of your training? Was sort of use the community, use the videos? Exactly. Like I said, I heard about Tableau. I went out, I used my favorite search engine, Bing, in my case and I went out there and I found Tableau. I downloaded the trial and I started playing around and again, being a developer, I want to see what I can do without having to read anything and I got a good start there and then I went out and started looking at training videos. So that's how I got my start. Well, we're seeing software evolve and the point where, you know, no training is the sort of objective and it sounds like you feel as though Tableau's achieved that to a large extent. Very much so. Do you feel like the balance of the industry is getting there or maybe is there already or won't get there for another decade? What's your thought on that? I really think it depends on the industry because I think, you know, different industries have different focus and some things, you know, takes a matter of complexity so it takes some real thought and some real innovative design thinking, if you will, to make something simple that's complex in nature. So I think as a whole we are definitely getting simpler as we go on because we're having so much more technology that helps us to do that but, you know, obviously I don't think we're there yet. And the app culture, right? There's an app for that culture, right? Absolutely. You know, there's no training manuals for apps. Right, right, yeah. And that's the direction we're heading, a lot more so. Yeah. So what's exciting you from a development standpoint? There's a lot of stuff going on, right? I mean, there's really new and interesting types of databases coming up.  Right, right. What are you watching? What are you tracking? What's exciting you? I think there are two key things right now. One of which you mentioned, apps. I think mobile is a big focus these days and I think anyone that's developing any kind of applications or any kind of interfaces with people, you have to have that mobile focus. And we at Citrix realize that and are doing that as well. You'll see that in our product focus. The other thing is data. And you know, exactly where Tableau is sitting right now, but data everywhere. And we're seeing that more and more, not just from a consumer standpoint of the things that we think of. Hey, we've got this support case in my instance or we've got this customer sales information but taking it even further and realizing that we have these mobile devices in our hands every day and we need to tie that together with what's going on the social networks. We need to link those things together and realize the value that we can get by looking at those feeds and correlating that with what's going on in our sales and also in our support. Is that part of your corpus of data today? Do you ingest social data? Let's say it's something that we're starting to realize there's value in. And we're in the process right now of realizing the big role that data is playing and we're trying to understand what we can do with that. Do you feel, I mean, there's obviously an opportunity for organizations like yours to be proactive with regard to what's happening in social data but I don't know if anybody's really figured that out yet. I mean, there are certain organizations that are good about maybe responding on social or interacting on social and that engagement piece is good. That's a good thing. It's good, very customer driven. But I haven't seen and maybe you have or maybe one of you guys are thinking about it sort of a data driven approach. Like there's all this exhaust out there. How do you make sense of it and how do you drive value to an organization like yours? Have you had those discussions? Do you see light at the end of that tunnel or? Again, it's an area that we realize there's value in and we're in the process of exploring things like that right now. We've got a whole Citrix Labs team that's involved in a lot of different data initiatives and doing just those kinds of things is trying to experiment and do research on the fact of what can we do to make value out of this and some of the key things and initiatives going on there. Excellent. All right, Steve, listen, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. I really appreciate it. Yet another good Tableau customer case story. We go to theCUBE, we go to all these events and you can always evaluate the quality of the company by the quality of the customers that they're able to have on. So you really appreciate the time and the insights. Mark Jackson is coming up next. He is with Piedmont Healthcare. Jeff and I have been talking this morning about the application of data in healthcare. So stay tuned for that. This is theCUBE. We're live here all day at the Tableau Customer Conference. I'm Dave Vellante with Jeff Kelly. We'll be right back after this word.


workforce and earning divides in the AAPI community from New American economy and the Leaders Forum. Today, one in three Asian American and Pacific Islanders were born in the United States, even though immigration from Asia remains significant. In fact, the U.S.-born AAPI population is now growing faster than the AAPI immigrant population. Another fact, nearly half or 45 percent of all foreign-born Asian American and Pacific Islanders have lived in the United States for more than 20 years. A remarkable statistic, given that before the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, immigration from Asia was highly restricted due to racially discriminatory country quotas. Another fact, there are more than 10.7 million Asian American and Pacific Islander eligible voters in the United States. Together, they make up 4.7 percent of all eligible voters in the country. Texas, home to an increasingly prominent AAPI population, now has the third largest AAPI electorate in the country with more than 736,000 eligible AAPI voters. And in fact, within the city limits of Fort Worth, our census has shown that AAPI is one of our fastest growing demographics. So now, more than ever, we must condemn anti-AAPI violence and racism and lift up our AAPI residents by honoring their rich histories and cultures and celebrating the many ways they make our communities stronger. And to that end, I am pleased to present today's program, Lost in the Sauce with Hal Tran, a Vietnamese culinary demonstration and story of immigration. Hal Tran, is a mother? Thank you, Veronica. I'm excited to be here. I mean, Fort Worth is my home and to be able to share my stories through food, through my culture. It's really an honor to be here. And I see a lot of maybe hungry faces in the audience. So I don't want to keep you. I know we have a little bit of time or time limit. So I'm going to talk as we go through this. But if you want to get started and serve one of the most traditional dishes of Vietnam, it's pho. And I know that there's all different kinds of pronunciations with that. And you just have to roll it with it. Just pho.  When the French were kind of bougie and they were eating the nice filets and cuts of beef that's more high end, they discarded all the leftovers and all the bones and whatnot. So the Vietnamese, Indo-China back then, said, you know what, we'll take that. And on the streets, they put all these discards, the bones, you know, and put it into a big pot with seasonings. And it was magic. I swear, I think this cures cancer at times because when I'm sick, when I drink one of these or my grandmother made it, we were little. It was just so soothing and so comforting. So the name put a foos means pot of fire. So this pot has been cooking since yesterday at nine o'clock. So it took about, I guess, 18 hours to make this soup. And I did use soup bones. I also use oxtail because it's a great way to sweeten the broth very naturally. Beef shanks. I can use brisket. I also did short ribs, whatever meat you have. The higher end meets, of course, sweetens the broth, but it's not about the broth. It's about the seasonings. And I brought them with me. I make my own mix, but you can go to the Asian market and get these pre-packaged mixes. And there's six magical spices in here. And if I can show you in smell and all that, but there's definitely cinnamon, a nice, this licorice bark, some coriander and cloves and fennel. So it's like this mix and it somehow just magically makes a wonderful aroma and it blends so well together. The first step in making something like this is to roast your bones and roast your meat. It's a wonderful process where you kind of cleanse all the debris away from the bones. It kind of seals it. You don't want all the gritty in your broth. Then make your broth. It takes, I wait about eight hours before I season anything. I add in charred ginger and onions and then the magic, the seasoning packet. This is a seasoning packet that I made yesterday and this entire packet went into this broth and it cooked overnight. So I hope you smell it and taste it and enjoy that aroma. The second part of what I wanted to show you today is making spring rolls. Also another traditional sort of an appetizer and it's fresh. We love using fresh herbs, fresh mango, cucumbers, mint. So I wanted you to have the hands-on experience in doing it.  It's not as nice and crunchy. You're not.  So take one and just wet it. Just nice and coat it with water. I promise it's going to be very malleable after that. I'm going to grab a chopping board. You have a plate.  Does she need water right here? Okay. All right. Let it sit for just a moment and so that it kind of settles down and it'll soften up. Now, if you want to just use veggies, you can. If you want to use the traditional shrimp, you can. This is also so very flexible. I love to do a summer one where there's strawberries and mangoes and kiwi. It's a nice fruit one. But it's a preference, whatever you like. So I'm going to start mine with the little shrimp and I'm going to lay my pretty side of the shrimp, the pink side, right on the edge of the rice paper. I'm just going to use a couple of them and if you can't see and I see someone has maybe soaked their rice paper a little bit too long, but that's okay. Get another one. We have plenty. If it's not going to work for you or it's too soft, just get another one and just kind of wet it again. No big deal. All right. So here's where all the layers are.  Get that. And this is local lettuce, by the way. I was able to sweet-talk my way through a farmer and give me his fresh lettuce this past weekend. So I saved it just for you. So take your mint leaves and lay it on top with your cucumber and your mango, a little bit of lettuce. Now you're wondering, why do I have noodles in front of me? Now traditionally we do put noodles in there, but I found a little secret.   So just put one of those on there. Okay. And then you're going to start from the left and from the right and just start tuck and roll. My grandmother could do this like with her little nimble fingers, so tight. I don't know how she did it. So I'm still practicing, but I'm going to just tight, tight, tight. And if my is too nimble, my paper is too nimble, I'll do it again. But I think I got it. You're here. I always get excited whenever it turns out all right. Now if it falls apart, that's okay. You did a deconstructed spring roll. And then we'll do another one. But yeah, once you have it, just give it a cut and you'll have a couple of sides there to work with. Now since these rice papers, they're about 8 inches. We don't want to overfill, but if you've got a nice nimble rice paper, that works too. And I see some really pretty ones out there. Awesome job. Oh, excitement over there. I think we're doing great. I'm going to show you how to make a sauce that goes to these spring rolls. Peanut sauce. And what I've done is just to get some creamy peanut butter and some hoisin, which you're going to use in your fub rock as well. Soy sauce. And I've put a little bit of chili in there, but not much because I don't want you guys to make it too hot for you. And then I also did some almond milk because this is going to be completely vegetarian or vegan. And just mix. Now if I were doing this at home, I would use a food processor because it's much easier. But this would work just fine. You want to mix it just nice and smooth. And then I'm going to pass it around. You're going to use it as a dipping sauce for your spring rolls. You're asking, how long have you been here? You might have a Texas twang to you. I came here when I was 6. We immigrated in 1975, the fall of Saigon. My father was in the military and we had a run. And what you see on television where it was chaos in Vietnam at the airport, it's true. It was awful. And when the Afghanistan incident happened and the refugees were coming here, it just kind of brought back some memories of that time. Now, six years so, I don't know what was going through my mind, but I know my parents were pretty petrified. I just felt like I was on an adventure. We got on a C-130 airplane, one of those cargo planes. And it was packed. We were packed in there like sardines. Quite hot in there because it's a metal. It's all metal. But I remember this GI, he handed me something out of a little packet. And he showed me to put it in your mouth and chew it. I'm like, okay. And it turned out to be chewing gum. It's like little chicklets. Of course, I swallowed it because I didn't know. But that's my first memory of what was happening in this adventure I was on. We went to camp, to a refugee camp. And we had free reign because we were locked in. And it was my first experience because we never had television in Vietnam. There was one channel on the radio. But in refugee camp, there was movies, guys. The big screen. They would show movies at night. Like it's a big sheet. And it was like mash. It was like watching Doors Day and Cary Grant and Pillow Talk. And it was my first experience to American culture watching these movies, these 1950s movies in the 70s. Oh, I totally fell in love with Cary Grant. Peanut sauce. I'm going to put it in my mouth. And you guys can get some in your plates. So the phone line, this is how it's going to work. You're going to get started so that way you can enjoy this. Grab some noodles. Put it in your little bowl here. I thought there were tongs over here. We'll use this one. Now, these are fresh noodles. I splurge. You can also use dry noodles. They keep for a long time in your cupboard. This is my favorite brand. This is the Three Ladies brand. It's always like a staple in my house. You actually have to cook these. You have to soak them first in warm water. They'll get a little malleable. But then you have to boil them for like three to five minutes. Not too long. Don't over boil because they'll get really soggy. So grab your noodles here. And the broth, the hot broth, is going to cook your noodles. And I'll ladle some broth over your noodles. And you can garnish with fresh sprouts, some basil, Thai basil, scallions. Now I did cut some jalapenos and lime if you are adventurous and like some spice to you. And then there are hoisin, sriracha, and a little soy. Whatever you like. I didn't know everybody's taste. So you fix yourself. And then I see that you're already chowing down some of those spring rolls. And those are some really pretty ones. Wow, he's got a really nice and firm one there. A nice job. So anyway, actually I'm a high school science teacher. I teach here in Fort Worth ISD. I've been a teacher for over 25 years. I raised two daughters here in the U.S.  I mean, they, you know, K through 12 right here in Fort Worth ISD. One is an engineer. The other one is a CPA. They got their math and science from me, not from their dad. So no, they are just wonderful kids. I don't know if you were, I don't know if you follow me on social media or not. Fort Worth ISD did something that is pretty amazing. And being the first of its kind, we started a all girls football team. And that was the inaugural year.  Because I really didn't know much about football. I just wanted to learn. And half my girls were athletes the other half or not. And they actually had such a winning season. We went to the playoffs last night. And like one. So it was an amazing, I speak on behalf of all women who like think you can't do something. You can.  And being an Asian-American here, it's a community driven by maybe some suppression and some bias. And I just feel that, you know, whatever we can do to encourage the, you know, the abilities of all women, whether they're Asian or Black or Hispanic, I just believe in that it should be, it should be open to all. So I had to, you know, fill that in a little bit. My parents, my father, like I said, was in the military. He was a captain of the South Vietnamese Navy. My mother was also a trailblazer herself. She was a person that was driven by education. She grew up very poor and had no what means to get past fifth grade. But she worked her way where she got into college. And the first college in Vietnam was Marie Currie nursing school. And I think maybe some of you might know Marie Currie. She was a nurse back like in the thirties and forties and made some, like she got the Nobel Prize. But my mother went to school there and became a midwife. And being the youngest, I was able to go with her and some of her, you know, adventures, I guess, out, I wouldn't say adventures. It was pretty bad out in the front during the war. My brother and my sister were already in school, but she had to take me along with her. And it was tough.   And, you know, if I had had a son, I guess I would be proud if they wanted to, you know, be in the military. But it really scares me.   You don't really see that. So I can talk on and on. So I'm going to let you guys come up here, serve yourself the soup. And then you can come back and I can share some more stories. I did make dessert for everybody. The dessert is a mix of coconut, leachy and jackfruit. If you're not familiar with jackfruit, well, you'll get to try it today. So that's here. Ready for you? The dessert goes in there. Yeah, I can eat all this too. It's so easy to make. You saw me. Yeah. Just enough to fill the bowl because it will cook down. Yeah. Here? Yes. And you can't shrimp. Yes. I should have made it. No, I made a vegan one. Sorry. No worries. Yep, you would definitely have sure have. Yeah. And then you get to garnish whatever you like over there. It's very hot. Very hot. No mushrooms. Yes, ma'am. There you go. It's very hot. Yes, ma'am. Have you had this before? Yes.  It's very hot. Very hot on the sides there. Thank you so much. Yes, you just have to soak it in water. Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. The bulk noodles are just so, you know, like all over and like this one just lays down nice and flat. Perfect. Just to tell you guys a story since I still have the mic on me, going to school, you know, as a newly person in this country, not knowing a word of English, I, I came in and we had very limited clothing. We were just what, what we had and so I had this little outfit, little chickens on it and little, my grandmother sewed this outfit and they sent me home from school because I thought I was wearing pajamas and now I see kids in high school. Wait, you are wearing pajamas. Yes. It's very hot, baby. Yeah. It's very hot. Oops. I just lost my spoon. Let me see if I can grab it. Here we go. Have you had this before? Yes, ma'am. Awesome. And it's going to be very hot in the bottom, so I would hold it on the sides. Now, what can you do with these noodles if you have so much left over? Well, what I would do is make a stir fry, some pad thai with these fud noodles. Thank you. Wonderful. You know, I'm going to get that one up right up there. Yeah. Thank you. It's super hot, so you want to hold it on the side. There you go. Now, I think the idea of race that we struggle with, whether we're Asian or, you know, Hispanic or black, is just, we have to teach our kids to be aware that there is no separation. And while I was in school, I was always afraid to ask questions because, you know, culturally I was taught not to speak up.  And so once I started asking questions, I was learning, so it was wonderful. Yeah. It's okay. Here we go. It's going to be very hot, so be careful. I would hold it to the side of the bowl here. You're welcome. Yeah. You look familiar. I don't know. Do I know you? What's your name? My name's Amanda. Amanda? I just started here about a month ago. I went to school in Fort Worth, but I don't know if it was the same. Which high school? Past school. What year did you graduate? 2016. You graduated same year my daughter did. Camille Brown? Hannah Brown? No, maybe. She graduated in 16. Yeah. I might have seen you. Okay. I was an instructional coach there at Paschal. An instructional coach? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Ty Basil. Yes. How are you? I knew nothing about football. I saw them hitting each other. I was like, I want to play that. Right. Isn't it fun though? I was like, you know, I played for four years. Here we go. It's hot, so hold it to the side there. So what school are you at? I'm at Jamal Tech. I saw we came in third place on the line. We did. We sure did. I saw that when you said that I was like, oh, what is she talking about? Yeah, I'm here. Yes, I'm so proud. I was excited. I was like, look at her. I saw some of the volleyball girls and the basketball girls. Yeah, the basketball girls. Half of them came on to the football. Yeah. Y'all, I've made so much. There was plenty for seconds and thirds, I think. How are you, sir? Have you had this before? Oh, there you go. Hold it on the side so it's not so hot there. How are you? Have you had this? I always get something different. Oh yeah, they do good. It's like a rice platter. Yeah. Yeah, good, good. Well, this, Bob, is like a marriage of aroma and spices. And I hate to say this, or it's love. It's love that goes into a pot. Every pot that I make, it's not about how much is in there or how percentage-wise or recipe. It's just, I cook the way my grandmother taught me how to cook. And I know probably plenty of you have that experience. Y'all, I'm so excited. A few years ago, I met my business partner, Dixia, and we started doing a dumpling business, dumpling pop-ups, all over town. And then we had some mutual friends, Trent and Dina Chaskin, and Trent makes the best sourdough in town. And that's not an exaggeration. It's a wonderful sourdough bread. We opened a store called The Table, which is not too far away from here. And we are one of our first employees that you have here, which is who, where is she? Kimberly Castro, she's one of my students. She was a sophomore when I hired her, and she is fantastic. But The Table is a local foods market that carries, you know, people who farm like this lettuce that you're eating, meats that are butchered here in Texas. And what was lacking was a sit-down place to eat. And so how, when her old age here decides to open a restaurant. So I'm opening a restaurant the end of summer called The Pantry. And it's right on Magnolia, right next door to Shinjuku. It's the old hot damn tamales place. So be on the lookout for that. I'll be serving pho and banh mi sandwiches and, of course, our dumplings. We're hoping to be the first dumpling house in Fort Worth. So where you can get soup dumplings and pork dumplings. It's very happy. Yeah. So I hope you come by and see us at the end of summer. I'm a spoiled teacher. I love my summers. And so I do take a little break. And I'm going to take this break and go to Paris for two weeks because I signed up to go to Le Cordon Bleu and to learn how to do pastries for the summer. So I'm going to come back and do croissants, do baguettes for you. So I'm really excited about that. It's like a learning and a fun experience for the summer. So yes, I still teach during the day. And I still do this cooking thing at events at night. People ask me, how do you ever sleep?  And it's, it's, but if I didn't love it, I wouldn't do it. And I truly love it. And I think that my legacy is maybe cooking for people, if anything. I leave behind and I hope that the people I feed are happy and, you know, remember that they had a good meal. So it's very hot, baby. Very hot. Can you talk a little bit about the connection between French cuisine and Vietnamese cuisine? Absolutely. So growing up, my, my parents, you know, were fluent in French. My mother would read French stories to me, all the fables. But the food that is in grain, and of course, Julia Childs is one of my, my heroes. It's very similar. We had the same phrases. We had the same taste. We just took it in a different flavor profile. For example, crepes.  And if you ever had the crepes, they're called Bun Sao, which is a sizzling rice cakes or crepes. They are filled with sprouts and mints and pork and shrimp. They look just like a French crepe, but it has no egg in it. And it looks so tricky. They make the color using turmeric, the yellow color. And it's so good for you. That's why we probably, you know, live to a thousand years old using these, these spices. But when I go to friends, there's also another reason, besides, you know, learning how to cook pastries. My grandfather, culturally, this was acceptable, had three wives. I think two were concurrent, you know, how that goes. And so he had 16 children, and all the children got along, and they, you know, connected with each other. So for the first time when I go to Paris this time, I'm going to meet one of my uncles that has never met any of my father's children. So he is very excited to meet, you know, an offspring of his brother, because my parents passed away quite a bit ago. So I'm hoping, you know, to get some stories. He said that, you know, he knew my father as a child.  And he lives in Normandy, which brings me back. Why normally, right? So I actually have been training as a pilot. And so about eight years ago, I started training to be a teacher astronaut, and I started learning about aircrafts. And you have a beautiful aircraft here in Fort Worth, the C-47, and it's hangered out at Meacham. It's a vintage World War II airplane.  And I'm flying that next week. And this plane, this plane is raising money to go back to Normandy in two years. I'm doing a special fundraising dinner June 1st with them so that, you know, every little bit helps. They need like $48,000 to get the plane to Normandy. If you haven't seen this plane or you haven't ridden this plane, look it up, because they still take people for rides. And I took one at Christmas to see the lights and all that over Fort Worth. It's comfortable. You think of a big metal thing, but they had seats in there and there's portholes so you can look out. But the plane is beautiful. It's anything that has retained that history. It's a wonderful thing that, you know, that, you know, Meacham Airport is able to to give them the space to keep the plane out there. I would check that out. But yeah, I'll be going to Normandy for a couple days and experiencing the food there. I understand it's on the beach, of course, you know, but so there's a lot of seafood. And I can't wait because I love, love seafood. I love anything related to the sea. I told my kids that, you know, don't bury me. Please throw me out to the ocean. And I don't care what gets me, but just throw me out to the ocean. So I'm walking around here. Everything looks pretty good. You guys are kind of quiet, so maybe it's a good sign. Yes, yes. Is that a Vietnamese or French? It's French for sure. But we do eat escargot differently in Vietnam. We use the periwinkle, the little, little beady ones. And my mother would cook like a huge pot of it. And we, it's communal.  And I mean, there's not much like, there's nothing to them. But we dip it into a ginger fish sauce. Whereas the escargot, the French escargot is a little bit more meaty, garlic, butter. That's good too. So very, very good observation that we, there's some similarities in that. Food-wise, spring rolls, egg rolls. It's such a common thing. You know, this would be considered street food in Vietnam. You go by a stand. I mean, even Anthony Bourdain raves about the pho in Vietnam because he shared a bowl with President Obama. So it's a communal opportunity or experience to be in a place where you can just sit and share the food with strangers sometimes. And that's a lovely part. And I'm hoping to brush up on a little bit my French this coming few weeks so I can at least, you know, order, you know, food or anything or find a bathroom in Paris. But I think it'll be okay. I mean, generally they're pretty nice, right? But it's been, I went to France when I was 16 and then this is my second trip. So we'll see how much it's changed. Either I'm gonna, you know, learn new things or I'm just gonna be overwhelmed with, you know, all the good stuff. So are you just going there for a week course or just a lesson? Just a course. Yeah, I had to apply and the cordon bleu is not cheap to go there. So I asked myself, I think it'd be a great Mother's Day present. So that's what I did. And it's two days of pastries and then a few days of cakes. You know, I don't know how I'm gonna do. I just, you know, I'm gonna work really hard at it and see. Just for the breads. And then you have the cakes and then you have the sauces, I think with that. So it's like a week. It's not too bad. Anyway, any questions? Or I feel like I'm just kind of throwing at you random things of information and things I tell my girls all the time and they're like, Mom, you talk too much. So I'm still fluent in Vietnamese. Although it's got a little accent to it, right? You know, if they threw me back in Vietnam right now, I might stutter a little bit until I get used to it. I've actually not been back to Vietnam since I left. I've always wanted to go with my daughters and the timing hasn't been right where, you know, we can get time off and go. But I made a plan. I made a plan because both girls are working that this next summer, wherever we are, I'm gonna go and if they can go, then I'll buy them a ticket and we all can go together because I want to experience that with them. You know, I couldn't tell you, you know, going back there, I'm sure it's be brand new for me and that changes. What I remember of Vietnam is just beautiful. We went to the beaches a lot and to Da Nang, to Dalak, and, you know, when my parents came here to, we settled in Arlington, our vacations were Galveston. It's the closest place we can get to the beach until we discover Florida. Now, you talk about groceries. My grandmother was a very smart woman. When we left the country, we had no idea where we'd go. We'd go into the jungle. We'd go into some place we don't recognize a language or know the language or even the food. So my grandmother packed seeds. Wow, it was like, you know, something they don't think about because it's survival, right? And I'm sure she packed the seeds in, you know, our bags and the lining of our bags. And then when we got here, my mother planted okra, tomatoes, and mint. It was, of course, mint so easy to grow. And then we learned there's a place called Trader's Village that we could buy chickens. We can buy little baby chickens. And so we raised chickens in this little duplex we lived. You know, we thought it was okay. We would slaughter the chickens and it was our food. But then, because we didn't have a car, we just thought, okay, we, you know, just eat what we grow. And then someone showed us or took us to a place called Safeway and there was chicken already cut up and had no idea that you could do this. And then we could buy milk and, you know, we still didn't have a car, so we bought the groceries and walked 10 blocks home. And, you know, I carried the milk. It was kind of heavy because I'm like six years old. But, you know, we didn't have to grow or slaughter any chickens anymore after that. There became pets.  We did a little event at the community where the Afghans had moved to on the east side of town. And the one thing that we missed when we go to a new place is the food. I mean, basic staples, like, where can we buy rice? My parents are like, you know, the rice at the store isn't the same rice that we're used to, the jasmine rice, where it's very aromatic. And I kind of saw that with, you know, the Afghanistan refugees. They didn't have the spices they need to give them a taste of home. So I went to Pindery's and I bought, bought, bought, bought. And we did these spice packets. And, oh my gosh, I felt, you know, wonderful how you share with them. Like, here, this is, I looked it up, I Googled it. And these are the spices that, and the families were so, so grateful that they can at least now cook, you know, with the familiar smells of their house. I truly believe that food is the, the glue that binds any community.  But wherever you are, wherever community you live in, it's the food that really brings you together. And this little restaurant I'll have on Magnolia is, is for that purpose.  I may not ever be a millionaire. Not that I want to be, but, you know, it's, it's, the purpose is to share that. And one of the best things I think about the place, too, is that we'll be using it as an incubator for the next generation of chefs. So my business partner is a culinary instructor at Trimble Tech, and she has students. And what do students need? They need the experience. And what we're losing is the generational recipes that our grandmothers have, that our Tia, that our Abuela have. And we're not teaching it to the next generation. Because I ask my students, hey, do you know how to make tamales? No, my grandmother never showed me. Or, you know, I just don't pay attention. And gosh, there's tons of recipes that, you know, families can, that have, they should share with their kids. And so we're pulling, you know, chefs' knowledge and people in the community's knowledge so that we can bring it to the pantry, bring it this, this generational, I wouldn't say gap, but generational knowledge that we're going to lose if we don't share it. So I really appreciate you guys. I know I'm just rambling. That's good. Thank you so much. Yeah. Just real quick, we're going to wrap up. We're going to do dessert after, but we're going to wrap up the program for our virtual audience. But I want to make sure that there were any other questions from our in-person participants today. Yeah. Any questions for Hal? Yeah. Well, that, I will thank you very much, Hal, for showing us your culinary techniques and teaching our group here a little bit about how to do that. And probably more importantly, just your personal stories that you have shared. I think what Hal said is food is definitely a very common denominator, regardless of what culture you are, you affiliate with. It's something that brings everybody together. And I just thank you for sharing, again, your food and your stories and your insight and introspection. So thank you very much, Hal. Thank you, guys. Thank you. Well, you do have dessert. It's in that big pot behind the black ramekins. It's a mix of lychee, coconut, and jackfruit. I don't know if you're familiar with those, but lychee berries, they grow in clusters. Coconut, you know, but jackfruit, they're humongous. They grow like this, and then you have to break it open. But these are all from the Asian market.