okay then let's start I made a wiki page these days for this bof and let's look what questions are okay first thing we had an ad hoc bof last year at Debcon Memorial it was just by accident because I wear a hoodie which said XMPP and then people approached me are you involved into something with HMPP and I said well not so much but okay there was some interested in bof and quite a lot of people came and there were some some ideas what can be made better in XMPP related packages in Debian and also we talked about the infrastructure of Debian itself our own XMPP server okay I try to summarize a little bit about what I know what happened since last year and I probably do not know everything so just tell me what I do not know what happened there were major releases of for example the XMPP server prosody from 09 to 010 and this is already in Debian and already also in stable backpots so whoever likes to run prosody you can have the latest and greatest version on both buster and stretch each ability has also been updated major release to 1804 it was so also a major release and also there was a major release of the client Gatlin which is quite important release because it does now use Python 3 instead of Python 2 GTK 3 instead of GTK 2 and all this stuff so very important for the future when GTK 2 and Python 2 will get removed at some time also packages like MacCabre and profanity have been upgraded I think both of them didn't make it into the stretch release because of bugs and also there's a completely new client called Dino and Debian it's Dino I am because there was a different program Dino before long ago but it's still Debian is an eternal database if a package exist at one point in time it is very difficult to ever have a different package with the same name it happened but then you need a long time until it's gone from all the old old old old archives and so on okay what also happened is there is now an XMPP team thanks to salsa there is the XMPP team on salsa and most known most not but many XMPP related packages are now in the XMPP team prosody, Gatlin, Dino, C+, profanity MacCabre and a lot of other stuff so whoever does some packaging work inside of Debian related to XMPP think about moving your package to the team so more people can help fixing bugs and you can help the others okay that's what I know anybody else who knows anything about any progress of any or not progress of any packages since last year or whatever at that point I like to know who of you uses XMPP as a end user so for chatting for example so most which clients are your preferred clients both on Debian and also not on Debian let's say on a mobile phone or wherever you use it maybe we can okay you didn't use XMPP right you you which client are you using no for the XMPP I know okay not okay okay well on iOS yes okay okay I okay let's let's end and then I repeat what Pitchin on laptops I use Pitchin or profanity on the phones conversations okay so I try to summarize most use Pitchin, Gatlin, one Dino and on on phones Xether and conversations and on iPhone tzatziki okay then next question would be is there anything in the context of Debian which should be done regarding the client side so is is there anything missing or any ideas we can improve not from upstream but from Debian I know that all XMPP clients are horrible but this is a thing of the upstream developers I would say Dino is a big step Dino for usability for usability yeah that's true unfortunately Dino has very very few contributors and I see one commit per week or less so it does not improve so fast that it should I hope it gets better because yeah it's really nice looking but feature-wise it's far behind all the others on tech no tech friends and family yeah yeah yes absolutely for non-technical people it's really nice it looks like conversations only on on the PC server-wise who of you does run an XMPP server and and are you using Debian packages or prosody or e-travel e-travel e good choice prosody and I didn't realize there was a back port of upstream so yeah yeah you can run 0.10 yeah so as of today I actually switched to back ports yeah yeah it's a huge progress from 0.9 to 0.10 so you should use back ports and you I'm also running prosody also the back port yeah the back port yeah I'm also running prosody back port with the back ports in my company so it's more or less internal server for the company and Debian also runs prosody with back ports I am this huge progress since last year Fogler.debian.org is our server for RTC and XMPP voice over IP has been upgraded to stretch and uses now prosody back ports and prosody modules back ports so still many people say e-travel e is still better so probably it is I and in fact I think about changing from prosody to e-travel e at my company okay is there anything about the server stuff it's only three people who could command we should do something better as Debian I think if we managed to have always the latest or best version packaged in the same way as for the clients then it's all we can do. I think currently this is a case so what what I see from prosody each other and also from at least some of the clients it looks it looks like the best distribution could do even back ports to the stable version still I I get always questions about gut trim for for Tracy and people want the latest gut trim on older Ubuntu versions or older Mint versions and there's not so much I can do as a Debian maintainer I almost do not have any contact to Ubuntu and less so to Mint it's I do not even know how to how to work with the people it's more thing how Debian works with downstreams and so on and nothing related to XMPP okay now Debian infrastructure who of you uses the Debian XMPP server which is anyway limited to X to Debian developers Debian maintainers no probably not Debian maintainers do not have a DO address right so they can't use it okay so who is a Debian developer and uses XMPP service at least once in a while you have your own I'm using it last year there was many complaints about spam it was and it was really really horrible and everybody in the room who used the service of Debian said I get 10 20 messages every day in Russian or sometimes combined Russian English that was really horrible it dropped significantly we changed to stretch in fact to use a firewall but we never managed to install the firewall it still dropped so we are I ask around why it dropped and some theories about it but nobody knows exactly why it dropped might be that the spammers found out that XMPP is a dead technology and it isn't worth to send spam to XMPP users I don't know also there was this XMPP spam fighting manifest did you hear about it if you search for it on the internet it's by one of the XMPP gurus the one who does the Android Yaksim client Georg something and he wrote a manifest how administrators of XMPP servers should prevent spammers for example limiting the number of accounts you can create per second and other things maybe some administrative implemented ideas of him I don't know anybody knows about this issue and why it dropped or maybe it does not drop in general I never got spam although so I don't know if lucky you this comes from or you got so much spam on all that you know addresses last year and there were a lot of people who said I never want again use my XMPP I used the Debbie and all cadres for some time then I switched off I switched it now on but no spam I I think the spam comes mostly when when you travel use ID is an email address that is published somewhere so they just looking for email addresses my private Java ID is also my email address so it's circulating around anyway and they specifically I think try to spam anything that looks like an email address or looks like a Java ID which has the same syntax so that's mostly likely why the TVN org Java ID is also got so much spam yeah but that would be the same for me with the debut address email address equals chapter address so this is rather strange that some developers got all that stuff and I was for some reason exclude yeah now it dropped totally I get maybe one to invitation spans per week which is okay I just ignore them so not direct messages anymore but contact requests that are spam anyway because I see that the sender is nobody I would know and and also the the message is neutral so it's not oh we met at that conf let's have a contact no it's always yeah the user wishes to contact you okay go away or normally I like if people requesting contact if they write one or two personal words so that I know okay this might be someone I would like to have contact to let's talk about bug number something okay or you are lazy maintainer then I know okay the person really knows me okay that's mainly what what I noted in the wiki so there's not so many things to talk this year much less than last year good well any anybody likes to address anything related to XMPP and so I'm not using XMPP at all at the moment I do know IRC I'm using IRC sometime and maybe you could quickly explain the difference between IRC and XMPP yeah anybody knows that I think the the most interesting I'm not an expert but for me it looks like they managed not to to use this omimo which works like like the signal it's more or less an implication of this protocol and this improves on a lot of drawbacks which I also saw for the of the record messaging and yeah you can go offline exactly exactly the device must not be available when you send the message no oh and so this I think convert conversations is pretty good in that so I had no problem so far there are especially for conversations and the other lot of in other implication other clients don't have this implemented yet gatcham is the other one for desktop which is most advanced yes but I know is it is it already available yeah okay okay I'm the maintainer of both and I'm a maintainer of both gatcham and dino and I always test omimo if I by using the two clients okay with my own accounts I never tested it myself but I from time to time I followed a conversation like group chat where they discuss about clients and stuff and this is sometimes interesting and they were kind of suspicious about the status of dino but I think this is really which makes it kind of there is missing a client for iOS which really is better than secure yeah which works flawlessly or jet secure must be improved but if you I use it with my my family my brothers and their families and my parents and of course this is mostly on the same server but it really works pretty well so it's really I would almost say competitive competitive to what is the name what's up I use XMPP also with my girlfriend I forced her to and she would not use it otherwise but yeah she uses conversations on Android and she sends me photos of our cats and I'm not here it's okay yeah it works like what's up yeah there is not a dedicated client with the right user interface like slack the technology would allow it but yeah this is a big problem with XMPP all clients are problematic but if someone would write a slack like client it would be possible based on the technology I have to say both ISC and XMPP are very old I think ISC is now 26 years old or more 19 yeah it's now 19 20 years old and ISC is even six seven years older so both are very old what you get with XMPP is an ID you log in into the server with your ID and your password and that's you and with with ISC there are nicknames then there's Nick serve as a workaround but yeah ISC is different in this respect so for example that in theory spam fighting is easy with XMPP because you have a verified ID it's not like email for example I cannot send you an XMPP message with a faked sender it's it's only if I'm the admin of the server but then it would be possible but not and if it's only more encrypted than that so so it's it's it's even better than email in this respect while ISC is worse than email in this respect I would say yes yes yes this is what the prosody spam filter module can do you can you can block complete servers you can block IDs which does not make sense for spammers because I change IDs all of the time but for example what is really nice in XMPP you have the roster so contact list and a spam filter can easily say okay everything that is by a contact is white listed which makes it possible to be a little bit more aggressive with the rest of the spam filter and with email that's it's not possible because you never know whether the sender is real and even if you say yeah this sender is white listed it doesn't make sense it with XMPP it's possible you can whitelist me and but I'm not an expert on XMPP neither I'm a Peketra mostly and only if you have the admin of the server because the server address is verified by by the receiving server so if if you I don't know what your server name is something dot AT and my server receives this then it looks as is from the server something dot AT and then yeah then it can be fake because we have the admin of your server but only the dritz of yeah of your server so as far as I know I'm not an expert on that but that's what I heard so it's a little bit better verified than email and much better than IRC DNS probably reverse DNS yeah I don't believe that's a cryptography because then it would make things more complicated because then you have to implement a trust mechanism before and that does not exist to my knowledge and I think it works that you usually you allow your XMPP server only to federate with with other servers which have a certificate SSL's are said certificate and that's also and and this is common in the XMPP world but it's not common in the in the email world because you always have to be be able to if someone even if an email server doesn't have a certificate you have you need to accept mail from the server so they from the beginning they more or less decided that we that they all want to have or demand this SSL connection and the certificate and so there is it's more effort to get into that system in fact when Google still had significant XMPP usage I had to still whitelist the Google server because they did not use SSL but because I do not know anybody who still uses XMPP with Google and I'm not even sure whether it works anymore I turn it off I removed long ago the whitelist entry for Google anyway so I allow only SSL server connections and in fact only SSL client connections as well wants to use my server without SSL has just bad luck I do not care for them I probably everybody has configured their server that way right it's very common in XMPP now that SSL is a must anybody else one so XMPP can't be a slack alternative but the XMPP technology itself has been used to develop a lot of messaging plans the most famous ones are is WhatsApp you could still find the for the messages or emails of the founders of WhatsApp on the XMPP mailing list if you could search for a few years back you will still find there also conversations and there's this CONTOQ is also another XMPP messaging plan so CONTOQ you won't with CONTOQ you will feel like it's just like signal WhatsApp but one day we are a friend of mine and I actually did conversations to CONTOQ chat and it worked CONTOQ uses phone numbers the conversations is usually the XMPP that we do but we still managed to get send messages between both of them we just needed to figure out if I'm giving the phone number what is the user name and password it is creating on the server so things that could be developed one thing that is funny I was at mini-deb conf in Hamburg and there was a sprint by a number of people they like to bring MOVIM to Debian it's written in PHP so I could really not help at all because I do not know any PHP and yeah but MOVIM is a XMPP client that runs on the web but as a server so you need to trust it your for example grid and password so best you run it your own but it's that web interface and it's more like a social network so it is a little bit like whatever Facebook or whatever social network so it has group it has groups and you can follow other people and you can also chat and group chat but it's all based on PHP on XMPP and you can combine it with all other XMPP clients and so on and they even have funny features from the social network world for example if you ever heard from younger people maybe the word stickers and stickers are like little images you can send around and in MOVIM you have even stickers so you click there and then you have a number of cats and pigments and so on and princesses and everything and then you send it and it's also this sticker implementation is based on the XMPP standard so it mainly sends the hash of the sticker image to the client the client looks whether it already knows this hash and then it just shows the right sticker and if it does not yet know the hash then it requests the sticker from the other side and so it's like so it's quite different from sending photos because in photos they are probably unique so it doesn't make sense to to have a hash mechanism but stickers are sent again and again so it makes a lot of sense to cave them so they have these other mechanism and XMPP but so far only very few XMPP clients do support stickers in fact I do not know any other than MOVIM so let's hope that MOVIM also gets into Debian unfortunately I do not know the state of affairs so what was nice at the MiniDebConf in Hamburg there was even the uptrend developer of MOVIM it's mainly one person or one and a half but the complete one person he was at MiniDebConf which was very nice I believe he is not even a Debian user but he came specifically for the sprint to the DebConf which I found very nice there's another social network based on XMPP it's called Salutatoire and it's already in Debian but there is now a new version upcoming and I hope we get it also into Debian but there are some dependencies we have to track and so on so don't hold your breath again like all good software it's made by a single person who does it in his spare time after work so both MOVIM and Salutatoire are the cool thing MOVIM and Salutatoire are two social networks both based on XMPP and there are a lot of things that are completely compatible so user of Salutatoire can send messages and I do a lot of stuff with MOVIM users this is really nice let's hope both will be in Debian by Buster that's from my side the Dino IAM package is linking to the Dino package in the tracker ah then I forgot the IAM have your account on the wiki then you can just fix it okay yeah the Dino was a music program or something right yeah midi midi tracker yeah just fix it it's a wiki okay anything else so then let's see what we have what updates on this issue of things we have next year in Kory Tiva we have a Debian XMPP room no this is a good question that's something yeah good that you reminds me on the on the Debian XMPP server so far there is one room but only for the admins so they're typically only Victor and Victor and Victor and maybe sometimes me and maybe Daniel Pocock but we could create more rooms and we can also think about allowing at least Debian developers to create rooms and then other people who are not Debian developers can join the rooms of course that would be a nice addition we just have to enable it in the configuration and yeah at least Debian developers should be able to create rooms on the other hand Debian uses mainly IRC and if we start to use XMPP for rooms it would exclude the users of IRC which I would find not so nice on the other hand if you use IRC it's easy for XMPP users to join IRC channels because our gateways I use Bbumi for example so we can activate this feature with the rooms but it would be nice if it if you do not forget please about the IRC users we have pages where we list all the Debian house channels yeah we could similarly have a page for listing all the Debian XMPP rooms and regarding missing out on conversations between the two IRC or XMPP we could create bridges yeah okay so it's like not for Debian but for a lot of other communities that I'm in we have bridges for IRC matrix and Telegram and people can choose to join from anywhere and they still get messages this is great so something something between XMPP and IRC could be easily done yeah there is one bridge that is in Debian and which is very nice it's called Bbumi does anybody use Bbumi or heard about it Bbumi is mainly a bridge from an XMPP server to IRC so for example I join IRC channels by means of Bbumi so I use my company XMPP server or another one that features Bbumi the Debian org server does not yet have Bbumi so I cannot use that address and then I go in IRC channels and it works relatively well relatively sometimes glitches but it's okay and some people even preferred over direct IRC so I can talk to Daniel and Victor also maintaining the Debian server that we install and activate Bbumi on the Debian org server and you can use your XMPP the over address to join IRC I'm hungry let's go to lunch 15 minutes dinner dinner in Europe it's lunch time now I was trying to trying to recreate any kinds of wheels in rust and maybe if anyone have something else idea of XMPP now maybe I'll try to return I will try to write a XMPP library in rust okay that's already one yeah no by a link French guy and well when XMPP when I say something it's always a French guy it's very French XMPP RS it's called do you know this yeah call it but I know that but actually I check his github page and it's like they only have support one only one of their stand well only one for their standards as the others are still in the wish list so maybe I should contribute a little close to me just send some poor request or something else yeah maybe you can talk to him directly he's always on XMPP and as far as I know he currently does not have a drop deliberately he quit the job to have more time for free software as far as I heard and to to blame or the wheeling I think it was and I just contact him and I think he loves any contribution so he's very nice person and I think any contribution is very welcome or any cooperation or whatever and because yeah there's still no real good rust software for XMPP and it's something that is really needed maybe I'll contact him I mean her or him contact him maybe next time or maybe later he's an art linux user but he was at last that conflict more real it's better me because I didn't I didn't even contribute any kind of package for any kind any in the institution nice very nice so so it's fun to work with him I believe also he knows a lot about XMPP so this is very nice I sometimes ask him some stuff any questions in the ISE no no and the ISE there were no questions right okay okay thanks thanks to video team


Hello everyone. I am Sam Robbins. I'm going to give a talk on the process of going from academic essays to blog articles This is a talk I originally gave at the SoA summer school earlier this year, but due to some technical difficulties it wasn't recorded so this is a Recording of the presentation. It was originally given on a panel about public scholarship. So that's the theme here so I want to talk about this process of Translating across the genres and I'll talk a little bit more about what I mean by that in a second, but first a little Background to me. I graduated from SoA with a degree in Chinese modern and classical. I was very involved with the Taiwan studies department at that time. I then went to National Taiwan University here in Taiwan to do a masses degree in sociology and have recently graduated and for about a little over a year now I've been an editor at the magazine Taiwan Insight, which is the online magazine for the Taiwan Studies program at the University of Nottingham So throughout that process I've written for Taiwan Insight, but also mostly commissioned pieces, edited pieces and Really just got to read a lot of great articles and a lot of great content about Taiwan. So in that process of editing I've kind of Got a better sense of what I think works in an article and what I think doesn't work So I'd like to share some advice about how to write for a publication like Taiwan Insight or of course for Taiwan Insight If you're interested in writing for us. So I think the biggest mistake that often happens When academics try to write for a broader audience is that they just make very surface level edits And I call this a process of going from thus to therefore So as an editor I can tell pretty much right away when a piece I receive has been very lightly edited from a much longer piece of academic work These pieces usually have a lack of awareness of reader. They're effectively writing for themselves or the academic peers There's language that I don't think really is appropriate to that context It's just a direct copy and miniature of a much longer piece So it ends up reading like an extended abstract or it just speaks to a point that I don't think works outside about very Arcane academic context So what I like to think is much more useful and what I think I've read a lot of pieces that do really great as a process of Translating and I use this term translating to specify against dumbing down It doesn't mean taking academic work and simplifying it, you know for the lay masses But rather it's about taking a piece of work and making it work in another genre And this idea of genre is very is very crucial. So the process of transformation not simplification different genres demand different things and Also different audiences care about different things and I use this concept with genre to refer to academic writing and blog writing Because I think it's important to remember that Valuable aspects of a piece of research can be highlighted in different genres and there are things that blog articles allow you to do that Academic essays actually don't So again, it's the process of taking one piece of work and presenting it in a different way for a different group of people Also, of course blog articles generally have a larger audience than a piece of academic work so not only is it a way to Highlight pieces of your work that you might not otherwise have the chance to so so a chance to get more people to read it I'm very certain that the pieces I've written for town inside based on my Thesis will be read many more times than my actual thesis and that's great. You know, it's I'm just glad that it's getting out there So I think the first step of understanding how to translate across genres is to be able to recognize genres For what they are and think about the conventions They might have so a lot of you listening are probably students or academics or been an academia for a while So you're very familiar with the genre of academic writing But I think there can be a risk of being so familiar that you forget the rules that are implicitly stated when we write in academia So I want to make them really explicit here Help us think about it as a genre So when you're writing academically you're writing for other academics in your field or if you're in a class You're writing for a professor of that class now why that's relevant is that usually means you're gonna assume some type of disciplinary training and you're gonna be able to Use some certain disciplinary specific terms of art now. I'm a sociologist by training. So when I write Research or I write my thesis it was for sociologists and that was you know in my mind when I thought about what I could mention and What was relevant and what people knew? Academic writing also usually has a highly regulated structure. It's gonna be an intro. There's gonna be a literature review There's gonna be data an argument and a conclusion now, especially when we talk about monographs or longer Research articles that implicitly read they're implicitly written not to be read in the consecutive order now You'll see in a lot of monographs that kind of a central idea gets repeated in many chapters or in many times And this isn't a bad thing. It's just taking into account how your readers might engage with a text Which I think is a really great thing to do. Also, these texts are written to be in a sustained dialogue with existing texts Now I also Sorry, I've already mentioned a little bit about assuming disciplinary training Well, this allows us to do is we can assume that our readers have probably read certain texts And we can talk about those texts and think about how they relate to the text that you're writing Now another feature of academic writing is that there's generally an aversion towards speculation and personal reflection I think especially in the social sciences as this idea of reproducibility and I intentionally put this in You know quotation marks this idea that anyone could write this piece or anyone could do this research Therefore, you know, I'm not in the piece. It's objective So that's how I generally think about academic writing as a genre and it's not a criticism or a praise of it I just think that's how it works blog articles on the other hand are a very different genre and I have the very different set of Concerns and constructions that said it's a much looser genre and it's highly dependent on the publication So if you take one thing away from the speech today, it's that if you're writing Whoever you're writing for try to learn about them as a publication, you know Read some pieces they've written maybe contact the editor and learn about what they're interested in and how they work But if I want to talk in general terms about blog articles, we can say they're written for a general audience and that means that you assume less prior knowledge shorter pieces are read are written to be read in a single sitting So you don't have to constantly signpost or constantly return to a central point It's a narrative nonfiction. That means you're developing an account There's a beginning middle and an end instead of an introduction and a conclusion These pieces usually don't end where they started There's a development throughout the piece an argument is developed in that progress rather than stated and articulated throughout the piece Blog articles are also a great place to engage with a perspective a point of view and really bring forward your personal insights So now that we can talk about Academic writing as a genre and we talk about blog articles as a genre How do we move across those two genres because I've seen some great examples of a piece that came from an You know a thesis that was then reworked into a really successful Blog article. So I want to give nine translation tips for how to move that process So the first tips are all about broader framing issues. I think the most important part of this is audience shift So the tip I would give you is to learn how to picture your imagined audience Now the most important question to ask yourself is who are you writing this piece for? So again, I said if you're writing a piece for a class, you're writing it for that professor If you're writing a piece for an academic journal, you're reading it for you're writing it for readers of that journal That question is going to be different for public scholarship And you need to think about who the reader is and why do they care? And what do they already know also crucial is what do you want them to learn and what can you tell them I? Really encourage people to think specifically about this and not to think abstractly about you know groups of readers or cohorts But try to think of someone specifically when you're writing now whenever I write something for talent insight I have been a few names of people I follow on Twitter that I know read my articles and I write for them and think you know Would they like this piece? Would they know this? Would they care about this? And I think you can do that too And if you're not sure exactly who that person may be you can ask your publication and say Who generally reads this who is the audience? Because different audiences things care about different things Now Secondly once we've done this broader shift of moving the audience We really need to reframe the piece and why it's important and why it's new I think we need to move from theoretical importance to empirically importance Now, especially I think in the social sciences We like to think that Our concept or a piece of research is relevant because we can draw Generally articulated principles from them that have a broader application Right, you know when you're researching democracy in Taiwan It can tell us something about East Asian democracies or new democracies or democracies broader But I don't think blog articles have to be framed that way Sometimes a great story is important in and of itself So you should always ask why someone should care about this topic and exactly what's new in your piece But how you answer that question can be very genre specific Some things are empirically interesting even if they are not theoretically important Sometimes a story is good in and of itself Sometimes there doesn't need to be a general principle that can be drawn from it Now I'd like to give two examples of this So the first example I would like to give is from my undergraduate thesis Which is something I turned into an article for Taiwan Insight Now if I had to sum up my undergraduate thesis in a single sentence I would say that transitions in party politics and immediate systems affect how and when safety might become a political issue And who can define what safety means When I came to write this for Taiwan Insight how I framed the piece and why it's important changed a lot Even though it was about the same story So if I had to give a one line summary of that article I would say that the 1990s were a time of great demographic a democratic progress in Taiwan But also a deepening anxieties about crime and safety across the political spectrum So both these quotes are referring to one piece of research But written for very different contexts now sometimes this translation doesn't actually have to be that big So another piece of research I've been working on Is about fun in the government zero community So the academic framing of this is that social movements literature overlooks the political Potentials of positive emotions such as fun Now I think this point actually worked relatively well for a broader audience So when I came to write that for Taiwan Insight My point was that fun can be a motivator of political action But in both cases you can see that exactly what's relevant What's interesting on what's new is framed in a different way Now building on this and broadening out a little bit I think an important translation is also to move from writing for a specific discipline to writing to a region Now I've already mentioned that you know if you're writing for a paper or if you're writing for an article You're usually writing for a specific audience. So, you know, I'm a sociologist by training So when I write things it's for sociology and why it tells us about sociological principles But for Taiwan Insight I'm writing about Taiwan or group or set of people in Taiwan Now this distinction I'll talk about a little bit more But it's important to think about you know why these people interesting regardless of the broader principles and Why this region is interesting and that doesn't mean you have to abandon your training But it's more crucial to think about what can your discipline teach us and why should non-specialists cap So another example I would give of this is a paper written by one of my classmates So the essay was talking about mother-child relationships as a mechanism for the reproduction of social inequality in Taiwan It's a very sociological point that you know was done very well But I didn't think it worked for Taiwan Insight So when we came to rework this piece for Taiwan Insight the piece was about stigma faced by signal mothers in Taiwan Now why this point is interesting is because of the mothers themselves their stories and their life experiences Same piece of research but framed in different ways Now having said all this I think it's really crucial that we can Still work with theory and frame it in a different way I would never suggest you have to abandon theory Or you have to dumb down anything you think might be too complex or too abstract Most theoretical ideas can be useful when worked in a way When presenting them in a way that doesn't assume prior knowledge about the concept So for example, if you use an essay that builds on historical institutionalism Perhaps you write it for a general audience in a way that highlights the way that past experiences shape our system works now So again, I'm still using this theory and using this idea But I'm not assuming any prior knowledge of historical institutionalism and I'm not This specifically speaking to that canon Now another example, perhaps you're discussing the modernization theory of democratization You can still write about that for a general audience But it will become instead thinking about how and whether economic development tends to lead to democratization So again, you don't have to abandon your discipline. You don't have to abandon theory But you have to make it work in a new context so the Next few points are about writing style and prose and narrative rather than overall framing And the crucial thing here is moving from a whole to a part So it really encouraged you not to condense an entire thesis into 1000 words You have to be very length Considerate in whatever context, right? If you're writing a 10,000 word thesis, you can't write 15,000 words Similarly, if you're given 1000 words for a blog article, you can't write 1500 words So with that in mind, you should never try to do too much I often reach out to people and say, you know, this thesis I saw you work. It's really interesting. Can you write a piece for me? And I just get that whole thing condensed into 1000 words and it just reads like an abstract what I think is much A much more successful strategy is to take one chapter or the most interesting point of your thesis and write a piece on that And the great thing about that is then you can stretch it out into two pieces or three pieces or more, right? I would much rather see one argument explained in full than three things explained poorly Now another way to think about this or another example of this is thinking about how much interview data or how many characters you can Introduce now. I was recently asked whether I have a limit on the amount of characters I allow authors to introduce in an article I don't but I do think it's important to consider how many names and how many people I have to remember So if you're dealing a lot with interview data, I don't want 1000 words of just quotes of six different people because it's hard to It's hard to develop a consistent thread through that So you have to be very considerate of the length you're given Another aspect of this is if you're writing 1000 words or 1500 words You can assume that a piece will be read in one sitting And every word counts a lot more So I really encourage people to move away from signposting now What I mean by signposting is in this essay I will or the next section will show or my argument has three sections or in conclusion I have shown that that's signposting It's telling me where I'm going to go as a reader Because the readers are going to engage with this text in a much more linear and direct way I don't think it needs that Similarly a conclusion doesn't need to be a direct overview of the content If a piece is five it takes five minutes to read I remember what I read five minutes ago That doesn't mean you don't need any conclusion But it can look very different it can move the piece in a new direction It can be forward-looking it can be reflective I think with a shortened piece you don't need to end where you started and you could move and progress The narrative in an interesting way to conclude the piece I think of this as about showing not telling Don't say I'm going to write I'm going to tell you about this Good writing guides its readers through the prose Good writing tells me why we're going by going there And good writing embeds conclusions throughout the text So to every paragraph I know what I'm meant to learn by the end of the paragraph Now a broader point we can draw from this is the idea of moving from argument to narrativity And I really encourage people to embrace narrativity And I've already talked about kind of empirical richness But I really want to stress that empirical detail and story is important in and of itself It doesn't need to serve a single point Story have a writing or story that has a beginning The progress is that tells a dynamic story is very good and successful in in these blog article contexts And it's a great point It's a great way to express a point of view and tell an interesting story So you know sometimes I've had people writing about You know certain government reforms, but it's not it doesn't have to be about the government reforms Themself in their effect, but just kind of a historical story and what did it look like before And what did it look like afterwards? So you don't need to have a central point and articulate that point You can do something that progresses This might be a bit more abstract, but I think this context of narrativity and kind of Writing in a way that isn't about an argument per se is really crucial if it can be done well Now another way to think about this is moving from objectivity to speculation And I put objectivity and quotes because you know I don't personally think that objectivity is ever fully possible And I also don't think that you know blind speculation is good But I think the blog articles can be a really great way to you know express a point of view So I talked a little bit about academic writing as a genre One thing that's really clear is that academic writing doesn't like Forward-facing speculation So you know we write about what's happened and what we know Know what we think might happen two years from now Blog articles can be a really great place But if you've got all this data and you really know this topic To talk about what you think might happen or to express your point of view Or just generally put yourself into the piece in some ways In a blog article context, a view from somewhere is always better than a view from nowhere And you can weave in personal experiences in a way that doesn't underwrite your context Or underwrite your argument or your account But rather builds on it and makes a piece more unique and interesting to readers So finally, I think this is one of the more complex points And it's something that I'm actually not that good at and I'm still learning to do well But it's this point of giving context where relevant So again, if you have 1000 words, you can't spend too much of it explaining key terms Or giving all the historical context, you can only give context where relevant So you have to learn how to explain a term in no more words than is necessary At the same time, people won't follow an argument if they don't know the moving pieces So we do have to explain things but do it shortly So an example is that I write about the government zero community in my thesis Now, whenever I write about this in my thesis, you know, I've got pages about their history And what they stand for and I could write a long piece about this In 1000 words, what you're going to get is something like government zero As a decentralized civic tech community that advocates transparency Open source technology and civic participation Another example, you know, if you're writing about Lee Dong-hui, you could write A whole biography of him, you could write a whole book about him But on first mention, you should say something like Taiwan's first democratically elected president It's simple and it tells me what I need to know without giving me too much detail Of course, exactly what is relevant will depend on the piece So this is just something to keep in mind and think about What do I need to say and what can I leave out Now, I started this piece talking about writing Taiwan for a general audience And I work at Taiwan Insight and my background is Taiwan Studies So I'd like to give a little bit of advice specifically for writing Taiwan and how to think about this Now, the first point I would make is that it's the exactly how to write Taiwan Or what's interesting about Taiwan is going to be very dependent on the publication So you have to think about who you're writing for So for example, Taiwan Insight is written for people who care about Taiwan Who are interested in Taiwan and already have some prior knowledge Now, if you're writing for something which has a broader East Asian perspective Or a regional perspective, you're going to assume a little less knowledge If you're writing for something that isn't interested in Taiwan at all Then of course, you're going to assume even less background knowledge And you'll have to think about why Taiwan is interesting So it's not really important that you're just generally following English language coverage of Taiwan And you generally know what are the narratives What's fresh, what's already been said Of course, you don't need to read everything But when you're writing about Taiwan in the English language You're part of an English language conversation about Taiwan That's true about academic pieces But it's also true about the news and blog articles So support and learn from existing publications Now I mentioned this point earlier But I think it's really important to think about whether you're writing about Taiwan A group of people in Taiwan Because sometimes people say to me You know, I want to make Taiwan more visible Or I care a lot about Taiwan How do I get people to know about Taiwan? You know, that's a great goal But sometimes it's just more important to tell stories of people in Taiwan And you know, for me, for example, Government Zero is interesting as an activist community In and of itself Not because it's in Taiwan And I can tell a story about Government Zero That isn't a story about Taiwan Now, of course, I have to talk about Taiwan to explain Government Zero But the focus is on the community and these people I think once you frame it that way Not only is it a great way to get into the narrative But it allows you not to have to explain everything about Taiwan It avoids you having to get the cliches of, you know A move likely to anger China or whatever If it's about the people or if it's about a specific group Then how that story works Or what is a Taiwan story can be framed differently Now, a final point I want to make And I say this is a Taiwan-specific point But it's not, of course, it's relevant for wherever you're writing about But I'm talking about Taiwan So I'll put it in the Taiwan context But when you're writing for a broader audience Or in an academic context I think it's really important to try to support local voices It, wherever you can And in your blog article or in the piece, you know Try to find out what's been written in Taiwan about this Highlight those voices and engage with those voices And if you have the skills to do it Translating is a really great way of doing public scholarship There are a lot of great blogs here in Taiwan That do these type of articles And have published successful pieces That would get a broader audience if you public If you translate them into English And it's also a good way to learn what makes a piece work So this is something I personally try to do when I advocate And I'm not saying don't write your own pieces Or, you know, don't get your research out there But I'm saying you can do both And there are multiple ways to do public scholarship Okay, so this is a broad summary of what I've talked about I know I've briefly, I know I talked about before About against conclusions But I think in the genre of PowerPoint presentation conclusions are still good So recognize genres, consider your readership Reframe a topic and think about what's interesting About the topic and embrace narrativity So that's everything I have today Thank you so much for listening Please don't hesitate to get in touch If you're interested about this process Or talking about the PowerPoint Or if you're interested in writing for Talent Insight I'm very happy to talk about that Please check out Talent Insight I think we do a pretty good job Of putting out interesting content on Taiwan Feel free to check out my Twitter Some of it's Talent related, some of it's not But yeah, it would be great to hear from people And yeah, thank you for listening


G'day. How are you going? Welcome to my channel about boots and boot-related things, and if you're new here, my name is Tech. I film on budget country and I acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land. Today, I'm going to look at the six most popular outsole used on boots. So the first type of outsole I want to talk about is the leather outsole. The oldest form of outsole really, if you think about it, caveman probably slapped on a piece of leather over his foot and strapped him in with some leather fonds. So it's probably the oldest form of outsole in your footwear. So this is the Grant Stone diesel boot in Black Chrome XL with a double layer of leather and the outsole is leather. The pros and cons, the pros is that it's an extremely flexible piece of outsole material, which molds to your feet, is extremely comfortable, breathes quite well, and is quite flexible. In this case, I've got shoe trees, so I can't really flex it. The con is obvious.  You can attempt to make it less slippery, such as in the case of this Oak Street bootmaker's trench boot, using butyl cork. Butyl is a form of compound that's infused into the leather, making it a little bit more oily and a little bit more sticky, so that in fact it's a leather sole, but it's quite sticky. So the biggest advantage of it is really in a dress boot, because as you can see, leather soles can be very flat in profile, quite sleek, quite elegant. The second type of popular outsole I want to discuss tries to maintain that flatness for sleepiness. You wouldn't call this Iron Ranger a dressy boot, but the idea is that workers in the turn of the century could wear these to work and then polish them up and go to church or whatever with them, and don't look as if they're walking around in great big clumpy boots. This is cork nitrile. The Olden Indies also use them. It's cork infused rubber, little chips of cork made into a rubber sole. As you can see, the pro is that it's sleek, it's quite lightweight, it's quite flexible. The con is that it can get quite slippery just like a leather sole, but you can imagine going to church with that. It's still quite sleek. You're not clumping around in commando boots. The third most popular outsole still tries to retain a flat look to it, so it looks quite sleek. So it can be versatile in the reasonably dressy, but they provide for better grip by putting in studs. This is rubber, of course, so this is the famous day night sole. As modern as it looks, it was invented in 1905, 1910 for the worker to go to work and be able to have a good grip. A proper day night sole, I think if you can just see, has these studs slightly raised and because they're in a little circle, they don't actually pick up dirt. They're reasonably comfortable and over the years has become quite widely copied, so Grant Stone, and in this case, Thursday, used their proprietary versions of it. In Thursday's case, they also include the day night smile at the bottom. Very grippy, light, flexible, reasonably dressy, and in my case, in urban wear, walking through grass maybe. I'm not sure it hiked through mountains in this, but in my use case scenario, very comfortable, very grippy. The next most popular outsole is crepe rubber. Crepe, not to be mixed up with the wedge soles that you find on wedge sole mock toe boots, which are sometimes called crepe, and I'll talk about that later. But crepe comes from the French word and it's rolled through a crepe pier. Sometimes it's called plantation rubber because it's exactly where it's made. Liquid rubber is taken from the trees, they're tapped, they're mixed with acids and other chemicals to harden them, and they're poured on thin tins in order to get tacky and harden, and then as they dry, they're rolled through a crepe pier just rollers to get thin slices through, and that's why you get this rather horrible molten sort of look to it. And basically, roll rubber. Most famous for clout's desert boots, and as you can see, they're just basically glued on. Very grippy, extremely grippy, they're light, they're comfortable, they're squishy to stand on, but oh my goodness, are they ugly? They really pick up all kinds of dirt, hair, you know, things you wouldn't want to talk about, and I'm going to wash my hands after this. So the next type of outsole is the wedge sole, used primarily in mock-toe boots, but they're starting to change, they're starting to be used in other boots because they are so damn comfortable. Now these are sometimes called crepe rubber, but they're not, they're blown rubber. It's rubber that's taken back to factories, reconstituted, have air blown through them so they're a bit squishy, and then they're congealed into sheets in a mould to create this sort of an effect. Highly, highly comfortable, very soft and squishy, great support because there's no gap between the ball of the foot and the heel, causing a bridge at the arch. It can be pretty grippy, particularly if you have these things cut into it, but they are soft and they do wear out quite quickly. And finally, out of the popular types of outsole is the commando lugged sole. You can always tell commando sole because of the pattern of the radiating lugs and these cross shaped lugs in the middle, even on the heel. This is made by Vibram and there is quite a tragic story behind this. Vitaly Bramani was a mountain climber in Europe and his friends died in a climbing accident and he'd always maintained that if they had proper footwear with good grip, they wouldn't have died, so he invented the commando sole. You see these almost everywhere now. This is a full commando sole. It radiates out to the edge and it's a full length. You also get them as a half lug commando sole, so there's a leather outsole and then on top of that they put a half lug of commando sole onto it, similar pattern as you can see, radiating out in the crosses, same on the heel. There is a variation on these deep lugs. I mean, you see them everywhere, don't you? Timberland, if you think about it. But there's a variation on these deep lugs called the ridgeway sole, made by the same people who make day night soles. And these are quite deep lugs, as you can see from the side, and yet in most angles you wouldn't even know they were there, except maybe the heel where it's cut in quite deep. But these wavy lugs are better in the sense that they don't pick up as much dirt and grit and bits of rock because they're wider, and yet they're still as grippy, very comfortable and fantastic traction. There you go. I hope you found that useful. I'm going to use this video to refer to in future, so that I don't keep repeating myself when I talk about outsole used in the boots that I review. Hey, don't forget to click on the like button below, and if you haven't already, click on subscribe as well. My video on the five best business casual boots in my collection is coming up next. You don't want to miss that. Until the next time though, stay well guys, and I'll see you soon.


Dotted north to south of the Pacific and Indian Ocean is the beautiful sub-region of Oceania, known as Polynesia, made up of over 1,000 of the most beautiful and indeed intriguing islands. Some of the most puzzling ruins on earth can be found here, upon some of the most remote islands of this enormous chain. The most well-known being Rapa Nui or Easter Island, with its iconic enormous Moai statues, an incredible and extremely remote place, one that was once home to some of the most resilient and luckiest souls on earth. For to land upon these remote shores all those years ago, instead of perishing in the deep blue, could be seen as a one-in-a-million chance occurrence. Direct mariners from all over the world marooned upon an island littered with enormous, unexplainable ancient statues, once hewn from the solid bedrock and moved across the island using as-yet unexplained technologies. And although Eastern Island takes up nearly all of the public spotlight, there is another island, an equally confusing, amazing counterpart. Known as Temahua Tahua, it is located upon the island Nuku Hiva, the largest of the Marquisis Islands within French Polynesia, whose once ancient inhabitants lived within a crater of an ancient volcano upon the island. Temahua Tahua is littered with puzzling statues, possibly as ancient as the Moai, yet they are clearly of a much more peculiar subject. The earliest archaeological evidence of human inhabitation of Temahua Tahua is estimated to be around 2,000 years ago, yet many suspect these statues may be far older, an apparent altar for worship of a reptilian deity. Did the inhabitants of this ancient island once encounter aliens? Who were these statues intended to depict? It is highly intriguing that this extremely peculiar island should be found in a similar location to Easter, and although the Moai do appear to be human, we still do not know who or what was capable of shifting such enormous lumps of rock all those years ago. In fact, even with modern technology, we cannot shift such statues without damaging them. In known human history, Temahua Tahua was the ancestral home of Queen Vakhehu, the last queen of the Tahui, the ancient people who once lived upon Nukuheva. She successfully reunited the two halves of a once-divided tribe, subsequently becoming their queen. The Marquisis Islands were settled by Polynesians around 200 BC, and have cultural links with many other Polynesian peoples across the Pacific. But the origins of these alien-esque statues remains a perplexing mystery. Are these really the depictions of ancient aliens? And if not, why go to such effort in creating them? Temahua Tahua is undoubtedly an amazing place, one which deserves far more attention. The Great Sphinx is among the Earth's greatest cultural mysteries. And the 1930s self-styled prophet Edgar Cayce predicted that the secrets of the Sphinx would be revealed sometime in the 1990s, and Cayce, it turns out, may have been right. 10,500 BC, this is when the Sphinx is gazing directly at his own image, the constellation of Leo. And if we are to turn 90 degrees and face due south, we would see the three stars of Orion's bent in a pattern that mimics exactly the pattern of the pyramid on the ground. So we have here a perfect conjunction taking place only and only in 10,500 BC. But history books teach us that in 10,500 BC, our human ancestors were still in a primitive state, incapable of the advanced astronomical and engineering skills necessary to build great monuments. We're suggesting that the entire foundation on which our notion of human history rests is faulty. Ancient Egypt, the land of secrets, the land of kings. There are certain things in life that outweigh all others, burning questions regarding the most important aspects of all of us, to fully understand ourselves, I believe it is imperative that we strive to understand where we came from. This quest for the truth, is the driving force behind mystery history. The answers to this question, where did we come from, I feel is more valuable than sovereignty, more valuable than wealth and power. Something that should not be concealed for any reason. Egypt is an amazing place, which opens its doors to many of its valuable treasures, however, the most amazing finds, the most amazing objects I have discovered, remain hidden. Hidden and vaults that may still be flooded with the sea waters that swallowed ancient Egypt. Those with treasures that if as old as the erosion of their protective sphinx, may be over 12,000 years of age, artifacts which possess great power, the power to rewrite human history. I'm Mark Lainer and I'm here at the great sphinx of Giza, on behalf of Dr. Zahi Hawass, helping him out on drilling that we're doing underneath the sphinx. In our first hole here will be underneath the sphinx is our left paw. Perhaps the most visible example of an advanced civilization in Egyptian prehistory is that the great sphinx itself. Although the head was quite obviously re-carved in dynastic times, the body and the man-made courtyard in which it sits shows signs of heavy water weathering. We think that all the indications suggest that a time capsule was deliberately concealed at Giza in Egypt with the intention that it should be found one day. A time capsule that would abolish all ambiguity over this matter and make it absolutely certain of what had gone before and of what we have forgotten. But a time capsule that was not intended to be found by barbarians that was hidden away very carefully to be found, as the ancient texts say, by the fully worthy. Perhaps that's who we are, perhaps that time has come, perhaps that's the decision and the awe-inspiring prospect that we confront in the near future. The right to open the chamber under the paws of the sphinx is something of a political game these days and the Egyptian government is holding all the cards. Only they know when and if the secrets of the sphinx will be revealed to the world. Expeditions between 1991 and 1993 led by the independent Egyptologist John Anthony West with chief geologist Dr. Roberts Chock, professor of geology at Boston University and chief seismologist Thomas Dobeki from a highly respected Houston consulting firm, conducted a geological and seismic surveys around the great sphinx of Egypt. They concluded as follows, the pattern of erosion on the sphinx indicates that it was carved at the end of the last ice age, when heavy rains fell in the eastern Sahara, more than 12,000 years ago. This contrasts starkly with the orthodox Egyptological dating for the sphinx of around 4,500 years. The seismic survey indicated the existence of several unexplored tunnels and cavities in the bedrock beneath the sphinx, including a large rectangular chamber at a depth of some 25 feet beneath the monument's front paws. In 1993, John West and his team were physically expelled from the site by Dr. Zaheer Weis, the Egyptian government's chief inspector of antiquities for the pyramids and sphinx. He was angered by the suggestion that the sphinx may be far older than the civilization of Egypt itself. A film created from the data linked the sphinx to the lost city of Atlantis, and suggested that the chamber beneath the paws might contain the legendary Hall of Records of Atlantis. American psychic, Ed Gay Kayes, who died in 1947, prophesized this exact event occurring in the 90s. If his predictions were accurate, then whatever was discovered has been covered up. The Hall of Records is said to be an ancient library, rumored to have been deposited at the time of King Inhotep in Giza, Egypt. Though, no one knows where. One suggestion has been that it was secreted away under the great sphinx of Giza, with a secret entrance to this layer, located near the sphinx's paws. Dozens of academic researchers and historical commentators have come to similar conclusions, such as Manethu and Plutarch, it houses the knowledge of the pre-denastic founders and latter Egyptians on Papyrus, and allegedly several inscribed gold metal plate scrolls with the partial history of the lost civilization of Atlantis, much as the great library of Alexandria housed Grecian knowledge. The entirety of the ancient Egyptians knowledge, the builders of the great sphinx, the pyramids, etc., is said to be held within this place. You have to wonder, what could be contained within these documents that would lead to a huge concealment of this wonder? Does it prove our origins are extraterrestrial? Does it tell of us Tyra forming the Earth, while our home planet, died? Do these ancient passages contain a themina? Or an alien craft? Does the library tell of us being visited? Without the world having access to these elusive tunnels beneath the great sphinx, all we can do for now is wonder. There are a number of artifacts found at varying parts of the world, which, due to the immense age of the strata they were discovered within, fly in the face of current paradigms in regards to the chronology of man. Iron pots, zinc vases, even imprints of ancient chariot wheels, found in numerous coal seams, and found by people in positions of responsibility, whom often testify not only in regards to their legitimacy, but are often accompanied by the lump of coal in which they were found, still possessing the intriguing imprint upon their surface, undeniably supporting the testimonies of these individuals, all but proving authenticity beyond doubt. Like that of the iron pot and its accompanying coal block, which was its tomb, carbon dating has indicated that the pot is an astonishing 300 million years old. However, as time goes on, and coal mining, along with many other mining activities, becomes more rapid and advanced in nature. It is simply a matter of time before even more mysterious and unexplainable artifacts are also found. Unfortunately, due to the controversial nature of these artifacts, it is very likely that a number of them have either been shrugged off or actively destroyed before ever achieving widespread acclaim. However, fortunately, the next artifact of interest, just like that of the many others we have previously covered, can not only be seen as yet another smoking gun, indicating that there has been a number of advanced phases within human civilization, but yet again, this timeline could in all possibility date back an astonishing 300 million years. Although modern society has been taught that we are at the height of human accomplishments, many of these techniques we currently claim as our own accomplishments could have been achieved an unimaginably long time ago, far back within Earth's history. Dated to the same age as that of a number of other artifacts, which we have covered in the past, a group of brass doorknobs were once abandoned, eventually finding their way into a coal seam which has been dated as 300 million year old geology. Found still encased within this ancient strata, these astonishing artifacts are undeniably of an incredible age. Unfortunately, and rather predictably, not much has been done in regard to mainstream investigation into said artifacts and their current location if indeed still in existence is unclear, yet fortunately, before their disappearance, photographic evidence was taken, subsequently allowing us to add it to the volume of research and artifacts which not only support our posit of lost civilization, but place human activities an impressive 300 million years back into Earth's history. Who made these brass doorknobs? Could we really be a civilization hundreds of millions of years old? We find the evidence to suggest such highly compelling. Has ancient alien technology finally been discovered within Russia? According to several talented UFO enthusiasts, along with a number of scientists, that is exactly what has happened. A team from Princeton University in America and the University of Florence in Italy have discovered a quote, quasi-crystal, so named because of its unorthodox arrangement of atoms, found within a meteorite from a remote region of northeastern Russia. This crystal long thought impossible to be formed naturally due to being too energetically unstable and atomically manipulated. When the team discovered that the meteorite contained this mysterious ancient intelligently designed material, they merely moved the goalposts, simply stating that it can indeed be formed naturally. Technically, scientists describe quasi-crystals as quasi- periodic, being manually ordered, no longer found on the periodic table. Although they exhibit a pattern that fills all available mass continuously, they lack, with scientists and mathematicians term, translational symmetry. Simply put, they are not naturally occurring materials. The meteorite in which it was found is believed to be around 4.5 billion years old, yet alas, when it picked up this perplexing and possibly alien passenger, may remain unknown. UFO enthusiasts and scientists alike have previously hypothesized that evidence for alien life would, in all possibility, be found in a form such as this. Pointing out that quasi-crystals, being a novel form of matter, should actually be seen as artifacts of alien artificially created technology. No one has ever been able to explain how quasi-crystals can be formed by natural processes, and no one is ever likely to. It just does not happen. They're forbidden symmetry, making them impossible to be formed naturally. The only other known quasi-crystals, besides those found in the Chokotka meteorites, were only recently synthesized within laboratory conditions by scientists. Being very hard, with low friction characteristics, also a low heat conduction, quasi-crystals are a very useful product, used in a wide range of high-speed technologies, such as the coatings of airplanes and stealth fighters. Two-time Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling, the idol of the American Chemical Society, and one of the most famous scientists in the world, argued till his last days against quasi-periosity in crystals mere existence. He didn't even believe we would ever manage to create it. Does this sound like a naturally occurring material to you? How did this complex material end up on and within an ancient meteorite? Did this lump of space debris once collide with an alien craft, somewhere out there in deep space? It seems, regardless of what certain scientific bodies would have you presume, that is, indeed, the most likely scenario. There are a number of unexplained ancient monuments all over our planet, one of the most synonymous of which, undoubtedly, is Stonehenge. Although another, the Great Pyramids, is one we have studied, finding newer casing stones, seemingly conservation efforts, by later, yet also, now lost civilizations. Stonehenge, it would seem, has stood the test of time, not enjoying the privilege of having this later preservation attempt. Yet the resilience of the incredibly hard-wearing stones, which the monument was cut and built from, is an extremely impressive legacy within itself. Clearly of at least a neolithic age, yet it has continued to encounter its fair share of vandalism during its long life. Significant amounts of recording damage has been recorded in known history. In the Victorian era, for example, chisels were sold to tourists to chisel chunks of the megaliths away, to take home as souvenirs. Now, fortunately, it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, thus it is illegal to deface or vandalize the site in any way. Yet interestingly, new theories as to its original purpose continue to grow, one particularly extraordinary theory being put forward by 62-year-old landscape architect Sarah Eubank suggests that she believes the Stonehenge we see today represents a mere portion of a remaining ruin of a single majestic building which once had a spectacular, thatched roof temple. Although the theory is interesting in nature, there are countless other theories with incredibly strong, repeatably provable experimental evidence, strong scientific theory, which cooperates the clock theory. Yet it still exposes the ancient's intimate solar knowledge the creators of the sites clearly possessed. Thus, it would seem, the true purpose of the hinge was a solar clock, possibly a post-cataclysmic reminder. It is the site we always find highly intriguing.


Yeah, and Jan's just a jump in here real quick. Okay, yep, go ahead, yep. Yeah, just to speak on that a little bit more. Oh no, that's what I was gonna say. Yep, yep, go for it. Yeah, and Steve just had a little bit of color here. Okay, yep, everyone have a great weekend. Okay, yep, okay, yep, bye.