Live from the FIIA Barcelona Grand Villa Compensator in Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube at HP Discover Barcelona 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor HP. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is The Cube. We're live here in Barcelona, Spain at HP Discover 2014. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the scene from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest, Tom Norton, VP of HP OpenStack Services. Welcome to The Cube. Thank you, John. So we just chatted with the head honcho engineer. I knew he was tired so I went for the hard questions early. More him down a bit. But a great guest, Martin Tarante. He's awesome. And the open source ethos is so awesome at HP. See you guys really doing a great job. So we're certainly impressed. Big fans and rooting for HP. But OpenStack is going through some interesting times. Dave and I always commentate that we don't know if it's a consolidation or a land grab or misfiring. Is it working? What's shipping code? All this is a lot of fun going around. Certainly a lot of fun. But we always say the rubber hits the road with customers. Who's shipping code? So I got to ask you what's going on with state of deployments? What are you seeing for that migration for the services and offerings out there today? Well, it is really interesting because customers are going to be a little more mature. But in one way or another, they're still looking at a singular workload or looking at an environment that supports a test case. I think it's really important with any new technology like this when you, especially in an enterprise case, you decide you want to understand the performance elements, understand the productivity elements, understand predictability, high availability, security elements of it. So doing a massive change is very difficult. I mean, the knowledge base is difficult. The integration aspects are difficult. Understanding performance can be difficult. So we see our customer base today where people are actually very interested because there's a lot of advantages in the enterprise. But they're being careful. So regardless of how long they've been working with customers now, they've been doing this for 18 months. And they've been working from trunk. They've been working with their own distributions where we have people who are just trying to understand it because they've got some requirement, maybe scalable storage or something. So for each one of those, though, it's a case study almost to begin with. I think that's where most people are. They're adopting for a particular purpose and they're starting with a singular idea of this workload is going to provide value and I want to use this new emerging platform to do that. So thinking about workloads and how customers decide to put what where at the highest level, you can think of, well, some stuff, this stuff can go in the public cloud, this stuff, I'm going to keep on premises and I'm going to build a brick wall around it. This stuff, I'm going to do hybrid. Now that's a very rudimentary discussion of workloads. Right. And so point number one point number two is and it's it's apples to oranges to compare Amazon to OpenStack. One's a, you know, for service, one's a platform of which you build products out of. Right. Having said that, Jerry Chen, who's a partner at Greylock came back from OpenStack Paris and we asked him to do that apples and orange, orange comparison. And what he said was very interesting. He said, Amazon's trying to be one thing for all people. OpenStack is trying to be all things to all people. Which again, I thought was kind of clever. Whether or not you agree with the apples to oranges. And I know this arguments around that. From a services perspective, it's clear that OpenStack has more use cases, as I described earlier, public, private, hybrid, et cetera. From a services perspective, how do you approach that? It's got to be somewhat more challenging. Can you talk about that a little bit in terms of how you evolve services? Sure. So I think from, especially from an OpenStack perspective, it's really going to be driven from a requirement. We talked about the workloads. You talked about performance or what you can put publicly. But there are a lot of levers in it. So if I look at a customer that may be in Germany, for example, it'd be very difficult for them to put their data, whether it be health care, or it might be public sector or something else, very difficult to put data in a public market, in a public cloud environment, and have storage extend that way. Because there are privacy issues, there are restrictions in terms of what you can take out of the country and what you can. So in that particular case, being able to keep the data private, surrounded and protect the data, but having the flexibility to say that's only the data platform. The application or the driver for the data, maybe it's the app, maybe it's information and analytics that need to be done. You can combine that with someone that can best host that because they've got better performance. You might have better storage performance on premise. OpenStack can allow you to network that or combine those approaches in a seamless way so that the consumer doesn't really get a look at where those two are combined. They just see the end result. And that's how we can use OpenStack. We can help people develop a storage base, people develop an application base, and be able to integrate those two, connect those two in a seamless way so the end result is still a unified application data platform. So I like that Germany example, because I've used it many times with the public cloud guys. And the answer used to be, well, we have a facility in Ireland that's part of the EU and that's good enough. And you talk to certain customers and segments in Germany. Now, Amazon just recently announced a data center in Germany. So my question hearing you describe that, is that maybe not enough? There may be other corporate edicts that I have to meet that just having a physical location there itself isn't even enough. Yes, I know I can't move it out of the country, but even in the country, I have to have certain edicts. Is that what you're finding and are you able to deliver services to assist customers in those more complicated situations? Well, I think it still exists. It's probably not the norm. You know, from what we've seen from a service provider perspective, because that's where things seem to be kicking in. And we've seen that kind of partnership between service providers, where they've got some that say, well, just talking today, within a country like Nepal, or a country like Pakistan, so they've got some restrictions, but they also have certain elements within that country that are problematic in terms of blowing out a service provider concept. But they can combine services to be able to have that combination of things with it. They may want to have the network where they observe from Singapore because it can be refreshed. There's a lot of compute. There's a lot of network bandwidth that may come in, but they might want to restrict the data. Now, to answer the question, though, is, yeah, there are certain business requirements or certain governmental compliance requirements that say, I want to protect the application as well. For example, very recently, there's been some compromise of mobile apps where people are taking, without naming anything, people are taking videos or they're snapping pictures. And the application that resides in the mobile device was actually a front to be able to capture the data before it actually got deposited someplace else, right? So they're saying, now I need to protect the app and wrap that app, control the app, regardless of what device may be using the app, and I have to protect the data. So it complicates the cloud approach. Very much so, yeah. But you can do that still in some ways where you can protect the app, protect the data, but provide it outside of the country. So in country, there are the regulations, but you'd be able to provide it outside of countries to countries that aren't going to require that the app would be wrapped and protected within country. So sometimes I get confused around the services at HP, because there's a lot of them, right? So you've got technology services within EG, you've got sort of former EDS sets of services, and you're specific to OpenStack services within HP's cloud group. Is that right? Well, so I have OpenStack and the development platform as well. So really, for Helian professional services is what we're running, and our focus is going to be on OpenStack and Dev platform. So how do you relate, connect to those other services organizations? So we're really a service provider too. So if it was a more traditional cloud delivery. You're the expert zone. Yeah, so if it's going to be an ES, and they're going to be serving up a virtual private cloud for example. And that, one of the requirements may be connectivity or scalability or something, and they want to use what HP has the expertise in is around OpenStack, I'll provide that service to them. The same way with technology consulting or HP software, we're going to provide those very specific deep dive experts who have worked in the enterprise and have done Swift in the enterprise and done it in a scalable way. Where we're talking petabytes of access to data. Where we're going to talk about compute. Where you may go from 100 nodes where you might have or 20 nodes per cloud and you have 20 clouds where you're going to have 400 nodes or go to 600 nodes and so on. So the enterprise adoption of OpenStack seems to be where the major challenge is today. Because a lot of the development work is being done at a usable scale, a testable scale, but the adoption in the enterprise where you would have a big service provider or a global telecommunications provider. They're all really interested in OpenStack because of the services that they can provide. But providing high availability and full tolerance and scalability, that migration to an enterprise grade type of version is where we can adopt helium and the HP approach and some of the true content that HP is embedding within the Healing OpenStack environment or dev platform. And we can help the customer scale that to a level that they want to scale it to. You're talking enterprise customers. Enterprise customers, man. And so you're starting to see demand for that. What's driving that demand? Well, I think you mentioned at John to begin with. There's a lot of consumption of businesses coming in and the reason is because there's a demand that says I want to be able to address a larger volume of customers. So mobile devices is really drawing a demand for access to applications. But it's not just apps, it's data. So if you want to, say you're a multimedia company, it's talking to somebody in Europe just last night and they're a multimedia communications and media company and they're doing all this video analysis work where they've got 20 petabytes. I think in this case it was five but there are others that can have 10 or 20 petabytes. And they want to find an easy way to provide search access to that as a cloud service where they can say I've got this repository of video and I want to analyze the video for a certain criteria and I want to be able to offer search of that video environment to that end user. Not necessarily just to a business where you're going business to business, you're going to go business to consumer now where you can do analytics or even machine to machine where I could say I'm going to offer this data pool and I've got somebody that's generating analytics within their service so they can run the service engine, I can host the data and so as a service provider you can expand very greatly when you have something like OpenSec. You can expand storage very quickly to consume extra data in retail right this time of the year. The retail data coming in from endpoint machines and from the web is huge but it's not valuable all year long. So maybe I want to collect information and I want to scale information as a retailer because I want to collect trends that run from maybe late September, October to February 14th, maybe January 1st. And I want to keep that data for a certain period of time and then I don't need it anymore. I can put it to tape. I can do something different with it but I want to run an analytic equation against it for a segmented period of time to scale up from one petabyte to three petabytes or from a certain number of terabytes and quadruple it or more and then scale that back can be very expensive in certain circumstances. So if you think of that kind of scalable storage opportunity and you know you've got a segment transportation is the same way.  Federal Express, UPS, whatever the delivery company is from Thanksgiving to Christmas and January 1st, huge volumes of data. You want to be able to run analytics against it. You want to index it and you want to push it to tape. Well to do object storage over that period of time can be very expensive. So what we're doing with services is trying to understand, okay, how do I create that environment where I can expand that very quickly with low cost type of physical infrastructure below it and then contract it and maybe redirect that portion of it somewhere else but I'm doing something with Opus Act that allows me to expand and contract and that's growing in terms of its ability. You know we've got- So agile and flexible, what you're saying is that the developers can program on stuff that's important to business but having that flexibility with cost and technology.  The world of clouds, the world's flat, right? And I think that's a very common use case and you can't do that if you're talking notes or you're talking numbers of environments. The licensing requirements can be very expensive if you maintain that all year round. Yeah, I mean Opus Act is definitely the Lego blocks model. We've talked about that in theCUBE all the time at the Opus Stack SV event we had. We had it, but Dave the quote that you mentioned but Jerry Chen, what he actually said on theCUBE was a year ago Amazon was trying to be one thing for all people Opus Stack was trying to be all things for all people. Which is what he's basically saying is Amazon is the one trip pony. You go there and it's it. Opus Stack has a little bit more legs in terms of use cases and a lot more legs. I mean people want to tailor Opus Stack for making and building infrastructure. Right. With cloud, right? With legacy stuff in the back end. So would you agree with that statement that that's one of the main objectives? Absolutely I do. So I think part of the quote earlier was agility is kind of tough to define in some cases, right? Because it could mean a lot of different things. But in this particular case being able to customize or address a particular business value of business issue is very important to the value of Opus Stack. So you could say something about, I mentioned retail earlier, you could want to do something in retail that you want to speed up the transaction but make more information available at retail. That's a very common use case. But with Opus Stack you can actually do more. Well I guess we always like to smile because we always roll our eyes. We've been saying this for four years now. Shadow IT really drove Opus Stack because I think the people we talk to, CIOs that we talk to in the Wikibon community were like all privately admitting to us that Shadow IT is running rampant in their organizations and they actually think it's a good R and D but they got to bring it in. And so Opus Stack became the hope, the bridge to cross to this new world. And I think that was an initial motivator that we heard. So I got to ask you, that is what people think. They want Opus Stack to be a really viable bridge so I don't have to get locked into an Amazon or another club. Now Amazon is trying to change that by going to enterprise. So that's where we're at right now. So talk about the use cases. Is it Shadow IT? Is it like push heavy computing system cloud, R and D, test dev? What use cases are going mainstream with enterprises that you're seeing that are taking the Shadow IT back in with Opus Stack or those little Shadow IT I define as non-mission critical stuff? Right, well I think- Ungoverned stuff. I mean I wouldn't call file sharing using Dropbox. It could be mission critical. Non-mission critical. Security holes left and right. Yeah, I think that it's still there though. But I think that it's less prominent now. I think people are saying that IT can be less on the defensive with the way Opus Stack is today. So I think taking a defensive posture that says I have to maintain relevance in the business, I want to stay important. Well they can take offense if it's clear that you're driving the car. Yeah, and you can actually take something like this and say, what are you trying to drive from a business? What is the end result that you try to get that you want to go outside the business for? And you can bring, and you can say, actually we can react faster. I can give you more than just infrastructure. I can give you more than just a database.  I can give you some other security elements. I can be flexible enough that I can segment some of the requirements of it. And I can actually control the network internally as well. Because Opus Stack, what we're seeing now is this really idea of using the platform which is Opus Stack and layering a development platform on top of it. So I've got the whole dev base. I've got things like Trove where I can start experimenting with big data. I can start looking at virtualizing different characteristics even virtual desktops, for example. I can look at how I initially did that and I can get ahead of that with this. I can react very quickly to requests that come into this. But I think even what's the most exciting aspect of it is you can actually say I can segment that and I can react even faster than I could have in by going external. Because you can have partnerships that you can establish ahead of time. You can network between different service providers. You can network between different IT providers and say that I can take that negotiation aspect away. You know, one credit card swipe doesn't necessarily give you everything you need for your business value. You may have to go two and three different places to get exactly what you're looking for. And what IT can say today is I can broker that. I can actually, using Opus Stack, have those predefined networks already connected where I can have a storage base provider and I can have a compute provider. And I can have someone coming in and doing network virtualization for me and I can monitor that. And I think the challenge for IT becomes that how do you establish that governance model around that? And how do you tune Opus Stack so that it can be connected? How can you tune it so that I've got a trusted compute model between those different partners? And that's why they're calling us today. So that brings me, there's one more challenge I want to throw into the mix there. I'm going to get your comments on the developers themselves. That's a big draw. People need more developers. I want to ask you, I asked Mark the same question. I don't know if you heard me asking the question. I just got it. Okay, good. So what are the top three targeted developers that you are looking at, not to hire, but that you want to engage to see the Opus Stack ecosystem be successful? Is there a categorical like mainstream developer? What's the top three targets? Give me the personas. Languages that they code in, skill sets. I still think that it's going to be mobile apps. I think is one of the key targets that we're still seeing because people are still, the mobile world is still driving. So if someone is coding or developing for mobility or a mobile application base, and it could address any business issue, but I think mobile apps is driving a lot of that. The second example I'd use is going back to the original premise that says, I think it doesn't matter whether it's healthcare or not, I think applications that are going to need access to data and have data that they can, that will create a variant of the information or the response from the data is going to vary. Say it's a medical application or it's an insurance application or it's an engineering application. It's going to go back to a repository of data and return some result. I think developers that are looking at high-scale data platforms and how you can take something which has been, big data has been talked about for a while, but you can virtualize that. Using things like Sahara and other places, they can actually virtualize that access today that used to be a physical constriction in terms of a data center size and being able to expand and contract. So Python, data wranglers, no JS. All that is becoming a more and more. Mobile apps might be something different. What are they coding mobile apps in these days? But for OpenStack itself, I mean. Well, I think our work is mostly geared towards extending what is part of OpenStack. So we don't do a lot of application development. Most of my work is understanding the requirements of the app and then going from there. So most of our work is still going to be work with Ruby and work with Python and other things like that. Okay, so there's really two talks. There's people working on OpenStack and then there's the consumers of OpenStack, the developers. Right. Okay, we're getting the break here. Tom Norton, thanks for coming on. Vice President at HP OpenStack Cloud for services, appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. Day two, coming down a little wire. Here in Europe, I'm John Furrier with Dave Melanthek. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.


We have a clip from a documentary I produced on Asanja's plight, where he's reflecting on that video, which made a huge splash and was really WikiLeaks introduction to the world. I like to roll that clip and get some of his thoughts and then get you to, you know, add any meat onto that. So let's roll that real quick. Find them all up. Here's your two traffic, 260s. Come on, Mark. Video WikiLeaks would title Collateral Murder showed footage from a U.S. Army Apache helicopter of soldiers gunning down more than a dozen people in Baghdad who weren't engaged in active combat, including two Reuters reporters. The video generated international press and controversy. Asanja said his intention was to expose the casual carnage and destruction happening in the course of the U.S. war in Iraq. It was another day at the office. How routine it was, a whole street covered with bodies. The reaction to that was nuts. And so as we've, you made very clear in this interview, the charges against Asanja have nothing to do with all these rumors swirling around what happened in 2016. It's about the release of these documents in 2010, including this video. What was the import of the collateral murder video? Well, it really marks a before and after concerning the Bush Wars. This, it's 2010, right? This actual event depicted in the video is I believe from July, 2007. And so the war had started in 2003 and it had been going for seven years by the time collateral murder was released. And by then, there wasn't much interest in the media anymore. There were embedded journalists traveling with U.S. convoys and going to press briefings by the Pentagon and so on. But there was no real insight. There were just body bags coming back from Iraq. And there was no real news work or worthiness, let's say, in reporting about Iraq. And then suddenly this came down and it had such an impact because it really contrasted with what, with the curated information that was coming through the media and it was, it depicts a war crime. That's what you see. It's not just the gunning down of these individuals to begin with where two royalties journalists are on assignment and get killed. One of them tries to crawl to cover and then a van pulls up and two good Samaritans come out of the van and try to pick up this journalist and then bring him into the van and then it gets shot down. And everyone dies except for two children who are shielded by the body of their father. So this is a truly horrific video and it's horrific not just because you're watching it but because you're listening to the conversation and the kind of jokey conversation around it and so on. And it's become to the Iraq war, what that picture of the of the napalm girl, you know, in Vietnam is to the Vietnam war, the one where she's walking and she's running naked away for the village that has just been napalmed. It is, I think Chelsea Manning has said that it is like in 30 minutes you see just the concentration, the Iraq war in its essence. It's just very telling to me that this is what the US is prosecuting him over is facilitating the release of undeniably true information about the war that the US was prosecuting so that the people could have a clearer vision of what was going on. And it clearly had an impact on people's view of that war. And for me, Julian Assange is a figure of world historical importance because of what he unlocked with WikiLeaks. I mean, he demonstrated undeniably that the strategic use of technology like encryption would be shifting the entire global power structure and he ushered in that new reality really. It was the reality that the cypherpunk movement dreamed of this world where a small team of hackers and activists can just share information. And even the most powerful governments can't do anything to stop the release of that information. And he pushed it into being and showed a whole generation that maybe resistance to these powerful super states actually isn't futile. And if you have the right tools and you know how to use them, you can really change the world. And I think that might be a big part of why he's a marked man more so than his alleged crimes. But is there anything else to say that you wanna say as we're wrapping up about his significance as a cypherpunk or kind of his place in history? Well, I think Julian is a visionary and a pioneer, as you say. His writings and his speeches, many of his speeches or clips have gone viral on the internet in relation to Ukraine, for example, he was talking about Afghanistan, but his kind of big picture analysis and criticism of the drivers of war, the true drivers of war have currency now. And in fact, I often go back to things that he wrote 10 years ago because they have stood the test of time. And he is a global figure and a thinker of our times and the type that is direly needed. So, Julian has to be freed, not just because this is an enormous injustice and the precedent it sets affects journalists everywhere in the US, but also globally, it's an extreme overreach, it criminalizes the publication of true information, of the highest public importance, but also because of Julian's position as a public intellectual and of someone who promotes truth and is a critic of war. And just, I'm not sure when this is airing, but there's a house resolution currently which has been tabled, I think that's the word they use in the US, I don't know, by Paul Gosar that says expressing the sense of house, the house of representatives that regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment and the BUS ought to draw all charges and attempts to extradite Julian Assange. And there's also a letter that's been signed by multiple congressmen, and including Thomas Massey who we interviewed last week asking Biden to do the same thing, to drop the extradition. So, to wrap this up, can you tell me like, are you optimistic that there will be some sort of shift in the political winds that something can change for Julian's case? Like, how are you feeling at the end of the day here? Well, I think that politicians that actually take the time or at least their staffers that take the time to look at this case will immediately understand the dangers and the un-American nature. I mean, really the First Amendment is something that is quite unique in the world and it defines the political culture of the United States which is much more open and dynamic than other parts of the world, for sure. And this case is actually kind of a more Europeanized, more not to talk down Europe too much, but it is totalitarian in its nature and it changes, it shifts the political culture and it has to be reversed. And I think any, you know, it's the vast majority of politicians that look at this case seriously will be, will understand that the dangers of this case, that it should never come to pass that the case should be dropped. And I'd ask any viewers to contact their representatives and ask them to support any efforts to drop the case against Julian. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. You can watch another clip here or the full episode here. New episodes drop every week, so subscribe to Reason TV's YouTube channel to get notified when that happens or to the Just Asking Questions podcast on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcatcher. See you next week.


Marcel Duchamp, an artist, once said, Not all artists are chess players, but all chess players are artists. What kind of artists are they though? Are they like the painter, the musician, or is another pretentious chess quote reveals like an art form where composition and performance take place simultaneously? Under this view, games allow us to express ourselves as both authors and exponents of a creed, a creed instantiated by the rules of the game itself. But beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. Who is evaluating the work of art that players present? Even in as narrow a sub-domain of play as chess, we see there are beautiful games, beautiful moves. In fact, there is beauty in the rules of chess itself. Moreover, chess can be used as a canvas to host other forms of beauty, allowing us to tell stories of triumph, obsession, and betrayal. This is why there is confusion abound in our understanding of what beauty even means in the context of games. Beauty has a philosophical field. It's called aesthetics. Beauty is created through communities of practice, documented by artistic schools in different medias. But what is the quality of beauty we might consider exclusive to games? First, a cliche and a massive spoiler for the end of Shadow of the Colossus. You have been warned. See, Shadow of the Colossus is beautiful. It's beautiful because it creates a foreboding sense of scale, as elegant design that makes us feel disempowered and, you know, looks beautiful. But its most beautiful moment happens at the end, as a conclusion of our tragic quest to save our beloved and turn into a beast ourselves. As our new demonic facade is dispelled, we try agonizingly to reach towards our goal only to be confronted with futility, witnessing our tragic impotence firsthand. Our beloved awakens after this, denied our reunion, but is reunited with our horse companion through the game, who we thought to be dead. There is beauty that is communicated using other mediums, beauty that only interactivity affords, but beauty has an aesthetic property here, the game's most beautiful moment is not some discreet element, but an emergent property of a sequence of signs, symbols, mediums and forms. It is our appraisal, both as observers and participants of this, that make this scene beautiful. There seems to be as many theories of what makes something beautiful as there are people to pose the question, but functionally we can think of what utility it serves in our relationship to reality. Evolutionary arguments will say we have an affinity for symmetry and proportion, because it indicates health, that we like landscapes that are indicative of survival environments, that the golden ratio is revealing some property of structure and form itself. Those more culturally inclined might say that beauty varies and is subjective, it changes from culture to culture, is embedded in the meanings of the traditions of different people. Of course we can't resolve this divide, nor say something as banal as that it is clearly a mixture of both, but we can speculate, pontificate about this question in relationship to games. I can tally up moments where I personally feel beauty. There are beautiful moments in games like eco, where you must protect a princess with empathy in an isolated castle. There are also beautiful instances of design, like how meticulously choreographed journey is as an experience, to mirror the structure of the hero's journey. There is also beautiful plays in the game as seemingly vulgar as a fighting game. Moment 37 is beautiful, because it was a feat of execution under high pressure, that distilled both performance and expression, but it required the tapestry of Street Fighter III Third Strike's parry system to express, frame tight reactions to a sequence of hits countered with a sliver of life remaining. To really understand what games contribute to our pursuit of beauty, perhaps it requires what Bertrand Russell explains as beautiful in math. Math, rightly viewed, possesses truth and beauty, a beauty cold and austere like that of great sculpture, a stern perfection. I suspect that if I asked people for an example of a beautiful game, they would list a game with beautiful visuals or a beautiful story, or beautiful music. But as I asserted, beauty is in the amalgamation of these things to create an impression in us. Mechanics are abstract, but they are also interacted with. It is how they are used to create a form of play that makes something beautiful. Perhaps we can say that the mechanic itself was beautiful. Is the jump in a game beautiful? It can be. It is versatile, can be combined with many genres. We can jump and shoot, jump to overcome obstacles, jump into an attack in a fighting game. But the jump isn't beautiful because of this intrinsically. It only becomes beautiful because of what it means in the context of the game. In Street Fighter, the jump in allows you to get over projectiles and start pressure. And this is beautiful because it is integrated into a system where there is positional play and rock-paper-scissor dynamics that allows counterplay. You can anti-air a jump in, there is risk. But if you read a whiff or horizontal attack, you can punish your opponent. In Celeste, the jump is beautiful because it is a move that in itself has risk but is required to reach your rewards. It is versatile, allowing you to jump and then dash in any direction. But it is also integrated into a game that challenges us incrementally, right at the edge of our competence. The beauty of the jump isn't in the jump itself, but in what it allows us to do, perform and reveal about human patterns of thought. There is risk and reward, non-nash equilibrium dynamics that create depth. There is a series of obstacles that escalate like the escalating patterns of a beautiful song. Just like the jump, the rules of chess enable this expression. They create a canvas for people to express themselves. It is as if we have been given a sheet of music that is both scripted but allows room for improvisation. The old distinction in man-play and games between Lutus and Paidea play and games can help us here. We both adhere to rules and play with them. This is how the chess player is like the musician. It is the possibility space of games where we play, that beauty in games seems to take place. A place where rules are so contrived to allow us to experience beauty. Some rules don't enable this, others do. The job of the critic might be to deconstruct which do and which don't and the designer to refine this collective craft. These properties of games can then be subject to scrutiny, but we often end up imposing value onto it. Chess and Go are often said to be beautiful because they're elegance but generate a practically infinite possibility space. They have low complexity and infinite depth. This is an aesthetic value though, in line with an almost algorithmic definition of beauty rooted in the idea of efficiency and elegance. The same way a mathematical theorem is beautiful because it has no fluff. E equals MC squared. The same way prose is elegant when it says more than the words it uses says individually. This is a compositional beauty, but paradoxically, it is expressed by designer, the player, as well as the game itself. The artistry is collaborative. Games aren't just designed. They evolve. Who invented chess? Was it Mr. Chess? Or was it a series of rules refined and regulated for thousands of years? Chess evolved as much as it was designed. It's beauty forced by a process of artificial selection. The selection funnel being our interest. Our desire to play it for some aesthetic reason. Perhaps to understand the beautiful, we need to contrast it with the profane. What makes a game ugly? There are games that are visually ugly.  Then, of course, there are games that have ugly subject matter, crass and crude, pieces of media that have no aesthetic merit. Nothing to tell us. In fact, they might distort, propagandize. So there are games that are mechanically beautiful, enabling performance and composition like chess. There are games that create beautiful moments, using the language of interactivity to craft beauty as an emergent by-product. But perhaps it is in the intersection of these two things we can get a true sense of beauty in games. How do we reconcile this, though? A game is an artificial set of constraints that allow us to learn with just the right amount of friction, emotional valence and structure to get us to an experience. It is grounded, embodied, participatory. Storytelling might also serve a similar function, as some argue. It allows us to plan and speculate, ruminate, create hypotheticals that allow us to experiment with our ideals and try to construct virtue. To reveal patterns of reality that are not just for survival, but also give us meaning. What if our experience of beauty in games happens when an experience is crafted in such a way that it is properly attuned to our inherent capacity to learn itself? The process that enables the pursuit of these things in the first place. Play is both fake and real. We do it, but it is not essential. It is inessentially essential, or essentially inessential. We are living in an imagined world, but also imagining what worlds we wish to live in. Games create ideals, utopias of rules, that reveal elements of our participatory reality. But simply, the beauty in mechanics and the beauty in stories are one and the same. There are a way of gauging when something reveals patterns of reality that are both deeply personal and universal. It is hard to see this beauty, the same way it is hard to see the beauty in a math equation. Games are beautiful when they have depth, both mechanical and thematic. But this depth, perhaps, is one and the same. It is cognitive and emotional engagement. I have a sense that certain games are beautiful, but these are more obvious. What of less obvious cases? God Hand is beautiful, in my opinion, but not in any obvious way, which perhaps confused some critics. It is crass and vulgar and crude, but its mechanics? Beautiful. It's a system where you must manage multiple enemies but with a camera that fixates on one. You have three different kinds of evades, a duck, a sidestep and a back dash. Each with different uses. You have an assortment of customizable combos that allows creative expression. The challenge is perfectly calibrated to create a sense of dramatic escalation. The game's depth and beauty comes from prioritizing enemies, reading patterns, spatial navigation, reflexes, expression, creativity. Its narrative, despite its camp charm, is non-existent. But that hardly matters. Then there are games that seem beautiful but have exactly nothing to say. The art of video games is not the art of other mediums. It is like that of great sculpture, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, but sublimely pure. Visual and compositional aesthetics are a double-edged sword. They both amplify beauty and can distract us from it. Somehow we need to recognize the unique contribution of games to our understanding of beauty, but also see games as part of a continuous tradition that uses multiple mediums in our pursuit of such an ideal. The Tetris effect lives on the border between these conceptions of beauty. Its system is beautiful without its aesthetics, but its aesthetics reveal why the system was beautiful to begin with. Tetris is beautiful because it is elegant, with little complexity. Clear lines with tetronomos. Tetris requires you both plan ahead, but also improvise as tiles come in a pseudo-random order. They drop in bundles of 7, meaning consequent pieces will be different, but then a new pool of 7 pieces appears. This means there is both planning and improvisation. It enables expression of many types. Tetris has openings like chests, funnily enough, but also strategies of dealing with bizarre shapes. How about the T-spin, where you use a T-spin to spin it into a double or triple line clear to amplify your points? It's creating a score out of our aesthetic of efficiency. You are rewarded for using less to gain more. A mathematical beauty. A beauty cold and austere perhaps. Except it isn't cold and austere, at least it isn't in the Tetris effect. It happens with dynamic music that resonates every time you move a piece, pulsating harmonies and vibrating particles dancing to the patterns of play. It clarifies beauty in games as much as it obfuscates it.  Moves like symphonies, like paintings, like dance and rhythm and expression. It is simply foregrounded using a language of beauty most of us more readily comprehend. Tetris in the Tetris effect is framed with conventional beauty, but embedded in a web of broader meanings. It is a hero's journey across cultures, across space and time, from our birth to our death. But it is simultaneously abstract in our heads. It is math and music, separate categories tonally distinct but really one in the same thing. A universal category explored using the language of games, but also in conjunction with others.


Governor Walls will be in Bemidji as part of a statewide education tour tomorrow. The tour will highlight what Walls is touting as a historic education proposal from his administration. The governor will be at Bemidji High School at 1.30pm for a listening session with students and educators. Walls is also making a morning stop tomorrow at Minnesota State Community and Technical College in Moorhead. If you enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to Lakeland PBS.


Hey Coach, how's it going? In today's video, I'm going to show you a tip that's worked really well for me. It's worked really well for all the coaches I consult with in our mastermind. And this is in regards to closing clients at your sessions. So here's what I'm talking about, right? For me, I don't let anyone enter my, for me in my program, I don't let any clients join my program unless they have an evaluation session with me. I've created tons of emails, tons of different videos about why I have an evaluation session. So I'm not going to dig into that now, but what I am going to tell you is at that evaluation session, what I personally do is throughout the session when I'm teaching the player that I'm working with concepts about what we're doing, I'm always going to have that player. So my student that I'm working with, I'm going to have them go teach their parents about what they're learning with me, right? So immediately what this is going to do, it's going to establish that I'm the authority and now if the player can explain to their parent about what they're learning with me, this is showing that the player is learning, right? Most coaches don't do that. Most coaches will just go through their session and then at the end of the evaluation session, they'll look to sell their program to parents. I don't do that. Here's what I do. I let and I allow the player that I work with to sell the program for me and I do that very simple, right? So throughout the session, I'm always drilling down on the concepts that I'm teaching the player. That player has to tell me exactly what they're learning and then I say, all right, cool, Johnny, go tell your parents real quick about what we just learned. I want to make sure that they got it. So this way throughout the whole session, that player's learning concepts with me, they're teaching their parents. By the end of the session, those parents, they've learned more about soccer. That's the sport I coach. Then anything that they've ever done because now they've seen the interaction between me and the player, me and their son or daughter, and their son or daughter and them, right? So I'm bridging the gap now and here's what happens. When I know this is a player that I want to work with in my program and their parents are clients that I want to work with in the future, right? Then I understand, okay, great. As long as I do well in the evaluation, as long as I'm teaching this player, as long as they're seeing good value, this player, if they are excited about my program, they are going to become a client without me having to sell anything. So at the very end of the session, here's what I do. I'll be talking to Johnny and I'll give Johnny a high five, congratulate him on coming to the first session and I'll say, hey man, before we go, I want you to go teach your parents everything that you learned today and then once you're done, just bring them back over to me and we can chat and then you can go home and we're done with our session, right? Here's what happens. Johnny will go talk to his parents for about five minutes. Again, to re-establish that this is what he learned. He's going to show his energy that he really likes it and what it's doing, it's selling my program for me without me saying a word, right? That right there, what it does, it's going to show the parents that Johnny's excited. It's going to show the parents that Johnny learned a lot and if that's just one session, imagine how it's going to be over the next year of training, right? And because I have a very particular system on how I talked to parents before the evaluation session, the parents already understand what the investment is, they already know what the commitment is, they already know what's up, right? So for me, it's easy when I get to the evaluation session, if the session goes the way I want it to, right? That player will convince his parents to get them into my program, right? That right there is how you should be building your business, right? Notice how at the end of the session, I'm not begging Ms. Jones to be in my program. I'm not doing that at all. If that player, if Johnny's the right fit for me and I know that I want to spend the next six to 12 months having Johnny in my program, great, right? I'm going to let him go sell the program to his parents and this is the thing, this is how parents are. When they see their son or daughter enjoy something, when they see them learn, when they see that this is so valuable for them, why on earth would they say, no, Johnny, we're not going to do it in the car? They're not going to do that. They're going to want Johnny to be happy, right? And that's when they join my program, right? And this is the easiest way to close parents at the evaluation session. If you don't know what the evaluation session is, if you need help with that, if you need help with your business, let's get on the phone this week, simply head over to my website. Go to www.buildmysportsbiz.com. From there, there's a big blue button at the top of the page that says Mastermind. Literally, just click on that. There's a two or three minute application form. Very easy to follow, very easy to fill out. From there, we will hop on the phone. I'll see how I can help you out. Guys, I do this every single week with all the coaches, all right? All the coaches will watch our YouTube videos, our podcasts or emails. I get on the phone with everybody, all right? So don't hold back. Don't be shy. If you need help, reach out to me. I've already been there and done that with my own business and we're helping coaches in every single sport imaginable with their private training business, their group training business or their cancer clinics. So reach out to me there. That is the best way we can connect. I'll see you next time.


SPI is a very simple multi-device communication protocol. It supports fast 10 megabits per second transfer speeds and it's very, very cheap to implement into your projects. SPI stands for Serial Peripheral Interface and as the name suggests, it's commonly used by microcontrollers to send and receive information from small peripherals such as SD cards, shift registers and sensors. Just like I2C, SPI supports masters and slaves. The masters are typically microcontrollers such as Arduino's or Raspberry Pi's and slaves are usually peripherals such as, you know, like the SD card sensors or shift registers in this case. Unlike I2C, however, SPI only supports one master. SPI also uses separate clock and data lines to facilitate with communication and it also has a slave select line for the device like a microcontroller to decide which slave or peripheral it wants to communicate with. Next, let's actually understand how SPI communication works. There are three to four wires in each communication loop.  The fourth one is the slave select. Now if you're using more than one slave, this slave select cable is necessary for each separate slave but if you have only one slave device or one peripheral then you don't need this. Now that we've understood how SPI is wired, let's actually understand how the signal propagates within the SPI communication loop. Step number one, a common clock is set between all the peripherals by the single master device. Now this is set over the SCK wire and the four modes of setting up the clock as you can see here. Now the compatible modes for SPI devices can be found in the datasheet and if you want to learn more about the different modes of clock, you can learn about them in the tutorial I've linked in the description below. Step number two, if you have multiple slave devices, the master will pick which slave device it wants to communicate to and it will enable communication with that slave device by pulling the slave select line down to a lower voltage. Step number three, here's where the actual data communication happens. The master will actually transmit information to the slave with the master out slave in line that we talked about earlier. Now the master can send the information with the most significant bit first or the least significant bit first. This depends on the slave specification. Step number four, next the master can actually request a slave to send information back to it.  So after step three is actually completed which is the master sending information to the slave, the master can actually send a reply bit back to the slave and then the slave will send its reply over the other cable which is the master in slave out cable and that's how signals are sent over SPI. Now moving on, let's actually understand the two ways of wiring up multiple slaves in SPI. First we have the multiple slave select option. This method is very similar to how multiple electronics might be wired up in a parallel manner. Now this option allows you to have individual slave select lines for each of your slave peripherals. This is especially useful if you want to individually address each of your slaves but this comes at the cost of having additional IO for each of your slaves. That means you need an additional pin for each slave. This can become a hassle when you have multiple slaves and you don't have enough input or output devices on your microcontroller. Now an alternative to this is the daisy chaining approach as you can see here. Now like I mentioned the last approach was sort of similar to how electronics are wired up in parallel. In this case the daisy chaining approach is sort of similar to how electronics might be wired up in series. This method allows us to address all the SPI slaves with just one slave select line but you must send enough data for all the SPI slaves. What actually happens to the data is it goes to the first slave and then overflows to each of the subsequent slaves till it reaches the last slave. This method is very commonly used with LED clusters. Next let's actually compare SPI to its alternatives such as I2C and C0. Now one of the reasons that SPI is so popular is that you can use a simple shift register for your receiving hardware. A shift register is very simple to use and incredibly cheap. Next SPI can stream its data continuously because it doesn't use a start and an end bit like I2C does. Next SPI doesn't need to use a complicated slave addressing system like I2C because SPI just addresses each of its slaves using a dedicated slave select line. Furthermore because SPI has a dedicated data in and data outlined to the master we can actually stream data continuously in both directions and this is one of the reasons why SPI is a lot faster than I2C. But now we come to the downsides. The first one is the slave select system. While it's convenient for a few slave devices if you have multiple slave devices and you're not using a daisy chaining setup this can require a lot of additional input and output pins. Furthermore I2C only uses two wires while SPI even if you do use a daisy chaining setup will have at least four wires. Next SPI only supports one master device while I2C actually supports multiple master devices. Next SPI doesn't have error correction like you are or it doesn't have acknowledged bits like I2C. You also have a lot of configurable things in SPI such as if you want to send least important of most important bit first the multiple clock modes or the different ways of wiring up multiple slaves. Now this is great if you're advanced and you want to have more configurability in your projects but it can also be a downside for big nodes who might find all this confusing and want to just get started on their projects. So lastly before we end this video, let's talk about how we can integrate SPI into our Arduino or Raspberry Pi powered projects. First let's talk about the Raspberry Pi implementation. For the Raspberry Pi you have to go into raspy-config and into interfacing options and then enable SPI. These are the SPI compatible pins on your Raspberry Pi. Lastly before you can use SPI you have to make sure that you have imported the rpi.gpi package into your Python code and that's it.  For the Arduino it's even simpler. Each Arduino has its own SPI compatible pins. On the Arduino Uno for example it's pin 10, 11, 12, 13. And lastly to actually use SPI in your code you have to import the SPI.h library into your project. And that's it for this tutorial. Now throughout the tutorial I talked about i2c and also serial. Now I have dedicated tutorial videos for that. If you enjoyed this tutorial you can give me a like or you can ask your questions down in the comment section below and also stay tuned for more future tutorials like this by subscribing down below. Thanks for watching.


This time we'll try some harder examples, so we have, start with this number in binary. Then I will just take one, multiply by two, give me two, add the second one, gives me three, multiply by two, gives me six, add the third bit, gives me six, multiply by two, gives me twelve, add the fourth bit, gives me with twelve, multiply by two, gives me twenty four, add the fifth bit, multiply by two, and then add the last bit. So this gives me fifty in base ten, and that is what I see over in my number line. If I started with the octal version of sixty two, I would do the same thing. I'll start with six, multiply by the base, six times eight is forty eight, then I'll add in the second digit, which will give me fifty as well. Hexadecimal would be the same way. I'll start with thirty two, take the three, multiply by my base. This time I'll get eighteen, and then one times three is three. That will give me forty eight, and then I'll add the second digit, and I'll get fifty in base ten again. If I take another large number like one hundred thousand, the binary version is... So I've picked the largest number in my number line, so I expect these two to still be equal. And I'll start with the one, and multiply by two. This gives me two, and I'll add the second bit. This gives me three, times two is six, add the third bit, times two is twelve, add the fourth bit. Now I might start getting lost with all these zeros, so I'm going to start marking these out as I use them. So you can see I've taken the first bit, the second bit, third bit, and there's the fourth bit. This leaves me with twelve, so I'll multiply by two and get twenty four. Then I'll add another zero, gives me twenty four again, multiply by two is forty eight. Add the next bit is forty eight, multiply by two will give me ninety six. Next bit is a one, ninety seven, and I'm going to come back up here. So I've got ninety seven times two, four, carry a one, eighteen nineteen, so I have one ninety four. And I'll add the next bit, this is one ninety five, multiply by two, zero carry a one, eighteen nineteen, two, three. And then I'll add the next bit, so I've got three ninety, multiply by two, zero, eight, seven. Add the next bit, so I have seven eighty one, multiply by two, two, sixteen, fourteen plus one is fifteen. Then I'll add the next bit, multiply this by two, so now I have four, twelve, eleven, and three. And then I'll add the next bit, thirty one, twenty five, and now I've got one, two, three, four, five more zeros. So I'm really not going to be doing any more adding, I'm just going to be doing a whole lot of multiplication. So I've got thirty one, twenty five, and I'll multiply by two, so that gives me four five, two, six. Now I'd add this zero, and then go back and multiply by two again, zero, carry a one, two, four, five, six times two is twelve. Add this zero, now I'll multiply by two, zero, zero, carry a one, five, and two. Add this zero, multiply by two, add this zero, multiply by two, and then finally add the last zero. And my result is, as you'd expect, one hundred thousand. If I start with the octal version of one hundred thousand, that's three, zero, three, two, four, zero. So when I'm done converting, I also expect to get a hundred thousand out again. And I'll start with my three this time, and again I'm multiplying by the base. Give me twenty four, then I'll add the second digit, let's me with twenty four, multiply by the base. So eight times four is thirty two, eight times two is sixteen, plus three is nineteen. Add the third digit, let's me one hundred ninety five, multiply by eight. Eight times five is forty, eight times nine is seventy two, plus four is seventy six, eight times one is eight, plus seven is fifteen. So I've used my three, the zero, and the second three. So the next thing is this two, which gives me fifteen sixty two, and I will multiply this by eight. So sixteen, forty eight plus one is forty nine, eight times five is forty plus four, and eight twelve. So now I'll add the next digit, which is a four, and this gives me twelve thousand five hundred. And I will multiply this by eight, zero, zero, forty, sixteen plus four is twenty, eight plus two is ten. And then lastly I would add the zero, and yet one hundred thousand in base ten. Finally I'll do the same thing for base sixteen, where I'll start with one, eight, six, a, zero. So I'll start with my one, and multiply by sixteen, give me sixteen, now I'll add my eight, this gives me twenty four, and I'll multiply this by sixteen, six times four is twenty four, six times two is twelve, plus two is fourteen, and then one times twenty four is twenty four. So when I add those together, I get three hundred eighty four, use my one and my eight, and now I'll use the six. So this gives me three hundred ninety, and I'll multiply this by sixteen, we add zero, six times nine is fifty four, six times three is eighteen, plus five is twenty three, and one times three ninety is three ninety. So now I want to add the a, except I don't have any a's in base ten, I'll need to convert the a into base ten. Fortunately a in base ten is just ten, so I'm going to add ten here, and this will give me sixty two fifty, which I will multiply by sixteen. So six times zero is zero, six times five is thirty, six times two is twelve, plus three is fifteen, six times six is thirty six, plus one is thirty seven, and one times sixty two fifty is sixty two fifty. So when I add these together, I get one hundred thousand in base ten, then I'll add my last zero, and I'll have a hundred thousand in base ten still.


The worst thing about affirmative action is that it created a parents' time, it's who benefited from the program and now is in a position where he's going to deny many young African American talented individuals an opportunity. You just listened to NAACP President Derek Johnson react to the illegitimate Supreme Court's decision to effectively kill affirmative action today. Now I can't say that I'm surprised, but regardless, as Kimberly Crenshaw put it, this decision is a significant setback for civil rights in the United States and are a cornerstone of the conservative movement's coordinated effort to roll back access to opportunity for systemically marginalized Americans. And she's absolutely correct about that. And there's more comments and facts about affirmative action that we're going to get to, but first I want to talk about the actual decision because I do think that that's important. So Slate's Mark Joseph Stern explains, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, effectively outlawing overt considerations of race at civilian institutions of higher education, public and private. So that right there is the effect of the decision. However, it's a puzzling move, legally speaking, considering that two loopholes are still in place. The first is that military academies are exempt from this decision and the second is that someone can still talk about how race played a role in their life and affected their life in admissions essay, for example, but the college can only take into account that person's individual experience and not the broader role that race plays in daily life in broader society. So the question is, what will that look like in practice and how does it defer from before? Well, Stern continues, these qualifications make chief justices otherwise thunderous opinion rather puzzling. It will undoubtedly curtail university's use of race and building each incoming class out long check the box style racial identifications that make admissions officers work easier. And that sea change will absolutely damage schools efforts to aid underrepresented racial minorities who received none of the privileges that many white applicants take for granted. In that respect, the decision is a massive blow to racial justice, one with noxious consequences throughout society that we will feel for the rest of our lives. But in a direct response to the incandescent dissents by Sotomayor and Justice Kintaji Brown Jackson, Robert's opinion leaves some room for admissions officers to undertake what might be called a holistic review of each applicant, including their racial identity as it relates to their life experiences. A quote holistic review, however, was already required by the precedents that Roberts effectively overturned on Thursday. Thus, the decision substitutes one vague regime with an even more ambiguous one inviting, as Sotomayor noted, a plethora of litigation that will promote chaos rather than establishing a workable new order. So in other words, Roberts knows that there's a problem, but his solution idiotically is to ignore societal and systemic ways that race plays a role in people's lives. And this is because, as Stern explained in the article, he believes that the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment is meant to be colorblind, meaning that the government simply can't classify people on the basis of race, which in theory should lead to equality since laws can't explicitly discriminate. The problem with the colorblind interpretation of the 14th Amendment is that the world just doesn't work that way. You can't abolish explicitly racist laws that we've had on the books for generations and just all of a sudden expect everyone to be equal. That's not how that works. Furthermore, even if laws are written in a colorblind way, they still can produce racist results. For example, Stop and Frisk didn't mandate that New York City police officers disproportionately stop blacks and Latinos more than white people, but that's the result of the law. But the question is why? Well, because of systemic factors, right? Because their cities are overpoliced. But why? Because police suspect that they're more likely to be guilty of crime than their white counterparts. But why? Because they live in more poor communities. But why? Because they've been denied access to wealth and capital. The point is that none of this is coincidental. And these colorblind laws mandate that you pretend like everything is copacetic so long as the state doesn't explicitly say you can target blacks for this, whites for that, and so on and so forth.   Not pretend like it doesn't exist. And Ibram X. Kendi put it best in an article he co-wrote for The Atlantic with Uma Jayakumar. He writes, race neutral is a legal fantasy, the latest to conserve racism. He adds, quote, the idea of race neutral admissions metrics like test scores is a fantasy like the court doctrine that segregated schools were separate but equal. We show how several admissions metrics disadvantage black, Latinx, native, and many Asian students. The court effectively outlawed affirmative action, which closes racial inequities and admissions, leaving the metrics that have long led to racial inequities in college admissions. The result, a normality of racial inequities sanctioned by the court. Again. And I'll link to that article down below. We're not going to get into it, but I would recommend that you read it because what he says is very important. But what I do want to share with you is Justice Kintanji Brown Jackson's dissent because she also points that out in a really powerful way. Per Common Dreams, quote, in her dissent in the North Carolina case, Jackson wrote, Gulf-sized race-based gaps exist with respect to health, wealth, and well-being of American citizens. They were created in the distant past but have indisputably been passed down to the present day through the generations. She continues, every moment these gaps persist is a moment in which this great country falls short of actualizing one of its foundational principles, the self-evident truth that all of us are created equal, she continued. With let them eat cake obliviousness today, the majority pulls the ripcord and announces color blindness for all by legal fiat. But deeming race irrelevant in law does not make it so in life. Bingo. That is the core issue with this decision. And as a result, racial exclusion will now be the outcome. Now, part of the problem is that a lot of people don't actually know what affirmative action looks like in practice. They think that they know what it is, but in actuality, they don't really know what it entails. So the right conjures this image up in your mind of a young white dude who worked extremely hard to get a 4.0 GPA only to be passed over by a student with a 2.5 GPA because he was black. But that's not how that works. Affirmative action simply lets colleges use race as one of many factors in college admissions. So they're not just looking at race, right?  They're looking at a number of things. GPA, SAT scores, extracurricular activity, volunteer work. And also if this person was part of a historically disenfranchised community and they can use that as another plus, which is a good thing. People of color still have to work twice as hard to get half as far, but affirmative action made it so that way for the first time ever. Race wasn't seen as a negative. It was seen as a positive. But people like Tim Poole are spending the day calling people who support affirmative action racists simply because he's only capable of imagining this as reverse racism against white people when in actuality it's a meager attempt to right a historic wrong. But with this perception of affirmative action in mind, ironically, can you guess who actually benefits the most from affirmative action? Believe it or not, it's not black people. It's not Latinos. It's white people, literally. In a 2022 Teen Vogue article by Wendy Leo Moore, she addresses misconceptions about affirmative action and how it hasn't actually been that effective in addressing the racial equality gap within colleges, but it may have actually helped to close the gap when it comes to gender inequality and education and employment, with white women being the biggest beneficiaries of this policy. And furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the biggest determinant in college admissions isn't actually race, despite the existence of affirmative action. As Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez put it, quote, if SCOTUS was serious about their ludicrous colorblindness claims, they would have abolished legacy admissions, aka affirmative action for the privileged. 70% of Harvard's legacy applicants are white. SCOTUS didn't touch that, which would have impacted them and their patrons. And she answered the question right there because you were all thinking as you were reading that, well, why wouldn't they touch this if they truly care about equality and colorblindness? It's because it affects them and their patrons.  We'll jump right to the front of the line.  Well, jump right to the front of the line. That's the actual reality if you really want to reduce it down to a caricature, right? But nobody really looks at legacy admissions despite the inherent unfairness with that practice, right? They're not saying, oh, well, legacy admissions is leading to underserving mediocre applicants. Meanwhile, black and brown students get side-eyed when they're in college by the whites who feel like they're not qualified to be in that same space with them. And David Dole shared a portion of Ellie Mistal's response to this decision that I want to share because he speaks to this. He writes, Black people are attacked and shamed simply because the policy exists, regardless of whether it benefited them or not. I've had white folks whom I could standardize test into a goddamn coma tell me that I got into school only because of affirmative action. I once talked to a white guy whose parents' name was on one of the buildings on campus who asked me how it felt to know that I got extra help to get in. Unbelievable. The sheer nerve of white folks is sometimes jaw-dropping. He adds affirmative action is used by a certain kind of unwashed white mediocrity as an excuse to denigrate the credentials of anybody black. And that is so true. He is spot-on right there. In fact, there was a famous case involving a woman named Abigail Fisher. And after getting rejected from the University of Austin, she decided to blame black people as opposed to her own mediocrity. Or more specifically, she claimed that her whiteness was the result of her rejection specifically when she had absolutely no evidence that that was indeed the case. But when all else fails, blame affirmative action. That's the go-to strategy for people who can't accept that they didn't get in because of black people being able to get in. Inclusion isn't the issue. They're the issue. Other issues may be the issue, right? But that's what Ellie Mustal was talking about here. In fact, Justice Kintanji Brown Jackson herself experienced this after Biden announced that he wanted a black woman on the Supreme Court. People argued that this was racist because he was prioritizing race over qualifications, yet she's by far and away the most experienced and qualified justice on the Supreme Court by every single metric that matters. So again, affirmative action does not increase mediocrity. You can blame legacy admissions for that. But it really doesn't matter now because it was effectively destroyed by the Supreme Court. And one last thing that I want to leave you with is a tweet from Hasan Piker who asks, how are you supposed to mend racial wounds if even the band-aid solutions are now considered racist? And that, my friends, is a very good question.  I mean, pretending like it doesn't exist hasn't helped, but the conservatives opposed to affirmative action haven't actually proposed any counter solutions. And that's because maintaining white supremacy and that status quo benefits them personally. And they will do everything in their power to keep that current power structure in place. So that's why they simply don't want to address the problem because inclusion of others feels like oppression to them.


Pre-diabetes is not just a high-risk state for the development of diabetes. Pre-diabetes can be a disease in itself. People with pre-diabetes may already have damage to their eyes, kidneys, blood vessels, and heart. Evidence from numerous studies suggest that the chronic complications of top 2 diabetes start to develop during the pre-diabetic state. So by the time we have pre-diabetes, it may already be too late to prevent organ damage, so best to prevent pre-diabetes in the first place, and the earlier, the better. 30 years ago, virtually all diabetes in young individuals was thought to be autoimmune type 1 diabetes. But since the mid-90s, we started seeing an increase in type 2 diabetes among our youth, particularly in the United States. Indeed, the term adult onset diabetes has now been scrapped and replaced with type 2, because children as young as 8 are now developing the disease, and the effects can be devastating. A 15-year follow-up of children diagnosed with type 2 diabetes found an alarming rate in young adults of blindness, amputation, kidney failure, and death in young adulthood. Why the dramatic rise in childhood diabetes? Because of the dramatic rise in childhood obesity. During the past 30 years, the number of children diagnosed as being overweight has increased more than 100%. Once an obese child reaches 6, they're likely to stay that way. And even if they don't, being overweight in our youth predicts adult disease and death regardless of adult body weight, even if we lose it. Being an overweight teen may predict disease risk 55 years later, twice the risk of dying from a heart attack. More cancer, gout, arthritis. In fact, being overweight as a teen was a more powerful predictor of these risks than being overweight in adulthood. This underscores the importance of focusing on preventing childhood obesity. So how do we do it? From the Official American Academy of Pediatrics Clinical Practice Guidelines, the problem appears to be kids eating too much fat and added sugars and not eating enough fruits and vegetables. Doctors at every occasion beginning soon after a child's birth should endeavor to give sound advice regarding nutrition and growth so that obesity and its complications may be curtailed. What might sound advice sound like? Well, the chair of the nutrition department at Loma Linda University published a paper suggesting not eating meat at all might be an effective strategy. Population studies have consistently shown that vegetarians are thinner than comparable non-vegetarians. This is from the largest such study to date. A body mass index of over 30 is considered obese 25 to 30 overweight and under 25 ideal weight. The non-vegetarians were up at 28.8. The average meat eater in the U.S. is significantly overweight. As one gets more and more plant-based, the average BMI drops, but even the average vegetarian in the U.S. is overweight. The only dietary group that was on average ideal weight were those eating strictly plant-based. So that comes out to be about a 33-pound difference between the vegans and the meat-eaters. Vegetarian children grow up not only thinner, but taller. Vegetarian kids grow to be about an inch taller than other kids. Apparently, meat intake is somehow negatively associated with height. I can just hear the Dairy Council now saying, because of all the milk the veggie kids must be drinking, no. The veg kids consume significantly less dairy and much lower animal protein intake overall. Meat intake is apparently associated with growing wider, though, and school-age children in the consumption of animal foods eat dairy or eggs associated with increased risk of overweight. Whereas plant-based equivalents like veggie burgers, veggie dogs, veggie cold cuts were not, and whole plant foods like grains, beans, and nuts were found to be protective. This may be because plant-based diets are low in energy, density high in starch, fiber, and water, which may increase feelings of fullness, and resting energy expenditure, meaning resting metabolic rate. Eating plant-based appears to boost metabolism, so we just kind of burn more calories at rest, even when you're sleeping. However, we're not sure how much the benefits are due to increased consumption of plant foods versus the decreased consumption of meat. Either way, plant-based diets should be encouraged and promoted for optimal health. Local, national, international food policies are warranted to support social marketing messages and to reduce the social, cultural, economic, and political forces that make it difficult to promote such diets. For example, although the advice to consume plant-based diets is sound, questions arise regarding the relative high price of produce. Yes, we can reduce the burden of childhood obesity, prevent the further spread of disease, but we need to ensure that plant foods are affordable and accessible to children of all income levels. Fruits and vegetables may not fit on the dollar menu, but our kids are worth it.  Who among us wouldn't go to the ends of the earth to enable our kids to live 20 years longer?


Spiritual development plays an important part in the making of a United States Marine. Lieutenant Commander Ulysses L. Ybalde, Shatlan Corps, United States Navy, will deliver the graduation prayer. Ladies and gentlemen, please rise. Let us pray. Father, today is a special day in the life of these new United States Marines. As they graduate, we pray that they will be strong and courageous, believing that you have called them and are always with them. We ask that they would be bold and stand for what is right, even if it means standing alone. Equip them for every purpose and journey you have in store so that they would live as mighty warriors in this life for your purposes. We pray that when they encounter various struggles and difficult times, when they experience loss and things don't go their way, that you would teach them greater perseverance through the womb. Build deeper character, stronger faith, and use any hardship in their lives for ultimate good. Turning it around for blessing instead. We ask for your powerful boldness, encouraged to face every challenge set before them with the confidence and peace that can only come from your spirit. Raise up greatness within their lives, greatness in this generation. May they be willing to stand strong and true, passionate for you, believing that you have designed them for purpose and good works, which you have planned and prepared in advance for them to do. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord, let His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. And may the Lord look upon you kindly and give you peace. Amen. Thank you, please be seated. The Manning General Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego welcomes you to what is a historic event in the life of a Marine. Their graduation from boot camp, approximately 40 weeks each year for the past 100 years, new Marines have departed San Diego for service with units of the Marine Corps around the globe. The primary mission of the Recruit Depot is to provide basic training to recruits in the west of the Mississippi, which represents approximately 51% of all applicants in the Marine Corps each year. The Depot is also home to recruiter school and drill instructor school. All our efforts here are geared toward one end, producing America's finest fighting force, the United States Marines. This morning, Company F, Second Recruit Training Battalion, Recruit Training Regiment, will form in March in the parade. Following the passing review, the graduating Marines will return from and center of the reviewing stand for final dismissal. The staff for today's parade is comprised of Marines from the Recruit Training Regiment. The commander of troops is Captain Andrew Ilawaniak, Company Commander, Company F, Second Recruit Training Battalion. The parade agenda is Captain John P. Cliff III, Executive Officer, Company F, Second Recruit Training Battalion, Recruit Training Regiment. The marching units are now being called to attention and the Agitance Command sound Agitance call will begin today's parade. Marching in today's parade are 471 of the graduating Marines from Company F. Among the 471 Marines are two Marines who displayed outstanding performances and two individually graded events. Private First Class Danilo C. Reyes from Platoon 2134 is the Company High Shooter, scoring a 333 out of 350. Private Michael A. Martinez from Platoon 2134 is the most physically fit Marine, scoring a 300 out of 300 on the physical fitness test and the combat fitness test. They will be receiving awards from Marine Corps Association and Foundation. Present today is the Company Honor Graduates Recruiter, Sergeant Jonathan R. Savage. Not present today, but worth recognizing is the primary marksmanship instructor with a Platoon High Shooting Average of 218 out of 250 for Platoon 2134, Sergeant Zorn F. L. Yabau. Recruit training is comprised of subjects required to produce basic Marines who function effectively in garrison, are trained in rudimentary individual field and combat skills, and practice the personal and professional traits which distinguish them as Marines. Examples of these traits are discipline, the achievement of a state of discipline which assures respect for authority, instant and willing obedience to orders, and the self-reliance to maintain or improve those traits which exemplify a Marine. Military bearing consistently demonstrates military presence and personal awareness as well as the proper wearer and maintenance of uniforms. Esprit de corps acquires the common spirit of the Marine Corps that inspires enthusiasm, devotion, pride, initiative, teamwork, aggressiveness, determination, moral courage, integrity, camaraderie, and the burning desire to work with and for others toward excellence and common goals. For 246 years, Marines have fought and won whenever and wherever the nation calls. In the harshest conditions, over the most brutal terrain, and against the most formidable enemies, Marines defend the ideals of freedom with grit and tenacity. Though battlefields change and capabilities evolve, history proves that true victory comes from the individual Marine with skilled resolve, the drive to overcome any obstacle, and the warrior spirit to fight on against all odds. It takes that steadfast faithfulness, semperfidels to corps, country, and each other that abounds throughout our storied legacy. Marines today remain in combat, forward-deployed throughout the world, confronting every challenge with courage, loyalty, and faithfulness. Their resolve to be most ready when the nation is least ready to defend freedom anytime and anywhere, to stand ready to aid those devastated by natural disasters, to pay tribute to those who have forged our proud legacy, and to honor the families and loved ones who faithfully stand beside us. For the Marines of Company F, today marks the end of the 13-week recruit training cycle. They have marched countless miles at Camp Pendleton, and on this parade deck, and have been trained as their all Marines as basic riflemen. In addition, due to an intensive physical training program, their strength and endurance have doubled since their arrival for the recruit depot. Their Marines qualified to take their places in the ranks of the world's finest fighting organization. The platoons are now being aligned from left to right in order to get them into their exact positions for the parade. The next portion of the ceremony will be our national anthem. We welcome veterans and members of the armed forces to join us in rendering appropriate honors with a military salute. For guests who have not served in the military, it is proper etiquette during the national anthem to place their right hand over the hearts and for those in the audience wearing headgear to remove it. Will the guests please rise for the presentation of the colors? Ladies and gentlemen, our national anthem. Thank you, please be seated. Following the command parade rest, the parade adjutant will give the command sound off, which signals the band to parade forward of the assembled Marines while playing military marching music. The parade adjutant now presents the assembled command to the commander of troops. Officers center march, all unit commanders and guide-on-bearers march the front and center of the formation. Historically, it was at this point that commanding officers would issue orders and instructions to the unit commanders. Following this, the unit leaders would face about, return to their units and pass the information along to their Marines. Out of our nation's history, millions of men and women have earned the title United States Marine. Many who have helped shape our history join us here today. In keeping with the tradition of once a Marine, always a Marine, we would like to recognize them. At this time, those in the audience who have served as Marines, please rise. Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for their dedicated service decor and country. Thank you, please be seated. Ladies and gentlemen, the battalion commander for second recruit training battalion, Lieutenant Colonel James R. Smith. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. On behalf of Brigadier General Jason L. Morris, the commanding general of Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego, and the Western Recruiting Region, as well as on behalf of Colonel Joseph W. Jones, the commanding officer of the Recruit Training Regiment, welcome to the graduation of Company F. I'd like to begin today by recognizing a few groups vital to our mission accomplishment. First and foremost, to you, the friends and families of these new Marines, thank you for your love and support on their journey to this momentous day. You laid the foundation that allowed them to take the initial steps towards becoming a Marine. Your love and support sustained them during their training here and will continue to be a source of strength in their new vocation. Welcome to the Marine Corps family. To the families of the Company F staff seated to the right of the reviewing stand, no one knows more than you the time and dedication it takes to transform a civilian into a Marine. Sergeant Major and I are deeply grateful for your sacrifice and support, which enables these drill instructors and officers to perform this critical task. Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for the families of Company F. I'd also like to recognize today's parade reviewing official, Lieutenant General Smith, whose impressive value you will hear shortly and who currently serves as the commanding general of the First Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Pendleton, California. Sir, it's an honor to have you here. Thank you for joining us.  These men and women work tirelessly to identify, educate and inspire the next generation of Marines. This legion of recruiters are represented today by Sergeant Wilson from recruiting substation, Oak Lawn, Illinois, who is responsible for guiding the company honor graduate, Lance Corporal Roman, into our corps. Our other partner in this endeavor, the instructors at Weapons Field Training Battalion, who teach the critical combat skills necessary to fight and win in any climate place. They are represented today by Sergeant Yubao, the primary marksmanship instructor for the Company High Shooter, Private First Class Reyes. Ladies and gentlemen, a round of applause for our recruiters and our combat instructors. Gentlemen, well done. The last group I'd like to recognize certainly need no introduction.  And from the moment your loved one arrived here, there's been a drill instructor with them, 24 hours a day, seven days a week tirelessly instilling the qualities and a spree decor of a United States Marine and leaving an indelible mark on those they lead. Trust me, your Marine will never forget the name, the face, or the gentle, loving voice of their drill instructors. Now, these Marines behind me are on average 19-year-old high school graduates and one has a college degree. They come to us from every state and territory in the Western recruiting region and 10 countries around the world, as far away as Japan, Ethiopia, and Ukraine. And when they raised their right hand and swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, they differentiated themselves from 99% of their peers. Upon arrival, these drill instructors forged them in the fires of martial discipline and shaped their minds and bodies in the mold of generations of Marines who have worn our cloth. They proved themselves capable of carrying heavy loads, long distances over rugged terrain with minimal food and sleep to be where they're needed, when they're needed to accomplish any mission. Now, moms and dads, you may have noticed some change in your new Marine.  And I promise they know how to make their beds. But the truly important change is the one that has taken place within. For they have been immersed in our core values of honor, courage, and commitment. And by virtue of standing here today, they have embraced those as their own. And it is because of this, because of the journey they have undergone and because of the moral, mental, and physical development that they have displayed that I am pleased to present 471 young men who can forever proudly claim the title of United States Marine. And if you'd excuse me, I'd like to address our nation's newest Marines. Good morning Marines. Sergeant Major and I are incredibly proud of you. We've watched you learn, strive, and grow these past months. And we are pleased to welcome you to our ranks. When you stepped on those yellow footprints, you affirmed a commitment of selfless service to our core. These drill instructors fanned a flame inside of you and now we trust you will keep it burning bright. You can be justifiably proud of what you've accomplished here. You earned your tan belt in our martial arts program. Some of you learned to swim for the first time in our water survival training. And many of you overcame a fear of heights in our confidence and obstacle course. You learned weapons employment to deliver precision fires on targets from a staggering distance of 500 yards. And in a final test, you completed the grueling three day crucible where you were required to display exemplary character, physical and mental toughness, the ability to decide, act and communicate, leadership and a warfighter spirit. And every Marine, past and present, expects you to display those same attributes in your future trials. So having completed the longest and most grueling recruit training on this globe, you're ready to carry on our Marine Corps tradition as America's naval expeditionary force and readiness. As you go forward on the next leg of your journey, I implore you to be safe, be smart, and make good decisions. Remember that that eagle globe and anchor pressed into the palm of your hand atop the reaper represents 246 years of Marines who have come before. You must always be worthy of that legacy and protect what you have earned. And so on behalf of the Marines, sailors and civilians here aboard Recruit Depot San Diego, let me be the first to offer you a traditional naval parting of fair winds and following seas. Congratulations Marines. Semper Fidelis and welcome to our Corps. Now taking their position in the reviewing area is today's parade reviewing official Lieutenant General George W. Smith Jr. Commanding General, First Marine Expeditionary Force. He is accompanied by Brigadier General Jason L. Morris, Commanding General for Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and the Western Recruiting Region. Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for honors and remain standing for the firing of the cannons in honor of Lieutenant General Smith Jr. Please be seated. Lieutenant General George W. Smith Jr., Commanding General, First Marine Expeditionary Force. Lieutenant General Smith was commissioned in the United States Marine Corps in 1985, following graduation from the NROTC program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He graduated from the basic school and the Infantry Officers course, earning the Military Occupational Specialty of 0302 Infantry Officer. Lieutenant General Smith has served in a variety of challenging billets in numerous commands who include series commander and company commander for Fox Company at Marine Corps Crew Depot San Diego, Inspector Instructor at Fourth Force Reconnaissance Company, Future Operations Planner G3 and G5 at First Marine Expeditionary Force, Deputy Operations Officer at First Marine Division, Commanding General at Marine Air Ground Task Force Training Command and Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center 29 Palms, Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense and Deputy Commandant at Plans, Policies and Operations Headquarters Marine Corps. Lieutenant General Smith currently serves as the commanding general for First Marine Expeditionary Force. Lieutenant General Smith has been privileged to serve in commands that have been awarded the Presidential Unit Citation, the Joint Meritories Unit Award, the Navy Unit Commodation and the Meritories Unit Commodation. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Lieutenant General George W. Smith Jr. The Marines have been trained here in the past 100 years and have departed San Diego for combat and conflicts around the world, including places whose names are immediately associated with Marine courage and dedication. Name such as Guadalcanal, Terowa, Iwo Jima, Husan, Inchon, Chosin Reservoir, K-San, Way City, Lebanon, Granada, Somalia, Fallujah, Ramadi, Marjah, Sange, and our most current operations worldwide. This parade deck is rich in history and tradition and no Marine trained here ever forgets its sights and sounds. Sergeant DeMarcus Hill, Dentailer Z. Kneed and Honor Platoon 2133, Senior Drone instructor Sergeant Magonzo W. Bowyer, Liasi J. Tamale, Page 21 of your graduation pamphlets, you will find the Marine's Hymn. The Marine's Hymn has a history dating back to 1859. It is a longstanding tradition for Marines to face the direction of the music and stand at attention when it is heard. It is now directed that all Marines present and who have served honorably, and ladies and gentlemen, you are all encouraged to join. Sing the words to the first verse as Marine Ben San Diego performs Anchors Away followed by the Marine's Hymn. Will the guests please rise, distinct qualities of String Foundation of the Corps, each year recruit training provides thousands of America's finest young men and women with a basic knowledge and skills to function in a profession characterized by its own set of high values and tough stand. Most important thing we do in the Marine Corps is make Marines. The individual Marine is the Corps. Marines graduating today, the long arduous journey of the last 13 weeks is but a small step. Their initial training is not over. Soon after graduation, they will report to the School of Infantry, Camp Pellet in California, where they will continue to be trained to serve as a ladies and gentlemen. At this time, we would like to introduce to you the Marines responsible for ensuring the success of the difficult transition required to become a Marine. The company commander is Captain Andrew Ilawaniak. The company first sergeant is First Sergeant Jose D. Ruiz. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in a round of applause for the company staff of Company F. Next portion of the ceremony will be the traditional function of retiring the guidance for her training and of being retired to symbolize the disbanding of platoons. All similar units in the Marine Corps carry such guidance, which identify the unit and are a source of pride to each individual that the honor of carrying these guidance is outstanding leadership qualities, motivation and character. And we're selected as the platoon honor graduates compete for the titles of series and they're considered the top Marines graduating today and have demonstrated the highest potential for future leadership and responsibility. The guidance will now be returned to the drill instructors. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Smith and the battalion Sergeant Major, Sergeant Major Baldez. Ladies and gentlemen, please hold your applause until honor graduates have been recognized. Platoon 2129 is private first class Dustin J. Laetru from Sioux City, Iowa. The honor graduate for platoon 2130 and the company honor graduate is Lance Corporal Pedro Roman from Chicago, Illinois. Lance Corporal Roman is also the recipient of the Chesty Puller Award for his outstanding meritorious performance while in recruit training. The honor graduate for platoon 2131 is private first class Austin M. Barlow from Oakdale, Minnesota. The honor graduate for platoon 2133 is private first class Nathaniel A. Williams from San Angelo, Texas. The honor graduate for platoon 2134 is private first class Brandon A. Talton from Fort Worth, Texas. And the honor graduate for platoon 2135 and the series honor graduate is private first class Gary A. Boydward from Detroit, Michigan. Ladies and gentlemen, the honor graduates of Company F. The company first sergeant will now give the command to the senior drill instructor to dismiss their platoons. Needless to say, this will be the most welcome command they have received throughout recruit training.