What about maybe raising a pup to become a guide dog? Well, they're looking for puppy raisers. The challenge would be to raise a pup up to a certain age and great reward, obviously, for seeing a pup develop in your own home. And additionally, puppy raisers and temporary borders get the satisfaction of knowing that they have played a role in providing guide and assistance dogs that enable people who are vision impaired or families of a child with autism to enjoy the same freedom and independence as everyone else or as close as they can anyhow. And it's a chance to learn some new dog training skills as well if you already have a dog. And I would imagine that it might be preferential if you do. Well, now I'm joined by two people with plenty of experience, Annie Gollacher and Leslie Newbury. You're both welcome. Thank you. Thanks for coming in. And let's say hello to the two dogs as well. Annie, yours is? Sally. Yes, Sally is a...  Now that I spoke, she looked up at me. She's here beside me. She's licking away at her licky mat. Hopefully she'll behave herself. Mm-hmm. Well, hopefully. Fingers crossed, but sure, you know. They don't, they don't. And Leslie, yours is? I have nutmeg. Nutmeg is 11 months old. And she's doing very well. And she's got a lovely dog treat there, so hopefully it'll keep her nice and quiet. Oh, yeah. Nutmeg's a bit of a communicator, so she likes people to know she's around. Oh, OK. Excellent. Well, as you say, I'm happy there at the minute with the dog he treats. Absolutely. So hopefully that'll... Sorry, her is it? Her. Or it'll keep her distracted. Leslie, both these dogs now will be handed back after a certain time. Is that how it works? They will, yeah. We're guide dog puppy raisers, so we basically foster the puppies from around nine weeks of age until around 14 months. So we do a little bit of training, but I would say we're more socialisers. So what guide dogs look for us, the dogs live in our home. Mm-hmm. They're with us 24 hours a day. And we go through sort of a protocol and the pups live with us. We take them out, we socialize them. Everywhere we go, the pups go. So that when they go down to cork, there's nothing that's strange or new to them. So in shops, dentists, hairdressers, bus, train, pups sometimes go on a flight as well. So everything. So they have a well-rounded, reasonably well-behaved pup ready to start training in the next stage. So the idea would be to bring this growing dog with you as many places as possible. Absolutely. Yeah, the more places that we can get them out, the more socialized they are. Okay. Obviously, we have to remember that they are puppies. They're no different to any other puppy. So when we get them at nine weeks, they come their complete blank canvas. And we have to do everything that anybody would do normally with a puppy. We puppy, we toilet train them. We feed them certain ways. They go through all the normal phases that all the other puppies go through. Of the chewing and the barking and the zoomies and everything else. Yes. You know, but yeah, so it is a bit of a commitment, but it's great fun. And it's, we have a wonderful team in Donegal. We do. Not just the puppy raisers. We have our volunteers, our fundraisers, our temporary borders. So important to me as a puppy raiser. My grandchildren over in England, I had to get away. So the temporary borders would look after my pup when I'm away. And it means they go through a certain amount of training and they keep the pups in the same routine and the same boundaries as we would do. So it's great. And it's good for the pups. It makes them a little bit more adaptable. Because when you have a dog, it's a bit of a worry then when you have to go off on holidays, especially if they're spoiled, you're thinking, do I have to put this dog in the kennels for like the week that I'm going to be away? And how, you know, how will it be treated? And, you know, will it be socialized when it's there? Will it get enough exercise? But Annie, it seems like there's a good community here, good supportive community. When you're raising these dogs. There is, there really is. Like the temporary borders, all you got to do is send them a wee text and say, are you free? The state to the state. And they'll say yes. And then you give them all stuff, maybe a list of what the dog's routine is like and they follow it. So it means then there's no break and the dog isn't confused when it comes back to you. They don't go into kennels this day with the person in the home the whole time. But now there's great support. And Leslie always says they're never born guide dogs. They're born a puppy and they become, they're molded into a guide dog. So, you know, you are told and guided what to do. The support is great. But as Leslie was saying there, really, it's your job just to raise them as you would any dog that you want to raise properly, mind you. And they'll be, I'm sure there's a few outlines. But by and large, it's not your job to train them as guide dogs. It's just your job to raise them up to be a fairly well-behaved doggy. Well-behaved dog that'll listen to the commands and is trainable, you know, and that wants to listen and is happy to do things. And if you get them a good grounding, those first six months, isn't it, Leslie, are very important? And if you just treat them well, they'll, you know, it'll work out for them then, it does. And Leslie, do you have to have, is it a preferential that you already have a dog to take on these? Not necessarily, not necessarily. You're a, I think the guidelines say that we can have up to two pets in the house. Another dog can't be an advantage for a small pup because invariably they show them the way to go and do some a few manners and things like that. But it's not essential if you don't have another dog, that's not an issue. What about a cat? Cat, I have cats, I have hens, I have geese, I have pigs, if you name it, and they're great for the dogs. Because on the train, that's all part and parcel of creating this rounded socialized dog. We can't have a guide dog running after cats. You know, we can't have a guide dog running after pigeons or whatever in the street. So it's little weak things that we concentrate on just to have that social rounded pup to hand to the trainers. And they do have a fantastic job down there, absolutely. They dot the eyes, cross the teeth, introduce the dogs to the harnesses. Is Dynan Cork. Dynan Cork, absolutely wonderful. We're a little bit away from there, but I have to say the support that we get from our guide dogs is phenomenal. We have a supervisor, Killian, who is amazing. And he's always on the phone checking up. We have Zoom puppy classes. He comes up to Donnie Gold to check on us on the pups and does a bit of training with us in and around Letter County or wherever we are. And then we have the puppy manager, Shreen, who is, again, very, very supportive. And there's a big demand for these dogs. Oh, the waiting list is extraordinary, especially with the assistance dogs as well. You know, when you think of it, these, as Annie rightly said, you know, these are just pups and we train them a certain way and raise them a certain way. But it can take up to two years to train one dog. You know, so it's a huge investment in time and energy and money from our guide dogs as well, you know. And Annie, the assistance dogs are different. Are they to guide dogs? Are they more for comfort?  And sometimes families may never have been able to, let's say, visit Santa before or go to family events, but when they have the assistance dog, it gives them extra support and comfort and the child feels reassured and they're able to go and do things. Yeah, yeah. Brilliant, good idea. And is, I mean, for somebody listening in, they're thinking, especially somebody maybe who wouldn't have had a dog, that sounds like a lot of effort and hard work. Yeah, there is, but there is that with raising any pup. Absolutely, it's no different from raising any other puppies, you know. We have great support, as I say, from our guide dogs, from and each other. The other puppy raisers round about as well are fantastic support. But it is a bit of a commitment, but it's such good fun and it's so good for us, you know. It's changed, I've been doing it now for 14 years, nearly. And I've met so many wonderful people. We've great friendships within the branch now and everywhere you go, people talk to you. People stop and talk to you. So it's a great social thing, getting out for a walk. Annie and I were in Archfriar this morning. Beautiful sunny day, out getting out for a walk. You know, so it's... There's an unofficial dog park here in Leroy County and it is, it's very... Well, it's great for the dogs because they get to socialise, but it's great for the owners as well, because then automatically you're going to chat to the owners. If the dogs are getting on great, then you want to let them run around together and you stand and chat. So it is socialised. But the other thing about puppy raising as well is, you know, these pups have to adapt to their new lives as either an assistance dog or as a guide dog. So puppy raising fits in very much to most people's lives. You know, I work part-time. So that's not an issue. When the pups are of a certain age, a little bit bigger, not much comes to work with me. So it's all part of the training because that's what their life may be like once they're qualified, you know? So if you work a couple of days a week, it's not a problem. If you work from home, it's not a problem. You know, it can fit in. Solutions will be found. Solutions will be found. And it's, yeah. Must be hard to hand them over, you know, at 14 months. I just handed one over about four weeks ago. I've still not over. She was called Heather. I had her for a bit longer than the year because she was a bit immature. And I think about her all the time. But even the pup I have now, Sally, I call her Heather all the time by mistake. You never forget them, unless he's gone through it a lot more than I have different pups. But still, it's the... I was driving down to Cork and dropping her off and thinking somebody else is going to see her every day. Which is, you don't realise, like, the way that she would hopefully impact someone's life, you know, giving them the gift of independence or something, or, you know, the way that they could change somebody's life. So I've got to keep telling myself that, you know, it's for a greater good, and I can't be selfish and hold on to her one. That's what hopefully her life is supposed to be like. Absolutely. To help someone. Absolutely. It is a great thing. And pups at guidedogs.ie, if you want more information, it's pups at guidedogs.ie. And there'll be plenty of help and support there should you decide to take one of these on board and raise them. Anyway, listen, that's the first for the show, having a couple of dogs in the studio. So thanks very much. And the best of luck with both Nutty and Sally. Thank you. John, thanks very much. We also have a Facebook page, if I don't mind me saying, just as Donnie got a branch of Guide Dogs. And so all the information, you can follow the pups progress, all the pups and Donnie go. And if anybody wants any more information or wants to join the team, we're desperate to find some new puppy raisers, temp boarders, or even volunteers. As much as an hour and a week or you can do the full whack. And we'd love to have you on board. Before there's a day coming up in Glen Bay in May, is that right, May 24th? We're having our National Guide Dog Day. And on the Saturday 25th, we'll be the walk in Glen Bay. And more details will come. But it'll be from about two to four. We'll have a nice walk with all the puppies and everybody's welcome. On the 25th. 25th of Saturday. And the 24th, we're having different collections around Donnie Gall. OK. As you might see us in supervalued different places and things like that. And come in and say hello and meet the pups. Brilliant. OK. Thank you both. Annie and Leslie, appreciate it. John, thank you very much. Thank you.


Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including John Atwood, Pat, and DeGrasia A. Daniels. Coming up on DTNS, why can't our phones be actually waterproof, YouTube's new tools to fight comment spam, and channel imitators and third-party payments come to the Apple Store in Korea? This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, June 30th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. From Austin, Texas, I'm Justin Robert Young. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chin. I am ready to figure out why I can't throw my phone in a bathtub full of water. But first, let's start with a few tech things you should know. ARM announced its latest CPU core designs, the high-performance Cortex-X3 and medium-core Cortex-A715. ARM's proposed design for socks would have one Cortex-X3 core, three A715 cores, and four efficiency Cortex-A510 cores. ARM says the X3 will offer 25% better performance than the outgoing X2, with the A715 offering performance like the Cortex-X1 core from 2020, with 20% more energy efficiency and 5% better performance than the outgoing A710. The A715 drops 32-bit support, meaning flagship systems on ships based on ARM's reference design would be 64-bit only. The NFT marketplace OpenC warned users that a staffer at the email vendor customer.io misused employee access to download and share email addresses of its users to an unauthorized third party. OpenC said that if you ever shared an email with it in the past, quote, you should assume that you've been impacted. Customer.io said it did not believe any other client data has been compromised. Samsung began mass-producing chips using its 3-nanometer process, reaching production ahead of rival TSMC. Samsung said the process reduces power usage by 45% and improves performance by 23% compared to its 5-nanometer process, no word on which customer will receive these initial chips. Samsung says they were for a high-performance, low-power computing application. Google is updating the Chrome password manager so that it syncs with Android password manager. There will now be a single page to manage both at passwords.google. And Google's switch to Android app for iOS now works for all Android 12 phones, not just the Pixel. Researchers at Lumen Technologies Black Lotus Labs detailed a highly-sophisticated custom-built malware called ZUO-RAT, infecting small office and home routers from Cisco, Netgear, Asus, and Dreitech. Once infected, ZUO-RAT finds all connected devices with the threat actor using DNS and HTTP hijacking to install other malware on, with custom malware able to target Windows, Linux, and macOS. Researchers say ZUO-RAT's structure appears intentionally complex, combined with being highly targeted against U.S. and Western European organizations. It indicates the capabilities of a state-sponsored actor. So, as always, make sure you're up-to-date on your patches. And if you're infected, reboot your machine. If you reboot the router, that'll get rid of the malware, though a full-factory reset is recommended for full recovery. Alright, Justin, tell us what is up with Apple. Oh, that rascally company, Apple. Well, they have another policy proposal for allowing third-party payments on iOS apps. So to catch you up, Apple is facing various pressures to allow third-party payments for apps in its iOS app store. In the U.S., a court ruled that Apple had to allow, quote, buttons, external links, or other calls to action that direct customers to purchase mechanisms. The wording on that is vague, and the final word on it is yet to come, as Apple appealed that part of the case and was now granted a stay on implementing it back on December 8th. Apple has been in a back-and-forth with Dutch regulators about allowing dating apps to use the third-party payments system. Apple gives those developers a 3% discount on app store fees, so they still have to pay Apple's 27% or 12% depending on where they fall in the policy. But the biggest effort comes to us from South Korea, which passed a law last August aimed at Google, but requires all mobile app stores of a certain size to allow third-party payment systems, which pretty much brings us up to now, right, Tom? Yeah, Apple announced Thursday its latest proposed policy that allows Korean app store apps to implement third-party payment. A developer who wants to take advantage of that must fill out a form, and the payment processors must meet certain criteria for reliability. Apple recommends that you use one of the following, like, white-listed companies, KCP, InSys, TOS, and NICE as pre-approved payment processors that will pass inspection. If you implement a third-party system, you cannot also offer Apple's in-app systems. You have to choose. There's also some language that must show up in the app advising users they are not using Apple's system, so some features like family sharing aren't going to work if you use a third-party payment processor. And developers have to agree that they will handle all requests for refunds and subscription management. A new binary must be submitted for distribution in the Korean store, which is similar to what they did for the Dutch dating apps as well. And developers get a little more discount in Korea than they do in the Netherlands. 4% off of payments. But that means if they would normally give Apple 30% of their cut, if they use the third-party payment system, they give Apple 26%. And we should know that this policy must be approved by the Korean Communication Commission, the KCC, which previously expressed criticism at Apple for still keeping such a large portion of payments. Yeah, so I mean, this is just kind of an update for everybody if you're wondering like, okay, so where are we with Apple allowing third-party payments? How's it going to work? You know, now that we've seen the Netherlands system, which is limited to just the dating apps because there's some quirks in the way they're applying regulatory frameworks there. But we're also seeing the Korean one and it's going to be somewhere around 26% to 27%. You still have to pay Apple in order to be listed in the store. And then this white listing of payment processors I think is probably a smart way to go about that to say like, we want to make sure we're regulating these to be reliable ways of paying because people are going to complain to Apple no matter what. So here are some ones we know meet our criteria. Not only meet our criteria, but I believe we are seeing the future of where this problem is going to go for them. Sure, you can use a third-party payment system, but we're going to discourage you against rolling your own so you can keep an even larger share of the profits. And we are going to recommend that you use these trusted vendors. At that point, I would not be shocked considering Apple is making sure that you know that there are certain ancillary features that you will not get access to if you don't use Apple's own proprietary system. Wouldn't be shocked if going forward that maybe these trusted vendors make another deal with Apple so you can include more of these kinds of features when you use them, if you want to use them. I think this is Apple shoring up their ability that they still would be able to wet their beaks, so to speak. Yeah, and I think to a certain extent it's justified for Apple to say, we are operating the App Store. We don't charge a listing fee for that. Yeah, so this is the way we have chosen to recover the cost because we let people list for free. We're going to take a chunk. You can argue whether it should be 30%, 15%, 26%. Those numbers, that's up for argument. But yeah, this is the route they've chosen to fund development of the App Store. And of course, there's no way that they are going to make any move on this until they absolutely legally have to because they know exactly what the law is country by country, and they are going to work their best magic around that law. And it just makes sense for them to do so. Man, wouldn't it be something though if Apple just said, you know what? We're tired. We're tired of fighting. Like, they would wait for all the legal processes to play out. But if they were just like, we're just going to make a new policy for everybody. Here you go. Sorry, everybody. Yeah, but every second they wait, that sweet 30% cut just keeps on coming in, keeps on coming. What if they start to realize though, they're like, oh wait, if we let Netflix do this and we give them 20%, then we get the Netflix money, which we're not getting any of right now. Well, that I think is probably continuing to be figured out. Yeah. Well, YouTube announced some new policies to try to fight comments spam and channel imitators. Comments spam is going to get combated by letting creators select increase strictness. This isn't even a new option. It's a checkmark under the existing option. Hold all potentially inappropriate comments for review. So right now you can either just let everything go up, which, you know, if your channel of a certain size is a recipe for disaster, you can say let the AI determine what might be a problem based on some things that it knows and to hold those for me to review, but let the stuff that's okay go up. Although that will allow some inappropriate stuff through.  Or you can just stop comments from going up altogether and hold them all for review, turn them off altogether. What do you think of this part before we get to the channel stuff? I actually think that it's, I mean, it's an interesting way for them to solve that. Obviously YouTube is a user base that is wide and varied. And so they need to keep their solutions as simple as possible. But man, I actually, in reading this was thinking I would love to see more control in granularity of how you control your comments. I think it would be, it would behoove the YouTube community. If on your channel you could do a video that says, Hey, from here on out, we're only going to do, or maybe video by video. I'm only going to do five word comments on this because if people want to say something that is a bumper sticker length, then that's, that is what it is. But if you want to say something more, we're going to encourage you to go to our discord, for example. I think that there's a real opportunity here to help you mold your community in those comments. Yeah, there's some fine tuning that they could offer. I think what YouTube's trying to do though is keep it really, really simple.  So I like that they're keeping it simple. But honestly, this is the old Apple versus Microsoft approach argument, right? Microsoft says, we'll let it be simple if you want, but we'll give you the tools to make it complicated underneath, because Apple just has, you know, historically walled you off and said, we're just going to make it simple and you don't need to make it complicated. Unless you want to go into the, you know, terminal and start doing things there. But you want to know what I would almost say in the world of community of digital community, then this is, you know, a Twitter versus Reddit or something like that. Reddit offers a lot of moderation tools. You can communicate both that are policed by mods and that are done automatically. And I think YouTube, look, they are of a certain size and creators of built communities that deserve those tools. No, that's a good allegory. Thank you for bringing the allegory into the 21st century. Yeah, there we go. It's only 20 years old as opposed to... All right, let's talk about the channel thing. As of July 29th, channels will not be allowed to hide their subscriber counts. Now, YouTube acknowledged in the post about this that some smaller channels hide their subscriber counts so they don't look unpopular because if people don't know, then they may be more likely to subscribe. But scammers and imitators use that to their advantage too. So they try to trick viewers into thinking they're a larger channel. Often what they'll do is use similar characters. And so YouTube is reducing the character set you can use as well. So they, you know, if they wanted to pretend to be YouTube itself, they might use the yen character because it looks like a wine. If somebody's not paying attention, they click on it. And then they create a channel that looks like the channel they're trying to imitate. But you wouldn't be able to tell it's not. Now, with subscriber counts front and center, you'll see, wait a minute, the channel, the beast channel I was, Mr. Beast Channel I was trying to go to, I know has millions of subscribers. This one only has six. Maybe I'm at the wrong place. I think it's a smart idea. Yeah. Well, folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is in our subreddit, you can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. Associate Professor Reich Cho of the CQ University in Australia has an article in the conversation called, it's 2022. Why do we still not have waterproof phones? It's definitely worth a read. Smartphones have varying levels of water resistance, and some of them are quite impressive, but they aren't waterproof. Waterproof means water can't get in. You've likely heard phones described as being IP69, water and dust resistant or some such thing. But Tom, what are those numbers mean? Yeah. So the IP in this case does not stand for intellectual property. It stands for ingress protection rating. It's overseen by the International Electrotechnical Commission, the IEC. That is a standards commission. It's been around since 1908. So like IEEE or ISO, if you're familiar with those, it's made up of companies, governments, users, unions, a bunch of other people, simply to make things easy for everybody to be on the same page. Each IP rating has two numbers, like you heard IP68, for example. The first is rating of protection against solids. So if you see IP68, the six is for dust. The second number is the rating against water. Solid rating goes from one to six. Rating goes from one to nine. So IP68 would mean it's dust tight and almost water tight. The example that Justin gave is the max you could do. IP69 means it's dust tight and water tight. The eight rating for water means it can withstand continuous immersion, but maybe not high pressure jets of water. Nine is protected against, you know, hitting it with a power cleanser. But Samsung phones are certified IP68. They got fined in Australia last week for over promising water resistance. What was that about? Yeah, so there's some caveats around the eight. In Samsung's case, it was IP68 up to 1.5 meters for up to 30 minutes at a time. An iPhone is also IP68, good at the eight rating for up to six meters of water for up to 30 minutes. So if you drop them in water briefly, which is 99% of these encounters, you're still probably fine. Yeah. If you drop an IP68 phone in the toilet and grab it right away, you should be okay. But there are other considerations. So if you drop it in a pool, chlorine. If you drop it in the ocean, salt. That can corrode the exterior. It can cause damage to the phone, especially the charging port. If you drop it in the ocean, you really need to dry it out and clean it before you try to charge it. And waterproofing materials degrade over time, too. So the older a phone gets, the less waterproof it's going to be. Those seals and things just start to degrade. Also, if you dropped it and broke it, if you've cracked the screen or if you cracked the case, obviously that adds another way for water and dust to get in. All right. I think I get the rating system now, but let's go back to our original question. Why can't we just make these things waterproof, Tom? Yeah, yeah. So the weak points on our phone are the buttons and the ports. Your headphone jack, your charging port, your up and down volume buttons. The camera also, the camera casing, has to be watertight and dust tight. Depending on what you're sealing, you might use glue, adhesive strips, tape, silicone, rubber seals. And then a lot of companies are starting to do a polymer coating added to the circuit board. So if a little water does get in it, it keeps it off of the circuit board. It repels it from there. A company is developing a process for that that injects an insulator into smaller devices like the Apple Watch and the Fitbit. They don't quite have that process for the bigger stuff. But all of that adds cost. Adding all those seals adds cost to the production. In fact, Xiaomi co-founder Lee Jun once estimated, like back in 2016, that making a Xiaomi phone waterproof added 20% to 30% to the cost. So Professor Chu notes that there are some new methods that might make it easier to waterproof the phone. A coating similar to the one applied to circuit boards might be added to the outside of the phone. This would have to be more durable since it was the subject to the wear and tear of you touching it in the way that circuit boards are not. And circuit boards could be made on waterproof silicone, therefore obviously making them more waterproof. Yeah, PZ Milesi in the chat points out that Samsung mostly got the attention and therefore eventually the fine. Because IP68 is accurate, that's okay. And they had the information about this many minutes, this amount of water. But they were showing people swimming and surfing in their advertising. And like I mentioned, ocean water can corrode that port and they were properly disclosing that. So there's a lot that goes into this. It really is something where if you're going to have a way to get into the phone with a jack or a port, it makes it more expensive and harder to waterproof it, which is another reason why I know Apple is kind of pursuing that portless future, right? No buttons, no ports. It makes it easy to make it waterproof. You know, it did make me reflect at how far we have come in the waterproofing or water resistance that we do have now. There was certainly a time where at any moment that I might have fallen into a pool with my phone, it would have immediately gone in the bag of rice, however apocryphal that solution is. But now I, you know, if I go out paddle boarding on Lady Bird Lake, I'll often just keep my phone in my pocket, where I know I might fall in, but I'm not really worried about it. Yeah. I remember sitting in a pool a few years ago and realizing my phone was in my pocket and just giving up, like not even bothering taking it out and throwing in the rice. Like, no, it's done. And that was back before water proofing. Things were a little water resistant, but maybe we're talking, you know, five, not even eight. These days, it does feel like, yeah, you can splash it. You can drop it in water. If you grab it real quick, it's going to be fine. I think we've made a lot of progress, but I think a lot of people are like, yeah, but don't we have the ability to just seal this stuff off? And we do. It just would make your phone really expensive. And so, you know, companies are trying to balance that out. Not to mention, like it makes it harder to repair to go through all that stuff. I don't think the companies care so much about that, but that's another part of this too. Yeah. Maybe one day. Maybe one day. Maybe one day. One day we're going to have robot umpires. That would be umpires that are actually robots. That day is not coming soon, but a lot of people use the term robot umpires to refer to using algorithms to aid in calling balls and strikes. We talked about this on May 31st on the show. We'll have a link to that show in the show notes if you want to get the full discussion about how that all works. But we have an update. Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN this week that he wants the automated ball strike system, as they call it, implemented in 2024. So he's got to get the players on board. He's got to get the fans on board. He's got two years to do it. A fully automated system would, if you didn't listen to that May 31st show, send the call to the umpire over an iPhone. And then he would say it out loud. They're trying that in the minor leagues right now. They might do it that way in Major League Baseball, but the Verge pointed out the other option they have would be to make it an appealable thing. So the humans would keep calling balls and strikes, but you would have a certain number of challenges every game to say, I think that was outside. And then the algorithm would weigh in and have the final word. And that's effectively what they do in tennis, right? That is called by a line judge. And then you can appeal that. And then they will show the motion graphic of exactly where the computer said it hit, which I think is good.  This league, man, they love doing things about five, six years after it would have made sense to really do it when people were paying attention. Yeah. I mean, never, I am not a big fan of the, why didn't you do this before criticism? Because it usually comes when they've done something. Yes. You know, and it's like, well, they're doing it now. Okay. They didn't do it before. The past is the past. I go, I'll mark McGuire on it, but, but I do like this.  I know some people argue like, oh, it's the beauty of the game. You get used to the empire and everybody's on the same page. Hey, how about this? How about if everybody's on the same page all the time at every game? Like I, I, I'm not going to rule out the fact that different stadiums, even if it's just psychological, not real, might be perceived as having different strike zones. It goes guarantee you that's going to happen. Well, that strike zone at the Coors field is a little wider, but it would be great if you didn't have to guess every time. Like who's behind the plate? You know, I do think it would regulate the umpire strike zone into something a little bit more normal if they knew they were going to be embarrassed by a challenge call. It's actually an interesting strategy thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. At our mail bag, a big Jim, the trade nerd wrote some excellent additional insight in our discord related to the story on shipping from Bloomberg that we talked about on Wednesday. Jim writes regarding security risks. Some of the top ocean lines in your company or some of the top ocean line in your company are working to try to secure their internal networks, including shipboard operations. However, the majority of those ocean providers that we have now are using least vessels and those least charter operations that do not necessarily follow the direct guidelines as an owner vessel by the carrier. There's also a question of which standards are they supposed to follow outside the country's waters when it comes to specific lockdown of data. The WTO statement and their guidelines are very basic at best. The World Shipping Council has advised stringent requirements that go beyond the WTO requirements. And I would expect that those are going to be more likely followed as it is a US and European group. Now, couple this with the current labor negotiations going on on the West Coast, round negotiations breaking down across the United States, a backlog of cargo that needs to move inland so much so that certain container ports have an excess of 5,000 to 10,000 containers that cannot move inland because of shortages of various types mixing in a hint of hacker and you've got a wonderful recipe for disaster. But hey, who knows, just my two cents. That was a good, that was a good imitation of big gyms. That's just my two cents there at the end. Thank you, Jim. He wrote all that and more in the general channel of the DTS Discord if you want to go and read that and ask him some questions about it too. I'm sure he'd be happy to answer. Also, Bodie, who has his own kilowatt podcast about electric vehicles, loved the discussion on the cost of electric vehicles. We had a Monday show. Wrote earlier this month, Ford's president and CEO Jim Farley was interviewed at the Bernstein 38th Annual Strategic Decisions Conference. Farley thinks that we're going to see a price war in the EV space at the $25,000 price point with a vehicle build around $18,000. Ford and other automakers will compete on the initial price on the vehicle but use a form of shared vehicle ownership and software upgrades and or services to sweeten their profits. If you don't know what that means, shared vehicle doesn't mean you like you and five people own it. It's kind of like what Tesla does with their full self driving, where you pay $12,000 to access the feature enhanced autopilot just came back for $6,000. Bodie says I was pleased to hear Sarah Rich and Roger talk about the Chevy Bolt as an alternative to more expensive EVs. The Bolt is a good offering and with the 2023 Chevy Bolt having an estimated range of 259 miles and an MSRP of $25,600, this would be a pretty sweet option for someone wanting to get into an EV without paying a ton of money. Having said all that, if the Bolt doesn't light your fire, Bodie's got two other EVs in the $25,000 to $30,000 price range for you to consider the 2002 or the 2022, not 2002, 2022 Nissan Leaf S range of 149 miles, MSRP of $27,800, and the 2023 Mini Cooper will have a very modest range of 110 miles, but if you just need to get around town, that's plenty and cost you $30,750 according to car and driver. Thank you, Bodie, for that. Appreciate the extra info. Thanks, Boats. Yeah, and I really needed to get below $20,000 myself. I thought about buying a used Leaf because I could get it for below $20,000, but then I read that some of those older Leafs that you buy used, you know, had battery issues and when you're buying them used, the battery's already old, so if they're going to have battery issues, it's more likely. And so I'm waiting for a car that's below $20,000 new. Well, actually, these days, I'll just buy it new because used cars are right now more expensive than new cars. But yeah, if we ever go back to a world where used cars are cheaper, then I'd buy the cheaper one. Maybe one day, Tom. Maybe one day. Well, Justin, I would normally let you talk about something you've got going on, but do you mind if I say something I've got going on first? You go, sir. This was partially named by you. It was a brainstorming session with you that where we came up with the name A Word with Tom Merritt. I'm going to do a talk show. It's me and a guest using a single word to launch a conversation about how we think about the world. Not what we think. This isn't a deep dive explanation. This is a conversation about how do we deal with all the information out there? My first guest will be tomorrow Andrew Heaton talking about the word tribalism. And you can go subscribe to it in all of your favorite podcast apps or go directly to a wordpodcast.com. That is a wordpodcast.com. Go check it out. Let me know what you think. Two of my favorite erudite tall bearded co-hosts. You and Andrew Heaton. Yes. I promise that the guests will get progressively less like me as the show continues. Andrew Heaton was speaking of Andrew Heaton. He is also on a show that I do. He is a permanent co-host on We're Not Wrong featuring myself and Jen Briney in the episode that just came out today. We talk about the idea of the illegitimate Supreme Court, the testimony in the January 6th hearings and the summer of pain at the airport and whether or not we are going to see airline CEOs in front of Congress before the end of the summer. Something that you might want to listen to when you're delayed at an airport during July 4th weekend, which is coming up. We are not wrong available anywhere you get podcasts. Bring the pain on indeed. Hey, big thanks to our brand new boss, Rick, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Rick. Aw, geez, Rick. Aw, geez, Rick. Maybe Morty will be tomorrow. But for now, we're very happy to have Rick. Thank you, Rick. If you're Morty or someone else, go back as patreon.com slash DTNS and you could be featured on tomorrow's show as well as get all the perks and cool things that come with getting the patron, including like a direct feed. I had an editor's desk today for the folks at the associate producer level and up talking about my new mixer and all that sort of stuff. You also get good day internet, a longer version of the show available at patreon.com slash DTNS. We are live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. Back tomorrow with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta illustrating. Good to have him back. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


Hello, and welcome to the STM32WL training session. This session is organized to provide you with the most important information to ensure that you can develop your application as easily as possible. You will find a technical description of all of the STM32WB modules including peripherals and development tools organized into specific sections system, memory, security, analog, peripherals, watchdog, and timers, and ecosystem. You can browse each section separately and learn about each module in the order of your choice and at your convenience. This session also allows you to search directly for a keyword and you will have direct access to the sections covering this information. Now let's take a closer look at the new STM32WL series of wireless microcontrollers. The STM32WL microcontroller is a new series of wireless MCUs with a built-in sub-gigahertz radio. It is an evolution of the well-known and market-leading STM32L4 ultra-low power series of MCUs extended with new peripherals to support the widest range of use cases and enriched with additional low power functions to improve the overall power efficiency. The STM32WL5 product line comes with a dual-core architecture made of an ARM Cortex-M4 core, a Cortex-M0 plus, and advanced security features. As you will see in subsequent training modules, the STM32WL series is also available through the STM32WLE product line, which is a single-core product based on ARM Cortex-M4 only. The advantage of such architecture is its full openness and multi-modulation capabilities, enabling users to flexibly implement any compatible sub-gigahertz protocol. Indeed, the four available modulations, namely LORA, GFSK, GMSK, and BPSK, make the STM32WL series suitable for LORA-WAN, SIGFOX, or WMBUS implementations, for instance. As the system is fully open, such modulations can also be used for any custom implementation of proprietary protocols or for many other standardized protocols. Users will always be free to implement whatever protocol they need on the STM32WL series. Thanks to its rich set of features, the STM32WL can support a wide range of use cases from utilities to smart homes, from logistics to industrial monitoring, or any other IoT applications. This slide summarizes the eight key points that make a difference for the selection of the STM32WL microcontroller in a new project. With multi-modulation, total openness, advanced security features, and a large ecosystem, STM32WL is the de facto choice for long-range sub-gigahertz IoT applications. STM32WL is actually the first and sole LORA-enabled system on chip in the world, which finally leads to massive cost savings for device makers. The STM32WL series benefits from ST's long experience in developing STM32 microcontrollers, as well as a rich ecosystem based on its hardware and software tools already used throughout the entire STM32MCU family. Now, let's get started with the training. Do not hesitate to follow the events and news about this product on our website at www.st.com slash STM32WL. Enjoy!


Without any further ado, please help me welcome Tom Killian. The coast is the meeting place of the two great realms of the world, of the physical world that we humans inhabit. It's the meeting of the land and the sea. And we're really land creatures. And the poets that write about the coast almost always are looking from the perspective of the land out at the sea. And Gary said, well, what about poetry of the sea? What about looking at the seaside of this divide and trying to find something that talks about that? And he has one poem that I think he'll read a little bit later that he wrote out to sea. Because Gary spent a lot of time going back and forth across the Pacific on merchant vessels. That made me start to look at the poetry of the coast and think, are these people really, these poets really investigating what it really means to be on the coast in terms of the sea? And when we look at the poetry of the coast, one poet stands out, it seems like, above all the rest. And every time I asked people or my publisher, Hayday Press and Berkeley, sent out queries to all their poet and poet scholar friends, well, what do you think is important? Who are the poets of the coast? Inevitably, everybody came back saying, well, you've got to start with Robinson Jeffers. So I started thinking about Robinson Jeffers, which turned out to be a good place to start with my own interest in the poetry of the coast. And also, it turned out to be a good place to start with Gary's experience of the California coast. Because I was surprised at first to learn how important Robinson Jeffers had been to Gary. Jeffers, I don't know if many of you know his poetry. I'm going to read a little bit of it tonight. He's a somewhat an archaic figure in California literature. I mean, he wrote in the 1920s and 30s. He kind of fell into disfavor in the 1940s. Was resurrected by the environmental movement after he died in 1962 as a great poet of the natural world of the California coast, especially down around Carmell and Big Sur. But he did some things that nobody else did. And one of them was to really give you a feeling of the importance and the great expanse of this other side of the sea land divide. What it's like out there in the sea, thinking about what the sea brings to the land. And so he's really truly is the foremost poet still, the California coast. I think everybody that writes about the coast, that's trying to explore it as a place, as a natural world, not just about human ideas about their lives on the coast, but trying to get into the place and inhabit this landscape world of the coast. They go back and look at Jeffers poetry. So we're going to read a little bit of that tonight and some other things. And I'm going to pull out some of my notes so I can get started with giving you a bit of an impression of what's in this book that's coming in a few weeks or on a slow boat from China. So in the beginning of the book, I want to talk about the sea as the wildest place in our natural world. It's a place that's the hardest for us to experience. The poetry of the coast springs from the spectacular collision of land and water, the great elemental realms of our planet. The water realm is one of movement. Currents, winds, and clouds streaming in a great arc across the northern Pacific to spin and flow into California's coast. The land, built by much slower movements, is to our fleeting perception, the stable element, the rock on which the sea breaks, the hard edge whose contours define the vast moving plane of the watery hemisphere. Poets of the coast like to remind us that our life essence comes from the sea, but we are not of the sea. Our human nature, our powers, are indibutably of the land. We need look no further than our own bodies and contrast them with the physical forms of our distant cousins, the sea mammals, to understand the utterly different evolutionary exigencies of the realms of water and of land. For us, the sea is the ultimate wild, and there has been no greater challenge to our human imagination and ingenuity than learning to live and travel on the watery surface of our planet. As is so often true in the physical and mental worlds we inhabit, it is the transition from one realm to another that is most fraught. The edge where sea meets land, the coast, is where we face true wilderness. In the California coast, this, you might sort of round it off to 1,000 mile coast when you include all the ins and outs and saltwater estuaries. That runs from the Mexican to the Oregon border is a very wild coast indeed, especially when seen from the sea. And the first European explorers that came by ship were very put off by this coast. It's one reason that California wasn't settled for 200 years after Europeans had settled the west coast of Mexico. It's very difficult to get here by sea. The currents from the north, the winds from the north, the cliffs that face much of the coast, the huge surf, the fogs that obscure the few places where you could get into a nice sheltered bay, like particularly the Golden Gate in San Francisco Bay, which was discovered from the land, as I'm sure you all remember from your California history classes. All those things really made the California coast a particularly wild shore that was very forbidding. And it still is that way if you try to row along it or sail a sailboat that isn't equipped with a motor to back it up. I've rowed along some parts of the coast and it's a scary place. Of course, now it's a place where people like to have a lot of fun. The impact zone is where the great water sports of surfing and diving for abalone and fishing, inshore fishing bring a lot of people. But the coast also is a place that when people were trying to make their livelihood that way and get their sustenance from the sea, the coast was a very dangerous and wild place. A lot of people have tried to encompass the California coast. It's a huge place. It's unknowable to any person in their lifetime in an intimate way. We can only know some little parts of it. But there have been some really good books lately. This project, doing this project on the California's Wild Edge, the coast, got me to look at a lot of these other projects. And particularly, The Golden Shore by David Helvarg and Philip Fradkin's The Left Coast are real recent books that try to encompass the whole coast. In this project, what I wanted to do, I decided, was really focus on what I call the poetic history of the coast. And juxtaposed with my woodcut images, a lot of different poetry from different eras and some prose writing as well, particularly from early experiences of people that walked along the coast back in the 1700s and 1800s, rode horses along the coast in the early 1900s, who were really getting an intimate view of the coast, one that's harder and harder to get along the whole coast today because there's roads and cities and so much urbanization, although there's still a lot of places that you can walk along the coast. And if you ride a bicycle, of course, you can kind of travel at that same slow pace. But the essence of this project is pairing what I call the silent poetry of my visual art and the verbal poetry of human experience to create a poetic history of the coast. Where I got started on my idea of thinking about the coast of California was when I went to UC Santa Cruz in the early 1970s, a great coastal town, sort of the quintessential California coastal town where northern and southern California come together in one little place. It's got the sunny south-facing shore like southern California and the beach culture like southern California. And then back up the canyons and in the mountains, it's got the redwood forests and the intense rainfall of northern California. So it all comes together, the logging culture of the Anglos, the old ranching culture of the original Spanish settlers. And Santa Cruz, when I got there, also happened to have some people that were really deeply involved in the poetry of the coast, particularly William Everson, who was my teacher at the Lyme kiln press that he helped to establish in the basement of the library at UC Santa Cruz. And he printed these amazing fine-pressed books. And one of my introductions defined printing and turning poetry and art into sort of a serial set of images linked with word pictures came from working there at the Lyme kiln press with Everson. And he was involved when I first met him in this incredible project of Robinson Jeffers' work called Granite and Cyprus, a big handmade folio book that's still considered one of the most beautiful fine-pressed books of the United States in the last century. And it introduced me to Jeffers' poetry. So what a wonderful introduction to his poetry. And it made me want to do something like that, being young and sort of naive and thinking that, well, if I see something that I like, I should try it too. So I came up with this book, The Coast of California, a big folio book that had my sort of sophomore poetry juxtaposed with some pretty nice prints. By then I was already doing some good artwork. In 1979, that's sort of the first iteration of this book in a lot of ways. And it was all done down there in Santa Cruz. Here's a classic view of that city with the old church on the ruins of the Spanish mission and in the background, the church of fun at the boardwalk. So I tried my hand at combining poetry and art. But I began to realize that what I really wanted to do was use other people's poetry with my art. Most of all, I wanted to use my poet ideal, get some of his poetry in there. And eventually I was able to. And that's Gary Snyder, whose poetry I've always considered to be the touchstone of my way of looking at this California land and culture that we live in. But I liked a lot of poetry. I even liked romantic 19th century poetry. I liked Lord Byron. And I liked the California poets who thought Byron was so great. Like Ina Colbrith, the first poet laureate of the United States, I mean of California, who got her crown of laurel at the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition right here in San Francisco. And not only was she the first poet laureate, she also was the first woman to ever be asked to read the commencement poem at a university graduation way back in the 1870s at the University of California when it was just getting started. So I thought I would start by juxtaposing a poem of Ina Colbrith with some of my prints about the beach. And it's called The Seashell. And she wrote it in the early 1880s.  A long wave rippled up the strand. She flashed a white hand through the spray and plucked a seashell from the sand and laughed, oh, doubting heart, have peace when faith of mine shall fail to thee. This fond remembering shell will cease to sing its love, the sea. Ah, well, sweet summer's past and gone. And love, perchance, shuns wintry weather. And so the pretty deers are flown on lightsome, careless wings together. I smile, this little pearly lined pink veined shell she gave to me with foolish, faithful lips to find still sings its love, the sea. So 19th century. But you know, English loves that lilting line. We may look back on it and go, well. So San Francisco, where Gary and I both were born, is a city that's had a lot of poets, from Ina Colbrith to the San Francisco Renaissance in the 1940s. And one of the great poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, as they say, almost unknown today and in his day, even less well known, was Jack Spicer, who Gary introduced me to, as he has introduced me to many poets. And Jack Spicer wrote a piece that has a different sort of resonance to it than the seashell. This ocean, humiliating in its disguises, tougher than anything. No one listens to poetry. The ocean does not mean to be listened to, a drop, or crash of water. It means nothing. It is bread and butter, pepper and salt, the death that young men hope for aimlessly. It pounds the shore, white and aimless signals. No, one listens to poetry. He's pretty good, isn't he? So then we have another really wonderful poet in San Francisco. I'll call him the poet laureate of San Francisco, although I'm sure he's declined the honor, if I can't quite remember. And that's Gary's good friend, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This is about the changing light. The changing light at San Francisco is none of your east coast light, none of your pearly light of Paris. The light of San Francisco is a sea light, an island light, and the light of fog blanketing the hills, drifting at night through the Golden Gate to lie on the city at dawn. And then the housey and late mornings after the fog burns off and the sun paints white houses with the sea light of grease and sharp clean shadows making the town look like it had just been painted. But the wind comes up at four o'clock, sweeping the hills, and then the veil of light of early evening. And then another scrim when the new night fog floats in, and in the veil of light the city drifts anchorless upon the ocean. So over the last decade or two, Gary and I have woven poetry and art together in a few different books. We've explored the high country of the Sierra Nevada and the single ridge of Mount Tammel Pius. And these projects were based mostly on foot wandering over these landscapes and notes and sketches that we made during these foot wandering, hiking, backpacking expeditions. But the coast of California, of course, is quite a different landscape world to explore, close to 1,000 miles, depending on you measure it. And though I've bicycled along a lot of it and hiked a bit of it, it would take more than a lifetime to explore the whole coast. But Gary and I have both collected our creative artifacts. From quite a bit of the coast, it turns out. Gary has his many poems, which you'll find in the book. And he's going to read some tonight. And he also has a lot of journal entries. He has kept incredible journals throughout his life, really the raw material for so much of his poems, just like I've kept sketchbooks. And I have a collection of about 60 finished wood and lino cut prints, some of which you can see in the gallery there. Yet to create a book that begins to explore the whole coast, we had to go beyond our own artistic productions and gather poems and writings of many other people, reflecting the centuries of recorded human experience and artistic exploration of this coastal world. I looked for accounts of foot-paced coastal journeys and poems that explored what it is like to inhabit the land seascape of the coast. And I spent time with a lot of historical writing. Juan Crespi kept an incredible diary with the Portola expedition. A man named Joseph Smeaton Chase rode his horse from Mexico to Canada during the 1910-11 and kept a fantastic journal. Even Jaime de Angelo, who lived down in Big Sur for many years and also in Berkeley, was a horseback poet of the coast. And in one of his journals, I found this little excerpt that talks about what it's like to travel at horse pace or foot pace compared to what we do today. Nowadays, de Angelo said, when you average 60 miles an hour on smooth highways, people do not realize what traveling horseback meant. A horse does not walk much faster than a man. I must have owned some 150 horses in my time. And I can only remember three who averaged a steady six-mile-an-hour gate under the saddle. So we find it hard to imagine walking the whole coast of California. And that's why I've turned to so many different poets who've explored their own parts of it. Now, the great poet that I talked about earlier, Robinson Jeffers, really was a walking poet, too. He built this stone house on Carmel Point back around the time of the First World War. And then he walked from that area, which was all very lightly inhabited. And there was just a wagon road down the coast and a trail into Big Sur in much of the teens and 20s. He walked it year after year from Carmel all down to Big Sur. And his poems have, in their long, resonant lines, both that foot-paste cadence and the deep landscape knowledge that only a lifetime of walking a place can bring. Jeffers also, more than anyone else, searched for a sea-centered point of view on the coast. I tried finding it in some of the early Spanish explorers' diaries, particularly in Richard Henry Dana's two years before the mast. You can find a great sea-centered point of view. But Jeffers was trying to just imagine it from that edge of the sea that he could see crashing into the rocks below his house day after day, what Gary calls California's wet edge at its wildest. And Jeffers shows his way of looking at the sea. For example, in this excerpt from the poem Cador, he wrote in 1928 talking about the sea. It dreams in the deepest sleep. It remembers the storm last month or feels the far storm off Unalaska and the lash of sea rain. It is never mournful but wise and takes the magical misrule of the steep world with strong tolerance. Its depth is not moved. Inevitably, this project is mostly concerned with the landward side of the great sea land boundary. The wet western edge is where California's coastal poetry gets its power. And this project draws its energy and particularly from four great meetings of land and sea where points of rock thrust into the deepest and wildest parts of the sea. The bookends of the coast that this book is mostly concerned of and most of my art and Gary's poetry is about are point conception on the south where the coast turns eastward and Southern California begins. So from there, northward to Cape Mendocino, which is the farthest point that most of the early sailing expeditions from Mexico were able to gain and where the coast really begins to change again into an even wilder and stormier coast than it is south of Cape Mendocino. So these are the bookends of the coast and then there's the two great poetic touchstones of the coast, not as big in terms of their boundary defining different zones of the coastal landscape but very important in the poetic works that we've found on the coast. And the first one is point Lobos, which is really the world of Robinson Jeffers. And I'm going to read a few things from the point Lobos world of Jeffers at the end of this presentation. And the other one is point Reyes, where Gary has spent a lot of time and which Gary really has gotten to know on foot the way he likes to know a landscape and he's going to read quite a few poems about point Reyes. So just before we turned over to Gary, let me talk a little bit about the other two bookends of the coast. Point Conception. It's the boundary between Southern and Northern California. And to sailors, it was always a very difficult place to get around. It once took Richard Henry Dana five weeks to sail from Santa Barbara up to San Francisco Bay and he sailed back down the coast from Monterey to Santa Barbara in 24 hours. He said about Point Conception, Point Conception, the Cape Horn of California, where it begins to blow the first of January and blows all the year round. Now Cape Mendocino is the other great sea mark and there it is, that's Cape Mendocino. It's one that a lot of people don't see because it takes a long time to get out to Cape Mendocino on very rough little roads. The farthest point of much early exploration, still in a relatively wild area, although it's been settled by ranchers for a long time, there is a poet up there of Cape Mendocino, a friend of Gary's. Gary introduced him to me, his work, and then I went up and met him where he lives in Eureka, Jerry Martin. And he spent a decade crafting a series of poems, a little jewel of a coastal chapbook called The Rocks Along the Coast, and I'm going to read the poem of that name from this little book by Jerry Martin and show you some slides of the Northern Coast, the Mendocino Coast. The Rocks Along the Coast, they were once like us, like we were, a part of the continent. The ones close in get to keep their green, sometimes a tree, a few birds. Farther out, they wear away, and at certain tides go under. But in some opposite, equal justice. At a point not too close in and not too far out, to even the balance, they are added on. Barnacles, limpets, blown sand, maybe a seed in criminal droppings. It could be the wearing down winds out, leaving them stranded in their own by the main body's day to day breakdown and retreat, or they are thrust up and will remain by the sheer memory of the edge of the continent going over the edge of another continent. It has to do with love and how love has everything and nothing to do with islands, how it takes so much to be ocean. And so little to be rock. There are no islands left along this coast. All the rocks have names. So now I'm gonna turn it over to Gary to read about that other great point on the coast. Point rays. I'm gonna do two things. I'm gonna first read a brief prose piece about point rays and a kind of a memoir of my own experiences of the Pacific coast and off from up in Oregon, clear down to here, which is actually the territory I've been covering for many years of my life, as is recorded in the poem in Mountains and Rivers Without End called Night Highway 99, in which you can learn all about out of hitchhike on Highway 99, which is no longer there. Now it's I-5, and you can't do much on that. But this is a little piece I did called, and I did it for Tom. He gets a lot of stuff out of us. Discovering point rays. Tamal, hey, yeah. That's the coast miwak word for it. Tamal means bay, right? Hey, yeah, point. As a new graduate student at Berkeley, down from Oregon, I found the warm and sunny climate confusing. All through October, that first year, it stayed rain-free, and I was tempted to go out walking or bicycling or exploring around every day because in the Pacific Northwest, you would not normally waste a good fall day by staying inside. I wasn't keeping up with my classical Chinese courses, and I realized I'd have to change my standards. Also, I had, for several seasons, spent summers working in the forests and mountains of the West, and winters skiing and doing mountaineering whenever possible. In coastal California, the snow fields seemed too far away, so I turned to the local hills and forests, Mount Tamal Pius and vicinity, and finally the ocean coast. In Portland, Oregon, a half-days drive to the coast was a real project, and though the whole beach seemed open and public, getting through to the waves then required wading estuaries or slogging over sand dunes, and a lot of close-in places needed trespassing to get to the surf. As a high school student, I couldn't afford it, and as a college student, I couldn't spare the time, but in the mild California winters, warm even during heavy storms, I found myself heading north to the Point Reyes Inverness area, and finally all the way out to the windswept foggy hills over the Bishop Pine and cows. My father had told me of a few dairies out there going back to when the coastal strip was the only place that the cattle could graze year-round without irrigation. Many early ranches were started by Azorian, which, who were Portuguese settlers, and Hawaii and Hawaiian ranches was all Azorian cowboys in the beginning. Eventually I discovered an accessible and isolated beach down a steep trail toward the northern point of the point where you parked up above. This beach had bluffs and cliffs behind it and big rocks to give shelter from high wind. Good sand and surf, but not so shallow that you couldn't swim. I made a deep, almost sea mammal connection with the Pacific here. Learning to tumble in the surf, dive down deep, come up behind, roll with the weight of the wave, then slide out, never mind the cold, in and out, thrashed and whipped about, and luckily somehow surviving that power. I visited this remote place many times.  Friends standing there, the fresh plucked steamed mussels and the cheap white wine, French bread, sandy nudity, strong legs and lungs, what more could one ask? And the good thing about modest polyester sleeping bags is you can shake the sand right out. It was an alternative to mountains and snow, a place to get to in a reasonable time and camp undisturbed for days and sometimes party, half the night talking politics, poetry and dance, singing in a tiny circle of free spirited friends. Later, as a Buddhist monastic beginner in Japan, this was what I missed most. So a few poems about all that. I never pulled all these poems together in one place because I just didn't. But now with Tom, I have to think about it. This is a little poem called Point Raise. Sandpipers at the margin in the moon, bright fan of the flat creek on dark sea sand, rock boom beyond. The work of centuries and wars, a car is parked a mile above where the dirt road ends. In naked, gritty sand, I stinging salty driftwood campfire smoke out far. It all begins again. Sandpipers chasing the shiny surf in the moonlight by a fire at the beach. I wish you all that experience and it's free. This is one of my favorite poems because I don't usually write formal poems and when I do, I like it. And this is blocked out as you will hear briefly and formally, even with proper rhymes and a trick or two in it. It's called the North Coast.  We passed over hills in the night and walked along beaches by day. Sage in the rain or the sand, spattered by new falling rain. That ocean was too cold to swim, but we did it again and again. A Chinese friend translated this poem into Mandarin and then got confused and wrote me a question about the line, Sage in the rain or the sand. And she says, does that mean a wise person sitting in the rain? I said, wise people in California don't do that. I got to ended up going to sea for over two years. I still have my retired national maritime union card and I still have my, I guess it's still legal, Coast Guard Siemens papers, but boy, did it take a lot of work to get Siemens papers. And then once I had them, after I got Siemens papers when I was 17 or 18, when I was ready to go to Japan at the age of 25, my passport was withheld. And what I found out was that my Siemens papers had been obtained in New York City at the hiring hall of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, which I was friendly to. And the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union was totally dominated by the Communist Party, which I did not know at that time. All I know is that they had a great sign on the wall that said $100 fine for any racism or any other kinds of comments that are denigrating to your fellow workers. And a second time of being charged this, you will be kicked out of the union. There is no Marine Cooks and Stewards Union anymore. That one went down. So working out at sea and traveling across the Pacific, this is my one little thing about the Pacific that I'm slipping in here, not the coast at all. Now you know about, I'll tell you something about the Pacific Ocean if you didn't know it already. Its average depth is five miles. It is a huge quantity of water. Longitude 170 degrees west latitude 15 degrees north. For Ruth Sasaki. This realm, half sky, half water.  Streaks of glowing fish. The high half, the high half black, too, lit with scats of stars. The thrum of the diesel engine twirling 60 foot driveshafts of twin trees. Shape of a boat and floating over a mile of living seawater, under way, always westward, dropping land behind as we go east. No, dropping land behind us to the east. Brought only these brown booby birds that trail a taste of landfall feathers in the craw, hatch rock barons, old migrations, flicking foam off stern into thoughts, sailing jellyfish by day, phosphorescent light at night. Shift of current on the ocean floor, food chains climbing to the whale. Ship hanging on this membrane, infinitely tiny in the heights, the deep. Airbound beings in the realm of wind or water holding hand to wing or fin, swimming westward to the farther shore. This is what I wanted, water and the world in so much crossing, oceans of truth, seas of doctrine, salty real seas of our westering world, spray of lonely slick on deck, sleepy between two lands, always a floating world. I go below. Well now, moving just briefly into one more territory here. The view from the ocean. And this is from my latest book that's just out. I don't know if Tom even knows about this point or just barely knows about it. I've been thinking about wildfires. I think about drought too, but I don't worry about it. Wildfires have always been present. It was not human beings who started burning the landscape. It was burning on its own with the help of Mother Nature for millennia, for millions of years. The average, the estimate of the climate people or the NOOA, what is it? 20,000 lightning strikes every summer in Sierra Nevada of California. You don't have to wait for people to start the fires. So it's not true. What they say in the Forest Service, only you can stop forest fires. Absolutely not true. So that made me think about how it looked several million years ago to have a fire going. And here's a point about it called wildfire news. For millions, for hundreds of millions of years, there were fires, fire after fire, fires raging forests or jungle, giant lizards dashing away, big necks sticking out from the sea, looking at the land in surprise, fire after fire, lightning strikes by the thousands just like today. Volcanoes erupting, fire flowing over the land. Huge sequoia, two foot thick fireproof bark. Fire pines, their cones, loved the heat. How long? How long to say? That's how they covered the continent. 10 locks of millennia or more. I have to slow down my mind. Slow down my mind. Rome was built in a day. And I'll finish on this note because imagining a beginning now to imagine and live with that consciousness of the West Coast being the edge of the ocean and remembering that we live on the edge of the Eastern Pacific. And I try to tell my friends in Asia that I'm going on across to the Eastern Pacific again when I'm heading back to Turtle Island, North America and all that goes with that. So I was asked to make a little statement about reinventing North America by some humanistic bureau. And I wrote this, living on the Western edge of Turtle Island, living on the Western edge of Turtle Island in Shasta Nation where the human beings are native, Euro-African, African, Asian, Mestizo, Pacific and Nuevo Americanos, Turtle Islanders where the dominant language is still Americano edge of the Eastern Pacific in the Homo Sapiens year, 50,000. Thank you. So I'm gonna end with some Robinson Jeffers. And he's talking about fire as well. He wrote some poems about Big Sur burning. This is his realm, Point Lobos. This is the view from his tour house at Sunset. And he wrote a poem that's very long and I'm not gonna read it all. And it deals with the great themes of his 19th century Euro-American worldview of manifest destiny, the imperial United States moving westward as the Europeans had before them across the Atlantic and ending up on this shore, this continent's end as he calls it in another poem. But here he's exploring it as maybe the finishing point of one race pushing on a torch past from hand to hand from Asia to Europe to the new world and ending on California's coast. It's called the Torchbearer's Race and I've taken the liberty to excerpt some parts that go with this print of mine that has such a fiery look to it. The Torchbearer's Race here is the world's end. Dark and enormous rolls the surf down on the mystical tide lines under the cliffs at Moonset. Rolls the surf of the far storms at the heart of the ocean. The old granite breaks into white torches, the heavy-shouldered children of the wind, our ancient wanderings, west from the world's birth. What sea-bound breaking shall flame up torch like? I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore. The very turn of the world, the long migrations end. The sun goes on, but we have come to an end. The Torchbearer's Race, it is run in a dusk when the emptied racer drops unseen at the end of his course. A fresh hand snatches the hilt of the light. The torch flies onward, though the runner die. Not a runner knows where it carries fire to. Hand kisses hand in the dark, the torch passes. Oh flame, oh beauty and shower of beauty. There is yet one ocean and then no more. God whom you shine to walks there naked on the final Pacific, not in a man's form. The torch answered, have I kindled a morning? For again, this old world's end is the gate of a world fire new of your wild future, wild as a hawk's dream. And he explores this world that's questing up into the heavens and into outer space. And finally, the Torchbearer falls on what he calls the gate sill of the universe beyond the earth's confines and he closes saying, remember that the life of mankind is like the life of a man, a flutter from darkness to darkness across the bright hair of a fire. Oh, wow. What was the question? How did you meet? Well, it was at a party. That's right. As usual. You know, I met Gary, but he doesn't remember. I think I first saw Gary when I was a teenager. He was with a traveling circus of wonderful poets at Glide Memorial. Oh, that's right. Doing some benefit, maybe for the Zen Center or something. I don't know. Well, that was before the days of the Zen Center. Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, and then I saw him again at UC Santa Cruz in, oh, the winter of 1972. I think he came to read there. He had a new book out called Turtle Island and he was reading a book about the power of the natural world. And suddenly there was a great clap of thunder. All the lights went out and stayed out on the whole campus. And as we all went out into the beautiful night the snow was falling through the redwood trees. So. That was a spectacular night, yeah. Yeah, that was pretty amazing. I don't think I've ever seen it snow since in Santa Cruz up there in the redwoods at UCSC. I still run on to people who remember that reading that night and the failure of the lights and the thunder and the lightning. And the timing was impeccable. And the copper, and some of them are on the East Coast. Even. Well, they remember it even more then. That's their best memory probably. So I'm glad I've got a moment here to add something. The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union sign on the wall. I didn't get it quite right. Baiting, the word was baiting, right?  Those three things written in big letters on the wall and saying you would get kicked out of the union if you kept it up. And that was in 1947. Would I do what? Well, this is not a very popular thing for me to say, but I don't think that there's much point in like worrying about the drought because first of all, it's a social construct. It's a human problem. It's not that mother nature is producing less rain. In the 1880s, if we had the rainfall that we've had in the last couple of years, people would not have called it a drought. There were a lot of businesses, a lot of industries in some big cities. In the 1880s already, San Francisco, Los Angeles and so forth, but human beings were not requiring and using nearly as much water then as they are now. And so they said a few dry years and that is a better way to speak about the drought at this point than to call it a drought because it seems like nature is taking the hit and that it's short changing our present gigantic overpopulation and overdeveloped world and not giving it all the water it needs. But it's true that the snowpack of the Sierra is what supplies agriculture in the Great Central Valley. Where I live, we're still getting plenty of water from our wells up in the northern Sierra Nevada. And that's true all across Northern California. The wells are holding up if you get up into the mountains a bit. And so you have to go place by place around the state to actually know where there's some problem with water and where there's not. But the groundwater in the Great Central Valley is overdrawn. Just like the groundwater in Arizona around Phoenix and Tucson is way overdrawn down over 2000 feet deep now to get water out of the desert around Tucson. So California doesn't have a big problem. It just has an attitude problem. The Southwest is the one and I'm going to a big land use panel in Las Vegas in September where they're going, I know exactly what they've got a bunch of people that they're paying good money to to come and say the federal government should turn over a lot of the public land in Nevada and let us go down as deep as we want to go to get more water. And that's all BLM land, public land. People's land, not government land, people's land. So that's a real argument. We're gonna have some real arguments. And since I'm being a prophet right now, I'll go on a little bit farther and say, the real possibility and not a very good possibility but it would work for a while will be to make a big pipeline from the Columbia River to the Southwest and that will supply it with more water than it needs for a long time. By that time, maybe we'll have a new climate. Gary, did you get a chance ever to meet Robertson Jeffers? No, I never did. Okay, no. Did you, were you moving around in the kind of same, well, you were in Big Sur sometimes. I was down the coast a few times. But you know, I knew that he didn't wanna see young poets who with foolish questions. And I wasn't about to knock on his door and impose on him. William Stafford, you know the name of William Stafford. Wonderful poet, now dead. William Stafford told me how much he had admired and had thought, and he's from the Midwest originally, how much he had thought about Robertson Jeffers as a young man. So he finally, he chiked all the way from the Midwest to Carmel. And then he walked down and sat on the rocks right near Jeffers stone house when it didn't have any suburban housing around it, I hope. And he said, I sat there for three days looking at the house. And I saw people moving around inside of it. Then I decided not to try to see him. I understand that. But Jaime de Angelo, of whom you will hear more later in his book, was, they say was one of the very few people that Robertson Jeffers would open the door for day or night anytime and love to talk to him. They had a good time together. They first met, I know how they first met. Yeah, do you? Yeah, well, I know the story. I don't know, it's true. Well, that's all we've got. Yeah, and the story was that Jaime de Angelo was carrying home a stake from the butcher shop to his house when he ran into Robertson Jeffers on a trail in Carmel because Carmel just had little paths through the woods in the teens when they both lived there. And he recognized Jeffers and he invited him over to his house and their women partners got along well and they started to make dinner together and something happened to some of the vegetables they were cooking and they burned them and they threw them out the back door and then they threw the potatoes out. Then they fed the steak to the dogs and they had a really great evening. But they didn't mention that they threw out the wine. So, well for it.