All right, so welcome to the middle third of Biology 1B. In this section, we'll be covering evolution. Basically, I can't cover the entire field in one third of a course. 13 lectures is the number of lectures we'll have. But I will try to hit the highlights some of the more interesting aspects of evolution that are of the most relevance to the general public, for instance, in medicine. So a little bit about the course. First of all, the instructor, that's me. My name is John Holsenbeck. Well, I guess you see it over there. No, you don't. That's unusual, isn't it? I guess you can look at it on the screen as well, but I'll let them sort that out. So I thought my name was on the screen too, but evidently not. My name is John Holsenbeck. Like I said, you'll have me for the next 13 lectures. I do have office hours, and they're going to be held directly after the lecture. So they're going to be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, from 9 to 10 AM. And the room is 2013, 2013 BLSB. If you don't know where that is, it's just down on the north side of the building. That said, you can also drop by my office. So if you can't make it to my office hours, you can either email me, and we can try to schedule an appointment, but better yet, if you're on this side of campus and you have a question, you can drop by my office, which is 4161 BLSB. And obviously, if you just drop by, there's not a guaranteed chance I'll be there. But there is a chance, like a 90% chance, that I'll be in my office. So you can just roll the dice and see what happens. Now there's another thing I should mention, and it's because I think there's a temptation to email questions to me, which is fine. That's why I'm here. So you can always email questions to me, but you have to realize that some questions require a long response, right? And so the last thing I wanna do is spend an hour at the computer typing in a long detailed response to some question you have. So a lot of times I might ask you to just come by my office hours, and we'll discuss it then. It's much more efficient to do it in office hours or just in person talking than to actually write out an email, okay? So some questions, obviously, I can't answer quickly, I will, but if it's gonna require a lot of time writing a response or writing an answer to the question, then I'm gonna ask you to just come by. And that's just because I've got things to do with my life as well besides spend all day typing emails to you, okay? But it's nothing personal, that's what I wanna say. Okay, so what are we gonna be covering? We are gonna be talking about evolution. The syllabus is now online. So if you go to the course website, you'll see the syllabus. Like I said, 13 lectures we'll be talking about population genetics, that's sort of the mathy part of evolution. We've given examples of natural selection. We'll be talking about the evolutionary advantage of sex, sexual selection, species, and how species form, phylogenies, which is how you reconstruct the history of life. We'll talk a little bit about the fossil record. And the very last lecture I'll talk about human evolution or actually I won't, I'm gonna have a guest lecture for the very last lecture, okay? So that will be announced at the time. So I'll be out of town, but the last lecture will be on human evolution. What else do I need to say? Oh, in terms of what you're required to know on my exam, so it's cut to the chase, sort of speak. So everything I say and everything is in my notes you're responsible for. Now the book, you're aware that this book has the large Campbell, what is it, 9th edition. That is, in the syllabus I give chapters that you might read and think of that as background or supporting material. If it's in the book, but I don't say it in lecture or it's not in my notes, then you're not responsible for it. If I say it in lecture or it's in my notes, then you are responsible for it, it's that simple. So I know there's a, you know, inevitably somebody will ask me, do we have to know this? And the answer is if I said it or it's in my notes, you do, okay? Now the format, of course, the midterm exam will have I think what is it, 30, 33 questions on it. And that will be on November 5th from 6 to 7 p.m. And then the final, there will be a portion of the final that will be my question. So there'll be 17 questions on the final that will be from me, okay? I'm thinking what you'll see is a disproportionate number of questions on the final from the third section, the plant biology section of this file 1b, because that last section doesn't have midterm. So they have, you know, the final will have like a midterm from the last section plus 17 questions from the last section, plus 17 questions from me and 17 questions from Dr. Shable who did the ecology. Is that clear? Okay. Are there any questions about sort of the organization of what we're gonna do here for 13 elections? And it's pretty simple. I come up here, I talk and you guys, you know, absorb the information and then you regurgitate it on a test, but hopefully you'll remember a lot of it 20 years from now, okay? Now a little bit, I don't wanna talk about myself too much, but I think I should mention a few things. I actually went to Cal, you know, I graduated, ooh, go Bears. So I graduated in 1988, which is, you know, a long time ago to you guys. It doesn't seem that long ago to me, but I know it's a long time. I actually was in this class in 1986. So it was a much different format. The room was much shabbier back then because they renovated the building between 1986 and now. But I did take the course. I think I'm the only instructor to teach Bio 1b who's ever taken the course in the past. That's a first. There is a chance that Dr. Fine, if he ever, he's in our department, if he ever teaches the ecology section, he also took Bio 1b. He hasn't taught Bio 1b yet. So I'm the first and so for the only person that's ever taken the course. And it's sort of, I've taught this for three times now. And it's, I should also say, like a lot of my family members went to Cal as well. My mom did. My sister was a year behind me. So we're big Cal fans. And I never actually, you know, go to football games. I never actually had the opportunity to go to a baseball game. It looks like I never will now. But, you know, I do try to go to, I do try to go to the sports and I do enjoy that. Actually, you know, go to the football games. I alternate children. You know, my wife doesn't like to go to them. She went to another university, but I do take kids to the game. So anyways, a little bit about Bio 1b. I taught it three times. And the first time, especially when I was teaching it, I was thinking, well, what did I learn in Bio 1b? I was actually trying to think back to my lectures in Bio 1b. And the remarkable fact is that I couldn't remember anything from Bio 1b. Not one thing. I couldn't even remember who instructed Bio 1b. And you have to remember, I'm now colleagues with these people, right? They're in my department. So I can't even remember the person that did it. And so, it's a little bit disconcerting because I was thinking, well, if I can't remember, and I'm actually an evolutionary biologist, what can I expect from the students who are taking it, many of whom will go off to medical school and make a lot more money than I ever have a chance to make? And so, my goal here is to at least leave you with an impression of what the basic facts of evolution are, what the process is, and hopefully a general sense of the interesting things that are going on in the field. And it is an interesting field. It's an intellectually important field. It's the only field that ties all of biology together. Now, this is one of the remarkable things about biology. I mean, from your perspective, it probably seems like a lot of memorization, right? You go through molecular cell biology and there's a lot of things to remember. I mean, the mechanisms you learn about how cells work, they're like Rube-Goldberg contraptions, right? And evolution is kind of unique because it's the only real conceptual part of all biology. This is the part that ties it all together. This is why it makes sense. This is why we have Rube-Goldberg contraptions that run cells. It's the evolution, the natural selection, the fact that we're not the result, and organisms aren't the result of a design process. It's a process of natural selection. And natural selection works with a variation that's currently in the population, as you'll find out. So anyways, I couldn't remember much. I could actually remember as an aside, I don't want to reminisce too much, but I do remember one thing from Bio1. I also don't remember a lot from 1A, but I do remember one laboratory, and they don't do this laboratory anymore, but at the time what they did is some physiology lab, and you take a rat, and they're looking at respiration of rats, and you put the rat into a little chamber, and you measure how fast he's using up oxygen. And then the idea was you immerse the chamber into cold, like an ice water. The rat's fine, but he's now colder, and of course his respiration picks up because he's burning energy more quickly. That's the experiment. In the RTA, you can imagine in a course like that, you're working with live rats, and the first thing they do is animal care, and the TA's going over how you have to treat the animals kindly, and if anybody abuses the rat, you're gonna get an F on this lab, and it's just threatening us, and then she's talking to us how to handle the rat. So she says, don't worry, these things are harmless, but you need to handle them carefully. So she reaches into this cage, and it's one of these cages that, I don't know if you've seen these sort of rat cages, but has the lid comes up, right? She lifts up the lid and goes in to grab the rat, and the rat bites her right here in between her thumb and her first index finger, and we're all like this, and she's shaking her hand trying to get the rat off, and the rat's sort of with her, she finally grabs the rat and throws it into the cage, and you can see the rat sort of bounces up and comes back down, she slams the cage down, and she's holding her hand, and she's looking at us as just one second, and she runs out of the room, and that was it, and we're all thinking, my God, we have to deal with these killer rats, and there was a lot of debate among, at least my lab group, you divide them into lab groups, but who was actually gonna touch the rat, and all our members, I didn't have to touch the rat. But anyways, that's the only thing I remember. I don't want you guys to have experiences like that in the evolution section, but I do want you to remember something, okay? So that's the course. Oh, and the last thing, I mean, it is an important field. It's become more important remarkably, so that it's hard to believe that a field that started 150 years ago is becoming more and more relevant, and one of the main reasons it's become more relevant isn't just because of antibiotic resistance and the medical relevance of evolution, but it's the field that can actually make sense of genomic sequence data, so I don't know if you've heard this, but it's becoming quite easy to sequence human genomes and genomes of any organism or critter you can think of, and evolution turns out had the tools, the statistical tools sitting there, and their toolkit that we've been using for years to do these types of analyses, so it's actually becoming more relevant, not less relevant, okay? So it's a remarkable fact about the field is that it's actually something that you probably should know something about, and my only fear is that I'm not the most dynamic lecturer in the world, so I want to convey my enthusiasm, but I know I don't really have the personality to do it, but you have to sort of believe me that, when I say that, at least inside me, I'm sort of bubbling with enthusiasm about the field. Okay, so I really don't see the point of having this here, okay?  Technical difficulties, yeah, okay. I did mirror the window earlier, but we'll do it again. All right, no more, all right, we're fine. Okay, so we're back in business. Okay, well in case you don't know, that's Charles Darwin. You'll learn a lot more about him in the first few lectures, but I want to start off with an example of evolution, and I'm gonna ask you back there, if you have a pointer, that's one thing I just forgot to get a pointer, it's not really important right now, but this is one of my heroes, this is Alexander Fleming. Does anybody know what Alexander Fleming's important for, or known for? Penicillin, he discovered penicillin, right? And so this is Alexander Fleming, you got the Nobel Prize in 1945 for his discovery, and you have to, he was basically a research doctor at St. Mary's Hospital in London, okay, and he was in World War II, in World War I rather, which of course went from 1914 to 1918, and in those days, and actually all the wars previous to the First World War, the main cause of death, thank you so much. The main cause of death in wars wasn't so much being shot, right, which of course is a bummer, but that wasn't the main cause of death, it's like you're in the camp and you come down with some disease and you die, that's the world in the Civil War, that's where most of the people died, and a die of wounds suffered in battle, they died in camp from pneumonia or tuberculosis or some bacterial disease, okay, and of course this was also true in World War I, a little bit less true than it was earlier because at least they knew what caused disease by then, but a lot of the wounds that people suffered at that time would become septicemic, right, you'd have blood poisoning essentially, and you've heard of gangrene, that's another type of septicinium. So Alexander Fleming was interested in trying to prevent deaths through bacterial infections, he was in 1922, he discovered lysozyme, which is an enzyme that lices bacteria, so he was the discoverer of lysozyme, so he'd been doing this for a while, and in 1928, he sort of fortuitously discovered penicillin, and the story's kind of interesting because what he was doing, let's see, so this is his lab, he's sitting in his lab, and you can sort of see these circular objects, these little disks, these are called plates, and a lot of people that work with bacteria, they grow the bacteria on these little plates, let's see if I've got it, here's an example of a plate right here, so here's the plate, it's the little dish, and what you do is you pour into this dish a jelly-like substance, jello-like substance, I should say, that's full of nutrients, it's called luria broth, and it's an agar-type substance, you put agar in there to solidify the luria broth, and the bacteria love this stuff, and so what you do is you basically pour this gel into the bottom of the dish, and then you spread, and there's technique to this, but you spread a thin layer of bacteria across this gel, and you put them in an incubator, and the bacteria, of course, do what bacteria do, they divide and grow, and after maybe a day, or maybe even less than a day, you'll get what they call a bacterial lawn, but basically the plate becomes opaque, that's because there's a layer of bacteria now growing evenly across the surface of the plate.  Shoot, these are all ruined. What he did is he came back, and he noticed there was a fungus growing on one of them, the penicillin fungus, and around the fungus on the plate, they had this nice lawn over here, but there was this zone of inhibition where no bacteria were growing, and of course the guy had a train mind, he was looking for things like that would inhibit the growth of bacteria, so it wasn't as fortuitous, but he was prepared for the discovery in a sense, right? And so he said, there's something in the mold that's inhibiting the growth of bacteria, and so he spent the next 12 years basically exploring this, trying to isolate what it was in the fungus that was in the mold that was actually inhibiting the growth, and they finally got some help from chemists who actually isolated the penicillin and also were able to synthesize it, right? And so basically by World War II, which is 1939 for us, 1941 to 45, penicillin was starting to be grown, or manufactured on sort of an industrial basis, and it saved tons of lives, and some of the early reports of the act of penicillin, the first antibiotic were almost miraculous. People near death, they gave them penicillin, they almost literally hopped out of their beds, but it was almost that traumatic, right? It was just, it was a miracle drug, and so basically from the start of the development of antibiotics, modern antibiotics like penicillin, is they've called the 50 years after that, golden age of medicine, prevented millions of deaths. I mean, there's probably a good fraction of us in this room who wouldn't be here without these modern antibiotics. You know, our parents or we would have died, or our grandparents would have died of some bacterial infection, many of them would, okay? So this is an example of the plate. This has given you, oh, so if 19, say 28 to 1940 sort of represents the beginning of the antibiotic era, 1947 was the first year in which they'd noticed bacteria that were resistant to penicillin. So the bacteria responded almost immediately. So before they had antibiotics like penicillin, there was some fraction, some very small fraction of the bacteria were resistant to it, and after it was started to be used in a clinical basis, you saw more and more bacteria becoming resistant to it. This is an example of evolution. It's not a change in a single bacterium, it's a change in the population in general. So you started to see the bacteria respond, evolve to the use of antibiotics, and so the medical community responded like you might think they would. They developed new antibiotics. So for instance, I can't see like I used to be able to, this is pretty pathetic. So you saw immunoglycosides introduced in the 1950s and 60s. Cephalosporin was another one that came around tetracycline. They started to introduce all sorts of new antibiotics that attack the bacteria in different ways. Some of them, for instance, would inhibit the translation machinery, this machinery that makes proteins. Others would inhibit DNA synthesis, for instance, some act on the GI race, which uncoils the DNA during replication. So there are all sorts of ways that these different antibiotics would attack the bacteria, but the bacteria, there would always be some fraction, some small number that would be resistant for able to evade that antibiotic. And of course, when you then have a lot of antibiotics and use the fraction or the frequency of those particular bacteria would increase in the bacterial population. That's evolution. So these are examples of resistance. Of course, you need to think about resistance as not being your resistant or not. It's sort of a continuous scale. You can be more or less resistant. So what you're seeing here are plates, and what they've done is they've taken a small piece of paper, filter paper, usually impregnated it with, soaked it in an antibiotic, and then they set that onto the plate.  And of course, what you have to imagine is happening is the antibiotic is leaching out of the filter paper and there's a gradient going out. So it's probably most concentrated at the filter paper and less concentrated as it goes out. And at some point, the bacteria can handle the amount of antibiotic and at some point, they can't. So the smaller the hole, the smaller this hole is, the more resistant the bacteria are. So for instance, these holes are smaller than these, so these bacteria are probably more resistant to whatever the antibiotic is than these are. Because you can actually measure resistance, right? How much of a particular antibiotic do we need before we kill the bacteria? All right, so that's basically what I just said. So this is an example. So antibiotic resistance is an example of evolution. It's a fact. In that sense, evolution is a fact. We can see, for instance, evolution happening today, not only in the bacteria, but in other species as well. And we have a fossil record that shows us that species that lived in the past look different than they do today. So things have changed over time. And that's all evolution is, is change over time. And that's the necessary part of any theory of evolution is recognizing that things have changed over time. Now the real question is why? And Darwin, Charles Darwin is a certifiable great man. And the reason is he's supplied the why. I'll talk a lot more about his theory and about his life in this lecture, but the basic reason Darwin is a famous person is because he provides the mechanism to explain why we have evolution occurring. He provided the mechanism that explains antibiotic resistance. And so these are just some pictures of Darwin through time. Most of the time you see him sort of represented as a fairly in his later years. The photo I showed you in the very beginning was this one, or from his, I think he died in 1882 or 1883. But there he is as a young man, sort of a very angry young father, I suppose. And he had a lot of children, so I have two kids I can imagine, multiply that by four and you get scowls. And then he was buried. You can actually find him today in Westminster Abbey. So he was very near Isaac Newton. So he's a very, he's of that caliber of a scientist. So a little bit about Darwin. There's a, one thing I forgot to mention in terms of how the course is organized is that these, these are keynote presentations. I'll have them saved as PDFs. Those will be available after the lecture. And then I also have notes that I use, fairly detailed notes. I will also post these as a PDF, right? But after the lecture. So you'll be able to, man, I know you go, you wanna write down a lot of information, but a lot of it will be written down again in these notes. Anyways, a little bit about, about his life. Well, actually I think I wanna back up a little bit. Let's go turn the lights on. I have to remember how to do this. There we go. Blank the screen. Perfect. So a little bit more about the idea of what a successful theory of evolution requires. So I already mentioned the fact. All right, now, this is not something that's original to Darwin. The idea that things change over time is not original to Darwin. There's actually pre-Darwinian ideas that, that species change through time. Okay, in fact, I list some of them, but the Comte Befum, he's a French scientist. He had an idea, he wasn't a, he was a creationist, but he, this is the 1700s of course, but he did speculate on the idea that things changed over time. There was Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. He was sort of a philosopher and doctor, but he had this idea that all life sprang from one species, right? Now he didn't have any mechanism in his writing that's so flowery that it's hard to actually interpret, but it looks as if he had an idea of evolution. And then of course you've all heard of Lamarck, sort of your high school biology textbooks, favorite whipping voice, sort of speak. Mostly because he's, you know, they kind of use him as an example of a wrong theory, right? Well, it turns out that some of his theory was right. Things do change over time, right? So he accepted the idea of evolution. He saw that, look, things do change over time. His mechanism was what was wrong. So he had this idea that organisms through use or disuse of some part of their body could change that trait over time, over their lifetime, and then pass it on to their offspring. Now of course we know that's not true.  That's not something that's passed on directly, okay? And so basically what we know today is that individuals don't change over time, their genetics don't. It's just a species that change over time. So anyway, so Lamar had some ideas about evolution as well. It just turns out his mechanism was wrong. The other part of a successful theory of evolution is to think about what the pattern of evolution might be. So this is describing what we see. Is it a gradual pattern of change, or is it an abrupt pattern of change? So for instance, you can think of where there's a, so if we make a little graph here, here's our graph, maybe we'll have our trait that we're interested in measuring on our x-axis and we'll have time on our y. So one pattern of change can be something slow and gradual. The trait changes over time in a slow, gradual way. And this was the pattern that Darwin argued very strongly for, okay? Another possible pattern would be one of more abrupt change. The trait more or less doesn't change for a while then you have a period of very abrupt change and then it doesn't change again very much. That's a different pattern of evolution. It's still evolution, but it's not a slow, gradual pattern. Now there's still debate among evolutionary biologists about what exactly the pattern of evolution is. And what's not fair is you often see critics of evolution point to the debate within the field about the pattern and as I'll talk about in the second of process of evolution as an argument that the fact of evolution must be wrong as well. That's not fair, right? Nobody, no scientist or very few scientists debate the fact of evolution. It's an accepted theory. It's accepted fact in the field of biology. What people debate about why we actually have a field of evolutionary biologists, why people like me can actually be employed is because there is active research on the pattern and the processes of evolution. So that's a little bit on the pattern of evolution. Darwin did have something to say about the pattern. He argued that it was slow and gradual, but he could have been wrong in many instances. And then we have the process or the mechanism of evolution. And this is where Darwin made the major contribution. As I said, he wasn't original about arguing that evolution occurred, although he gave lots more evidence that it did, or about the pattern, but it's mostly the process. He described a unique process that we'll describe in great detail and that process is called natural selection. Natural selection, so you guys in the front here can see it. This is his mechanism for evolution. Now of course, we will talk about some other mechanisms that cause change through time as well, but this is the mechanism that can cause adaptation. It can cause creatures to be adapted to their environment. It's the only mechanism we know of that has that property. Again, we will be talking about that in great detail. So how did Darwin come up with this? Oh, and I should say one last thing about a theory. So I think you can look at the, I mean, this is just my own thoughts on this, but I think you can look at the fact and the pattern of evolution without, you can just document. You just look in the fossil record. You can look at the organisms around us and you can actually document change through time and you can even document the pattern. If that was all there was to the field, I would argue that I wouldn't be in it, frankly. It would be rather uninteresting. It'd be a little bit like stamp collecting. Well, I saw this here and I saw that there. What really makes the field of evolutionary biology and science is that we can actually attach a process to things that occurred in the past. When we see change through time, we can say, well, we understand the natural selection is working today and we can actually measure its effects today and we can say, and this process must have worked in the past as well. So in order to explain past events in a mechanistic way, you have to make a very important assumption. It's one that you probably don't have a problem with, but it's an important assumption. So we might as well stay explicitly. It's not controversial, but the assumption is that the processes we see working today also acted in the past. That's all there is to it. It's such an important concept that it has its own name, and it's a long imposing name, but here it is, uniformitarianism. So uniform materialism. So I think I have it spelled correctly. Once again, it's just the idea that the processes we see working today also acted in the past. So if we can see natural selection, for instance, operating in the past, the same process must have worked today. If we can see natural selection working today, we can extend that process and say it also worked in the past. Now this is an assumption that actually underlies several historical sciences. So for instance, geology also makes a uniformitarianism assumption. It's the basic idea is if we see processes acting to erode rocks or form rocks today, that those processes worked in the past. We see earthquakes fracture the crust. We see sedimentation occur in river basins and lakes in the deep sea. We see wind and water erosion working today. Those processes worked in the past as well. It's not a controversial assumption. It also underlies astronomy. There's a really good course on campus at the top of Filippenko. It's a kind of introduction to astronomy. I wish he was teaching when I was undergrad here. But basically it's the same argument. When we see the light from stars, the light we see isn't, it traveled a long way, sometimes billions of years. So the things we see working around us in the heavens, those are things that occurred deep in the past. So in order to explain how these stars are moving around, we use physics, right? We understand how planets and stars move based on things you would learn in physics A and 8B. Once again, it's the idea that the processes we see working today also worked in the past and other places as well. It's not a controversial assumption. Now that's not to say, so uniformitarianism, so we might consider the alternative first of all. So what is the alternative to uniformitarianism? Of course it's the idea that processes we see today didn't work in the past, that something else happened, in which of course completely, if we believe that, then there's no way you can actually go ahead and apply these processes into the past. We would have no way of doing science in that case. And I would argue that that type of assumption does have a name, it's called magic, right? Or supernaturalism. But the idea that without that assumption, if you're gonna willy-nilly substitute new processes and say that they worked in the past and we can't do science, okay? So that's a sort of a ground state. We can't even have a conversation unless we can kind of agree on some of these assumptions. Now, if you believe uniformitarianism, it doesn't necessarily mean that all the changes are slower gradual. So uniformitarianism does not equal slow gradual and continuous change. There's lots of perfectly natural processes that are abrupt. So for instance, in geology, it's the 100, so-called 100 year, or 1,000 year floods, right? Those are abrupt things that occur over the course of a few days, but infrequently. In fact, they're very important in formation of rocks. If you look at rocks up until dinner, up in the hills here, what you see are the rock layers are mostly formed in, not gradually, but every 1,000 years or so. The sedimentation occurs in abrupt instances. And then most of the time in a section of rock, if you look at a section of rock that's exposed along like Claremont Avenue, and you look up, most of the time isn't in the rock, it's in the layers between the rocks, if that makes sense. So you don't have to, or the volcanoes, that's also an abrupt change, or asteroids hitting the earth.  Those are definitely not slow gradual things, thank goodness. There are things that happen once very occasionally and they have a big effect. They're definitely abrupt. So the dozen uniformitarianism does not equal slow gradual change. And uniformitarianism doesn't imply that the rules governing the change of the past and present are perfectly understood or predictable. So for instance, there's lots of things about, there's a physics department here because there's lots of unknown physics. There's a chemistry department here because there's lots of unknown things about chemistry. People are actively working on these fields. So we don't know everything, there isn't a done to know about everything. That's why we're still have science departments. And so just because we don't understand everything doesn't mean we can't actually use this uniformitarianism assumption. Or it doesn't mean that we can perfectly predict what happens. So for instance, a really good example is the weather. We think weather patterns are caused by physics and chemistry, things we understand, right? But that doesn't mean that the weather is predictable. It means that you can only, it's such a complicated system that there's always some degree of uncertainty about what the weather is gonna be tomorrow. And in fact, weathermen with all their information can only do a little bit better than this very simple prediction scheme which is tomorrow's weather will look like today, which is pretty remarkable, right? If you have a scheme which says tomorrow's weather will be like today's weather, you'll be right quite frequently.  Which is pretty, that doesn't mean that we say, well it's supernatural. It means that we just don't understand the system well enough to explain it with perfection, right? There's always some amount of random chance or stochasticity in some systems. And it's the same for evolution, geology and these other historical fields. So that's all I wanted to say about the field. That's what you understand that there's a fact and pattern and process of evolution. These are the successful components of a theory. So when we discuss the field, you might think about what parts are the pattern, which are the processes that are causing the pattern. And I would argue that in order to actually attach a process to things that occurred in the past, we have to make this uniform tering assumption, okay? And it's an assumption that's not unique to evolutionary biology that's shared among several historical sciences. Are there any questions about that? Okay, so let's go back to Darwin. I want to talk a little bit about, so usually I don't have such problems with this. At least in the past I haven't. So this is, here we're back in business. All right, so we talked about Darwin. So I want to talk a little bit about his life. He was kind of a remarkable story. We won't be talking about Darwin the entire 13 lectures, only this lecture and part of the next one. But the story is what a privilege. He was born February 12th, 1809. That's the easy date to remember because it's the same day and year as Abraham Lincoln. Two pretty famous people on the same day and the same year. Obviously different backgrounds there. He was born in England. His father was a doctor. His grandfather, as I said, was a doctor. He was slated to become a doctor as well. There's a lot of pressure you might imagine in the family to become a doctor like his father and grandfather who were both very successful. They're well-to-do. They were not hurting for money at all. In fact, I don't think he ever needed to work in his life. Basically he basically had a trust fund and then when his father died he inherited all the money. So he never had to work a day in his life. This is very common of scientists of that era. It wasn't a profession back then. It was something that gentlemen did. People that had means of support and so they could go ahead and pursue science on their own. What science didn't start as a field until the late 1800s when you actually had professional scientists. Anyways, he was slated to become a doctor. I believe the first university he went to was in Scotland. And you have to remember this is before the days of knocking people out and doing surgery while you're knocked out. He basically witnessed a surgery on a child and decided, okay, I'm not doing this. And so he decided he didn't want to become a doctor. He transferred to Cambridge University and he was slated to go into become basically a pastor in a church. That was sort of another respectable way to go if you have a respectable profession for a very wealthy people. But at the same time he was a very avid naturalist. So naturalism or being a naturalist was a very popular hobby like collecting beetles and birds eggs and being a bird. These were all very popular hobbies back in the Victorian era of England. And he was a very enthusiastic bug collector for instance. He was really into beetles especially. And he was also very much drawn to the courses he took with his botany professor and the geology professor, the fellow named Lyle. Charles Lyle was the professor of geology. He was actually the one who argued for uniformitarianism in geology. So you can imagine Darwin was probably exposed this idea very early. And he was also exposed to the idea at the time that the earth was much older than people thought. So by the 1830s, 1820s, when he was going to college, the idea that the earth was maybe tens, what they thought were tens of millions or maybe 100 million years old. Of course we know it's much older now but was sort of gaining popularity. So people realized the earth was old. So he knew the earth was old that they had. He was exposed to uniformitarianism assumption and he went on lots of field trips with his botany professor. And when he graduated, he was presented with the opportunity of a lifetime. So instead of going into a seminary, he was given the opportunity to go on around the world trip with the Royal Navy as the naturalists. So what the Royal Navy was doing at the time is to prevent ships becoming shipwrecked. They were doing very good job of trying to map out the coasts of different parts that hadn't been mapped out before. So what they would do is they load up a ship with what are, we're called chronometers. Everybody know what a chronometer is? It's a very accurate watch, right? And it helps you measure longitude accurately. So they send out these ships with lots of chronometers and they would do very careful mappings of the position of the coastal parts of like different parts of the world and also soundings, how deep the water was at different points. So basically making detailed maps for mariners, okay? So he was given an opportunity to go on one of these on the HMS Beagle and his role on board was as the ship's naturalist. And the real purpose was to give the captain somebody to talk to during dinner because the captain was a gentleman. He needed a gentleman to talk to over dinner. And so Darwin fit the bill. He had an interview with the captain, Captain Fitzroy. Fitzroy liked it. There was this idea, there was this field at the time which was very popular was what is this? Physiognomy, which was the basically trying to assess people's characters by looking at the bumps on their heads. And evidently, Fitzroy was a real adherent to this. And he looked at Darwin. He thought he had good bumps on the head so you're in, okay? So Darwin was in, he went off on this cruise. He was seasick the entire time. It was a five year cruise, right? It was a five year voyage. So from 1831, 1830 to 1835, 36. And most of the time was spent along the east coast of South America doing these mappings, all right? But whenever they would come along the coast, he would go inland and he did lots of collecting. So he would send these to you package, he would prepare skins, he'd send all sorts of specimens back to London where there are curators at the museums there who would receive the packages and sometimes got quite excited about what he was finding. He found, for instance, one of the, he found lots of fossils in South America here in the Galapagos Islands, which are now part of Ecuador, I think they were then too. He spent quite a bit of time going from island to island. So here is the Galapagos Islands. Now the Galapagos Islands, you may have heard of the Galapagos Islands in conjunction with Darwin's name, right? Cause he spent a lot of time here and he referred back to his time, the collections he made on the Galapagos Islands over and over again. But at the time when he was going through the Galapagos, he didn't have the theory of evolution in his head. He didn't have the mechanism of evolution in his head. He was just collecting. And in fact, a lot of the collections, I mean, if you were really thought of the islands as being super important, you probably would have labeled all the specimens by which island you collected it from. He had to kind of reconstruct which islands he collected things from after the fact. So anyways, he was on the Galapagos Islands and of course, if you go to the Galapagos, there's all sorts of pretty cool organisms. You have these giant tortoises. I love tortoises. I've got one in my backyard, not one is this big, but he's big. But you know, you saw the Galapagos tortoises and one thing they learned, for instance, by some of the locals is that some of these locals claimed that if you gave them a tortoise shell, they could identify what island it was from because the tortoise shells varied from one island to the next. Then you have these weird marine iguanas. Here's some land iguanas. You have, you've probably heard of the Darwin finches. He thought they were mockingbirds, but it turns out the islands have a radiation of so-called radiation of finch well over a dozen species. And of course, I think when they were at the islands, it was pretty common in those days to grab a couple tortoises. And these guys lived for a long time, even without food, and you basically turn them upside down on the ship and then you have food a month, your fresh meat in a month from now. It's kind of sad. That's why there's so few around now. Anyway, so he went on this voyage, eventually returned home. He married his second cousin, I believe. This woman, I don't know if you've ever heard of Wedgwood pottery. Some of you may have. It's a very famous pottery. It's a fine china. But anyways, he married a Wedgwood, his cousin, and so his wife was pretty well off as well, and they had lots of kids, and they settled in down. Here's his house. And still there, it's a sort of museum nowadays. There's his house. And he started up some, at this point he'd given up going into the seminary. He settled down to doing science. He started up lots of notebooks. So he called one notebook, which he started around shortly after he got back from this voyage, the transmutation of species. So somewhere in the early, in the late 1830s, he started to get his ideas on evolution, and he started to accumulate evidence for the theory of natural selection from 1836 to 1859, 20 years. He was very conservative. He didn't want to break this idea without lots of evidence. And frankly, he was a little bit concerned about what would happen to his reputation if he let this idea up. So he spent a long time amassing evidence, and then it was 1859, or actually 1858, where he had to publish. What happened is he got this letter from a naturalist, this guy Wallace, who was out in the South Pacific collecting specimens, and Wallace had a completely different background. He was a naturalist and collected butterflies to sell. He actually had to make a living as a naturalist. And he wrote this very short paper and said to Darwin, could you please present this at the Royal Society, because I've got this idea about how species change. And Darwin read this, and he realized that Wallace had written a better abstract of his idea of evolution through natural selection than he could have written. He said, oh shoot, there were a couple of his friends, including Lyle and Henslow, the botany professor, that he had told these ideas to, and they said, look, what we'll do is we'll read both papers side by side in 1858. So the two papers were read at the Royal Society, and interestingly, they had no effect on anybody. In fact, the president at the Royal Society that year said it's too bad, no really big breakthroughs came through this year. That's 1858. But basically, Darwin had the fire lit under him, sort of speak, and he wrote what he called a short abstract of his ideas, and that's what you see as the origin of species. He's actually intended to write, if you can believe it, an even thicker book. Outlining his ideas on evolution through natural selection. And I believe this might be a good place to start. What we'll do is stop, rather. What I'll do is I'll discuss the theory in great detail and what Darwin said in the next lecture, and good luck on your midterm.


Hi, the series of videos under the heading of Suggestions for in-class activities are based on two prerequisites. Here is the first. The recommendations for the organization of in-class meetings require the use of the inverted classroom model. That is, students should have worked through the respective content prior to the in-class meeting. Thus the in-class meetings are not instructional anymore but purely practical. The second prerequisite is that the digital content that students have to work through prior to an in-class meeting is a combination of video, multimedia and print. In other words, for each suggestions for in-class activities there is at least one e-lecture and one e-learning unit on the Virtual Linguistics Campus. This class, this particular in-class meeting is special in many ways. First, this is the first unit of the class and maybe even the first class in linguistics at all. So the students see their lecturer for the first time in person, hence in contrast to what we normally do in class a short introduction about oneself could be very useful for your students. Secondly, irrespective of the students involvement, we have to assume that they have little or no prior knowledge in linguistics or phonetics. So this entire field here is by and large unknown to them. So we cannot build on that. All they know is contained in the video, phonetics and overview and in the corresponding e-learning unit on the Virtual Linguistics Campus. And furthermore, students might not be too familiar with the inverted classroom model yet. So let's give them a chance to familiarize themselves with this approach towards teaching and learning and allow a bit more repetition in the first in-class meeting than you would normally do. With all this in mind, this is what I think one should do in class. As usual, you should first of all define the goals of the in-class meeting. We've already defined the special aspect. So one thing we have to do is we have to clarify what phonetics really is. And then we will look at speech anatomy at some selected aspects because the entire topic is introduced in the e-learning unit and in the e-lecture. And then of course, and this is very important, we will practice. Well and do one thing. Tell your students that the first three sessions will be hard, at least as far as terminology is concerned. They will be flooded with new terms with terms like alveolar, glottalic, pharyngeal and so on and so forth. So point out to them that they can use all sorts of techniques that ease these difficulties in class. For example, they could use our workbooks. There is a workbook for this class which you can obtain on the virtual linguistics campus or they could take their notes, their printouts, the interactive whiteboard contents and so on and so forth. Before you start with the practical, about 25% and that's only a rule of thumb of the in class time should be reserved for questions that the students might want to ask about the virtual session, the e-lecture or the workbook content. Now these questions should be collected for future classes and for optional revisions of the online content. Once this part has been finished, the phase of practicing starts. So here are some possible questions, just write them down and collect them. So for example, your students might want to know why acoustic and auditory phonetics are interdisciplinary. Well collect this question, discuss it later on or postpone it until next time. And now you can start with the content that is with practicing. Now the first task is to define the field of phonetics. You have to do that again to make sure that everyone knows how the field is subdivided. You could for example do it by dragging some labels around if you have a wonderful Promethian active board like I have.  And then you could go on, you could say okay, how are these fields subdivided? Well and you could go on dragging things around. For example we know that there is a branch called Articulatory Phonetics, one called Auditory Phonetics, one called Acoustic Phonetics and I always keep mentioning that you can associate these branches with three p's with production, with perception and with physics. Well and if you have graphics or diagrams or images you can ask your students to come to the front and associate them with these branches of phonetics and then I think everything should be clear by and large at least but you could go into this as much as you like. Now a second task could be to look at these three sub branches. So here we have the branches of Auditory Phonetics, of Acoustic Phonetics symbolized by the Synthesizer and some other machines and Articulatory Phonetics. And of course you could now do two things, either you could define the two branches which are not the subject of this class Auditory and Acoustic Phonetics and tell your students more about these for mere reasons of interest or you could concentrate on practicing the main principles of Articulatory Phonetics and in fact this is what we suggest here so we will concentrate on this branch of phonetics. For example we could deal with and that's a third task we could deal with airstream mechanisms. Tell your students how to produce a pulmonic airstream. Well everyone can do that because we normally are capable of breathing. You could do one thing which is of interest. Let me pick up a rubber band. Now what you could do is you could show your students how you can create a sound by blowing air through a rubber band like this. Okay having done that your students might have some sort of understanding how the vocal chords vibrate when pulmonic air goes through them and creates the initial sound input to the production of speech sounds. Well defined terms like glottalic airstream and velaric airstream by showing your students how to produce them. The glottalic airstream for example by pretending to lift some heavy weight like this. Now the glottis is closed and then you can produce a second closure in the mouth like this and release it and so you have produced an ejective consonant without a big problem at all. Or you could produce a velaric airstream by pretending you drink something with a straw like this and here you are. So your students already have some idea how these more or less exotic airstreams have to be created. Finally let your students write down some words on the board. Let them come to the front and write down let's say the word man and ask them how many vowels and how many consonants are contained in them. Well you could add the phonetic code without explaining it at all and could say okay we have in fact two consonants here and one vowel. And then you could give them another word for example what would they think about the word thick. Well orthographically and that's all they have been used to up to this point they would say we have four consonants and we have one vowel. But if you represent the whole thing phonetically then immediately you would see the result is something like this and they will come up with the same solution. So again we have one consonant here one consonant there and a vowel in the middle. So this already gives them a feeling what has to be done in phonetics because orthography and that's one thing they will learn is not the basis for our decision about the sound structure of human speech. Without explaining too much about transcription, speculate about vowels, consonants, places of articulation and so on. This might be considered to be a preparation already for the next unit about consonants. Well the time required for these exercises, activities and tasks is totally up to you. According to my experience you should make sure that the terminology is clear. For example the difference between various airstream types, the precise role of the glottis and so on and so forth. And last but not least enrich the in class phase with anecdotes about languages and their specific sounds. For example this is interesting here use some examples from the language index for example this guy here who is just fantastic and who produces wonderful, wonderful clicks in his language OSA. So let's just listen. Okay. Just the post-apart. Yeah. And what does it mean in English? This morning I was chased by skunks so I ran to Bondi's house. His father did not know that I was in trouble so he almost hit me with a stick on the head and I was like here I'm dead. Fantastic. Well the language index of the virtual linguistics campus is of enormous help in the phonetics class. Well and if you want more exercises just use the questions on the VLC practical sheet associated with this unit. That's all. Thank you very much.


Thanks for checking out this movie review video. This is for the 2017 film a ghost story, which is an 824 film and it's horror Is is not I don't know I'm going through all the 824 horror films because I want to do like a final ranking And this is kind of horror-adjacent in a way and I would argue that because it tackles the concept of ghosts a little bit and then it also there are some things that if you think very deeply about them are actually kind of Unsettling and horrific about humanity Including you know human existence how humans think about leaving things behind and being remembered and you know Relationships and you know stuff like that. So I would argue. It's a little bit horror adjacent But at the least let's let's move on there will be spoilers for this because it's a 2017 film So just know that I would recommend it overall It is very hard to get through in the beginning, but it really does pick up towards the end and in the end I did end up enjoying it enough to recommend it Written and directed by David Lowry who did the films ain't them body saints Pete's dragon the old man in the gun and the green knight, which I have not seen any of those Now this film has actually been viewed as very tainted because one of the producers has been Allegedly charged well has been charged for allegedly sexually abusing children The other issue is Casey Affleck the main actor in this has been Accused of sexually assaulting women so those two things have kind of put a lot of taint on this actual film And I would implore people to actually just keep in mind Those are not the only two people involved with this film And there were a lot of people who worked very hard on it and there's a lot of very great things a lot of Achievement in this actual film. We shouldn't just cast it aside because of those two awful human beings just saying The cost for this film was actually a hundred thousand dollars and it ended up making 1.9 million which is a good turnaround and you have to think a hundred thousand dollars is very very low That's a low budget very very very low And you can see that in the film because there aren't really any practical effects thrown in there and they use the very simple Costume of just like a gigantic white sheet which are actually were problems with that Lowry didn't anticipate such issues as You know not really being able to see the physical acting of Affleck as he was under it And they had to kind of alter the sheet in order to get around that also the eye holes kept moving and slipping and causing vision issues But also just it didn't look right, you know shooting With the eye holes in different places So they had to come up with a way to alter it to keep them there And then also just tripping on the sheet when trying to move so they had to fix all of these things Which were actually challenging and they didn't anticipate that So this script was actually used as a way to deal with negative feelings on the trajectory of humanity And that's something that kind of Lowry said and I think that really does come through in the film Especially towards the end when you really start to see the overall idea behind it Lowry refute Lowry fused his desire to make a film with a simple ghost costume With his interest in looking at the attachments that people have to physical places now This shows up as like attachment as in the main mode that you first see as you know See the character see because it's just C and M as the two early on main characters and so sees physical attachment as a ghost to the house that he was last at and It's also kind of the attachment to a house of memories, you know Even if a person moves on even if they leave like M There's still the memory of everything that happened at that house And then when someone new moves in even though they're not aware of everything that went on in that house It has a history. It has memories. It has, you know past events It'll have future things happening too and it kind of goes down that rabbit hole And I think it's very interesting the way it's done In the end once again because one of my biggest issues with this film is that it's about a 30 minute Film in the runtime of an hour and a half I think it could have been cut down to be an amazing Amazing 30 minute film, but the problem is they chose to really stretch it out to an hour and a half It seems very arbitrary that it would end up being that long and it doesn't work at that length And for that reason there's a lot of boring moments There's a lot of times it's just moving way too slow and there's nothing going on and it's not engaging and It's not like that stuff was really it doesn't seem like it was done for any real reason Other than to just stretch runtime. I'm sure there was some sort of actual reason But it doesn't come across to the audience and it doesn't work So that's one of my big issues with the film. Like I said overall, I like the film I would recommend it But I also won't give it high marks when I could have if it was a much shorter film Because they really made some poor choices with how to put it together The costume. Oh, yeah, I already talked about that Whatever so the there's a quote in the beginning of this whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting And I think this is kind of set up to to kind of give the idea of You know, whenever you show up at a place someone is You know the door is shutting for another person and and that's very Important for you know what you see in the film of you know people new people moving into the house and as someone moves out new people move in and it's The the portion of of whoever's moving out their portion of their life that door is closing Just as other people are coming in and that portion of their life is opening in that exact same place So I think it's an interesting concept to think about So C isn't very present with this partner Which is something kind of interesting that you see in the very beginning But I think it's also a problematic for setting the the film up And this is one of my other issues with it Is you don't really get a good feeling of the relationship that c and m are having early in the film And even the little glimpses that you see C seems very distant. He's very focused on making his music He's very focused on kind of dismissing what m is saying about wanting to move. I understand that's because you know C has a very strong pull a strong tie to the place and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a bit but um It doesn't it doesn't it then plays that their relationship is not that great Now I understand that they were trying to get through that the relationship is very good by having that extended scene Where they're sleeping and cuddling together But that is one of those really long boring moments that they really should have cut down and it also People do that anyway, you know, like that doesn't say enough in my opinion. You need to show it in other ways There's some good impact to seeing just the aftermath of the car crash that happens in this for c Because really you don't need to see the horrific Events of the actual accident There is a lot of power in that and the fact that they chose to Pretty much not use any score for when that happens So you can just focus on the aftermath of C's lifeless body just sitting in the car. It does help For you processing it as an individual like you can feel free to process it however you want to And take your own time with it and it is kind of a you know a very profound impactful moment The simple sheet makes sense because C is covered with it at the morgue And that's kind of the last way that m ends up seeing him So it makes sense that as a ghost he would be like that but then we also see that all ghosts are like that So that was just the initial concept Uh But I guess maybe it was tied into the concept that that's kind of how everyone is seen for the last time when they die Other than you know, if there's an open casket the sheet is is a cool visual and uh light and shadow actually plays in interesting ways on it And my favorite parts with the use of that costume are not only some of the very smooth movements with it that Affleck does But also in the moments where they have colored lights Introduced because it reflects very very brightly off of that sheet and it just looks cool. It's a great visual Just showing C standing in the rooms of the house doesn't actually work that well at least not initially Moving through the house actually would have been a lot better And this is one of the worst parts of the film. It is terrible And this is one of my biggest issues is that after Affleck After c dies And he comes back as a ghost and he goes to the house. It is like the longest most excruciating Portion of the film as you just watch him stand In various rooms and I haven't seen him move just standing there and the the shots are way too long the scenes take way too long And then of course that scene of are we gonna watch em eat an entire pie by herself?  I don't know My wife checked out at that part of the film and she didn't check back into it I because I was going to do a review on it kept with it Uh, even if I wasn't during review I probably would keep it with it because I kind of have a policy of If you start a film just finish it out because you never know what it's going to turn into And this is one of those films, but the problem is It didn't have to be like that It could have been engaging the entire time And it's not and it they really stumble horribly Up and tell about the 38 minute mark, which is very inexcusable to go that long 38 minutes until something really interesting happens So they really miss the mark on a lot of stuff with this and I think that's one of the reasons I don't hear a whole lot about this film Like I said, if it was a half hour film amazing and here's the thing short films are still films And perfect example that film host that came out recently that's under an hour runtime People are raving about because it just goes goes goes goes goes It doesn't need to be longer. It was as long as the story needed to be and that's what a ghost story should have done Make it as long as the story needs not all this other garbage Sorry rant over Uh, and I couldn't believe we were going to watch m almost eaten entire pie. That's inexcusable The groundwork was never laid for viewers to care about c&m And their relationship wasn't developed enough for people to really love and feel for the loss That's kind of something I was talking about about not seeing enough of their relationship and getting the feeling of who they were There's no groundwork for backstory or development. You do get that later in the film But you needed that up front in order to be engaged the whole time and that's part of the reason that You know, even when the lesser interesting things are going on It could have been more interesting if you had laid better groundwork ahead of time So things are out of place a little bit in this Something interesting or I already wrote about the 38 minutes in or talked about the 38 minutes in The scene of m listening to c's song in the past and present where it's cutting in between that is actually a really good scene That's probably the best the most impactful Um sappy type scene Uh that happens first there are more It plays really well to emotion And that's actually mainly because of the music the music actually matched that that situation very well that scene very well So you did a really good job with that I think that's where it starts to really really start to pull you in and things start to really happen in the film And make sense as to what the whole point is The ghost rage seems like it comes kind of out of nowhere When c's going around and like throwing plates and stuff with that one family's there Um, I guess that's just because c is mad because m's not there anymore And I I wrote down that he needs a little ghost therapy It did seem like it didn't really make a whole lot of sense I guess that was supposed to be kind of a play on this is what's happening when people think their house is haunted But it it didn't make sense within the context of the film. It was kind of dumb The Beethoven discussion now this is a very important part of the film The discussion was that there's that party going on and c is watching it go on and that one guy who's kind of bald Is talking about Beethoven and Beethoven's song This discussion speaks to human desire to be remembered and be doing something for a purpose in life Since we all know it's eventually going to be over for us On the grand scale it actually doesn't matter though is kind of the point that he's making he's making this point that Everyone's living for something and in the end it doesn't actually matter and even when you're going You're just hoping that there's going to be at least a piece of you or something You created that sticks around that people will remember or people can look at and say hey that person did that And it's this desire to be remembered to feel like our life was for something and that when we die We won't just be 100 percent forgotten and moved past but the reality is to a degree. Yeah, that does happen Even someone like Beethoven, you know, like he's talking about like yeah He has a song there and that will echo throughout humanity for the most part Maybe at some point it won't but for a long time those songs will echo echo through humanity But people don't remember the actual person for that But I guess to a degree that is a little part of that person But I was seeing this is a lot of speaking to we think that there's so much special stuff involved with our Life and our and our relationships and everything but in the end it doesn't really matter In the grand scheme of things because everything ends because there's so many people thinking the same thing And going through the same things and it's shown very well here because see ends up seeing You know into the future and then actually goes back in time and sees all the things On that one piece of land where that house was that have happened that when he was alive had no idea about And further bolstering the point that none of it Really it all happened but none of it really mattered because no one remembered Whoever was there at that point in time on that land was only thinking about what they were doing What what their isolated little bubble was up to and forming their own memories Which is important for the enjoyment of actual life when you're going through it So I think it kind of makes a good point of like, you know, enjoy your life while you're there Create memories understand that, you know, your memories are tied to physical places But also understand that there are other people who were there and had memories tied to that and have physical Ties to those places as well and just be aware that that does happen. But don't think you're too special either it's kind of this like hopeful and happy and sad and depressing at the same time I feel Anyway, it was a good discussion because really I mean that discussion of the Beethoven song just like tells you the whole film The crux of the whole film The one driving interest in the film is wanting to find out what's on the tiny piece of paper in the wall So that was a cool little thing to throw in there Now the thing that sucks is that you don't find out what was on it So I'm sure a lot of people are mad about that I was a little bit mad about it But then again once C actually reads it and then disappears You understand that whatever was there was what gave him closure what allowed him to be done Waiting like the other ghost in the in the house next door Um and realize that there's nothing left for me here You know and I think that may be lining up with when m has finally moved on or he's realizing that m has finally moved on And that there will be memories and he was important at one point But her life has moved on and he's done and his Purpose is over to a degree so he can move on Cool shot of C standing in the wreckage of the house when the wreckage was actually there That was really cool like the long shot of just him standing there very very cool shot um I guess there's a point that C didn't want to go because in a way he was always there And would always be there at the house He was tied to that place and was never going to be able to go until he sees the paper and finds his closure basically His story is done There are portions with no score in this film But it doesn't actually work that great because there's really nothing happening and especially early on in the film So when nothing's when there's no score It's most helpful that something is actually happening and then especially if it's like gray area What's happening so then people can kind of form their own opinions of how they feel about what's going on be like Is this good? Is this bad? How am I supposed to feel about this? But A lot of the times there's actually nothing happening when there's no score So that's actually not helpful. You should actually have music there in my opinion Just saying There's a concept of people having attachments in places physical emotional and with memories And also the specter of someone you lost With you while you're in that place where you made your memories with that person And that's best seen obviously in the parts where m is back at the house And you know over her shoulder c is standing in the room as she tries To move on and have a normal life and or find out what is a normal life after that There's always that specter of the person you lost there And and some people believe that is that is physically true that the ghost is actually around you Or the spirit is actually around you and some people it's just a mental thing. It's it's the memories It's the loss. It's the grief stuff like that. I believe the second thing, but just so you know I get the idea of the audience being a voyeur to mundane regular life just like sees ghost But we don't need the scenes playing out in real time. It's it's too It's far too boring and the point kind of gets lost This is kind of talking to what I said the beginning was problematic because of so just know that Because of how slow and boring it is instead of making a point of love lost and the remnants of us left When we die it comes across more as see you're not really missing anything after you've passed And I think that's how it feels up until that 38 minute point Where the point starts to be introduced and we start to really understand what's going on So I really think that should have just cut a ton of the first 38 minutes out for that reason So maybe you know longer than a half an hour film total, but yeah, you get the point One thing that I do like is that the film makes you think about where you are And wonder who was there before you? What did they do and what memories were made there? Then think forward and wonder what and who will come after you You know, what are those people going to do like in this house that I live in? You know, it started to make me think who's lived here before what memories did they have? What did they do in this house? And then when I'm gone either because I sell the house and move or because I pass away Who's coming after and most likely they're not going to remember anything about me But maybe I'll leave something behind like that piano that's left behind and it's always been there You know, maybe there will be that one remnant That just stays there and people are aware of it, but they don't necessarily know where it came from and why Just saying maybe think of that Ultimately, there's an interesting and impactful concept here, but it's a 30 minute film stretched to one and a half hours So maybe a little bit more than 30 maybe like 45 50 whatever, but we all get the point. I've already talked about it Had nauseam Sorry about that. So anyway, um Obviously a lot of problems with this film, but a lot of good things at the same time So with the possibility of five stars and half stars in play I'm going to go ahead and give it a three star rating because it's very impactful once it really starts going It's just that beginning portion That's very very rough and it probably turned a lot of people off and made them turn it off before experiencing the important and more You know existential interesting stuff to the film, but I would recommend it for people And like I said, it's not my favorite 824 It's closer to the back of the line, but it's not bad. It's it's pretty solid So it's solid three But anyway, I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this film puts your comments down there And please do me a favor real quick hit that subscribe button because it means a lot to my channel And I'm very appreciative every time someone does that Literally takes you a second. So it's totally painless and it means a lot for me But if you are going to do that or you already have make sure you also hit the notification bell That way you know anytime that I'm putting up a new video or I'm doing a live stream or whatever You know just saying but thanks regardless for checking this out and until next time keep it brutal


Quarterback coach Greg Knapp came to Fleet Activities Yacosca to meet with sailors and host a youth football skills class. I love getting the chance to meet with some of the military because for what I do for a profession, which is kind of the entertainment industry, it's only because of what our military done. The Denver Broncos coach who helped to lead the NFL team to win last year's Super Bowl posed for photos and signed autographs at Yacosca's Commodore Matthew C. Perry galley. It's an honor to meet somebody and to have them come out here, you know, from my home team and, you know, especially after they won the Super Bowl is so cool. After meeting with the sailors, it was off to Purdy Field where he taught skills classes to local children. I just like to say thank you to all those that do serve us and both military and often, you know, whether the military or several civilian personnel on site here and across the US. The event was organized by Yacosca's morale, welfare and recreation as a part of the youth sports program. Reporting from Yacosca Naval Base, I'm petty officer Jacob Allison.


Howdy guys, IndiePixel here. And in this video, I'm gonna talk about how to create an HDA for the Houdini engine for Unreal 5 here that will automatically place a volume actor around a selected set of objects and it'll orient it correctly. So let me demonstrate how this will work and the HDA that we're gonna create in this video. So I just instance the HDA into the level and let's go take a look at the details panel over here and we're gonna go over into this particular area here and I'm gonna go and say start selection and this will allow me to select a certain amount of actors here. And then I can say use current selection and you'll notice that it produces a trigger volume here. So if I were to select this guy and go into brush editing mode, you can see we have this trigger volume that's been oriented correctly around those selections and we can update the selection to whatever actors we want. So if I say start selection, let's add a couple more of these guys. So use current selection. You can see now that the volume itself has updated and reoriented to the new selection. So let's take a look at how we build this inside of Udini with Udini Engine. First thing to do is go and create a geometry node. So let's drop down in geometry node and I'm gonna call this get objects and then I'm gonna select it, do a shift C. That'll create a subnet around it because I wanna control my inputs and my outputs separately. So I'm gonna call this IP add volumes to selected like so. Then I'm gonna right click on this guy, say create digital asset and I'm gonna put in my namespace and my version number like so and then just clean up the label and then we need to save it to an actual location. So I'm gonna put this into my current Unreal project here. So we're gonna go to Unreal projects. We're gonna go to volume actors, content, HDA and we're gonna save it right in my HDA folder. So hit accept. That'll bring up the type properties. I'm just gonna put a one point own for the version number and then go and hide on my default UI that comes with the HDA. So with that hit accept and dive into my HDA and then set up an object merge node here and we'll call this get objects as well. And I wanna actually import the transform information from all the assigned objects that we assigned to this particular HDA. So then I'm gonna drop down a null node and this will just serve as an easy way to get the output from this object merge node. So we'll say out objects like so. All right, with that done we need to go to the type properties and we need to promote this object one parameter. So to do that, I tend to use the alt middle mouse click and then I wanna give this a proper name and a proper label. And now inside of the Houdini engine for Unreal if you were to put outliner in front of the name of this particular parameter it will automatically default the object input to the outliner selection type. So just keep that in mind. So I'm gonna call this outliner objects and then outliner objects like so. There we go. Hit apply and accept. That's pretty much all we need to do right now. So I'm gonna hit save node. I'm gonna go to my Unreal project here and let's go. I'm gonna show Explorer here. We're gonna go and find that HDA that I just made. So IP add volumes to selected. I'm gonna drag and drop that into my content browser here and hit save. And then I'm going to right click on it and say instantiate at the origin like so. There we go. Also make sure that your Houdini engine has started and stuff like that. It'll auto start if you, if it's not already started when you instantiate the HDA. All right. So what we can do now is go and assign. Let me actually get rid of the previous example here. So what we can do is we can go and assign objects to this input. So you notice that it's actually automatically converted over to the world outliner input. There's a lot of different types of inputs here. So by putting that outliner in front of the parameter name, it defaults to that, which is great. So I'm gonna hit the start selection. You'll notice that the button switches over to use current selection, which means that it's waiting for a selection.  And what happens is they get assigned into that SOP input here. So now I have both those containers in here. The cool thing about this is I can do a control alt and O and this will automatically open up my Unreal scene but inside of Houdini so I can continue to work on my HDA. All right. So once you're inside of Houdini here, I'm gonna go to my desktop. I usually hit L to space out all my nodes. All right. And then I go and find the HDA that's currently active in my Unreal scene. I turn everything off. So just by selecting it and hitting the blue flag. And then I come in here, allow editing of contents. And if I were to hit F with my cursor over the scene view here, you can see I have the imported objects. And you'll notice that if I go to wireframe by hitting W on the keyboard, I'm getting a really interesting topology. That is not the topology of the actual asset. These are dense polys, but I have Nanite turned on. And so this is the result that Unreal is sent over to Houdini for the Houdini engine to process. This will work just fine for this particular HDA. So I'm gonna drop down a geometry node here. And we're gonna call this add volumes like so. I'm gonna turn off this display flag on the get objects there because we don't need to output that particular mesh. I really just wanna convert this into a volume. So I'm gonna do an object merge node. I'm gonna call this get objects. I'm gonna turn off the transform because we've already imported the transform information. And I wanna get the objects from that get objects geometry node like so. So now it's imported into this geometry node. So we grabbed it from here and just imported it into here. Cool, so with that done, all I need to do is put a bound node around this. Let's do that, it's real easy. But the more important thing that we wanna do is we wanna constantly orient this to the objects shape. So we need to turn on this oriented bounding box. You'll see that it's oriented correctly, pretty cool. Now, how do we get this over into Unreal? How do we get this particular shape? Because currently we have no way of converting this over to like an instance of an actor. And so to do that, we use the extract transform node. And we need to drop down a box. So if I drop down a box and we just keep it at a size of one and one and one, what'll happen is this box will then get transformed, translated, rotated and scaled, or transformed over to this particular box, all right? So I'm gonna pump this guy into the first input, the bounds into the second input. And you'll notice that all I'm left with is a point. But this point is very important here because we can instance a particular actor onto this. The other cool thing about this is it comes with the orient attribute, gives us a pivot. And you can go into the extract transform node and change this over to a translation, rotation and non-uniform scale, which is really useful for volumes because they aren't always just a perfect cube. So now you get the scale values. So in order for this to work, where this actually produce a volume inside of the Houdini engine for Unreal, all we need to do is drop down a wrangle node, we'll call this unreal adders for attributes. And we need to assign the s at unreal instance attribute with some volume.  And so I'm gonna create a trigger volume. And all you need to do is just copy the name and then paste it into that unreal instance attribute in Houdini with no spaces. So let's do that now. All right, so let's go and turn this guy on. I'm gonna type in trigger volume, semi colon, do a control enter to commit the code. And then I found also that we need to basically cut our scale in half. So I just do V at scale times equals 0.5, like so. There we go. I'm gonna right click on my HDA, say save node. I'm gonna go back into unreal and I'm gonna hit rebuild all instances on my HDA in the content browser. And with that, you now have a volume. How cool is that? Very, very cool. All right, and so that's basically what I wanted to show. This scene is all set up with Nanite and stuff like that. And it is just cool to turn this on because it is a cool view. But you can see that Nanite is working. Each one of these shipping containers is around 200,000 polys, so Nanite is a beast. All right, so hopefully you guys found that useful. Let me turn off the display here. But that is how you create oriented volumes with Houdini Engine for Unreal 5. Thanks so much.