Now we're recording. A media archeologist, essayist, and poet, the Dean of the College at Bennington College. He holds a PhD in comparative studies from the Ohio State University and has received numerous awards and fellowships including from full rights, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vermont Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. He is, of course, the author of the brand new book, Need a Dead, Reserving Data at the End of the World, which has just come out from the University of North Carolina Cross in which he will give us a taste today, of course.  And full of hot tits about where to get the Vermont State food, the maple creamy. It's a maple sauce for Christian Khan. Probably the best food in existence. Sorry, no offense to the box lunches. Those of you in the room are eating. But come up to Brian afterward if you're gonna be in Southern Vermont and wanna eat something truly delicious. So with no further ado, I'm gonna pass it over to you, Brian. And thank you so much for being here. Can't wait to hear more about this amazing book. Thank you. All right, so can people in the back hear me pretty clearly if I speak at this level? Okay, thanks everyone for coming. I'm going to read from the intro of the book and take you on a little journey with me that I took when I was doing research. And then I will give an overview of some of the other chapters. You can see some of the other places that I went and the cases that I did get to. So this is from the introduction, which is called I Will Survive. I'm just here to look at some old photos. I slide my driver's license onto the silver tray below the bulletproof glass, then to a gun-hipped guard, a row of six assault rifles on the wall behind her. She keeps my ID and passes me a security badge, saying, clip this to your shirt, return to your car, and someone will drive out in a few minutes. Follow them in. I walk back to my rental car and sit, stare straight ahead to where the road leads directly into and under a small mountain. Soon enough, I see a red car emerge from the tunnel. It's driver waves at me, pulls a U-turn. And even though they just came out of this facility, they have to have their car searched again before they go back in. Follow her to the security checkpoint and after she's allowed through, it's my turn to let the cube of chain link fencing drop around my car. The Kevlar Cloud Security Guard gives the trunk in the back seat a curse research, asking me whether I have explosives or weapons. He's quite genial, almost cheery.  He asks that we pops open my glove box. Yes, I reply. What an interesting place, huh? It's amazing they have all those old photos down there, isn't it? Yes, it's amazing. Are you doing some research or? Yeah, I'm writing a book. That's great, that's just great. Have a wonderful day, you'll love it down there. Thanks. He waves me through, slaps a button that raises the wall of fence in front of me and lays flat the row of yellow steel spikes on the road ahead. I then wait for a green light to raise yet another security gate, protecting the entrance to Iron Mountain's National Data Center in Boyer's, Pennsylvania. Formerly a limestone mine, the site was converted into a secure records and data storage facility during the Cold War. Now it consists of roughly 150 underground acres of vaults filled with ordered avalanches of paper, miles of microfilm and digital servers forming a part of what we collectively and inaccurately refer to as a cloud. For the data we preserve around the clock just a little bit of the sky, it is a place on the ground and underground. It had Iron Mountain, one of nearly 2,700 data centers in the United States alone. The entrance to the cloud is what military strategists call a choke point. Stone archway wide enough for only a single vehicle to pass through. Easy to barricade, difficult to penetrate. One of the reasons this place has such a high security rating at four. Let's put that in perspective, the White House and the Pentagon are five. I've come here to do research at the Corvus Film Preservation Facility. Anybody heard of Corvus? You know Corvus, it was like an image licensing company. Yeah, it was created by Microsoft founder Bill Gates for his image resource company Corvus. This, I'm gonna call this Corvus Film Preservation Facility, the CFF for short, so I don't have to say it a little bit. Now it's only one of many vaults in Iron Mountain. Bill Gates built this to house his photography collection. He built a 10,000 square foot refrigerated vault located 220 feet underground in a limestone powder. He had tens of millions of photographs down. So Corvus makes money by licensing images for use in commercials, reading cards, magazine ads, documentaries, websites, book covers, and anywhere else images are deployed to pursue the revenue. Though journalists or documentarians like Ken Burns or his assistants have visited the CFF often, the facility is notoriously difficult for academics to access. I sent emails and made phone calls to basically everyone I could find on the Corvus website for about three years. And suddenly somebody got in touch with me from the archive. I had no idea why or how it just happened. But the fact that academics have a hard time accessing the CFF makes sense because the richest man in the world at the time built it not for research purposes, but for profit. Corvus began as interactive home systems founded by Gates in 1989. The billionaire had imagined that people in the digital age would eventually have wall screens in their homes. Like if you ever read Fahrenheit 451 where they all have the wall screens and they thought, okay, so if there are wall screens everywhere people are gonna want to decorate their walls with art and iconic photos. So if I own all the art and iconic photos or the rights, the digital rights to the art and iconic photos, I'm gonna be the richest man in the world all over again. Now as we know, Spring's got smaller, not really bigger, so he kind of missed there. But anyway, that was his idea. So back in the 80s, he began buying massive amounts of art in numerous image archives. He snapped up the digital rights to art in the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery in London long before most museums, artists, or lawyers even knew what digital rights were. He bought one of Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks not to mention the digital rights to all the Ansel Adams photographs and some of the most important photography archives in existence. His acquisitions included the Betman archive which contains over 10 million photos and illustrations including the entire United Press International Archive and iconic photos like Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue, or Marilyn Monroe having trouble with her skirt on a Manhattan sidewalk in a row of construction workers searched on a steel beam quoting 50 stories above the out-of-purpose atropolis. If you haven't heard of the Betman archive anymore, the Betman, if you've never seen it on the photo predator or something here and there. So the originals of these highly valuable photos are actually stored in a special deep freezer at negative four degrees Fahrenheit. According to Henry Wilhelm, the designer of the CFF and the leading expert in the field that I really love called Image Permanence. The refrigerated humidity controlled vault will effectively preserve the photos until in it for 15,000 years. Without such measures, photographic negatives will decay within a century or so. All right. So finally, I passed through the choke point. Now excitement is building because I'm like, I'm finally going to get to go to this place. Okay. But you have to drive excruciatingly slow when you're at Iron Mountain, right? Because it's fully securitized. So I'm moving like 10 miles an hour and I cannot wait to get there. And there are all these people on golf carts like zooming around me.  It's kind of a really big problem. It's actually a fire in Pennsylvania that's underground. It's burning through coal like all the time, forever. So anyway, I'm here, I am. I'm driving. I'm all worked up and really ready to get there. I parked my car just outside the CFF and there's an Iron Mountain representative there named Debbie. And she greets me. She's very nice. She offers me a guided tour of the larger facility and I'm like, oh, almost in. Okay, I'll do the tour. We hop on our golf cart. We take off and she begins to list some of the features of Iron Mountain. Underground city of Alton offices has its own fire department. We pass by four bright red fire engines. In addition to in-house emergency services, Iron Mountain has the backup supplies of any respectable doomsday bunker. The 2000 people who work underground at Iron Mountain to survive for months under a total lockdown without any contact or reinforcements from the world above. We ride past the set up doors for the Warner Brothers logo beside them. That's where the studio stores original masters of its classic films, Debbie says, ET, Back to the Future, Jaws. They're all inside. Just around the corner is an unmarked vault.  So it's really weird. You have to kind of shout at people.  But in that one, she points to a set of black doors, are all of the original reels of Steven Spielberg's interviews with Holocaust survivors. He's one of our private clients. I learned that all of the original records of the US patent office are somewhere down here, as well as the black box from the United Airlines Flight 93 and numerous other artifacts and rooms without signs over the doors. They're contents classified. As I ride the golf cart with Debbie, I flash back to being five years old, watching the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark on Betamax. If you know what Betamax is, they're not people. Now I'm speeding on a golf cart through a real-life version of that warehouse where they rolled the Ark of the Covenant into, as the credits came on. The fictional warehouse, like this one, is an almost boundless archive of materials, some of them secret, that we painstakingly preserve or protect. Materials that exist in the kind of necessary oblivion just below the surface of everyday life. And like the Ark of the Covenant, we attribute to these materials a kind of supernatural power and treat them with reverence.  We ride past an office where herds of workers are returning from their lunch break. The facade of the cubicle space is plain, with a sign that reads, rather than ivory, U.S. Office of Personnel Management. This office is one of the main reasons for the Doomsday security measures of the facility, as it houses all of the records from security clearance proceedings. We check out another ball. This one tidy and endless and just as cold. We open up a box of microfilm backups of nationwide insurance policies. Are these old? I ask, why are they on microfilm? She smiles, replying, no, they're not old. These boxes just arrived. Microfilm is still the archival standard for permanent records. Digital files aren't considered permanent. So a lot of corporations and government agencies still keep backups on microfilm for certain kinds of records you have to by law. As if to drive home the point, Debbie takes me down the road to a media lab where old paper files are being digitized. But in the other half of the lab, technicians in white coats are creating microfilm copies of PDFs. It's the blatant reverse of what popular culture and digital technology tells us, namely that we make progress by shifting to new data formats. But in that moment, in the digitization and microfilm lab, I realized that media history is like all of history, a cycle, a whirlwind of human successes and failures, much more disparate and haywire than any story we tend to tell about it. She drops me off at a music and media production studio. The rooms of the studio have the same cave walls as the other vaults, but they have been painted a shimmering silver, like something out of a 1960s sci-fi flex set in the 1990s. At some point, some dude at Iron Mountain was like, yeah, let's paint all the cave walls silver and it will like reflect the light and heat. And then somebody realized like that's not how light feet work. So they just stopped. And that's the result. And in this silvery cave, there's every type of surviving media playback machine in the world.  The studio technicians can pull up the sound or the images for you. That is if they can be pulled up. There are horror stories of master recordings being unplayable due to decay or malfunction. And these stories are not all or even mostly about the older recordings, but about the newer digital ones. According to Garrett, my tour guide in the studio, our drive failures can shut down an entire project and render any future projects evolving at least for possible. I remember we were supposed to remaster a Kanye West recording, which could have been more than about 10 years old. We pulled the hard drive out of the vault, popped it in, and it just wouldn't spin. So that material is pretty much lost. Beyond the work of contemporary artists, Iron Mountain houses some of the most valuable recordings of history, including master tapes of Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley. As Garrett tells stories of coaxing sound out of fragile artifacts, studio engineer who looks like Dana Carvey's garth from Wayne's World interrupts to inform me that I am standing in the same room with the original recording of Gloria Gaynor's I Will Survive. He is running the tracks into the sound editing software Pro Tools for a disco version of Guitar Hero. I bet you never noticed this super funky guitar underneath everything else. Super funky guitar underneath everything else. He says to me as he presses a couple of buttons and suddenly all the tracks drop out except the guitar. He's right, I hadn't noticed the guitar before. And it is indeed super funky. Only later when I noticed how strange and haunting it was, the recorded voice of Gaynor was shouting the phrase I Will Survive, even as it underwent preservation. Like a protest against the decay and inevitable entry into oblivion that ultimately awaits even the most guarded of human artifacts. The pleading in the voice is both adamant and vulnerable, reminding us that one can desperately see survival, but survival can never be guaranteed. Then into the photo editing room we go, where a worker customizes Corvus images for licensing clients. She removes dust and hairs from the digital scan as well as other noise. She also manipulates the image. Not just wrinkles or cracks in the emulsion, but also pieces of furniture for people can be removed from an image. At this moment, she's erasing a podium from a photograph of Elmar Roosevelt to make the photo unbalanced. It's a standard procedure for every digitized image they license, and it reflects a tricky truth. Preservation may promise to keep everything the same, but it always changes that which it preserves. Outside, Debbie is waiting on the golf cart. How'd it go? She shouts over the sound of air compressors and jack cameras. Very interesting. I reply at the top of my voice. There are actually workers across the way on these scaffolds, because they're like hollowing out more limestone caverns for more data, vaults, or photo vaults, or paper and microphone vaults. Let's get you over to Corvus, she says, and start heading that way. Corvus, I'm here to see as many images as I can from the Batman archive, and I'll just summarize this part. Basically, when Bill Gates was buying all this stuff, it was still the 90s when everybody thought they were going to digitize everything, because I'll buy it. There are about 11 million photos. I'll digitize all of them, and everyone will have access to this great archive. Well, they got about 200,000 photos in, and they did the math, and they digitized by the time they digitized all 11 million photos, half of them would have decayed beyond recognition. So they're like, let's not do that. So they digitized about 250,000, and prior to him buying it, the photos were in this really hot and humid office in New York, so they were just like succumbing to what's called the vinegar syndrome, which is when photographic negatives decay, they have at least an acid that smells like vinegar. So actually being in the facility, you can still smell that. There's a smell of decayed images. So what he had to do was he digitized 250,000, and then he built this 10,000-square-foot freezer, because he's like, if we're going to digitize these at any point in the future, we have to stop the decay. And then they have a smaller freezer outside of the big vault, and that's at negative four degrees, like super cold, and that's where they store the very important photographs, get it? The VIP, yeah. So like Mary Ellen Monroe and Albert Einstein and all of them, they're in a special vault. And when you pull photos out of that vault, because it's negative four, it actually takes hours, because you have to progressively move them to warmer temperatures that you don't get condensation on the images. So it's quite a process, right? So eventually I go into the big vault, and I'm looking down these long rows of filing cabinets, filled with tens of millions of photographs. And I really begin to wonder and destroy the question that this book is about. How did Americans become so obsessed with trying to save photos, paper documents, sound recordings, looting images, and digital files? And how did we become obsessed with saving them forever? So I was in grad school when I started exploring this. And so I, you know, I did what you do. And I looked at books and documentaries and all this stuff. And I kept running into like some version of like a really bad history channel documentary, or like a really bad like high school research paper, like since the beginning of time, NAN has always preserved the ancient Egyptians. I was like, this cannot be the only excuse for why the Iron Mountain National Data Center existed. But then I took a class where I ran to a very important essay. In his essay, The Ontology of the Photographic Image, the pioneering French film critic, Andre Bazin, offered the most compelling universal theory on what motivates humans to preserve. Bazin died at the untimely age of 40. And his theory of preservation is not only that, it is also a meditation on mortality and the fleetingness of life. He penned this theory in 1945, in the wake of the unprecedented death toll of World War II, a war captured in photography and moving images in vivid detail. According to Bazin, humans attempt to ward off time and death by preserving images of themselves that will outlive their physical bodies. At the center of all this human creativity is a mummy complex decline. Universal and trans-historical practice in all cultures and at all times, this psychic structure finds expression in all the plastic arts from painting to sculpture from death masks and taxidermy to photography and cinema. Not to mention, of course, ancient Egyptians' mummification of the dead. Yet Bazin can never really explain why preservation practices are so intensive in some cultures and not in others. Nor did he have an answer for why the scale and technological sophistication of preservation increases at one moment in history as opposed to another. According to him, when we preserve, we manifest our mummy complex and tell ourselves that whatever happens in this uncertain world, that no matter who is left alive when a war or economic meltdown includes, the trace of us will remain. This is the technological afterlife we seek, not unlike the Egyptians who preserved the heart, liver, lungs of the dead and earthen jars so they could be used in the afterlife. But unlike the ancient Egyptians, we have made such extensive preservation necessary, not only for our afterlife, but also for our earthly life. As our financial lives, social lives, love lives, and all major economic and governmental institutions in our country rely on digital infrastructure to record, preserve, and redistribute the data that underwrites our everyday life. The Egyptians did not do this, so why didn't we? We the dead makes the case that the mummy complex is mutated. We have perceived success in our preservation efforts so often that we have made a way of life out of it. We Americans, we the dead, now have a new condition, the data complex. The data complex is both material out there in our libraries, archives, data centers, bomb group bunkers, and it's psychological. It's a complex inside us in our minds where we fear the progression, time, decay, and data loss. Emerging in the early 20th century and developing over a series of crises, the data complex preserved more and more data about us than it promised us security in a kind of database immortality long desired by the mummy complex. But now, the data complex has become so vast, so automated by algorithms, machine learning, and artificial intelligence that has moved beyond preserving data about and for its human creators. The data complex now exists ultimately to preserve data for its own sake. The data complex's main purpose is to preserve itself. There are a couple of key concepts in the book. I'm going to do a little overview, and then I want to make sure we have enough time for questions. The one key concept is I make a distinction between our biological bodies, our bio body, and our data bodies. So all of us have a body of records that accompanies us. It really starts off before we're born with medical records if your parents are in ultrasound, et cetera, and accompanies you through your life and all the ways that you are tracked and traced and things that you create and then even after you die and that body of records is all advancing, no pun intended, with holograms and all the postmortem chat bots and all the stuff that's happening, which I get into later in the book. So we all have a bio body and a data body. And another key concept is the concept of the cyborg. And cyborg comes from a form of cybernetic organism and the essay in which that term was coined in 1960 is actually called cyborgs and cyborgs and space. And so drawing on a couple of different writers, they argue that so the version of cyborg we're most familiar with, which is a human with machine implants, that's sort of like the sci-fi, antithesis version. Actual cyborgs and closer to the original meaning of the term is actually a system that humans are plugged into. It's a homeostatic system. So the way they narrativize this is like imagine someone in deep space exploration. They can't be bothered with constantly maintaining the machine because then they would be like a slave to the machine and it would be like free to think about what was the next galaxy they wanted to travel to. So the idea with the cyborg was to actually integrate the humans built in autonomic systems with those of the machine. And so the entire cybernetic circuit contains itself automatically. So I talk about the data complex as a cyborg in that classic sense of the term. But let me do a little overview of the book and then we can dive into whatever you want to dive into. I'm going to share my screen. So that's just the cover of the book. This is the choke point at Iron Mountain that I described before.  You're not going to win that battle. This is inside the Corvus vault. So there's all kinds of stuff down there like rag paper, newspapers from the 1850s and pretty amazing stuff. This is one of the media vaults. I went into one that had all of HBO's, Masters and everything that ever produced. This isn't a Getty Images image of a Corvus vault, is it? This is a Getty Images image of another vault. There's a whole other story where like in 2016 Bill Gates sold Corvus to a Chinese investment group and now Getty Images manages it in North America. I have to explain that later in the book because that hadn't happened yet when I went there. And I had to use some Getty Images because I wasn't allowed to take photos anywhere else but inside the Corvus office because of security measures. And also if I had to go to the bathroom, somebody walked me there and waited for me outside and then walked me back. So this is inside the media lab where I met the dude from Wayne's World. I'm reincarnated. And this is the actual office. I wish I had time to talk about those card catalogs that you see because it was Otto Detman, the founder of the Detman archive, his completely customized idiosyncratic system, which had nothing to do with like do decimals or anything.  It's happening. That thing is as incredible as the photos themselves. And also nobody knows how to use it because the guy that knew how to use it, they laid off. And so it's just kind of there and you can look through it, but it's completely useless in separate fascination. This is the underground lake down there that they use for cooling the server room. So they pump water from one end of the lake and then they pipe the rugs of the ceiling and absorbs heat from all the servers. And then they pipe the heated water back to the other side of the lake and cools it down again. So let me just talk a little bit about what's in each chapter and then I'll be quiet and take some questions. You got time for that? Or should we jump right into the questions? This is so fascinating. We'll take five minutes. So I'm sure you've all read the early issues of vital statistics, special reports. But in the first chapter of the book, I looked at some work that was done at the Bureau of Standards, which is usually associated with weights and measures, but they were funded by the Carnegie Corporation. So you carry out the first scientific studies of what causes deterioration in paper and microphone records. Because in the late 19th century as the US industrialized and railroads spread out across the country, the corporate form really stretched out. So you had all these corporate headquarters, you had all these different sites within the business, and you could no longer just walk onto the factory floor and see how things were going. You had to use these paper records, but the paper records were printed on the wood pulp, which by the early 20th century was shown to have some problems of durability. So now we have the government and corporations are most important institutions that are supposed to be the most durable and they're literally held together by these fragile deteriorating records. So there was a lot at stake to figure out how we could create permanent records. So this is just one of the reports that the lead chemist Parker Kimberly published. But I dig into that history and I also look at the use of gas chambers to sterilize and mitigate volumes because bookworms are a real thing. There's an actual insect that tunnels through books. These are real. It's not just a car jam thing. And they were destroying a lot of records and a lot of priceless books. So they started using poison gas on books and Huntington Library, Arthur Kimberly, who you just saw as a report, he picked it up, went on to work the National Archives, and then it became pretty standardized practice. So everything that came into the National Archives was gas and gas chamber. I look at the first quote unquote permanent time capsules created in the 1930s. There were some fellows very much influenced by the eugenics movement who were really scared that all of these African-Americans and immigrants were going to contaminate American culture as we knew it and destroy the typical American family and I'm just quoting them, right? Like the degeneration of the cause of degeneration of the light rays. So they created capsules like this one where they took basically mankind's accumulated knowledge up to that point, put it on microfilm, put it inside of a glass capsule, put that inside of a metal capsule, sealed it with asbestos and then buried it like 100 feet underground. And this was supposed to be opened by people 5,000 years from now. So the year 69-39. If you're interested and you read the book, you'll see like the chairman of Western House talking about how they'll be like supermen and superwomen and there will be no abnormal people in that time. Very much influenced by the giant. This is the typical American family because the Western House time capsules deposited at the World's Fair in 1939 and 1939 World's Fair also had the typical American family contest. This is one of the families that won. You can see they're very typical. This is Thoromel Jacobs who also really created an even more ambitious project at the same time. Western House sort of stole his idea actually. He created the Crypt of Civilization and it was modeled after the Egyptian too. It's outside of Atlanta, Georgia on the old Thorpe University campus. And that's actually where I drew the title because he gave an address at the closing of the crypt where he talked to the people of the 81-13 who would open it and he said, so we knew the dead out of a distant past salute you in the sunny hours of the future. And we wonder if you have the same hope of immortality as we do. His archivist, this really idiosyncratic guy in TK Peters who was an inventor of pre-Kinsey sex researcher, a filmmaker. He was like the historical consultant on the birth of the nation. But he also was the archivist for the crypt. He also was an avid yoga practitioner and I've been to all of his papers everywhere, UCLA, Library of Congress, et cetera. And he said that he was going to be there in 81-13 because they believed in reincarnation and he was going to make that happen. I don't know if that's how reincarnation works, I'm not an expert. I don't think it is. But he said he'd be there in 81-13 to explain the crypt to everyone in the future. So this is actually one of his inventions. It's a fragment of metal film that I found at the Library of Congress because with any new medium that comes along, any new data format like microfilm, we're really excited. This is better than paper, it's great. And then you're like, but it's also new and we really don't know if it's going to last. Let's back it up with something ancient. So they have these metal film reels. You can see it's FDR. So it was invented by TK Peters and invented a special projector that would bounce light off of it. So it worked by reflection around the shiny light through. So the image gets etched into nickel.  Oh, this is him doing yoga. By the time you get to chapter three, I'm looking at things like atomic bomb tests, which we know like the mannequins getting blown up and Operation Q, but they were also doing things like dropping atomic bombs on filing cabinets and saves where documents will be stored to make sure that our data was bomb proof. And then I dig into a lot of photos right into that. I go to the bunker at Greenbrier. This is a luxury resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, under which was a secret fallout shelter for Congress, which was never used. There was no atomic bomb dropped in the United States, but you can tour it now. And it's also a data center or what's known as a data bunker. That's the 27 ton. Later in the book, we go to outer space. I didn't go there literally, but I thought about projects like Trevor Kagan's last pictures, the boys are going to record and sort of look simultaneously at these frontiers, if you will, right? Because digital isn't a materially unsustainable format because it requires all of these minerals and metals. And it's also a data bunker. That's the 27 ton door. Later in the book, we go to outer space. I didn't go there literally, but I'm going to look at all of these minerals and metals that the earth has in finite supply. But now Goldman Sachs is saying, we just invest in asteroid mining. We'll have an infinite supply of platinum gold and all the things that we need. So the end of the book gets into the question of outer space exploration, how the tech world is trying to take us there. And also continuing efforts to expand the data complex here for things like DNA data storage. So I'll stop there and we can go anywhere in that itinerary to go deeper. So thank you. That was amazing. And it really kind of spreads to moments of my professional life because before I ever went to Los Angeles, I did my MFA at Poetry and of course, every professional event there starts with someone like reading what they wrote. And I really loved and appreciated going back to that time and appreciate this book as a literary work in addition to that research. Thank you. I was thinking about the kind of like, there's the Cold War era where we're worried about preserving corporations, right? The corporate person. And then by the end of the book, you're talking about this like the preservation of our like data bodies in the present moment, right? Where we're not preserving the like corporate person, we're preserving like the actual person and maybe turning them into a like after like AI chatbot. So if first the data complex, we're worried about making corporations and all. Now it's worried about making Beyonce immortal, which is like fully data fried in every aspect of her life. What's it after next? Oh, that's a great, great, great, great question. Well, I think, I think what's happening is there's a blurring that goes on between life and digital after life between individual and corporation where the data points of the corporation now needs to survive in this model of digital capitalism, surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism, choose your name is also what we need to survive, right? So we're sort of tied in together to the circuit. I'll give you an example from the book about what some people think is next. So the Bureau of Standards, the name of the Bureau of Standards is now the National Institute for Standards and Technology. And so if you have a facial recognition system you need to test, they have with the scoring system that you can submit there. But they're also working with people on outer space exploration. So there's a plan that they're hatching with a guy named Chris Mason who's a meta-genomicist. And he is trying to sort of adapt, use biotechnology to adapt the human body to be equipped for outer, so rather than like terraforming Mars, let's genetically modify some kind of microorganism that we can smear on her skin to actually absorb all of the radiation in space that would otherwise burn us. So ideas like that. And what he thinks, he doesn't tend to talk about this. He thinks that as we explore deeply into space, we need to interrupt the inevitable heat depth of the universe. Like he literally says this in a said in that talk, we need to use our ingenuity to make sure that the universe does not destroy itself and eat that and interrupt that cycle. The scientists now believe that like it's going to expand, it's going to collapse again, it's going to dig down again. So what's beyond that is something that's sort of beyond profit. It's beyond immortality in a sort of individualistic way. It's about the endless life of the human species as a whole. In his view, that's another thing that struck me about the book. And I think very natural, like we're both Americans. It sort of, it spans kind of 20th to 21st century American history. It's very centered here. An example of a very centered here. But of course, I mean, part of verification is that we live in a really globalized world. And as I was thinking about the kind of data complex, it strikes me that one of the significant things about it is that it's the global North, right? That's generating a lot of the data, like recording ourselves and all our like, whatever, selfie reels. And of course, using up the energy that it takes to maintain that data and building technology often on top of that data, which then gets either just pushed on to the majority world as solutions that are not built for their benefits, but are nonetheless exposed on them. Or worse, perhaps they're like included, but in a predatory way. We'll go build some data by conducting our medical research abroad. So I'm wondering, like, what your thoughts are about the global dimensions of the data complex? Like, do you think that it's sort of equally present in all societies? How do you think about kind of global equity in the data complex? And the, you know, I guess my, the bigger version of this question is, is the data complex as something that evolved in a structurally unequal society, kind of inherently bound to reproduce those inequalities or could it ever be an engine of positive change? Well, the second possibility is more hopeful than I tend to be. That's not to say it can't happen. I think that, I think that there are, well, I guess that's a question. I think that it is uneven. I think that it's particularly intense in the United States for reasons that I get into in the book, and there are some numbers to back that up in terms of, you know, the United States has, you know, as a country has more data centers than the rest of the top five, you know, so the country, the corporations that are based here, even the organizational systems for information. But as far as it being used for something, something more liberatory or more positive, I guess that's possible. What would have to happen though is, I think we would have to somehow disrupt the idea that it's infinite expansion is a fundamental good. Right. We'd have to somehow, and I think we'd have to somehow figure out how to fuel it with energy sources more sustainable. I think until those things happen, it's a pretty destructive force, and I think we have to, there's a possibility that if DNA data storage can scale, that it could be a much more sustainable data storage format. You will still need computers to read it, but perhaps you can scale back the digital technology abuse in scale of the amount of DNA data storage that goes on. So that could reduce the carbon footprint. It could make it more efficient. It could make it, it could reduce the requirements for cold because now they're one of the data centers to market circle, but as you know, cold is going away. So that's one possibility. Now, I'm sure everyone who's here is extremely good looking. They're also probably smarter and better read than me. So I didn't know about DNA data storage until I got to the last chapter. So I'm going to give you a short overview of what's going on there and then do we have a mic runner to do a question for the audience? Okay, so after this we'll turn to a couple of audience. So digital tends to be a binary code, at least in a way that we tend to use it now. And so you can actually assign, you can assign that binary code to the fundamental parts of DNA. And so scientists roughly about 10 years ago, Microsoft University of Washington, Harvard as well, there's what's going on, figured out how to store digital files in DNA, how to retrieve them. Synthetic DNA, but also George Church here at Harvard, since that's been stored in a living DNA of E. Coli. It was a video that was then stored there and then retrieved several generations later, if I'm not correctly. So why that's appealing is DNA is super dense. So as of a few years ago, a stat came out that said you could store all of the information on the data in a shoebox worth of DNA. So it's appealing in that sense. It promises being the most dense data format ever. And if you freeze it or dehydrate it, you can basically create a fossil that lasts for billions of years. It's very expensive, of course. So there are many startups and people like Bill Gates are investing in it. We're trying to figure out how to make a scale so that it can be cheaper. It's not wild. All right. Questions. Yeah, I see Nick there. This is really interesting. Thank you. My question is, you know, when we think about these artifacts or this data, a lot of times it requires a way of interpreting it. So the Einstein picture is just a picture of an old guy with his tongue out if you don't know what Einstein is. In your view, then does the data complex require sort of freezing cultures so that people can understand and appreciate what the meaning of these things that are being preserved are or will we see a way of things over time through this process? That's a great question. So I think this is something that all these preservationists have struggled with at every step. You have to preserve the metadata. You have to preserve some element of the context in order for these things to make sense. So this is as important as preserving the, as you said, the Albert Einstein photo itself. In some ways, all the photos are seen as reinforcing each other's historical archive and you can sort of put it together. But still there's a deep anxiety about this and each of them went about it a bit of a different way. So the way I've answered your question is to give a couple of examples. In the Crypto Civilization, they created a sort of Nickelodeon style flip book like to teach people of 8113 how to read English. The Westinghouse Corporation, they created the book of record and they also had a lot of research on the stories around the world, libraries, archives, Smithsonian, Tibetan, monasteries, and the Malaeas, those tribes. And they also had in that book of record, John Harrington, who was an ethnologist, he produced this guide to English. Again, to teach people English and to write the book of record, so they were like, well, we need to make a great, a very nice place to dig it up. But then they were like, there's no way to create a semiotic system that is natural. One of the people said we need to create an atomic priesthood and you just pass down the knowledge from one generation to the next. Which was actually sort of create stainless steel tickets to the opening of the crypt in 8113 and we'll have fathers pass them down to sons for all the intervening generations. So, and then there's reincarnation thing which is like I'll just explain it to you. I'll just come back and explain that. So, yeah this is another thing that sort of drives us anxiety about whether any of these projects are going to work and when the data complex that anxiety serves to make us preserve more in more formats and back it up again and make it redundant and disperse it closer. We never really get the sense of comfort that we're looking for. We just end up doing more in the same. Standing by energy with all three ice caps that flood our data center. All right, another question. Yeah there's one in the back. Thank you so much. Hey Brian, it's great to see you. Congratulations on this book. I have a question about verticality and the way that your work I imagine stretched you and forced you to think about what the vertical plane does environmentally in terms of the practicality of preservation, but also why outer space, right? So I'm sure you've had to put a lot of thought into the subterranean and association with that, the legal architecture that may or may not carry forward the happening on the surface of the earth to spaces below and above ground and if that's not interesting maybe you could talk to us about your Wall Street Journal piece as well and how you presented your work in this kind of educational way to people in corporations today. Yes, thank you Megan, thank you for coming too. The outer space question is very interesting so what I noticed is that as we're growing further and further into the ground to store this data, tend to be doing more and more safely in other products beyond storing data, we're also looking to outer space and outer space as long been a sort of dreamy place. It's a place of fantasy, it's a place that is imagined to be pure of all of these sort of contaminating elements that we find on earth, whether racial, chemical or otherwise. So it's very much, it's very much an old sort of colonialist and peerless dream about going to the stars and only the people that we take with us will be there and we can create that kind of utopia. There's a dream that the resources there are infinite, the mineral resources there are infinite, but what I saw was that you have, if you take like Jeff Bezos for example, he helped fund and design the 10,000 year clock, the clock of the long now, which is supposed to run for 10,000 years in a cave in Van Horn, Texas on the track of land that he owns. But then at the same time he's investing in outer space as places. So it's kind of like a dual movement. We don't, we don't really like say we're going to go to space and like leave earth behind. We kind of do both at once. We're going to go further into the subterranean data complex and go further into outer space. I think the other thing that keeps us feeling about space is that it's imagined to be this kind of like, what I call in the book like an intergalactic clean room, because earth is dusty and dirty and if you want any digital stuff, you have to create these environments that are free of dust. So there's this idea that you can just expand forever. There's this idea that you can in the Goldman Sachs perspective that I used to have my students read in my digital materiality course. They say that there's actually water in asteroids, which you can convert into rocket fuels. So you can turn asteroid, you can create asteroid gas stations. And that would actually support this deep space travel. So I'm sorry, that's kind of rambling. I don't have to answer your question. But again, I see movements almost always in each case in both directions up and down at the same time if you want to believe the other. How would we have a plan for one more question? I mean, I couldn't help but think as you were answering that, like how childlike in some way this desire for infinite resources, right? Like if we can't have it here, like where is the place where we can go be irresponsible? Can we go to outer space? Can we take a cave and do it down there? No, it's left. Yeah, question in the back. Great talk. There's a kind of implicit assumption that future generations will benefit from access to this data. Is there much discussion about the possibility of hard to play it? Yeah, can you speak to that a little bit? Yes. So one of the things that I talk about in the book is how often preservation practices are toxic because decay is that decay we associate with death, but decay is actually full of life, right? Decay is often microorganisms that are like really happy because they're eating a corpse or they're eating a leather book or they're eating these other things that they like to eat. So in order to say, if you look at the art of taxidermy, for instance, you want to preserve a scan in the 1800s, what they would do is they've covered in arsenic, right, until they found things that weren't as lethal to humans, but still pretty toxic. The gassed books for the National Archives and Huntington Library and all those other places, they are carcinogenic, right? They gassed them with carboxide, which off gasses and leaves a toxic residue. So there's a, I think the data itself, as a meteorologist, I would say that the material is the data itself. And so there is an intoxication that happens and they can be harmful. Just to put it in the minds of some of these preservationists, they were constantly thinking about, again, how these things would be received. And even if they're not harmful, like you look at something like the Westinghouse time capsule, which I had up there, this long sort of thing, my friend Nick Javelin, who's written the best book on time capsules, he was like, they might actually not open this thing because it looks like an unexploded bomb. So that's a little bit to the side of your question, but I think that that whole sphere of concern about, will this harm them or how do we keep them from being harmed? Or how do we even communicate that this is something that we think would be good for them? And then the other anxiety in there I think is not so much harm, but one of the abiding things is that, especially these guys in the 20s and 30s were like, we're going to do this amazing technological feat that's going to prove that we modern are superior to all these ancients. But then as soon as they do that, if we succeed, it's the year of 6939. And they're looking back at us as these primitives. So they're constantly like, we are modern. Oh wait, we are modern. Oh wait. And it was just, again, it just fuels the cycle of anxiety that leads them to do more and try to do better. I think that's a great place to end. I wish I could say that we had had the foresight to record this talk on some sort of permanent, but yeah, unfortunately, not micro-peach, not going to Iron Mountain, just going into the cloud where it will dissipate and help fully decay. So please join me in thanking Brian for coming and for sharing this really terrific.


Hey Bola buddies, thanks for watching. All right So a recent plush sale kind of prompted me to do a video on this and I'm not in my normal background I'm just kind of spontaneous video thought I would just kind of sit on my couch and Share these bolos with you. I love this brand. It is so well made But when I did a deep dive research, I realized that some can go for crazy money Hey, Bola buddies. Thanks for watching Amazing, right? All right, let's get started And I'm gonna share with you some big money bolos in this brand. So let's get started All right. So let me first show you my sale. I Sold this little cutie. It is a Manhattan toy company pink Flamingo chick plush and it is so cute right here is the little tag All right, but I want to tell you to be careful because the tags look differently on Different years and different dates. So the vintage plush are going to have different tags This one here. I believe is newer. It's probably retired But this sold really fast for twenty six dollars plus shipping and I picked this up at the Goodwill Benz So let's go over to Mercari first because what I like to do in my videos for plush is to show you what's selling on Mercari Poshmark and eBay because what I have found is that plush does really really well on Mercari it does decent on Poshmark and Always does good on eBay, but eBay can sometimes be flooded So I think it's important to cross-post your items to other platforms when you're doing plush So let's get started with some of these bolos Over here on Mercari. This is the number one Manhattan toy company plush to be looking for and when I say number one, I mean the dinosaurs in General. All right, let me look look at the tag here. This one is from 1984 And it says made in Korea and it's 18 inches. Okay, so 159 plus Shipping this sold for and honestly like the photo is not that great even it's kind of chopped out So I'm wondering if oh there we go. It was my screen. I've got it zoomed in That's my fault. All right. Well, it's still a little chopped off, but anyway Let's look at the next one here This one is an elephant is it an elephant It's an elephant and it's sold for a hundred and thirty five dollars plus shipping also vintage also made in Korea Now if you guys watch this and you decide if I convince you that you should be having your plush items on Mercari There is a link down below. It's a referral link and you're gonna get ten dollars to shop when you join with it And you're gonna get another twenty to shop after you sell a hundred dollars worth of stuff So definitely worth Checking out and I buy on Mercari all the time also now we'll get over to Poshmark here shortly And I was surprised to find Different plush Over on Poshmark. It was really interesting here is another Manhattan Stegosaurus this one's from 1984 sold for a hundred and thirty waiting till you see the eBay We'll get to that but this guy right here a hundred and thirty. So again another dinosaur going for over a hundred dollars This is a rare Manhattan toy company black leopard and Anything realistic that is larger Those are going to be a Bolo in most cases definitely be on the luck look out for these Realistic-looking plush this one just happens to be Manhattan toy company and it sold for a hundred and twenty five dollars Free shipping so free shipping is gonna hurt a little on a bigger item like this, but very cool Bolo This is a fraggle rock Sprocket dog Jim Henson Manhattan toys from the Muppets this one still has the original tag and Let's see 16 inches. I don't see The year so I'm not sure how old this guy is. Let me see if it's on the back of this tag Usually it'll say and I think the year is important, but I'm not seeing it as anybody seen it Oh 2010 so it is retired fraggle rock The next item are more Puppets it looks like Jim Henson Fraggle Rock This is a set of four these went for a hundred and ten. So this guy right here. Let me see if I can go back Whoops didn't want to go back that far here he is this one went for a hundred and twenty five and He's not over here. So he must be a harder to find one because all four of these went for a hundred and ten Any puppets I always pick up puppets love puppets vintage Manhattan toy company plush dinosaurs They sold the two of these for a hundred Here is your tag Again a different tag these are from 1991 So 93 and 91 so there is going to be some variation in the tags, but it's nice that the tags are dated for sure Here is another one of the Brontosaurus this one went for a hundred It's from the 1980s as well Always always always in my opinion put that tag people want to see the tag Here is another dinosaur this is a triceratops 12 inch so this one's smaller sold for seventy eight dollars. Here's the tag 1993 so it looks like the ones from the 80s, of course go for more because well They're older and probably harder to find vintage platypus Manhattan toy company 1987 hard to find he sold for sixty four. He's got that same logo on his so if you look at this one and We go over here and look at My listing you can see it is a totally different tag All right, let's go on to this guy Manhattan toy lanky cats Georgie blue eyes now we have an another tag Under stuff floppy. So this is kind of I don't know if it's supposed to be under stuffed That's interesting. Look how funny it is $50 on this one. So not huge money, but still 50 bucks for a plush. I will take that all day long Here is a Manhattan toy company dog and It sold for 48 plus shipping 17 inches from 1998 Now one thing I will say on Mercari the bad thing about it is there's not auction style. So Anybody on Mercari can price their item at what they want and they may have undersold some of these So keep that in mind and still definitely do your research This one is a Manhattan toy blue pattern pals bunny This is a newer one like mine and it sold for $46 plus shipping Here is a Manhattan toy black panther plush and Let's see. I don't see any measurements, but a different tag. So I don't know what year this is They've got it right there in their kitchen my goodness This is your listing. I'm sorry. I laughed but White background if you're gonna put it in your kitchen do a white background. Otherwise try to find a solid background It's really distracting to see the actual plush when there's all this stuff around it That is my personal opinion. You may or may not agree still sold for $45 plus shipping The next item is this purple dinosaur. It's a 15 inch from 1984. I'm guessing maybe Just maybe they undersold this one Based on the other comps of the dinosaurs and we're gonna look at eBay.  Oh boy galloom Pagela galloom pagalots never heard of it mrax monster plush toy, and it's got the original tag on it This is from oh wow, it was originally $52. Wow, I don't see a date 2008 original tag attached so I probably would have put Used original tag attached, but that's just what I do for plush if they're original owner that could be different All right, so let's go over here to Poshmark this bunny Manhattan toy from 2001 sold for a hundred and thirty five dollars So Definitely a little cutie right there, and I'm sorry I had these all pulled up and enhanced them for some reason They went back down to the original size. So a little updating there sewn nostrils This one's cute. It's a little woodlanders moose plush It's sold for a hundred bucks, and he doesn't look very big He's ten inches from the top of his antler to the bottom of his foot so that A person that had this listed did a really good job of including lots of great information in the description Something I do not do looks like maybe it originally sold for 80. Not sure Sold for a hundred bucks This one right here is adorable, and if I had to guess this may be a newer one, let's see if it tells us 2003 so no it is vintage. Well, yeah 2003 vintage It is a cozy cradle doll mini plush, and it's got the original tag attached sold for seventy nine dollars plus shipping This is cool definitely would have picked this up. I love picking up puppets It is a vintage Manhattan toy finger puppet theater. Look how cute this is. Oh I didn't tell you what it sold for it sold for seventy eight dollars plus shipping on posh mark Here's another one of those go Galuma Pagalots or whatever it is sold for sixty five dollars and it's twenty four inches So it's actually a pretty big guy so You can look at that one and compare it to the mercury there Here is this little lovey if you don't know about loveys. They are a bolo They may not be big money bolo's but a lot of times they sell really good because people are looking for them It says slight blemish at eye this sold for fifty six dollars plus shipping This next item is a little lamb. It's still got the original tag I believe this one does have the newer tag and This little lamb sold for fifty five dollars plus shipping and And the next one also is a newer one that sold for forty nine. It's a plush kitty So let's go over to eBay now and talk about some craziness. All right Now what I did not do today is I did not break these down by Did it sell I started out with these first ones checking feedback and there was no feedback for any of them So what we can do is we can go into this listing I'm gonna show you how to check. All right And I'm gonna click on the feedback and This is one way to check man Atten We'll just put in Manhattan. No feedback new items for sale, so we're gonna type in man pattern and See if it's re-listed. It is not Relisted so that tells me that the item probably sold they just didn't leave feedback But I cannot verify that 100% But what I want to show you is at the top at the very top of all of the eBay solds. These are highest first We have the dinosaurs. So we've got the t-rex the rhinoceros we've got another elephant and If these actually sold for these prices the they are going higher on eBay So either the people on Mercari underpriced them or these people really didn't get paid for these items Let's look at this one because these are all the same seller right here. So let's go in and Let's put in Manhattan. I think I already looked at these and there were no comps or no feedback left Let's view seller store and There are none listed. So the only Manhattan toy that's listed is this groovy girls So I'm gonna say that maybe they were good sales and the people that bought them just did not leave feedback And that very well could be here. We have another Triceratops Brontosaurus so the number one Manhattan toy company Plush selling plush are the dinosaurs 100% hands down and this elephant Here is that Pierre the pig. I don't know what this one for I can show you another way to look if you would like Let me go in Okay, so I am over here at research terror peak product research I am going to cut and paste that title in here and I am gonna hit research Once I do that, I am gonna see right here that this item sold for a best offer of $120 So that does not it was 179. You can see it's crossed out. So it sold for 120. So let's go in And see if there was any feedback left No feedback We're gonna go into the seller store And it is not Relisted so I'm gonna say that that also was a good sale Uh, I know that we saw another Pierre the pig over on mercari and I think it went for less Let me see if I can find it real quick Was it the last one I did Right here 45 bucks. Now it does look a little bit different This one says terry cloth 45 dollars and this one Is terry cloth, but it looks it looks a little different but 120 this one looks to be in better condition. Maybe But anyway, uh 16 inches on that one. This one is Seven inches. So this one is smaller but either way the Manhattan toy pig Pierre is a good one to look for look at this Huge ride on 58 inch dragon nylon plush. Oh my goodness. I would have priced that so much higher. That is incredible Uh dying just because I would price it higher doesn't mean it would go higher but So now you guys know how to check therapy here is a another leopard or a jaguar panther plush two of them here a little bit different style So that's a good one as well. Here we have a leopard Here's another giant dragon a cheetah So here are just some of the big money plush And again, I am not verifying these here is a groovy girls Now most of the groovy girls are bread and butter, but this one is a jumbo life size 40 inch So it looks like she might do okay Look at this. These are cool. These are all in their original packaging says few rips. That's weird So manhattan toy company is definitely a item to be on the lookout for here's a platypus 79 99 another pier Looks like that platypus is definitely one to be on the lookout for here's some groovy girls See, look at this all of this for 74.99 and a best offer was taken. So Um, oh look at this little cutie from dr. Seuss So be on the lookout for manhattan toy company a lot of the vintage ones can do pretty well, but You can also do well with them as bread and butter. Here's some more fraggle rock Super cute, right? Oh, look at the little kitty Kitty kitty. I think that one was over on um poshmark Around the same price it sold for Here's the beds the groovy girl beds Oh, look at these unikitty Maybe look at this. I would have done a buy it now on that Always start your auctions high. This person started at 49 dollars and 99 cents Probably hoping for a bidding war and that did not happen. So I would say, you know, if these are going for 100 to 150 Start your auction at 100 or 150 All right, you guys thank you so much for being here. You could look um Let me let me just show you something before we go here. Let's go. Um, I'm in high to low Let's look low to high Just a just to show you now I personally would never ever Create a listing for something for a dollar 95. I just it's not worth it to me. Uh, that's a buy it now But you can see here some like an auction probably Don't start your auctions at 99 cents. I always say don't start your auctions at 99 cents start it at the minimum you want to take I am sure that these people did their research, hopefully And just decided I guess to price these low. Oh my goodness. Look at this magnetic no puppies I bet it has baby puppies that um Maybe uh hook on to it How cute is that? But look at these little cheapies. So there are Manhattan plush that do not go for a lot of money So just because you see Manhattan toy does not mean it's going to be a big money bowlo Here is one that is a newer one that is not a big money bowlo. Okay So definitely look them up Some of these people may have undersold their items keep that in mind a reseller could have bought some of these and flip them But I just you know, I I do these big money bowlo's But I just don't want to forget to say that there are so many that are bread and butter Let's go to like page Let's get out of the major bread and butter and go into like kind of the mid area I think I have it on 200 here Scrolling. Oh my goodness. So sorry so sorry so sorry See we're still in the nine ten dollar range For the solds. Let's go to page four And let's kind of look into some of the ones here Oh, look how cute that is So we're still in the 20 30 dollar range, but you know for me if oh look look. Yeah, they hook on look how cute They are. Oh my goodness the nursing nana dog. That is stinking cute. Um, oh look at the bulldog Anything realistic like this pick it up um So 20 to 30 dollars, there's mine. Hello Bolo with olo buy one get one 25 off with coupon um 25 35 40 dollar range for a plush. I am super thrilled with that I love the magnetic ones. Those are cracking me up So more I didn't know about here's the one that's like mine that sold for 24 99 So yeah, look at all these amazing cute plush But now you know what to look for which ones are big money. Thank you guys so much for being here. Thank you for watching I appreciate it so so much Um, let me know if you learned anything new from this. I definitely did I like digging into plush because I like to sell plush So, um, the rebel reseller also does plush category videos. So definitely check her out The zombie bargain hunter as well. So thank you guys so much. Be sure to like comment subscribe and share and Thanks for watching. Oh, leave me some sort of comment down below


Parashaped puff ball. If you slice them in half like this, the inside should be marshmallow white. And that's how you can tell this edible mushroom from poisonous lookalikes. The poisonous lookalikes will all be dark on the inside. Here we are, mid to late October, Missouri Ozarks got a nice mess of edible mushrooms right here. I'm going to harvest these and serve them up. I've already tried one. If you're not quite sure about the inability of a mushroom, you don't want to start with a large batch. What I did when you first ate it, what I did was I took this mushroom right here, sliced it in half, make sure the inside is marshmallow white, and then I ate half the mushroom. And according to what I read about the poisonous lookalikes, if they're going to affect you, it should affect you within about 24 hours. So you don't want to, if you're not sure about a mushroom, you don't want to start with a large dose. You want to start with a small dose. So I'll eat half of this mushroom all the way 24 hours. And if no ill effects, then I will know that we're good here. But I'm confident about this mushroom anyway, because of that right there.  And the poisonous lookalikes will be dark inside. Some good eating there. Note the darker brown spot on the top runs kind of elongated slightly. But that's not always the case. Some of them just appear to be more like a spot. But if you do see the elongated ones, that's a good clue. Nice mess of edible mushrooms. That's some good eating there. Parashaped puffballs. One of these are soft brushes. This is a mushroom brush, very soft. You don't want to wash mushrooms. You want to brush the dirt off of them.  But I want to get the majority of the dirt off of them before I put them aside. It's good organic soil anyway, right out of the woods.  So you shouldn't worry about getting a little dirt in your mushrooms anyway. And besides, when we cook them, that dirt will be sterilized anyway. Of course, some of these I might eat raw. That's OK, too. We've been eating these mushrooms fresh, and they are delicious. And my wife saved some of the fresh ones for a recipe that she's making. And the remainder, I'm going to dehydrate for later use. I sliced these mushrooms into thirds because they will dry faster when they're sliced like this. I kept a few intact here just because I wanted to see how they do when I dry them whole. It can also dry them whole. It just takes longer. So we'll dehydrate these and have mushrooms for later use. OK, it's been over 24 hours with the heat on very low. And they seem to have dried nicely. So what I'll do is put these in a plastic bag. And when I get ready to use these, all I have to do to rehydrate them is just add water. Here are the whole mushrooms. They dried nicely, too. Yeah, they're ready to go, too. This is Survival Doc, reminding you be prepared or be prepared to be fleeced.


I've been really impressed at the dedication of all the volunteers across our eight villages from Horningsy in the north to Tevesham in the south. We've all been working hard getting to know each other and doing a whole range of things from shopping for vulnerable residents to collecting prescriptions, to keeping in touch by online meetings and WhatsApp groups. It's been impressive and I've been delighted to work alongside officers from South Cams, as well as the volunteer coordinators to try to keep our residents safe and resilient. And now we're looking forward to things improving in future and to welcoming spring. What I've been doing during the COVID-19 crisis is I've been making sure that the various community leaders and volunteers in each of the villages that I represent have been put in touch with the correct people at the various councils and local authorities in Cambridgeshire. On top of this, new information is coming out every day regarding the crisis and changes to legislation, etc. So I've been making sure this information is swiftly disseminated down to those community leaders. On top of this, I'm making myself personally available, my email address and mobile phone number available on the District Council website for anyone that does need help and doesn't know who to turn to. So please, if you know anyone that does need help, please do point me in my direction. On top of this, I would like to thank all the volunteers in the various villages for all their hard work and tireless work during this time. It's very much appreciated. Stay safe. I'm privileged to be co-leading the community COVID-19 response together with Yvonne Murray, an incredible parish councillor and community champion and the core coordination team, which is an unprecedented collaboration between the parish council, local churches, local charities and South Commons District Council, which has seen a groundswell of over a thousand volunteers who were supported by a network of 125 street coordinators to ensure that food and prescription supplies are delivered when and where needed. And it's also meant that over this long Easter weekend we've been able to reach out to 1,500 elderly and potentially vulnerable people just to check that they're okay, to make sure that everyone is safe and connected. Here in Hardwick, I'm happy to report that we have between 30 and 40 fabulous volunteers who are giving dedicated support to the over 200 people who are self-isolating for one reason or another. We're providing help with shopping, with collecting prescriptions and a whole variety of different tasks. I call them Hardwick heroes. They're doing a fantastic job and I offer my most sincere thanks to each and every one of them.


This is stock number 9444. We are here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. You're new and used heavy-duty truck headquarters. Remember, we are the guys that have the trucks on 41. Today we are checking out this super clean 2012 Ford F-250 crew cab long box. This truck has a 6.2 liter V8 motor. From this HD video, you will be able to tell that this truck is extremely clean all the way around. No dents or dings on that front bumper. Valence is in excellent shape as well. Black is the color. This one comes with the 18 inch alloy rims with the chrome covers. And this one has Michelin LT 275 70 R18 tires on it. Probably about 60% of the tread left on those tires. You can see the frame and underbody on this truck is in really nice condition as well. We shoot all of our videos in 1080p, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, or smartphone device, turn them on now. Because it's like you're right here looking at the truck with me. Hood is in really nice condition. Factory fog lights, headlights are nice and clear. Passenger side rim, no scuffs or scrapes on that. And as we go down this side of the truck, you can see just how clean that body is. How reflective and mirror-like that paint is. We take these HD videos so if you are far away. Or even if you're close by and just cannot make the trip down, you can still see the truck, hear the truck, and have confidence in what you're looking at before you even get here. We sell a lot of these trucks out of state, so we want you to have the confidence that you're dealing with the right truck and the right people. I didn't see any dents and dings down this side, very very clean. Factory chrome step bars, back rim is in excellent shape as well. And the back tires have roughly about 50% of the tread left, just a hair less than the front tires. Frame and underbody is in really nice condition. It has the camper package with the anti-sway bar, that's what that is right there. Frame and underbody are very clean like I said, and it's like that all the way underneath. Lower rockers are in really nice shape as well. As we come around to the back of the truck, very clean back here. Rear bumper, no dents or dings on that. It does have the backup sensors, tailgates in pretty nice shape. Has backup camera, locking tailgate. Has a factory forward drop-in bed liner. One tiny little ding on the corner on the other side there. And down this side of the truck, just as clean as the passenger side. I didn't see any dents or dings down this side of the truck, very very nice. You can see just how nice and mirror like that paint is. That's why we take the videos because it doesn't... We don't feel that the picture is just doing justice enough for how nice and clean these trucks are. Inside this one has the Lariat package, which gives you the black leather interior. There are no rips or tears on this seat. Both of these seats are heated and cooled. Comes with factory floor mats throughout. Power windows, power locks, power mirrors. Has the telescopic tow mirrors, they telescope out like so. And it has the memory driver seat. This one has the auto headlamps and the power pedals. And as we hop inside the truck here, you can see that this one has 85,192 miles. You can see you got your information center here. You can do your truck apps, your fuel economy, trip A, trip B, and then your gauge mode right there. Instrument cluster is nice and clean. Has the six speed automatic transmission, the turned out four wheel drive. They're heated and cooled seat buttons, dual climate control. Your tow command factory brake controller. This one has sync so you can connect your Bluetooth phone to it. This one does have the roll stability control and the downhill assist control as well. And it does have the AM FM CD player. And this one does have serious satellite radio capabilities as well. Take a look up here. This one does have the power sunroof, which is my bad there. Really nice condition. And you get the power sliding rear window up there as well. Comes with side curtain airbags too. And the passenger seat is very clean as well. No rips or tears on that. And factory format on that side too. Take a quick look at the back seat and then we'll check out under the hood. As you can see, there is a storage area underneath the rear seats here. And you can see that this back seat is nice and clean. No rips or tears on it. Has the power sliding rear window with the built-in rear defrost. And the back carpeting and floor mats are nice and clean as well. So this bottom storage container locks with the ignition key. So you can lock it with that and undo it however you need. And back here we have the factory subwoofer. And the latch tether anchors for your car seats. So you can put car seats back here. They just don't have the anchors in the seats. And then this one does have cup holders in the center console. Take a quick look under the hood. These mirrors are heated and they also have the built-in directional signals. Under the hood we have the 6.2 liter V8 motor. Engine bay is very clean, runs very smooth. This truck has been fully safe and inspected by our service shop. Has a fresh oil and filter change. All the fluids have been checked and topped off. And this truck is 100% ready to go. To see more pictures of this truck or one of our other 400 new and used cars, trucks, SUVs, minivans, wranglers, half tons, three quarter tons, one tons, you name it we got to go to our website www.SummitAuto.com Full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle on our lot. Videos of every single used vehicle that we have all at SummitAuto.com Thank you so much for checking out the video. If you want to check out more videos like this one, you can go to our YouTube channel which is www.YouTube.com. Remember to like, subscribe and share on this truck and all the videos you see there. In fact, in a second, you will see a link to subscribe to our YouTube channel on your left. A link to more heavy-duty truck videos like this one on your right. If you have not been to our website on the bottom link to this truck on our website, click those check us out. We really look forward to helping with this super clean 2012 Ford F-250. Crew Cab Long Box. Thanks again.


Hi everyone, my name is Aaron Conway. I'm a assistant professor at the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Toronto. I'm really pleased to be able to participate in this conference and really looking forward to viewing all of your presentations. Today I wanted to present to you just the way that I've used the FlexTable package to create kind of some graphical study characteristics summary tables for the last couple of systematic reviews that I've done. So the code is available to you and use here if you want to. And so I'll just show you what I've done. So first of all, I suppose the reason that I use the FlexTable package in particular in comparison to any one of the very many others that there are is that it pairs really well with this office down package, which then you can use so you can include your table just in that one up down document source document. There's going to be your reproducible manuscript because you can use this office down package to kind of change the landscape because obviously with tables a lot of the time you have to use a more horizontal landscape format rather than the vertical and various other things like that. So FlexTable paired really well with this office down package and you can still kind of include some graphical sort of images within your table to display the data better. So these are the packages that we needed to use. We'll just draw in some data and then this first chunk was just some data preparation kind of stuff to get your table into to start off with in this text format. That includes all the kind of typical characteristics that you would include in a normal summary study characteristics table to systematic review. So things like age, author details, the country, some details about the characteristics of the participants like age, sex, I do clinical research. So we typically include some details about where the study was conducted. So what clinical setting and this systematic review in particular was about the accuracy and precision of a type of blood pressure measurement device. So we included the device type where the measurements were taken and information about the number of participants and the number of measurements that were compared in the study. And so basically this table, you know, we just use the FlexTable package to kind of replace some of this text with graphical images to make it a little bit more interesting. So the first thing that the FlexTable package allows you to do is kind of replace some numbers with these kind of bar columns with this function called minibar. And so essentially we I used it to show the comparisons of like sex, so female versus male by putting one of the colors, you know, as more of a blue color and the other one as a pink. And so we basically just replaced that the percentage there with a color for the foreground and the background. And then another cool thing about the FlexTable package is you can use the function as image to just put in any type of image to into a particular cell to replace a cell. And I used that with the flag on flags package to replace the countries with a flag. So that's particularly useful in this circumstance because just having a little picture of a flag to replace like long country names gives you a bit of extra horizontal space for the table, which is handy to have when you're needing to knit to like a Word document rather than HTML or something. So that was a handy feature of the FlexTable package that was useful in this context. The next part of it was I wanted to replace some of the numbers for the number of participants and the number of measurements in each study, so that you can the reader can more easily kind of pick out which studies were the largest included the or particularly small studies. And so we use from the FlexTable package this for the participants we use the mini bar function to create these bars again. And for the measurements it's like this lollipop measure. And it's actually got so it's got like a bit of white like a white bar and then a purple little dot on the end to make the lollipop charts will replace the background a little bit later to make the white kind of stand out a bit more. And then we there are some functions within the FlexTable package to kind of merge redundant content between columns or rows. So we've done that with the year here and then we've merged some redundant content from some of the rows where we've got duplicated content from different studies for here. And then we've got some additional styling like I was saying you can replace some of the background color of the cells to kind of make those lollipop charts stand out a bit more and also replace some of the column headings. And then we can move through to another kind of feature was you can just as I was saying before you can add in any sorts of images and we just added an image into this column header to explain kind of the legend of the gender or the sex column. So that's kind of the the functions within the FlexTable package that I use but it again it was really the fact that FlexTable really pairs well with this office down package. And you can use these kind of comments block comments from the office down package to enable like a landscape view just for the pages where you want to display these tables in the landscape format. So that when you knit your table it'll produce the document in the landscape format. So that's where it ends up looking like. So just basically a way to kind of replace text that you would usually include in a systematic review summary characteristics table with some images to display the information in a more visually appealing way. Thanks again for listening and looking forward to viewing everyone else's presentations. Thanks very much.


How's it going everyone? Caleb here with late in sports cards. We're gonna be working on recon basketball next tonight We got a couple of these. This is gonna be six box break number 25 random teams. Thank you all for joining here the results Get a little bit of water and we're gonna start this guys. Good luck here. Thank you. Thank you. See what we got All right, these are all cards ship. Good luck quite the checklists with this product here White the checklist you will find some very interesting vets Oh Good luck all Bring it out with a Hawks legend Kevin. Where'd her auto? Oh, yeah to 25 Hawks legend red velvet, baby Give me some standards. Yes Erin Gordon and oh nice closing statements there John Moran's Cards sick-looking nice closing statements hollow. What's that? Very nice. Yeah, perfect Very nice it there. You go Grizzlies. Time for to see those inserts Start toss them in the recap Austin Reeves, Jonathan cominga rookie to 49. Wow You go Warriors great start Cam Thomas Breeze Take that Chris Paul Markel Falts pink Yeah, right? How much is 20 cases of pristine? I Don't know. What's the price of the box on you that one? Alan Iverson the 199 sixers and a maneuvers of Scotty Barnes.  Bothering you that much tonight We have 20 cases of pristine Yo kids rock the rim Jalen Green Nice one on the green even if we didn't Richard find a way to get That's 20 cases of pristine. I need a personal. Yeah, we know Kade base from mezzo and future legends of I just assume a hero. We have autograph pelicans Herbert Jones Awesome rookie auto there. There you go pals Nice Herbert Jones Booker Silver Jimmy Butler pink in all seriousness the going price is about 430 a box right now I think of the website to 299 dream on green warriors Ricky recon Zyre Williams It's an eight box case Darius Bay's Lee Hall hopefuls of Steph Curry Nice one there warriors Cool $68,000 For 20 cases of pristine if you got that name Kitty to 199 SGA and a maneuvers of Harden be quite the punishment $68,000 punishment All right Autograph this time Mitch Richmond that's autographed to 149 for the Kings Mitch Richmond, yeah, I claim to fame all protein of Curry nice Cool names in it too, I think you're right 199 to Marcus Cousins red nuggets Josh giddy Rookie recon I think you're on to something Caruso Greg Brown pink Joe Val the 299 and Kyrie Irving on the maneuvers Topping Luca and Curry Ray Allen silver got a rock the rim of Tatum is GT door silver Kevin long future legends in the mellow ball We Saints Texans just got underway not bad. There's some QB's in that to watch Raptors autograph our money Brooks six of 25 True potential our money Brooks Not bad Josh Christopher PJ Tucker on the silver and pink I pulled a Such a sick card out of this on Tuesday Kispert to 99 Josh Hart rookie recon a book night. It's a SGA One one like Amy's laundry tag. Oh, wow. That's fire. That's fire. Was it a personal no, it's group break Skies the limit of cake cutting him. I sit there pistons We go toss out the recap This is one of those products where there'll be a couple like inserts and stuff that'll definitely make it in there We're Sean Holmes to 299 and maneuvers of Chris Paul KD I had a decent Donovan Mitchell take that definitely for the jazz That was a PYT as well. Oh, that's pretty solid. I mean someone will definitely be really happy Speaking of Sondra, yeah, of course, he's that next card.  Nice. That's a patch autograph solid there. It'll be 8 of 99 nice Tray man thunder Awesome patch autograph congrats on that. That's Gary P There he birds silver Hall hopefuls of Russell Westbrook He might make a lot of triple doubles 299 ready gave red rock the rim It's not very difficult to make it into the NBA It's a little bit different than other sports for sure the easiest yeah Maxi claver It's gonna be a top of the charts that time Kevin Durant thunder Yeah to 299 Matisse Thible sixers maneuvers Jason kid Hang it up, you know Is that who's playing quarterback right now? Oh, yeah, you guys can watch Gino Smith right now in NFL Network That's pretty incredible right the 299 Deandre Jonathan coming a rookie recon Nice good to see that Josh Richardson and Jordan Clarkson pink Great to see that actually Let's keep her going guys this time. We've got a Sam Houser Celtics true potential rookie auto Celtic Sam Houser Silver LeBron and a silver Chris Middleton Zaire Williams rookie Dwayne Washington rookie that time number 299 Pacers rock the realm of Russell Westbrook Lusion store Yakapodal Donovan Mitchell or excuse me Davion Mitchell the rookie silver next in future legends Anthony Edwards I literally read it as Davion. It's still first. Whatever reason just Brutal man.  We have Star Wars Finest at 5 to go It'll be coming up in just a little bit guys about a Hour and a half away or so Check that out right there five to go remember your guarantee to random hits Your guarantee to random mini box with each spot purchase Yeah, sketches great color More to look for besides just the hit as well The refractors look nice Here we go cool products Yeah, good luck here everyone Oh Bomba Rui Hatchimora and Bobby Portis second half of recon It's number 25 To 1 99 and the Red Spencer Dinwiddie future legends Tyrese Maxie six years MPJ Jared Allen Silver future legends Cam Thomas Throwing around the word legend much there. Yes. Why it's not in your stack right now Keon Johnson at 299 on the rookie blazers gotta keep it real good on Herbert Jones rookie recon very good audible there Gotta keep it real It happens Keras Lever Julius Randall pink Jock Landl rookie Malik amongst silver and a maneuvers of Tyrese Halliburton Pacers Trevor Simeon with two touchdowns today. Okay You take over the bear starting job to 99 JT Thor rookie autograph for the Hornets. Thanks for the follow there shy You go Hornets Jimmy Grant Silver top of the charts train young See I guess thanks again, like I said just Star Wars left With spots. What was that five to go the last time I gave it a look Another Kevin Werder for the Hawks. What's going on? 17 of 49 glorified blue auto former Hawk legend now a king Yeah, definitely still Hawks legends Ben Simmons and Will Barton pink Yeah, he was he was Causing problems for the box to 1 99 Mike Conley. It's red rock the rim of Aaron Gordon Yes, he was taking it to us pounding them Threes everywhere they had their whole team though. That's a Danny green to 49 So many threes and rock the rim of Anthony Edwards We go to let's Right now a personal order reply ripping about 1 a.m. Eastern time. I would guess a little bit later It's probably 130 a.m. Eastern time Yeah, right around that though. It's not it'll if not it'll go on Monday. Yeah, no That's a good question check that I'm not sure I don't know Yeah, Kobe white there to 99 bulls and future legends Evan Mobley Yeah, right now. We're working on the group race. You can check out the break schedule right here That'll tell you exactly what's going on. It doesn't look like there are any tomorrow Okay, so yeah, there is also morning personals tomorrow. I don't assume a silver and any of the pink Like at like 10. Yep, so it'd be tomorrow late tonight Lonzo and a brand in Boston, Jr. Pink Jalen Suggs rookie there. Well, Bomba to 299 and maneuvers of Josh Giddy thunder Yeah, we're working on the group breaks right now Personals have been already ordered for the last few hours here. We've been coming on in Grizzly's Santi Aldama that time 7499 on the patch auto Yeah, two RPA's is kind of tough in recon You go Grizzly's Jalen Brunson silver rock the rim of Donovan Mitchell Nothing to be sad about Austin Reeves rookie to 299 Lakers rock the rim of Zion Jordan pool silver Luka pink Evan Mobley base Chumo Kiki silver and future legends of Jammer ants Autograph this time Hornets Kai Jones autograph. That's green two of five There you go Hornets Nice green. So you will five. We'll take that How lorry silver all pro Devon Booker really solid Really solid Rocco James Springer to 199 erin Gordon on the red. I'll print Saint-Goon rookie recon last one guys Close now recon basketball for you the first of the random team style breaks tonight We have one more of these right after this It was Monker Ruba to 299 Rishon Holmes Kings Kate Cunningham rookie recon Beautiful card fistings Exactly know what that design is, but it's kind of cool. Yeah, I like it You know Exactly know what it is, but it does look nice Magic Johnson silver manoeuvres of Yolkish Joshua Primo, there's events him in silver rock the rim Dominique Wilkins Collins we have autograph for the bulls. I had to sue move. Wow another patch auto 93 of 99 Awesome hit bulls. I don't know what's going on with all these patch autos We'll certainly take that you think they're like one per box at the recon, but they are certainly not Oh, I think in a full case when I read that one. Yeah, that's the last couple of cases that I do is about one per That's really nice.  I'm a rant to 199 red future legends of SGA That's awesome. Take a lot of patch autos. Yeah, why not certainly take it Please Randall Ray Allen and Brandon Boston jr. Pink rookie. Very cool stuff guys Last little bit here at this break someone 90 or excuse me to 299 Joe Val Pelicans and rock the rim of Yanis Wizards Isaiah Todd bass autograph The wizards Kevin love another sky is the limit of Kate Cunningham another one. That's sick. Definitely take that You go pristins nice Satya drama Nikola Vuchovic to 99 bulls future legends of jaren jackson jr You got it last for you Damon Thanks, sir Ray Allen. We've got a silver Josh Christopher and Denny Avdia silver Hey, what's up, Bernie doing good. Hey Bernie doing really well. It's been a great night so far I've been absolutely smashing it on these breaks Let's do a recap guys of the first recon break. You had bass autograph Isaiah Todd patch auto IO to sumo Kai Jones on the green auto to five Patch autographs at the old ammo to 99 Kevin Werder blue Hawks JT Thor Hornets Sam Hauser Celtics Kate Cunningham Pistons couple of them Armani Brooks their Raptors auto Claim to fame on the Mitch Richmond very cool card Kings Herbert Jones pelicans closing statements John Morant another nice insert there That's gonna be a trade man On the patch auto another one and Kevin Werder again autograph for the Hawks. Thank you guys very much We have one more recon basketball coming up next. We'll get right to it shortly