What's up guys and welcome to trendy updates hapa SPM bars now onto the trending topic this week is none other than willie paul willie pose and Diana Bahati aka Diana B. You know of late kumehua na chaos pales social media that is after willie paulali release a diss song targeting Diana B and of course Diana did not take a chance to respond back however you guys it came from zero to a hundred because Diana went on his uh rather Diana went on her youtube channel to tell us that willie paul actually attempted to rape her and you know she was telling us the untold story of uh you know herself and the incident that happened uh between her and willie paul a few years back now it cost chaos you guys until willie paul li bidi amengia pales social media to clear his name and he also went ahead and did a video and put it up on his youtube channel just to explain to us what exactly transpired between her and Diana maroa we do not even know who to believe because willie paul now accused Diana of lying and also of course just uh firstly accusing him attempted rape now you guys i see if that is not enough you know chaos have been there willie paul has released a press you know press statements as well na kasema ana ele kia kutini piaya where justice is going to be served that is the same case as Diana said she's going to court justice can be served i see if that is not enough we have nika the queen kama mna kumbuka nika the queen ali kua ni uh yuki ni ex wife wake doctor of wheneke and she's a gospel artist she's uh you know the paga wisha hit maker we all know she is a gospel artist now nika the queen has took to her instagram page kusema Diana is actually lying kwa sababu she was there during that night and by Diana li chkuliwana willie paul walu kua pagari she was listening to the music na she looked actually very comfortable uh been in the kwevo ana sema Diana hakula zimishwa kua palena willie paul in case you want to know more here's the video of nika the queen trying to explain to us what exactly happened during that event good morning my name is Varunika but most of you know me as nika the queen i'm a born again christian i'm a mum to two adorable brothers ages of 11 and i'm an i'm a first born in my family that consists of cows in one wall so all my life i've been surrounded by women and i love my love through his word have learned to the truth the holy spirit has shaped me to the truth and as the bible states jesus the truth he is the truth as you are you know and as a christian i'm a lady and um the truth shall always stay two free i'm not here to take five i don't know who is right i don't know who is wrong i'm here to speak about what i saw and never will i ever nika and walk it forever i have girls my first born is 11 she's entering she's she i'm soon to be a a mum to a teenager they understand and never would i ever god forbid one such a thing to befall anybody close to me god forbid so i love families a lot i love marriages that is an institution from god himself we are getting and i wouldn't want to say you or utter in words that may affect or cause harm to anyone's marriage because that is not the whole point for this video i've not been at peace since i saw i saw the story of diana in the e-police yesterday i slept i woke up in the morning to prepare my children's for school and then i was preparing my children for school i was like as a mother what have i been teaching my children i've been teaching my children to always be honest no matter how ugly the truth looks beyond say it as it is don't twist anything say it as it is don't try to look good say it as it is you know and it will set you free and i say there's a christian that i am i will say what i have to say and i want to say this i'm not clout chasing for anything i don't have no way i don't have a song that i want to release or anything i'm not clout chasing i am not doing kiki no it's because where i'm seeing this thing going the direction it's going it's not going to be good you see and you know what happens when an issue that affects a woman comes out i can't speak up a bit to the need because we are all following the emotional side of which i totally understand and uh these was around i think five or six years back five i think five years ago obviously i don't know the exact time the exact date i don't know but it was night i used to live when i was married to one again my ex-husband we used to live at Kretall apartment and we used to live in first two there are three faces this first one this first two and then this first three again and uh in kretall back then in kretall apartment we used to have um in first two we never had we we never used to have a movie shop so if you wanted to get a movie you would go to first one yeah at that time it was just first one if i'm not wrong but you would just go and then later on is when the movie shop access three was open so one day it was not even a date it was at night i was uh i was with my ex-husband now willipon ken to visit but he didn't come to the house he didn't enter the house so i think we were taking a stroll with my ex-husband then around the estates so willipon was driving a white macabees at that time so willipon kumiroba we were at the entrance of our block we used to live in block three and it was at night it was it was at night i remember when willipon came out and as we all know anybody that knows willipon knows that willipon always plays his songs willipon always loves playing his songs you're getting so that time i think it's when he had done a collaboration with sauti song i think it was take it slow the one you better take it take it take it take it take it slow i think and the akakuana to skizisha that song you're getting akatu skizisha from his car with the sticker zone and as we did not enter the car we were standing willipon piya and it took her to cut mama water punja but what caught my attention is willipon was not alone willipon had a companion of a woman and the lady was dressed in white and the lady was seated at the car driver's seat we are going to my point this is in the first true okay so when the song was blasting the girl as well was jamming to the song which later on when diana became famous is when i came and realized oh the same lady that was so i want to at least correct something that i had her say from when they left first to get i don't know what transpired i don't know what went down i don't know that one i will not speak of it because i don't know what i will speak of i have watched diana's video you understand i have watched diana's video and he says if it was in first one because i remember i think diana lived in first one before later on moving to first three for bigger house so because i think first three is in bedrooms and in first one it's i think to bedrooms so and the movie shop in first one is on first floor you get so diana saying she was at a movie shop when they started talking with the pona kivonbe get to do that was the first room mind you they had to walk down all the way to where the car was at you get diana says when she entered the car we all drove off understand drove off and went to her to to his apartment but mind you these are two people that came together in the same car and entered phase two where there is no movie shop where diana is not living and they came together and as the look of things if diana was really being harassed at that point i don't know what happened beyond the get i'm just talking at that point she should have used the opportunity to get out of the car but she never used that opportunity to get out of the car actually she was jamming to the song you get in my point so now this is leaving me to disagree with her concerning the point of pickup at cradle and how they drove off you're getting that is my honest truth and i don't know if ofoneke still remembers this because we were with him if he remembers this i know he will say also the truth you're getting and one thing i want to say is we all have our past some of our past embarrassing you're getting but let us not be ashamed of it let's put it out there as it is you're getting we are human and man is to error nobody is perfect you're getting let it put it let us put it out there as it is that is all i can just say now you guys we do not know who's telling the truth who is lying but we are going to wait because we are going to wait for justice to be done and we are here to inform you this is trendy update on spm bars


TheBasementShop.com is the premier spot for the beefiest bases, acoustics, drum kits, even ukuleles with a wide variety of new and used musical instruments and accessories from D-Drum, Luna, Dean, Specter, Warwick, Sadowski. Head over to TheBasementShop.com to find the gear you need to rock out. TheBasementShop.com. The City of Pikeville will be holding a Sensory Safe Inclusive Easter Egg Hunt and photos with the Easter Bunny on Saturday April 8th. We're going to have an all-inclusive Sensory Safe Special Needs Easter Egg Hunt. That's for the ones that don't normally get to participate. Maybe they have some mobility issues and they can't really get out in the yard with everybody else. Maybe they just aren't real social, don't want to be social with a lot of other people, or you know just there's just something that makes them a little bit special and we want to be able to have events for them as well and have something that they can enjoy. The event is open to the community with a focus on adults and children with disabilities. The event features inclusive Easter Egg hunting zones and sensory friendly games. The Easter Bunny will also be present for photos and a backdrop for children who aren't comfortable taking a photo with the Easter Bunny will also be available. So we're going to have different little stations set up here at the football field at Bob Amos where we're at now, where if you have limited vision, if you're in a wheelchair, anything like that, or like I say you don't want an Easter Egg hunt with a bunch of other people.  We're going to have some stations set up like that and our great friends over at the University of Papua football team, which is another great reason to have it here at the football field, has volunteered to help us. So we'll have plenty of help on hand if one of these children just needs a little extra help gathering their eggs. The sensory safe inclusive Easter Egg hunt will take place at the Bob Amos Park football field on Saturday, April 8th from 10 a.m. until 1 p.m. For more information, you can visit the Pikeville City Tourism Facebook page. For Mountain Top News, I'm Kelsey Dean.


My generation believes in a world where women and young girls can actually contribute to change for a better future, for a better generation. So I do that what I do with young girls, basically because I believe they have a potential that hasn't yet been tough. They have a vision, they have a purpose, but they just need a hand up. They just need someone to hold them and actually show them you can make it, you can do it. And that potential can actually be used to make a sudden change in their communities. The men here don't know what it's going to be like when they get back in, and they're απ burning themselves and they're just keeping their eyes shut. The men here, they don't talk to each other, they don't answer the call. You know, they're saving you to get back home, but what matters is that you're not going to get back. They're not going to be on the streets. What matters is that you're going to get back on the streets. My name is Mbamah Finesse, I'm from Sokoi. I'm from Mfuriakapoliti. I'm from Birawakai. I'm from Nambira. I'm from Sokoi. I'm from Jambani, Business. My name is Mbamah Finesse. I'm from Sokoi. I'm from Nambira. I'm from Sokoi. I'm from Sokoi. I'm from Sokoi. I'm from Sokoi. I'm from Nambiti. We focus on entrepreneurship to bring out the person or an economic transformation ability among these young girls. Then we focus on section of productive health rights because we believe everyone needs to be healthy, everyone needs to know their body. Because with a healthy body, brings out a healthy mind and we need healthy leaders. We need healthy leaders who are going to make it out there. So at the end of the day, they're all going to be social change makers, social change agents in their communities.


I'm in the dark, you kept pushing on, but then you went too far. Marine Land! And we got cancel! Everyone loves Marine Land. So Marine Land is such an interesting topic because I have, like, I have no idea what's going on, but I have an idea of what's going on. It's the weirdest thing. So my sources for Marine Land are always accurate. I've never been wrong about Marine Land, to be honest, to date. So when it comes to information, I'm very confident in the information I get. With that being said, if my sources are to be correct as they usually are, I feel like you're going to cease and desist. The Kellogg's information that I've been teasing, 100 Kellogg's lane in Hamilton, Ontario? Hamilton, Ontario, I think, or London, Ontario, London, Ontario. They will most likely be the new owners of Marine Land. Now, it has gone silent. So Marine Land, basically, last year started preparing for the sale. You could tell they were cleaning up all the rides, they were cleaning up the area. And then, like, we've known about Kellogg's for about a year and a half now about the Kellogg's information. We've had to keep that tight lipped. Like, again, this is pretty risky, so knock on wood. Because if they're not the buyers, then, again, so take this allegedly. There, I'm protecting myself from all that. This is alleged information to be taken with a grain of salt. Rumblings. Rumblings. So the problem is, it's gone silent. I was told that it was purchased and that they were waiting for lawsuits to clear. The lawsuits are now, as of two weeks ago, all resolved and cleared. So Marine Land has got zero lawsuits against them. Provincially, they're good as well. Federally, they're good as well. I'm 12 and 0. So we, like, we should be hearing about the new owners. Now, the only interesting thing that has come up about this, two things. Hard Rock and this Kellogg's company. There's been some sort of partnership deal that took place about six months ago. And I'm trying to keep an eye on if it has anything to do with Marine Land. So that's one. Number two, there's been ever so slight rumblings of Hershey Park. I don't think I'm sold on the Hershey Park thing. But something has happened because Kellogg's like, so I'll tell you the whole story that makes more sense. So basically, the story of the sale is the owner, Marie. She's put the park up for sale. It is up for sale as is. You can only buy it if you are interested in operating it as a theme park. I know this. This is that information is correct. And it is highest bid. It is not a sale price. There was no sale price to the sale, which is crazy. And it's land and theme park as a whole. So highest bid won the park. There was only one bid on Marine Land. And it was the Kellogg's people for the longest time. So I don't know what's happened with that because I was told January was supposed to be the announcement. January's passed. I was told even before that it was supposed to be like October, October passed. But January was supposed to be the announcement. Now the only thing that makes me believe we could still see it is because the lawsuits did get settled in January, like end of December, January. So maybe that information is correct based off of that. But if a bigger player like Hershey Park did make a bid last minute, maybe what we thought were the owners were dethroned and that's why we're not seeing anything. So that's why I say I don't exactly know anymore because the owners that I knew or I speculated the owners that I speculated were the 100 Kellogg's lane. And this was supposed to be their first theme park. I knew the plan. I knew the rides that were most likely coming next like now it's interesting. This is what has me thinking that it's a bigger player. So in these images you see here, so they've started excavating. I'm speculating. I have to be really careful in how you talk about Marine land. I've started speculating that they're removing the dead animals. So for those of you that don't know in the upper left image here, this is where the animals have been kind of like it's either here or right. I could be one of these two areas. The animals are buried from what I speculate. They are starting to remove those dead bodies. And then if down here in the bottom, bottom image you just see like a dirt road almost. So Marine land has slowly been building service roads, good service roads around the whole park so cars don't drive on property anymore. That's the whole point of it. That to me is a sign that there is a bigger player coming into because if it was a family I can't one of Canada's richest families buying the thing. I don't think they would change much. They could but I'm thinking the service roads, service roads scream someone that knows how to run a theme park. Yeah, you want to establish infrastructure. They're building the service roads everywhere like around attractions so no cars ever on the path. So that's what has me thinking. That is 100% speculation. That is not, I haven't been told the service roads are because it's a bigger theme park. That's just my guess. I could be totally wrong and maybe 100 Kellogg's lane knows how to operate a theme park better than we know and these service roads are because of them. But the good news is things are moving forward. Service roads are being built. The animals are what I speculate being removed from their graves which is a sign that with all the lawsuits being settled maybe we'll know who the buyer is. I'm telling you right now it's either the Kellogg's people, Hard Rock or Hershey. It's one of those three. It's only one of those three. If I'm wrong, I hope I'm wrong because there is another player that I wanted to be but it's not going to be them, Dollywood, who owns them again? Oh, Herschand. Herschand. I wanted to be Herschand so bad. Herschand had visited so this information I know to be true too. Herschand had actually visited the park last year twice. No bids were made. I know that. Or at least that's what my sources said. No bids were made. So they visited the park. Obviously they're not interested. Herschand did buy an aquarium out in Vancouver. Oh yeah. Yeah. So that was my hope. They're looking at properties in Canada. I don't understand why more people aren't looking at Marine Land. With the amount of space they have and at the end of the day Marine Land is prime real estate. You're at Niagara Falls, one of the biggest tourist areas in the country. The border is right there so you can be getting Niagara traffic, St. Catharines, maybe Hamilton, Toronto, but then you have Buffalo, Rochester, all that other traffic that you could feed from and there's no really competition in that area other than Darien Lake and if you do a few good investments you could easily outbid that. So I think Marine Land definitely has potential. It should be viewed as competition regardless of what it is because there is so much potential there. Oh yeah. Everyone looking at Wonderland's numbers and then you look at Niagara Falls packed today. 200,000 people recently. Did you see New Year's? Yeah. That was probably upwards of half a million. Can you imagine a Six Flags even brand up there? Canadians know more about Six Flags than they know about Cedar Fair which is crazy to me. The name Six Flags stands out to even Canadians more so. It surprises me that there weren't lineups of people even just inquiring about Marine Land. I don't know what the parameters were in terms of so if I was someone that wanted to buy Marine Land I would not keep the 1,000 acres. I would buy Marine Land, sell three quarters of the land because most operators can't afford 1,000 acres. So that would have been part of my business proposal to a bank to get the loan to buy a place like Marine Land to sell three quarters of the land even half 50% of the land to land developers. But her requirements from what I understand were it had to be sold as is. So that's what could be causing the problem because I don't see how this place isn't already something. Well I mean it's over 1,000 acres right? It's like how many Magic Kingdoms like 99 Magic Kingdoms or something like that? Well a great adventure including the safari is out 800 acres and that you know the safari alone a great adventure, Six Flags great adventure takes three hours to drive through. Marine Land is 1,000 acres. I think another intimidating thing about all that space is. There is a Six Flags in Canada, we're on. Good call out, good call out. But I think an intimidating aspect to any amusement park operator or just anyone when buying this land is look in these pictures look at all that undeveloped land a lot of it is marsh wetland you know like you said there's not really that infrastructure yet and there's so many trees and you know there's a lot of reclaimed land and it's a big task like whoever buys this property unless they want to run it as is but if they want to make their own mark on it they are going to need to put the work in. Not saying it won't be rewarding because I think if they did like it would be extremely rewarding. Yeah, who knows I need it to be someone because Wonderland needs a little bit of chess they need a little chess game for them to get good yeah so but yeah there is a lot of land that is developable by the way it isn't like all like you haven't been have you know we went this summer. Okay because they have that bird sanctuary that never got built and it's developed land and it's ready it could fit like eight coasters on it alone it's massive it's right behind star voyager if you remember that big circle I was a little out of it too when we went don't forget but yeah marine has got a lot of potential.


I joined the infantry, the first unit was in Germany, right about the time the ball was coming down, 89-90, and after about four years it just started getting dull after the Gulf War, and I had two predecessor squad leaders that joined Special Forces, so that's the path I wanted to go on, and see if I had what it takes. So I went and joined Special Forces, we were the first team to go into Southern Afghanistan. At that time it was early in the war, we had some new elements come in, they brought in some new equipment. This equipment malfunctioned, had a bad battery signal, so they changed one of the BA-5590s, and what that result did is kind of recalibrated the laser to where the next shot would calculate the location that you're at. So this attack P at the time, lays the target, sent that coordinate up to B-52, who obviously plugged in that coordinate and dropped a 2,000 pound JDAM on us. There was this young E-4 that was in the OT, occupational therapy with me, and he was brand new, 101st, just lost his arm. What are they going to do?   They're here to help, and there's no reason he should have this, and then it was just kind of, I don't know, it's just one of those things that affected me, like, we can do better in this. I nominated Mike for the outstanding disabled veteran of the year for all he's done. You know, since I've known him since 2012, he's always going above and beyond at helping all veterans, but particularly disabled veterans in legislative work to outdoor activities. You name it, Mike is doing so much, he's bent over backwards. He himself being a disabled veteran, he knows how important it is that we continue to improve things for disabled veterans. Mike has done a wonderful job as a member of the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs. The three things that really come to my mind off the top of my head are his ability as a legislative director to assist us in giving the funding for the three new homes in Minnesota, Veterans Homes. The Bell Pass that provided $32 million in funding to go towards these three veterans homes. He's also been instrumental as it relates to the Sport Our Troops grants program. And lastly, I think most recently is the COVID-19 funding for families of veterans that have been affected by COVID-19 and lost income. We've been able to help over 4,000 veterans with distribution of about $6.2 million. So I originally met Mike when he was the legislative chair for the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs. Mike learned that I used to hunt and loved to hunt. And once I was injured, I assumed I couldn't do that anymore. And so he encouraged me to pursue that, that he can still do it. Not obviously different challenges, but he completely motivated me to not give up in my pursuit of being able to hunt again, just having to be a little more creative over it. Mike has been instrumental in encouraging me and others to get back into the outdoors, regardless of our injuries. Ah, little Somali. There's that one, yeah, nice. The outdoors has always been part of my life. That was where the funnest times of my life were as a kid, was in the outdoors with my dad, with my, you know, cousins and my friends. And it's just been the most joyous time of my life ever. So I think one thing with Mike is his passion for the outdoors.  And you see Mike get other vets out there on the water or out there hunting. And when you get a group like that with some shared experiences, the vets really start to open up. They start to really be able to talk about some things maybe that they don't talk about and connecting the outdoors and those experiences is something that he does great. I think inherently people want to help veterans and want to be connected to that kind of help. Most of them just don't have someone who will put it together for them. I met Mike. He had been on a hunt and I helped him sort some issues out he had with that hunt. At that point in time, I realized that we needed to do something differently than what was being done. Those of us that have lived in the outdoors have an idea that there's a healing process that becomes pretty visible and that if we can combine some of that with these veterans that are sometimes not having the best day and give them some peace and provide opportunities for them to talk to other veterans that may have had the same issues or maybe veterans from a previous generation that had issues in a different way to get pretty positive results. I asked Mike to research who we should work with. He said there's no question we should be working with the VAV. It took him some time to research it but that's what he came up with and so I started to put together these fundraisers which took place and we raised a million and a quarter and helped more than 3,000 veterans do things in the outdoors that made them feel better about life. You're disabled but you don't really have to worry about that. You just got to kind of figure out what brings you joy and do it.


from Nature Northwest. It joins me in the studio now to talk about a different number of different subjects. Angus, thanks for coming in first of all. Thanks a mil John good to be here. Let's talk first of all about things getting warmer and we had a great spell there for what was it nearly four weeks and it was glorious. We're back to normal today but it's it's not just out and about that's the warm our oceans as we know are getting warmer as well and recent figures support that and that the oceans the waters around Ireland are getting warmer as well. They are yeah they're breaking records at the moment and that there's ocean heat waves happening in in many of our oceans around the world. Temperatures are spiking both north and south which is interesting because of course it's winter down south and south of the globe but they're also seeing temperature spikes but the the highest spike of all is just off our coast it's off Ireland it's off Britain and it's also the other side of Britain going into the North Sea that the waters off our coast the moment are four to five degrees warmer than they should be at this time of year four to five degrees warmer. Which is great if you're out for a wee swim in the last few weeks you might have noticed that the water was lovely but not not good for you know wildlife. It's not and the problem with a lot of this kind of warming is it's so fast it happens so quickly so wildlife doesn't have time to adjust. We can adjust a lot better of course but the fish in the ocean and all the other characters in the ocean the plankton in the ocean which is the backbone of all life for us and for everything else that lives in the ocean. It suffers severe stress because of that and some places you'll get big algal blooms which will be bad and they will take up oxygen which depletes oxygen for other things and other places then it just gets too hot for fish perhaps too hot for them they can head north and so then those fishing stocks are affected and their predators are affected and whatnot but one of the big effects is on plankton plankton itself and of course half of our oxygen comes from plankton half our oxygen comes from tiny microscopic plants that are in the oceans every second breath you take I am so looking after oceans is a very important thing and at the moment they're absorbing a huge amount of heat and it has the scientists worries. So already fish around our coast have been overfished for years and stocks are depleted but now with the oceans warming that's not going to help either. It's not because it pushes a lot of our fish of course are cold water species and it pushes them further north and that puts our fishermen under pressure it puts that whole industry under pressure and they're under enough pressure as we know so it makes it very difficult. All right from a fish too of all things moths because it was a moth one particular type of moth in the news last week and it's called the oak processionary moth and it was in the news because we've been worried about it to look out for it. Is it it was not around here there were some cases now but not up here. Not up here it's that we know of that we know of exactly and it's another symptom of just our global way of living. Oak processionary moths they like to eat oak trees and their larvae every moth of course starts off as a very hungry caterpillar and they eat leaves of some kind and this type of moth eats oak leaves and they were discovered in Ireland in 2020 in Dublin for the first time and the nest was quickly destroyed and we'll talk about why in a minute but they were discovered then again a couple of weeks ago a few days ago on four trees and the trees had been brought in from Europe they've been imported in and the builder the developer didn't know they're doing anything wrong they brought in these trees and planted the trees on the estate which seems like a right thing to do but those trees were carrying the moth they'd picked up the moth in Europe or picked up the little caterpillar I should say and when they start off initially the caterpillar are very very small with their little eggs initially over the wintertime and then they hatch out into a very small caterpillar so they'd be a hard thing to see but at this time of year May June July they grow very very quickly. Okay and that's the reason why you know we're always checked at airports and ferries for you know for carrying in any livestock or plants that you know something like this can and does happen. A very long time ago I was lucky enough to live in New Zealand and I remember arriving in New Zealand and they asked I do you have anything to declare and I was looking at the the declaration the pictures of the various different things and one of them was shoes and boots I am so I asked people in the queue and they said oh no no you better you better go and produce your boots so I did I produced my hiking boots and I remember they washed them there was clean when they came out the other side and I took a metro security as the day I bought them. Yes you were carrying something in the grooves at the bottom. Yeah because you can carry seeds you can carry all sorts of different things but you can carry say up to 30 species of seeds for up to 10 kilometers walking they've done experiments on this and so we've been moving things around the globe for a very long time and some countries like New Zealand have been very aware of this and they've been protecting what they have and we are a little bit slower to catch up on that but it's a very difficult thing to try and protect from from the likes of oak processionary moths which are so small tucked up into imported trees or the same kind of thing for the ash dieback disease and that is a fungal disease that is blowing across Europe how do you can stop that but it was initially brought in by trees that were affected from Europe planted here the people who did it did it perfectly instantly they weren't breaking any rules thought they were doing the right thing and but it's just part of that whole global trade. What's the problem with these moths why do they want to get rid of them? They're bad for the trees so bad for nature and of course oak trees will support more and more life more insect species than any other type of native tree so they're a threat to the trees because they can really strip the foliage but more worryingly again is their threat to ourselves and because they have very very fine hairs and those very very fine hairs if you touch them if you come into contact or if they feel threatened they'll sometimes shed those hairs they'll blow in the wind and they can cause nasty reactions and for some people they they can cause an asthmatic type reactions and but a lot of it would be a skin irritant. Now you got to remember that these there was four of them and four of these nests were found and they were all destroyed and they were all in Dublin in a park in Dublin. So it's not an issue that we have here as yet and that we know of but it's a very interesting story and it's something that's worth being aware of. Is it just oak trees that they like? Pretty much they do go to a few other species but mostly it's just oak trees and they'll they'll munch true everything but the biggest threat and the biggest worry that they have is is these fine little hairs. They turned up in England in 2012 same thing trees brought in and nobody knew these these little characters were on them and they said that was in London and now they spread around Kent and some of these other places around London over the last few years they're slowly slowly spreading there and they thought they were on top of it but they seem to be able to get away and hopefully our own department of agriculture has managed to get on top of those ones and spotted them all and they're certainly watching out for them. Now this is the time of the year for the the cuckoo and I see there's a project now trying to track the cuckoo it's a cross-channel project and the idea is to try to find out where Irish cuckoos actually spend their winter months. It's a fantastic project it's a fascinating project I've put a piece on it or a link to it up on my Facebook page and it's well worth looking at there's brilliant interactive maps on it and so cuckoos they come here around about April time and they come up from Africa and we've known that we've known that for a very long time and they lay the eggs famously into the metal pipette's nest and their egg looks just like the metal pipette's egg has those same little brown speckledy patterns the metal pipette has and then mom well dad has bred and mom once she's laid enough eggs up to 30 eggs and 30 different nests and they abandon chip and they start heading back so already at this time of year they're starting to migrate south it's amazing we haven't even got to the longest day yet. So they lay their eggs in the metal pipette's nest and they lead the rearing of three young men to these other birds? Yes and those little eggs they emerge and the the chick emerge after only 12 days which is very very quick and then that chick will out compete and effectively kill off the metal pipette's chicks metal pipette's own offspring.  So we have this romantic notion about the cuckoo because you know they're a distinctive call but there's a sneaky bird and not a bit nice when you realize that the other the metal pipette's then are killed off and it's only the cuckoo that survives in a nest. That's exactly it it's funny we as humans place our own kind of emotional boundaries on things and we think cuckoos are wonderful we love to hear the sound we think it's brilliant these characters back from Africa and whereas we vilify magpies and magpies are much better parents rear their young they they put a roof on their on their own nest they look after the young so well the very clever bird and so on whereas the cuckoo yet so it lays an egg in the metal pipette's nest and then goes and it's an amazing relationship really and the poor metal pipette doesn't figure it out and keeps just trying to feed this oversized chick and eventually that chick is able to make its way back to Africa with no map no mobile phone no GPS and no parent to guide us it's not like the Swallows where it's where it's forming big flocks and it's heading off with birds that have done the trip before and it's able to make its way back to Africa all on its own and that's what they're trying to figure out with this project where do they go how do they get there do they stop that kind of thing okay so I would wear an Africa they go how long it takes them there how often they stop that they just want to work out precisely they want to try and figure that out and they've so this project has been going on by the the British bird situation the the BTO from since 2011 and they have tracked over a hundred birds they amazing the technology they're able to get tiny little satellite trackers and put them onto the bird and these things are so small and way so little that they don't bother the bird at all and they're able to turn them very precisely where they go some of the birds head off to Italy for instance some of the birds head off to Spain and they're able to fly a thousand kilometers without stopping or across oceans they're able to fly straight across the Sahara desert without stopping because of course there's no food from there and eventually they end up kind of down in the bottom middle of Africa and the Congo basin and that's why they spend the winter until about January and they start mooching the way back up so they've tagged a few Irish birds and they want to see what happens to them and what's the numbers of the cuckoo like here in Ireland so our numbers sadly are going down and they've dropped by as a 25% 27% in the last couple of census that was between when when there was a big count down in the 60s and another big count and done about 10 years ago so that data is over 10 years old and they were down by 27% I would say it's a very safe bet to say that those numbers have gone down even more and a lot of that habitat loss the birds that they lay their egg into the the meadow paper and that is a bird that's on the threat as well there's an awful lot more of them but they're also on the threat again because of habitat loss but this this project will give so much more information and if you have a look at the link that we spread around and and I'll send it to your own Facebook page as well and it has a map that you can look at the Irish birds and if you press play on the top of the map it will show you its progress those those birds that they've tagged and where they've got to and very wise Irish birds because the survival rate seems to be higher if you go down towards Italy for the birds that go down towards Italy and then head down south into Africa as opposed to the ones that go down in Spain because climate change much as we touched on a few minutes ago is causing huge droughts in Spain and that puts pressures on the insects which put pressures on the birds and the Irish ones so far have found themselves somewhere between Marseille and Monaco nice parts of the world to go to so that's that's where the Irish cookers are right now it's amazing so it a lot depends on what road they take their survival rate yeah completely and and they found that they have the ability to be able to double track so if they get to an area that they they believed was going to be good for refuelling and there isn't food they have the smartness to be able to go back again another amazing thing with bird migration that they found through this tracking project is and that the chick that will leave Ireland in the next few weeks once it once it's fully grown it will take a much more direct route and it won't have many stopovers that's hard wired into its brain it's able to find out most likely but they're not definitive in this but most likely true following the magnetic curvature that they can they believe they can see they can actually visualize the magnetic field around the world in a way of course we can't do that at all so they're able to follow that and that helps guide them where they are but then they find the same bird the next year and the following year they will divert their course to places that have better food so they're able to learn from visual landscapes and visual clues in the landscape and figure out where the food was best and where it might be best to hang a left or hang a right to get get more moths hopefully some of those processionary moths and whatnot because it's the caterpillars that the cookies like to eat okay okay amazing because there's so much as you say hardwired and then they they learn as they go as well every year yeah yeah it's a fascinating project yeah okay finally I mentioned for a nature walk that's on this coming weekend yeah so there's a nature walk on the 25th the 25th is World San June Day so there's all sorts of events happening all over the place celebrating San Junes and there is a wonderful program and that has just started it is one of these EU life programs and the EU life programs there's quite a few running at the moment in Dunigoland and the West Coast of Ireland they're supporting farmers to restore habitats and their long-term programs they've got good grants behind them they're very positive thing and they've been signed up to and there's one just started called Life on Machr and Machr is a unique type of San June habitat that only exists on the West Coast of Ireland and the West Coast Scotland doesn't exist anywhere else in the world and so there's a couple of sites that they're looking at restoring those those habitats and one of them is around it's in Guidor and around that area and they are having a walk on the 25th this Saturday at 3 p.m. meeting at Bald Eddie and there'll be various different talkers country contributors I am telling you about the project telling about all the good things that are happening and explaining some of the wonders of beautiful matter habitat and what time does that start at 3 p.m. 3 p.m. this Saturday meeting at Bald Eddie okay thank you super thanks John we love summer at Dunstores saving the aisles when you


All right, so today, I want to follow up on the talking I did yesterday.  As always, I start at the end because once I get on a roll, I have no idea how long it's going to take me, and so it's best to let you know the takeaway at the end. The takeaway for the end is we are computing wrong.  Not even the guy who invented it said it would be gone soon, and he said that in 1950. And we're still doing it. For scalable computing, for secureable computing, number one, we have to give up on this idea of hardware determinism. We have to give up on this idea that the computer hardware guarantees to do the same thing twice. And I'll talk about all these more. hardware determinism is for the fragile, centralization is for the small, and that's the real problem. The whole idea of a CPU, central processing unit, means one guy is doing everything. Well, what's the problem with that idea? The problem is he can only go so fast, and if you get four guys, multi-core. Now they have to coordinate. Did you change that? No, he changed that. That doesn't solve the problem either. Synchronization I'll come back around to, and then cybersecurity, yeah, this is the thing. I mean basically the idea of RAM, random access memory. Every location in memory is the same distance from every other location in memory. That's what random access means. That's the whole point. If you've got a pointer, you can go anywhere. That's insane. It's like I could stick a finger and poke you in the gallbladder. You wouldn't really want to let me do that, and it should be impossible for me to do that unless I have gallbladder, doctor power, or something. But the way we've designed computers, everybody who's running on the same CPU, every instruction from our most secret private medical information to the scum of the internet exists at the exact same square centimeter of SODA. It all goes in the exact same place, and by the grace of God we didn't manage to divert the control at once. It's crazy. It's insane. Fifty years from now, I hope nobody will believe this is how we computed back in the stone age of computing, which is where we are now. All right, that's my basic takeaway. How are we going to get from here to 50 years from now? We're going to get here with this idea of indefinitely scalable architecture, and that's what I want to talk about today. I want to say what the idea is, and the idea, unlike most of my ideas, is actually quite crisp. It's actually quite specific. You might not like it, or you might think it's a silly idea, but hopefully it should be clear what the idea is. Here's the high-order tag. The idea is indefinitely scalable computer architecture can be grown. You can add more and more arbitrary amount of hardware that you can add to it and never run out of anything. As long as you have real estate, money, power, and cooling, you could make the machine bigger by plugging in more basic tiles, basic units, a computer from here to the horizon, a computer from here to Jupiter, if you want, and never run into a 32-bit address space limit, never run into clock distribution tree problems. Okay, that's the idea. Once we do this, once we accept that the only thing that's admissible as a computer architecture is something that has this property of indefinite scalability, certain other things happen. Number one, hardware determinism departs. No matter how much we are willing to spend on a given piece of tile to make it as reliable as we can, there still will be some failure rate, one in a million, one in a billion, one in a billion per year, whatever it is. And that means if we have more than a billion tiles and we run them for more than a year, there will be failures undetected by the hardware delivered to the software. And that's the violation of hardware determinism. Once we have indefinite scalability, we are going to have to deal with undetected hardware errors at the software layer. Are we having fun yet? What that means is we've been pretending, when we teach algorithms and we sort numbers, we pretend that we guarantee that these numbers are going to be correctly sorted. So where on my mother's pile of numbers? That these things are sorted. And how can I do that? I can do that because hardware swore to me that it would do exactly deterministic writing, exactly follow the laws of logic without fail. And if it couldn't do that for any reason, it would crash the entire machine and then we all agree everybody's dead and so there's no sin. The only sin is to create a mistake and not crash. That's the rules we have now. Once we can no longer do that, once we can no longer actually give an ironclad guarantee that we're going to do the right thing, we have to admit there's going to be some chance we're going to get a wrong answer. And that's what we say software becomes best effort. All you can do is you say, well, if everything else is okay, if the hardware is good and there's enough time and the data isn't changing too rapidly, then my answer will settle down to the right answer and we're all good. But I cannot guarantee you, I'm sorry, I cannot guarantee that these numbers are in the correct order. And in fact, nobody else could either, but we just used to pretend when we were children. But now we're grown up, okay? Once we can no longer have hardware be deterministic, once we admit that software and hardware are best effort engineered, that's all we can do. Then what I suggest is the way we're going to build software. Software is going to look like artificial life, meaning software will automatically compete with other software to reproduce itself, not just for more performance, but for robustness. So in case there's some errors in one of them, that's okay, I got cousins that are doing this too. As long as any good bunch of us can get the answer collectively, we're still good. So in the future, where we're heading, this is the story. Software is going to be alive in that literal sense. It's consuming energy, reproducing for performance, possibly for evolution, well that terrifies me as wearing my engineer hat, wearing the scientific hat, let's put random things in and see what happens, engineer goes, are you nuts? These things are real. They're consuming energy. They're taking space, eventually they're driving your car. We don't want evolution, well, maybe we do. Fundamentally what I'm saying is this is a whole other way to compute than what we've done now. Eventually we'll start seeing similarities, so eventually we'll say, oh well, once you have this thing made out of cells that are competing and blah, blah, blah, you know, you can kind of implement sort of a little teeny finite state machine here. You only use 20 billion gates to implement a three state machine, but man, it's a really robust three state machine, you know, you can taser it and it still says, I'm in state too, blah, blah, that kind of thing. That's the whole story. So if you don't want to stand, you got the main point. Now let's unpack it a little bit in our remaining time. Okay, so what I want to talk about today is this idea of the two attractors. There's fundamentally different ways to compute than the way we're doing it now. Alrighty. That's the two attractors of computing. The consequence of that is we have to give up on this idea of strict correctness. We have to give up on this idea that we have cherished, that numbers must be exactly guaranteed 100% correct or else they're crap. We have to say there's intermediate. These are numbers are kind of sorted. You're welcome. Is that good enough for you? Well, it's up to you. This is my best effort, take them or leave them. I joke, but this is how society works, right? You never get these actual proof guarantees. This is not wheat. This is white. No, no, it's wheat. Okay, I'll get it anyway. My head doesn't explode, hopefully. Out with strict correctness, in with strict indefinite scalability, and this is what I've been talking about, unpacking this idea, and then try to actually get into, well, once we are talking about computation, not as an abstract PRAM model, not as an abstract something of bits and RAM and so forth, but a physical device. We can now characterize that physical device like any physical device. How much does it weigh? How many watts does it dissipate and so on? And we can compare computers, not in terms of MIPS, but in terms of MIPS per watt or MIPS per gram and so forth. Now, of course, an instruction on A and an instruction B could be very different creatures, but we're going to blame that on the first person to talk about MIPS as if it meant something, and we'll have that same flaw. Still, a billion MIPS is better than one, almost surely. All right, let's talk about the first one, so the two attractors. And again, I did talk about this yesterday in the context of life, but so I'm going to try to cruise over it a little bit quicker. If anybody wants to jump in, if anybody is bold enough to try to stop the train, and say, what the heck was that word? I would love to have questions if you want to jump in. Otherwise, I just go faster and faster and faster until we all crash. All right, so I've already talked about this, so just to sum it up. Hardware determinism. This was the fundamental contract of computing. Hardware turns physics into logic. Software turns logic into money. That's the idea. And the money has to be enough to pay for the software and the hardware together, plus 10% for management, or whatever. And if that works, if the logic from the physics leads to enough desirability so that there's enough money to stabilize the whole system, then computing works, digital computing works. And it's been great. Digital computing, Negrapati six or seven years ago said 10% of the world economies now, something like that, is tied to computers. It's been an unbelievable success story. But from the beginning, and again, we learned this if we didn't know before in the lecture yesterday, one guy, one lonely voice shouted out that this is wrong. This is not the future for us. And it was von Neumann. In the future, the actual lengths and chains of operations will have to be considered. You cannot use billions and billions of instructions just to put the queen on the king and solve it there. Because that's stressing this idea of determinism. We need to keep the programs short so that there's a reasonable probability that none of the instructions will screw up before we're done. And number two, we're gonna have to allow the idea that operations may fail. We may say, is one less than two and get the answer no. Just every once in a while. I'm trying, I really am. But there was a cosmic ray or something on TV and I got it wrong. So what it comes down to is, I suggest to you there are these complimentary, largely complimentary approaches to computing that you can line them up across all of these dimensions. And I call the first one finitely scalable and the other one indefinitely scalable, finite versus indefinitely scalable. And they have different language, different emphases all the way through. Finite scalability is traditional computing. It focuses on algorithms. You give me an input and then you wait. You stop, hold the world constant and I compute. I am the computer. And when I'm done and you just wait, I give you the output. This is guaranteed correct, you're welcome. That's the algorithmic approach. In indefinite scalability, the corresponding part is the process. It never begins, it never ends. It's sitting there responding to inputs, getting messages, sending outputs. It has some state. It might respond differently this time than it did last time. Who knows? But the last thing it wants to do is exit. The whole point is never exit. Algorithm versus process, finite scalability. We say the number one thing is it must be correct. If your output isn't correct, we can't even talk about it. You're in some state of logical sin unless you have a proof that your algorithm works, that your output is correct. In indefinite scalability, that's not the requirement. The requirement is you give some answer. The requirement is don't die. The requirement is be there to say something. And once you say something, the goal is to say a true thing, to say the right answer. But that's secondary.  All other things being equal, you'd rather save your energy for a rainy day just in case of that. Robust, then correct, then efficient versus what we know and whatever we do with, where we say it's not even admissible as an algorithm until it's correct. If it's not correct, we don't even know what you're saying. You're just battled. And once we know it's correct, then the goal is to be as efficient as possible. And then given that it's efficient as possible, you then may have to make it as robust as necessary. You go back and say, well, it turns out there might be an error in one of these bits, the comparison might be wrong. Let's do the comparison three times and vote whether we want to go true or false, you armor where you need to armor, okay? All the way down, two approaches almost duals in how they work, all right? And the takeaway, the short story, the outrageous concept I'm trying to suggest to you is we are in the wrong attractor. We are in the finite attractor and we want to be in the indefinite attractor. And the current state of computer hardware development, as was mentioned in the abstract for this talk, increase in clock speeds for CPUs are slowing down. Or you have to go to seriously heroic engineering like liquid nitrogen to get your CPUs to go five gigahertz or whatever it is. And on the flip side, that we cannot for the life of us make a secure computer. Both of those come from the fact that we are in the finitely scalable attractor for computing, and we have massively overscaled it. We've taken it far beyond where it wants to be. It's like we had this cute little one-celled animal 50 years ago. And now we have this hideous blob, still one-celled, but gigantic. And it's just not working so well. And we're saying, let's let the blob drive the bus. That's where we are today. It's crazy. It's really crazy. Okay? So that's it. That's my mission, my research mission, my career to make this point as compelling as I can, as broadly as I can. And to make it as credible to think it might actually be possible to compute on the other side, and to try to get people interested and build frameworks and mechanisms that people can start to contribute to learning the engineering, building the body of knowledge that we need to understand how to be useful computations on indefinite scalability. That's the story. So that quote from von Neumann that we'll have short programs and they'll admit failures, that's 65 years ago, 68 years ago, something now. Why is he still wrong after all that time? Why are we still in the finite attractor? And fundamentally, it's because we do what we know. We train our students with what we know. And for the longest time, we were able to get times 10 in the clock speed, times 10 in the memory. Relatively cheaply. Design, walk-in, and network effects, I suggest. Account for the reason why von Neumann said we were going to switch, give up on hardware determinism when we got to 10,000 gates in a chip. It wasn't chips, it was tubes. And we're not even close. And we're still trying to make the central story go. When you say design, lock-in, it's easy to say, but what it really means is there's all these assumptions that go into how we build computers, how we program them, how we judge them as good or bad, that mutually support each other and make it difficult to move away from this approach. And here are several of them. The idea of strict correctness, I'll talk about that just a bit more in a second. Random access memory, I already talked about that. Random access memory is great because in step one, you completely ignore physical space. You say it doesn't matter in the least where this thing lives. Here, here, here, here, all you need is the address and it's equally good. So in step one of computer architecture, we eliminate space. And then in step two, we go, oh, a buffer flow, overflow. How did that happen? Well, we didn't really eliminate space. We just hid it from ourselves. And in fact, at the end of the object, there's another object. It's all still living in space. You overflow one object, you're in another object. But we don't know that. Why? Because we threw it away. We thought random access was such a great idea. See how it works? And you never even think it through. You think that reliability is a hardware problem. When you add up a bunch of numbers, do you add them up twice and make sure the answer comes out the same? That's what your elementary teacher told you to do. Does your computer program do that?  Why? Because reliability is a hardware problem. If you were to write software to say, oh, let's add them up three times and make sure we got the same answer, everybody would know you were a fool and you were being inefficient. As long as you have the hardware determinism guarantee in your pocket, you are covered. If it ever turns out that you get the wrong answer, it's his fault. Sue him. Bankrupt his company. I am covered. And that's explicitly what best effort hardware takes away. Best effort hardware says, oh, sir, I really tried. What is greater than two? I mean, no, it's less. No, it's greater. That's it. And once you say that we've changed the deal, now the pressures on software are totally different. Software doesn't even need to respond for 250 milliseconds because it's responding on user human input, a click of a button. It could add up the numbers 10,000 times and nobody would ever notice. And now it would matter. We would do it if we could if we knew we had time to do it.  What is the biggest number? It's 12. If you absolutely have to be efficient, then you'd be efficient.  Living systems will be 30 times redundant, 50 times redundant, most of the time, except in those moments of great drama. And we'll focus on them in the stories. But we're not going to engineer for them. Okay. All right. Okay, here's an example. This is one of the first things I did that's got written up in a viewpoint in the communications of the ACMs several years ago. Sorting. Let's consider pairwise sorting. But suppose the comparison operator is only right 90% of the time. Okay. And you're sorting a deck of cards, a standard deck of cards. Are you going to get the right answer? What do you think? The odds are good? No, odds are not good. I mean, are you going to get the right answer one in 100 times maybe? It's going to be pretty damn small. Okay. And the important point is, if we're saying strict correctness, if we're saying you must be exactly right or you're just being incoherent, that's all we can say. You're not going to get the right answer. Go away. There's nothing more to say. But if we go beyond that, if we take a robustness approach, we go further. What we have to do is give up on the idea of strict correctness, meaning yes or no. 100% correct or 0% correct. And come up with something I don't know. Let's call it partial credit. You got the answer wrong, but you showed good effort. So here's an example. Suppose here's some numbers that are allegedly ordered. And what we do is we compare how many positions they are out of order. This guy's the smallest. He's supposed to be in the first position. So his positional error is 0. This guy is where he's supposed to be. So these guys are switched. So the first one is off by 1. He wanted to be here. Second one's off by 1. He wanted to be there. We add them up. Positional error of 0 means you got it right. Positional error of 2 means adjacent guys were swapped. Positional error of 8 in this case is the worst case. It means you got them exactly backwards. There's a couple of ways to get maximum positional error. This is one of them. All right? So now, if the positional error is 0, you're definitely correct. And if the positional error is not 0, you're definitely incorrect. But we can now distinguish a little incorrect from a lot incorrect. So we took traditional sorting algorithms and sorted a deck of cards using a comparator that was right 90% of the time and graded the result with positional error. Oh, hard to see. Y axis is the average total positional error in the deck over 52 cards. So the average case of the deck was actually shuffled. It would be up here around 900 or something like that. I don't remember exactly. With QuickSort, we got an average positional error, maybe 250, something like that. MergeSort was actually under 200. BubbleSort. Incredible, ridiculous, black sheep-hated bubble sort. Yes? How do you know that the graders would make a mistake? Because the mistakes that were made here, we programmed it. No, I'm saying real... Oh, not in the simulation. Right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a great question. And fundamentally, when you start to say, I'm going to add extra checks. I'm going to add up multiple ones. Now you have an additional question. What if the guy who's doing the majority rule gets it wrong? And this, again, just like almost everything, goes all the way back to Von Neumann, showing that the additional hardware required to do the voting is basically logarithmic in the amount of information that you're merging. So as long as each individual gate is greater than two-thirds chance being right, but 50% plus... I don't remember the details. They actually show that it will converge.  No matter how many times you did it, if you tried to write six on the answer key and the guy next to you bumped you when you wrote nine, all your great work, well, unless there's partial credit. Okay, so here's the point.   Well, so what? It took no noticeable time to bubble sort a deck of 52 cards. Now, again, if we were in a circumstance where it was happening in the inner loop of something else, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, bubble sort could be completely unacceptable. And that's the example of I'm using the machine to its absolute possible stuff. And so I'm doing all these dangerous, dangerous things like not checking my work. And in traditional computing, we think about that all the time. We do worst case thinking. That's what it means. Worst case. But most of the time is not worst case. Most of the time we have tons of time. We could do bubble sort and be much, much, much happier. This is a striking result that you cannot see if you're thinking strict correctness. If there's no partial credit, these are all infinity. These are all max. Okay, that's the idea. All right, so bottom line. Efficiency is not a good. It's not an unalloyed virtue. It's a regrettable sometimes necessity. When computers were young in Von Neumann's time, they were incredibly expensive and they really sucked. And you spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, I don't even know, to build these things and then you wanted to get as much computation out of them as you possibly could so you turned yourself inside out to make efficient code. But we are in a completely different universe now. We got computers coming out of our ears. Take a guess how many computers are in the room here. Hundreds, way more than the number of people. And it's only going to get worse. And they have more cycles than they need for almost everything they're doing.  Okay. Shoot it. Yeah, right. So suppose I ran this ten times and I'd still be doing less comparisons than one bubble sort. Would that include the... It absolutely would. Here's another approach. Why don't I just take quicksort, but every time I get a pair of dies, just punch it into the comparison three times and then take a majority rule and have that be the result of the comparison, right? And when we're thinking with traditional computing head and that's exactly the kind of thinking that we want to do, then we say, no problem. And 90% correct. Well, you know, let's do best of seven. That'll drive the probability down to the binomial and everything. And then we're right back to the party because now we'll drive the chance that we'll get more than half of the 90% chance wrong is down to the level of it's likely to not happen even once during the time it takes to do the sort. But that made one key assumption. It assumed the failures were IID. It assumed the failures were an independent random variable, which is a perfectly reasonable assumption to make. But did I ever say that? Did the universe ever say that? Suppose you did that and you made everything work great, but then it turned out there was a weird failure in the comparator, which is actually this kind of steampunk mechanical thing that in addition to having a 10% chance of getting the wrong answer, it also has a 50% chance of just returning the same answer it did last time. The little output lever just gets stuck and it just says, true, true, true, no matter what you put in. Now your brilliant idea of punching it in seven times goes out the window again because now you have bursty errors, you have runs of errors. And then you say to yourself, wait, wait, I can figure that out. I will dovetail all of the comparisons together. I'll do read Solomon coding on the thing. And yeah, you can do that. But think of what you're doing. You're attempting to bag the universe into saying, you must tell me what the possible errors are. And if I can get you to tell me what the possible errors are, I will compensate for them with the exact minimum amount of redundancy and I'll get my determinism back and I'll go home. So strict indefinite scalability, where is it here? All right, let's get on to that. Do we have a thing? Well, it'll be coming up in a minute, but the key point is in best effort computing, do we actually see the best effort computing slide? I can't even remember. Best effort computing says you try to get the right answer but you reserve the right to give the wrong answer and furthermore, your errors are uncertain. If anybody asks you, what is the distribution of your errors? The answer is, I don't know. It could be anything. It could be an oracle out to mess you up. And the reason for that is expressly to defeat this kind of thinking. Where we say, ah, what is the error model? You tell me the error model and it's all good. But we don't know what the error model is and in the real world we can't know what the error model is because in the real world, if nothing else, there is malice. There is somebody who is as good as an oracle who's going to come up with that run of seven failures in a row just to mess you up. Okay. All right. So here is strict indefinite scalability. This is the precise idea. Given an indefinite supply of real estate power cooling and money invent, there is no real estate power architecture based on hardware tiles, completely identical to the degree that we can make them so by manufacturing processes that can be usefully deployed at any scale. Any number of tiles can be plugged together as long as we have real estate to lay them out, power and cooling to run them and money to buy them without ever re-engineering. And then there's one little footnote that says you're not allowed to change the mass of a tile. A tile must be constant and the cost of storing one bit is greater than zero. Okay. That's it. That's the whole game. So you try to think about how would you make computing work like that? All right. Yeah, this... I love... It's not PowerPoint, but I love it anyway. All right. I do this talk and I say, so tell me what you're thinking of. Not even close. Supercomputers in general have been scaled just about as big as they possibly can at whatever level of reliability and cost their fundamental tile is using and if it wasn't, they would have made it bigger.  It's finite scalability on steroids. The internet, that's the number one answer up on the board. Internet, internet indefinitely scalable. You can keep adding more nodes, keep adding more nodes. What do you think? Is it indefinitely scalable? Yes or no? No? Why not? Prouding. What about it? There's problems with figuring out where everything is at any given time. And if you add things and remove things, you have to update that table. But there are methods, BGP will do it. Does it actually get slower as the thing gets bigger? But it's slower anyway. Well... We have to come up with some notion of what we believe the cycle time is of the internet. Because if it's going to grind to a halt, then we're going to be unhappy with this. But there's a bigger problem. There's a more obvious problem. Absolutely. Who said it? Yeah. IPv4 is basically already blown out. I mean, long since blown out. IPv6 merely 64 bits. 10 to the 38th addresses. How long would it take to fill the universe from the sun to Alpha Centauri with a sphere or concentric spheres of 10 to 30 addresses? Not long. So, the internet is only finitely scalable because, number one, it assumes a global address per node. And number two, that address is finite width. And even if you thought, well, suppose I had a self-terminating string so the addresses could get bigger and bigger and bigger. Whoops. Our tiles are finite mass. You can only have so many bits in them. Eventually, all of the bits will be tied up remembering what this guy's address is. And you're still dead. Okay. So, for indefinite scalability, you have to give up on the idea of having unique IDs, globally unique IDs. Turn machines. You know, you just keep buying more toilet paper to feed into a thing. And so on. Assuming it was actually really real. Same sort of problems. And then finally, the one that's relevant for the, oh boy, remaining zero time of the talk. Cellular automata. People familiar with cellular automata? Some people refuse to raise their hand. Is anybody in the room? I said, okay, we have one guy in the room. That was an honesty check. First answer wasn't reliable. Yeah. But actually, it was closer to one minus the answer. But so the takeaway from all of this is, boy, actually it's a real jerk. You know, 10 to the 38, that's really big. That's more than there are atoms in the entire planet. You know, you could assign an IP address to every single atom on the planet and he's not happy. Well, that's the whole point of strict indefinite scalability. It's a theoretical notion. And it forces you to say, well, what would you have to do if you couldn't have unique node names? It doesn't solve any of the problems of networking. It doesn't solve any of the distributed networking problems, but it forces them all on the table. You can't hide them. You can't pretend you have global routing. You can't pretend you have constant latency links between any pair of nodes. Those are not physical. You can't have them. It's not indefinitely scalable. Okay? That's the way it works. And by doing this, by being strict, it will lead you home. It will lead you out of the correct and efficient attractor and force you to start thinking about indefinite scalability and all that other stuff. Robustness. The things may fail. Dealing with incomplete information about who the neighbors are. Not even knowing the neighbors. Neighbors don't have names. That guy, his name is West. His name is East. We could start talking and we could agree on a name, but that's part of the computation, not part of the hardware. That's the idea. So, what are we doing? We're giving up on CPU scaling. This is the history of computing. Clock goes faster. The bus gets wider. The memory gets bigger. Alright? This is 1940 1970 or 80, something like that. Whatever. And then, you know, so this clock is now going 3.6 gigahertz and it's just too expensive to go any faster or the pipeline just gets turned into mush. So now we're doing this multi-core thing and we're all excited about that. You know, the stupidest phone has eight cores now. Is that ridiculous? I mean, it's ridiculous, but I love it. And the problem is is now we have eight different caches and each of these guys is reading and writing at the same time and we have to coordinate all this information. Did you change it? Did you change it? Do you change it? And there are a little bit of research that's trying to make cache coherency cheaper, but you read between the lines and it doesn't actually work, not quite yet. So at the moment, cache coherency is basically quadratic as you get more and more cores. It's a hack. It's a nice hack, but it's a hack nonetheless. And where we have to go is network scaling. We're now, instead of making the single CPU bigger and bigger and bigger, we say the CPU is not C anymore. There is no central processor. But we have endless, endless of these guys. And the goal is not to make each one as big as possible. The goal is to balance computation and communication in a way that's price competitive, that's economically advantageous. All right? So the goal is to switch to network scaling. So it's kind of like internet. It has some feelings that are like internet. But it's a personal internet in a box. It's your internet that's dedicated to you.  That kind of thing. And they have to go from here to here to here to here to here, talking protocols, talking languages, making requests, not doing shared memory, boy, all the way across the whole thing, because we don't have that, only local connections. Before they actually get to my medical information, before God forbid they get to my screen and could affect me, because I'm the most important thing in the internet in a box universe. See? We could have this. We'll have to get started. We have to start springing the design bear traps to do it. All right, I don't have time to do this at all. Right, here's where it is. So what we're doing is we're renegotiating the contract between hardware and software. Instead of hardware guarantees reliability, software guarantees desirability, where hardware is best effort. It's going to try properly as directed by what the software says to do, but it doesn't guarantee you to do so, and even its failure patterns are uncertain. That's to fill the hole. So you can't say tell me the error model. Sorry, is no error model. Have a nice day. Software on the other hand will make its best effort to make progress and accomplish whatever the user wants with a minimum amount of failures and the damage when failures occur while once again reserving the right to fail if it can't do anything else, and correctness, strict correctness is abandoned and degrees of correctness becomes a quality rather than a requirement. Okay, and that's the story. Am I supposed to stop at 10 of? No, no, no, no. 13 minutes to the end of the slot depends on how much you want the questions. Am I trying a little bit more? Okay, a little bit more. Oh yeah, and I promise we were going to talk about this. That if we give up on things like, well, everybody knows it's X86 or ARM7TDMI sub 3 version 2, because ARM is always compatible. Now if instead we just fundamentally talk about physical devices performing computations, we can compare them on first principles. So here, I don't know if this is really readable, these are some basic, basic physical computation metrics that I made up to sort of study what we've got. The peak computational density that's a row sub s, the sub s means indefinitely scalable, that when you're measuring these things, you can't just measure it using three tiles. You have to measure it for three, and then three by three, and five by five, and seven by seven, and amortize until you get down to the price per tile, assuming it can be as big as possible. If you actually just measured off a one tile, you do not have a scalable notion of peak density and so forth. And so it's the tile compute speed divided by a power mass, and measured in terms of instructions per gram second. Instructions per gram per second like that, which is the obvious SI unit, but it's pretty big. And has anybody ever read a science fiction book called Accelerando? A couple of folks. It's really, if you can tolerate science fiction, it's really very cool. And it's pretty, it's on the internet. In that, there's a unit, a slogan, how many mips per milligram? And a mips per milligram is just ten to the ninth times rho, like that. So it's a more reasonable size unit. The peak power efficiency is rho divided by watts, how many instructions per milligram per second, I'm sorry, the instructions per gram per second, per watt, the dissipated power, the peak communication velocity, this is a very important one, is in terms of the physics that you're simulating on the thing, with the scalar automata that you're running on this thing, how long does it take for the first bit to get from the center of one tile to the host level, the center of the next tile, like that? So it's a measure of the latency, but it actually matters how big the tile is. Smaller tiles will have a higher velocity, literal bit velocity than bigger tiles. And then finally the average event rate, the number of events per site per second that the cellular automata sees on a tile, all in with the communication cost, the locking, whatever it is, and this is what we want to see. When we go out to buy our indefinitely scalable hardware, we're going to want to know what's the air? What's the AER, the average event rate on this benchmark, on that benchmark? Question? So is that useful if you don't know the error rate? I could give you something great, right? Yeah, yeah, right. My best effort and your best effort might be slightly different. Yeah, and the honest answer is that we have to nail down the contract between hardware and software to say what counts as a legitimate error rate. And so there's some number. One in ten to the ninth events will fail or something like that. And yeah, you're absolutely right. And again, it's got all the same problem like an instruction. These might be different instruction sets, different widths, how do you even compare instructions to first order though we don't care, right? Anything that could credibly be called best effort has got to be doing hundreds or thousands of instructions per error or else everybody is going to go on Twitter and rag on whoever it is that claimed they had 100 air with a success rate .1. Okay? And just to say that we've got these things here are a few hardware tiles that we can measure these parameters or at least we can estimate them. I didn't really do it. So here HP 65 that you'd make an indefinitely scalable grid out of it by laying a whole bunch of HP 65s next to each other in space and then you measure it. And you say row s, what's that? Oh yeah. The instructions per second per gram well this thing weighs 215 grams or something and it runs a couple thousands of instructions a second maybe. So the row is about 10. The communications velocity the peak communications velocity is 0. It's got no actual way to talk from one calculator to another and that's in fact a reason why it's not a very good tile. But that's a success story for our metrics because the metrics revealed that this was not a very good tile. This is called the Illuminato X Machina the IXM. This is the tile that I developed with a company called Lex Liquidware in 2009. It was briefly for sale. These four connectors connect laterally to four neighbors indefinitely scalable. As far as you want we get numbers around 10 to the sixth, 10 to the seventh, the fourth this is the X minus XK1 it does a little better. The weight of this thing is what matters. So the point is we can already start drawing lines in the sand and comparing potential solutions for indefinitely scalable computer architectures. What we can't say here is what's the air what's the average event rate because the software never got running on these this guy doesn't even run it and so on. We're just at the beginning. Question. The network this one OK. Yes. Sure. As long as we don't pretend there's wrap around or toroidal connections or anything like that. We didn't use the old five processors they had an old file. Yes, absolutely. How is it different? Technology they are indefinitely scalable but it's a super infinite computer or nobody wants to pay for millions of files. I don't exactly want to pay for it but you can be a grant that's a great question and yes two responses number one it works a lot like the five if we just filled this out in a five by five two things the bandwidth off-chip is substantially less than the bandwidth on-chip, right? So that whatever we get from these guys talking to these guys is not going to be the same that we're going to get from this guy going down to the balls and going over to the board. It's latency it's latency more than bandwidth and for our peak communications velocity because we need to have these guys agree who is going to do an event on the edge. So bandwidth is a little important but latency is a lot important. So that's point number one. And point number two the practical problem I mean this is like an engineering question in the fives in the cores on the fives they ditch the instruction cache on the per core things they're really small and for the machine that I'm talking about which I really didn't get to show you so much because we nerded out so hard these guys are seriously mingy. They're doing very very different things like that and to do that these guys all have to go out on the routing memory bus to pull in the instructions they're going to execute. So as a practical matter they made the wrong decisions they needed to make each individual core a little bigger, a little realer but there's plenty of other things coming down the pipe the adeptiva people, the parallel made a similar mistake soon, especially if we know what we want we'll get there. Other questions? So on the software side of things embedded real-time system you have software that you call any time algorithm which are algorithms that you give me more resources I'll do a better job but when you say time's up I'll tell you what I know when I know that I'm just not done with it and that's sort of self-stabilizing in terms of the answers well the question is that so the idea is that you give me more and I'll do better but that's not something that you're willing to grant I would love, again this goes back to if we had this secondary channel if we had this urgency channel then you'd be able to say time's up give me an answer well when you call time it's up, you give me whatever you've got best answer you know we have to implement that sort of purely as software we have to make a protocol message saying time's up and so forth and I would like to push it lower I would like to actually have signal lines they're signaling urgency between modules somehow yes yes it absolutely would and you know you think about things like how to compute the max in an on-demand way is you know it's like just pick a number and return it pick a random element of the array and return it and if you have more time pick another random A of the element and compare it to the one you've got and if it's bigger, pick it and as long as you have plenty of time you'll end up returning the right answer except when the one that you're holding gets corrupted so even that even something as simple as find the max in a here's how much time you may have way gets interesting other questions? I'm cheating, I was there yesterday so I saw it if these things are not addressed how do you not globally address them how do you initiate the program, not how do you write the code I can sort of imagine it but my brain hurts how do you get the code in there? there's two questions, number one is how do you get the sort of table of elements in there that says the properties of the fundamental types and that's the laws of physics how do you get the initial condition in there to actually get it to run and there's separate answers for both of those and the idea is for the laws of physics what you know is they really shouldn't change very often so you have a background neighbor to neighbor thing where you're saying I'm running version 32 of the physics, what are you running oh you're running 31, here copy mine and the laws of physics opportunistically spread through the grid and that is part of the fundamental model in the 2009 grid they would update themselves dynamically on the fly and then when they finished updating they'd reboot to the new software and everything would just keep going and you could see the way moving through the grid like that to get the initial condition in the thing is in an indefinitely scalable architecture there's no boot time there's no power on time things are going on and off the whole south 40 just got hit by and it's up in the next few minutes there is no initial condition there is only indefinitely and that is however you make it happen we are hoping, we don't know it depends on the bill of materials to have an accelerometer on our next generation tile so for example you could just tap on the tile and that could be programmed to inject some atoms into the local cellular automata which the processing could then grind up and say oh I think there was a tap like that and finally that's going to be the system question of what are you doing with these guys last question so I see what you're trying to say with the vastness and all that there's one thing when you're trying to solve practical problems is also the computation of time so are we doing all these at the expense of time or do you think it actually would come in well once again time is only urgent when it's urgent lots of times you know you have a system control clock of 1000 hertz or something like that and all the modules have to report in comfortably faster than that but that's it there's no actual wind to be going way faster than that and again at the system level then that's what we would like to push back and the idea is this particular model and this is what people hate the most is they say energy energy energy they've got all of these tiles they've got clocks spun up they're doing events over and over and over even if the grid is mostly empty you're wasting energy and the answer is yes indeed why? because living systems and this is my biological inspiration they flourish when there's ample free energy living systems can survive when energy is tight but they don't flourish so for here we're saying energy is a sunk cost the cost to run all the tiles is already paid for so in this framework a cycle saved is a cycle wasted so instead rather than saying oh I should stop the clock and save energy we say I should check my work and then later on we can say okay well the fact is the voltage is now down to 3.7 volts whatever it is so now you've got to start pinching but the design level wanted to be done where there's plenty last one I'm struggling with my questions alright so if you're insisting with this one you're still computing general purpose compute is that correct? what I'm really insisting is to take a system level view we come in with what is the system doing and work it down we would like the architecture, the hardware to be quite general with respect to systems that you could perhaps want to guess any value and basically looking at the type of problems dedicate the system that fits yeah certainly as a practical matter for initial testing demonstrations and so on we sort of imagine playing with little robots that kind of things and just doing sort of basic system control in real time because that's a natural fit for this sort of thing but the hope is that once we say wow this is really cool and look you can chop the robot in half and both halves go driving off like that we say well I could take that architecture I could apply it to this and this and this and then it can specialize in optimization for serial determinism we got to give this guy a chance folks thanks so much for coming, thanks so much for saving me thank you


Hi, I'm Laura and I work as Principal Environmental Officer for the Queensland Government. I studied science majoring in Zoology at JCU and I landed a graduate Queensland Government job in Mackay before I moved back to Townsville. I guess I started to government by the prospect of career advancement. There's so many options to move between offices in the state and you get to see everything Queensland has to offer. It's such a large organisation that you really can do a lot with it. I really enjoy working for government because of the variety of work within your job and within the department. There's also a really supportive environment and the people I work with are great. So I've been on a bit of a varied journey. After I finished my studies at JCU in 2009, I took a gap year to work in retail in Townsville and I did my postgraduate qualification. I was offered a graduate position as an environmental officer based in Mackay and I moved south at the beginning of 2011. So while I was in Mackay I got to learn about a different side of the industry. I learned about sugar mills, shipping ports, water treatment plants, coastal processes and the inner workings of government. In 2012 I moved back to Townsville to take up an environmental officer position in the Townsville Mining Team. Through working hard and applying the skills I learned on the job and through university I've progressed to a senior environmental officer role and I've also acted as a principal environmental officer which is like a team leader. JCU really prepared me for the start of my new career because they provided me with the report writing and the time management skills which I really needed to gain my first job in government. My advice would be to do as much work experience as you can while you're studying. Even if that means working for free in your study breaks and seeking the opportunities yourself. When you graduate there are literally hundreds of other applicants with very similar knowledge bases and the best way to set yourself apart is to demonstrate your desire to work in your chosen field. That's through pursuing opportunities and getting the experience you need for your interviews. Plus work experience can also help you decide what sort of work you do and don't want to do before you finish your degree and that way you can pick the subjects you're interested in and that will help you get the job you want.