We'll have a talk by Swawomir Piazetsky. I will talk about Python in astronomy. Please welcome Swawomir. Hello everyone. My name is Swawomir Piazetsky and I would like to talk today about the Python in astronomy. Why I chose this topic? Well for almost nine years I was working in the astronomy field in the universities and during that time I was introduced actually to the Python and right now I don't do astronomy that much but I'm working in a company that uses Python every day. So I thought it would be nice to marriage these two topics and my interests and both of the fields and present this speech. So what I would like to talk about today will be like three points, what I would like to just briefly say about astronomy itself, some short history of astronomy with the points that for me are quite important I think in astronomy. I would like briefly describe the package Astrobi which is a package dedicated for astronomers and astrophysics that contains in one place most of the important models and methods using in astronomy and in the area I would like to talk about auto which is a hybrid software, Python and Fortan that I was using during my research in astronomy. Okay so let's start with the beginning. So as you probably know the astronomy is one of the oldest sciences and the first observation was actually taken by the naked eye. So the Asians civilization like Babylon like Maya, Greeks or Egyptians they were using only just eye for just to check what is happening in the night sky and what they are using this information well they were using mostly for navigation for creating simple calendars for agriculture for religion purpose just to manipulate the people of course because once you know where is the solar eclipse for example you can just say the people that yeah you have to pay us more because the gods are very angry on you. So that was like the very beginnings of the astronomy so actually wasn't that much science on it but the first civilization that started to think a bit deeply about astronomy and giving more important questions like what is exactly happening above our heads why it's planets moving this way not the other way and what is our purpose in the universe. So the Greeks start looking for these answers and what they achieved they achieved to estimate the distance between Earth and Moon and they introduced their geocentric system that put Earth in the center of the system and all of the visible objects as planets, sun and even stars were traveling around the Earth. They also started to creating the first astronomical catalogues of the stars and they were able to find with an naked eye just around 1000 of stars they were able to precisely give the coordinates of each of the stars so you could easily find out in some time when you would like to search for these objects. In the middle ages the Europe was not that much into the science because of different things that are happening here but lucky for us the Islamic world was really into the science they really put further the study in astronomy they improved the methods of the observation they were able to discover a few galaxies and some supernova as well they also introduced quite a lot of names and terms that are nowadays using in astronomy but the first revolution in astronomy in my opinion was actually just changing the way of the thinking of the solar system hours so the Copernicus Polish astronomers decided to dethrone the Earth and put in the middle the sun in this case all of the planets would be going circular around the sun and with this model it was much easier to explain why the planets behave like they behave right now but that was just a theory he was not able to prove it in a mathematical way or even observation because at the time there was no instruments he was doing all of the observations still with an naked eye but with the help of that came the Galileo who invited the lunat and one of the first objects he was looking at was Jupiter and he discovered that around the Jupiters are small objects the moons that are circular around it so it was kind of proved that it's possible that around the biggest objects travelling are some smaller objects so that kind of proved that Copernicus had the right and that around the sun it's possible that all of the planets are silkering Newton and Kepler just proved this model in mathematical ways and for the next decades what was happening in astronomy was just improving the telescopes and the method of observation and thanks to this we were able to see deeper and deeper to the universe we were able to discover more objects we were able to create a bigger catalogues of the stars that we know is until the photography was invaded from that point I think astronomy moved very fast in the discovery of new objects because we were not able only to point exactly the position of the objects but we were able also to store some information about it so as for a star that it's quite easy because the star doesn't move that fast but with the photography we were able to detect some near-earth objects that are passing very fast and they are not that bright as a star but we were able to capture them on the photography so when you have several photographs from different nights and you can see that some objects are moving like tweeting then you probably found some asteroids that it's just passing by the earth and the last I think revolution in astronomy came with computers of course today we cannot imagine even any science without computers because we do some nasty complicated computation on it we replace the analog photography by digital photography and we were able to send even the telescope to the space that's why we avoid lots of noises made by atmosphere and earth and we are able to see even deeper and discover very rare objects in the sky so when we have computers we need also some programming languages and in astronomy most important programming languages is Fortran and C++ why those tools? Because they were made actually to do some numerical computation they are very fast, they are very powerful and because they are quite long already in use we have a lot of libraries and a lot of software already is written so many software in astronomy written in Fortran and C++ that there is no even sense to trying to rewrite it into the Python or any other modern languages because it just will take too much time okay so I also ask some astronomers why they choose the Python so I would like just to show you some results of the form that I sent to the astronomers community and one of the first question I ask them is just why they choose Python so I think that it's not really huge surprise that they choose it because it's a huge community they can easily get any answer if they have any problems there is quite a lot of modules that they can use it and they love it because they get tools to create plots before there was some software but right now with Python they can actually customize as they want and as they wish and that's why they really love it but what they are using for the Python so yeah one of the first thing and the most answers were answer was the drawing the plots they really use it for it they using some every single script for backups for maintaining some everyday work they doing for some simple scripts that are using just for the current work of course they using also for data analysis of the observation and I heard also that some of the telescopes are controlled by the software written in Python what are the favorite packages I would be not surprised that it's a non-py, cpy, matpotlib for drawing the plots math and astropy and yeah the next thing I would like to talk about astropy because it's just the package as I mentioned in the beginning concentrating on most of the important metals in astronomy and astrophysics in one place but I would like not to talk about all of them because then I would need much more time I would like just to show you few of them and just slightly describe what for they can be used and why they introduce them to the astropy so first will be the units and physics and astronomy you cannot tell and describe any events without the units you cannot say that someone is walking with a 5 because you don't know if he's walking 5 kilometers or he was walking 5 minutes or with a speed of 5 meters per second or whatever so you need units just to finish the just to fully describe the event so an astropyte if you import the submodular units you can get most of the important unit in astrophysics and astronomy like meters, kilometers, Celsius, kilograms and so on so once you call it units and meters you get the object called unit of course and with the name of meters so I was thinking that it would be nice to show how does it work if we will just have a simple task to solve let's say that we would like to know how much time do you need to cover a distance of 15 kilometers if you are moving 5 meters per second so let's introduce the distance if we call it we will get the object which is quantity and with the quantity we have the information of the value and of course of the units that's what we can do with these objects well we can easily convert this value to meters to any other distance length of course we can multiply and divide it and so on and so on so let's introduce also the velocity the velocity as I say will be 5 meters per second and yeah it's not a rocket science so if you want to know how much time do you need it you have to just divide the distance by velocity and the result of this equation will be 3 kilometers multiplied by second divided by meters it's kind of weird for the time unfortunately AstroPie have a problem with simplify the units so if we have this kind of problems we have to a little bit help him just calling the compose and we will get of course the correct answer which will be 3000 seconds which is 50 minutes ok so if we know how to define the distance I would like to talk about the distance in astronomy right now in the earth we are using kilometers, miles, meters and so on we know how to how far it will be 5 kilometers away from here more or less or 5 miles but in astronomy kilometers are not always that useful I mean we can use it for nearby objects like satellites, like moon even but not much farther I mean the moon is in the nearest point is like 380,000 kilometers away in the farthest way will be around 405,000 kilometers so you can see it's already kind of difficult to repeat this number and this is not that far away in astronomy actually it's just nothing so if we would like to see the distance between earth and sun you can see it's like 150,000,000 kilometers away more or less if I would like to repeat the number I would have some problems with that and because the astronomers like simple things they just introduce a new unit it will be astronomical unit which is from the definition the distance between earth and sun with this value we can very easily describe the distance between planets from the sun or from each other and it's just much easier to say this is like 5 astronomical units instead of huge number of kilometers but this distance it's not good if we would like to travel inside our galaxy because the nearest star are far away from us and we need a new unit which will be light here which could be also kind of confusing because from the very first point if no one knows what is it it could be like a unit of a time but actually it's a distance that a light needs to cover during one year which is around 63,000 astronomical units but the light years are very nice for galaxy inside the galaxy but we know already that there are other galaxies we would like to travel to other galaxies we need another unit of the distance and we came with a parsec which from the definition would be like 3.26 light years and with this unit we can start to talk about distance to galaxies, to quasars, to black holes supernova and so on ok, so I would like to show you why it's so simple using astronomical units as you can see on the left side we have planets in the solar system it is of course with a one and it's just easier to say that Neptune is 30 astronomical units away from the sun than yeah, I know what is it, 4 billions kilometers and on the right side we have few of the nearest stars in the light years so if you can remember one light year is 3.26 no, it's 63.000 astronomical units so yeah, for the proxima centauri we need to travel like 4 years with a speed of the light to get there ok, and astronomy and physics you also need some constants and these constants are also introduced to the astropy and I would like just to briefly show you two of them, one will be quite important gravitational constant so once you call it you get the value you get the error of this value of course you get the units because we are operating with the units and some reference where you can find the actual definition of this constant the second constant that I think it's kind of important in astronomy would be solar mass as you can see the value is very very high and the sun it's not actually really huge one and the universe is actually the average size of the sun so if we discovery any star and we are able to determine the mass of the star we will use the units mass of the sun ok, the next thing will be table it's really nice subclass using for astronomy because we can start to do quite nasty competition with it but to introduce the table we need three equal lists of here will be the integer, float and string so this is the way how we we can introduce the table and we can add the names of each of the list we can add some extra metadata to the objects and if we will call it we will get the information about the length and how does it the table looks like and what we can do with the table well we can from the beginning we can just add the well known units to one of the table so let's set the unit and if we will call it again we will have the information that a second column is with a unit of seconds so now we can start to multiply divide it we can start to do some computation on rows not only on the columns it's kind of a lot of things to do with the table I think it's worth to have five minutes and just check it what probably you could use it for okay and in astronomy you cannot do any observation if you don't have any coordinate system you have to have some points like like in the earth we have in astronomy we have different coordinates depends on the on the telescope it's that was created so we can all of the coordinates are in the spherical representation the only difference between them is the starting point of counting the angles and here you have several ways of introducing the coordinates thanks to the astropy coordinates so we have here one of the coordinate system that we can describe using the time which will be like 42 minutes and 5 and 30 seconds and the second variable will be 41 41 days and 12 minutes and so on so what we can do as I mentioned what we can do with this variable as I mentioned we have different kind of coordinate systems so first of all we can start converting to different representation we can convert it to the Cartesian representation and get a well-known value of x, y and z we can also convert to this spherical representation we can also convert to other coordinate system here what I was using is a galactic galactic coordinates just to describe position of the galaxies and the sky what we can also do we can also add a distance to the objects and then when we call it the Cartesian representation we will get the value and the value of the distance the catalogs the catalogs are made for some specific times one of the most popular time is for the 2000 years so we have to represent the position of the objects at the time that he was visible at the time of 2000 thanks to this we can later transform to other epochs and check what time and we can check that the position of the object is completely different like for example here 50 years ago so if we will just print the coordinates of system one and the epoch of 2000 and the second in 1950 you can see that the position of the object was slightly different okay so the auto this is the part of the work I was doing in the field of astronomy and the software is a hybrid of Fortran and Python Fortran do unfortunately most of the work he's doing the computation and the Python is using just for communicate between the user and the Fortran so with that package we are able to do computation on periodic orbits periodic orbits are the solution of the equation that are repeating in some time which will be easier to say that if we have an orbit and some object is spinning around it the periodic orbit will be the one that after some time of t the object will come exactly to the same position with the same value of velocity and the same direction so thanks to this software we are able to check how the system is changing when we increase for example one of the value in this case let's say the energy so once we add a little bit more energy to the objects the trajectory of that object will change and that software help us to find these changes and put it as a kind of the family of the periodic orbits in some points we can have several solutions for the same for the same starting points and these points are called bifurcation points so that will be looks like if we represent any family orbits as a slide as a line the periodic orbits will be just adding some branches to the light to this line so in my work we choose one of the Hamiltonian which described the energy of the system by giving the position and the speed of the objects on the left side I choose to plot on the Poincare section how could the orbits looks like so each dot represent one periodic orbits and as what actually the plot is showing is that in this field in these places we have orbit periodic that are not stable so after some time they can't lose the stability and there will be no more periodic orbits and in this position where we have some kind of structures and the orbits will be stable and even after a thousand of years there will be still periodic orbits and nothing will change on the right side we have the representation on the coordinates of the value of the energy okay so where is the place for Python over here and Python is used as I mentioned just to communicate with what we have for fun what we have to do first we have to define the function which will be the equation of motion of the Hamiltonian that is described over here so we have to take a derivative of each of variables and return the value to the from the function we also have to describe the orbits this first orbit that we are starting from so we have to give some initial condition and just start to compute to get the whole the whole orbit with the positions and velocities and if we will have this information we can start and do a computation and we get some some results so the results of this computation was getting this this plot which is the which represents the family of the orbits that we are able to find so here also each dot is a one orbit a periodic orbit and as you can see this is kind of evolution of this one orbit here the green is a stable orbits red one are unstable and these plots are just showing like if we would like to slice in this energy how the orbit looks like in the system here we have a chaotic orbits which are unstable here we have a stable one and this is just the Poincare section which show exactly the same here we have a slightly different value of the energy so what I would like to do in my work is like looking for finding the branches but not in the flat in the flat images only to create the free 3D maps of all the branches so we will start to looking on this main branch over here and it's representing over here and we start to check how the orbit looks like this example is just showing all of the symmetrical periodic orbits that can be seen over here we have one symmetry and going from one point to another we can see how the we should see how the orbits might change during the evolution of the orbits so we knew it that in these points from which we will get more solutions so we could follow those solutions and check how the how the new orbits will look like so if we go to the next slide we can see that after the bifurcation points we lose the symmetry it's the first thing that we are noticing and the second thing is that just after bifurcation points the new orbits that are stable and all of them are unstable what was also quite interesting that we have two different points but actually there are kind of common in this family in the evolution of this family and yeah so that what we get it from the auto packages and it will be kind of all from my talk so for the summary what I would like to say is just that Python is start to be more and more popular in astronomy mostly for teaching the students as the first programming languages they really really love it for for drops of the plots and yeah if you are thinking that the Python could be I don't know do some revolution in astronomy it's mostly using the plugins for existing software just to communicate with with already existing software instead of writing a new one because it's not that fast as Fortran or C++ so what would like also thanks to colleagues of mine that have a look on the on my presentation some correction and that will be all okay thank you we have time for a few questions a bit more thank you very much for the presentation and short introduction to astronomy can you please explain what's behind the Pasek I understand the light here is Pasek yeah I can try explain what is the Pasek Pasek is a distance of astronomy units seen as a arc seq value so you have to be you have to be that far away from the earth so you can see the distance from earth and earth as a one arc seq value so this is kind of definition it's kind of difficult to explain it but something like that just the angular so I notice you're wearing an STX next t-shirt are you working with astronomy still at your current employer no no day more I've been one of the friends of mine trying to give us some work but in the end it didn't happen so at the time I'm just working as a developer any more questions well really really nice talk and do you think solutions as Scythe on Numba or these type of things are going to improve or extend the use of Python in astronomy like GPU acceleration I don't know because you said it's used mainly as a wrapper for other Fortran or C++ things have you heard about usage with Scythe on Numba well they use Scythe and Numba for some simple scripts that they can they could use in different languages but in Python it's just generated much faster so as far as I know and what I was doing as well was just like simple computation that I just need for next day or whatever that's all I can say so if there are any more questions thank you very much thank you


How's everyone feeling about the Linux community right now? And Linux in general? Well, I'm afraid to tell you that according to our next speaker, Linux sucks.  And he's going to tell us why. As soon as he gets his Linux laptop hooked up to the projector system. Now, hey, hey, yeah. All right, I'm turned on now. All right, first off, while I'm getting set up here, everybody squished the frig together.  Get together. Bring it in. People in the back, bring it in, bring it in, bring it in. I'm not screwing around about this. I'm not starting until you bring it in. You can't sit right there. Ilan Rabinovic, organizer of scale, take a frigging chair. Bring it in. Bring it in. I see you in the back.  Thank you for waving.  You can stay over there. But everyone, bring it in. I am going to yell at every single friggin one of you in a minute. Oops. You're welcome. You can't hear me anymore. Bring it in. What the heck, people? This thing is cranked through the roof and you guys are still sitting. The guy in the very far back right corner. Yeah, you. Everybody turn and look at him. You are so far away right now. Closer. You don't want to? All right, all right, all right. Let me turn on my display. Beautiful. No. No. No. Better. Hey, that's a thing. All right. So before we jump into this too crazy, is everybody coming here at this exact same time tomorrow night? Yes. I'm going to be very clear about this. The prizes are bonkers and we have free beer. Now, is it possible to turn on the house lights for about 20 seconds here? Thank you.  I'm up here. This is really unsafe. Sweet. Do you guys just applaud someone for taking a picture while standing on a chair? Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Let's just move to the next slide so we're ready here. Hold on. Hold on. I'm going to bring up Twitter.   Hashtag, scale 14x. Tweet. All right, sweet. Now we can get started. All right.  Is everybody in the right place? Fantastic. So let's get the disclaimers out of the way right from the start. I don't care what any of you think. That's number one. Number two, I don't want to hear you talking about it while I'm talking because I am the most important man in this room right now. Isn't that right, Ilan Rabinovich, organizer of scale? Ilan says no. All right. Third thing, then the second item on there because I didn't number them properly, is that no one sanctioned this. Scale didn't sanction this. No employers of mine sanctioned this. And as a follow-on, there may be some bad words. I don't have any bad words planned other than that one right there, but sometimes they just happen.  Right? It takes a little bit of guts. I recognize, by the way, this might be a little controversial. I spelled Cajones that way. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary, and there was a lot of options, and so I went phonetic. I am extremely white. Could I tell you a story about how wide I am for a second? I don't need to sidetrack this. Does anyone else use 23andMe or any of those DNA services?  So I did those, and it tells you where your ancestry came from. Now, I know for a fact that in my mixed ancestry, I've got various Native Americans and all sorts of different things. Apparently, the white DNA has massacred all the non-white DNA in my body because I am 100% Western European white, according to my DNA, which means that my entire family history is really all for naught. So I am literally, as far as I know, as white as it is possible to be, scientifically. Could I have a cup of water over there? Thank you, Kara. Now, this is really important. I am not a very smart guy. I was a software developer at one point. I was awful at it. I was really terrible. Ask anyone who used my software. It was so buggy. It was ridiculous. So being as this is the, I don't know, seventh time I've done a big dog and pony show about how terrible Linux is, I thought, how cool would it be to ask people who are actually smart about Linux instead of just me? So I did that. I asked a semi-random sampling of people. Raise your hand if you know who Corey Doctorow is. Yeah. Corey Doctorow is an author and a general free software and free culture advocate. You brought me two cups? You are righteous. Yes! All right, all right. Now, Corey Doctorow, I'm going to admit, is kind of an idol of mine. I think he's kind of fantastic in every possible way. So I asked him. What do you think of Linux, Corey Doctorow? That's a good point. So, all right, so he was pretty blind, I felt. He hates Linux. That's fine, but he's just one author. What if we could find another author and see what they think of Linux? Let's get, let's make this scientific, right? Let's get a sample size. Corey Doctorow does not a sample size make. So I asked this guy. Does anyone know who Pierce Anthony is? Of course you do. Especially if you were a boy who was ever the age of 13. Because Pierce Anthony has written 200 some odd books, fantasy novels, science fiction novels. The man is kind of a literary something or other. I don't know. I'm not very good with words. Giants, that was a really simple word that I could have used. It's fantastic. So I got a hold of Pierce Anthony. Who, as it turns out, has been using Linux as his primary operating system for 15 some odd years. Now, before I play this video, I should point out that Pierce Anthony is not a sprightly young chicken. He has been around in this business for a very, very long time. In fact, I managed to track him down, literally, in the swamps of Florida, where he lives with his wife and he is a very elderly gentleman. He was kind enough to record this video, which I think is absolutely adorable. Sorry, Pierce. And he recorded it while sitting on the stairs in his home. This is what Pierce Anthony, literary giant, thinks of Linux. So there you have it. So what we're at right now is a scientifically definitive result. We have a sample size of two, two distinguished and well-known authors. One who says that he hates Linux. The other who says that it's flat-out a disaster. At this point, I decided it was safe to conclude that all authors hate Linux. So we need to move on from there. We need to define someone maybe who works with Linux day-to-day, maybe someone who is involved in the monetary side of it and making it fit for big companies, maybe someone who really knows his stuff. So I reached out to Jim Whitehurst, the CEO of Red Hat. And I said, hey Jim, just give me kind of an off-the-cuff thought. What do you think of Linux, Jim? This is what he sent back. Keepin' me alive is this energy drink. This is a true story, by the way. Last night, I was trying to delete a couple of USB flash drives and I went to the disk utility routine. Forgot to switch over from my main hard drive to the USB and I literally deleted the partitions of my operating system that I was running at the time. Because what on earth were the developers thinking when they would let a user delete the partitions of the machine they are currently running? I spent an hour and a half less like building my whole damn computer. I asked Mark Shuttleworth if he would come on. He respectfully declined.  He kind of just looked at me like, no, I know what's going on. So, two things. This is a little thing I do.  I practice it once or twice. I make sure I know what all the slides are. But I always like to do one thing that scares me a little bit. One thing that I have not planned. So, until about an hour ago, this slide read, what is Linux? Bonus points compare it to, so then I asked my wife this evening, what should I compare it to? She suggested a potato, which means in a moment, I will be comparing Linux to a potato and why that is terrible. But first, every time I've given this freaking thing, I have gotten this exact verbatim statement sent to me in droves and I'm going to read it for you because it drives me frigging bonkers. I'd like to just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Linux is in fact GNU forward slash Linux or as I've recently taken to calling it GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU core libs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full operating system as defined by POSIX. All of us have seen this. All of us have posted something on Reddit and had this be what someone comes back with. It drives me to the point of murder. I love GNU stuff.  Wait, wait, wait. I said wait, you guys don't listen well at all. In all deference to my good friend, Richard Stallman. I like GNU, I'm going to repeat this. And free software, I just think the name is clumsy. That is all I'm saying. Now, let's get back to talking about potatoes. That slide bought me three minutes to think about what I thought about potatoes, by the way. And then I drank water and got 12 more. All right, here's the thing. Every operating system is like a potato, right? I asked you right, like that makes a whole lot of sense. Think about it like this. Windows, Mac, DOS, anything, you get it and it's a potato. You make it your own by adding something on top of it. Some applications, some themes, some chives, some butter, some bacon bits. Maybe a little dollop of sour cream, which is an absolutely incorrect thing to do to a baked potato. It's disgusting, man. Raise your hand if you like sour cream on your baked potato.  Now that's totally fine. And if Linux were like that, that would be totally fine too, but Linux isn't like that. Imagine if you will forget everything about Linux for a second, but imagine if you will a world in which there was such a thing as a potato copier. It's like a photocopier, except it copies potatoes. Basically verbatim, maybe not exactly. There might be a little bit of different shapes and sizes, but essentially you take a potato and it copies it. Now it doesn't just copy the potato. It copies anything you shove in that potato. It copies the sour cream. It copies the bacon bits, which is always a good thing to copy because it's delicious in a baked potato. Just as an aside, can we raise hands if you like bacon in your baked potato? More people than sour cream, thank you. Now what if, what if you took that bacon copier and you gave it a potato with some bacon bits in it, perfectly good, and you want to get more of those potatoes with bacon bits, you want that. Everyone wants that. You want to distribute it for free. And as you do that, it starts spitting out potato after potato after potato with bacon bits. That's fantastic. And then someone comes along and adds sour cream to one of those potatoes and begins copying that potato. And then somebody adds chives to another potato and begins copying that potato. After a while, there's potatoes everywhere. With all sorts of really messed up ingredients in them. There is potatoes out there with, well, let's say mayonnaise. Someone put mayonnaise in a potato. Would anyone ever put mayonnaise in a potato? You would not. All right, all right, I have, are you serious? You really, you've actually done that. You've put mayonnaise in a baked potato. What sort of messed up world do you live in? Did you not have butter? Do you not have butter? Butter is amazing. Can I have a different butter? Yeah, you're wrong. So here's the problem with that. If you have a potato copying machine and it's cranking out these copies of potatoes, invariably something's gonna go wrong. Have you ever seen the movie The Fly where after the guy Jeff Goldblum goes through the machine a whole bunch of times, like eventually a little fly gets into it and he comes out the other side and not quite right? That's what can happen with a potato copier. And that's really what Linux is, right? It's not an operating system that you slap the ingredients you want on top of. It's a strange potato copying freedom loving mechanism that enables you to eventually get mutant potatoes that have so much sour cream in between the molecules of the actual delicious potato that you can't get the goddamn sour cream out. That really has nothing to do with the rest of this presentation, but I feel pretty happy with how that went. Now, now, I've got a long way to go here. So Linux, we're all here because we agree it sucks a whole bunch, correct? Correct. So, what could we talk about? What are the various things we could talk about? Could we talk about replaced display managers that seemingly will never ship? Now, we're not gonna talk about that. I'd like to talk about this one because this is another display manager that I don't understand why it exists, but it's not shipping, so it's not a big deal. We're not gonna talk about this one. All right, to the booze in the audience. Allow me to just say that I rather quite like Fedora, but the Fedora people are so fun to poke. It's like a hornet's list, but the hornets that come out are rainbow-colored and just delightful, so you just wanna jab at it and then spray it with something. You can't talk, that one. We're not gonna talk about this time. I've made fun of Fedora in the past, I'm not gonna do it. Now, who here would like to hear me rant and rave about Ubuntu for a while? I'm not gonna do that either. We're gonna talk about this. I just by a response that I picked the correct topic. All right, show of hands, or shouts, whatever. Who here among you have legitimate concerns about System D? All right, it's a few of you. So let's step back for a second. I don't care what anyone in the audience has to say. I do a little bit, but if I say I don't, it's funnier. Let's talk about what System D is before we get into why it pisses me off so much. So here's just a little bit of a mock-up. For those who aren't familiar, System D started ostensibly as a replacement for the initialization scripts, right? A new initialization system for the modern age where we can all prance freely in meadows of daisies and sunflowers and everything will work just a little bit better because it's a more modern code base. Reasonable, right? There have been efforts to do this in the past. Plenty of them, in fact, and some of them have worked wonderfully well and some of them have sucked a whole bunch. Now along came System D, which really in and of itself, for being in a niche script that gets your computer up and running, it does the job, right? Does it work? Yeah, it does that. Then the System D creators did something dark, something very sinister.   In that article, I made a joke. And that joke was that System D would, sometime over the coming year, add to its portfolio of functionality a web browser and an office suite. Wait, it was an easy to joke to make because, duh. People took it and may have realized that, yes, this is half a joke, but they kind of saw a nugget of truth in it. In spades. People look at it and they think, by God, you're right. It is expanding to become what is essentially a complete nutter operating system unto itself. Now, why is this a problem? Okay, let's not talk about Emacs right now because we might later. So, oh, John Maddog, you are ruining things with spoilers for the rest of the audience. The Unix philosophy. You make a lot of small modular bits that can all work together, right? Why make one monolithic beast that has way too many pieces and parts all on it that's just not gonna work that well? It's time for a story. How many people did Pinewood Derbies as a kid? It's fun, right? All right, that's quite a bit of you, right? So, I did Pinewood Derbies as a kid. This is not a picture of my Pinewood Derby. This is the only good Creative Commons license picture of Pinewood Derbies I could find. The cars I made as a kid, never, never, I'm sure, performed this well. So, when I was a kid, the very first Pinewood Derby I did, my dad was gonna help me out and make the car cool, right? Sometimes the kids are supposed to do it themselves but it's cool if the dad helps, right? Like, it's cool if the dad helps you carve the little block of wood and turn it into a little car that's gonna race a whole bunch of other cars down the track, that's cool.  It just didn't look very cool. So, I got the pocket knife out and I started kind of carving little swoops into it and I made it look badass. I wish I had a picture of this. I looked all over for a picture of this. I thought it looked great. Granted, hindsight and memory may not be serving me well. It might have looked ridiculous. But it had like this swoop on the back, right? Not like a spoiler, but like an honest to God like spoon sitting on the back facing forward. If you can imagine a car with a spoon on the back, you can imagine it's not very aerodynamic. I also painted it with more coats of paint than would have been reasonably advisable. It got thicker and it got heavier. But in the end, the paint with the flames, I should say flames, because I think it looked a little funny, but the flames looked cool and it had little headlights on the front. I put actual headlights on the front. It was just like a little things on it. It was cool, right? It was way cool. And it lost that pun with Derby by so much. It was the slowest freaking car on the whole Derby by a landslide. A landslide. I sucked so bad.  Like System D. They put a friggin' spoon on the back of a race car and expected it to go faster. Now, right now? Is it being horrible? Is it destroying our lives? No. But the promise of where it could go is not fantastic. Remember Anakin Skywalker? Another example of this. Has anyone here, as a kid, you all do this as a kid, who might ask you questions for. As a kid, you draw pictures, right? When you're like, let's say like eight, nine, 10 years old. I know like 10-year-old boys are just a lot of special. They'll draw pictures of like a helicopter shooting at like a building or blowing up a palm tree. You know, some randomly overly violent machismo thing that we did as a child, right? Did you guys all do that?  You didn't do that? I was a violent kid. So anyway, I did that a lot as a kid. And I found one thing. I could draw planes and spaceships very well because there was a lot of sharp angles and I could manage to do that. Anything that had more to do with than that, the pictures were kind of crappy. Now I did what you kind of expect a 10-year-old boy to do. I'd draw a spaceship or an airplane. I'd do an okay job of it. It was recognizable. Then I'd add some buildings. Then I'd add a dinosaur. Then I'd add a guy driving the dinosaur, like on the back, holding like a gun.  Now there are exceptions there. We'll talk about that later. I'm gonna change topics away from System D for a moment because we're gonna talk about it more and I need to take a break. Let's talk about stats for a second. This is gonna have very little commentary for me, so let's just look. That's the last 10 years of searches of the word Linux on Google. It kind of highlighted December of 2011 because that seems to be when it kind of leveled off. That's down, right? That's a lot down. That's not a little down. That's a lot down. What does Google search trends track? How interested people are in something, which means they don't care about Linux. What do they care about? They care about iPhones. A lot.  It's like a stegosaurus. They care about iPhones a lot. What else do they care about? You guys, this is Google. This is the truth. Now, there was a moment. There was a moment you'll notice. Where at the end of 2014, beginning of 2015, it looked like Linux might be more important than Justin Bieber for just a moment. That moment is gone. Are there any believers in the audience? That guy in the back, or were you just stretching? He put his hands down so fast. Gonna leave that right there. Now, let's come back to numbers for a second. I love numbers. But finding numbers, hard numbers, for how well each version of Linux does, each Linux distribution does, is harder than hell. What is the only real way to compare it? DistroWatch. This graph, this horrible, disgusting graph, is the last 14 years, I just did the math, of the top, the current top eight distros on DistroWatch. It's interesting, isn't it? There have been changes over the years. Changes aren't bad, right? Changes are good. We all like changes. I like a lot of changes here. Let me actually pull this together a little bit. I'm gonna remove the bottom three. My apologies to Arch and Slackware and Elementary. You guys are in the top eight. That's pretty good, but we're gonna cut you off for a second because I can't handle that many lights. So let's look at this for a second. This is a lot of change in a little over 10 years. That's five different organizations, volunteer organizations and companies, kind of a mixture of the two, doing a ton of work, a ton of work to package, develop, and test. These four awesome Linux distributions. Well, awesome in the Linux sense of the word. How much time could they be saving if they actually work together on one? Probably a little bit among you. And I'm really curious about this. How many of you have had the conversation with your friends? Boy, it sure seems like we fork X an awful lot. Wouldn't it be better if we all worked together? Come on. Sheepish, sheepish, up, up, sheepish, proud. I like it.  But it's true. If we all worked together, if Ubuntu, Linux, Mint, Fedora, OpenSusa, and Debian all worked together on the singular distribution, they would have more manpower, significantly more manpower, to throw at many of the same problems that they're solving over and over and over again, instead of this crazy back and forth trepidating for positioning. Now, this really is just measuring interest, right? This measures interest on a website called DistroWatch of each individual platform, right? So it tells us interest over time. And other than it's showing both Ubuntu and Fedora slowly sliding into oblivion now, I'm not really sure what else it shows. So I'm gonna move on.  Because in fact, it kind of pisses me off. If you look at the non-free software world, there was a time when Mac OS X and Windows were really behind some of the things in free software. It wasn't that many years ago. Free software and Linux gave you virtual desktops first. Right? Virtual desktops. That's badass. Now everyone's got them. Close store software has them. They've been able to catch up in so many ways that it is, I think, definitively showing that both Linux, open source and free software simply isn't functional at the current point in time. To the point where giving up on free software probably makes the most sense at this point.  And I honestly don't think that it makes... I'm sancting Knusius of the church of Emas. I didn't call you a god. What? My name is Lesserby. Okay. You've been letting non-free programs flush that looks like Mac OS. Whoa. It's almost as nasty as Windows. There's not a... Brace all that, user shackles. Could I use BI? Using a free... I don't... I mean, I guess I could, but I... You're making progress will be a saint. Okay. There's no system. That was weird. That was a weird thing to have just happened. I don't know if you could really see it, but as he faded in here, he was like, Brian, Brian, and it was a little creepy from up here. So that was Richard Stallman. And Richard Stallman makes some pretty good points. Maybe not in that moment, but in other moments. Maybe I've got this all wrong. Maybe I need to look at this from a different point of view. Maybe Linux isn't a crappy potato copying machine. Maybe it's an amazing paid potato copying machine. Maybe making a Frankenstein potato is the best possible kind of potato. If you think about it, if you came across a potato sitting on a counter somewhere, fresh out of the oven, wrapped up in tinfoil, what do you immediately think to do with it?  What do you do with it?  I mean, really, you don't think put sour cream on a, like if you think, I pulled a root out of a ground, I'm gonna make it warm and put curdled milk on it.  You don't think I'm gonna put bacon, now you do think I'm gonna put bacon on it. Yeah, that's just a given. But some of the other things, chives. Who would put chives on a potato?  What if there's a combination out there of ingredients so preposterous that no one has ever tried it on a baked potato before? If you have yogurt, has anyone ever put yogurt on a baked potato? Is it good? This guy says it's good. I went to a restaurant once and they gave me a potato filled with macaroni and cheese. It was amazing. It was good. Chocolate syrup? He just made that up. No one's ever done that. That's a thing. That's a thing. Here's the thing. We don't know what sort of combination of craziness and collaboration is going to produce the world's best Frankenstein awesome mutant potato, right? So why not get a potato copying machine so we can make as many friggin' copies as we want and keep trying over and over and over again and keep doing that sort of thing?  Clearly.  I think that's a fair statement to make. Would anyone else go so far as to make that statement? Nope. Fair enough. Moving on. Let's come back to system D for a minute.   And in the last half, I tell you why I was absolutely wrong and why whatever I told you sucks, it's really truly amazing.  System D is incredible. All right, four of you agree with that. And here's the reason why it's incredible. It's kind of monolithic-y. It's not that great that way. It's not modular in any way.  And it does seem like they're gonna build an office we didn't do it at some point. I don't really know if I want them doing that.  Seriously. Back in the 1990s, there was a point in time when a lot of desktop environments that we use today didn't exist at all. They didn't exist. Did KDE and GNOME, which came first? KDE or GNOME? KDE? GNOME came about a year later, something like that, right? So for about a year, there was KDE, but no GNOME or GNOME or however people who can't speak properly say it. Did they think we shouldn't create that because it does things differently? No, they created it anyway and it turned out to be kind of awesome. Did canonical stop and not make unity? No, that was a bad idea. Really sorry guys, it wasn't like that. All right, we'll go off of that. That was the slide of system D. I just put it up there again momentarily to point out that, hey, it's a little bit wacky. And yes, it is trying to do an invasion of the body snatchers and take over your entire lives, but let them, let's see what happens, right? If all the distros don't like it, they're gonna stop using it. If the GNOME people don't like it, they're gonna stop using it. And that's totally fine. Because if we don't take risks, we don't do anything cool. Let's come back to this. Let's talk more about Pinewood Derby's really quickly here. My car sucked. My car lost the Derby, but my car looked way cooler than any of the other cars.  Remember when I said I started with a triangle? Their car was just a triangle. There was no creative flair in that car whatsoever.  My car was awesome and pointless, but awesome. There are many Linux distributions that I would classify as pointless. Many of them. In fact, there are many Linux distributions that are jokes that were literally created to be a joke. Someone earlier today mentioned Hannah Montana Linux. That's a friggin' great example. How great is it that that exists? That's a wonderful thing. That's part of our cultural lexicon as a people now. The Hannah Montana has her own operating system. Does anyone use Hannah Montana Linux? Has anyone here ever, one, anyone besides that devilishly handsome man ever actually installed it? Just to see what it was like, you actually downloaded it and put it on your computer. And was it as pink as I thought it would be? Awesome. Is it pointless? Yeah, it's pointless, but it's so cool that someone reached out and tried. I really drew crappy pictures as a kid, and earlier when I said that I drew good planes and spaceships, I was lying. They were so bad. All by themselves, they were bad. In fact, the only thing that covered up that I was the world's worst artist is that I filled the page with things that almost looked like dinosaurs and people riding them. That was the only thing that convinced anyone that I might have been able to draw one good thing. I still can't draw. However, if I could, and I could draw truly well, I would draw something like Chuck Norris riding a dinosaur holding a machine gun, because that's awesome. Should I just draw a dinosaur? No, everyone's drawn a dinosaur. Let's draw something different. Chuck Norris with a machine gun. Okay, that's not that different now because the internet's here, but you add enough things to it, and eventually it gets awesome. Let's look at this for a second. Sorry about the... Yeah, you can mute that for a moment. Be ready to unmute that a little later. So this is it. This is, actually, this is real. There's nothing about this that isn't real. This is real. I say lies all lies, but Google's kind of telling the truth about these stats. But there's one thing here that it doesn't take into account. Over this period of time, there's been an absolute explosion in the popularity of multiple specific Linux distributions. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSusa, Arch, a wide variety of things, and people have begun searching for those instead of just Linux. So if you start adding together, and I found this really hard to do in a chart that made any sense, so I gave up because I'm committed like that. You can see it. Actually, over time, the interest has grown because there's more to it that people are searching for. Now, it does mean that interest in the Linux kernel itself in terms of what people are searching for, that's going down, that is going down because it is, because it is. And this still friggin' holds true. But there's one other aspect that this doesn't really take into consideration. It's the old wisdom of if your friend's all jumped off a cliff, do you? And I think that applies pretty goddamn well right here. Linux popularity, in terms of search results on Google, has dropped precipitously over the last decade, whereas there has been an explosion of iPhone searches. Why is that? Because iPhones are friggin' popular. But it doesn't mean they're cool. It just means they're popular. Justin Bieber is popular. He's popular, right? That guy in the back, where'd he go? There you are.  He's popular. I'm gonna move on because actually these numbers are really depressing. All right, let's move on really quick. Now let's come back to DistroWatch. So sure, sure, Google search trends, not great, not fantastic, but these DistroWatch numbers, these are fantastic. These are really fantastic. And here is why. Multiple things. First, it shows interest over time, skyrocketing. Skyrocketing. Now this is again just on one single highly flawed website. But it shows interest over time going way, way up for Linux as a whole. That is incredible. That is an incredible thing. And not only does it show that, it shows an incredible diversity of ideas. Crazy. Arch and elementary. Those are two projects that almost don't even seem like they're based on the same thing. They are two fundamentally different frigging beasts, right? And yet they're sitting up there kind of pretty close to each other, almost neck and neck in terms of interest through this website, right? How awesome is that? They're entirely different. And yet they're doing so astoundingly well and it's all within the same family of us, of us as Linux users, as Linux developers, it is within that. Now a lot of the top ones all kind of have a common lineage and a common heritage, but not all of them do. And if you look at all of the hundreds and hundreds of Linux distros out there, this chart gets even nuttier. It gets to the point where it is absolutely indecipherable. And if you narrow this down to just those top five, what I kind of consider to be the granddaddies right now, like plus Linux mint, who's a little bit newer. But these are the most popular, the five most popular versions of Linux in the whole world. And they're kind of jockeying for position. I mean, look at Debian with its massive swoops up and down and look at, I mean, look at Ubuntu there, Ubuntu shot to prominence in 2004 and has really stayed pretty consistent despite the fact that there's, how many Ubuntu spinoffs are there? I don't even know. I didn't even bother to look because it sounded so boring, there was so many of them. But that's just it, despite Kabuntu and all these other derivatives, it's still holding its own, still doing well. Sousa has been sitting there, OpenSus has been doing steadily well for a long time. The same is true with Red Hat, doing steadily well, declining into oblivion a little bit, but that's not too bad. All of which means that all of the things about Linux that are the worst things about Linux, the things that give us system D, the things that we love to hate are also kind of spectacularly awesome. And if you took away the thing that would create system D, you take away the thing that create anything else, anything else beautiful. So I want to revisit some of our dear friends that we heard from earlier. Make sure we got audio for this because it's beautiful. This is Corey Doctorow, author and totally awesome dude. That wasn't easy. I actually have been using Linux every day as my only operating system for more than a decade now. Yeah, you have. Yeah, he has. How many people here have been using Linux as their primary operating system for more than 10 years? Okay, three hands up for a second. Who of you have been using Linux for less than a year? Less than two years? Less than five years, let's go like that. There we go. So probably more than half of you have been using Linux and primarily Linux for over a decade, over a decade. How awesome is that? Let's hear from Pierce Anthony. Here's freaking Anthony.  Well put, Pierce Anthony, who is so adorable. All right, Jim White here.  Linux is awesome.  I love Linux. When you need something that may not even be packaged for your version of the operating system by simply compiling a module if you can make it work. I'm Jim Whitehurst, President CEO of Red Hat and Linux is awesome. He had to get that in there at the end. I'm Jim Whitehurst. Awesome, right? So if I've got at the end of this ridiculous period of time that we've spent together, if there's a message, if there's the moral at the end of the Scooby-Doo episode, it is this. If something comes along that is system D-ish, should we make fun of it? Should we belittle it? You're absolutely right, we should. Hold your applause. We should. We should criticize the holy living hell out of it with love in our hearts. Because the reality is that the people that make things like system D have their hearts in the right place and are trying something a little different, a little new. But if we think they're wrong, we yell about them. We fork our distro and we go the frig home. And that's totally, totally okay to do. Thank you. This is Littic Sucks. Go, go away. Go away. Go, go, you go, here you go. Go, go tomorrow. All right, so once again, a big round of applause for Brian Lunduk and the wild ride he just took us on. What a wild ride. What a wild ride. It was a wild ride. It was a wild ride. All right, so that concludes our evening events in this room. We look forward to seeing you guys tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. for Corey Dockrow's keynotes. Remember, he hates Linux. He does hate Linux. If everybody could find Corey Dockrow over the next day and remind him that you have him on record saying how much he hates Linux, that would be choice. Yeah, GNU4 slash Linux, right. All right, thanks everyone for coming. Have a good night. Thank you.


I work as part of the Human Microbiome Project, which is a new initiative funded by the NIH Common Fund. For almost 20 years now, I've been a researcher working in a laboratory. But this was a new opportunity to really work with physicians and microbiologists and laboratory scientists who all come together to form a group to ask a very simple but important question, which is, what are the bacteria that live on our body and how do they contribute to our health and to disease states? Well, the question is old. What are the bacteria that live on our body? And for a long time we've answered that question by seeing what we could culture and what would grow when we put them on bacterial plates like this. So for a long time we would look under the microscope and say, oh, staph epidermidis is the dominant bacteria that lives on your skin. Well, this project is exploration. What we have found by not just looking at what we can culture, but what we can actually sequence. It's like you go in with a microscope and at first if you didn't have a very powerful lens, you'd be able to see maybe some of the larger pieces of when you look under a microscope you could see a hair or something like that. But when we go in with this more powerful microscope of looking at the DNA sequence of every bacteria that's there, suddenly we see this enormous diversity. We find staph epidermidis. It's not that what you learned in the textbooks isn't true. It's just that there is an entire ecosystem of bacteria that live there, many of which are really hard to culture. And they don't grow very well on these Petri dishes that we have because that's not what they've evolved to do. They've evolved to live on our skin.  But what do they do for us? Like why would we want to have these bacteria living on our skin? Well, they then take some of these oils that our skin cells produce and they turn it into a natural moisturizing. We're really trying to think about what are the healthy bacteria that live on our skin and to really focus on those healthy bacteria. Now, there are bacteria that come in and cause infections. And so I'm not saying that we shouldn't worry about bacteria getting onto our skin and not just as a scientist but as a mother of two young kids, I believe very strongly in hand washing. And I hope my kids wash their hands every time they come in from the playground. But we have to lose this language of warfare and thinking about bacteria as only pathogenic. Bacteria in the gut aid and digestion. Bacteria on the skin, aid in keeping your skin moist and moisturized and supple. And if you have a very, you know, smooth skin, then you don't have cracks in your skin where bad bacteria could get in. And the good bacteria, what we call the commensal bacterias, are also basically holding the property on your skin. And so if a good bacteria is standing there occupying that space, the good bacteria is going, I'm here, I'm here.   And that's sort of the difference between the transient bacteria that you wash off your hands and the ones that take up residence on your skin. So what is the exploration? Well, the exploration is about how does a microbial shift or the small microorganisms, these bacteria, how does a bacterial shift contribute to disease states and then how do you bring that back into balance to achieve health again? And what we're learning about this is also just changing the way we think about ourselves. What we found was that on healthy volunteers, the skin is an ecosystem. And what that means is that the bacteria that live here on my chest are really different than the bacteria that live here in my underarm are really different than the bacteria that live here in the bend of my elbow.  And here is a moist area that has, you know, really no hair. When you sweat, that's a waste product of bacteria.  And why does your underarm smell different than your feet, the bottom of your foot, your sneaker? Because these are different areas that sweat and they do have different types of ecosystems of bacteria. What I've seen is that people now are using all these antimicrobial products and, you know, we just, we don't know how that's going to change the bacteria that live on our skin and how that's affecting the good bacteria and the bad bacteria.  But, you know, the bacteria that live on our body are not necessarily bad and we should treat them with a little bit more respect.


Good morning. My name is Clara Caballero. I'm a third-year resident of Somalia in my country. I live in Bolivia. For those who don't know me, I've been here just for more than a month. I'll be staying here just two more weeks. I came for doing a servership in the retina clinic and it's good to know the people that I haven't met yet. Well, they wanted me to speak a little bit about what is going on with the eye hospital in my city and with the residency in my city. I would like you to apologize for my English mistakes because my English is not as good as I thought. Your English is a lot better than most of us. Thank you. I may have it distraught. Well, for those who don't know, my country is in South America. It's just the heart of South America. The name is Bolivia but now the name has been changed. It's officially known as the Plurinational State of Bolivia. It's a landlocked country located in the center of South America. It's a democratic republic and that is divided into nine departments. Its geography is barred from the peaks of the Andes in the west, which we took Dr. Muffin and Dr. Duffin, to the eastern lowlands and is situated within the Amazon basin. It is a developing country. Its main economic activities are agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining, and manufacturing goods such as textiles, clothing, refined metals, and refined petroleum. We have an estimated population of 10 million people, which is really multiethnic. The main language spoken is Spanish, although I didn't even know that we have 34 other indigenous languages that are official, which I didn't even know. The geography, Bolivia has a huge degree of biodiversity. It's considered one of the greatest in the world, as well as several other regions with such ecological subunits as the Al Altiplano. We have jungle, we have tropical rainforests, we have desert, we have everything. It's divided into three physiographic regions, the Andean region in which I live in. It's located above 3,000 meters of altitude with some of the highest spots in the Americas, such as the Sahama, which is for you, I don't know, meters for you is not that important, but it is like 21,000 and 462 feet, and the Imani, which is like 21,200 feet. For example, we have a picture there of Dr. Duffin and Dr. Mifflin when we took them to the Sahama. We live really high. We have the Subundian region and we have the Llanos, which is located below 1,312 feet meters above sea level. Here we have some pictures of the country that are visually into the night departments. We have a lot of mountains, and we have a lot of, this one is a picture of the languages that we speak in our country. La Paz is the city I live in. Its original name is Nuestra Señora de la Paz. It's the seat of the government of Bolivia. It's located in the western part of the country, in the apartment of the same name. It's an elevation of the city. It's roughly between 11,975 feet, and the city is built on the hills. We basically live on the hills, above sea level. It is the world's highest de facto capital city. The city is sitting above, surrounded by the high mountains of the Alti Plano. It's kind of in the hills, and it has a lot of variety in elevations. From 10,500 to 3,500 feet, it depends on where exactly are you standing on the hill. We have a picture here of our city. I think it's really beautiful. The mountains you see in the back is the Yamani. The mountains are always covered in the snow, but it doesn't snow in my city. I don't know why. We have some other pictures. Our city is in the mountains. If you see the orange arrow, it's exactly where I live in the city. I live kind of in the middle. We do have a stitching. No, no. I keep saying that I have too much oxygen here. But we can breathe there. We can. What happens with the banks, with the eye hospitals in my country? In 1920, Dr. Landa Lyon, he opened ophthalmology courses in clinic at the School of Medicine in La Paz. The eye hospital named Said in the city of La Paz in 1939 becomes the first eye hospital in Bolivia and in South America. Dr. Liz Landa was the first director and founder in the Bolivian state, and he was awarded with Condor de los Andes, which is a great award in my country for that contribution. In 1950, Dr. Aníseto Solárez creates the Bolivian Society of Prevention of Blindness, and in 1957, it's created the Bolivian Institute of Blindness. But what are the ophthalmological disorders in Bolivian Andes? Actually, in Bolivia, 78% of our habitants live above 6,561 feet, and 50% live above 11,481 feet, so we really live up high. The average is about 12,467 feet. The air is thin and clear with low humidity and allows for more sunlight of the solar spectrum. That's why instead the heat diffusion is really low, so people are burning in the sun and in the shade they freeze. That's why these factors, in addition to a racial influence, the skin color of the people, that's why we call ourselves the bronze race, is because of the color of our skin. But what is the, when we have to talk about pathology of the eye, we have presupposing factors of pathology in the eye because we have a higher level of solar radiation, infrared, visible ultraviolet, and cosmic radiation. We have a lot of exposure to the environment directly. We have exposure of the eye to hyperbaric apoptia, and acute and chronic and nutrition and altitude because we have a lot of malnutrition in my country. Now, the ophthalmological disorienting height that we have found that are more common are metropia with 40% of the people living in the highlands need glasses, often for myopia, astigmatism, and presbyopia. Conjunctivity is pigmentosa with high incidence of proliferation, reaching almost 90% of our children. They have these terrible conjunctivitis and they are always scrolling their eyes. Yeah, I have never seen it here. Yeah, and I do have a lot of it. It's a more than pigmentation, it's proliferation. We have been reckless. Yeah, yeah, we treat them with is the only way it helps because otherwise it continues and it's worse and basically they're kids. So we have to trust the parents. Yeah, we have been reckless. We have the region and we even have them in children from three to seven years, of course, in young and in adult. We have cataracts with high incidence of prevalence. It will have macular degeneration, which are the most we have to know what are the biggest causes of blindness in Bolivia. We have accidents and trauma as the first one. And it is because our workers do not have, they do not care much about the way they work. They just want to make some money. So they do not protect themselves as much as we would like to. We have infectious diseases. We have congenital disorders, cataract retinal detachment, glaucoma, and we have some people that is blind, but we don't know why exactly. Well, the hospital I work in is named Instituto Nacional de Automología. It's the first one that has been created in the country. It has now 39 years and it's divided into triage. We basically try to do the same thing as we do here. We have sub-specialties as retinal glaucoma, coloplastic deviatrics and escrobism and serial segment cornea refractive surgery. We have the Department of Community Services and the Department of Low Vision, which is really new and it's just starting. We count with a clinical laboratory, pharmacy, cardiologist, surgical area. We have a future optical implant. We do have patient hospitalization rooms. We admit the patients so they can stay in the hospital. We have the address for the webpage of our hospital. I've been reading all about it and the mission of my hospital is to provide qualified eye care committed to promote, improve, and rehabilitate the visual health in our population. And the vision of my hospital is to be in an integrated hospital to the community that can resolve all the problems with the highest technology that we can find. Here is a picture that I have found of the people that work in my hospital, if you see in the center. And now is the current director of my hospital, Dr. Joel Moya. The residency. We have residency of host technology in my country, in three cities in the country. In three departments, we have it in La Paz, Cochabamba, and Santa Cruz.  We have formed almost 75 ophthalmology specialists in the country, in the city. It takes three years to be an ophthalmology specialist. We have now three residents in the first year for residency in the second year and two residents in the first year. It varies because it depends basically on the government. They decide when they want two, when they want three, or when they want four residents in the specialty. Only three of the nine residents receive some kind of payment. The other ones they do not. Yeah, the payment comes from the government. We all have to do it now. We, in the past, they had to go three months to a rural area to do some community work. Now it's a year. And now I even heard that they're planning to make it three years for every single medical specialty in the country. For example, if traumatology takes four years, you have to go four years to a rural area to do some kind of work. Now that's what it's new for us, it's even new for me. I just found out that. I don't know how it will be approved until I finish. We do not have fellowship programs available in my country. We are divided by models. Residents of the first years do mostly optics and refraction. We do optics and refraction. And residents of the second and third year, we are divided by a specialty clinic in ophthalmology. We have session, bibliographic sessions, clinical cases, ruby articles, and presentations of research. We also do research ourselves. According to agreement side with the university, because we are part of the university, we have a methodology research course for our residents of the first year. We do research. It has to be prospective. We have to follow some guidelines in the city. First year, we do assist to the patients. We do take care of the patients. We see patients even do by ourselves. The first year residents, they take care of the general ophthalmology patients. The second year and the third year, we take care of the sub-specialities. In the residents, we cover the emergency service 24 hours and 30, all year long. And we do have to stay at the hospital. We cannot be on call. Do you have any questions? I know you do. At the beginning, from day number one. You do get surgery treatment? Yeah. We have a lot of work there. So day number one, if it happens to be that you're with a surgeon and he's in surgery, you just have to go there and help more. Do they turn a lot of surgery? Not as much as we would like, but it's getting better. So give me an idea. It depends on the resident. Because when you want to do surgery, you can ask for more surgery. You don't have, for example, you have to do 100 cataracts in order to be an specialist. We do not have that. So if you do want to be a surgeon, you can look for yourself to do more surgery. You can ask your professors to do it. For example, so far, I have done 40 other surgeries, but because I want to, I have some friends that they don't want to, that they can, they will say, okay, I want to learn, but it's not something I want to do. I want to be more like a general of the knowledge. It's not a surgeon. So it varies. A cornea specialist has cornea in my hospital, at least. But we can find somewhere, some other places to go and do it. Basically, yeah, because for example, I've chosen the United States by my friends, they go to Mexico and they go to Peru. Those are Puerto Rico. The three countries they chose to go, but I don't have, I just chose the United States. Notice that you didn't have neuro-opemology left to there? We do not have. We do not have the specialty of neuro-ophthalmology in the hospital. And I don't think that even in the whole country, yeah, it's something that is really missing. I have a friend that he really wants to do the fellowship in neuro-ophthalmology, where we have to go outside. We cannot do it inside a country.


I'm Ann Sherry and I'm the Chair of Safe Work Australia. Today marks the start of 2014 Safe Work Australia Month and what an exciting month it's going to be. This year's theme is Work Safe, Home Safe. It helps us to remember that our most important reason for staying safe at work is not at work at all. We all want to go home safely to our family, friends and loved ones. Each October, Safety Month reminds all of us, but particularly business leaders, that health and safety should be on top of our priority list. We know good health and safety is good for business. There's increasing evidence of the relationship between well-managed work health and safety and better business outcomes. We see lower costs, increased employee engagement and innovation, continuous improvement, higher productivity and improved profitability. During Safety Month, Safe Work Australia and regulators around the country are providing events and information to assist in improving work health and safety. Starting today as the key part of Safety Month is the Australian Strategy Virtual Seminar Series. This exciting free online event will showcase some of the latest developments, innovations and research in work health and safety. This is the first time Safe Work Australia has organised this type of event and I hope you'll join with me in making it a great success. Hosted on the Safe Work Australia website, the Virtual Seminar Series is aimed at people with an interest in work health and safety. It will feature video presentations by work health and safety regulators, experts, academics and business leaders. Some of the presentations which I'm looking forward to hearing are about how organisations can move from a reactive to a proactive work health and safety culture and how regulators can be more responsive. Other highlights of the Virtual Seminar Series include two live online panel discussions where you will be able to ask questions of the panel. The first panel will explore leadership and culture and the second will discuss managing work health and safety in challenging environments. The full program of events and all the presentations will be on the Safe Work Australia website or your mobile device. I encourage you to take a look. If you're as passionate about improving workplace safety as I am, I urge you to consider becoming a Safe Work Australia Month Safety Ambassador. Hundreds of everyday Australians have already signed up as Safety Ambassadors for their workplace. The role of a Safety Ambassador is to take the lead during Safety Month, spread the message that safety is everyone's responsibility and everyone can make a difference. Registered Ambassadors also have the chance to enter their workplace in the Safety Month Workplace Participation Reward. New in 2014, the Workplace Participation Reward will acknowledge one workplace for outstanding participation and engagement in Safety Month. And the winners will receive a fantastic training opportunity. There really are so many ways you can take part in Safety Month. To find out more, you can go to the Safe Work Australia website or download the Safety Month app.


say as much nerves as it was excitement. You know, I've been telling my friends and family that two years ago I wasn't sure this opportunity would ever come. I was 24 year old in short season able and you know, so I was more excited. It was kind of a culmination of, you know, the work and and all the people that have supported me this whole time. At what point in time to get an inclination that you could actually get into this game? I mean, Harkey makes fun of me a lot because I stay ready the whole time. I'm always stretching, moving around. So I try to tell myself that, you know, any situation I could be going in. Obviously, when the lead got a little bit bigger, I knew there was there was a chance, you know, so I stayed locked in pretty much the whole time. What was your phone like after you got back to the clubhouse after making an appearance? It was a little crazy. You know, it was just a lot of friends and family, you know, congratulating me is really cool. You know, it's people that have been part of this journey with me. And, you know, they say it takes a village and, you know, I've been lucky to have a lot of people in my corner.