What makes the birthday event so special, man? Oh, it's so special, it's just that... Yes, yes, it's Oggy, the Og monster, aka Ogmios, aka Ogmios.  What's your real name? Og... That's a good name! The good thing about Milo... Um... You know, he's imaginative as a battler. That's what something I admire about battlers is that they will come with interesting angles.   He keeps very active and very fit, not in that... Don't... Do you know what I mean? He's a fit guy! In the original meaning of the sense of the words... You're fit, mate! I go running, you know what I mean? When I've got a battle coming up, I have a pad next to my bed, isn't it? Because, like... And, yeah... In the showers, well, like, it's just sometimes you sit down and just... In the shower? You sit down in the shower? And just cry. People don't know about these battle rap methods, man. Like, this is where, like, the creativity flows. You sit down in the shower, curl up in the feet or position, cry your heart out, and you've written a third round, boy. Do you want to know what I had before I came here? What? Chicken Royale. How does that make you feel? Disgusted. Hurt. Burger King. Did you really? Yeah, genuinely.  Garbage. On the 29 bus. Stunk out the bus. Stunk out the bus as well. Imagine if you'd have been on that bus behind me. What would you have said, would you have said anything to me? Nah, you wouldn't have said anything. Because I let people live, and you live and let live. Yeah, but you don't let the chickens live. I'm not one of these people that gets disgusted or offended, like, by things. I can take it, you know what I mean? It's not like, well, chicken Royale. Right, get off the bus. It's like, yeah, there's plenty of other smells to focus on. There's a lot on buses in London, I can tell you that. You eat that regularly? Well, yeah, but are you saying I shouldn't? Yeah. You can eat meat, if you want, but like... Do you reckon I shouldn't eat that? Yeah, it's not good for you. Fast food, fast junk food. It's... Oh, fuck, man. Well, maybe I'll stop then. There's a fire card, and we're on it, you know what I mean? We've got to hold our own.  We don't want to let the sight... Top of the fly, I'd imagine, aren't we? I think we're about at the top, yeah. Yeah, near there? Biggest font. I think we're just under Pat's Day, maybe. Yeah, something like that. I might not even be on there out of just sheer godness of this battle. Yeah, it's just implied. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't need to say, you know, who's battling that. That's not important. A battle that is 6-1 against Nilsham's skills. Yes, I took that out of the battle, but I was really going to talk about how bad that battle was, mate. I'm so sorry. I really didn't enjoy it. What's your favourite comic book character? Dennis Domenis. Favourite film? Ah, Sam the Seal. Favourite colour? Turquoise. Favourite type of wood? Mahogany. Favourite song? Um, that's tough on that. Favourite song? Yeah. I can't even think of one, like... Favourite song? Quick fire. Favourite song? I'm thinking... Smells like Teen Spirit.


Hi, everybody. Give folks one last minute to grab their beer or cheese or beer and cheese. All right. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to New America, and thank you for coming. You are here for tonight's event, and hopefully you're tuning in online to watch tonight's event. Why should we imagine solar flares taking down international space stations? Which, despite its weirdly specific title, is going to be a wide-ranging conversation on science and science fiction and art and Afrofuturism and astrophysics and alien life and the future of the internet. Post-colonialism here on Earth and the colonization of Mars. So I'm Kevin Bankston. I'm the director of the Open Technology Institute, which is the Tech and Tech Policy Development Wing here at New America. I'm also a big sci-fi fan, which is one of the reasons why I'm excited to be here tonight at this event sponsored by Future Tense. Future Tense, if you don't already know it, is a partnership between New America, Arizona State University, and Slate magazine, which explores emerging technologies and their transformative effects on society and public policy. Central to that partnership is a series of events in New York and Washington, D.C., including events like this one, as well as the Future Tense channel on Slate. And so you can follow the conversation here tonight with hashtag after the flare, and you can follow Future Tense on Twitter at Future Tense now. So without further ado, I would love to introduce our guests for the evening. First, Deji Alakatun. He is the author of the novel Nigerians in Space, and it's new sci-fi sequel after the flare, the inciting incident of which is also the title of this event tonight. A solar flare takes out the ISS and a whole lot of other things besides. He's a fellow at Future Tense. He is the new head of social impact at Sonos, and until recently he worked on the advocacy team of the digital human rights organization Access Now. A team I often have the pleasure and still often do, have the pleasure of working with. Also joining us is Lucien Walkowitz. She is currently, this year for the next year, the Baruch S. Bloomberg NASA slash Library of Congress chair in Astrobiology in the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress where she is, amongst other things, examining the ethics of Mars colonization. She is also astronomer at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago where she studies stellar magnetic activity like flares and their influence on planetary habitability using data from NASA, NASA's Kepler mission. She's also a practicing artist working in a variety of media from oil paint to sound. You can find information about her work as a scientist and as an artist at tangledfields.com including a link to a piece. She wrote for Vox just last year about the damage that a solar flare could cause to the power grid and to the internet. So I'm going to ask for a question about that right after these housekeeping points. Please silence your cell phones. During Q&A, which we will get to in about 45 minutes, please wait for the microphone to ask your questions so the people online can hear you and please ask your questions in the form of a question. And please, we welcome you to stick around after the event for our reception where we will continue with book sales and Deji will be around to sign copies of the book if you like, and we will continue to serve beer and wine and cheese. So, Lucienne, tell us a bit more about what our solar flares and what risk do they pose and what was the Carrington event and what happens if another one happens. Can you tell us about that? During the Q&A our people also allowed to ask four questions in a row. One question, one question at a time. Just giving you a hard time. So solar flares are these really energetic events that launch themselves off the surface of the sun. So our sun is magnetic and has these sort of tangly magnetic fields on its surface that trap like really hot particles in plasma. And sometimes those fields have tension and so they snap, they rearrange. And that can spew these particles, literally particles of the sun out into space towards us. And they also are associated with like big bursts of energy. So normally the light from the sun is mostly in the visible range where our eyes can see it and a little bit in the X-rays and ultraviolet light, more energetic kinds of light. But during flares we get these big bursts of X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. And so that creates all kinds of effects here on earth. Most often it just creates aurora. So the northern lights are the glowing of our own atmosphere as those particles interact from the sun. So most of the time it's totally benign. But occasionally we get these really big flares. And the Carrington event, which you mentioned, is this historical flare from 1859 that is named after a astronomer who was, you know, minding his own business, observing the sun and drawing. So don't look at the sun, but you can project it and draw the sunspots. And that's a very old form of astronomy. Lots of different cultures have had that observations of sunspots throughout history. And he was watching the sun and saw this brightening. And what he had witnessed was this incredibly energetic burst of energy and particles that then created auroras that were so strong they came all the way down. They were seen in the Caribbean. They woke up campers in the Rocky Mountains. Usually, you know, you have to go up north or very far south to see northern or southern lights. But this was something that created a really global effect. It also shorted out telegraphs, which were the dominant technology at the time. And so we looked at this event now as a much more technologically capable, but also technologically reliant society that has all kinds of things that use the power grid. And it's a little bit of a worry that if we had another big event like that, that it could create damage to our technological infrastructure. And so that's why flares are cool and also why flares are dangerous. Like most cool things, they're kind of dangerous. So it's screwed with the telegraph 150 years ago. Today it would screw with the internet. It would screw with the electrical grid. And also satellites. You know, we didn't have anything in space in 1859. And today, you know, your ability to use your phone to map the New America Institute and come to this event relies on things like GPS and all of our communications, rely on satellites, and they're out there in space where they're relatively unshielded from bombardments of solar particles. And this is not out there possibility. In fact, if I'm remembering from reading your article correctly, just a few years ago there was a Carrington level event that we just missed by like a week. Like if we'd just been a little week earlier later in our orbit, we would have gotten this huge flare just a few years ago, right? Yeah, so this is sort of a subtlety that actually works out in our favor, is that these events happen on part of the surface of the sun. So like the whole sun itself doesn't send energy equally in every direction. It's sort of, you know, like throwing a baseball that goes in one direction and has a particular trajectory or path. And so for us here on Earth, we're going around the sun and that means that sometimes these events just miss us. And fortunately, we have lots of space telescopes that are designed to actually observe the sun and watch for those events taking place. So usually we only get about eight and a half minutes between the light arriving from the sun, but particles move a little bit slower. So we have usually a little bit of warning before they arrive. So insurers are pretty woke about climate change because they need to like factor that into their thinking about risk. It turns out they're looking at solar flares as well. There was a Lloyds of London report that indicated how severe this could be. What did that report say? Yeah, so there's actually been a number of different reports. So it's not only insurers, it's also like the U.S. government and other governments look into this as a source of national security, right? And so a lot of those reports do different kinds of estimates on the kind of damage that could result. One of the things about our power grid is that it's very interconnected and so failures in part of the power grid can take down very large spots of the rest of it. And sometimes if it's a minor event, it does the equivalent of tripping a breaker in your house and you just repair the damage and move on. But if it melts down a transformer, well, transformers cost millions of dollars and take a year or two to manufacture. So depending on how severe it is, you have a greater or lesser chance. So there's a number of different reports that go from like a mild gasp to complete pearl clutching about how bad a potential flare would be, but all of them essentially say not good. But one could imagine something like say looking at what happened to the power grid in Puerto Rico from a hurricane but seeing that on perhaps a continental scale. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, the dire situation in Puerto Rico should remind us of how much we depend on energy. And so there are milder examples. So back in like two, I think it was 2003, it might have also been the 1989 flare. But there was a flare that essentially disabled part of the grid in the northeast predominantly affected Quebec, but also a little bit of the northeastern United States. And that was a situation where the power was down for like 24 hours. And so, you know, the damage there was relatively minor, but if you have something that was the level of a Carrington event, you could be looking at, you know, big spots of the continent being totally out. The electromagnetic field provides some protection, but not for our satellites or for our International Space Station, which answers the question of the panel, why should we imagine solar flares taking out the International Space Station? But Deshi, why did you imagine that? You read up, you read some of these same reports, you did some research, and you came up with a science fiction scenario around this science. Tell us why. Well, it is actually somewhat of a trope in science fiction, the solar flare, but I think there was a new current of the conversation that bubbled up when Lucien was going on radio and talking writing her articles. So I think I happened to catch some of that. I was looking for a scenario that could shift the focus from, you know, when you watch your typical science fiction movie, the plot happens, Indians always attack the United States and the resolution is in the United States and if it's not in the United States, it's resolved by the U.S. Air Force or Army or some actor in the United States. So I wanted to use it as a way to shift the global power and have us look at what might happen if instead some parts of the world are taking off the line through an event like this and others are thriving and in this case it's Nigeria and West Africa. So, you know, I was at the Milwaukee airport about three or four weeks ago and I stopped and looked at, I picked up a random collection of books, this series called Tom Swift, which was put out in the 20s and 30s and then again in the 50s and 60s. The first one I opened up was about a solar flare. So that was really interesting because here I had done all this research and I really wish I had had that two-minute explanation that you just gave because that would have saved me a lot of time. But, yeah, so it was really a chance to think about not just, you know, right now I feel like our access and knowledge about what NASA's doing is greater than ever. You can go online and watch live feeds from the space station but then what would happen if some of these things that we take for granted, all the advanced technologies that we're enjoying disappeared and it's a scenario that can be very interesting. You know, in the book, Nigeria stays online. So a lot of... That's because it's on the equator where the... Well, this is the part where I'd love to hear Lucien's thoughts because what I saw was a diagram in the Lloyd's report. If I'm not mistaken, there was a diagram that said the magnetic field would sort of shield the equator and you did write about that a little bit in your article like Cuba. You know, there were some particles seen as close as Cuba, I mean some Northern Lights kind of effects. So the idea was that it might be possible. It could happen and then what would happen is all the technology and all the resources flooded to a region that people typically think of as developing that still has a lot of catching up to do. So what would happen if Nigeria could leapfrog and contribute in that way? Well, one of the things that happened is a reversal of a current political situation where you had a bunch of Americans fleeing to Mexico and Central America. Can you talk a little bit more about the... Before we move on to Africa, what was the sociopolitical situation you sketch in the U.S. after this disaster? Yeah, so I think there has been a lot of great thought about... And I think a lot of it depends on your own personal take on the way humans behave. Do you think we would tear each other apart? There are the preppers, which are communities that prepare for sort of apocalyptic scenarios.  All in preparation for either some religious event or... So, you know, I thought... But there are a lot of people who probably would bend together and support each other. So, you know, in my view, the military would probably still be functioning in some way. So that would be a haven. You know, people with generators would thrive for a while if they weren't shorted out by the flare. So I sort of saw it as enclaves. Silicon Valley becomes an enclave, it has its own exploration. A very exclusive one. Very exclusive. You have to pay to get in.  You need a permit. And so that's part of it. People who are more communitarian end up in the southwest of the United States.  So I felt like there would be a little bit, a blend of these things, because you see those blends today. There are people who throw up huge walls and hide. And then there are other people who, you know, keep their doors unlocked and open for other, you know, and share with others. So, Lucien, if... What is the likelihood or possibility of an event on the scale of what Deji sketches? How possible is that? And how long would it take us to recover from an event like that? Yeah, so actually a lot of what we learn about from... Well, okay. Let me lead with the good news. It's relatively rare. One of the things that's difficult about studying rare events is that you, you know, we only have, like, the Carrington event, essentially, as one of our observed events on the sun. And so it can be really difficult to describe, like, how frequently those things happen. But this is actually a strength of studying other stars. So instead of waiting for our sun to fry us periodically and then counting how often that happens, we can actually observe other stars and see how often they're flaring and then calculate the probability of that. So that's something that became possible with NASA's Kepler mission a couple of years ago, which was a mission that was a space telescope designed to look for planets around other stars. But it actually was really great at studying stars as well. And the estimates from observing the sun with Kepler are that these events happen, like, every few hundred years. So that means somewhere between, you know, like, 200-ish to 300-ish. They're not periodic. They're chaotic, essentially. And so that doesn't mean that we can be like, well, 1859 was, you know, roughly 150 years ago, you know, we can't time it or predict it in that way. It's really difficult to predict in general. But we can say that probably we will have another event like that in our life. Maybe not our lifetimes, but within, you know, the near horizon of the human race. And so I think that, you know, the chances are pretty good. It's just kind of a matter of when. Yeah. So start saving your money to buy your way into the Silicon Valley enclave. Yeah. So, but moving to Nigeria, part of the the core, the story engine here is the ISS is integrating orbit and it's going to, like, scorch India, and there's someone still up there too. And so Nigeria's space program becomes the center of the rescue effort. And this is set in and around the space port where they are preparing to do this mission.  Can you talk a little bit, I mean, apparently there is one and could you talk a bit about that? Sure, yeah. I had the opportunity to visit the space program in 2014. And yeah, it exists. It's a real thing. And they have a mission to put person into space by 2030. Other countries also have one. Ghana has a space program. Ethiopia has a space program. And then other developing countries like Malaysia and United Arab Emirates has a pretty ambitious program that this center featured a conversation about. So I think part of it is that countries they're the most compelling argument that I heard was from the founder of Nigeria's space program. His name is Turner Issoon. And he said that people wonder when you have poverty, you have problems with basic potable water. Why would you have a space program? He said, well it helps us shift our solution space. That sometimes the really advanced technology can help us think about our own country in different ways. Look at floodplains, try to protect farmers, help them predict crop yields, do population census. So there are practical values for it. And I think I was really moved by that visit to the program in 2014. Both seeing the potential of it, but then also the very real problems it has which is lack of funding. Most of the funding goes towards satellites, communication satellites, and then developing countries actually do really cool partnerships with other countries and they share the satellite time. It's a way for them to distribute the cost of launching the satellite and using the data. So that was the idea is that there actually is one there and if it was the only one that was still in operation then the world would shift its resources. And the reason why would anyone care the reason in the story is that there's an astronaut who stranded up on the space station and that needs to be rescued. So people just pool their resources and I bring in India because India actually has a very advanced space program. They've sent Rover to Mars and India prides itself on running the most cost-efficient space program. So they're kind of interesting cultural dynamics. The different space programs try to distinguish themselves in different ways. Japan has one. There's a lot of space programs. So that just kind of feeds into the plot. You mentioned struggles with potable water while also struggling to launch people into space. One of the things that struck me about the book and strikes me about Nigeria and you've written about this outside of the context of the book striking contracts between old and new, between technical and natural. Can you talk a little bit more about that contrast or retention and how it impacted your work? I mean, one way it seemed to obviously impact the work is in terms of some of the technology you described. This is in the near future. And so you have these bio-mimicking cell phones, these geckophones that behave like animals. You have these mal flies that are actually like little robotic fly drones that are trying to infect the geckophones. There is a great technology of you take the cowrie which are these shells that have been used as currency for hundreds of years and then integrate them with the blockchain. So there are a lot of great examples of these dichotomies being joined in the context of the tech in your book, but talk more about that. Sure, yeah. I think with the prominence of Silicon Valley and all the amazing innovations that's happening, a lot of people feel that they're just trying to catch up. That feeling also goes to things like jobs that jobs can be taken away by a robot. But in other countries, you know, they want to create opportunities for their own people. So what would happen in the way with the flare, what sets it up so that there is the time and space for Nigeria to innovate on its own and mingle the technology with its traditions. The biomimicry of these kind of animals that are mingled with devices, the idea there is in my father's ethnic group, the Yoruba, there are a lot of proverbs involving animals and because of the history of the culture, it was sort of in the forest and so I was playing with those ideas that it is a stereotype wild exotic animals of Africa, but at the same time it is deeply in the lore and understanding of some cultures. So I wanted to see that. And then in the story, I also contrast that sort of phones mimicking animal behavior with the actual hacking of live animals and so there's some play on that and what the ethics are behind that. You also, one of the interesting sort of fusion technologies is the use of online identities fused with tribal identity. So tribal identity plays a large role in Nigeria. How did you... Tell me a little bit more about that concept and why you integrated that. Yeah and I feel like I should just say, Nigeria is in West Africa. It's the biggest... It's the most populous country in Africa. It's not the biggest by land mass. It's also the wealthiest country in Africa. So just to bring people back who are like, what is Nigeria? If you haven't already Googled it on your phone. Let's repeat that last question. I was asking about the role of tribal identity. Over 250 ethnic groups in Nigeria and there is actually a lot of ethnic harmony especially in cities where people have to get along and they do and they have for hundreds of years. But then there are times where if you're the wrong tribe and the wrong place at the wrong time, you can be killed just for the way you look. So that was based somewhat from my activism work of there was not too long ago Facebook required transgender people to share their real name and I'm not sure you might have been involved in that campaign. We were not particularly active in the shoot. You weren't in the shoot, but Kevin for your work at EFF and so on. So access now campaigned a little bit with other groups on that to try to get Facebook to say some people can't use the real name because they'll get killed or ostracized or harmed or lose their job and my idea of bringing this tribal identity is just in Nigeria the thought is well if you're in the wrong ethnic group at the wrong time that can get you in trouble. But I merged it a little bit with so that if you have you could shift your tribal identity and your actual gestures and behavior changes to the person on the other end and then it has an added security layer that you can access certain parts of the space port network depending on the tribal identity that you've assumed at that time. So it's just kind of playing with some of the real code switching that actually happens every day for a lot of people you know when you read about Africa you say this person is from this tribe that person is from this tribe. In reality a lot of people are actually from multiple tribes even I said my father is from Yoruba he's also a half ebi from a Togo which is a different group and that's a common story in Africa that people have multiple identities that they swap at different times to their advantage. Another echo of an area where our organizations work in the book is the the vulcanization or the splintering of the internet after the flare especially that accelerates countries locking down their internet and in fact Nigeria has its own I forgot what it was called Nigel Webb. Can you talk a bit more about that trend and how that played into the thinking of the future world in your book? Yeah definitely I mean I was happy to see that Luciana talked about that how the internet would be impacted by the electricity outage which is something that we forget I think I experienced that when I was writing the first book during the space because in South Africa at that time they were rolling blackouts so internet would go down electricity would come back up and then the internet would eventually come back up and just that feeling that they were connected but yeah I worked on a campaign called keep it on which was fighting when governments intentionally shut down the internet it was 156 organizations sorry no 130 organizations from 56 countries the campaign is still running hashtag keep it on hashtag keep it on and it's because governments want to assert control over people's self-expression and control the information they have so what would happen in the book I'm asking the question what would happen when everyone's afraid and suddenly the resources aren't there would it be like you're just throwing up digital tariffs and just to get from one part of the internet to the next you need special permissions you need to be from the country that is actually the vision that a lot of countries have for us so and that argument is being made even today so I just looked at that and you can see that Nigeria isn't innocent there because they walloff their internet they don't want other people on and their excuse is that they're using malware and cyber criminals which is often a justification you see for regimes that are then also instituting massive censorship and surveillance we're going to come back to you soon I promise but I wanted to ask about Afrofuturism this is a word that's going around a lot these days in the discourse around science fiction and race what is it is your book Afrofuturism how should we be thinking about that issue and the representation of people of color in science fiction yes so nice narrow easy question yeah Afrofuturism is a big topic I know that's been discussed here it was a term that was invented by an academic to kind of like encompass different strains of thought creativity in predominantly African American music literature and movies and writing I think for me distilling it down what I really love about it it's been going on since the 30's 40's 50's 60's it's been going on for a long time and it's just become cool for some reason that's beyond me I'm not sure why people are really interested in it right now but I'm happy to have the label applied to the book that's not why I wrote it I did explore technology and African futures and African American futures because the protagonist is African American he's not Nigerian man and for me when I distill it what I like about Afrofuturism what I find that is very liberating for people is that it's the philosophy that we all have the right to imagine our own futures and to imagine a better future for ourselves if your imagination is crushed and you can't even think of what would make a better life for you and your family your society or your community then you're going to have a hard time getting there and I think that's the fundamentally freeing part about Afrofuturism that doesn't have to be limited to African Americans it's just a way that African Americans have used this technique and this philosophy to try to imagine their own stories and better stories for themselves and Itasha Wilmak who's really an expert on that is going to be here in just a couple weeks to talk more about Afrofuturism next week to talk about it she's really follow her on Twitter she's excellent she's the most positive person you'll ever follow on Twitter another future tense event coming up next week the history of the future hashtag so and you know one thing that keeps coming up in the context of Afrofuturism now is the Black Panther the comic and doing the comic and now the authors of this vast secret technological civilization hidden in the jungle in Africa I don't want to give away too much but there are some hints of a lost civilization subplot in this book as well you see any sort of creative link there or a theme there you know it's funny there isn't a direct link because I didn't know the Black Panther story that well until I was almost finished with the book when Tanahisi Coates made it much more prominent I actually went back and started reading the earlier iterations of the Black Panther and I've said in other places there what I love about it is it's encouraging people to explore their imaginations and their own histories there are problems with it from an African standpoint which is at least in the comics the dress is wrong some of the cultural things are wrong they're almost like stereotypes of how Africans are expected to behave I mean it was started in the 60's so there's plenty of reasons by the way he didn't grow up in Uganda where it's supposed to be set but I think what I want to do with Nigeria is a lot of African cultures may have a very rich oral history and a lot of cultural knowledge but the archeology hasn't really happened or so in Nigeria there are a few archeological mysteries of people who have been around civilizations that have been and disappeared and that happens all over the continent and so I just looked into some of those mysteries and put that in the story some of these things archeologists have done a great job they know a lot about what's going on but there's still enough for us to have some fun with the story so I think that's kind of the similarity to Wakanda and the Black Panther story so on the last fun tip Boko Haram plays a large role in the book can you discuss that a bit and what role they play yeah sure I mean I don't want to spoil it but many of you may be familiar with the Bring Back Our Girls campaign which is when 300 girls were stolen from their school of the night and forced to go with this militant Islamic group so it's a reality they still exist they're out there in Nigeria some of those girls have been recovered but a lot of scholarship has shown that a recent coverage has shown that that story is actually way more complicated than we'd like it to be for example some of the women who are rescued don't want to be rescued because they actually have a better life with the militants than they did before but they are still extremely violent they force people to blow themselves up in marketplaces they do beheadings all of the really horrible reprehensible stuff that you hear about militants anywhere so that's just a reality it is part of Nigeria especially in areas that haven't received as much government support so the infrastructure isn't there the education isn't there and there are all kinds of contradictions that so that feeds into the story so this is a country that wants to try to go to space and rescue somewhere from the space station but at the same time there are people rampaging in the countryside on a completely different quest so in a really awkward segue we're going to move from post-colonial terrorist politics of Nigeria where Boko Haram is in many ways reacting to British colonialism and rejecting western education and culture to the colonization of Mars because that is a topic that is the focus of your tenure at the Library of Congress and I'd love to hear more about that work and the ethics of extra planetary colonization yeah I always think the word post-colonialism is funny because if you ever want to see colonialism live and well just watch some of the ways we talk about going to other planets you know right now we're at this interesting juncture where we have the technological capability to go to places like Mars to send not only rovers but in the very near future to send human beings but a lot of the way that we talk about it is dominated by the model culture of who are the creators of science and technology in general by which I mean the silicon territories as they're called in your book so you know a lot of the narratives about going to space and humanities future in space is very much coming out of marketing departments at private spaceflight companies who are interested in being players in space in the same way that usually it's been governments sending people to space like organizations here in the US like NASA so it's surprising to me that when we talk about something that is as futuristic as human beings being on another planet and either going and visiting or staying that we still recycle things like Columbus coming to America as though that has no attached baggage to it and was like a totally fine thing so when we talk about space one of the things that I'm really interested in is looking at not only how we talk about it and how using those narratives excludes people from imagining their futures in space I think if you constantly recycle these colonialist narratives that in their implementation really excluded a lot of people and actually resulted in the exploitation of many many people not only indigenous Americans but also people who were taken forcibly away from Africa and into slavery you repeat a lot of the mistakes of the past and you cut that imagining of who can be on another planet you cut that off from a lot of people so I'm looking partially at narratives but I'm also looking at the laws around who can for example own things in space so we have this outer space treaty that's from 1967 that states that no one can own a celestial body but just a couple of years ago in 2015 the United States passed a law that says that you can actually own space resources so you can't own Mars but if for example you found water on Mars well then you could own that water so it's not totally clear how a lot of these laws interact with each other what does it mean practically speaking to own water but not actually own the land that you're on well we have analogies of that right in the past couple of years we've seen the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline where you have indigenous people with a right to the land and companies wanting to bring construct essentially infrastructure on that land and bring resources through it or from it in a way that impacts it as a person who studies the science essentially of life in the universe I'm very interested in seeing us learn some of the things that Mars can teach us from an astrobiological standpoint it's one of the easiest places for us to get to it's a place where we might learn whether there was an independent origin of life whether life if it originated on Mars evolved independently whether there are similarities or differences and so from that point of view you know we don't let people go mine in places that are of cultural or scientific significance here on Earth necessarily and so you know I think a lot of the this sort of if you follow those threads off into the future of the plans that are being made now and the way we talk about those plans they have implications that might mean that we don't get to learn whether there's life on another planet in our solar system so they have very serious scientific implications and they also and this is one of the things that I love about Afrofuturism too is that the things that we think about our future in space very much reflect the kinds of things that we think are permissible here on Earth for better and worse and so you know that can be imagining like a future in which people who normally don't get to be a major voice get their voice or it can be a future in which we set ourselves up for exploitation yet again and so I'm using the collections in the library to look into some of those those issues. Does Antarctica provide us with any sort of sense of how this might play out in that it's supposed to be kind of international territory I have no idea whether you've been to Antarctica or whether you're even the appropriate person but like I've been thinking you know that yeah maybe it provides some insight into how we might behave and yeah. Yeah I would say that Antarctica presents one vision of how Mars exploration could take place so work in Antarctica is typically you know it has similarities in that it's very removed from the rest of the earth and you know also differences in that it's a much nicer place to be than Mars. So you know when we look in Antarctica most of the work there is scientific so there's not you know for example a huge amount of like resource extraction happening at McMurdo base there and so that's sort of one vision of how we might see ourselves on Mars but also we have to be a lot less careful there too you know the things that are negatively impacting Antarctica tend to be global things like climate change and not so much you know human contamination because it's already part of the Earth's biosphere so there are similarities but also differences. That's funny you mentioned Antarctica for a reason I'll get to in about 60 seconds because we talked about this in the green room Kim Stanley Robinson science fiction author he wrote a really incredible trilogy about the colonization of Mars red Mars, blue Mars, green Mars affecting the change in color of the planet as it is terraformed and one of the major themes and discussions in the book is the ethics of what they are doing the ethics of even going there how they're impacting the environment how they can or should react if they find evidence of life past or present it's a really powerful piece of work and possibly my very favorite sci-fi ever but then he followed it up with a book called Antarctica basically using that as a microcosm for the exact same debates and I highly recommend it and I think it addresses many of the same issues you're studying right now Kim Stanley Robinson is also a good example of another theme in science fiction right now called Clifi which is trying to imagine what the future looks like in the face of the reality of massive climate change and he just had a book come out called New York 2140 which is actually a somewhat hopeful vision of what New York looks like in 2140 after several massive surges of water rise such that lower Manhattan is basically a new Venice and I'm seeing this trend of people trying to grapple with how do we imagine our future in a constructive way in the face of this massive change that is coming even the Trump administration's New Climate Report agrees this seems to me an example of what you call science fiction thinking you wrote about the idea of applying applied science fiction like science fiction as a tool for thinking about the future in a systematic way can you talk a bit more about that along the same lines as the empowering nature of Afrofuturism and thinking through to imagine your own future I think there are tools I mean even just before you get to the science fiction just fiction writing learning to write a story you know coming up with characters and plot and I think what even a literary fiction writer will do some world building in that sense you know figure out the town that the story is set in or the cafe where a scene is going to happen and what sits where and why and how do these things interact in the room and I think science fiction takes it maybe a little bit further because it removes some of those basic assumptions about how you know gravity works or how particular new kind of biology might fit into the scenario and I think I did an event with Nora Jameson who's you know just won the Hugo Award twice which has only happened with one other author two back to back which was Orson Scott Card and her world building there's an irony there I think in terms of Orson Scott Card is a renowned kind of let's say kind of racist well Nora is like the woman of color who just got two Hugo's in a row so she's excellent world building to the extent you know in her story the special power that some of the characters have is they can sort of terraform themselves like their version of the force is like being able to understand complex geological processes and manipulate them and that has to have a certain logic so in building that world so that it's consistent and it makes sense and you know what were the political structures that's world building and you know she's a little bit more in a different time frame but what I believe is that tool of trying to imagine a new scenario and all the complex forces at play the people who would be acting upon them and who would be reacting can be very helpful for imagining new technologies thinking about new technologies and even things you know as you've observed Kevin's written some great stuff on this companies are thinking about it about how they imagine their products and so forth so I think it's got a lot of application but I do feel that like design thinking the principles of design designing a room, designing a space designing an object it's another tool for you to find creativity in your life and try to set your goals and achieve great things if you can so I really think that science fiction thinking it's actually pretty new to me so I say this as someone who's written my first science fiction book I've written a bunch of science fiction stories but before that I was really a literary writer so I see the power of it and why it's fun and enjoyable and I think other people should be able to tap into that Public Service Announcement specifically we were talking about NK Jemisin's fifth season which is brilliant, highly recommend it so we're seeing science fiction being used more and more you mentioned in the company setting in a think tank setting as a sort of strategic foresight tool sometimes even impacting policy there's also an interplay between fiction and art and science and I'd like to turn to you as an artist and hear more about your view on that relationship and in particular the relationship between your work as a scientist and your work as an artist sure, yeah you know I think that certainly art has a little bit of similarity to this way in which science fiction thinking can be used and that it can take us away from what so often happens in science where you get this very not even necessarily a dry explanation but a very thorough explanation of how something works and that's one way of experiencing scientific discovery and knowledge it's the kind of thing that you might see like on a plaque at the planetarium for example but there are other experiences that I personally have as a scientist that I think are not represented in the way that people who are not scientists consume science so to make that a little less vague you know one of the things that I think is most interesting as part of the process of doing research is the moments before you know what's going on those moments where you're like I think I see some sort of pattern here but I'm not really sure what it means yet that like opening of a door down a sort of curious path that you can have and if you're not a practicing scientist that doesn't happen for you with science very often because there's always you know somebody kind of telling you already what it means but you know the fun of being a scientist is that the universe doesn't come with an explanatory plaque so in some of the work that I've done so first of all I'll put the caveat out there that not all of my artwork in fact most of my artwork has absolutely nothing to do with science but some of it does and so for example I did this project using data from NASA's Kepler mission where what Kepler did was it measured how bright stars are with time and stars actually spin on their axes like tops so sometimes there are periodic changes in brightness and you can map those from changes in light to pitch in sound so you can map it to different frequencies that your ear can hear so I used this to create a sound installation where you could actually listen to the frequencies of those stars change with time and what I was trying to do was to give people access to that primary experience of hearing that there was a pattern and that there was structure in that data rather than just showing people a bunch of graphs where they'd be like graphs and I feel like graphs are also inherently inaccessible sometimes this is totally reminding me not trying to pimp my Twitter feed but it's there from Halloween NASA actually released basically an entire song track of what do you call it playlist of tracks of noise drawn from it's like the spooky sounds of space but it's like various types of space data turned into aural input it was really spooky and interesting is that 10 minutes for us or for everything? then we're going to move to questions right now again wait for the mic raise your hand if you'd like to ask a question and the mic will come to you my name is Alan Herbert I work for a company that sends payloads to the International Space Station so we don't want anything to happen to it now I'm going to ask you a few questions to you about the moon I know Mars is kind of far out but I was just at a thing yesterday where they talked about who owns the moon talked about the same thing you were talking about and there's resources on the moon right now too and people are talking about putting up developments all kinds of this is real all kinds of different things on the moon which is only four days away so I know we're talking about Mars but what do you say about the moon which could even happen sooner because the Trump administration is saying what about the moon right now and then we'll look at Mars later on but there's so many companies private companies looking at things on the moon and saying how do we monetize certain things how do you assure certain things and a lot of companies want to own certain things but one of the things they were saying is that if you own a habitat or something you own that but you don't own the ground so there's all kinds of different things about the moon in terms of ethics and how we're going to deal with that because that could really happen in 10 years and also add and what about asteroids as well because that's where a lot of the speculation is yeah so the moon is just as complicated a place for totally different reasons so a thing that makes the moon and Mars distinct is that Mars was probably what we call habitable or at least a hospitable environment for life to have formed at some point in its history the moon on the other hand we don't believe to have or have been capable of hosting life so in that sense the difference of that you could actually still find existing life on Mars today or history of life that gets taken out from the standpoint of worrying about the moon however you're right that the moon is a big focus for this administration I actually just wrote an op-ed for Scientific American bemoaning that we pivot every four to eight years you know like pivoting to the moon no we're pivoting to Mars no we're pivoting in a circle so in the case of the moon we do have these resources for example the moon is a great source of helium which has a variety of different engineering aside from your party balloons a variety of different important engineering applications and there is talk of going and mining or selling real estate and it is complicated it's not you know you actually literally definitely cannot own the moon at least at the moment and that's something that almost every existing country agreed to back in the 60s but you do have these other these other pieces of legislation like the space act which was you know not from this administration it was the previous one that says that you can own these resources and so it's not clear how that plays out in practice there's also cultural arguments to be made like so Neil Armstrong's footprints on the moon are now like arguably a very important human cultural site it's very rare that the history of exploration of a space is actually like literally imprinted in the soil of the space and hasn't been you know the moon doesn't have an atmosphere it doesn't have like a water cycle so it's the total history of that exploration is preserved and so you know do we even own Neil Armstrong's footprints like can anybody go do anything to them and so there's I'm literally reading a book right now that is called who owns the moon but you know there's a tendency to think that if it's not Mars and if it's the moon that we're like totally free to just kind of like do whatever and that is also not the case my relationship to the moon is just that my first book Nigerian in the space the main character is a lunar geologist but not from the standpoint of exploiting the resources of the moon it's just what drives them it's his passion and Johnson Space Laboratory in Houston yes sir wait for the mic hi Jack Kopansky independent there was a mention of the discover satellite and since we're talking about solar flares if you could talk about the discover satellite at all and how long would that satellite be up there at L1 and should we replace it at some point and also related to that is you mentioned at the beginning X-rays from solar flares but they go at the speed of light so that's a little different and whether discover helps us at all with that so I don't actually know specifically about the discover satellite the solar missions that I generally follow are solar dynamics observatory which has a really awesome YouTube channel by the way and SOHO so I can speak without knowing about its orbit I can say that one of the threats to satellites in space from solar flares is that the heating the flare can essentially puff up the Earth's atmosphere a little bit and create drag on satellites that essentially deorbit them over a period of time not immediately it's not going to rain satellites right away so you know depending on the orbit that satellite is in you could see it deorbit it also any kind of electronics in space that is vulnerable there's some shielding but not not perfect shielding for electronics in space and so that makes them vulnerable to flares but in the case of X-rays all light, visible light X-rays ultraviolet light it all travels at the same speed and so we do get that warning from the flare the actual radiation that happens that we might get the particle hits that create those aurora and create a lot of the other mysterious effects here on Earth yes ma'am thanks a lot for your insights it's been really interesting I guess what we're saying is it sounds like it's a premise of your work is that the internet is now an integral part of human life that if we lost it we would have to restore it which is an interesting assumption given that we didn't even have the internet you know within my lifetime so do you consider taking it in that direction versus how do we restore it yeah I mean thank you for the question I alluded to that in a little bit of what would happen in the US and how people would communicate so there's actually a lot of really amazing thought about how people could communicate actually using internet technology and ideas of sending packets across a network with pre-internet tools like ham radio in the Houston the hurricane when Harvey hit ham radio was really important for rescues but not using the data side of it it was just traditional use of ham radio but there are different technologies some people call them sneaker nets some people call them mesh technologies which don't depend on the internet to thrive there's a whole ecosystem it's mostly people just tinkering right now some of them for military have some support for that but I think probably you would get a blend there's been enough advances in those kind of pre-internet adapting pre-internet or working with simpler technologies because the internet what's great about it is how distributed it is you can get information in different ways to someone every piece of the information or be the source of the information and that's what's exciting so there's no reason to get rid of that idea we can keep that idea but we just might have to adapt it to earlier technologies or analog technologies yeah in the form of questions that we wouldn't necessarily recreate this broad network that we would actually retract to smaller more autonomous community sizes in other words you wouldn't have to have communication to California you would stay within a region you should read this book and that's a perfect closer you should after you buy the book right over there you should read the book it's quite good but join me in thanking our guests tonight and and once you have bought the book you would be happy to sign it for you and goodbye internet I hope the internet stays I hope it doesn't go down good night


Hello everyone welcome to this quick lightning talk hopefully on hackathons open stack hackathons I'm hoping not to be too long today mostly because this is going on YouTube. So hello YouTube viewers So keep it towards the five minute in so this is this is nice and quick just quickly. I'm David Flanders I work for the open stack foundation I'm specifically in charge of trying to support the application developer community and all the things kind of built on Top of open stack. So at this conference. We're always talking about, you know, the core infrastructure as a service Well, my job is to figure out how these kind of things sit on top of of course It's the impossible mission because there's so many of them nonetheless Hackathons represent a really important activity because it's the place where we bring not just open stack Developers and people around open stack DevOps network engineers system it engineers But all the application developers and all the other tooling open source tooling that you can have on top In fact, let's actually get into it. So hackathons leveling up the stack What I'm going to cover in the the nice little lightning talk we have today Well, what is a hackathon? So why do we do it? Well, we want to bring the whole community together Do you want to host a hackathon? And this is really what this primary talk is for is to encourage those of you who want to bring and level up your Community hackathons are an incredible way to actually grow your community and bring other open source Community components together all in the same place Where do you get help? Open stack community is fantastic for putting the help sending experts mentors all the rest of it The planning tools you'll need to run a hackathon.  So after spending, you know a significant period of your life doing this event and getting to it What are the actual things that you can look back and say this is the value we got out of it? This is what was achieved and then we'll have some time for Q&A as well for everybody to ask questions. So Onwards and upwards. Let's let's look at what a hackathon looks like. So here's a little video of the last hackathon We ran in Guadalajara, Mexico. Whoops go back Here we go Hackathons are incredibly inspiring so inspiring because it's education. It's helping application developers understand the opportunities of cloud computing and come together and start to build a community Enable them to think creatively. It allows more people than ever before to have access to technology All collaborating, sharing ideas, being able to make digital things and digital ideas is what a hackathon does Guadalajara is one of the fastest growing technology cities in the world We're very happy to be here for the first-ever open-stack application hackathon in the Americas This is the second one that we've done. The first one was was in Asia Behind me in the room. We've got around 200 people participating the theme that they try to get the teams to develop around our Applications that can help make an impact on society and improve the quality of people's lives 48 hours 72 hours and really go after that The really exciting thing of course is the hackathon also is a competition. So what is the best idea? Welcome to the open-stack community. We consider all of you a part of it now So I'm gonna put pause there You can watch the rest of it on YouTube if you like it goes into and just shows the incredible Diversity and everybody actually engaged in it, but I just wanted to give you a feel for what it's like and all the rest of it But like I said, you can also watch the summary video of the Taiwan hackathon As as well as this video with a Guadalajara. So What are hackathons all about? So really the hackathon what we're trying to do is bring together all of these application tooling communities All in the same room. So it's not just open-stack. It's getting Kubernetes or OpenShift or Cloud Foundry or Messos or Docker Swarm Provisioning tools for applications like Ansible or Chef or SaltStack SDKs, GopherCloud, Ruby's Fog, Apache's LibCloud and Python. So all of these technologies These are the ones that we pick and choose based on your local community We build that infrastructure in that stack. We decide which tools you want We get in the mentors and experts you need to be able to actually train people in this and get them ready for the hackathon And then most importantly the experts and the mentors in the room to help the teams competing Oftentimes we do these events with universities. So there's kind of two sizes of events We do either large events which do take quite a bit of planning And those are with universities governments companies all engaged usually it's university students or researchers participating in teams of about three to six people and then a bunch of mentors who are in the red shirts The teams are in the black shirts and the mentors are going around as experts in helping use and teach the teams How to use these different tools in situ as the hackathons going we also do a bunch of training beforehand as well Send some video pre-training skills to the teams about a month in advance So they can watch some screencasts get to know the mentors who are going to be there And also just learn these basic technologies on how you actually are going to use these application skills And that's really one of the coolest things about this and why it does take around six to nine months If you don't have a cloud, we got to figure out how to partner with the cloud build a cloud Then we've got to figure out how to put these other application tools on top So that can take up to three months some time for us make sure to not only build the cloud you want But to decide which application tooling we want on it along with the experts and mentors and then also do some testing because we obviously have You know, we had 50 60 teams up to 300 400 people in Taiwan in the room The last thing you want is the technology to fall over. It's just a great way to also test a new cloud So if you got a new public cloud provider or a new company starting to provide an open stack cloud It's a great way to get them involved so that they can test their Infrastructure and see how it works in the reeled with road users. We also do smaller hackathons So if you're from a company and you've built an internal Open stack cloud very specific for your company Say a bank or something like that and you want to start to roll that out to your developers Internally within the company. We also have a formula for that and that way it's obviously more usually more of a closed event It can be an open event as well as you want But a lot of those times it's a great way to get your internal organization to bring your different developer teams inside of that Organization and kind of do an internal hackathon, which is really a great way to actually promote New skills training in a way that isn't chalk and talk, you know, this is a bit boring you all having to listen to me and point At things so it's a really interactive training methodology hackathons provide for being able to roll out these systems so Community coming together is really the key in this right so we don't even label these necessarily as open stack hackathons a lot of the time We'll just say it's a cloud hackathon It's an app hackathon and the reason is is because we want to break down those found those barriers between All the different open source communities. We're all open source. We all believe in the same thing We want to couple these technologies together in the right way and most importantly We want to bring not just the different technologies But the different skill sets in this community You'll see a lot of dev ops a lot of sys admin a lot of network engineers in other communities We want to get the application developers. We want to get the site reliability engineers We want to get the UXers the behavior-driven development testers the idioters the innovators We want all of those people to come together and that's actually one of the most empowering thing about hackathons Is that it's a whole of community event Sharing experience and explaining your point of view to somebody else in a real-world experience of trying to build those applications We also make sure obviously to Have your participants there So we usually go around to the the universities and ask them to send teams We also get startup the startup community. We go ask the other meetup groups to participate in it So it really is a large partnership activity to bring all the different developer communities in the same area Mentors as I said are really essential Not only to be there on the day and to act is kind of substitute team players to go into the various teams and help them But also like I said a month in advance We get those mentors to create nice little video screen tutorials that they can send to the teams So the teams can meet up watch those videos start to play with those different technologies and understand those technologies One of the coolest things I love about it is we get to do These tutorials in different languages, so obviously you could see Where we did the Spanish language ones we actually would if it wasn't in in Spanish itself We would transcribe those and actually provide language specific tutorials Which is one of my favorite parts of the job is to actually reach out and make sure we're we're hitting the whole world That is it isn't just English centric Judges we usually get some high-profile judges to come around and as you can see We had one of the leads of Intel come by one of the leads of IBM They're looking for new talent. They're looking potentially to even buy the teams in Oftentimes will fly them to a summit to meet other CIOs and CTOs So it's a great chance for especially new developers or Developers in general to actually get that next level job that they want and to prove themselves so that they can go in And and have that opportunity Promoters naturally we're really good at promoting all those technologies and tools So we make sure to have a media team support you do media interviews We get the newspapers in do some interviews so forth and so on And then not last but not least we make sure to have good event organizers So we contact your local meet-up advisors We get the whole group working together to be able to put this hackathon on and then of course the foundation Usually via myself I'm there to support you and provide liaison and connect you with the different people that you need connected with And to hold your hand a little bit hackathons can be a bit scary I think I've been through about 50 of them now over over my career So I've got plenty of advice, but everyone's been different. Everyone's had its own little unique thing Okay, so you might be saying I don't want to run a hackathon I do want to run a hackathon It is a considerable investment of your time if you do want to run a hackathon Please please get in contact with us the way that the process begins is you just email events dot at open stack dot org You're probably forwarded through to me from there. I have you meet with our hackathon working groups So these are people who have run hackathons in the past who just interview you make sure you're aware of the obligations At what goes into it? We have a nice little checklist a little toolkit of things you need to commit to And once you've had that interview then we get the foundation agreement signed we find out what resources you need Depending on the size of the hackathon the foundation can either help provide liaisons and contacts to people who could provide Sponsorship sometimes the foundation provides a little support itself if we can And most importantly we make sure that you have that steering committee because like I said We don't want this to be a vertical open stack event. We want this to reach out to all the Technologies and communities that surround the open source cloud ecosystem. We want to bring everybody together Also the steering committee is obviously really important to just as I said the events are usually anywhere from two to four hundred people So you need that steering committee to help invite people and take care of the different aspects of the event and again We've actually got a great kit which will allows you to understand what those different roles are and how people participate in that Last but not least things like understanding sponsors prizes media swag registration process and promotions We've got templates for most of those so it's it's really easy to just get the event bright up in the right way Know what your media stage needs to look like what kinds of questions to ask your newspaper people and to really make the event Something that is going to get a lot of attention and level up your community We never want to run a hackathon where we don't know that after you know The the promoters and the people are all around it that that local community is going to carry on and be bigger And better connected, you know, we want to always be improving the open source community As I said I already talked about the mentors we provide for you and getting those training videos and in the language to suit Getting the mentors and judges to arrive. We often have done pre-training as well So usually the hackathon happens over the weekend Friday to Sunday or something like that over 40 hour period Usually camping depending on on the environment obviously not in the company So we don't have a lot of CIOs to get tenting out yet, but maybe one of these days But yeah, we make sure to have the mentors and judges there to participate And then last last but not least it really is a crazy adventure It's very tiring, but I walk away from every hackathon just truly inspired And I think that's one of the most important parts of open source is that you can walk away with that feeling that I Know people I've got I've never walked away with hackathon where I haven't had New sincere friends that I stay in touch with and I really adore and yeah, they're just people I really love to work with So who helps you do all this again, I can't overstress this sounds like a big undertaking But what the foundation does is it brings the full force of the community? Behind it to make sure you are supported and you have the people and understanding for being able to run the event you want so Obviously we help you get that cloud infrastructure up We get you connected with the other communities So I will can't you over to the lead of open shift or Kubernetes if you want to use those different technologies The lead developers of the different SDKs we make sure to provide all those contacts So one of the coolest things if you decide to host a hackathon as I guarantee that your your Rolodex or your list of contacts of people who are in the know and making stuff happen It significantly increases you really all of a sudden level up your your own personal career in terms of knowing The in people in the in the open source the movers and shakers of the open source community Obviously registration promotion and feedback we make sure to support you on that sponsorship guidance training in a box Safety and community code of conduct. I myself usually attend to make sure that you are following the community code of conduct and that there's no That if something does break down, there's a correct process for dealing with it It is a competition So you have to set up your judging process very carefully make sure it's fair And we really make sure to actually monitor that and audit it so that if anybody asks why or why the people won the competition We have a very a very excellent process for telling you why we made those decisions and that it was Transparent and fair and all the rest of it, which is really essential And last but not least is Just I cannot stress the the tidal wave of support you get from the community We've had people fly in from all over the world for hackathons because it's that inspiring the people in this community Love coming to hackathons once they've been there because it's just incredibly Empowering and it's great. It's a great way to meet all the all the people who come to these events as I'm sure you know over 60 Countries are represented at the summit this year. So Really great way to engage that international community even though it's a very local event So finally, I'll just leave you with the the kind of output So once you finish the hackathon you got to ask yourself. Well, what did I actually get out of this? I've spent a lot of time and effort in it And these have been the things that when we've interviewed people and talked to them They've said this is what I get one is leveling up your community to the next layer You know, you might have a couple of dev ops and people who like to install open stack Well, this is really going to push them This is going to make sure they not only have a cloud that works with a lot of people But you're actually going to build application technologies cloud technologies on top of that that are going to Make sure that that community is coming together and that a larger conversations happening You're going to increase the size and shape of your community So it's not just going to be dev ops or business people You're all of a sudden going to start getting app dev who are engaged in this usability engineers You're going to get a larger skill set a larger shape and size of what your community actually looks like Training training training, you're going to have these videos You're going to have all these people skilled up and new skills These are great resources which when you go on to continue to maybe do other hackathons in forthcoming years You already have those resources so it gets a lot easier to onboard new community members because there's a lot of skills to learn in this space Usability is one of my favorite things so often times we'll take the mentors and we'll interview them and we'll say where were the problem points You know and that's that's one of the cool things about open source is that you know We're very careful in the way we address this but not all these technologies work perfectly with one another and sometimes It's hard to eat your own dog food and this event is a fantastic dog fooding event for understanding How these different technologies build on one another and how to use them And finally is just the real-world human testing of it all when you get DevOps in the room with sysadmin network engineers application developers usability people all of them have very different perspectives on the world and The way you break those down and you stop the arguments is actually just getting them together Solving these problems with one another and people walk away from it with their with a shift in their mindset They think about things differently developers who might be saying no I'm not going to change my point of view on this feature all of a sudden because of the human interactions and seeing the pain on somebody's face When they've got to use a technology and it's not working. That's the magic sauce That's how you get people to realize what real Usability features are what key features are versus just the features which are cruff and you know part of the long tail So I'll leave it there I've gone on more than I really wanted to but I get excited about this as you can tell I apologize if I've spoken to you quick But this is a good opportunity to ask any questions people might might have around hackathons Perhaps perhaps I can ask a question first of all of you. How many of you would consider I'm not committing you How many of you would consider running a hackathon? Okay, that's fantastic. That's really great. I'm glad I'm glad so what kind of questions can I answer? If there's no questions that great then that means the presentation was good, right? Yeah, so the question is What are what's the biggest obstacle in trying to I guess engage an application community or? Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, so Look, I think it's hard to speak of obstacles But I will say that one of the reasons why you need a kind of six month planning period at the very least is because Most of the organizers of hackathons go and stop by a bunch of different meet-ups and they say hey Ruby people Hey, JavaScript people hey Python and it's different in every local community, right? And that's what actually begins the decision for which application tool sets you're going to build on top So they'll go and they'll meet with the Ruby people and the Ruby people will be like Oh, yeah, we would all love to use fog the SDK that works on top of open stack And you're like okay great, or you go to another community and they say oh we really use Java We want to use Cloud Foundry because Cloud Foundry's got a bunch of good Java modules for being able to use it So going and essentially doing those interviews that's probably it's it's not hard because believe it or not You go to these other meet-ups and they're just really happy to hear you're trying to bring things together because meet-ups have really Siloed groups into certain things and some people have come together You know like there's a DevOps meet-up But those DevOps meet-ups now aren't talking to the application developers and they're the people they're supposed to be working with so I think that just going out and being humble and saying hey I'm trying to get together a bunch of meet-ups to actually Run and do some new ideas and do some new training It's a bit scary because you're putting yourself out there, but at the same time It's incredibly rewarding because you're gonna make those new contacts You're gonna have a better idea of what your local community looks like in terms of the tools They want to use we want to use Ansible with OpenShift. We want to use Go for cloud with Docker swarm and that's people. It's not it's not the technology It's actually the people who want to use those things So it's just taking that time to go and and do the meet-ups. Did that that kind of answer your question more or less cool Any other questions? Gonna get off easy Yes, please You don't people do fumble And that's that's why it's really essential that we a a month in advance So we get a steering committee going about six months out and that steering committee decides What are the tools and technologies we want to use? So we build that in the infrastructure and then we go and we find the mentors the people who have actually done that stuff To then provide some video training so a month from the hackathon We start to send this this training in a box So the teams that start to register we say hey check out this training on how to use Shade with Ansible and so it's a big Python shade is a really good Python library So we make sure to work with the Python group and we send them videos saying hey, here's how shade works Here's a screencast of the code working Here's some things that are gonna break down best of all after you've watched this video You're gonna show up at the hackathon and I'm gonna be there and you can ask me directly And so that mentor during the hackathon they're all wearing red shirts, you know So if you look in this diagram you see you get the mentors help desk right and they're all wearing red shirts And then you have all the teams in the middle and so those red shirts are kind of swarming around the room And it's if you saw in the Guadalajara hackathon It's a really cool effect because you'll have you know that developer bouncing from table to table saying Okay, this is the way you need to understand shade and the coolest thing is is all the value that those Those mentors get because the lead shade developer will be there talking to this team who's like Oh, I don't understand how I do the Authentication configuration to be able to use multiple clouds. Well, all of a sudden that mentor goes back and says I need to improve the documentation on that I've seen the pain on somebody's face and that's really the best part is Hackathons you're gonna get some failures There are some teams who are not gonna get to the finish line in that amount of time The best thing is is that we can feed that back and we can actually do usability checking on this And that's one of the biggest thing open source misses is it's scary to dog food. It is scary to see somebody's face in person When they're actually using your technology Did that answer your question? Yeah, cool Yes, please. I don't really know that there's an answer to that I think that the reason why we've done sizes of three and four hundred is mostly because we partnered with universities Universities end up sending their computer science group along with several other computer science groups and Actually, it's been interesting. We've had other non computer scientists as well But it's that feels like a number that's big enough that justifies the six to nine months of prepping a cloud and getting it All built but if you've already got so if you were to do an internal hackathon And I can't talk about these hackathons because we're NDA 8 on you know Which bank or whatnot? We've done but if you're to do an internal corporate hackathon you can do those a lot smaller, right? that could be 20 people of you know teams of three or something like that, but It's got to justify the the cost in the time of somebody so usually what you do is you'd meet with our hackathon working group And they talk you through a little bit about the time commitment and the resources of why you'd want to do it and if it justifies it for the business where the business is trying to roll out a Continuous integration continue CI CD pipeline for publishing applications Which meet a regulation for a certain country on a bank size That then becomes a justifiable cost because they need all of their application developers in that company to understand that That's the process that they have to use otherwise They're breaking the law and the way they do these things so it's really just up to probably the company But if you're gonna do a public open hackathon you want it to be probably 150 at the minimum. Yeah That feels like a good size for competition prizes Any other questions Excellent. Thank you so much. Please do get a hold of me. Like I said you can reach me It's pretty easy. Just Google Flanders and OpenStack I'm sure you've all seen the television show next to our neighbors at the Simpsons.  I apologize. I've had to live with it since 83 Thank you very much. We'll see you around


Hi everyone, Joe for Jaspy's CaseBreaks.com. Coming back to you with a nice one here, 2023 hip-rate football case hits edition, series nine. All case hits, it's pretty nice, right? Random team break number one, it's a 10 box case. They only made 100 boxes, only 10 cases. Big thanks to this group for making it happen. Thanks to the people who bought their spots straight up and congrats to the people who won their way in in that mosaic fat pack break. All 32 teams are in. Let's do it, let's roll it, randomize it, two into six, eight times for names and teams. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight. We have Matt Dana Raymond after eight. Two into six, eight times for the teams. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, six, seven, and eighth and final time. After eight, we've got the Rammelie down to a pride of lions after eight. All right, Matt with the Rams, E.A. with the Ravens, Andrew with the Titans, Joe with the Saints, Matini with the Dolphins, Hans with the Houston Texans. Andrew with the Buccaneers, Joe with the Niners, Adam with the Falcons, Ben with the Steelers, Michael with the Seahawks, Adam with the Panthers, Ryan with the Browns, John with the Bears, Nicholas with the Packers, Michael Russo with the Denver Broncos, Matt, last spot, Mojo, Cardinals, Adam with my Raiders, Andrew with the Washington Commanders, E.A. with the Eagles, John with the Vikings, Damon with the Jets, Ryan with the Chargers, John with the Patriots, John H with the Vikings, John M with the Patriots by differentiating the Johns, Adam with the Vangles, Nick with the Bills, Adam with the Chiefs, Jalen with the Giants, Joe with the Colts, Stephen with the Jaguars, Hans with the Cowboys, Raymond with the Detroit Lions. Now I am gonna pause the video just for a little bit and see if there's any trades. Feel free to trade, but trade at your own risk. So stick around everybody, we're gonna pause the video and we'll see you on the other side. All right, welcome back, no deals are done, so that list you saw on the previous screen remains the same here on Wednesday the night.  Yeah, that mosaic pack I wrote Wednesday. What am I doing? Let's change that to Friday, let's change this spreadsheet to Friday. I'm telling ya, all my days are now goofy and mixed up, this is what I get for taking time off and switching days with Jason. Anyway, there it is, we're back on track. All right, thanks everybody. Next we're back to normal. So I'm just gonna have one weekend day tomorrow, I'll be back on Sunday, I think on the Fanatics Live channel, then my schedule will be back to normal for until, so when's the next time I'm taking time off? Try to hit up a spring training game in early March, so there might be a little thing in March. That's it, until maybe I'll do something in May, then June I'll probably pop out to visit my folks, my dad for father's day, but that's not gonna, I'm not gonna take any extra time. That's it, I don't think I have another major trip until September and then the holidays. All right, good luck everybody. So these are all casettes, here is nice, a little stained glass, Justin Fields rookie. Let's see what the bears are gonna do with Justin Fields. Are they gonna stick with him? Give him some weapons. Will they trade him? We'll get Caleb Williams. We'll see, John with the bears, graded card. Nice, it's gonna go this way and it is nice, a solar eclipse, Joe Burrell, PSA nine from Spectra. These are really sharp, I like this. Since then, we're on it since then, Adam with the spot that he won in the filler, nice. Another graded card, love seeing the graded cards pop out of here, looks like a downtown and it is, we're in downtown Atlanta. It's exactly what downtown Atlanta looks like if you've never been there, it's under the sea from 2022, Donner's Optic PSA nine. Falcons, that's gonna be for Adam with the other spot that he won in the filler. Are they getting bell check? Are the Atlanta Falcons getting Bill Belichick? I feel like he's gone there for a second interview. Tom Brady Kaboom, but Buccaneers edition, Andrew, very nice, case it's edition. So we have here, we have Drew Brees, downtown from clearly Donner's. That is what downtown New Orleans looks like. I've never been, I've seen pictures, but I think that's it. Joe, Joe Lawson with the Saints, there you go. All right, another graded card, Lamar Jackson, Stain Glass from 2023 Mosaic Football PSA nine. A good time to get this guy. I mean, this team looks good. Ravens look good. Lamar Jackson looks well-focused, motivated.  All right, next box. By the way, that Tom Brady Kaboom is on the sell sheet. Really nice. Another graded card, and it is nice. Joe Montana Colorblast from Obsidian. Try to catch it in the light right there, very cool. Just slab, not graded, but protected. That's gonna be for Joe and the Niners. Won the Niners in the filler. Got that spot for a fraction of the price. Turning to a Joe Montana. Colorblast always look really sharp. All right, looks like another downtown from downtown. Micah Parsons, Dallas Cowboys, Hans with the Boys. That is what downtown Dallas looks like. Little chaotic right there. Angry, angry Cowboys fans out there. But a nice hit. A nice hit. All right, two more to go. Celtics up by two on the nuggets, beginning of the second half. Some of the ESPN folks were wondering, is this a NBA Finals matchup? It'd be pretty good. I spy another downtown card. This time we're gonna go to downtown Vegas. That's exactly what it looks like. I like the, oh, this is a cool card. I like the playing card look right there. Adam, you got my Raiders. There you go, man. Very nice one. Cool looking card. All right, and that is, no, well, this is on the sell, this particular one, not on the sell sheet. There's a graded version of this one. That's a PSA 10. Yeah, I did see that on the side cross. I was hoping it was the graded one, but the graded one's a sell sheet. All right, final one, and it is graded. It is downtown. It is not on the sell sheet, but it's a nice one. It's Kenny Pickett from downtown. PSA 9 from 2022 Donner's Optic Football. Kenny Pickett downtown. That's, I'm pretty sure that's what downtown Pittsburgh looks like, right? I'm almost certain. That's exactly what it looks like. Ben, with the Steelers. There you go, Ben. Nice one going your way. Nice stuff, folks. If you love the hip parade, we love the hip parade. We've done some collabs with them. They do a great job. So thanks to hip parade for another great case. We've got hip parade baseball that we can work on as well if you like this format. I'm Joe for jaspeaskacebrakes.com. Thanks for watching. Thanks for breaking with us, and I'll see you next time for the next break.


Hey, this is Brett, and this 2016 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Sahara is stock number 13392Z. I am here at Summit Automotive in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, you're new and used Jeep and Jeep Wrangler headquarters. This 2016 Jeep Wrangler has the 3.6-liter Pentastar V6 engine. It's paired up with the six-speed manual transmission. This Jeep has been fully-safetyed and inspected by our service shop, has a fresh oil and filter change, all the fluids have been checked and topped off, and it is 100% ready to go. I'm going to go all the way around in this video, inside, underneath, start it up and take a look under the hood in order to give you the most accurate representation of the vehicle possible. Black clear coat is the color, and I show all my videos in 4K, so if you have HD capabilities on your computer, tablet, smartphone, or television, I recommend turning them on now because it's your best way to check out the quality, condition options, and cleanliness of the vehicle before seen in person. And as you go down this side of the vehicle, you can see the rear fender is in pretty nice shape, the doors look really good, I didn't see any major dents or dings on them. Front fender is in nice shape as well, and if you like the video you can subscribe to my YouTube channel which is youtube.com slash summit auto, click the bell notifications and you'll get updates on the videos I do each and every day here at Summit Automotive. This one comes with the 18 inch painted and polished aluminum wheels, it has bridge sewn dual or AT tires. These are 25570R18s and they have I would say probably 60% of the tread left on them. Once again front fender is in pretty nice shape. Comes with the LED, some JW speaker LED headlamps, we'll turn those on at the end of the video and it does come with the factory fog lamps. You get the painted insert on the bumper there, part of that Sahara package, I didn't see any major dents or dings on there, you also get the 7 slotted grille with the silver inserts part of the Sahara package as well, front grille is in nice shape and the hood is in very nice condition as well. No major dents or dings on there, passenger side front fender, no major scuffs or scrapes and the passenger side rim, no major scuffs or scrapes on there. As you go down this side of this 2016 Jeep Wrangler, take note of how clean the body is, how reflective and mirror like that paint is, I take these HD videos so if you are far away or even if you're close by and you just cannot make the trip down but you're still interested in purchasing the vehicle you can see the Jeep, hear the Jeep and have confidence in the vehicle that you're looking at before you even get here so when you do get here there's absolutely no surprises. You can make a smart and informed buying decision from wherever you're at. If this video helps you make that buying decision let your salesman know that you saw the video that was helpful and that Brett sent you. Back tires have just about as much tread as the front tires and the back wheels in nice shape too. You do get four wheel disc brakes with the Sahara or Wrangler package, frame on the body is in pretty nice shape and it does come with the factory step bars on there. I did want to show you the door hinges because these are always an area of problem on the Wranglers, not always but sometimes you can see those are in really nice shape. Coming around to the back of the vehicle you'll notice that it does have the towing package, receiver hitch four pins wiring, rear bumper you get that painted part right there matching spare tire that's a brand new tire so you can see how much tread comes on those tires brand new. One little ding on the rear bumper that's really the only major imperfection I saw. Back storage area is very nice and clean. You get the factory all-weather subwoofer back here. You get the hard top with the four bolts on each side, two quick disconnects to get that top off. We actually did a video showing you how to take your hard top off your JK. That's in the upper right hand part of the screen if you want to check that out but very nice and clean back here. You do get an area for a roof and door hinge bolts, looks like they might even have them out on this one. Back door is in nice shape as well and that shuts nice and solidly. Does come with the color match top and that is in nice shape but I apologize for the water on top it's about to be a snowstorm outside but that's a nice condition and for full disclosure this back rim pretty nice shape does have just a little bit of oxidization on there nothing too bad though. Once again these door hinges all look really good. Take a look inside.  You get the bucket seats in front. You get the Sahara stitched on the backrest. No major rips or tears does have this driver seat height adjuster and it comes with the factory all-weather floor mats. Comes with auto headlamps, power locks. Take a quick look at the back seats. Back seats are just as clean as the front seats no rips or tears back here it does have the latch.  Child safety locks on the back doors and the bottoms of the doors all look really good. We'll hop inside check out the miles the radio and everything that this Jeep has to offer on the interior. You can see that this one has 46,884 miles you get the compass and outside temperature display on there instrument cluster is very nice and clean. Comes with the leather wrapped steering wheel cruise controls on the right bluetooth and information center controls on the left and you do get audio controls on the back of the steering wheel. This one comes with the 430 radio you get AM FM and Sirius XM radio capabilities on here you also get a hard drive where you can save music and pictures up to 28 gigs worth of hard drive space. Here your power window controls your air controls heated seats stability control and your mirror control your 4x4 shifter your six-speed manual transmission once again passenger side format and seat are in excellent condition or rips or tears on there smells very clean inside this Jeep I don't think it's ever been smoked in and you do get an auto dimming mirror the windshield is in really nice condition I didn't see any major rock chips or anything on there and it does have the Alpine premium sound system. So we'll start it up take a look under the hood we'll also show you I'll also show you all those LED lights in the front starts right up no check engine lights or anything like that. This one also has the 115 volt 150 watt plug-in right there I would personally like to thank you for checking out the video today and hopefully from this HD video you've been able to verify the quality condition options and of course cleanliness of this Wrangler all the way around inside and out under the hood you get the 3.6 liter pentastar v6 engine engine base very clean runs very smooth once again this Jeep has been fully safety and inspected by our service shop has a fresh oil and filter change all the fluids have been checked and topped off and it is 100% ready to go there is the emissions sticker we can check out those LED lights they are nice and bright fog lights are working nicely too and I would highly recommend this Wrangler from a quality and condition standpoint and to see more pictures of this Jeep we're one of other 550 new and used cars trucks SCVs mini vans Wranglers you name it we got to go to that website right there is summitauto.com full pictures and descriptions of every single vehicle from two locations all at summitauto.com and if you'd like to check out more HD videos you can go to youtube.com slash summit auto remember to like subscribe and share on this video and all the videos that you see there in fact in a second you'll see a link to subscribe to my youtube channel the upper left a link to more Wrangler videos I've done in the upper right a link to this vehicle on our website in the lower left today link to one of our latest youtube videos in the lower right click those check us out we're super excited to help you with this ultra clean 2016 Jeep Wrangler unlimited Sahara in black clear coat thanks again for checking out the video remember to like subscribe and share on the youtube channel I really appreciate it thanks again


Mantle Convection, Mantle Convection is the slow creeping motion of Earth's solid silicate mantle caused by convection currents carrying heat from the interior to the planet's surface. The Earth's surface lithosphere, which rides atop the asthenosphere the two components of the upper mantle is divided into a number of plates that are continuously being created and consumed at their opposite plate boundaries. The creation occurs as mantle is added to the growing edges of a plate, associated with sea floor spreading. This hot added material cools down by conduction and convection of heat. At the consumption edges of the plate, the material has thermally contracted to become dense, and it sinks under its own weight in the process of subduction usually at an ocean trench. This subducted material sinks through the Earth's interior. Some subducted material appears to reach the lower mantle, while in other regions, this material is impeded from sinking further, possibly due to a phase transition from spinel to silicate perovskite and magnetoestite, an endothermic reaction. The subducted oceanic crust triggers volcanism, although the basic mechanisms are varied. Volcanism may occur due to processes that act buoyancy to partially melted mantle causing an upward flow due to a decrease in density of the partial melt. Big forms of convection that may result in surface volcanism are postulated to occur as a consequence of interplate extension and mantle plumes. It is because the mantle can convet that the tectonic plates are able to move around the Earth's surface. Mantle convection seems to have been much more active during the Hadean period, resulting in gravitational sorting of heavier molten iron, and nickel elements and sulfides in the core, and lighter silicate minerals in the mantle.