Welcome to Learning English, a daily 30-minute program from the Voice of America. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak. This program is designed for English learners, so we speak a little slower, and we use words and phrases, especially written for people learning English. Coming up on the program, Gregory Stockle and Gina Bennett have a story on the history of promises made at UN climate talks. Brian Lin has the science report on the creation of a biocomputer made with lab-grown brain tissue. Later, Jill Robbins and Andrew Smith present the lesson of the day. But first... United Nations delegates from nearly 200 countries recently held a climate meeting in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The delegates agreed that the world must move away from fossil fuels like oil, gas, and coal. The UN meeting on climate change is called COP28 this year. Recently, the Associated Press gave details about some of the main results of notable climate talks over almost 30 years. The Kyoto Protocol was the third high-level UN climate meeting. It took place in Kyoto, Japan in 1997. The agreement asked 41 countries that produced a lot of carbon gases to cut their emissions by about 5% compared to their emission levels in 1990. Countries agreed to some of the terms in the Kyoto Protocol by 2005. The United States and China, however, did not approve the agreement. Those countries have the world's two largest economies and produce the largest amount of carbon gases. The Kyoto Protocol was not successful by some measures. Emissions have greatly increased since then. But it is the first time so many UN members agreed that carbon gases were a problem. The 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark is widely seen as a failure. Developing and developed countries disagreed on cutting emissions and whether poor nations could use oil, natural gas and coal to grow their economies. However, wealthy countries promised to send $100 billion a year to developing countries. The money was to be used for green technology by 2020. Green technology often describes energy technology that does not produce pollution when it is used. But wealthy nations did not reach their goal of $100 billion by the start of the 2020s that led to criticism from developing countries and environmentalists. In 2022, the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, an international economic group, said wealthy countries probably reached their $100 billion goal. But the British nonprofit group Oxfam said 70% of the money was in the form of loans. It said the loans increased debt problems in developing countries. Also, an increasing number of weather-related disasters are blamed on climate change. Experts say the money promised is not enough. British economist Nicholas Stern said that developing countries likely need $2 trillion every year by 2030 for climate projects and recovery. The Paris Agreement is widely considered the single biggest UN agreement on climate change. In 2015, about 196 nations agreed to keep atmospheric warming well below 2 degrees Celsius since what the agreement calls pre-industrial times. Later, the goal became limiting warming no higher than 1.5 degrees Celsius. The UN says the Paris Agreement is a legally binding international treaty, meaning that it has the force of law in countries that approve it. But there do not appear to be punishments for countries that do not follow its rules. Today, the goal of limiting the rise of the atmosphere's temperature to 1.5 degrees is still central to climate discussions. UN experts say the world's temperature has not passed the limit set in the Paris Agreement. The UN says it has warmed from 1.1 to 1.2 degrees Celsius since the early 1800s. But it says the atmosphere will reach the 1.5 degree limit soon unless large cuts and emissions are made quickly. Six years after the Paris Agreement, climate officials wanted another agreement to strengthen the levels agreed upon in 2015. The meeting in Glasgow, Scotland was put off until 2021. It was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The meeting included protests led by teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg. She helped lead a worldwide movement of youth activists demanding more action from leaders. In Glasgow, countries agreed to phase down coal use. That is different from saying phase out. India and China, two of the world's biggest coal users, pressed for the change. So far, most countries have failed to meet the promises they made at the Glasgow deal. Emissions from coal have increased and most major coal-using countries have yet to slow use of the fuel. Last year, climate talks took place in the Egyptian Vacation Town of Sharma El Sheikh. There, countries agreed to create a fund for poor nations for the first time. Delegates agreed to a loss and damage fund. Its aim was to provide money to countries that suffered damage from severe weather events. Delegates at the COP 27 meeting called for the fund to be created after a flood in Pakistan killed an estimated 2,000 people and caused billions of dollars in losses. The fund was officially created on the first day of this year's talks in Dubai. Over $700 million has been promised. Giving to the fund is voluntary. UN climate experts say billions of dollars are needed because of weather-related events like cyclones, rising sea levels, floods, and droughts. The experts blame the extreme events on increasing temperatures in Earth's atmosphere. I'm Gina Bennett. And I'm Gregory Stockle. American researchers have combined lab-grown human brain tissue with computer hardware to create a working biocomputer.  The team made brain-like tissue that took the form of what they called a brain organoid. Harvard University's stem cell institute explains that an organoid is a collection of individualized, complex cells that can be grown from stem cells in a lab. Under the right laboratory conditions, organoids can be made to look and even work similarly to real human tissue and organs. In this process stem cells can follow their own genetic instructions to self-organize, the stem cell institute says. So far scientists have been able to produce organoids that look like or resemble some organs. These organs include the brain, kidney, lung, stomach, and liver. Such lab-created organoids are generally used to study how organs work without needing to experiment on actual organs. In the biocomputer experiment the team said stem cells were able to form neurons similar to those found in the human brain. Neurons are electrically charged cells that transport signals to the brain and other parts of the body. Feng Guo led the experiment. He is a bioengineer and professor of intelligent system engineering at Indiana University, Bloomington. His team recently published their research results in a study in nature electronics. The researchers attached the brain organoid to a set of traditional electronic computing circuits. The researchers call this system brain aware. The system was used to establish communication between the organoid and electronic circuits. An artificial intelligence, AI tool was used to help read the neural activity of the organoid. The scientists aim to build a bridge between AI and organoids, Guo explained to Nature. Guo believes that combining organoids and computer circuits could provide additional speed and energy to improve the performance of AI computing systems. The study notes that adding human brain power might be able to help machines with the things they do not do as well as people. For example, the researchers said humans generally have a faster learning ability and use less energy thinking than computers do. During one part of the experiment, the team tested the brain aware systems voice recognition ability. The team trained the system on 240 recordings of 8 different voices. The researchers said the organoid produced different neural signals in reaction to the different voices. The accuracy level of the system reached 78%, Guo said. This is the first demonstration of using brain organoids for computing, Guo told MIT Technology Review. He added, it's exciting to see the possibilities of organoids for biocomputing in the future. Guo said these results persuaded his team that a brain computer system can work to improve computing performance, especially for some AI jobs. But he noted the best accuracy rates recorded by the brain aware system were still below the accuracy rates of traditional AI networks. Guo said this is one of the things his team plans to try to improve. Linus Mernova is a developmental neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. She told Nature that more research will be needed to improve such systems. But she said the study confirms some key theoretical ideas that could eventually make a biological computer possible. Mernova noted that in earlier experiments researchers have used other kinds of neuron cells to perform similar computational activities. But the latest study, she said, was the first to demonstrate this kind of performance in a brain organoid. I'm Brian Lin. Brian Lin is back in the studio to talk more about his science report. Thanks for being here, Brian. Of course, Dan. Thanks for having me. This week you've explored an experiment scientists say resulted in the creation of a biocomputer, a combination of computer chips and human cells. Did the researchers suggest what first led them to carry out this unusual experiment? Yes, one thing the scientists noted was that attempts had been made in the past to create computer chips that work similarly to the human brain. Because the human brain can do things, of course, machines cannot. But those attempts didn't really produce the desired results.  To see how their so-called brain-aware system would perform. And the scientists said the experiment clearly showed the system was able to perform in ways similar to a human brain. But they also noted the overall accuracy rate was lower than what they hoped for, correct? Yes, that's true. For example, the team said their system was still performing at a rate below traditional AI networks for comparable tasks. But the researchers pointed out this was a first proof of concept experiment for this kind of system. And they say they're confident that with further experimentation and system improvements, they can raise that level. Possibly even to one that outperforms traditional machine learning systems. Alright, thanks as always, Brian. You're welcome. Thank you, Dan. My name is Anna Matteo. My name is Andrew Smith. And I'm Jill Robbins. You're listening to The Lesson of the Day on the Learning English podcast. Welcome to the part of the show where we help you do more with our video series, Let's Learn English. This series shows Anna Matteo in her work and life in Washington, D.C. Today, we're going to look at the language in Lesson 48 of the series. In this lesson, Anna meets a tourist visiting Washington and helps her find some places to visit. Hello. I have lived in Washington, D.C. for a long time now. And I have done a lot. I feel that I know this city pretty well. Wait, that's the wrong way. Where is it again? Excuse me. Can I help you? Have we met before? I don't think so. I've just flown in from Boston. My name is Jean. Hi, Jean. I'm Anna. I really feel like we've met before. Anyway, how can I help? I want to see an interesting museum, but I don't know which one. I can help with that. I've lived in Washington, D.C. a long time. I think I've seen all the museums. Wow. Thanks. So tell me, which museums are good? Well, they are all good, but they're all different. There are science museums and history museums and art and culture museums. I want to see an unusual museum. I like the sculpture garden. Have you ever seen sculptures in a garden? It is really artistic. I have never seen a garden of sculptures. I'll write that on my list. I noticed in this part that both Anna and Jean are using the present perfect tense to talk about their experiences. It's common to hear that in this kind of situation. That's right. We use the present perfect tense to talk about an action in the past that is important in the present. For example, we heard Anna say, I have lived in Washington, D.C. for a long time now. The present perfect may be confusing for learners because we use it to talk about a past action. It is called present perfect because speakers use it to stress the importance of a past event in the present. You know, we hear another example a little later when Jean says, I've just flown in from Boston. The sentence, I've just flown in from Boston, stresses the present effect of a past event, the travel from Boston. The exact time of the travel is not important. To form the present perfect, we use two verbs, a main verb and an auxiliary verb. The auxiliary verb is have or has, and the main verb is in something we call the past participle form. For regular verbs, that just means you add D or E-D to the base form of the verb. Yeah, like live and lived. Let's give another example. Have you ever lived in another country? I have lived in another country. I've lived in France for a little while. And I've also been lucky because I've visited many different countries. So those verbs visited, lived, they follow the rule and just add D or E-D to the base form. But for irregular verbs, you might find different forms for the past participle. For example, the past participle of fly is flown, just like the past participle of see is seen. For example, we can say, I've seen that movie. Another way you can hear the present perfect in this conversation is with the adverbs ever and never. Listen again to this part. I like the sculpture garden. Have you ever seen sculptures in a garden? It is really artistic. I have never seen a garden of sculptures. I'll write that on my list. The sculpture garden is a beautiful place just a few blocks away from our office. I notice there that Jean used the negative adverb never, which of course means she hasn't had the experience of visiting that place. I sometimes hear English learners saying, I have ever, when they want to say they have had an experience, but that's not correct, is it, Jill? No, I've heard that too. I think the way to understand this is to remember we usually only use ever in a question formed with the present perfect, not in a statement or an answer to a question. You know, Andrew, something else stands out for me in what Jean said here. What's that, Jill? She says she'll add the sculpture garden to her list. In each of these lessons, we have included a different learning strategy to guide people to be more effective language learners. In this particular lesson, the strategy is focus attention. By making a list, Jean is helping herself remember the places she wants to go. And she can prioritize her time too. By seeing that she has five places to visit in one day, she can decide how much time to spend at each one. Prioritize means to decide which things are more important than others. But, Jill, our listeners might want to know why Anna said Jean looks familiar to her. Oh, that's easy. The same member of our staff played a genie in another episode of Let's Learn English. She magically changed Anna's costume for Halloween. Ah, yes, that's right. I remember. So this is what we might call an inside joke because the creators of Let's Learn English know that the same person was playing the same role. Now, let's find out what other places in D.C. Anna recommends. Have you been to the Museum of the American Indian? I visited that museum many times. It is very peaceful. I have always liked American Indian culture. I'll put that on my list. Do you have any other suggestions? Well, if you like plants, you can visit the US Botanic Gardens. It's very organic. I have always loved plants. I'll write that on my list too. Wow, you know so much about D.C.'s museums. Well, I have lived here for over a year.  What? D.C. has a zoo? Yes, and it's beautiful. You've lived here for so long and you haven't been to the zoo? I've never been to D.C.'s zoo. I've never been to any zoos. You have never seen zoo animals? I grew up on a farm, Jean. I've known farm animals my whole life. But the zoo has lions, and elephants, and zebras. If you have never seen a real-life elephant, you must. They are so majestic. I will. I will. There. I've written my own must-see zoo animal list. Have fun at the zoo. And thanks, Anna. Have fun at the museums, Jean. And thank you. We heard about two more unique places on the National Mall. The Museum of the American Indian and the Botanic Gardens. And I noticed that Anna is making her own list of places to see now. Jill, what is your favorite museum in Washington, D.C.? Oh, that's a tough question. I love the American Indian Museum. And they have a great cafeteria. But the Spy Museum is a lot of fun, too. Well, it's funny you should mention that, because we're going there in our next lesson of the day. Operation Spy. Great. I can't wait. In the meantime, you can write to us with your answer to our questions. Have you ever visited a museum, a zoo, or a public garden? Where was it? What did you see there? What would you tell a tourist to see in your hometown? You can email us at learningenglishatvoanews.com or put your comments on our YouTube video for this podcast. And it'll be great if you share the lesson of the day with your friends and family. Remember that you can also find us on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Thanks for listening. I'm Andrew Smith. And I'm Jill Robbins. And that's our program for today. Join us again tomorrow to keep learning English through stories from around the world. I'm Ashley Thompson. And I'm Dan Novak.


Hello there! I'm Sandy Alnok and today I'm going to do something really weird. I'm going to make a feminine shark Christmas card with this cute set from A-Rielle. We always tend to make blue water for fish to swim in and I am going to do something different because I saw this on the Googles and I thought it would be kind of fun to use it as an inspiration point for my card for today. Trying to make something that's more girly and here we go. So I'm going to begin with some twilight ink from Catherine Pooler and I just stamped the image almost in the center-ish of the paper and this is on cold-pressed watercolor paper and I'm going to paint all the way around it with water. You might wonder why I've been doing that a bit lately when I do these backgrounds and it's for your benefit. A lot of times I don't do that when I do my own painting because I paint pretty quickly but especially if you don't paint quickly you need to be able to keep your water on the page. You have to keep the page wet for things to blend because the biggest problem most people have is that the paint dries out and then you get hard edges and you try to fix them and on and on and on. If you paint water across the paper and when you start out it can be puddled but then by the time you add color to it it should be still wet and shiny but not puddled. Then you end up able to move the color around a little bit easier. So here I'm just going to use I'm using a big number 12 brush to paint some color all the way around the entire outside of the image. I'm being really careful along the the shark side. I want those shark edges to be very sharp. The tree I'm going to add my own softer edges to the tree so I don't have to worry about as much. So you're going to see me get a little bit messier when it gets to that portion. The palette that I'm using this time is not one that I show here very often. I don't use it very much. I try not to say hey you need to get all these colors because I have a gajillion colors and I hardly ever use them. I use the colors that are in my chosen palette that I use for all of my videos because that way if you get the colors that I have then we're painting the same kind of a way and I don't want you to feel like you have to shop all the time. But I haven't played with my Primitech colors in forever. It's been ages and I wanted to have a good pink to do this background with. This one isn't quite as warm as the pink in the sample card but it's got some texture to it and when you're trying to do a big background like this sometimes having something that has granulation that texture is going to actually make it look like a little smoother of a background because of the way that the paint goes on and lays down and I'm using Rodanite Genuine.  I'm not going to add white watercolor because that's just a whole lot of labor and when we're talking about a card it doesn't absolutely need to be watercolor. If I were doing a painting I don't use white pen in my painting that's when I switch to either white watercolor or white watercolor grounds to add white things but on a card not really worried about it. So the edges of the shark on the right are nice and sharp and the edges on the tree on the left I'm not worried about because I can paint my tree right over top. I'm going to dry the whole thing but I'm drying it not just one section at a time. If you dry one section at a time you're going to end up with hard edges. So keep the heat moving around the entire thing so that it dries relatively evenly. There's still a few places where it's not perfect but I'm going to be adding bubbles in there so I decided not to worry about it. Probably could have fussed around with tilting the paper more in order to get the color to move perfectly and you know so what that was not a huge issue for this particular card. I'm painting the shark in hematite another one of the primatec colors and it is going to have a little bit of texture to it. Now there is no law that says you can't use primatec along with the regular colors absolutely none. I do have a couple of primatecs in my regular palette. I just don't have a ton of them but since I had this palette out I decided to use it for the whole thing. I'm also doing this one with the no-line kind of look because that's what my sample card had. It didn't have a big heavy black outline on that Santa and reindeer so that's what I was trying for here but I do have another card sample that I will show you at the end where you can see the difference between using black ink or using this really soft ink and just for purposes of saving anybody who tries this I use the Catherine Pooler Twilight ink to do the stamping and I let it dry really well. It dried overnight so I didn't even actually bother doing this card till the next day because a lot of inks may not work really well for watercolor so just because I use that on this one doesn't mean that I'm saying hey this is like the best one to use for watercolor. It's not necessarily a waterproof or water color safe type of ink. Now it can work and here on this card it didn't bother me at all. I didn't have any problem with that that ink rewetting or anything. Sharks have white tummies of course so I'm gonna have a mostly white tummy although I am gonna add a wash of color later so that he has a little bit of gray underneath of there. Give him a little bit of that. You could also for some of the details like this his big smile in his eye I'm doing that detail with my paintbrush but you could also do that with a pen and might be a little bit easier for most people because it takes a lot of practice to get control with any kind of a brush. This one is a silver black velvet brush and you know it's just it's one of those that's real hard to get that fine control and fine detail with so you do need to do some practicing but here you can see I added that little bit of gray shadow underneath of him and it gives him just a tiny bit of dimension adding a little extra shadow underneath of the hat. So there's just a little tiny bit in there. Now next up I am going to paint the hat. I debated whether I should make the hat red and then I decided no I want to see what this jadeite color is gonna look like so I made his hat green he's got a green hat on and not red so I am going to end up adding red into the tree but what I realized as soon as I started painting that green hat was that I had to figure out how to make the tree look different from the hat because now I have the green tree and the green hat to be painted in one card. A red hat might have been a little bit easier but there you go. I'm using the rhodonite for the ornaments on my little my little Christmas tree and then I used the hematite again for the tree trunk. The color that I chose to use for the tree itself is a color that's in my regular palette and this one is called green appetite and you can see the green is very different it's much darker it's much more of a yellow green the jadeite is more of a blue green color so the two of them do separate visually but I was very conscious of making that tree darker than I might have otherwise just to make sure that it separated from the hat so it didn't all blend together into mush because you know mush is never a good thing but notice how I'm just making feathery edges on the outside of the tree I'm just making little brushstrokes and then the tree is solid for the most part on the inside so it's a way that you can make a tree look a little bit more realistic and since the green appetite is dark I can paint right over top of that really light pink background without having any real ill effects of it so got all that green painted in and then I'm gonna just add in a little bit of extra of the green dropped into the tree itself so I get rid of that place that the one area where painting over top of the pink caused a little bit of a problem is that that edge is then darker it's darker for one because it's collecting paint around the edge of the wet area but it's also darker because the green is going over the pink so just adding a little bit more of the green inside fix that just fine next up I took some very thin row tonight the pink color and started making some bubbles not all the bubbles that I'm going to do are going to be in the road tonight but I did it with a very pale pink and the longer I let it sit there and the closer it gets to dry the more they'll stay but if you paint bubbles tone on tone this way then you can take a paper towel or what I use is baby wipes so it's something that gives me a little softer edge and dab off some of that excess color and then it doesn't look like there's like pink measles floating around him it just looks like they're very soft bubbles floating around the area and especially once we add the white pen bubbles it's going to look even better in that way so I finished putting the panel onto a card base used a pink card base and popped it and then added the sentiment and embossed it in white embossing powder I'm dreaming of a great white Christmas which I thought was really cute for this and then started adding white snow or white bubbles around the shark some of them are actually open circles and some of them are just dots and I'm keeping it all in almost one column above and below the shark you could put it all over the entire card but you're taking away from the focal point when you do that in some of the open areas I'm making some snowflakes like on that vintage card which are basically glorified asterisks make a plus and an X and you've got one of these little snowflakey things and the final touch was to take those little strings and he has wrapped around him that are holding on to the tree and draw them back in over top of the tree so he's still got it strapped to his back I sort of wondered if he needed another couple of strings to hold it on there it looks pretty precarious but this other shark is the one that was stamped in black ink and one thing I noticed when I pulled out both cards is I hadn't put any bubbles in front of my shark so I added just a few in front of him and in front of the tree so that it would look like he's within the bubbles rather than in front of the bubbles so there you go my crazy Waco pink shark cards not sure anybody else has ever had a pink shark card in their life but somebody on my Christmas list is going to be getting these because I think they're really funny I might make some more maybe I'll make some with different colored water in them that'd be kind of fun all right you guys have a great day I will see you again very soon hit that like button subscribe if you're not already and I'll see you again soon with another video go make something beautiful talk to you later bye


Unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, are being used more frequently in precision agriculture applications, such as monitoring crops for disease or pest infestations. In this paper, the authors demonstrate how UAVs can be used to capture multi-spectral imagery and analyze it using various indices to determine the health of crops. They found that the NDVI, GNDVI, and SAVI indices could be used to detect differences between healthy and unhealthy crops. Additionally, they showed that the use of UAVs can provide faster and cheaper data collection than traditional methods, making them a valuable tool for precision agriculture. This article was authored by Sebastian Candiego, Fabio Riemondino, Mikayla de Giglio, and others.


Yo what up welcome back to another episode of whoa the background is different Everything has changed and change is bad. That's why we still shoot film Do you remember the best day of your life? Maybe it was the day you got married or the day your kid was born Maybe it was the day you graduated college. Hell. Maybe it's the day you finally learned how to use the toilet as an adult Personally, my best day ever is when I found out that my favorite slide film Rolly vario Chrome is most likely expired Government ectochrome and the film photography project is selling that like hot pancakes Rolly vario Chrome was a limited-run film about two or three years ago And nowadays it's kind of hard to find but I haven't let go of the possibility of ever shooting it again Some say that might mean I'm living in the past, but hey, aren't we all after all we still shoot film Oh wait, I made that joke already. What is the best way to describe Rolly vario Chrome for those who have not shot it before? I suppose it's what smashmouth was singing about when they sang walking on the Sun because as you'll see it looks like the Sun Exploded right next to you in every shot. Here's some sample shots from my dedicated vario Chrome video So when this friendly neighborhood film shooter commented and said that vario Chrome looks a lot like FPP retro Chrome I had to investigate. I grabbed two rolls of FPP retro Chrome my contacts T2 and my speedo and headed out to Wildwood New Jersey to visit Monica's parents It would be our first time flying since COVID so Monica told me I wasn't allowed to whole mouth any water fountains in the airport When we touched down I loaded up my contacts T2 and was ready to hit the beach and make everyone disgusted by my beach body Because the night before I went on a crazy bagelbites bender If you're confused, there's actually two available iterations of FPP retro Chrome one in 400 ISO and the other in 320 ISO For this trip I shot with the 400 speed variation I can't imagine that the 320 ISO version is substantially different and yes, these were shot at box speed While we were in Wildwood I insisted that we sample every ice cream place in close proximity mostly because I'm irresponsible with sugar But also because I wanted to photograph new locations at DQ the sunset was getting more and more gorgeous by the minute All I hoped in that moment was that the meter on the contacts T2 would do it justice and thankfully I think it did The next day we went to a different beach and Mother Nature was threatening me with good light. So I finished the role Monica also had a blast of pretending to be a professional seashell collector Unfortunately, she had grown attached to the shells giving them names and such which only made things harder when I had to smash them So what exactly is retro Chrome? Luckily the film photography project has all the answers to summarize real quick It's basically expired government surplus ectochrome that the FPP stumbled upon at an auction This particular batch comes from the Tenopa test range in Nevada and was likely stored in the freezer until that fateful day When the test range decided to switch over to the D word in the early 2000s. So what does that mean for us? Well, not much it does mean that there probably is a very limited amount of this stock left in the world though I long wondered what might be the best scenario to shoot this film stock because of its Distinctive look as you probably notice with this film one of the major characteristics is this sort of orange yellow wash That kind of looks like it was developed in highly acidic cat piss This effect really tends to surface in the brighter parts of the image like the sun the sky the lights etc So that's cool, but what does it look like at night? I was determined to find out but I was a little more determined to smash more ice cream So maybe you noticed or didn't notice because you're as oblivious as I am this film is pretty grainy and to put Things simply there was shit all over it after scanning I had to paint out a lot of little specs on the film and one of the roles had a dotted line through the entire thing Which was an excruciating pain in the dick to paint out the other role that I shot that week did not have a line through it So I'm not sure what happened, but since the Tenopa test range is about 70 miles north of area 51 I think we can assume it was aliens Furthermore retrochrome is a color-positive film which means when it comes out of the developing tank It's ready to go as a comprehensible image whereas color-negative film is inverted So it needs to be flipped as well as corrected to see a balanced image If you're having trouble wrapping your mind around that concept think of slide film as a pizza delivery when it's delivered the pizza is ready to consume or Rubble over your body depending on whatever you do with pizza whereas color-negative film is more like grocery store pizza You'll need to take it home pop it in the freezer and eventually bake it for 30 minutes before you can have a slice Does that make sense these analogies doing anything for you? I shot some more night scenes, but they didn't really turn out To be fair the contact T2 only goes down to f2.8 So I wouldn't really classify it as a low light beast Colors on this film don't seem to apply any sort of logic as to how they render sometimes in the shade You'll get blue shadows, but at other times you'll get purple and sometimes for no reason at all The entire shot will just look like it's washed out in yellow. It's pure chaos, and I love it Eventually it became time to go so I regained consciousness early and decided to finish up the role by shooting some morning light That was coming through the windows So retro chrome would you ever shoot it? Is it just like vario chrome or not quite? I don't have the answer, but damn it does look suspiciously similar The physical film stock is even the same base color perhaps one day I can leave vario chrome behind and learn to love again, you know after I've had enough time to grieve personally I would shoot the crap out of this again, and I plan to pick up some more roles that way every time I go through a vario Chrome withdrawal I can turn to retro chrome for a quick pick me up. That sounds like healthy behavior, right? There's just something about the colors that works well for me I think of course I'd say that these colors are not very true to real life But real life is boring and needs to be spiced up sometimes anyway oddly enough This is one of those film stocks that when I get the natives back I kind of think they generally just look okay, but then after two or three months I look back at them something weird happens and I kind of fall in love with them It's a weird phenomenon for sure and I'm sure that all of you have experienced that to some degree in your own work So that's something for you to reflect upon I suppose until then I guess I'm gonna go order a pizza


Hello everyone and welcome to Blackstar Potential. My name is Lee Fuge and in this video today we're going to be talking about some cool ways to get the most out of the tremolo effect built into your Blackstar Amp2. So all the tones you're going to be hearing in this video are coming directly from the Amp2 that is on the desk in front of me. I am running straight out of the XLR output of this pedal straight into the front of my audio interface so all my cabinet and room simulations are coming from cabrig that is built into the unit. So the tremolo effect lives in the modulation section. It is on the middle toggle of the three position switch. So tremolo is a guitar effect that lives in the modulation factory. It modulates the volume of the guitar signal that you put in in a rhythmic time-based way. So we can think of tremolo as being an effect that subtly just dips the volume or we can use it to create some quite cool choppy guitar sounds. So we're going to dial in a few different tones with the tremolo effect in this unit and I'm going to show you how you can use this in a couple of different situations.  So this is a more extreme tremolo effect. Now in the tremolo setting on the Amp2 there's actually two different types of tremolo. Up to the halfway point we have regular tremolo. This is a lot more extreme and this sort of harsher cutoff and start point for each of the notes. Then when we get past midnight we go into a harmonic tremolo. This is a little less extreme. It's more pulsating and the waveform is a lot smoother. So harmonic tremolo actually sets us a little bit more in the ballpark of a rotary speaker type effect. It doesn't sound exactly like a Leslie-style rotary speaker but it's the same sort of principle. We get the same sort of pulsating movement again like a univib for instance. So we're going to be looking at the regular tremolo to start with and I'm going to set this as high as I possibly can. So I'm going to actually have this on 10 so that's right at the cusp of the control there. The time I'm going to set quite slow. I'm going to set that on 2 but I will move that when I'm playing just so you can hear the difference because I want the slow effect to be really pronounced at first and the level I'm going to have on full because I want the maximum amount of the tremolo effect. So without the tremolo on I'm using this clean tone. So that's completely clean from the Amp2 but the only thing I do have on is I've got a room reverb on as you can see there on the unit. So when I turn the modulation on we're now activating the tremolo and it's going to do this to the sound. So the reason I wanted to set the time very slow is so you could hear that obvious choppy effect. If I raise the time it's going to sound more like this. So that's a pretty choppy sound. It's great for textural guitar parts where you're just ringing a chord out and if we push the time even further we get into some really fast rhythmic ideas. So the time actually determines how fast that choppiness happens. With the depth at its maximum we get the most amount of chop. If I push that down we get less of that. Get more of a pulsating sound. The second thing I want to show you is how to get some 60s univibes style sounds with the harmonic tremolo. So for this I'm going to set the harmonic tremolo on half so five and I'm going to match the level at roughly the same point so that works out about 7.5 on the scale and then the time I'm once again going to set quite slow to start with. With the harmonic tremolo because it doesn't have that hard cut and start point this is a much smoother tremolo effect so it sort of pulsates gradually as it goes up and down. Sounds a bit like this. Now this one is really cool with some drive because we get into some 60s Jimi Hendrix C-style lead tones. That pulsating effect is very reminiscent of a univibed type circuit. We can obviously make that faster and we can increase the depth.  If we set that on maximum like this we have quite an extreme harmonic tremolo. That really takes us away from that more subtle 60s thing so if you want that Hendrixy vibe you definitely want to sit more around the sort of five to six to even seven on the depth control with a slower time. You don't want the time too fast because you don't want that really choppy effect. And the third way I'm going to show you how to use this is a subtle lean tone. So I'm going to set the time at around about six and a half but the depth control I'm going back to the regular tremolo here that's going to be very very subtle so that's just going down on one and then I'm going to have the level of this about three and a half because again we don't want too much of this tremolo effect we just want this to subtly make the clean tone shimmer. So without the tremolo it sounds like this and then with that on we're going to get the same clean tone but we're going to get this little pulsating sound alongside it. That is a little bit more reminiscent of an amp-based tremolo where we get this warmer pulsating style tremolo that isn't quite a harmonic tremolo. Again we can be more subtle with that if we want we can set the time slower so we get a slower pulsating effect. What you don't want to do with this kind of thing is go too fast because that gives you a much more extreme sound. The depth is really key here because we want as little of that tremolo in as possible the time you can just set to your own taste and then the level this shows us how much of that we get so if that's higher it becomes a bit more choppy with kind of like a fading but again because we're going for a more subtle amp style tremolo we want that level lower because we're just blending a bit of the effect in with our clean sound. So tremolo is a great rhythmic modulation effect it can create some really cool textures but can also be used for some really nice subtle sounds as well. If you're playing with a drummer you definitely want to be aware of your speed of your tremolo because you don't want this to go offset with whatever the drummer's playing so it can be quite a hard effect to really dial in sometimes because you really need that to lock in with the rhythm of whatever you're playing but there's a lot of fun to be had with tremolo. Let me know down below in the comments what your favorite songs or riffs that use tremolo are and don't forget to hit the subscribe button to the black star amplification youtube channel because there's a bunch more videos just like this one on the channel and don't forget you can check out the other videos where we talk about the other effect types inside the amp too. If you're looking for a guitar teacher in your local area please head over to musicteacher.com check out the music teacher database over there there's a great network of teachers all around the country waiting to help you guys out. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you soon.


Friends, thanks for checking in. Today we're looking at a Tanfolio Defiant Stock Master Full Size. Double action, single action pistol that is pretty amazing. Imported by IFG Italian firearms group out of Amarillo, Texas. And every time I've ever done a best of series or compilation, people say, where's the Tanfolio? If you don't have a Tanfolio, then this review is incomplete. And I'm not talking about the little seazy lookalikes. I'm talking about something like this right here. The full size models that is so well known in the competition world. Very prevalent. People love Tanfolio. And I never realized how much, or shall I say, why they love Tanfolio as much as they do until I took it to the range yesterday. I literally thought after just a couple of rounds, this gun shoots itself. It is so precise. You know, you ever align the sights and you pull the trigger and you say, well, I'm not sure that one hit. And all of a sudden ting, ting, ting. I mean, it was unbelievable. Right out of the case. No learning curve or anything. And it's a beautiful gun. Now, if you go with this, it's about 1,100 bucks, full steel frame, 4.75 inch barrel comes in a red case here, two 17 round magazines and a cleaning kit right here, which is a nice touch and a trigger lock. You could also use that lock to lock up the case if you decide that's the way you wanna go. But you know, it's just a beautiful looking and shooting handgun. Two 17 round mags. Already mentioned that a skeletonized slide right there to lighten it up. Quick action locks up very nice. A ambidextrous thumb safety, a bit extended there. Pretty common on competition guns. Just take a look at the grip, kind of a wood grain polymer. And we look at the texturing on the back strap and the front strap, it is really nice. Magazine release sticks out a bit, makes it nice and comfortable to drop that mag. It does have a rail there. Beefy dust cover. Right there, pretty beefy. Fully adjustable sights. They call this a super sight. Okay, you can adjust it any which way you want. And a fiber optic front sight. What a nice looking and shooting handgun. So impressed, I had to say. You know, it's been a while since I shot as well as I did with a handgun and this tanfolio just made me feel like I was cheating. Check out those rear serrations. I've never seen anything like that before. They're like these memory bumps that stick out a bit. But you do get a nice firm grip on the slide when charging and there are the lightning cuts right there. Beautiful handgun. Single action trigger pull I'm measuring right at. Four pounds, no over travel at all with the reset right there. It's a heavy gun. There's no doubt about that. But once again, I was just so impressed. I fully understand why so many people told me now that if you don't have a tanfolio in your best of group then it is incomplete. Measures up well with the CZ Shadow 2. All right, you can see here they're both in the same class. Double action, single action, all steel frames, fiber optic front sight. All right, and they're right around the same weight. We're going to get it on the scale shortly. But what a nice job tanfolio did with this. You can see right there it says defiant stock master. Now what they did with the stock master was take the frame of the stock three. All right, the tanfolio defiant stock three and the features of the stock two put it together in this pistol and made a tanfolio defiant stock master. It does have a 4.75 inch bull barrel, polygonal rifle and a good looking and shooting handgun. It disassembles much like a CZ, okay? Instead of having indentations or shall I say lines has a couple grooved out memory bumps right there. Actually they're not bumps, they are indentations. And you just find that sweet spot and push out the pin and off comes the slide. Check that out, full length frame rails. And here you have a all steel guide rod and a uncaptured spring. Check out that guide rod, kind of unique there. And it does have a bushing in here. This right here will pop out and there is the bushing. And then the barrel is removed from the muzzle end. And there you go, bull barrel. And that makes a difference. That actually cuts down on the recoil quite a bit. Actually I put a decent amount of rounds through this. Let me go ahead and clean it up and I'll come back and put it back together. All right, I'll go ahead and put this back together. The stock master is available, locking lugs there by the way, is available in 9, 40, 45 and 10 millimeter, all right? So the TANFOLIO has a large line, far greater than I even knew of. I was studying the brand quite a bit and I went with the stock master. My aging eyes can get this to fit in. There it is. Then all we have to do is put the pin back and then find that sweet spot. And there it is. Nice double action pull too. It is really nice. Let's go ahead and get on scale. We'll see what the, we'll put the mag in here. We'll see what the TANFOLIO defiant stock master's weighing in at two pounds, 13 ounces. We moved that just the ounces 45 even, but here we have 17 rounds of nine millimeter, 52 and an eighth ounce. Let's just do a quick comparison with the CZ Shadow 2, 54 ounces. So a little bit heavier with the Shadow 2, both in the same class. The Shadow 2 has a little bit longer of a barrel, but it is a nice handgun. I am like so pleased with it, honestly. So there it is, TANFOLIO defiant stock master. You can see on the grip right there it says TANFOLIO. I am so proud to add this to my ongoing quest to find the best full size, all metal frames, double action single action pistols under 1500 bucks. And this one is such a nice addition to it. I can't wait to put that compilation together. This is a lot of fun at the range. And I guarantee you'll be seeing more of this beauty in the future. If you like videos like this, please subscribe and share. I always appreciate thumbs up button. Thanks for watching and you guys be safe.