Hey, it's Anfa and you're watching Anfa Vlog. Today we're gonna take a look at the ZenatsubFX Formant Filter. Bear with me. So you might wonder, what are Formants? I tend to think about Formants as fixed EQ curves that are applied onto a sound. For example, our voice operates on Formants to convey vowels. They all are built on the same saw-to-fly wave oscillator, but there is a bunch of filters happening in my mouth that change positions and they resonate in different parts of the spectrum creating a sonic imprint that is then recognizable independent of the note. You can sing an E on and on and you can still hear it's an E letter, it's an E vowel. Even so the underlying sound, the underlying tone, is it something completely different. So that is a Formant in real life. Every real life occurrence of Formants are acoustic instruments because every resonating body has a formant which is a static resonance independent of the played notes. For example, an acoustic guitar, let me get an acoustic guitar. For example, an acoustic guitar has a resonating body and this body has some shape and proportions that make it resonate at certain frequencies more and less at certain others. So it has a sonic imprint, it has an EQ curve that is applied just because of this box. Same applies to wind instruments and any other real instrument. For example, when I was synthesizing and trying to get a sound of a double bass, I researched the resonance of the double bass body and I used an EQ to put these resonances in to make the illusion better. Anyway, let's now take a look at Zenith SubFX because it has a Formant filter built in that you can use to get some quite interesting results, actually a lot of very different things that are hard to do otherwise or require some sophisticated external processing. So it's a valuable tool to know about, it's a little bit hard to use. If you ever use the Yamaha DX7, well that's probably the level of the interface. I hope that the Zenfusion project will enhance on that because it's a very powerful feature. So I have my arduous session set up here and let's just enable the first part, let's make it louder. Okay, and I will dial in a simple sawtooth wave oscillator so we have some basic signal to just listen to and assess the changes the filters are making. So you might not have noticed but Zenith SubFX has a few categories of filters. The basic one is analog and by default AdSynth comes with this one and the Lopez filter 2 which is resonating. The Lopez filter 1 is non-resonating, you can see this doesn't do anything. So it's almost, so it's also very gentle as you can see and hear. The LPF 2, sorry, it has a resonance which is engaged by the Q which is the quality, the higher the quality, the narrower the filter and the more resonance you get.   There's the state variable filters which are the same type of basic filters but they are different implementations so they sound different, they behave different, they react different to different inputs and we have the formant filter which is like the separate category on its own. How does it sound? Right now it reacts to the velocity of my playing so to disable this I'm gonna do velocity sensing amount 0. Now every keystroke has the same filter cutoff, so the same formant applied to it. So you can see we can adjust the Q of the whole thing, it also responds to the stages, it gets louder as we go, I'm gonna shift this whole thing two octaves down so we also have more harmonics to look at in the broad line window because this scale is linear, it's not logarithmic so it's more scientific than musical but it gets the job done and I actually I couldn't find a better spectrogram for real-time operation. If you know of any good spectrograms for real-time usage with Jack in Linux that are open source let me know, well this one isn't fully open source either, like it's dual licensed and you can't really, that's why it's not, botline is not in repositories because of the licensing. That's something lacking. If you're a Linux audio developer please code a real-time audio spectrograph. Let me know so I'll make a shout out about it and test it. So the basic thing that this formant filter does right now is apply aesthetic resonance to our signal. Let's bring it back to one stage and make it louder because right now it's very quiet and hit the edit button and now we can see the main formant filter window and there is a ton of options here. On the left we have the graph that shows what resonances we have, how they are positioned and what we're editing right now. You see we can have up to six vowels which is every vowel is a different set of formants. Here a single formant is a single resonance so you can have any number of formants, you can have two, you can have one, so it's just a single peak filter. If we increase this we have two and we have three, four, five, etc. So we have the formants which is the amount of filters that every vowel has. We have the vowels and each vowel is a predetermined set of locations for every formant, so every peak and we have a sequence which is a set of vowels in a predefined order that we can use and that we can choose using the BS position and that we can choose using the envelope and the LFO. If we change the sequence size to one we are essentially using just one vowel no matter what so now I cannot change this and an LFO or envelope or LFO won't have any effect if I make the sequence size of two we have two vowels to alternate between and now everything works. It is very very sensitive to LFO and envelope changes and to any changes in general so I'm going to increase the depth of this, return to the basic value so our envelope isn't doing anything and now it's still very fast so I'm going to decrease the frequency. You can see that our LFO is basically starting out in the peak then it's going here to the second vowel and then it's going back and then it's going back because the sequence is looping so when our LFO got here it was still going low but the sequence was over so it looped back and then the LFO was over so it was started getting back and it was looping looped back to the sequence and then it got back to the reset. It's a little bit complicated. We can change this by decreasing the depth. I hope we can get a simple two states. It looks like it's not that easy. So I may talk about the slow form and slowness and vowel clearness. So slowness is basically if you tried calf filter it has a control named inertia and that simply smooths out the input that you give it. So if we increase the slowness. The slowness refreshes with every note hit so I have to hit another note to hear the effect.  You can look at this. If we enable a triangle or a ramp up. Oh no I'm changing settings of not what I wanted. Not the frequency LFO. I wanted the filter LFO. Let's make it a ramp. So with no slowness it can jump from two positions immediately. As I increase the slowness it smooths out all this motion. The clearness of the vowels is something else is something different. It's clamping onto the values. It's like if we normally have like vowel one and vowel two and our LFO is slowly morphing between the two. The clearness if I make it very high it's gonna the LFO wants to give to the other but it's gonna it will be forced to stay on that first vowel and then when it crosses the line and it's not and it's closer to the other one it's gonna jump immediately. So it's avoiding mixing the vowels but to hear this we need to disable the firm and slowness because that is applied afterwards. I'm gonna make it a sine wave again. Let's also maybe shift this and make it wider and shift it up. Oh now we can hear it very clearly and see. With zero vowel clearness, clearness, with zero vowel clearness we get everything in between the vowels. So the individual formants are interpolating between different vowels on the whole spectrum and as I increase the clearness they stay longer in the in the target in the predefined values and then jump quicker between different vowels. Maximum clearness and then I can smooth it out with the formant slowness. Well that's interesting. So we have two vowels in the sequence but there are six total because there is from zero to five and we have different formants. We can select different peaks. We can have up to 12 and as you increase the number of the peaks it's gonna get louder. So I'm gonna play a note be ready it's gonna be loud. Louder at least. If I decrease it's much quieter. Also if we go with the Q very low Q this is 12 formants and this is one much quieter and we can see that this on this graph like the resonances build up and they increase the loudness even though with the lowest quality the Q so the highest bandwidth we don't actually create any recognizable shapes in the spectrum. Here's a spot where the saw wave is audible but it's speaking so it's kind of working like a vocoder or it's producing a vocoder like sounds or it can produce some growling talking bass lines if you wish. It can also produce some other things. Right now we have just two vowels in the sequence. What if we increase to three? Well that's super fast. I'm gonna decrease the vowel cleanliness and slowness so we have like the raw LFO output. I'm gonna actually disable the LFO. Oh funny it it was muted in one channel for for some reason. Oh I think I found a bug. By the way as you're playing with this keep in mind that resonating filters can be dangerous if you change the cutoff frequencies quickly and this is something I got from Mark D Curry who is the current developer of Xenon sub effects. I had some problems when the filters produced some screaming sounds extremely loud sounds and he explained me that a digital filter when you change the cutoff frequency so you move around the the cutoff knob or you apply a quick LFO or envelope and if you increase the quality so bump up the resonance it's gonna get unstable and it's gonna produce some extremely loud sounds and it's natural it's just the way digital implementations of these filters work. All of them have this problem so I thought this is a bug in the software and like you can you can approach this by trying to limit the amount of motion that the user can introduce or the amount of resonance he can get but then it limits the creative freedom so I think it's better to leave it on but warn the user that he might do something that's gonna hurt. So for an experiment let's try it. I'm gonna use a quick LFO and I'm gonna make it super quiet and then I'm gonna bump up the Q slightly slowly it's getting louder you can see yeah I left the note because it was beginning louder and louder and louder into distortion so now I'm gonna decrease the Q to same levels or safe levels and I'm gonna give back the loudness. Yeah so be careful with quickly moving highly resonant filters they can get loud. I figured out that she can create some interesting metallic ringing sounds when you just play with the range of the formants in the frequency spectrum so two controls we didn't talk about yet and are very like interesting is that center frequency in the octave span so center frequency is it's displayed here in the left upper corner right now it's at 200 Hertz. This line here is 20,000 Hertz this one is 10,000 so we are just shifting the whole thing in spectrum up and down and the octave span is the amount of octaves that the whole spectrum covers so right now we can get up to 10 octaves which is basically the whole range of human hearing from 20 Hertz to 20,000 Hertz it's just 10 octaves but if we decrease this we get something extremely narrow and if I increase the Q we can hear and see the individual resonances and in my idea that sounds that sounds super cool. The funny thing you see right now transitions are all straight lines you can increase the formant slowness to smooth them out to make that more organic interesting. I don't know what happens if we increase the stages it also decreases the Q and it is reflected right here on this graph by the way the filters in Zones of FX have a gain control so we can compensate with here and it is also reflected in this graph but this is generally very quiet right now if we increase the velocity sensitivity we can get a different resonance for every note or if we use the LFO in a random start mode nice wandering resonances by the way you can see that at the high resonance between the peaks there are also notches so it's not just it doesn't look the same like you can see that this frequency spectrum here on the bottom line display is actually quite different from this approximation here and there are also notch filters added in between the resonating peaks so that's very interesting because you get even more filtering applied than these 12 peaks and 12 peaks is already a lot. Not to mention that you can have two of these stacked because you can have a formant filter applied on a voice directly here so we can have actually 24 peaks let's give it an LFO yeah so right now we have two formant filters one after another and we need to be careful because if they start to resonate one on top of each other they're gonna get very loud oh sorry that was a high note uh no i'm not doing this again so yeah uh i think i would like to try making some simple composition or maybe maybe just dialing in a few sounds to make use practice show more in practice how this filter works and what it can do disable this let's make a hi-hat out of this sound so i'm gonna switch the oscillator to white noise so it's just noise i'm gonna decrease the loudness because it's gonna it might get loud i'm gonna increase the resonance and i will make this narrower so octaves less quarter an octave maybe half hmm i think i should be able to get something higher it looks like no i'm just gonna make a hi-hat sound out of this we have okay we have the LFO starting with random phase every hi-hat hit is gonna be different i think i would like to in to do some low pass filter to tame the filter the frequency content a little bit more well we clipped this really hard at some point okay so let's call this one hi-hat i'm not sure if we will be able to make a kick drum with formant filters this is actually quite loud i think all right let's make a base i will be talking so enable the keyboard let's give us a new patch and let's make this a sawtooth wave of course because sawtooth waves are great for exposing the quality of the filter because they contain all the harmonics odd and even so they are very harmonically rich okay we have the oscillator by default we have the lupus filter resonating slightly to turn down and you can see that even turning it up all the way still gives us some loss in high frequency content even at 16 kilohertz an 18 yeah oh maybe because i had the velocity sensing ah yeah okay it was just because of the velocity sensing so i disabled the velocity sensing let's change this to formant let's try program a a format sequence with just two formats let's make this more resonant let's turn this down i'm going to yeah we have vowel number zero vowel number one that is probably vowel number zero because they are very close together but we can verify this i'm going to change the b position let's make the sequence size of one yeah and this is the vowel number zero we can change the sequence and we can set up the sequence size and we can set up the sequence step so sequence position zero this is the first item in the sequence and we can assign a vowel number if we change this to a two this is going to be vowel number sorry vowel number one because the first one is the zero so right now this is the vowel this is what we have next the fourth and the fifth which is the six so yeah if we make this sequence size okay we can have up to seven in the sequence size but we have only six vowels so then we would have to repeat some vowel in the sequence so i'm going to make it six so let's go to vowel number zero now which vowel do we have right here and i would like to find the position where we have the vowel number zero this is not it i think this is it yeah so this is vowel number zero in the sequence which is assigned to vowel number zero in the bank of vowels somebody can mess with this we can add some more formants let's try to make a classic roll with just two positions and two formants so an extremely simple example let's just make one vowel up sorry one formant low other formant high you can also change their amplitude i guess we're not cleanly on this first vowel and let's make the second one just both formants in the middle or very close together oh yeah i don't want them crossing so i'm gonna make the zero the first one lower and the second one you see this is very clunky it's hard to manipulate let's now add an LFO yeah this is what i wanted let's make it slower so we can verify if it works okay the problem is our LFO depth is like clipped with reflection onto this smaller sequence so we need to decrease the depth of our LFO okay just a little bit let's try size five depth okay this looks good because we have the whole sequence from vowel zero to vowel one and back and no bouncing around now we can play with the frequency i'm gonna make sure we don't move the depth that's cool i'm gonna decrease the two so we can hear more of the note no it's it's very quiet so the funny thing is right now we can automate this because Zenith sub effects exposes the global filter cutoff which is applied to these filters so if i disable the LFO completely and we have no motion whatsoever i can just get back to ardor and let's just okay i guess the note is a little bit too low let's record some extremely simple example i'm gonna make ardor full screen for a while okay let's give ourselves a metronome right let's cut off yeah the last two bars are what i want to use okay i was a little bit early on that note and you can see it's it starts before the bar line so it was it was silenced okay so this is actually a beat let's duplicate this seven times yeah awesome hey we need a kick and we need a snap just kick will do but first let's play around with the automation for the filter cutoff you can also automate the filter resonance and let's just use the touch function loop over this okay the cool thing about touch is you can see if i don't touch it it doesn't record but if i do it does so so it's very nice for this kind of stuff because you can like write in record the automation moves one by one without destroying your other work uh i think i'm gonna increase the clean clean no the cleanness the slowness because okay uh let's just find our yeah here it is let's play it yeah so this is cool because we can actually build a longer sequence and a more complicated formant and we have a few filters in one with a single automation control that we can also smooth out this is this is really cool i want to i don't know make a kick drum just to um i'm gonna i'm holding control and middle mouse button and dragging this to duplicate the region and move it vertically because control duplicates and mid the middle mouse button drags between tracks without shifting in time i'm gonna delete these notes leave just one and i'm going to make a kick drum and we'll try to make it with a formant filter for the exercise okay we have our MIDI notes i'm gonna try make it out of white noise let's see what we can do so uh not sound but white right now we have the default resonating lobe as filter and let us use a single formant let's make it highly resonant and make a sequence of two and the first vowel we have it high in the second we want to have it low yeah we can have it even higher in the first now we can shift this all thing down and we can use an envelope i'm gonna disable a cleanness and slowness so we can easier see what what's coming okay well that's oh because i'm having the velocity sensing okay now we have consistent notes okay i managed to tune the envelope and the base position maybe this is the bs base position now we can slow this or smooth it out with the slowness but we need to make it lower oh i'm afraid it's not going to go low enough will it oh dear yeah yeah no the stretch is not doing anything for us here well i messed something up what do we have oh we have some low frequency maybe it is usable this is about 50 hertz that should be usable but how do we get there maybe i had so much trouble because i have this sequence stretch and it makes all the controls very sensitive oh that is usable as a kick drum uh at least regarding the spectrum oh yeah that's deep let's make it more resonant i actually i think i need headphones to verify if the bass is there let's listen yeah it's very low it's definitely a deep kick drum uh i think i need to decrease the slowness make this actually is very very quiet i'm afraid you might not hear it very well whoa that's distorting so let's add an envelope this doesn't do anything right now okay there's our kick drum our kick drum made with a formant filter let's distort it slightly for taste it's fine it's funny how unstable it is because we are making it out of white noise so it's random so some notes start with a peak yeah we managed to make a kick drum i have company okay uh let's duplicate this kick drum seven times and listen to our sequence okay i think that's it um i hope i've covered the formant filter thoroughly it is a little bit of a mystery it's hard to use the custom program but you can see it's not impossible and you can wrap your head around and make some cool sounds so give it a shot and if you have any questions or suggestions about this episode or the future ones if you have any ideas what i should do next what do you have problems with what would you want to learn about and the linux and open source audio world let me know leave that in the comments and i will see you in the next video bye okay that's for b-roll


Some great Métis influenced texts are Manny's Memories, written by Ken Caron and Angela Caron, illustrated by Donnelly Dumont. And there's a Métis translation by Norman Flurry. So I think this is a beautiful piece of Mr. Caron telling, you know, his childhood memories of round prairie settlement near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And there are many Métis communities throughout Canada. And kind of seeing that everyday lived experience, picking berries, working on fence posts. And we also see how, as a teacher lens, we see the real connection to real life. We see the images. We see the images of his family and making those connections. There's also a disc, but we also see how his daughter was instrumental in helping him write this text. And as well, we see his family today. So it's a great story. You know, this is an everyday lived story. It's a recollection of memories and how he is sharing this with us. Another beautiful example is called The Giving Tree, retelling of a traditional Métis story. It's written and illustrated by Leah Dorian, and the Métis translation is by Norman Flurry. What's really beautiful about this text is that we see it in English, but we also see the translation immediately underneath in Métis. And we can kind of see the color coding difference as well as stunning art. And we see that influence of the dot art and how that's highly influenced in this piece of text. So you could even come up with your own giving tree in your classroom. Back home, we have a long time ago what would happen is when Métis people were passing through on the landscape and say they needed to stop and take a break on a traveling route. There may be a tree or there may be something that would be stashed inside the tree, rations, food, different pieces. And so maybe you could create your own giving tree. And if you needed something, you would take something from the tree, but you would give something back in exchange. So maybe students could create their own giving trees in their classrooms. And they could bring something in. They could donate an item. Maybe they could give a giving tree. Maybe they could give something away in their community. Maybe they could give to someone who needs something more than they do. But understanding that if you give, you receive, you could go into the relationship of reciprocity. You could go into conversations around treaty. You could go into conversations around Métis treaty. So it's really, I believe that a piece of text can open. It's a motivational setting. It's something to simply open a door about conversation and how can you start your own giving tree in your classroom.


Everybody forced here ripping 2020 playbook football hobby a box half case number 20 random team style check the results any time a late in sports cards Com you started just a moment Tyler hero out four to six weeks So they have to make a deep run of that. We're gonna see him again.  I want to catch up here be a quick break though Lions I'm on Ross St. Brown patched to 75 hot routes and Eagles auto Kenneth gain well to 199 goal line graphs a material autographs book Colts Jonathan Taylor Triple Jersey auto nice JT numbered to 25 11 to 25 John on the Taylor Think I did that like first or second So I don't remember it. No, we're getting close to Jedi survivor Down in dirty patch literally dirty patch. These are game worn. That's a Tyler board boyd board Tyler Boyd 40 of 99 Last game worn of course very nice very nice hot routes. I'm gonna Ross St. Brown again to 199 this time Lions and look at this one Ron Dane Two of 99 goal line graphs Giants Ron Dane Badger legend Texan legend Ron Dane with the Giants did not know he was on the list interesting rookie playbook Jersey auto breeze haul Breeze the Beast 41 of 99 jets congrats on that one What game should it be table? Are you saying Thunder? We're saying that pickleball I mean Johnny McInero played pickleball.  No, that's That's prime James Winston stuff. Oh, I was talking about over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I would be knee-hat really Jeff Wilson jr. To 199 auto for the Dolphins and Cookbook bills There we go RPA book for color 33 of 99 James Cook book.  I mean you are I just that's why I thought you were saying Patch to 99 mammoth material Trey McBride Cardinals rookie with the three color patch Commander Sam howl rookie auto to 15 I slow number Evan with the commanders And look at this good box got a Bailey zappy as well rookie auto Patriots What is this storybook Kenneth Walker the third Seahawks on the patch book that is a crazy design Crazy patch to 49 Kenneth Walker the third storybook Patch cards to 99 is Pierre Strong jr. Patriots Bears Jersey to one 99 of the alish Jones jr. Orange your point runs everybody at the end and there's a big card Justin Herbert Four color patch auto book four of five.  All right patch card bangles Jamar chase to 49 Vaughn, I didn't get any crumble cookies this week by the way. I didn't do it 75 patch Drake London for the Falcons. I missed the cinnamon bun. I missed the cookie butter lava Miss the Oreo the peanut butter Oreo Did you get it? Rex Burkhead auto for the Texans to 49. So we got Ron Dane and Rex Burkhead. All right All right playbook And John met you the third to 299 Ricky Jersey auto playbook for the Texans Texans box. Yeah, I just want the Chargers to stay healthy around Justin Herbert And it's not even like that like every team has injuries, but they have injuries of like their best players Every time Every time it's so crazy Patch card Joey Bo said a 99 down and dirty game used Chargers Tyree killed Dolphins Jersey to 199 Printing plate one-of-one buccaneers rookie auto Logan Hall. There we go. That's nice black plate one-of-one books and Drake London a rookie auto playbook or a patch auto book three colors 20 of 49 London Atlanta London patch card to 75 crystal Watson Packers Congrats Danny out golfing for the heck are you dude? Got patch card staffer to 49 Rams got to be West Coast minimum Sunday best patch card staffer Rams That's pretty cool. Emmanuel Sanders auto for the Broncos a 99 Emmanuel Sanders. So Burkhead Dane Sanders Some interesting names the names that we haven't seen in products in a while though It's good stuff And John met you the third on the locker to 25 great hit for the Texans Texans did very well John met you the third Helmet patch glove patch-patch ball. There you go. Yeah, we've all had those guys on our fantasy teams at some point Burkhead and Emmanuel Sanders. All right points random 400 points to everybody here. Good luck Eight five and three points eight times Up top one two three four five six seven eight Packers you go back that'll do it. Thanks again everybody onto the full case


All right guys, so we're going to start off today's cut sectioning sectioning is going to be real simple basically two separate sections Working diagonal forward partings separating the top and the bottom So I go right at the edge of the eyebrow up to the mid crown Clip that away and then I'm going to go into the bottom I'm going to comb that backwards and then I'm going to work a diagonal back line to separate that low crown Occipital bone area with another triangle So just separating that and then I can go in with my clipper and clipper off that entire bottom section So for me, I'm going in with a clipper because I can work quickly And really get that hair removed and it's going to give me a very Similar if not the same result as doing clip scissor over comb So you guys can decide what technique you want to use But I'm going to go through and just quickly work that clipper clippers all the way closed at its shortest point at a Number three guard so I go through I work that off then I'm going to go in and polish that Doing clipper over comb so comb choice for me. This is a ys part comb But any of you guys if you just get a clipper a comb that is as wide as the clipper that tends to work really really well So you can just go through there now I take my trimmer my tea trimmer and I work that around and now we're going to get into the cut with the tri razor I'm going to use the tri razor to sketch out my links and to really create some soft lines throughout the cut And then I'll do some fine-tuning with the scissor as well at the end So our sectioning in the back is going to be starting vertical and then we're going to work Pi shape sections all the way around following the head shape though Not staying stationary. I want to just create some layering in the form of the head shape So just see me working Slightly holding that hair straight out from the head and then working that tri razor through Creating that layered effect nice little disconnect on this haircut But it's nice and soft because of the fact that we're using the razor So the razor is going to create some really nice soft lines in this cut I work my way all the way around the head the same exact way Pi shape sections Or diagonal forward sections if you want to see that and then you can see that we've got our length Now we're going to work our way through the top the way that I'm going to do this is I want to cut it at 90 degrees Or at a rounded kind of shape around the head But with that being said I don't want to elevate it too high over the head at this point I want to build up the way in the center of the head shape So everything's going to kind of come towards my body As I cut it so you'll see following the round of the head Working that razor through nice big strokes with the razor as well the heavier that stroke with the razor the back and forth movement The softer your line is going to be and the more texture you're going to create So this is one of my favorite tools. It's a three-sided cutting tool So you cut a hundred percent on the one side. That's what I'm using right now But you did possibly see me go in and I use the 25% cutting side just to remove a little weight in that fringe area as well So very versatile. It's kind of my Swiss army knife I use it on almost every single haircut that I do along with using a scissor because I don't think one tool fits all but it's a it's a great tool to have in your back pocket literally and Pull it out whenever you need it to create some texture movement remove some weight And you can see the effect that it's giving this haircut here So just continuing through to keep taking those sections bringing the hair over to me Elevation is always your friend when you're trying to remove some weight from a haircut. So You'll see that I'm lifting it slightly as I work through it. I'm not I'm not bringing it down to the ear I'm bringing it up above more that parietal ridge area if you guys are confused on any of the terminology that I'm using in this Video or any of my videos that you watch Let me know in the comments first off But second I do have an FSE digital haircutting system available on shop FSE. It's 49 99 It's got a PDF book that talks about terminology There's eight step-by-step exclusive haircuts for that system and it really walks you through and Tells you guys how to do all the basic haircuts so that you're starting off on the right foot especially You know if you haven't really studied up in a while or you're just getting out of school It's a great tool for you to train yourself or your team or your salon whatever it is I'm gonna go with the matte back scissor now and start creating some soft Edges around that fringe area. So Basically you explain what I did here is I went through and I cut with the tri razor my basic length that I was going for or about the length I was going for now I section off the top in that little triangle kind of formation And I just lighten up that fringe because I want to start to expose her eyes And that's really what I was going for so a little slide cutting through now We go with Paul Mitchell invisible wear memory shaper. I put that in the hair. It's a really nice light hold We'll call it a gel and I just work that through the hair It's gonna create a ton of shine Gives me that hold keeps the cuticle smooth You can see the texture already popping out, but we're gonna do a ton of techniques now guys So this is the Mizetani type Z dual texture scissor also available on shop FSE This is one of my go-to scissors be or texturizing scissors because it has teeth on both blades So there's no standard blade on this and what I love about that is as it cuts into the hair You can see how easy it glides through there's no blade to get in the way a lot of the times when you cut with a Typical texturizing scissor, especially if it's not great quality. You'll get a snag up In that so you just want to make sure that you have a good quality scissor but I'm sliding through it just like a hot knife through butter and Working that texturizing scissor through and just lightening up the shape So I've got my overall shape using the tri razor and now I go in and just remove some weight Elevate the hair point cut into it Create a ton of texture. So before I finish the haircut I want to talk about the color technique that I did to transform this yellow bright yellow hair color into this beautiful Pinky rose tone using the brand new Paul Mitchell the Demi pearl collection Basically what I did was I separated the top and the bottom kind of like I did in the haircut and I paint the entire bottom Section with 7p using 7 volume and I run that roots to ends all the way through then that top you section I go through and I paint just the root 7p and then I paint 9p Through the mid shaft it ends and I kind of work it with my fingers through just to melt That 7p and 9p together which created this beautiful technique You only have to process it between five to 20 minutes I processed it for the full 20 because I wanted the full effect of the tone I wanted to show you guys what this can do, but you can see how beautiful that color turned out All right, so finishing off with a little slide cutting with the texturizing scissor then I'm gonna switch back Go to my standard Matt Beck scissor. This is a five inch scissor I'm gonna do some slide cutting right in the front lift in the fringe up again. This is kind of Your artistic vision So the more texture you want the more you do it if you want to expose the eye a little bit more a little bit Of slide cutting slide cutting is such a great technique to just soften the haircut now I'm gonna go in this is called no thumbs technique Let me know in the comments below if you want me to do a specific video on how to do this But basically you just pinch the scissor you take your thumb out of it and you work your way up and down That's going to just lighten up the shape add a little bit extra texture in there as well But again, let me know if you want to learn that All right, so this is Paul Mitchell invisible wear cloud whip. I love this product because it's so light It's not like a typical wax or anything like that. It's very very light So you're gonna get all the natural textures gonna come out when you put this in the hair And obviously because we cut the hair this way. It's got a lot of nice Natural texture anyways and you guys can see beautiful hair color from Paul Mitchell The Demi, this is the new pearl line I was blown away with how I was able to take bright yellow hair and turn it into this beautiful smoky pearl tone At a level seven and a level nine Let me know what you guys think in the comments. Thanks for watching


Everybody forced here ripping 20 23 boom and drafts Bum and draft baseball sapphire and Gembo three box makes your number seven random teams will randomize right now and rip Good luck everybody four and one five times one two three four and five Sander K down to Jeff W and then five times on the teams One two three four and five Pirates down to angels Be sure to like the stream everybody and Subscribe and follow Do appreciate it? Sander with the Pirates Jeffrey D Orioles Matt F Red Sox Frank seven Frank with the A's Richard H Mets Brian H Giants Gavin with the D backs Dennis Rays Nick K Cubs branded D Dodgers Josh T. Padres Chang S. Cardinals Alex P Yankees Dean with the Rangers Aaron M has the Reds Kevin D Nationals John K Brewers Nick C Braves Michael C Guardians Chad C Phillies Mike K Iraqis Corey H. Bluejays Jeff W. Astros Frank with the Tigers Eric R. Mariners Michael D. Marlins Jeff W. White Sox Lisa with the Twins Brandon M. Royals Jeff W. Angels Here we go y'all let's do this starboard jumbo that's it is true D Mac Wyatt Langford is Considered by pretty much everybody to be the best hitter in this first bowman class He was the fourth overall pick oddly enough Most people think he he's also closer to the majors then because he played for UF in college Probably second best hitter in the draft behind Dylan Cruz, but he's not in draft Hopefully he'll be in moment. Hopefully he'll be able to sign with us. Yeah, hopefully a lot of people think he might be a Penini exclusive From around here Wyatt Langford Lunar Glow Chase Davis Cardinals for fractures of a hollering and Morris All right green paper to 99 you've got angle for the Guardians Yellow Lunar Crater Trey Morgan a 75 Tampa Bay Fractures of Woodward and Mahoney Yeah, you know the Eagles are hurting if they're only minus three against the Buccaneers.  Congrats, buddy future stars red auto was that from over chrome update? Yeah, that's sick, man I hit one of those from a regular top scrum this year actually first one auto Ethan O'Donnell for the Reds Not a red, but you know what I mean still nice hit the reds awesome though reds fire Jones or fractures of Castro match all Not so I think I might I don't I might try to get into it. I might try to get into it No, I don't think it'll be blow it either. I think it's not gonna be blow out, but I I don't know The Bucks, I mean they're obviously not the best right now They're banged up to Cravey refractor is there any booth refractor on what up, man? Bonne. How's it going dude? Got heat magic in about an hour Go magic Fractor auto Colt Emerson draft picks and prospects for Seattle 16 of 99 fractures of Montgomery and Barofa Yeah, well Baker hasn't been playing hot recently, but he's got like Banged up ribs. You got to hurt shoulder now like then they heard it. He heard his ankle, too, didn't he? That dude's a dog by blue paper to 499 Barofa and Blue Jays fractures of Gilbert and Max Anderson Bobby Bobby with and that's who I got Bobby with future stars. Oh, it was just the It wasn't around. I think it might have been numbered. I think it's numbered, but I don't I sold it Aqua Aqua Lunar Crater to 125 Maui Ohuna Giants the fractures of Brooks Lee and the Zanzanatello Yeah, I bet dude the heat drive Celtic fans crazy Have for years of the brawn heat Current heat light blue Coupette for the Rockies They're annoying man. You're like one star and then they just beat everybody Levi Wells and Christian Napchick But that's why hey, that's why culture. That's why Spoe just got that monster deal He's divorced to be final before he signed that deal such a dope I mean He probably he probably was like hey, he's probably hey, I would Hey, I respect it. If you're if you're separating it's it's his decision. Do you already mean like hey? Sionara sparkle anima out is for the blue Jays Fractures of Hunter Owen and Marcus Brown. He's his own person made that decision Goya Carson Rock of Forte I'm sure she I'm sure she knew None of what if she's worth more than him though, I want some hers He's like wait wait. Don't do it yet. Oh my god. I'm met stolen McLean. Let's rethink. Wait. I don't make this one Oh, I need to Make he insulted bond and it's a rich person divorce. Yeah, I'll be okay All right sapphire now not the best box of jumbo. It's all right though. We hit that Emerson auto foot of snow. Nice Sounds not fun Good lord, dude, you know, that's what I was fully healthy, but some guys a little more banged up than others You know where there's not a foot of snow Right outside the doors here. It's a beautiful 75 degrees Yeah, it was like it was humid today. Yeah, it was uncomfortable today. Yeah, not that cold though So I'll made a getting nice tomorrow. I think gold the 50 J. Bashir's Padres nice card on the sapphire Myer and Acunia Brian Acunia Tai Pete Rhett louder bit Tonsi and lead better as a coupe. Wow. We've got a Johnny Farmelo gold auto for Seattle 42 of 50 awesome Farmelo Aaron is killing it Cunningham and Jet Williams Brando Maya yellow to 75 young kill Fernandez Rockies Kade Morris and Jason Savakul. Yeah, not as many as much time here. This is the time you're to visit It's like February January time you're to come to Florida. Oh, yeah, don't come here between March and October I guess you're going to be something. Yeah, like yeah, if you're doing something outside spring ain't so bad But this is the time you're to be here Ricky Bradfield first Black number to ten Red Sox Connelly early Connelly early five out of ten Mahoney and Oh, Halloran four times toe It was like actively snowy Samuel bossaio orange to 25 of Hunter Haas for the raise So there's a lot of number cards in this box 25 raise hunter Haas Kravi and Muth Santos Floyd Barofin and Woodward. Wow, dude I wish we would get a foot of snow here one time. I just want to see how everybody would react People wouldn't know what to do with themselves. We got a red We got a red this box is how many number of cards we had in this box. It feels like seven It's like three on average, but sometimes you get more so I guess we got more here We got a red and it is an auto jack Hurley bonus auto to Holy cow five of five Arizona Congrats to the diamond backs that would be Gavin get that mad for you Gavin Let's go Gavin. We've got a napstick and a coleslaw covering. Yeah, I would love to see it I would love to see it state of emergency in the state of Florida Yeah, we'd be so we would be shot down for months Hell, yeah Not only in sports cards though. We lit That's no boost still yeah, we're reinforced got Nathan Denver for the A's yellow out of 75 Raidenburg for the Marlins McDaniel and Gonzalez What do you think about the Washington coach going to a Bama the bow or whatever his name is I'm a coach now It's yet as Jaworsky young and Haas. I mean he's kind of earned it. He turned Washington around big time It's very interesting Well, I think their first few options were like nope You don't wanna I don't know why they thought who's Sarkisians at Texas why they thought he would go Texas is more ideal of a job to me right now than Bama is what they're in the SEC now What's gonna have a man yours is going back?  I think so really making dude. He's making bank. I know, but I mean you're coming from bank I don't know man. Yeah, I don't know camfisher first I just think you want to play green auto now and it is Tommy Troy D backs you serious Gavin 54 of 99 Zona with a green auto now big one, too There we go bias and Bashir's Gbaks killed it got Roger Karyas gold Maui Ahuna Giants Maui Ahuna 47 of 50 Lucas Gordon Alex Clemmie. Yeah, cuz they wanted the Oregon coach and he was like nah Sark was like nah Adrienne Santana CJ Kfis Camilo Diaz a Luke Schlegger. I wouldn't camp out of the shop. I just drive home As long as the roads are Long as roads are plowed. I'm out of here, dude cold care egg yellowed a 75 Dylan had Padres 2375 Not afraid to drive in just a little bit of snow the roads are if the roads are it's Rosa plow. Yeah, you're good We're good. I'll go home with them sleds seven or a dog pulled sleds.  Oh Lot of requests only day shifts down on the drive home at night. Yeah, throwing ice everywhere Skeens Cole Miller Toran and Eldridge Sapphire's hitting tonight y'all He sold out there should be more for tomorrow night There's fanatics live There's a fanatics live one of one promo going this weekend hit a one-on-one you get five hundred dollars in break credit And then if you're in chat and someone hits a one-of-one, you'll have a chance at five hundred dollars break credit by being in chat That's the deal Pretty good. Yeah, pretty good. Yeah, that's strong So we pull a one-of-one whoever hit it gets five hundred bucks in break credit up for the next live And then we'll give away five hundred dollars to chat to someone in chat So one one grand per one of one so Could be cool Ohuna angle Excuse me Vredenburg Dylan head Fernandez Trey Morgan golden Huna and Bashir's an orange Hunter Haas black Con of the early Autos of McLean O'Donnell and Emerson insert auto out of 99 for Seattle Yeah, Lincoln walk, that's true. That's a long walk green the 99. Yeah, he said it close enough Green the 99 Tommy Choi for the D-backs Red auto Jack Hurley for the D-backs and a gold auto Johnny Farmello for the Mariners Holy hell two sapphire boxes Produced big time that'll do it everybody. Thank you again. We are on to the sapphire five boxers now


After a few weeks of studying thousands of questions done, I finally took my internal medicine boards. Here's how they went. Let's break it down. Hey friends, welcome back to channel. In case you're new here, this is going to be the finale of my internal medicine board series. If you haven't watched the first two, I essentially am studying or I was studying for my internal medicine boards as an exam that I have to do to get my licensing after finishing residency. It was a pain. So today we'll talk about the overall studying that I did after the second episode and essentially all the questions that I was able to do plus the ones that I wasn't. Talk about exam day, what well, what surprised me and frankly what I would have done differently. And then finally we will get into final tips on what type of things that you should know, especially if you're studying for your internal medicine boards for really any board exam that you need to do for your career. Let's review a little bit of the context at this point. So in series number one or episode number one, I talked about this entire plan that I wanted to do of my studying and all the questions that I wanted to cover. And I was frankly just very over ambitious. I didn't really account for going on a two-week vacation in Europe with my wife, starting my new job, moving to a new city and lots of other kind of life obligations in the midst of studying. And as I've said in past episodes, and I'll mention more clearly at the end of today's episode, is that I definitely would have started studying much sooner than I did, but overall it was just fine. First let's go ahead and get started with the review schedule that I had intended for myself. I just want to go over the Excel sheet that I've shared in the past two episodes and this will be a free resource that I'll link down below that you guys can sign up for within the MedVault. That's absolutely free. But essentially what I did is I wanted to use two resources, which I'll talk about later in this video, being a big step in your world and I'll tell you which ones I enjoyed more for yourself, but I intended to try to use both of them. And so essentially I created a spreadsheet that went over how many questions each of them had, as well as how many I had roughly completed, and then talking about roughly how many questions were left to do. Doing that I was able to then plug in my test date and also use Excel to then keep track of the current day, and then it was able to tell me how many days I had left till exam. So for example, if I said the test was, let's just say it's going to be a month from now, then it basically populates the rest of it, where it knows how many questions I have remaining, and then tells me roughly how many days. Now, everyone procrastinates, including myself. And so I included both a buffer for how many days I wanted to study, as well as how many questions I wanted to do. So you guys can see I kind of give my percentage of a 20%. It's just glided off the whim. But basically means that out of 32 days, I'll probably study 25. That gave me a question roughly in this example of 36. And then simply also, if there's going to be days that I study, I may not do all the questions that I intended to. So I also gave myself a buffer on just the amount of questions. Again, pick 20 to 25 in this example. So now instead of doing 36 questions in this example, I set myself to do 46. Now, when I was doing this, usually my numbers came out to anywhere from 80 to 120 questions. Keep in mind, I hadn't started my job at that point when I had made this. And so the intention was to do more questions up front. That way when I got closer to test day, I was ideally doing more questions and already ahead of the pace, even if I studied less frequently than I wanted. But I intended to study daily. Now, lastly, I kind of created a schedule between the early parts of July and all the way up to my test date, where I was going on vacation with my wife for two weeks in Europe, which was amazing. But I intended on doing some questions during then. And then I wanted to kind of ramp up on two weeks of vacation that I had before starting my new job. And then finally starting that first week of work, I wanted to ramp back down. And the goal should be to finish all of those questions. And as you watched the first two episodes, you saw the questions that I had set up myself to do and where I was after about a week and a half or a month and a half, excuse me, of doing this. In addition, I was also able to say how many questions were left in each resource. So how many you will have questions of cards that were left because each day was just assigned a cardiology day, a dermatology day. And then I went forward going to the next slide. This was going to be my review plan. So essentially, I kind of copied this over and adjusted as needed. But then I also said which topics I'd covered on which days based off of the amount of questions in that previous example that I showed. If there were going to be 40 questions that I did a day and I had to do 120 questions, that means it was going to take me three days to do cardiology. And that was kind of the plan. Now at the very end, I put what I actually did during those first few months. And the big thing I realized is trying to do U-World and any type of studying when you're on vacation is a big no-no because it just doesn't happen. I literally did like 10, 20 questions on the entire two week vacation that I was on. So I was severely far behind, but I also had purposely under planned. And so I only wanted to do 20 times two weeks, so roughly about 140 questions or 200 questions. And so I wasn't that far behind in terms of questions there. But that did make me, as you guys probably saw in episode two, that I wanted to do about 160 questions instead of 120. Unfortunately, I realized I tried to do 160 questions even when you're on your best behavior is not really that possible. So bottom line where we get to is I was not able to finish this entire review schedule. And what I'll show in a second, it really didn't matter. I wasn't able to get all of U-World done. My goal was to be able to get through all of MixApp and all of U-World and then be able to do the missed questions from both resources. So I kind of had a final review. But ultimately I finished all of MixApp and all except 300 questions in U-World. And I did completely fine, which I'll share about in a second. So as we saw in episode number two, I was already very behind in my studying because frankly, I only studied like one day on my vacation. So that was like 140 questions that I had to catch up on. Number two, I didn't realize how hard it was going to be to do 120 questions and much less 160, which is what my updated count came back to after my inefficient vacation studying. And that was very hard to stick to. So eventually I had to make a decision is I knew that either I wasn't going to be able to do all of the U-World questions or I wasn't able to do what I wanted to is to come back to all the questions a second time. I ultimately chose that I want to do as many U-World questions as possible and before go doing my mistakes because I had a strategy in the background of how to go for it. So long story short, I finished all my mixed up questions. Good there. I went through my U-World questions with the goal of trying to do 120, really 160 every single day to be able to finish U-World and ultimately wasn't able to do it. I've had left about 300 questions before test day and I didn't really have a time to go back through all my mistakes. And so then I essentially made a different variation of what I wanted to do, which is I started using Anki while I was doing U-World to capture all the mistakes that I was making. And if there was a question that I missed because I just didn't know something or I blatantly made a mistake that I probably would have made on test day, quickly made an Anki card about that fact and just moved on. And the goal was is to be able to do that Anki card a day or two before the actual day of the exam and do as many of them as possible, which was very, very helpful. So although I wasn't able to do my second review of the mix up and U-World questions I missed and I wasn't able to do all the U-World questions, I still was able to do like 900 plus the 1200 mix up questions, which comes out to about roughly about 2000, 2100. And frankly, it was more, more than enough because now let's get into the actual test day. So to go over the structure of test day, that this is the part that scared me the most is most people said that the test would be anywhere from nine to 10 hours, which felt extraordinarily long, particularly for the amount of questions that you were given. You have four blocks of 60 questions each that you're given two hours for during each block. So two hours for 60 questions, take a break as long as you need it, and then go to the next one. You had a total of about I want to say 100 minutes for the entirety of the day of blocks. Most of my breaks would be anywhere from like 10 to 15 minutes and then I had a 20 minute lunch break. The thing was, is when I started doing the questions, compared to both mix up and U-World, the questions were significantly shorter. They're also significantly easier compared to both mix up and U-World. Maybe it's because U-World gets a little bit more tricky into the details and mix up does too. More often than not the answer choices were different enough that as long as you kind of knew what they were trying to get to, you would be able to answer it. Now, if you weren't sure about the diagnosis or what they're trying to get to, then sure the answers looked very similar. But if I had an inkling of like this is the diagnosis, none of these would make sense for that diagnosis. This is the answer. It was a lot easier to do kind of process of elimination. And so with that being said, two hours for 60 questions, frankly felt like a lot extra time. Most of the blocks I was, frankly finishing with about 50 to 60 minutes left. And that's with doing all the questions, reviewing all of my mark questions, and then doing another pass through of all the questions really quickly to say like, I actually overall feel pretty comfortable with this. And that means that I finished the test significantly faster. I got there at the testing center at around 730. My test started at eight o'clock and I was out of there about like 132 o'clock tops. Most people from the test proctors say that they spend all the way from five to six PM. Did not want to do that by no means. And I felt comfortable walking out of the test that I likely pass. Maybe there are some questions that I missed on, but it wasn't frankly a big deal. And so that brings me into some of the final tips to kind of close out the series. Number one is just doing as many questions as possible and having a system of collecting those mistakes is probably more important than trying to do mix-up, view world, et cetera. You're going to learn what topics you keep missing on. When I studied those Anki cards that I had missed and those are basically a collection of all the ULT questions that I missed, it was like three to 400 Anki cards that I had made. And I did them the night before. A lot of those questions showed up on the test and I felt so much more confident because I had made the mistake. I've reviewed the Anki card and then I saw it again. So that part made the process much easier. So instead of trying to get through all of mix-up and all of ULT, more importantly, I think it's much more important to collect your mistakes and have a system ideally where you're doing it, like on a weekly basis or a monthly basis, depending on how long you're studying, but definitely the week before your test where you're reviewing those mistakes, you're going to be able to go to test day much more confidently. Tip number two is to don't let the test stress you out. I think the timing, the amount of questions, the people on Reddit that are freaking out about this, definitely add a level of anxiety that doesn't need to be there. Once you see what I mean in terms of the questions, majority of the people who take their words actually pass in their first time. As long as you're taking it seriously, you're doing your set of questions, you're practicing your repetitions, that's pretty much really all you need. So don't let excess anxiety start to build up. I know it's definitely easier said than done, but take from my example all the questions that I plan to do. This complicated study plan that I had created for myself and overall wasn't needed because even though I underperformed on the study plan, I felt like I was much more prepared on the actual exam. Tip number three, ULT or mix-up. Now my answer to this is really going to depend on what your institution gives to you for free. If you get one of those for free, that would be the resource that I recommend. Frankly, if I had done mix-up, then I probably would have just done just fine. If I had done just ULT, I would have done just fine. They're both really good resources. I feel like ULT is a little trickier than the actual board exam, and so then when I took the board exam, I felt a little bit more calm. And so personally, I found that mix-up had questions that were really well aligned to the board exam or completely out of left field that weren't tested, and you had to just be able to be prepared for both. And so do I think that you need both coupings? Frankly, no. If you have an issue with test-taking, then maybe it makes sense to spend extra money to take for the other board exam, but definitely finish first one before you buy the other one, which is what I did. But I had my institution pay for mix-up, so that's what I used first. And then I went ahead and bought ULT just to kind of see if I was ready. And for reference, I was usually getting anywhere from a 60 to a 70% on my 60 set of questions. And overall, my percentile was like in the 60, the 70%ile of all the test-takers using ULT. Tip number three is definitely start your study schedule a lot earlier. If you are somebody who is going to need that extra bit of help, whether it be through another QBank or using a text like the board basics, you want to be able to know that much sooner. And the best way to do it is to really get into those questions as quickly as possible. So if you're in residency, I recommend definitely for the block that you're on, that you're trying to do as many mix-up or ULT questions, depending on which block or QBank you have access to during that block. Even if you don't get through all of them, just doing them will help you get through tons of questions, help you do better on the rotation, but then also help you prepare for your board exam with that extra pressure. Now, as you're getting close, I would at least recommend starting your board setting two months before. It doesn't have to be full force the first four weeks, but at least you're just doing questions, even if it's like a block every other day. And then your month before the test, really amping it up to where you're doing, you know, two blocks, ideally of 60 questions each. And as you're getting closer to your test day, then I would definitely recommend doing two blocks within a short period of time together so you can work on that stamina. I felt very well-prepared because of lack of preparedness. I had forced myself to do 60 questions. Another 60 questions just to do the amount of questions. So my stamina was not a problem, but if you're somebody who struggles with test anxiety, or somebody who struggles with focus later on in the test, then definitely a two to three month period would be much more appropriate for you. So I know I probably missed things on the series of any questions you have, drop them in the comment section down below or message me on Instagram at the MD journey. I'm more than happy to help. But one of the questions you're probably asking is like, what is your score? Like, how well did you do? Unfortunately, although it's an electronic exam, you don't get your score back until like three to four months. So I'm still waiting, but again, I feel pretty confident that the past is going to happen. If it didn't, I'll let you guys know. If it didn't, I'll also let you guys know. But as always, my friends, hopefully you guys enjoyed today's episode. Make sure you like and subscribe if you're watching this on YouTube. I listen to the podcast because yes, we do have a podcast on the TMJ show. Make sure you hit that follow or subscribe on your favorite listening platform as well as leaving an honest review on iTunes. But as always, my friends, thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I was a little up to you guys on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.


Arsenic is not just considered a carcinogen, but a so-called non-threshold carcinogen, meaning that there really isn't a quote-unquote safe level of exposure. Any dose, no matter how small, may carry some cancer risk. So it may be reasonable to use the conservative allara approach, reducing exposure as low as reasonably achievable. I have a low bar for recommending people avoid foods that aren't particularly health-promoting in the first place, like when that acrylamide story broke with a chemical found concentrated in french fries and potato chips. I was like, look, we're not sure how bad this acrylamide stuff is, but we're talking about french fries and potato chips, which are not healthy anyway. So I had no problem provisionally bumping them from my list of yellow light foods into my red light list, from minimized consumption to ideally avoid on a day-to-day basis. One could apply the same logic here. Young food made out of brown rice syrup, rice milk, and white rice are not just processed foods, but arsenic-contaminated processed foods, so may belong down here. But something like whole brown rice is more difficult because there are pros to help outweigh the cons. The rice industry argues that the many health benefits of rice consumption outweigh any potential risk. That's the same thing you hear coming out of Japan about the arsenic-contaminated seaweed hajiki. Yeah, the cancer risk posed by hajiki consumption exceeds acceptable cancer risk levels by like an order of magnitude, but the Japanese Ministry of Health stresses the potential health benefits, lots of fiber and minerals, as if hajiki was the only weed in the sea. Why not choose any of the other seaweeds and get all the benefits without the arsenic? And the same thing here. The many health benefits of rice consumption outweigh any potential risk as if brown rice was the only whole grain on the planet. Can't you get the whole grain benefits without the risks by eating oatmeal instead, or barley, or quinoa? Or is there some unique benefit to rice such that we really should try to keep brown rice in our diet? Consumer Reports recommended moving rice to like here, not necessarily avoid it completely, but moderate one's intake. The rice industry criticized Consumer Reports for warning people about the arsenic levels in rice, saying there's a body of scientific evidence that establishes the nutritional benefits of rice consumption. And so, any assessment of the arsenic levels in rice that fails to take this information to account is inherently flawed and very misleading. They cite two pieces of evidence. Rice-consuming cultures tend to be healthier, but is that because or despite their white rice consumption? What about how rice-eating Americans tend to be healthier? Yeah, but rice-eaters also tend to eat significantly less saturated fat. So again, how do we know it's because or despite the white rice? They could have cited this study showing brown rice intake to or more servings a week was associated with a lower risk of diabetes. But presumably the reason they didn't is because white rice intake is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, and white rice represents 95% of the U.S. rice industry. Switching out a third of a serving of white rice a day for brown rice might lower diabetes risk 16%, but switching out that same white rice for whole grains in general like oats or barley might work even better. So other grains have like 10 times less arsenic and are associated with even lower disease risk. Though wonder the rice industry didn't cite this study. They do cite the Adventist studies, though, and some in vitro data. For example, in a petri dish there are rice phytonutrients that can inhibit the growth of colon cancer cells at greater and greater doses, while apparently leaving normal colon cells alone, that's exciting. And indeed those who happen to eat those phytonutrients in the form of brown rice once a week or more between colonoscopies had a 40% lower risk of developing polyps. The consumption of green leafy vegetables, dried fruit and beans were also associated with lower polyp incidence. But the only reason we care about the development of polyps is that polyps can turn into cancer. But there had never been any studies on brown rice consumption in cancer until now, which we'll cover next.


So, whenever we look for life in the universe, or places where life might be, we look for water. But why water? Why are we obsessed with looking for water on Mars, water on the moons of Saturn and Jupiter, water on extra solar planets? What's special about this quite simple molecule? Well, one of the reasons we look for water is we know it's quite common in the universe. It's one of the most common molecules in space. We see it in star-forming regions. You can see water in the Orion Nebula, for example. There's a nice statistic, actually, which says that the Orion Nebula, the nearest big star-forming region to us, produces enough water to fill all of Earth's oceans every 24 minutes. So, it's quite a lot of water. So, water's common, and we know it's essential for life. But it's useful mostly because it's an effective solvent. In other words, you could dissolve things in it. Things like salt, things like acids and alkalis. Well, and they're very important because if we're talking about life, reactions between acids and alkalis and salts are all incredibly important in the chemistry of life. Yeah, and life as we've ever encountered. Life happens when complex chemistry happens and complex chemistry happens when you can mix things up a bit. You need a solvent for that. So, then the question is, why is water so good at being a solvent? Well, it's a polar molecule. So, water's H2O. So, it's an oxygen and two hydrogens sticking off it. And so, it's a pointy molecule as well. But all the electrons spend more of their time around the oxygen end of that triangular point. So, and that's also quite small, which means that it can react well with things in the water and help them to break apart. Yeah, and this polarity allows it to form loose bonds with other water molecules and with all sorts of things. So, that means it can dissolve things. But it also means that the water's liquid across a wide range of temperatures. We don't really think about it, but this glass, the water in this glass would stay liquid right the way down to zero degrees centigrade and all the way up to a hundred. And that's actually a much wider range than other molecules. If we thought about a different solvent like ammonia, we wanted to consider whether there could be ammonia-based life, ammonia aliens out there, or they'd be stuck to just living within a range of a few tens of degrees. Yeah, it's about 40 degrees. Right, so they'd be much more sensitive to the environment than us superb water-based life creatures. And another example would be methane, which is only liquid for about 20 degrees. So, it's quite a short range. And water's also really good. If you happen to live in water and you have chemistry that occurs in water, you can put a lot of energy into water and the temperature doesn't change much. It's a very high heat capacity. So, that makes it very hospitable to the things happening. It also means that we can sweat as water-based creatures, and it takes a lot of energy away when we do so. But actually, water has another strange property that's almost unique to it. And that's to do with what happens when it freezes. We know this because when we make ice, and I drop my ice into my gin and tonic, the ice floats. And in fact, what's happening is that the density of ice, the solid sort of water, is less than the density of the liquid water. So, ice floats on the top. And that sounds like an obscure thing to be bothered by. But think about what happens if an ocean starts freezing, if a planet becomes slightly colder for some reason. What happens is it freezes from the top because as the ice forms, it floats to the top. And that creates a shell that protects the rest of the ocean. And we see this happening on Jupiter's moons of Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, each of which are icy moons with a liquid ocean deep inside. And that ocean is only there because the ice has floated up to the surface. Almost any other compound would have happened the other way around. The ocean is protected by the mantle of ice. That's right. So water is pretty common in the universe. It has all these amazing properties that make it particularly good at sustaining life. I mean, that's pretty amazing. So water is sufficient for life. You would need more than water. We have discussed the fact that you need other things in water as well. But it may be uniquely qualified to support life. And that's why we look for it when we look for life in the universe.