Okay, this is working. I hope. Cool. Hi. I'm Lauren. I am the faculty at NYU in a program called ITP, which stands for Interactive Telecommunications Program and this sort of arcane and meaningless name basically describes a program where we like to think that we are exploring the recently possible. So it looks like kind of like this. It's about 200 students on the floor, grad students, and they make things like this. And I started feeling a little self-conscious that there wasn't enough data viz in my presentation, so I included the obligatory kinetic penis wall that we have on the floor here. It was made by Peckysu for all your everyday data visualization needs. It's a great project. But what I want to talk about today is P5JS. And so P5 is a project that I've been involved in for about the past two years. And I think, you know, when you see these tools that people make or these libraries, I think there's different reasons for doing them. And sometimes it's like there's something you think just needs to exist and it doesn't and it would make your life and everyone else's lives so much better if it did. And so you just go and make it. Or maybe you're just awesome at something and you've made something awesome and you want to like share that wealth and that cool thing with everyone else. You make a toolkit. Or maybe it's some part of your ongoing research. And these are all great reasons to make toolkits, but it's not really the reason that I got involved in this project. And in fact, I didn't really ever mean to do this. I guess at some point I did maybe. But anyway, so what happened was, you know, I was a couple years out of grad school and I was working at Tulsa Limited, as Irene mentioned, and I was making some of my own artwork and I was using a lot of open source tools. And it sort of occurred to me that I would kind of like to contribute and give back a little bit and work on some of these tools. So I started trying to do that, you know, tried to join some mailing lists or figure out how I could help. And the response I got a lot of times was kind of like, it's too complicated to explain to you or it's too hard, you know, maybe just like answer some questions on the forum, which is a great thing to do, but it's not what I wanted to do at that time. So I kind of gave up. I thought, you know, if I'm really going to get involved here, it seems like I'm going to have to really elbow my way in. And that's not really my personality. I'm not. I don't really like force myself into things like that, at least not social situations. So I kind of let it go. And then a couple months later, I met Casey, our advantage to Casey reset a conference. And for those of you that don't know, Casey, along with Ben or Fry, created this tool called Processing, which they started working on in 2001. And it's a Java based toolkit whose goal is to make coding accessible to artists and designers and educators and beginners, and also to start to introduce visual literacy to programmers. So this tool has been widely successful and, you know, it's been going on now for nearly 15 years, and is taught in academic programs in terms of art and design, but also even in some engineering programs today. And so it looks kind of like this. So you're dealing with Java, but you're not immediately thrown into a eclipse in figuring all that out. And you can really quickly get something cool onto the screen without having to jump through all the hoops that you normally would with Java just to get, like, a wreck to show up. So this was exciting and it was approachable. And so anyway, I was talking to Casey, and I was kind of mentioning my interest in getting involved somehow, but, you know, finding it difficult. And I was saying, you know, I wish there was something I could do about this lack of diversity in these communities. But I don't feel like I want to go start a woman coding meetup, although they're great. It didn't feel like my thing. And I didn't feel like I wanted to, you know, I didn't feel like I was going to be an activist or an advocate or someone that's, you know, speaking about these things.  And he said, well, maybe you don't need a big plan or a scheme. Maybe if the opportunity arises, you just take it to, you know, do something, contribute something. And you can just be one more woman that's involved and, you know, go from there. So I thought, okay, yeah, if the opportunity arises. And so of course, it did a few days later when he wrote me and said, so you want to work on processing? And I couldn't really say no at that moment. So, so what we decided is that I would be a processing fellow, which meant for three months, I would work on something related to the project. And at that time, I was really excited about JavaScript, because I had like just learned how to, you know, write my first JavaScript program. And so for some reason, the processing foundation thought I would be like the perfect person to reimagine processing for the web. And it was not meant to be a huge project.  So this is cool. This was it. I finally had my chance. I was going to do something. And so I quickly got started spending the next three months doing absolutely nothing. Because I didn't know where to start. And I was scared. And I, you know, I barely knew JavaScript. I didn't really know processing that well even. And I didn't know how to think about making a tool or a library or how to bring two different languages together. And so I mostly spent that time just sending emails explaining that I needed more time and making excuses. And I think, finally, Casey said the same thing, you know, you don't need a whole plan. Why don't you just try and do something and do it by next week, if you can. And so I did. And as soon as I just got down to it and stopped being so scared thinking about, you know, the size of this imagined task, I found it was pretty easy. Actually, if you don't know very much about JavaScript, it's not too hard to write some functions because you're not thinking about, you know, how to make it perform well or documented or fit together or be extensible. So I just started implementing some of these first processing functions, like setting the background, drawing an image to the screen, setting the size of the, of the canvas. And so this was exciting. And it was kind of fun. And it was an experiment. And then I linked up with Evelyn Eastman. And the two of us would, you know, sit around and drink champagne and work on this tool. And she, we were both going to teach a class at RISD, intro programming. And so she said, why don't we use this tool? And I thought, what could go wrong with that? So it was very in progress. You know, this was like the alpha, alpha, alpha. And we didn't, you know, we just kind of went in there and wrote on the whiteboard, okay, install Sublime, go here. And we didn't have all these things like books to teach with or online materials or forums or documentation or a working library. But I think that they understood the kind of spirit of it. And so, you know, our, this was our syllabus or similar to our syllabus. And we always included this disclaimer slash invitation, which I don't know if anyone felt like it was a very cool invitation. But it basically said, like, this might not work. Have fun. But get used to it. And once you get used to it, it'll be even more fun. But I think that they understood the spirit that it was an experiment and that it was exploratory and their work that the students made with it really captured that. They really made things that showed that they were just as fearless, that they were okay with things not working, that they were willing to take risks. And this was exciting. And so, at the end of that semester, we realized that it was, it was becoming maybe more than just a three month experiment. And that maybe we could take this further. And we got some great help from some of the engineers at Boku, which is awesome. And one moment I remember, you know, we spent a couple days there just working with people. And we sat down with Ben Alman, and he offered to do a code review for us. And I think if I knew then, what I knew know now, I would have been like mortified to show this code. But I didn't. So I was like, Oh, here it is. And, and he looked it over very seriously. And then came back and said, So you might not want to put all the source code for your library into one file. You might want to develop some guidelines around spacing and, you know, equal signs, etc.  I learned about grunt. And we started kind of this stuff forward from taking this from a prototype or a proof of concept to something that could, you know, be a little bit more. And the whole time we're kind of like, What are we getting into here? You know, it wasn't ever like, Okay, we're going for this. We're doing this. We started getting some support from IDP. Dan Shipman was very excited about it. He's another one of the professors there. And we got some students working with us last summer through Google Summer of Code. So this is Sam Levine working on the IDE. This is Scott Garner who worked on some of the intro materials that I'll show in a moment. And Jason Siegel, who has done a lot with the sound. And we would have these meetups at IDP every two weeks. And basically a group of people would assemble and then like look at me as if I had some idea what was going on. And I would pretend like I did. And it was terrifying. And, you know, I kept doing this and then it started to get less terrifying and really cool. And now we have a group of about 20 people that get together every couple of weeks and are kind of like working independently on this. So that's kind of the, that's the origin. I think the cool thing was that, you know, we're all learning together and we're making together. And nobody in this room was a pro, but we were okay kind of collectively getting on and saying we're going to try to figure it out. And IDP was on that mission also. So what is P5? I guess I wanted to show. So we launched it. We made this kind of really goofy thing and I just thought I would show a little bit of it. Hopefully it's not too soon. Hi, I'm Lauren. And today I'm excited to introduce P5.js. P5 is a library that takes the core ideas of processing and brings them to the web. So you can do everything you've done with processing, but do it in JavaScript and some new stuff too. All the examples you see here were made with P5 and at the end you'll be able to see how they work. Here to show you some specifics is Dan Schiffman. Hi, thanks Lauren. Thanks for having me. My name is Dan and I'm really thrilled to be here to talk about some of the features of P5.js with you. So what is this P5 thing anyway? And what are the things you might do with it? Well, one of the core features of P5.js is drawing shapes. If you use processing before, it's really just the same. You might draw a circle or a square, a triangle or a beautiful flower. Flowers are one of my favorite things to draw. But let's put the flower aside and let's go back to that circle. This nice round circle. How did this circle appear here? A line of code. This line of code. This line of code made this circle appear and this is the thing you'll need to learn to syntax this way of writing code if you want to draw and design your own shapes. But the thing is this is real time software. This is happening right now. This circle can be interactive. You could click on it and it'll change color. Go ahead, click on it. Watch it change color. This is the code that made that happen. But here's the thing. This is the thing I'm the most excited about in terms of P5. We are here. I'm here in this web browser. I'm not really here, but you know what I mean, right? So the web. It's a powerful medium of communication and there's all sorts of things you can do on the web. All the things you can do with the web, you can do with P5. So we can start adding HTML elements to interact with, like a slider. We can put a slider here. You can slide it back and forth and you can change this circle's color. How did this slider appear? A line of code. Create slider. I just really, really love this line of code. I think we'll stop there. So one of the lessons I learned is if you want to do a project like this, it really helps to have someone that's very excited on your team. So that's great. So anyway, that's how we introduced it. And the idea is that you can use the tools you're familiar with. So you could use your favorite code editor and your favorite browser and just start making stuff in kind of immediately. And if you're coming from processing, it's very easy to port one to the other. So the language is very similar, although it diverges where necessary. And, you know, we're starting with the same drawing metaphor. And so this is an illustration by my friend Tayun Choi, who's making the drawings for the upcoming Getting Started with the P5.js book. So this is describing the Create Canvas function, which is kind of your starting place. And the idea is that it's not just the canvas. So there's, it's bringing together JavaScript and HTML, Vive and CSS and trying to make it so that you don't have to learn everything about this whole stack when you get started. You can just start playing and then you can go deeper into all of those as you need or as you want. And so we spent a long time working a lot on the documentation. So trying to make something that's kind of interactive and self-explanatory, so that you can start playing immediately and see how it works. And then also making a lot of examples that work just right in the page. And you can, you know, play with these things and update and see your changes happen without having to download everything and set it all up yourself. And then if you're kind of interested in it, then you can grab that code and drop it into your browser. So trying to make it so that you don't have to wade through Stack Overflow or some very complicated reference or documentation. And then there are new things we had to deal with. So, you know, asynchronousity and callbacks. And so, you know, there's now a method like loadJSON from processing has the ability to take a callback and to deal with that data. But then we also have other things like there's kind of two options. You can use this preload function that's kind of like a promises solution that you can first just call loadJSON like you're used to and then use the data later on in your setup and draw functions. We felt like touch should just work out of the box because it's so easy to get it onto mobile and it's one of the things we're excited about. And we are making a lot of examples and really excited about the possibilities of, you know, working with WebSockets and connecting with a node server and having networked experiences. So this is a thing that's not This is a project by Coven Verdi where it's an interactive soundscape and you play with it on your phone and then it aggregates everyone's interactions into this digital mural. And then the other thing is it should work well with other libraries. So this is a face tracker library. And you can see you can integrate it right in. And this is kind of like a basic mode. So you just start writing and everything is appended into the global namespace. But then if you want to get a little bit cleaner about it, you can wrap it up into what we call instance mode so that all the variables are wrapped up in one namespace and it plays even nicer with other libraries. And then we're building some libraries of our own. So once I have to do with manipulating the DOM or playing the sound and we're adding so many ones this summer as well. Okay, so I just wanted to try and do a quick live demo because I thought that would be like the most potentially disastrous thing I could do. So I'm going to flip back and forth. I hope that's okay. One of my scenes told me it gives her a headache when I flip, but I'm under a time crunch. So I apologize for the migraines. Okay, so this is what you would do if you're making P5. I've got a bunch of things linked in here, but you know, you link in the library. Here's my JavaScript file. And the basic metaphor with processing in with P5 is that you have this setup and draw. Things in setup happen once in the things and draw loop over and over. And so it's procedural. It's not a scene graph model. So you can it works really well for drawing programs and things like that. So that's what I'm going to do today. So I'm just going to make a little canvas. And I'm going to just draw something based on my mouse position. Hopefully that works. Okay, cool. So we've got that. I could make it look a little bit nicer. Switching the color mode. I'll set the fill color to kind of loop around. And then maybe I'll map the size instead of just 50 here to the mouse. Why so? Okay, so now I've got something that looks a little bit prettier. So that's kind of your basic, you know, Hello World program with P5. And then you could get a little bit more into it. So maybe I'll add in like audio input equals new P5. And then let's see, we'll just draw this to and then here instead of mapping mouse Y, I'll map the mic level. I'll also do the Y position. So the mic kind of goes from like zero to one, but I'm just going to make sure we get all the way there. Okay, so if I did that right. Okay, so that's fun. Okay, so then let's add the webcam. So we capture and we'll just grab the video so you don't hear the echo back. And I'll set the size to be the same as the canvas. And I'll set the position 00. I'll make sure this one's at 00. And okay, so now we should have my face in there. Okay, that's cool. But it'd be cooler if I could draw with my nose. So I'll add a tracker in there. So this is from another library that's based on Jason Sorai's face tracker research. And it's pretty easy to use and pretty cool. So I just pass in basically the capture element into this tracker and I initiate it with a model. And then here I could get the position. So if you look at this library, it, you can see there's actually like numbers for all these positions on the face. So I'm going to go with 62, which would be my nose. So something like and then here, we'll keep the audio size mapping. But here, instead of this X and Y, I could say something like, you know, get the 62 point and get the X and Y position. Okay, let's see. Okay. Now I feel like I should pass out, but I'll just keep going. Alright, so that's a show me and there's a whole lot more that you can do. And it's it's very fun. And there's lots of cool things. So I just wanted to share really quickly some of the work that other people are making. So I just, I wish I could show you these on the browser because there's something exciting about seeing that but I just made a video so I don't have to worry about it all so much. So just starting out, this is some student work. So this is from our first RISD class. And so these students have been programming basically, you know, one to maybe three weeks. And so they're exploring, you know, transformations, working with different media. There's artists and designers in the class and architects and you can see them each kind of bringing their own excitement to it. This is a piece by Kevin Verdi where he searches Instagram. It's a bot searches Instagram finds sunsets, uses P5 to pixel sort it and then post these prints online. This is by Mark Abbey playing with emoji. This is a piece by Kate Massoud that was trying to make a more interactive way for people to explore the Cooper Hewitt collection. This is another piece by Mark Abbey exploring storytelling. So it's a much longer interactive experience, but I'm just trying to see clips here. This is a piece by Jason Siegel, Michelle Chandra, Pam Lou and Ziv Schneider. So yeah, and I'm really excited about kind of the diversity of things that you see. It's not one particular type of aesthetic or goal or idea. So what else? So I'm really excited this summer. We have some Google Summer of Code students joining us to work on things like adding WebGL and 3D and shader support finally, adding SVG support and export to PDF, better mobile integration with things like phone gap, exploring serial communication OSC so that we can connect to things like Arduino or Connect, better documentation and adding a gallery finally. So that should be cool. The other thing we're doing at the end of May is one week contributors conference hosted at the Studio for Creative Inquiry in Pittsburgh. So it's going to be a one week conference where we work on all aspects of P5, not just or including, you know, fixing bugs, adding new features, adding documentation, but also things like thinking about outreach, community design, internationalization, university. And this is something that's really important to us and really important to me thinking of considering the place that we started with this project. And so this is open to anyone, you know, we have limited funding to cover travel accommodations and food. So if you're interested, go to this link and let us know in the form. And we'd love to have you join us. There's no specific skill set that you need to have just excitement and interest in being involved. We're also looking for companies that might be interested in supporting the event through scholarships for people that want to come or supporting some of our diversity events that we're planning for the week. So you can also get in touch if you're interested in that. So, you know, there's all the technical things, but the thing that's been really, and maybe this is clear for my talk, exciting to me about this project is a social aspect and thinking about how to communicate in line, how to have these conversations and how to set a tone for the community, how to be hyper aware on these, you know, GitHub threads, which is not too hard for me because I'm very sensitive. To language that might seem kind of aggressive because an understanding that everyone has their own communication style, but together we have to find a way to make sure that everyone can express themselves and feel comfortable doing that. So I'm really thankful for the opportunity that the Processing Foundation gave me two years ago. You know, they took a chance, I mean, I didn't know what I was doing, and they gave me the chance to learn. And I think this is what's so meaningful to me about this project. And if anything carries on, I hope it's that spirit, you know, that you don't have to be an expert or a pro or know exactly what you're doing or have a whole plan, that you could maybe just start doing something and learn along the way. And so I know there's still a lot to do for diversity in terms of access to these tools or having the time to get involved at all. But I think as a first step, we can make sure that everyone that feels interested in being involved doesn't feel excluded or afraid or unqualified, but feels invited and welcome. And it's really important to me in this project. But I think, like all of you today sitting here seeing all these different tools and frameworks, you know, if you are kind of wondering or thinking about getting into it somehow, that you feel, you know, willing to, like maybe we'll take a chance. Because I can say that it's worth it. And like Casey told me, you don't need a whole plan. You can just start and try something. And as a community, I hope that we can, you know, work together to open up this space so that anyone that wants to can have the opportunity to engage, to be a part of it, to make, to lead, and to learn. Thanks.


And by the way, gang, if you want to have an amazing laugh, one of the most funniest things you'll ever witness in your life and you'll carry it with you forever, right? Go watch six-year-olds, seven-year-olds, eight-year-olds play soccer. It's like the ball goes and you see a storm of kids toddlers just running after the ball and four-year-olds and five-year-olds, they just go bo-bo-bo-bo-bo-bo. It is, it's, if you need, if you need, if you need humor in your life, if you need that those endorphins, that healing factor of laughter, of innocence, of just beautiful collaboration, just humanity, right?    Okay, so funny.


Okay, thanks. So we discussed how if we had black holes characterized by their mass and their charge, if we had black holes with global symmetry charge, they would Hawking evaporate down to some minimum size while maintaining most of their charge and we would get infinitely many states of a given charge. So what we've seen is that for black holes that carry charge under a continuous gauge symmetry, there's some diagonal line in the space and black holes only live above this line. So this is the extremality bound. And so if we have black holes in a theory with gauge charges and they Hawking evaporate, if there is no way for them to shed their charge, if there are no light particles with charge that they can emit, then their Hawking evaporation will cause them to lose mass but they will stop when they hit the extremality bound and they can't evaporate anymore. If there are light charges, then in fact the black holes will tend to preferentially reduce their charge as they evaporate to follow some curve like this. But the important point is that if we have gauge charge, unlike global symmetry charge, we have only finitely many black hole states in a given range of mass for which we trust effective field theory. And so we don't reach the kind of sharp conclusion that we reached before. On the other hand, coming back to the question that Ateesh asked at the end of the last lecture, you could say if we have a very, very weakly coupled gauge theory, that starts to look a lot like a global symmetry. The limit where I send the gauge coupling to zero, it's hard to distinguish between a global symmetry and a gauge symmetry. And so if theories of quantum gravity really don't like to have global symmetries, you might think they also really don't like to have very weakly coupled gauge symmetries. Now maybe if we had precise enough arguments about the density of states, we would still run into a problem here because this number might be finite but large. But I don't really know any successful attempt to make that argument completely precise. Nonetheless, this kind of thinking that having a very weakly coupled gauge symmetry should start to look like a global symmetry and that should be forbidden is what led to the weak gravity conjecture. So the weak gravity conjecture originated in a paper in 2006 by Nima Arkani-Hamed Lubash Matal, Alberto Nicolas, and Cameron Vafa. And their statement of the weak gravity conjecture was that if I have a consistent theory of quantum gravity that contains a U1 gauge field, then my theory should contain at least one charged particle. Maybe particle is a little too precise. Some sort of charged object whose mass to charge ratio is smaller than that of an extremal black hole. So we saw that for black holes, there's a minimum mass to charge ratio and the claim is there should be something in the theory that violates that bound. Something whose mass is smaller than it would be allowed to be if that object were a black hole. And maybe at this point it's important to qualify one point about the previous argument. So we said that black holes had a minimal mass because they have an external electric field and we can integrate that electric field down to the black hole radius and that stores some energy which contributes to the mass. The distinction between light particles and black holes is that when we make this kind of argument that the mass should be at least as much as the energy stored in the electric field, for a light particle we would only make this argument down to the Compton radius rather than the Schwarzschild radius. So black holes are heavy in Planck units which means if you're integrating n from infinity you hit their Schwarzschild radius before you get to their Compton radius. Whereas for a particle like the electron if you're integrating n from infinity you hit its Compton radius long before you reach its Schwarzschild radius. And for that reason these are different calculations. So what this inequality ends up looking like is a bound on the charge relative to the mass which depends on the theory. So again in Einstein Maxwell theory in four dimensions for instance you would claim there should be a particle of mass m in charge q which obeys this inequality. The first thing you might notice is this is true in our universe. If our u1 is the u1 of electromagnetism the electron mass is 511 keV whereas the square root of two times e times m Planck is something like 10 to the 18 keV and so this bound is not even close to being saturated it's satisfied by more than 20 orders of magnitude by the electron in our universe. So if you want to draw a phenomenological conclusion from this conjecture you're going to have to look for something a little bit further if you'll then just electromagnetism. It's necessary that the charged particle is stable. It's not really necessary but if the particle can decay to something else that's lighter than one of the lighter things it decays to will always also obey this inequality and so I think you could keep iterating until you eventually hit something stable. Okay good that in fact that statement about decay leads me to one motivation for this conjecture which is that the weak gravity conjecture try to stop that wrestling. The weak gravity conjecture allows for extremal black holes to discharge so an extremal black hole in appropriate units has mass equal to its charge. If it decays to two lighter objects then just kinematically one of them must have mass bigger than the charge and one of them must have mass smaller than the charge and so the weak gravity conjecture can be thought of as the kinematic condition that allows for extremal black holes to shed their charge. The other thing to notice about the weak gravity conjecture as we were discussing before the extremality bound for black holes tells you that for black holes the gravitational force always overcomes the electromagnetic force. This is precisely the opposite. If I have two particles that satisfy the weak gravity conjecture and I take them far apart their electromagnetic repulsion which scales like E squared Q squared is stronger than their gravitational attraction in the limit that they're non-relativistic which goes like their mass squared over M Planck squared. So this is the origin of the name weak gravity conjecture. This is a conjecture that there must exist some particle for which gravity is a weaker force than electromagnetism. The original conjecture was a statement about a single U1 gauge field in a theory with gravity. It didn't really refer to massless scalars or other possible particles in the theory. And as I mentioned before the form of the extremality bound really depends on the additional content of the theory. So if we have a theory with a dilaton for example that couples to the gauge field the coefficient in this inequality will change. And what we have now are in fact two different statements that you might imagine generalizing the weak gravity conjecture to in a theory that contains scalars. So I wanna distinguish those two statements. One of these I will refer to as the repulsive force conjecture. And this is the statement that there exists some particle which at long distances has a repulsive force between two copies of itself. And the other I will still refer to as the weak gravity conjecture which is that there exists a super extremal particle that is one that violates the extremality bound. In the case of Einstein Maxwell theory where I just have a photon and a graviton these are equivalent statements. But if I have a theory with scalar fields for instance the weak gravity conjecture only makes reference to how those scalar fields couple to the gauge fields. When I find a solution in a theory where my gauge field kinetic term depends on some scalars I'll get some extremality bound that depends on that scalar coupling. Whereas this conjecture depends on how the particle that I'm talking about couples to the scalars because the scalars will mediate some attractive force between two copies of that particle. And depending on whether that particle couples more or less strongly to the scalars in the black holes do this could be a different statement. So these two statements because they kind of collapse into each other in the original case of just Einstein Maxwell theory these statements haven't always been carefully separated from each other in the literature but it's important when you're reading about cases that have scalar fields as many supersymmetric theories do they have massless moduli fields. It's important to keep track of which one of these two things is meant by weak gravity conjecture. One general comment to make about these conjectures is that they all have the form there exists a particle. It's not a statement that every particle in the theory has to obey this bound it's just a statement that there must be some particle in the theory that obeys this bound. And the fact that it has that form sort of signals that these kinds of statements are not going to be extremely easy to prove. So there can't just be any general argument about taking two of these particles and doing a scattering experiment or something and applying general principles like unitarity that are going to immediately tell you this result because this is a result that applies to some particles and not to other particles. So that in some ways makes it a bit harder to imagine how you would prove this as a general statement. Another aspect of this definition that's a little bit fuzzy is what do I mean by particle? I said particle or object. Because in fact, if I don't specify that this particle has to be light, it turns out that the weak gravity conjecture could actually be satisfied by black holes themselves. And that sounds at first glance like a contradiction because I told you that black holes always obey the extremality bound and this inequality is the opposite of the extremality bound. But the first thing to say is there are certain theories where there are BPS extremal black holes. So in some theories there are black holes for which BPS bounds, which are a consequence of supersymmetry and extremality bounds coincide. There are cases where these are the same bound and in those cases BPS black holes saturate the bound. And so I wrote a less than or equal to sign over here for a reason. The reason is that we know theories where there's nothing strictly less than because anything strictly less than is just forbidden by supersymmetry. And so in those cases, for the weak gravity conjecture to have any hope of being true at all, we have to allow for the case where these are actually equal. And in that case, BPS black holes can be the things that obey the bound. But if I look at a more general theory where the BPS condition is not the same as the extremality condition, then supersymmetry doesn't protect the form of the extremality bound. And as a result, the extremality bound gets corrections. So I told you that the extremality bound looks like the mass being bigger than some multiple of the charge. And that's true if I find classical black hole solutions in the simplest theory with only a two derivative. But more generally, we expect that any theory is going to contain higher dimension operators suppressed by some ultraviolet scale like the string scale or the Planck scale.  And so we could write down various four derivative operators in the Lagrangian, like F mu nu to the fourth power or a Riemann tensor times two f's or other terms, gaspinae. And these operators modify the black hole solutions. But because they're higher dimension operators, they don't modify big black holes very much. They have a bigger effect on smaller black holes. And if you compute the black hole solutions in the presence of these higher dimension operators, you find that there's still an extremality bound. And it has the form that the mass is bigger than the charge times some constant as we saw before. But now times some corrections that look like one plus some other constant divided by the black hole charge squared, more sub leading corrections, where this coefficient C, C1, some linear combination of coefficients of the four derivative operators. So the extremality bound that we're used to is really a statement about Einstein Maxwell theory with just the Einstein Hilbert action and the minimal kinetic term for the photons. As soon as we start adding these more complicated terms, we get different results. And the calculation of the bound in the presence of these operators was done in a paper by Yevgeny Katz, Thuvash Mantel and Megapati in 2006. So if you wanna know exactly how this coefficient C relates to the coefficients of these various operators, you can find it in that paper. And so depending on the sign of this linear combination of operators, we're either going to find that black hole states are not allowed to be quite on the extremal line, but have to be a bit heavier in the case that C1 is positive or in the case that C1 is negative, they're now allowed to lie a little bit below the extremality line. And there's some evidence that in consistent theories, this linear combination is always negative. And so in fact, black holes themselves can have masses a little bit below what the two derivative extremality bound would have allowed. I don't think this has been rigorously proven in general, but there's a suggestive argument in a paper by Chung, Liu and Riman from last year. Also, I think there's an argument that I think is specific to the case of four dimensions, but I'm not completely sure, which are Connie Hamed and some set of collaborators have not yet published, but have given some talks on that prove that given certain assumptions, this number is negative. The Chung, Liu and Riman paper tries to make an argument based on black hole entropy. And their argument makes a lot of assumptions. There are some reasons to think it really only applies to kind of tree level UV completions. The R. Connie Hamed argument is about looking at the renormalization group running of these operators and arguing that eventually this one, you know, squared squared has the biggest effect and that that one is known to have a positive coefficient for other reasons related to uniterity. So I think the status of this claim is still a little not quite rigorous, but at least there are enough different suggestive arguments that you might believe that it's just true that black holes in consistent theories of quantum gravity actually can exist slightly below the traditional extremality bound. So what I told you before was that the wheat gravity conjecture says that there should be particles whose mass to charge ratio is smaller than that of an extremal black hole. But if extremal black holes don't actually have a definite mass to charge ratio, if we get this curve that bends because of higher derivative operators, it's not quite clear what I mean by this. And so what I think I should mean by this, at least a statement that seems to be an interesting statement for which there's some evidence, is that the mass to charge ratio should be below the asymptotic extremality bound. Meaning I should read off the linear part of this bound at large q and define that to be what I mean by the wheat gravity conjecture. And if that's what I mean by the wheat gravity conjecture then in the case that this coefficient is negative, in fact, even black holes themselves could be the things that fulfill the wheat gravity conjecture because they have a mass to charge ratio smaller than the asymptotic slope of that line. So what does this mean? I would say that this minimal version of the wheat gravity conjecture, again, is not a very useful statement. If it's not telling us about the existence of light particles, it's just telling us that big black holes get small corrections. So the minimal wheat gravity conjecture, I think, is not quite sharp enough yet to get a lot of phenomenological mileage out of because it's too vague. It doesn't tell us these objects have to be light. It doesn't tell us they have to be small charge. It just tells us something has to exist that obeys this bound.  Okay, so where I want to head with us is to try to present to you some variations on the wheat gravity conjecture that actually do have more power, that are more useful statements that are getting closer to being relevant to phenomenology in the real world. But before I do that, I want to detour a little bit and just give you some examples of settings in the quantum gravity context where we can calculate the spectra of particles and see that there are particles that obey this bound. So I want to give you a quick review of Kaluza Klein theory, and also talk a bit about charge particles in the heterotic string spectrum. But maybe before I do that, I should ask if there are any questions about kind of the meaning of the conjecture itself or the things that I've been saying about it. In this modified theories, how do you define the charge? How do you find the charge? How do you define? How do you define the charge? Good, so both the mass and the charge here are just read off from the asymptotics of the solution. So the charge is just how quickly the electric field is falling off an infinity and the mass is the ADM mass, which you can read off from how the metric is falling off. That's a good question, right? So if you didn't hear the question, the question was, is there evidence of the same behavior when there is a dilaton coupling? As far as I know, those calculations have not been done, and that would be really interesting to do, I think. It gets a little bit more complicated because if I start writing down these four derivative operators, I get couple dilatons through them in many different ways. So I think it's not quite clear what choices I would want to make, but yeah, certainly it seems to be a well-defined exercise to make some sort of onsets here, try to compute how it changes the black hole solution, see what linear combination of things it depends on, and then see if we have reasons to think that linear combination is positive or negative. So I think that would be very interesting and as far as I know, no one has done it and I don't know anyone currently doing it either, but it's worth doing. More general gauge groups, I will have more to say about that in a little while. So I'll come back to that question. Okay, so I guess now I'll move ahead by talking about some examples where we can calculate spectra. And the reason that I want to do this is because when you start looking at concrete theories of quantum gravity, you rapidly see that not only do they have a particle that obeys the weak gravity conjecture, they tend to have infinitely many particles that obey the weak gravity conjecture. And in fact, they have a lot of other common features. That will be part of the story when I talk about generalizing the weak gravity conjecture and also about the swamp land distance conjecture. Okay, so the first thing I want to talk about is collucian theory. So I want to start with a theory that contains Einstein gravity and D dimensions and compactify it on a circle. So we're going to study it in a space of one lower dimension times a circle from the lower dimensional viewpoint. This has a U one gauge symmetry where the gauge field is just the graviton with one leg pointing along the circle direction. Okay, so this may be familiar to many of you but I think it's worth reviewing to sort of emphasize the features that are going to show up when we talk about some of these other conjectures. Also, I'm starting with Einstein gravity and compactifying. What I'm going to tell you about is just a statement about classical field theory but it's worth saying that we know that collucian theory appears in sort of a subsector of consistent theories of quantum gravity like string theory and so all of the statements I'm going to make can actually be found in real explicit UV complete examples. Okay, so we're studying the D dimensional theory where the D dimensional metric is given by some lower dimensional metric plus term which I'm going to write as R squared times some scalar phi of X squared times D theta plus a mu dx mu squared where theta, the periodic variable is our coordinate on the circle that we compactified on. And so the size of the internal dimension is R times the VEV of the field phi. Okay, what was the question? Okay, times two pi, yeah. And so this field phi, the radion field that controls the size of the circle is sort of our prototype of a modulus and we're going to be talking a lot more about moduli fields and how they're related to the weak gravity conjecture as we go along. So this is the simplest setting in which such a field appears and there's an exercise that if you've never done it before, you should do which is to take this metric and just plug it into the Einstein-Hilbert action and see what the action looks like in lower dimensions. And the action looks like this. It inherits a pre-factor that depends on the higher dimensional and Newton's constant. Then you get the size of the extra dimension two pi R phi. Then you get, I've tried to write this as a curlier R to distinguish it from R the radius. This is the Ritchie scalar of the D-dimensional theory. And then there are more terms involving the gauge field AMU that I'm not going to write at the moment. You will find that there is no kinetic term for phi. There's no term involving derivative of phi squared with the ansatz as I wrote it here. But phi mixes, has kinetic mixing with the graviton through its coupling to the Ritchie scalar. And we can define the lower dimensional Newton's constant as the higher dimensional Newton's constant divided by two pi R phi. Phi doesn't have a potential so it could really, its VEV could be anything. But here I'm just imagining that we look at solutions where phi is asymptotically approaching some constant value. And that's what I'm calling the VEV. Okay, so that's the action that we got at the beginning for collude secline theory. But now we should, we're free to work with that action if we want. But it's often convenient to do what's called going to Einstein frame, which means eliminating the kinetic mixing between the scalar and the metric. So we can do a field redefinition where we replace our metric with this power of the scalar, multiplying the metric. This is a vial rescaling. Notice it is a field redefinition. It is not a diffeomorphism. It's not a change of coordinates. And there's a general formula for what happens to the Ritchie scalar when you do such a vial transformation that if we rescale a field, then the Ritchie scalar changes in this way. This is another thing that if you've never calculated it, it's a good exercise to do. And in particular, this fact that it depends on the logarithm of the thing we rescaled by will be important for our discussion. Okay, so using this fact and doing this field redefinition, we find that our action becomes a different action where now we no longer have a scalar coupling to the Ritchie scalar. We just have its VEV and we now have a kinetic term which depends on the log of our radion field. And there was also a boundary term that I dropped. Now you could also have gotten to this just by directly starting with the different onsets, which looks like this. But that would not have been an obvious guess probably if you didn't start with this and then try to figure out how to eliminate the kinetic mixing. And now once we've done this field redefinition, we find that the gauge field couples to the metric, sorry, the gauge field couples to the scalar. Kinetic term looks like that. So our gauge field as a pre-factor, that's a power of phi. But the kinetic term depends on the log of phi. And so in terms of the canonically normalized field, this is an exponential coupling, similar to the dilaton coupling that I wrote earlier. In addition to the massless fields that we've been working with, we have the colluzicline modes, the excitations around the circle, and a mode of colluzicline charge N, N units of momentum around the circle has a mass given by N squared divided by the thing that's setting the size the extra dimension, R squared times the value of phi squared. And we have infinitely many of these modes from all the different momentum modes. So why did I go through all these details? It's because I wanna emphasize some features of this that turn out to be pretty universal and that sort of formed the foundation for several of the Swampland conjectures. So some observations. The matching of the Newton's constants depended on the radius. And if we assume that radius was big in fundamental Planck units of the higher dimensional theory, then the lower dimensional theory has a higher Planck scale than the higher dimensional theory, which means that if you measure Newton's constant in the lower dimensional theory, and then you do scattering experiments and see when gravity becomes strongly interacting, it happens much earlier than you would have estimated from your low energy measurement of Newton's constant. So theories that have these large internal dimensions have very low UV cutoffs relative to what you might naively expect. Quantum gravity cutoff is much lower than the D dimensional Planck scale. The next observation is that the limit where I make the gauge coupling small by making the pre-factor of this term big is the limit when the charged particles are light. So in fact, the masses of these charged particles when written in units of the D dimensional Planck scale are just n squared times the gauge coupling squared times the higher dimensional Planck scale to the appropriate power times one half. And these masses saturate the weak gravity conjecture. If we were to work out what the extreme low black holes look like, we would find this coefficient of one half is exactly what we want for extreme low black holes. And that's not an accident. It's because if this theory were supersymmetric, then this is also a BPS condition because our U1 gauge symmetry is just part of the higher dimensional space time symmetries. And so supersymmetry will protect the corresponding extremality bound. The next observation is the kinetic term as logarithmic in the scalar field phi. That also means if I were to write it as a function of the gauge coupling E, it would be logarithmic as a function of that too. So the canonically normalized field has this form. And if I rewrite things, sorry, log log phi. And if I rewrite the coupling of phi to the gauge field in terms of the canonically normalized field, it's exponential. So it's E to the minus some constant times phi hat. New sport, the final related fact to point out is that because of that, the number of colluciclinemodes below the cutoff scale is exponentially large as a function of this canonically normalized field. So we have a modulus field. As it goes to large values, we find exponentially many modes appearing carrying different charges under the gauge group all of which obey the weak gravity conjecture. So that's one example where we find that not only is the weak gravity conjecture obeyed, it's obeyed in a way that's much stronger than what it had to be just a few more minutes, right? Let me just briefly mention one other example. It's handy heterotic string for concreteness. I'll talk about the SO 32 string. So we haven't talked yet about what the weak gravity conjecture means for non-abelian gauge groups, but there's a U1 to the 16 sitting inside SO 32. So let's just look at the U1 charges, the charges under the carton generators of the algebra. And with this gauge group, we can find particles whose charges are labeled by these 16 numbers, U1 through Q16 with the QI, either all integers or all half integers and the sum of the QIs and even integer. That's the charge lattice of SO 32, okay? And we can work out the spectrum of particles that carry these charges and the perturbative string spectrum. And let me just jump to the answer since we don't have much more time today. The lightest charged particle for charge Q not equal to zero turns out to have a mass given by this formula two over alpha prime times Q squared minus two. So this spectrum is asymptotically linear. If I were to plot mass versus charge, it stays below the diagonal line.  So our gauge coupling E squared is related to alpha prime and G string in this way. Our 10 dimensional Planck scale to the minus eight power is related to G string and alpha prime in this way. And G string is E to the phi where phi has a nonical kinetic term. Well, I should put some constant factors in, but it has a D phi squared kinetic term with some constant in front. In other words, it's not logarithmic. So again, as in the previous case, we find a coupling which is exponential as a function of some modules. We find a set of states of different charges whose masses are bounded in some way by the charge.  And it looks like this. The factor of one in front or in the 40 Rice-Ring-Wardstrom case we had two. But if I rewrite this in terms of alpha prime, it's just this. So this linear relationship just is the extremality bound. So the heterotic string spectrum has infinitely many charged particles, all of which obey the weak gravity conjecture and which are asymptotically approaching the black hole spectrum. Okay, so we have our two examples, Kuhl-Sakline theory and the heterotic string. And we see that in both cases, not only did a particle exist as the weak gravity conjecture told us, but infinitely many particles exist. And tomorrow I'll try to explain to you how we were led by this to some more powerful conjectures that extend the weak gravity conjecture.


Hello and welcome to the session. My name is Mansi and I'm going to help you with the following question.  Are E and F mutually exclusive? So let us start with the solution to this question. So now we consider the experiment of rolling a die. The results or outcomes of this experiment are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. So the set of outcomes that is this set is called the sample space of the experiment. Any subset E of a sample space S is called an event. So we see that event E is that the die shows 4 so that will be 4. This is an event of getting 4. Also F will be the event when the die shows even number. So F is the event of getting 2, 4 or 6. Now we have to tell that whether E and F are mutually exclusive or not. So we say that E and F are mutually exclusive if E intersection F is equal to 5. Now intersection of 2 sets is set of those elements which are common to both E and F. So we see that elements that are common to E and F are only 4. So it is only 4. So we can say that E intersection F is 4 that is not equal to 5. So E and F are not mutually exclusive. So our answer to this question is no. So I hope that you understood the question and enjoyed the session. Have a good day.


Good afternoon everyone and welcome. This is Melissa Armo with the stock swishing today. I'm here reviewing HTZ This really had a nice move today and did everything I was supposed to do and more So if you watch this today and rated it It did rate good enough to short for the golden gap reading system and it looks like it all played out and It didn't even take that long to get going so the stock rated 21 points today for the system watched it Here was the hit. Okay in the entry dropped and broke Fell so hard. Actually. What was the time in here 940 felt fell completely off the cliff writing the 940 the first 10 minutes of The day and it came in out Actually ended up playing a second treat in this today boom boom, which I think a lot of people did You know, you can do the one trade which is usually the the best entry I have found is the first Okay, but every once in a while you do get a secondary move and sometimes you get a large secondary move But you have to be patient. This does have some room in it left. It's only 1139 today You have to watch the market in the afternoon But I think the best thing to do is trade in the morning and be done with the first move in and out And it's had such a nice move so quick so fast and did everything right so it's been one of those weeks where it's kind of been a little slow and Been watching things very very very very carefully and happy to have gotten the scat this morning So if you're interested in my class in the golden gap course You can email me at Melissa at the stocks whoosh calm to sign up You can still sign up for this weekend started Sunday Monday Monday is a repeat of day one Which is Saturday if you have a Saturday conflict and if you'd like more information you could email me to sign up Thanks, everybody and have a wonderful day


To the penultimate session of Domain's 202 Workshop. This is kind of a fun 201, sorry, not 202. 202 comes next year. I get looks around the table like, what? 202 is actually only offered every other year, and it's a one-party course. All right, smartasses all around me. So, yeah, today we're going to talk in this session about a question that some of you may keep you up at night. It keeps me up at night. Why reclaim cloud, right? Like, why would you do this thing? What is the cloud? Why are you pushing Docker on me? What's the big deal? We have domain of one's own. What do we need this for?  I know. Well, this session is going to help you kind of come to terms with that. And to do that, we have two special guests. Alyssa Maranaccio coming from, and I'm doing that right, right? That's the Italian in me putting out the Maranaccio. Is that how you would say it, too? Maranaccio, but close. From Wesleyan, who's an academic technologist, and we'll be talking with us a bit about how Wesleyan has used Reclaim Cloud for a core site that they created. That's an interesting story, so we'll get to that. And I need some time to actually get Tim Clark's full title. So the next guest we have with us is Tim Clark, who's coming to us from Muhlenberg College. And Tim is a senior instructional design consultant. He's got four words in his title. Like, I'm a fan. I've been a fan of both. I'm really excited to have you both with us today. So welcome, and thank you for joining. Thank you. Thanks. So Alyssa, I'm going to start with you because I think I have been on a bit of a Reclaim Cloud, kind of like, how would we say, Crusade? I don't know if that's the right thing to say or, yeah, I don't know. I've been on, I've been on the kind of, I don't even want to say it. I don't have the right words to say. I've been interested in Reclaim Cloud for the last several months, so maybe even years. And one of the things that happened in January that really raised a particularly good use case was Wesleyan was running a course. And I think the course is called Life is Good. Can you tell us a little bit about that course? Sure. So it's a philosophy course called Living a Good Life. And it's actually, it came from a project, a collaboration with Notre Dame. And there's three instructors that run it and it originally started for students in a particular philosophy course, but for the one that we're talking about today, that was actually kind of like a MOOC that we created. Just to make a long story short, there was this campus-wide initiative that came up from the top that we, the president, wanted to create courses that the Wesleyan community, parents and alums could take part of. So courses that are actually being offered on Wesleyan, but kind of a more condensed version. So the Living a Good Life was a course that was running well online and with undergrads. And so that was one that they took and kind of remodeled, we call them mini courses, into a mini course that we were now, for the first time ever, going to offer out to a greater community. And can I ask you, Alyssa, how was the, where did you build that site? And then once you build it, how was the reception when you sent out that invitation? We're laughing because you know. I do know. This is a small hall. It's a disaster that ensues. So the original Living a Good Life site for undergrads was built on WordPress. So we were like, let's just make a copy of it. And we cloned the website and built kind of that condensed version that we were going to, that we were going to release. I think it was like right at the end of December. So we send out that email that goes out to the greater community. We have this open online course you can sign up for. And unknowingly, it was very popular and we had 3,000 registrants in like the matter of hours. So of course, not realizing this, we were on domain of one's own, the WordPress site there. And we were hitting all kinds of resource limits because that, you know, it didn't handle that. And of course, I penically emailed Jim and said, what do we do? Yeah, it was, it was interesting. And again, that's one of those use cases that fell into our lap because here's an instance where you had a domain of one's own, which can manage decent traffic for a class, right? But when you're hit for 3,000 registrants on the fly, it's almost why the cloud elastic cloud was invented, right? To allow for those major kind of spikes of traffic to deal with them and then resolve back. So I think, you know, it was interesting to get that use case to find out you had so much interest in the course. It must have been great. But then obviously the post fact that was, oh, I'm getting 505, you know, resource errors. This is not amazing. So we quickly transferred that site over to Reclaim Cloud, right? I think it was like with a matter of changing some DNS, which we actually had control of, and we could push everything over. And it's just a simple WordPress site, but it was in a WordPress site that at this point had scalable infrastructure that allowed us to basically deal with the resources you needed for 3,000 people to take the course. Right. Exactly.   Like you're sitting in front of me and telling me you have this service and you're going to support it.  I was like, I'm sold. Let's do it. So we hopped on and did that. And what I really liked about it too is, you know, it can be tough with online courses because how do we know all 3,000, you know, are you just signing up because you're excited or are you really going to take part? So do we really want to pay for this if this many people aren't going to be in it? So I like that elastic model where we're kind of really looking for what we use. You've got the small, you know, server fee. But unless it's like really being used every time it's hit, like that's when you're paying. So that was a, that was big for us that sold us. It was a really good point too, because I remember trying, I think you were on the call with me too, Taylor, because Taylor had just been kind of at reclaim. He's like, what's going on here? I was like, let's try. Right. Like, but like, I think one of the things that was interesting is obviously people, when you're psyched, you're like, we're going to move you to the cloud, but it's variable billing. Right. We can't give you a number. People are immediately like, oh, wait. And if we could give you a number, it would be a large number. Like we have to, by the nature of it, we'd have to overestimate, which just is a waste of your money. So which is the difference between managed hosting. Right. As you're always paying for that top tier, you're always paying for that 32 gigabyte server. Just in the event you hit it at sign up when 3,000 people take it. But then only 250 people actually stick with the course, but you're paying just for the idea of 3,000 people are interested. And I think this is where elastic billing proved in your instance to be great because we looked at about $1.60 a day. And I think you ran it there for three months. So in the end, it was between $80 and $90 to run a kind of highly performant WordPress instance that could deal with, you know, potentially thousands of people have signed up, but they're not always paying for those resources should less take it. It's actually quite nice for the MOOC model. I think if you're doing something like a mini course based on hopefully massive attendance to get your community involved. So I really love that use case. I think it fell into our lap, but I think it's like, why would you run WordPress on the cloud? Often never because it's a blog like mine. No one reads it. There's no resources. Right. Like, you don't have to worry about that. See panels. Great. Used to make it one's own. It's really when you have this highly trafficked resource intensive site that the cloud works quite well. And it was a fairly seamless transition. So that's great. Yeah. And now we have a couple more going on. So it worked out. We found our solution and we're running with it, which is cool. I saw that you did add another site for another course. Yeah. It hasn't launched yet, but we are in the process. I think it's going to be fall though. Well, that's cool. I appreciate you sharing that story. You know, I love it because I think it's like, it fell into our lap as a great use case. So I appreciate that. Tim, you recently wrote, and I hope someone can link to the blog post, which I really loved talking about some of the various reasons as to why reclaim cloud. And I know you have particular examples. You've been playing with ghost and some other stuff. So can you set us up a little bit about why reclaim cloud at Muhlenberg? Sure. So it's really the esoteric projects, I think. You know, we are a domain of one's own institution. It does a great job for 99% of the source of student projects and a lot of the, you know, the vast majority of faculty projects. But occasionally there's something that comes up. That needs another, another stack, you know, maybe it's node or engine X or I don't know. It just depends. Or folks have found a project that's containerized. And so everything that you're going to be doing is going to invoke Docker in one way or another. And reclaim cloud is fantastic. Prior to reclaim cloud, you know, we had done a little bit of this stuff on digital ocean for honors projects or faculty projects. But the things that I think reclaim cloud permits that are a little harder to do either on your institutional infrastructure, you know, the main thing is, you know, all of the, all of the accounts on our campus are basically managed through our central user directory. And so whenever we have a collaborator who's off campus, it's a real problem for them to see anything that we're working on and to actually touch the command prompt. But reclaim cloud, that's really not an issue. So we had a professor who wanted to build an overlay journal and wanted to get into some open academic publishing. There's a lot of different software applications, open source software applications out there that can do that. Things like pub pub and Janeway and manifold and so on. And he just wanted to evaluate them. He just wanted to kind of get a sense of what worked best for his particular vision. And so, you know, he's very adept would get things mostly working. And it was really just that last little bit of configuration that presented a challenge.  So that was, that was to me the, when we worked with the folks from Janeway to have a group meeting so that I could learn, I could help support this, Jeff Pooley is his name, could take over the project and basically never look back. That light bulbs really sort of went off for me as to the potential, as a teaching platform, as a collaboration platform, you can share access at the, at the container level or at the application level, which I think is really interesting. And the ability to clone something with just a few clicks means that you could work in a development environment. You can try out, I don't know, the beta version or whatever and keep your sort of production environment pristine and working along all of the kinds of stuff that you'd expect.  You've talked to the developer and we use so AzuraCast for those of you who don't know is an open source radio, web radio platform and I don't know what language it's written in. Do you know what language it's written in, Taylor? I actually don't know. It's written in a language. Was language is to be decided. But it actually does, it runs on Reclaim Cloud. We moved it over there. It had been running on DigitalOcean for a while but it's one of the tests we did. But when we did recent upgrades to it and it's running in Docker, we were able to clone it like instantaneously. And that power to clone environments so that if you do anything and it goes wrong and then are able to kind of share it, for example, to your point, we could have shared it with the developer who seems to be very willing to help Buster Neese and really just kind of allow them to get access, show us something, demonstrate something and then move out is a really nice element of Reclaim Cloud is that you can bring in collaborators. I agree not to mention the way in which collaborators can then take it over and then like take ownership of it and pay for it, which I imagine is something that comes up a lot with research and grants and stuff like that. Yeah, that's the billing side I think is another area of a lot of future potential and in a couple of different directions. You're right. Cross-institutional support for grant-funded projects is a real pain honestly because when you're talking about on-premises servers and stuff, who's going to own it? And even taking advantage of some cloud platform as a service type stuff out there, who's going to pay for it, how that's going to work? When your institutional IT is expecting a sort of invoice, it's paid a year in advance in a fixed amount, so a lot of times you don't know how to estimate what these kinds of things are going to cost in support of a project that's a collaboration between a community group and the college, the town gown sort of collaborations and stuff. So that's basically not an issue I don't think with Reclaim Cloud and the way the pricing is structured. That's a big one. But I can think of another example that might be really appealing at a small school like mine. Hit us with it. Okay. So Azure Cast, let's just use that as an example. Let's say that you have a broadcast, a radio broadcasting and production course that you teach, I don't know, it enrolls every two years or something. Maybe you're in the broadcast booth, you're lucky enough to have an on-campus radio station like we do, but you want to talk about internet and streaming radio as a module in the course. Do you have everybody spin up Azure Cast? Well, great. You've got it working. You've got it configured. You've got all your DNS stuff sorted out. Should you have to pay for Azure Cast or run until the next time that course enrolls?  Yeah, no way. Just pause it. Just hit the pause button. Essentially, it's not going to cost you any money until the next time you need to run Azure Cast. On-off computing, right? The way in which you can turn these environments on and off in the next generation kind of platforms like Reclaim Cloud is so hard for a lamp environment admin to deal with, to understand. I'll say I love that aspect of Reclaim Cloud as well, Tim, that you can just stop an environment and the only thing you'd be charged with at that point is if your account is using over 100 gigs of storage and you pay per gigabyte, but it's pretty inexpensive, right? Agreed. But also, it's 100 gigs. You have to get there first. But I will say I've played around with many different cloud services before Reclaim Cloud even existed and gotten down even the road of writing my own scripts to, all right, I'm going to do this and then create a backup and destroy the server and redeploy it to try to approximate what you can just do with the stop button. And I did do it, but it was a big waste of time. It was a lot of work just to do something that seems like it should be simple. Here's another really exciting element. And you touched on this in your post, Tim. And we already kind of touched on it a little bit with AzuraCast is the thing that's really got me excited about Reclaim Cloud is it is esoteric. It is kind of the next generation sandbox. All that's true. But there's a bunch of open source tools out there, media tools, whether it be stuff like PeerTube, which is an open source clone of YouTube. Jitsi, which is a really beautiful open source kind of like Zoom or video conferencing tool. AzuraCast for the web radio. You have a very ghost, which we are loving for the Reclaim Roundup. You have a really new tool set of these next generation tools that you can actually explore and play with. At a fairly given that it's on and off, given you only pay for the resources you use, it's not a super expensive toolkit, kind of like C-Panel through Bluehost wasn't back in the day when we started using WordPress on campus in 2006, right? Like there is some parallels between those early experimentations 16 years ago and cloud-based computing, container-based computing, whether in Reclaim Cloud or anywhere now. And I think one of the things I'm super excited about this year is to try and be a somewhat of a, you know, a translator, right? A kind of like your post speaks to that, trying to get educational technologists thinking about what's possible within the realm of possibility, not having to be a programmer or a sysadmin or a developer. I'm super excited about that prospect. We're going to be doing a flex course in July around containers and dockers to get people on the ground floor thinking about what's possible. And for me, you mentioned it in your post again, Tim, which I think was really comprehensive and a great read for anyone else interested is, you know, there's a lot of bespoke one-off tools like data set or data visualization tools and we can go down the list that are very useful for a one-and-done, you know, cost you 30 cents to run it as part of an experiment for a course. And I'm super interested in like that kind of use-as-you-need computing to support faculty and students in their quest to do work in whatever way, right? Yeah, I mean, I teach a class that uses QGIS, which is an open-source geographic information system. And one of the things that I would like to see is getting QGIS in a virtual desktop environment in the marketplace because you can burn the first two or three class sessions in the semester just getting QGIS installed on everybody's Mac or Windows or whatever, you know, we've got a lot of students, I wouldn't say a lot, but we have a fair number of students who prefer to work off of a tablet and there's no way you're going to get that application to run on something like that, right? That's the device of choice that they have. So if you can build these sort of virtual desktop environments with a click, basically, and for not a lot of money, right? Each student just carries their own account in lieu of a textbook or something like that, or it's built departmentally, however you work that out, and they have their environment up and ready to start jumping into the real material instead of sort of finagling their software at the end of the first class period or the second class period whenever you get in there and start working on that stuff. And so just in terms of preserving instructional time, I think that that's huge. And that's just a tiny sort of scratching the surface about these kinds of things. I love that. And if I'm not wrong, Taylor, you've been playing with a little bit of that. I mean, you've been kind of doing some exploration of Reclaim Cloud, and I know one of the things you've been exploring is that idea of having a series of applications that students could just run through a kind of setup. What is the tool? Yeah, it's called chasm workspaces. And that I did a little stream on it not that long ago. I blocked it too. There's a blog post. I mean, it's a pretty short blog post. It's mostly just the stream. But what it was is pretty much what Tim is describing, which is that it lets through a web browser, you use desktop applications. And in the case of chasm, they have to be Linux applications. But I've never used QGIS. I've heard of it before, but I've not personally used it. But it does say it runs on Linux. So that maybe could be possible, right, to use a platform like Reclaim Cloud to have a chasm or something like chasm maybe to stream out that application running for a user to use. I mean, that use case is something that higher ed IT departments are doing a lot for Windows applications. And it's expensive platforms typically that do it. But they'll do desktop as a service, Citrix, I know at St. Norbert. Some of my co-workers are working with things like, when I was there, I was working with things like AppStream and from Amazon and Paperspace. And there's a lot of these platforms, but they're all, they're more like delivering an entire Windows desktop. And that actually has a ton of complication to it. Whereas I think the cool thing I got to see working with chasm is that it was very focused on just like one application delivered to us, any number of users, I guess, but it seems like manageable that if you could get something like QGIS working, because of the way Reclaim Cloud works, you could potentially make that application available to a bunch of people, or you could make it an installer that it's just like, nope, go sign up, and then you've got a credit on your account of 50 bucks or whatever you may need. Probably wouldn't want that for a classroom scenario. You probably want to handle that. Or maybe you don't, right? Like maybe you have a research project where it's a faculty member and a student working in QGIS and they're just going to drop on 50 bucks. Like $50 goes a pretty long way in Reclaim Cloud. They may get a year worth out of usage depending on what they're doing and how long they're doing it. So. So, Alyssa, you see now that WordPress is simply the gateway drug. Well, you know, the thing that's great and I'm sure, Jim, that this was absolutely perfect. Absolutely. This is me giving out free drugs to see what happens. You know, the great thing is to me, this is the two main things for Reclaim Cloud, right? It's like scale. I'm not actually trying to point, but it looks like I'm pointing at you. Exactly. Like huge scalable sites and things that will not run on LAMP, right? Those to me are the big things that I think of when I think of Reclaim Cloud. So it's really cool. We have just a few minutes left, but one of the things worth noting here and a couple of things is like someone was running a library site at Skidmore and, you know, it was running it on our professional services. It was like a VIP server where it was just a few people. But even that it was a library site. Like it needed to be on a more stable space. It was WordPress and they jumped to the Reclaim Cloud and they never look back. And it's like, yeah, for those kind of bigger sites, absolutely. And the other example which I think has been fun is I was talking with John Stewart, who we just heard from and Adam Kroom. They had a publications for University of Oklahoma, the student publications, which in some ways need to be separate from IT because they want their own independence. They want to be able to pay for their own media and they want it to truly be independent media from the university. They set up Tim, to your point, their own account on Reclaim Cloud, separate from the university where they could pay for their infrastructure, apart from domain of one's own or anything that was maybe tied to the university. And I think that's super interesting to think like, you know, these are other options in other ways. And sometimes the practical points like paying for them and like separating them out from the university is considered not necessarily a drawback, but a benefit to dealing with Reclaim Cloud which is interesting. So having said that, I am mindful of time and I want to say Alyssa and Tim, any last comments before we wrap up? Because we have about two minutes. You don't have to. I'm not putting you on the spot, but you can say no. Thank you, Jim. Well, I mean, I'm just, for me, like I said, I am sold. We've got multiple courses coming and are going to be using it. So we are thankful to have stumbled upon it. And if anyone does have any questions or thinking about doing something similar, we're happy to talk to them and kind of share our process as well. Awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, maybe it's stating the obvious, but for me, it's really the continuity here is encouraging people to do it themselves and to host it themselves and to have their space online that's theirs. And so, you know, thinking of this honors student that I wrote about in my blog post, going on to grad school and being able to, you know, zip this thing up and take it with her, I think that's the continuity from Domain of One's Own to Reclaim Cloud is infused with that ethos of doing it ourselves. Yeah. Thank you both. You rock. You rule. We drool. See you in five minutes for the close-up wrap-up of day two of Domain's 201. Thank you, Alyssa and Tim, once again. Thank you.