From New America and Slate, I'm Bridget Schulte, and this is Better Life Lab. There are some people you know from the moment you pick up the phone, you're just going to have a great conversation. Even if the phone line's terrible and the guy's describing his favorite way to fix eggs.  That's David Spara. The reason for my call was not to talk about eggs. It was to talk about busyness. Busy with a why. David's a leading clinical psychologist, but he admits he's got a problem, maybe even an addiction, to busyness. He wrote an article for Vox that included this grim assessment. I'm a robot programmed to obliterate my tediousness. During the day, I direct a research laboratory, write papers, and teach classes as a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona. Come 4.30 p.m., I run a kid limousine service, shuttling between various activities, preparing dinner, helping with homework, and the union EP. Scurry through these activities, often missing the moments of joy embedded in everyday life, and tie some sort of nightly electrical shortage, then crash out on the couch. I reboot in the morning and do it all over again. I'm addicted to busyness. On this podcast, we look at the art and science of living a full life. And busyness is something I've been thinking a lot about. For many people, I know it keeps stealing time from what we really care about. So I've been asking behavioral scientists exactly why busyness is so compelling and what we can do about it. We'll hear more from David Sparra in a moment. First though, I want to introduce Dan Arelli. He's the New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational. He's also the founder of the delightfully named Center for Advanced Hindsight at Duke University. And when we think about busyness, the first thing to notice he says is the way our environment is designed, at work and at home. When you ask people how many of you have right now rotting fruits and vegetables in your refrigerator, almost everybody admits that they have it. I just took mine out to the compost this morning. There you go. And it's a sad funeral, right? You take all this stuff that you paid lots of money on and you had good plans for and then all of a sudden you check on them and it's too late. That's true. It's so true. It's so sad. And the reason, of course, is that it's a bad design. Where do we put the fruits and vegetables in a low drawer that is opaque? Now, you could stand there in front of the refrigerator and say, let me examine all my options, including bending down and opening this drawer. And it's not a lot of effort, but it's a little bit too much. So because of that, we open the refrigerator and whatever comes at eye level are the things that come to mind and those are the things that we eat. So I think that what we need to do is we need to figure out how do we design better environments? It's true for the kitchen, but it's also true for the work environment. For me, one of the biggest lessons in social science over the last 40, 50 years has been that we make decisions as a function of the environment that we're in. You put people in one environment, they make one type of decisions, you put them in a different kind of environment, they make a different type of decision. And because of that, human freedom is not in our kind of ability to make decisions. It's in our ability to put ourselves into environments that would lead to better outcomes. You know, what I'd love to do now is listen together to a bit of the conversation that I had with David Sabara, who's struggling with busyness and feeling addicted to busyness. So let's listen to his story and then I'd love to hear your thoughts. Okay. I don't know, I spent a long time in the last couple of months trying to figure out what's wrong with me. I have a terrific life. I have a wonderful job, a great career. You know, I feel like a happy marriage or kids are doing fine. You know, I have every, all the blessings in the world and I feel grateful for them. I just sort of go around feeling mildly miserable all the time. And I felt like I was just running from one activity to the next and I really have tried to hack this up and figure out what exactly is going on here. And also really trying to provide for myself a lot of what I talk about. I'm a clinical psychologist by training and I have a psychotherapy practice and I talk with people who are trying to figure these kinds of things out all the time and sort of step back and look at it in a way that I might sort of advise my clients to do in my practice. And that's how I ended up on thinking about realizing, coming to the conclusion that I am perhaps addicted to busyness. Everything that you described sounds pretty great. It is pretty great. It is pretty great if you can sort of drop an anchor into your experience of it, but it's just sort of, the peace to me is getting like mind-numbingly fast and we're trying to also find time to buy a new car in our family and my son keeps saying, you know, all you have to do is like go in there and figure, you know, we know which car. I've been, you know, just going there. I can't even think for a minute like about doing that. And so just for me, the worst part of it all is the sense of being frayed, like the fabric being frayed or being frenzied. Frayed is maybe like, I don't have the bandwidth for anymore. I'm nearly exhausted. And frenzied is like I have this monkey mind that is like jumping from one thing to the next and I can't focus. I can't think clearly. I just feel exhausted by the way I'm turning over things because the next thing is coming to the next thing is coming to the next thing. So Dan, what do you make of that? He talks about feeling addicted to being busy and frenzied and frayed and he doesn't have much bandwidth. Yeah. So it's actually a combination of many, many forces and some of them are wonderful. Right? So the first thing is that life gives us lots and lots of opportunities. Imagine you were a farmer 200 years ago. You got up in the morning. What are your options? Basically go and work the field and you're going to work the field. You know, you can take a bathroom break, but you can eat a little bit. But that's about it. Now we have a tremendous amount of things that we could choose between. This freedom is amazing, but it also means that we often accept too many things from the beginning. So what we have and I'm terrible at this as well is it's very hard to say no. So what happens is we say yes too often and now we have too many things on our plate. And it has kind of two elements to it. The first one is we have too many things on our plates, but it's also stressful because now we need to manage multiple things at the same time and we spend some time on the management of which one do we do and which one do we don't. And I don't know about you, but when I try to meditate, like, you know, I try from time to time, I close my eyes. In seven to 10 seconds, I get my to-do list. Which basically come and say, okay, what's on my to-do list? Which one of things I need to make sure I'm not dropping? And what we have is we have a cost that is a part of this management system of, say, I have 25 projects, which one do I need to make progress on? You know, let's listen again to David Sabara and hear some of the ways he sees contemporary culture driving these behaviors and some of the strategies he's tried to overcome his own addiction to busyness. Everything seems to be about more and more and, you know, it's published more. It's pursue more opportunities, take advantage of more. I think the inertia of that kind of mindset just takes on a life of its own. And you have to be extremely deliberate to redirect the ship and to really sort of say, hang on a second, what is my ideal day? What is my North Star in terms of, like, how I want to live my life? Where are the moments and the times when I have been the happiest? I'm not necessarily unhappy. I don't want to paint that picture. I'm not struggling with a major depression. I'm not experiencing massive debilitating anxiety. It's malaise and wondering, you know, what else is there for me and how can I do this better? And I think that's an important time to take stock.  And, you know, is it a personal thing that we all are just now addicted to it? Is it technology? I think technology is a big part of the, you know, the frenetic sense that we have constantly checking in and updating and being plugged in. And that creates this sort of vigilance that people have about missing out and foreclosed opportunities. And so we're amped up. People are amped up and they're revved up. And so that's a big part of it. I also think that we are, you know, we live in a competitive time and there's competition to succeed and to do more with fewer resources, right? So people are really going after what is available for them. And then there's a contagion of busyness that becomes the social norm without even realizing it's like the air that we start breathing. That's a very hard force for people to recognize because it's like asking fish about the water they're swimming. You can't even see it, right? And that's, I think, why it took me so long to really recognize that. The idea that a psychology travels through a network is not a new idea, right? So loominess, you know, there's evidence to suggest, I'm not saying it definitely is, but there's the idea that loominess is contagious in a network. Depression certainly is. If your friends are friends or lonely, then you yourself are more likely to be lonely. And you can, you know, we can say there's this contagion. So these social forces at social properties are fairly well known and, you know, that's how these things get conveyed in the culture. I spent some time with a researcher at North Dakota State University who's been gathering holiday cards for decades. And it's amazing you go through the archive and every year you just become more and more breathless at how much stuff people are doing and how they're bragging about it. And these are people like from the Midwest. So it's kind of everywhere now. How do you stop that? How do you get out of that network or how do you change the contagion to something a little bit more positive?  I've been reading all kinds of interesting stuff. You know, the SAS Pico Air has a nice book on stillness and quiet. There is a book on busyness already. And, you know, there's a whole community of people. The slow food movement has a, you know, the slow lifestyle movement has a long history. So talk about how you're trying to overcome this addiction. What is your recovery plan? What are you doing to overcome being busy all the time? Well, I think I'm trying to be more deliberate in my choices and that's something all of us can do right away, right? And focus on saying no more and... But more sort of trying to focus very clearly on my values and make sure that I'm living in a way that is consistent with those values. And I think the antidote or the prescription here, however you choose to think about it, is all of us sort of just taking a pause on this and saying, you know, what are my values and is there a discrepancy between the guide, the principles I want to guide my life and the way I am actually living on a day-to-day basis. And I really just tried to create physical space to have more downtime, starting to walk more and be outside because I was losing touch with the sort of experience of being outside and moving my body through space. And, you know, I ride a bike quite a lot and I exercise a reasonable amount, but just sort of being outside other times and I really just focused on going for more walks and sometimes I listen to books or podcasts but sometimes I just walk and I, you know, will park my car maybe a half a mile, a mile away from campus and hoof it in for 20 minutes and it just creates space to just let your mind be restored by nature and be creative. And to me, that's made a huge amount of difference. Just that. Just that. That sounds so hopeful and it sounds so doable. Like, and we Americans are such overachievers that people are going to like start, you know, like walking miles and miles a day just to try to calm down. Well, we should. We really should because, you know, I'm involved in this very interesting series of programs with our College of Public Health and I was sort of learning about the ways in which they've tried to implement diabetes prevention programs and one of the things that they said is across a lot of the interventions that they've tried, the one lasting, sustainable thing for people has been walking groups. Wow. Creating groups in which you are moving together with other people and you have a time to connect, you have a time to, you know, get and give social support and those kind of things but you're also moving your body. This is very, this is very sustainable. So Dan, so what do you think? Moving your body, creating space, is that part of the answer to busyness? There's lots of evidence that getting into walking groups is very helpful and the reason, of course, that walking is good and spending time socially is good but also having pre-commitment to other people is very important. Right? When David just makes promises to himself, those promises are likely to go the way that all promises to ourselves go but when we make promise to meet a friend in the street corner, you might not care about your own health but you do care about your promise to a friend and you're going to show up but of course it doesn't really deal with the problem because the only thing it does is it says let's take an hour and make sure that in that hour we're not tempted. It's better than nothing because it has to be more productive when we're at our desk. It changes the environment that you're in to an environment that doesn't give you temptation and you're pre-committing to that environment and so on but it doesn't mean that he's going to say oh you know I used to work 18 hours a day now I have an hour of walking let me commit to things that only fill 17 hours. So I think it's kind of a patch. I think that the right approach is to figure out how to say no and how to do the things first that's very important to us. One of the tricks by the way we give people is to say when somebody asks you for something new to do imagine that they ask you to do it this week or next week. Now if you say oh look at my week right now you asked me to come and spend a day in Washington if I would cancel other things to do that then go ahead and accept it for April 20th 2018 but if you say no no it doesn't fit with my priorities now it will probably not fit in the year and a half from now either. So think about kind of what do we pile on our plate and how do we stop that I think is one thing and you know there's a really interesting question of what are we trying to maximize if at the end of each day you would ask yourself was this a good day what are the kind of things that you would do and the kind of things you would do are probably the kind of things that would give you the short term satisfaction oh I made the list like rusting off I answered all my emails what about the end of your life how many people at the end of life would say you know what I got to inbox zero 752 times oh that's so depressing I know the things that give you happiness at the end of life are very different and we don't have to go all the way there we could do the end of the year the end of the month maybe even the end of the week so what happens is that when we take too many things on the kind of things that give us short term satisfaction are not the kind of things that give us long term satisfaction there's a word I really love called cancellation it's the elation you feel when something is canceled when somebody asks you to do something to go to a meeting to participate in something ask yourself how elated would you be if half an hour before that meeting it was canceled and if you experience this elation just don't commit to it from the beginning because it means you don't really want to do it so don't get into those situations sometimes that sounds easier said than done it is one reason why saying no is so tough is that sometimes you say yes to things that you know you shouldn't but then they end up being wonderful that's true I went to give a talk to some VC company in San Francisco I said okay it was in some hotel 8pm in San Francisco and I'm driving why did I say yes like what compelled me at that moment to say yes and I get there and I sat with myself like what got me to say yes and I give my little talk and after that we sit and I have a drink with a guy next to me turns out he's Brazilian and he asked me what can I do to get you to come to Brazil this was a couple of years ago I said you know the World Cup is in two months I'll ask for a game and I'll be there and a week later I have tickets to the last four games and it was an experience of a lifetime I got to go to games I got to go with some of his friends I got to go with him to some of those things it was really a wonderful thing and from time to time those random things turned out and it turned out well and I personally feel that I'm kind of sometimes gambling with my time and that's where the danger lies right that's where the danger lies let's listen to the last part of my conversation with David Sabara he'd written this beautiful scene where he was tickling his five-year-old daughter and he described that as the best half-hour of his year so far I asked him how he got to that moment of connection this brings the addiction analogy full circle so with my daughter I talked about just sort of creating space for play just sort of sitting waiting to see what happens and looking for things to unfold that are not planned and not structured you know I think the idea of scheduling unscheduled time is really a good idea it's like I'm going to make sure that every night at seven thirty or after we do some you know the chores before the kids go to bed I'm just going to locate myself on the couch and just see what happens and you know often quite before I give my daughter a bath or something and she likes to do trust falls into me and for me to tickle her and make faces at her and all the good parenting stuff right and just going through the motions constantly we miss a lot of this and I mean I think from the outside a lot of people who would see me say hey you know you're connected to your kids that's lovely that's a beautiful thing but I wasn't like I was constantly like there's a routine and there are these twenty tasks and let's get through the routine and you get to bed so then I can you know be on the couch and see who wrote me some emails since the last time I checked an hour ago and um it's so sad and it's so true yeah and to me the beautiful thing with my daughter is like she's young enough that she wants to be you know she wants me to be wrestling with her she wants me to be tickling her hold her in an airplane position and those kinds of things and you know I'm not there's no way I'm gonna fifteen years from now feel like I missed that I'm just not that is a value so can I live close but last night I had been out from ten forty five in the morning and got home around seven thirty right so I'd been doing in my clinical practice and then going to give this talk so I hadn't checked in on email and there were seventy emails I got a day and I you know whatever that's life but I felt this absolute urge to dispense with them I felt like an urge like an addictive urge I could not feel better more relaxed more satiated and calmer until I clean my inbox and my son was making this he's almost nine he was making this awesome Lego thing it's like a tiny house out of Legos he's building and he's putting it on wheels like but he's building it and he's trying to finish it and he's showing it to me and I'm standing there and I'm thinking he's gotta go to bed so I can do the emails and he's like I'm so close and he kept perseverating on it and I was like you have to go to bed and I was like what is this about man you know I don't know if the analogy to an addiction is act but if it is then we're talking about riding a wave of a craving I was compelled to go to do the work because that was I needed to get rid of this noxious feeling of all the emails so I could do something right so the key idea is that you just let that feeling pass without reacting to it but you have to first try to notice it and see what it is and be able to describe it and then I just like I just sat down Indian style and I was like show me what you have here tell me about it and I don't know how well other people are doing that maybe a lot of people are doing that really well but my sense is that we are missing those opportunities because if it's not running to do email it's running to do Facebook just standing there and your son's doing it and you're like oh you know like like like like maybe maybe it's just me but the ability to just sit and say you tell me what you're doing here this is really interesting it's inspired by this TV show about tiny houses and people living this thing oh my god he's got like a bed in there and it's like you know foot wide and it's pretty cool so Dan you know here you've got a situation where you've got these 70 emails you can't think straight until you clear them out of your inbox even at the point where you've got this wonderful scene with your child in front of you doing creative and all you can think of is try to get the kid out into bed so that you can answer these emails what is going on what is wrong with us yeah so first of all you know I listen to this I say only 70 that sounds like an easy day but again if you think about how email was designed it was designed to give you a sense of what things have not been dealt with and to make it feel that they are waiting for you sitting on your plate and whether you do them or not the fact is that when you think you could be doing it it's already taking a toll and if you know that things are piling on your plate and there's some things that might require your immediate attention but we don't separate them they all look just the same right so you know when mail comes to our house it's very easy to separate catalogs which we don't need to look at from bills that we need to deal with on a monthly basis from personal letters you know we don't get that many personal letters anymore but if you think about it the form tells you a lot about what it is with email it all looks the same right so you say to yourself oh there must be some things here that are really crucial so what we've done is we've taken this pipe of information of digital information and we deliver everything from it but by delivering everything from it we elevate the importance of lots of things in a way that is completely inappropriate so I think he's right that we have created that but I'll tell you one thing I did as I travel the world from time to time I get to meet chief rabbis I'm Israeli and Jewish I'm kind of curious about Judaism and I always ask one question I say if you were recommending to me one commandment to keep which one would it be give me one what should I try and what do you think is the commandment that they all recommend you tell me keep the Sabbath interesting and they all said the same reason they say keep the Sabbath it seems like you're making yourself less productive it says take take a day off and instead of working and you know progressing don't do anything toward your actual goal but instead what it does is it gives you a chance to reflect on life and they say if you take this time and you reflect on life you'll actually make higher progress it's kind of interesting because it fits some of the research and social science of what's called depletion that if you keep on working very hard all the time you get mentally exhausted and kind of having some time to reflect on life and think about what you want to do might actually be very useful I talked to the chief rabbi in South Africa about this and he wakes me up very early the next day I think the guy has too much energy but he wakes me up very early in the morning he said let's get all the Jews in South Africa to celebrate the Sabbath and we start talking about what do we know about getting people to adopt a new habit and the final decision we made was not to build up for it but to start with one day a year of people doing the full thing and the reason if people have to think whether they want to spend time with their family beyond their iPhone even having their thought is going to diminish the capacity and their enjoyment of what they're doing what people need to have is the idea that there is no email it's just not possible and if you're a religious Jew of course it really helps if you think God really cares about whether you read email on the Sabbath or not but if you do and it's out of the system it's not tempting there's actually a really amazing piece of research showing that when you take Orthodox Jews and you check how tempted are they to smoke on the Sabbath they're not tempted if you tell them don't smoke they're craving the nicotine on the Sabbath they're not there's a higher order need that says smoking is just not an option here and we studied this what happened on the Sabbath that we tried out and what happened is that that was the feeling that people got that all of a sudden they were fully engaged because it's not just that they were not checking email they knew that it was outside of the rules and it's kind of an interesting thing what kind of rules should we create for modern society so that we don't tempt ourselves to misbehave I love that thought Dan, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us my pleasure, thanks a lot Dan Arelli he's written three books on decision making and irrational behavior two of them New York Times bestsellers Dan's a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University at Duke he also leads one of the most amusingly named research centers on campus the center for advanced hindsight we also heard this episode from David Sabara he's a professor in the psychology department at the University of Arizona where he directs the laboratory for social connectedness and health David's recent article for Vox titled I trained myself to be less busy and it dramatically improved my life for more resources on working healthier visit us online at newamerica.org click on the link for Better Life Lab Better Life Lab is produced by New America in partnership with Slate thanks so much for joining me for our podcast about the art and science of living a full life it's a collaboration with ideas 42 supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation our podcast is produced by David Shulman if you enjoyed this episode here's one more item for your to-do list take a moment to review Better Life Lab on Apple Podcasts it really does make a difference in getting the word out from New America's Better Life Lab I'm Bridget Shulte


Hello everybody hooded Cobra Commander 78 here and I'm back with another comic book Wednesday and this time we are looking at issue number 10. Now issue number 10 is kind of special. It represents a departure from the formula that we've seen in G.I. Joe comic books so far. It is also the return of the regular G.I. Joe writer Larry Hama after a two issue absence and we see some significant character development and plot development that will have far reaching impact on this comic book series. So let's get started and look at issue number 10. On the cover we see Scarlet and Snake Eyes in a suburban neighborhood and there's a sign that says welcome to Springfield a nice little town. One of the houses though is a facade and it is hiding two Cobra soldiers. We got a hint at the existence of Springfield way back in issue number 5 when the Cobra soldiers disguised as a marching band were from the town of Springfield. On the splash page we see the roof of a building and some of the Joes are sneaking around very stealthily. We have a title a nice little town like ours with the writer Larry Hama and penciler Mike Vosberg. The Joes are on a mission to assault the building which they believe is a Cobra stronghold and we're dropped right into the middle of the mission which is a departure from the usual formula. Usually we get the setup in the Joes briefing room when we find out what the mission is going to be so we're doing things a little bit differently this time. Inside the building the Baroness is waiting for the G.I. Joe team.  On the roof is Scarlet, Snake Eyes and Zap and it's a trap yet another trap. It seems like every issue of G.I. Joe has the Joes falling into a trap. This time it is literally a trap door. It opens up and the three Joes fall into a cell and the door slams closed. While they are still stunned their weapons are taken away from them. The rest of the G.I. Joe team rushes in but it's too late. A weird aircraft thing takes off from the roof with the three trapped Joes inside it. Inside the craft the Baroness gases the three Joes so they are unconscious for their ride to Cobra headquarters. Scarlet and Zap wake up in a jail cell and they are suffering from some very strange hallucinations. There's also a young boy in the cell with them but where is Snake Eyes? Elsewhere in Cobra headquarters we find that Snake Eyes is hooked to some strange contraction that looks like a torture device. Some new character called Dr. Venom is using the device as an attempt to read Snake Eyes' mind. Snake Eyes is not wearing his mask but his face is blacked out because we know that Snake Eyes has a hideous disfigurement. Apparently his face is so hideous that the comic book cannot even show it to the reader. Dr. Venom's explanation of how his brainwave scanner works is a bunch of techno babble mumbo jumbo but it sounds just scientific enough for us to accept it and move on without questioning it. Back in the jail cell Scarlet and Zap are still suffering from hallucinations. A door opens and they are given some bread and water but the boy that's in the cell with them warns them not to drink the water. Apparently the hallucinogens are delivered to them through the water. He uses the heat from the light bulb to neutralize the drugs so to make the water safe. Back at the brainwave scanner Dr. Venom is trying to use the machine to get Snake Eyes to reveal the location of the G.I. Joe's secret headquarters but Snake Eyes is blocking that information with some memories from his past. To suppress the information he has to dredge up more and more painful memories from his history. At this point we see a memory of a helicopter crash and we find out that that is how Snake Eyes' face got disfigured. Back at the cell Scarlet and Zap decide they have to trust this kid who is still unnamed at this point to help them escape. At the brainwave scanner Snake Eyes is remembering his time in Vietnam and when his family was killed in a car wreck. Snake Eyes' concentration slips for a moment and Dr. Venom gets a glimpse of G.I. Joe's personnel and vehicles. Unfortunately the vamp is drawn like just an ordinary army jeep. Back at the cell Scarlet and Zap pretend to be unconscious and the kid says something about an anti-cobra underground which of course brings the soldiers running. Scarlet and Zap are only pretending to be unconscious of course and they jump up and knock out the soldiers. The three escape with Scarlet and Zap disguised as Cobra soldiers escorting the boy out of the jail. Snake Eyes is doing his best to block the memory of the G.I. Joe headquarters despite the painful probings of the brainwave scanner but he has to dredge up more painful memories to do it. Scarlet, Zap and the boy drive around Springfield in a stolen car and the boy explains that Springfield was an ordinary town until the soap people came. The soap people were part of a pyramid scheme that was apparently a front for Cobra and Cobra ended up brainwashing the entire town. The entire town is just a disguised Cobra base. The buildings all house Cobra weapons. This reference to the soap people is a thinly disguised shot at Amway. Amway was a pyramid scheme and it started out selling soap and I've had some family members involved in Amway and I have to say it is a little bit brainwashing so I can say from personal experience don't get involved in Amway. It may not lead you to join Cobra but it does not lead to good things. Zap, Scarlet and the boy walk into a video arcade which is above Dr. Venom's headquarters but the kids in the video arcade are all loyal to Cobra and they see the boy who they recognize as a traitor and they see two adults that they've never seen before so they think that something's up. Underneath the arcade Snake Eyes is struggling valiantly against the brainwave scanner but it is taking a toll on him and he is nearly dead. Just then Dr. Venom and Cobra officer get an intruder alert and they rush upstairs to see what's happening. As they go upstairs they miss something on the screen which is Snake Eyes learning the secret ninja technique of slowing his heart rate and breathing to the point that he appears dead. This is the first time that we learn that Snake Eyes is a ninja. At the arcade one of the big arcade game laser guns is an actual freaking laser and one of the kids starts shooting at Zap and Scarlet. Dr. Venom decides that the kids have it well in hand so he returns to his work only to find Snake Eyes dead. But no he only appeared dead because he was using that secret ninja technique. As soon as he is let out of the restraints he knocks out the Cobra officer and takes the rifle and smashes Dr. Venom's face. If Snake Eyes knew how much pain Dr. Venom was going to cause him in the future Snake Eyes may have killed him right then. Snake Eyes retrieves his mask and goes upstairs to rescue Scarlet, Zap and the boy and they all escape in the stolen car. They drive to the airport where they find the same strange aircraft that brought them to Springfield. They ask the boy if he'd like to come with them but he declines he needs to stay there and fight Cobra so they hijack the aircraft and they escape. The escape is not perfect however the Cobra pilot that is flying the aircraft pulls a gun out of his helmet that's weird. Snake Eyes shoots the pilot and conveniently knocks out the navigation gear and the compass. The aircraft is flying through a storm and they can't tell which direction they're going. They keep flying until they make it all the way back to New York. They parachute out of the aircraft and Scarlet lands on the Incredible Hulk. Actually it's not the Incredible Hulk it's just an advertisement for another Marvel comic and then they take a bus back to GI Joe headquarters. Let's evaluate this issue. The escape is pretty contrived. I mean it's very convenient that the compass and the navigation gear were knocked out in the aircraft as they were flying through a storm so the Joes could escape without knowing the exact location of the Cobra base. The writer is walking a thin line here. On the one hand he wants to reveal secrets about Cobra but he doesn't want to reveal too much to the GI Joe team. This issue had a lot of science fiction mumbo jumbo from the weird aircraft at the beginning to the brainwave scanner to the laser gun in the arcade. Springfield is not all that small a town. It has a fairly good sized airport and if Cobra had taken over a town the size of Springfield it would be impossible even in the early 80s for them to keep it a secret because a city that size has connections to neighboring cities and somebody would have noticed that something was up. I do think the art was a little bit subpar though. I'm not a great fan of Mike Vosberg and I will be happy to see some other artists take a crack at GI Joe. I really don't mind this lack of realism though because this issue is just too much fun. I mean we learn a lot in this issue. We get an inside look at the secret Cobra headquarters. We also learn a lot about Snake Eyes. We learn how Snake Eyes' face got disfigured. We learned that he was in Vietnam. We learned that he was a ninja. We learned that his family was killed in a car accident. We're also introduced to a new evil character Dr. Venom and Dr. Venom will feature prominently in future issues of GI Joe. We are also introduced to the brainwave scanner which is a device that will also feature prominently in later issues. It's nice that Zap is in this issue but he's more of a third wheel. We're starting to see a core group of characters in these GI Joe comic books that are starting to weave their way through a lot of different stories and Snake Eyes and Scarlet are among the that core group. Zap is portrayed as having a mustache in this issue as he appeared on his card art but his action figure did not have a mustache. The way Zap is drawn he appears to be Hispanic which would be accurate to his file card and I do appreciate the ethnic diversity that we see in GI Joe. Springfield is a great metaphor for the dangers of extremism inside the United States. Not all threats to freedom and the Constitution come from foreign countries and even though Springfield seems like an ideal town it seems perfect on the outside underneath is a layer of fascism and totalitarianism and evil. And let's not forget the comic books warning about the dangers of Amway. As I said before don't get involved with Amway. This was a fantastic issue. Larry Hammer is back with a vengeance. It's just amazing how much information they crammed into this issue and a lot of this information will be very important going forward. Even though this was a standalone story it's different from the other standalone stories that we've gotten in GI Joe so far. This entire story exists to provide context for later stories in the GI Joe comic book series. I love this issue. I highly recommend that you pick up GI Joe number 10 and read it. It is vital to the storyline of the entire GI Joe comic book series so do not miss this one. This is a great comeback for Larry Hammer. Thanks for watching this video. I hope you liked it. If you did don't forget to hit that like button and don't forget to smash that subscribe button. I've got a lot of great new GI Joe comic book and toy reviews coming up and you do not want to miss them. Thanks for watching and I'll talk to you later.


Cymru'n gynhyrchu'n gwybod ychydig yn ymlaen nhw'n gweithio'n gweithio'r menu i'r expedisiau cyntaf, a'n gwybod i'r expedisiau yn gweithio'n gwybod i'r lli, oherwydd, mae'n gweithio i'n gweithio, ond mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. yn gerigoddiol. Mae ydw i'r penderfyn nhw'n gweithio rwy'n sefydling hynny. Mae'r penderfyn ryw ar hyn, mae ydy'r effig iawn o'r rhan sydd yn gwahanol a rhan o'r ffordd o hefyd yn yr unrhyw ar os yma a ddim ar hyn gyfan y masbyg a'r ejad. Mae'r rhan o'r ffordd? Yw fynd yn chen nhw. Fy wnes yn ei wneud drafod yn edgell o'r hwnnw, felly mae wedyn i'r trail hefyd yn leirio gyda hyn i'w ddim ynser, ond mae'n gweithio'r gweithio. Ond i'r wych yn ymweld, yw'n mynd i gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. Ond o'r llwydd o fysydd, yn ymgyrch, yw Llym Pïch Ultra 7s. Mae gennym ar gyfer cyflau. Mae gennym i'r gweithio'r llwydd o'r gweithio, mae gennym i'r llwydd o'r gweithio, ond mae'n gweithio'r pwg yw ddysgu cyflau yn y llwydd. Mae'r llunio sy'n gwybodaeth. Llyniodd, ddangos liwn, ond hwnna'all eithaf, ac mae'r lluniau flynydd i'r cyffredinol o'i ei AM ysgol yn dwys i'r llyfrredu lluniau llyfr Peninsula, i'r lluniau llyfr, tegwch, gwylwch llwyr, a'r llwyddo llyרג i'r llyfr. D [♪ Rhyw llyfr הפer, fan ffainllwyllon flushy, fe ffainllwyll yn rwynt, ddyn nhw'r llyfr llyfrilyllon flushy, sy'n gyffredinol. a ydydd eich bwysig ar gyfer y llaw. Ac rydych yn fath, ac rydw i'n ganddo i fynd i'ch ei ddweud ei ddweud i'ch ei ddweud i'r rhagfyd, ac rydw i'n ei ddweud i'ch ddweud i fynd i'ch ddweudio, ond rydw i'ch ganddo i ddweudio mi oed yn ymwneud y proses a'r cyffordd o'r cyffordd o'r drefnidol yn ysgrifennu. it's a hot topic guys one that i'm sure you don't want to miss out on. Phil Raven hiking trousers with the the vents i found these really handy the vents are always often open i know it's winter but often opening knees up to get some extra to get some extra airflow to me and there's one of them on each side I didn't take this coat with me this is just what i'm wearing today because it's nippy it wicks wet it's just a an old height a an old t-shirt i've got free for doing a marathon or .. Wrtwch Wedonnaloh Mirch Ysledig Ac yna y heißtru knwr. Keyfynb journal fel teahym ded liquorau ainad andaeth. Gwnewch y hayyd immu'n ei choi... ... ac Feid middoli d 따�can. Adam noug lle yn gw Dieuch. அ perto soch. Yna r�� tydo... Ond stlicwodwch yn cael 현. Wel y werth. Failedig iddi am eich dor писyn... ..b datblymu. Feidi'r wneud o'r unrheid Wel' dyna ffeydom Abergeda. Roedd mell dad tydf anhil yng Ninoa Rhaen i'n gwybod i'r cwmpio i fynd i gynnwys i'r ffordd o'r holl mwy ac ynghylch yn cael ei ddechrau i'r ysgwyl a gwybod i'r pwysig i'r gwybod i'r llun a'r holl ddweudê'n cael ei ddweud petagornyn gyntaf mae'n ddweud yn cael ei ddweud a'i ddweud i gyd ac yn gwybod i'r gweithredu ychydig o'r tyfnol Cysgwyd yn rhan o ddweud a ydych chi'n nhw hefyd ac rhan o'r ddweud I need a lot of things to hand and in here my Garmin in reach mini very rare that you're going to need it but it's just in case if I fall over and spray my knob or whatever I can just press a button and go come get me and I can let people know where I am do emergency weather forecasts and what like so it's pretty good. I got a waterproof phone holder in there as well because I was using OS maps on my phone if it rains or if it's torrential rain for any long periods of time that goes round my neck. The phone's in there and I can still use it. Also in there was my petrol bindi head torch, a keepage sandwich bag and if it starts to muller it down then the torch and my phone and whatever can go in there and that just keeps everything completely dry. I also had my Cicero guide book in there as well. I took my hiking stick because I was using a hiking pole tent as well but I always take these on long distance solo hikes because they really do come in handy and these are just my black diamond cork handle hiking sticks. On the outside of the bag were my water bottles, just two plagi water bottles. I would put electrolytes in this one. This one I just keep as water just to hydrate with and also just mainly to cook with. This was always going to be electrolytes so I don't use that one for cooking and just any old plastic bottle I use. Also on the outside were my light weight foam pad and myriad of different uses just like sitting on putting under your sleep mat for extra protection from the cold and also from thorns and sharp stones. Where's nothing, it's always going to be coming with me that. Also on the outside of the pack waterproofs which I did need because obviously it's winter. It's a collaboration between Ronhill and Mountain Equipment, super light weight, it's a trail running coat, no frills, no pockets, just keeps the rain off me. Also on the outside woolly out just to keep lugs warm and mainly to sleeping as well. My waterproof trousers, I didn't use these in the end. Oh well I haven't used them so far when they are free through. Birch House Deluge waterproof trousers right into the brains of the operation, the top of the bag, the brain. I lost me Osprey bag cover, I don't know where that is so I'm just using this old DD rain cover. Does the trick. Anti body glide, it's for runners. I was doing it when I was doing a lot of running and it's just an anti chaff glide and it really does help just popping a bit of this on your inner thigh or on your nuts or whatever or under your armpits. Wherever you get a bit of chaffing in it, it really does the trick. I recommend that. These high five zero sugar electrolytes. Pot one of these in your water, it replaces all your salts and things that you might lose while you're doing long distances. That's it, that's what I kept in the top of there. On the inside of the top of the thing, we have CBD oil which I use at the end of every day. It just helps me sleep and it's good for joints and that and that's Kent CBD. I do have a discount code and I'll leave a link below for that if you're interested. Jelly earplugs. Right, let's get into the main bulk of it, the main bag. And it's all just been stuffed in here, don't worry about that. Kept in a dry bag, obviously everything in here is in a dry bag, individually in dry bags and then I've put a builder's sack which is waterproof just an extra layer because in winter you can't, it's one thing getting if you wet but you can't really dry things out. In here we've got my nature hike down trousers, adding an extra layer of warmth for the evenings because again it's winter. A secondary pair of Dan Tuft socks. Aclyma merino wool leggings. Again just for an on a night time really. My lightweight aclyma merino wool base layer. My trunks because you never know, even in winter I might want a little dipperoo, my secondary pair of pants. I need some new ones these, they've got old in man. Icebreaker, I took them and a Patagonia pair. These are brilliant, these are probably one of the best hiking pants I've ever had. I need some new ones of them, they're falling to pieces. That was it for clubs, I just kept everything pretty lightweight and obviously layering is the key. Also in the top four are these delta pegs for the outside of the tent, the rest will be normal pegs but in winter up high. It's just peace of mind, because a lot of the time when there's heavy winds that's where your tent will fail, is it the pegs, it'll just rip the pegs out but good luck ripping them out because they're sturdy. Electric bag, again in a waterproof bag we've got my pump which doubles up as a lantern for a night and it also blows up my air bed. It's a little bit of extra weight, you don't really need it but it is luxurious. After a full day hiking it's just demoralising having to blow up air bed manually so I take that with me every time and it really does hold its charge well as well. Power banks, because you don't want to not have a phone so I've got these two power banks both by anchor. Possible's bag. Sinoc, however you want to put, canoc sinoc. Water bladder to collect the water and then my soil micro squeeze which you attach to the bottom and that's just for procuring water and filtering it. Biodegradable wipes, these are great man. You get foot and hand warmers. They last all night.  Great stuff. My bread bags, for anyone who doesn't know about the bread bags is that once I've finished hiking these are like my camp shoes.  Top tip. Compied blister pads essential. There's got a bamboo toothbrush and mini toothpaste. My Soto Windmaster and a little first aid kit that I've put together myself. It's just got some anti-hystamines, some painkillers, a mirror to check if we tick so if you get anything in your eye or whatever. Always handy to have a mirror. Some tweezers, some plasters and lighter and then this little tube here that's just got some matches, safety pin, scalpel, a bit of fishing twine.  Food. Real termat muesli, viewsli. Couple more real termats and I took a couple of adventure foods as well. Enough food so that I didn't have to get anything on the trail. Obviously when you're on the trail you take advantage of your pubs and your cafes and your shops and your chippies and all that but I like to have enough food so that if none of that's available I can just bat on so I took enough food for the adventure there. I had to buy this because I forgot man. I had to buy it on route and it's the Alp Kit and in there's the gas canister and then a little gas stabiliser and that all goes in there and that's what I'd boil my water in with my Soto Windmaster and that's it. Not doing any cooking on this one obviously just boiling hot water. The trusted and well loved. Still a bit wet and he's drying out man. Lanshan too. Neoair, extra large, exterm. I've had this for years. I've patched it up maybe two or three times. It's got little holes in but I've patched them up. It still works a treat. Keeps me warm. My sleeping bag is, well this was the big one. I was like shall I bring, do you bring me a winter sleeping bag which is maybe an extra 500 gram or do you go for your free season and then make it up with coats and stuff but I'm really glad that I took this and this is Rab Ascent 900. A wonderful, wonderful sleeping bag and my pillow because me the other one's got an hole in it. It's just this creature pillow. It falls down to less than this but I just chucked it at the bottom and then it's got a real nice feel to it. Nice and comfortable. You could take some snow spikes with you if you knew you were going to get snow. I was doubtful so I risked it and didn't take them but that's something that you could consider. Obviously everyone packs differently for their style of camping and hiking but this is what I took. Right there you go. That's everything I took. I'll put the weight on the screen now. I'll leave links to everything below here. My next video will be of the hike and this sort of helps you know what I've got with me, what's in my bag, how much it weighed. Right thanks for watching. Take care of yourselves. Bye for now. I'm just going to leave everything there. That's it.


The Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, has ruled out the postponement of the 2023 General Elections, led by the various attacks on its facilities across the country. The INEC Chairman, Professor Mahmoud Yacoubou, who spoke at the Chatham House in London, decried the growing attacks on the commission's facilities by non-state agents. At the meeting, Yacoubou assured Nigerians that the commission, in collaboration with security agencies, had increased the security presence and areas prone to attacks by criminals. Fifty facilities of the commission were attacked in various parts of the country, mainly in the form of arson and vandalization. Buildings, election materials, and vehicles were destroyed, and sometimes these attacks even targeted staff of the commission. During the continuous voter registration, some staff of the commission in emo state were attacked, resulting in injuries and death. The implication of the attacks is that we have to rebuild facilities and replace materials. And the commission and the security agencies have increased their presence in some of these locations. The last attack actually happened on Sunday, on Sunday last week, but because of the cooperation between the military and the Electoral Commission, we were able to respond and the damage was limited to just a section of the building in a local government office. The commissioners repeatedly called for concerted efforts to control and check these attacks. And in December last year, the National Assembly held a public hearing on these attacks, and we hope that authorities have these attacks under control and the response by the security agencies is more coordinated. But in spite of these attacks, we'll rebuild facilities, we'll replace damage or lost items, the election will continue.


Hi, welcome to Visual Studio Toolbox. I'm your host, Robert Green, and with me is Phil Jepixi. Hey. How are you? Good. How are you? Doing good. Right. We are continuing our series on design patterns, and today we're going to look at factories. Yes. The whole set under that umbrella corp of the simple factory method, abstract factory. Cool. So, factories. I see these quite a bit, usually in code that other people have written with databases or services involved, so it's a fairly well-used pattern. Yeah. The goal really is, as we've said on several of these shows so far, to encapsulate or isolate the creation of an object from the code that needs it. Okay. New is glue. If I am creating an object and using an object at the same time, I am now stuck to the implementation. Okay. So, let me go back to the car metaphor that I used in the original show that kicked off this series. You drive, right? Yes, I do. Quite well, I would say. I'm sure you do. So, you have a car. Did you have to put the engine in it before you drove here to work today? No, I did not. It was already there. Yes. So, you had this dependency on the engine, but somebody injected that for you. Right. Right.  Can you drive another car? I can drive another car, yes. Okay. So, as long as it subscribes to the iCar interface, you can probably drive it, right? Right. Well, if you were only able to drive your own car and your car was in the shop, you couldn't come to work. Right? True. So, if you knew up that instance of your car directly when you need it and something happens to that instance of your car, you're stuck. Okay. So, what we want to do is we want to encapsulate or isolate the creation of these things, cars, from you. So, you just get up in the morning and say, I need a car. Maybe you're going to take your wife's car. Maybe you're going to take a rental. Maybe you'll take your car. It doesn't matter. It matches the iCar interface. Right? Right. So, that's the factory's... I see where this is going. What you're saying is, I could in my garage have a factory that builds cars for me. Yes. So, I can wake up in the morning and decide which type of car I want. As long as it subscribes to the iCar interface. Nice. Yeah. I'm digging this. I think tomorrow I'm going to new up a Ferrari. There you go. As long as you got the factory to make it. Okay. Back to reality. Back to reality. So, the simple factory, and I've got it crossed out, it's not truly a pattern. Again, that's really getting into academic semantics that I don't care about. But it is a code construct. And it really just simplifies object creation in one place. So, that's probably why they don't call it a pattern. But it really helps reduce duplicate code and enforce dry, which is don't repeat yourself. Okay. Right? I've said many times on your shows and in conference talks and certainly in the books and courses, if you write something once, you should encapsulate it. If you write the same thing twice, you need to back up and encapsulate it. If you write the same thing three times, I would ask you to stop being a programmer. Because any time you've got this duplicate code, you're risking some severe side effect bugs. Right. So, I've got a simple factory. Actually, let's look at the test. And again, like the other episodes, we're driving a lot of this discussion around unit tests so we can see how these things are used in action. Okay. This is not using a factory. This is just code that based on some sort of pizza type creates a new pizza. And you probably see this in lots of different places. Perfectly did, yeah. So let's say that I need to get a pizza in different places in code. So I clip or inherit this code into other methods. And any time I need a pizza, I call this little block of code. So what if I'm going to introduce a Italian? I guess I'll be an Italian style of pizza. Yeah. So I would do this, right? I would just say, case pizza type dot Italian. And I would, I don't have any implementation for that. Okay. And I'd have to do some refactoring to add as a pizza type and create a class that is a Italian pizza. But if I've got this code, and I'm pointing it to screen, which you guys can't see, if I have this code in multiple places in my application, I have to now remember everywhere I put that code to then add the Italian pizza option. Okay. If I don't do that, then in method B that maybe you're working with, you don't have the Italian pizza option. We've just introduced a bug. So at some point you'd say, oh, why don't I just create a method and I'll pass in the type of pizza I want to create and then it will know which pizza to create. Yes. We want to reduce that duplicate code and encapsulate the creation of the pizza. What we would rather see in our line of business code or our calling code is something as simple as this. Okay. Create pizza. Let me get the resolution change going on. So let me put a line break in. So I want to create a pizza of the New York style with some set of ingredients. And I just make sure that what I get back is actually of type New York. So that idea that, I mean eventually this list could grow long, but every time you want to create a pizza, you're going to have to add that whole case statement. You're pretty quickly hopefully going to decide, well, that's not very good. So you're going to move it somewhere else, create a class that does that for you. That's a factory. It is a simple factory. It's a simple factory. Right, but it's a factory. It is. Okay. And if we look at the simple factory, it really is just the case statement encapsulated in a static method. Got it. We had the discussion about static versus singleton with the singleton episode, which I'm not sure if we've already published or not, but if we haven't. Singleton, yes, we have. Okay. So we've already published it. Singleton. We're doing song in one, in two days. The singleton. Who is the first creation? So it was the previous episode. Yes, previous episode. So rewind, go back and watch that episode. But we had a big discussion about when is static okay versus when you need a singleton. Right. And a pizza factory is totally, well, any factory, simple factory, is a perfect example of when static is good enough. Okay. Because I'm not maintaining any state. Yep. I'm encapsulating the creation of a new object. Now, in reality, you probably wouldn't have these lines hard coded in there. You might be calling to a database. You might be calling to some other service to get the type back, but we want to encapsulate all that code in one place. Okay. So anytime we make changes, we make it in one place. Right. And we extract that newing up of an item away from the code that needs it. Okay. So that's the key, because when you say new is glue, then every time you knew something, there's gonna be a voice in your head saying, well, that's bad. Yes. New is glue. You eventually have to new it. You have to at some point, right? But keep in mind that this pizza, this simple factory is not actually using these pizzas. It's just creating these pizzas. Right. This is your garage. Yep. Creating a Ferrari. Yep. Because you've asked for a Ferrari today. Yep. But tomorrow you wanna go climb Mount Rainier. So you ask for a four by four and it produces a four by four. Okay. You don't care how it happens. It magically happens. Right. So the bad pattern, the anti-pattern, if you will, is to new something up and use it immediately. Yes. The pattern would be to let something else new it and then it just returns the instance. Right. And using factories is one way to accomplish that. Yep. Another way is dependency inversion, where you would use some sort of inversion of control container. We should probably do a show on that at some point where you've got something else creating it based on a configuration or a DI container, ASP.net core is a perfect example of dependency inversion in action. So regardless, you're, again, the pattern is take that newing out of the hands of the people that need the new thing. Okay. So. Cool. Very simple, not truly a pattern. We'll call it a code construct to keep all the academics happy. It's a good practice. It is a good. And it's, again, it's probably occurred to you to do that already. Right. Okay. And actually a good way to, let me back up into Visual Studio. This is Visual Studio toolbox after all. After all. And I can go into analyze and right here select analyze solution for code clones. And what this will give me, do you know if this is a enterprise on link feature or is this in pro? I don't know. I was just about to wonder was this, what is this a 2017 feature? This is a 2017 feature. Okay. And I just recently learned about it and I think it's absolutely awesome. So what it will find is places in your code where you have duplicate code. Oh, cool. So you run this analyzer and if you've got this switch statement in five, six, seven places, then it'll come back and say, hey, you've got duplicate code here. It's an exact match. It's a strong match. It's a weak match. And then you can go look and say, hey, I'm doing stuff up in here and here and here. Let's move that into a simple factory. Nice. All right. So we get into the first true pattern of the factory series and that's a factory method pattern. This uses a method to deal with the problem of creating objects, right? And I don't have to specify the exact class that will be created. The exact instance I should say, because we're coding to interface. So lots of words on the screen. It's really best explained just by going into the code. So let's look at the factory method tests and what we want here. And again, let me do a line break because of the resolution change. So service book is 3000 by 2000. We're not recording at that. So I gotta remember when I'm sitting in my hotel room that I can't always show everything at once. I want a New York style pizza. Yep. And I call the New York style pizza store and I order a pizza.  Okay, seems simple enough. I can make a class, call it New York pizza store, say create pizza. But you remember when we talked about the template method where we wanted to have some sort of order to a sequence of events. Right. Going back to the e-commerce problem. I want to take the order, process the payment, pick the inventory, packet, ship it. Right. We also talked about pizzas in a private, in a prior episode where we said, well, you know what? We have to take the order, process the payment, we have to make the pizza, we have to cook the pizza, we have to cut it, box it, deliver it. Right. At order of execution, we want to stay the same. Yep. So instead of doing all that duplicate code, when we look at the New York pizza store, it really is just an instance of an abstract class called pizza store. Here's our factory method where we create a pizza of type New York pizza. Okay. And we look at the base pizza store class itself. Here is, and again, it's not a template method because that pattern has some differences to this, but conceptually it's the same. We've got this method in the abstract class. We want to have some things happen. So this is not part of the pattern, the factory method pattern. This is the factory method pattern. We are calling this abstract method called create pizza. Okay. That's gonna be handled by a derived object. Okay. What do these look like to you? The pattern we've already talked about, right? That's the simple command. That's the command pattern, right? So again, you see how all these things kind of work together. Okay. So you're telling the pizza to bank yourself. Mm-hmm. And if it's a New York style pizza, it knows how to do it. If it's Chicago, it knows how to do it, et cetera, et cetera. So would you call, I see that you're not using the word factory in the name of anything you're calling, which I see used quite a bit, that people will call a factory to create something. Yeah, so with the factory method, it really is more embedded than that. Okay. And as opposed to being a specific factory. Now, in my experience working with the factory method, I would probably never do this alone, but in conjunction with the abstract factory, which we'll talk about next. Okay. But what we're really trying to do here is push that responsibility of creating the pizza into something that knows how to create the pizza. Okay. So I'm creating a pizza store and I say bring me a pizza. The pizza store knows how to create its specific style of pizza, right? So we have a New York pizza, Chicago pizza, et cetera. And that is done with a method call from the base class. So the base class says, you're derived, you take care of creating the right object. Okay. And we'll go to town on it. Okay. We'll bake it, we'll cut it, we'll box it, we'll ship it, et cetera. Got it. There are some shortcomings to this and let's say... So again, just to reiterate, the factory method pattern says take the newing of something and instead of newing and using right away, right, delegated essentially to a specific object that's in charge of creating it. Yeah. Is that about right? So this is done by creating, right here in the definition, done by creating a factory method, right? Either specified in an interface or implemented by child classes. In the example that we've shown today, it's implemented in child classes. Okay. So let's say you are only ever gonna create a pizza. There's no New York, Chicago, California, there's just a pizza, right? Would you still wanna use a factory? No, I would probably... Method there. No, I'd probably just use dependency inversion to put that pizza in where I need it. Okay. Right, I could put that pizza right in the constructor of whatever it needed to do, but there's no choices. Okay. So really what we're trying to do with all of the factories and even the simple factory is take those choices and push that responsibility to somebody who understands those choices. All we want is to receive a package from Amazon, let's say. Okay. We order something, we want to show up in two days if we have pride. Right. We don't care how it's packed. We don't care how it's shipped. We care that what we get is in one piece and it's still edible. If it's perishable, it's not broken, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so to get back to when we originally started talking about patterns, they are, and the idea was that you have a problem to solve and somebody has already solved it for you. Yes. So the problem that the factory method pattern, we're gonna talk about the abstract, the problem here is that you have multiple types of classes that you're gonna create. So how do you handle that? If you only ever create a class and instance of a class, that's not a problem that the factory method was designed to address. Is that the correct statement? That is the correct statement. Okay. And one could argue pragmatically that if you only ever had one type of pizza, you don't necessarily need to code to an interface. If you only ever were going to have one car and drive one car, so the car you got when you were 16 and got your license, you were gonna keep for the rest of your life, so you couldn't drive anymore, do you really need to program to the iCar interface? Right. But in reality, is that realistic? And we have to do a balancing next year, it depends. Maybe, maybe not, and for some places, yes, in other places, no. That's the architecture answer, of course, it depends. But what we really need to think about is not gold plating. In other words, don't write code because we think someday down the road they're gonna need this, but still write code that we can extend without modifying. Right. So if I code to an interface, even if it's an iPizza interface, and I'm only ever going to get one style of pizza, but I code it to an interface, it's not much more work, maybe a couple lines of code, but now I can change the behavior through extension without having to go back and modify that code. Okay. Makes sense. Which is the open close principle from solid, right? Open for extension, closed for modification. Right. Right. So the abstract factory, again, a lot of words, so you can always pause the video if you wanna read it, but I'm just gonna highlight it. It provides a way to encapsulate individual factories that have a common theme without specifying their concrete classes. So again, I don't get hung up on real academic definitions. I really wanna just show it in code. So let's look at how we would call this, and this solves one of the problems with the factory method. The problem with the factory method is I have a New York style pizza store. I can only ever serve New York style pizza. Let's say that one. New Yorkers would say, what's the problem with that? Yeah, what's the problem with that? Well, what if the Mets and the White Sox are in the World Series? All right, so being a baseball fan. Let's be realistic. Let's say the Cubs and the Yankees are no offense to White Sox or Mets fans. So Robert has just turned off half of our listeners. Sorry, that was him, not me. No, but the point is, let's say that there's a Chicago team and a New York team, and they're in the series, and the mayors make a bet, if they tend to do, that if New York wins, that Pizzeria Uno and all those pizza places will have to serve New York style pizza for a day. And the reverse is also true. Those New York restaurants will have to serve Chicago pizza for a day. Well, with the factory method pattern, I would have to create a new pizza store to get that new style of pizza. Right. Technically, I mean, there are ways that we can change the factory method to accommodate that, but as you said, this problem's been solved. Let's leverage, stand on the shoulders of giants and leverage what's been done before us and solve it using an abstract factory. Okay, so here I have a New York pizza store with abstract factory. Again, naming is hard, so I just named them as obvious as I can for teaching purposes. And I say, give me a New York pizza store, but I want a Chicago style pizza. And I'm still calling ordered pizza, right? It's still taking the responsibility to that factory method of creating the pizza for me. Right. But what we've changed is we've now abstracted away the type of pizza into a pizza factory. The pizza factory itself is just an abstract class, create pizza. This is a theme that we keep saying over and over again. And if we look at the New York pizza factory, now this is not a New York pizza store, this is a pizza factory. Right. So we derive from pizza factory, we're gonna create a pizza, and the New York pizza factory creates a New York style pizza. So whatever it needs to do to make that type of pizza, and it's off to the races. A very slight change to the pizza store is we now have a pizza factory that we pass in when we create, for example, a New York pizza store. And that factory then creates the pizza that further extracting it away from the store itself. So here we have the New York pizza store with the abstract factory, which drives from, of course, pizza store with abstract factory. And by default, it will serve New York pizza. But we can always create a new instance of it and say, you know what, this time I wanna serve Chicago style pizza or California or Italian or whatever we wanna add in. So we've completely further abstracted away the creation of that object. Okay. Does that make sense? Yep. And so I like using them together, although again, implementation details very, we're talking about patterns. Somebody who's watching is probably gonna look at this and say, we're not really doing the factory method anymore because the factory is doing to create pizza and not to derive to class. And that's true. But you know what? It is how you implement it. The pattern is there to be implemented to fit your particular need. I did it this way because since I have to have the pizza factory to know which type of pizza to create, I said I'm gonna eliminate another call to a derived class and another override. I saved code. I didn't repeat myself and I pushed it all down here. Yeah, and again, this is not an academic exercise. Right. Techniques for writing code. Absolutely. Yep. All right, we're actually done. We talked about all the patterns, but that timer can't be right, can it? Well, it goes to 10 minutes, so it's turned over twice. Okay. So we're in the back room, Studio B. There's not a big clock on the wall. We have a little kitchen timer in front of us that says three minutes and I just panicked thinking that we were only talking for three minutes. No, we've been talking for 23 minutes. All right, well that's excellent. That makes an episode. Three minutes will be a little short. That would be. Okay, so that's the factory. The family of factories will call it that way. The factories. Okay, cool. So those are the factories. Yes. There's a fair amount going on in there, but hopefully you guys think that we did a good job of simplifying it and letting you know when you would use them and why, which I think for a lot of these is maybe even the hardest part, right? There's the code, but then there's the why. What problem are these solvings so that I should think about using them? And one of the problems that people run into with any pattern is the favorite pattern is the one they just read, right? So you might see this episode and go, I'm gonna use the factory pattern and that's really backwards. You need to have all these different patterns in your toolbox. And then when you're confronted with a problem, how do I solve that? Yes, exactly. The factories are meant to solve the, how do I new up something without having all that specific knowledge in the class that's going to be using it. Right, cool. All right, hope you enjoyed that one and we'll see you next time on Visual Studio Toolbox when we will continue this discussion because we're not quite done yet. We're not quite done yet.  Thanks for watching.


Siiiiiiiiiじゃない. I've talked about this many times before, but when looking for a new game to play, and by new game I really mean an older game that you just haven't heard of, It's just not realistic to expect to find something as good as Megaman X or Earthworm Gym or whatever, to just spring from nowhere, usually you gotta make do with something that falls into the category of perfectly OK even if it's flawed or not particularly challenging or whatever, That's how I would describe a game like Artie Lightfoot. When I say this game is perfectly okay, I'm not calling it a quote-unquote hidden gem. And I'm definitely not saying it's as good as some of the more prominent Super Nintendo platformers, but it's still worth a look because to a lot of people, it's unknown. Maybe because it didn't sell a ton of copies, or it didn't get rented a lot. Or in my particular case, I never even saw this one advertised very much, because I didn't find out about this game until much later on. On the surface, Artie Lightfoot looks paint by numbers. Like one of the gazillion mascot platformers out there, like Aero the Acrobat, or Bubsy, or Rocky Rodent, just to name a few. But I think this one's a little better than those games. You play as Artie, who appears to be a cat of some kind, and you're accompanied by his best friend, Peck, a bird that follows him around.  The rest of the controls are about what you'd expect from a game like this, with two exceptions. You can hold the B button to bounce on your tail for a higher jump, and you can press and hold up to hide in the background from enemies. There's 17 levels here, you get four lives, and unlimited continues with the password system. One hit from an enemy, and you lose Peck, although the game gives you plenty of opportunities to find him again.  And yeah, okay, I admit this is one of those cases where it's hard to pinpoint what exactly it is about this particular game that makes it better than other platformers. It's one of those things that boils down to feel, and that can be difficult to pin down. The main thing that stands out for me is the combination of the controls and the camera. Too many times now, when you play some of these platformers, either the controls are way too sensitive, like in Bubsy, or way too tight, like in Warlock, for example, or the controls will be fine, but sometimes the camera will be all over the place, like how it is in Judge Dread. But in Artie Lightfoot, they get both just right. I guess the word I'm looking for is comfortable. This game is comfort food. When I use that analogy, I mean it in both a good way and kind of a bad way. Yeah, Artie Lightfoot is comfortable to settle into, but that's kind of all it is. There are some interesting settings here, like when you get swallowed up by a monster and you have to traverse its insides to get out, but otherwise, this game is just kind of bland. When I edit these videos, I like to string together as many different settings and environments as possible, but in this one, so many of these look the same. It looks like I'm showing off the same level over and over. There's so much brown and beige and tan and gray that it gets old after a while. The level design also isn't exactly inspired here either.  And yeah, sometimes the game takes advantage of Peck's presence. But overall, the level design falls kind of flat. It's certainly not bad. The last level where you're upside down is kind of cool and using Peck to dodge these spikes is a fun challenge, but it just seems like they could have done a lot more. If anything, there are certain areas that could have used more polish because there are some difficulty spikes that show up here and there that are really gonna enrage some players. It's nothing too unusual, just stuff like annoying enemy placement and blind jumps, that sort of thing. One thing I really like about Artie Lightfoot is the presentation. Yeah, I know I just ripped down the level design in the settings, but the sprite work here is well done and I really like how the story is told, with the only dialogue being this blurb of text at the beginning of the game. The Sacred Rainbow has shattered into seven pieces and Artie's gotta go find them all before the Evil King Visconti gets to them. But more than that, how the story is told here is great. There are certain sequences throughout the game that seamlessly move from gameplay to a cutscene, like this early boss here where he chases you on a minecart into a cavern before you fight him. There's lots of stuff like that throughout this game and I really like it. The music fits the game perfectly too and I find myself getting a lot of the tunes stuck in my head. I especially love the overhead map music. However, I should point out, if you play the Japanese Super Famicom version of this one, you'll find a few differences, both in the game and the manual. The Japanese manual here is courtesy of RVGfanatic.com and was translated by a gal by the name of Kate and the artwork here is fantastic. There's a link in the description if you want to see more. The Japanese game also has a gruesome boss death where it melts in acid until it's reduced to a pile of bones where in the North American version it just gets conked out and there's other minor little touches here and there throughout the story that are a tad bit different. Anyway, yeah, I enjoy Artie Lightfoot because it gets the basics right, the sprite work is good, the controls are just right and the camera is at the right proportion and it doesn't zip around too quickly. Yeah, it's not always the most interesting game and there's some balance issues that I alluded to earlier but it's still a solid playthrough. The more I think about it, the more this game really could have used a sequel to build onto what this game does well, as well as add a few more things. But as it is, Artie Lightfoot is 16-bit comfort food. Don't go into it expecting too much, just a reasonably comfortable playthrough that I think most people will dig. And I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


was born into an amazing family and I've had really great schooling. I went to a great little private college in Lake Mills at Lakeside and the teachers there really went above and beyond and they really inspired me. Three years ago I decided to attend Madison College knowing that it was a great transfer school. I plan to go there for two years and go to UW Madison and study terminology. However along the way plans changed. I took a lot of math and math and science classes to prepare me and I realized I don't like math and I don't like science and I'm not very good at them. So I needed to come up with a new plan. By this time I really started to fall in love with the college. I loved the little community atmosphere and I love learning about all the different programs and you can clearly see them showcase to my college. So I decided I would stay there a little bit longer and decide what I was going to do. Being a student at a tech college really made all the difference to me. It gave me a chance to explore all the different career options and eventually I found mine. I am currently in the court reporting program and court reporting is really a versatile career which is perfect for me. It's an awesome feeling to think that I can pick up and move anywhere and I can find a job.


Hello everyone, this is AliceGal. In this video, I'm going to start talking about Meek strategy Nash equilibrium. This is the final solution concept that I'm going to talk about. And we'll look at the game called matching quarters. This is the game of matching quarters. It's supposed to be called matching pennies. That's the most well-known name of this game. But because we're in Canada and we don't have pennies anymore, so the smallest currency we have is a quarter, and we're going to match quarters instead. So Alice and Bob are playing this game, and they each have a quarter, and they will simultaneously show one side of their quarter. Alice wants the size of the two quarters to match, whereas Bob wants the size of the two quarters to mismatch. So from the payoff matrix, the utility matrix, you can see that if the two quarters have the same sites, so either both has or both tails, then Alice is happy, Bob is not as happy, whereas if the two quarters, the two sides are different, then Bob is happy, Alice is not as happy. Now given this game, now we have a few different concepts we can use to analyze it and try to predict what the players are going to do. Let's use the concept of pure strategy Nash equilibrium. So let's think about this question. How many of the four outcomes of this game are pure strategy Nash equilibrium? Think about this yourself, and then keep watching for the answer. The correct answer is A0. Turns out none of the four outcomes is a pure strategy Nash equilibrium. That may or may not be surprising for you. Now you might wonder if you remember when I introduced John Nash and the Nash equilibrium, I said that this is a really useful concept because every finite game has a Nash equilibrium. So what's happening here? We don't have one. How is that possible? Didn't John Nash prove this? Turns out he did prove this, but his exact statement was that every finite game has a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, and a pure strategy Nash equilibrium is a special case of a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. So we have a game here where we don't have any pure strategy Nash equilibrium, but we definitely have at least one mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. Next, let me show you how we can derive this mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. I'm going to show you the derivation. So the derivation answers the first question I have on the slide is if we're given a game, how do we calculate the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium? But after deriving the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, we are also going to think about the second question. So the second question is more looking at the pure Nash equilibrium, reflecting it and trying to interpret it. So the second question says if a player is mixing between two actions, how should we understand this? Why is the player really doing this? Let's take a look at how we can derive the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium of this matching quarters game. So first of all, each player is playing a mixed strategy and recall that a mixed strategy is a probability distribution over all the actions for the players. In this case, there are two actions per player. So Alice needs to play heads with some probability and tail with the rest of the probability and Bob also needs to play heads with some probability and tails with the rest of the probability. So in order to derive the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, we need to specify, we need to derive these mixed strategies. So let's assume that Alice plays heads with probability P because there are two actions, so we only need one probability to define the distribution. And similarly, let's assume Bob plays heads with probability Q. So I've taken the game matrix and highlighted the corresponding probabilities. So later on we can use these to calculate the expected utility of the players. Now, what's the trick? How should we derive these probabilities? It turns out the rule is quite simple. The rule says one player, this is a two-player game. So one player is going to choose their probability, their mixing probability such that the other player is indifferent between their actions. So in other words, for our game Alice chooses a value for P such that Bob is indifferent between his two actions. And similarly, Bob chooses a value for Q such that Alice is indifferent between her two actions. Now here indifferent means that the expected utility of playing either action is the same for that player. So Bob being indifferent between his actions just means both of his actions gives him the same expected utility. So he sort of doesn't care about which one he plays. Now, given this general principle of deriving the mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, let's now look at the calculations. So first of our Alice is going to choose P to make Bob indifferent between his actions. So if Bob is indifferent, we need to calculate his expected utility for each action and equate them together that will allow us to solve for P. The expected utility for Bob if he plays heads, if Bob plays heads, we are in this left column. We are in this column right here. And if Bob plays heads, then we're looking at these two numbers, right, zero and one. So if Bob plays heads, then with probability P Alice plays heads. So Bob got the utility of zero, right? So with probability P, Bob gets the utility of zero. And then with probability one minus P Alice plays tails and Bob gets utility of one. So Bob's expected utility is the sum of the two, which is one minus P. Similarly, if Bob plays tails, then we are looking at the right column. Let me highlight this. And then we're looking at these two numbers, right? If Alice plays heads with probability P, then Bob gets utility of one. If Alice plays tails with probability one minus P, Bob gets utility of zero. So Bob's expected utility is P. We equate these two. That gives us an equation involving P and we can solve for P, which is 0.5. Okay, this means in order to make Bob indifferent between his two actions, Alice should choose P equals 0.5. Basically means she should play heads and tails randomly. And the calculation for Bob is very similar, but let me still go through them. So Bob wants to make Alice indifferent. So if Alice plays heads, then we're looking at the top row. And in particular, we are looking at, since this is Alice, right? So we're looking at the first two numbers. Now if Bob plays heads, that's with probability Q, Bob plays heads and Alice gets a one. With probability one minus Q, Bob plays tails and Alice gets a zero. So that's the expected utility in this case is Q. And then for the case when Alice plays tails, in that case, we are looking at the bottom row. And we're looking at the first two numbers as well. So with probability Q, Bob plays heads and Alice gets zero. With probability one minus Q, Bob plays tails and Alice gets one. So Alice's expected utility is one minus Q. Again, equate these two together, you get 0.5. So overall, what's happening? Well, there is one mixed strategy Nash equilibrium. And at this mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, Alice plays heads with probability 0.5 and Bob plays heads with probability 0.5 as well. So to summarize, how do we derive a mixed strategy Nash equilibrium of a game? The general principle is that each player is going to choose their mixing probability to make other players in different between their actions. Now, given this derivation, I hope you get a sense of how to answer the second question as well. So the second question says, if a player is mixing between two actions, if they are playing both actions, each with some probability, what does this mean? What does this tell us about the two actions and the expected utilities for the players? So it turns out when a player is mixing between two actions, it means that the two actions have the same expected utility for the player. It means that the player is indifferent between the two actions. So what's happening at this mixed strategy equilibrium is that each player is choosing their mixing probability to make the other player indifferent between their two actions. And then once the other player is indifferent between their actions, it really doesn't matter how much they play each action because both actions are the same. Once they're indifferent, they can mix with any mixing probability, except they have to choose their mixing probability to make the first player indifferent between their actions as well. Okay, so there's an interesting dynamics going on where each player is choosing their mixing probability to make the other player indifferent. But once they're indifferent between the two actions, really the mixing probability doesn't matter to that player anymore. Right, that's everything for this video. Thank you very much for watching. I will see you in the next video. Bye for now.


Hey Psych2Goers, welcome back to our channel, and thank you so much for all the love that you've given us. Your ongoing support has helped us make psychology and mental health more accessible to everyone. As a quick disclaimer, we wanted our viewers to know that this is a fun activity video, and this video should not be taken too seriously or used as any kind of diagnostic criteria. With that said, let's continue. Did you know that not only do you have a physical age, which changes with the ever-turning wheel of time, but that you also have a mental age that will never change? Different from your physical age, your mental age is how old you are emotionally and psychologically.  As an adult, you can have a low mental age, processing a childlike view of the world around you. A young person can have a high mental age, indicating that you're wise beyond your years. It's important to note that mental age is also not your IQ number, but rather an expression of how you feel inside. Figuring out what your mental age is is a great way to become more self-aware. If you'd like to learn about your mental age now, grab a pen and paper, or open up the notes app on your device. You can take this fun quiz to determine your mental age. There are 10 questions to answer, so make sure you mark your answers as we go. Let's begin. Number one, what do you usually do when you make a mistake? A, admit you made an error and try to fix it. B, try to figure out why you made the mistake in the first place. Or C, laugh at your silly mistake and ask for help so you don't make another one.  A, tell them it happens and find another way to spend your time. B, feel upset about it, but move on eventually. C, try to find another day to hang out and have fun together. Number three, how would you normally react if someone was angry with you? A, give them space to be angry before talking to them. B, try to work things out right away. Or C, tell them jokes until they forget their anger. Number four, what's the first thing you would do if you won the lottery? A, pay off your bills and put the rest in a savings account. B, go on vacation and make new happy memories. Or C, buy that cool thing you've been wanting for a while. Number five, what's the first thing you would do if you had to choose between two equally good things? A, think on your previous experiences so you make an informed decision based on facts. B, make a list of pros and cons and then choose the option with more pros. Or C, ask someone for their opinion and do what they suggest. Number six, how do you usually handle a major disagreement in the workplace or in school? A, calmly discuss the disagreement and try to come up with a compromise. B, go to a supervisor or teacher who would be able to help figure out what to do. Or C, get the other person to see your side of things. Number seven, what would you usually do if you had a big project due tomorrow? A, get started on it right away so you'll be able to relax later. B, take some time to relax first and then start working on it as soon as you're done relaxing or C, alternate between working on it and taking breaks. Number eight, which of your responsibilities would you eliminate if you could? A, paying bills. B, doing laundry or C, picking up after yourself. Number nine, how would you habitually react when someone compliments you? A, accept the compliment and give them one in return. B, accept the compliment and thank whoever complimented you. Or C, don't accept the compliment by saying you don't deserve it. And number 10, how do you normally respond when you embarrass yourself? A, acknowledge and validate your feelings but realize it doesn't matter in the long run. B, try to pretend like nothing happened but internally obsess over the feeling of embarrassment. Or C, feel upset over it and possibly even cry. Okay, are you ready for your results? If you got mostly A's, your mental age is between 40 and 55. Your mindset is more so self-assured and secure. You tend to think about things in a matured manner.  You struggle with finding your way, and though it may be difficult, you always wind up on the right path in the end. If you answered mostly C's, your mental age is between 10 and 20 years old, and your perception of the world is young and bright. When I took the test, my mental age was rated higher than my chronological age. And I agree with my results. I've always kind of felt like an old soul. Do you feel like your mental age is aligned with your actual age? What score did you get? Let us know in the comments below. Don't forget to like and share this video if you had fun taking the quiz. The studies and references used are listed in the description below. Make sure to hit the subscribe button for more Psych2Go videos. And thank you so much for watching. See you next time.


2020 has a nice even sound to it doesn't it just like 2020 vision something that sounds perfect and complete 2020 well every new year is the same in some way because it is a new year it is a completely unwritten year and it's no accident that this is the time for resolutions for what this year will be about now of course it is just a number so nothing will magically change between December 31st 2019 and January 1st 2020 it's just another new day and we just happen on the calendar to give it a new number so there's a limit to what it means of course it doesn't completely remake everything and the things that we're doing on December 31st there's nothing that will automatically change them on January 1st but I believe that in some way it is more than just a number it can be more than just a number because of what the number means the number 2019 is now full of meanings it's full of everything that we filled 2019 with whenever you just hear that word 2019 or see that written and you can call to mind what kind of year you've had everything that's happened everything you did what this year was like you just see that number 2019 and it calls those things to mind when you see the number 2020 well now it's completely fresh year it could be anything so that's the power of the new year the idea of this blank page where you can really start fresh and I think whatever can help to give that feeling is good I mean we could have that every day in some way ideally every day should be like a January 1st because every day is that completely fresh start for the rest of your life like they say today is the first day of the rest of your life and yet another one of those cliches but an absolutely valid one if we could really start each day as being a beginning that would be very powerful and that is what it is because really every day every day that starts it may have a number like January 2nd or some number that suggests that it's not first but every day that starts is completely unwritten and completely open to be anything and it's only at the end of that day that we can judge maybe what it was about and maybe not even until later can we really understand the significance of that day but when you have January 1st of a new year now is the day where we automatically get that written into the date itself that yes this is a start this is a beginning of something new so January 1st 2020 when you look at that number you see that number 2020 and say wow it's now 2020 as much as it's just a number that is now a fresh number that can now be associated with new things we can leave aside everything that's associated with 2019 and bring on a whole new set of connections with that number with that new year and what it means to you and with 2020 not only is it extra fun because we have the doubling 2020 and that's not going to happen again until 2121 so let's enjoy it while it's here and we also get unofficially the beginning of a new decade now I know of course technically the 20s as a decade do not officially start until 2021 because 2020 is part of the end of the second decade the end of the teens but in terms of how the numbers we look at in terms of that third digit of the year two zero we've been looking at two zero one for the last ten years now we're looking at two zero two we're looking at the 20s wow can you believe it we're now in the 20s and this is now a whole new decade so this is as much as again I can keep saying you can keep reminding ourselves it is just a number and it doesn't automatically make anything happen but it is an opportunity to start this new year this new decade with a fresh new approach and ask yourself what do I want this decade to be about and starting with the year what do I want this year to be about which will then set things going for the 2020s this decade that we're now stepping into because it's so young right now it's at its very beginning we have that little bit of extra power to be able to choose the direction that we want so where do you want to go with this year