We're here from some of the poster sessions at ISD 2016 and I'm here with Brian Miller. Hi everyone, it's great to see you. Brian Miller at EdTech Nerd on Twitter. You can see my awesome sticker that Tony made for me for Tony Scope. I'm the Educator Community Manager at Wonder Workshop and I also speak internationally on Connected Toys for Top Tech EDU. So you can check us out there at toptechedu.com. But we're really excited to be here today and walk through this space with you. Yeah, me too. So we were supposed to do this on Periscope but the internet is not reliable for us. So you're watching this not live but that's okay because I think you'll still see a lot of great stuff and Brian has such good insight into this stuff. So I know in our Periscope we started talking but we might as well recap. What are we seeing here? So right here we have students that have done a project-based lesson on the steam classrooms using the Smithsonian Invention Kits, which are kits that are pre-built that you can purchase and it gives you an opportunity to work on a number of different things like robotics. More of the lighting and building and maker electronics components that they're connecting together. It's a more advanced version of Little Bits or Makey Makey because you can do some more robust pieces where it actually does require you to solder. So it's kind of the next step. This is actually perfect because it looks like Buford Middle School is using this for a middle school lesson which is definitely a little bit more advanced. Is soldering dangerous to do in a classroom? It can be, you know, under teacher direction I think you're okay but for the most part you're dealing with a heating element, you know. So being around and being present is a big piece of that just to make sure students don't get burnt. But with a little instruction, you know, you can show anyone how to easily solder. One of them want to show us what they've made. Yeah. Do you guys mind being on video? That's fine. Hi! Can you tell us about one of your creations here? Who's going to talk? So this is a speaker right here and what it is is a cone inside a box and inside here that you can't actually see there's a solenoid. Oh, okay. No. So there's a solenoid that has a magnet. So the solenoid is part of the cone. Oh yeah, so here. Okay. So here we have the cone which has a little mini solenoid as part of it and when you send power through it like that, the thing vibrates. Yeah, the solenoid vibrates and the magnet does all... No, because it's so... Okay, hold on. Kaley, you talk. Yeah, when you send electrical current through the solenoid, so this is alternating current. So it means it's switching directions while it's going through and so that means that when it creates an electromagnet in the solenoid which is the coil of wire, the magnet will be attracted but since the magnet is held in place by this the cone will move back and forth and because we have it at such a high level it will move back and forth faster and make vibrations instead of like a definite like just going like this and that makes the music and so... How much of this did you have to put together yourself? Well, we had to put like this part together but the rest... So the box, the boxes, the basket, cone and... Yeah, that's it. And spiders, we had to make those but everything else was like... Yeah, we were provided with this part and the foam part around the cone. What grade are you girls in? We were in eighth grade. Well, thanks for sharing. Yeah, they do. Add to your ribbon collection here. Eventually this will get put on YouTube so we can see them. Alright, alright. So the thing that I like about the Smithsonian kids is they were talking a little bit about what they were able to do with it but it was a kit that they purchased and it walks them through all of the steps so you're dealing with the curriculum that they already have that's created, you can purchase the tool and then from there you can build it and construct it and actually make a physically working speaker so the students are learning how the inner workings of that are actually functioning, which is really neat to have and especially to see girls doing this I think that's such a great thing as well. Yeah, and I'd like to follow them and see what they come up with next. After you make a speaker, how do you improve upon that or what's the next step, what do you add to it? Yes, the different iterations are always impressive to see because now that they understand the foundation they can build from that and make something even more impressive. Alright, let's see. Games in the classroom. We're going to take a walk over to this young student talking about Dashing Dot who is incredible. She could basically work for a Wonder Workshop. Alright, awesome. So, tell us a little bit about the Dashing Dot for people that don't know it. So, Dashing Dot robots are robots that are designed for kindergarten through fifth grade students that teach them all about computer science and coding through tangible toys such as the robot. So, this is something that could be implemented across all curricular areas. We have a number of different lessons and ideas that you can use while working with them in the classrooms. Teachers.makewonder.com is the site that you can go to get that information and we are also offering the opportunity to help fund clubs getting started. So, we provide teachers with lesson plans, examples but also provide them grant opportunities. We're giving away $10,000 to schools as well to help them fund coding in their schools and while we're here at ISTI we're giving away a Dasher Day as well. So, people that are unfortunately not here they would be missing this but we're really excited to be doing this. So, Pola. So, which one is Dash and which one is Dot? Because some people might not. And this is Dot. This is Dash and this is... Dot is the one little circle and Dash can move. Yeah, he can move because he has wheels on the bottom. So, he can... Hi. Nice and high. So, tell us what you've learned from them. I've learned to code them with Blockly. It's an app. They have five apps and Blockly is my favorite because you can add whatever you want to do and it's coding. So, people like when I do that more because they say it's the real thing coding and it's my favorite. So, you can put Start and then you can put Light Green. So, he'll turn green once you put Start. You can do... Once you move, if you clap he'll say Hi. Or if you flip him he'll do this. Or if you click button three he'll do this. It's really cool and Xylophone is also really cool because if you put this on his head he'll play and you code with your phone it's a whole Xylophone and there's dots that you click on your phone and he'll do the lights and he'll play on the Xylophone. So, what's the craziest thing you've ever programmed them to do? So, we did a maze me and my dad and it took me a really long time to get all the maze all around the house. I get a really big part of my house. So, we put tape and I had to follow the tape with the exact coding on my phone on Blockly. So, you had to get them from the start to the end and it was a lot of fun, but it took a really long time. So, Polo, can you tell us a little bit about your club that you started at your school? Yeah, so it started because my teacher, she was unpacking them and she had to start them up so I offered if I can start them up for her. And she said, yeah, so I started them and I got really interested with all this stuff. And with the Xylophone it was the first thing because it's like a lot of fun because it does noises and it turns colours. So, I started with that and then I told my parents if I can buy one and they let me for my birthday. And so, I started my own club. I asked Ms. P if I can start my own club. And so, we do a lot of stuff like we do mazes and we build Legos on top of them and it's a lot of fun. We make movies with them and we put this on top. It's a lot of fun and we dress them up. And Polo, can you show everyone your nails? Yeah. Oh, tell me more about this. It's the Eye of Dash and Dot. And it's also on your shirt? Yeah. He's nice and happy. That's awesome. Well, thanks for sharing. We have a little something for you. A little ribbon to add to your badge.  Thank you. It's so neat to see her excitement with that. And so, take a picture together. All right. Oh. We're taking pictures. You don't see this on the video but that's okay. You're welcome. Aw. It's neat that she's been so inspired from you to do that. That's really great. Aw. Thanks again. It's funny. People are nervous about being interviewed or they're very excited. Yeah. One thing if you're watching this on YouTube is that we can't switch the camera back and forth like I would like to with Periscope. We're just living with it. Let's see. Yeah. Fabrication. Okay. St. Margaret's Episcopal School make, create, fabricate. It rhymes. One of the neat things about makers is the ability to create some really cool fabrication. We're talking a lot about getting all genders involved in creating and sharing their talents. Part of this is what the girls are looking for. We actually met Paula who is interested in coding and that's wonderful as girls. We met some girl engineers as well. To see that represented is actually incredible here. But here what they're working on is they're working on fabrication. They're adding some LED lights to some of the designs they're making. They're allowing some of the participants to create as well. They are building basic circuits between making, creating and fabricating. So making would be it's a really good question. It's going to get me stumped here. There's a lot of people that have different ideas as to what it is. Making is the ability to build something from current elements that are available. Creating is something where you think of it from an idea that you have that hasn't been done before and fabricating is taking something that's existing and adding some modifications to it that allows you to do some really cool things. In this case, they're modifying some snowflakes that they're cutting and placing on the location in which they are on the map. So wherever they live, they're marking themselves with these cutouts that they're making and fabricating them with an LED light to make them light up and come to life. Thank you for that explanation. There's definitely overlap of those words. The maker culture is embracing all of those things. It doesn't matter what you call it. In good maker spaces, you'll see all of that stuff happening. The fact that they're using all three words means that they're doing something really cool. Do you have a maker space, a create space, or a fabricate space? Absolutely. You can have a fabrication lab where it's just fabrics or different pieces that you're adding to it. A fab lab? Exactly. Maker lab, maker space, fab labs, they all have the same idea built around them. Yeah. Let's keep going. The windows in here make some really interesting lighting effects. So not professional video right now, but that's all right. This could probably be an audio podcast almost too. And then tinkering is another word I see. How does that fit in? It's all related. Tinkering is related as well. Dealing with objects and just kind of manipulating and changing them around and building on to what they currently do. There's a lot involved in all those words and they all kind of relate one another. Let's go to the sunny corner unless you saw something. Let's head over that way. This one's about hour of code. This is steps to start a low cost coding club. Looks like a lot of hour code stuff. Which I think is great because they've created such a really nice curriculum that allows anyone to implement coding into their school for no charge. They do a lot of the instruction. They provide teacher resources and they pull from a number of different areas beyond just the hour code stuff. So they partner up with other companies, different apps that you can work with and it's become a movement that a lot of people have jumped on board with because coding is going to be something that we're going to rely on in the future. People being able to manipulate and change their economy later on in the future. Preparing our students now is such a big piece and it looks like they have a couple different things. Starting in after school club it's a great way to get coding into your school. If you don't have the time in your schedule to do that or the budget you can create this after school club where people of the similar interest can join together and do this. Family hour code I think is a fantastic thing. I hadn't heard about that. Home to school connection is so important but what's happening when they're at home and that's one of the things that we want to be able to learn a little bit about as well and teach parents about this because we want them involved and seeing what the students are able to create and do and hopefully create that interest and embrace it because it's really going to be from the support of the parents that it's going to be able to allow those students to continue on with it. I have three year old twins and they're coding with the Osmo coding app. Right, oh my gosh that is the best app I mean they're three so it's a little hard for them but they're starting to get a hang of it. Right and I saw your periscope of you doing it as well and it's actually one of our top tech toys that we talk about also but it's these connected toys that teach coding. It allows people from all different backgrounds and skill levels to begin to learn about how to integrate computer science into their lives so the earlier we can do that it's like teaching a world language. We want to be able to give them the opportunity to develop and grow and this being part of that I think is a really great idea and tool so yeah computer science is here to stay it's something that the government is continuing to embrace and grow with so we're excited to see from developer standpoint what comes out in the future. So let's talk about drones. What do you know about them? So I'm a big fan of drones. I'd like the drones that you can actually program rather than just fly. You can do some really cool maker projects where you build and create drones for free fabricated projects that you can purchase because the science behind it is very complex so they have really nice kits that you can purchase but what I'm a fan of are some of them that you can just go into the store and purchase and use and program using with an app like Tickle. So Tickle runs across multiple apps. If you're not familiar with it check out Tickle. You can download it for your iPad or Android. It connects multiple devices so it works with Sphero, it works with the Parrot drones it works with Dashing Dot. So it's all block program language program drone to fly which I think is really cool. So it brings the excitement of drones into your classroom. So I asked about drones too because there's a poster session in the corner about drones so let's go see what they have. I'm a big fan of drones. One of the first drones was the AR drone it was this huge thing and loud. It was really fun and now drones have shrunk down considerably and that drone was so expensive and then they crash and you're like oh man that's a lot of money down the tubes. Yeah and they've come down in price dramatically and the fact that you can easily purchase and implement them into schools I think is a really cool thing. The sad news is I don't think there's a drone here. I don't see any drones but I do see behind us BB-8 Spheroes. Let's go to that. No drones but we have droids. Using robots to foster creativity and empathy in classrooms and that's such a cool concept. It's trying to pair up empathy into using robotics. How do we teach empathy within schools but I'd personally like to hear what this guy has to say to learn a little bit how he's doing it but he has here a couple of things. He has the Sphero Ball it looks like he's using Sphero to do that at least that's what he brought with him so he has the regular Sphero version he has the Spark version on the table which is a see-through version so you can see what is happening inside and then they have the new Star Wars edition BB-8 version as well. So they have two different versions of that they have the regular BB-8 version but they also have the new battle edition that's going to be coming out where it looks like BB-8's been run through you know the fights and the battles. Oh I didn't know that was coming. That one's coming out yeah yeah but I'm really interested to hear about how they connected to empathy. Yeah so it looks like some worksheets and things we'll get that and we'll talk to him in a moment here Sphero on a mountain main alright this really doesn't make sense without him telling us what it is and I'll get the there's a QR code or a link for you guys watching. Alright let's see if he wouldn't well I but I'm not going to edit this is the thing because that'll take a long time so I'm treating this like it would be a periscope because if I had to go back and edit it would never get done too much work so I think this must be Richard Perry I can't see his name tag but well that's the thing so there's people waiting waiting to talk to him and I hate budding in just because I have a microphone and a phone on a stick doesn't mean I can cut in front of people but I would just like to put the microphone in front of him so we could hear him but I'm too shy I hate interrupting I don't want to like he's going with his flow you know well we have the web address bit.ly slash classroom robots so we'll come back to him maybe or we'll check that out let's go around the back here we visited the google docs add-on guy from this morning usually more spheroes let's see using tickle just what you were talking about so there's sphero and then there's ollie so ollie is also owned by sphero these are robots that kind of don't have the full 360 degree mobility like the ball does but it rolls forward backwards it spins all around in circles it's a different way of controlling and it's actually much much much faster so you can do some really neat tricks with it they come in again in a couple different versions one thing to point out if you're interested in sphero or ollie sphero is completely waterproof so you can do some really neat art projects with painting and coating so you can code and then you have it lay on a canvas and you have it paint out what you've actually done not waterproof so that's one that you want to remember and I know people have made mistakes thinking that it was my son learned to crawl because he wanted my sphero and so I put it in front of him moving a little bit and he wanted it so badly that he's going to figure out a way to get to it and then eventually the sphero was so slow compared to him he'd get it and throw it or put it in his mouth so I guess yeah I didn't know it was waterproof and they have the rubber nubs that you can use to keep it less from scratching up but dogs love it and pets so you have your cats or dogs chase it around and cats are not happy with when the sphero is out they're not happy I can see other cats might enjoy it oh yeah absolutely throw a little laser pointer in there too and they're having a ball no pun intended so then we have some tickle code here telling it to when you start playing to go left and change color and change speed and all that just by connecting those different little code blocks together what I love about tickle is they've taken a language that most educators are familiar with because of our code and some other beginning coding programs and they've unlocked a lot of really neat features within a lot of these connected toys so the developers for these connected toys may not have necessarily created an app that can teach computer science but tickle has created the ability to code using block programming language and connected through their APIs so they've unlocked a lot of really neat features that you may not even find in the developers apps who created the connected toy so that's neat so they do a really nice job with that yeah let's go around the side here maybe she's eyeing us I don't want the camera to come talk to me or maybe she does Jennifer do you mind being on video you can say no that's fine okay awesome so tell us about your poster this is a project that we did with 7th and 8th grade pre-algebra back in September our math teacher Pete Smith wanted to review the number line with the kids so we had two spheroes and two olleys we did the lesson we demonstrated it for them first had the sphero turn green went in the positive direction turn red went in the negative and then we had the kids go to one of the four whiteboard walls and write what they observed so this was all just kind of silent we didn't tell them what we were doing and then after they came back we demonstrated it again and then you just started seeing the light bulbs go off we were like what are you observing what is this doing and they're like oh it's the number line so we put them into groups of three or four each group had an iPad and they used the tickle app an iPad and a robot they used the tickle app to program the robot to move along the number line they had to come up with their equation program it and then demonstrate it for their class so that's some of what you're seeing on the video the excitement where they're they're getting the equation right or wrong and it was just a really great visual way and very hands-on way for them to get this early concept that they needed for pre-algebra but also a lot of collaboration things you don't always see in a math class or pre-algebra class but you know got them working together very early on in the year so I love the connection to the number line and we used you see the hot wheels tracks we used those spheroes a little wobbly on tile and so when we started thinking number line we didn't want it to wobble and I had a huge box of hot wheels tracks in my office I'm the library director so I had just you know all the toys so I had the hot wheels tracks and we laid those down and tried that and it worked great so we just gave the hot wheels tracks to the kids and said go you know yeah what was their biggest challenge when they were presented with this was it learning how to code or was it the actual math concepts it was part of it was coming up with their equation so some of them you know we gave them the iPad they just started programming and it was kind of like well where are you going with this and they lost track of what numbers they were using so we kind of had to refocus them we had them in four different classrooms and all we had some empty rooms at the time so we were rotating among the groups and just talking to them checking in with them some of them wanted to go really big like 26 minus 50 and we were like okay got to fit in the classroom you know so think about the size let's scale it down a little bit they tried to trick each other so some tried to flip the number line and they were like no it's really going in the positive direction not the negative so you know just refocusing them on that but they were having fun with it and and learning these concepts that was just great yeah thank you for sharing thank you and do you have some information online it looks like you have a there's a QR code that goes to blur.com there's also there there's a blog post we wrote about it and another presentation we've done these videos will be there you can download the lesson there yeah and then we've got the lesson that people can take here as well awesome thank you we have this for you oh that's right yes TonyScope.com right at that address I have it somewhere else but it'll probably be on like YouTube but it'll be linked on there so that'll be where you can find it you're welcome our first year with collaborative makerspaces and 3D printing so actually I'm kind of amazed that we've gone this far without seeing 3D printing yet yeah I honestly think that this is maybe one of the only ones that are 3D printing because it's a lot to bring you know especially when you're traveling so they they brought 3D printers and they're actually printing stuff live right now and they have a number of different things that they've also printed out so yeah this is a great way to a great tool to bring into your classrooms to talk about different things that you can create from scratch but also things that you can download to create as well and manipulate and change it definitely has a place in every maker classroom because the students can design something from scratch or manipulate and see what their outcome is so they're designing digitally and then they're printing out for the physicality which is one of the coolest parts of dealing with these and it looks like they have a ton of stuff that they've printed out on the table as well so we'll have to sneak over there to see it's our way through oh you have a 3D printed tie that you're wearing do you mind being on video sure you've got it you've got to tell me about your tie would you mind holding the microphone okay this was made on Ticker Cat and it took a lot of time I looked at a real tie and then I measured it in everything and then I made it elastic so it's stretchy so you can actually take it off and everything right here so it's like a real tie and then we printed it it takes a long long time to do there's lots of stuff like this took 2 hours this took 6 hours in a whole because each part each color took 2 hours so it takes a long time to do stuff so when you print this do you have to then go in and change the color so like you have to print all the whites at once is that how it works or you can tell it which it'll switch colors on its own no you have to switch the colors like right here we have blue and you inside the extruder you'll see it if you go walk around on the other side you'll see the extruder and you have to pull the other color and put the next color in so I printed this part one time this one a second time and this one a third time so I printed them all in 3 different times so how often have you worn this tie couple times yeah I can think of so many occasions to wear a 3D printed tie what did you learn from doing this lots of stuff you got to really make stuff pretty exact pretty exact or it's not going to be right did you have a version where it wasn't right yes the first time I made it I thought it was the right size but it was only from here to here size and it was super super small so I had to really up size it make it a scale or two bigger couple scales bigger what else do you have some other things on this table can you tell me about them yes we have a table right here a desk for like at school and it's a scale project for math so I scaled it down from the actual thing so you based it off of a real object yes another thing we have is a keychain over here right there that was one of our things for valentine's day we had to make a bunch for candy grams for school we have a catapult in the back does it really work yes it does it does yes it does but right we didn't want to bring anything so we don't lose the pieces but they're pretty small you could shoot like peas or something out of there you could shoot little stuff if it fits it alright then do you have like a google like a cardboard viewer is that what's made here so we were trying to make a google cardboard since the 3D printer is much smaller we're probably going to have to make it in half because we're needing a bigger see it doesn't totally fit but the lens are a little small but the nose pieces are about the same size should be right we haven't fully got the piece on the side to hold your phone and we made the rubber band so it stays on your head so instead of holding it like this it will stay on your head and you can just move around it's amazing something like this there's a lot to think through huh there's lots of stuff you have to think through to make things just simple as this you have to think hard just simple as a name tag you have to think what was the most difficult thing that you've done so far in your class class wise nothing so hard but stuff that I want to build was actually pretty hard like this this took me like a couple like three weeks or four weeks to make because I had to make it super exact and I had to make it pretty exact and make it took a couple weeks like I said does anybody else made a tie or this is like you're the only one who did it I'm the only one who did it for our school this is our first wearable thing for our school the next thing we're making is a bow tie instead of an actual bow tie cool well Cameron thank you for sharing we have a little ribbon so you can add to your name badge if you want we'll put this video on youtube a little bit later and it's at that address thank you that was fun I love his explanations of stuff seriously what a cool student to be excited enough to try to solve a problem on his own that probably wasn't a class activity that he had to solve he had a passion to do that and spent his own time creating and dealing with all those mistakes and failures and kind of working through it so he had an idea there were no directions I'm sure on how to do it and he had to work through and even something as simple as the 3D printer not being large enough to print his google cardboard and trying to come up with a way to make that actually work by putting two pieces together these are skills that we want our students to leave with working through challenges working through problems dealing with failure recovering from that being creative thinkers what they're doing in that class really inspired that student to do some really cool things I love talking to students when they're that passionate and he definitely was and he was not shy at all for sure well I think this is getting to be a long video for youtube so we'll probably wrap this up maybe we'll see if Periscope will work for a second part but Brian I want to thank you so much for joining me you have so much insight into this and so people contact you how do they do that they can do that by either it's the easiest way at edtechnerd or you can visit me at brianbryanlmiller.com or you can follow us at toptechedu where we talk about a lot of the stuff you saw today and connected toys as well I love chatting with you so much can we do this again maybe Wednesday I think I'm available Wednesday closing keynote time afterwards after the keynote is done let's talk about the cool things we've seen here the 3D printed tie I might have to call dibs on that one that one's a pretty cool one I now want to get a 3D printed tie I think I've seen 3D printed bow ties but not a tie like that so that was pretty impressive it is a conversation piece absolutely but I want to thank you for inviting me to be a part of this I mean to be able to share with viewers at home that are not actually here live you know some of the amazing experiences that we're getting to see in person and transferring that to them I think is just such a great opportunity to continue to learn the poster sessions are my favorite having all this stuff and like you know a couple steps later your 3D printing and then a couple more steps you're at dash and dot and making stuff fabrication it's just all right here yeah exactly so this has been a wonderful opportunity so thank you and I look forward to doing more on Wednesday my pleasure we'll see you later


Phones, everyone has a phone, some even more than one. We love our phones, they play a significant role in our lives. Your phone starts here, or here, or here, and it ends here, or here, or here, or here, or it can be reused. Two-thirds of our used phones eventually end up in developing countries, places where people can use them for years to come, but where they still can't be recycled. So, do our phones have to end up on an e-waste dump? No, they don't. On your behalf, we buy waste phones in Africa, stimulating local economies. If you buy a new phone, we will save an old phone from the e-waste dump. This compensates for the material footprint of your new phone. And what about your old phone? If you sell your old device, we will save a scrap phone from being dumped. This also prevents more waste. We make sure end-of-life phones are recycled responsibly, so the raw materials can be reused. Because an old phone contains the same raw materials as a brand new one. Closing the loop's positive impact offsets the waste your old and your new phone produces, making your phone usage more sustainable. That's why our service is called One For One. Have you made your phone waste-free yet?


Hi, welcome to Seymour's World Commentary on Think Tech Hawaii. You can find all my commentaries and Seymour's World episodes on the Think Tech Hawaii website. I welcome your comments by email, text, or phone. And you can reach me at Seymour.Kazimersky at gmail.com or<PHONE_NUMBER>. I want to thank you all for your comments on last week's show, as well as all your best wishes for my fight with cancer. I honestly don't have any side effects for my treatment and I feel absolutely fine. So let's go to our topic. Today it is, what is mindfulness? When we are mindful, people find us to be more attractive, trustworthy, and authentic. All of us at one time or another find our minds wander, doesn't yours? Mine does. It's not because I'm getting older. It's because, or because I haven't trained my brain and my body to be mindful of awareness. At first, when this theory was brought to me by a very good friend, I was skeptical because I truly felt that I could control my thoughts, my emotions, and especially my consideration of others. In my last commentary, last week, we called it Looking Beyond. I gave several examples of how we all tend to make assumptions on first glance rather than fact. Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, our feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment. Actively noticing things about something you know very well, be it driving or your spouse or anything we think we know very well, is energy begetting. Start noticing people in a different way. What you may perceive as rigidity, that person sees themselves as very stable. What you may perceive as impulsiveness, that person may see themselves as spontaneous and fun. It's all in our perception and may not be right or wrong. You can come from a place of judgment until you see it from another person's perspective. Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them, without believing, for instance, that there's a right or a wrong way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we're sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future. When we are less judgmental, we are more open to experience, hence we are more mindful. Our view of an event makes it positive or negative, so stress is on us. How do we relate to stress? Obviously, if we react negatively, we cause negative energy. I think you get the point. So why do we practice mindfulness? I did some research and listened to a blog, which I will be glad to share with you. Just send me a note. And I was pleasantly surprised that being mindful takes very little effort and has amazing results. Studies have shown that practicing mindfulness, even for just a few weeks, can bring a variety of physical, psychological, and social benefits. Here are some of these benefits, which extend across many different settings. Mindfulness is good for our bodies. A seminal study found that after just eight weeks of training, practicing mindfulness meditation boosts our immune system's ability to fight off illness. We could all use that, right? And I'm practicing mindfulness right now. Mindfulness is good for our minds. Several studies have found that mindfulness increases positive emotions while reducing negative emotions and stress. Indeed, at least one study suggests it may be as good as antidepressants in fighting depression and preventing relapse. Mindfulness changes our brains. Research has found that it increases density of gray matter in brain regions linked to learning, memory, emotion regulation, and empathy. Mindfulness helps us focus. Studies suggest that mindfulness helps us tune out distractions and improves our memory and attention skills. Another point, mindfulness fosters compassion and altruism. Research suggests mindfulness training makes us more likely to help someone in need and increases activity and neural networks involved in understanding the suffering of others and regulating emotions. Evidence suggests it might even boost self-compassion as well. So how do we cultivate mindfulness? It really is a change in lifestyle. I was in Thailand last month and attended a clinic that is very involved in cancer treatment. Obviously I was very interested in what it could do for me. Guess what one of the major factors in the treatment schedule was? Mindfulness practiced as meditation. They emphasize that although mindfulness can be cultivated through formal meditation, that's not the only way. It's about living your life as if it really mattered, moment by moment by moment by moment. Here are a few components of practicing mindfulness. One, pay close attention to your breathing, especially when you're feeling intense emotions. Notice, really notice what you're sensing in a given moment, the sights, the sounds and smells that ordinarily slip by without reaching your conscious awareness. Recognize that your thoughts and emotions are fleeting and do not define you an insight that can free you from negative thought patterns. Tune into your body's physical sensations from the water hitting your skin in the shower to the way your body rests in your office chair. If you don't believe me, try just one of these keys and you will realize that the sensations both in your brain and your body will immediately be heightened by a wonderful feeling of acceptance and awareness. That's what mindfulness is all about. My name is Seymour Kazimurski. You're watching a commentary of Seymour's World. You can find all my commentaries and Seymour's World episodes on the Think Tech Hawaii website. I welcome your comments by email, text or phone, and you can reach me anytime at Seymour.Kazimurski at gmail.com. Aloha, have a wonderful week.


Stevenson falls to Gettysburg tonight, 3-2 Glen Clark with Dylan Holey afterwards. Dylan, you're a captain on this team, a weird game, a lot going on, a lot of craziness involved. What do you say to your team after a tough one tonight? I mean, you just got to rebound quick after that one. We have a tough game on Saturday against St. Mary's. There might even be better than Gettysburg, so we just got to learn from those stakes. I mean, we played hard. We played together. Honestly, maybe one of the best games we've had this season. We played hard together, and we just got to get ready for St. Mary's on Saturday because we got to play just as hard as we did today, if not harder to come out with a victory. We were talking to Coach about this, Dylan. The response that you guys had after they came out and they were sort of dictating possession in the early going and they end up getting that first goal, you guys quickly bounce right back. How proud are you of what you saw from your team in those moments? Yeah, I definitely thought it was a good response. I think we came out a little slow. I don't know. That can't happen either, but after the goal we came out and we scored two goals in the next 15 minutes, the last 25 minutes of the half, we were definitely the better team. In the second half, first 20 minutes, it was a little even, but you could see the goal coming even though we had a bad decision by the refs or whatever. We gave up three set-piece goals and you just can't let that happen against a good team like that. If you give up three goals, it's going to be hard to win against anybody, especially a team like Gettysburg. Dylan, everything that was going on the night, right? All the injuries and discipline issues that were happening. You ended up having a lot of guys that were out on the pitch in big spots. How good is that for the entire team that so many guys have gotten this experience early on in the season to be out there and make plays? Yeah, it's definitely great. We had a lot of guys that don't play a lot of minute step-up, Declan Marvel, freshman center mid, Brian Ventura, sophomore forward. They both had great games tonight. Adrian Morales, I think, had his best game of the season tonight. He had a real good bounce-back game. We're going to need all those guys in conference season because you're going to have to go through a lot of guys in conference to get wins against teams like Messiah, Lycoming, Lev Valley. We've got to beat those teams if we want to get to where we want to be. I definitely think it's good to give all these people experience against a quality team like Gettysburg tonight. Alright, Declan, anybody want to say hello to give a shout out to? I guess just my parents and my brother. Thanks for always coming and supporting me. Awesome, man. Declan, congratulations. I know it was a tough one tonight, but a great effort from you. Thank you. He's Declan Holy. I'm Glenn Clark for GomezTankSports.com.


Well, Kevin Duffy, it's a pleasure to have you here from Houston, Texas. I'm in Dallas now. You're in Dallas now. What happened? I moved Dallas about a year ago. Okay. You're happy with the move? Yeah, so far. Okay. And your firm moved too? Are you just working remotely? No, we moved the whole firm there. Okay.  We run a hedge fund from an Austrian perspective. A global macro, long, short hedge fund. Yeah. So, you're very much in touch with the daily, hourly, minute-by-minute market happenings. I remember in October 2008, we had this wonderful conversation, you were at the airport talking on your cell phone? Out of breath. Yeah. It was exciting. We were all out of breath in that period because everything was falling apart or so it seemed. You had a different point of view. You said things where reality was asserting itself. Yeah. The market was starting to assert some discipline on the system. I think you and I were both excited to see that cleansing start to take place. You could see it take place, especially in the private sector. Companies that had expanded, retail square footage was growing at 8% to 10% throughout the 2000s and that stopped and capital spending got cut. You could see how companies were just being very conservative, free cash flows going up and the strong were surviving. The companies like Linnons and Things were liquidating and their competitors like Bed Bath and Beyond were doing well. That part of the process worked exceptionally well. Within the banking system, though, they arrested that with the bailouts. I think we probably discussed that as well. We did. I think we talked at the time, the prevailing attitude was that the world was falling apart and would completely collapse. The entire world financial system would come tumbling down unless the Federal Reserve intervened and the Treasury intervened. I recall there was a review at the time that this was just lots of hysteria, really. I guess we'll never know because now we know what they've accomplished. They have intervened in a massive way. Not just the bailouts, the expansion of the Fed's balance sheet by $2 trillion. The national debt essentially not allowing the GSEs to be liquidated. Those implied liabilities became explicit to the taxpayer. The Fed's balance sheet increases by $2 trillion. The total debt, if you include the GSEs that got brought on, about $6 trillion. We've thrown this wild party, so what have we accomplished for all this? We've gotten the biggest rally in the stock market, the biggest two-year rally in something like 64 years. We've created a lot of the discipline that was being imposed back then has been removed. Now we're bringing back the old bad habits that we had during the bubble, the housing bubble and the credit bubble. Near the end of the credit bubble, there weren't too many people warning that it was coming to an end. You were among them, but there weren't that many. I think within the Austrian community there were a lot that were warning about this. There's no question. I think the GSEs, there was an article written, it was in the free market newsletter. I think back in 2003 by Christopher Mayer about mortgage market socialism. That was a fascinating article, and we still have that on our website, and it really laid out the case for us to short the GSEs. We started our fund in the middle of 2002, and we shorted Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that entire time. It took until 2007 before the wheels started to come off, and then, of course, 2008, the shareholders were wiped out. Despite all the QE1 and QE2, all the intervention and everything, there's still downward price pressure on real estate markets. This is what's so fascinating is that they have thrown the kitchen sink at this. They've bailed out the crony capitalists. They're still around. They have engorged the government. They've engorged the private sector. The real economy has suffered through all this, but it's been the political economy that's done well. You can see it with beef prices versus poultry prices. The average person is suffering. The poultry business is not doing well, but beef is doing well, and high-end restaurants are doing extremely well. The prices on real estate with the continued downward pressure, every few days it seems like there's more news that, look, we have a poll on this one, it seems like a demonstration of the limits of government power. Well, I think it's also, it's exactly, it's limits on the power. They don't have control, and it's this idea that they're in control of things. They're printing all this money. They're creating all this money, and they're trying to expand credit. They're not able to do that. They're not able to just siphon money wherever they want it to. And I think the lesson, that's one of the lessons, and another lesson is that the old balloon, the old bubble, once it bursts, that balloon has a hole in it, and it will not take the new money. So look at, I mean, QE2 is a great example. Look at what they've accomplished. And I think it's fascinating, you look at that the recovery in the stock market that we had from March of 2009 through April 15th of last year, that was QE1. And at the top of that, you had the cover of Newsweek about how the economic recovery is in place. You had Barack Obama on the cover of Businessweek, and he's shooting a free throw, and it's a silver dollar. And it was all about Obama-nomics is working. And then it says, and who says so? Wall Street, as if Wall Street were any kind of an expert on this sort of thing. The same people that got it wrong now are saying that this is working. And so that was right at the top of this rally in the market. And then we get, it all starts to fall apart into the summer of last year. And then QE2 comes along with just after throwing trillions of dollars at the economy, now it's just a mere $600 billion. And what has happened since then? And it's really fascinating because you see cotton prices are up 150%. And you have, sugar prices are up 60%. And copper is up 23%. And gold is only up 14%. And this is what's kind of interesting that they've been able to achieve a couple of things, but none of these things were intended. Right, so they're objective. They're trying to, what are they trying to do? They're buying the long end of the government bond market. So what happens? Long bond yields go up. And in fact, the worst performing asset class since August 27th, when they announced this, is treasury bonds, down 10%. Everything else is up. Stocks are up over 20% across the board. But then, even within the stock market and within the precious metals market, you're seeing the animal spirits come back. They've ignited this inflation. So for example, in the precious metals market, gold is up 14%, but silver is up 84%. And you're getting, the public now is buying, coin sales are off the charts. Right, this treasure can't even keep them in stock. Right, and then even within the gold mining stocks, senior gold stocks are up only 10%. They've actually lagged behind the stock market, whereas junior gold mining stocks are up 30%. And then you have the stock market, which has been completely insane. You now have Jim Kramer, who's on top of the world. So at the bottom of the market, in March of 2009, he's on the John Stewart show. And of course, this is the Jim Kramer, who in August of 2007 was telling the Fed that they know absolutely nothing and they need to lower rates, which they of course did and it didn't matter. It didn't stop the meltdown from happening.  This was not at the very top, but close enough to the top. Yeah, close to the end. Now, a large part of your job, in addition to analyzing the balance sheets of particular companies and knowing where the best places are to put your money, must involve somehow looking at the present state of things and sorting out what represents real recovery, which you would expect some of that. Given the depths to which everything sank, you would expect some real economic growth. Separating that from the phony, the artificial new bubbles that are being created. How do you do that? Yeah, well, that's what, you know, it's funny. I have a friend who lives in Phoenix and during the height, I mean, he had, he was at ground zero of the housing bubble. In 2005, he used to say, every day we just get up and look out the window and wonder what is real. And that's kind of where we are today, is just try to sort through what is real. So we just stick to very defensive areas, basic necessities, and try to avoid the cyclical companies. But we also do it on an evaluation basis because you can see that when you get these bubbles, you get this vacuum effect. So you have this money is pouring into speculative names, like the salesforce.com and Netflix and Lulu Lemon and things like that. Well, at the same time that's happening, there are broad pools of where money is taken out of. And this is exactly what happened during the tech bubble. You had, during the tech bubble, the six months leading up to the bubble in March of 2000, you had stocks like Procter and Gamble and Abercrombie and Fitch down 40, 50%. And it was the old economy value stocks that people were selling so that they could basically buy more lottery tickets. Yeah, pets.com and the like. Right, and this is what's happening today. You have the same thing where people are selling Kroger or we mentioned chicken before, which is depressed, and they're also getting hit by high grain costs. So a company like Sanderson Farms has just been... But isn't this partially just a result of people taking on more risks than the market would otherwise encourage? I mean, you've got enormous moral hazard built into everything, it seems like, today. Oh, absolutely. And this is, I mean, you look at what the damage that the Fed has done.  And it's in lowering interest rates, you can see the whole risk profile change. And it's amazing when you think about the conversation that we had in October of 2008 and people panicking and the risk profile, how it got brought down. And today, how it has completely changed as if nothing has changed whatsoever. The discipline that was being imposed is gone and the speculators are back. It's just like 2007 again. And it's very difficult to assess this going forward. Something like a moral hazard just doesn't lend itself to any kind of serious measurement or evaluation. You just have to kind of watch it play itself out. Yeah, well, I mean, we can quantify some of these things. And we can see, I mean, one of the other things I wanted to add was that in terms of when the Fed lowers rates, there's a saying in the business that there's more money lost chasing yield than at the point of a gun. People have been crawling out on the risk limb because of lower rates. And then they see, in the beginning, they're very cautious. But then they see the market start to move up. And then we get further and further that all of what happened in 2008 slips into the memory hole. And so you've had a huge drop in money market fund balances. And like I said, you can quantify this. You can see that it take money market fund balances as a percentage of mutual fund plus exchange traded fund assets at the top of every bubble, the technology bubble, the credit bubble, and this stimulus bubble. It's about 20%. And at the bottom, we had, I think we got up to 35% at the bottom and 38% in 2008, 2009. It puts Austrians in a strange situation. I think we talked about this in 2008. At the time, your worry was not the recession or the deleveraging. That was not the thing that was causing the worry. You were worried even then about the recovery. Yeah, we were exactly. We were worried about that they would intervene and not allow this process, this healthy cleansing process to take place. As this continues, then people become ever more risk-averse. Or I should say they're adopting more and more risky investments. And we've got inflationary pressure now. And really, we seem to be not on the road to renewed prosperity, but just a replay. Well, and it's not just what's going on in this country, but it's what's going on around the world as well. I mean, it's not like we're in isolation. You have these problems. I think China is a great example of what's going on. You have the view that we have a bubble in China. Yeah, I think the Austrian insight, I was listening to Joe Salerno the other day, and he talked about when you get this artificial boom, you see it's overconsumption plus malinvestment as a result of excessive credit expansion. And doesn't that sum up what's going on in China? You've got in 2009, credit expanded by 100% you've had and money supply grew by 30%, and now it's growing at about 20%. You just huge, you talk about the stimulus. A lot of this has been coming from China and it's a little bit frustrating because I know there are people that consider themselves anti-fed, anti-Bernanke, pro-Austrian that I think have been sort of co-opted by this idea that China is a positive influence and that that's going to just take commodity prices up and gold up and all the rest of it. Well, you have wild speculation in China. You've got, I remember the Japan bubble in the late 1980s you had a housewife selling mutual funds door to door and you had million dollar golf club memberships and just insane valuations of property. Well, you've got a similar thing going on in China right now. You've got in Beijing land prices are up nine times in 10 years and they've got, it's the same kind of inflation. The inflation statistics are way understated there and people are trying to keep up with the inflation and so they're speculating. Now in addition to following the markets as closely as you do you also spend a great deal of time looking at fundamentals that you read in the Austrian books that's why you're here at the Scholars Conference which is wonderful because you're kind of a practitioner of Austrian economics but you don't neglect the theory. You're thinking about the theory all the time. How does that work in your own mind? Well, I think a couple of things. There's so much that applies but in our business Nassim Talib talks about this, the being fooled by randomness and it's the survival of the, not the survival of the fittest but the survival of the least fit and what we've had here is this last 20 years kind of this artificial period in the markets and the survivors and those that have been the most successful have been interventionists. They've been Keynesians in various strains of intervention and I think this is where we have a big advantage just viewing the world through this Austrian non-interventionist lens and so our competitors right now are basically, what's the justification for being in the stock market? Well, either the intervention is going to work and we'll get a recovery or it won't work and the Fed will just print more money and that's the extent of the analysis so I think it gives us a huge advantage. Do you encourage your clients to read in the Austrian tradition? Well, fortunately we don't have to because a lot of what we know from this business is that a friend of mine, Tony Deden, who's a big supporter of the Institute has been over a long period of time. He always says that the problem with this business is when you run it like a business and I think what he meant is this isn't the kind of business that you can maximize revenues in the short run. You really have to think about the long run and the problem is that the customer really doesn't know what's best for him and so you need, you can't just have people chasing a track record or chasing short term performance. You really need to have a philosophical fit so we have most of our clients, they're very patient and what gives them that because we go through ups and downs is that they tend to be Austrians, they tend to be libertarians and they definitely either they're in that camp or they're close and we're trying to move them in that direction as much as possible. Yeah, well I hope that we can meet back again maybe next year or maybe in, I don't wanna wait two and a half years to see how all this is going to play out but these are very exciting times, very different times than they were in 2008 and it will be interesting to watch, see what happens and to hear your views as we go along so I'd like to thank you for coming today. Thank you for having me, I enjoyed it.


good morning good morning good morning my plan today is a one more time and crookie just to talk around various aspects of rigidity and necessity to the point where I hope we will all feel completely comfortable with these ideas and on Friday we will go on to Putnam's article meaning and reference which actually really is continuous with the Kripke and after Putnam will be going on to Evans and Putnam and Evans are really building on Kripke so all these ideas will keep coming back to from different angles so I want to start out by looking at what Kripke said about illusions of contingency why it's kind of a surprise to find that Hesperus is phosphorus is a necessary truth and then I want to come back to what we were talking about last time with the Strangler and different kind of names and so on because after last time's discussion a number of people made some very helpful comments about how I could have explained it better so I'm going to take another crack at it and then go on to review the definition of rigid designation and something about extending Kripke's approach beyond just ordinary proper names okay so let's start out looking at what Kripke says about Hesperus is phosphorus okay class Hesperus is phosphorus do we think that that is a necessary or be contingent is this rigid or flexible is this rigid or flexible is the whole thing necessary or contingent for a good class okay are you reasonably comfortable with that so far yeah because actually what we're going to do is just keep I'm going to do today just keep coming back at this from various angles but that's like the basic data we want to try and keep prodding away at okay the one objection Kripke considers you might have to say that's necessary it's a little after all couldn't it have turned out that Hesperus was not phosphorus I mean presumably there was a point in human history when nobody knew whether Hesperus was phosphorus I mean lots of these informative identities are like that right you it was a surprise to find out they were true but if it could have turned out that Hesperus was not phosphorus well doesn't that mean there is contingent if Hesperus is phosphorus I mean this is one thing is though that this isn't just supposed to be an epistemic possibility it's perfectly all right for Kripke to say there was a time at which for all we knew Hesperus could have turned out not to be phosphorus but could it really have turned out that Hesperus and phosphorus were different things is that it's possible that Hesperus and phosphorus were different things then it can't be necessary that Hesperus is phosphorus so here we have Hesperus coming up over the morning in the Pacific and here we have Dural phosphorus in the evening they are the other as you can see they look rather different couldn't it have turned out that they were different things isn't it possible for those to be different things if that's right then that's a challenge to the idea that the identity is necessary well what Gripke says about this is that it really could have happened that you had a visual presentation like this of the heavenly body in the evening and a visual presentation like that sorry a visual presentation like this of the heavenly body in the morning and a visual presentation like this of the heavenly body in the evening and it could have been that these two visual presentations were presenting different objects that really is a possibility there's a possible world in which that happens.  You get a presentation like that in the morning.  And they're actually presentations. They're, in fact, presentations of different things. That's got to be possible. Yes? But the question is, are you describing, then, a situation in which Hesperus is not phosphorus? If you are describing a situation in which Hesperus is not phosphorus, then it's possible for Hesperus not to be phosphorus. So it can't be necessary that Hesperus is phosphorus. Follow me very closely here. But the argument is, this isn't really a situation. Although it's possible that there could be in different heavenly bodies, providing this presentation and that presentation, at least one, either this one wasn't Hesperus or that one wasn't phosphorus. It was something different that was presenting in that way. It was something different that looked like that. So what you've got is a situation in which there are two distinct bodies occupying the very positions occupied by Hesperus, phosphorus, venus. But these are different. One of them is not Hesperus or one of them is not phosphorus. So Kripke's general answer to this kind of objection is, any necessary truth, whether it's an episteriori-necessary truth or an a priori-necessary truth, could not have turned out otherwise. It could not have turned out that Hesperus was not phosphorus. That's not really possible. But in the case of some necessary episteriori truths like Hesperus is phosphorus, you can say that under appropriate, qualitatively identical, evidential situations, so the qualitatively identical means you're getting presentations like this and this. It seems just the same. Under appropriate, qualitatively identical, evidential situations, an appropriate corresponding qualitative statement might have been false. So in this situation, you might have used words like Hesperus and phosphorus here, actually. But you wouldn't have been talking about the same objects. So that statement and that situation would have been false. Under appropriate, qualitatively identical, evidential situations, an appropriate corresponding qualitative statement might have been false. So there is a kind of illusion of contingency there, because you could have got a situation that was, for all the world seemed just like the situation we actually have, and in that situation, what you'd have expressed by Hesperus is phosphorus would have been false. But really, you wouldn't have been talking about Hesperus and phosphorus there. You'd have been talking about some different object. Because if that one really was Hesperus and that one really was phosphorus, they'd have been the same thing. Here ends the first lesson. So it can look like Hesperus is phosphorus is contingent, but that's just a mistake. Once you know all the facts, you realize that the identity is both true and necessary. Yes? The dubbing, yes, yes, you say, I dub the Hesperus and I dub the phosphorus. Yep. Well, isn't the photograph good enough? I mean, I'm trying to show the quality of the evidential situation by using the photograph. You could have a situation that seemed just like this. You have the same pixels, even though it's a different object at the other end. Yes? Fixing of the object is done by dubbing, sure. The dubbing is what? That's right. That's right. Not supposedly, we are fixing the reference by that dubbing. Yeah. That couldn't have happened. That's right. But that's not the supposition. The point is rather you could have a situation, you could have a qualitative situation that's qualitative like this and you say, I dub the phosphorus. You could have another situation that was qualitatively just like this one, but it was actually a different object you were looking at and you say, I dub the phosphorus and it's actually a different thing you've dubbed. I mean, it could happen with dubbing a person, right? You say, I dub the Balthazar and then a qualitatively identical situation. You've got the identical twin and you're saying, I dub the Balthazar. These are two different dubbings, the dubbings of different objects, but they're qualitatively very similar, yeah. So the point is that in the actual, given that what really happened, we actually did dub the same object twice over and once that's in place, the identity is necessary. But you can make sense of the hypothesis of a qualitatively similar situation in which you had dubbed different objects twice over, yeah. That's the thing that makes sense. That's where you get the illusion of contingency. That's why you might mistakenly think that phosphorus was phosphorus was not necessary. Last call, if you can formulate it as a question and raise it, yep, yes? The way you'd establish a truth here is by something of a spatial temporal location, which, yeah, it is important to distinguish all these different factors, you're right. But the simple idea here is you're taking one object, Hesperus, and you're saying all of it, phosphorus, there is one in the same. So if it's one in the same object in this world, how could it, here is something like this is what really is intuitively driving Kripke's thing. If it's one in the same object in this world, how could it somehow split apart in another possible world? I mean, if it's split apart in another possible world where you have two objects and in fact, you only have one in this world, how does that even make sense? If there are two in some other possible world, they can't both be identical to the original one. Do you see what I mean? Because they're two different things. So it really is kind of commonsensical. If Hesperus really is phosphorus, then it must be necessary. You can't make sense of it splitting up in different worlds. How could you split with yourself in a different part? I mean, somehow with yourself actually, it's so tempting almost to imagine, well, maybe I could be in two different places or many different places, wouldn't that be grand? But really, it doesn't make any sense. Yeah, because which one's you? So there's that, but at the same time, you have to try and do justice to the sense that, well, after all, there are things that could have turned out otherwise here. And that's what this is trying to do, is saying that you can't envisage a situation which is for all the world like the actual situation. But actually, you were talking about two different objects when you said Hesperus and phosphorus. So you're actually envisaging here a situation in which it wouldn't even be true that this one is that one. Yeah, there were always two objects, if you see what I mean. That's right, the illusion of contingency, but ultimately it's really a thing about epistemic possibility and not proper possibility, metaphysical possibility. Yeah, yep, yep, yep. No, I'm just looking for people who hadn't asked a question, but no, it doesn't explain why the designation is rigid. Okay, that's our next topic. Okay, are we reasonably comfortable with that? Okay, so let's go back to this thing about descriptions and names. So, okay, class, the inventor of the wheel is that, so that designates an object, all right, but we can make sense of talking about that as a designating an object, the one and only one person who invented the wheel. All right, does that designate the same object in every possible world? No, so that is a flexible designator. Consider the actual inventor of the wheel. Is that, that designates someone, all right? Does that designate the same person in every possible world? Yes, because every time it designates someone, you have to keep tracking back. For every possible world, when you wanna know who the actual inventor of the wheel designates in any possible world, you have to look back at the actual world and find out who in the actual world invented the wheel and then look at what that person's up to in this world. Yes? So, the inventor of the wheel is flexible, the actual inventor of the wheel is rigid. Yes? Nixon, yeah? Uh-huh. If we do have something like this in any possible world. Yes. Right. Yeah, the idea is the picture is, you might not think this is satisfactory, but the picture is we're designating a particular object and then it gets up to lots of different stuff in different possible worlds. And if you say, what makes it the same object, the answer, Kripke's answer is, there is no plainer English than that. It's the same thing, what more do you wanna know? If you keep shifting like that. I agree, that is, when Kripke talks about the telescope view of possible worlds, yeah, he's talking about a picture in which you got one possible world here, you got another possible world there. You look at all the, what's going on here, you look at what's going on here, and then you say to yourself, now which of these here is identical to which objects over here? That is really puzzling. And Kripke is trying not to get into that kind of problem. Yeah, he's trying to say, look, the whole way you specify a possible world is by saying, this one's getting Nixon in it, and that one's getting Nixon in it. And you just, you use the name to guarantee the sameness of the object across the worlds. Yeah, but that does lead to some pretty murky consequences. Like, if you don't mind me taking you and your neighbor as examples, right? In this, there's a possible world in which, okay, you're wearing a hat, and your neighbor is not wearing a hat. I mean, I hope you don't mind me doing this, right? But you're wearing a hat. So there's a world in which your neighbor is wearing the hat, and you're not wearing the hat, right? So there's a world in which you swap hats. There's a world in which you swap clothes. There's a world in which you swap many of your temperamental characteristics.  There's a world in which B gets all of A's characteristics and A gets all of B's characteristics. Yeah? I mean, that seems to make sense in Kripke's picture. There could be a world in which everybody in the room kind of shuffles around, yeah, takes on everybody else's characteristics, and you just stipulate that so. You say imagine the world in which A's got the hat, and you see what I mean? And the whole idea of your question, well, what makes it the same is to say, well, I don't know that that really makes sense. If you describe a world in which it's just like this one, the class looks just like this one, but everybody's shuffled round. You think, well, what makes it the case that it's the same? What makes it the case that it's the same person here who's sitting in this chair or is sitting in that chair in the other class? You don't know, looks just the same as this class. It looks like everybody's sitting in just the same chair. You see what I mean? So that seems kind of mysterious, but it is a consequence of Kripke's picture. Yeah, yes, yes, that's right. Yes, right. So the idea is that some objects do have essential properties, and they can't vary them in different worlds. But, and so then you have to get into the question, well, what characteristics of an object are essential to it? Yeah, and the trouble is there are some characteristics of an object that seem to be essential to it, like being a person, right? If I say, well, okay, it's one thing for everybody if you're shuffling around, what in the class? What about a world in which you're made of wood?  You see what I mean? You might think, well, where do you go too far?  Yeah, that's not really possible. But the trouble is that's kind of intuitive, but the trouble is are you going to be able to amp that up, that doctrine of essential properties to such an extent that you can stop people shuffling around? You see what I mean? It's not that it seems completely hopeless, but it doesn't seem obvious either, and you could do that, yeah. So there is a puzzle for how you stop the shuffle. If you can just stipulate as Nixon and another, you're talking about in another possible world, and then go to speculate as to wherever might be going on with him in that world, it seems like it could be just anything. Well, or at any rate, the essential properties are not going to put that much of a dampen up on what you speculate might be happening in that world. Yep, yes, yes, right, that's right. Yes, yeah, ah, ah, current is interesting, but it is, I read current, if you put in current, the current president of the United States, yeah, I read that as flexible, yeah, because if Al Gore is looking at Obama, say, and saying that could have been me, he doesn't mean he could have been Obama, you see what I mean? He means he could have been the current president of the United States. So he's thinking that's flexible. Yes. That's, I mean, I don't mean that said in store, you know, God told me, but so far as straight off, my feeling is that it's only when you put in an actual that you get this effect, yeah. There are interesting analogies between time and possible worlds. You can think of time analogously to possible worlds, and you can think of descriptions, designators that vary, have different references at different times, as opposed to designators that designate the same thing relative to all times, yeah. And when you think about that, current is really kind of analogous to actually, but it's only an analogy, it's not the same thing, yeah. Okay, is this all right about the inventor of the wheel and the actual inventor of the wheel? Yeah, that's all right. Okay, now I think what happened last time was, I said, okay, I'm going to introduce a name bright for the inventor of the wheel. And the way I hear that is when you enter, I mean, Kripke says names aren't typically descriptive, and that's all right, I'm not quarreling with our argument, but I just say, I'm going to dub that, I'm going to say whoever it is that invented the wheel, I'm going to call them bright, and that's a name. And I mean, Kripke can't stop me, right, I'll do what I like, yeah. I can call him bright or her bright if I want, yeah. And then the thing is, my ear is that when you say by bright, I shall mean the actual inventor of the wheel, the inventor of the wheel, you always, when it's a name, kind of sticking naturally so that really you're using bright as rigid, yeah. My ear says I can make sense of the supposition that bright might not have invented the wheel. Now the thing is that you guys quite rightly picked up on the possibility that bright could be used as actually strictly synonymous with this description, so then it would not be rigid but flexible. So there are two ways you could go, you could say bright means the actual inventor of the wheel, or you could say bright means the inventor of the wheel, and if you say bright means the actual inventor of the wheel, that's to say that it's rigid, whereas what you guys are saying, or many of you were saying was, if bright means just the inventor of the wheel, then that's flexible, yes? And I actually compounded the confusion by using the strangler as my example, because there it really is, well I still think my ear is, it's a little bit weird to use that as flexible. I mean, let me give an example, if you say the president, that really is flexible, right? I mean, Al Gore can say I could have been the president. You can meet, it specifies a role, if you meet an aged Jimmy Carter or a dinner in Washington somewhere, he might say to you plentifully, I used to be president, you know? My hearing of the strangler was not that it was flexible like that, but I think it's a possible interpretation that it's flexible. You could imagine someone saying, I used to be the strangler, I don't think much of the new guy, what do you think? You see what I mean, you could use the strangler as the name for a role, yeah? In the way you use the president as the name for a role, and I think that is how you were hearing it, it's the name for a role, and in that case it is flexible. Someone else could have been the strangler, just as someone else could have been the president, yes? But I wasn't hearing it like that, I was hearing it as, meaning the actual, whoever's actually done it, a particular person that we're then going to speculate about, but once you say that, I think that sorts it all out. Is that right? So if you interpret bright as meaning just the inventor of the wheel and that's flexible, but if you hear it the way I was hearing it as the actual inventor of the wheel and that's rigid, so then if you hear it the way I was hearing it and you say bright is the inventor of the wheel, then that's a priori, but it's not necessary. So there you go, I blew up the idea that a priori, throughs are all necessary. The nice thing about this example is it seems so clear to, so to see clear what's going on, yeah? Oh, this is the rigid use. So if you take the rigid use here, then this is rigid, this is flexible. So different possible worlds, this is picking out something different. This is always picking out the same thing, yeah? So if I say, well, bright could have been hit by an asteroid, then a bright wouldn't have invented the wheel. So I'm hearing it as rigid and then it's not necessary that bright invented the wheel because it could have been prevented. She could have been prevented, but it is a priori because if anyone invented the wheel it was bright, yeah? That's right, that's a priori, right? But not necessary. The actual inventor of the wheel is the inventor of the wheel, very good, yeah? Okay, so the thing this brings out is when you get something that is a sign having its reference fixed by a description, then it really could be rigid or flexible. That was really the model of the discussion last time. I was saying, I hear it when it's a name is always being rigid. You guys are saying, no, but it could be flexible. And that's right. And that's where someone had mentioned intention, right? You get a choice. If you're hooking up the name to the reference by means of a description, you get a choice as to whether it's rigid or flexible. That's all right, okay. But then think about, I mean, the whole point of a lot of Krupi's discussion is this is really an untypical case. Usually the connect between a name and an object is set up by a causal chain. And if it's a causal chain, they're setting up the name object connection. There's no role being specified that something different could be meeting in different possible worlds. If it's just a causal connection, setting up the connect between the name and the object, then it looks like that has to be rigid. You couldn't keep the meaning of the name constant but vary the object. What would it mean to keep the causal connection constant but vary the object? It doesn't, I mean, it's a bit like if you imagine having a telephone conversation with someone, you can say, well, I might not have had that conversation with that person. So there's you and the other person and this causal connection between you down the telephone line, but it hardly makes sense to say I could have been having that very same conversation but a different person there. A causal connection, if it's gonna be the same causal connection, it's gonna be the same things on both ends. So if it was a causal connection between the object and the sign, that it's making it true that the sign refers to the object, then you couldn't keep constant the meaning of the sign but vary the object. So that case of descriptive names is very unusual. Usually it's a causal connection that's fixing the reference of the sign and then the designator has always got to be rigid. The name has to be a rigid designator, yes? N is the number of cows in the field, yes, that's right, April, I'm a bit necessary, yeah. Yes. Almost, when you say, I can't remember if it was N or N, say it's N is the number of cows and the cows and the field, right? Then N is not there being used as a variable. I see why you say it's a variable but it isn't really being used as a variable. I mean, remember if you're doing this in a maths class, probably not very hard maths class but you're not there using it. You're there using it as a sign for a particular number and the task that you'd be set is find out what that number is. So its reference really has been fixed by this when you say N is the number of cows in the field, yeah. So it's standing for a definite number of cows. It's just unknown, that's right and you've got to find it out. That's right, there could have been a different number of cows in the field, yeah, but it's still April, I, that N is the number of cows in the field and anybody says, ah, but maybe you're wrong, maybe it's not N, that's just, you're making a joke if you say that, yeah. Well, really, okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, right, well, this is the subtle thing with where the actually comes in. I mean, I realize I'm doing the same thing again. I'm assuming that once you make, once you have a name here, yeah, this is the number of cows that are actually in the field, yeah, you're not assuming that it varies depending on how many cows, oops, very, yeah, you can speculate had N not been the number of cows in the field, yeah, had there been more cows in the field, that makes perfect sense, it seems to me, yeah. But as with the Strangler, you can read it as a name as, you could read it, I think, as implying a role, but I do actually think it's a very, it's a kind of unnatural reading. If you don't mind my saying so, as with the Strangler, I'll be your Strangler tonight, you know. You can make sense of that way of talking, yeah, but it's a little bit weird, yeah, okay, okay, okay, well, let's see, one last bit of geeking out on rigid designation. So what is a rigid designator? Scribke's official definition is, we'll call something a rigid designator if in every possible world, it designates the same object. And of course, the same things kind of different names in other possible worlds, like came up earlier. You can make sense of saying, suppose Al Gore had not been called Al Gore, yes, we've got the actual world in which Al is called Al, and then we've got this other world in which his parents decided to call him something different. Yep, that makes perfect sense. You could have had a different name. People sometimes complain about their names. If only, well, actually, I'm gonna give some examples, but there may be some people of this name in the class, so I wouldn't do that. You can think of your own, right? Okay, that makes perfect sense. In every possible world, it designates the same object. That's what a rigid designator is. But of course, there are gonna be some possible worlds in which the object doesn't exist.  I mean, if your parents had never met, you would not have existed, yeah? So suppose you consider the possibility in which Al Gore doesn't exist. Relative to that possibility, does the name designate anything? Well, you could say it's a rigid designator if in every possible world in which the object exists, we're only gonna consider the worlds in which the object exists, and relative to those worlds, the name always designates the same thing, yeah? Or what about the worlds where the object doesn't exist? Does the name designate anything relative to such a world? Well, you could say, with hispirus and phosphorus, you could say in any possible world in which hispirus exists, it refers to the same thing. In any possible world in which phosphorus exists, it's always referring to the same, the name's always referring to the same thing. So in any possible world in which these, relative to which these two terms are designating something, the statement's necessary. I mean, it doesn't really get an evaluation with respect to a world in which hispirus doesn't exist. I mean, if the planets had been formed in a different way, then hispirus might never have come into existence. Right, that makes sense. So relative to that world, is it true that hispirus is phosphorus? In that world, is hispirus phosphorus? Hard to say? No, right, it's a little bit strange. Yes, it's hard to know quite what to say about that case, yeah. So you could say it's weakly necessary in the sense that it's not that it's true in every possible world, it's just that it's true in every world in which that planet exists, yeah. It's true in every world in which Venus exists. So that'd be a little bit weaker than saying it's true in absolutely every world in which, in every world, in any world at all. Or he could have a stronger definition of rigid designator. This is just like a homework question. I mean, it's not really clear, it seems to me, which way to go on this. You could say I'm gonna have a stronger definition. In every possible world, the name designates the same object, whether or not the object exists in that world. Yeah, isn't that weird? But suppose you consider an example like, if Hitler had never been born, the world would have been a better place, okay. Well, if you wanna consider that possibility, okay, I'm using the name here to specify the possible world, yeah. So I use the name and I specify this world. This is the world in which it's true that Hitler was never born, yeah. But if it's true in that world that Hitler was never born, then the name Hitler must be designating something relative to that world, right? Is it, is designating? Well, you can't, well, no, it's not designating an absence, it's designating a person. It just happens not to be there in that world. Just think how you make sense of this. If Hitler had never been born, I'm referring to a particular person, Hitler, and I'm specifying this possibility, he was never born. So how should you say you load the name up?  You see what I mean? But you seem to need to think about it in that way because if you say if Hitler had never been born, well, I wouldn't have known who you were talking about. That doesn't seem the right answer. Yeah, it seems perfectly clear that this is true. Well, I mean, yeah, there's nothing controversial about that. It seems perfectly clear that that's true. Yeah, yeah. Very good, yes. Yes. It's very hard to know what to say about the unicorns in this kind of picture because how does the term have meaning? In the actual world, there are no unicorns, yeah? So there's nothing to be causing the use of the term unicorn. So it must be descriptive, yeah? And whatever has a horn, something that has a horn. Is that right? I'm not sure if that's right. It's hard to know how it's got meaning the term unicorn. I mean, how does it have, how come I know what you're talking about when you say unicorn? Because there's nothing that I'm causally connected to, yeah? You're referencing the concept, yeah. That's not what you mean. The concept doesn't have a horn, right? You mean the unicorn's got a horn, not the concept of unicorns got a horn. Right, well, yeah, it's very hard to know how to, I find it hard to know how to evaluate the kind of claim is necessary that unicorns have horns.  Rums, rums of horns, right? Anyway, so rums of horns, that's true in this world, right? Is it necessarily true? Well, I guess not. I mean, after all, rums could have had horns bred out of them, could have happened thousands of years ago. There could have been some genetic mutation a couple of thousand years ago or tens of thousands of years ago, as a result of which rums never got horns. You can make sense of that. How does it go with unicorns? I mean, I don't know, I mean, how do you find out about the genetics of the unicorn? You see what I mean, it's very hard to know how to evaluate these statements about unicorns. And there's something, so the causal theory says it's hard to know how to interpret a statement about, the causal theory has difficulty interpreting statements about unicorns, but I actually suspect that you and I do too. As you see it, I mean, if you really pushed us on what we're talking about when we're talking about unicorns and what's true about unicorns and what's necessary, it's not that clear anyway. I think, yeah, yeah. Yep. Individual names say Hitler, you know, you might be referring to, That's the one, yes, sorry. Yeah, but I mean, I'm sure there are other people in Germany that unfortunately have that name. So you could be referring to somebody else, so it doesn't really seem like just a word has meaning. I told you, and you know, it doesn't, don't, you have to, is it meaning really just a property of statements or a language as a whole? Well, if you're going to talk about truth or falsity of individual statements, it's hard to see how a meaning can be just a characteristic of the language as a whole, because then you couldn't talk about the truth or falsity of an individual statement, yeah. So long as we're able to talk about a particular statement being true or false, then it does seem like we must be able to explain how the components of the statement are contributing to that truth or falsity. Yeah, that's that notion of semantic value. And the only, really the only way of explaining what a name is bringing to a statement being true or false is its reference. You could throw that out and say, I don't believe there's any such notion of truth, yeah. We only evaluate the totality of statements made in a culture or something. That totality is right or wrong, but it's a really wild view that, yeah. I mean, people have held just about any possible view here, but it really is not commonsensical. You don't know what it means to make of inference in such a case, yeah, because inference is taking you from true statements to true statements if it's correct, yeah. Okay. Okay, so you could say Hesperus is phosphorus is strongly necessary in that it's true in any world whether or not Venus exists in that world. Even in worlds in which Hesperus and a phosphorus don't exist, it's still true that Hesperus is phosphorus. So these are two different definitions of rigidity. In every possible world in which the object exists, the term designates that same object. And in every possible world in which, in every possible world, whatever, the term is still designating the same object. Whether or not the object exists in that world, that's the point of the Hitler example. Okay, I think we'll leave it there for geeking out on rigidity and necessity. Okay, we will move on to Putnam on Friday. Okay, thanks. Thanks for the discussion.