Okay, we now have Zoe Cormier with Talk on Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll. Great. Can you hear me? Is it coming through? Chuck, I think you've switched the feed. Hello, can you hear me? Great. Thank you so much. So, as you said, my name is Zoe, and I'm going to be talking about sex, drugs and rock and roll. I've just written a book, which we've got here, and it's for sale in the shop, about these three favorite activities. Before I get going, anyone with children in the audience, I will be using graphic language, I will be talking about body parts, I will be talking about addiction and drugs.  So, as I said, my book is about the science of hedonism and activities that we tend to think of as sinful and what science has taught us about these things. And ultimately, my book, it contains a lot of really, really amazing stories from the history of science, and I'm just going to give you a snapshot of a few things that are in there. But the ultimate goal isn't just to tell these amazing stories, it's really to get at this. You probably can't see the screen, but it's a figure of Rodin's The Thinker. And the ultimate question that I seek to answer is, what does it mean to be human? What do sex, drugs, and rock and roll teach us about what it means to be human? Because this is a question that has occupied the minds of scientists and philosophers since the moment we became self-aware. What is it that specializes the human species away from the animal kingdom? What is it that makes us unique? Is it the capacity to do mathematics? Is it the ability to write things down? Is it the fact that we can think about the past, present, and future? Is it self-consciousness? What is it that makes us special? And traditionally, scientists have focused on our higher cognitive capacities, our so-or quote-unquote frontal cortex activities, things that are thought to be elevated among the animal kingdom in terms of higher thinking. Meanwhile, other activities, getting high, getting laid, and rocking out, have been denigrated as primitive. They've been denigrated as animalistic. They've often been thought to be more basal parts of our species. What I would argue is that these three things are just as important defining characteristics of the human species. Now, you can't see it, but it's a photograph of Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock. And this photograph really says it all. So you've got Jimmy, sex on legs. You've got 400,000 people in front of him. And most people, you might not know this, but Jimmy used to wear tabs of acid underneath his bandanas so he could stay high the whole time. And he's playing to an audience of 400,000 people. And today, we think that we're hardcore with Glastonbury, you know, 175,000 people.  And they had one stage, one stage, and most of them didn't have tents. This says a lot about how much we value sex, drugs, and rock and roll. If you haven't been paying attention, you might not think that these are important qualities of our species, but clearly they are. So what have scientists discovered about these supposedly base pursuits? What have modern empirical investigations taught us? But moreover, as I'm going through the contents of this lecture, I want you to think about what do these things teach us about the scientific method? It's a two-way street. So let's get to everyone's favorite subject, sex. How many people here know the name Visalius? Okay, Visalius was a Dutch anatomist in the Renaissance era, and he's known as the father of anatomy. He basically invented the art of drawing the human form in a scientific manner, and he was truly a genius, and he was capable of elucidating the valves of the heart. Sir, I'm about to talk about some very dirty content that you might not want her to listen. It's going to be up 50. Are you sure? Because I'm about to start talking about the clitoris for like 15 minutes. Okay, fine. Sure? Okay, it's your choice. So Visalius was capable of elucidating the valves of the heart, and he was capable of tracing the tubes that lead from the ovaries to the uterus, the fallopian tubes. And he did not believe in the existence of the clitoris. He believes that it didn't exist. When a colleague of his, Rialdo Columbo, an Italian, claimed to have discovered it, Rialdo Columbo claimed to discover the clitoris, and he was not the only anatomist at the time who claimed to be the very first person to ever find this thing. And Rialdo wrote to Visalius, and he described it as, quote, so pretty and useful a thing. And Visalius shot back, you can hardly ascribe this new and useless part as if it were an organ to healthy women. Key words, new and useless. However, modern studies have found that the clitoris contains 8,000 nerve endings, a higher density than found anywhere else in the human body outside the brain. It is the only body part that appears to be designed for pleasure and only pleasure. It is indeed a pretty and useful a thing. Moreover, you can't quite, oh, you can see this actually. So in five years ago, urologists in Australia mapped the shape of it, and they found that it's not just a little nub on the outside of the body, it extends inside the body into a wish-found structure that goes all the way around the vulva, and it grows in size as we get older. Now, Visalius was not capable of finding this either through dissection or recreational activities. So there's probably a lot more about him than it does about the clitoris. Now, the history of the clitoris inside the clitoris is colorful and quirky. Let's get to your friend and mine, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud did not think the clitoris was imaginary. He knew it existed. However, he said it was childish. He said that only women who masturbated and climaxed from manual stimulation of the clitoris required it to achieve orgasm. And he believed that through marriage and sex and maturation and mating with a man, a woman would develop into a mature form who climaxed from only penetration, not requiring a man, a fumbling man, one might add, to use his fingers or his tongue. Now, Freud called this the clitoral vaginal transfer, and he said that this was a key cornerstone in a woman's life. Now, denigration of clitoral stimulation was not restricted to the male of our species. This is one of my favorite stories from scientific history and the scientific study of sex. This is Princess Marie Bonaparte. Princess Marie Bonaparte was the great-grandmice of Napoleon, and if you can see in the photograph she's wearing basically a crown and a lot of bridal gear. She clung to her regal heritage with every inch of her being. And there was another inch of her being that she scrutinized with great interest, and that was the distance between her clitoris and her vaginal opening. She did not climax from penetration alone, and this caused her great despair. This was the 1920s, and she felt like a lot of women today feel that she was inadequate, that she was improperly built because her clitoris was required for orgasm. So what did she do? She conducted a scientific study gathering data like any intrepid scientist would. She measured the distance between the clitoris and the vaginal opening in 243 women. And she split women into three categories, the paracredoradien, the mesocredoradien, and the telecridoradien, and she said that women who had their clitoris further than an inch and a half of her vaginal opening would not come from penetration alone. She measured herself and she decided that she was one of the unfortunate telecridoradien that her clitoris was too far removed from her vagina. So what did she do? She hired a surgeon, and the surgeon snipped the ligaments, connecting her clitoris to her body, and he repositioned it closer to her vaginal opening. And then she still didn't climax from penetration alone, so she had him do it again. And this was in the 1920s. Like I always say, truth is stranger than fiction. Napoleon's great grandkids had a surgeon reposition her clitoris twice. The history of the clitoris doesn't end there. Let's get to our lovely charmers, masters and Johnson.  William Masters wanted to study people having sex in the lab, and he knew that this would look suspect. He thought that it would look weird if there was just a single scientist watching people have sex in the lab. Moreover, modern scientific studies look at couples who volunteer.  And he knew that this would look odd, especially because he was using prostitutes, mostly, and grad students. Now, so what did he do to make this look less suspect? He decided to have a female co-author on his paper, so he hired his secretary, Virginia Johnson, sorry, Virginia Masters, and she, eventually, he left his wife for her. So these were rock star scientists. They were on the cover of Time Magazine. They were very famous. Through their studies, they decided that women who do not climax from penetration alone suffered from, quote, sexual dysfunction. And they even went so far as to use the word disease to describe such women. Now, the great game changer in the history of the clitoris is this woman, Sherry Hyde. Sherry Hyde was then and is now a vape. She's still a vape. And she was a student at Columbia University in the 1970s. And she couldn't pay her tuition, like a lot of American students. She wanted to be a psychologist. She wanted to be a scientist. And it was just too expensive. So what did she do?  Frankly, if I could do what I would. So she posed for a photo, and she didn't know what it was going to look like when it was printed.  So what did she do? She staged a protest in front of playboy headquarters against the very ad that she had appeared in. How cool can you get? So she went on to do some incredibly groundbreaking research. She interviewed a hundred thousand women, aged 14 to 78. And this is a lot about science. A lot of people think about Eureka moments. They think about running naked through the street. Yeah, that's probably a good idea. I wouldn't know if it was my niece. So she interviewed a hundred thousand women, and a lot of people think about Eureka moments. People think about that big wham bam moment of realization. Frankly, a lot of science just involves being incredibly patient and gathering lots of data and then seeing what it tells you. So she did this, and she found that 70% of women require direct patrol stimulation in order to orgasm. 70%. And that figure has held up ever since. In the past 40 years, every other study has found pretty much the same thing. When she published her findings, Playboy Magazine called it the hate report. The hate report. However, her research reveals that it is indeed, as Rael de Colombo said, a pretty and useful thing. Now, let's get on to the lads. The penis, your favorite body part and mine.  Most mammals have bones in their penises, and these bones are used for quicky insertion, for quicky mating. It allows a male to simply insert himself into a female very easily at any moment. And so this includes dogs, cats, whales.  It's about this big. It's called an usik, and the Inuit use it as a weapon of warfare. They use it as a club. The fact that humans don't have a bone in their penis, and by the way chimpanzees do, so the fact that our closest relatives do and we don't, further indicates how special this is for our species.  In other words, behavior and psychology and the mind are integral for things like arousal and sexuality, which means that what goes on when we have sex is unique in the animal kingdom.  If you look at the brain, there's a strip inside everyone's brain called the somatosensory cortex. It's basically a map of feeling, and it's basically, when neuroscience is mapped, where body parts are positioned in this region, it basically illustrates the size of your brain that is devoted to sensation in that region. So for example, the lips are huge, the eyes are huge, the torso is very, very small. You actually have very few sensory nerve endings in your back. So you can turn this into a 3D model, and this is what scientists produced in the 1950s.   When this was published by Wilder Penfield and his colleagues in the 1950s, they lied. They lied. They made a very, very significant omission. What did they omit? The size of the penis. An updated version published five years ago looks like this. I'm not quite sure if you can see it, but the member is enormous. Weak in the knees. Now no discussion of science and sex would be complete without a discussion of homosexuality. Clearly, this is a very fitting subject as we are in Bletchley Park. As I'm sure all of you are very well aware, we thank this country's greatest scientists ever with chemical castration. Well done science, well done us. This was the mainstream view for a very long time. I'm sure a lot of you are very familiar with the history of how homosexuals have been treated, not just by religious pontificators and politicians, but by scientists. They have been denigrated as diseased, pathologized, subject to mental institutions, ice bath therapy.   I think this is the worst. Ice pick lobotomy. I'm not sure if you can quite see, but there is a medical doctor at the front there. His name is Walter Freeman, and he's got an ice pick and a hammer, and he's sliding the ice pick underneath the eyelid into the frontal lobe and swirling it around to sever connections between the frontal lobe and other structures at the back of the brain. This was proffered as a treatment for homosexuality in America, and thousands of gay men had this done to them. One of the reasons for this is that mainstream science accepted the idea that being gay was a pathology. There were lots of scientists who thought that this was ridiculous and tried to overturn mainstream thinking. The most important one is this guy, and if there's anyone in the audience who's homosexual, you should know his name. In fact, everyone should know his name. His name is Dr. E. Friar. Dr. E. Friar was a psychiatrist in the 1960s and 70s, and he was gay, and he couldn't come out of the closet because mainstream scientific thinking had put homosexuality into the diagnostics and statistics manual. This is basically the Bible of psychiatry that decrees what is healthy and what is not, and it declared that homosexuality was a disease. So he couldn't come out of the closet because his entire life and his career would be ruined. So he gave a presentation at the American Psychiatric Association's AGM in a rubber mask, a wig, and a tuxedo, and he gave an impassioned speech under the name Dr. H. Anonymous. Now, I would think wearing a rubber mask and a tuxedo and a fluffy wig would make you look sane, but it worked, and homosexuality was removed from the DSM just one year later. And think about how much courage it took to do that. To sit on stage knowing that at any moment somebody could run up and take off your mask and reveal who you really were and your life would be ruined. So what would I conclude from the study of sex and the study of science?  Moreover, it takes bravery and rebellion to overturn entrenched scientific stupidity. Sometimes being rebellious is important to really progress towards the truth. Moreover, science has revealed that anatomically, behaviorally, and psychologically we are unrivaled in the animal kingdom with respect to our sexuality. It is a very special thing and one of the defining characteristics of our species. Other animals might rut and reproduce, but we've taken it to the next level. Right, next step. I'm not quite sure how much you guys are into this subject. This is drugs. I normally talk about this at music festivals where most of the audience is already on drugs and they actually perform. But even if you're a complete T-Totaler, you can't deny that they're an important and interesting subject. Why would any species want to self-dose to the point of self-obliteration? It's a scientific puzzle, and therefore it's worthy of inspection. So what have scientists discovered about drugs and what science has done for drugs? I'm sure you all can think about tablets, potions, etc. But what I find more interesting is the way drugs have influenced science. Starting with Nobel Prizes, there are many rumors that Francis Crick, the co-winner of the Nobel Prize in 1962 for Physiology or Medicine for decoding the structure of DNA, there are many rumors that he achieved his insight on LSD. He was known to be a party animal. It's a bit of a rumor. It was published in the Daily Mail a few years ago. We're never really going to know the truth because it's dead now. We know for a fact that this man, Kerry Mullis, who devised and he had his insight on acid. The polymerase chain reaction won him the Nobel Prize in 1992. And this is a truly ingenious innovation. In the 1980s, scientists had an incredibly difficult time trying to read the language of DNA. It was an incredibly painfully slow, laborious process. A strand of human DNA can be four billion letters long, basically. And reading it one letter at a time took months and months and months. Today we can read the genome of a single species in a single day. Before, it took an absolutely painfully long time. Mullis' insight was to take the strand, split it into thousands of little bits, and then read those individually, and then put them back together. And it truly was a stroke of genius, and he did deserve the Nobel Prize because this is revolutionized medicine. And he got his insight into how to do this on LSD. And he wrote about this in his autobiography. What are the two most important words in this quote? Mountain road. He was on acid while he was driving. He was driving at night down a windy mountain road, and his wife was asleep next to him. This year is a photograph. You can't quite see it of the Mary Pranksters, who were Ken Keesey's band of hippies, but he was on acid while he was driving. He was driving at night down a windy mountain road, and his wife was asleep next to him. This year is a photograph. This year is a photograph of Mary Pranksters, who were Ken Keesey's band of hippies who drove around America taking acid and writing about it and taking more acid and driving and taking acid. Basically, a Nobel Prize winner did the exact same thing, routinely, apparently. Now, let's not label Carrie Mullis a scientific hero, because ever since then he's done basically nothing of importance, except he's gone on to deny the science of climate change and AIDS. Illustrating once again, and think asinine things. Now, let's get on to somebody who is not asinine, one of your country's greatest scientists, Sir Humphrey Davy, founder of the Royal Society. Sir Humphrey Davy is truly one of this country's greatest products. He produced this thing, the Davy Gas Lamp. Until he devised this, miners in this country and around the world were dying by the tens of thousands due to tunnel collapse. Seems of methane would open and explode, with people at a time. This incredibly simple invention is basically a wire mesh cage that encircles a flame, and the flame can just allow for the controlled burning of the gas. And there's no question that there are people in this room who are alive because of this invention. It saved the lives of untold tens of thousands of people. Before he did that, he was the world's very first balloon addict. He was in love with nitrous oxide. He was working at a research institution just outside of Bristol, studying a variety of gases and what potential applications they had for human health. And some of you might smile to yourselves, knowing that Bristol is then and still today a hotbed of chemical consumption. However, nitrous oxide is incredibly important for three reasons. Number one, this is the very first drug that was ever made in a lab that was put into the human brain. Until then, all the drugs that people consumed came from plants or from fungi, or from another wild source. This is the very first thing made in the lab. Nitrous does exist in the atmosphere naturally, but it had to be produced in the lab using the new tools of the science of chemistry for it to actually be concentrated and isolated into a singular form. Number two, Humphrey Daisy's studies were the very first methodical investigation of a drug and its effects. He took very detailed, very careful records of how much he took, how much his friends took, what the effects were and how they influenced people. And number three, and this is the most important thing, this eventually led to the gift of anesthesia, pain-free surgery. Until then, all we had to dull the pain of any kind of surgical intervention was booze and maybe a bullet to bite. This eventually led to the proliferation of things like chloroform nitrous as is used in dental surgery and all the other chemicals that are now today giving us the opportunity to have surgery without knowing what's happening. Again, there's no question that there are people in this room who are alive because of this. Now, Humphrey Daisy didn't quite realize that at the time. What he thought he was doing was probing the border between consciousness and subconsciousness, life and death. He thought he was exploring the hinterlands of the mind in a true investigation of what it meant to be self-aware. And he loved it. And like kids today, he made lots of cool gear. This is a silk balloon that he made that's entombed by a wire cage.  On one occasion he sat in there for about an hour and he inhaled about 80 quarts of nitrous oxide. This puts any balloon lover today to shame. Kids today in Brooklyn who think that they know what they're doing amateurs. This guy was a pro. He'd leave it to the scientists to do it right. And like drug enthusiasts today, he wrote down what he thought were salient things. Nothing exists but thoughts. The universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains. One thing about Humphrey David that I like a lot is that he tested everything he ever experimented on, on himself first. Even before he gave it to an animal, before he'd even give it to his friends. He did everything to himself first. And then when he decided it was fun and safe, he would share it with his friends. And he had parties with the cool cats of the day. And they also had their thoughts written down. Robert South he poet laureate for four years. I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder working gas of delight. Samuel Colleridge an unmingled pleasure. Anonymous. I felt like the sound of a harp. This man Oscar Wilde said in fewer words what other people attempted to capture in hundreds of words as was his want. I felt that I knew everything. Now nitrous oxide escaped from the lab. You can't keep something fun secret forever. And this is a pattern repeated throughout scientific history. Scientists isolate something people enjoy it and then it gets out into the world. Next up, cocaine. The active ingredient in coca leaves, if you chew coca leaves, it just gives you a bit of pet. It's not like doing a Miami style line. The active ingredient was not isolated until 1860 by a German chemist. And after he isolated it, it sat basically in a vial on a laboratory shelf for about 20 years and no one really paid any attention to it. Until your friend and mine, Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud came along, picked it up and thought, what's this? And he became arguably one of the world's very first cocaids. And he would stay up all night for days and weeks taking cocaine and writing about how amazing cocaine is. You ever want to do cocaine, it's really good for creativity and I really like cocaine and I want more cocaine. And he did this for a couple of years and he published a book called Uppercocka.  Give it up for Sigmund Freud. Always the charmer. Now this book along with a few other scientists who were revelling in what he called the most gorgeous excitement of the chemical, led to its popularization in mainstream society. So the Victorians injected cocaine into everything they could get their hands on. It was sold in herons, it was sold in drinks, it was sold in candy for children which I find incredibly counter-intuitive. There were other potions for children that were sold that contained opium which I think makes more sense. This is my favorite cocaine containing product from the day. This is a wine that was 10% alcohol, 8% cocaine and it received the blessing of the pope. And Queen Victoria was a fan as well as two American presidents. Ver Mariani. Now scientifically this was very important because the proliferation of drugs and their ingestion by scientists and the public alike eventually led to the discovery of neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are the chemicals in the human mind that are basically the molecular messengers. They're what cells use to talk to each other. So you've heard the names of these before, dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin. It wasn't you could argue that we only discovered them because of the human tendency to take drugs and this is why. Most drugs work by mimicking the neurotransmitters in your body. So I'm not sure if you can quite see it, but on the left that's a molecule of psilocybin, what's in magic mushrooms. On the right, serotonin. They look shockingly similar and that's how magic mushrooms work, is they fit into the key holes in your mind that are designed for serotonin and in fact they fit into those key holes better than serotonin itself. LSD works the same way and so does mescaline. It's basically botanical burglary. They basically lockpick your genome. It's really quite impressive thievery. And scientists in the 19th century were puzzled as to how drugs could work. So this is how the train of thought went. How can something made by a plant or by a fungus work inside the human body? It doesn't really make sense. And so when they started to investigate how they worked this led them down a chemical detective trail to finding the receptor. So the very first time this happened nicotine was first isolated in 1843. It wasn't until the 1970s that scientists found the receptor for it and this receptor normally binds to the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. When they found the receptor they named it after nicotine. It's called the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor. The pattern continues the active ingredient in cannabis was first isolated in 1964. The endocannabinoids our own neurotransmitters were not found until the 1990s. Moreover morphine 1805 it took a hundred and seventy years for scientists to track down endorphins which is what morphine mimics. And this is my favorite example it might be possible that we never understood the role that serotonin has in the brain if it wasn't for LSD. And this is why. 80% of the serotonin in your body is contained in your guts. Not your brain. And so scientists didn't think that serotonin had a role in the mind. However a couple of scientists Maurice Rapar and Arda Green they had experimented with LSD they knew that LSD looked like serotonin so they carded 10,000 liters of cow blood to the laboratory in Baltimore to isolate the active ingredients and they eventually demonstrated that serotonin has a role in the brain. Now I'm sure all of you are familiar with SSRI antidepressants. These are the most popular form of treating depression in the human species which as we all know is one of our most intractable killers. And it's arguable that we would never have developed them if it wasn't for the resemblance between LSD and serotonin and again there's no question that there are people in this room who are alive because of these drugs. Now let's get to the invention of LSD because this is one of science's greatest stories. This is Albert Hoffman the man who made LSD. He was not a hippie. He was a Swiss nerd.  He worked for chemicals in Zurich, Switzerland and he never took drugs until he made LSD. After he took it he fell in love with it and he took it until he was 96 and he lived until he was 102. 102 that's him on his 100th birthday. That's not an advertisement for drug use I'm not quite sure what is. So what happened was he was working away in the lab he was studying the chitin molecules of crustaceans and he studied the perparae plants and he was trying to make a synthetic analog of something. What do you think he was really trying to do? He got some of this crystal on his fingers and then as he rode a bicycle home he started to trip and this was the world's very first acid trip but it was an accident. What do you think he was really trying to do? Does anyone here know? Okay, well this is Raul Levent at the back. He was trying to make treatments for pregnant women. He was trying to create drugs that would stop post-partum hemorrhaging and the death of women in childbirth. That was his main goal and he spent almost his entire life pursuing this goal and in fact he developed something called methargyne which is still today one of the most widely used drugs in Osteopteryx. And the reason he developed LSD is because there's this thing, it's called the ergot fungus. This is a black parasite it's a fungus that infests dry and if people consume large quantities of this, which has happened routinely throughout European history for the past thousand years, they can suffer from something called ergot poisoning and it's foul and it kills. The largest mass killing was about 50,000 people in aquitaine. The last reported mass outbreak of this fungus was in 1926 in Russia and the poisoning was very severe. You would experience hallucinations, delusions, fever, gangrene. There were reported incidents of peasants who had all four limbs drop off. That's why you've got hands and feet hanging above the saint. So victims of this form of poisoning have their own saint because it was considered to be so unpleasant. So Hoffman wanted to be able to create synthetic analogs of this fungus. Why? Because midwives knew that in small doses prepared in the right way you could use this fungus to prevent postpartum hemorrhaging and also to induce miscarriages or abortions if preferred. So he wanted to make something that would allow for the prevention of postpartum hemorrhaging but without the horrible side effects of hallucinations and fever. So if you remember anything acid comes from a parasite originally acid has its own saint and it was born in the quest to find remedies for women. Now after Hoffman experienced this drug he declared LSD could be for psychiatry but the microscope was for biology and the telescope for astronomy and this made sense at the time. I mean something so powerful that can bend the mind. Surely that has a lot to teach us as any of you may know from genetics for example when something works you break a bit of it and see what happens. Knock out mice for example engineering same principle. So he wanted LSD to be used in meaningful therapeutic ways to treat the human condition and to understand how the mind works. However like cocaine and like nitrous before LSD escaped from a lab into the world and became very very popular and the rest is history and authorities obviously were very worried about counterculture and the mass use of this drug in uncontrolled settings and whether or not you're a fan of LSD if you've ever seen anybody lose their minds to it if you've ever met an acid casualty somebody from the 60's or 70's who walked through a door in their mind and never came back you would worry too.  So there was a massive clamp down on therapeutic use of psychedelics so for a long time scientists really were restricted to research on animals the whole history of animal research and psychedelics is long and very colorful there's a lot of it in my book this is one of the most famous studies this is very interesting I'm not sure if you can quite see it clearly but these experiments were funded by NASA now you may have seen this image before it's spider webs produced under the influence of different drugs and you may have seen this and thought it was just an image created by some guy in the department of vice magazine or whatever no no no these were real studies in the 1970's and these were funded by NASA the space agency the very same agency that put the man on the moon gave drugs to spiders to try and get an idea of how toxic they were what's fascinating is that the caffeine web which is bottom right is the most messed up one it makes absolutely no sense the marijuana web you can't quite see it but it's in the top left basically the spider kind of knew what it was doing they gave up halfway through and then you can see bottom left the LSD web is essentially flawless but it's really broad make of that what you will now while some scientists were experimenting on animals here is a man who did not experiment on animals and no discussion of the history of science and drugs would be complete without this man Alexander Shulgen Alexander Shulgen is the man who gave the world MDMA Alexander Shulgen was a chemist chemist to be precise and he was working for Dow Chemical and he was making pesticides in fact and he made one of the world's very first biodegradable pesticides and his patents on these basically made him independently wealthy so eventually he was able to spend 40 years in a shed in his garden making drugs the reason he started doing this is because he was given a sample of a chemical by one of his grad students when he was at Berkeley and this chemical was MDMA this was first synthesized in 1914 by Merck in fact no one really knows what happened to it but they gave it to a few animals in the 1920s it didn't seem to do anything interesting and they kind of languished in obscurity somehow it got into the counterculture and we don't really know how it's presumed that the CIA was using it to investigate its potential as a truth serum on psychiatric patients in Canada in a program called MKUltra which some of you might know of probably knows for sure but it got into the counterculture and there are bits and pieces of it floating around the club scene in New York and what not and one of his students got her hands on some and she handed it to him and she said try this and he did and he was overwhelmed but what he did that was special was he figured out how to make it because until he came along no one knew what the molecular structure was or how you could produce it he fell in love with the act of making new chemicals and he spent the next 40 years making it new drugs he did it at Dow for a few years but then they got tired of his druggy pursuit so he set up a lab in his garden he can kind of make this out from the photograph but it's basically composed of milk bottles and jugs and homemade tubes and wires what I love about Alexander Shulgen is that he tried everything on himself first he did not give it to animals he was a gentleman and if he thought the drug was good he would then give it to his wife and if she thought it was good they would give it to their friends now he created more than 2,000 chemicals that he tried them all on himself of these about 200 were psychoactive including 2CB, 2CE, TCI a weird one called DOI that only affects the ears it's basically a hallucinogen for your auditory system but not your eyes, it's fascinating and when he was worried that the CIA would try and shut him down he composed everything in these two books one's called PECAL and one's called TECAL they're basically chemical cookbooks if you're online now you can get on arrowweb.com E-R-O-W-I-D and you can find the recipes for everything but what's interesting is that every single time he made a drug and took it it was 100% legal because it was brand new there was no regulation on anything he did so he basically made drugs for 40 years and he died at the right age of 86 not bad now as I said for a long time scientists could only really investigate the use of drugs on animals until today we are now experiencing something that some scientists are calling the psychedelic renaissance a lot of psychiatrists and neuroscientists lobbied the government and universities for years and years in some case 40 years to get permits and planning commission and funding to study the impacts of psychedelics on the human mind why? because all drugs all drugs whether you're talking about alcohol caffeine, nicotine, MDMA every single drug is a double-edged sword and it has good properties and it has bad properties it's about how you use it and when and why and so they're now conducting proper double-blind studies on people to investigate therapeutic effects okay one of the first ones LSD and cluster headaches cluster headaches are known to be incredibly painful it's one of the very few forms of pain that the papacy has said might merit the act of suicide people who suffer from these forms of headaches had found that LSD could treat their pain and they set up online forums about this like hey dude have you tried acid my headache went away blah blah blah they lobbied the American government to have that drug legally investigated for therapeutic potential and they won they won crowd sourced drug investigation due to recreational activity there are many other drugs that people are now exploring for their therapeutic effects using magic mushrooms to help people quit smoking this is in Baltimore using cell assignment to help treat obsessive-compulsive disorder people who scratch themselves to the point of wearing their skin down to the point that they bleed or worse no way really okay cool so ketamine and depression NDMA and PTSD LSD and alcoholism the list goes on and on so could psychedelics be for the mind what the telescope was for for the economy maybe most famous drug scientists in this country drugs are an important part of our evolutionary history and we cannot ignore them now I'm going to zip through my very favorite subject music music has never broken my heart or killed any of my friends and this is my absolute favorite of our three sins so if you're going to look at what scientists have found about music you have to ask what is music what is music it's incredibly difficult to define here's a definition organized sound well an alarm clock is organized sound and that's not really music some have called it beautiful math it is beautiful it is mathematical but many forms of mathematics are not musical the best definition is it is an exquisite illusion it's an illusion it exists in your mind and it exists only in your mind and the way that I can explain that is that there's a condition called amusia which means no music people who have amusia don't hear what other people hear where some people hear crescendos and beautiful symphonies and pleasing chords they hear disjointed noise it doesn't mean anything to them and there usually is nothing wrong with their hearing their brain just doesn't do the computational magic that it goes on in everybody else to create the perception of music and 4% of the human population has amusia and most people who have amusia don't know they have it because they don't know what music sounds like to other people you can go online the University of Montreal of McGill in Montreal they have online amusia tests and you can discover if you're one of the 4% you'd be in good company one of the most famous is this guy, Che Guevara probably had amusia he hated music and he couldn't tell the difference between any genre so what's going on in the rest of us as you are probably familiar with there are more possible connections between the neurons in your head and there are atoms in the universe the most complicated thing in the universe is inside your skull and when neuroscientists looked at what goes on inside the skull when people listen to music they found some amazing things they found it engages every single part of your brain more than any other human activity more than language, more than mathematics more than anything you can do music touches every corner of your head from top to bottom, front to back the major structures such as the cortex the hippocampus memory everything my favorite it also touches so called primitive structures such as your brainstem and your cerebellum parts of your brain that you share with reptiles respond to music but not to spoken language or random noise moreover when you listen to music it triggers the release of chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins the same chemicals that are released by cocaine and by other drugs you do not need no cocaine all you need is Marvin Gaye your iPod is an auditory sex toy it's doing the exact same thing moreover anthropologists have found that all human cultures make music not every human culture has the number zero not every human culture has our agriculture architecture, writing, stratified social structures every human culture makes music moreover it appears that the oldest recovered artifact ever was a flute this is the femur of a bear it was found in Slovenia and scientists have created a replica of it of what it would have looked like at large scale it makes the dolbré me fa scale and this is 40,000 years old so if we made flutes 40,000 years ago how much longer were we making drums bells or just singing so if music is something that we've evolved to do if it's ancient how might it have evolved could it have an adaptive benefit could it have been selected for what is the most obvious answer huh? that's the great answer and I will get to that but that is not the most obvious answer I'd say there you go sex Darwin thought so I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind to make charming the opposite sex there's one very quick story I'll tell from the history of rock and roll does anyone hear what the very first I'm sorry you might want to go like that do you file? does anyone here know what the very first thing Pamela Anderson said to Tommy Leeliz she saw him at a party she walked up she shook out her hand and she said I will fuck any drummer that says it all Canadian girls we are classy if nothing else however the less obvious answer is social bonding we are social creatures and we navigate our world with music to create social bonds with each other it's a form of sonic navigation and scientists have found that when people sing in choirs this triggers the release of oxytocin this is the same hormone released by orgasm and by breastfeeding and this is not released when you sing solo and it's thought that this facilitates social bonding moreover if we didn't have social bonding and if we didn't have music and if we didn't have the pyramids if we couldn't go he, po, he, po and do it together in time we never would have created the world's ancient monuments so just like for questions could we have formed large complex societies about music could music predate language as a form of communication could we have evolved language without music would we be human without music by our last point one minute left don't worry do animals make music if animal made music what kind of music would animal make? animal beat drum anyway so there was a neuroscientist who wanted to investigate this question for real so he took marmosets his name's josh mcdermot he was a club dj and then he became a neuroscientist so he took adorable little marmosets and if you're a lab animal and you've got like some marmosets next door who are having drugs experimented on them or you're like in the music marmoset lab i'd want to be in that lab i'm not sure if you can quite see it but he basically made them this maze and he put different speakers at the ends of different tunnels and he played them different genres of music it's basically like a multi room rave from marmosets so he could tell by where they went what they liked so he played them classical techno garage what kind of music do you think they liked? techno classical rock jungle now the answer is silence no matter what the marmosets always preferred silence they just found music irritating because their brains weren't doing the magic that our brains do so this led some scientists to say well humans therefore must be the only creature that makes music and then other scientists said well that's ridiculous whales and birds have very complex sonic communication it might not be what we do but that doesn't mean it's not music and this led to a back and forth and a very long very boring argument scientists tried to draw a line in the sand and he said ok other animals might make sounds but we are the only ones with a sense of rhythm when he said this this angered a lot of people in the public and he got a flurry of angry e-mails people saying no no no my dog pops its head it's a soup dog and he said fine fine fine if you have a pet and you live in the San Diego area come to my lab I will pay for your expenses and I will test it and this this is quite a tip but this is a talk or two and Bob gets his head in front of Mr. Freddie Mercury and Queen and he does this so accurately they wrote a son of a patron in 2009 and published it now in the New York Public Academy describing the ability of a non-human to keep time this video has been viewed 9 million times on YouTube you can also see a link to the Backstreet Boys and to Michael Jackson and I wish you could see it more clearly but it's just about the most awesome video ever so that brings us to the end so what have we found? we have found that other animals have the capacity to keep time but no animal really does what we do we are the musical monkey we are also the drugiest monkey other animals might self-dose but we have taken it to the next level and we are one incredibly sexy monkey so what has science taught us? science has taught us that what we perceive to be base or primitive pursuits are actually a deeply important and special part of the human condition moreover these primitive activities have led us to some of science's most astounding discoveries about what it means to be human and how the universe works hedonistic impulses have informed intellectual pursuits and most importantly and please don't forget this there is redemption in being rebellious you need to talk back to your superiors if we're ever going to progress thank you I've got books for sale here interestingly there was a review today in the Daily Mail that was blowing the last time the Daily Mail wrote about me they described me as Dr. Zoe Chromier they gave me a PhD which I don't have and then they quoted me a bunch of times saying things that I didn't say they didn't even call me so anyway, Dr. Zoe Chromier thank you and also thank you so much to the EMF Festival for having me it's a real real pleasure thank you


This study aimed to examine associations between maternal age and offspring outcomes in five low-income and middle-income countries. The findings suggest that younger maternal age is associated with lower birth weight, gestational age, child nutritional status, and schooling, while older maternal age is associated with increased risk of preterm birth and less two-year stunting and failure to complete secondary schooling. However, offspring of both younger and older mothers had higher adult fasting glucose concentrations. The study highlights the need for efforts to prevent early childbearing and suggests that extreme maternal age could be associated with disturbed offspring glucose metabolism.


Hello everybody, HoodedCoverCommander788 here and I'm back with another vintage GI Joe toy review and the last several reviews that I've done I have looked at some of my favorite GI Joe toys but I can't look at a favorite GI Joe toy every review. I've got to mix in a few reviews of toys that maybe aren't my favorite so this time I'm going to review this. Just a quick reminder before we get started, if you'd like me to review a particular GI Joe toy, leave a comment on this YouTube video and I will get to it as soon as I can. I have received a couple of requests and I will get to those, I need to get a few pieces before I do those reviews but they are on the list and I will get to them soon. This is the Cobra Snake Armor and the acronym Snake stands for System Neutralizer Armed Cloaking Equipment with cloaking spelt with a K. They really stretched the bounds of reason, logic and spelling to make this an acronym. Really not everything needs to be an acronym. The Cobra Snake was introduced in 1983, it was also sold in 1984, it was discontinued in 1985 when it was replaced with a blue version of this same toy. The Cobra Snake was worth one half of a flag point which is the same flag point value as the GI Joe pack rats. The Cobra Snake Metal Armor was a toy that could be used with an action figure, you could put an action figure inside it or you could use it as a standalone toy like this.  It came apart in pieces like this, it's essentially disintegrated like that. This is the front piece, you can see it has a black sticker for goggles that is not a clear plastic piece. It has this number six on it, it has Cobra symbols on the side, on the inside it should have sticker control panels but the stickers are missing on mine. This is the back piece and it had some pegs for these attachments and I will get to those later. These are the arms, there is a left and a right arm, they are not identical and both arms had pegs for the attachments, they're pretty long pegs. If you take the attachments off the arms are in fact pretty short and the arms had these kind of rubbery discs that were used to attach the arms to the main body of the toy. That brings us to the legs and there is a left leg and a right leg, they are not identical and each leg is two parts, you split them apart down the middle there, you take both of them apart because when you put the action figure in you will put these on the action figures leg. Inside the Cobra Snake Armor when you didn't have an action figure in it was this body support piece. It was rubbery, it had a couple pegs at the feet here that would go inside the legs of the battle armor to kind of just hold it together when there was no action figure in it. That brings us to the arm attachments and there were four. There was the flamethrower, the machine gun, the missile and the claw. Each one of these arm attachments was two parts, there was this base part that would attach to the arm of the snake armor and of course there was the end attachment for each of the devices, the claw, the missile, the machine gun and the flamethrower. As far as I can tell these base pieces for the arm attachments are identical and interchangeable. Let's take a look at the features of the snake armor and the main feature was that you could reassemble it with an action figure inside and Storm Shadow is going to help me demonstrate that feature. The first thing to do is to assemble the leg pieces around the legs of the action figure and you need to make sure that you have the left and the right leg on the same side. The leg will always have an inside indent like that so you can know which one is the left and the right. This one is the left leg. Let's assemble one leg around Storm Shadow's left leg and assemble the second leg around his right leg like so. The front part of the leg had these pegs that would fit in the holes on the back leg so you could line it up perfectly and snap it on. Next we assemble the main body of the armor starting with the back piece and you make sure you get the correct arm. The arm will sweep forward slightly like that and you use this disc and put it in the slot on the side of the back piece.  Next we need the action figure and we need to place the action figure in the back piece. There isn't really a good place for the arms so I think you just need to fold the arms in like this. This is actually kind of difficult to do with a straight arm figure. It's easier to do with a swivel arm action figure so just fold the arms in like that so they don't obstruct the front piece as it goes on. The front piece has these pegs much like the legs did and the pegs fit in the holes on the back piece.  Now we need to put on the arm attachments and you can choose any of the four that you want. I'll choose the machine gun. It doesn't matter which arm you put them on, they fit on either arm, on the other side I'm going to put the claw and they just slide into the pegs there. They are kind of rubbery so you do need to push them on fairly firmly but they do stay on quite well once you put them on. My younger viewers who don't know how to count yet, the toy has two arms but four attachments so you need to have a place to put these other two attachments and that's what these pegs on the back are for. You just put the pegs in the holes of the arm attachments like so. Now you have the two arm attachments that you're not using stored and the other two on the arms. That leaves this piece kind of just hanging out there when not in use and if you're nine years old you will probably just lose it. Let's take a look at the articulation of the snake armor and the articulation is the same with or without the action figure. The arms can swing all the way around and you can kind of rotate the attachments like that. The legs do not have articulation at the knees so they can only move at the waist a little bit and I mean only a little bit because if you move them too much it will pop the entire thing apart. The stiff leg design of this toy reminds me a lot of the robot in that movie Robot vs Aztec Mummy. I am a robot. This brings us to the main reason why I'm not a big fan of this toy. Look at this. How cool does Storm Shadow look inside the Cobra Snake battle armor? The correct answer is not very cool. At no point can you even see the action figure and if you can't see the action figure the action figure might as well not even be in there. Really just looking at it can you tell that Storm Shadow is inside this toy? Well as a point of fact he isn't. I hope you'll forgive the sleight of hand but it's just to illustrate the point that the action figure actually adds no play value to the snake armor and the snake armor adds no play value to the action figure. I mean the action figure can actually do more when he's not inside the snake armor. The design of the snake armor is clunky. It does not look like a weapon of war. It doesn't look like this would give a soldier any kind of advantage in war. In fact a soldier wearing this in war would be at a disadvantage because if you knock this thing over there's no way he's ever going to get up again. It's like a turtle on its back. The Cobra Snake armor is white which started a very brief trend of coloring Cobra vehicles white which continued with the Cobra Claw powered glider. There are several colors that I really like for Cobra vehicles. Black, blue, even red but unless it's an arctic vehicle white is not one of them. This does not look great as a color for a Cobra vehicle. I especially have a problem with the pegs on the back for the extra attachments. Now I do like it when they give us storage on the toy for the extra bits. But in this case they stick out really far and it looks pretty ridiculous. It also puts the toy off balance and it tends to fall backward. The toy doesn't balance well, it doesn't move well, and it falls apart very easily. None of these pieces snap into place. So if you play with it too rigorously it's just going to disintegrate. I have some sticky tack on the bottom of one of the feet to help hold this thing up and that even isn't helping all that much. You may know from my previous videos that I'm not a big fan of excessive science fiction in G.I. Joe and this is entirely a science fiction piece but that's not why I disliked the toy so much. I dislike it because it's just not a very good toy. The different G.I. Joe media used the snake armor in different ways. The G.I. Joe cartoon used it as a robot and the G.I. Joe comic book used it as a kind of mind control body armor that people would wear much the way Storm Shadow did in my demonstration. Since the snake armor makes for a really crappy battle armor I think it actually makes more sense if you have it as a robot. Even though I don't like a lot of science fiction in G.I. Joe, if you're going to do it you might as well do it in the most plausible way and this is more plausible as a robot than battle armor. Consider this. In the G.I. Joe comic book issue number three Cobra had a giant robot and it was a pretty smart robot but if you re-imagine that as a big dumb robot and then later Cobra creates this snake robot instead of a battle armor later still Cobra creates the bats the battle android trooper and they were smaller than the cobra snake and smarter.  Those three robots would represent a technological progression as Cobra's robotics technology improved over the years. So if you're going to have science fiction in G.I. Joe that is the way to do it. You can see a progression in the technology over the years and that is much less likely to break the suspension of disbelief. Of course the way the snake armor was represented in the comic book as a battle armor it was also a technological progression since it used the technology from Dr. Venom's brain wave scanner. Of course if you go that route then you kind of lose the progression of robotics technology but I kind of like the robotics technology progression better than using the brain wave scanner in battle armor. I just think it makes more sense. That was my review of the 1983 Cobra Snake battle armor. I hope you enjoyed this video and if you're thinking of getting a Cobra snake I hope you found this video informative. If you liked it go ahead and give it a thumbs up and whatever you do make sure you subscribe because I've got a lot of great new G.I. Joe toy and comic book reviews coming up and you do not want to miss them. Also if there's a particular vintage G.I. Joe toy you would like for me to review make sure you leave a comment on this video and I will get to it as soon as I can. Thanks for watching and I'll catch you all later. Move at the hip very little and the legs can kind of move at... Crap.


My name's Ryan, here to bridge the gap between designers and developers, which I didn't make it to the keynote this morning, but apparently he's already started off the whole bridging theme with PHP and Rails, so I'm not real sure. This guy at the office is not allowed to know about that. So I figured I'd start off and give a little bit of a back story of where I've come from and maybe some of the things that I've been able to experience and observe that kind of led to this idea. It's about seven years ago, I banded together with two business partners to start an agency called Udall. So when it was in its infant form, I was a designer. So it was basically, I was a designer, John was a developer and Mark was a business guy. So we had that trifecta and we went out and thought we were going to do great things and we did. We've grown to be a pretty significantly sized agency now, but through that journey I've gone from being the only designer that we had to spending my days today writing mainly code, front end and back end and all that fun stuff. So through that journey and through working with other designers and developers, some of which were great, some of which who were not so great, I've learned a lot and seen a lot of things. Number one being kind of the rift between designers and developers. There's the fundamental split between the left brain and right brain. Just very curiosity, how many people would consider themselves mainly a designer here? All right, that's when I figured what was going to happen. How many devs? All right, everybody, yeah. So it'd be an unfair fight if I were to like split and be like, all right, we are actually going to do the Braveheart thing. But the idea is that designers are creative and they don't really get what developers do and developers kind of feel the same way. Designers don't really feel the pain of slicing up some comp or meeting some weird expectation or need or desire of a client or even a customer. So as I started thinking about this, it's interesting because it gets reinforced constantly. Even little comics like this that are showing exactly how different a designer and a developer are. But at the core level, they're really the exact same almost. They just have different tendencies. So as I continued to think about this and the divide that exists, I was like, really all we're doing is distracting us from the one thing that we want to do, which is to build great customer experiences. And I know there's probably kind of a mixture, we're obviously, I'm here from the agency perspective because that's what I do every day, but I know some of you are with product development and kind of singular focus, which I envy often. But at the end of the day, we're all focused on building great customer experiences, whether it's for a client or whether it's for kind of the end customer and you need both design and development working together in order to do that. However, we keep putting them in boxes and separating them so much so that as I was talking to Jake this morning about this talk, I was like, you know, there's really kind of that divide winds up silently getting amplified even within our own office. So in our office, as we started to hire creatives and hire developers and even refer to the creative and development department, we slowly found out that everybody kind of exists in these pods. And there is literally a wall between design and development in our office. And you know, we need to kind of figure out how to tear those down in order to do things better. So when we go to talk, when we go to create a great customer experience, you know, how do we do that? Well, it all starts with a kickoff of some kind, in our world it doesn't. In most worlds, you're going to have an initial meeting or something where somebody came up with an idea, they presented it, and they said, yes, let's do that. How do we get that done? I don't know, let's talk to this guy. And ultimately, you've got this kickoff. Everybody leaves the kickoff, they're excited. They have ideas of where they're going to go, what they're going to do. Maybe you've got some action items, a formal plan, or you've got a project manager who's going to take all that stuff. You might even have a defined process of something like this. I literally just googled web development process. And everything looked like this. And then I laughed because I was like, I've shown this to clients before. Not this one, but a branded version of this. And the idea is that there's this planning process where you come up with the project management plan and the timeline and the risk, maybe you're really complicated and you've got risk management and all those sorts of things. And then once we have that figured out, we know exactly when we're going to deploy this thing, and there's definitely not going to be any delays. So we can go straight into design, where we do those wireframes, maybe we'll build some prototype things using something like Envision, like the hotlink sort of prototypes. And then once the designer's done with it, we're going to hand it over to development. Development's going to code it, they're going to hopefully test it. And then we launch it, everybody's excited. We do that final testing. And then there's just maintenance, ongoing, forever. Everything kind of follows this, whether it's an app, whether it's a website, whether it's web application, something like that. The reality is it doesn't work that way. It never works that way. There's always something that pops up. There's always these blurred lines where design and dev specifically, it's just not that clean. You can't hand a flat Photoshop comp off and expect that what gets created is actually going to be something good. So the best way that I can think to talk about that is to look at an example. So I made up an example that reflects or embodies a lot of the things that I've seen happen at our shop a hundred times. So again, following that process, we have a design. Just for the sake of keeping my own thoughts together. We're going to say that we have a designer named Carl. And Carl was tasked with creating a design for a cooking class. Really wants to go with this contemporary simple design, but still have that creative flair, something with a strong CTA. Carl comes up with this design. Super proud of it. You have the design and dev handoff. Joan, our developer, takes over and she says, yeah, this looks fine. I think we can do this. So Carl goes about and in our world Carl moves on to the next project that is on his plate. And Joan goes to work coding this site. Three weeks later, Carl here, the website that you built for that cooking class, it launched. It's up. It's doing pretty good. He's like, oh, cool. I'm going to go check it out, see what it looks like when it's live. So hopefully this works. It did. So Carl goes out to the web and pulls it up in the browser and looks at it. He's like, all right, well, this isn't really what I thought it was going to look like, which is weird, because it looks exactly like the Photoshop comp that we just looked at. So Carl goes over to Joan's office like, hey, what's going on? This looks nothing like I intended it to. It's very flat. It's very boring. There's nothing going on. Why is this? We talked about all these other things that we could do, but at the end of the day, it's just boring. It's kind of flat. But Joan's also pissed, because Joan's like, well, what do you mean? I even gave you this cool rollover effect. Where's my mouse? All right, I lost my mouse. All right, well, you know, there's the button rollover effect and all that kind of stuff, and she doesn't understand why it even fades in and out. Carl didn't put a rollover effect in the PSD. Joan had to infer that and went the extra mile there. So they're both mad. They're both mad, because they feel like Joan feels like she did what she was supposed to do. Carl feels like their work was underrepresented. So that just creates this giant war, and perhaps they're going back and forth, and they're trying to figure out how to fix it or whatever. And at the end of the day, we're just kind of sitting with a little shitty product. And we have to solve that. So how do we solve that? The first step is admitting that there's a problem. That's with everything. And in our world, there's lots of problems. Just looking at the web, I started just writing some down. We have all sorts of problems. We have new things like WebGL that we're not really sure how it all works yet, or what the capabilities are. We have animations. We've got parallax stuff. We've got 3D transforms. We've got design aspects of those and design principles. And then there's also the technical side with limitations, things like Internet Explorer that blows up everything you get there. So these become problems. How does a designer portray that they want you to use some fancy WebGL effect? Or how do they portray using 3D transforms? How do they even know what 3D transforms exist to use? Those are all problems. Second step is figuring out how to work together and overcome those problems. And you have to do it together. So as I was thinking about how do you do that and where can you work together? Because that's kind of a broad brush thing. I stumbled across this graphic, which is something that we use to show how everything goes through. And ultimately, most people are probably following a similar model, because scrum is a cool thing that everybody's excited about now. Where there's some sort of task that you're doing. There's some sort of weekly cycle, or monthly cycle, or hopefully not quarterly, but there's some sort of deployment, and there's a feedback loop of some sort. So I was like, well, we think about this feedback area as getting feedback from the stakeholders. Oftentimes, that's customers, clients, executive, et cetera. We never really think about there as the internal stakeholders. So when we look at this, there's a perfect opportunity here to bring in internal stakeholders through the development lifecycle and through the design lifecycle. And the great thing is we already have a spot where we should be doing it anyways. So it's easy to just kind of connect the dots there. So what's that look like? There's a few keys, I think, to having this successful feedback loop. Number one is entering with a plan. So it starts at the level of planning to have those internal feedback touch points. But then in those, you have to plan for what you're going to do. If you just have a meeting where you're like, all right, we're going to show you the progress, and that's it, Carl, our designer, may not actually know what he's supposed to present as potential problems. He may just show up and say, yeah, it looks fine. And then ultimately get to the end and have the exact same reaction, which I'm sure some of you have experienced, where you've asked for feedback along the way and none was given, and at the end it's still the same situation. So you have to plan for the type of feedback. You have to coach for looking for effects or looking for making sure that you're meeting the design intent that they're looking for, and vice versa. Designers in that feedback process need to solicit feedback from developers to say, we, as people who write code, know a lot of things that affect the customer experience, and ultimately affect the design output that designers just don't know about, perhaps, or exactly how it works. So being in that mindset of providing detailed feedback and direction is important. Second one is asking questions often. I can't count the number of times that through a development process, if I get to the end and think, if I had just asked the designer why we have five different font sizes in this, I could have saved quite a bit of time and code and hassle on my end, because the reality is I get to the end and the designer looks at it and I'm like, why are these slightly different? And we wind up consolidating the one font size anyways, because in Photoshop it's really easy just to tweak that stuff by a pixel or two and not even realize it. The same is true on the design side. There are things that perhaps a designer will try to fit something into a nice neat little box, because they know that somebody likes to use bootstrap for their grid system or something, and it's just kind of not working, I think, about five column layouts, or like five boxes side by side, doesn't work with the standard bootstrap layout, but the reality is if a designer just says, hey, I need five side by side, how can I do that? And you're like, oh yeah, it's fine, just do it, because it's not that much code. So asking questions and keeping that open dialogue between kind of the design and the dev crew is important. And lastly, I think going the extra mile, a little bit cliche I think, but as you're progressing through the project, I think remembering that everybody has the same intent or desired output of a great customer experience, going that extra mile and searching for something or bringing something up later in the process is important, the whole idea, I think the boxes of designers and developers being very different people along with that whole process can often lead to a developer thinking that if something's in the design phase, I don't need to worry about it. In fact, I shouldn't worry about it. The reality is you should. You should go the extra mile and care about it during the design process. The same is true when it's in development. If you move on as a designer to your next project and kind of purge this one from your memory, which ultimately in the example that I gave is exactly what happened. Karl moved on to his next project because he was done with the design piece and it's moved to development and purred the little circles and it's never gonna come back to development or design. And by never checking in, there was never that gentle nudge to say, well, we're kind of off track here. Can we bring it back to center? There actually isn't a third step at all. I tried to think of another step and I was like, really, it's all about working together in kind of those three principles of having a plan, asking questions and going the extra mile for your counterparts that is truly important. And if we do that, we can help to bridge that gap a little bit. So now I'm gonna rewind and think about what could have happened to the exact same project had we done that. So we started off with a great kickoff. Everybody was excited. We created a plan to have a weekly review so that in the three weeks that it took Joan to create the simple page, which would be slightly obnoxious. There were touch points where those two are talking to each other and they're actually looking at how it's all coming together. And so it actually came together a little bit nicer. It looks fundamentally, it looks the same, but we've got this nice little radiating heat effect, which was ultimately something that Carl wanted. They wanted this subtle effects, but you've also got the little perspective shift as the mouse moves around. So it takes something that, these are two very minute little features that the designer as they were looking, perhaps found that, saw somebody else do the mouse perspective thing and were like, that's pretty cool. We could do that with this because it's really simple and it gives some dynamic movement and a little bit nicer feel. But by never checking in, never actually gave, we're able to give Joan the gentle nudge. So now we've taken our little poo and we've polished the poo a little bit.  You know, so at the end of it, as I think about it, designers and developers aren't really all that different. We're all people who have a common goal of building great customer experiences. And we use the tools that we have at our disposal to do that. Designers work in Photoshop and Sketch and developers work in them and a million other code editors. So I think if we understand that and we understand that we can contribute to each other's work heavily, I think we can kind of break down some of the barriers and produce some better work. That's all I got.


This is a skimmer that was just recently taken off an ATM This is more of a two-piece skimmer This first piece is the cap that goes over the card reader where you insert your card in here same exact cap That's on the ATM that this is removed from so it blends right in on the back here You'll see the inner workings of the skimmer This is the second part of the two-piece skimmer this plate goes over part of the ATM Which matches up pretty much exactly like what's on the ATM the pinhole camera on this fascia plate is right in this area On the back it also has the inner workings of the camera system This is kind of a two-in-one skimmer. This is just a basic plate that goes over that reads the card It's got a pinhole camera down at the bottom. So as you're inserting your card, it's triggering in the camera It's watching you punch in your pincoat and then the back here is the camera and the inner workings of the skimmer With the memory chip those are some of the things you need to be aware of when you're using an ATM


Hi there, I'm welcome to the short video having a look at manual pattern recognition in a little bit more detail So as you can see there, I've got a chart here for the US 30 if I look down to the bottom of my tabs right here I've got one called patterns. This is one of my favorite features in the whole next-generation platform Something I find to be very very useful when looking for new opportunities if I just highlight triangle right here And attach that to my chart. What that's then done is it's gone looked for other Technical patterns on here, and you can actually go back and historically back test this So you can see how often the technical patterns have moved in the right direction So you can see here that every pattern's got a price projection box attached to it. It gives you a star rating System attached to that as well So it gives an idea of how many technical indicators back up the direction of the trend The more stars you have the more technical indicators back up the direction of the breakout the less stars it could be neutral or slightly Contrarian and as you can see there, I've actually got a new pattern That's just developing there on us there in the daily interval. You can actually add multiple different Technical patterns on there at the same time and you still get that same functionality on there Incredibly useful feature. In fact, you can have up to three turned on at the same time But typically I just like to have one or two turned on and I particularly like the triangle wedge or channel They've got double tops triple bottoms heading shoulders of first-head and shoulders and everything else as well very very useful feature and you can actually go ahead and customize your experience there You can change the the color schemes of all these charts. I could change the the thickness and everything else Now what's really good is this continues continuously evolves in real time and depending on the interval that you've selected I'm just gonna jump into five minutes for a second And as you can see there it will actually continuously look for new patterns on whatever time from you're looking at So I'm just gonna click here in fact and go to my maximum area my five minutes I can just go go back and back test all these different patterns that had been Developed and have evolved over time on the US 30 I do find this feature very very useful that I can just see one that's developing there In the future if I'm not fit if I just extend my chart ever slightly You can see that price action there a little bit easier right about 16 320 Such an easy service to go ahead and utilize The pattern recognition scanner is much more than just a price action Breakout tool you can also utilize it to look at candlestick Continuous formations and recognition as well. So you can see here. I've got why selection of different candle formations to choose from from belt holes to marabouzos to three white soldiers Three black crows all sorts of crazy Japanese names But a lot of a lot of technical traders do like to utilize a lot of these candlestick formations And you notice here that they are color-coded. They're they're gray if they're a continuation pattern They're orange if it's a selling pattern and they are slightly blue if it's a bullish pattern And as you can see there I'm just gonna just go ahead and change my doji patterns right here gonna make that purple Make it medium just so we can see it's a little bit easier on the chart there And as I zoom in you should be able to see all the candles Highlighted there and this is highlighting all the current doji formations that are visible on the US 30 And it just makes the whole process of identifying very popular candlestick Formations so much easier. And again, this is a tool that I utilize a lot And it's something that you guys can just turn on and it will evolve in real time now typically I just look utilize the candle formations on a daily or weekly Bases I tend not to look at it in short time frames, but to be fair guys is completely up to at home So again, you just go to patterns. You've got a chart pattern recognition candle pattern recognition And you've got full access to this on your live account the CMC markets


What is happening YouTube? Thanks for tuning back into the channel today, right here with the Rust Belt Mechanic. Now, I know a couple of weeks ago, I did on a Nifty Tools episode, I showed you guys a set of chassis ears from Steelman Pro. It was their newer Bluetooth version and I ended up checking that one out, used it a couple of times and decided I really didn't like it. Because of reasons I'll go into later in the video, but today we're gonna be checking out the kit I ended up getting for the shop here. It's the Steelman 60635 wireless chassis ear system. So we're gonna go in depth with this one, show you how it works and show you how well it works as well. Make sure you guys stay tuned. Like I said, a couple of weeks ago, I showed you guys on the Nifty Tools video about this Steelman Bluetooth chassis ear setup. It's newer-ish to the market and I had a chance to check it out. It ended up being definitely not for me. We ended up trying it on a couple of vehicles, worked once or twice, but then we started having quite a few issues. Where that one fell short is the Bluetooth connectivity. Now in theory, that system should have worked absolutely fantastic, had a lot less wires and things to be able to go wrong and get caught on the vehicles, but at the same time, you also left a whole lot more room for error when it comes to the app, the charging of the system and not using any external batteries that you guys can change out. So the thing went dead pretty quick and then after using it a couple of times, we ended up losing connectivity. The Bluetooth on that one would drop after about five to 10 seconds of being connected and then we realized that the app needed updated, updated the app and then it still wouldn't connect right so they were gonna have to send it in for repair. So it ended up just causing a whole lot more problems with what it was used for. On top of that, it costs about $150 more than this set and you guys have to have an Android-based tablet or a Windows-based tablet or PC to be able to use it with. So there's an extra expense on top of that one, whereas this amazing set right here is all contained into its one packaged unit, four different channels to it. It's gonna be cheaper, it's gonna be more dedicated, less issues, less things to go wrong on the technical aspect of it. So let's get this thing opened and have a look at it and see what's inside. So getting the kit all opened up here, as I said, it comes in this really nice blow molding case, four channels to be able to work with and a nice standalone handheld wireless receiver. This thing's gonna be using each of these individual four-channel transmitters, which are triple A battery powered for these and the really cool thing with this kit is when it comes in, this whole section here is full of all the triple and double A batteries that this system is gonna use. So you don't have to go out and purchase $30 or $40 worth of batteries right off the bat. I've used this kit about three or four times now and the battery life is still at full charge from what the indicator says, so it's working absolutely fantastic. Now the difference between this one and the Bluetooth kit is these are gonna be the wireless transmitters. They've got the transmitter right here, which is gonna have a clip that you can either clip something onto if you're using on an interior panel and then it's got the insert for your clamp transmitter right here. And what actually plugs into that are gonna be these clamps right here. They're gonna be able to clamp onto any portion or any service you're looking to listen to and that little section right here, just a standard little AV plug, that one is gonna plug right into your receiver and right here. So there's a couple more things in the system to be able to get caught rather compared to the Bluetooth system, but it does come up with a bunch of different ways to be able to tie these things up where you need to. It comes up with about 10 of these little velcro strips that you guys are able to put through the little area right here in the transmitter assembly. Zip and you can put it to any section there or comes with a whole big old bundle of zip ties if you guys are gonna need it to sit a little more secure in something that may be moving on you. Now I've already kind of figured out the downfall to this is that, you know, there is a lot of extra wire and if you guys don't tie this up really great, it's gonna have an issue and get caught. So as you can see here, I've got four channels there and three clamps. Well, that's because I got one, got caught on something on the road and kind of ripped it off. So first week of use, we've got one down, but that's all right because you can buy these things separately on their own. Now getting to the actual transmitter here, really nice handheld individual box. You're not gonna have apps to update Bluetooth connection. As soon as you guys turn these things on, which is simple as, you know, flipping the little switch right there, they're putting out the wireless signal. All you have to do is turn this thing to the on position and you have your signal which is gonna be pulsing of whatever is on the pickup portion so you can see what's making noise and then you're able to select between all of your channels. As you see here, it's got six different channels right here to be able to choose from so you are able to add on more receivers and have them in the kit if you wanted to have more than four. Now, why you would wanna have more than four? Not really sure, four is usually plenty enough for testing the different areas that you think the noise or vibration might be coming from. Volume is adjustable, it gets quite loud from the speaker here, which I personally don't like to use. When I'm going on a test drive, I like to use the headphone jack because that is able to get me zoned into what I'm listening to and not hearing the ambient noises throughout the inside of the vehicle, you know, kind of clouding what I'm actually listening to. Like I said, this thing is wireless receiver. It does take six of the AA batteries go into the back right here and the kit does come with those so also super nice as well.  We've got a Jeep Wrangler that we've got kind of a weird winding vibration to just to give you guys an idea of what this thing is able to figure out. So let's go check that out. So here in the shop, we've got this pretty awesome 2017 JK Jeep Wrangler. As you can see, it is lifted three and a half inches sitting on 35s, been pretty modified, got some light bars, some different bumpers, winch, all kinds of things to make a whole lot of extra noise. Power boards on top of that. So the noise that this thing is making, if you were to take a glass of water and wet your finger and rub it around the rim, all you hear is this really high pitched frequency vibrating throughout the vehicle. Now it's very odd because it only happens between like nine and 14 miles an hour and then again at 32 to 39 miles an hour. After that, you don't hear the noise at all. So something that's complex and everything. We use the serometer and based on the frequency, it's gonna be rolling at our 35 inch tire frequency. So it's gonna be going with that pitch, which is kind of odd. So we're gonna be looking into clamping this onto a couple of different areas. See if we can find where that height pitch frequency is coming from. So we've got a couple of our clamps hooked up here. First one, because we've got drive line, little vibration. We've got it hooked up right here to our pinion area of the front differential and put onto the diff there. And then our second one, because these things have aftermarket bumpers and they vibrate quite a lot. We've got a second one tied onto the front bumper.  See if we can catch any vibrations up there out of that one because I already know that these things are pretty prone to vibrating as well, along with those light bars making weird wind noises. I know we're not looking for that, but we'll have a look and see what we can find there. So let's go out and get this thing going on a test drive and see if we can hear the noise preliminarily before we turn the chassis ear on. Now we've got the old GoPro action camera here for some tools in action. So we're gonna be driving this thing down a nice, even road. See if we can get you guys to hear the noise that we are talking about. So there we were here in that one at about 12 miles an hour. Now we're gonna pick up speed a little bit and hear when it comes back in. We hear some wind noise. It is about 33 miles an hour. So we hear our noise and I'm not sure where it's coming from. This thing is just resonating literally all over the Jeep. Can't really tell. So now we've got our nice Steelman Pro set here and we're gonna get this thing turned on and see if we can pinpoint where this noise is coming from. Now like I said, normally I really would like to use the headphones because I'm able to isolate out all of the extra noises that are happening in the vehicle. If I'm hearing the noises, you know, through a speaker and through the actual vehicle, it's kind of hard to point them out. But for YouTube purposes, we're gonna be using, it's just the speaker that's gonna be putting out right here on the Steelman receiver. So we've got our channel one. This is the one down on our pinion. See if we can get a noise out of that one. Getting much noise out of that one. Hear it on the vehicle, but not there. Let's go over to our second channel. A little bit there, not much. Third channel, we're gonna get the vehicle to do it. Not much picking up our wind noise that it has definitely through the speaker. But I think that's where we're getting a lot of our noise from. Let's turn around and see if we can get it to do it a little bit better on the vehicle. There it is. Like I said, it's really hard to pick it up on the actual speaker, guys. Because, you know, you're not really getting it isolated from the other sounds in the vehicle. But you guys are able to hear the different sounds and everything. The number one channel, we're hearing a lot of what we've got to clamp to that pinion. So we're not really hearing a whole lot on that one. Other than just bearing noise. And then channel two, a lot of just vibration because that one's out on the front bumper. But then channel three, that one is picking it up pretty nicely through the speaker. So our issue is actually out here, this light bar and A pillar is vibrating at the same frequency of our tires.  People who own jeeps really already understand that one. But what we're trying to get rid of is that high-pitched noise is gonna be there in the A pillar and in the actual light bar also. So we've got a couple of little things that we are we're gonna be able to try through our upfitters. But at least with this tool, we were able to pinpoint and find our actual issues. So what comes all in the kit, as you guys saw, it comes with the four different channels of receivers, comes with the dedicated wireless receiver, your instruction manual, which who's gonna ever look at that again, but there it is, comes with not three, but four of the mic clamps in a nice little vinyl bag. Comes with about 10 of these Velcro little attachment things so you can attach these or zip ties for zip tying up those or the wiring for it. Comes with a couple of really fancy little note pads here so you, if you don't exactly remember where you put them you can identify where you put everything and put that onto the dash so you remember. It also comes with a cheaper set of in-ear headphones. I personally use another set for myself and anybody else in the shop who's using this they can share the earwax between these ones. I like the ones that actually have the little rubber inside to them so they seal really well in my ear. Kind of drowns out all of the other noises that are reverberating around inside the vehicle. Makes it really nice. Now you can pick this kit up just about anywhere including Amazon.  I will be sure to put a link to this one down in the description below. If you're comparing this one to the one that I did on the Nifty Tools, the Bluetooth one, that one's gonna run you about 370 bucks so about $110 more for one that you have to mess around with a whole lot more apps and Bluetooth connectivity and other issues along at that point. This one tried and true wireless dedicated system that's gonna connect to itself, nothing else. The only other things that you really want to watch out for is if you have cell phones or radio signal in the car you wanna make sure that you have those turned off or put aside because just like if you hold your cell phone up to a speaker on a vehicle it's gonna throw some interference so you make sure you wanna turn that one off or keep it away from the unit. Other than that, zip tie these things up a little bit better than I did in the first round and you won't end up losing those. You like I said, you can get these separate as well there. I think they're about 14 or 15 bucks for each one of those clamps to purchase separately. Well, hopefully you guys enjoyed this review and got some information out of it. If this is something that you guys are looking for in the chassis year world, Steelman is pretty much the dedicated supplier to those. There's not really a whole lot of other manufacturers out there and as for ones that are just tried true work and have a whole lot less issues this is gonna be the kit that you guys are really gonna want to look into. Thanks for tuning in today guys, I appreciate it. As always, you guys stay awesome.