All right. Hello, everybody. Good afternoon. You are at this session here for IBM and Cloudsoft, how companies of all sizes leverage OpenStack-based private clouds. I'm Osmeir Mohamed. I'm an offering manager at IBM. I came into IBM through the Blue Box acquisition. So we've been building private clouds based on OpenStack for more than three years, and we've been delivering it on IBM infrastructure for about almost two years. I'll let Duncan introduce himself, but Duncan is a partner and customer of Blue Box Private Cloud. Duncan? Yeah, hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us. Duncan Johnson, what founder and CEO with Cloudsoft, I'll introduce the company more formally in the second half of the presentation, but delighted to be here sharing the stage with you, Osmeir. All right. Perfect. So what we'd like to do is, you know, I think everybody's got their fill of technology and OpenStack, and we'll cover a little bit of that today, but what we wanted to convey today was sort of how we're transforming these businesses that are running on OpenStack and managed private cloud and what they're going through. So we're going to be focused mainly on the companies. The ones that are public will share their names. The ones that are not will anonymize them. And I'll do that the first half, and the second half, actually, I'm going to let Duncan tell his story.  And we keep it, and I think we've got a reasonable size crowd. So if there's going to be questions, we'll, I think we'll take it towards the end, but we'll definitely have ample time to cover that. All right, so just a quick primer on what IBM's offering is around the private cloud. So, again, these are built of the foundations of Bluebox. And so the first two that you see, BlueMix Private Cloud and BlueMix Private Cloud Local, those are offerings that came in through the acquisition. We modified them to run completely on SoftLayer, or SoftLayer is always now known as BlueMix Infrastructure. We use Community OpenStack. And IBM, even prior to the acquisition of Bluebox, was a huge contributor to OpenStack. And we actually built the service on top of sort of the contribution of the community. And what we do, as you saw in the keynote yesterday, managed private clouds is where you have sort of a joint responsibility between the customer and the vendor to deliver the cloud experience. I'll cover a little bit more on that. So for any customer that doesn't want any vendor lock-in, wants Community OpenStack, wants to deploy sort of generic operating systems, they may want to run a pass that's open source. We feel that BlueMix Private Cloud and BlueMix Private Local would be optimal for that. And the difference between BlueMix Private Cloud and BlueMix Private Cloud Local, Private Cloud runs in a SoftLayer data center. There's about 24 SoftLayer data centers in the world. We can stand up Private Cloud in less than three days in any of those locations, while BlueMix Private Cloud Local runs in your data center. So there are companies that must run behind their firewall, or have infrastructure that need to leverage behind their firewall, and will gladly manage that cloud for you remotely. So we'll have remote hands, we'll VPN into the environment, but you experience between BlueMix Private Cloud and Local will be identical. The only difference will be where the physical infrastructure sits. So moving on to the bottom of that, we actually introduced a new offering because we heard from customers, a lot of enterprises, that require a vendor-specific distribution or OpenStack. So we partnered up with Red Hat, and really we see this as the best of both worlds. We're gonna bring our scale and expertise in running Private Clouds to the table, while customers that have a support contract or have applications that require REL and that Red Hat stack to run can get the benefit from IBM and also the benefit from Red Hat. So if you need REL OS, so you need running Windows or SUSE, you wanna run an enterprise database, you wanna run OpenShift or Docker orchestration, that will be the offering that we would position for our customers. But again, the people that are supporting these, the automation that we use, the data centers that we deploy on, are identical between Blue Mix Private Cloud and Blue Mix Private Cloud with the Red Hat. So in terms of OpenStack services, we support nine today. We've got a couple that we're adding here in the next couple of months. And if you're familiar, or most of you are familiar with your cell phones, the way that these services will show up is they'll just show up the next time you log in. So we will actually do the deployment of the services in the back end and then we'll just turn it on for you. During that next maintenance window. So it is as simple as that experience that you get on your cell phone and also as you would get if you're going into the public cloud. So we do try to make the experience running a private cloud and consuming the private cloud very similar to what you would see in the public domain. The only difference would be that the bare metal infrastructure that you're running on is dedicated just for one customer. And the model that we've seen after doing this for many years is what we call a shared responsibility model. So let's start with what IBM does. We focus on the things that run underneath the hypervisor. So this is a sample of things that we would do. So anything to do with keeping the management and the uptime of the cloud, we take that on. The oily bits that you don't wanna touch is how I would tell the customer. So if there's a security breach, we will patch it. If there's a failure in the services of the bare metal infrastructure, we will go replace it, right? We'll maintain the SLA 99.95. If we don't maintain the SLA, we give money back to you, right? So we manage the cloud because we know that it's important to you as a business and we will actually provide you credits for not keeping our end of the bargain. We'll do upgrades and maintenance. So these are the things that if any of you who've built or opens that cloud, it's easy to sort of get to the first milestone. Question is whether you can get to the second and third and fourth milestone, right? And so we run hundreds of clouds. We try to keep them standardized and we learn from every single interaction that we have with our clouds and it pays dividends across all of our customer base. Technical support. So anytime that you have an issue within OpenStack, an API question or something's not working as expected, you call us. And we have experts that are already 7x24 to go do that. We also will assign you a customer success manager that will help you onboard. We actually have a five week protocol in terms of getting you onboard with OpenStack. So a lot of these things that people have hard time or they have to go through different vendors, we try to bring that into one consistent experience for all of our customers. So what do you do as a customer? Well, anything to do with the virtual instances and the applications, right? We don't wanna touch your data, right? We don't wanna tell you what automation scripts to use. We don't wanna tell you what OS is to use. You go ahead and use whatever you want, right? Very similar to what you, the experience that you have in the public cloud. A backup and application. Backup and for VM and your applications, right? You may have a tool that you need to use. We're not gonna specify what that is. Additional users that you want beyond the cloud administrator. So all these things that we do and then we find that in two, three years of running clouds that we found a happy medium where customers actually do want control over their cloud but they're also parts of the cloud they have no interest in. All right, so that's a quick overview of sort of the offering list. Let's see what we've done with our customers. So first off is Treehouse. Treehouse is an education company they're based in the Pacific Northwest and they provide online education for professionals that wanna learn how to code, right? Which is a huge growing market similar to what you see with Code Academy and things of that nature. Treehouse was a customer of Bluebox prior to us being acquired by IBM. And so one of the big things we had to go do, we had to move them from our data centers into an IBM data center. So we physically had to move their cloud. And in the process we also had to upgrade their cloud. So there were a bunch of moving parts. We actually ran two clouds side by side for them so we allow ample time for them to migrate. But what they were looking for, right? When we became part of IBM they were very concerned about, hey, are you guys gonna become very curated and very specific about your implementation or OpenStack? So that's why they wanted to keep their old cloud running. They really literally wanted to see API call to API call whether we were staying consistent. And we did, right? So they were able to validate over a period of 30 days that it was, you know, it truly was open infrastructure. We had background compatibility around the API. We provide competitive pricing to them. They were, we used different storage between our old data center and the new one. So the old data centers we had a vendor specific sand that we used while in IBM we use Ceph. And so they wanted to make sure that whatever applications they ran before got the same IOPS. Actually we gave them more IOPS running on Ceph. And then they needed the same SLA as before, right?  They have no ops people on staff. They are completely dependent on us. So we were able to go deliver that. You know, the solution was IBM Bluemix Private Cloud. The picture gives you sort of what that infrastructure looks like. We built them infrastructure with separate control and data planes. So we had dedicated controllers running all the open stack services. And then they had a choice of different compute nodes because they had different kinds of workloads that they were deploying. So we built different resource pools to ensure that workloads will go on the right type of compute node. And then they had a block storage called, we call it hybrid block storage node, running with Ceph in the background. And then we have a pair of gateways. So all of our clouds have a pair of gateways on the front. This is where we put the ACLs, the firewalls, any termination of VPNs and whatnot. So that's what we did. So Treehouse I believe has one location in DC and there's potential for them to move to another one. So as you'll see with Duncan's presentation, a lot of our customers tend to deploy more than one cloud. The next one is Lixil. So Lixil is a company in Japan. From the US they are equivalent of the Home Depot of Japan. And Lixil came about via a acquisition of five companies. And so when they started engaging with IBM prior to actually prior to the Blue Box acquisition, they were already on the strategic path to go figure out how they were gonna go from five different IT platforms to one. And so what they landed on, where they were gonna have two major platforms, they had a platform that was based on OpenStack and any net new applications were gonna be built on OpenStack and they also had their enterprise workloads that were not being refactored and those were gonna stay on VMware. But what was clear is they were gonna get out of the data center business. So both their VMware platform and their OpenStack platform is being hosted in an IBM data center, literally side by side. So, but focusing on the OpenStack piece, so they made a strategic decision to go with OpenStack, they couldn't move to the public cloud but they wanted an elastic and public cloud type of experience. And so we went through, we actually did a three month POC with them in the Tokyo data center to prove all these things. So very similar to what we did with Treehouse, they just need to see the IOPS, make sure that the applications could do there. Their API compatibility was so on and so forth and they were expanding too. So they actually had a five year growth plan and they didn't want it to make sure that as they went through month by month, we could actually deploy additional resources within the SLA that we provided, which is less than one day. So they could have additional compute nodes, additional storage nodes deployed and available to them in OpenStack in a day or less. So we went through a lot of that and it was a great win. So in terms of what that looked like, again, very similar to what we did for Treehouse, just at a larger scale. So we had the same dedicated controllers, the same Viada pair, but instead of a one gigabit ethernet link into the data center, we had a 10 gigabit ethernet link in and it was a dedicated circuit. So they actually had a dedicated circuit from their location to the IBM data center and then it would pass through the Viadas before it got to the OpenStack infrastructure. And then they had a choice of different compute nodes. I optimized just to give you an example, is our compute node with SSD back storage and the fastest CPU that we have in our catalog. And then, so, but the additional thing that they needed, they needed access to bare metal servers. So they had workloads that could run on virtual machines. That was the primary use case that they had for their OpenStack cloud, but they also had some items that needed to run in bare metal, specifically databases. So we don't have ironic yet. You probably noticed that in the second slide that I showed, but IBM, by virtue of us having the software infrastructure, we can provision bare metal servers and connect it over the network. So even though you can't provision the bare metal servers through OpenStack, you can consume bare metal servers by provisioning it via a separate set of APIs and then linking it over the network. One interesting thing that we have to do with Lixl was the last item that you see on the list, which is VM-like migration. So they were long-term VMware users. They were very used to being able to move VMs as they needed. As you know, with modern elastic clouds, you sort of just let the scheduler decide where it goes within the resource pool and then your application deals with any sort of restart of the VM if you need to. Well, they couldn't make that operational change. So we actually went ahead and enabled VM-like migration for them. And so they don't use it very often. I think a lot of times is when, as they migrate their workloads off of their old infrastructures to the new ones, they may have put the workload on the wrong compute node. And so to free up some space, they may use this, but it's not something they use every day, but it was something that we had to innovate and deliver and make sure it was available to them in that timeframe. All right, so the last one, I had to anonymize, but it's a real estate company in Asia. And so they're doing, unlike a lot of places in the US where you're sort of building in a small plot of land and there's really one or two residences, this company here creates city master plans. So they take a huge swath of land, they develop it, and also they can come along with it, schools, residential, commercial. And so, but what they wanted to do, they wanted to control the experience, very similar to how we control the experience for our customers, they wanted to control the experience for their customers. So think of TV, think of audio, security, all of that was gonna be wired together. So they needed a very modern infrastructure to sort of build that out. But they couldn't host it in an IBM data center, right?  But they're a real estate company, they don't know how to run IT. So what we ended up doing is we ended up deploying Bluebox, sorry, Blooming's private cloud local for this customer. Okay, I lied. We are building it right now. So literally we have people in Asia building out the cloud right now. And it's going well, we hope to have it lit up and hand the API endpoints to them before the end of the week. And so what they were looking for was absolutely location, so it needed to be local. But also they knew that at some point their customers would want to go and go to the public cloud. And so different from private cloud, we have a public cloud and something that they wanted to be able to tie. So for example, they could provide credentials to a customer that would work on their private cloud and also on their public cloud. So those were things that they wanted to make sure were available to them. And then for the commercial side of their city plan, they also wanted to make sure that those customers could get more than just IaaS, right? And so that's where some of the other parts of IBM, visioning, garage, consulting, managed services were the things they wanted to partner up with. So it was while we're gonna talk about OpenStack, a lot of what swayed the customer over to IBM was definitely around location and also around the Valiat services around there. So and what it looked like, hey, it looks actually very similar to what we talked about before. And the reason why is that we build standard clouds, right? So for as much as we see a lot of customers have very unique problems, very unique needs, right? And they start off looking very, very different. When you actually start building your cloud, it actually ends up looking fairly similar, right? A little bit of customization, there's definitely a lot of people scales that are different, but the underlying technology is the same. And speaking as an operator, that's how we can run all these clouds and upgrade them very easily, right? They all fundamentally look the same to us. So but again, it's built again, even though it's an on-prem solution, we still have the dedicated controllers, we have the same type of compute nodes, and instead of the hybrid storage, which is a mix of SSDs and hard drives, this one here is pure SSDs. So they want a performance right out of the gate. So in summary, what I would say around a lot of these customers, right? Obviously, they were looking to go to a modern platform. It was never, like in the case of Lixill, it was deliberate to have two platforms, right? They understood that you can't put a square peg in a round hole. You can't take a legacy app and try to run in an open stack. And I think maybe some of you know this already, it's really hard. You can't try to make open stack run like VMware. There'll always be things in the VMware stack that cannot be replicated on open stack. Having said that, in the case of live migration, we were able to replicate that and definitely meet the needs of the customer. We definitely dealt with customers that really their core competency wasn't running the infrastructure, right?  If you deal with wiring and cabling and stacking or racking and stacking, managed private clouds isn't really a good fit because what we do is we take away the things that you're not interested in. If you're transforming yourself from a company that's used to do that, but you want to move further up the stack, then managed private cloud makes a lot of sense, right? And then I think hybrid is definitely something that we've seen a lot. So we have customers that actually started, like I think the real estate company actually did their POC on the hosted platform because it was the easier, cheaper thing to do. But then when we actually deployed it or deploying it, we did it locally because the experience was the same. They got 95% of what they needed from the hosted offering, but they finally went to the local. And we're actually seeing customers run both, local and dedicated. They would run production on the local and they would run test dev on hosted. So we're seeing all sorts of different combinations here as we go deeper and deeper into the market. So with that, Duncan, I'm gonna pass it over to you and let you tell your story. Thank you. So now we're switching to I guess our experience. And I would say I really like that slide, the division of responsibilities because that's been borne out by our experience but I'll get into that in a second. So we're not as well known as IBM and Red Hat, so here's a quick summary of who we are and what we're doing. And so our focus is on hybrid cloud application management and I'll explain in a couple of slides what I mean by that, but key to us is being able to model an application and then to be able to deploy it and most importantly manage it throughout its life cycle. I was talking actually, I met with the GM for OpenStack for Red Hat this morning, Rakesh, and he said, well, that's really letting a thousand flowers bloom on this platform and I really like that idea that the platform is rock solid, but it's what you then do with it that I think interests us and our customers. We're very much involved in the open source movement. We are in fact the founders of Apache Brooklyn, which if you're familiar with the Apache software process, sorry, the foundation process, you go through kind of school incubation, primary, secondary, and eventually you sort of graduate. So we're now a top level project, which is very important for us and for the community. And that's really the foundation of everything I'm gonna talk about. When I talk about the Cloudsoft application management platform, I'm talking about the commercial offering built upon Apache Brooklyn. And we're pioneers in what's known as autonomic computing. So this is the idea that essentially you want to do everything fully automated end to end and in much the same way that your autonomous nervous system keeps your heartbeat, core temperature, breathing regulated, especially when you're standing on stage and don't really want to be thinking about those things. It's the same idea within IT. So model deploy and manage. So the model is, think of that as really the blueprint. In fact, we call it a blueprint. So that defines the components that make up your application, the interconnection or relationship between those, any dependencies that need to be sort of taken care of. But most importantly of all, then the policies that you want to apply at runtime, really the best management practices around how to actually look after this application or service. So that model you can think of as being the class if you're into sort of object-oriented programming. So now you want to take that model, that blueprint and deploy it somewhere. And so at that point you instantiate a live model of that same blueprint. So now you've got real software components, you've brought them up correctly, you've wired up everything, you've made sure all the dependencies are sort of dealt with, recognized, and now it's running on your cloud. What you then want to be able to do is actually get data from it, sense what's going on in the environment, both from the application itself but also from the surrounding environment. So that may be through the platform, it may be through other network monitoring tools. But the idea is that this is a living, breathing thing and you want to get data from it in order to manage it properly. So unless something is providing you with that data, you can't react to situations that arise and then take action. And so that's the whole notion of management. So sensing the environment and then affecting the environment of fundamental concepts. And you do that on an ongoing basis. So the blueprint is not fixed for all time. It's a bit like you build your house but now you want to add an extra wing to it, maybe two wings, maybe you've got divorced so you need separate houses. But the idea is, that's a terrible joke, my wife will kill me when I get home and it's being recorded. Never add a lift, that's my advice. But the idea is those blueprints really do allow you to actually land and expand on any environment. So that does run the gamut from physical and that can be bare metal. It can be just a plain vanilla, bring your own nodes or bring your own servers to the party through to virtual then local or dedicated private environments. So local being on-prem, typically dedicated or managed being something that's been hosted for you. Now you heard probably yesterday's keynote that we're now looking at private cloud in three different ways, including remote managed. So the point is that whatever the flavor of cloud, public, private, virtual or physical, our blueprints will run in those environments and in some cases they'll run across many of those environments. So this is a mind map of the Klaus of AMP product. I don't expect you to take it all in but the idea is that you're basically able to connect through to private clouds, to enterprise infrastructure, to public clouds. You can also connect through to and work with things like Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes and Blockchain. The idea, these are all aspects or examples of what you can do once you have an autonomic control plane and you have an application management platform. So the fundamental thing is the platform on its own is not very interesting but when you build up sets of blueprints it becomes much more interesting. So why do we choose IBM and Red Hat? Well if I wind the clock back prior to the partnership doing Red Hat and IBM we'd already engaged with the blue box team just after we met with them actually in Paris before the acquisition in the course of getting to know them they got acquired by IBM and I think we were the first actual IBM soft layer based private cloud to be stood up and that was in San Jose so that's going about 18 months now. But we didn't just stick with one location we always wanted to have multiple locations because one of the things we feel is really important is to be able to actually deploy real world applications across real world infrastructure. So we wanted to roll out a global private cloud and that becomes a test bed for us and it also becomes a great proving ground for customer evaluations. So fast forward to literally what? End of March. So at the end of March we actually upgraded our environment and at this point we decided not just to upgrade two other nodes in fact one of them we moved from Singapore to Tokyo not physically but we chose to relocate and reposition ourselves across San Jose, London and Tokyo but in London we felt we should actually work with Red Hat and actually stand up for Red Hat powered Blue Mix private cloud. So we did. So as you described when you sort of brought on a customer from their environment into the Blue Mix environment we did much the same thing moving from the old environment to the new environment. So we were running in London, San Jose and Singapore and so that great process went really, really smoothly. So this is a deep, politicized view of the world. When we posted the slides I'll give you the credit it came from, it's our Creative Commons from Wikipedia. So this is the situation today. Three clusters, one in London, one in San Jose and one in Tokyo but that frankly would not be terribly interesting to us. We're not for the fact that we can now connect those. So there's a fully meshed private network and this is where we're actually able to leverage IBM's own private network which is something that software brought to the party. I don't know if you want to say anything about that but... I think the couple of things here so they look like one from a Keystone standpoint so we enabled single sign-on for Cloudsoft. So the same credentials that work in San Jose will also work in Tokyo and London, right? So that's key so that's a single consistent experience. I think the second thing is obviously the lines that connect together. So that's the global network, the global private network that all software data centers are connected by so you can send traffic, replication traffic, whatever it is that you want from one cloud to the next for free. Yep, not just free but it's reliable as well. So I mean this was one of the things that if you're gonna choose a partner, choose one that does have a global footprint but also can provide you with from a security point of view a very robust, reliable way of connecting those individual clusters so that what you can then do of course is choose when or if you want to go out onto the internet. Of course you do, you're offering a client-facing application but it also gives you the ability to do things like a wide area of replication. So we've worked a lot with Bashow and React as a good example of that. But of course in order to do that I have to complete this incredibly expensive only done on Sunday graphic which shows of course us running the application management platform in each of those locations. Again, just as you do at the network and the OpenStack tier, we're able to sort of utilize all of those locations from any one of those points of view. So we can be starting up in London and deploy to both London, San Jose and Tokyo and vice versa.  Of course we're not limited to those three locations. There are 50, 60 data centers around the world where we could drop one of these clusters in. And actually as I look at that I think it's somewhat Northern Hemisphere biased. At least with Singapore we just about crept into the Southern Hemisphere. So we'll probably at some point look at Australia. Well possibly, I'd like to go there. The only problem with that is if you look at the submarine cables I'm not sure it's always the most efficient place to land and expand. So this is one of these interesting things. When you actually get into the guts of the internet and the global networking it really is submarine cables that will drive where you want to put things. Which is why Singapore by the way is a great point to those presidents. One thing I didn't want to touch upon right so what we actually did when we migrated clouds off from the old infrastructure to the new plus migrate them from data center to data center we actually built parallel clouds. So we actually built these new clouds in the same data center as what they were in. And then we provided a time where they could migrate their workloads. So going back to a couple of slides back where we had that shared responsibility so we would build the clouds and provide the API endpoints, credentials and what not but we're dependent on the customer to sort of move the workloads. Part of it is customers know their workloads better than we do. The other part of it is we don't touch customer data. There's a lot of compliance and security concern and so that again, it really is sort of around what we want to go do with the private cloud. We do want to help you get your applications running, get you going, migrate, ride the technology curve. I think on the new infrastructure, it's faster and I think at the top. Double the capacity and the one mistake we made and this was our choice, not your was we went for the sort of entry level clusters. So one gig top of rack and basically everything's now 10 gig and a lot more horsepower. In the case of the, you probably want to get into the guts of the Red Hat configuration. It's even richer than that, isn't it? With the separate controllers. Exactly right. And so, but the thing we're going to go to is really allow customers ride the innovation curve, ride the cost curve, but also not make them reinvent themselves every 12 months. So we're there to really help you migrate because again, letting CloudSoft run their business, provide value to their customers is the most important thing and we're there to sort of stay out of the way. So the way we see it is, if you don't notice IBM and the Blue Box team, we're doing our job. And by the way, you're not, if somebody's worried about, well, how much control do I have over this? You still have exactly the same access to the open stack environment. You can set things up yourself and in our case, oftentimes that's automatically, but the idea is that if there's ever an issue, there's always somebody that you can call night or day 24-7. And I used to almost be terrified of calling the help because if I did, I'd get three people all pinging me saying, how can I help? I mean, it was phenomenal. It is phenomenal. So, but that's quite good actually. That does train you to think, if I do that, I'm going to create a lot of excitement. So, but phenomenal support, phenomenal response. And in terms of migration, yes. I mean, helping us migrate both the, not just the applications, which actually, as you rightly pointed out, we have a good handle on but also making sure that the environment was replicated, which is also important in this context. And everything we're doing here, of course, we're doing this, we're learning as we go and that then benefits our customers. So when we work with customers that are Red Hat customers, they're delighted that we have a Red Hat environment because they can look at what we're doing with OpenShift, as well as, of course, what we're doing with Cloud Foundry and Bluemix and so on and so forth. Yeah, and again, and I think this also shows, we're fairly agnostic when it comes to the solution, right? What we provide is the experience and the uptime, whether you decide to run all community, all Red Hat, a combination of both, that's really the customer choice. Exactly, thank you. So in summary, better together is a lame political slogan which we could probably do within the UK right now. But we do get a very, very consistent experience wherever we go with these guys. And it's not just the Bluemix Private Cloud, we're also working with them within the context of the Bluemix Container Service. That's probably a talk for another day. But again, it's the very open, you get the APIs you expect, not some sort of homegrown thing. And you can do cool stuff, like you can run blockchain networks and as I've mentioned before, multi-site database replication, et cetera, et cetera. And so, slideware, that's the blockchain stuff, and these are a couple of the announcements. But it's probably, do we have time just to quickly, I won't try and do everything.  I'm gonna try and do a demo. All right, there we go, all right, so. Now I do know that I have to turn PowerPoint off, otherwise I can see it, all you see is that, which I'm sure Red Hat and IBM are delighted, but it's not actually showing you a demo if I stay in PowerPoint mode, so I know I killed everything. All right, no, there we go. It's there, okay, excellent. There was no pause there, nothing, no panic, no look on my face, it said, heck. So in the interest of time, I'm not gonna try and deploy sort of a globally spanning sort of hyperledge of fabric, or indeed a Kubernetes cluster, but these are just examples of some of the things that one can do. So if I actually drill down on one of these, so this is showing us running essentially a fabric that is spanning, this is spanning San Jose, Tokyo, and London. I'm now looking obviously at the world through my eyes, which is looking at software that's running on those clusters, but the point is that's a single blueprint spanning multiple locations, and we can also do that across multiple clouds, so if I just close that guy up, and this is the other thing, same blueprint just gave it different locations instead of saying deploy us in Bluemix private cloud across the three locations that we manage. We said no, let's run it across Amazon, Google, and Azure, sorry IBM. And are you making native open stack calls when you're deploying to? No, what we're doing, so I should have mentioned this earlier, under the covers we also use Apache J Clouds, so that gives us the lingua franca for things like compute and storage. The networking is still a little challenging, but we've put some thought into providing application network security that maps very much onto things like security groups and so on, so it works beautifully in AWS, and on open stack. So the same, again it's bubbling up these concepts, so from an applications developer point of view, I'm creating a blueprint that really is Venn diagrams, so all I care about is these things are in one group, these things are in another group, this can talk to this over this port and vice versa, so rather than getting into really deep territory when you're doing SDN or overlay or anything like that, so then finally there is a Kubernetes cluster which we deployed earlier, this is the cooking show after all, where what we're essentially doing, again it's another blueprint and that blueprint stands up a Kubernetes cluster for you, and one can obviously do this automatically, but in terms of the idea of effectors and so on, here's the worker cluster, I can resize by delta, so I better make sure I know what the size is. Okay, so six, well yes I did ask for six worker nodes, so each one of those by the way maps on to an open stack VM running on BlueMix, but I can say, okay delta, I'm just gonna go up by one, is that gonna do that Robert or is that gonna take it down to one? It's gonna go up by one, you see never work with children, animals or CEOs, so there we go, it's just started another node like that, so and if you're really interested in what's going on, you can poke into it and see that it's starting, it's provisioning it and so on and so forth, all of which is useful when you're debugging, not what you want to do when you're doing stuff fully automated, but just one example of the kind of thing one can do. Yeah, I really like this demo because it doesn't really need to show open stack, open stack is in the background, we're doing our stuff, and it'll be clear if we're not doing what the SLA says, this demo won't work, so we're sort of the invisible hand in the back. All right, I think we've got a couple more minutes, if there's any questions, if you can head to the mic, I'm more than happy to answer those. You mentioned having a single side on between open stack instances and the three locations, are you using federated keystone for that? So you can log in to one? Yeah, so we're using keystone to keystone federation, but we also, for some customers, actually they'll have an ID provider on the back end, like a central database, so in the case of Cloudsoft, they're using keystone to keystone federation, so the three clouds trust each other, but we do have another model where you can use an ID provider. Cool, thank you. Again, it's the idea it's pluggable, so which I think is a theme of this conference, isn't it, the idea of compacting things? Yeah, compostable, I think. Composable? Composable, yeah, compostable. Uh, ouch. Yeah. Anything and anything else? So, no? One more, here we go. So what are the services span across data centers apart from keystone? What about horizon? What about glands? Do you have a way of making sure that the images sync up across geos? And from a portal perspective, is horizon a single dashboard for multiple regions? Right, all good questions. So today, what we federate across is keystone. I think it's the only thing that we federate across. So yeah, so in the case of horizon, in order for Duncan's team to go from San Jose to Tokyo, they'll have to go put in the appropriate DNS name or the IP address. But what I would say is, and this is actually suited our purposes, is each one of these we can treat as an individual endpoint, because logically that's what we want to do if I want to deploy an application, I want to control where particular components are running. But the really cool thing, which is kind of magic to some of myself, is that there's a shared private network that shows up in all of those clusters. And as long as you're using that network, everything is fully connected. And really what we wanted was connectivity versus trying to sort of synchronize images and so on, because we're not really so much concerned about images as we are building software. So typically we'll take stock images and we'll work with those. And then we lay down the software and not just install software, but make sure it boots up correctly and that all the interconnections are and dependencies are taken care of. So that really suited our model. It's in a way, it's the least invasive way of doing it because you can ignore it. And if you want to use it, it's just a shared private network. Yeah, and I remember the conversation we had around single sign-on, it was really about if there's a new person that joins Cloudsoft and instead of having to put the credentials in three times, you just put it in once, right? Whilst for the other customers, they truly want to know who you are, right? So at least for us, we've seen the use case be different between Keystone and Keystone Federation versus an ID provider. But to say that, we've been working together for 18 months, we've had items on the roadmap. There were things where we, Cloudsoft committed to us and we put things on the roadmap. And so as OpenStack improves support across all these different projects and what's important to IBM is that they're stable. As ultimately, we drive a service. So whatever we put into production needs to work. And so quality of the code, stability and whatnot is key. But as that innovation curves continues in OpenStack, we'll gladly adopt it and make it available to customers. But good question. All right, so we are at 420. On behalf of Duncan and IBM, I'd like to thank you for being with us. We'll hang out, but thanks for coming. Thank you, thank you very much.


a new hand to hold. He stood and he stared and he reached for the hand of the person he hoped would help him understand. But the hand was not there and the bad feelings grew and before long he found he knew not what to do.  He tried to contain them but when they burst out it changed him completely. He'd scream and he'd shout but everyone thought he was naughty and bad. Nobody knew that he'd just lost his dad. The hand that was missing unraveled his mind and made it too hard to be calm and be kind. Things got no better for quite a long time until one day a teacher said why not hold mine? Your dad's hand is missing that must make you sad but if you hold my hand we'll make things less bad. So he reached out his fingers with caution at first as he realized that things could not get any worse. And as he held on to this new hand he found that slowly he put his feet back on the ground. Things were not easy he had to work hard but he felt things improve as he let down his guard and alongside his teacher he felt safe and secure. It felt better than feeling so sad and unsure.


Okay, do we have a good sound check there? You're on. Yeah, I'm good. Terrific. Well, let me give a quick outline of where we're going. For those of you that are new, what's happening in this class is we're going through the major creation texts of the Bible and we've made it all the way through to Ecclesiastes. It's my goal to try to finish up the book of Ecclesiastes, if not this week, next week. And then we're going to jump into the book of Isaiah. We might actually address the verses in the song of Solomon, but hey, it's not a major creation text, but we're going to do something a little bit different. We get to the book of Isaiah. I've actually prepared a set of questions, study questions for all of you, so you're going to actually be doing a little bit of work as you go through the book of Isaiah. I'm going to begin with an introduction because Isaiah actually had a major impact in my coming to faith in Jesus Christ, so I'm going to kind of set the table for you. And we're not going to go through the book of Isaiah verse by verse. We're basically going to be going through and picking up the apologetics content that's in the book of Isaiah. You've heard me say this before that of all the books of the Bible, it's Isaiah that gives us the most detailed description of the doctrine for the Trinity, but it also gives us the most detailed description on the origin and history of the universe. And these are both things that we can now establish are correct by looking at the record of nature. I've given a brief talk here before about how science only makes sense that God is triune. We'll unpack that in a little more detail as we go through the book of Isaiah, specifically about what he says about that very thing. But before we go into that, I just wanted to show you a couple of things. One is that NASA has released this incredible photo. It will turn the lights off in a minute. And just an announcement, this class is live streamed. So we had someone back there actually feeling the routine questions. If we get a non-routine question, we'll actually address it here in class. But all of you, if you're visitors, you're welcome to ask questions. I don't mind being interrupted because if I don't finish my lessons, I've got next week to finish it. But that also explains why we get through our content as slowly as we do. But I'll try to keep things on pace here as we move through. But yeah, if you step in front of the cameras, you will be live streamed to the internet. And incidentally, we record everything here in this class, both with audio and video. So if people want to pick up on what we've been talking about here, they can download it from paradoxes.org. And that's the website for the class, paradoxes.org. In fact, you can actually go back 30, 40 years and listen to class discussion that we had. We do take the time of editing out all the announcements. However, those people that do the announcements have been asking, could we please have special MP3s, which are announcements only. But so far, we've not had anyone volunteer to pick up that task.  So, but yeah, a couple of things I wanted to show you. And one I deleted by mistake from my computer. But you will see it on my Facebook page. It's an image just released by NASA from the Osasaurus satellite, OSIRIS. Osiris, Osiris Rex. And you say, where did they come up with these names? Well, believe it or not, Osiris Rex has a very complicated acronym. In fact, I don't even remember what it is. Although you will see it on my Facebook page exactly what that acronym stands for. As I understand how a number of you people here work at JPL, what have been told at JPL, you can't start the project until you come up with an acronym. That's step one. You've got to come up with an acronym. And I can't remember that from my radio astronomy days. You wouldn't start an astronomy run until you first came up with an acronym for the project that we were working on. So you want to know why scientists love acronyms, that's why. But yeah, what this, how do you pronounce it? Osiris? Osiris. That's Egyptian. That's Egyptian, Osiris. OK. You can use O-Rex if you want to. OK, yeah, O-Rex works as well. That's good. About halfway, this is a spacecraft. It's on its way to mine an asteroid. They're going to an asteroid. They're going to mine stuff and bring it back. So, and this is actually part of a NASA strategy that maybe they will, this is kind of a test, because they're actually thinking about, maybe we could actually mine some of these asteroids for real. Why? Because there's actually asteroids out there with a metal value that exceeds one quadrillion dollars.  Can you imagine that? And so, yeah, it's tempting. Let's go out there and mine that thing and bring all that platinum and gold and silver back to the Earth. And it's not as ridiculous as it sounds. They said, well, rather than going into the big one, maybe we could find a small one and maybe we can drag it back to an orbit around the moon or around the Earth, which would make it much easier to mine. And as silly as this may sound, they've actually economically priced it out. They could drive the price of these precious metals down by about a factor of 10 if they were actually to go out and grab one of these asteroids. So, yeah. But it also could be a fulfillment of Revelation chapter 6 where it talks about this big star crashing into the Earth and poisoning our fresh water supply. So maybe a NASA accident is going to be the fulfillment of Revelation 6, who knows. On the positive side, it could actually greatly increase our technology and wealth. And keep in mind it's the platinum group metals that actually play a big role in the treatment of cancer. So it's not just increasing the wealth. They could have a major impact on our health. Anyway, I was going to show you that image this morning. I deleted it by mistake with my computer. But if you go to my Facebook page, it's there. And what it shows you is the Earth and the Moon together. It's not the first time we've had a shock from outer space of the Earth and the system. That's the first time I actually see the Moon and the Earth well separated from one another. And just to give you an idea, the Moon is about 30 Earth diameters away from the Earth. So it's not as close as what you might think. And this image actually shows that. But what I'm going to show you is a set of eight photos released yesterday from NASA of Jupiter. And what's special about this is that they've taken the Juno spacecraft, which has been orbiting around Jupiter, and they've lowered the orbit. And what they've released are the highest resolution, most color-detailed photos of Jupiter to date. And we will need the lights off for you to be able to especially appreciate this. Voyager 1 took a good separated shot of the Earth and the Moon as it left here. So that's maybe the second one. Yeah, second one, but there's a little better resolution. OK, this is the Juno craft. And incidentally, Juno is going to make several close fly buys of Jupiter. So it's just the first set of images that we'll see of Jupiter. And for those that are participating in live streaming or downloading it, we're actually going to put this on the Paradox's daughter website. I have all these on a flash drive. So they'll be available on the website. And so this is kind of a shot of Jupiter as the Juno spacecraft comes in. And here we see it a little bit closer. And so these are all going to be closer and closer. And you get to see the detail of the cloud structure of Jupiter like it's never been seen before. And this is looking down on the pole of Jupiter with more detail with the storm structure at the pole of Jupiter. OK, these are all different gases that are being mixed together. You get methane, ammonia. You actually have a little bit of water and carbon dioxide, helium, hydrogen all being mixed there. And you've probably heard of the Great Red Spot, which is a huge hurricane that you see on Jupiter. And what this is showing is there's hurricanes all over Jupiter. And the hurricanes in Jupiter, you get wind velocities of between 200 and 300 miles per hour. But unlike the hurricanes here on Earth which last for a few days, these hurricanes last for centuries. And you see just hurricanes everywhere. And then here's a more detailed look. At the cloud hurricane structure of Mars. Let's drag it through. Are those true colors? These are true colors. And then I think this is, yeah, that's the last one. So this is where the spacecraft zoomed in really close. And you just see the detail. And there's just storms everywhere.  But it's nothing but nonstop hurricanes and the atmosphere of Jupiter all the time. Do you have some idea of the scale of that picture? Yes, I can. Jupiter, let me take it back a little bit. OK, let's go back one more. OK, it would take 11 planet Earths to go from one edge to the other edge of Jupiter. So some of these storms you see are the size of the Earth. So they're not like little hurricanes we have that are a few tens of miles across. These are literally thousands of miles across. So for example, this little storm that you see here, that's the size of the Earth. This one's the size of the Earth. That one's the size of the Earth. So nothing trivial about Jupiter. OK, before we jump into Ecclesiastes, I also want to tell you about a paper that got published in the Royal Society, Proceedings B, a beast and its ideology. And it's a study of this creature. Anybody know what this creature is? It's a lemur, but it's a special kind of a lemur. What happened here? I got some background stuff here that wasn't supposed to be there. So let me just move off on this. OK. This is what's called the Barrow Sepaka Lemur. It's a very special kind of lemur, highly sociable. Probably one of the most sociable of all lemurs. That's why I mean, we would take our kids to the zoo. They loved the lemurs more than they did the monkeys or the baboons because they were such as social creatures. They're very engaging. Of course, they got those huge eyes because they are diurnal in their behavior. And there's been a lot of studies done on lemurs in Madagascar. And this is a species that does live in Madagascar. But it's a huge group, almost 10 authors, 9 or 10 authors here that studied these creatures for years. And it's the most detailed study of the behavior of these animals to date. But they not only studied the behavior of these animals, they were measuring their DNA repeatedly. And what they're able to do is immediately. And what they're able to determine is that this is a species of lemur that actually developed the capacity to digest certain leaves that other lemurs cannot digest. And what they discovered is they've picked up a microbiome that's unique to their species. And a microbiome refers to the friendly or the symbiotic bacteria that are inside your gut. And we humans benefit from bacteria in our gut. They're able to help us digest food. We otherwise couldn't digest. So what they discovered is this borosapaca is actually able to digest poisonous leaves, toxic leaves. And the reason why is they have this microbiome that's actually able to work within the gut and detoxify these deadly leaves so that they can digest them. And the bacteria do two things. They detoxify these poisonous leaves, but they also enable the lemur to digest the leaves. The leaves are so fibrous that if it wasn't for that gut bacteria, they wouldn't be able to digest them. But what's exciting about this paper is figuring out how it is that this particular species of lemurs is able to pull us off whereas other primates can't. And they discovered all to do with their social behavior. They have not like sometimes with the chimpanzees, they'll have a social group that numbers a couple under chimpanzees. In the case of this species of lemur, the social groups are around about 20. So it's a much smaller social group. But the social groups overlap. So for example, in some cases where the primates are territorial. You've got one set of baboons, for example. This is our territory. Nobody else is getting in. With this species of lemur, they do permit overlap of their territories. And so there's actually some social engagement from one group to the other. But what these researchers notice is the intensity of the social interaction within the particular small group. And so a couple of things they notice is that they groom one another constantly. They're always involved in the grooming. And they're basically taking parasites off of the bodies of these creatures. But the way they groom is interesting. How chimpanzees and baboons will groom with their fingers. These lemurs groom with what they call tooth combs. And so they got specialized teeth that act like combs. And so they'll use their mouth and their tongue actually to groom the body. And the other thing they do is they scent mark. And so they will rub themselves against trees to mark their territory. But what they notice is that they will actually check out the markings of every member of their group. And so they're going around the different trees and rubbing against the scent marking of another member of their little tribe. And what that has done as these researchers discovered is it's actually created a far more diverse microbiome in the stomachs of these creatures. Because so much of the contact is oral. And so they're able to transmit bacteria, friendly bacteria from one individual to another. Now what we see in other primates is that happens between a mother and a child. The very process of being given birth transfers a microbiome from the mother to the child. We see that in all primates. But what they're seeing with these lemurs is that in addition to that, there is this transfer of the microbiome from one individual to another. So as one individual picks up something in the environment, it can get communicated to all members of the tribe. And as a final test of this, when they actually did the DNA test of different individuals, what they discovered is that the most social and most loyal members of the group were the ones that had the most diverse microbiome and the one that benefited the most from the microbiome that they had. And you would think with all of this oral contact that they would be more susceptible to disease. And they said, yeah, we actually see some of that, but the benefits far outweigh whatever decrements they discovered from this thing. But what I thought was interesting is the very end, is they said it's the very tight family groups that really enhance the benefit of the microbiome and the loyalty they have to one another. And it's like, you know, that's something that we human beings can emulate as well because after all, we're seeing an erosion of the tightness of the family social groups today, and especially the extended family were involving cousins, aunts, and uncles. That's, you wrote it considerably over the past several decades. And maybe we could take a lesson from the lemurs because they certainly seem to be benefiting from this. So anyway, I'll be writing an article on this on my blog, probably come up in a week or two. I thought I'd give you an advance notice on that. And now let's see how far we can get through the book of Ecclesiastes, yes. I'll comment briefly. While you are gone, I mentioned a scientific discovery which approved one of your models, an RTV creation model. Your creation model doesn't really get as much credit as it really deserves in predicting scientific discoveries. One of the things I remember 25 years ago, you predicting that science would find that the earliest life on Earth would be complex and that it would happen as soon as the Earth could support life. And that was discovered recently on a team of an Australian scientist in Greenland found fossil bacteria dating back 3.8 billion years. It was more than one species, which means you were correct. It's an complete ecosystem, not just a single bacteria-like thing. So I thought it was a major discovery because it proves that your models and what you've been saying for 25 years is correct. Well, thank you. And yeah, we are on top of that. I think Fuzz is the one that's writing articles on it. But there's two discoveries. One is they've actually found fossil parts of life that dates back at least 3.7 billion years and hints of 3.8. That's a major advance because until this discovery, all we had was isotope evidence. And incidentally, I think the isotope evidence is very good because what we notice with living systems is that they will consume carbon 12 more readily than carbon 13. They'll consume nitrogen 14 more readily than nitrogen 15 and sulfur 32 more readily than sulfur 34. Something about life systems, we like the lighter isotopes of these elements. And incidentally, you're wondering they're all non-radioactive and so the decay has nothing to do with it. But what they've noticed is that in the carbonaceous inclusions of these rocks that date back 3.8, the oldest is 3.825, they find the isotope signatures that tell us that that carbon is from the decay products of living material. So they don't have the actual fossils, but they have three different isotope signatures that tell us that life was present. And what Dave was saying about the fact that it's not just the simplest microbes, even the more complex ones, because what's interesting is that the photosynthetic bacteria, which are very complex, the simplest bacterium has about 400 gene products, but the simplest photosynthetic one has 1400 and your typical one has 3000 to 4000. What's interesting is you get a slightly different isotope ratio for the photosynthetic microbes and you do the non-photosynthetic microbes and they see both, which basically makes the point that it's an ecology of microbes that you see at the origin of life, not a single bacterium, like you get in a traditional materialistic model for the origin of life, but all life comes from a last universal common ancestor. We don't see that, we actually see an ecology of microbes and we're not just talking one metabolic pathway or two metabolic pathways, they've identified five different metabolic pathways in the isotope signatures. But what is new is to say we not only have the isotope evidence, we actually have fossil parts. Because before that, the oldest fossil parts we had were 3.47 billion years. And that's a brand new discovery as well. I announced a little more than a week ago how the team that went to Australia from UCLA, Bill Schoff's research group, if you wanna read what he has done, he's on record as having found the oldest fossils on the earth while members of his team have gone back to Australia and have found much more definitive evidence of fossils there that date back to 3.5 billion years. And again, it shows a complex ecology of microbes rather than just a single species. So yeah, these are major advances that are telling us, number one, life originated on planet Earth very quickly, not over billions of years, but in a geologic instant. We know that because the conditions just previous to the earliest date for the origins of life rule out the possibility of life existing on the earth. He got an event called the late heavy bombardment which basically sterilizes the planet. And immediately after that, we got life everywhere. So for as one, Niles Eldridge said in his book, he says the very moment that life can possibly exist on the earth, we have life. Life is intrinsic to the earth. It just happens immediately. So it happens very quickly. It's a complex ecology, not just a single species. And we're talking about not just simple microbes but complex microbes as well. And evidently, we're talking a great abundance. It's everywhere. Everywhere where we see these most ancient rocks, we see the signatures of life. It's not just in one or two places. How many gene products again could you call that? Okay, the simplest photosynthetic life form has about 1,450. Your more typical ones, three to 4,000. Now, the isotope signatures are not able to tell you exactly how many gene products. So we know it has to be a minimum of about 1,450. Well, when they talk about the simplest life form having 400 gene products, keep in mind that's a parasitical life form. It can't exist by itself. The simplest life form that can exist by itself has about 1,200 gene products in it. So yeah, but there are parasitical ones that have less because they depend on other microbes to fill in what they can't do for themselves. Yes. The interesting I saw reading the articles is the scientific community obviously very much understood the implications of this last discovery because there were a lot of people upset saying it's too early, it's too complex. You must be wrong. It's too early and too complex. Now, Australia people came back and said, the fossils are there. You can look at them. The rocks were pure. It wasn't mixture, it wasn't contaminated and the fossils were there. So of course they're standing by their discovery. Even though people are very upset at it because they realize the implication that there's no time for evolution. Well, we saw that Fuzeran and I at one of the original flight research conferences we attended where there was a major debate about this fight in Australia. Were these really fossils or were they just things that look like fossils and really had nothing to do with life? And the debate went on literally all day back and forth. What's new about this fight in Australia is it's removed the debate. There's now no question that these really are fossils of living organisms. And so that has settled that debate. But I can remember being present there at the original flight conference and you're right. It was basically atheist researchers coming forward and says this can't possibly be life. Because if it is life, look at the philosophical implications. And none of us likes those implications. So this has got to be wrong. And Bill Shaw stood up and says, I don't like it either. Because he himself is an atheist. He says, I don't like it either. But it doesn't matter whether I like it or not. This is the data. And I believe the data really is the signature of life. So, and I would refer to Bill as a friendly atheist. And we got to talk to him and he just says, you know, this is where I come from. But he says, I'm gonna stand by the data regardless of whether I like it or not. So I found that quite commendable. Yes. So what I understand the evolutionists say is that inanimate material involved in the living material, there's like chemical evolution. And they call that the biogenesis, right? Correct. So there's still no theories about, there's no theories that they have to try to account for that, right? Still, even now, you haven't heard it or run across anything as of lately? Well, late last July, Buzz and I went to the very latest origin of life conference. It was held at UC San Diego. And what we noticed comparing that conference to previous conferences is the ideal biogenesis model is even more troubled today than it was at the previous times. And what I think what was new at that conference is they finally recognize they're really up the creek without a paddle when it comes to trying to get all the amino acids in the left-handed configuration and the ribose sugars right-handed. Because the latest experiments, and they knew this even 20 years ago, that if you want to take a mixture of left and right-handed amino acids and make them all left-handed, you expose it to certainly polarized ultraviolet light. And if it's sufficiently monochromatic, it will destroy the right-handed amino acids at a faster rate than the left-handed. But here's the problem. It does destroy both. It just destroys the right-handed a little more efficiently than the left-handed. But the latest experiments that they announced at this July conference, basically said we've done enough of these experiments now to realize that as you begin to approach purity, in other words, as you begin to get up to 100% left-handed, never got there. They got to about 80-something percent. But what they said is we were able to project and realize that if you actually were trying to go all the way to 100 or close to 100, you wind up with no sample at all. You literally destroy everything. So you mentioned the models in trouble. Did they ever really have a model or did they just kept trying to find it? Well, kind of where they operate from, Doug, is they say, well, you know, one thing we know for sure, God wasn't involved in this at all. So we got to figure out some way to make this work without a God. And so they keep trying these different things, but everything's a dead end. And we're not just talking a problematic dead end. It's, we're looking at intractable problems. You know, and this is one example. Even when you're working in a laboratory where you're controlling everything, you know, what you wind up with, you find the closer you get to purity, the more of the original sample you destroy and nothing's left by the time you get to around 90%. And so it's like, okay, there really doesn't appear to be any materialistic pathway. The other dramatic thing that happened at the conference is they devoted an evening, but they had five of the leading origin of life researchers get up and comment on, are we in a position where we can understand where the building blocks of life molecules come from? And all five got up and said, gave a 10 minute talk, summarizing their research. By the end of the conclusion, the moderator said, okay, yes or no? All five of them said no. Moreover, but they said at the very end, not only have we no understanding where these building blocks come from, we don't even know where the building blocks or the building blocks come from. So, yeah, and that was a new concession made at that conference. If you wanna listen to more of the details of that, Buzz and I did do a podcast where we kind of did a review of what happened over that week long conference at the UC San Diego. And any of you who are interested, we actually have a collection of all the abstracts of those. And that's what's interesting because I noticed in the original life research community, they had these conferences and they speak and they put out all these abstracts but it typically takes three to five years before the peer-reviewed research papers show up in the literature. Which is why Buzz and I go to these conferences whenever they're in North America. Now, if they have them in Mongolia or someplace like that, we don't go because it's too expensive to go, but we do go to everyone that's here in North America. But that's one reason we do it is because we realize we're gonna be exposed to material that won't be published for two, three, four, in some cases, five years. Okay, can we get into Ecclesiastes? All right, chapter 11. It says, cast your bread upon the waters. For after many days, you'll find it again. Give portions to seven, yes to eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land. And then it goes on in verse three.  Whether a tree falls to the south or the north in the place where it falls, there will lie. Whoever watches the wind will not plant. Whoever looks at the clouds will not reap. As you do not know the path of the wind or how the body is formed within the mother's womb, so you cannot understand all the works of God, the maker of all things. So your seed in the morning and in evening, let not your hand be idle, you do not know which will succeed, whether this or that or whether both will do equally well. Now, typically when you read commentaries on these verse eight verses of Ecclesiastes 11, it's interpreted in the context of economics. In other words, diversify your investments because you don't know which investment's gonna succeed and which one will fail. There you go, money, investor's guide. All right, somebody's already following that advice. Or others will say, well, I think this applies to agriculture and you wanna diversify your agriculture because you don't know which crop is gonna succeed and which crop will fail. And that's particularly true in the early history of humanity when the climate was a lot less stable than it is right now. And so this is often interpreted as investment. But keep in mind the larger context of the book of Ecclesiastes is that it's a guide to help us reach the fool.  Be careful when you use that word because in our English culture, we kind of interpret it in a negative context every time. As we've mentioned here in the class before, there are five different Hebrew words that are translated as fool. The one of the book of Ecclesiastes is predominantly addressing is the one who says there is no God. The fool said in his heart, there is no God. Now, yeah, the ball, exactly. And that may be a very rational, logical person, maybe a very morally upright person, but it's basically someone as a philosophical worldview, there is no God. And I need to live by life accordingly. And so if we interpret the book of Ecclesiastes and incidentally, this isn't the only interpretation. It's one of many interpretations that this is a handbook and how we who are followers of Jesus Christ can reach people who have this viewpoint that there is no God. Okay, so what I wanna do is kinda take you through these eight verses in that context. How can we interpret this as a guide to help us reach people who say how there is no God? Well, cast your bread upon the waters. I'm basically suggesting what it's saying. And I think this is backed up by what else we see in the book of Ecclesiastes. Don't just use one technique or one method and try to persuade someone who thinks there is no God that there really is a God. Have a variety of tools in your chest. You don't know what's gonna work on a particular individual. After all, everyone that has this feeling in their heart that there is no God, they're all different. You're not gonna reach them with the same tool every time. And being a professional apologist, I kinda see this as a criticism of a lot of my peers. A lot of them go out and train people and say, this is a silver bullet. Use this trick and it'll work every time. Well, it'll work on a certain small segment of the community of people who believe there is no God. This passage is telling us you want a diverse tool chest. So, one of the cards I hand out when I speak in churches basically is a card that says these are the four categories of scientific evidences that typically prove to be helpful in persuading people that there's a God. I purposely put four there because I don't want people to think there's gonna be one that will always work at one time. But they're the four that statistically have had the biggest impact. Namely, talk about the origin of the universe. Talk about the design of the universe and a planetary system that make possible our existence. Talk about the origin of life and talk about the origin of humanity. Those four have always risen to the top with people who have that mindset. Now, there's obviously more than those four, but what I do in purpose is try to communicate to people, hey, don't just look at the origin of the universe as the only tool you need. There's a diversity here and depending on a person's background, one might impact them more than the other. And frankly, as I've been engaging educated people who have this point of view that there is no God, it doesn't take just one bullet. They need many. And so one reason why I developed those four that comes from Anthony Blue, who was probably the most famous atheist debater of the 20th century. But he wound up late in his life in his 80s becoming a theist. And what he said to people was the four evidences that changed me from being an atheist to a theist was the origin of the universe, the design of the universe to make possible our existence, the origin of life and the origin of human beings. And he's not alone. Many of his ilk have also named those four. Now, obviously there's more, but that's kind of the point of this text here. Make sure you got a diverse tool chest of apologetics tools, which is why you got more than one book and more than one DVD and the table over there. And you know, people tell me, okay, what's the best thing I can get off the resource table to reach my father who's not a Christian? My response is, well, tell me about your father. Because I mean, not all fathers are gonna be reached by the same tool. And so, you know, they've been raised in the church. They've had an exposure to the Bible. What is their main objection to the idea that there's a God? And then I'll recommend one. Why don't you start with that? But I always tell people that. Start with this particular book. Don't end with that book. That's gonna be the door opener. And then you're gonna want to expose it to other resources. Moreover, don't just give them a book or a DVD. I think that's great. I do that all the time. I mean, I'm giving away stuff to people I meet.  And... And... Well, you'd be amazed at how many people I've been able to influence who've come to do some plumbing or some electrical work on their home. Or, you know, the people who have been working on the power poles or trees in the backyard. Almost every time I'm able to engage and figure out what their issue is and say, this is a book I think you need to start with. But here's the trick. When you give them something, arrange to have a follow-up meeting two, three weeks later, not more than a month later, and just say, hey, why don't you think of that resource I gave you? And they might say, oh, I haven't had a chance to pick it up yet. But they'll say, you know what, I've been meaning to pick it up, so no problem. How about if we get together for a month from now? Then it gives them time to get it. And then you get to sit down. And at that meeting, you can figure, okay, what's the next tool I need to give them? And so kind of look at it as a process. And that's kind of what this text is saying. And the last time I was here in class, three of you came up to me and asked me, okay, I've been praying for a relative or a friend to come to faith in Christ. And nothing's been happening. And so you'll tell me about your prayers. And what I've been discovering is that they're basically making the same prayer over and over again. So you know what, God hears you the first time. You don't have to repeat it. And actually there's a couple of texts in Matthew and Luke where Jesus says, don't pray like the Pharisees pray or like the Gentiles pray where they do these repetitious prayers. And you know, that's kind of the common denominator we see with people in other religions. You look at the Buddhists, the Hindus, you look at the Muslims, they do these rote prayers over and over again. Sometimes every day they make the same prayer. And basically we have Jesus telling us in Luke and Matthew, don't pray that way. Or it can take you to this text, diversity, okay? God hears you saying, I want my son to come to faith in Jesus Christ or I want my uncle to come to faith in Jesus Christ. Okay, how do you want that to happen? And then you might say, okay, I think this is how I'd like it to happen. And get God permission to shake his head and say, no, no, no, that's not the way I wanna do it. And then you pray again. And diversity of prayer. God wants you to be engaged with him. He will act when you pray according to his will. But he wants you to work with him on discovering exactly what that will is. And it may be that God says, you know what? I'm gonna do all four of the things that you asked me to do and bringing your mother to faith in Jesus Christ. But I don't like the order. Can we change the order around? And can I add a fifth thing? That requires being involved in God with diverse prayers, specific prayers. Now you say, well, how are you pulling that out of the text? I'm just saying there's a general principle here. And given the larger context of the book of Ecclesiastes, at least in one context is a handbook and how to reach these people to say there is no God. I think it's appropriate to apply it in this particular way. Notice too, as you move from verse three to verse eight, it's basically saying, stay busy. Notice the exhortations throughout here. Don't look for excuses to be idle. Basically make the comment about the farmer. Hey, if you're worried about the wind, you're never gonna plant. If you're worried about the rain, now you're never going to reap. And so things might happen, it might be unpleasant, but keep yourselves busy. So even if it's not working, keep yourself busy. And so again, I think we can apply that to our ministry of trying to reach people who say there is no God. Stay at it, keep busy. Make sure you retain what it says in first beat or three. Be gracious, be gentle, be respectful, but stay engaged. It makes a big impression on the non-Christian when you maintain engagement in their life and where it's not repetitious. You're engaging them in different ways. But that's what you see for verse three and following. Okay, cast your bread upon the waters. Be diverse in what you're trying to do, but don't let yourself be idle. After all, you only got a few decades here in the face of the earth, don't waste your time. Stay busy, or you do not know what will succeed. And so again, it's making the point, don't worry about the failures. It's through failures that you actually come up with success. And that was a tip I got when I first started my undergraduate physics research.  Same thing with these problem assignments they give us. I remember one, we had this one physics professor, and he wanted to be fired for what he did. But what he did is he gave us an assignment December 15th, and it was 100 problems that we had to solve. And it took about a little more than 100 pages to leave the whole solution. It was due Christmas Eve at his house. And so, and it literally took us, working nonstop all week to finish those problems and deliver them to his door. And he said, I got a Christmas present for you when we delivered the problem assignment. It was a second problem assignment. That was his Christmas present to each one of us. And he says, this one is due New Year's Eve. So this quote time off we had between Christmas and New Year's was all consumed by this one professor. However, I learned something, as I said, the chairman of the physics department wound up firing him for being, quote, cruel to his undergraduate students. So, I didn't complain, but several others did. But I learned something from him. He says, you know, these problems are really difficult. And the only way you're gonna get a passing grade on this assignment is to learn from your failures. So yeah, work on the problems and don't get discouraged when you don't get the right answer. And you know, when you fail, that's gonna show you the pathway towards the correct answer. And sometimes it takes six or seven failures before you finally figure it out. And his comment was, look, I'm wanting to train you not just to be good theoreticians, but to be good experimentalists. Because when you're in a lab, the same principle applies. Don't be discouraged by things that don't work or by your failures. It's through your failures you'll be able to figure out how to actually make the experiment work and not to be resourceful. And incidentally, as one things I really appreciate about my education at the University of British Columbia, they really stress resourcefulness. So for example, we would go into a laboratory setting and there'd be almost no equipment on the table at all and we need to do this complex experiment. That I remember one where we had to measure the surface tension of this fluid that we'd be pulling out of an eyedropper. And I said, okay, we got the eyedropper. What else do we have here? And we quickly realized we needed a thermometer. Well, there's no thermometer. We needed a clock. There was no clock. And so what we had to figure out is, well, you know what? Our blood temperature is about 98.6 degrees and we got this tap here. We did have a little sink with a tap in it. And so we could pour water out of it. And we knew in Vancouver that the water was always the same temperature as it came off of the snow melt off the mountains. So we knew the temperature difference. We actually attached between, what we did is put it underneath our tongue, which is about a degree less than your body temperature and then attached it to the little thing where the water was coming out. So that was our thermometer. And then for a clock, we used our heart rate. And so we were able to figure it out to an in 10% precision. But a lot of the students got nowhere. They just couldn't get started. And they kept doing that to us anyway. That's a walk of subject. But the whole point is you don't know the pathway by which you will succeed. And the only way you're gonna figure it out is keep trying and don't let the failure stop you. The failure to tell you what is wrong, when you figure out enough stuff that's wrong, eventually you'll reach into the path that is right. Kind of like doing a jigsaw puzzle, right? The piece doesn't fit, try another piece. That doesn't fit, try another piece. Eventually you'll find the piece that fits. And so how to rule that all out. I don't see Jackie Stewart here. There was one time when we were trying to do, we did a lesson here on how to fit together passages in a consistent way. And this is when I was in my 30s. And people were struggling. So what I did the next Sunday, I came with a jigsaw puzzle box for every person in the class. And basically said, I want you to work up the principles of how to put together a jigsaw puzzle the fastest way possible. There's a procedure. It's basically a procedure whereby you figure out how can I minimize the number of errors I'm making before I find the correct error. And there's a strategy. And so it took the class two separate Sunday lessons before they actually figured out the best strategy for doing this. But afterwards a bunch of them bought jigsaw puzzles.  Now that I can beat all my relatives at this, I think I'm going to start enjoying this. But again, it's kind of a principle here. Keep occupied, don't give up, because that often happens when people are doing hard jigsaw puzzles.  Say no, keep learning from your mistakes and keep trying to figure out the best principles. There's a way to minimize the number of dead ends that you'll come across. Okay, that's the first aid verses. And then it jumps into verses, actually seven through 10. White is sweet and it pleases the eye to see the sun. However, many a year a man may live, let him enjoy them all. But let him remember the days of darkness, for they will be many. Everything to come is meaningless. Be happy, young man, while you're young and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth. Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see. But know that for all these things God will bring you to judgment. So, and then it goes on into chapter 12, which we'll see in the next page, an exhortation to the young man or the young woman. And basically saying, when you're young, all your days look sunny. But in your youth, remember, days of darkness will come. Okay, and for those of you that are young here in the class, talk to somebody who's 20 or 30 years older and say, have you ever had a bad day in your life? I'll bet you they'll be able to tell you about a few bad days of that in your life. And the point to this text is, young man, young woman, it's gonna happen to you too. And for a lot of young people, it's already happened. In fact, my parents said it's a miracle that any teenager makes it to their 20 because of all the risks they take during their youthful years. And now that my sons are in their 20s, they're starting to tell me stories of things that they did that they never told me that they did. And it's like. It's safe now. It's safe now. I'm horrified to learn what they did. It's like, you could have killed yourself doing that. It's like, you don't think about that in the days of your youth. But basically what this text is saying is, in the days of your youth, you need to think about that. Darkness will come. There will be hard times. That happens to everybody. Nobody has a life that's peaches and cream all the way through. If you live long enough, it will happen. And it doesn't take very many years before you start experiencing those things. But then it says at the very end here, know that for all these things, God will bring you to judgment. Because a lot of the darkness that comes into our life, it's not the fault of our environment.  Incidentally, that happens to everybody. I could have you come forward and get testimonies. Have you ever done anything in your life that you've really regretted that had consequences that were very painful for you?  And if you're my age, you can probably come up with 30 or 40 stories, okay? This does happen. But there's a promise here. God will bring it to judgment. No. I think a good cross-reference to this is what happened to King David, okay? King David sinned and he brought calamity upon his own life. And God sent him a prophet. And David acknowledged what he did. He repented of what he did. And the prophet said, God will forgive. But there will be consequences. And I think that's something we'll need to remember.  It doesn't mean he removes the consequences of those. And if you look at David's life, what did he do? He took Uriah's life and it took his wife. But what were the consequences? Because that's what the prophet said, is that okay, you're forgiven, but there will be consequences upon you, upon your family, and upon this nation. Anybody remember what those were? Absalon. Absalon. Absalon? Baby that died. He had a baby that died. Okay, how many of his sons were impacted by what he did? All of them. Yeah, well, we don't know exactly how many he had, but the ones that are all named in the Bible, the four big characters, Solomon was the only one that escaped. The other four. Yeah, so it wasn't just Absalon. And you can imagine the grief that brought in to David's life and of his wife as well. So, and it continued on into the next generation. So, Solomon suffered the consequences. Then it went beyond Solomon's life as well. Yes. People say God forgives our sins, and we put them as far as he's from the way. Is that just like a way of describing grace, or I mean, does he actually forget? He's on this, right? He actually forgets, okay? God knows everything, but he says with respect to your sins, I choose to forget. Now that's in comforting because when we pass from this life and enter into heaven with God, it's very tempting to be so embarrassed what we did here on earth, that we start saying, oh, yes, I did this and this, and God's gonna step forward and says, I don't even know what you're talking about. Okay, you may have not forgotten, but you've forgotten. They've been erased by what Jesus Christ did for you on the cross. That's when God chose to forget all the sins that you've ever committed past, present, and future. Now, there are consequences because although God forgives, God everybody else is forgiven. And so this is the problem with David.  And incidentally, I've told you this before, I don't care how good of a Christian you are, when you pass from this light to the next light, you're gonna be going through the first Corinthians three fire. It says, we'll pass through a fire. And what is that fire? It's God taking all the dross out of our life. He basically uses the analogy of taking impure silver and putting it through a fire so you come out with pure silver. And basically making the point, God wants to make sure when you enter into heaven and the new creation, everything obnoxious about you is gone.  And have you ever met a Christian who's 100% non-obnoxious? Doesn't happen. Every one of us is obnoxious to some degree. And it mentions that first Corinthians three, some more so than others, right? Well, I think that's gonna be true with a lot of us. Well, what happened to you? There are actually some that I wanna be around right now. So, but actually it's making this, this is an echo of all of this text here, is why don't you make that refining fire as least painful as possible? Take care of the obnoxious stuff now. You know, you're young, don't be idle, work on this because it's gonna minimize what you're gonna have to go through with the first Corinthians three fire, incidentally.  But yeah, the exhortation here is, why don't you minimize that now? Because it's gonna make things a lot easier when you go through that refining fire. I see them at a time. However, I think we're gonna wrap up chapter 12 next week and then we're gonna jump into Isaiah. What I hope to do next week is actually give you the handouts of all the questions that I want us to go through so you can actually be pondering this. Because I don't wanna be in a situation where I've been before, where I had no questions. Everybody's got a blank look on their face. So this will be your chance. Like, especially. Yeah. Exactly, okay. Let that down, yeah. We'll begin with a little introduction to that as well. So let me compound prayer, Father in Heaven. We thank you for this time. We've had here this morning and this afternoon. And Lord, we thank you for the life of King Solomon and all the experiences you took him through and all the lessons that through him we can learn and appreciate that we can be delivered from a lot of the pain that he experienced in his life. And Father, I do pray that you'd help us to diversify our evangelistic and apologetic stools, our prayer light in such a way that we can see your hand that's guiding us in how we pray and how we act. So Lord, make us more intimate and fruitful partners with you and our service to you here on earth in Jesus' name. Amen.