We're here at ITU Telecom World 2012 in Dubai, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Amobula Johnson, who is Minister for the Ministry of Communication Technology of Nigeria. Amobula, thank you very much for being with us today. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. I'd like to talk to you about the radical transformation that's going on in the ICT sector, and what for you is the principal opportunities arising from this? I think the greatest opportunities for us in Nigeria is just the opportunity of inclusive development. The fact that ICTs become really a level for everybody, and they really become a means by which you can include the population that is not typically included in development. They live in the rural areas that are disadvantaged, they're economically disadvantaged, they're socially disadvantaged. All of those things, ICTs can actually help to bring them in to the former part of the economy and help us to begin to close that digital divide that we all talk about. What have been the major challenges in the Africa region? The biggest challenge really is broadband, is getting that broadband infrastructure out, because when I say inclusive development it sounds very compelling, but you've got to get the connectivity and the access to the rural areas, and when you look at countries like many African countries where a large portion of our population is actually in those rural areas, the challenge is really getting that connectivity, whether it's fiber or satellites or whatever it is, getting to the rural areas at a cost that is affordable to the people in the rural areas, and also of course at a speed that makes sense to them as well. And how have you been managing to overcome these challenges? We've used, to a certain extent, our universal service funds, basically from the 2% of the annual operating revenue from the telecoms companies, and we've used that primarily, at least over the last two years, we've focused primarily on using those funds to subsidise our private sector operators to going into those areas, and we've also used them to subsidise the purchase of devices, because it's not only about getting broadband there, it's so people have the mobile phones and the tablets and the computers to access that infrastructure. We've talked about the challenges. What's your vision or response to address the opportunities that are obviously being brought about by this incredible transformation? There are tremendous opportunities, and I think for us in Nigeria, today, ICT contributes about 5% of our economy, and when we're looking at, with the transformation agenda of our president, it's to diversify the economy away from oil and gas. So ICT is really a very veritable means of actually diversification. So there are opportunities in software development, there are opportunities in device assembly, there are opportunities in broadcasting, and so our vision, basically in one sentence, is to increase the contribution of ICTs to GDP, and that comes about by various things, not only the inclusive development, but also the commerce and the business that comes out of the opportunity of having ICTs available to people. So you're optimistic for the future of ICTs in the region? Absolutely optimistic. It's a way forward for sure. And finally, we're here at ITU Telecom World 2012. Tell us a little bit about your presence here and why you think this event is important. This is actually, I mean, Nigeria has been represented here several times, but this is actually my second time. I was just made minister before the last ITU. I think the reason we're here is, well, there's seven reasons why we're here. First of all, it's to just be aware of what is happening around the world. I think the conversations that are going on right now are really very, very important for us as we take ICTs forward. And sometimes they're actually in validation for what we're doing in Nigeria, because you hear what other countries are doing, how they've been successful, the mistakes that they've made, and you learn from that and you take it to Nigeria. But there are many things that they're doing that we're doing as well. So it's validation for our strategy, validation for what we're doing. And finally, it's an opportunity to showcase Nigeria. We've got a very nice pavilion here. We brought some young innovators, people that are doing tremendous things, young Nigerians that are doing tremendous things in IT. And we're hoping that we can showcase this to the world. And of course, it's an opportunity to tell other countries that Nigeria is a great place to invest. There are many investment opportunities. So many reasons why we're here. And this year actually, again, just to validate the fact that ICT is very important to the Nigerian economy, our vice president has been here over the last two days. He was at the opening ceremony, gave the remarks at the leaders forum. And so that just shows that this is important, and we're taking it very seriously. Marbella Johnson, thank you very much indeed for being with us today.


Good morning. My name is Kannan Mughalya. I'm a professor in chemical engineering. I have been asked by Professor Fartek to come and deliver this lecture on latex. How many of you already use latex? Everybody uses latex. Who doesn't use latex? Is there anyone who doesn't use latex? So why are we doing this lecture? Only people who know latex have come. How many students are in the class? 19. Those of you who have been using latex for more than one year, can you raise your hand? More than one year. More than five years. People who just started using latex, raise your hand. Are there some people? So I'm happy that I didn't come prepared because it would have been a waste of time. Had I come prepared, what I will do is I will share some experience that I have had in using latex. So I have been using latex at least for 15 years. It's something that I don't claim to be an expert. In the sense I don't write style files and things like that. But I'm very comfortable in using it and in fact it is very difficult for me to start using word for example. LibreOffice Writer. How many of you use LibreOffice Writer? So I find it difficult to do and sometimes things don't work. I have a tough time trying to figure out why things don't work. And of course I always go to Google to find out the solution. Google works for latex also. You know the basics. Then as you experience it, as you use it, you see that your skills become better and better. More importantly, you find that there are a lot of things that the community has developed and left on the net. You can just download and use them. So I'm going to circulate two books that we wrote on latex. I haven't got the other two. So this is a book that I wrote in 2007 and I took 10 years to write this book. Based on the experience in teaching this course at IIT Bombay to our MTech students who come from various engineering colleges who have various backgrounds. So I wanted to teach a course that will be good for all of them. Then I wanted to write this book. Of course I delivered that course many times through C-Deep. It was transmitted. So for that I created many slides. I created examples. I created pictures, drawings and things like that. So in 2007, John Wiley and Sons, this was published at the UK office and they got it reviewed at four different places. One reviewer in North America. One reviewer in Europe. Third reviewer in continental. Second was in continental Europe. Third was UK. Fourth was Australia and Japan. So because this is for the international market. They thought it was okay. While writing, they also asked me will you be able to give camera ready copies for this book? I wasn't sure. In fact, one of my friends, one of my colleagues in electrical engineering said don't agree to that because they will want you to do a lot of precise adjustments because it's John Wiley. And you may not be able to do it will take a lot of your time. So I said I cannot do the final correction, but I will do the, you know, more or less final. So then he said the person whom I was negotiating with in John Wiley and Sons, he said in that case I won't give you all the money I have kept for writing this book. They do have some money. I'll give you only 1000 pounds. Other money I'm going to keep for final correction. But it turned out that they didn't have to make any changes. Okay. And I lost that other money because I did the whole thing. Okay. You will see I'm going to circulate this book. You will see in every figure also it has lots of figures, more than 100 figures. Probably it has 1000 equations. Right. You can see in figures also the symbols, mathematical symbols are the same symbols as in the text.  What software do you use to create a figure? Do you create a latex output in that? Because I have not used it. You'll have to find out because one of the things that you would like to do is sometimes you have mathematical symbols. You have mathematical symbols in running text. Right. And you say, see that figure and you want to see that symbol there. The output variable, you know, some C or zeta does that symbol zeta in the figure same as the one in the text. Okay. If you do that, if you make them identical, it's something that somebody like John Wiley would want. Okay. Those are the things that made very easy. And so this is one book which I'm going to pass around. And I can tell you that if I didn't use latex, it would have taken many more years to write it. In fact, I can't imagine doing this in Word or LibreOffice Writer and still making sure that it will be correct. It'll be correct. All cross references will be correct. Right. So that that I would not have been and of course the get up the second book that I wrote. Actually, I made a promise to my wife after writing this book that I won't write another book. Okay, because I took 10 years and I was there all the time. And in fact, my I feared that if I wrote another book, there will be a divorce at home. So I didn't dare write a book. Okay. But she was surprised that I wrote this book. She asked me, when did you write this book? She didn't even know this. I wrote this book along with my staff members. I think there are 10 to 12 people, 10 people here. They're all my staff members. We wrote this book in one week. Of course, it just explains an EDA tool called Askad. We wrote a similar book on Arduino, Arduino microcontroller. We wrote another book that was that took a little longer, but maybe 10, 12 days because that required quite a bit of validation of the hardware connection. But this one didn't have any of them. We had a software. We wanted to explain it and we had 10 people. Then I said, look, we have to plan it out one week. We will produce this book. So we formed a management team and the work was allocated to various people. They will do this. This person will do this. This person will generate pictures and so on and so forth. But if I didn't tell you all the story, if you read this book, you will not know that it was written by 10 people. The consistency that you have in this book is amazing. I can tell you that there are no mistakes in cross-referencing. All figure numbers, table numbers, chapter numbers are exact. There are no mistakes. How does it work? He is writing. He is giving a chapter number. I'm using it. He has got a figure number. Somebody else is using it. But still it is correct. No mistakes. So it is possible with latex. I can assure you that it is not possible with any other software. It may be possible, but it may require a lot of work. I want to ask you, now that more people have come, is there anyone who doesn't use latex here? So I think you should learn. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to circulate these two books. You can just have a look at it, pass it around. So this is one week book. This is 10 year book. I don't want you to understand anything. We are not going to ask any questions on this. I just want you to see the type setting. While we are going through this, because all of you already know latex, I'll tell one more story. In our MTech program, I had an MTech student from Mumbai, I think Bharti with the Apeed or some college like this. And he wrote the seminar report. Seminar report is compulsory in the first semester. And he produced a terrible report at a tough time. And I asked him, why is it so bad? So he said, he said, oh, it kept formatting it by itself. What he meant was in word, you connect it to a printer, prints differently. Okay. You open it and then open it. You make some change. It has changed everything subsequently. And it has made a lot of changes. That's what he meant. And he got a C, CC, I think. That means he just barely passed. Then I told him after the seminar, so he came and talked to me. I said that his performance wasn't so bad. He did actually well. His English was weak. But nevertheless, he did a good amount of work. I thought he deserved something better than a CC. So I told him, one of the problems is that you are unable to, you know, write it, produce a good report because of the method that you have used. Please use latex. So I taught him to use latex. And next presentation, I think it was the first stage, he got an A. And they said, fantastic work.  Okay. I know he improved. Okay. And then so I always tell my students after that experience, if you write your report in latex, you get one grade higher, minimum, okay, because of the get up and so on, you can produce it in any other software also, perhaps, but that will require a lot of work. That will require a lot of work you can do without that. You can do it fairly comfortably. Okay. So I want now from the audience, I'm going to ask you some questions now that you have used latex. Can somebody tell me what in your opinion is one powerful feature of latex? Any one of you can tell or a feature that you like. Formulas can be written easily. Right. So you don't need another software for that. All mathematical symbols can be written. And for people who know programming, it is very logical. Begin this and this and then open braces, close braces for fractions, hours, all kinds of things. Okay. Very nice. Okay. Anything else? Cross referencing is very good. What all who said that? Yeah. What other what what all cross referencing have you done? Table number. Okay. External reference. Meaning like internet. Citations. Citations. Okay. For the references at the end of the book. Okay. What else? Now customization will take up. I want to finish this numbering. So the book that I'm passing around, I told you that I have about 1000 equations. Okay. I always ask people, you have written a report with let's say hundreds of equations and your guy asks you to remove the first equation. Okay. Now the numbering will start from 234. Okay. Of course, the number latex will automatically change it to 123. But what was to has become one now. What was 99 has become 98 now and so on. Right. But what about referring to those equations in the text? Okay. So you put a label and in the second pass to pass compilation, compiles it first time, assigns values to all symbols in the second pass, it picks up those values from the table and puts it. Right. How many of you have used automatic referencing? Or how many of you have not used automatic referencing? Is there anybody? Some of you, you may want to use that. Okay. So for example, so if you say, let's say you say something like g of s equals frag numerator over. The moment you write an equation like this, then you say slash label. Now you put something. So that's where the variable that you create and then you can refer to this. So for example, if I say equation one, so my symbol is called equation one, then I want to refer to it. So what do you say in equation reference? Yeah, transfer function g of s is defined. So this is how I would write the text. So what I have done is instead of calling it because I can compile it and see that the equation number is one. I can refer to it. I can just say in equation one, that will be the easiest thing to do. But if I do this at the time of compilation, actually I don't know what number this equation is going to take. I'm saying whatever number is assigned to it should be used here. Whatever number I define here should be used here. If it is chapter one dash 52, this will be chapter one dash 52. Whatever is defined here, whatever is assigned here will be used here. So this equation numbering is extremely good. So you can do this for, you can also say this was defined in slash page ref slash ref. So I think page ref, I think this should not be there. In the place of ref you say page ref, slash page ref bracket equation one. When I have a doubt, I always go and check whether it is page ref. Page ref. So that is correct. Then it will say in page. So in fact I would say in page, is this coming? In page page ref. That's how it will come. So I can actually demonstrate this. Begin document. Begin equation. Let's say g of s equals rack n of s p of s. End equation. Just compile it first. pdf let's take test. Test.pdf. When we later, I'll hold it here and I can make it bigger. So a very simple equation that I generated. And it has an equation number one. So let me write one more thing. Equation array. Equation array. I have to put this, put this. I could have used a line also. This is what I normally do. N of s equals, let me just try if it works. Let me take errors. It's not happy with this. I'm going to switch over to something that I like. Let me use a line. For this, I need a package called ms math. The same thing. Anything is I should not use. So here is a simple thing. I'm just using an environment called a line. In order to define this environment, I have to use a ms math. That is a package I have used. Anyway, we are discussing the numbers. Numbering, automatic numbering. Let's say n of s is n0 plus n1 s plus n2 s2. s to the power 2 plus c dots. This is how it is coming. I'll keep it here. So now I can write it, modify it, compile it. It will come here. So supposing I want to put something like n underscore capital N, s to the power capital N. Save it, compile it, and you see that you've got the new nn s to the power n. It comes. So it's a very effective kind of a thing. You have to use a pdf viewer that remains the keeps the focus on the same page because some will refresh or may not refresh. So you'll have to reload once again. And you'll have to go to that particular page, which is a pain. You'll have to close a pdf viewer, which will keep the focus in the same place and will also refresh automatically. If you do that, then it is very effective. You make a change, see it immediately. Make a change, see it immediately. You can do that. Now if I say in equation 2, the numerator transfer function is defined. In equation 2, the numerator transfer function is defined. Actually I can stretch it a little bit. I have more space here. So we can see that. What happens if I get rid of this first equation? So your guide says get rid of the first equation. And now it has become 1 here. It has become 2 here. So what do we do? This when we put the label. So we say slash label equation. Then I say in equation reference, equation 2. So I see that I put a label there. So the label is assigned a value in the first compilation. pdf latex is the compilation process. And in the second time it is assigned. So let me compile it. Now it says that it is not defined yet. Now it is 1. In equation 1, the numerator transfer function is defined. What I will do is now I will get rid of this. I will compile it. It says 1 now because this is the value in the symbol table previously. I compile it once more and it picks it. It picks it. So this is a very powerful feature. Of course the page ref is another one that I told you. I have said that this equation is defined in page ref equation 2. This is no big deal because the whole thing is quarter page. I need not give a page. I know page number. It is in 1. But imagine you are writing your thesis. Sometimes it is useful. One of the things that in my book I said, who has that book? Digital control. I said anything I referred to, within last 2-3 pages, I will just say go and see it. But anything above 10 pages, I will always say defined in page number this. To make it easy for the reader. It is a 500 page book, 600 page book. And you refer to something defined 200 pages ago, we will have a tough time turning over. And late take use is free of cost. It does not cost anything. So automatic numbering is extremely useful. Page numbers, equation numbers, table number, chapter number, section number. Anything, even if you have an enumerated list, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you want to refer to the fifth point in that list somewhere. So you can refer to that. In the list, point number 5 is this. Then it does not matter who comes and changes, whether your friend, partner, whoever, your enemy adds one line, removes one line. It is still the same. So it is very good for group effort. The next was about citation. Somebody said citation, right? Citation. Citation is very useful because sometimes you write a paper, you send it. And the paper says that the journal author says, editor says, this is not good enough, you know, send it somewhere else. Or even in the same journal, he says, this is fine. We are happy with your work, but we need to have the referencing in a different style. What style do you all use? Have you used bibliography? Have you used BipTec? In case you haven't used, I wanted to show you. So that's why I picked. So you see in our web page, spoken-tutorial.org. By the way, we have got many awards for this effort. If you go there, you can see the links for this. In fact, Google thought that it was a very good idea what we were doing and they gave a research award. So what you have to do is from this pull-down menu, you choose Laetic. We dub the spoken part into many Indian languages. So you can choose English here. The search. And then it gives you 12 videos here. It gives a playlist. It gives you the order in which you have to listen to. So we have one of them called. So by the way, how many of you use Windows? Other people use the Linux? Very good. Happy with that. So for Windows people also, it is useful. You can run the same thing. You can take the source code. Just put it into, you know, suppose you decide to switch over to Linux and no problem, whatever you generated, take all the source file, copy it. It'll work without any problem. Several years ago, I switched over from a Linux machine to Mac. And then I had by the time already written a book on optimization, which I am not circulating. I just took the same thing. I just have to define the default directory in Linux. It is slash home, something, something, username. Whereas in Mac, it is default directories slash users, something. So I just had to create a symbolic link that whenever it looks for slash home, it should go to slash users. That's the only change I had to make. Then later compile without any other change. The whole thing worked without any problem. So that kind of thing is not possible in any other machine. So anyway, coming back later on Windows, what is compiling is a, by the way, these are all about 10-minute tutorials. So I would want you to read in case anybody is interested in learning latex. You learn using this how to establish using tech works. We recommend tech works. How many of you use tech works? Is there anybody? Okay. Of course, I always use Emacs and PDF latex. You're welcome to use in case you want to use an editor for this purpose. I recommend latex works because it works. Because it works on Mac. It works on Windows. It works on Linux, all three. Okay. So that you don't even have to learn the editor that integrated development environment if you change your system. What is compiling? Letter writing, report writing, mathematical type setting, equations. So let me just show you what mathematical type setting looks like. Welcome to this tutorial on basic mathematics type setting using latex. Notice three windows, match dot. Let me advance it a little bit. I'm not sure whether you can see. Similarly, we write beta, gamma, delta and so on. Let's see what happens when we compile this. Let me use it and open it in Chrome because I'm unable to something. One can get a complete list of such symbols from standard textbooks on latex or from the Internet. We will next take up the concept of spaces in mathematical expressions. Before we do this, let's delete these. Welcome to this tutorial on basic mathematics type setting using latex. So let me advance it a little bit. Gamma, delta and so on. Let's see what happens when we compile this. So you can see that the way I have created this tutorial. In fact, I created them myself. You can also see that I generated them in 2007. Because some students of mine wanted, you know, said, can you please create some tutorials? We have difficulty in using latex. We know it is very good, but we have a tough time using it. Can you please create it? So that's when I created most of them. TechWorks was created by my staff member. I'll use this. Then I say equations, tables and figures. How many of you have used Beamer? Some of you have used Beamer. Beamer is very nice because it is useful to make presentations. The same equations can be used. Same thing, cut and paste from your latex document into this with some minor adjustment. You will see that it applies. Bibliography is something that I would recommend. It will increase your productivity immensely. Once again, you might have, in your thesis, you might have 50 references. And then you suddenly found some other author you wanted to insert. At the time of examination, somebody says you missed out this important reference.  So this is two whatever equations and numbering and so on. Now let's go to the next point that somebody said. You can define your own commands. That's what you mentioned. Who said that? Because we are just still going through advantages of latex. I think we will probably finish this lecture just by discussing that. It is, latex is a, you know, it is programmable. You can define your own commands. Very powerful. I am going to illustrate this with a command that I, as a teacher, as a faculty member, use extensively, day in and day out. Suppose I give a question paper, let's say a quiz, conduct a quiz, or a mid-sum exam. So I have questions, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on. And then I have answers for them also. I want to keep the question and answer together. By the way, how many of you are teachers who taught in some class or other, some college or other? Is there anybody? There is nobody? You will find, once you become a faculty member, you will find immense use for this. Because over a period of time, you set a lot of papers and you have a lot of answers also for that. For every question, you have an answer. But at the time of exam, you don't want to release the answer to them. So you want to suppress all the answers and give it. But when the exam is over, you want to unsuppress. You want to give all the answers. So for that, there is a very nice command, very simple command. I will also explain that command. But I will first demonstrate it. So this is mid-semester exam. We just concluded last week. So I will show with that 016 exams. Don't worry about all the equations and so on. Let me just show you this. So this is my mid-semester exam. You can see question. I have answer also. Similarly, second problem, there is a question here on the answer terms. Now this I wrote so that we can start the grading. I gave it to my TAS. Start the grading. Here is the solution for the question. Now what I can do is if I go and change this, I have a command called eat answer. I have removed that. That means it's going to eat the answer.  Let me do this for big quiz. 02 big quiz.tech. Let me close this. Close this. Can be corrected just that it will take couple of minutes. 02. F. Actually I should do, because I like this because it comes in two columns. So once again you can see that problem, question, answer. Similarly question 2, answer and so on.  Compile it and you see the whole thing has come in one page. It's very useful to teachers. All the exams that I have conducted, since the time I found this command, I have got solutions. Otherwise I'll have to search. I generated 100 equations in the last five years, but I don't know which answer is for which question. Because you will have two versions, one for keeping question and answer, another one to give it to the students. The moment you have two versions, there are management problems. You make a correction in one, you forget to correct the other one. Here it is the same version used. So let me just show you what I do. By the way this was actually suggested to me by Professor Sudarshan. Your head, right? So we have a small group of people, we discuss with each other and then we get better, learning from each other's experience. So here is a new command called quest. What does it say? It has, what is in square brackets says it has one command. It has one argument. It has one argument. And then that argument is referred to as hash one. How is the hash one to be used? We just put it. It puts in braces. So you see here, this one says there is one argument. This one says, this one refers to that hash one. But what does it say? It says nothing, just use it. So I have something like, here is the question. Question this, up to this. For example, if I close this, it shows that. You see that? See the cursor? So that is the question. So that is quest. The whole thing, so if I say slash quest, it will, it just, this whole thing is argument one. Entire thing within the braces is argument one. It says just put it there. Okay? All right. Now I have a, also a command called eat quest. Okay? What does eat quest do? Eat quest says, inside the braces nothing. See this? I am renewing command quest. But now it has nothing in it. Okay?  So let me show that. What happens if I eat the question also? Whatever else I had done manually has come, but all questions also disappeared because I have eaten them. The same thing you have to do for answer also. So it allows me to show only questions or only answer or both. Why would I show none of course? Okay? So I won't do that. So it is very useful to me and I, so if I want to put only answer, I have only answer. So it's a very powerful thing. This is just an example of what you can do in. Now I'll undo both of them. So now I have question and answer. Oops. Okay? Here is a question. Here is a question and here is the answer. Right? Do you follow? So it's a very powerful thing. Okay? Any other advantages of latex? Any other advantage you can think of? You want to point out? Okay? So I changed my presentation because you already know latex. I don't want to go through this. I want you to just see the beauty of latex. It's a very beautiful thing. It allows you to do all kinds of fantastic things. Right? So I have 5 minutes. So what I want to do is, I know that many of you are from various colleges. In your college, does anybody use latex? If anybody says that in your college they use latex, I would like to know. Which college? IIT Jodhpur. Okay? AMU. Okay? Kannur. Okay? Kannur, of course. Kerala is Linux, I mean, open source people. Yeah. C-O-E-P. Okay? IIT Kanchipuram. Okay? Very good. ISI Kolkata. Okay? NIT Calicut. Okay? Sangli. Okay? Very good. So what I would like to do is, I would, now that you all, you're all using latex, I would, where are you from? Yeah? BJTI. Okay? Now that you are using latex, I would want you to share this with your colleges. Okay? You share this information with your colleges, using your UG colleges, using Spokane tutorial they can all learn. Okay? Let me show you some statistics in latex use. See these statistics? Training. So we have trained 11 lakh students using Spokane tutorials on various IT topics. Here the topic is of course only latex. Let me just filter. We have trained 62,000 people around the country on the use of latex, and it turns out that most of them are college teachers. Most of them are pursuing their higher studies. They write, they do MTAG, they do PhD, they have to write a report, they have to send paper, they have to make presentation, they have to write their thesis. They find this very useful, and you can see that various places across the country, people are using. So here is somebody, Kerala Kottayam. Kottayam. So view participants, you can actually see who did this, Anuj Mohammad did this, and these are the people who underwent this workshop. So we have lot of information, you can see this. So what I want you to do is to see, I want you to show where the help is available so that you can ask your college teacher to contact them and our people will be happy to conduct this workshop in latex for your college students, your colleagues, your undergraduate friends. So you see this software training. Here there is something called about the training. Go there. It actually tells about how this training is, what are the different topics available, what is the procedure and so on. But finally, at the end, it gives a list of people who take care of various states. In our team, we have people for every state their email address and phone number. We just share this information with your friends and so are your teacher. They can organize this for all your colleges. There is one other thing, there is one other question I want you to ask. Quick question. How many of you in your college has internet connectivity in every computer so that you can simultaneously watch videos in your lab? I see few hands going up, but not many, thank you. So for that, there is something called create your own disk image. You can say advanced C, all levels. Advanced C is not there. It's a bash, all levels. How many of you know bash? No, it is still downloading. So using this, it normally works. Using this, you can add selected files, you can create zip file, and that zip file can be copied into every machine, unzip, and then open the index.html. It will open from the file system, but you don't need internet. It gives the entire playlist, the whole environment is set up. So you may want to point to these two features to your colleges so that they can start using latex. So I want to thank you. Thanks for listening to me. Sorry for exceeding time limit. Okay, goodbye.


Salt is considered a probable cause of stomach cancer, one of the world's leading cancer killers. If their estimate of an 8% increase in risk for every extra gram of salt a day is correct, then in a country like the UK, nearly 1,700 cases of stomach cancer happen every year just because of excess salt intake. Even in a country like the US, it would beat thousands more every year. The risk of stomach cancer associated with salt intake appears on par with smoking or heavy alcohol use, but may only be half as bad as opium use or increased total meat consumption based on this study of more than a half million people, which may explain why those eating meatless diets appear to have nearly two-thirds lower risk. We know dietary salt intake is directly associated with the risk of stomach cancer and the higher the intake, the higher the risks, but this meta-analysis went further looking at specific salt-rich foods. Pickled foods, salted fish, processed meat, and miso soup. Habitual consumption of pickled food, salted fish, and processed meat were each associated with about a 25% greater risk of stomach cancer. The pickled foods may explain why Korea appears to have the highest stomach cancer rates in the world, but there was no significant association with the consumption of miso soup. This may be because the carcinogenic effects of the salt are counteracted by the anti-carcinogenic effects of the soy, effectively cancelling out the risk. Even if we made garlicky soup with some scallions thrown in, it may drop our cancer risk even lower. But cancer isn't the primary reason people are told to avoid salt. What about miso soup and high blood pressure? Well, it may be the same kind of thing. The salt in miso is squeezing our blood pressures up, but the soy protein in miso may be relaxing our blood pressures down. But for example, if you compare the effects of soy milk to cow's milk, and to make it fairer, compare soy milk to skim milk to avoid the saturated butterfat, soy milk can much more dramatically improve blood pressure among women with hypertension. But would the effect be dramatic enough to counter all the salt in miso? Japanese researchers decided to put it to the test. They followed men and women in their 60s who started out with normal blood pressure and followed them for four years to see who is more likely to be diagnosed with hypertension in that time. Those who had two or more bowls of miso soup a day, or those who had one or less. Two bowls a day would be like adding a half teaspoon of salt to one's daily diet, yet those who ate two bowls or more appeared to have five times the lower risk of becoming hypertensive. So maybe the anti-hypertensive effects of the soy in the miso exceeds the hypertensive effects of the salt.


Jacob Karabin from Slovakia. He's in blue. Liam O'Brien's in green. There's Chris Cross and Chris Cross and hanging out. I want to go here. You go there. We're all just buying time to the final lot making sure we're close. But look what happens because Slovakia, bam! Get out of my way, O'Brien! Oh, O'Brien spins like a top, crashes. He can't get back out of last place. No one else really affected by this. And not cool. Not cool, Jacob. What do you got against Liam? So they finish it out and Jacob actually finishes in third place, which would have him advance. But after the race, he's like, well, I guess I should take a seat here and see if they're gonna see what I did. Rule it illegal or not.  He's like, you know what? I don't need to hear what you guys say. I think I can just guess it.


Tamil Nadu Antichoprity Eradication Front's 4th state level conference was held on 4th and 5th January 2023 in North Madras. More than 300 delegates participated from all the districts across Tamil Nadu apart from the delegates of the district in charges of Tamil Nadu Antichoprity Eradication Front, in charges from the mass movements like mass movements, youth movements, women movements, all the other fraternity movements and Dalit organizations have participated in this 2 days conference. Yesterday it was a public meeting which was titled Sadhi Marupalaragal Sangamam which means to organize people, it's a union of people who want to really eradicate caste from this society. So that public meeting with thousands of people participating in the public meeting, we openly announced that the cadres of Antichoprity Eradication Front will really strive hard to eradicate caste and evils of caste from this society. Honorable minister, there was some board minister, Mr. Radha Krishnan from Kerala participated and Balaprajabadi Adigalar, he also participated and gave a spiritual talk against the evils of the caste and he said that without, see he will take the fire from this public meeting, this fire to eradicate caste to all the parts of Tamil Nadu. So today it's a delegates' conference, the conference was inaugurated, today's delegate conference was inaugurated by the victims of caste atrocities, especially we all will not forget the poor girl, 16 year old girl Nandini who is brutally sexually harassed and killed by the caste dominance in Arilo district of Tamil Nadu, her family, her sister, her mother and family members and those who lost their very precious lives of their family due to the caste atrocities, they all came together that they owned the conference, they said Tamil Nadu Antichoprity Eradication Front is our own organization, we feel that it is our own organization, so in that sense they inaugurated the conference and it was quite a very emotional moment on that time with the victims of the caste atrocities, owning the organization, the delegate conference began like that, honored various Dalit organizations, representatives which TNUF working along with, TNUF is very unique in coordinating all the other Dalit organizations who is working in the districts for the same caste, so there are more than 10 to 15 leaders across Tamil Nadu who are working for the cause of the Dalits have come here and we all stood in a stage and we announced to the fastest movements that we are not alone, the people, the movements against the caste eradication are not alone, we are together we will fight against the caste atrocities in Tamil Nadu and after that we passed so many resolutions demanding special law to prevent killing of inter caste marriage couples, it demanded the implementation of guidelines given by the ministry of home on the basis of the judgment delivered in the Shaktivagini case, in a case filed by Tamil Nadu untouchability eradication front, the high court of Chennai has also given certain guidelines to be followed by the district authorities for the protection of inter caste marriage couple, so this conference has demanded both the center and state to pass special legislation against caste corner killings, second important resolution passed by this conference is against manual scavenging, it demanded manual scavenging act should be strengthened particularly the definition of manual scavenges, the conference has demanded that certain provisions of the act has to be strengthened, already a bill is under consideration by the parliament, the manual scavenging prevents an act 2020, so utilizing that bill, sending that bill to the standing committee, the bill has to be strengthened to prevent the deaths due to manual scavenging, third one because of neoliberal policies, the concept of scheduled caste saplan and tribal saplan got diluted, so the conference has demanded to strengthen SCST saplan and tribal saplan, it has demanded that special act should be passed for the implementation of scheduled caste saplan and tribal saplan, likewise the conference has passed many resolutions against the violation of reservation in higher education institutions like IIT against caste bias in schools and hostels, the conference has demanded that reservation should be implemented in private sector institutions also, likewise conference has demanded that Dalit minorities also should be included in the list of scheduled caste, so conference has passed many resolutions, the 30 resolutions has been passed by the conference, the conference has demanded that Manu statue in Rajasthan High Court should be removed, so based on these resolutions the TNEF conference has decided to carry forward the struggle further for the protection of welfare of Dalits and Adivasans in this country


Today, we're going to talk about the beginnings of the Renaissance, but before we do, we're going to talk about a precondition to the Renaissance, and that is the prosperity and the thriving economic condition of towns and this growing tendency toward urbanization. The area we're going to concentrate on is Tuscany, and we looked a little bit at Tuscany yesterday when we saw Sienna and Florence and Pisa and a number of the great cathedral towns in that area. The first thing I want to mention is the nature of medieval urban space, very dense, very tightly tangled. The town we're looking at on this image is San Gimignano, and San Gimignano is a hill town, and it's a hill town that is distinctive because of all these little thin spindly towers called Towers of the Nobles. Each noble family rivaled the next to have the most spectacular, tallest, thinnest tower, and these were great because you could get on top of the tower and watch for invading marauders, or when the marauders arrive, you could climb to the top of the tower and hunker down, or you could simply have prestige by having the most magnificent tower in town. Right now it seems as though San Gimignano is full of towers, but in the Gothic period there would have been far more. Here's a map of San Gimignano, and one thing we see is a surprising discovery and that is that San Gimignano is a Roman town. Of course it's hard to put out Cardo and Declamanos if you're on a hill, so there's a little bit of a wiggling of the Cardo and a little bit of the wiggling of the Declamanos, but it's essentially a rational plan. And the space of the public spaces fracture because of the hill town and because of the hierarchy of different buildings. So there's a diagonal echelonning of spaces along this juncture of the two major roads that's really, really very nice. Here's the church and here's a square with a fountain in the middle that we see on this image. During the Gothic period Italy was really splintered into different factions. The squabbling continued into the Renaissance and two of the factions were the Guelphs and the Ghibliens. For the most part the Guelphs were in favor of the Pope, in favor of the Papacy, and Florence is an example of a Guelph town. The Ghibliens were in favor of the Holy Roman Emperor up there in Germany somewhere. And Siena is a Ghiblientown, for example. The Guelphs were also, as a rule, let's say more progressive looking and a lot of the wealth of the Guelph towns did not come from inherited money and land, which was typical for royalists, but rather through industry and through banking and through trade. Hence there's a different taste in the arts between the Guelphs and the Ghibliens, the Ghibliens. I'm fairly happy to continue with Gothic traditions or let's say international Gothic style, an updated kind of Gothic, while the Guelphs are really very happy to experiment with newer and newer developments in the arts. Here's the town of Siena, spectacular. It's laid out on three hills with a major church on each hill, and in the low ground between the three hills there's one of the most beautiful squares that you will ever see anywhere. The Piazza del Campo in Siena. Twice a year they have horse races, a remnant from medieval culture, when each district in the town would field a horse and a rider, and they would compete for the glory of their district so that the colors of their district would be flown from the tower. And notice the tower of the town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico, it's one of those little spindly towers, not dissimilar to the ones that we saw in San Gimignano a moment ago. Inside the town hall we have one of the most interesting painting cycles that you will ever see, ever, and it is the good government, bad government cycle by the Lorenzetti brothers, Ambro Joe and Pietro Lorenzetti. I think the subject is interesting, and what I think is interesting about the subject is that it's really opening up a little window into the way people in 1338, 1340 thought about their society and thought about their agency in that society. In an earlier period, even 50 years before, even 30 years before, I think feudalism would still be sufficiently intact that people would simply say, our lot is bad, we are sinners, it's our duty to suffer, the king hierarchically has rights that we don't have, nothing we do can possibly remedy the situation. But here in the good government cycle, there's an indication that actually actions on earth pay off and that humans can actually improve their lot through hard work and through good management. We have a bunch of allegorical figures of things like justice and prudence and temperance up here overseeing the life of the citizens under good government. And notice they are orderly and prosperous. And here's their town. Their town looks not different, really, from San Gimignano. Their town is crenellated with these little interesting roofscapes. Their town has many, many towers. And their town is prospering like crazy. I find one of the most interesting places to look on this fresco is on the roof scape. These people are repairing the roof, these people are repairing the roof. That's good government, you take care of things. By the way, I said that this is a fresco and let me tell you what a fresco is. It's a technique of wall painting that's very, very common in southern climates. You need to have a fairly dry, warm climate to make frescoes work well. Because it is a wet method of painting. You prepare a piece of plaster and on the plaster surface, pigment is directly applied onto the plaster so that the pigment saturates the plaster. And you don't have the tendency of the plaster to flake off, but rather it's really in the wall. And this system is good in dry, warm countries because the plaster will dry. If you try to do this in a northern country, you might not have the same lock. So baker is baking the bread. Children are playing. People are doing their shopping. Good government. Good government also helps the landscape prosper. The farmers are sowing their fields. The orchards are bearing fruit and so forth. On a different wall, and in a bad state of repair, because bad government can't keep anything running right, we see an allegory of bad government. And instead of having the seven virtues hold in court, we have the vices hold in court. And with the vices, we have Mr. Devil himself with his devil horns and his little friend Donkey Boy over here. Piling up at the feet of bad government, we have decaying corpses or bodies crawling to their ruin. And here there is no maintenance on the houses. The houses are falling down. Things are crumbling. So good government is the way to go. Just one more thing about both good government and bad government as paintings, not as representations of an urban mindset, is that the Lorenzetti here are not really interested in showing you space. They're interested in representing something about the city, something about its density, something about its activity, but in terms of a perspectival representation of space that could be mapped out, it would be impossible to do. This is just aspatial. The representation of buildings and walls and landscape are as aspatial as in Egyptian painting almost. Here's Florence, the great Guelph town on the other side of Tuscany. Here's the cathedral begun by our an awful decambio that we discussed in our last talk. And here's the Arno River. As an aside, in the city of Piacenza, also in Tuscany, to the north of Florence, was a rabid Guelph town. And if someone was convicted of a crime, the first thing they did was bestow a noble title on them. And then the next thing they did was kill them. Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall in Florence, spindly little tower, that looks familiar to me. And here's an aerial view, showing you the structure of the town of Florence. It looks much less higgledy-piggledy, let's say, than Siena, but that's not Guelph versus Ghibli, and that has to do more with Roman versus not Roman. And Florence was originally a Roman town. There are still Roman ruins in Fiesoli, not so far outside of Florence, and the foundations of old Roman temples have been incorporated into a number of the Christian buildings in Florence. So here's Piazza della Signoria, the town hall, and the little square in front of it. And this drawing shows you Florence as a Roman town, with a cardo and decumanos crisscrossing it. And this shows you Florence in an expanded state. Here is the cathedral and the baptistery and the bell tower as a point of reference. And you can still see the cardo and the decumanos cutting through the town and giving it structure. This view also gives us a glimpse of a local tuscan vernacular, which we already got an inkling of when we looked at the Siena cathedral the other time. And that has to do with this pattern making of striped marble, white, greenish, pinkish, to create these interesting surface manipulations of stone fascia. And we have it on the Giotto bell tower. And we also have it on the baptistery right over here. Beautiful. By the way, this baptistery is pretty interesting. And it's a good example of something that's called Tuscan proto renaissance. It is a Romanesque phenomena. And it has to do with the appearance and a number of these Romanesque buildings of an architecture that seems distinctly classical. We have the round-headed arches, which we would have in any Romanesque building. But we also have pediments. And we also have Corinthian column capitals. Just when the towns of Europe are growing in prosperity and the universities are increasing the general knowledge of all the people, and trade is allowing them to exchange ideas and to exchange customs and become more diverse and complex in the way they organize their lives. The very trade routes that brought them this prosperity brought them a bad piece of news. And that bad news is black death. Black death peaked in Europe in around 1348 and killed off 30% to 60% of Europe's population. And the black death particularly hit you hard if you were in the southern countries. This is a little map showing you some trade routes. These are maritime trade routes. But there were also silk routes that came across overland. And with all of these expeditionary parties came goods. And with the goods came rats. And on the rats came fleas, bringing the black death. So every place you have a port, like Venice, like Genoa, like Pisa, you have centers of infection that continue from that point forward. However, there were some benefits to the black death.  But as the workforce became scarcer and scarcer and scarcer, the remaining workers demanded a fair wage and got a fair wage. There were more consumer goods to be had. And trade and production of luxury goods could happen. You could get a class of people who were more philosophically inclined or inclined toward the arts. And the middle class rose and flourished after a while. There were some more macabre pieces of information. This is what doctors would often wear when they were ministering to the sick during the black death. These are bird beaks. That might be scary enough to make the black death go away, but they had rags soaked in ammonia inside the bird beak, believing that that would keep them safe. Of course, the disease was carried on the ticks.  Likewise here, we see a group of people with bubons all over their flesh, bubons. You see these bubons all over these people. They are these postulate blisters that characterize the ill smitten with black death. And it's bubonic plague.   Notice also that there's a geographical distribution of the bubonic plague. In the south, where you have a lot of Mediterranean ports that are the first to receive these shipments of goods from afar, the death rate is very, very high. And many say that it was closer to 75% to 80% of the population. Whereas in more northerly climates, the death rate was lower, around 20%. Could have to do with fleas getting killed off by cold weather, as well as the fact that not as many ships came into those ports. Black death, silks. In fact, there was a little commune or a community of Genovese traders by the Cameroon Sea. And Genghis Khan, no less an adversary than Genghis Khan, in order to effectively lay siege to their town through the dead bodies of bubonic plague victims over the town walls to sicken everyone inside the town. Oh, Genghis Khan. I bet all of you played this game at some point in your life. Ring Around the Rosie. It's a lovely little song. These are children in the 1950s singing Ring Around the Rosie with their school teacher and having a lovely time of it. I wonder if they know that they're singing about the Black Death, because Ring Around the Rosie is actually a Black Death song. Ring Around the Rosie means that little pink spot that develops on your skin before the bubons break out.  And ashes, ashes, we all fall down is a recognition of the inevitable fact that everyone must die and everyone will eventually turn to dust, ashes. This is a medieval depiction of the dense macabre or Ring Around the Rosie, as we call it nowadays. There were two reactions that people had to this almost certain inevitability of death coming with this terrible plague that wiped out so much of Europe. One reaction was extreme piety. And the other reaction was to eat, drink, and be merry, because you only had a short time on it. So these skeletons seemed to be carrying a hearty atmosphere all the way to the grave. So there was another consequence of the Black Death. And it quite could an unpredictable consequence of the Black Death. And that was that a high percentage of the master craftsmen died, because urban areas where the craftsmen lived were hit much harder than the countryside. And when the master craftsmen die, the whole method of teaching the arts is put into compromise, because they didn't have schools like we do now where you can come and learn architecture.   You learned your trade that way. The same was true for casting metals. The same was true for weaving. The same was true for painting. So when all or most of the masters died, the arts were in a crisis. People had to figure out how they could learn to do things in the absence of these masters. And it brought with that a recognition that they really couldn't do much at all. It's possible to say in the Middle Ages, people thought that they were living a life continuous and uninterrupted with the culture of the ancients. But they were basically Romans walking around with pointy outfits. But in this period of around, say, 1350 to 1400, people began to realize that, no, they are quite different. They've experienced about 1,000 years of darkness, during which time they've been forgetting things. They've been forgetting how to build complex vaults. They've been forgetting how to build aqueducts. They've been forgetting how to cast in bronze. And so what could they do? They didn't even have the masters to tell them what people knew five years ago. And they had an interesting response, and that was to not even think about what the masters knew, but to go back to antiquity, to go back to Roman culture and try to recover the glory that was Rome. Hence this notion of rebirth. Renaissance, renascita, means rebirth. And the thing that is being born again is the glory of ancient Roman culture. The philosophy, the art, the statecraft, you name it. And so all the texts that the ancients had that gave some insight into how they organized their thoughts or how they theorized their world were of great demand. And so this is Cezanne Ana's Vitruvius that we looked at before. And it's giving us some insight into the kinds of things that these people were pulling from the ancients. Certainly Cezanne Ana's Vitruvius shows us an interest in geometry, the square and the circle, and the nesting of the square and the circle. And all of these things are authorized by Plato as emblems of the divine. The circle is the cosmos, the square is the earth. But we also have here a kind of heroic nude, heroic with big feet, nude, which is a classical idea. It's the way that ancients would represent a person. And so what Cezanne Ana is beginning to suggest is not only is this interesting geometry and mathematical perfection being taken from the ancients, but also a kind of humanism, a notion that the human body is reflective of the divine beauty of God and deserves contemplation and not just the kind of scorn that was heaped on it in medieval times. This business of looking at the world and thinking about the world and trusting your senses is something that is really newish, let's say. Example, this is the model of the cosmos built by the great astronomer Johannes Kepler. And Kepler was an incredibly good observer of heavenly phenomena and kept very detailed notebooks. And Kepler's notebooks correspond with a uncanny degree of accuracy to mathematical predictions and models that would be made nowadays using computers to figure out what was going on in the heavens when Kepler was with really the unaided eye keeping records. And Kepler's observations indicated that the cosmos were elliptical. And that's pretty interesting because this model that Kepler gives us shows the cosmos as spherical with a nesting of all of these geometrical figures, a cube, a sphere, a tetrahedron, a dodecahedron and all the way down the line with these perfect platonic forms, none of which match his empirical observations. And Kepler was probably responding to the fear of sensory perception that goes back to Plato. When Plato tells you that your senses are subjective and not universalizable and corrupt. And there's no truth in what you perceive through your senses and the only truth is in the realm of pure ideas. And mathematics is descriptive of pure ideas. But there was another development and already in medieval times or late Roman times the philosopher Plotinus suggested that in fact beauty transcended mere sensory perception and beauty offered you a glimpse to the heavens. And so that it was not a distraction to admire a beautiful flower or a beautiful person but rather it was offering you a direct way to appreciate the beauty of God. And so through Neoplatonic thought which was very, very popular in the Renaissance especially in the early days, the entire physical world became reinscribed. This is a painting by Sandro Botticelli, famous painting of the birth of Venus. And let me just say that Botticelli was an extremely strong fundamentalist Christian. He was a follower of Savanarola, this arch monk who initiated the bonfire of the vanities where frivolous items of culture were burnt in this big heap. And yet Botticelli painted this beautiful female nude of a pagan topic, Venus. You would have to say, this is crazy, why is he doing this? And the answer is Neoplatonic thinking not only permits him to gaze upon beauty and understand that this is somehow revelatory of divine truth but it also allows him to make analogies, analogous links between, let's say, the virgin birth of Venus and the virgin birth of Jesus and the immaculate conception of the virgin. So this is a deeply pious theme when properly framed by Neoplatonic thinking. Shift in sensibilities. It might be instructive to see how the craft of painting responded to the new challenges brought about by this changed sensibility and this new interest in the physical world. The painting we have up here right now is a enthroned Madonna by Giotto. We'll be looking at it in a moment as a comparison. But before we look at Giotto, I'd like to look for a little while at some medieval images. This one of God the Geometer we've looked at before where God with his compass describes a perfect circle and makes order out of the chaos and forms the universe. The background is gold leaf. So this is clearly not a painting in the space of the world but a painting in some kind of celestial realm. The same is true of this bishop with a model of the city on his lap. Both of these figures are flat to find more by linear elements than by volumetrics. Both of these figures are hierarchically positioned not engaged in real activities in the real world. And the same can be said for Duccio's enthroned Madonna. I think this is an incredibly beautiful painting crazy about Duccio but there is this kind of linearity that characterizes the picture and really more of an interest in the playful and elegant swirl of line and drapery than any kind of representation of the human figure behind it or even the weight of gravity on the drapery. Duccio makes little gestures toward representing space by converging lines on the throne but the figures flatten out and the gold leaf contributes to the flattening. If we move just a few years ahead we can see Chimabue and Giotto. Chimabue in 1260 and Giotto about 50 years later. Chimabue discovered Giotto. Giotto was a little boy tending sheep according to Giotto Vasari's lives of the artist.   And so it went. So what exactly did Giotto learn from Chimabue? How did he pick up on things that his master taught and how did he transcend him? Well, certainly they're both using gold leaf backgrounds and as such the space flattens out. But Giotto has a really different conception of the human body than Chimabue. Chimabue's figure is characterized by these elegant linear folds and curves and seems to be floating on the throne rather than sitting on it.  The figures flatten out against the space and the space is very, very tight. And look by contrast at the Giotto. These figures are fully volumetric and also he has a tendency of organizing figures in layers so that these robust space displacing angels form a foreground and behind that we have a middle ground of angels in green and behind that we have background. So there's a space being developed not only through the intuitive perspective that Giotto gives us on the throne but also through the volume of the figures and also through the layering of the figures back in space. Giotto is an interesting figure on all levels. This is a lamentation of Christ from the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. And this is really an extraordinary painting. Now he doesn't have anything like the throne to help him develop a perspectival image of what the space of the throne might be. But he does use the geometrically conceived cylindrical volumes or pear shaped volumes of these figures to really occupy and thereby carve out a substantial space for the action of the figures. And the landscape creates a background in front of which the figures act out their suffering. Here he doesn't have architecture to map out the space but note how he uses the angels. He uses converging wedge of angels to begin to suggest the space coming together and moving back even deeper. Quite nice. And another thing that Giotto is doing that we have not seen before is that he's beginning to offer a certain amount of psychological complexity to these characters. These are not blank staring neutral figures but these are figures grieving for their loved one. The real watershed moment for this new sensibility that was emerging came at a competition for bronze doors at the Florence Baptistry. Here's the Baptistry, the Baptistry of San Giovanni said to have been built over a Roman temple to Mars right in front of the big cathedral, the Duomo Santa Maria del Fiore that we looked at in an earlier discussion. And here is the Giotto bell tower. So this is quite a prestigious competition to be building something in such a important site in the city. The competition doors are not the first set of bronze doors constructed for the Baptistry. Already in 1330 to 1336, Andrea da Pizano had made a set of bronze doors and it's useful to look at these just as a point of comparison to what happens in these new panels. There's a frame and the frame is a kind of Gothic quadrofoil. Funny little shape, not a window onto the world but really more a frame for a cipher. And even the way these different actions get characterized is almost more like a flat linear cartoon than anything that's happening in space. We're being reminded of the stories but we're not really being shown how these stories operate in the lived world. The competition brought forth some of the most extraordinary talents of the time. A goldsmith called Filippo Brunewski and a sculptor called Lorenzo Giberti. Of the many competition entries that were submitted for the bronze door competition only their entries remain but good enough. They're both pretty spectacular. Giberti ultimately won and this is Giberti's, sorry, this is Giberti's panel right over here and this is Brunewski's panel. And although I am a huge fan of Brunewski I would have to say the judges were correct in giving the award to Giberti. And one thing that I think is so extraordinary about the Giberti panel is how it is not using a medievalizing conception of space being unfolded flat against a neutral background but actually space is created through landscape and occupied by figures in this landscape. Here's what I mean. If you look at the Brunewski we get this kind of range. Things that are here. Things that are in the middle. Things that are up above. And they're not really in a continuous space. It's hard to understand how they all hang together spatially. Each element that's part of the tale is on its own special little platform. And by the way, the subject here is the sacrifice of Isaac. This is a story in the Old Testament that says Abraham was told by God to take his son, his only son Isaac up to a mountain top and to sacrifice him. And Abraham is very disturbed by this. This is his beloved son but even more beloved to him is God. So he takes his boy up and as he's about to sacrifice him on an altar an angel comes in and says, no, no, no, you don't need to sacrifice your son. Look in the thicket, there's a ram. And so God tested the faith of Abraham and Abraham met the challenge and the ram was sacrificed instead. So both of the artists are showing us the ram. Here's the ram up here in the thicket and the primary actors, Abraham and Isaac. Abraham and Isaac. And the angel of course is also a major actor. But in the case of the Brunelleschi these different episodes are stacked vertically. In the case of the Giberti there's a kind of spatial diagonal of landscape that locks everything together and really makes a much more charged composition. But they're both really good and they're both really classicized. Notice that this is Roman drapery that the figures are wearing. And notice too, the conception of Isaac here in the Brunelleschi we have a nude. Quite an idea, quite a Roman idea. But look at the conception of the nude figure in the Giberti. This is a totally classicized little Hercules of a nude sitting on a altar that looks more like a Roman sarcophagus than any altar used in Christian ritual. Quite amazing, quite amazing even in terms of the spatial conception. Notice on the Brunelleschi everybody is revealing their salient properties. Profile of a donkey, profile of a sheep, profile of a guy. Look what we have going on in the Giberti. These figures are turning in space. We see the back of a figure, quite amazing. You see the torquing of the landscape, the spiral of the landscape being acted out with the torquing of the figures. This is a kneeling contrapasto that we have here from our friend Isaac. And we have this oblique emergence of God coming out of the sky to halt the slaughter of the boy. As the project for the doors progress the ambitions become more and more and more complex. Here we have one of the panels from the east doors by Giberti called the Doors of Paradise. We see them here as a total compilation. And in terms of the task of Brun's casting they're already fairly amazed. What Andrea da Pizzano did the south doors he was doing something that by the standards of 1330 was pretty difficult and that was casting a Brun's panel this big. There are quite a lot of them and they're connected together by this inframement. Giberti casts even larger panels and casts them with a really complex kind of spatial undercut. So he's casting deeper, he's casting in a more refined way. There are terms used to describe what Giberti is doing. And the most basic term is bas-relief. Ba is French for low. So bas-relief means instead of making a fully realized three-dimensional sculpture three-dimensionalized space is being compressed into a low or narrow field. It's a particular kind of bas-relief called schia-chato and schia-chato basically means squash. If a mosquito lands on your arm, schia-chato, no more mosquito. You can see how effective this is. The figures in the foreground are almost fully rounded, fully cut away from the background. The front side of this rounded temple is quite distinct and as it moves farther and farther back, the relief becomes lower and lower and lower and you get this sense of incredibly deep space in a fairly narrow plenum of space. And look at the things that Giberti chooses to represent. He's bought into this recovery of the antique of the glory of ancient Rome, hook line and sinker. Everybody's wearing Roman drapery. The architecture is Roman. The planned typology of round building would have been known to Giberti and pretty much everybody because the pantheon was still operating as a church at the time. It's not very good at getting the Roman architecture down, but he's trying. We have this little indication of a columnar structure, a little bit of Corinthian going on and muscular volumetric bodies, bodies that bear weight, bodies in space and a real interest in space and landscape. And this is not even the most extraordinary panel. I find the birth of Eve to be quite amazing where Eve emerges from the side of Adam to fully classicize nudes and even an attempt to represent the specificities of landscape like water and the variability of trees and wind. Or over here, the representation of different ranges of layered classical arcades, Corinthian pilasters with wonderful detail, very closely observed and the kind of turning of the bodies in space that we saw in the competition panel is being developed even more fully here. Look, we have this little group of figures of whom we see the backs or this boy whose foot kicks out from the space and casts the shadow. Quite amazing with a little goat head. If you compare the ambition of the gates of paradise with the ambition of the earlier doors, you can see that the craft has increased the scale has increased and the conception of space has gone really far, far, far forward. So there's an interest in representing space but at the same time that there's an interest in representing space there probably was this lurking sense that too much attention to mere sensory perception is going to lead you astray and that wouldn't it be great if the pure idea authorized by Plato and subjective perception could somehow be married together. And this was a task really provoked by explorations of space like the ones we have Giberti doing here on the gates of paradise and pursued by the loser of the competition, Filippo Brunelleschi. Brunelleschi set himself the task of proving a mathematical solution to the question of perspective. All the perspective we were looking at in say the Giotto chair or even the Cimabue chair was just a kind of intuitive perspective. Things kind of converge. That's the appearance of things. That's the corrupt sensory perception of things that is not true because we know those things don't converge. If we measure them, they wouldn't converge. So Brunelleschi tries to marry together objective truth of mathematics with subjective vision and comes up with a formula to mathematics perspective. And he gives a proof, a demonstration proof to persuade the citizens of Florence that this is true. And what he does is he sets up a position right here by the main door of the Florence Cathedral. And the object that he draws is the baptistery which is a great object because it does have this connection to having been a Roman temple at one point. So what a good thing to draw. Or paint actually. And he has this crafty idea about painting it in such a way as to fool the viewer into thinking or not knowing whether they're looking at the painting or the real object. So here's the vantage point right here in front of the Duomo, in front of the cathedral. And he's got this cone of vision. He's got a vanishing point, a horizon line. He maps out the geometry of the building and casts points to create a perspective. And then what he does is really crafty and uncanny. His feeling is that people will know this is fake and not the real thing because they will know that the sky does not have moving clouds. So he paints it on a mirror. And there is a reflection of the real clouds on the mirror. And people look through a people and they look into a mirror and they see the reflection of the real space and the space of his baptistery collapsed on the same field. And in his day, the people that Brunelleschi ran into could not tell the difference between one and the other. And so suddenly with mathematics perspective, any qualms you might have had about trying to represent the space of the world were completely gone and perspective took off. This by the way is Brunelleschi's method more or less for representing perspective. And if any of you have ever had to try to construct a perspective in the old traditional non-computerized fashion, you probably used a method very similar to this. You have a measuring line in the vertical and in the horizontal and you simply project points upward and you get something that converges. Brunelleschi's method was never written down but he taught it to many of his friends, many of the artists such as Masaccio and Donatello were acquainted with Brunelleschi's method of perspective. It was not until a bit later that Leon Battista Alberti actually wrote down the technique of perspective in his book, The Pictura on Painting. But here in Masaccio and Masalino's cycle of paintings for the Brancacci Chapel, we begin to see the effect of this new mathematics perspective and also further developments of this interest in the antique, this interest in recovery of things Roman. Look at the expulsion of Adam and Eve over here. Two muscular, weight-bearing, classical nudes being driven out of paradise. Or look at the tribute money where St. Peter is paying off tribute money. There's an attempt at Roman architecture here, the arches are round. But this is Florence, this is not Rome and things are still too thin, too spindly. It's the look of classical architecture but not the substance, not the muscularity of classical architecture. But you do have that muscularity here with the figures. And when you look at this leg kicking out, you think that Masaccio must have seen the leg kicking out from the Ghiberti panel and thought that that was something he certainly wanted to play with. The Masaccio work that really makes manifest the lessons of perspective the best is a painting of the Trinity in the Church of Santa Maria Novera. Trinity is a common theme, father, son, and Holy Ghost, which is the dove hovering right between father and son. So I think what's interesting about this painting is that it operates both compositionally in a Gothic way but also in this new, perspectival way. So the traditional way that the picture would operate would be to become a hieratic symbol, a symbol driven by ritual and convention. And it kind of does this. The subject is the Trinity. And compositionally, if we trace the figures, we get a triangle. And the symbol for the Trinity is not a triangle exactly, but it's a triangle with a circle in the middle of it. And oh look, we also get a circle in the middle of it. And in the middle of the circle, we have the navel of Christ. So in many ways, Masaccio is casting Christ as the Vitruvian man in a circle inside of a triangle in a diagram of the Trinity. Pretty clever. But he's also doing more than that. He's unfolding through layering different ontological fields. And by ontological fields, I mean people who exist in different states of being. God and the Holy Spirit are back here, pulling forward in the range of the Virgin and Joseph of Arma Thea, who gave a tomb to Christ. We have Christ, who is both man and God. Pulling forward, and again, the architecture demarcates these different zones very, very clearly. We have donors, the people who pager, or this work of painting. But that's not all, because this is perspective. And so the eyeball of the viewer is also implicated in the space of the painting. So not only do we have God and the Holy Ghost and Christ and Mary and the donors and the tomb of the dead, but we also have the eyeball of the viewer. Everybody is implicated in the space. And the triangle that we had on the flat picture plane in the traditional spatialized description, two-dimensional description of space within the painting now becomes activated in a three-dimensional sense in Masaccio's perspective. Fabulous. And if you look at it, you'll see that he's looking at Roman architecture. He's got some coffering going on here. He's got some Corinthian plasters going on here. He's got some Ionic column capitals going on here. And they're going on in a kind of thin and unbelievably attenuated way. But he's trying. So Brunelleschi figures this out. And Brunelleschi's doing great, you have to say. Let me just mention that Brunelleschi's training is not as an architect and not even as a sculptor, but as a member of the silk guild. He's a goldsmith. So he's got some expertise in casting metals, but he has no expertise at all in architecture. However, as we mentioned before, there was this galling problem for the city of Florence. And that was when Arnolfo Di Cambio died, there was a giant octagonal hole in the middle of the church. And Florence, by this point, had prospered sufficiently that they felt they should try to get something on top of that giant gaping hole. And so they had a competition and everybody was invited to submit projects. And Brunelleschi, who had no expertise, no knowledge at all about architecture, came to the board of overseers and said, I can do it. I can build you the dome. And what's more, I can build you the dome without money or dirt. And what does he mean by money or dirt? And what he means is that the dome of the pantheon, which was the exemplary dome to which every other dome would be compared, was said to have been built on a mound of dirt and the stones were laid up on this dirt mountain. And then after the entire structure was intact, the dirt was carried away. And the citizens of Rome were happy to carry the dirt away because cleverly, as they were building this mound of dirt, they put coins in there. So the pantheon, probably not true, but pantheon was said to have been built with money and dirt, a mountain full of money that then got emptied out by the citizens. Brunelleschi says he can do it without money and dirt. So how's he gonna do it? And he says to the overseers, and again, this is according to Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artist, which is more hagiography than biography. Hagiography means lives of the saints. But anyhow, he says, I'll tell you why. I will not tell you how I will do it because if I tell you how I will do it, my method will be so clear and so logical. Everyone will want to do it. But I will give you a demonstration of how clever I am. And if you can do what I say forth as your task, then I will tell you my method for building the dome. And they say, okay, Brunelleschi, what do you have? And Brunelleschi says, I would like you to stand an egg up on its vertical axis. And he brings in a little basket of eggs. He tells people, try to do this, try to do it. And the eggs roll off the table, the eggs break, nobody can do it, and they finally give up. And say, Filippo, tell us, how do you set the egg on its vertical axis? And he takes the egg and he thinks the bottom of the egg with his finger so that it indents slightly. And then he sets the egg up on its vertical axis.  You are doing something that you never said you were going to do. And he said, of course I didn't say I was going to do it, but it is not wrong to do it. It was simply my ingenuity that allowed me to understand that this could be done. So Brunelleschi gets the commission to build the dome. And to his great disgust, he's forced to work with Giberti on this project, even though he thinks Giberti is a nincompoop. And he's forced to be second to Giberti in command, although the whole project is initiated by this conception that Brunelleschi has of how to build the dome. So building of the dome is a project that Brunelleschi worked on for years and years and years, beginning in 1418 when he submits his first model and ending really at the end of his life. So here's the big hole. And what Brunelleschi does, you can begin to see by looking at this drawing, this sectional drawing. And that is, he conceives of it as not a singular dome, but a double dome, because it's a tricky problem here. And the tricky problem is, the span is so great, it will be difficult to find something that will cover that span and that will come down to allow the nave to translate through. He builds triangular piers over here and the part of the triangle gets hollowed out, but the double dome makes it lighter, but it also makes it rigid. When we talked about the pantheon, we already noticed that the geometry of the coffers do something quite similar. They scoop away material and make it lighter and they also, through the coffering, begin to brace the structure and make it stiffer. So this is what Brunelleschi does, this cutaway perspective shows us quite well what he does. He's got his double dome system going on and he's got a series of ribs that carry the load to points and the points come to rest at these points within the piers, within the triangular piers. In addition to that, he has a series of horizontal rings that are tied together. So he's got this kind of three-dimensional system locking together the exterior shell, the interior shell, and this series of rings together. And then as webbing to connect these things together, he puts in a particular kind of brickwork, a herringbone brickwork, that further engages the system and locks it together. So this is the ingenuity of Mr. Brunelleschi and this is the space between the two domes, which I personally will never do again in my life. This is the scariest place in the world.  Brunelleschi didn't simply have to invent how to build the dome, which was hard enough, but he also had to invent how to get materials up to the dome. He had to think about what the geometry of the dome would be. And in so far as he was a goldsmith and knew nothing about domes, he tried everything. He went to the market and bought giant turnips and carved them to find the right shape for the dome. He went to the banks of the Arno where flat mud banks could be found and did drawings to full-scale so templates could be prepared for the masons that when they went up there, he did not want to be a millimeter off because if he was, the whole system would fail. This was a daunting enterprise. It was so daunting that he made some extraordinary rules for the workers. For example, he told the workers they could not come down and eat lunch and go back up again because this project was so high up off the ground that if they did that, there would be a real difficulty in terms of ever getting back up again. They would lose too much time. They would get dark. They would not have the opportunity to get back up and get down. So he told the workers they had to bring their lunches but they had to water the wine because he did not want the workers to be drunk and to fall down. So next time we will talk more about Brunelleschi, Brunelleschi's dome and other contributions to architecture by Mr. Filippo Brunelleschi and other great luminaries of the early Renaissance.


What's going on guys got Kyle here with late in sports cards, and we are riffing one box of 2023 Bowman hobby This one is for Stefan P. Good luck Stefan. Yes, sir drip gang for life Gotta we have a good time over there. We have a good time over there guys. You guys are looking to get some midweek Some midweek personals and we are on drip Wednesday nights Friday nights and Saturday nights doing a personals guys Get uploaded to YouTube just like these so if you guys aren't able to be around They'll be uploaded just like this just to a different account is the late in sports cards drip personals on YouTube So if you guys can't watch it is just about the same experience. I'd say just about Drips a really fun platform as well. You can get a Everything all in one spot. You can pay for your breaks there They'll ship right to you. We have a lot of fun over there Like I said guys after this we got Luke with a prism choice and then we have Michael S should be the last one of the night or last one of the day here with a Bowman jumbo Appreciate everybody getting some personal boxes today Keeping me busy all morning. Like I said, we do have Sam starting at five. So Not too long before we'll be breaking some more Sunday fun day Sam Sam day fun day something like that Something like that anybody about to watch this race coming up There's everybody watching uh everybody watching the Celtics today Miami race is fun, man. I like the I like the track out there Interesting that it's in the It's in the hard rocks parking lot, but it is a nice track. It's pretty cool They have a section called the marina section to where they have Where they have boats just sitting out of the water that kills me every time I see it You can get tickets for the marina section, but you're actually not you're on a boat But you're not in the water It's kind of hilarious. Honestly. Good luck Stefan. Let's see what we got in this hobby Starting with some paper got Vulpie First chrome Louise Garcia and a lunar glow. This is gonna be Elijah Green nice prospect there for the Nationals Only not numbered a lunar glow some more paper Got chromes de Jesus Acunia Rookie favorite Osvaldo Parraza Davis those are two impressive mustache shows while who while who's Two impressive mustache shows there. I approve September Soderstrom Yeah, you watching the Celtics Luke your Celtics fan We got a few Celtics fans around here. Oh, no, you're good Luke. You're good Luke. That's just for uh That's just we need that for a drip. I got you we got you right after this box our hassle Yeah, we'll be ripping yours right after this one Luke There's a gram There's a Miguel bliss There's chromes corona and paroza prospects of your Donnie Kellen's on this on the uh on the Celtics to huh Your Donnie and Solano. Oh Randy's thinking Randy's thinking sixers. Oh, I think they might get one just since their home They might get one today Soderstrom top 100 There's a Spencer Jones chrome and Ariel oh Monty is gonna be the Lunar Glow for the Reds there and true blue is gonna be our auto first foam and auto of Nick Moribito For the uh Mets there three of 150 on the true blue auto Moribito Chrome's Acunia and Galoff. There's a Lazaro Montez based chrome Dominguez Rookie favorites, Adley Ruchman. You got the Tatum Jersey right now. Let's go. I like it Parozo and blaze Jordan. I'm a magic fan. So I got no dog in the fight any of the fights going on right now Zach Veen September. I don't even I mean, I really can't even pick one if I had to pick somebody to win Austin Charles, I wouldn't know who to pick There's a purple paper Jordan Davis or Jordan Diaz. Sorry Jordan Diaz purple paper rookie for the A's If I had to pick one, I probably would pick the Celtics to win Perez and young just because I'm more of a more of an Eastern conference guy Curtis me But the West is very tough. I don't know if I don't know if the winner is gonna be coming out of the East and Our first is gonna be a blue lava first Jainer Fernandez nice one there blue lava to 150 Jainer Fernandez Is that right Luke? Got Andy pages top 100 Got a chrome Hernandez and first on the atomic is Roman Anthony nice one there for the Red Sox Not numbered on the hobby atomic. We've got a rookie Osvaldo Paraza. Oh, that's sweet Luke Heck yeah, man. We had a Cole Anthony here wants to break. He did some Pokemon breaks for us There's bowman scouts Diego Cartier top 100 Sanchez the song As a prospect Cheerio first of Sanchez and Martinez Paper paper paper got chrome Lee sang got a brome Blake Lubey chrome. There's a top 100 of Kobe Mayo Sidenio and Martinez prospects Marcello Chrome's Coloss a royal. There's a rookie favorite Francisco Alvarez paper paper Lawler Elijah green and last chromes on the back Kumar rocker and Jonathan Machia Alrighty Stefan that will do it for your one box of 2023 bowman hobby. Thank you so much. We will get that right out to you


So let's consider a system I can put in many states, like a dice. Well, that gets a bit complicated because a dice can only be in one state at a time. So to make things slightly easier, I'm going to consider many systems and think about how many ways I can organize them. That too is difficult because, again, I don't have anything to start from. So I will start with a small analogy. Assuming that I have six matches and I would like to know how many ways can I organize them, so I have four on this side and two on that side. That is not entirely trivial. Let's forget about the four and two first and say how many ways can I organize six matches if the order matters? Well, first I can pick six, either of six, or sorry, the order, and then I can pick any of five, and then any of four, and then any of three, two, and one. So that's going to be six faculty. But that was just the total number of ways I could organize them, right? How many ways could I organize the four here? Because those are going to be the same states. Well, it's the same thing there. That would be four faculty, and on that side I would have two faculty. So if I'm only interested in the number of ways I could divide them this way, it would be six faculty divided by four faculty divided by two faculty. And I'm going to do exactly that now, but for n systems. So let's assume that I have states here, state one, state two, all the way to state j. The probability of a state is weight one, weight two, weight j. And if I have a total of uppercase n systems, I'll have to draw that here. The number of systems I have in state one is going to be n one, which is uppercase and multiplied by weight one, etc. So then I'm going to have n one systems there, n two systems there, and n j systems there. Just defining things. But defining things is important if you want to solve something. And that means that the number of ways, again, we're going to use p because p is the probability I'm after. That is proportional to the number of ways I can organize this number of states. And based on what I just said for the matches, I'm going to argue that that is uppercase n faculty, total number of ways I can organize all those systems, divided by n one faculty, and two faculty, etc., all the way to n j faculty. The faculty function is a complicated one. It's not easy to work with. And I can't really immediately do anything here. But remember that we're talking about large numbers in general, the statistical mechanics, right? And for large values of faculty, there is something called the Stirling formula that we can use to approximate it. And to save space, I'll write that up here. Stirling's formula says that for large values of what should we use, I'll just, I'll reuse n here. For large values of n faculty, we can write that as approximately n divided by the natural logarithm e raised to the power of n. And then I can introduce that here. So first, in the nominator, well, that's going to be uppercase n divided by e raised to the power of, that should be uppercase n. But instead of uppercase n, I should be able to write that as the sum of all the lowercase n's. That's going to save me one step. n one plus n two, etc., plus n j. And then I'll just write out the lowercase n's. That's going to be n one divided by e raised to the power of n one, and two divided by e raised to the power of n two, etc., up to n j divided by e raised to the power of n j. I know it doesn't look simple, but it is. This trick here, do you see here we have e raised to n one, e raised to n two, etc., and here I also have e raised to n one, e raised to n two. So I can simply strike those out. They will cancel each other. It's still not the world's most beautiful expression, but let's see where we get, continuing on the equal sign there. This then corresponds to uppercase n divided by lowercase n one, raised to the power of n one, multiplied by uppercase n divided by lowercase n two, raised to the power of n two, etc., all the way up to n j, raised to the power of n j. I hope you can see that up there, but there are some things I can use if I go back to my definitions and weights here. So uppercase n divided by lowercase n one, that's kind of weight, the inverse of the first weight. So I'm going to write that as the inverse of weight one. And then instead of n one here, n one was the total number of systems multiplied by weight one. I know it doesn't look easier, but it will be. One divided by weight two, raised to n number weight two, and then all the way up to one over weight j, raised to the number of systems. And now it's paid time, because now I'm going to assume one system. Because again, it was just the derivation here that was easier when I considered n systems. With one system, n equals one. And if n equals one, I'm going to get a much nicer, actually, rather than avoid writing the equal sign here. So that would mean that p is proportional to one over weight one, raised to weight one, multiplied by one over weight two, raised to the power weight two, multiplied, et cetera, by one over weight j, raised to j. Still doesn't look particularly beautiful and simple. But it wasn't probabilities I was after here. Rather than let's do the normal derivation of entropy and see what the entropy would look like. Entropy is k, l, n, m, or p in this case. If I just use the logarithms here, this is going to simplify something very nice. This product will become a sum, right? So I'm going to have k. And do you notice how all the w's are in the denominator? I can flip that around one over that and just add a minus sign for the logarithm. So this is going to be a sum of the logarithm, leaves some space before. And then it's going to be the sum over all i, weight i, raised to the power of weight i. And then I'll use the logarithm laws one final time and put that weight in front of it. So the entropy in this system corresponds to a sum over all the states, the weight for each states multiplied by the logarithm of the weight of that state. And that the weight here, this means that we get the entropy again as k, l, n, omega, or weight, which is minus it. This is pretty cool because it corresponds to the definition of entropy that Claude Shannon introduced in the 1900s information theory. So there is a very close connection between entropy the way we interpreted in physics and statistical mechanics and entropy and data science on the other hand. It's exactly the same type of entropy or order versus disorder we're talking about. And armed with this, we can in principle calculate the entropy. The only problem is to calculate the entropy, I'm going to need the sum over all the states in the system and I'm going to need to know the weight that is how much time it's spending in the system. And for any even semi-realistic simplified model, the only way we can do that is typically with a computer simulation that samples all these states and finds out what the weights are.