Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to get through this thing called Cobra Convergence. Sadly, one of our founding members, FormBX257, is no longer with us. In his honor, because he will always be immortal in our hearts, I present the FormBX257 Memorial Crimson Guard Immortal Review. What's that? Whoa, whoa, I'm still alive, I'm still alive! Oh, it seems Kevin is still alive! Hey, that's great! So instead, I present the FormBX257 Reunion Crimson Guard Immortal Review. You think Kevin is really immortal? Commander788 here, welcome to Cobra Convergence 5! This is my official contribution to the convergence, but on my channel, it's Cobra Convergence all month long. This video is a tribute to one of our first Convergence, FormBX257. I'm going to be reviewing the figure he reviewed for the very first Cobra Convergence. Crimson Guard Immortal, I'll have guest convergence to give their assessment of this figure. Yes, FormBX257 will be back. I'll be frank, both FormBX257 and Timmer have already reviewed this figure. It will be difficult for me to cover it any better than they did. In fact, it's impossible, so Timmer has agreed to allow me to use part of his review in this one. It's a star-studded cast as HCC788 presents the Crimson Guard Immortal. This is the Crimson Guard Immortal, Cobra's elite trooper from 1991. This figure was introduced in 1991 and was available for 1991 only. It was discontinued for 1992. This is the only version of the Crimson Guard Immortal in the vintage era. There were a couple post-vintage versions released. The Crimson Guard Immortal is made up of new parts. Nothing is reused from earlier figures, at least in North America. There was a European release that used a repainted head from the 1990 Rock Viper. The head of the Crimson Guard Immortal was reused on the 1993 male-away personalized figure that was called either Nama Cobra or Crieta Cobra. Crimson Guard Immortal traces his lineage to the original Crimson Guard from 1985. What exactly is a Crimson Guard? It's a special kind of Cobra trooper. They were elite. They were the best of the best. In fact, they were so good they couldn't be used on the battlefield. They mostly served as Cobra Commander's personal guard, undercover agents, and a fifth column. A fifth column is a group within a country that favors that country's enemy and tries to undermine the country from within. A fifth column can be dangerous to a free society in a couple ways. They can have a direct negative impact if they attack the country's interests from within. The country's response to a fifth column can weaken civil liberties as it's easy to view any opinion that differs from the majority as supporting the country's enemies and those who hold those opinions may be attacked. The name Crimson Guard is often shortened to CG or phoneticized to CG's. A few CG's receive plastic surgery so they all look alike. In the comic book, this is referred to as the Fred series. The Fred CG's were numbered. Fred I, Fred II, Fred III, and so on. One of the Fred's, Fred VII, impersonated Cobra Commander for a while. In 1985, in addition to getting the Crimson Guard, we got Tomax and Zemot, the Crimson Guard commanders, also known as the Crimson Twins. Despite having command of the Crimson Guard, their uniforms were mostly blue, not red. In addition to commanding the Crimson Guard, the twins were also financiers for Cobra. In 1989, a new version of the Crimson Guard was released in the Python Patrol subseries in Python Patrol colors, which, as you can see, includes very little Crimson. Where the Crimson Guard immortal fits in the Crimson Guard lineage is unclear. After 1989, the hierarchy of the Crimson Guard gets very fuzzy. The immortal is distinguished from the regular Crimson Guard and is considered a new type of trooper. We'll talk about it more when we look at the file card, but it's unclear what difference there is between these guys and the regular Crimson Guard. To complicate things even further, in 1993, the Crimson Guard commander was released, even though they already had commanders Tomax and Zemot. They're called immortal, but they're not literally immortal. They're immortal in the sense that their courage will live forever in the annals of Cobra history. Timur has an excellent explanation for the immortal moniker. This is a clip from his review. Firstly, there's obviously the name. It was clearly inspired by the Persian Immortals. These were elite troops that both served on the battlefield and as an imperial guard for the Persian Emperor. So, like with the Crimson Guard and the Praetorians, Hasbro took their cue from ancient history once again. I may have been a bit hasty when I said the look was inspired by the Samurai. It may be based on what Hasbro thought Persian armor looks like. You know what's funny? According to Wikipedia, immortals is actually a mistranslation. The Persians never called them that. Going by the original Persian name, they were called companions, though even that seems like a literal interpretation. And I assume the original meaning was just guards, as in imperial guards. Still, imperial companions sounds less like an elite fighting force and more like an escort service. So, I wonder if the Persians heard about the mistranslation and just went with it, agreeing it sounded way cooler. Thanks for helping out Timmer. Don't forget to check out Timmer's channel and subscribe. He's trying to reach 2,020 subscribers in 2020. Let's look at the card back for Crimson Guard Immortal. This one has the UPC cut out for some reason, but we can still see most of the card. It looks like this was $3.99 at KB Toys. It has the GI Joe logo and Cobra the enemy. It has a red background indicating an enemy character, but it also has the digital explosion background behind the card art. So, this is a halfway between an 80s style card and a 90s style card. The card really wants us to know weapon really shoots. Well, that's a bit of an overstatement. We'll talk about that later. The card art is pretty good, but there are some peculiarities. For instance, this missile seems to be shooting out of the machine gun, and there's another missile attached to the other barrel. That is not how the toy works. In the section behind where the figure would have been sealed, we have a diagram and instructions on how to put the accessories together and how to launch the missiles. Flipping the card around, we can see the cross cell. These are other figures that were available at the time. It looks like a previous owner used a highlighter to mark over the ones that he had. This figure was worth one flag point and it had a file card. This is a file folder shaped card, which was typical in the 1980s. 1991 was two years into the 90s, but they still had 80s style file cards. That's good. Let's take a look at the Crimson Guard Immortals accessories, and there's a lot here. In 1991, figures started to include tons of accessories and sometimes elaborate weapon systems. Spring-loaded missile launchers were introduced, but they weren't yet standard in the line. Crimson Guard Immortals was a figure without a spring-loaded missile launcher, but with an elaborate weapon system. The Crimson Guard Immortals included a two-barrel missile launcher. It is in black plastic. It has a grip between the two barrels, and it has a brace. It is rather short on detail, but it did have two black removable missiles. These missiles are identical and he has some extra missiles so you can pop some new missiles in once you fire these off. The card says weapons really shoot. Well, let's talk about that. First, these missiles fit in the launcher barrels firmly enough that they won't fall out. That's excellent. That's better than some missile launchers from the late 80s and early 90s.   Finger flick technology isn't the most sophisticated way to fire a missile, and I think it has no chance of knocking down Dr. Meinbender. Let's give it a shot anyway. No, just bounces right off of him. Crimson Guard Immortal has another weapon that is similar to the first one. It is also in black plastic. The tube includes another finger flick missile, and the bottom part has a two-barrel machine gun. And that machine gun even has an ammunition belt that runs from the machine gun down to the figure's leg. I'll take this ammunition belt off for now so I can take a look at it. One end of the belt slots onto a peg on the underside of this weapon, and the other end slots onto a peg on the figure's right leg. That's why this weapon needs to be in his right hand, not his left. That ammunition belt is black. It's made of soft, flexible plastic. It has some detail on one side, but the other side has less detail. Looks like that's supposed to be bullets. Minimal detail, but it serves a function. The weapon with the machine gun fits in his right hand. It is black like the other one, and it's very similar. It has the same missile launcher barrel on the top, and like the other one, it's lacking in detail. It has this double-barrel machine gun on the bottom with the peg that connects the ammunition belt, and it has the grip in between, and it has a brace in the back. We've already looked at a lot of accessories, but there are more. He includes a backpack. The backpack is in black plastic. The backpack has minimal detail. It's basically just a rack for three additional finger flick missiles for a total of six. The missiles fit in three holes on the backpack, and if the missiles are placed face down, they fit snugly and they will not fall out. It's all so much. It's a massive pile of accessories for a single figure. Adding more accessories doesn't make the accessories better. In this case, though, the numerous accessories, it's not much of a problem. Crimson Guard immortal can hold all of his accessories at the same time. They're all black, so no crazy, loud colors. The biggest problem is, for all of these accessories, I would prefer a simple assault rifle. Let's take a look at the articulation on Crimson Guard immortal. He had the articulation that was standard for GI Joe figures well before 1991. He could bend his leg at the knee about 90 degrees, and he could bend his leg at the hip about 90 degrees. He could move his legs apart about so far. This was an O-ring figure, meaning he was held together with a rubber O-ring that looped around the inside so he could move at the torso a bit. He had a swivel at the bicep that allowed him to swivel his arm all the way around. He had a hinge at the elbow so he could bend his arm at the elbow about 90 degrees. He could swivel his arm at the shoulder all the way around, and he could lift his arm at the shoulder. He had a ball jointed neck so he could look up and down and turn his head from left to right. Let's take a look at the sculpted design and color of Crimson Guard immortal, and I can already say it's a massive improvement on the Python Patrol Crimson Guard from 1989 in that he has a lot more red and a lot less yellow. On his head he has a red, non-removable helmet. It has ridges on the top of the helmet in some nice detail. He has a silver Cobra emblem on his forehead. He has silver goggles and a black mask. The helmet and the mask are fine, but the goggles I think are too big. A narrower eye slit, like on the original Crimson Guard, I think would have worked better. On his chest he has a red shirt with a raised collar. He has silver segmented armor that covers his entire chest. He has black buckles on that armor, at least I interpret those as buckles. He has black straps that connect to the armor and run over his shoulders, and on the back you can see where those straps connect. On his arms he has long red sleeves and silver armor on his shoulders. There's a black detail on his right upper arm that may be some kind of ammunition. He has silver armor on his forearms, and he has black gloves. On the left upper arm there is a silver tampo that is a unit insignia, and that is the same symbol as the one on the original 1985 Crimson Guard. It's altered slightly, but that is the same Crimson Guard unit patch. On his waist he has a belt with minimal detail. There are straps that run from the back of the belt down to his legs. The belt buckle is silver and there's a red cobra emblem at the center, and below the belt there is more silver armor. On his legs he has red trousers and a lot of additional detail. On his right leg he has a black box on the outside leg with straps that run to his belt front and back. That is apparently ammunition for his machine gun. Right below it there's the peg for the ammunition belt. In the middle of his right thigh he has a tiny black dagger. On the left leg he has more black straps, and on the outside leg he has what looks like grenades for a grenade launcher. So maybe that's an additional function of his weapon system. And then on both legs just above the knee he has black ridged straps that run all the way around. He has black boots. There's some nice lace detail on those boots. Then he has these black extensions that run up to his knees. Those are not knee pads, but there's some kind of extension on the front of the boot. Even though this is a departure from the first CG, I can imagine this as a Crimson Guard. All the original colors are there, red, black, and silver. They didn't attempt to muddle the elegant and coherent color scheme with neon yellow. I'm looking at you Crimson Guard Commander. Let's take a look at Crimson Guard Immortal's file card. It has his faction as Cobra, a portrait of Crimson Guard Immortal here. It says his codename is Crimson Guard Immortal. He is the Cobra Elite Trooper. Incidentally, that's also what the original Crimson Guard file card said, Cobra Elite Trooper. So there's no distinction here between the immortal and the original. In this top section it says vehicle proficiency Cobra grade 8. I have no idea what that means. Is this guy intended to be a vehicle driver? Like a general vehicle driver? Is that the distinction between this guy and the original Crimson Guard? I don't know. But he is licensed to operate all Cobra land and air vehicles, including Hammerhead and Hurricane. Hammerhead is a sea vehicle, so that's hilarious. This paragraph says Crimson Guard Immortals are fanatical super soldiers who swear a fearsome oath of absolute obedience to Cobra Commander. Advanced weapons systems marksmen and martial arts experts, they are the most formidable fighters of the Cobra Legion. A CG, in parenthesis CG, when not serving as a personal bodyguard to the head snake, is involved in covert operations around the country under deep cover, assuming an apparently normal occupation and frequently running for public office. This bottom paragraph says the immortals are lawyers or accountants who pump iron, wear body armor and carry big guns. What they can't get by stomping and shooting, they'll get by suing and auditing. This file card is fine, but what they're describing is a regular Crimson Guard. Other than the vehicle driving bit, there's nothing different for the immortal. They don't seem to be a special branch or even more elite than the elite troopers. They're just CG's. It does clarify one thing, the Crimson Guard are absolutely loyal to Cobra Commander. This is how I imagine them. They don't need Tomax and Zamot as middlemen. The CG's or CGI's would be Cobra Commander's most trusted agents and his personal guard. Let's see what some other Cobra Convergence presenters think about the Crimson Guard immortal. The 1985 version of the Crimson Guard is one of my top 10 favorite G.I. Joe figures of all time. So you might think that I wouldn't like this 90s version considering it's supposed to be an upgrade or a replacement. But I really do like this figure. It has a lot going for it. And in fact, I easily put this thing right beside my 1980s versions as a variation. As a matter of fact, the immortal tag underneath there really helps with that. Crimson Guard immortal. Formidable scarps, great figure, but does remind me of a line from Die Hard. 9 million terrorists in the world and I have to kill one with feet smaller than my sister. The Crimson Guard immortal is a really cool figure. I love that he's in the same color uniform as the original figure. He's got a lot of the same design elements. He works great as a squad leader, a sergeant, or as a heavy weapons guy for a unit of Crimson Guards. But those finger file rocket tubes are really bizarre. Looking at the Crimson Guard immortal overall, it's an excellent figure. It's not quite as good as the 85 Crimson Guard. I prefer the predominant red. The silver takes over a bit too much on the immortal. The helmet also isn't as cool as the original Crimson Guard. The accessories definitely could have used more detail. Other than those minor complaints though, it's fantastic. The colors are great. I could go for less silver, but the color choices are perfect. They kept the Crimson Guard tradition of red, black, and silver. And that shoulder patch that matches the original, that's beautiful. The accessories are a bit cumbersome and lacking in detail. I would have been happy with an assault rifle. I do appreciate that they kept all of the accessories black. The finger flick technology is not the most sophisticated way to fire a missile. But they were trying to give the toy more play value. They could have saved some of the trouble and given him a weapon reminiscent of the old CG rifle. For a 90s figure, it is head and shoulders above most figures of that era. No crazy colors, no oversized spring-loaded missile launcher. It feels like an 80s figure. My biggest problem with the Crimson Guard Immortal is, what is he? Is he a regular Crimson Guardsman? Has the entire Crimson Guard Corps been converted to Crimson Guard Immortal? Is this just an updated uniform for the Crimson Guard? Is it an extra elite unit within the elite Crimson Guard? Are they Crimson Guard officers? Based on the file card, they have exactly the same undercover mission as the regular CG's. I imagine the Crimson Guard as Cobra Commander's most loyal troops, serving as a personal guard and enforcers. They are the most fanatically devoted to Cobra ideology. They are what every Cobra trooper aspires to be. To the posterity of Cobra loyalists, they would be legends, immortal in the historical sense. That was my review of the Crimson Guard Immortal. I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you to everyone who helped out. Welcome back, FormBX257. Don't forget to check out these other Cobra Convergence contributors this week. You saw GI Joberg on August 1st. You're seeing me on August 2nd. The Full Force podcast has August 3rd. Half the battle has August 4th. Special Mission Force has August 5th. Comic Tropes has August 6th. Toy Palloy has August 7th. Plastic Battles has August 8th. Make sure you check them all out and subscribe to them so you don't miss their presentation for Cobra Convergence 5. And do you want to participate in Cobra Convergence? There are instructions on my website, hcc788.com, on how you can get involved. In addition to my website, hcc788.com, I'm also on social media, on Facebook and Twitter. I also have a Patreon, which helps me keep this channel going. Thanks to all of the names you see on your screen right now, I could not do it without them. Cobra Convergence 5 marches on. I'll see you next time. And until then, always remember, only Cobra is Cobra.


Hi guys, this is Rich here. On behalf of RichTVLive, we are 14 days and 54 minutes, 7 seconds away from history in Canada. And there's a company that I've been looking at that is demanding my attention because of copyright laws. I don't want to be showing other people's videos, but this is Azal Hazan, president of Canada Royalty. You should put Canada Royalty on your watchlist. CRZ in Canada, CNNRF in America. Remember, RichTVLive is strictly for education, entertainment purposes. Always do your due diligence, always do your research before you invest in anything that we talk about here on RichTVLive. Canada Royalty, 88% by a bar chart. It has been going up steadily. As you can see here, it was at $3 on August 16th and it is just climbing steadily. And you can see it is up 195% in the last year, 69% in the last three months and 26% in the last month alone. Let's look at some more news. So, as Ontario's proposed cannabis retail plans may irk producers that are capped to just one storefront, Ottawa based Canada Royalty Corp is aiming to make itself a leader in the province with its move to buy a vape shop chain. Canada Royalty is purchasing, look at this, 180 smoke for 25 million with an additional 15 million to be awarded upon completion of certain targets by the end of 2020. The company said in a statement released late Thursday in an interview on BNN Bloomberg as Afzal Hazan, President and General Council of Canada Royalty said the purchase will help it draw customers as 180 smokes established base of users are already aware of smoking products through vaping. When we took a look at the customer streams that were coming through the door in various businesses, 180 smoke was appealing because they surveyed their customers and 80% plus were cannabis users too. As Sam said, it's a very interesting captive market. 180 smoke and its subsidiaries including 420 wellness currently have 26 locations in Canada, that's right, 26 locations, 15 of which are in prime locations throughout Ontario that sell vaping nicotine related products and parts. Marijuana for vaping along with other pop products like edibles and beverages will remain banned until October 2019 when Canada legalizes the drug next month. 180 smoke has already targeted prime locations where they see large amounts of foot traffic and pedestrians' attraction into the stores, Hassan said. Canada Royalty said it expects the vast majority of 180 smoke retail portfolio to be eligible for retail cannabis sales after marijuana becomes legal on October 17th. The vape chains revenue grew more than 50% in 8 months to August from a year ago to 6.78 million, Canada Royalty said. This is just the start people. When we took a look at this market and also started to see extremely onerous restrictions on advertising and marketing taking place, we realized that retail is where you're going to win customers, consumers in Canada for cannabis products. Hassan said, if you are not going to be doing things through the government, you are going to have problems. This is what he's trying to say. This is what I've been saying since day one. Canada Royalty's acquisition comes after Ontario introduced legislation Thursday governing the licensing and regulation of the province's private cannabis retail model, which is scheduled to be in place by next April. While Ontario's new regulations will limit cannabis producers to just one retail storefront at their production locations, effectively putting the brakes on their provincial retail plans, some industry observers suggest they could use a franchise model to circumvent Queen's Park's legislation. Even so, Hassan poured cold water on the viability of a cannabis franchise model succeeding in Ontario over the short term. The benefit of franchise typically tends to be buying a brand that recognize and pulling customers in the door, Hassan said. In the cannabis industry right now, it's very hard to see a franchise that could see that customer pull power just yet, maybe in a year or two or three. That could be the case. This is a very interesting company. I think it's got a lot of potential and it's one that you need to put on your watch list. Put it on your radar. I'm on their website right now. It's cannaroyalty.com. I'm doing my due diligence. I'm doing my research. Please, if you like this video, smash the like button. I would love to know what you think about cannaroyalty. Do you own this company? Do you want to own this company? Is it a company that you're interested in? They look huge to me. I think they have so much potential. This is a massive acquisition, a $40 million acquisition. What do you think? Remember, I'm not a licensed advisor. This is strictly an idea. I'm not telling you to buy this stock. I am strictly looking at the company and I want to know what you guys think. Do you think that this is a winner? Please, let me know. Comment on the video. Share the video everywhere. Remember, if I win and you win, we all win. I don't own this stock right now. I found it last year when it was way, way cheaper. It has done very, very well. It is definitely on my watchlist. It's definitely on my radar. What do you think? We are 14 days, 47 minutes and 55 seconds away from history. It's true. Canna Royalty Corp. A new pick for you to look at from your boy Rich. Canna Royalty Corp. CNNRF, CRZ in Canada. You're not winning. You're not watching. I'm out. Peace. Canna Royalty.  Wow. I like it.


When you look outside, you see different states of matter, right? You can see solids with all these leaves, tree bark and buildings. You can see liquids that is water over here. And you can feel the air present around you, right? Matter can occupy three states, solids, liquids and gases. And I want to think about what is similar among these states of matter and what is different. In this video, we will answer that question and in doing so, we will realize how changes in the arrangement of particles can give rise to these three states of matter. Alright, so let's begin with solids. Take a book or an iron nail or a pen or a pencil and you will see that these objects have a very clear boundary to them. You can see where they end and where they start. A solid also cannot start flowing, right? So we can say that solids, they have a fixed shape and volume. They have a fixed shape and volume. So try compressing a solid and you will find that you can't. That shows that solids also, they are incompressible. The fact that solids have a definite shape, they have a fixed shape and volume and that it cannot be compressed is what makes them rigid. That's why we call solids as rigid. Now why do solids have these properties? How are the particles arranged which give rise to these properties for solids? Let's have a look at this image. So you can think of it as a jar and there is something kept inside this jar, maybe like an ice cube or any solid block. So the particles in a solid, they are arranged in a fixed pattern. Strong forces hold them together. So they cannot really leave their positions, they are not free to move. That is what gives solids its fixed shape and volume. The only movements that they do make are tiny vibrations. Finally, there are no spaces between the particles in a solid. So that's why we cannot compress it and that's what makes it incompressible. Now I have some more examples for you. I want you to take a look at these two images. You have a pair of rubber bands and this is a sponge. Let's look at the rubber band first. So here we have the rubber band and we can change the shape of a rubber band, right? When we apply a force in these directions, we can change the shape of a rubber band or if we take a sponge, we can easily compress it. The definition of solids is really breaking here, right? So does that mean that these two materials are not solids? Well, let's think about it. So if you look at the rubber band, the fact that we have to apply a force to change its shape shows that the rubber band resists or doesn't want its shape to be changed. Just like any other piece of solid, just like any pen, if you apply a force, it will resist. It does not want its shape to be changed and the rubber band is doing the same. Just that the amount of force that you are applying to a rubber band is much less and the amount of force to change the shape of, let's say, a book will be huge. But both of them are resisting a change to their shape and that is what solids do, right? Also when we remove the force, it comes back to its original shape, a property that is called elasticity and you will learn more about that in physics. Rubber band, just like any other solid, also doesn't flow, right? So that's why we can say that even rubber band is a solid. Now for a sponge, we can compress it easily. Does that mean that it's not a solid? Well, if we look closely, if we look closely, we will realize that there are a lot of air spaces. There are a lot of air spaces in a sponge. Air occupies a lot of space in a sponge. So when we compress it, all the air is expelled out or thrown out and then we are able to compress it. It seems as if the volume of the sponge is decreasing. But the fact is that, let's say, there was some amount of volume to begin with, there was also a lot of air spaces to begin with, right? And then when you compress it, you just throw out all of that air outside. Now what you're left with is just solid sponge.  The volume of the solid sponge is not changing. It's just that you are thrown out all the air. So it seems that the volume of the sponge is changing. But it's not really changing, right? And that's why we can say that even a sponge is a solid. All right, let's take one more example which will challenge the definition of a solid. So here we have sugar or salt. You can take anything. Now, if you take, if you take like something like anything that has salt in it, and if you try and pour salt, this looks like a salt shaker, okay? So when salt is coming out, when salt is coming out from it, you will see that salt can flow like a liquid. It flows like a liquid, right? So can we call it a solid? Well, it turns out we can because if we zoom in and if we only look at one salt crystal or one sugar crystal, we will see that this has very much of fixed shape and volume. We cannot compress it as well. So it's just that you see a lot of salt and a lot of sugar over here, too many crystals. So it gives, it seems that they are flowing, but if we just look at one small crystal, then that has the properties of a solid, a fixed shape, volume and it's not compressible. So even a salt or sugar, even that is solid. All right, now let's move on to liquids. So when we look at liquids, we can see that they can easily flow, right? They can easily flow. So let me, let me write that. They can flow easily. And what does that mean? What does that tell us about the shape and volume? Well, you must have realized that even if you take any shape of container, it can be, it can be any random shape of container. You will realize that water really takes up the shape of that container. So it does not really have a fixed shape. It does not have a fixed shape, but is the volume changing? Think about it. Even if we pour water in different containers, the volume still remains the same, right? Only the shape is changing. So it does have a fixed volume, but it does not have a fixed shape. Also if you try and compress a liquid, think of, think of having like a balloon, let's say you have a balloon and there is water inside of it. You can still compress it to some extent, but you cannot compress it entirely, right? So they are somewhat compressible, not entirely compressible. So they lie somewhere in between, let's say between solids and we will see gases can be compressed. They really lie in between solids and gases in terms of their compressibility. So we can say that they are somewhat compressible, not entirely compressible. All right, one more interesting thing about liquids is that you see all these aquatic animals living in water, right? How are they getting oxygen? Like every living being requires oxygen to survive. So how are they really getting oxygen out of living in water? Well, it does all that gases can mix with liquids and that really is called diffusion. In this case, oxygen can mix with water and then aquatic animals can take use of that oxygen to survive and live. Even solids can mix with liquid and again that is still called diffusion. Diffusion is when two different types of atoms are mixed with each other. So the other two states of matter can mix with liquids, solids can mix with liquids. We can take an example of crystal of potassium per magnet and if we just let it be inside a beaker of water, very soon you will see that it starts spreading out throughout the body of the water. That is really diffusion because you have intermixing of two different types of particles, water and potassium per magnet. In this case, you can see solids diffusing with a liquid. In the case in the example of aquatic animals living in a body of water, you can see gases diffusing with water, in this case oxygen. So liquids can have that property. All right, but why do liquids really have these properties? So let's have a look at what's happening at the molecular level. Now when it comes to liquids, the particles are not arranged in a fixed pattern. The particles are moving around or sliding past each other. They're still not going outside the container. They're very much contained within this volume, but they're still moving around, right? So that tells us that they do not really have a fixed shape, but they only have a fixed volume, fixed volume and not a fixed shape. And finally, there is some space between these particles, so they are somewhat compressible. And finally, the fact that these particles, they have some spaces in between them. This gives room for atoms of any other type of element to take up this space. And that is how diffusion works, right? When we had potassium per magnet, the particles of potassium per magnet, they took up the spaces in between these water molecules, these water particles, which is how they diffused. And if gas is diffusing with water, oxygen can take up this space between the particles of water. That is how diffusion works. So we see how a regiment of particles in a liquid can give rise to these properties. Fixed volume, not a fixed shape, the ability to have other substances mixed with itself and also allowing it to compress to some extent. All right, now let's look at gases. So when it comes to gases, it's difficult to see them really unless a gas is colored. But different types of gases are part of your daily life. So when you see an LPG cylinder, there's an enormous amount of gases. That is compressed and then the cylinders can be used. So the first main property of gases, we can say that they are really compressible. Even if you take a balloon with just air in it, you can very easily compress it, right? It'll even burst after you apply a certain amount of force. And the other thing is, if you have a gas in a container, it will fill up the entire volume. If there is a container and there is some gas in it, let's say there is a lid on top. So it's closed from the top. And if you have some gas, any gas, it will fill up the entire container. So it does not have a fixed volume. It does not have a fixed shape. So let's write that neither a fixed shape nor a fixed volume. So it has these two main properties. And also you can have two different types of gases mixing with each other. So it also allows for diffusion. Now these two are the main properties for gases. Now let's see how the particles are arranged, which can give rise to these properties. So in gases, the particles, they are moving randomly in all the directions. So in this case, you see a molecule, a molecule made up of two atoms. They can move in any direction. They can move randomly in all the directions. They fill up the entire volume of the container. So that means they do not have any fixed shape or volume. And there is a lot of space in between these molecules, which makes a gas highly compressible in nature. And now there's one more interesting thing about gases. So I'm sure you must have experienced this. If then someone's cooking anything near you or let's say there's a perfume being sprayed in the corner of a room, immediately you can smell that, right? How is that possible? So think about it. There is already air present around you. There is oxygen present around you. And when something is cooking or if there is a perfume being sprayed in a corner of a room, the gas particles from those two things mix with the oxygen or the air around you, and then it reaches your nose. So this is also an example of diffusion. Again, mixing of two different types of atoms. Atoms of a perfume, whatever compound is used over there. And the atoms of food, whatever food is being prepared, right? So that is mixing with the oxygen present around you and is able to reach your nose. And this shows that even gases can allow for diffusion. Different gases can mix with it. All right, so these three were the states of matter. Now you can see how the enrichment of particles can give rise to different, different kind of properties with these states of matter. Just quickly summarizing, solids have a fixed shape volume. They are not compressible. Liquids have a fixed volume, not a fixed shape. And they are somewhat compressible. Gases are highly compressible and they neither have a fixed shape nor a fixed volume.


What's up everybody, I'm the Mangus, you are awesome and so is Aron.  I, however, think he'll make over one hell of a support, but we'll talk about his possible positions and drawbacks later. For now, let's get into the Myth Spotlight. As always, we start with Aron's lore and his 3D model. I personally think Aron looks like the absolute hands down best out of all the myths so far, just incredibly detailed with what looks like organic armor. My only complaint is the scooped out portion of his chest that would kinda funnel any attacks against him directly into his face. Other than that though, very good looking myth.  UG has not confirmed if there is a cap on the stacks or if you could just keep growing more and more powerful throughout the game. Quick note, I really like the effect when you gain the soul stacks. Now for the special ability. All myths in ethereal will have a special risk-reward ability bound to the right click. Aron's is called Torment. Torment turns the damage from Infernal Aura off and instead radiates a fear effect for a short time. The fear can only be applied once. The spotlight also confirms what fear does in the game. I wasn't sure if it made people run away or if it just rooted them in place. Now we know, they run away. We talked to UG about this ability and from what they said, Aron's aura will be a big part of his damage so giving up Infernal Aura for the fear actually will be a sacrifice. Aron's first basic ability is Burning Fists. Activating this causes Aron to execute two rapid melee swings that apply blaze to the target. Blaze is a magical damage over time debuff. Basically you put a burn on him. It seems that the blaze debuff will factor greatly into the rest of Aron's kit. If the target is already affected by blaze when you do your burning fists, then the punches deal extra damage and refresh the duration of the debuff. It's important to note that this is an ability, not a buff to basic attacks.  Aron's coolest ability is impending doom. You rush forward with a reduced turn rate and grab motherfuckers. This deals damage and you hold onto them with a magical flame hand. You can then throw your target in a direction of your choosing. If you don't throw them, you instead spike them into the ground. If you throw your target into a wall, they get stunned. Furthermore, if you grab a target that's affected by blaze, you can increase crowd control reduction for a short period. They show Aron at one point throwing Marina off the edge of the map. Fall damage is a thing in ethereal, so throwing people from one of the side lanes in the void lane will most likely kill them. Throwing them off a void lane, as you see here, will almost certainly kill them.  Next up is Hell's Inferno. This is a range ability where you lob a ball of fire at a target location that explodes, deals damage, slows enemies and it applies blaze. If the target is already 420 blazing, then they also get decreased magic resist. This thing looks really slow. I can't imagine you're going to hit anyone with a naked inferno. However, if you impending doom into someone, chuck them toward your team and then immediately shoot an inferno at them, it should make for one hell of a combo. If you played Paragon, think of this as like when you played Sevrog and you hit someone with colossal blow, and then catch them with a subjugate as they land. Aarons ultimate is called imminent apocalypse.  Your basic attacks during your ult also apply blaze. Pretty basic self buff ultimate, but with as crazy as the rest of his kit is, I'm pretty happy with it.  You can activate imminent apocalypse to double your aura size, activate torment so that your aura fears, charge through the enemy team grabbing one person and fearing everyone else away, throw that person into your team and chuck a firebomb at them to slow them. You'll be able to single out one person that your team will naturally focus on while preventing the enemy team from doing anything about it.  At first look it seems Aarons is going to be appropriately terrifying. So where will Aarons be played? Just like with Talos, I think solo lane is an obvious choice here. It will allow him to get soul stacks much faster than if you took him into the jungle, and his aura will provide easy bully potential. However, as I watched the spotlight, it dawned on me that Aarons has a lot of potential as a support, especially as like an anti-dive support, which those are few and far between. If several people dive your ADC, you can just right click and fear them. If it's just the jungler diving in, rush them down, pick them up and chuck them under your tower. The fireball provides some area to deny that can be tossed on top of your ADC if he's being chased and that'll slow his pursuers.  I brought this up to UG and they said that the biggest problem with trying to play Aarons as a support is that his base health is pretty low to account for the soul sacking mechanic. So in order to get the most out of Aarons, you need to be getting kills, and if you're playing him as a support, you should be giving those lane kills to the ADC. I don't know though, he sounds like a dream support to me. You could build in tanky, pop your ultimate and bam, you're a body blocking monster on top of all that other stuff. I will most certainly be giving Aarons support a try. We should be seeing Marina next and she's meant to be a support, so I'll try to rein in my enthusiasm for support Aarons until I see her kit. It seems like Aarons has everything going for him, but I did think of a few scenarios where he could fail pretty hard. For example, if you're trying to take down a tower, the damage aura will cause you to take aggro when you really don't want to. Same with early game, if you're starting with low health, then all the enemy solo laner has to do is get in range of your aura to trigger minion attacks against you. You'll have to play really safe until you can get a few soul sacks under your belt. That's all I have for now folks, I personally think this is the craziest kit we've seen so far. Let me know in the comments what you think of Aarons, tell me how you feel about his skin shown at the end, and also let me know how you feel about the Parmeron skin that I designed. Like the video if you wish, sub to the channel if you so desire, but for now, this is the Mangoo signing off, you guys, have a good one. Mangooos!


Hi Erica. This is Ashley with Oxmore Toyota. Thank you so much for your recent interest in a new corolla in this email I have provided links to our current selection of corollas for you to look over at your convenience when you get a moment Please give me a call. My number is five zero two two and four seven one six six or you can also email me back. Thanks. Bye


So, welcome to the, oh, that's the wrong slide. Let's start from the beginning. Welcome to the Prometheus Functional Update for August. I'm Ben Kochi, I'm the Prometheus Lead. Joshua is our product manager and we have engineers on team Paul, Kevin, Julius and Mike. Mike just joined us recently to work more on the front end. So, straight into 9.5, so in 9.5 we added some nice new automatic monitoring for the idea to production and automatic deploys. So, this is really great for demos and at the end of this, Joshua will actually do a little demo of this. It should be nice and easy for everybody to now see automatic Prometheus metrics and starting to get some actual customer facing metrics into the four GitLab users. Also, in 9.5 we've improved the GitLab Rails Ruby metrics. We have done a bunch of cleanup and added a few more metrics that has been helping out in production to help instrument the GitLab install and the gitlab.com install. And we've done a little bit of cleanup to improve the metric names to meet our guidelines. We also added a simple web server into the Sidekick job runner. That will allow us to expose worker metrics and finally get much better information from the workers to find out what they're doing. And we'll be expanding on this in later releases. We also continue to do some minor improvements. We've did some UI bug fixes and improvements and we also had a bunch of bugs that were discovered in the Prometheus multi-process library which is the backend code that instruments the Ruby code. And that was causing some problems in production we had to turn it off. But those bugs are all fixed now and we've been doing some nice performance improvements so that monitoring does not get in the way of actually serving users. So coming up in 10.0, we're gonna have a big focus on getting parity, feature parity with the influx DB metrics that have been in the system for a while. Influx DB is used in a little bit of a different way. It sends event streams instead of metric streams. So then what that means is for every event that happens we send a metric or we send a sample event to the influx DB. This is not something that is possible with Prometheus. So we're going to be translating that and improving on things with Prometheus we'll be actually be able to have live real-time histogram data instead of having to do post-processing on event streams. And this will allow us to eventually remove the influx DB metrics from the GitLab application. We're also gonna be working on another major feature we're gonna be trying to improve the application performance metrics so that users will be able to put their own metrics and be able to see their own metrics coming from their applications instead of just side metrics like the CPU and memory usage of their running applications. We're also going to start working on adding canary support to the Prometheus we've been wanting to do this for a couple of releases but it's been we've run out of time with all the various other work going on and we'll finally be able to we're finally going to put some effort into getting the canary features added to the enterprise edition. Prometheus in the gitlab.com production we've been working on the influx DB to Prometheus gateway so that the existing influx DB metrics are available to the Prometheus server so that we can do more real-time monitoring that influx DB hasn't been able to do because of the way we ingest that data. There's a little bit of blockers because of some inconsistency in the labels but that's being worked on and hopefully should be cleared up soon. We've also spent some time to help production with their alert manager and alerting so that we can reduce the alert fatigue for production and improve the alerting visibility for the production environment. And we've also been working on trying to improve the git host alerting because they've also been drowning in alerts and need to have a little bit of sanity for their monitoring. And now I'll leave it to Joshua to do a quick demo of the idea to production. Cool, thanks Ben. And I want to do a full ITP demo. We'll just kind of focus on the monitoring section here. I'll look at the changes folded into the sales script. Also while I'm getting set up here I just wanted to thank Jose. He wasn't on the team list there for some reason but he's done the vast majority of all the front end code here for all the meetings items. So I definitely want to thank him and all his contributions and make sure other folks know that he's been quite busy helping out. So cool. So this is again, a center ITP demo has been deployed by our Helm charts. And if you deploy with our Helm charts like we do with ITP, this is all very, very automatic. So I'll go ahead and create a new project and just take a new URL. Just take preview of nine five in case you haven't seen it. This is running RSC four which is like half an hour old, maybe an hour. Got a public project. Nope, I've already had the same name. So let me just do that. Put back in our URL here and create project. All right, cool. All right, so we need to make a couple of minor changes to the example app here. Nothing major, basically just add an option to interest a little latency because before it was responding so close it would always be zero and so a zero latency chart is not that interesting. And then we also introduce an error in point if folks want to use it that they can then generate some errors to show the metrics. Of course, as you all know, click on auto deploy, click on Kubernetes or we can even do Kubernetes with Canary here. Just all I have to do now is enter in our domain name which I think is this one, let me just make sure. Yep, we're good, I just couldn't see it. We'll scroll down, commit this into master and we'll of course have our new pipeline that is running. Take a couple of seconds here to get things into staging. While that's happening, I should mention that this is not just for people who deploy their Helm charts or deploy with IDP. What we actually do is we can pull these metrics off of the nginx ingress which is probably the most popular ingress for Kubernetes. And so if you're pulling there and if you're using nginx ingress you could simply set one flag on that nginx ingress and you'll get the permuteus metrics. And then once you have that, all the rest is done. The only thing with our Helm chart is it automatically does that for you. It uses the nginx ingress and then sets that flag. But so it's really not a lot of config either way even if you don't use it. It's just that it's not totally 100% automatic here. So let's go ahead and open up our page. Here we have Hello World. You'll see it takes just like a quarter of a second to load here, which is a bit different than before but not too long. We'll give it a couple seconds to get some of the monitoring hooked up. We'll give it some traffic to take a look at. We can also hit the end point here as well just to give you a sense of what that looks like. There we go. And if we head back to our page here and click on monitoring we'll see some metrics coming through. And again, it takes a couple of seconds here for the metrics to get picked up. But you'll see here we'll have the error rates which is how many errors or HB500 errors they have in per second, the latency and then also the remember request per second as well. So if we just hit refresh here we'll start to see data pop up in just maybe another 15 or 20 seconds. We can also just continue with some more traffic to keep things interesting while we're waiting. And of course during the normal demo you can talk through or go through other areas. But there you go. You can see we got latency popping up for our first data collection point. And we'll see a couple more seconds here. So you'll see throughput coming through and you'll see HB errors coming through. Again, since we just deployed like half a minute ago takes a couple of seconds for things to cycle through. There we go. So, and again as of course you generate more traffic and as we get more data points here you'll have a little more of a semblance on the chart. But you can see really there how easy it is to get some pretty important metrics. You know how many errors you're generating what's your customer latency and so you get 17 milliseconds for example here. And of course also on the error on the throughput side you know not too many requests per second but we're doing all right for an application that just launched a couple of seconds ago. So pretty cool stuff and of course you have your CPU utilization here as well being pulled from Kubernetes. So we do have a page to load Sesame for data which is when you don't have any data whatsoever and we're kind of pulling it from Prometheus. You'll see it kind of pop up there for a second. It's harder for us to know like for a certain chart if there is a data point or not but we can start to look into it and see if we can improve it, have like a little chart here saying we don't have enough data points or something like that but that's a good suggestion Clement, thanks. Any other questions? No? Okay. Well, thanks for everyone's time. We'll give back 20 minutes and maybe then if you wanna wrap up or we can sign off for now. Yeah, no, if nobody else has any questions that's just absolutely amazing to see the useful metrics for customers. And with that, yeah, 20 minutes back. Thanks everybody. Thanks everyone.


Time to drop Twitter. Maybe it's time to drop Twitter. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech, and the tagline of our show is Elon Musk is wrecking the Twitter platform. What do we do now? And our guest today is none other than our senior engineer, Eric Colander. You may have heard of him. He's already famous, and he's going to talk about this from a ThinkTech point of view and a technical point of view and a platform point of view. Because in fact, we're on eight social media platforms. We're all over town. And one of them has been Twitter. And in fact, Eric has been managing Twitter account. But not too long ago, we decided that it was much too problematic for us to continue that. And so now we're off Twitter, like so many responsible corporations around the country. Welcome to the show, Eric. Hey, Jay. Good to be here. Good to be on this side of the camera. You do well at that. So let's talk about our experience with Twitter. You were managing it for some time under our impact program funded by the Atherton Family Foundation. And I wonder what it was like in the beginning and how it changed, and then how it changed with Elon Musk. So Twitter, as you know, is probably one of the most popular social medias out there. They got 250 million some-on users or so. And it's just the biggest wave that people gather news these days. And so we started going on there, started tweeting, not to a big impact, but as soon as they made the announcement with Elon, we nixed that. Yeah. Let's look at a commentary that we made, one of our other staff members made, about our decision process over that. A commentary about leaving Twitter. Okay, let's look at that now. Aloha. Thank you for your consideration of the views expressed in this ThinkTech commentary. Up until now, Twitter has been going in the right direction compared to other social media platforms in regards to regulating hate speech, particularly when it barred Donald Trump. But Elon Musk's frenetic purchase of Twitter and what he has done since then has changed all that. Musk has permitted outrageous lies and conspiracy theories on Twitter, pulled moderation systems, and has himself tweeted hateful lies, appalling conspiracy theories and calls for violence, most recently spreading misinformation about the attack on Paul Pelosi. On the same day that Musk closed his deal, researchers from Montclair State University found that the platform has become a much more hostile environment. Hate speech increased 4.7 times higher than the seven-day average. Twitter is becoming an appalling and destructive force in social media and the public conversation, even more than before, dangerous to them, to us and the country. We hope it fails, and we hope that its failure will show other social media platforms that they should not follow Musk's example. We hope other social media platforms will learn to respect the trust reposed in them by the public and that they will better moderate their content. We cannot succeed in anything as a nation of fools. Our democracy depends on demanding truth and rejecting lies from all media, and to act constructively and with purpose to achieve truth and reliable information about our community, our country and the world around us. Lies and hate destroy democracy, and that should be clear from history. We can only hope there will be a more rational change in ownership and a sweeping and profound change in policy at Twitter. Or for a new, better platform in the future. Thanks so much for considering the views expressed in this ThinkTech commentary. Aloha. Awful. Important. So can you tell us a little about Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter? He's been in the paper every day on all the other media and the print press, of course.  And now this is his newest quote, play toy, end quote. That's an expression by some other billionaire discussing it.  Did I say 44 billion? Yeah, I said 44 billion. What was that like? I mean, the commentary center was frenetic. Do you agree? Absolutely, yeah. He obviously just bought Twitter was a two weeks ago now. And the reason he wanted to buy Twitter is because he thinks that there's some political favoring for liberals on Twitter, as well as the other reason is the abundance of bots on Twitter. And he wanted to kind of bring that to an end. And I don't think he's going to really be able to do that very successfully. I think he's jumping into something he doesn't really know that much about. Yeah. Yeah, that's an interesting point that he hasn't been in this before, but he's a very smart guy. And he's done Tesla. That's not easy. He's managed it right down to rolling up his sleeves on the assembly line. And SpaceX, which I'm sure he didn't have any experience at all in that. So maybe he'll learn about it. But the first thing. He's a smart guy.  He's a very, very smart individual. Yeah. So now the first thing he does is he fires all his executive cadre. And what was all that about? He just trying to get rid of that out with the old and in with the new, I think is his kitchen sink is the term. I think he's just completely upending the corporate structure there to kind of control things in the way he wants to do it without any of that. As he calls woke, wokeness that surrounds Twitter. And he's kind of, I don't get the why people are against being woke. It's just being educated. It's not, it's been kind of turned into this political, it's been politicized, but it's really not anything more than being educated. Yeah. And he did it. You know, I had a, I had a client one time who fired all the staff in his company, its company by email from its headquarters on the mainland. And boy, were they who you wake up in a Monday morning and you're fired.  There's a certain gratification and firing like shot and fro to take joy in shattering people's employment lives. What do you think about that? What effect did it have on the, those executives? And I, there, it's a broad range of executives. And what effect do you think it had on the rest of the people? And there's quite a few people who have worked for Twitter. Yeah. They said there was about 7,500 employees, not including the executives. And he acts, I think half of them right on October 27th or 28th, whatever the day was where he bought it, along with the top three executives. The three executives will be fine. I'm sure they'll, they'll land on their feet. But the other people, they, they, I think there's, they brought a number of lawsuits against Twitter. And so we'll see how that goes. But I guess I just saw a report that he's even trying to hire some of the guys that he fired originally. So it kind of looks like he might not know what he's doing with that. I don't know. Well, two, two thoughts on that. You know, number one, what I last saw was it was actually a class action by a number of, I mean, a great number of Twitter executives that he he fired.  But the other part of that is what kind of effect does that have on morale in the company in general? Not much. I'd be, I'd be pretty afraid to speak out too much against what Elon's trying to do there for fear of losing your job, which I don't think anybody should have to work in those conditions. Talking about a hostile work environment, you know, fired on a Monday morning by email. Not a good start to the week, that's for sure. And, you know, then I think he was obligated arguably to pay them some kind of severance, and he didn't do that. He just fired them. So now there's an issue over that too. Well, then of course, he gets in there and he wants to make the turn the company more republican, I guess. That's just a perfect time to do that. I mean, the whole thing seems planned to be big news just before the midterms. A lot of people have said that. What do you think? And yeah, he brands it as making it more fair and equal. One of his biggest arguments is that there is a very high liberal bias on Twitter, despite studies and reports saying the exact opposite. There was a study. I can't quite remember where who did it off the top of my head, but they concluded that the average Twitter user would be more inclined to see much more right-leaning tweets and profiles than left-leaning. So there really isn't that liberal bias that Elon is talking about. Well, he closed that in the notion of free speech, and he calls it first amendment. So anybody can say anything. This is a really interesting policy question. And a lot of the people who he fired were actually moderators.  So he's moved into a different frame of reference now. It's the first amendment on steroids.  Where does that take Twitter? Is that the Twitter we used to know, or is that something else? Well, Twitter has always had a, they've always been, I think they delete millions of accounts, fake accounts every month based off if they're bots and they're putting out malicious information or fake information. So yeah, so free speech on Twitter has always been obviously a big thing. But that doesn't mean you can go and say whatever you want. Twitter has deleted accounts consistently based on whatever metrics they have. They don't want hate speech on there. And a lot of conservatives mostly are saying that that's unfair towards them with hate speech or with regarding lies about the election. That's the big one that people are getting silenced for. Very interesting. So the staff that he fired was largely involved in moderating hate speech, that is in keeping it off and permitting accounts that were hate speech accounts. And when he, my reading is when he fired them, the hate speech software they were running stopped working.  And so there are some stats now. You're familiar with the stats only in the last few days about dramatic increases in hate speech. Yeah. And so the video that we just played a little bit ago referenced a study from Moncler State University. And their study was within the first 12 hours of Elon's takeover.  The 12 o'clock midnight to 12 o'clock PM, first 12 hours of the first day, those numbers rose up to about almost 300 an hour. And that's 12 a.m. to 12 p.m. These are not peak Twitter hours. This is the dead of the night mostly. And yet those numbers skyrocketed. Well, you know, it's global. So the dead of the night here may not be the dead of the night somewhere else, you know. So he himself, Elon Musk himself, is an active Twitterer. And in fact, he calls him Chief, he calls himself Chief He quit, I think. That's his title, his corporate title in Twitter now. That's the owner and the chief executive. And he has made no bones about his own views, which are kind of right wing. And he has, he has also made tweets that are conspiracy theories, that are lies, and that are hate. How does that play in all of this? You know, it seems to me that the advertisers wouldn't like it too much if the chief quit, you know, did that. But he's doing it or he had, I'm not sure if he's still doing it, but he got a lot of pushback. He definitely has favored some of the right-leaning conspiracy theories and the big one, obviously, with the election. I don't know if he's come out and said that he believes Trump won, but he's definitely leaves it, I think, more open to interpretation. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And then it's pretty famous when he did some kind of ridiculous conspiracy theory tweet over Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi's husband, who was attacked just a week ago. What happened there? Well, the attack we all heard is some crazy guy came in and attacked, wanted to get Nancy, but only Paul was home. And thankfully, you know, he's all right after the surgery. But yeah, I think Elon was trying to come up with, there's been a lot of conspiracies that this guy was Antifa, and he's actually liberal. And I don't get how you could believe much of that. He clearly wanted to go and hurt Nancy and her husband. And I think that's the end of it right there. He was a crazy, crazy guy. One of the conspiracy theories was that he had a prior relationship with the person who attacked him. I did not hear that. Yeah. I think that might have been involved in Elon Musk's tweet, which is really a lie, not true. And it's just provocative. But that whole thing about lying on Twitter is so interesting because so many people, many tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, believe it. They believe it and they retweet it. And then before you know it, you have half the country. Half the country is involved in Twitter somehow, directly or indirectly. And they believe it and they think it's the news. I mean, some people have said that Twitter is the biggest news media in the country. Beyond all the others, that is really scary considering its lack of responsibility, its lack of accountability, and the amount of conspiracy theories and hate speech that winds up on its platform. Right. And for most people, when they see a tweet, that's the beginning and the end of their news update, is reading this one tweet. Most people aren't going into research things or finding different takes on it. Whatever tweet they read, that's there. That's fact now to them, regardless of how true or untrue it might be. Yeah. So if Twitter doesn't moderate the content and if it allows all that on there, it has a huge reach. And we never saw this before in our lives where a lie could reach so many people and affect public sensibilities, public opinion, and votes. So this is all directly related to the midterms. What's interesting too, you probably have seen this, is that Twitter moves very quickly. So if I put a tweet up, if I am, for example, Donald Trump, he's not a good example, but if I put a tweet up on Twitter, it can be, somehow, you'll have to explain to me how this works because I don't understand it. It's not like a newspaper where you may get a copy, an email copy of an article days later. No, no, no. This is minutes later, even seconds. How does that work? So retweeting is one of the features of Twitter that everyone's, I'm sure, is familiar with. If I was going to retweet UJ, people would say your tweet, but it would be on my timeline. And yeah, those things can spread like wildfire, thanks to a lot because of bots. And bots work, it's just a program that can send out thousands of tweets, thousands of retweets every day. And that's what is a big problem with Twitter because people listen to those bots, people who are following those bots, not knowing that they are bots. And they're putting out this sometimes hate speech, misinformation, lies, and people eat it up, they buy it, they believe it as fact because that's their news source. There are two things that have been very disturbing over the past day in the media. One is the report that Vladimir Putin has activated his social media internet research agency in Moscow to get on the bandwagon and make tweets in favor of the Republican DOP, MAGA group. That's a great concern. The other piece I noticed was that the Republicans are doing, I mean, it's really like real time. The Republicans are doing this now all of a sudden in anticipation of election day. And so what you have is this huge swarm of tweets and retweets going on to try to change votes as of election day. You think that Twitter will change votes? I mean, the dark side of this, the Republicans, and for that matter, Vladimir Putin, who has always wanted Trump and the MAGA Republicans to win elections, are actively trying to change votes right now, either to change votes affirmatively or to confuse people about voting. Do you think it'll work? To a degree, yeah. They do have an effect on whatever Rush has been doing. But also, I think that in today's elections and stuff, everyone's kind of already in their own silos. I don't know how many people are going back and forth so much, but more that people are getting cemented into their own beliefs more and more. You make it even harder and harder to see the other side's viewpoints. Again, coming back to the election, everyone knows that obviously there was a fair election that Donald Trump lost. But to so many people, they just fundamentally don't believe that. And if you don't fundamentally don't believe that, there's on the way you can do, you can't convince them. Yeah. Well, we're going to see, aren't we? We're going to see how that works. But you're the one thing that disturbed me when all this started, that it was either just before or just after Musk closed on his acquisition of Twitter, was the suggestion that he would allow Donald Trump back on. After January 6, Twitter threw Trump off. They blamed as most right-thinking people did the insurrection on Trump because Trump called for it in public on television.  And he's been off ever since early 2021 until now. But Elon Musk said he was going to let him back on again. You think he will let him back on again? It seems consistent with your perception of this. And if he gets back on, what effect? I think it's going to depend on if and when he announces his campaign, which it's looking like he is going to. And I think the argument will be, well, if all the other candidates can app Twitter, why can't this candidate? And he's a very special case because no other candidate has tried to incite an insurrection. So it's a little bit different for him. But I do believe that he will be eventually allowed back on. And he's going to go right back to his old games. He's going to spew those lies again. He's going to spew moralize. He's going to do everything he can to fake the election again. And thus our democracy and thus our country. So this is really important. What happens with Elon Musk? He controls the largest platform, platform people regard as news. He controls and he believes that he needs to quote, open it up and quote, but really favoring the conservatives and the extreme conservatives. And if you let Trump back on, that's going to have a significant effect. This is a pretty, oh, and this is the preferred platforms for people who want to spread the big lie and spread conspiracy theories and so forth. And you know what? This may have an effect on Facebook. I saw an article also there that Facebook was going, in the process of terminating a very substantial percentage of its staff also. Trump claims, rather Musk claims that he terminated staff because he was losing money. Facebook might make the same argument. We don't know if that would be true or not. And then terminate a lot of staff there too. And what that's called, it sounds like to me, for terminating the moderators, terminating the content moderators and shrinking down the moderation systems and doing what Trump and doing what Musk is doing with Twitter. So this may be a virus here among other social media platforms. That's also pretty scary. It is. Yeah, because you don't want to see this stuff travel to the other social medias because then that's that much more reach on social media. So hopefully, they don't go the way of Twitter. Yeah. Well, you know, we have been trying to put think tech content out on various social media platforms, all together eight of them, plus a level community television. And what what kind of effect does this have a significant effect on our efforts to develop impact, either in Hawaii or on a national basis, that we are jumping ship on Twitter. There's a lot of, there's a lot of corporations, very responsible national and multinational corporations that have, in fact, don't dip on Twitter saying they can't tolerate what what Musk is doing. And they could not tolerate having lies and conspiracy theories and crazy perversions of the truth back on again. And they're jumping ship. How is this going to affect Twitter? Do you think Twitter will lose more money? Do you think that Elon Musk will be able to make that up with his $8 blue check system? Do you think that Twitter will survive? I think Twitter will survive because it's at any point could be bankrolled by its the richest man in the world. But they are going to lose money. Twitter has never really been a profitable company. They're consistently in the red. And so the only revenue they have really is advertisers. And yeah, like you mentioned, dozen and a half major advertisers, major companies have pulled all their advertisements from Twitter, which is Elon's all talking about he's complaining about it. But in fairness to Elon, he has not made any content changes yet. But these are the pulling of the advertisements is kind of making a statement to you on like, don't you better not make these changes otherwise we'll never come back. That's an interesting question. I wanted to ask you about that. So they leave in protest of many things which we have talked about here. But they always say we might come back if he cleans his act up. So and for that reason, he may clean his act up or not. If he's really a good businessman, he will clean his act up. And that's what he is. He's a businessman. He's if something's not making money, I don't think he's going to stick around for too long or he's going to change his practices pretty quickly. And Twitter could be very profitable or I don't know that the answers to why it has never been profitable. Other social media sites are Twitter just has not been able to despite being one of the most popular and big news source for so many people. I wonder how much his popularity I should just the wrong word is his his appearance in the news these days every every minute of every day. You could look at the Washington Post in the New York Times and on an average day see two or three articles or op-ed pieces about it. So he's getting his name, you know, he's getting his name out there. He's becoming a very famous person. And that has got to have an effect on people not so much leaving Twitter, but joining Twitter. They want to see what all the hubbub is about. They want to follow the action. What do you think? Will that help them being a negative celebrity this way? It will gain popularity with those people for sure, but it's not going to make him popular with his avid advertisers. And that's again what he needs to run the company. But it will definitely he'll get some you'll get more supporters and more support from his current supporters. So some of them have said they've reserved the possibility that they'll come back. If he if he cleans his act up on these things, that they'll come back. Do you think this will happen? And is it should this affect the way we think tech feel about it? Might we come back? I think we could definitely go back because again, Twitter is such a valuable source for a company like Things Tech Hawaii to reach its viewers to display its content. So it's definitely valuable.  Okay, here's a hard question for you, Eric. Are you ready? Are you sitting down for a hard question? We'll find out. What does this tell us about the future of social media in general? It seems to me that Elon Musk and Twitter have created an inflection point. And as I mentioned, Facebook is also firing people in large numbers. And I don't know what effect that has on the moderation of content there. It's always been an issue on Facebook and others. Are we going to have more or less hate content in general on these social media sites? Are we going to see a governmental regulation of the moderation of hate speech and content on these sites? How is social media going to change in the context of this inflection point? I don't see social media, especially Twitter, going very much farther forward without some sort of government regulation. It's too tight into politics and news that you can't just let it free roam as it has been.  And despite them being objectively false and no basis, so many people believe them. And it might take government regulation to fix that, which I think that's a way that most social media companies will have to go. What that regulation is, I don't know. What you're really saying is that we may have to take another look at the First Amendment because they live in the protection of the First Amendment. And query whether this means that the First Amendment also has to change. Well, the First Amendment is of course very important. It's an inherent right that Americans have. But the famous exception, you can't yell fire in a movie theater. There's got to be more exceptions, but one of those, a new exception needs to be you can't incite an insurrection. If you're going out there and speaking to the masses, you can't allow that because look what happened. Yeah, the other part of it is you can't have a country that runs on lies. You can't have a democracy that runs on lies, especially when 300 candidates who are seeking election in the midterm deny the 2020 presidential election, 300 of them. So if you have a lot of lies like that, you can't have a democracy. And if you don't have a democracy, boy, it's going to be different. And so really the question is whether it's too late already. It may be too late to actually moderate the content on social media and to get back to respect for the truth in a functioning democracy. Any thoughts? I don't think it's too late for Twitter or social media to go that way. But I think it is definitely too late for a lot of these election deniers. For someone, there's no convincing with any amount of facts that what's fact is fiction. Yeah, one thing is clear, though, that the whole issue with Elon Musk and Twitter and possibly other social media sites is inextricably intertwined with public sensibility, with voting and with the future of our democracy and thus our country. We thought for a time that social media was kids' play or even a play toy of a guy like Elon Musk. Now we see that it is inextricably intertwined with our future, all of us. Thank you, Eric. Eric Collander is a deep engineer of Think Tech Hawaii, sharing his thoughts on Elon Musk's acquisition and management of Twitter. Thank you so much, Eric. Thank you, Jay. Aloha. Mahalo.


We are talking about immunology. At some point or another, we all get little cuts and bruises and sometimes you get pricked by thorns or wood splinters. We have experienced these but we don't know what happens at the cellular level. Let me show you what happens at the cellular level when we get a prick from a thorn or a wood splinter. We just talked about scenarios, war scenarios that the first requirement for defensive forces to mount a response to an attack is detection and announcement of that detection. In our body, injury is detected by specialized cells which are present in most tissues. These cells are called the mass cells. I'll point them out right here.  These vesicles contain special signaling molecules that can alert the rest of the body that there is an injury has been detected. Mass cells drive their name from the German word mastos, meaning nourishment, because when they were discovered first by a German scientist, he saw these cells and the vesicles, these cells full of vesicles, he thought that these cells were basically responsible for providing nourishment for the surrounding cells. That's not their function, of course. These vesicles contain a signaling molecule, one of them being histamine. When histamine is released in the surrounding tissue, it does several things. One of the things it does is it dilates the blood vessels or the capillaries. These vesicles, they're of course lined with cells. When they're stretched, they become leaky and material can go in or it can come out of the injury zone. So injury has been detected. It has been announced. The first light infantry, which I refer to as cells that are going to come in and they're going to try to contain the problem. Those cells are basically the phagocytic cells shown here. These cells, they are attracted to histamine and other signaling molecules that are being released at the site of injury. They find that injury, they will move in and they will see if there are any pathogens at the site of injury. If there are, for example, bacteria present, which are shown here in purple, if they encounter these bacteria, they will engulf them. They will phagocytose them. They will ingest them and contain them. So these bacteria do not go to other places and cause infection. So these phagocytic cells move in and contain the infection. Another thing these phagocytic cells do is they release interleukin-1. Interleukin-1 is also a signaling molecule. It interacts with the thermostat in our body. As you know, we geysers or heating devices have thermostats. These instruments basically regulate the temperature. So interleukin-1 can signal our thermostat to increase the body temperature. Remember, I told you that our enzymes are more resistant to higher temperature than the bacterial enzymes. So these cells are containing the infection. They are signaling the thermostat in our brain to increase the temperature. So these bacteria will not be able to spread and grow. So this is the first response. So when that happens, after the injury has been detected, other cells have also come to the site of injury and they do their job. The cells that are making the lining of epithelium or the blood vessels, they start expressing special proteins on their surface. And these proteins, some of these proteins initially first of all slow down the phagocytic cells or the white blood cells or in other words the cells that are going to fight the infection it causes them to slow down their movement. They're floating in the bloodstream. When they detect these special signaling molecules on the surface of certain cells, they slow down and they start rolling till they come close to the site of infection or the injury. At that site, this flatten out, as you can see in this diagram, the cell is flattening out. We will also see this in an animation. The cell is going to flatten out and it is going to crawl between the space between the two cells. The cell is going to go through these cells in between these cells and go at the site of infection. So here is a way how cells are attracted to the site of injury. Soon after that, the histamine is signaling seizes. Other parts of immune system that we will talk about in much later, the complement system, it can also cross through those gaps that I talked about when the blood vessels are leaky. The purpose of this exercise is to contain and neutralize the pathogen that is invading the host territory. So this is basically an exercise initially to first of all limit the scope of infection. So by first of all engulfing these phagocytic cells, engulfing the bacteria or the pathogens and also signaling the thermostat in our brain to increase the temperature a few degrees centigrade to restrict the ability of these bacteria to divide and survive in our bodies.


All right. Hi, everybody. Thanks for joining the Jenkins advocacy and outreach sick meeting today is Thursday, November 2nd. We'll go over a couple of action items that we had from last meeting. And then on the agenda, I have the contributors spotlight project. GSOC 2024. The Jenkins contributors summit at FOSTA. DevOps doesn't award nomination and scale 21 X that's for scale 2024. So, in the last meeting, I had two action items that I needed to develop a plan for GSOC 2024. So, for the organs admins are involved in this, you should have access to it. I've shared the document with you. So if you don't have it, please let me know. All right, got thumbs up from Bruno. And then the project idea. I've initiated this document as well. I got feedback from Mark so far, but we will talk further next week and we'll get this all figured out. Okay, so contributors spotlight project. So, again, thank you so much Chris for driving this effort for us for the web pages. So, I mean the site layout and the repository looks awesome. And Kevin has been doing an amazing job with writing the stories interviewing contributors so we do have quite a few stories lined up at the moment so we are ready to go. And then Kevin you want to talk about the next bullet that you have added here. Yeah, and Chris can speak to this as well. Since Chris did open the ticket yesterday but we have got a ticket open with the Jenkins info team to get started on the process of determining the best way to get this integrated. And whether or not there's going to be a new sub domain created for it, or how we're going to just approach it basically, and the way we left it yesterday was the idea of, I think having a sub domain for the contributor stories specifically that leans on story dot Jenkins that I have. And that way we can redirect and open things away into it. And that also gets us more viewers users eyes on the stories page itself and the story site. So it would be a benefit all around in that in that sense. But yeah, we just got to the ball started the ball rolling. We've discussed with airway and Damian in the info meeting and airways aware, and has been discussing a particular as well. So, yeah, if Chris if you'd want to add anything to that I'm sure there's some things that I might have missed. I think for for the report we are using gas be because I asked him for before and they told me they feel comfortable using that tech stack. And also we are using. We are using material you are in component library. That should be quite easy to integrate into gas be as well. And I think for the ticket like we are deciding on, I think, I think it's like from heavy site. He prefers using contributors. So I will ask the new you for the new feature. But that's what I think from the PR that's what Mark wanted to. So as I remain stuck with that one. And for for existing stories, I will keep it for now. I would have a set because that's the easiest way to go forward at this moment but we should try to figure out ways to integrate the two stories and contributors. I later on so that's something we could do eventually. Well, I think I like the idea that contributor contributor spotlight is in the same area as with within the success story menu. So, plus one for me. Thanks so much for Kevin and Chris for all your work, the heavy lifting on this project.  As I mentioned earlier, we are preparing for the program so there's lots for us to do with regards to updating the web pages and discussing project ideas so more to come in that space later as we make progress. Of course, you know, if you know of anybody that is, or might be interested or might be a good mentor, please recruit them because mentors are hard to find. I think I'll go ahead and ask a year main if he wants to return one more year as a mentor. Awesome. Thank you Chris. So Jenkins contributor summit at Fostam so Jean Mark has developed a the agenda for for this at for the contributor summit. Please feel free to add input to the document and he also has a place reserved for the contributor summit at no charge for the project. So that is a huge bonus for us there, because I know that everything goes fast and it's expensive. Okay, any questions there before I move on. Okay. DevOps doesn't award nomination so I am making the submission tomorrow the deadline is tomorrow tomorrow is the third. So tomorrow is the deadline so if there's any input to it please feel free to add it by, say, this time tomorrow. Otherwise, I will make the submission midday my day, which is noon Pacific time and scale 21x. This is the yearly Southern California Linux Expo, which takes place, typically, soon after Fostam so it's beginning of the year. Next year is going to be in March 14 to the 17th and it takes place in Southern California. The Jenkins projects has always had a presence here since, as long as I can remember. So, Mark and I have been staffing the booth, and we do get a supplementary. Sorry, a complimentary booth space from the organizer so that's a 10 by 10, which is a very generous booth space that we get for free every single year because we are an open source project. So the only thing is that we will need to help to promote the conference so you will be seeing me proposing tweets and LinkedIn proposals every now and then, when deliverables comes up so so that's with that. Mark has already made a submission for the CFP so, and I'm going to be speaking with Mark. So hopefully we will get accepted. But other than that, that's it. Is there any questions, anything else we need to add. Cool. All right. Thanks everybody. Have a good rest of your day. Good night, Chris. Yep. Thank you. Thanks.


What are private files? Every user in Moodle has their personal file storage area known as private files. This is useful as a teacher if you like to organize your files into named folders and install them privately until you want to display them on your course. It's also useful for students if they start work during the day, save their work in their private files, complete it at home and then submit it to the teacher later. Private files can be accessed from the dashboard as here or a teacher can add the private files block to their course page to make it easier for their students to access their files. If we click to manage private files, we can see what it looks like. We can, if the browser allows it, simply drag a file into the private files area. We could click add and add from the file picker or we can create a folder and upload files into there. Let's create a folder called grammar and then when we click to create the folder we can then click into it and upload straight into this folder. I'm going to click the add button and go to Moodle's file picker, which we see in a separate video and then choose the file to add to my private files grammar folder. We can change its name if we want, change the author if we want and change the license from the site default if needed and then when we click upload this file it's important to remember to save the changes. If we don't, we're given a message to remind us that we have to save the changes first. Private files now has the folder with the file in which we can access at a later date to display on the course. And finally, if your administrator allows it, you can send files to your private files as email attachments. If you're able to do this on your Moodle site you'll see an email address in the private files area and this is the address that you use to email files.