Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for inviting me to a beautiful and very well-designed city as a Designer and software developer. It's very important to be in a place that actually feels enjoyable to be in Could you do me a favor? Could all of you hold up your phones very quickly? The faster you held those up you're more of a cyborg than the others in the audience Looks like you guys are our 30% heavy tech cyborgs and the rest are lower tech cyborgs with the holding of them But in fact we are all cyborgs Every time you look at a computer through your eyes you're interfacing with a piece of technology So it's not terminated or not Robocop. It's in your pockets every single day And here's somebody looking at a screen being a low-tech cyborg David David Hess talks about low-tech cyborgs that you're a sometimes cyborg not all the time not every day not every moment But sometimes when you open up your pocket and look at the device in it So what's a what's a formal definition of cyborg? So here's the first definition of cyborg from a 1960 paper on space travel It's an organism to which an exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new ambient spaces So in plain English that that was used to talk about a person in space Because humans are very strange they like to put external objects on them So they can go and explore the Alps or go underwater where fishes are or go into space Which is an environment that humans technically shouldn't be in but they want to because we're very strange Creatures that like to explore new spaces So let's look at this tool for example So this is a hammer and 3,000 years ago versus today Nothing much has changed in the shape of the hammer If you think of a saber-toothed tiger if he goes along and one day his teeth are broken He can't eat as well anymore, so he's more likely to die But if a caveman suddenly breaks the hammer he can go and make a new hammer So this external evolution has differentiated us from animals So we look that hasn't changed much over time. We use the hammer to extend our fist We use the automobile to extend our capability to run Incredibly quickly and instead of just walking all the time or being a slow land animal But what about computers? This doesn't make any sense in the past 40 or 50 years We have computers the size of a gymnasium and then we have this Tiny phone and nothing about what the shape of this is or what it looks like says what's inside And in fact the interface has changed over time So in in this case the interface was actual physical buttons and you had to press them And if you wanted to change what the button did you would go back and you would you know Actually physically reroute all of the wires and the electricity But suddenly you have this new interface which is liquid the button can be anywhere on the screen you can touch any part of it And so it goes from solid to liquid to air very very heavy very light And then when you just walk somewhere some action will be able to happen But the main difference between these two types of technology the hammer and the machine is that one extends the Capability of the physical self and the other one extends the capability of the mental self So now we're storing our memories outside of ourselves And that's what makes studying cyborgs very interesting today Because yes, we have been a sort of low-tech cyborg with all of our technology But it hasn't extended the mental self in the same way as it is today So Marine McHugh who's a science fiction writer said soon perhaps it will be impossible to tell where machines end and humans begin So a traditional anthropologist goes out to another country and says hmm. How curious these people are how interesting their culture How interesting their tools hmm fascinating and then and then they go you know back and talk to the other anthropologist Wow, did you see this culture? It's it's incredible But that's not as important today as Looking at regular culture and saying hmm how fascinating these people are who around me every day How curious these objects that they carry in their pockets that cry and you have to pick them up and soothe them back to sleep by talking to them And then you have to plug them in at night because they need energy And then you have to replace them when they get old and take care of them and put little clothes on them So that when you drop them they don't get hurt So cyborg anthropology is technically not very new But it is new in a certain way in 1941 there was these things called the Macy meetings Anthropologists and scientists started getting together and they said hmm. What are these things called computers? They're going to be incredibly important in the future and everyone's going to have one and of course everyone said you guys are crazy This is 1941 you know these are used for you know warfare and things like that They said no no we need to start talking about this so they started talking about it And they had a series of meetings on on the future of humans and technology and they said one day This will be important and people will be able to study these Macy meetings and they'll they'll care because they'll have a computer in their pocket but it didn't take until 1992 for people to have those said computers and Start to have the beginnings of the internet and connected devices So at that point cyberg anthropology was was a sub-discipline of anthropology at the American Anthropological Association So that's kind of the history behind the the discipline itself So here's some actual history about about technology and humans So this is Steve Mann and in the 70s and 80s He went to college at MIT and he would walk around campus wearing 80 pounds of computing equipment and The reason he did this Is because he didn't want to he didn't like the idea of somebody going like this over a computer all day He said that's that's very primitive like in the future. We need to be able to wear computers We shouldn't have to conform to computers computers should have to conform to us So he built a small Television screen that's what you can see in in his eye and he has antennas because he coated his hair with metallic gel so that he could conduct a signal from from the Wi-Fi hotspot that he created before the traditional internet really existed by Breaking into a building and installing his own personal antenna on top And he went around for a year like this before he made a friend that was a close enough friend That was a close enough friend to also wear 80 pounds of computer He also met his wife during this time during the metallic gel stage She's also a cyborg. I'll demonstrate in a minute He also wrote this paper if you're interested in wearable technology or the little heads up displays He's done it all very early on He was one of the first people to ever do this and he writes a nice Interesting paper very dry. I highly suggest it if you're looking to build any of this stuff because he'll say no This will never work and this will work and I wore this for seven years and this worked really well One of the things he really didn't like is walking around town and seeing pictures that were not his so he said Advertisements that's somebody else's message. Why can't I see my own message on a sign? so he said well, I'm going to make it so that my heads up display can Cancel out a rectangle of advertising and put a white space over it And then I can read my email on the white space while I walk around town So this is his wife saying hey Steve you've gone too far You have to turn left on Bay Street because he went so she's texting him because she can see Him in real time through his his goggles that are taking video all day But one of the other issues is that you can't just have a keyboard while you're walking around That would just look ridiculous. I mean not not as ridiculous as this looks already But it would look even more ridiculous and so Steve Mann has this this twiddler device and this device is great It's a one-handed keyboard so you can walk around town You have a mouse and a keyboard you type up to 60 words a minute so while he was walking around town He would write his dissertation So there'd be a red light. He'd have to wait for the crosswalk sign. He'd write a bit He did walk in the park. He has an idea He'd write a bit of that so he didn't have to go to a computer in order to store a thought It was it was very mobile just just like our mobile phones So this was very exciting now He uses it to edit Wikipedia as he walks around town, which is why there's so many Wikipedia entries from him Here's an example of him blocking out a billboard so he says okay. I don't like this billboard I want to read a research paper on it So he recognizes the rectangle and blocks it out and then reads the paper But he also applied this to the supermarket So he go into the supermarket and he didn't like a brand and he'd hit cancel on the brand and he wouldn't see the brand anymore So we just walk around the supermarket and actually see everything he wanted to buy and oh great He didn't like the waste of time that modern society kept giving him So this is a message a location-based message his wife left him a message It says Steve remember to pick up the 2% milk And so he goes to the store and there's a location-based message in his heads up display and he can see oh great My wife left me a message I I will never forget again because I don't have to bring a list or anything like that So these location-based messages are now possible with with your cell phone, but it took a long time. This was 1995 So over time he said All of this heavy 80 pound equipment is going to get lighter and lighter and lighter all that is solid melts into air So as you can see in 1998 it fit into a pair of glasses in the little twiddler device, which looks kind of cool I mean pretty cool And this is him in present-day system with his his daughter probably teaching her calculus or something He learned to to swim by studying fluid dynamics by the way before he ever got into the pool So his newest device takes video in one eye Processes around the back of the head and processing loop and then feeds that processed video into his other eye through a laser and It's pretty exciting so that's a kind of history of What people have been doing that is now just beginning to be possible today So whenever I look at the future I always try to go 20 or 30 years back in the past to see what was being done on a 500 to a million dollar research budget So let's talk about the present day. So now you have these extensions of your mental self Your phones your computers and they're larger on the inside than they are on the outside Which is just mind-boggling because it doesn't take any time or effort to really store something You can pack in all the information you want and the device doesn't get heavier Which is ludicrous. So these are these magical devices So there's this kind of automatic production of space. You can't see it. It's it's in your computer You don't know how much stuff is in there So this was a project by by Maxter and what they did is they took eight years of digital photos And they said what would happen if you printed all of the digital photos and all the information your computer out on paper What would it look like? What are we carrying around every day and they printed it out and it looked like that So when your computer crashes and you lose all of your files and you feel like you've lost something very heavy You've probably lost this giant piece of material But the other thing that's happening is each of these is a memory and in order to get to that memory You either have to search in your hard drive somewhere or or search somehow On on your computer So we have these our brains are changing. They're not just storing information They're storing how to get to that information So I've been an efficient hopefully an efficient user of my brain and saying well, okay I remember that memory But I need to remember the keyword to get that memory in Google or I need to remember the keyword to get to it My email box and over time we're all becoming these kind of persistent paleontologists Where we keep digging up old memories instead of looking into our minds and saying hmm I remember that time in that place. What day was it and then you remember you say Hmm, I remember that email that guy sent me and you search for it And so you have this whole geology of history In your email boxes that's stored outside of yourself And you have this very mechanical process of getting it and you're carrying around this with you every day at your external brain And this leads to a kind of social punctuation Say, okay, I'm out and then I need to check in or I need to Remember to write this email to somebody and you punctuate your social experience So you have real life and then you have virtual life in the same part of real life And then you have all these different kind of time zones, right? So there's the time zone of Twitter and the time zone of Facebook and then when somebody sends you a message That's another type of time and it and its own response rate And and so it's called presence light where you're kind of there all the time But you're not always there all the time you're kind of half there and half somewhere else when you're using a device But all of this together if you get too many emails and too many requests and everything's going haywire And there's so much and you feel overloaded that you can call it a panic architecture. It's just ah There's so much information going on So this leads me to some of the prosthetics and their discontents One of the big problems with technology is that if you keep it for too long it turns against you This guy kept his phone for too long and now we laugh at him because he has a ridiculous looking cell phone But one of the issues about about phones is that you do you have to make sure to upgrade or else it will fail And so we're kind of stuck into this cycle of re-invigorating our external selves And also one of the issues is that when the phone was on a landline you could go into your Home and you'd sit there and you'd have your nice phone call And there's a bunch of private space if you close the door But now suddenly you don't have that private space because you're outside on the phone And so you have to temporarily negotiate a private space So you see people outside trying to use their phone and trying to be quiet about it Or you see somebody completely ignoring this and they're talking very loudly and it's very obnoxious So this is this is a proposed solution to that This is actually a real cell phone booth He can collapse it behind his head if he wants to not be on the cell phone anymore So there's a video of him online where he where he walks around town And he's ordering something at a restaurant and he's like, oh, sorry. I have a phone call And whips this over his head is like talking and the woman's like, I can't talk to you anymore But what happens when you upgrade all of your technology this is this is a picture of all of the discarded phones from you know last year's model it's kind of Think of it like trees every year a tree Loses its leafs every season a tree loses its its leafs so it can make room for new leafs And every season we discard our old technology to make room for the new technology Because technology unlike our human hand doesn't last us our entire lives We have to get new external brains as they get faster and faster Unlike just getting one hammer and having that last you a long time So ambient intimacy is is a word used to describe The idea that you can always be in touch with somebody by the click of a button So in the same way as we printed out all of the information from a computer If you were to print out all of the connections that you have in your phone right now that you have the capability of actually You know interacting with our contacting right now would probably look like this You're carrying around this many people in your phone right now that you could potentially connect with You kind of have this ambient intimacy with them where you could text message them or talk to them at any point in time The problem is that when you're in a traffic jam, you're also in the same situation There's a bunch of people next to you. They're having the same experience, but you can't talk to them This is kind of a tragedy of modern industrial society where you're in a traffic jam Everyone's angry, but they can't talk to each other So when the cell phone came about now you can suddenly talk to somebody and feel human in an otherwise Inhuman experience and in this case the cell phone has allowed us to be more human and allows us to actually connect with people in In a situation where humans are kind of on pause in this very technological Containment situation. It's very hard for me to sit in traffic jams. By the way, I end up thinking about all this stuff So what about becoming a cyborg? So now infants are having the second self before they're even born their parents make them a social media account and then tweet for them And then they have to deal with the consequences later It's like baby pictures times 200 Just really strange memories But your second self is not really your second self anymore It's kind of becoming this private this primary self or this kind of extended self So, you know, this this is a self that people can act on and message when you're not even around It's this placeholder of identity But in the same way that when you wake up and you shower and you and you know You make sure that your hair looks okay, and you make sure that you're clothed every day people are learning to Present themselves digitally. So, you know, you wake up and maybe you upload a picture You make sure that this is this is fresh so that your online self needs the same amount of maintenance as your real-life self because it's really not too much different and something interesting is happening with with these kind of Say you live in a tiny little place and you don't have a yard and In real life It could take you three or four years to get a promotion to get the feeling of accomplishment But if you go into Farmville everything you touch has a reward 200 points 300 points And you end up getting entangled in this web of social obligations But the rewards are faster and because the rewards are faster online. It becomes very addicting And there's all this space that you can own and you kind of you know This this game has a kind of godlike view where you're you're God and you can You know create all these things that you wouldn't be able to in real life So you see these kind of addicting architectures start to show up And another thing is is watching database games happen So when force core first came out they said add in the venue and you'll get five points So everyone says oh, I want five points all add in all these venues But really it was a data entry game everyone who used force core was effectively the employee of four square entering in Database codes for all the different locations that were in the system and then people could play the game after all the cards have been made In the same way Facebook is kind of like a spreadsheet And so it's kind of this spreadsheet game where oh look what happened in cell a2 or cell b3. Oh, that's fascinating or You know you upload a picture and it goes to d3 and then somebody is subscribed to cell d3 So they get very excited about it And there's these other things that happen like you get a plus one friend or plus one follower or plus one like and those are tied Into you know your psychology and you feel that you feel this connection as if somebody laughed at your joke in real life And if you don't get a response it feels very Strange that that no one's out there listening and and I see people who are very concerned with that There was this one woman and her daughter was very worried to go on Facebook So she said what if you go on Facebook as the family dog And so she went and created an account as the family dog And then she went to all of her relatives walls and started barking and trying to play with them and One day the relatives who were probably pretty sick of getting arf arf whoop whoop on their walls said well We're not going to comment on this So she didn't get a comment on it one day and she ran to her mom She said mom no one commented on my post on Facebook and then her mom says well, that's okay But it was so terrifying for her you know this expectation of the social response that people have and So this plus one in this like in this comment have become a sort of social grooming the same way that you would hug someone in real life Maybe you could comment on them or or like or or have a response So it's very similar and and they're all tied into these psychological and physiological effects You feel a sense of being a sense of interaction during that time Does anyone remember these tomogaches? Okay, I hear a mumbling of yes great So the funny thing about these you have three buttons you feed the creature it beeps in class you get it taken away Oh, no, my creature has died. Oh, you know But these are kind of these training wills because if you look at how somebody uses a phone now You feed somebody through text messages, but there's real people on the other side Instead of these creatures and maybe there's 50 of them on the other side And so you're feeding them and taking care of your friends through text messages and and interaction So it's very similar to this except the creature on the other side is real And they're an actual friend that you have that you want to meet in real life And if the teacher takes the phone away, it's the same disruption in class So in an analog backyard you go outside you you are you know physically interacting with the Environment you're you're trying out your muscles and trying to see how strong you are or how fast you can run and it's very physical and mental But now the the new backyard is you try to see how far you can go on a website or or how much you can antagonize somebody or Or how much you can interact with somebody and and how far you can go and it's a very mental Situations it's very psychological and cognitive And you're interacting with people that don't necessarily have to be in the same room as you are the same country And there are no real borders that the borders are more along the lines of which website you're on those are the new borders You know Facebook is one type of geography of people and and reddit is another type of geography of people And some of them have wars with each other, which is kind of interesting to watch and I went to the the four square support forums and this person was very upset she said help help There's just verbally abusive user and I found a bunch of these Situations where there were these girls who were teenagers and they would go and open up venues that say Ashley sucks And then they would put tips on all the venues around town Ashley's a meanie Ashley's a jerk And then Ashley would walk around town and check in on four square and get these tips about how mean and rotten She was and it was this virtual reality bullying And I thought well, you know teenagers are really mean to each other in general But now they are they have new interfaces to be mean to each other on and so they can't just go home They have all these these troubles that they have to deal with on these virtual spaces So I'm going to talk about the future Mark Weiser was a researcher at park in the 70s and 80s and he had this idea of calm technology The idea was that the technology would be there when you needed it and it would go away when you didn't it wouldn't be in Your face it will be very well designed and be there right then kind of how Steve man said well I want to have my email with me when I need it and then I can just walk through reality Without having all this you know grossness on my face So the idea behind calm technology is that it's just there the interface is invisible and sometimes it shows up when you need that information the other thing is improved interfaces interface design and and the idea of design and aesthetics and Something that's actually useful and and reasonable to interact with is going to be the most important thing now that we have mature Technology that can actually work in all these different places So this is an example of what I consider horrible design You take an element from the real world like a book page and you put it into a physical interface And what happens people try to turn the page and go it's much worse than real life and then and then they kind of they finally get the page over and then Sometimes the code breaks and it snaps back and you're like oh, I hate this interface But you really want to read Alice in Wonderland on your book You just bought a $500 iPad and you don't want to let it go to waste So what what I like to look at is these superhuman interfaces if you had a book made out of a flip board It would be a giant Rolodex Which you would never be able to carry around because the pages start from the middle and they go and and you just touch them once and they turn and The way in which the information is presented turns you into a superhuman instead of being Afraid and weirded out by technology you feel like you have some power over it this this interface empowers The person and makes them feel good and turns them into a superhuman So any website or our device or interface that that empowers somebody is a good interface But it's very hard to design because most people say oh Let's just take the elements of the real world and just translate them over instead of saying one of the unique capabilities of this new platform and how can we use them to make something that's Physically impossible and yet wonderful to use so another thing is We built this game called map attack where you turn the entire city into a game of risk And you have all these little coins that you collect with different number values And we wanted to do it as an experiment to see what it would be like to run around and play in the real world in real Time and it feels kind of like a superhuman game because you're able to see where everybody is and what team they're on and what Kind of coin that they've eaten and so people run around and grab these virtual coins and their mobile phone becomes their map So they look at their phone and then they run all over the place and halfway through playing this game We debuted at Stanford University earlier this year Everybody was running Extremely fast and trying to get these coins before everybody else and trying to get the 50-pointer and we realized that The landscape started to look more vibrant and we had more energy and there were these adrenaline rushes And we realized that we'd each run maybe three or four miles without even noticing it and we're exhausted But it was all in the real world and it was the first time most of us had Computed without having to be on a computer and it was this very different feeling And I definitely want to see more of those feelings. They're just very hard to program right now So the idea is that your your phone will become this kind of remote control for reality That it will turn you into this this kind of superhuman that you know the world is very small You can now stand on one side of it Whisper something and be heard on the other and so these these devices will be able to you know do things that are a little bit Better so that instead of humans being on pause Technology takes care of that part and I think that for a very long period of time people have blamed themselves when they can't use Technology they've said oh, I'm bad at technology, but for a long time. It's been technology. That's been bad at humans Because it hasn't been able to be correctly designed because it hasn't been made for humans because programming a machine is not The same as talking to a human There's a completely different language and so until and it's starting to happen technology is designed for humans You don't get to blame yourselves for being bad at technology because you aren't so so everyone's off the hook If you've ever thought you're bad at technology So in reality the best technology is invisible it just gets out of the way and connects people So the idea is the world that's no longer this with 80 pounds of equipment But this where everybody is computing But they don't really notice that there's a bunch of people at the end of map attack after their team one and they all have computers And they're all computing right now, but but no one can really tell So the idea is that all that is sold Nelson air dissolves and we have a very nice reality Hopefully so thank you very much Thank you Thank you. What a great Presentation and you know the first question that comes to my mind is actually what is steve man doing now? What is steve man doing now? So steve man follows me on Twitter. Oh, which is just ridiculous because I look up to this guy I looked at what he's doing and He's making musical instruments that work in water.  Is that right? Yes, not not commercially interesting or maybe not commercially interested interested. Yeah, that's that's right Somebody went up to it They created a conference on wearable technology the first one I think it was 2001 or something and they had steve man keynote and steve man key noted and then they said you know Have you thought of designing these things for regular people and he said no this works just fine He's very pragmatic he has a book called cyborg and it's beautiful and it's so logic It's very Vulcan really it's it's it's it's very fun. But yeah, he's not interested in So it is really wonderful also and those you know these times where you always your first thought is how to make money on something I mean, this is a truly creative person. I was just wondering when I listened to you and When you when you show that picture of those people from 1941 who said that you know very soon people will have computers and nobody believed in them and and many things happened and and here we've talked mostly about Cell phones which are in many ways computers But so I mean did you ever think of what let's say if we sat down like those people here now and think of what We might be using in 50 years. Do you have any idea at all? You know, I think this is probably one of the closest conferences to the Macy meetings Because everyone in the room is interested in technology in the future and nobody's thinking I mean people are thinking okay What's happening right now, but people are very interested in creating it and developing it You know, I don't see Well, okay if we talked about wearable computing and like computer vision that would be awesome That's another industry that's lagged for many years because they the devices and the components have been cheap enough to really put In you know in front of your glasses. Yeah, so we could probably talk about that Or we could talk about the the philosophical underpinnings or something like that But I think there's a lot of that already being talked about so in a way This is very similar to those those Macy meetings and there's a whole part of the world that probably doesn't care Maybe it's the same. There's just more people to talk about it Now I would like to leave the the questions to the floor. Do we have microphones? There's somebody Yeah, out there, please introduce yourself and and also where you've Represent hi, I'm Martin Berg am a sociologist from good old here in Malmo I thank you first of all for a very interesting presentation indeed and it's quite fascinating to see this sort of historic account of You know gadgets But you know the good old Anthropologist and Clifford Goetz once called for a thick description and I think something is missing in your presentation that I would like you to elaborate a bit on because you said that The best technology know in the end the best technology is invisible And I think it's important not I mean important to note that technology is not neutral in any sense And and in the same way as the the best technology is in Invisible it's also the case that the best way of exercising power or hegemony is also to make it invisible And and there are a lot of questions here that I need to think that we need to touch upon questions of capitalism questions of power and Questions of well hegemony basically and I would like you to perhaps elaborate a bit on that Okay, let's see First off a book is an invisible interface when you're really into it a good book writer Make something that you dissolve into and then you don't even notice that the book is there So technically that's an example of an invisible But you talk about power and consumption and hegemony and and all these very political concepts So in a certain sense I worry that there will be a future in which there's a bunch of people who are a higher social Class who have access to the tools to create software to the ability to consume things to the ability to communicate with each Other to the fastest internet and then on the bottom There's this very low resolution capacity of action and interaction and that when a bunch of this Kind of matures, you know some country can say oh, I'll shut off this sector or I'll shut off this and because people are so Intertwined with the technology and used to it. They won't make any alternative methods of communication They'll be stuck by the own system that they Bought into so yes, there's a very negative Idea of where it could go wrong and I think in the world There's no there's kind of an equal amount of good and bad and I think that technology itself is Technology it's kind of an evolutionary thing it evolves because we purchase it And it changes shape over time But it's really how there will be these very positive implications and there will be equally negative implications It just depends there's this entire spectrum and it's happened this way since the beginning of time We have industrial revolution and a bunch of people die and they get sick and they haven't perfected Pasteurization or anything and then a bunch of people end up having a longer lifetime So in the same way with this new technology, you know Maybe some people will get lots of back problems because they're sitting over a computer And some people will able be able to you know in their Midwestern town actually connect with people who care about the same things They do Regardless of geography so I think overall it's you know, it's really there's this wide spectrum It's not good or bad, but there are good and bad examples that will happen and all of them will happen Over the course of time when we engage with technology. Hopefully that's a little helpful. Thank you more questions over there Hi, my name is Martin Rueghfeldt. I work for a company called expert maker You talk about a Shift where you moving knowledge and and intelligence into machines that sort of outside of yourself Where do you see that stopping where it's the end line? I mean people talk about the singularity people talk about Where we sort of live in a virtual world and stuff like that. Okay, thanks so the question so I want to attack the singularity part of that because I Just wrote a post about how we've had a singularity technically a few times a micro singularity The World Cup was a singularity Everybody knew it was going on they were all able to communicate about it the earthquake in Haiti was a singularity the Michael Jackson's death was another type Of micro singularity where our ability to communicate was fast enough that we had a kind of global consciousness moment for the majority of Connected citizens so I consider that you know, we don't have them all the time We have them every once in a while with an event and and that ends up you know being this This is kind of like the entire earth has the same weather pattern for one day And everyone can kind of have something in common to talk about before they go back and into their other channels In terms of the information Externalizing I have no idea where it will stop In a way, it just seems like it's going into databases Compressing itself and that you know you get one stream of very specific data Say four-square data and then over here you have another very specific stream of data like biology And then you have another one about weather patterns And when you put all of them together and connect them laterally you get this very rich interconnected database where you're able to have computations on all three systems at once and you can Basically amplify the power of that externalized Information and I don't know where it will stop or if it's bad or good for people or if suddenly the internet goes away And no one has stored anything in their brains anymore because they've offloaded everything that would be a good science fiction book to write But but if you have an idea is please tell me after the session because I'd love to know your opinion on On that and where that ends There's the question over here Hi Benjamin job from plus it's now really thanks for it's all very very insightful I have feeling that you're leaning more on the utopian side of cyber anthropology than the dystopian side I'd like to ask you what do you feel more most excited about in the developments of a cyber organic stuff? Thanks, I lean on that optimistic side because if I came up here and gave you a dystopian speech She would be very depressed And right after lunch you don't need to get depressed you need to be uplifted because you just ate and your bodies are trying to Weigh you down with chemical processes What am I most excited about I'm excited about that that I can go home and my house greets me and turns on the lights for me because it notices that There's a GPS circle around my house and my phone knows that I'm going into the GPS circle I'm excited about real-world gaming where you can play with people that you don't even know and run around and and have Exercise and be unleashed from the chains of sitting down in front of a computer I'm just excited about kind of playing with the technology and having fun with it Which is which is in a way a very privileged type of idea that you have to have access to the technology and have access to the methods of creating the technology in order to play with it But that's the thing I'm most excited about the thing. I'm least excited about is The ease at which you can get addicted to consuming Information and how it makes your brain feel over time. We've had you know We have these stomachs that tell us when we're full which is very convenient so we don't overeat But our brains are not yet Configured to tell us when we're full if we've read 400 RSS feeds and 10 emails and we've been on the internet all day on one of those sites It says related reading read more and we've read more you might also like this article Okay, and then you go and Wikipedia and you go down this black hole in three hours later Now only do you feel really bad in your brain?  That's just an entire demographic of humans in general But I hope it doesn't increase by the ease at which you can consume information So that hopefully that's a dystopic perspective to help even out the utopian side Anybody yes, yeah Hi, my name is Joachim formal. I'm from a company called Ericsson You've been talking about humans artifacts and how we relate to The physical things around us and at the same time we can see that many of the things we have now are kind of Instanciations if you want or it's the data inside of them, which is actually the thing How do you think that will affect our relation to objects? so there used to be In order to do something like you went on a regular tiny calculator You'd have to have really a gymnasium or one of these rooms full of computers and then they started to say Oh, we can fit all of this into a into a calculator And it was like yeah a calculator and then they tried to make the smallest calculator Which is like this big and no one was able to use it and they said hmm So that's when you know the actual liquid interface to start to show up where it doesn't you know You have the phone as a remote control for these little tiny chips So you could have chips in your body that that regulate your blood flow or you could have you know Your mood you have a little thing attached your head You know like a soft sticker and then all of these things are talking to each other Through the centralized database of your phone and that sends up to a server and gets processed and then come back to your phone And then suddenly you can see all these analytics Where it's about little tiny nodes Connecting through this very powerful computer that you're holding in your hand and that that that interface is a handheld visualization and kind of operating system for your life If it's if it's done well So I think of it like you have a bunch of invisible information stored in servers where you can't even seed them And then your interface to it is this phone and then you have a bunch of little Interfaces that that just connect to the phone and then that's your visual apparatus with large enough touch targets You can actually act on it. I guess that's where I see it going That's kind of the 1970s ubiquitous computing type idea without chips everywhere. I just Well, I guess you'd have to have chips everywhere But smaller ones without interfaces where you just have one good interface and tiny little pieces of technology Yeah, we have we have time. That's the fantastic thing because Amber didn't spend her 45 minutes So, I mean take the opportunity. I saw some other arms raised here and there or you can all just go and Have an early break Okay Wait a microphone is coming Hi, I'm Dave Asprey I'm giving one of the talks this afternoon about living a hyper connected life And I noticed almost everything you talked about there was very observational and passive I'm actually going to be wearing electrodes on my head during my talk That are running a current over my brain while I talk excellent and I'm a little concerned that both in the quantified self-movement and in most of the things I see here It's very much like I'm just gonna look at all these things But just looking at them and not doing anything with the data particularly doing anything in a real time to feed it back in and affect Your bio biological systems seems wasteful So is that something that you talk about in other speeches or are you veering away from that in your research? Ah? So thanks So there's another speech all about location-based technologies and getting lots of data where I show Maps of me and my co-founder Aaron who's somewhere in the audience here Where he has been tracking his location at five second intervals for about three years now And I've been tracking a lot of what I've been doing and then visualizing it So I visualize every time I edit a wiki or every time I edit a website or every time I you know check into a place So there's all these visualizations So I'm kind of doing all this data streams But that's an entire other speech with a lot of different diagrams and graphs and different topics where it's very much the applied Type of thing like what if you made a button that's invisible and when you walked into it an action happened somewhere else? Like an actual invisible interface and you had you know GPS going on your phone in a GPS circle So and also there's this quantified self meet-up That I go to in Portland, Oregon where we have a bunch of people come in with our different devices that track Information and we talk about the different ways to visualize them and it's it's very exciting In a way there there are In some ways it's okay. I'm gonna track everything. I do cool But then there's another way where you can actually figure out if you track yourself every day via GPS over a year You can find out what's the most optimum time to leave to get to work on time? Is it 845 is it 842 and you can say oh, it's always 842 except for Mondays I don't know why and then you can always leave it 842 in the morning and go so in order You know if you if you track what you're doing then you can find these patterns in your life I use the sims to run a simulation of a very small floor plan to optimize the happiness of two people in a space Because you can see what's wrong with you over it You know three times the speed right so I realized that there was a chair in the way and that you know The simulation of myself and my partner were You know kind of annoyed over this chair and we realized it was because it was too close to this You know other piece of furniture, so it's like okay in real life. I'm going to move the chair And I moved it and everything was happy But we wouldn't have been able to see it unless we played it in three times the speed So it was a kind of quantified self take yourself out put in this space run a simulation Debug real reality, right? So so I'm very interested quantified self and actually applying it I just wish I could compress space and time and make a talk that's twice as long and just crazy involved And then I'd show that other side of the data, but thanks for bringing that up Let's say the last question now Anybody else I know in Sweden I I live and work in Italy and every time there's a question and answer session There will be a 100 people who want to talk and the question is much longer than and the question is usually ends Don't you agree on that? So that the speaker gets a yes or no But in Sweden people are mostly a little bit more shy and also sit there and what I would like to but maybe I don't know Maybe it's a stupid question Who is thinking like that right now raise a hand? Okay, I saw would you like would you like to to actually Say it out loud Because I I also have a very stupid question and that I feel like Expressing if you let me No, no, there's one good It's kind of a personal question to you Amber I'm a mother and I wonder when you were a kid What did you want to become? Okay, that's a good question So it started when I was four or three and a half Four probably my dad would sit me down and he would read me the bedtime story, right? But the bedtime story was called the evolution of consciousness Every night this is how the brain stores memories This is why the Neanderthal brain didn't really pan out that well. Hey dad. How do how would I store this memory in it? Oh, well, that's you know and he draw these diagrams and Then he'd you know, he'd be like here's space and time and you can fold space and time over in order to get to points quicker And I said, oh, I really want to bend space and time when I grow So, um So I had insomnia every night of course because it's like You get this story at 8 p.m. And then it takes till midnight because you're like well I'm watching my brain fall asleep and now I'm watching it store a memory and I wonder what REM sleep is Can I watch my brain actively dreaming while I'm still conscious? Can I lay there and and wait for my senses to shut down? And then ten, you know go into conscious REM so I'd wait there and I'd be like wow my The vestibular sense in my brain just turned off which which negotiates whether I'm standing up or not And I feel like I'm falling. Oh, this is right before I enter into a dream. Oh, this is great And then I tried to tell this to kids at school and they really did not get it No, no, thank you so much. Thank you very much fun and very cute


Sssss-ess drunk! Sometimes when there's no access, or not enough money for a particular license, game devs will still plow ahead with whatever game they were making, even though anyone can see it was clearly made in the image of a certain movie or comic or TV show, or whatever. We saw it pretty often on the NES with Journey to Silius, for example, which was originally supposed to be a Terminator game, and you also see it on the SNES and Genesis occasionally, too, with games like Outlander. This is clearly just Mad Max 2 the game. For those unfamiliar, Mad Max 2 is part of the movie series starring Mel Gibson. It was released in the U.S. under the title The Road Warrior, and it's after the apocalypse and fuel is in huge demand and there's lots of driving and leather. Apparently, the publisher Mindscape did actually have the license for Road Warrior at one point, but lost it for one reason or another, but they decided to just release the game anyway for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis in April of 1993, and they just decided to call it Outlander. Despite this being planned as merely a Road Warrior title, this game is majorly ambitious. You start immediately after the title screen, controlling a car, just hold the Y button to accelerate and B to use your unlimited ammo to gun down these people on motorcycles that want to kill you for some reason. As you can see, you're not exactly feeling a great sense of speed here.  It could definitely use some help from an improvement patch that utilizes the SA-1 ship. But still, what's here is really impressive because of the sheer amount of detail they put into this part of the game.  If a biker comes up next to your car, another window pops up on the screen and you can use the L and R buttons to fire a shotgun to the side. The rear view mirror up top also has a great amount of detail, tracking multiple bikers that are following you while your character grimaces while taking damage. You can even go in reverse by holding down on the D-pad to run over bikes behind you. It can be tricky to get the timing right, but if you're able to do it, you see the biker fly up into the air while their bike explodes. In later levels, you get helicopters coming after you and you use sidewinder missiles to bring them down. There's even turbo boost you can pick up. Just press up twice and you'll go, uh, slightly faster. The driving may not look impressive and definitely could use a touch-up, but all the extra bells and whistles here are really cool. The thing is, though, if your health meter at the bottom of the screen runs out, it's game over and you have to start over and check out this game over screen. Woof, that is brutal. Your health meter carries over to the next game mode as well.  The whole idea is to walk to the right and smash open some crates so you can collect as many items as you can, and it's everything from better armor, food for extra health, and weapons and fuel for your vehicle. One interesting wrinkle here is that some food has gone bad due to being contaminated by nuclear waste, I guess, and it can actually do a ton of damage, but you can also find a Geiger counter, which helps you avoid food that's gone bad.  They're really slow, and your character moves at a leisurely pace. C'mon, dude, this is a post-apocalyptic action game. Get a move on! The hit detection is just plain bad. It's one of those games where you can walk right past enemies and not take any damage, but any attack they do within a comparatively huge range will hit its mark, whereas your attacks have a 50-50 shot at actually landing. Here is the most effective way to get through these beat-em-up sections. The old fist to the groin. Yes, that's right, ignore your weapons. You just scuttle your way to the right, duck, and punch them in the balls. Apparently, your character has more in common with Johnny Cage than the road warrior. But, yeah, while the driving sections are actually kinda interesting, these sections are such a chore to get through. At least once you labor your way through this, you pick right back up where you left off in your car. As I alluded to earlier, this game did get a Genesis version with some minor differences, the biggest being the performance being a bit better, with the driving parts running a little more smoothly and a bit faster. It just doesn't feature the rear view mirror up top. But for the beat-em-up parts, the controls still suck, and the best way to move ahead is still just to groin punch everyone. I only wish you could kick in this game, so maybe you could pretend the protagonist is a grown-up Bobby Hill. The Super Nintendo version of the game features the music of Mark Knight, a longtime chiptune artist some folks might know as TDK, and he's worked on sound design and music for tons of stuff over the years, everything from Crysis, The Witcher, and lots of Amiga ports like Wing Commander and Battletoads. This is some of his earliest stuff, and while there's not a lot of music here, what's here is pretty dang good. So yeah, Outlander has some really interesting stuff going for it, and I'd love to see what this game would look like with an improvement patch that speeds things up a bit. But as it is, it's only a good game on paper. The execution throughout this one is pretty sloppy. The driving sections are at least interesting and kinda fun, but the side-scrolling sections just flat-out suck. Also, I should mention that if you want to complete this one, it's a really, really long playthrough, and the settings barely change, so no, I'm not using footage of just the first level. This is what the whole game looks like. The Genesis version is marginally better, and it actually has a password system, so if you want to play this one, I'd go that route. But otherwise, I'd just wait and see if this one gets some kind of patch to improve the performance. Alright, that's all for now, and I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.


Hamzor, welcome to Unizor education. Today we'd like to continue talking about logic. And there are certain topics which just couldn't be touched in a very short lecture, which basically was the foundation of logic which we have discussed before. Today we'd like to talk about relationship between logical expressions. And most important relationship is implication. If one statement implies another statement, what does it actually mean? Well, we were talking about statements being truth, but having a logical value of truth or false. Yes, there are certain statements which are neither, and we probably, yes, we did talk about this a little bit, but right now that's not the subject. Let's talk about subject of having a specific meaning of certain statements. Either the statement is truth or statement is false. And what can be actually inferred from this? Inference or implication, all these words mean that let's assume that one particular statement is true. What follows from it? Well, if you can say that if the statement A, when it's truth, basically results in a statement that B is also truth, then we're saying that A implies B, or A is a sufficient condition for B. Well, sufficient is basically a general word, but in this case it's quite obvious that you can use it. Yes, for making sure that the D is true, it is sufficient to prove that A is true. Well, sometimes we can have conditions which are implying each other mutually, which means A is sufficient condition for B and B is sufficient condition for A. Well, in this case we can say that A is necessary and sufficient condition. So, there was another word in which I could just use, a necessary. So, a necessary condition is the one which definitely needs to be true if another condition is also true. Let me just exemplify it. Basically, if A is sufficient for B, then B is sufficient for A. That's the definition of that thing. As an example, let's consider that, for instance, I have a pen. This is a statement. I have a pen. And let's consider another statement. I have a red pen. If I'm saying that I have a red pen, let's call this condition A and this condition B, if I'm saying I have a red pen, it actually means that I have a pen. So, from B, we can infer that the A is also true. So, if B is true, then A is true. So, A, in this case, is a sufficient condition for A. Is it a necessary condition? Or vice versa, is A a sufficient condition for B? Well, the answer is no, because if I have a pen, it doesn't really mean that I have a red pen. It might mean I have a black one, right? So, A does not imply B. So, in this particular case, we have that B is sufficient condition for A. A is a necessary condition for B. And the reverse is not actually true. Let me give another example. In condition A, number N is multiple of three. It's like three, six, nine, all these multiples of three. B, statement B is the following. The sum of digits of number N is multiple of three. Well, these two statements are, well, they're quite remote from each other. In terms of the previous problem, the previous example which I made, N and red pen, they were kind of close and it was kind of obvious that one implies another and another doesn't imply the first one. In this case, it's completely different things. I mean, let's consider number 123. Well, on one hand, we have to think about whether it's multiple of three if it's divisible by three without remainder. On the other hand, we can summarize its digits, one, two, and three, and make a decision about that number being divisible by three. And then we're saying that one actually might or might not imply another. We have to basically prove it. So, this is a typical condition when we can prove a theory. Like, if A, then B. If we can prove that theory, it means that the A is sufficient condition for B. If we can prove the theory that from B actually follows A, so if sum of digits is multiple of three, then the number is multiple of three. Then it proves that the D is sufficient condition for A. So, in this particular case, it goes both ways that A and B are both necessary and sufficient conditions for each other. Well, let's try to prove it. If we can take any number represented in decimal systems, as you know, we can have its digits A0 times 10 to the nth degree plus A1 tends to the n minus 1 degree plus, etc.  So, for the number 123, 123, this is A0 times 10 to the second degree, which is 100. So, it's 100 plus 2. This is time step to the first degree. So, it's 2 times 10 plus 3. This is my last digit. By the way, 123 actually is divisible by 3. You can check that out. And sum of digits 1 and 2 and 3, 6, which is also divisible by 3. So, how can we prove that this particular number is divisible by 3? Well, actually, it's very easy. Why? Because let's write down the following thing. We will subtract A0 from this. We will subtract A1 from this. We will subtract A n minus 1 from this. And we will subtract A n from this. Now, what do we have here? If you group these two together, or these two together, you will have an expression A k times 10 to n minus k minus A k. A1 times 10 to the n minus 1 minus A 1. Now, this is A k times 10 to the n minus k minus 1. Now, this thing is obviously divisible by 10 minus 1. We can prove it separately, but just trust me on this one. And 10 minus 1 is 9. So, it's 9 times A k times sum number n, whatever the name n is. So, this expression is divisible by 10 minus 1, which is 9. And whatever remains is n, and A k stays by itself. So, what I'm saying is that if we will subtract from the big number sum of its digits, by the way, this is intended to be minus, right? I'm subtracting. So, if you subtract from the big number sum of its digits, you will always have something divisible by 9, and therefore divisible by 3. What does it mean? Well, it means that, let me just express this statement differently. If you have a number n, you subtract sum of its digits, and you got something which is divisible by 9 and by 3. What does it mean? It means that if this is divisible by 3 or 9, this is definitely divisible by 3 and 9. It means that n should be divisible by 3 or 9. So, we can say that the divisibility of sum of the digits and divisibility of the number itself should always be in sync. If this is divisible, this should be divisible. If this is not divisible, this is not divisible. And by the way, this is not only for 3, this is also for 9. So, we kind of prove both theorems, number n is multiple of 3 or 9, and sum of digits of the number n is multiple of 3 or 9, so correspondingly. So, they always build together. If this is divisible, then this is divisible. If this is divisible, then that is divisible. Which means we can prove this theorem in both ways. a is sufficient condition for b and b is sufficient condition for a. So, basically this is a very short introduction into another aspect of logic, which is related to definition of what is necessary and what is sufficient condition. I will also put a few little exercises for this particular topic, and that's just for kind of self-study. It's basically an interesting thing, and there is another aspect of this necessary and sufficient condition. It's related to set theory and geometry, if you wish. You know that sets are usually represented geometrically. Like this is one set, and this is another set which consists of elements of the first one. So, this is a subset, so to speak. From the necessary and sufficient condition logic examples, we can actually use the same type of geometrical representation. Let me put it this way. Let's consider I have a statement. If point belongs to a subset, then it belongs to the bigger set. That seems to be obvious, right? So, we can say that the belongingness of the point to a subset is a sufficient condition for belongingness of that point to a bigger set. Why is it worse then? Why is it worse than before? Belongness of the point to a bigger set is a necessary condition for belongingness of that point to a subset. So, I can say that relationship between set and subset is really a good representation of necessary and sufficient conditions. So, subset towards set is like a sufficient condition. And correspondingly, set to a subset is sufficient to belong to a set. The reverse belongs to a set. So, it is a necessary for belonging to a subset. The word necessary and the word sufficient, they do have their own everyday meaning, but in this case we are basically in the same type of meaning. Mathematicians did not really invent any new meaning of that word, because if we are saying that something is necessary for something else, it means that without it, that something else will not happen. Without our point to belong to a big set, we can't even think about it belonging to a subset, right? So, that's why belonging to a set is a necessary condition for a subset. And why is it worse then? If I definitely know that the point belongs to a subset from it, it definitely follows that it belongs to an entire set. So, it's quite sufficient. I have actually proved a stronger statement or used a stronger statement. Point belongs to a subset. It's stronger than point belongs to a set. Set is too wide, subset is a small one. So, if I have a statement that the point belongs to a small one, then definitely is sufficient for this point being belong to a bigger set. So, this is kind of a geometrical representation. This is sufficient and this is necessary conditions. Just keep it in mind. Whenever you have this necessary and sufficient thing, you don't know which one is which, think about this geometrical representation. If you have proved something stronger than that is sufficient condition. Stronger means smaller in this particular case. You are narrowing down your logic to a more precise definition. It's stronger than saying something on a broader basis. For instance, if I'm saying that the number is divisible by 9, it's stronger than the number is divisible by 3. Because from the visibility by 9, definitely follows the visibility by 3. Which numbers are divisible by 9? 9, 18, 27, etc. 9, 18, 27, etc. Which numbers are divisible by 3? 6, 9, 12, 15, 18. So, as you see, there are more numbers which are divisible by 3. It's a bigger set than the numbers which is divisible by 9. So, this is divisibility by 3 and this is divisibility by 9. As you see 9, divisibility by 9 is smaller set. And according to this geometrical representation, this is sufficient condition for this. And, obviously, divisibility by 3 is necessary without which we can't even think about divisibility by 9. Okay, that's it for this little addendum for our logic. Thank you very much.


Hey everyone, welcome back to the state of the web. My guest is Dave Crossland. He's the program manager for Google Fonts. And today we're going to be talking about the state of web fonts. What are they, how to use them effectively, and what's new. Let's get started. So Dave, thank you for being here. My first question is about why web fonts? What do they bring to a website beyond the standard fonts like Helvetica? Well, web fonts really express us and kind of feeling for organizations, they express a brand. And you can have a web page without a video, but you can't have a web page without text. You have to have fonts. And so a brand at its core would be like a logo, a color, and a typeface, or a font. And so web fonts bring the kind of rich design that we have in print media to the web. And according to the HTTP archive, nearly one third of websites use a font from the Google Fonts API. So why are developers turning to the Google Fonts API? I would say that Google Fonts is fast, easy, and free. And so on our analytics page, we've clocked up over 22 trillion font views in total since the service launched in 2010. And I think that being on Google's content distribution networks, we benefit from cross-site caching. So when you visit the first website that uses a font like Roboto, it's downloaded, and you may see some latency there. But then on all subsequent websites, which use the font from Google Fonts, then it's in the cache and loads instantly across the different websites. We also try and make it really easy. So the Fonts API abstracts a lot of the complexities of web font technology from you. So we serve different font formats to different browsers. For example, with better compression formats like Waf2, only the newer browsers support those. And so we serve Waf2 files to those newer browsers, and we serve other formats to older browsers. And then finally, we make things free, and we have a directory of hundreds of choices which everybody can choose from. Now, of course, if you want a particular typeface, then it may not be available in Google Fonts, and you would go and license that font for your usage. But not everybody has the sophistication in design or the resources to license fonts. And I think it's important that everyone in the world is able to do typography. So I don't know if developers truly appreciate how complicated web fonts are under the hood. I got a taste of this when I was at YouTube a few years ago. I helped change the default font to Roboto. And it was not as easy as just changing the font family CSS style. There's a lot you need to do to make sure that it goes smoothly for the users and they have a good experience. For example, YouTube users are from all around the world. They have different languages, different alphabets. What are some of the things that developers need to be concerned about for an international audience? International users face a challenge because the file sizes of fonts for them can be larger than just for European languages. Traditionally, Google Fonts has done a kind of slicing of fonts into language or writing system sets. So we might have, for example, Latin, Latin Extended, Cyrillic Extended, Greek, Greek Extended, and Vietnamese. That's your current support for Roboto that's used on YouTube. We also support other languages, Hebrew, Arabic, Thai, many different Indian writing systems. And the biggest challenge has been for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean fonts. A typical font for Indian languages can maybe be two or three times larger than a European font. But for East Asia, it can be 100 times bigger. And so we've been able to use a number of technologies. For example, Waf2 Compression, which is now a W3C standard this year. And also the app font face CSS has a new aspect called Unicode Range. Unicode Range allows us to slice the fonts into pieces dynamically. And the browser will only download the pieces that it needs. So that means that we were able to slice a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean font into over 100 slices. And therefore the latency of each slice is similar to your European font. This means that the experienced latency is much better. And because the slices are cached across different domains, then the font gets faster and faster to load over time. Custom fonts have also been used for icon fonts to show images. And more recently they've been used for emoji as well. So we're moving beyond just text and onto these other ways that we're using to communicate. But it's not without its own challenges, right? That's right. Font technologies are always improving and evolving. And the use of emoji as a kind of special case of icon fonts is particularly interesting. I think that there's a debate in the web development community about how to best approach this. Using images for icons, whether that's PNG or SVG vector images, has some advantages there. One of the advantages to using icon fonts is that aligning icons with text in labels is often a common use case. And getting the alignment onto the baseline of text can be tricky when you're dealing with two elements, a text element and an image element. And so icon fonts can play a good role there. They also have good legacy support because obviously text systems work everywhere. Unfortunately for emoji and color fonts, that's a little bit more complicated because there are different color formats for different platforms. And so one font file needs to have a lot of data to support all of the platforms at once. And they can look different on different platforms. So yeah, emoji as web fonts is still, I think, kind of as a cutting edge thing, but it can add consistency and I hope we see more developments of that in the future. And going back to the Roboto at YouTube example, one of the things I remembered that was kind of tricky was when we would have font weight bold in our styles, that would default to weight 700 by the browser. But our designers decided that it looked best as weight 500. So we actually had to go back and change all of our styles from font weight bold to font weight 500. And it became kind of a new way that we had to ingrain into our style development. But there's something new that's coming out called variable fonts. How would they help address the situation? Yeah, variable fonts can help a lot. It's a very exciting new technology. It's part of the open type standard, which is the font format that's widely supported in pretty much all platforms today. And variations allows you to do runtime interpolation between different sort of styles or faces within a font family. So traditionally, you would have like a thin weight, a regular weight, a bold weight, an extra bold weight. And in CSS, you've only had up to nine weights, 100 to 900. With variations, then you were able to specify weight 154 and dial in a brace specific and sort of dynamic weight. You can animate these weight changes using CSS and animations. And in CSS4, there's more direct support for this. So does that mean that every font is now going to be able to be completely customizable or are only a few fonts going to be eligible for this? Well, it is something that font developers need to add to fonts. And so in that way, it breaks down the traditional wall between the font maker and the font user. And so variable fonts create a kind of dialogue between the two. So as a font user, you can customize the font but only in ways which the font maker has provided for. And so that means that you don't need to become a type designer yourself, but it means that you have that flexibility that you didn't have before. And the variations are not only for font weight. There's also font width, there's slanting and there's also optical size. And those are all part of the open type standard today. Optical sizing means that when you change your font size, from 10 point to 70 point, then the letter forms will actually react and respond to that change. And so as your font size gets larger, the letter forms will become more elegant and as it gets smaller, they can become more legible, more readable. There's also all other kinds of variations you can imagine which aren't part of the standard and are specific to each font, things like rounding and many creative options. Google Fonts is commissioned to sort of experimental trial fonts from type designer David Burlow at Type Network. The first is DecoVar, which has a lot of variations which are decorative. So rounding different kinds of serifs, different kinds of stroke patterns. And this can be used as a kind of graphical device because variations can be animated, I think there's a lot of potential there. The other typeface is Amstelvar. And Amstelvar is a text typeface and it has a set of parametric axes which go far beyond just weight and width and into things like the ascended length, the ascender length and a lot of variations which can be used together to create more readable text. I'm especially interested about variable fonts. We're gonna have to have you back on the show once they're a little bit more established and we can talk about the state of them. But where could developers go if they wanna learn more about any of these technologies? Microsoft Edge has on their developer site a really good variable fonts demo site. So that's a great place to learn more about variable fonts. There's also the design.google.com slash fonts articles website where the Google Fonts team publishes articles about type and typography in collaboration with the Google design team. And then there's also material.io where you can get the material design icons font and learn more about material design guidelines. Well, there you go. The links are in the description so go check them out. Share your web font stories in the comments below. Don't forget to like and subscribe so you can tune in for another episode of the State of the Web every other Wednesday. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.


I'm John Zuccarelli, I'm the commander in charge of low-voltage fuse removal and the safe work at height project. This project is looking after low-voltage fuse removal from the conception, from training right through to the equipment and where it will be placed and used out into the field. That's the same for safe work at heights. So low-voltage fuse removal is the CFA's ability to disconnect supply when safe to do so and safe work at heights is CFA's ability to work off roofs safely, which is a requirement from WorkSafe. Our packages have been built by our subject matter experts in the field and it has been endorsed by EnergySafe Victoria and endorsed by WorkSafe which is a really positive step for us to move through. The project team is currently rolling out training and low-voltage fuse removal has been rolled out to 82 brigades with about 25 brigades to go in stage one, which is about 420 members that have been currently trained or will be trained in the stage one process. The prerequisites for low-voltage fuse removal is the electrical awareness safety package that can be delivered either face-to-face or can be delivered by the learning management system. Safe work at heights will be rolled out very shortly. So currently the package is being finalised and will go out to consultation and we've targeted 32 brigades. Now with both packages they will be delivered to a class 5, 4 and 3 brigades with 1s and 2s being selected at a needs basis by the operational manager. The beauty about these packages is it gives us the ability to work safely wherever we need to do so. So in the low-voltage fuse removal space we can actually disconnect supply, work safely and then hand over to the power company and with the safe work at heights we can operate off a roof without the risk of falling off and it also gives us the ability to do a dynamic risk assessment whether we perform the task or we don't. So it really increases our ability to understand the conditions that we work in. Once you have the qualification in low-voltage fuse removal and work safe work at heights there is a three-year recurrence and what that means is that every three years you'll need to come back and redo the skill but coupled on with that there will also be changes because as the industry changes in the electrical world that we were able to pick up those changes and incorporate them into the package. With safe work at heights there is also a three-year recurrence. The safe work at heights training is a two-day course which incorporates all the prerequisites delivered on the day and after the second day you'll be qualified in safe work at heights. Low-voltage fuse removal once the prerequisites are done it is a one-day course that's approximately four to six hours of theory and then four to two hours of the fuse removal process and once that's completed the equipment will be sent out to the brigades and the minimum numbers for brigades to be trained in low-voltage fuse removal is four members per brigade and then the kit will be sent and for safe work at heights it's a minimum of five members per brigade. We're looking at a target audience of roughly about 20 people per brigade for each discipline so it gives us flexibility and it doesn't put the burden on the members that are trained but this is in stage two and stage three rollouts which will be in the next couple years.