Hi, welcome to the All Things LGBTQ interview show where we interview LGBTQ guests who are making important contributions to our communities. All Things LGBTQ is taped at Orca Media in Montpelier, Vermont, which we recognize as being unceded indigenous land. Thanks for joining us and enjoy the show. Hi, everybody. I'm here with Carolyn Gage, who's here for a return visit, as our viewers know perhaps.  She's written many other things, has a blog, has written essays, has written short stories. But we're here to celebrate the arrival of her new collection, Big Plays. Yes, I mean, I loved each play and we're here to talk about them. First, if I welcome Carolyn. I'm delighted to be back here. I've really enjoyed meeting you in the previous interview. This is wonderful. Well, thank you for sharing your work with us. And let me read a little summary of this volume that I recommend that you can purchase if you go to Carolyn Gage Big Plays on the internet. If you just Google my name and Big Plays, you will run across it. It's in Amazon. It's in Barnes & Noble. You can get it off my website. Or you can go to lulu.com and type in Big Plays, Carolyn Gage, and get to it. Let's read the summary. One reason you should get it. Huge casts, gigantic themes, multiple subplots, more scenes than a Shakespeare play, two intermissions, epic sweeps of history, breathtaking relevance with heart stopping suspense and momentum. In other words, what would have been known in previous eras as plays. By one of the world's most public and prolific and feminist and lesbian playwrights. So this is, you know, I spent all morning. I spent several days earlier this week going through this volume and, you know, I can't recommend it enough. It's very, very exciting. Yeah. There are three plays in McClintock's corn, which is about Barbara McClintock, the historical figure, Nobel Prize winner. And it also sheds a lot of light on autism. And we, I'd like to talk about that a little later. The second play is Stigmata, which explores the lesbian contradictions that we could be both victims and victimizers. And this is really riveting. I was raised Catholic, so a lot of it was familiar. I had to say it, even though it takes place in the 17th century. And the third play is The Spindle, which is a children's fairytale for adults. And it explores the banality and horror of incest. So that's a encapsulation. Let me ask you about the two historical plays. How did you have to choose these two figures to write about McClintock and Benedetta Carlini, the 17th century nun? Well, I read a lot. And every now and then it's like, I'll read something and I feel a little hand tap my shoulder and say that, write about that. I kind of feel that my plays come to me. And then I spend, I was seven years writing Stigmata. That was a big play. And I knew it. That was enormous. And the amount of research, I think I've got several banker boxes of notes about, you know, I had to look at early modern Italy, witch hunts, convent life, whole life of Galileo, who was kind of in the same time period.  But yeah, that was one that tapped me on the shoulder. And McClintock's corn was 30 years gestating. I had read Reverence for Life or it was a biography, I think Evelyn Fox, don't quote me, but it just, I knew I have to write about her. And it took me 30 years. And it's interesting because after I wrote it, which was in the pandemic year, the first year of the pandemic, two years ago, I realized I had to be old to write this. It spans, you know, her life from late 20s until she was in her 80s and won the Nobel Prize. And, you know, she'd crossed my radar in my late 30s. And I realized there's no way I could have written this. I am old now. And I can deal with that sweep. So that was, you know, that was wonderful. Yeah. And then, well, the autism is a piece of that also, but you were going to talk about that. Well, you just discovered more diagnosed with autism yourself in the recent past. I was, I wrote the play about McClintock. And then after that, I discovered she is considered autistic now. And that's pretty obvious if you look at her life. And then it began to dawn on me. And so am I. I mean, it just was very interesting that writing that play for some reason just broke open my denial about that. And now I am stunned. I mean, I was tiptoeing, buzzing, humming, spinning, just the just the behaviors as a very small child. But then of course, the adult choices, the fanatic hyper focus on the lesbian plays and the writing of them and the insane sacrifices I've made to do that.  I mean, just like, how did I miss that? If you read the play, it really is clarifying in terms of the level of concentration that McClintock needed with her corn and how focused it was and how I know it's not necessarily how productive it was and how accomplished she became. She was a Nobel Prize winner. So this focus really paid off in terms of outside world. But you know, but notice that was not the reward. The work was the reward in itself. She did at a certain part, her work was very not what the culture was about. The culture was about the atom bomb and the discovery of the structure of DNA. And we've cracked the code from life. Everything's downhill from here. And she kept saying, no, no, you're missing it. Environment influences the DNA. And they're just like, no, we are little gods. We are little gods. And that's just not true. And she just sat it out for another 30 years. They gave her the Nobel Prize for work she'd done in the 50s when she was universally trashed. And I think that's autistic. She didn't care. And she stopped publishing. She stopped talking about her work. It's like, why bother? Why bother? They don't understand me. But that didn't put a dent in her agenda, her steady work. They're getting up the working seven days a week, because that was her area of special interest. And I absolutely relate to that. I began my career when they were like three lesbian theater companies in the country. I don't know that they're any now.  I write heavily censored archetype, the lesbian butch, especially these days.  It has never phased me. I had a New York agent. She's like, you've got to write more men in. You've got to like de-lesbian. If these were straight women, I could market them. None of that phased me. It was like, I just felt like, I have to write what I write. They come to me. I write what I'm given assignments and I write them. That I think is autistic. I look at that and I look at McClintock's work. It's like, I know what she's doing. And it's incomprehensible to other people who want a family, a home, a decent income. How can you write over 100 plays knowing that most of them will never be seen in your lifetime? And then if they are, they'll be so controversial they'll make your life incredibly difficult. Autism? Easy answer. One of my favorite lines in the play, and this is what I was trying to articulate earlier, is that it's not really about outside rewards. And the McClintock character in the play says, the idea is not to win but to prevail. Yes. And I think that's really key. Yes. I certainly learned a lot from that play. So thank you for writing it. Okay, let's go to the Catholic Church in the 17th century. Plague times. Plague times. What is plague times? And we're in plague times now. Yeah. And the ending is kind of apocalyptic. I don't know if I want to spoil it. But the play doesn't spoil the ending. But yes, absolutely. And we are in a time of hysterical beliefs in silver bullets that are demonstrably not silver bullets. Very much like what people did in the plague time. Believing in something even if it doesn't work assuages the anxiety, you know, and then a fanatic embrace of that is a part of that. It's really, yeah, that was interesting. I mean, I wrote this before we were in plague times, like it was something long ago and far away, but apparently not. I know. And all the machinations of the ins and outs of the Catholic Church. The third play is the spindle. And I was really, I think it's really an important play. You say it's your most autobiographical play. Can you talk? Yeah, this is a this is a radical retelling of Sleeping Beauty. That's the spindle. Yeah. But it's the phallus. The pricking of the finger when you turn 16, the, you know, traumatic teenage encounter with the philocracy, if you will. And then she just goes to sleep. She dissociates. She becomes a knesiac. She that's falling asleep. There are many young women that fall asleep, not literally, but in terms of the dissociation amnesia, per identifying themselves with the perpetrator, all of those things. I actually feel like that, that fairy tale has always been a reference to the interference of girls coming of age and the falling asleep. Well, the tale is that if beauty, one of the heroines is pricked by the spindle, she'll fall asleep for 100 years, but then that's redefined as for a long time. And falling asleep becomes more metaphorical.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's true. Spindle scars.  You know, I hang out with unrecovered survivors and I, I can, you know, maybe so grandiose, but I feel like there's a lot of markers and that, you know, if you're on the far side recovery, you know, I think it's kind of like being in recovery from alcoholism or addiction, you can probably walk into a room and pretty quickly pick up who's who's active in an addiction. There's just subtle markers and stuff that a lot of people in the culture don't pick up on. But in this, that's the metaphor. And that little butch heroine, Doko, who's like 13 years old, she begins to perceive that everyone has spindle scars in the whole kingdom, all the women. And that's why she's not able to get anywhere. She's trying to talk about this frightening situation with the spindle and the curse and, and then, and the women are not responding appropriately.   None of them think clearly, they're all asleep, they're all dissociated, they're all perpetrator identified. And I kind of feel like, yeah, I mean, we've survivors, we certainly have that experience a lot, you know. And one of a great part of the play that I personally enjoyed was when you put in that they're going to Doko and Andrea, the godmother who's butch, they have a butch to butch conversation. Yeah, four times. And then it comes up a few, you know, that's their conversation. And I was, I just loved it because I personally am a lesbian. And I wonder if it's a lesbian audience would really appreciate. I'm thinking, Oh, it's a little bit of a stereotype. But you know, Doko has had her first rejection, crushing rejection by a heterosexual girl who has been flirting with her, you know, it was not and is crushed, confused. And here's the butch fairy godmother who's like, realizes I got to talk to her about this. And then and she doesn't really have the skills and Doko doesn't either.  But yes, I think my plays are very there's a lot of things lesbian audiences get from my plays that a straight audience wouldn't necessarily understand that they're in the presence of lesbian archetypes because they're so heavily censored. And the butch on butch, you know, mentorship, you never allowed to even see one butch much less to much less an older one, a younger one, you know, there's a lot of scenarios that are missing from the canon that my plays are trying to write back in. And the three godmothers are all lesbians. Oh, yeah. Doko's been raised by these three godmothers who some of them have the scars too, right? Bethany, yeah, one of them is confused, as many family members are and they feel the best way to protect the family is to kill the memories to split off. That will not serve us well. You know, your father's a wonderful person or whatever, just that false was misguided loyalties and and we see her she's a good hearted woman. And it's just doing knee jerk, you know, keep the secret stuff. And we see her come come to consciousness about that and is horrified by her complicity and just really devastated that she was protecting the perpetrator and sacrificing the child and didn't see it didn't even see it. Yeah, that kind of remorse. And, you know, I have worked with mothers where incest happened and there's a tremendous sense of guilt and there's very few recovery programs for those mothers. There's just so much shame, so much guilt. So and again, that's a difficult archetype and I wanted to put her in my fairy tale. And of course, there is redemption and compassion and forgiveness for her. Well, to change the tone, one there was a little revenge scene in the scene of violence against one of the perpetrators in the play. I don't want to give too much away, but the guy says you can't kill me. I'm your father. And don't go kills him. Yeah, she's I guess I can. And that's my own journey. That's like probably the most important scene in the play. That's why I wrote it. That's what I was trying to get to. I think she says just because you're my ah, this was this was the one that was so important to me that the line just because you're my father doesn't mean I have to be your daughter. And that frees her up. She treats him as an enemy threatening her life in the lives of one she loves and that warrants killing him. But yeah, that's a real revelation.  You know what? I have no obligation, none along familiar lines. And I personally found that scene very empowering. I loved it. It was empowering and you know.  It is a children's theater play. It's got the four primary colors, the fairy godmothers, the magic, the chandelier swinging, the sword fights.  I can't remember what famous feminists said that, but that is true. And that's it isn't an isolated incident. And I felt like setting it as a children's theater with the sparkle and the bibbidi-bobbidi-boo, the horror of you know, actually, this is a common experience for a majority of little girls. This isn't a bridge too far. I'm not reach overreaching here. You really want a fairy tale about the lives of children. Here it is. In your intro, you say 30 to 40 percent of young girls experience incest. That's a huge number. Well, and in that, it's like a father figures, the dentist or the priest or whatever. We're an uncle or, you know, it's not always the biological father, but it's kind of a father figure, authority figure. Yeah. And the percentage is one out of three. It really I always remember that they say if you want to terrorize a whole population or control a whole popular, colonize a population, terrorize 15 percent. That's enough to achieve it. And I'm like, well, we've got 33 and a third percent for girls and women. So we are like double colonized. That's like overkill. If you only need to terrorize 15 percent, we can, we got double that and then some. And the whole culture, I think of women, femininity, all that stuff, myths about motherhood. I mean, I feel like what we're looking at is a colonized culture. And the roots of that are this terrorization. If we weren't raped in childhood, we certainly are surrounded by friends and family members who were and all the lessons that come from that. The other thing I liked about the play was the ending.  I thought that was really cool.  It's so phallic and graphic and the falling asleep and the pricking. But the answer is find the one good man. That'll fix it.  We know that's not the solution now. It's the self-love and the women who can model the self-love and teach us to love ourselves. Yeah, I think that when Angelina Jolie did the film Maleficent, I think they had the Prince kiss and nothing much came of it. They made a point like that too. I think it was the love of a mother or something, the self-love. I mean, we've evolved. We know waiting for the Prince is not a good, no, it's not good strategy. Yeah, but I think what was upsetting for some lesbian audience members is they wanted to see the Princess get back together with this childhood friend, Doco, and the Princess is too far gone with privilege. And that's what's so good about the play. I mean, to turn to meta fiction at that point, I thought it was brilliant, really. Yeah, the happy ending. It has a happy ending, but it is not going to be romance. And I want to say that it is true. It's just like in recovery, there are some people not capable of it.  She is, she's not going to make it. She's got too much incentive to be complicit in her own abuse. And she's surrounded by people that are supporting that. And her little friend is a working class kitchen helper and a child and not part of her blood family. And you know, it just, it's, I just want to say that's real. That's real. She's never going to wake up.  You have to realize I am going to have to become part of this or else leave to save myself. And doko with the help of her godmothers has a wonderful resolution. But the romance junkies are like, I knew it was hoping for that, the convention. But I can't work miracles. I wrote this character.  I know that's so much more real. Yeah, yeah. It's extraordinary. You know, it's like, you know, those girls, those straight girls, you know, sometimes you just got to turn and just kind of wrap them in a little warm blanket and say, I got to, I got to turn this over now. And I'm leaving. Good luck. Good luck and good night. Yeah. So tell me, what's your next project? What are you working on now? I'm working on a play called St. Francis and the Fallen Angels. And that sounds kind of evangelical or something. But keep in mind the line, there are no fallen angels. There's only women who've been pushed. And this is about Francis Perkins, the secretary of state and secretary of labor throughout the whole Roosevelt four terms. And it's a particular night. And she's in a crisis. And she's being sandbagged and set up by the president to fail. And the issue on the table is social security, which is literally, literally the lives of millions and millions of people. And what people don't know about her is once a month, all those 12 years, she would leave Washington and her male only environment and go up to a convent in Baltimore, an Anglican convent for three days of peace and quiet. So that's where I've said it. And she's on the verge of quitting. The deck is stacked, the pressure realizing she's been set up. And also she had a partner who was a woman, a roommate who had just died unexpectedly. And there's no acknowledgement of this because it was a closeted relationship. But she's lost her housing. She's lost the love of her life. She's lost this tremendous Washington wife who made, you know, stuff happens in Washington at the dinner parties as a single woman.  And so she's grieving but not allowed to grieve. And she's kind of on the clock with this impossible job she has to do. And it's Christmas. It's Christmas Eve. And so all these, it's a very intense little one act play. And it's about quitting. It's about, I can't do this anymore. And of course that's a crisis of faith also. God has begun to look a lot like FDR.  And I think all of us, especially Dykes have come to a point where it's like, you know what? That's not fair. This is, I feel that way often, you know, writing lesbian plays like building the Ark in the middle of the desert. There's no rain in sight. There's no lesbian thing. There's nobody producing work like I'm doing. And the academics won't touch it with a 10-foot pole. And it's like, I can't do this anymore. And then there's, you must. And then it's, I can't. And that is, I'm writing as usual, right on my own, Rad Hot Issues. And I'm up against it right now when it's seeing queer cultures incredibly hostile to lesbian culture. And that's breaking my heart and my back. And I'm kind of like with Francis in that convent. And Francis, 20 years prior to where my play happens, she stood on the sidewalk outside the triangle, shirt waste fire. That is what forged her. That's where she got this spine of steel. I think if you stand there and you watch these 147 mostly girls and young women jump out the window, most of them on fire, they didn't jump until they absolutely had to. I mean, I think you either just come away broken or you pick up a good alcohol habit so you don't have to think about it.  And often when you're mission driven, the breakdown is horrendous. It's just like, I'm done. I can't do this anymore. You know. Carol, keep going. Because we read big plays, everybody. And we want to hear more from you. Come back any time because your work is so exciting and interesting. Well, thank you. And I also want to tell people, email me, carolin, at carolengage.com. I have a reading on February 6th of a play called Star Pattern that I absolutely love. It's a very short play. It's about the 1966, Texas, Utah, Texas, Austin, the first mass shooting as we know them. Of course we've been shooting people, indigenous people, but it's the first contemporary mass shooting. And when the first victim lay on the mall, wounded, nobody would rescue her because he was still shooting.  She was bleeding out. She would not have survived without that. This is a play about Rita Star Pattern, that lesbian who did that, like, a staggering act of courage and solidarity with a woman she didn't know who was eight months pregnant. It's a huge, it's a really important play about establishing matriarchal spaces in the belly of the inferno of patriarchal violence. And these women did something so radical.  Go on the website. But email me and I'll send you the registration number. It's a Zoom reading and then later I'm going to put it up on YouTube. But come and join us live on February 6th, four o'clock Eastern time, because there's going to be a question and answer and a talk back. And I love this play. I love this play. Carolyn, thank you. Thank you. Anyone who has been an activist within the LGBTQ plus community knows that historically, religion has been used against us to justify discrimination. However, there has been an movement with openly identified LGBTQ plus leaders of faith to try and change that and to change it from within their religious institutions. And joining us today is someone who has been very involved in that initiative within the reform movement within Judaism. And from Temple sign, I am Burlington. Please welcome Rabbi David Edelson. Welcome, David. Thank you. It's very nice to be here. I appreciate the invitation. I am so glad that you were able to accept because I understand that your schedule is very demanding these days. It's a busy time right now for clergy in general, I think. So I've read as you are experiencing. Exactly. So I want to start talking a little bit about your personal spiritual journey and how you came to the decision that you wanted to be ordained as a rabbi. And reading your biography, which if someone can find the seven days article, it is entirely worth the read. Your spiritual journey started in an unusual manner as a drum major for a marching band at your Georgia High School? That's correct. Well, I don't know if I would say my whole spiritual journey, but my adult spiritual move happened there. I was, as many people know, marching bands and football are very big in the South particularly. And as it was at my high school, and I was elected drum major after my freshman year to become drum major myself more year, which is very young. And so I was very honored and worked very hard and did very well. We had a very good band year in all the competitions and things like that. And then that spring, I got, I came down with a very bad case of mononucleosis and was out of school for six weeks. And during that six weeks, I later learned that the band parents, not including my parents, we were the only Jewish family in the county in the town at the school. And so the band parents had gotten together behind my family's backs, so to speak, and had decided unanimously that they weren't comfortable having a Jew lead the band down Main Street. That's the quote that I was given when the band director called me in and informed me that I was not going to be drum major again because of that. So and my family was very assimilated. I mean, we did holidays sometimes, but not even every year. The nearest synagogue was an hour away. So it wasn't an active part of our regular lives. We certainly knew we were Jewish, but that that was about it. And obviously, if I was doing football games and banned every Friday night, we weren't going to synagogue on those nights. So I was pretty surprised and shocked and angry. And in many ways, the reaction to that and figuring out, well, if this is going to affect me this much, I should know more about it led to the spiritual journey of discovery for me. And without denigrating anyone's faith tradition growing up in the South back then, particularly, this is in the mid 70s. It was not a religiously terribly diverse area. And it's certainly when it came to LGBT issues and frankly, Jewish issues and issues of people of color, the organized white institutional religious world, the church, the Baptist church particularly was not a friendly place. So it was a journey of discovery for me to learn more about my own tradition and find that I resonated with it intellectually quite a bit and spiritually. I think you're probably being more gracious than they deserve. I'm trying to be. But I'll let that go by in reference to your revered status now. Okay, after high school, you did not immediately start the rabbinical studies. You got a degree in something else. Yeah, rabbinical school is a graduate program in for most streams of Judaism, rabbinical school is post your bachelor's degree or it's a graduate degree. It's a five year graduate program. And depending on your background, six years. So I first went to William and Mary and majoring in comparative literature, which I love very much. And it still informs like the way I approach Bible and things like that. I'm a very much a literature person. But was your long range expectation was that after you finished the undergraduate degree, you would start the rabbinical studies? Well, actually, this is almost embarrassing to admit when I was still in high school, I guess at junior, we had to do a big, you know, what do you want to do with your life kind of presentation. And mine was I was always a Star Trek person, I'll just admit it still am. And mine was to be a rabbi in space. And so I knew I was interested in it. I didn't know just how motion sick I become that space was not really an option for me. But so I knew I was interested in it. But at the same time, I was far from decided about it. In college, I ended up being William and Mary does not have a large Jewish community. And I ended up being the president of the Hillel there for a couple of years. And that reinforced the thoughts. And then when I graduated from college, I moved in with my, my boyfriend, who was also my boyfriend back in Georgia when I was drum major. And we moved back in together in Atlanta. And there I started being more involved in the Jewish community. And as you know, we went to Jerusalem for a couple of years. And somewhere in that first year there, I was clear what I wanted to do. So it was a longer process, although it would have been my number one choice from high school, but it was not, it was, it was in competition for other ones, other graduate degrees in academic degrees. And then William Shatner was given the opportunity to touch space. A rabbi in space may still be within the realm of possibility. It may be, it should not be me. Okay, but while you, you were not only open and clear about your Judaism, from reading your bio, you were also very open about your sexual orientation. You started, you were one of the founding members of a student organization looking towards the inclusion and ordination of LGBTQ plus rabbis. Yes. Yes. When I interviewed and I interviewed in Jerusalem because I was already living there.  There's never, there's rarely the right time to put it, but when they said, is there anything else that you want to know about us? I was like, well, yes, I'm gay, I'm here with my partner, that's likely to be, you know, and you should know that. And I was accepted and there was not a reaction to it. And so I was like, great, that's good. That's what you want. They're like, okay. I didn't fully realize that the ordination of gay and lesbian rabbis was not yet decided. I realized I should have known, but it was before the internet and those things weren't as easy to find out as I guess they were, as they are now. And I knew some older gay rabbis that I'd been in touch with talking about it. So when I got back from Jerusalem that first year and that first year, my partner was welcomed on like school field trips, like he was part of the class. It was, there was never any issue whatsoever at the school or frankly in Jerusalem during those years. So I was pretty surprised when I got back to New York of all places and the issue was presented to me. Now I need to really give credit that some amazing rabbis had been working on the other side having been ordained. They weren't open when they went through school, but they came out later. Or they were straight and they simply were allies and advocates. So rabbis like Maggie Winig and Joel Kahn had done tremendous work and others as well. So there was already a movement among the rabbinic conference to support the ordination of LGBT rabbis and I should say at that point it was probably gay and lesbian rabbis. I don't remember the transgender community being fully included in that conversation at the beginning, but very soon it was for sure. But it kept being voted down as as happens in other faith traditions or it kept being tabled until the next year sort of thing. And as a student I was not that patient. I had a desire to change things. So I and a couple of other people started Hinenu, which means here we are. In the Bible anytime in Hebrew it says Hineni, it's usually somebody speaking when God calls them and they have to respond. So we did Hinenu, which means here we are, not here I am. And as since I was openly gay already, I very willingly became the the the spokesperson publicly for the organization. There were we had a good many members who were lesbian and didn't feel as comfortable yet since being a woman rabbi was still one. I don't want to call it a burden or a gift, but it was certainly something they were aware of that could affect their employment opportunities. And so there was some reluctance then to be as open. I was pretty clear and it was already open. So that that genie was out of the bottle so to speak. So we lobbied in the school for changes and we lobbied the conference for those that had been ordained for changes. And so we worked with the rabbis working on the other side so we could coordinate our efforts a bit. And what happened interestingly is that, and this is a little complicated so I'll make it as quickly as I can, the agreement in the reform Jewish movement there's one rabbinical school in the US, and there's one rabbinic conference. So if you were ordained by the rabbinical school, if they said yes, you were automatically admitted into the conference of reform rabbis, which was the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the CCAR is what it's called. And so one of the issues that was coming up was we kept figuring like, well, I was open when I interviewed other people were and we are getting through the school, you know, what's going on with that. And so we decided to have a town hall meeting before the big vote that was coming up at the annual conference or at the biennial conference. And we had a town hall meeting to say, you know, what's going on with this. And in the process of that meeting, it became clear that there had already been a letter by the president of the school saying we are not going to discriminate on this basis. And so it was already it just hadn't been publicized. It was an internal memo.  And so then the question is, is the Central Conference going to decide not everybody gets to be in the conference, which was a change. And so what ended up happening is the Central Conference said, well, if the schools already said that, then we're not changing our policies.  Now, there had already been accepted, but just not openly. And so I have professor one professor in particular who wouldn't sign my ordination because of it. But then most of my classmates also said they didn't want him to sign theirs. So, you know, I had a lot of solidarity from my class. So I, you know, it was a fight, but it was a fight with a lot of allies, I have to say. And in fact, in the class beneath me, one year below, was a young man who was heterosexual and was an ally and was part of the work we did. And he ended up being the president of the college until he died in an airplane accident a couple of years ago. So and another member was the dean of the college. So the acceptance has not just been lip service. It has it has clearly been demonstrated over and over at the highest levels of administration and leadership. So before we run out of time. Yeah, sorry, that was a long answer. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. That's that's the kind of LGBTQ plus history that we are not documenting that we are not sharing with those people coming up behind us. Yes. They have no idea how within the reform movement you were able to achieve what it is that has been given what has been granted to you. But I want to get from, you know, you spend time in New York City. You were the rabbi for your association for the death.  You made this statement that I cannot just let go of sometimes you have to leave home to come home looking at what other faith traditions have to offer as well. And you end up in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, another Bethlehem, and then and then you end up here at Temple Sinai. I as an LGBTQ plus person. If I approach Temple Sinai, what can I expect from you? That's a good question. I you would expect a welcoming inclusive community made up of Jews and Jewish adjacent people, spouses, family members that aren't Jewish necessarily, but are part of our community. You should expect when we can get back together in person again. A lot of joy is singing, a lot of laughter. I very much believe that music and a sense of humor are crucial tools, not just for getting through life, but for having an open spirit and being spiritual people. So I think that's what you would expect. And I think that's what you'd get. We're a very welcoming community, I'm proud to say, and have been. And the reform movement remains very open. We've had presidents of the CCA of the rabbinic conference and other very high positions, repeatedly held by LGBT people or very strong allies. So as someone who is not brought up in the Jewish tradition, I would be welcome to come in and sit and experience that sense of spirituality. Absolutely. You would also experience Hebrew, which is a barrier if you don't know it. And I say it's a particular barrier because most of our songs are in Hebrew. So we have a Judaism as a very rich singing tradition, but it's almost it's almost always in Hebrew in services. So so you would have that experience as well. But our prayer book is translated and transliterated. So and people would be happy to show you what page we're on and so that you can participate. And our prayer book is also gender neutral and things like that. So you would be welcomed in and included to the level that you would feel comfortable including yourself. You can all just sit and see what's happening. We have groups come in that want to learn about it and they're always welcome. I was going to say from having seen your name in the news since you came to Temple of Sinai in 2018, it seems that within the larger communities of faith in Burlington, there is a concerted effort to present a in solidarity interfaith response. I mean, I have seen you standing side by side with the amount who I would tell you traditionally that's not a relationship we would expect. Is that something that we should get used to and we will be seeing more of? I believe so. We are working very hard to be partners where we can be partners. Of course, there are issues like on from our perspective is reform Jews issues of LGBT rights are reproductive choice that are and egalitarianism that are not up for debate for us. They're fundamental bedrock principles. So certain areas we can cooperate on other areas we try to be respectful to each other in our disagreements, which frankly in this day and time feels probably just as important as solidarity is the ability to disagree respectfully. So, you know, certainly the Imam, I think it's important for people to understand that the probably Judaism the closest religion to Judaism in terms of religions and how they work is Islam. We are very close in a lot of our approaches to spirituality in terms of how we do things and how we how we see religion playing out in our lives. It's mostly since the early days of Zionism and Israel now that it's become an area of significant dissonance and on those areas we don't totally agree and we have agreed to be respectful in our conversations. And the Imam has been a role model in that. So I'm very, very appreciative of that. And with that I need to say thank you. And I'm looking forward to the time that I get to sit and experience that spirituality with you in person. Well, it's my pleasure. Thank you very, very much. Anytime. Thank you for joining us. And until next time, remember, resist.


Welcome everyone. So we have been discussing so far static teams with various sorts of types of information for the players. We looked at an example with two players and in which both players had identical information, sometimes they had no information, sometimes they had asymmetric information, sometimes they had noisy information. So and in all of these cases we saw what the method is to find the optimal policy or optimal strategy for the team problem. Now what we will do is look at a slightly different notion of optimality for team decision problems. The kind of notion that we have looked for so far involves what you can say is a global optimum or a team optimal solution. So this is team optimal in the sense that it is the optimal one for the entire team and it presumes that the strategy has been chosen keeping the entire teams goal in mind. Another notion that comes up which is the one I will define today is what is called a person by person optimal. A person by person optimal is optimal for a person given a set of strategies for the other players. So a person by person optimal is a tuple of strategies such that it is optimal for each player to play his strategy assuming that the others continue to play the strategies from that tuple. So in other words this is a strategy in which neither player from the team would want to change if the others do not change. So in some sense this is some kind of a local optimal solution and that kind of solution is called a person by person optimal solution. So the notion we have looked at so far is called so far we have seen team optimal, a team optimal solution. Now what does this mean? So suppose you have a team problem, suppose there are n agents or n players and they have to choose strategies gamma 1 to gamma n and the cost that they incur is j of gamma 1 to gamma n. This is the setting of a typical team problem. Now a team optimal solution so gamma 1 star to gamma n star is team optimal if j of gamma 1 star to gamma n star is less than equal to j of gamma 1 to gamma n and this holds for all gamma 1 and gamma n up till gamma n. So in other words j 1, gamma 1 star to gamma n star is a profile of strategies or profile of or a policy for the n players such that collectively they would not want to deviate from it. So in other words no other combination of policies is better than this one, it is strictly better than this one. There may be combinations that are as good but no other combination is strictly better than this one. So this is that is called a team optimal solution. So another notion as I said is what is called person by person optimal. So let me use a different color for this gamma 1 star to gamma n star is person by person optimal if j of gamma 1 star to gamma n star is less than equal to j of gamma 1 star dot, dot, dot, gamma i minus 1 star. So notice what I am writing here I have written the starred strategies for players 1 to i minus 1 then for the player i I will write a non-star one I will just write a gamma i here then player i plus 1 I would again I will again write a starred strategy and all the way till n player n again also the starred strategy. So these here the remaining ones are starred and this one here the ith one is without the star. So and the it is a person by person optimal strategy if this is if j 1 so gamma 1 star to gamma n star is a person by person optimal strategy if j of gamma 1 star to gamma n star is less than equal to this right hand side here for all gamma i. So what does this mean this means essentially that the it is for all gamma i and for all players i. So it means that for so j of gamma 1 star to gamma n star is per is his person by person optimal if it has the following property that keeping the others fixed at their starred values it there any player i would not want to deviate from his starred value strategy that means there is no other better strategy for him there may be other strategies that are as good but there is no other strategy that is better for him than his starred than his starred strategy that means the cost keeping the others fixed at their starred at the star strategies it is optimal for this player to continue to play his starred strategy and this is true not just for play for one particular player it is actually true for all players. So in other words you keep say suppose I take i equal to 1 then in that case the strategies of players 2 to n are held fixed at their starred values the strategy of player 1 is is allowed to change from gamma 1 star to any other one is allowed to explore all the other strategies and it turns out that gamma 1 star is optimal in spite of this and it is not just true for player 1 one can also do this for player 2 now for player 2 you keep all the starred you keep the starred values the same for player 1 and players 3 to player n and then allow player 2 to change its strategy from gamma 2 star to gamma 2 to some gamma 2 and then it turns out that any such deviation does not improve the cost and similarly for player 3 as well and floor and so on. So the this point the this this tuple of strategies gamma 1 star to gamma n star this policy is such that no unilateral deviation is from it is profitable. So let me write this here so no unilateral deviation no unilateral deviation reduces the can reduce the cost unilateral deviation from gamma 1 star to gamma n star can improve the cost. Now what is now what is the relation between these two notions we have defined one notion here which is the team optimal and another notion here which is the person by person optimal what is the relation between these two. So one relation which is kind of very obvious to see is that every so one notion one relation which is very obvious to see is that every team optimal solution must also be person by person optimal. So every team optimal solution is also person by person optimal now why is that the case well it is easy to see from this definition here itself. So if you look at this this particular definition here it is fairly obvious so for example for in order to show that gamma 1 star to gamma n star is which is team optimal is also person by person optimal what one can do is you can in this right hand side here in place of gamma 1 to gamma n what we can do is fix all the gammas for players other than player i at their star values and leave gamma i at as it is. So then these then become simply this particular expression what you get here on the right hand side then is this particular expression.  So therefore the the cost under then therefore what we find is the cost under gamma 1 star to gamma n star is less than equal to this particular expression and consequently gamma 1 star to gamma n star satisfies this inequality here and this is true you could do this not just for player i but in fact for every player. So as a result of this the we can conclude that gamma 1 star to gamma is also person by person optimal if it is team optimal. So this every team optimal solution is also a person by person optimal solution. Now one can ask if the if there is any relation in the opposite direction and remarkably there is in fact such a relation. So let me write that down here so this is a neat theorem now the the notion. So the other thing to note here is that this these notions of team optimal and person by person optimal are not limited to static team problems. So this is these these notions are not limited to static teams. So they apply also to dynamic teams and any other kind of team problems. Also applicable so these are also applicable to dynamic teams. However there if as if one wants a relation in the opposite direction so if one wants a relation in which we can claim that maybe if a person if you have a person by person optimal then its solution then it is also team optimal then that sort of relation needs some assumption about the information structure. So that result is coming up next. So we have this theorem. Consider a static and let L of u1 to un, psi be so this here is the cost function of the team. So u1 to un are the actions of the n players. Let me write this in my earlier notation u1 to un these are the n players actions of the n players and psi is the environmental random variable. So an L of u1 to un, psi is my cost function. So suppose let this be strictly strictly convex and continuously differentiable in u1 to un. So we want this this function L to be such that it is strictly convex and continuously differentiable in u1 to un. So it should be strictly convex in u1 to un and also continuously differentiable in these variables u1 to un for each value of psi then in that case then every person by person solution optimal solution person by person optimal solution of this team is also team optimal. So if you have this kind of a problem then every person by person optimal solution is also team optimal. Now this theorem is not that hard to prove but I will not get into its proof though. But let me let us realize a few things about this and notice a few things about this. See notice that because we are talking of this theorem is asking us that L has to be has to have two properties. It has to be continuously differentiable in the u1 to un and it has to be strictly convex in the u1 to un. It is not asking for any requirement from psi. So you just need that this is strictly this strictly strict convexity and continuous differentiability has to hold in u1 to un for each value of psi that is all that is being asked. Now what this actually presumes also is that when we are talking of strict convexity strict convexity or convexity for that matter is a notion that would that is applicable when u1 to un take continuous values. That means if you have u1 to un which is the action set of these which is the actions that the players can take if they are finite set if the actions are being taken from a finite set then this sort of notion is not even applicable or not even defined. Because like in a in so if you take the example that we had considered earlier where there were two players one could take actions up and down player one could take actions left and right those kind of those kind of teams would not satisfy this sort of thing. Here we would need therefore that L actually has takes values L should be taking values let us say ui suppose we need ui here to be in some r mi. So it has to be a real vector not just some discrete not just a discrete a vector that takes some discrete values then it and consequently so if I write m as the summation of mi and if I and suppose psi takes values in some r d suppose then L here is a vector from r m plus d is a function from r m plus d to r. So this sort of a function is the one for which one can talk of strict convexity and also continuous differentiability is this continuous differentiability again makes sense only if you want to un are actually allowed to take values in in a in a continuous space it is like like r mi right. So this is something to note so this this regime is not exactly the one that that we used in our in the example we have studied so far. A particular type of problem where this is where this property holds where these properties holds is actually a one of our familiar friends it is what is called the linear quadratic Gaussian team. So linear quadratic Gaussians are is a combination we have seen multiple times before in this course and it is reappearing here now again in the in the avatar of a team. So what is the linear quadratic Gaussian team so let us go to a new page and write that so a linear quadratic Gaussian team so what this mean this is often referred to as the LQG team. So what is the linear quadratic Gaussian team so the in the linear quadratic Gaussian team you have L having the following structure so L of u1 to un, psi takes the form u transpose Q u plus u transpose s psi. Now what is this so where u here is just a vector that is formed by stacking up the u1 to un this is your vector u Q is a fixed and positive definite matrix s is just some any matrix and so this is the structure of the cost the in order to define the team I also need to say what the structure of the information is so remember information in a static team was yi equal to eta i of psi so here in this case in the case of a linear quadratic Gaussian team yi is just equal to hi psi where hi is where hi is a full row rank matrix. So what one has to do then is as a player you have what you have to do in as an agent with the team you have to choose ui equal to gamma i of yi so this is an example of a static linear quadratic Gaussian team so I should mention here this is static. Right so this in this in this sort of team what you have therefore if you look at L now if you look at the hypothesis here we have assumed that Q is positive definite here so if you look at this function L as a function of u1 to un for each fixed psi for each fixed psi as a function of u1 to un this function is actually now convex in fact it is strictly convex because because Q is positive definite right so this sort of L as the property that so L is strictly convex in u for each fixed psi so for each fixed value of psi this L is strictly convex so as a result of and moreover it is just a quadratic function L is also quadratic in for each fixed psi it is also quadratic in u so consequently it is also continuously differentiable so it is strictly convex L is also continuously differentiable for all fixed psi so it is also continuously differentiable so consequently the previous theorem applies right so the previous so the previous theorem then what does it say previous theorem says that if you can find a person by person optimal solution of this of this team problem then one you have effectively all you can effectively also find you have effectively also found a team optimal solution so every person by person optimal solution of this team problem is also team optimal. Now in fact this little observation actually is extremely powerful because it helps us in gives a very easy way of finding the team optimal solution of this particular LQG of the LQG team static LQG team finding the team optimal solution of an LQG team otherwise would have been a much more tedious task whereas in this thanks to this this correspondence between person by person optimal and team optimal one can actually solve for it rather easily so in order to get an idea of how one can actually solve this you can observe that because y is so notice that yi is some hi times psi and I forgot to mention the vector psi here is a because this is LQG this is I forgot to mention that this vector psi itself is some is a Gaussian vector all right so this is with some mean 0 and let us say variance covariance matrix sigma. So because now the vector when the vector psi is Gaussian then what happens is then this is actually and this now becomes an LQG team without when the vector psi is not Gaussian it is just some linear quadratic team and even for such a team the previous result would still apply because you would still have that L is strictly convex in you for each fixed psi and continuously differentiable in you for each fixed psi right. So so the previous theorem continues to apply that every person by person optimal is also team optimal for but when psi is Gaussian one can actually say a lot more so when psi is Gaussian in this case one can actually find the team optimal solution in a in a closed form. So when so when psi is Gaussian you can see what if you think about just the person by person optimal solution what you would have there is you would be fixing fixing the these the actions of all the other players players except for I and then solving for the optimal action optimal policy for player for player I. So that that sort of logic actually suggest suggest a certain type of optimal policy and we will come to this particular logic in the next in the next lecture.


Throughout the ages countless reports of unexplained and baffling discoveries have been reportedly made deep within the minds of Earth. Regardless of the type of mind or indeed its depth, it seems that these peculiar stories continue to surface, and usually only by word of mouth. Often attached to these fascinating tales, you will find stories of these artefacts being seized, destroyed or simply re-buried. We are often confronted with an apparent cover-up, vast resources and manpower being harnessed to hide these facts from the world. The motives for choosing to conceal such artefacts from the world could indeed be endless, though regardless of motive, we feel it is imperative that we continue to expose these stories to the Earth, if we have compelling witnesses and unmistakable evidence of a cover-up. Deep beneath the city of Donetsk, within the Rostov region of Russia, a large foundation of sandstone can be found, something known as Rock Shield of Carboniferous Age. It is about 300 to 360 million years old, and is lined with distributions of coking coals that are also of around the same age. Astonishingly, Mr. Kosatskin has discovered, upon the roof of this shaft of coal, an imprint of a chariot wheel, an imprint undoubtedly made before the rock had formed around it. He also discovered another imprint, a small distance further along the shaft. It must be noted that these imprints have remained buried deep within these seams of rock for many millions of years. If a scientific analysis could have been undertaken upon this artefact, it could have shaken our understandings of world history, just like so many other artefacts we have been made aware of, all but a few now stolen from the public domain. Upon realizing the implications of his discovery, Mr. Kosatskin, an extremely experienced foreman in ventilation and safety engineering, specializing in seismic prognosis, thankfully took several photographs of his miraculous and now concealed discovery, before officially reporting it and requesting a scientific evaluation. When his boss notified the owners of the mine, in the hopes of getting an analysis of the artefact with an attempt to preserve it, to his boss's surprise, they demanded he continued the work through the shaft, so that it could be subsequently flooded, which is unfortunately what has occurred, making further exploration of the sites impossible. He stated that he's investigated further regarding the western mine's history with the fellow miners there, and was able to confirm the existence of the other print within that mine. It had been damaged by blast hole driving, and was little mentioned, though it was indeed there. He was sometimes in this cut, he said, and got to take a good look at it. He says that he was surprised, but also somewhat afraid to admit that these objects are of artificial origin. We on the other hand are excited by such a premise, and will keep you posted on any further developments regarding the mine. We recently covered the astonishing discovery made deep within a coal mine under Rostov in Russia. Fortunately photographed by Mr. Kasatkin, an experienced safety engineer, who discovered the prints of what clearly appears to have been left by chariots' wheels, these seemingly impossible prints are, thankfully, not the only unexplained artefacts to have been found deep within the mines of earth. In 1912, workers shoveling coal in the municipal electric plant in Thomas, Oklahoma would make an equally important discovery. As they were breaking up the large lumps of coal in preparation for the furnaces, to their surprise, a small iron pot would be ejected from one of the chunks. Several experts would examine the iron pot over the following few days, all declaring it to be genuine. Apparently, the imprint of the pot could also still be clearly seen in the broken chunks of coal that had encased it for, in all possibility, millions of years. According to Robert O. Fay of the Oklahoma Geological Survey, the Wilburton Mines Coal, in which the pot was found, is an incredible 312 million years old. The cup is now displayed at a private museum in southern Missouri. It was fortunately photographed by Robert Nordling, who sent a copy to Frank Louis Marsh, emeritus professor of biology at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, on 10 January 1949. He forwarded the images to Wilbert H. Rush in 1971. Rush was a professor of biology at Concordia College. This means that we now have several artefacts we know to be in existence, which, according to modern understanding as to the age of coal, are over 300 million years old. The pot is still within a private collection of an unknown collector. In 1944, a 10-year-old boy by the name of Newton Anderson was playing in his basement, smashing lumps of coal with a mallet, when he made an amazing discovery. The coal that he was playing with had been mined very near to where he lived in Upshire County, West Virginia, and is largely accepted to be around 300 million years old. Even then, Newton's, and subsequently his parents' surprise, when he presented to them this small bell, complete with strange winged figure and its possibly very ancient clapper, later found to be made of iron. Although there are many people who now insist that the dating of the coal must be incorrect, this little bell could also be a long lost relic, lost within Woodland, that over the eons becomes perfectly preserved within the eventual coal seam, lost by an advanced civilization which once inhabited Earth. The bell is considered an anti-Diluvian artifact, or an object of pre-flood origins by the Institute for Creation Research, who had the bell submitted for laboratory testing at the University of Oklahoma. Whilst there, a nuclear activation analysis revealed that the bell contained an unusual mix of metals. A mix of metals not uncommon to Earth, but rather unusual for our current civilization to have decided to have manufactured it with. After supporting its authenticity as a very ancient relic. Later on in his life, Newton Anderson spent a great deal of time researching the figure atop the bell. He discovered similarities to the Babylonian Southwest Wind Demon called Pazuzu. The demon typically is shown with a prominent headpiece like the bell figure. The Hindu deity, Garuda, is sometimes depicted on top of bells, as is the Egyptian Isis. The kneeling posture with hands clasped is also quite like Garuda representations. And because of this, some have argued that it must be an Indian Gantabelle. However, these similar and often confusing arguments over very similar deities could be seen as a consequence of Cataclysm. Past civilization and the mythologies briefly retained and all recorded at a time before such belief systems became too clouded with other outside influences. Another rare artifact is this strange handle, also found in coal and fortunately photographed before it vanished forever. Totally petrified and reportedly appeared to have virtually turned to coal. According to those who briefly investigated it, the handle appeared as well made as any modern handle. What do you think regarding these strange objects? Can coal form an object's petrify faster than we have ever witnessed? Or are these relics indeed millions of years old? On the shores of Lake Taupo, within New Zealand, is an intriguing as yet unexplained artifact that has become known as the Kaimanawa Wall. What is interesting regarding the Kaimanawa Wall is the fact that it clearly predates academia's rigidly attested view of the past inhabitations of the country. New Zealand is largely accepted to have first been inhabited within the last 800 years. However, the analysis that has been done on this mysterious wall has shown that it is, at very minimum, 2,000 years old. Additionally, it clearly displays the telltale construction qualities of a lost knowledge, evidently within countless other ruins found all over the world. The controversial wall first came to public attention during the early 1990s, with a publication by Barry Braelfords in the New Zealand listener, called Megalith Mystery, Our Giant Stones in the Kaimanawa Forest Park. Evidence of an ancient New Zealand culture? Within he details how analysis has shown that the stone wall is at least 2 millennia old, and was created by previous unknown settlers within New Zealand. He called them the Waitaha, and postulated that they were subsequently exterminated by the Maori's who arrived only 800 years ago. Furthermore, Brailsford maintains that the wall could link New Zealand with Egypt, South America, and many other ancient civilizations, continuing to list 12 pieces of evidence to support his claims. Predictably, however, individuals within many different fields of academia have leapt to the defense of currently upheld paradigms. The Department of Conservation, archaeologists, geologists, and just about every political party in New Zealand, including a number of media outlets, directed tremendous hostility toward the claims, leading to the site being completely shut off to the public. You have to wonder, what are they so scared of people finding? Regardless of Braelfords' evidence, a conclusion that the wall is nothing but a mere natural formation has been publicly peddled ever since the publication nearly 30 years ago, a conclusion in staunch denial of reality or evidence. The conclusion made by official geologists was that the wall is an outcrop of a large ignombrite, a natural formation created about 330,000 years ago. They claim that the block shapes were produced by fractures in the rock, attributed to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other natural events. It seems scholars are quite happy to date such sites, but extremely reluctant to attribute any intelligent design within their creation. Could the Kaimanawa Wall really be a 330,000-year-old man-made wall, a wall built by the same people as many other sites found across the world? We find such possibilities highly compelling. If you enjoy our content, if you think our battle worthy, please help us to continue our voyage of discovery in unraveling the mysteries of history. Links to donate can be found within the description. Without you, we cannot survive. Thank you.


Welcome back to another episode of testing the tips where I, the average golfer, test out some of well, some of the best golf tips out there from the leading golf YouTubers, and this episode comes from Danny Moore. What he says in his thumbnail is 99% of golfers don't understand that and I can confirm Danny that I was one of those in that 99%, there is no doubt about that. Now the title of this video is The Secret to Great Ball Striking and we'll explain how Danny gets o'r rydw i'r ddweud o'r ystyried i'r rhaid i chi, ond ydych chi'n gweithio'r ffordd ym ni yn yma i'r ymddangos beth o'r grwp. Felly mae'r gwrdd yma'r gwrdd yn ymddangos ar gyfwilol, cyd-reifem, y tempau ac ymddangos. Ac ydych chi'n gweithio, mae'r cyd-reifem ac i'r gyrdd yn gweithio, mae'n gweithio, ac mae'r gwrdd yn gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. After watching this online lesson from Danny, I'm questioning whether or not it was about rhythm and timing, or whether it was about sequencing. And understanding the fundamentals of the sequence of the golf swing is key to getting those bits right, and that's what Danny explains really well in his video. And hopefully I can relay that back to you and how it's no doubt helped me. Now, the video starts with an explanation on how we start the swing and how we get into that sort of backswing. Seems very, very simple and straightforward, but for me then he explains one of the sort of the dangers or the pitfalls that a lot of golfers fall into when they start the backswing with their hands. And that's something without doubt that I start to do. And it shouldn't be that way! It should started with the motion coming from the body and their hands follow and the club follows, and I think for me it's very much a vice versa situation. Menai weithio'n gwerth o'r awr y byddach ac weithio allan o'r awr maen nhw yma i'ch gwerth a'i gwneud fy llach yn y byddau'n gwrthol i holl o'r awr vaen, flynyddio'n gaelio'r cael sy'n gwerth allan i hefyd yn oed yn edAN yn dweud ac maen nhw'n gwerth o'r awr maen nhw maen nhw wedi'u gwneud y ffrindig a gwnewch i'ch cefnogi i'r awr i hefyd iddo buddyn nhw, yn gwerthol i'r awr valve .. driving on the back swing starts or into the downswing starts with movement from the body first and the club follows. Danny explains how we get that sequence in right. This is the first stage at trying to get those movements into some kind of order. Right. This sequence in starts with the ball for the time being golf club in hand out in front of your feet together. ac mae'n dweud yn cymdeithasol, mae'n ysgol i'r gyflusio. Mae'n ddydd o'r wneud o'r grannu cael eu cyflos. Mae'n dweud i'r gael, ac mae'n dweud i'r gael yn gwneud, ond yw i'r gyflosiau, ac mae oed yn dweud i'n dweud. Dwi'n dweud. Dyna hwnnw'n gweithi, dwi'n dweud. Dyna'r gael yn dweud, dwi'n dweud, yna'r gael yn dweud. Ydw i'n dweud i gael, dyna'r dweud o'r dweud, go on to the back foot into the backswing back on to the front foot into the downswing, but for the time being all you need to do and trust me on this it's just that simple motion so it's one two okay then what we're going to do is on the backs on the step backwards we're going to introduce a golf club and you're going to start your swing with that motion so what happens is if I'm going to address I make the step back then the golf club follows now currently in terms of a weight distribution for me if I was stood in the sort of fixed position where I'm at I would start with my club head and hands then my body starts to turn the body would follow the key to this is that the body leads and the club head follows and at the moment a lot of us and I would be in that category the club head starts and the hands start and the body follows so it's a complete reversal of that but just back to the this first stage first of all club address yeah one then two is for me again this is how I counted it's one two with the club to follow and then three is the step forward and then four is the downswing so you're ready for this let's have a go and see if we can get this sequence right one two three four and it's quite quick that so the one is the step forward two is the back three and then four and that's the sequence so it's got to be weight to the rear foot club head follows that's the that's effectively the backswing then it's a step forward which is three and then the club head follows in terms of the downswing now I hope you all got that because trust me I watch this video time and time again of Danny's because I struggle with that sequence and if I'm honest with you if it wasn't for Hannah's assistance behind the camera we broke it down into four steps not into three I think Danny's explanation is one two three we broke it down into the four different steps and it worked for me because I was struggling to understand it and I couldn't get the sequence right so one two three four got it I can only do it in a quick rhythm let's see if I can do it just a little bit slower one two three four and I think then what he's asking you to do is hit short control shot and carry on trying to get that sequence of movement right so if we were together it's one two three four and all your hitting really probably a little bit longer than Danny would have wanted us to do it's just that control shot just to drill in that sequence and like I said trust me on it it takes a long while well it took me a long while I've spent a good hour trying to get this right it seems a very simple process but for me that stepping back we broke it down like I said into four movements not into three and the count was one back two the club head follows three forward and then four the club head comes through and you start into that downswing and the follow through that's the first stage practice that element get that sequence right and now we'll move on to stage two one two three four one two three one two three okay so right so after much effort like I said in trying to get this sequence right you've seen me hitting some shots there sort of like I said half shots I've got seven iron in hand and again it's controlled it's feeling that sort of sequence that rhythm and that's the bit that I really did struggle with like I said but the next stage really is just to simply amplify those movements to take it into what effectively you want to be as a full swing so we do exactly the same but the steps become bigger and you're using the ground a little bit more because the whole thing in all of these lessons and sort of the fundamentals of the golf swinging what I've found is by using that ground a little bit more using the legs and the body like I said in this case to start the swing but also again using that ground again to sort of drive down into the start of the to the start of the downswing as well so we just all we do is address the ball it's one two three four again but it becomes bigger so I'll take it as a practice swing first of all the swing becomes bigger it's one two three and then four now let's count these really quick but I hope you just see for me I really struggle to sort of step and lift this foot this front foot so for me it's just a slight movement or a shift of weight and again whether that's right or wrong I don't know but I can't lift that foot and move it forward and the only thing I would say with that it's great as a sort of training motion to get the sequence in right but I almost find it better in the next stage I'm going to get to which is addressing the ball in a norm position without the movements if you like but anyway let's try this whilst the camera's on so I'll address fairly close together and we'll go for one two three four and that's a really decent strike to be honest so that's our sort of full swing and you'll see there we sort of got in above that sort of 140 odd carries what I'm sort of seeing much more building like I said and you'll see the other overlays that we've got how we started from that sort of lower end and sort of got that movement going keep watching that back and keep trying to count that tempo that's what I found really difficult and like I said added in an additional count for me on a personal level so like I said it was that that one two three four but I'm going to try one ball now which is really like I said where it counts which is at the kind of addressed position and all that changes really is obviously there's no step we're in that position but it's the weight shift and it starts from this front leg into the backswing so into the backswing and then let the club head follow into the backswing let the club head follow and then it's back down into this left foot then the club head follows into that downswing I hope I'm explaining this right because like I said it's very much my interpretation but it's very much me understanding that my own sequencing was definitely it's definitely out and there's no doubt of our that the hands would have started again instead of me drilling down and then or pushing down into that front leg transferring the weight into that left leg quite often like I said my hands would start the backswing the downswing rather and then my body would follow so let's have a go with a shot on thingy so weight over to the back and then back through and down it's a really great strike strike on the ball decent ball decent ball flight but it took a lot of getting used to this and it even took a lot in terms of me translating it into a video I'll be perfectly honest with you and if we had done this video at the start of the day in the first hour I really struggled with that sequence but what it highlighted to me was that just how poor my sequencing is and I by no means mastered it in this few hours that we've tried to put this video together but it's given me like I said a better understanding of where it should be and it's without doubt something that I will definitely take in terms of the practice range and something that I will concentrate on when I'm on the tee and that sort of shifting of weight making sure that my weight is starting to get over to that left side before I start to drag that club in to the downswing right did my very best that was a tough one to explain I hope you enjoyed it I hope it made sense but I think as ever with all these the best way to understand it is by watching Danny's explanation and seeing if you can sort of marry the two together and like I said you've got to use your own interpretation like I said Hannah counted a different sequence and we ended up counting four sort of movements within that tip and it helped me and that's what you've got to do you've got to take elements from it bring them to your own game see what resonates in the brain and try and adapt it a little bit at least that's what I've done anyway right as ever thank you for watching comments down below I hope you enjoyed this continued series of me testing the tips love your feedback let me know if you give that one a try I'd be interested to hear from you and I'll see you all very soon


Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE. We're live in Las Vegas for IBM Impact. This is our flagship program, theCUBE. We go out to the events and extract the ceiling from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angle. I'm joined by my co-host Paul Gillan here. And our next guest is Roger Ray, InfoSphere Streams product manager. Welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you very much. You know, it's great to be here. And it's interesting that you almost said InfoSphere Streams without listing. That took me about a year to say that. I had to concentrate. You have to concentrate and think very hard. In fact, when Streams first came out of IBM Research to be called a product, our CEO at the time, Mr. Palmosano said, I think we need to call this SystemS, which was the research code name for Streams, instead of trying to say InfoSphere Streams. Well, we love Streams. I mean, obviously we're in the media business, online media, social media. You know, you're talking about social graphs, social distribution, word of mouth, whatever you want to call it. Essentially, they are Streams.  So it's basically Streams means real time. So, Taskeek, so the average person out there, it just means more noise, right? So there's a lot of noise in the Streams because there's a lot of issues with getting data out of real time Streams. It's almost like planes taking off from every different runway on the planet, right? So like, how do you make sense of it?  The report gets spit out, now it's different. You have all kinds of signaling, mobile phones, updates, so many omni-channels of data. So describe to the folks how you address that, and what is the whole basis behind Streams? So Streams is a real time analytic platform. So as you talked about, John, you can take mining algorithms against historic data. What you can also do is take those same kind of mining algorithms, and run them against the Stream, while it's still in memory before it ever lands to a disk drive. Streams was actually created as a joint research effort with the United States Government Department of Defense. They said, you know, we have all manner of data, and it's coming so fast that we have to process it in real time. Landing something to a disk drive, even huge clustered arrays like a dupe, is still too slow to keep up with the volume of information that we have. And so we have this challenge of the huge volume of information that's coming in at such a speed that nobody can handle it. And then there's also the issue of analytic silos. Just as many people have application silos, and they worry about integrating those different application silos, there's the challenge of how do I integrate the analytic silos? So for example, if I had street corner cameras on all the corners, and I were doing a facial recognition kind of application, we know those really aren't very reliable. Wouldn't it be nice if I could fuse that information I may have just seen Roger the bank robber on the street corner with where are all of my law enforcement personnel? Can I send a message immediately, via tweet, text message, or whatever other technology I have out to that law enforcement's location? We just saw this picture at this location a moment ago. Here's the picture from our database. Please investigate. Well, Streams does all that in real time to fuse the many different kinds of streams of information. I was just going to use that word fusion because you have context in real time motion, data in motion, as you guys say on your website. But the fusing the data, it sounds easy, but it's really not. You got other databases, other data sets that you have to kind of correlate context in real time.  I mean, that is pretty hard. Can you take us through the nuance there? Well, to get to the more detailed nuance, that's why there was several years of research with the government to go build this. IBM actually spent over $100 million in engineering and R&D over the last 10 years to build this. We've made it much, much easier than it's ever been. There's a high level language, software development, visual development, where you drag and drop, what are my sources of data? What do they look like? Are they structured? Is there some structured to it, such as a database, a temperature sensor that has a sensor ID and maybe temperature and humidity or other pieces of information, or unstructured information, such as a web camera, that as you're streaming out this video, what that really looks like is some camera's ID, so you know what the camera is, fuse that with information, what's the location of that camera, and then just a blob of data that frame by frame is a series of images. And then you can do the analytics on the image to understand in real time what's there. One of the things that we heard at the Amazon re-invent conference was the Kinesis product that they had. Yes. Which is kind of a data warehouse. So similar kind of thinking that they're poking at. Can you take? What I tell you, John, is they're poking at it, but they're years behind, and when you really look at Kinesis up front, all it really is ingest into an in-memory store, and they'll promise to keep it for up to 24 hours, and then read out of that to do some analytics. So you're not doing analytics on the same machine where you're storing it. It's really much more of an in-memory store as opposed to streaming analytics, which you could do with things like, well, at this show, WebSphere Extreme Scale is an in-memory grid to be able to cache things, things that have been around for years. Stream is really record by record as the records come in. You might call them events, you might call them tuples or messages if they're coming from a JMS messaging system. As each record comes in, what do I do with this? Do I want to filter it? Do I want to cleanse the data? Geospatial applications, you know, GPS, let's just drill down on that. So obviously Amazon has a little bit of a, they're taking baby steps, but they're not over the top trying to do a reach-around on IBM because they're really talking about mostly log files, right? Mostly developer-focused. Give some more examples of some of the media streams implementation. You mentioned the camera one, that's pretty real-time. That's heavy-duty data, obviously video. What other examples can you give in terms of big deployments that you guys have rolled out? Well, the media and largest deployments that we've done are in the telephone industry. So every time you browse a website, make a phone call, a little bit of metadata gets spit off of which we've read a lot about in the last six months here in the United States with the NSA and others. But many of these large telephone companies, for example, some of mine in India, get about nine billion of those per day. Hundreds of thousands per second. They're all spit out by the switches in a binary type of format. You need to convert from binary into ASCII so that you can do some cleansing of those data, maybe enrich it, and then load it into a database so that it can be used for the monthly billing cycle and other things. But at the same time, as we're converting that data from the binary to the format, we stream off the records as they're being written to the database to do further analytics. Churn prediction, is the customer likely to leave? Fraud prediction, is the customer using this new phone service to make an exorbitant amount of international calls, which is a good indicator of fraud. I bought the service, I'm gonna make a few days of international calling, and then I'll throw the phone away and disappear. So a wide variety of things in the telephone industry, just to be able to improve their processing of the data, add analytics, in near real time. We say near real time for that, because it's really every five minutes that a switch spits out a couple of thousand to 20,000 billing records. The two examples we talked about so far, government, national defense and telephone, are very, very large industries. Are there applications to small industries as well? Well that's where we're trying to go with some of the cloud offerings that we'll be coming up with, such as on Blue Mix and the IBM cloud, is to be able to say, let's allow small companies to use this in a shared infrastructure, and be able to build out some simple services. So some of those that any small company could use, for example, is analysis of the social media. We did a nice pilot, again, sort of defense, but you could see how this applies to a small business as well. One of the large police departments in the United States said we're gonna be protecting a concert, we got a black eye a few months ago, and we did another concert, and we didn't know about fights breaking out, until the next day they showed up on YouTube. So of course the press just had a field day, where was our police force at this time? We said, well, we'll do two things for you. And we did the pilot in just a couple of weeks. Let's monitor Twitter, social media. Most people never turn off the location feature in their phones. So when you tweet, guess what shows up along with that? That metadata stuff, where are you located? So it was very easy to throw away all of the tweets, and that's what you said, all of this junk that's out there that you really don't want. They only wanted tweets that were within a very small distance of the concert venue. Everything else was garbage, and they didn't care about it. And then we filtered on special words that the police might be interested in, like drugs, fight, drunk, puking, or other words that, you know, passed out would be another good one that we need to know about. And then we only gave the pertinent information to the law enforcement officers to do things, and the location, where are they in the venue? The second thing we did was just a very simple facial detection. We weren't trying to recognize anybody, but they had cameras trained on some of the fences around the venue. Obviously, unless you're eight feet tall, there's a certain level that you really shouldn't have a face on a fence. So anytime you have a face on a fence, that's probably a pretty good indication that someone's trying to get into the venue that shouldn't be coming in that direction. So that was another one that we did. And again, those kinds of security things can apply to many companies. If you have, even as a small business, are there things you want to secure? Okay, so I've got to ask you the question about the customer. So if I'm a customer upstream, or a potential customer of streams, what am I thinking about? What's on my mind? I might not say, I don't wake up in the morning and say, hey, I need streams. I have other things that I pop it through my head, like things around hitting deadline, I'd be more agile, pressure to do certain things in the business. What's the mindset of your potential customer for streams? So there's a couple of them. One of the biggest ones is simply, listen, I'm doing some analytics today, but it's batch. And I just need to do it faster. Or I need to do it continuously. One of our applications that they need to continuously monitor because the world changes is an iceberg flow monitoring application. Conoco Phillips has this oil field off the north shore of Alaska, and they have this small challenge that they need to know 48 hours in advance, is the iceberg going to hit my platform? Is it going to be strong enough and big enough that it'll cause an oil spill? And I can't be wrong in that decision because I can't have an oil spill off the north shore of Alaska. The Gulf of Mexico situation there would be untenable for all future drilling up there, not to mention the environmental impact. But there's also the issue if I'm wrong and move the platform, I lose four days worth of drilling. Two days to move it out of the way and two days to move it back in. So they take satellite images, they take wind and weather information, how's the current flowing, underwater drone information, again underwater currents, so they can accurately predict where will that be. But usually that's the kind of a problem. Listen, I've got some real world environment, I've got a variety of different sensors that are giving me all kinds of information. It might be temperature, it might be wind weather, it might be some type of video, or in this case the satellite images, where I'm analyzing the images to learn things and then try and understand how does that change over time. Now, what are the infrastructure requirements? It sounds like you would have a huge computing overhead, you would be required to do this kind of sophisticated analysis. Well, you know it's all like any other computing system that you have. How much goes into, how much goes out to, and how complex are the processing that we do inside? So you can do it on any scale is what you're saying. So you can do it on any scale. If you have a small scale, if you're just collecting Twitter feeds and you're happy with the 10% Twitter feed, that's not very much volume of information. Obviously the messages are short. If you're only searching for a few key words, you can very quickly find those key words of interest to you. Obviously video image processing are much larger. So I have customers that range from very small, roughly four core systems to be able to do these kinds of analytics. My largest installation is one of the several US government installations that's in the neighborhood of 130 core nodes doing video and image analysis, cybersecurity types of things that detect hacking into networks, zero day attack kinds of things. You have a quick start addition on the InfoSphere Stream site. What kind of experiments are you seeing people tackle with when they're just sort of playing around? So when they're playing around really, it's just sort of learn and compare, how does this compare to other streaming technologies like Kinesis that you mentioned or S4 that's been around for several years or Apache Storm that's going on. How does this compare to other kinds of things? And then once I get that in, it just depends upon what's the nature of what they're doing. Is it some internet of things? I just want to filter off, look for thresholds, is the temperature sensor going higher than it should be, accelerometers, is somebody in a car going faster than perhaps they should be to go explore geospatial kinds of applications. We've got a number, I haven't mentioned the healthcare kinds of applications that were installed in about 15 different hospitals around the world to do intensive care unit monitoring. In fact, tomorrow morning, Bob Pitchiano's keynote speech, he'll have Dr. Carolyn McGregor. Carolyn McGregor is an informatics professor from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. She's been working with neonatal ICU's at Sick Kids Hospital and several other hospitals in Ontario and the United States and China as well. And Bob will be on shortly this afternoon, we'll have to hit him up. Oh good, you'll have to ask him about that and we'll see how well prepped he is for that. Is this to monitor sensor data to determine if a critical event is occurring? Well, what we're doing is several things. For example, Emery Hospital is one of our reference customers. They've got streams hooked up to about 100 beds. So the ICU monitors, you're familiar with ICU monitors and you see EKG waveforms. There's a number of different sets of analytics that we do want on those. All hundred of those stream into, and it's two servers is about all it takes. From each patient, they're getting about a thousand messages per second. That's that EKG waveform. And we do the analytics to detect where's the start and end of each heartbeat. So you know what the time is. And then there's some analytics that are called heart rate variability. All of us are heart rate changes all the time. The beginning and ending, where does the heart pump in each end? What's the heart rate? 72 bits, 80 beats per second when you're excited and things like that are higher. So you're looking for what's the variability in that. And if it's not varying, then you have an answer. So I got to ask you the hard question, which is the billion dollar question everyone's seeking is making it user friendly is a really, really important piece of this equation.  I mean, essentially get everything ingested in. So great ingestion, love that. So big fan of that. You've seen things like Nest being bought by Google for billions of dollars. You've seen the internet of things. Big evidence on the interaction design. How do you guys make the user friendly? So like, I'm sure there's a lot of policy-based stuff going on. What's the secret sauce? What's the vision? I mean, that must be a real challenge. Can you just go into detail? So John, yeah, a couple of things. Today you should understand streams is still for programmers. We've made it easy for programmers with drag and drop visualization and lots of adapters and lots of analytics that you can bring in. To reuse existing analytics. Whether they come from Matlab or SPSS or RSS. So it's on there, you put it on them. It's on there. But it's still putting on them to be developing. Some of the things that we're starting to do on, we've got some pilots going on now with the ability to take that streaming data and streaming it into Microsoft Excel. So now you've got an Excel based end user exploration tool to say let's see those streaming records come in and I'm not quite sure what I'm looking for but I know Excel pretty well because I use it for everything, everybody does. So let me use some of the analytics in Excel to be able to further extend the base applications. And after I've learned those, let me be able to see that, report back to developers to update it. That's the short term, the longer term is. How do we allow the Excel users to build on those macros, to build on those visualizations and generate the streams code to build their own streaming applications? You've outlined some fantastic examples here. Are there any, as you build out this core technology and sort of let people find uses for it, are there any applications that customers have found that have surprised you? You know, frankly, every one of them surprises me because I'm amazed at the things we could do. Who would have thought about monitoring 100 people all at once and seeing a simple dashboard so that a doctor can quickly identify across the whole hospital where's the critical patients I should go see first? The initial work with Carolyn McGregor on the neonatal intensive care unit to detect illness 24 hours earlier. Let me ask the question differently. Okay, ask the question. You should ask someone who might be watching to say, well, I work at an accounting firm.  We, it's just not part of our business. Is there some way they should be thinking about their business differently that you would advise them to think differently about the business that might realize the potential of something like Info Screams? Sure, one of them is just that question that we started with. What analytics are you doing today? Is there value to get results faster? So if today you're bringing it all in and you're doing a weekly quarter leave in accounting, there's risk accounting, what's the right timeframe that you should learn that you are exposed and should be thinking about taking some action? Is it simply the daily close of events? Would you like to start looking at intraday events to understand your risk tolerance? Are there things, if you're an insurance company at risk to do weather monitoring and are there things that you can do with your customer base to better understand even in real time the weather patterns of what's coming up, which we've also done some pilots with people on hurricanes coming in and how does that impact the risk to oil refineries and other things and what's the stock price based upon the risk of where will that hurricane hit? Excellent examples. So we are here live in Las Vegas. I want you to give the audience for the final word in the segment. Why is this a moment in time for IBM that's going to be a game changer around this? Because, you know, IBM is on all the trend lines so all the fault lines as we say is the tectonic shifts are happening. Blue mix in the cloud, streams there, you mentioned to the developers still some more work to be done on the user interface side. Big deployments, but here at Impact, what is the big thing that's happening here that you want to share with them? So the biggest thing that you'll see really is the internet of things. We've done an awful lot of work with the message site appliance people where message site gives the very fast high-speed delivery of messages. But when you're dealing with millions of messages per second from millions and millions of automobiles, millions and millions of sensors, millions and millions of sensors that are on houses to monitor your electric voltage and things, you need something that can analyze all that, monitor in real time and detect actions that should be taken. So the ability to take actionable insight to be able to understand what's going on in the real world continuously at the right moment in time make a decision, take an action that improves your business, improves your social standing, the social meeting and other things, whatever it might be, that's what the capability is. And nobody can bring that together like IBM has. We've got the analytics from acquisitions that we've done throughout the years with SPSS and Cognos. We've got the messaging capability. We've got Watson for the cognitive analytics, the entire foundation and the ability to do it, not only with my product with Streams in the real time, but numerous batch ways of doing that with big insights or Hadoop offering, the database offerings that are all part of Watson foundations where Streams can really act as the five senses feeding into Watson cognitive computing. Very impressive, certainly, I can say, looking at it, it's robust, comprehensive. But final question just to drill down on that for you is, where are we in this build, grow, monetize for the customer? I mean, that's the end game is they want to make their business more competitive, serve their customers and you see the evolution, build, grow it and then you need to make money from it in services value. Are we still in the early build stages? What would you peg the... We are still in the early build stages in several early adopter industries. There are several advanced applications where they are monetizing it and saving money in the hospital area where they're saving lives in the, as I mentioned, energy and utility things where they're doing a better job of monitoring infrastructure for repair kinds of actions. But it's really still the leading edge customers in those industries. Roger, thanks for coming on. Roger Ray with Info, Sphere, Streams. Got that right. That was great, John. Streams are outside, data lakes are lakes. They use that in big data terms. These are Streams, I'm calling gushers and Niagara Falls of data, if you will. But great stuff, really relevant. Data is the future, congratulations. This is IBM Impact, this is theCUBE streaming the data here, live to you. This is theCUBE, we'll be right back after this short break.