And now, I would like to introduce Dave Sawyer, who is with FFW. He is a solutions architect by day and comedian by night. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Good morning. My name is Dave Sawyer with FFW. I just want to talk to you real quickly so that I can get back to the Pantheon Party, which is still going on right now. You know, for decades, technology has been inspired by science fiction. And we see many examples of this. One is Martin Cooper, creator of the mobile phone, credits his inspiration to watching Captain Kirk on Star Trek talking on his handheld communicator. We see many examples of this over and over again, from Dick Tracy's two-way wristwatch radio to today's Apple Watch, from Hal to Siri. The impact of science fiction on real-world technology is undeniable. But what has been the impact of science fiction on Drupal? And is it a coincidence that Drupal 8 was released before the forthcoming Star Wars 8? Hmm. I've seen a lot of people at DrupalCon walking around in Star Wars shirts. Have you? That's what I thought. So to get to the bottom of this, I recently interviewed several members of the Drupal community and I filed this report. This is Dave Sawyer from FFW, reporting from New Orleans. Is Drupal inspired by Star Wars? I conducted several interviews to find the truth. So you've worked in the Drupal space for many years. Is that right? Yes. Yes. Quite some time. So you've probably heard about the connection between Drupal and Star Wars, right? What connection? Well, a lot of people are talking about how Drupal is inspired by the Star Wars story line. You've heard that, right? Never heard that one. He was obviously hiding something. I could tell I was onto something big.  I mean, haven't you heard rumors that there's a connection between Drupal and Star Wars? Star Wars? No, I don't think so. You know, I've been a host of the Drupal Easy podcast for eight or nine years now. I've been a Drupal user for a while. We've interviewed Dries on our podcast and I've never heard of such a thing. Be honest with me, though. Are you hiding something? No, I don't know what you're talking about.  Is that right? Yeah, I spend a lot of time with clients talking about Drupal, what a great solution it is. They're always amazed that such a powerful tool doesn't have any licensing cost and that they can just use the source. I'm sorry, did you just say use the force? No, I said use the source, you know, like the source code? It seemed he was giving me some sort of a clue. I knew I was close. So I asked him again. Is there a connection between Drupal and Star Wars? I'm sorry, I really need to get back to work. Please join me in welcoming to the stage your keynote speaker. Humanom is Schnitzel, group CTO at Amazey, Michael Schmid. Good morning.  That's what I wrote a couple of weeks ago when I entered my community keynote on the events page on Drupal.org. So what do I mean with that? It's going to be a story about me. It's going to be a story about how I started what I'm currently doing. So that's me. Couple of years ago in the Swiss military, I'm Swiss and in Switzerland we still have a mandatory military service. So every man goes for at least 21 weeks to the military and you would probably guess that you're like out in the woods every day doing, preparing ourselves for war and learning how to survive and all these things and I'm really sorry it's not that. I was in the Air Force and we spent a lot of time in offices. We spent a lot of time preparing exercises and organizing things and doing stuff. But there were some occasions where we went out. And one of them was a three day exercise where we knew we have to rub through forest and learn how to build tents and all these things and I was really excited because sometimes you just want to go out and learn new things that you don't know. So the exercise started and the first night we found a farm and there was a farmer and he was super happy to have us there and we slept there. We slept with the cows in the same room and it was all good and on the next day we continued so we got the order to actually sleep outside. So we found a place in the forest, we put our tents up and organized everything and then we got the order that we need to have a guard. We needed to guard our small village that we set up in that forest and it wasn't a big deal, we did that all the time just that I got the shift from 2 to 3 am in the morning. So didn't make a big deal out of it, we planned the next day and we said okay we get up at 7 o'clock in the morning so I was planning myself okay if I go to midnight then I can sleep for two hours then I do the guard and then I can sleep another. So I was perfectly fine with that situation to get up middle of the night, protect my fellow older soldiers and do that. So we had dinner and I went to bed, I got up at 2 o'clock in the morning again, it wasn't easy but I did my duty and when I went to bed I realized when I went back into my tent I realized it slightly starts to rain but I wasn't too much worried about that. So I went to bed, fell asleep again and then during the night I'm hearing screams, screams of BG4, BG4. It's German and means Bereitsch of Skrad IV which basically means you have to get in a full-on chemical and biohorsered suit with gas mask, gloves, another suit it's super hot in there. It's not definitely not what you want to do. So I'm lying in my sleeping bag under my tent and I'm hearing that BG4, BG4 and it wakes me up and I'm lying there and it's really like what's happening, I wasn't prepared at all for that. And so I'm trying to reach my watch and while I'm turning I'm also realizing I'm completely soaking wet. My whole sleeping bag got sucked up because my tent has a leak that I didn't realize it started to rain like crazy and I was completely soaking wet lying in the bed and I really didn't know what to do anymore. I know I have to get up, I have to get into that suit because there's no other way but I didn't want to. I just, I didn't know what to do so I was wondering where is the shot off switch? There has to be one and I closed my eyes but I couldn't find it. There was nothing. So there was no escape at that situation. There wasn't also in the Air Force we had cool helicopters that sometimes rescue you. When I'm listening, I was listening to a helicopter sound and there wasn't. There was also no waking up because I just woke up. So I'm lying there completely soaking wet not knowing what to do. It was probably one of the few times in my life that I really didn't know and I was hopeless. I was thinking that's like the worst situation and it was actually an exercise and it wasn't something I knew it's not something really bad but it just wasn't that situation that I did not know what to do anymore. So I was lying there thinking what can I do and couple of minutes or seconds I don't know while all these screams around and people are like already starting to remove my tent because everybody knew we have to leave now I realized that everything will be good again. It's just an exercise.  It's not something that is going to take forever. It's going to be over at one point and it will be good again. I did not know when exactly I did not know how exactly but I know it will be the case and that gave me hope. So I got up, got into the suit, helped others and I realized also others were at the same situation. They were not prepared for that and actually the hardest part for me was that I didn't get enough sleep.  I only had like three hours of sleep. So I realized we are survivors. As humankind, we survived so many situations in life and we are. We have that in our core to survive a lot of crazy things. But I also realized I need to prepare myself better. I need to prepare myself. If I just knew, if I didn't think that I get six or seven hours, I wouldn't have been so angry at myself or angry at the others that I only got three hours of sleep. So I really learned that I need to prepare myself. The problem, though, work as we do it all together, wherever in which company, as freelance or whatever, it's not an exercise. It's our real life. We don't know sometimes when it's going to be over. So I'm not a doctor and I just have a lot of experience in working in tech. I work at AMAZ for seven years now. And right now we have five companies and we have a new one in the making. We have offices at three different continents with more than 40 people and definitely no plans to stop any of that. But I can tell you, sometimes it's not easy. Sometimes I'm back hopeless not knowing what to do in situations like when you have to fire people or when you have hard decisions to make, when you have clients calling you that are angry and you don't know anymore what to do. And a lot of times I'm feeling back in that situation. I remember that I just need to prepare myself and it's going to be good. So if we look at elite sports, they do a lot with their bodies. But if you look at tech, we do a lot of things with our brains. Our brain is our elite sports. And they treat their bodies really, really well. They make sure that their body is happy. They make sure that their muscles are happy, that their muscles are prepared, that everything they need to do at one point is prepared. So I really believe, so I really believe our brain needs treatment as well. Our brain needs the same treatment like elite sports are treating their body. Our brain needs treatment as well. So that's why I'm saying our brain health is more important than your standing desk.  The first one is get a coach. And I'm not specifically talking about the coach that you maybe pay for. That can be, that's what I do, but if you need somebody that allows you to follow your goals to keep track of your goals, somebody that you go on a regular base that just asks you, how are you standing? Where are you with your goals? What is the current situation? Did you achieve it yet? Did you not? If I look over the last seven years, I overestimated so much what I can do per day. And I think everybody of us that ever estimated what they want to achieve in a day knows that. I think our brain is playing tricks on us. If we just ask ourselves, what can we do per day? But I can definitely tell we are hardly underestimating what we can do in a full year. Myself, a year ago, I decided I want to hand over the CTO of a major lab Zurich to my deputy CTO at that time, Josef. And I wanted to have a second apartment in Austin and that involved like getting rid of my own apartment in Zurich, moving to a smaller one, selling all my stuff and doing a lot of things. And I went to my coach and he asked me, what do you want to do in a year? And I just told him, without thinking if I can achieve it or not, for me at that time, it was completely unachievable. So the only thing we did, just every month, we were sitting together and the only thing he did, he reminded me of my goals. And I saw my goals in front of me and I knew I want to do this. So we did step by step. I completely implemented a new management structure of the tech team in Zurich. We sent people to leadership schools. I did coaching to my deputy CTO. I started to sell my apartment. I found a new apartment in Austin. I sold all my stuff and I achieved it in a year and if I would go back and ask myself a year ago, I would not have believed that I can do that. And the coach didn't tell me how to do it. It was all myself. The only thing he did, he asked me, where are you right now?  Number two, reflect. So the coach allows you to think about in a monthly base. But a lot of times, we think also in weeks. So what I do, I reflect myself once a week. Once a week, I ask myself, if the last week that that just has passed, am I still happy if the same week is going to happen again? And to be honest, a lot of times I say no. A lot of times I say no, I want to change some things. I want to try something new. But just thinking about that. And realizing that you want to change something already helps you a lot. I do that every week. I ask myself, am I still happy if the last week that happened is going to happen again? And for me, that is the core question. I'm not asking myself, how many hours do I work? Like upcoming to that DrupalCon, especially starting a new company, I was working roughly 80 to 100 hours per week. And I ask myself every week that question. I said every time, yes, I'm still happy. So for me, it's not about how many hours sleep, how many hours of work. For me, it's really myself. I go into myself and I ask myself, is the situation you are in, are you still okay with that? And if not, then change something. And I try to change a lot of things. The week later, I ask myself again and again and again. So try to get into a rhythm that you reflect yourself on the week before. The next one took me quite a long time to realize that. I was just working every day, I liked to get up really late and I literally walked like at 8.58, I walked into the office and attended stand-up. And then in the evening, I was working more and I never really had a productive time. But then I started to work earlier in the morning and I realized that working for myself, working in the morning allows me to really focus for a couple of hours on something without any distraction. We are in a team world. We work in a team, especially in tech, with a person itself cannot achieve something. But I know and I felt myself that sometimes it's just necessary that you have two hours where there's no Slack, where there's no Twitter or nothing else. And at the beginning, what I tried is just to disable these tools. But that didn't work at all. Because I knew the people are wrong. I knew I could some miss something. So I ended up in just checking every 15 minutes, just in this lecture. Then I got distracted when I was somewhere else. So what I do now, I get up really early. It's not easy. And it allows me to have my two hours productive time every morning that I can really focus. And that helps me a lot in getting things done, especially as we hear later that I may be dislike. So number four, splitting up your day. Everybody of us has things you have to do that you don't like at all. Myself, for example, time tracking. I'm really, really bad at it. So I realize every now and then I realize, look, the last two days, you just completely forgot it. And then in the past, I told myself, yes, I'm going to do it. I'm going to do it tomorrow. I'm going to do it. And then three days later, I realize, now you have to do a whole five days.  And I try to split it up in a way that I first do things that I completely dislike. I start my day with something I completely dislike. And it's hard. It's not easy, but it allows me to get these things done. And I do them time boxed. So I'm setting an alarm for 30 minutes. And I do things that I completely dislike. And I do them for 30 minutes. And then I do something that I like. And I give that to myself for a bit longer time. But again, it is time boxed. For a more hour, I do something that I like. And a lot of times, I didn't finish what I dislike for the 30 minutes, so I just go again. So I do it again. I do something again that I dislike. And then again, I do something that I like. And that just goes on. And at one point, you will have all your dislike stuff, and then you can do everything you like. But that helps me when I realize I really have to do something. So you can see me in the morning, getting up, going to the office. And the first thing I'm doing, I'm trying to figure out which hours I've worked in the last three days. But then I've done it. Then I'm over. And then I can really can focus on my day with stuff that I completely like. And so I'm just repeating through that. And it's getting something that's really getting used to. And you just do the stuff you dislike. And you have to do that. The next one is about our body again. And you may be heard before that 60% of our body is water. I think we all learned that at one point in biology class, somebody told us that. And you said, OK, yeah. I mean, I cannot see it, but it makes roughly sense. But did you know that our brain consists of 85% water? And that was really surprising for me. Because I thought it's the same. It's actually more than our whole body. So it looks like our brain is really thirsty. And there's a lot of things about how much water you should drink. And if you Google right now, you will find a lot of different things. It's not really clear what. And as I said, I'm not a doctor. That's what I found a lot of times that makes, for me, most sense that it's based on your body weight. So on your body weight, if you're in the imperial system, it's half an ounce or two an ounce per pound. Or if you are metric, it's 30 to 60 millilitre per kilogram. For myself, that's between two and four liters. That's a big range. And the idea behind it, it really depends on your own body. It depends on how much you exercise. It depends on what the outside temperature is. It depends on where, on which place in the world you live, on the amount of water you need. But definitely, you should drink more than the minimum. You should stay above that. Why should we do that? So science shows that if you are only 1% dehydrated, you can already measure a 5% decrease in cognitive functions. It's only one single percent less water in your body than there should. That's not a lot. And even worse is, if you have a 2% dehydration, your short-term memory is getting fuzzy. And for me, especially in programming, when you're working and writing code, you have to remember what you just wrote before. And if that's getting fuzzy, how can you write code if you don't remember what you just did? And you also have problems focusing on task. And that's, again, only with 2% dehydration. So it's really important that we drink enough water throughout our day. And there's a lot of different ways of doing that.  And after some time, you just get used to it. So right now, I don't need external information anymore. I just drink the water that I like. And right now, I'm between 3 or 4 liters per day. And it's also important I'm talking about water. I'm not talking about Red Bull. I'm not talking about Coke. I'm also not talking about Diet Coke or Coke Zero. I used to drink 7 to 8 bottles of Red Bull per day. And I can tell you, when I stopped and switched to water, my whole body was like, it was so much better. First, I lost weight without doing anything because I put so much sugar into my body. I exercised a lot. That was my excuse all the time. I said, oh, I'm exercising three days per week. And that probably helped. But I realized how my body was just happy that I gave him not sugary water, that I just gave him water only. So I cannot even remember when I drank my last Red Bull, but sorry, Red Bull. So yeah, slides.com, sorry. OK, next one, taking breaks. And one other thing that I learned in myself, and then I researched it, and I realized that, and research again shows that our brain is in two different modes. Our brain can be in two different working modes. One of them we probably all know is the focus mode. It's where we're really into, where everything around us is completely gone. And we are either focusing on whatever you do, reading, coding, giving a session, or whatever it is. So that's a completely focus mode. But there's another mode that we probably all know. It's called the diffuse mode. And the diffuse mode is like the daydreaming mode. It's like when you're just there and not specifically thinking about one thing. So one interesting thing is that we, if you have a really hard problem, we cannot solve really hard problems in the focus mode. Our brain needs the diffuse mode, where you are open to ideas to solve really hard problems. And I can definitely find that, that a lot of times, I'm just working on something, and I cannot figure it out. And I'm stuck, and I don't know how to solve a problem. Then trying to fix it, and I'm researching, I'm googling, or whatever. And I just don't find a solution. Then I get up, and I walk three steps. And after these three steps, I have, I see a solution in front of me. So just getting up, moving the body, seeing other things. Also, your body has to focus that he's not walking into that door that you just walked through. Like, just all these things that your brain suddenly has to do other things allows you to also think different. So how do we make breaks? How do we make breaks if we have a lot of stuff, have a lot of work every day? And I tried all these different tools. If you go and Google Take Break Tools or whatever, you will see that there are thousands of tools that either should completely lock your computer or tell you all the time that you should do it now. I tried a lot of them. And for me, they only worked exactly once till I installed them.  I want to finish. I'm in my focus zone. I'm really there, and I want to do that. And I know I should take breaks. But if you are in that situation, you don't want to do that. So I found a way. And again, it has to do with our body. If you drink a lot, you also have to pee a lot. And for me, it's something that I cannot not do. It really forces myself in taking breaks. And it's so surprising every time. Every time I'm like in my zone, I'm working, and I'm realizing my body tells me, hey, you should pee now. And then I'm like, no, no, I can do it. And then you're trying to fix a problem, you should fix a problem. And then you end up in a problem, and I say, OK, I get up. And then you walk. And again, three steps later, you realize something about a problem or whatever. So the combination of these two, and now probably all my coworkers in Zurich know now why do I get up so often. Because it's probably definitely more. But it helps me in forcing myself in taking breaks, forcing myself to get away from the computer, get away from the problem, think about the whole picture. Sometimes, though, you are really stressed. And I had situations myself that you are stressed and you need something that relaxes you in a short amount of time. And I tried a lot of different things. And at the end, I really believe it doesn't matter what exactly you do.  Just find something that you really like that relaxes you, that you can do when you know there will be a test. There will be whatever, something that calms you down. So it can really be whatever you want, what I just believe. It should be something that it doesn't take too long. Because if you end up taking whatever, doing a three-hour workout, you're going to miss whatever you just did for that workout.  So for me, sometimes, it's just spending time with kids. I have a lot of friends that have kids. And I just go out with them. And I get my fingernails painted. And it allows me to go away from the daily stuff. And maybe it's just 15 minutes. But it allows me to go somewhere else, to go in another place, and then go back. A lot of time, though, the kids maybe are not around, so I'm just showering. So I shower every morning religiously. Showering helps me in structuring my day and also relaxing. Because when I get up, I see already my phone, or I already know what I have to do. So showering in the morning just gives me a short amount of time to relax. And sometimes I even shower just before I do something. So when I go to a test, or when I do something specific, and I know I'm stressed because of that, I just take a 10, 15-minute shower that allows me to completely relax, to think about again, remind myself that it's going to be over, that I just have to repair myself. The obvious one is about sleep. And I read a lot about how much we humans should sleep. Interesting is, we don't yet really know why we need sleep. So for me, it's also really hard to stay on stage and say, OK, you should sleep that amount of hours. I think it's really something that you should figure out yourself. Or I met a lot of different people that have a lot of different sleep ways. I also myself tried a lot of different sleeping patterns. So I tried for myself to sleep twice per day instead of only one. So I tried a lot of things. And I really encourage you to know yourself how much sleep you need. But one thing that is really astonishing for myself is you remember that daylight saving that we do twice a year? On the next day, there's a 17% increase in car accidents. So for me, and I can definitely say, my brain is confused during daylight saving. So if you sleep less than you should, that there is danger involved in that. Because every daylight saving day, on the next day, we have 17% increase. So for myself, I right now know I can roughly sleep six hours per night. And then I need, after seven days, I need probably eight or nine hours. So I can do that cycle. But again, figure out yourself how much it is. There is one other cool thing, though. A lot of time I cannot fall asleep. And so I learned one thing first. Go to bed only when you're really tired. Don't go to bed when you think now I should sleep. If your body doesn't show you that you're tired, for me, at least, it never works. I cannot really force myself to go to bed. But sometimes you're even tired and you cannot fall asleep. So I try to find tools or hacks, as we heard before, to get myself sleeping. So one of the things I do is called relaxing breath. And there is a pattern behind. It's a four, seven, eight pattern. So what does it mean? You breathe in for four counts through your nose.   And interestingly, it doesn't really matter if that is seconds or whatever. The difference between the breathing in and the breathing out, so the breathing out is double as long as the breathing in, that's the important part. And I do that every time when I go to bed and I'm realizing my pulse or my heart is pumping. Because I'm already thinking about the next day or what just happened today. So I need to relax myself. And what I do, I'm lying in bed and I'm trying to listening or to feel my own pulse. When I first read that, I didn't believe it's possible what it is. If you're just lying in bed and trying to listen to your own body, you can feel your pulse pumping. So what do you use? I use the pulses as counts. And that also tells me when I'm relaxing. So when I do it the first time, already when I breathe out the first time, during breathing out, I can feel how my pulse is slowing down. So it allows me to relax my body. And with that, better fall asleep. There are even people that say they fall asleep during that. Never happened to me. But it's actually, it's kind of hard to do that.  It's not something you do out of in a regular day. So for me, I only do it two or three times. And it already helps me to relax. But still doesn't mean I'm sleeping. So there's another trick. And as we are a PHP conference, you can show the trick in code. So I'm counting down from 100.  So how does it work? You just start at 100, and you count down.  And when I wrote that the first time, because we all know the sheep counting, you know? Just one sheep, two sheep, two sheep. What is interesting, though, the counting down is something we don't do regularly in our daily lives. So it is something that our brain has to slightly give focus to. And it allows your brain to distract itself from all the other things that you're thinking about. And interestingly, sometimes I start to count up suddenly again. Like I'm maybe at 70, and then 69, 68, 69, 70, and I realize, no, no, no, it's the wrong way, and then I go back. But it really allows me to focus on something that is slightly hard, not too hard, than the hard problems I'm trying to solve. And the lowest number I can remember is seven. I was really scared there, but I fell asleep at roughly seven. And interestingly, now I do that for more than three years. And it's a tool now that my body somehow learned, if I do that, you have to fall asleep now. So I had a really hard time in the past falling asleep in an airplane. Maybe that's because I sleep on my stomach all the time, or maybe I really like planes. Maybe it's both. I don't know. But I had a really hard time falling asleep. And that thing now, if I just sit in a seat in an airplane or actually anywhere, and I start to counting down, I'm going to fall asleep. I'm not doing it now, because there's more stuff here coming go, but it really helps me. It's a tool for myself that somehow my body learned, if I do that, now please go to bed, or please fall asleep. So it helps me falling asleep faster than when I actually, when I'm in a stressful situation, I know I have to get up in the morning again. And that's most of the time more stressful, so you cannot really go to bed. So that really helps me. One other thing, and that's obvious, I guess. But one thing that I had to painfully learn myself is to turn off all distractions. Set your phones in a way that they're not vibrating, that they're not making any sense. Except maybe you have a hosting company and you're on duty, then don't turn it off. But there are, I hardly believe that there's something that has to wake you up at three o'clock in the morning. So turn them off. I told myself in the past, no, no, it's just good. I mean, setting that up is not necessary. But I can tell you, if you do that, you will sleep better. And sleeping is very important. So sometimes all these tricks, they work for myself, but there are situations where it doesn't work anymore, where you're so stressed, where you're just in a hole where you're stuck, that you cannot get out anymore. And so what do we do? In regular life, let's say you have bad eyes. You realize your eyes vision is strange. So what do we do? We go to a doctor, and the doctor helps us. If you have a broken arm, we go to the doctor. And he helps us. If we are sick for a longer amount of time, we go to the doctor too. It's exactly the same. So there was a study by osmihelp.org that is the open source mental health initiative. And they asked people, do you think that discussing a physical health, like eyes, broken arms, or you're just sick, would have negative consequences to your job? 77% said no. 19% said maybe. And 4% said yes, it could have negative consequences. So that means they would not do that. Interesting though, and probably not surprising for you, is our brain can also get sick. It's a part of our body that can get the same problems like a broken arm or things, stuff that does not work anymore correctly in our brain. But if we ask the same question about mental health, so do you think that discussing a mental health issue would have negative consequences? The result is different. Now only 36% say no. 41% say maybe. And 23% say yes, yes. It will have negative consequences, and therefore I'm not talking about that with my peers, with my friends, with my family, and or with my boss. And I really think that's completely wrong. If we as a society treat people that have brain-related issues and they cannot talk about that, we do not allow these people to actually get treatment. Because these people, they will not go to doctor because they're afraid that it will come out. How do I tell my boss that I have to leave in the afternoon? Do I make something up or so? So it's really, really important that we learn to talk about mental health like it is any other physical health in our body. So I really encourage you, if you feel to be in such situation, there is treatment out there.  There is treatment, there are solutions, please do that.  It's about you, it's about your body, it's about your brain, it's about your own life. So please do that. So all of that, they're all really cool things and you can do them and they get better. So over the last seven years, I started to doing that and I learned one important thing. I learned that I have to prepare myself, that I have to prepare myself for anything that is coming up, for anything that maybe is gonna be really hard. So I do that every day. So as some of you know, I ran for the Drupal Association Board and for me that's quite a big thing because first it's a second time and then it involves a lot of things. It involves going to a camp, it involves going to show yourself like what are you, you go to these meet the candidate session, so it's a big thing. And I know when it will come out, I will be alone. I will be at a conference most probably in a hotel room myself. So I knew that. I checked the times, when this is gonna happen. So I prepared myself and I prepared myself in, okay, there can be two different situations. The first of them is I'm the winner. That was the easy part. So I just said, well, I'm happy, I'm gonna maybe tweet about it, whatever, that was the easy part, but there was the other part of it's maybe not me. So I prepared myself with saying, okay, I'm gonna tweet to the winner. I'm showing to the world that I'm happy for that person and I knew there will be steam in me and I knew I wanna get it out and I wanted to get it out via Twitter to all my peers because I know friends of me, friends of mine will be there and will read it and if they see that I'm happy for the winner that felt myself. So the day came, it was Tuesday evening I guess and I got an email. I got an email that said something about Drupal Association board members and I can feel my pulse jumping from 60 to probably 180 and I'm reading through the mail and I'm completely hopeless again. The problem was the mail only told me that I'm not the winner. The mail did not tell me who the winner is and therefore I could not do my preparation and I do not wanna blame the mail. The mail was good intention. It was good intention to telling everybody that runs that was desperately waiting on the going out. It wanted to tell everybody we're really sorry it's not you we gonna announce tomorrow who it is. So it has nothing to do with the mail that I felt hopeless. I just was not prepared for that. So I had to get out steam and I don't know Holly if you're here, if you're here I'm very sorry for the mail that I wrote to you but it had to get out. It had to get out of me and I felt better right after writing the mail I don't feel good now about it but I just was not prepared for it. So all these things all these things I told you they will not fix everything. You will fail and you will fail very very hard. You can try to prepare and it makes things easier but it's not a fix for your whole life and I learned that every every day. So you will never be perfect and that is perfectly fine because I don't believe there is a person out there in the world that would say of itself I'm perfect. We maybe believe that all these people are saying that but if you actually ask them, if you would ask me I'm not perfect. The only thing though I can do is I can learn I can learn from my from things that happened and I can improve them. That's the only thing that really keeps me going that every time I realize something or something happens that I did not expect and trying to reflect about what happened and I'm trying to improve it for the time that is coming. So these are all things that you heard today. You don't have to apply any of that you can apply all of that pick out what you think you wanna try talk to me about them tell me if they work. As I said I'm not a doctor. I did not study any of these things. I just do them since seven years and I can tell you for me they all work and I think it's really important that we also start to discuss among us about what works for us that we're not just sharing the newest coolest tech tools but we also share really cool hacks for ourselves. Start the discussion about our brain, our bodies and that will make us as a community much better and will help people that are in hard situations to open themselves to learn about it and get better. Thank you. I'll sit with the king again. Seems to be the theme. So thank you so much. That was amazing. So many interesting and amazing and insightful points about overall health and in the technology sector that we work in. Two key points that I'm taking away from everything I saw there were awareness and making decisions. So having the awareness of what is happening with your health and then making decisions based on that and I'm guilty of this. You are according to what you were saying and I think everyone else is too. Just having the ability to have the awareness and maybe having some tools to give you that awareness and making decisions on that. Do you have any recommendations? I mean as developers I think what we immediately go to what tool can we use to help us to become aware of what's happening? Maybe there's some automated tools or other ideas like that. I think it's really having people around you that somehow force you to talk about that. Like if you had a hard day like in work either talk on IRC. It doesn't matter. The tool really doesn't matter but just talk about it because a lot of time that forces you to explain somebody else what exactly happened. And for me especially in coaching sessions a lot of time I go there and I have an unsolved problem for myself. And then I explained somebody that was not in that situation. I explained that to somebody else and while explaining I'm realizing that I already have the solution but just forcing myself to go through the steps what exactly happened, what is the situation allows me to have also an overview picture of something. So, and I think that was something that I learned also like the reflecting. I didn't do that before I started the coaching. So during the coaching I realized that I have to reflect myself. So I put myself into that situation. So I think it's really a process that you have to start with getting comfortable also in thinking about these things. So in the realm of coaching and finding those resources to help us make those decisions and well with the awareness first and then making those decisions based on that helping us through looking to examples within our own communities and so on. In Toronto we had our recent Drupal camp and instead of having a keynote to start it we arranged a panel of longtime members to talk about the history of the group and all sorts of things but one element that came up was the idea of burnout and I talked about that with Dries in the keynote and one of our members who actually founded our group was at the first Drupal con et cetera hit a real hard wall with burnout and being able to essentially he encapsulated it with saying no, learning how to say no and maybe that is an element of what you discussed too is being comfortable with saying no and how to learn how to do that. Do you have any commentary or insights in what could lead to that process and being able to do that? Yeah, I think it's a lot about the saying no especially in open source it's the community is awesome and we really try to help each other but I think the ability to say no and for me actually I realized it's not about the yes or no for me it's the yes but later. That helps me a lot because I don't want if somebody comes to me and has a question and I see that that person is struggling and I have the solution like while the person tells me what it is about I know I can help that person but it's not about I don't have time right now it's that problem and sometimes a problem that somebody brings you and talks to you right now feels more important than the problem you're trying to fix that is actually maybe more important so a lot about saying yes but please later or yes let's set up a meeting tomorrow or let's set up a meeting in an hour so I can go back to my problem that helps me a lot in being in the situation of wanting to help but not having time because I don't want to just say no that's because especially like I can't help that person that's it. Yeah so yeah saying no or yes but later is a great idea sometimes we're under deadlines and it's really hard to a deadline is a deadline is a deadline we can't do anything about it and we just have to get into that state of mind where we know as you said right at the top of the keynote you know you'll get into this situation where you're overwhelmed with work and stress and things and there will be light at the end of the tunnel and how to get to that preparing yourself and the mindset of being able to do that is very difficult and there are companies who have programs in place to help their staff, employees, remote workers, et cetera be able to deal with that. Do you have any additional thoughts on how that can work and how companies can bring that kind of culture to their company? Yes so what we try is we have scrum teams and the scrum teams do the retrospectives and it's really the part where it's important to talk about also feelings or how we felt in specific situations and I think that allows again an open discussion not about just that we used the wrong tool or we used the wrong process it's also about how can we make ourselves better and it's definitely a process to get that in I think also especially maybe in tech that's the view I have we are not used to talk about our feelings but especially in a team of like four and five people that together achieve a goal it's really important that we know what also the status is and so like if somebody has let's say a really hard time in the personal life and because of that can maybe deliver less in a team or it's just in their thoughts a lot of other ways it's important that the whole team knows so that we talk about that and that's definitely something at least we try to encourage to tell everybody hey if you are in a specific situation we need to know that and let's talk about it and especially if you wanna get that allowed to do that in a company I think the easiest way is to step up and start with yourself as the management as the team lead or as the scrum as whatever it is if you wanna change something if you show that you wanna change with doing it yourself everybody else will follow and I can definitely say it makes it much better of a team if the team can talk about also personal issues stressful situations and stuff like that. I think so you put up seven years on the slide and many of us have worked in the technology industry for a long time I've personally seen this trend towards this idea in this way of thinking and I can see it only improving and becoming more wider spread throughout the industry do you have any thoughts on what the future of this kind of attention to our health can be? Ooh good question I think it's maybe not I would just wish I mean maybe it's just more a wish that I feel if that we can talk about all personal issues because at the end no matter if it's physical or mental or anything that there is no fear of talking about the specific topic I think that is for me at least what I see talking with about the topic a lot of different people that there is a lot of fear a lot of scariness am I allowed to talk about that should I talk about that and I would just wish that we get less of that we have a culture that we can talk about anything that keeps us thinking during the night or during the days or makes harder to work that we can talk about these things. It's not exactly an answer to your question it's more like a wish that I would see in the future going to happen. Fantastic thank you unfortunately we're out of time now for the Q&A so thank you everyone for coming we do have one quick announcement thank you Michael so much for your keynote it was fantastic sorry just getting my notes here so coffee is in exhibit hall session start at 11 and Dan Evelyn please check in at the registration there's a lost item for you Evelyn Evelyn pardon me oh sorry 1045 I've read my notes wrong pardon me session start at 1045 and I guess that's it so thank you again Michael and thank you everyone have a great day.


OK, good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the Provost Lecture Series. This is the second one. The first one was given by Professor Ishiro Maruyama two weeks ago, and who just retired. And he was able to give a really nice lecture. He invited his wife, and his talk will be posted online very soon, in a couple of days. And Scotty already created a YouTube link. And for those of you who are here for the first time, so this is one of the initiatives, the Provost Office, started this October. And the purpose for the Provost Lecture Series is to celebrate milestones in the careers for boys faculty members, those who are going to retire and those who get promoted. So for today's lecture, given by Professor Mahesh Bandy, so he's recently promoted to full professor. And just again, I would like to show this slide as a thank you note. And some of you are not shown here, such as Scotty, several people from the CPR. They have been very helpful in terms of designing the posters and related to the video recordings, writing the story, and so on. And also a big thank you to the staff members from the Provost Office, and in particular, Matsukawa-san and also Magani-san, who have been working very hard to make this possible. And also Patrick Kennedy, who's the cast to make our special gift also possible by doing 3D printing. And also everybody showing here, so without their support and approval, it's not possible to make the Provost lecture series. So thank you again. And again, so now me being also the Provost, I understand there are a lot of approvals, and we have to get up very early every day to go through all the approvals. And it's very necessary. And so this is the gift to Mahesh. And so all the details are taken care of in terms of what's written. And this is courtesy by Peter, and also the font, type, and size, everything. I hope you like it. And so finally, I would like to introduce the President Peter Groos, who is going to introduce Mahesh Vande. I asked Peter to provide a nice photo. And as you can see, Peter is very ready to celebrate Christmas and the holidays. And so after the lecture, so we will serve some coffee and snacks in the patio area. Again, please be very mindful. So when you talk to your colleagues and so on, so we can prevent the COVID-19 spread. So now the floor is out yours, Peter. Yes, so what you saw is a preview for the upcoming holidays. Already getting a warm napkin. No, I don't need anything. So in any case, I thank you very much, Amy. And I'd like to start by expressing my gratitude to you for setting up the Provost lecture. Because I believe this was a missing link. It complements the many specific talks we have that are for very distinct audiences. And it allows everybody, including admin, actually, to hopefully understand and take home something about what voice research is all about. Now, today's speaker is Mahesh Vande. And Mahesh doesn't really need an introduction because he's one of the founding faculty members who has joined OIST even before OIST was an accredited university in 2011. Mahesh studied at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also received his PhD in physics. He was a post-doctoral researcher at Los Alamos and Harvard. And after being a visiting faculty at Brown University, he joined OIST as an assistant professor, being promoted to ten-year associate professor in 2018. Now, as Amy indicated, we are actually lucky that we still have Mahesh. He recently received an impressive offer and thanks to an extraordinary effort by our EOG and by our management, we could promote him to full professor and extended a counter offer that he accepted. Thank you, Mahesh. You will not regret it. I hope. Of course, we solicited the opinion of leading physicists. Here is just one statement strongly supporting our retention efforts that I want to share with you. I quote, he's an outstanding creative scientist with wide curiosity and inborn talent for experimentation. World-class soft condensed matter experimentalist combining sophisticated technical abilities with outstanding intuition and understanding of theoretical and conceptual issues in a class of his own, still a core. Mahesh has also a keen sense of humor. He often jokes that he works in dozen matter physics as it chimes with condensed matter physics. More seriously, he sees physics as the art of approximation that provides a general bag of tools to think about many things beyond the field's core questions. But, and this was also quite clear in the past three, four years, he doesn't sit in a theoretical ivory tower. When face masks, the N95 respirators, were unavailable during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, he built a cotton candy machine in his garage and manufactured electric charged non-woven polymer fabrics with commonly available material, such as a drill and discarded plastic bottle taps. After validating the material and confirming the filtration efficiency that it needs the N-I-O-S-H-N-95 standard, he kept essential health care workers in Okinawa supplied with N-95 respirators until the commercial ones became available. Well, many of us would have had our plates full with one research area. He moves easily among a wide spectrum of problems, such as the spectrum of wind power fluctuation or the stiffness of the human foot and evolution of the transverse arc. Well, there is something like that in anatomy. We all need it and we use it actually heavily. His scope and his energy are humongous, which enabled him to also provide invaluable assistance to numerous non-governmental and governmental agencies. I personally benefited from his advice on our COVID-19 emergency response, which has helped to make the right decisions during the entire COVID-19 pandemic and kept poised on a clean course without a major breakout of COVID-19, not the least, thanks to Mahesh Pandey. So, without further ado, let's see Mahesh, if as a wanderer, he ever got lost. Thank you, Peter, for your very generous introduction. It's a knowledge and a pleasure. I gave, this is my second inverted talk at OIST and in the same auditorium, my first inverted talk was here a little over 10 years ago. It was my job talk. So, why these masks, these Venetian face masks? They have something to do with the fact that they all come from the Venetian carnival in 2020. But I am going to try and be a nonlinear story involving Venice as the central point in space across various points in time. So, moving forward, so the date is February 22nd, 2020. I am outside the Santa Lucia station in Venice here. These are the videos I took that morning. All the crowds out there. I was there to catch a train to Trieste to teach at the Spring College on Physics of Complex Systems to start 24th February. I was one of the four lecturers at that school. And there was nothing out of the ordinary that morning, except for the fact that there were members of the Italian Armed Forces with IR temperature sensors at the airport as I was disembarking. And I bought my train ticket. And I continued to get my photos. Here is one photo of a lady and a gentleman. This is the last two days of the Venetian carnival. And on February 23rd, the carnival was closed down as Italy went into lockdown. And the school was canceled. I finally left Italy on February 28th and made it back to Japan. So during those few days, while I was recording my video lectures at ICP, I was also the first time I had ever heard of the N95 masses. And I did not know anything about them. Meanwhile, in Japan, apart from the fact that the Japanese yen was 109 yen to the US dollar, the masses were getting pretty difficult to find. Here is a DIY Doraemon mass. This was from February 25th, 2020. And as I said, I had never heard of N95 face-to-face respirators before. So late February 3rd, I started reading about N95 for the first time in media. Then I started looking up the literature. And I come back to Japan. It was a breeze to the airport. No questions asked. I came home and I chose to self-isolate for two weeks. And during that period, I asked myself, how does N95 filter more than 95% of the particles? And can I make one? And one of the first sources I found was this document from the National Academy's press of the National Academy of Science of the United States. And this image, this schematic is taken from their book, which basically explains that there is no one-shot solution to filtration of these bio aerosol particles. You have to apply a range of strategies. One is that if you have particles that are 10 microns of larger in size, then they don't follow the stream lines of the flow, of the airflow. So they go slam into the filtration layers and they get stuck. Second is when particles are so small that they can diffuse away from the stream lines and then get stuck to the fiber. And the third is through electrostatic attraction. Since I'm not good at this, I have actually borrowed an instructor video. Upon learning about them, you might think, like I did, that N95 mask is basically a really, really fine strainer. A mesh of fibers with gaps too small for dust and other airborne particles to get through. A strainer filters out particles larger than its openings, but not particles smaller than its openings. So you'd expect that with a mask, after a certain point, small enough particles will sneak through. But this isn't how N95 masks work. The particles they filter are generally much smaller than the gaps between the fibers in the mask. What's more, an N95 mask is actually really good at filtering both the largest and smallest small particles. It's medium-sized small particles that are hardest for it to block. This isn't at all like a strainer, because N95s are much cleverer than strainers. The overarching goal of an N95 mask is instead to get an airborne particle to touch a fiber in the mask. Regardless of how big an airborne particle is, once it touches a fiber, it stays stuck to it and doesn't become airborne again. This isn't anything special about the fibers, but about the size of the particles. At a microscopic scale, everything is sticky, because the weakly attractive force between molecules is more than strong enough to hold very, very small things in place. So you shouldn't think of N95 masks like a fine window screen that keeps insects of a certain size out. You should think of them more like a sticky spiderweb that can catch an insect of any size, as long as it touches a strand. And so N95 masks use a bunch of different clever physics and mechanical tricks to get particles to touch their fibers. First, many spiderwebs are better than one. Unlike strainers, where stacking many identical ones doesn't improve the filtering at all, more layers of sticky fibers means more chances for particles to get stuck. And how likely particles are to hit or miss a fiber depends in large part on their size. Airborne particles larger than 1,000th of a millimeter basically travel in straight lines because of their inertia. And because there are so many layers of fibers, their straight line paths are essentially guaranteed to get a fiber and stick. Airborne particles that are really, really small are so light that collisions with air molecules literally bounce them around. So they move in a random zigzag pattern known as brownie in motion. This zigzagging also makes it super likely that a particle will bump into a fiber and get stuck. Particles of in between sizes are the hardest to filter. That's because they don't travel in straight lines and they also don't bounce around randomly. Instead, they're carried along with the air as it flows around fibers, meaning they're likely to get carried past fibers and sneak through even a mask with many layers. But N95 masks have a final trick up their sleeve. They can attract particles of all sizes to them using an electric field. In the presence of an electric field, even neutral particles develop an internal electrical imbalance which attracts them to the source of the field. This is why neutrally charged styrofoam sticks to a cat whose fur has been charged with static electricity. But unlike a cat's fur, an N95 mask's electric field isn't just ordinary static electricity. The fibers are like permanent magnets, but for electricity, electrons. Just like you can permanently magnetize a piece of iron by putting it in a strong enough magnetic field, you can electritize a piece of plastic to give it a permanent electric field. By electritizing the fibers in an N95 mask, they gain a long-lasting ability to attract particles, which means they capture about 10 times as many particles as regular fibers. And this is, after all, the point of an N95 mask, to filter out particles from the air, and they do it cleverly. By taking advantage of the molecular scale stickiness of matter, using many layers of fibers that catch straight moving large particles as well as zigzagging small particles, and having an electric field that attracts all particles, you get a mask, not a strainer, that's really good at trapping both large and small airborne particles and does a reasonably good job at filtering out middle-sized airborne particles. Precisely what fraction of those sneaky, medium-sized particles get blocked gives you the number of the mask. If at least 95% of those particles are filtered out, then the mask is rated N95. I'm sure all of us are now experts in N95 masks. You don't need this video. So what is the typical, the usual way to manufacture these electric fabrics? One is electrospinning, where you have a polymer melt or a polymer that has been dissolved in an organic solvent, and you apply a high voltage field between the syringe, which we call the emitter, and the board here, which we call the collector, and by applying force on the piston, basically the pressure, that creates the creation of the droplets and leads to, and the electric field basically spills the fibers away as you see here. This has a problem, whereas this method is agnostic to the type of polymer, it has low throughput, so it will scale with the number of syringes. So if I want to make large number of fabrics, I need many, many syringes. Also dealing with high voltage DC fields needs expertise in safety measures. The second, the industrial method is called melt blowing, where you have a polymer melt that is sent down this knife edge, and you create an air knife, where you blow hot air, and it gets sprayed onto conveyor belt, and as you see here, and as the fibers cool down on the belt, they are electro charged by a corona discharge treatment in this area. Now this one, it's the most common manufacturing method. It is inherently suited for volume manufacturing, but it is not suitable for construction with common parts, which was the main goal of what I wanted to do. So I was sitting in the self-isolation, so and I happened to have, I happened to have an American neighbor who had a cotton candy machine, don't ask me why, and he has four kids, a chance remark, a passing remark by my post-doctor mentor at Harvard back in 2010, he mentioned making polymeric nanofibers using cotton candy machines. If that led me to look up, well, if he said something, he must have published it, and I found those papers, and using that, he had worked out basically what is the threshold angular velocity of this cotton candy machine, and what would be the average radius given the material parameters and the design parameters. So this is not an exact relation, and I guarantee you this is only one of two slides with any equations, but you don't need much to understand this. Basically, you need two ingredients to create these fabrics. One is you have to create a drop of polymer, and that is the initiation of the jet, and the second is to stretch it until it pulls down and forms a strand. So for the jet initiation, there is basically a combination between two kinds of forces, the category force which is dominated by surface tension versus the centrifugal force which is caused by the spinning of the emitter that is sitting here. So once the jet is initiated, the, since this is not a Newtonian fluid like water, it is a non-Newtonian fluid because it's polymeric, it starts stretching. So that is achieved through a competition between the viscous forces which try to stop the fluid from stretching and the centrifugal force. So the advantage of this method is not only can you construct it with common labor load parts, you can also achieve both the jet initiation as well as the fiber formation by the same forcing method which is the centrifugal force. So then the question is what is the threshold angular velocity at which one must spin this emitter through which the polymer is ejected? So typically, as you see in this video here for cotton candy, you put the material inside the emitter drum in between and it has plenty of holes which we call porphyse and we select the porphyse radius. So from basically balancing these forces, you get the minimum angular velocity at which you must spin this emitter in order to initiate a jet. And once you initiate a jet, even the distance between the emitter and the collector, what would be the average radius of the fibers that you get? These are order of magnitude estimates, they are not exact. So that's called scaling analysis or dimensional analysis. Now translating these parameters to design, the material as Peter pointed out was basically portal caps and CD cases which is basically polypropylene and polystyrene polypropylene. I will skip the technical details of isostatic versus low crystallinity polypropylene. Basically one is brittle and the other is tactile. PS is basically polystyrene. You want to use what is known as general purpose polystyrene, not the expanded polystyrene which you use as styrofoam for packaging. By the way, styrofoam is very good for making napalm which I practice as a high school kid back in India. By the end of summer, the neighbor's wall was missing so that's a difference. So we use low crystallinity polypropylene and polystyrene mixtures in the temperature range which is given from the handbook of chemistry so you can just look it up. And then from the calculations, the jet initiation, we needed threshold revolutions per minute of about 4500 RPM but it started working at around 2450. So as I said, this is an order of magnitude estimate, it is not exact. It gets to some ballpark which means well. So a simple electric drill would work. A general tool can go up to 35000 RPM but that's an overkill. The emitter I used was soda cans. So you see here, that was the drill and that was the soda can, beer cans work best actually. And the office radius we chose was hundreds of microns and this, so this is from the lab. So there was my neighbor's cotton candy machine and what destroyed to R&D which is not research and development, it's a research and destruction part. And then I switched to this and it worked. So that was the R&D with the research and development part and once that happened and supply chain were just opened up again, we managed to get this and with care itself we started doing it. Once we had these fabrics, it was basically a question of taking the fibers that were generated that basically ended up like this and while they're still hot, we just sandwiched them between two thick glass plates to create a sheet and cut them into rectangular sheets. And we tried two methods, one was the standard surgical mask, you put the electrical charge there in it and applied to protect yourself. The second was with Kieran's help, there's an open source design that we found online for the Montana mask because the person who designed this and left the 3D designs online for free was from Montana. And you just put it in the holder and you can stick some rubber bands here, elastic bands and you have a respirator. So what about the structural properties? So Ishizu-san, who I hope is here, she helped me with scanning electron microscopes, micrographs of the fabrics. So this is the scanning electron micrograph of a commercial N95 electro charge layer. So that was our baseline against which we were testing what we were creating in the garage and later in the lab. This is from isotaptic polypropylene. This is from a mix of this low crystallinity polypropylene and polystyrene mix. This is low crystallinity polypropylene alone and this is polystyrene alone. What you see immediately is this one is no good, it is too, it looks too little, this is no good because it is too tactile. These two were okay. Now it was a question of okay, how do these candidates perform relative to the commercial N95 electro charge layer when it comes to the filtration performance? So we also measured the average radii for all these materials and if this was the benchmark we were looking against, the isotaptic and the polypropylene and polystyrene mixtures compared decently well, whereas the low crystalline polypropylene was too high, polystyrene was just way too high. Now the question of electrocharging. For this I sacrificed my microwave oven. So what you need to electrocharge the fabrics is basically there are different ways. The one we chose is what is known as isothermal charging. What you do there is you take two electrodes and zap the air at very high voltage and basically the electric field rips the electron apart from the atom and creates ions. And what you need for the fabrics is negatively charged. So you want negative ions and negative ion when traveling towards the fabric. And the design rule for this comes from 1889, Friedrich Passion, who is better known in atomic spectra for the passion series. You know the Lionel series, the Bamer series, there's a passion series, that's the passion. And he showed through empirical evidence that for any given gas the breakdown voltage, that is the voltage at which the atoms of the molecules of the gas ripped apart is a function only of the pressure and the electrode gap. And that was the empirical relation he gave, which was later put down properly in theoretical form by John Townsend. And so here P is the gas pressure, D is the electrode gap, which is, these are the two ones, the things we care about. But in our case, we didn't have high pressure facilities or low pressure facilities, we were working at atmospheric pressure. So if you translate all this into a lumped parameter model as we call it, say in physics, at one atmosphere, you can lump all parameters and you get the breakdown voltage as the distance electrode, the inter-electrode gap times 30,000 in centimeters, okay? Now for voltage, above the breakdown voltage, you get what is known as an ionization region near the active electrode. And there is a space charge field. Now this is a very non-linear problem. Nobody has ever solved it accurately. There are very serious linearizations and then you have a solution for very specific geometries like the point plate and the point cylinder geometry, which gives you the voltage current characteristics. But I'm not lazy, I'm just an effort minimalist. I overcame that calculation by a circuit solution, which was take apart the microwave, you get the transformer and you get a second transformer, which means a second microwave. And that's your 110 volt AC line, a switch. All of us understand that so far. One line goes to this palace. This guy does something interesting. It acts as a safety catch. It doesn't let too much current pass through. And by doing so, I did not have to sit and calculate this non-linear resistor problem, which would, I mean the Russians haven't solved it and if they haven't solved it, there's no hope for me. Right? So the solution, you have the transformer which grants up the voltage and it goes to what we call a diode bridge, which will convert the AC into a DC and you get the voltage output in the electrodes. When you do that, now there's the electrode design problem. The problem is I can't put the fabric in between the electrodes because the sparks will puncture through the fan. So what we did was we put a fan to blow the air, so the sparks would go from the negative to the ground electrode, but the ions would be passed on to the fabric sample through a transverse jet. And it's basically a centrifugal fan taken from an old computer. I'm not telling you which one because it still has an acid tag. It's a 3D printed flow focusing and power composite casing that leads to electrodes. And when you play it, so that's, and you can hear the fast clicking. That's actually a sign that this is negative ions, that is, this is negative for another solution. If this positive it is, it's called streaming and you don't hear these clicks. So once that is done, now we have to worry about optimal treatment. And what you're looking at here is infrared imaging of fabric masks being exposed to the ionic wind which you can see like air going down. That is basically the ions coming down. So we had to do it at different distances from the mask, distances between the mask and the electrodes. Because if the electrodes were too close, it would basically burn the fabric. The temperature would be so hot you can see this one in this case, the distance was less than five centimeters and it was basically getting too hot. And so the polymer was melting once again. So you had to have an optimal distance where you couldn't melt, but it would also transfer enough ions so that the fabric would get charged. So once we figured that out, then we come to the next problem and this was done by, so this, for this work I was assisted by Pinaki's post-doc, Julio Katoloeffi is here. But he came to the lab and helped me do the imaging and figure out what was the problem. Now here Scotty comes in and we thought, okay, we will take a few videos to the first website, but it turned out the method I was following was wrong, you see some yellow flashes come through one occasion and those yellow flashes are basically the flame from the sparks singing the cloth and creating these pinhole burns. So if you have a pinhole burn that is roughly on the order of 10 microns, then no good, right? No N95. So we had to take care of that and once we did all of that and nailed down the working parameters, now we come to the beautiful plots. This is the time when my late PhD advisor used to wake up from his sleep during talks. So what do we have here? The test had to run 12 miles because that is the typical time healthcare worker would wear their mask. And what you're looking at is brand new commercial N95 mask, which is over here. So that had between 10, minus 10 and minus 12 nanofolumes. So that was a base nine. If we were to take the mask, dip it in alcohol to get rid of all its charge and then recharge it with electro charging method with the homemade plasma apparatus, then we did almost as good minus 10 nanofolumes. Then comes polystyrene, which is almost as good. And then polypropylene, which is here, which is not so good. And then surgical masks are somewhere here. Now, not all surgical masks work because some are made of polypropylene and that does not have to charge. But if they're made of polypropylene, then it works. And then we wondered, is it possible to take any cloth masks and charge them as well? This was just a shock in the dark. And it turned out you cannot. You can, but it's no good. So what happened was we started noticing that it would get charged, but over a period of time, it would decay. The charge would decay and settle to some value. And usually it would even go down to complete zero charge. So we wondered what that was because this constant charge over a 12 hour period that told us these fabrics are electrics and isothermal charging was at work. And there's this established procedure for it in literature. But this one had never been worked out. Turns out the exposure of plasma to fabrics has been done in the textile industry to make them wrinkle free or fire retirement, but not to see if they can attract charges. So we wondered what was happening there. And since I don't have the capacity to go to higher pressures, but we had a small vacuum pump at a belger. So we put, we exposed the fabric to these ions at two different pressures and two different temperatures. So several various pressures and two different temperatures. And what you see is as a function of the pressure and temperature, the amount of charge uptake on the cloth fabric changes. And this tells you that the amount of charge that is sticking onto the cloth fabric cloth is basically subject to some thermodynamic variables. Why? Because all of thermodynamics is based on temperature, pressure and volume, right? So one more test to see if I could do this cycle. Basically we started point A, which is around 80 kilopascals at 23 degree Celsius. Turn down the temperature at the same pressure to point B. And then go to point C, where we are staying on the same temperature line, but we decrease the pressure to 60 kilopascals and go back up to D and then back to A. If you can repeat that cycle, then that tells you your adsorption desorption regime, which is subject to thermodynamic variables. So we only provided proof that the ions that are taken up by the fabrics are due to adsorption. But then the problem is adsorption and desorption are dominated by temperature. So if an individual wears a cloth mask that has to be electrocharged by this method, there is hot air that is exhaled in our breath. So the desorption is actually going to get accelerated. So whereas we could not come up with method or technique to electrocharge cloth-based masks directly, we were able to show that there is a method of adsorption and desorption working. We did not go any further because the theory of adsorption and desorption actually is not completed yet. So this work was not about that style. Finally, the proof of the pudding, that's the filtration capacity. So usual systems that test for the filtration efficiency come from a company called TSI in Minnesota for about $150,000 a machine. And not only did we not have that kind of money to throw, it was also a time when all the supply chain was just exhaled and broken down. So we made one at home. So we purchased a mannequin head from Okinawa City. We got, I took apart an ultrasonicator and pulled out what do you call it, the PSO drive. And you could generate steam, basically vapor from the sonication. So you generate a mist, you have an air intake, and then you have a flow rate valve to control the concentration of the mist that is entering the chamber.  And now, we did not have the special particle counters that I used in this trade because they come for $150,000 a pop. We used what I've used for an environmental monitoring. So we borrowed one from Williams and Thassiti's management, and I bought one more from Amazon. So one was inside to get the concentration inside the box, and the other outside, we stuffed it to a vacuum pump. So one shortcoming of this test is, it does not create the oscillatory back and forth flow that annihilation and exhalation, but it's better than no test. So once we did that, let's look at the results. So for a commercial N95, so let me tell you what this means. So sorry, yeah. So the quantity you want to look at is the penetration, which is basically the ratio of the concentration in the monitor B divided by the ratio of the concentration in the monitor A times 100%. So if this is less than 5%, then it's doing better than N95. So if you look at that, so commercial N95 masks were doing very well. So charged and neutral means the aerosol particles we created with a mist, were they charged or were they neutral? So we did it with water and we did it with salt water because that is the typical way these tests are conducted. And you could see a measurable difference even with the crude PM2.5 monitors, but both of them were below 5%. If it is above 5%, then the N95 test has been. For surgical masks, it clearly failed.  So that makes a lot of difference. Without a tape, you are close to 40 to 50% penetration. That means 40 to 50% of the particles are going through even if you have your mask covered. But with the tape, you come down to somewhere between 10 to 15%. It's not N95 but it's still better. Then we have the materials we had created. So we had the polymeric fabric before it was electrocharged. So non-electrocharged layer and electrocharged layer. And tests are conducted at two flow rates, 30 and 85 liters per minute to simulate walking and running. So when we did that, the polypropylene failed. The polypropylene polystyrene failed at the 30 liter and 85 liter per minute mark. But it came close on the electrocharged part. This is the, yeah, sorry, these are polypropylene and these are polypropylene polystyrene. So here we did a non-electrocharged and electrocharged at different flow rates. And here we had the aerosol particles, charged and uncharged. And the best test came out here finally for the polypropylene polystyrene mix which went below the N95 standard. So that was the one we finally stuck with. And then we also tested the penetration for brand new N95 and then if you discharge it by soaking it in alcohol and recharging it, what happens then? And also the surgical mask that is uncharged and charged. And finally we reconfirmed what we had looked at. What we had discovered for the cloth mask that the ions that they were getting charged because of ion adsorption. But they were getting dissolved and as it is, then the filtration efficiency was also suffering over time. It was decaying with the charges. So that is what we figured out. I won't bore you any further with that. So I have basically condensed some 50 pages of material spread out over two papers that we published into the last 40 minutes. I want to leave a lot of time for questions. But before that I want to acknowledge a lot of people who couldn't have been possible without the help from so many people. So as I said earlier, I first learned of the cotton candy method from a passing remark by my post-doctoral mentor, Al Mahadevan and Harvard. Shankar Ghosh, my good friend and a faculty at TIF on India was the first to suggest use of commercial VM 2.5 monitors for filtration. Sachin Velankar, whom I met as a young assistant professor when I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh, and he's a Polymer expert, made several critical suggestions on the polymer material characteristics and critical reading of the manuscript. This work was supported by Voice Graduate University. And I'm particularly grateful to Peter because when we did this work, I requested him that we will not file a patent for it. And he was most gracious to give permission immediately. And the work was taken up by several groups all over the world. I have lost count of the various groups. I do know my former post-doc, Florin Paras, took it up at the French Aerospace Labs and Airbus industries had a group going with it. There were groups in Indonesia, Brazil, in Africa, Asia, all over the world. Finally, many people at Voice helped me get this work done on time here in DSE as head of the engineering section, Ishizu-san, who hopefully is here. And Humbin Kang, she did the scanning electron microscopy. Humbin did the FDIR studies. Tomomi Okubo and Ruzquart, Michael Hooper, Chris Hulu, Siddique Danny, LNB, all from CPR, helped with the web pages. I understand I learned much later that there was actually a huge flow of traffic when the web page went up on the OIST website. And with the efforts of the CPR and the gospel, so to speak. And then Bruno Humble, Paolo, and Shinya from the imaging section, they helped with the confocal microscopy. And that work, I have not shown it. In fact, it's going to be future work. This is not done because nobody really understands how the N95 filtration actually works. And I have one hypothesis which I would like to start with. I don't think it will be most likely it won't be right. But it's a starting point. And then finally, my advisor, my late advisor from Pittsburgh and my post-doctoral advisor from Los Alamos and my post-doctoral advisor from Harvard. They deserve special mention because they gave me a lot of freedom to explore. And what little I know, I owe to them. And my style is in large measure an amalgamation of their individual styles. If you look at their work, you will see mine is a variation on their theme. It's not unique in any way. And finally, the enigmatic title. Well, those of you who are Tolkien fans like me know where it comes from. It comes from a poem in the Lord of the Rings. All that is cold does not glitter, but all those who want it are lost. The old that is strong does not wither, the fruits are not reached by the frost. So I'm a big Tolkien fan. And these are the topics I have studied, the ones in black problems I have studied, the ones in blue are either ongoing or future topics I hope to take up, plan to take up. So the craziness is not done yet. And I'll end with yet another quote from Paul Key, which is, and with a dent, I cannot say. It's a line from another poem. The road goes ever one and down, down from the door, where it began. And now far ahead the road has gone, and I must follow if I can. Pursuing with eager feet until it meets some larger way where many hearts and errands meet. And with a dent, I cannot say. So I hope I'm just getting warmed up. There are under 24 years before I retire. And before I stop, there's final non-linearity from Wetz. So this is Antonio Vivaldi, Gilbreth there also, the Red Priest. Now, the reason I'm explaining this through this story is many people find my style confusing. And as Peter pointed out, I call it doesn't matter. Now it's customary to quote Feynman, because if it's a Feynman quote, it must be right. It's kosher. And he said, if you really have something important to say, then it doesn't matter what you work on. So that is Feynman's quote. I'm not Feynman. So I say, I work on doesn't matter physics, because whatever I work on doesn't matter to me. But I don't consider myself unique. There are many people like me who have taken this path. There are pros and cons to it. I'm happy to explain them if you choose to ask me. But I wanted to take the story not of a character you know, but specifically of a character you don't know. And this is the story of Antonio Vivaldi in the 18th century Venice, who trained often girls known as the Filial Coral at the Ospedale della Piedra. This is a painting from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. And when it appeared there, nobody knew of these ladies. Even today, I bet you most of you may not have heard of the Filial Coral, which means daughters of the quarry. The Ospedale della Piedra was a charity institution that used to take in orphan girls left at the Scaffetta, a small drawer where if the baby could fit in, then the Ospedale would accept that. And they had a quasi monastic life, but they had musical training from people like Vivaldi. And the system of the modern orchestra goes back to Filial Coral. The Concierto goes back to them. Vivaldi composed 140 Conciertos for the Filial Coral, 28 of them for one specific member, Anna Maria della Piedra. She was born because she had no family. She was orphan, so she came to be known as Anna Maria della Piedra. But by the time she passed away from this world, she went by different names at different stages. Anna Maria della Piedra, Anna Maria della Piedra. Anna Maria della, what was it, Mandolin, because she could play all these instruments. This was a time in the musical progression of Venice when a lot of experimentation was going on. And these were the rock stars of the musical scene in Europe at that time. And yet, most of us have not heard of them. Maybe because they were women. Maybe because they were orphans. Maybe because Napoleon's troops literally threw out their books and records when they invaded Venice in 1787. But the fact that he is famous because he had a chance to experiment with them deserves a mention for them too. But the reason they made him so famous is because they could play any instrument. So there was one Maddalena della Piedra who she was soprano. And in between, during the intermission, she would come and play a solo. There was another lady, Pellegrina, who was trained in violin, harpsichord, oboe. And Vivaldi wrote concertos on the oboe for her. But at the age of 60, she lost her team. She could no longer play the oboe. And then she played the violin again. So there are people who did that. And yet, we haven't heard of them. So I'll leave you with one final example because we come from Jetland. Anybody know who this person is? His name is Yokoi Kumpei. Remember? He's responsible for the electronic gaming industry. He was a one-man department who used to maintain the Hanafotakar machines before Nintendo became famous for what it is. And he used to make games during his spare time, which the chairman of Nintendo saw, and the rest is history. I will not tell you the story. It's all in this book. But what I have explained in the last 40, 45 minutes is basically what he said down in this book as lateral thinking with seasoned technology. That is, you take mature technology, just as I did. Michael Dave's got his candy machines and ask, what can you do with it? That is different from the original use it was intended for. So even there, I'm not unique. There are these people who have done this before time and time again. So let me stop there and take questions. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Mahesh, for that tour de force. And I was wondering when I was sitting at the end, how I can bridge from the gaming industry to the violins, to the violin, to your PhD advisors. I think there's really only one thing. It's creativity. So what you have taught us is to be creative. And that creativity really emerged from your talk. And I could have never imagined what kind of science you can do using a drill and an empty beer can, so in any case, Mahesh, are there questions or comments that you would want to bring forward or ask Mahesh? If you have any questions about any of these topics, I'm happy to answer. Mahesh, very beautiful talk. I have a question related to, as you mentioned, the TSI based in Minnesota. That's the company also making micro-PIV setup, the same company. And so for their standardized test related to the filtration percentage, is it dependent on the charges of the particles and also particle size? It does depend upon the particle size, but their machines do not measure the charges. So in fact, you have to do separate. And what about the types of particles? And everything you tested here, they're rigid. What about deformable particles, like a virus particles and such? So we did actually do it with aerosol particles, basically. We also did it with polystyrene beads. So we did both deformable particles as well as rigid particles. One thing I should mention that is very different between the filtration tests we performed and what TSI machines do. They give you the distribution of the bio-aerosol particles by their size. There was no way for us to measure the size. As was the binary measurement, is there a particle or is there not? OK. OK, thank you. I just want to make a one remark. Back in May 2020, so my unit was the freight unit, we're also making face shields. And we encountered a lot of kind of supply chain problem. And then I heard about Mahesh was making N95. So one day I saw Mahesh in the hallway. I said, do you have a mask for me? And Mahesh was like, no. It's a black market. And the next day, I saw Milan was wearing one. I was very jealous. But I gave masks to Milan, but they were not the masks I made. So I had kept some masks, but the coastal worker came to deliver the PM-2.5 monitor. And he did not have a mask. So I gave him what I had set aside for Milan. And I gave Milan the mask and I had set aside for myself. And then I went back and made more masks for myself. Milan also gave me cookies. Anymore. I understand there is coffee or some cookies outside. So however, however. Yes. Wait, wait, wait. Regarding the location of Okinawa, what kind of creative potential do you see here locally? Low-hanging fruit. Can I ask such a question? You can ask any question. Because we're here. I'll give you an example. So I heard once that two brothers, after the Second World War, came across the pile of Coca-Cola bottles that were entering the trash. And they wondered, what could we do with them? And that was the birth of the new cube glass industry. So one of the ideas I had after this attempt was, what if I could take the discarded computers, laptop monitors, et cetera, and ask myself, how could I reuse, re-purpose, or recycle them? I don't know. The standard way it is done is basically, you send them to some chemical processing facility. But I come from a lab where we did not have much funding. It was just me and my advisor. We used to make stuff by ourselves to do our measurements. So that culture has sort of carried on. So you actually find the best Fresnel lenses in computer monitors. You get the best Gaussian diffusers in computer monitors. And the cheapest ones are the best engineered ones that you would find for that size, even Thorlabs or New Portland supply that sizes. You get built-in modules that actively cooled down the microprocessors, which you could convert into microscope thermal control status. You could take the cameras from your smartphones and your laptop monitors and turn them to look at sky images to do solar photovoltaic measurements. So there is a scope for a startup with a re-use recycle, re-purpose. And there is Okinawa Kosen not far from here. And they are bright young students who have just the right amount of training to take the idea. I'm 46 years old. I'm considered a dinosaur in Silicon Valley. I'm not good enough to create a startup. But there is a lot of scope for creativity in Okinawa. There's a lot that comes from this island. Another example I'll give you is the north of this island, there's an artist by the name of Ichiro Pikuta, who lives in the village of Kada. You have his B.O. in your place. So he was the first artist to showcase his work at OIST in the first year after my arrival. And in the video that ZPR created, he makes a curious remark. He says, these paper screens or paper partition screens are good at humidity regulation as well as thermal regulation. And so I took it up upon that. And I visited him. And with help from Ayano, the backbone of my group, RU8 for my group. And she helped with the translation.  And we tested them under that. And he was right. And I don't have a, there is no theory to explain the effect. And it happens because of several layers of these paper being stacked up, which basically leads to paper is a peculiar material. It absorbs vapor molecules. And then it starts puffing up. And because of that, the pores close in. So this is what in applied mathematics is known as the moving boundary value problem. So the next layer is ready to take new paper molecules. But they are unable to pass them. So you have to wait for them to diffuse together side and then go. So this delays the propagation of humidity from outside to inside the house. So somehow the Japanese and the Okinawan people had figured it out by trial and error. But we scientists have to give the empirical quantitative tests and produce theory out of it. So my hope is one of my group members can help me work with Kikuta Sensei to provide the explanation. So there are examples. I can only go through examples. Because science itself proceeds through examples. Another example of his enormous creativity, the way to bridge things. And I wish you luck in doing many more things. Here's the man who can translate it into products and hopefully companies. So before we go, you've seen this in the first slide for me. This is like a recognition of today's talk. And when Andy asked me about a nice sentence for you, I just figured, to Mahesh, who can make sense out of chaos.


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