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[Assistant] They can be triggered by all sorts of things, including allergic reactions, dryness, and even some diseases.


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[Assistant] And then there are the mysterious ones that pop up for no reason at all, or just from talking about itching. You're scratching your head right now, aren't you?


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[Assistant] When a mosquito bites you, it releases a compound into your body called an anticoagulant that prevents your blood from clotting.


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[Assistant] That compound, which we're mildly allergic to, triggers the release of histamine, a chemical that makes our capillaries swell.


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[Assistant] This enables increased blood flow which helpfully accelerates the body's immune response to this perceived threat.


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[Assistant] That explains the swelling, and it's the same reason pollen can make your eyes puff up.


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[Assistant] Histamine also activates the nerves involved in itching, which is why bug bites make you scratch.


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[Assistant] But the itchy sensation itself isn't yet fully understood. In fact, much of what we do know comes from studying the mechanics of itching in mice.


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[Assistant] Researchers have discovered that itch signals in their skin are transmitted via a subclass of the nerves that are associated with pain.


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[Assistant] These dedicated nerves produce a molecule called natriuretic polypeptide B, which triggers a signal that's carried up the spinal cord to the brain, where it creates the feeling of an itch.


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[Assistant] When we scratch, the action of our fingernails on the skin causes a low-level pain signal that overrides the itching sensation.


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[Assistant] It's almost like a distraction, which creates the sensation of relief.


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[Assistant] The leading theory is that our skin has evolved to be acutely aware of touch, so that we're equipped to deal with risks from the outside world.


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[Assistant] Think about it. Our automatic scratching response would dislodge anything harmful that's potentially lurking on our skin.


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[Assistant] This might explain why we don't feel itching inside our bodies, like in our intestines, which is safe from these external threats. Though imagine how maddening that would be.


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[Assistant] In some people, glitches in the pathways responsible for all of this can cause excessive itching that can actually harm their health.


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[Assistant] One extreme example is a psychological condition called delusory parasitosis, where people believe their bodies are infested with mites or fleas scurrying over and under their skin, making them itch incessantly.


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[Assistant] Because this injury has so severely damaged the nervous system, it confuses the body's normal nerve signaling and creates sensations in limbs that are no longer there.


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[Assistant] In amputees, mirrors are used to reflect the remaining limb, which the patient scratches.


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[Assistant] That creates an illusion that tricks the brain into thinking the imaginary itch has been satisfied. Oddly enough, that actually works.


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[Assistant] Researchers are also searching for the genes involved in itching and developing treatments to try and block the pathway of an itch in extreme cases.


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[Assistant] If having an unscratchable itch feels like your own personal hell, Dante agreed.


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[Assistant] Because of you, Red Boy is a prisoner of the Bodhisattva Guan Yin.


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[Assistant] Journey to the West Chapter 77 The Magic Fan


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[Assistant] When he finally landed, he was far from the Iron Immortals mountain.


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[Assistant] Wukong looked around and saw a mountain nearby. It looked familiar.


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[Assistant] Wukong and Lingzhi sat outside drinking tea.


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[Assistant] The monkey told the bodhisattva everything that had happened with the iron immortal.


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[Assistant] The Bodhisattva handed a small stone to Wukong.


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[Assistant] The Iron Immortal came out and wrinkled her nose. I thought I got rid of you. She raised her fan. I'll just have to wave harder this time. The woman waved the fan furiously. A terrible wind blew past Rukong. But the monkey didn't move.


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[Assistant] Before she could shut the door, Wukong turned into a cricket. He quickly leaked into the cave.


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[Assistant] Please stop! Cried the Iron Immortal. You can have the fan.


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[Assistant] Wukong found his companions in the village with the old man.


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[Assistant] The monkey explained how he tricked the iron immortal.


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[Assistant] The monkey waved the fan hard. Whoosh! A strong wind blew toward the mountain. Hukong smiled.


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[Assistant] Suddenly, there was a roar, as the flames grew bigger, filling the sky.


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[Assistant] Hmm. Oh dear. My quarians cast you aside. How tragic.


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[Assistant] Hey, what were you thinking sending Sam back alone like that?


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[Assistant] So, how's my son? Seem okay?


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[Assistant] And if you're done making wisecracks, I got work to do.


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[Assistant] If you happen to be in the town of Lubec, Maine in July of 2016, you may have seen something a little curious on the horizon when you looked out across the bay.


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[Assistant] In the distance, on an otherwise uninhabited island, loomed large black letters that spelled the word forever. The sign was 15 feet tall and 50 feet wide.


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[Assistant] And sometimes, like in this video, you could barely see forever peeking out of the shifting fog, accompanied only by the rhythmic warning sounds of fog horns.


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[Assistant] But it took over a year to plan and execute, and it required the help of so many people, like the lobster boat captain who helped transport all of the materials to the island, and the volunteers who helped carry thousands of pounds of wood and steel to the top of the hill through waist-high shrubs.


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[Assistant] And in the end, forever only lasted for three weeks.


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[Assistant] So if you're wondering why I did it at all, as I often did during that process, it might help for you to know a little bit more about me and my upbringing.


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[Assistant] I grew up in an evangelical Christian family, and although I'm an atheist today, I've realized that my religious upbringing has played a really important role in shaping the person that I've become.


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[Assistant] In 1986, when I was five years old, my parents became missionaries to South Africa.


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[Assistant] And that was during the last few years of the apartheid. So we lived in an all-white neighborhood, and I attended an all-white public school, while my parents helped found a multiracial church in downtown Cape Town.


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[Assistant] I witnessed the racism and oppression of people of color I knew and loved on a daily basis, but because of my own skin color, there was no way I could fully comprehend it.


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[Assistant] Was how the people I met in South Africa could envision a better future for themselves and their country? A future they really believed was possible.


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[Assistant] I was there to see Nelson Mandela released from prison, and I watched an entire country begin a major transformation. And that transformed me as a person.


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[Assistant] It instilled in me a sense of wonder and optimism and possibility that permeates everything I create.


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[Assistant] We make sculptures like forever as a way of giving physical, tangible forms to language and time. Those powerful but invisible forces that shape the way we perceive and experience our realities.


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[Assistant] And in doing so, I try to give other people the opportunity to reflect on their own perception of reality and inspire them to wonder and imagine what else might be possible.


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[Assistant] I often use signs to do this because how simply and effectively they're able to grab our attention and communicate information.


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[Assistant] This sign on the side of the highway in Texas. They can often signify things that we can't see at all, like the distance to our destination. Signs often help to orient us in the world by telling us where we are now and what's happening in the present moment. But they can also help us zoom out


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[Assistant] Shift our perspective and get a glimpse of the bigger picture.


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[Assistant] Imagine, for example, you're walking down the street in Philadelphia, a city in the US that contains so much history, the birthplace of our Constitution.


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[Assistant] But imagine you're walking down the street in an area that's undergoing a huge transformation due to gentrification. And as you walk down that street, you notice something flashing up above you. So you look up, and you see this.


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[Assistant] A flashing neon sign that says, all the light you see is from the past. And then, all you see is past, before turning off completely for a brief moment.


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[Assistant] And it reminds you that because light takes time to travel across space, even from just across the street or across the room, everything you're seeing in the present moment is technically an image of the past.


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[Assistant] My time in South Africa taught me that when people are able to find common ground and work together towards a mutual goal,


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[Assistant] Powerful things can happen, and so much more becomes possible.


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[Assistant] And I want to create more opportunities for people to find that kind of common ground. I want people to feel the power of collaboration, sometimes quite literally.


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[Assistant] A few years ago, a friend of mine showed me how our bodies can safely conduct small amounts of electricity. And if you hold hands with another person, a small electrical current can pass through your held hands and become like a switch that can trigger something else to happen.


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[Assistant] I put two sensors on a platform far enough apart so that one person can't make it work on their own. But when two or more people work together to complete that electrical circuit, the inflatable comes to life.


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[Assistant] I always love to see how each group of people finds a different way to bridge that physical and metaphorical divide.


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[Assistant] At this moment in time, I think we could all agree that the future feels pretty bleak and uncertain.


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[Assistant] More sustainable, more equitable future depends first on our ability to imagine it.


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[Assistant] We have to find common ground with people we would maybe otherwise disagree with and work together towards that mutual goal.


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[Assistant] So, if you can humor me for one more minute, I'm going to ask everyone in this theater to hold hands.


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[Assistant] Make that metaphorical gesture of reaching across the aisle. And after you've held hands with people on either side of you,


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[Assistant] If you feel comfortable, please close your eyes.


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[Assistant] Now take a minute to imagine what you want, what you want the future to look like. And give yourself permission to be at least a little bit idealistic.


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[Assistant] And can you start to see how, if we all worked together, it might actually be possible?


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[Assistant] Aspire 8, Captain. You will round up your fellow troopers currently on leave in Lardboard Juno.


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[Assistant] Journey to the West Chapter 75 Battle of the Wukongs


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[Assistant] The two Wukongs stared a curious ear.


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[Assistant] You mean I could destroy it? Said the other Wukong. No? Yelled the other.


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[Assistant] The two Wukongs began swinging their iron bars at each other.


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[Assistant] Please stop! Cried the Judge of the Dead. You'll tear this whole palace down! The Monkeys stopped.


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[Assistant] Said the other Wukong. He looked worried.


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[Assistant] The two Wukongs landed in front of the guard. The guard looked surprised.


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[Assistant] As the first Wukong started to enter the monastery, the other one backed away.


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[Assistant] He grabbed the other monkey by the arm and dragged him into the monastery. In front of Buddha the first Wukong bowed.


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[Assistant] The other Wukong hesitated a moment and then bowed also. Greetings Buddha, said the first Wukong.


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[Assistant] When Buddha lifted the bowl, a tiny monkey spirit lay on the table. Wukong leaned closer to see.


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[Assistant] The monkey thanked Buddha and then flew back to Mt. Porilaka.


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[Assistant] She and the monkey found the Tang monk and the others along the road to the west.


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[Assistant] The Bodhisattva told the Tang monk that it wasn't Wukong who'd attacked him.


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[Assistant] Journey to the West, Chapter 79, The Mountain of Flames.


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[Assistant] Said the demon. Wukong charged toward the demon.


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[Assistant] Wukong turned into a phoenix and shot after the crane.


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[Assistant] The bull flew up into the sky, and Wukong followed.


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[Assistant] With a snort, the bull spun around and flew the other way.


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[Assistant] But other soldiers appeared and blocked the bull's path. Wukong watched as soldiers surrounded the bull.


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[Assistant] The bold demon king returned to his demon form.


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[Assistant] That the bull demon king. The demon nodded.


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[Assistant] The Tang monk and his companions were at the old man's house again.


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[Assistant] Once again they thanked the man and followed the road up the hill. At the top they looked at the mountain of flames.


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[Assistant] The air cooled down and Wukong saw the valley start to turn green.


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[Assistant] Leaves grew on trees, and small flowers popped up here and there.


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[Assistant] Birds sang in the branches as other animals ran through the grass. Wukong smiled. He had done evil things a long time ago. Now, he was fixing them.


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[Assistant] Time for that shower? Yeah, I'd say so. See you guys soon!


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[Assistant] Soon enough. No need to stick to a schedule here. Right? Right!


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[Assistant] Okay, we're going to finish up by talking about some, uh, practical applications of red-black trees, and in particular, bee trees, which are a general, general version.


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[Assistant] Often the data that we're trying to store is really huge. There's a large amount of data and we're going to look at a more general model for external storage.


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[Assistant] Uh, where, uh, we work with contiguous blocks of data that are big, maybe, uh,


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[Assistant] So the, uh, real property of, uh, external storage that not your local memory is that the time required to get to a page is way larger than the time to access data within a page. So what we want to do is try to access data that's out, uh, externally using a minimum number of probes.


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[Assistant] That's a model of a file system that is pretty workable. And so bee trees are a generalization of, uh, balanced trees that allow for this.


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[Assistant] The idea is to allow not just two or three keys per node, but a large number, like the number that can fit in a page.


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[Assistant] Might be, uh, m equals a thousand, m equals four thousand. Uh, and, well, we gotta have at least, uh, two, uh, keys at the root. Uh, and, and the only other restriction is that, uh, we don't want the nodes to get too empty.


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[Assistant] So we have less than m, but we want to have at least m over 2. And as you'll see, this is a generalization of 2, 3 trees that allows us to build balanced trees that are very, very shallow.


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[Assistant] Typically these are set up so that, uh, the, all the data is in the external nodes. And so the, uh, external nodes have no links, they just have keys.


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[Assistant] Uh, so it's got five keys, it's got, uh, uh, room for one more temporary one. Uh, and then what'll happen is when you insert into a full node, uh, it'll split, uh, in the same as before, and then we'll pass the, uh, split up causing, uh, a split, uh, uh, up higher.


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[Assistant] So the red keys in the internal nodes are copies of keys down below that direct the search.


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[Assistant] Uh, so, but for now the main idea is that, uh, it's, it's like a, uh, 2-3 tree, uh, except that we allow way more keys per node.


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[Assistant] Uh, and then when a node gets filled, it splits into two, uh, so a node's always between half full and full. If an m is a thousand, it splits in two, then each side has five hundred.


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[Assistant] And then we can use that property of the trees in the analysis to show that it's not going to be very many probes to get to any key.


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[Assistant] Uh, so the, uh, search is, uh, you know, just the same as we've been doing, just generalized. Uh, there's a list of keys at every internal node, uh, and, uh, that key, uh, tells you that then links for every key.


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[Assistant] Uh, so, uh, this link is for all the keys in the B tree that are between this key and the next one. Uh, in every case it's that way. So if we're looking for E and this B tree, we go down the left link.


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[Assistant] Uh, and then we'd get on the second length because E is between D and H, and that's just the way it organized. And then when you get to an external node, you just look for it. And so that's, uh, uh, all searches terminated in an external node. And otherwise, it's just a generalization of what we just did.


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[Assistant] Uh, it comes into the node on the left, uh, and then that makes that temporarily over full. Uh, it's got one too many, so we split it into two nodes and that causes us to add a new entry into this internal, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, in this case it's a C, which is the smallest one in this new page. And that has to be added, and we can move all those over, there's plenty of time by the memory model.


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[Assistant] You could have some hybrid structure where you use something different for the internal model, but usually it's fine just to do that.


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[Assistant] Uh, now that one becomes over full, uh, so it has to split, uh, and we have to create a new root, uh, just in the same way as we've been doing.


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[Assistant] And so the end result is that a search or an insertion in a B-tree of order m, that's where we're putting m keys per page, requires between log base m minus 1m and log base m over 2m probes.


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[Assistant] So what power do you have to raise 500 to to get bigger than n?


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[Assistant] In practice, that's going to be like four or five. And we can keep the root page in memory.


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[Assistant] You can get to any piece of data, even if it's trillions of pieces of data. It's a huge, huge file. You can get to any one with only five or six probes. That's quite amazing.


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[Assistant] Really an astounding example of algorithmic technology, uh, doing something that, uh, you wouldn't really, uh, necessarily think that, uh, you could do so easily. Maintain a dynamic, uh, search symbol table with trillions of keys so that you can get to any key just by looking five or six places. Uh, but that's what beat trees provide for us.


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[Assistant] This is a simulation that shows a growing bee tree. So when a page, at the top, there's just one page that fills up. When it fills up, it's red.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, and that splits into two half pages. And then keys get added on one side or the other. Uh, so, uh, each, uh, line in this table, uh, some page is getting a new key. And eventually one of them fills up and splits.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now we have four pages, and now this time the first one fills up and splits, uh, and so forth. So, uh, the black is the occupied part of the page, the white's the unoccupied part, uh, and fold the page about to split, then right below there's two pages. So this shows the process of building a large p- bee tree.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, uh, kind of half empty. It's a little more than half empty, usually, uh, analysis shows. And, and people, uh, have variants of these algorithms that keep it, uh, m-much more than half empty if that kind of space is a, uh, is a consideration.


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[Assistant] So, as I've mentioned, red, black trees and bee trees are widely used as system symbol tables.


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[Assistant] The Java implementation of TreeMap and TreeSet is red-black trees. C++ standard template library uses red-black trees. And it's also used in the Linux kernel and in many other systems.


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[Assistant] Uh, my friend, uh, Philippe Flageolet, uh, who recently died but was a famous French mathematician, uh, sent me an email, uh, late one night. He was quite excited because, you know, he was watching a rerun, uh, on, uh, an English, uh,


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[Assistant] Actually, Canadian TV show on French TV. I didn't know he spent his time doing that, but he was very excited because he saw this clip.


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[Assistant] So, not only is there some excitement in that dialogue, but it's also technically correct, which you don't often find with math and popular culture or computer science. A red-black tree tracks every simple path from a node to a descendant leaf with the same number of black nodes. They got that right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's also true of bee trees and both of these methods are very effective and widely used.


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[Assistant] Ash, we're not running, stop just for once and enjoy it. Stop being a whiner, just go with it.


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[Assistant] All the rogues are in second class. Haven't seen any sign of Shinra though. We can ditch the uniforms.


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[Assistant] The whole ship is crawling with thieves. They're everywhere. Please, you have to help. Copy. We're on it. Good. I'll round up the stragglers, but there's a lot of ground to cover. You, give me a hand.


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[Assistant] I'm so sorry, we like just stopped our wheelie rentals for the day. You're kidding me. What do we do instead, Tifa?


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[Assistant] Sup bro, forget something? Or did you just miss the unbeatable ambiance of my seaside paradise? Either way, I'm glad you're here, cause I was actually hoping to ask you for a little favor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Figured I'd make the most of my financial solvency and give the inn a total makeover. Thing is... You short on hands?


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[Assistant] Ah, if only my dear bro. Kinda the opposite problem actually.


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[Assistant] So yeaah, it's your classic existential crisis. You get the idea. Uuuh.


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[Assistant] I told you to stay out of sight! You're just gonna confuse him! Aren't you supposed to be out shopping anyway? Go on, shoot! Aww. How come he gets to talk to my bro and I don't? So unfair. Uh, see what I have to deal with?


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[Assistant] It's true. Oriani and I were separated at birth when he was ripped from our mother's arms. The creatures that stole him brought him up in the wild as one of their own and... Oh, he's not my twin!


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[Assistant] Turns out a few of them managed to stick around somehow. And I think they might have even multiplied.


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[Assistant] Oh, but I am. I sent a crew to fetch materials and haven't heard a word from them since. Turns out I can't rely on myself. My other selves.


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[Assistant] You'd be doing us a solid by tracking him down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, we were looking for a part to help us repair the boiler, but it turns out nobody makes it anymore. Then we thought, why don't we just make it ourselves? So to do that, we're hunting for a transmuter chip. Any luck? Sure wish we had a chocobo right about now. Okay, I'll take it from here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We're looking for instructions on how to craft a boiler bath.


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[Assistant] And if you find one of those chips, feel free to just transmute it yourself. Are you trying to give us even more work? You two are the best!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, actually, there's one more.


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[Assistant] Said he wanted to give the hotel royal flair by putting the Tonberry King's crown on display. Last we heard, he was desert bound.


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[Assistant] Well, we got a boiler to fix, so we're gonna head back. Our other life is in your hands, bro.


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[Assistant] You see, we're renovating the hotel. And I thought a Tonberry King's crown would give the place that palatial feel. But it's uh, somewhere over there.


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[Assistant] Rumor has it, the Tonberry King lives somewhere nearby.


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[Assistant] Listen bro, I don't know if you were planning to check out the dunes, but if you are, you'd really be doing me a solid if you brought me back that crown. Preferably in the most pristine condition possible.


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[Assistant] We johnies are delicate flowers that wilt in the desert heat.


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[Assistant] Mr. President, please. What is this really about?


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[Assistant] Well, talk about burying the lead. Heidegger, I'll need troops.


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[Assistant] Many centuries back, a Roman king called Numa made a calendar according to 12 lunar cycles which approximately take 354 days. But as even numbers were considered unlucky, Numa rounded off days to 355.


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[Assistant] He also made each month odd numbered, leaving one month, that is, February's, with 28 days to reach the total of 355.


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[Assistant] But as the Earth takes 365.24 days to travel around the sun, seasons and weather conditions started mismatching with the 355 day calendar.


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[Assistant] He made the calendar into 365 days by adding days in each month except February. As still, 0.24 days were pending each year. After every 4 years, he added one day to February, making it a leap year. Thus, February has 28 days except during leap year.


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[Assistant] The human voice. It's the instrument we all play.


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[Assistant] Why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here, seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large. The habits that we can all fall into. First, gossip. Speaking ill of somebody who's not present.


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[Assistant] Not a nice habit and we know perfectly well the person gossiping five minutes later will be gossiping about us. Second judging.


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[Assistant] We know people who are like this in conversation and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. Third, negativity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can fall into this. My mother in the last years of her life became very, very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day I said to her, it's October the first today, and she said, I know, isn't it dreadful?


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[Assistant] We've all met this guy, maybe we've all been this guy. Some people have a blame thrower.


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[Assistant] They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions. And again, hard to listen to somebody who's being like that. Penultimate, the six of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration.


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[Assistant] It demeans our language actually sometimes. For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it?


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[Assistant] And then of course this exaggeration becomes lying out and out lying and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us. And finally, dogmatism. The confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated,


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[Assistant] You're listening into the wind, you know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that.


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[Assistant] So here they are. Seven deadly sins of speaking. These are things I think we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this? Yes there is.


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[Assistant] I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately these things spell a word.


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[Assistant] The word is hail, and it has a great definition as well. I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I'm talking about this definition too. Greet or acclaim enthusiastically, which is I think how our words will be received if we stand on these four things. So what do they stand for? See if you can guess. The H, honesty, of course. Being true in what you say, being straight and clear. The A is authenticity.


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[Assistant] Just being yourself. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth which I think is a lovely way to put it. The I is integrity.


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[Assistant] Being your word, actually doing what you say and being somebody people can trust. And the L is love. I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well.


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[Assistant] Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time.


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[Assistant] I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. So hail.


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[Assistant] Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. You have an amazing toolbox, this instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now, and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking. Register, for example.


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[Assistant] Now, falsetto registers may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. You can locate your voice, however. So if I talk up here in my nose, you can hear the difference. If I go down here in my throat, which is where most of us speak from most of the time,


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[Assistant] But, if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. You hear the difference?


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[Assistant] And we have timbre. It's the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. Well, if that's not you,


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[Assistant] That's not the end of the world. Because you can train. Go get a voice coach.


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[Assistant] And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice.


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[Assistant] Then prosody. I love prosody. This is the sing song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's route one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all.


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[Assistant] That's where the word monotonic comes from, or monotonous, monotone. Also we have repetitive prose that are now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question. When it's actually not a question, it's a statement.


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[Assistant] And if you repeat that one over and over, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame. So let's try and break that habit.


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[Assistant] Pace. I can get very, very excited by saying something really, really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize. And at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence.


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[Assistant] There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful.


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[Assistant] Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. Where did you leave my keys? Where did you leave my keys? It's a slightly different meaning in those two deliveries. And finally volume. I can get really excited.


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[Assistant] Some people broadcast the whole time, try not to do that. That's called sodcasting.


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[Assistant] Imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice.


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[Assistant] Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage. Asking for a raise.


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[Assistant] A wedding speech, whatever it is. If it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on. And no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice.


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[Assistant] Actually, let me show you how to do that. Would you all like to stand up for a moment?


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[Assistant] I'm going to show you the six vocal warm up exercises that I do before every talk I ever do.


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[Assistant] This is where we are now, right? We speak not very well into people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. I have talked about that on this stage in different phases. What would the world be like?


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[Assistant] If we were speaking powerfully to people who are listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose. Or to make that a bit larger.


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[Assistant] And consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound. That would be a world that does sound beautiful and one where understanding would be the norm. And that is an idea worth spreading. Thank you.


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[Assistant] We can begin again in the morning. Please be here at ten o'clock.


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[Assistant] For hundreds of years, alchemy has captured our imaginations, taking center stage in games, in novels, in films. It became popular in the Middle Ages, but it has existed in one form or another for thousands of years. And at the heart of it was the quest to create the philosopher's stone.


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[Assistant] A waxy, red material that alchemists believed could turn ordinary metals into gold. Unfortunately for them, of course, there is no such thing as the philosopher's stone, and this is impossible. Unless they are radioactive or in a nuclear reactor, atoms are stuck forever as the same element. But while on that hopeless quest, alchemists


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[Assistant] So although we often talk about alchemy in the same way we might describe magic, it actually formed the foundation of modern chemistry and medicine, and it led


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[Assistant] Before Mendeleev put together his draft of the Periodic Table in 1869, alchemists


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[Assistant] worked mostly off Aristotle's understanding of the elements back from around 300 BCE. Aristotle had proposed that all matter was divided into four elements — water, earth, fire, and air. But through their experimentation, alchemists discovered some of the official chemical elements we know today. One of those was phosphorus.


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[Assistant] That was just a normal Tuesday for him. Either way, when it was done, Brandt was left with a tar-like substance, which he heated again with sand and charcoal. He kept the mixture at the highest temperature he could sustain, and after many hours, a white vapor formed and then condensed into thick drops that glowed brightly


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[Assistant] Absolutely. But weirdly enough, this is basically the same process used to produce phosphorus today, although instead of P, we use phosphate ore from the ground, so against all odds,


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[Assistant] That led Boyle to make some educated guesses, and he began to also experiment with urine, discovering the secret of phosphorus for himself. And at that point,


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[Assistant] The secret was out for good. Boyle not only published the recipe for phosphorus, he also used it to create an early prototype of phosphorus-tipped matches. Next, alchemy is also responsible for the discovery of three super important chemicals called the mineral acids.


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[Assistant] As part of their hunt for the philosopher's stone. This time, these acids interested alchemists because of their unique properties. For one, when mixed with other substances, they helped transform one compound into another. Not like lead into gold, but stuff like turning baking soda into table salt.


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[Assistant] That seems like a pretty significant transformation, so maybe lead to gold is possible. Also, when concentrated and combined with each other, the mineral acids could create increase.


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[Assistant] To make hydrochloric acid, alchemists just heated table salt in a crucible. That broke the salt into compounds, including chlorine gas, and that reacted with water in the air to make hydrochloric acid. But other processes seemed a little more complicated, or at least,


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[Assistant] Like many of these stories, it's not clear what they were ultimately up to besides the whole make-the-philosopher-stone bit. But in the al-Razi story, he somehow found himself


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[Assistant] It was often mixed with water and other impurities, so again, this is not how we make it today. But sulfuric acid is still widely used, of course. In particular, it's a key ingredient in the production of phosphoric acid, which is a major component of fertilizers and pesticides.


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[Assistant] It's also used in the iron and steel industry to remove rust from metal before it's sold, and it has roles in paper making, petroleum refining, and water purification. And because sulfuric acid is great for dissolving organic material, it's often used in drain cleaners, so the next time you're unclogging your bathroom sink,


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[Assistant] That's not what every alchemist was interested in. Some were interested more in biology and medicine, and their work…


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[Assistant] He believed that the principles of alchemy could be applied to the organs of the body. Basically, he thought that the primary purpose of the body's organs was to separate the pure


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[Assistant] This was a broader definition of alchemy than most of his peers might have used. And Paracelsus wasn't so much interested in finding the philosopher's stone as he was in just understanding the world and the rules that governed it, which was very modern of him. One of his most controversial ideas was that our, quote, inner alchemist


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[Assistant] And while that definitely isn't right, in exploring the idea, Paracelsus came to a conclusion that still applies today.


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[Assistant] Whether something is poisonous is a question of dosage. At the time, he was researching the therapeutic properties of several compounds that his contemporaries thought were too poisonous to be used in medicine. But he argued that at low doses, poisonous substances could have important medicinal benefits.


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[Assistant] Conversely, large amounts of anything, even water and oxygen, could be poisonous. And he was totally right, and people even today struggle with this idea that it's okay to have small amounts of things that would otherwise be poisonous. This was a dramatically new way of thinking about poison, and it led to a new science.


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[Assistant] Of problems, as a science? At the time, alchemists were looked at with suspicion, particularly by the Church, who worried that alchemists were heretics or practitioners of witchcraft. So, to avoid trouble, many kept their findings secret. Maybe just to avoid people asking, why did you need so much urine? When they did write notes, they wrote them in code so that no one else would be able to make sense of them.


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[Assistant] You know, modern-day historians trying to piece together the history of science. Many were also suspicious of their peers and reluctant to share their results with each other. This secrecy meant that new compounds weren't given standardized names and were possibly discovered multiple times by different alchemists. And because there was of course no good peer review process, alchemists


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[Assistant] The only people who could prove them wrong were other alchemists. And because alchemists didn't share their methods,


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[Assistant] It often took forever for claims to be disproven. Also, there was no established scientific method. So many alchemists' investigations were nothing like the experiments of scientists today, which are based around testing.


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[Assistant] Others had the same goals as modern scientists, to understand the rules that governed the world around them. Still, as modern scientific thought developed and more rigorous standards became commonplace,


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[Assistant] Alchemy eventually faded away, and the chemistry that we know today emerged.


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[Assistant] That science doesn't always need to get it right on the first try to be important and useful. Through testing and experimentation, we can sort out our missteps and distill them down into something closer to the truth. We will probably never know everything about the universe, but if we consistently test ourselves and the world around us,


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[Assistant] We can start to uncover big pieces of it. The result might not be as shiny as gold


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[Assistant] But it will be a whole lot more valuable. If you liked this episode, you can thank our patrons on Patreon. We could not make this show without them, so to all our patrons, thank you for giving us the ability to dive deep into science and history and make more content like this. If you want to learn more about becoming a patron and supporting free science education and communication on the internet, you can go to patreon.com slash SciShow.


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[Assistant] So you should be, because the Barossa is home to some of Australia's best world-class wines.


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[Assistant] Where we're standing here at Jacob's Creek Heritage House is where all of that began.


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[Assistant] But he is now the chief winemaker.


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[Assistant] And what we've done is pulled together a very special pantry featuring the best from the Barossa and also around the state. The Barossa cheeses are unbelievable. The dried fruits are famous from up here. Schultz and Stein, you smorgas. Little bunion mushrooms. And also it wouldn't be complete without some Jacob's Creek wine. You're going to have two hours to prep and then service will begin.


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[Assistant] So think about that and how you're going to employ those in the dishes you cook.


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[Assistant] I know that I don't need to remind you of the consequences, but I will. Least impressive team, into elimination tomorrow where one of you will go home. You ready? Yes. Let's go. Time starts now!


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[Assistant] So let's work our way back, starting with what's freshest in our memory, those desserts. Blue team.


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[Assistant] Red team, we're twenty minutes to go. We were deeply concerned that you wouldn't get anything up, but...


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[Assistant] You got there and you got there in style with a solid combination of perfectly cooked beef.


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[Assistant] So, mains, went to the red team. George?


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[Assistant] While regaling you with daring stories from her youth, it might be hard to believe your grandmother used to be a trapeze artist.


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[Assistant] However, the bad backs, elbow pain and creaky knees so common in older people is more than just old age. In fact, the source of this stiffness plagues many young people as well.


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[Assistant] The culprit is arthritis, a condition that causes inflammation and pain in the joints of over 90 million people in the US alone. But are stiff, creaky joints really inevitable? What makes arthritis so pervasive, and why haven't we found a cure for this widespread condition?


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[Assistant] The first hurdle is that arthritis is actually a spectrum of over 100 different arthritic conditions. All these conditions share symptoms of joint pain and inflammation, but the origin and severity of those symptoms vary widely.


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[Assistant] Even the most common type, osteoarthritis, is trickier to prevent than one might think. It's a general misconception that arthritis is confined to old age. The origins of osteoarthritis can often be traced to a patient's early life from any seemingly ordinary joint injury.


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[Assistant] Following impact, immune cells rush in to help clean and repair the damaged site and begin pumping out enzymes, including matrix metalloprosinases and agracanases.


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[Assistant] These enzymes clear out the damaged tissue and contribute to inflammation. But while this rapid swelling helps protect the joint during recovery, inadequately healed tissue can cause these immune cells to overstay their welcome.


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[Assistant] The continuing flood of enzymes starts to degrade the cartilage, weakening the joint and leading to arthritis later on.


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[Assistant] Not all forms of arthritis can simply be traced to an old sports injury.


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[Assistant] This condition is actually an autoimmune disease in which autoantibodies target natively produced proteins, some of which are secreted by cartilage cells.


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[Assistant] We still don't know what causes this behaviour, but the result is that the body treats joint tissue like a foreign invader. Immune cells infiltrate the joint, despite there being no tissue damage to repair.


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[Assistant] This response leads to chronic inflammation, which destroys bone and cartilage.


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[Assistant] Yet another condition, spondyloarthritis, has similarities to both of the conditions we've covered.


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[Assistant] Patients experience continuous inflammation in the joints and at the sites where ligaments and tendons attach to bones, even without any initial injury. This leads to the flood of enzymes and degradation seen in osteoarthritis, but is driven by different inflammatory proteins called cytokines.


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[Assistant] As the enzymes eat away at cartilage, the body attempts to stabilize smaller joints by fusing them together. This process sometimes leads to outgrowth, called bone spurs, which also cause intense stiffness and joint pain.


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[Assistant] With so many factors causing arthritis, our current treatments are tailored to tackle specific symptoms rather than the underlying causes.


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[Assistant] These range from promising Macy techniques, which harvest cells from small pieces of cartilage to grow replacement tissue, to a technique called microfracture, where surgeons create small holes in the bone, allowing bone marrow stem cells to leak out and form new cartilage.


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[Assistant] As a last resort, people with withered cartilage can even undergo full joint replacements.


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[Assistant] But outside these drastic measures, the underlying drivers of autoimmune arthritis still present a unique treatment challenge.


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[Assistant] Scientists are making progress with therapies that block TNF alpha, one of the primary proteins causing inflammation in rheumatoid arthritis. But even this approach only treats the symptoms of the condition, not the cause.


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[Assistant] In the meantime, some of our best defences against arthritis are lifestyle choices. Maintaining a healthy weight to take pressure off joints. Low impact exercises like yoga or cycling. And avoiding smoking.


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[Assistant] These arthritis fighting behaviours can help us lead longer lives as we continue to research cures and treatments for the huge diversity of arthritic conditions.


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[Assistant] Want to know what exactly is happening in our bodies as we age and why we age at all? Find out with this video.


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[Assistant] You've been to the weapon shop? It's ridiculously loud and I like it though.


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[Assistant] Well, sounds like you got a fan, son. I wonder though.


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[Assistant] About time I had some competition. Assuming Esther's not full of it.


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[Assistant] It's Shinra. They just showed up and started shooting. I think they're trying to cover up what happened at the reactor. To pin the blame on-


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[Assistant] Now, where can a man get a drink around here? Hee hee hee. Yoo hoo, waitress!


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[Assistant] Back in the kitchen, good to see you here. What about the bling boys? Never, never in the history of MasterChef has anyone worn two pins on their apron.


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[Assistant] So this is how it's gonna work. Each round,


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[Assistant] You have to replicate Shannon's Brunoise to the best of your ability.


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[Assistant] You have 10 minutes to make that beautiful brunoise of carrot, celery, and onion. And 10 minutes starts now.


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[Assistant] Reese, you need to hurry up, mate. You need to hurry up. Careful, careful, son. Stay focused, Reese.


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[Assistant] Right you two, you ready for round three? Yes. Good stuff, we're loving this. This is all about the salted caramel. Move up to your benches.


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[Assistant] Sasha, you'll have 75 minutes on the clock.


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[Assistant] Andy is a professional, slight disadvantage, you only get 60 minutes.


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[Assistant] Sashi, you also get the choice of ingredients with which you'll hero in your dish. Andy?


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[Assistant] You have to hero the same ingredients that Sashi picks. But here's the kicker.


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[Assistant] You won't know what ingredients you're cooking with until your time starts.


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[Assistant] As always, it's a blind tasting, so the three of us will have absolutely no idea who's cooked which dish.


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[Assistant] I'm really excited because we know Sashi is a brilliant cook. He's already won a pin and he could win another one. Maybe history will be made.


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[Assistant] What do you think? I like it. It's nice and clean. Nice expression of the lamb.


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[Assistant] Yeah. Nice looking dish. I like it. Sauce looks good.


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[Assistant] Look at that. That's beautifully cooked. Really nicely cooked. That is rock and roll, that is. That classic rosé is beautiful.


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[Assistant] Look, the only disadvantage for me, honestly, is just the presentation. Very tasty, I'm salivating, I'm trying to, you know, get all that sauce off the plate. Delicious.


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[Assistant] Two great dishes. Isn't it nice when we get to taste two beautiful dishes? Question is though, is that second pin gonna go off?


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[Assistant] You know there are some days where we love our job, don't we? And today was one of those days. Two beautiful dishes. Thank you.


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[Assistant] Whether or not Sashi has made MasterChef history and won that second pin.


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[Assistant] Okay, so sashi, that meant you cooked? Lemon bi purée. Beautiful. Andy, let's score your dish first.


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[Assistant] It was a beautiful looking dish and I thought that it was clean and beautifully elegant and I scored it 8 out of 10.


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[Assistant] I'm fine. You were right, just needed some sleep.


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[Assistant] Is that how you were back in university? Not quite that great, I hope.


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[Assistant] Whatever. Let's see how it stacks up against the real thing.


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[Assistant] And what makes you say that? The cameras. It's not his style to avoid the limelight.


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[Assistant] Cuddle up with a partner in our cozy gondolas and see our golden paradise in a whole new light.


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[Assistant] The memories you make here are sure to last a lifetime.


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[Assistant] Your attention please! We are currently experiencing some minor technical difficulties. While our technicians are working hard to resolve this issue. For your safety, we ask that you follow all staff instructions.


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[Assistant] I'm really nervous doing this without a recipe. This is going to be really hard.


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[Assistant] First thing I need to do, I take out that butter and put it in the microwave for 45 seconds to melt it.


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[Assistant] Yeah, looking good mate. I'm looking at the eggs and I'm going, do I need two? Do I need three? You want this pin?


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[Assistant] I'll start with two. Ah, that, three.


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[Assistant] Two teaspoons of vinegar. Get on the double boiler. It's looking good.


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[Assistant] Time's running out, I'm whisking. He's giving it a good, good whisk. Good beat. He's giving it a good beat. I'm taking it off the heat, putting it back on the heat, taking it off the heat, making sure that the temperature's just right. It should be just nice and warm. It's coming together.


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[Assistant] I'm tasting it and it needs more acidity. So I add a bit more vinegar and a bit more lemon juice. So far so good.


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[Assistant] I want this pinned so badly right now. I'm up against Sashi, I can't let him through.


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[Assistant] It's thickening up. I'm having salt in there. How do you know how much salt to put in? It's a lot. It's so sweet and so bitter. You actually need a lot.


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[Assistant] To the West, Chapter 84, The Sad King.


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[Assistant] The streets were lined with people selling food and other goods.


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[Assistant] he pointed to a crowd of people reading a sign on a wall the travelers walked over to the crowd


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[Assistant] The king looked up, but didn't say anything. The guard whispered to the travelers.


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[Assistant] Hiss the Tang monk. Show some respect. Wukong ignored the monk and looked at the king.


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[Assistant] Several small demons were standing outside a cave entrance.


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[Assistant] A large demon with broad shoulders came out of the cave. He wore three bells.


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[Assistant] Olives. We've seen a lake and a salt bush growing.


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[Assistant] I feel responsible for my team being in elimination today. Like, I'm the captain. And if I use my community pin, it kind of feels as though I'm just jumping ship.


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[Assistant] So, today, you're cooking with chalk.


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[Assistant] The prosciutto around the outside, I would have preferred skin. What the prosciutto is doing is overtaking. It's not celebrating the chicken in that way.


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[Assistant] I wish you had cooked the chicken a little slower, uh, so it's more moist.


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[Assistant] I find it very refreshing and alive.


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[Assistant] The floweriness, uhm, which means it's, it's overcooked.


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[Assistant] I'm so thrilled with that perfection of the chicken where it's, it's shimmering. It is just so perfect.


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[Assistant] Really, when you think of the simplicity of it and the fact that we're feeling this way, uhm, it's a good signal.


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[Assistant] Welcome back. Today we're going to look at some symbol table applications to give you some idea of how, uh, symbol tables might be used by client programs for practical problems. First one we'll look at, uh, seems even simpler than regular symbol tables and that's about sets.


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[Assistant] We want to be able to create an empty set. We want methods to add a key to the set and to check whether a given key is in the set or not. To remove a key, uh, and maybe return the number of keys in the set and also have an iterator to iterate through keys in the set.


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[Assistant] This is simpler than symbol tables because it's got no associated value. That's a very simple API, but of course we want to be able to do these, uh, operations efficiently. How would we go ahead and implement that?


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[Assistant] Well, if you think about it for just a minute, you see that what you need to do is just remove all references to value from any of the symbol table implementations that we look at. The implementation is easy. Take one of our symbol table implementations and get rid of the code that refers to values.


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[Assistant] So, uh, the way we'll set that up is to think about, uh, having a list of files, uh, a list of words in a file that are exceptional in some way. In this case, we'll have the word, uh, file list.txt, uh, that has these four words in it. Was it the enough?


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[Assistant] Uh, so, uh, there's two, uh, complementary ways to look at this. Uh, one is so-called whitelisting, where we want to take the words in that file, and then we have some other much bigger file.


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[Assistant] And what we wanna do is print out all the occurrences of our exceptional words in our given file. Those are the ones that we care about that we wanna get through.


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[Assistant] So in this case, uh, tinyTale.txt, the first couple of words from, uh, Tale of Two Cities, uh, and these words appear often. It was the, uh, it was the, uh,


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[Assistant] Uh, another complementary approach is to think of these words as words that we don't want to ever see. They're blacklists and we want to take them out of our source file.


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[Assistant] So, uh, a blacklist client would print out all the words in our source file, tinytail.txt, except was it the enough? In this case, best times, worst times, and so forth.


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[Assistant] Uh, such as the ones listed here. For example, you might have a spell checker where you want to identify misspelled words.


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[Assistant] So then your key would be a word or string, uh, and in your exceptional list would be words that are in the dictionary. And you'd want to print out all the words that are not in the dictionary. That's an example of an exception filter.


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[Assistant] Uh, or, uh, in a browser, you might want to mark your visited pages or block sites, uh, and so forth. Uh, or like the one at the bottom, uh, credit cards. Uh, maybe, uh, you run a credit card company and you want to check for stolen cards.


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[Assistant] Uh, then your keys would be numbers, uh, and in your list, uh, might be kind of short, which would be the stolen cards that you know about.


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[Assistant] And you'd want to run a whitelist filter for those cards and print out in your long list of transactions whichever transactions have the stolen cards. So that's just a couple of examples of exception filters.


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[Assistant] What's the implementation of an exception filter? Here's a simple one using the set API that we just articulated. So we start by creating an empty set of strings. And again, since we don't have associated values, we just have the one generic for strings.


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[Assistant] Uh, and then, uh, create a new input stream, uh, from, from the first argument, so that's the name of the file that contains the exceptional words. Uh, and so, uh, this just reads those strings while the input string is not empty and then adds them to the set.


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[Assistant] Uh, so then now we have our set of exceptional words, uh, and now from standard input, uh, we read words. As long as our set contains the word, we print it out. If it doesn't contain it, we don't print it out. Uh, so that's an example of a whitelist filter. And to implement blacklist, uh, we just, uh,


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[Assistant] Right, tuck in guys. Tease it apart.


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[Assistant] Excellent. If you can continue this you will nail it.


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[Assistant] Complacency doesn't exist in this kitchen, yeah? You don't want to slip behind. 45 minutes down, 2 hours to go. Come on.


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[Assistant] What does it say? Read it out loud. Read it out loud.


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[Assistant] It's not just some purine, a bit of duck and some kale leaves. There's a lot going on on the dish, so you've gotta be restraining the amount.


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[Assistant] Okay, the chestnut puree's not there, but I get a bit of that chestnut flavour from the sauce.


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[Assistant] You've also given us some incredible dishes. The crab with the XO sauce. The Korean chicken with extra crispy skin. The coriander noodles. I mean, how can we forget them? You've brought us some cracking dishes and we're gonna miss you. But Lisa, we're sorry now it's time to say goodbye.


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[Assistant] You remember how our parents used to tell us that when a person died, their spirit would cross Mount Nebo?


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[Assistant] I didn't. At least I had my suspicions. But I buried them. I wanted it to be true so badly. I didn't want to think my mom was just gone.


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[Assistant] Plus, Emilio and the others said they'd help me find her, so up the mountain we went.


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[Assistant] I hit my head pretty hard when I fell off that cliff. Think it messed with my memory. Everything from around that time's a blur. I only knew what the others told me. Didn't even occur to me to question them.


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[Assistant] But now I know that's not what happened at all when the rest of them ran. You were there for me.


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[Assistant] Yeah, at least that's how it looked to me while I was in there.


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[Assistant] The planet. The lifestream. Us.


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[Assistant] A singular leader telling them what to do. And you might think you know why. Because schooling helps fish avoid being eaten. But that's only part of the story! To really understand schooling, you don't just have to think about biology. You also have to dive deep into psychology.


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[Assistant] And into physics! There are technically two types of fish crowds, schools and shoals. Schools are highly coordinated groups that seem to move like a single organism, while shoals are looser, less organized gatherings that can be huge, like,


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[Assistant] The size of a city. Still, despite their differences, both of these benefit fish. Beyond reducing the odds, they will disappear into a hungry mouth. You see, studies find that communal fish have lower metabolic rates than loners. That means they use less energy going about their day-to-day lives.


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[Assistant] So they're healthier and have more stamina. In fact, researchers have found that fish living in groups have higher growth rates


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[Assistant] Protect fish from predators because it's helpful to have a lot of eyes scanning for danger. Plus, it can be difficult for predators to target individual fishes in a blurry mass of fins and tails. But it isn't just scientists who know there's safety in numbers. The fish know it.


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[Assistant] In 2016, researchers found that fish living in groups were calmer and less stressed than solo fish. And less stress means there's less energy spent stressing. So there's more available for things like growth and reproduction. But stress reduction isn't the only way schools help fish save energy. There's also…


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[Assistant] Couldn't figure out what actually goes on with them. Then, for a 2020 study, scientists came up with a solution.


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[Assistant] The researchers made robots that looked like carp. They put them in a tank and measured their swimming patterns more than 10,000 times. Based on this, they made predictions about how schooling fish optimized their speed and energy use.


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[Assistant] Then, they tested those predictions on free swimming goldfish. They found that by beating their tails out of sync with the fishes in front of them when they're close,


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[Assistant] And matching their tailbeats when farther away, these animals could capitalize on the small vortexes of moving water made by other fish. So they save energy by constantly adjusting the rhythm of their tailbeats


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[Assistant] And by chilling out with a bunch of their best buds. And that means fish always benefit from schooling, even…


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[Assistant] Thanks for asking! If you find yourself wondering about things like this a lot, I bet you would enjoy other quick question episodes like Can Soda Save a Dying Fish? So maybe watch that one next! And you might consider clicking the subscribe button and ringing the notification bell. That way, you can catch every episode


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[Assistant] George has pulled out his infamous velvet bag and, uh, handing out bandanas.


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[Assistant] Okay, go for it girls. Today I'm captain of the red team.


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[Assistant] Gina and Sarah are working on the entree of marinated quail with roasted capsicum and crispy sage, while Aldo and myself are gonna tackle the main of a beef steak and cauliflower.


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[Assistant] If we're doing cauliflower, I think we just keep it really simple but good flavours. Yep. Fiery's definitely have to have a big appetite. A great protein like steak on the barbie should really satisfy them.


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[Assistant] Chloe and Jess are both very strong with desserts and they come up with smoked chocolate ganache with some blackberries and fennel.


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[Assistant] I've got a great team behind me and I've got to step it up a notch and put up a good dish tonight.


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[Assistant] Today, Red Team's entree is marinated quail with charred capsicum and crispy sage.


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[Assistant] It's gonna be a real task to try and keep these fires on point. Vi is really a fickle mistress. If you don't pay her enough attention, she's just gonna go out on ya. And if you give her too much, she's gonna burn the house down.


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[Assistant] Today Red Team's main is going to be a beef steak with roasted cauliflower. The rib rack at the moment, I'm just removing the bones.


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[Assistant] We want to give them a hearty steak and veggie meal and for the veggie element, we're going to champion cauliflower. We're going to cook it two ways.


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[Assistant] If we were to serve that, it'd just ruin everything. I think we've butchered the first lot of cauliflower, so uh, Aldo's gonna crack on with the next lot. The problem is we don't have enough cauliflower to make the mash. We've gotta come up with another element and fast.


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[Assistant] I've had a huge problem with the barbecue pits and everything's fallen by the wayside with the main. Although how are we going on those zucchinis, mate?


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[Assistant] After having a few issues with the cauliflower, we're trying to add a smoked zucchini salad.


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[Assistant] I'm gonna have to now. The biggest concern for me at the moment is that I haven't even started on the steak yet.


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[Assistant] I don't have enough time anymore to cook it whole. I'm removing the steak from the bone just so that we can get them cooked in time.


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[Assistant] Oh, I've taken a deep breath, I'm feeling really happy. All the guys have pulled together really well, as I knew they would. The steak's cooked perfectly, the zucchini tastes good, and hopefully it all ties together with the cauliflower.


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[Assistant] Agree to the terms and we'll take care of the rest.


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[Assistant] Cloud. The letter, if you don't mind.


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[Assistant] Shears asked us to rescue his patient. He didn't say anything about how we should deal with the kidnapper.


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[Assistant] This lecture will be concerned with poetry and poetry at a very critical moment in English history.


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[Assistant] As we've seen, it hit supremely high levels in the early 17th century. Recall, if you would, Milton and the metaphysicals. It hit another high level with the Augustans. Recall Dryden, Pope, and Johnson.


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[Assistant] And a third high level, uh, in the Romantic Revival.


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[Assistant] Arguably, as we've seen, it may be thought to have descended to something, if not a trough, or certainly a lower level in the Victorian period, as the novel seesawed supremely high. The novel was the, the form at that period. Fiction flowed, poetry ebbed. Sometimes it's the other way around.


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[Assistant] And in this lecture we, we confront a paradox. In fact, more of a conundrum. Total war.


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[Assistant] Does not normally coincide with great literature of any kind.


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[Assistant] During hostilities, people are too preoccupied with the matter in hand, fighting and winning or losing. But the so-called Great War,


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[Assistant] 1914 to 18, it was 1917 to 18 for the Americans. The Great War, which tore Europe apart for a century, saw the emergence during the hostilities, let's say while it was going on, while the guns were firing, of some of the finest poetry produced from England in the 20th century.


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[Assistant] Poetry as great, I would suggest, as that triggered by Coleridge and Wordsworth's lyrical ballads during the French Revolution. How and why did this happen?


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[Assistant] Well, that's the large question, the big question mark if you like, hovering over this lecture. And to answer that question,


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[Assistant] We must look at lives, and sadly, we must look at some premature deaths as well.


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[Assistant] But for starters, one can say that this war was not merely different. 1914 was not merely different by virtue of its scale as being a great war.


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[Assistant] True that weaponry was used of unprecedented lethality. The aerial bomber, the submarine and the tank, for example. And battlefield casualties were incurred on an unprecedented scale. But what made this war different from say the Franco-Prussian war of 1870?


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[Assistant] Was that it was not just the Germans that England was fighting.


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[Assistant] In a sense, it was also England that England was fighting. It was internecine, as well as being, as it were, a conflict between great nation states.


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[Assistant] At the heart of the war, articulated I think at its most precise in the poetry we'll be looking at.


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[Assistant] Is, is the sense that England, as I say, was, was somehow in conflict with itself, at war with itself, or, or more exactly, it was at war with a system of obsolete and illiberal moral codes and civic values, which altogether had made up Old England.


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[Assistant] So, to simplify, the enemy was not the Kaiser, but jingoism. Home front warriors. Colonel Blimp.


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[Assistant] Incompetent generals. A decadent establishment. Soft-faced profiteers. Those, those in fact were all English.


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[Assistant] And you can say, as I have said, that England was fighting England. That, it was a terrible thing. And obviously it caused all sorts of...


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[Assistant] Of difficulties, uh, for those living through that awful period of history, but nonetheless it created good poetry. There was in fact one, if you like, tiny silver lining, and we're looking at that silver lining.


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[Assistant] Now let me illustrate that conflict of England versus England.


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[Assistant] Or parts of England versus other parts of England, with one short poem by the angriest of the war poets, Siegfried Sassoon. He's not, as that first name might suggest, German, but English. Ultra English.


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[Assistant] The scenario of the poem is two ordinary soldiers, conscripted men, private soldiers as they're called, on their way up to the front, on the line up to death, as it was dramatically called. The casualties were horrendous.


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[Assistant] On their way to the front, the commander passes them on his horse, on his fine horse of course, the general. This is, this is, uhm, Sassoon's poem.


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[Assistant] Good morning, good morning, the General said when we met him last week on the way to the line.


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[Assistant] Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of them dead. And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.


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[Assistant] He's a cheery old card, granted Harry to Jack, as they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. But he did for them both with his plan of attack.


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[Assistant] The general, of course, will go back to the officer's mess at rear lines headquarters that evening and enjoy a good supper. Now who then is the enemy in this poem?


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[Assistant] Think back if you were to Tennyson's Charge of the Light Brigade, which we examined in detail. A general...


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[Assistant] On that engagement, Raglan did for 300 of his hussars there with a botched plan of attack.


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[Assistant] But the poet, Tennyson, does not criticize the army command or his country. He praises instead the bravery of the 600 who rode into the valley of death into the mouths of those Russian guns.


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[Assistant] The summoner blundered, but he doesn't actually sort of pin that blunder on, you know, the generals who in fact were culpable. Sassoon takes a very different line.


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[Assistant] Sassoon incidentally wrote that poem in 1916 and published it in 1918. This is the point I'm making, that this poetry came out hot from the anvil.


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[Assistant] Sassoon's nickname among his comrades for the ferocity of his own fighting was Mad Jack.


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[Assistant] He was, he was himself a great, a great fighter. So in fact, there's no cowardice, no, no


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[Assistant] No taint of cowardice in his conduct during the war. His given name, Siegfried, was German because his mother loved Wagner. It means joy and victory. Now I could devote a whole lecture to those ironies. In fact, England


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[Assistant] England had a German monarch at this time. They changed their name during the First World War to Windsor from Saxe-Coburg.


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[Assistant] There were all sorts of ironies here, but the bottom line is that 4 million people died.


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[Assistant] Now, firstly, the briefest of outlines of that great war in which, as I say, millions died, it's a necessary context, I think.


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[Assistant] It began, the war began, or the preconditions for the war originated, no one quite, no one quite knew how at the time, with an obscure street crime, the assassination of Emperor Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in the Balkans in late June 1914.


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[Assistant] Now the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which was a huge construct at that time, almost immediately fell apart.


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[Assistant] A succession struggle ensued and complex international alliances were invoked. There were all sorts of treaties and agreements which in fact were now called into play.


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[Assistant] The dominoes began to fall. By August 1914, war was inevitable. It was like a train crash. Everyone could see. It was, it was unnecessary and would be catastrophic, but no one could quite work out how to stop it. They didn't know where the brakes were.


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[Assistant] It would be a short, sharp war, it was thought. They would clear things up. They usually did. They were a bit like sort of, a bit like blowing a nose or something. It was actually Europe would be better afterwards.


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[Assistant] Three mighty powers were involved. On the one side, Germany, which after Bismarck's reforms was the mightiest military state since Rome. On the other, Imperial England, mistress of the seas and coloniser of vast tracts of the globe. And Republican France.


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[Assistant] So, it would be a serious fight. There were very values at war here, as well as nations.


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[Assistant] On the 3rd of August 1914, Germany declared war on France and invaded that country. Britain, linked by Treaty to France, sent an army, an expeditionary force, across the Channel.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, on another front, Russia, against whom Germany had also declared war, was decisively defeated, opening the way to revolution and the setting up of a Soviet state in 1917. Very big domino indeed.


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[Assistant] The whole of Europe, it seemed, was falling apart, and to the side, the Ottoman Empire was also an active, engaged player in this deadly game.


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[Assistant] The great age of kings, kaisers and tsars was coming to an end. But what would replace it? Well, in the short term, stalemate.


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[Assistant] The German advance was stopped short of Paris and three and a half years of bloody trench warfare ensued until eventually the stalemate was broken by the arrival of America into struggle in 1917 and the bleeding to death of Germany by army losses and a British naval blockade and new killing technologies.


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[Assistant] Notably the tank, which finally supplied the answer to the hitherto invincible machine gun nest.


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[Assistant] The carnage was fearful. Primitive bombers, zeppelins, airships could not inflict much damage on civilian populations, but blood was spilled in fearful quantities in the trenches, in what was effectively hand-to-hand, or at least close-quarter combat.


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[Assistant] There were, as I say, some four million British and French fatalities. Magnitudes more than in World War II. The European theatre of World War II.


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[Assistant] Whole generations were wiped out. And for what? A few yards of barbed-wired mud in most cases.


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[Assistant] Armistice, which was humiliatingly oppressive on Germany, was finally signed on the 11th of November, 1918. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month is still observed with two-minute silence in England as a memorial to the terrible losses of those four years.


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[Assistant] Now, the greatest poet produced by the war, Rufford Owen. Now, Owen was as angry as Sassoon, but more sensitive and experimental in his techniques. He was a greater poet. Owen focused on the suffering.


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[Assistant] All blood and sugar stick complained WB Yeats who thought Owen was too soft. A verdict with which I think posterity has heartily disagreed. Too soft I should say as a poet. Owen was another gallant soldier when it came to fighting.


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[Assistant] What I want to read out now is a representative Owen poem. Now, Owen, like Sassoon, was an infantry officer. He was decorated for gallantry.


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[Assistant] The war wounded Sassoon through his military cross, which is the second highest award for bravery in the British Army, into the Mersey River. So disgusted was he with the meaningless slaughter of offense and counteroffense in 1917, the war's bloodiest year. Oh, and didn't go quite that far.


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[Assistant] It was the responsibility of officers, and this is the background to the poem I'm about to read, it was the responsibility of officers, like Owen and Sir Soome, but also an officer, to write letters of condolence to, and where possible, visit the bereaved families of men killed under their command. But how to communicate the awful truth of war was impossible.


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[Assistant] So this is the, the poem of Owens that I want to read.


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[Assistant] A motto for the whole of that big show as the soldiers called it. The poet is contemplating a dead comrade still lying in the snow where he fell. Clearing up corpses in the trenches was a low priority action.


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[Assistant] Owen's poem, which shows the, I think the clear influence of Keats, has an emotional warmth which, which bordered on the erotic. There's anger, certainly, but also something else, a kind of defeated love. I think the, the corpse that he's addressing or discussing or talking about must be an enlisted man. Move him into the sun.


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[Assistant] Gently its touch awoke him once at home, whispering of fields unsown. Always had awoken, even in France, until this morning and this snow. If anything might rise him now, the kind old sun will know.


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[Assistant] Think how it wakes the seeds. Woke once the clays of a cold star. Our limbs, so dear achieved. Our sides, full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir. Was it for this the clay grew tall?


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[Assistant] Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil, break earth's sleep at all?


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[Assistant] Something collapsed at the end there, where in fact he, as it were, sort of confirms the title of futility. Why? What, what's it all about?


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[Assistant] Now technically, as I say, Owen is not just higher than Sassoon as a poet.


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[Assistant] And invoked throughout is Ecclesiastes, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And the anguished implied retort, was it for this the clay grew tall? Is this, is this


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[Assistant] Was it worth living if this is what dying is? So, cut off this, this unknown warrior's life was futile. But so too, the wall which cut off that life is futile. And then, hovering over it is, is that, that pessimistic cloud. Perhaps, you know, life too is futile.


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[Assistant] All these things are raised by the poem. Poetry answers no questions, but it does pose those questions in ways that we have to confront them. War poetry did not unsurprisingly begin on this


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[Assistant] Supremely angry disillusioned note. This is a mid-war poem, a late-war poem.


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[Assistant] Kipling-like patriotism, remember the white man's burden, and fine sentiment was the poetic mood of 1914 as the, as the nations marched to war.


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[Assistant] Now, the principal exponent of that mood, that phase, that early phase, is Rupert Brooke.


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[Assistant] Rupert Brooke was a very handsome, one could almost say beautiful young man, and like Owen and Sassoon, he was gay. Homosexuality inserts itself into this poetry in very interesting ways, one of the things which gives us, I think, a rather privileged perspective on it.


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[Assistant] Brooke was in fact called the handsomest young man in England by, who else, WB Yeats.


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[Assistant] Brook had close connections with the ultra-refined Bloomsbury group, whom we should be looking at in the next lecture. Brook was also a part of Genius.


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[Assistant] But it was a, compared to Owen, it was a conformist genius and Brooke was the, the, the laureate of the innocent pride in country and flag in, in queen or king, which propelled Britain unaware of the consequences into war.


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[Assistant] Uh, Brooke enlisted, volunteered, of course, although he was slightly overage and could have dodged that particular draft. And he died in the first year of the war. He never lived to see...


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[Assistant] The disillusioning stalemate that I was talking about earlier.


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[Assistant] He died not gallantly at the front, leading his men in a charge as into the valley of death, but he, and indeed as Owen died, Brooke died


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[Assistant] An infected mosquito bite. It was an inglorious demise. And that too has its irony. War doesn't obey any rules. War doesn't live up to our own images of it.


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[Assistant] Now, Brooks' reputation as a war poet rests on five war sonnets, as they're called. And the use of the antique sonnet form, associated, as you'll remember, with Shakespeare, above all, is another of his conformities. He writes a much more orthodox kind of sonnet than does Owen.


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[Assistant] Now the fourth of these sonnets, which is called The Soldier, is the one everyone knows, even if they don't know the name Rupert Brooke. This is how that wonderfully sonorous poem goes. As I say, it's very familiar.


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[Assistant] Uhm, very powerful, but one has to contextualise it as a poem of 1914.


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[Assistant] If I should die, think only this of me, that there's some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.


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[Assistant] There shall be in that rich earth a richer dust concealed, a dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, gave once her flowers to love, her ways to roam, a body of England's breathing English air, washed by the rivers, blessed by sons of home. It's lovely.


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[Assistant] And as Sassoon and Owen thought, wrong. As wrong as wrong can be. Dying is not beautiful. Dulce et decorum est is a lie. It's a fine and beautiful thing to die for your country. That Latin


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[Assistant] Tag means Owen wrote a poem under that name, Dolce Decorum, making the point ferociously. Now, in passing, one notes in


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[Assistant] In this poem, in Brooks' poem, a distinct difference in the American and British thinking about war.


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[Assistant] In Britain, master of an empire over which the sun never set, dying abroad for king and country was honorable. It staked a British claim on the planet as did the Union Jack, which, in the last throw of empire,


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[Assistant] To coincide with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Sir Edmund Hillary planted on the peak of Everest in June 1953, making Everest, in the mind of young school boys like myself, an English possession.


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[Assistant] America, by contrast, leaves no man behind and will go to almost any length to bring its fallen heroes home. The notion of a corner of a, a foreign field being forever American is wholly alien, I think, to, to that, that country's thinking about, about its, its war dead.


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[Assistant] Brooks' handful of poems, together with the fact of his death, was immediately recruited as pro-war propaganda, something which I think one can legitimately object to.


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[Assistant] What, what governments do in war is, is, is it quite often horrible that, that actually sort of, Brooke was mobilized after death, you know, like El Cid riding out dead on his horse. He was, he was used.


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[Assistant] Easter Sunday 1915, one year before the uprising in Ireland by the way. Easter is a kind of big moment in the Christian calendar. On Easter Sunday 1915, Dean Ing


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[Assistant] It's spelled I-N-G-E. The most celebrated church man in England read that sonnet, the soldier, from the pulpit of St. Paul's. The highest pulpit in the church, in the Anglican Church.


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[Assistant] Winston Churchill, then first Lord of the Admiralty, in other words Commander in Chief of the Royal Navy, wrote Brooks obituary in the London Times, the country's newspaper of record.


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[Assistant] Brook's name as, as the enumerable war memorial to be found to this day in even the smallest towns and villages across England. I was one quite, I was in one quite recently, a very small village. 50 people from that village died in 1914, 18. Six died in 1939, 45.


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[Assistant] The notion of living forevermore, that, that, that tag from Brook, you can find on any number of war memorials, which still stand, as I say, around, around England, in almost every town and village in Hamden.