 Welcome to Nerd Night East Bay. Awesome talks lined up for you tonight. Our first one is going to be about bees, which is very cool. I like it. We all love bees. I want to remind everyone a couple things. Number one, we have Oakland Public Library here. Manna is here from the library. She just raised her hand. There she is. So if you get a chance during the break you can go over and check out some lists of resources related to the talks. And there's also an adult summer reading program that Oakland Public Library is doing that you could participate in. Being a nerd, you kind of like have an unfair advantage, but I won't tell. And we also have a display of bee specimens and other cool stuff in theater too. So after the talk, if you want to learn more and see some actual physical displays, please check it out in the other theater. So speaking of bees, those of you who were here two months ago may remember I did an intro on superheroes and shared with everyone one of my favorite classic superheroes, the red bee. He's from the 1940s and doesn't really have any superpowers per se, but he keeps bees in his belt buckle and then releases them at key moments so they can, you know, sting his opponents. And his favorite bee is called Michael. Michael the bee is released. Get him Michael. This is another excuse to talk about the red bee and Michael. So the question is, can you actually train bees? Is that a thing? Well, you probably can't keep them in your belt. But let's start with the training part. And it turns out, yeah, they do train bees. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, for example, these bees are trained to detect bombs. They basically condition the bees to have like a Pavlovian response to the smell, the scent of various chemicals that are used in bombs. They associate it with like sugar water for the bee. And then when they expose the bees to an area or a substance that might be a bomb, if they see the bees' little proboscis come out like it's trying to eat, they know they have the suspect chemical on their hands because the bee is associating it with sugar water. So there's different ways to do this. One is you can just sort of release bees and they'll go to the desired smell that they've been trained toward. Another one is you can individually harness them, which is better for like airports and stuff because you don't want to just release a bunch of bees into an airport. And then they use these like digital cameras with special pattern recognition technology to tell if the bees are showing signs that they're recognizing what they've been trying to recognize. I thought everyone would enjoy the harness to bees. There's also some attempts to get bees to sniff out cancer, so to speak, or other ailments. This has been less successful and it doesn't really have so much medical application, but I thought this was really cool. This is a device that an artist created that sort of conceptualizes what it could be like where a patient could blow into the device and the bees would indicate by their behavior where they go, whether the chemicals that indicate having cancer or whatever other ailment are present in the person's breath. But that's not really feasible, but this is totally, they're gonna be bongs sniffing bees. So watch out for that next time you're going through security at the airport. All right, so here to talk about bees that live in the dirt is Hilary Sardinias. Thanks for coming to learn about bees. So I wanted to start out before everything kind of starts, to ask you guys a question, which seems I think relatively straightforward, but maybe it's not. So the question is what is a bee? So instead of calling out answers, because there's so many of you, I want you to just imagine a bee, right, and not a cartoon bee, but the actual insect, right? Think about its size, its color, what it sounds like. You guys all have a picture of a bee in your head. Does it look maybe like this? Yeah, so this is a European honey bee. And the reason I ask, you know, if this is what you thought of, is that when I tell people that I study bees, about 90% of them start asking me questions about honey bees. But these are actually very kind of particular atypical bees. So they have a queen, she lays all of the eggs in the hive. They have a division of labor. So there are worker bees. Bees take care of the young. Or they go out in forage and they bring back food that they turn into honey, giving them the name. You might have also thought, though, of the bumblebee, also a very common bee. We see them very slowly ambling from flower to flower. They're also colonial. They also have this division of labor. They make something kind of like honey. But in reality, worldwide, there are over 20,000 species of bees. So this is just a smattering of some of the diversity that exists out there. They're really giant bees, these carpenter bees. You might have seen them like in your back porch digging into the wood. There's really tiny bees that are basically the size of fruit flies. And a lot of people mistake them for that. There's even parasitic bees like this happy face bee. They're like cuckoo birds. So they go into other bees' nests and they'll lay their eggs there. And scientists are finding more and more bees as they sample different places. Like tropical forest canopies that they haven't really been able to find before. So the number might continue increasing and some estimates put the number of bees at about 40,000 globally. But it doesn't really answer the question of what is a bee, right? So to give you the whole back story, bees are descended from a type of wasp called cabronid wasp. And they dig holes in the ground for their nest. And they are carnivores, so they eat other insects as their food. But in the Cretaceous period, all of a sudden flowering plants burst on the scenes. Before that, no flowers in the world. And the Cretaceous period, if you guys have known your timeline of history, is also famous for dinosaurs. We're not talking about them. So you have this wasp and it's like, oh my goodness, there's tons of food that nobody's eating. There's all this pollen and nectar. And so they started consuming this abundant food source. They're basically opportunivores. So and then from that, they develop these structures. We like to call them scopa, where they can carry pollen a lot more efficiently. These diversified super fast. We don't really know too much about it because they're invertebrates, so they're not really in the fossil record. We know that they did diversify synchronous with flowers. So you can, well, unscientifically, I like to think of wasps or bees as herbivorous wasps. So now that you know what a bee is, why do they matter? Well, a lot of you are enjoying the delicious new Parkway food. And you might be interested to know that one out of every three bites of food that you eat comes from a plant that was pollinated by a bee. And so some of these plants are not the typical ones that you would think of. So take lettuce, right? Leafy green doesn't seem like it needs a bee. But in fact, the seeds from that are pollinated. They need a bee to be a vector to move pollen from one place to another. And on top of that, most of the vitamins and minerals that we consume come from these. So if you think about it, we'd all have scurvy if we didn't eat oranges pollinated plant. And on top of that, we are planting more and more of these crops that require pollination every year. At the same time that honeybees are declining precipitously, due to a lot of things you've probably heard about. Pesticides like neonicotinoids and colony collapse disorder and other diseases. But luckily, a lot of scientists have been finding that native bees are just stellar pollinators. Not only are they more efficient than honeybees, but they make honeybees themselves more efficient by interacting with them. So more pollen flows in the system. So we can basically rely on native bees to help us in case, you know, honeybees continue declining. Right? Very important. So what do they need in order for us to be able to do this? Well, they need a lot of things you need. They need food in a home within a reasonable distance from another. So for bees, again, food is pollen, mostly for the young and nectar, mostly for the adult. Their home is where they nest. A lot of them nest above ground and abandoned like beetle burrows and trees. And they'll chew into stems. But about 80% of bees actually nest in the ground. And so this is what I'll focus on. Oh, and the distance between where they nest, right, is determined by their foraging distance. And so I thought maybe you'd be interested in native bee life history. So this is a squash bee. She is emerging from her nest for the very first time. And she's going to go find a squash plant because she's a specialist. Get mated with by a male squash bee. So now she's ready. You know, she has all the sperm that she needs for her lifetime to find a new nest. And we don't really know why they choose their nest, like where they decide to nest. But often because they're a squash specialist, they'll nest near a squash plant. So she will go down and she will excavate a little brood chamber. Go collect pollen and then put it in the brood chamber. And she'll collect enough to lay a single egg. Go down, put it in there. There's her egg. Or eventually did it stall. Oh, oh good. She's just very slow bee. And then she'll cap that brood chamber and she will never see that baby again. She'll continue to do this, make different brood chambers and provision them with pollen and young for their remainder of her life, which can be anywhere from two to six weeks depending on the bee. She might make multiple nests. But if we focus in on that brood chamber, that egg will hatch into a larva. It will consume the entire pollen ball. And then it will pupate. And it will overwinter in this papery sack. And then when it's time for squash to bloom again, it will emerge as an adult and start that whole process all over again. So I do want to say that this film was made by Katarina Ullman, who's a graduate student at UC Davis. She gave me permission to use it. She studies squash bees. Okay, so bees nest in the ground, right? And they move a distance between where they're nesting, which you know now. And where they forage their food. And that's really determined by their body size. So small bees, like the little ones that look like droop flies that I showed you earlier, they probably can go about as far as the new parkway. Maybe. Because they just aren't big enough to fly very far. But a bumble bee can fly at least a mile. And some estimates put it, you know, upwards of like eight miles. So they really get around. Another thing that we know is that adding flowers to an area, providing food for them, attracts bees. This is great news for farmers. They can throw in California native shrubs along their field edges and bring the bees to that area, which is great. But there's a lot of stuff we don't know, particularly about nesting. So for a lot of bee species, we actually have no idea where they nest. We just can't find them. We also don't know what their nests look like. And we don't know what their preferred nesting habitat really is, mostly for ground nesting bees. So here's what a bee nest looks like. This is an aggregation of a sunflower bee. They like to nest near each other. So that helps us find them because you can see a whole bunch in a given area. And they kind of pile up mud around the outside of their nest. All right, I have a little clicker. To pile up mud, and we call this a tumulus. So you can really see it above the ground. They're an awesome bee because of that. Other bees like the teddy bear bee. Well, they like to enlarge holes in the ground. And so they'll kick off mud to one side. But sometimes that drives and wind comes, and then there's just this kind of obscure hole that you can't really see in the surface of the ground. Or take the longhorn bee. This is its nest. It kind of looks like a shadow, right? It's in a tilled agricultural field. And if I hadn't seen a bee going into the nest, I wouldn't have actually known it was there. And of course, vegetation can do. Well, this is what I study. I use these things called emergent traps. They have an open bottom and then a kill jar on top. And you can put them over a portion of ground to see if the bee is in the scene there. And bees usually go to this thing called an antechamber in their nest at night where they sleep. So you can put these out at dusk, and the bees will probably be in their nest. And the next day you go out and they're in the kill jar. Don't worry, not that many bees actually get caught this way. Not slaughtering them. In contrast to other methods that melatologists, people that study bees, use. So one of the things we like to do is set out these bowls of soapy water that are painted. The soap breaks up the surface so they can't kind of get a purchase and like climb their way out. And so they fly in and drown. Why do they do this? We don't really know. What does it tell us about what they're doing in an area? Well, they could be flying through, they could be nesting there, they could be foraging there. It just kind of tells us, all right, a bee was there. So, you know, sometimes what we do is we go out with a net and we actually sample on flowers. This tells us, yes, a bee was foraging here. So most melatologists think, you know, if you catch a bee in an area, it's probably nesting there. So I tested this. This is my beautiful venn diagram. I felt very proud when I got this published, like a second grade or getting something in pen and signs. So I looked at pan traps, aerial netting, and these emerging traps, the tents that I have. And I compared over a whole year sampling every two weeks, you know, where are the bees nesting there that were flying there caught by these other methods. So where it overlaps, right, those are the shared species and the numbers that are by themselves are the species that are not shared. And this is just ground nesting bees. I didn't count those above ground nesting bees. So I found about 47 bees total, or species, not bees, about hundreds and hundreds of bees. Pan traps caught the most species. Net cost the next most. And emerging traps actually caught eight species that I didn't see in either one, which I thought was really surprising. Only four species were collected by every single method. I thought that was a little crazy. What it says is that this assumption that if you're catching bees in a site that they're nesting there, it's probably not be true. You should probably start looking for the bee nest. All right, so I applied this once I figured out that this method worked. I applied it in agricultural systems because really that's what we care about if we're going to try to preserve bees in agricultural landscapes. So I asked, well, where are bees nesting? A lot of people think that bees don't want to nest in an agricultural field because it's tilled, it's irrigated, right, it's just highly disturbed. So we kind of think they'll nest on the edges. I wanted to see if that was true. Next I wanted to see, again, this irrigation matter. We think if you totally flood the ground where a bee is nesting, they wouldn't do so well. And then finally, does tilling harm them? Let's go through these one by one. Field versus edge. There was no difference. This totally kind of blew me away. There's all these scientific models that say, oh, bees can't nest in agricultural fields. They're going to decline. But they're nesting in fields, which is really exciting. It means that the area in which native bees can nest is a lot bigger, right? Because that ratio of edge to field, very little edge. So this is actually pretty good news. It's exciting. We should feel good about this. You guys don't look excited, but it's great news for bees. Okay, so given that bees are nesting in fields, what's the effect of irrigation? So drip irrigation is a great thing. You know, it reduces water use. It applies water directly to a root zone. But we'll definitely see more bees nesting in drip irrigated fields versus flood irrigated. Can you see this is the furrow between a row that's just getting inundated with water? And it creates this flood and then kind of drought condition where it totally dries out. I thought this might not be so great for the nesting. But I was totally wrong again. Okay, so there was more spread with the furrow. But if you look at this black one right here, that's the mean number of nesting bees I collected. And it's exactly this. So bees, at least the ones nesting in these agricultural fields, they're doing a pretty good job dealing with the irrigation. So this means farmers can do either way, which is, you know, again, pretty good news. Really surprising, unexpected, but awesome. Okay, so now we get to tillage. Kind of the third thing that I thought would probably be pretty bad for bees. So this is, you guys remember the squash bee from the adorable video that we saw? The herd way back in 1979, he looked at, he dug down and found all of these bee nests in the ground. So this shows the soil depth in inches and the y-axis shows the number of cells. So you can see between five and 15 inches, that's where most of the bees are nesting, right? And deeper in the soil, very few cells, so not that many bees. So farmers in the Central Valley, where I do my research, they have two methods of tilling. They will do a diskeying every year. So they'll just go about three inches down and turn the top layer of soil, right? And so you can see diskeying, but that's not really going to affect that many of the bees keeping that. But then every three years, they'll do a deep till. And this goes 16 inches into the ground and really, really turns the soil. And so when they go 16 inches, you can see that would probably affect the majority of the bees nesting there. So again, Katerina Ullman, the awesome graduate student at Davis, but she did that she made these little enclosures and she put squash bees into them. And then she looked at how many nests they built. And then after they had built their nests and finished, she went in and in every other plot, she deep tilled to 16 inches. All right, so with this, there's actually a very pronounced, very significant difference. So she put these tents back up the next year and looked at how those baby bees and their cells survived. And she found that in no till, you have pretty high survival, but until about half of the bees died, right? So that would probably really affect the bees. So what you can tell farmers is if you have a really attractive crop, like sunflower squash, might not want to deep till the next year. So you can allow the bees to emerge and find that crop again. All right, so we'll just recap a little what we learned about bee nesting. This is an idealized farmscape. We wish everything looked like this. Natural habitat, you know, agricultural fields, head rows, orchards, lots of diversified floral resources and nesting habitat. So we learned that bees will nest in fields and that the type of farm management may or may not matter, but we might have strategies for dealing with them. This is all very good news, right? In the end, I would say. I think we might be able to rely on these bees to help supplement honey bees. Of course, you also learned that most bees nest in the ground, which is pretty surprising. They don't make honeycomb. They don't do any of that. Here in California, we can boast almost 10% of the world's bees. We're super diverse. You can go out, look at a flower and probably see something awesome. Maybe it'll have pollen on its leg and let you know it's a bee. Wasps and flies don't have pollen. Well, they don't have the structures to carry pollen. Oh, no. Oh, good. All right. We know that planting flowers is good for bees and that they're gonna forage a certain distance from their nest related to their body size. We know that they nest in ag fields, right? All good things. All right. So maybe you're thinking to yourself, well, what can I do to support native bees? Maybe like cut the bee bug and are really excited to help. So, well, you can plant California native plants in your garden. They love like a huge diversity. It attracts all different things. Also, you know, because bees nest in the ground, maybe you don't bulge. Leave some there for them. You can also build a bee box. I have over in the display a little handout so you can learn how to do that yourself to attract the other kinds of bees I didn't really talk about. You can also not use pesticides in your garden or if you do, try and use them on plants when they're not flowering. You might have heard about the big bumblebee kills in Oregon, right? Last summer, like hundreds of thousands of bees. And you can buy pesticide-free foods so support farmers that are not using things that are harming bees. All right, so with that, I wanted to thank all the people that funded me, all of my amazing field assistants that went out at dusk and worked like 15-hour field days with me. My collaborators, the cool farmers, they were like super excited. They joked that the tents look like elves moving around the landscape. And some really cool sunflower companies. Most of my work is in sunflower. And of course, all the bees, the lives of the bees that I took. You guys happy? What's the difference between wasps and bees? Okay, so wasps and what is the difference between wasps and bees? Wasps and bees are both in the order Hymenoptera. It's the most recently diversified lineage of insects. It also includes ants. There's a lot of kind of morphological characters that you can clue it into. But wasps pretty date bees, and bees diversified off of them. Do you want to know the morphological characteristics? Okay, so if you're looking at a flower, at an insect on a flower. All right. You good? All right, thank you. Are we good? Okay. All right, so often first let me give you the difference between flies and bees, because often when people publish, sometimes even books that are about bees are articles in the newspaper. It's a flower fly, a surfid fly, the ones that hover. They're bee mimics. They also eat pollen. They're actually pretty good pollinators. So they only have two sets of wings. That's the first thing. They have giant eyes that cover most of their head. They're usually a really stumpy antenna. Those are the main things to look for. For a wasp, they have really constricted narrow waist. Most of their coloration is going to be on their exoskeleton. So bees are really hairy, and most of their hairs are branched when you look under a microscope. So they're stripes, they're going to be hairs, but not so with wasps. Wasps also fold their wings in half, whereas bees won't. So if you see really narrow wings, that's another thing to look for. Wasps, their antenna tend to be lower on their head. There's a bunch of stuff. You really get into it. But yeah, those are the key differences. Wasps are carnivorous. Yeah, so you probably, you know, tarantulas are big scary spiders. There are some wasps that go after these spiders. They'll drive them back to an area they've prepared, paralyze them, lay their eggs in them, and then those eggs will work their way from their extremities to their center, eating them alive. Yeah, wasps are vicious. Will bees pollinate pretty much anything, or do they tend to specialize? Will bees pollinate anything, or will they tend to specialize? You kind of hit on a really cool question in bee biology. We used to think that bees were a lot more specialized than they are. It turns out if you keep surveying a bee over time, it might switch plants. Hence the value of long-term research, right? But there are a lot of bees that are pollen specialists. So they'll collect squash pollen or sunflower pollen to feed their young, but when they go visit plants, they'll go get nectar from a wide variety of them, and so inadvertently pollinate them. So it really depends. You know, the generalist bees, like bumblebees, tend to be the most important because they're visiting a lot of plants in the system and helping maintain them. But often a plant that is visited by a whole bunch of bees is also visited by a specialist. So that specialist ends up being maintained in the system because other bees are also pollinating. So it's kind of cool. There's a lot of these stock gaps built in to prevent total collapse of a pollination web. Let's try up there. Yeah. Right. So the question is, how are bees surviving the irrigation and do they have to rebuild their nest? I have no idea. It would be lovely to study that. It's really hard to study the nest. You can't really just transport soil and put like a glass wall in and see how they're nesting. You'll see kind of people have gone in with plaster into nests to kind of look at the form of it, or you can actually dig them up. But it's one of the great mysteries. And so maybe in my future research, I'll get creative and figure out a way to look into it. Yeah, it's in the way back. Okay. So do bees collect pollen in nectar to eat later, or do they eat it when they're going? So bees are mostly collecting pollen for their young, right? They have like, you know, honeybees have these big balls of pollen on their leg that they take back to the hive. Native bees do the same thing. Usually most bees ingest pollen, incidentally, they're grooming. But they stop for nectar very frequently. Often, you know, they'll fly out and then on their flight home to their nest, they'll need to stop a few times to recharge. But they will mix nectar that they've ingested. They'll kind of regurgitate it and mix it with the pollen for their young. Two more. You mentioned earlier in the talk that native bees interact with honeybees and actually make them better in their honey business. So I was curious what common ways they interact with each other, and I apologize if we've let the honeybee jury sign come, but probably not. No, that's great. I really like the term honey business. So how do native bees interact with honeybees to make them better? So when you have a honeybee on a plant and another honeybee, either from the same colony or not, like, say a sunflower head, they'll just both kind of tool around pollinating and stay on that same flower. But you add native bees to the mix and they'll kind of meet up around the flower and they'll both fly off. But then you add male native bees, which I didn't get into at all, but they're super cool. So they're just zooming around, they have super short lifespan and they're looking for a mate. And they're not, you know, they're not really good at telling what their species is. And so, you know, they'll zip by, and they'll land on an unsuspecting honeybee who will freak out and move. So basically, you just have much more bee movement in the system, more pollen flowing, and that's what enhances honeybee pollen. Yeah, last question. How did I get interested in bees? Great question. Well, I went to UC Santa Cruz and worked in gardens there. Yeah, go sludge. And then, you know, I realized, like I didn't think I had what it takes to be a farmer. It's really hard to own land. So I got into ecological restoration, started working in a natural system, trying to make them better. And in doing that, you collect a lot of plant seeds. And I was finding plants that should have seeds didn't have any. But when you cross pollinated them, oh, they would set a seed. So I looked into it and found that, you know, a lot of people weren't thinking about, you know, pollination, although there were maybe a little bit more in agricultural systems, especially as colony colox kept in termines. I thought, well, this sounds super cool. Started setting them. I think they're very charismatic. Yeah, just fell in love. We'll talk to anybody about these. And I know a ton about honeybees. So ask me about that later, because everybody asked me, and so I spend a lot of time learning all about like the bomb sniffing bees if they use, I think, even now in a raft. So thanks, guys. And just as a reminder, Hillary will be in theater two, the Streaming Theater, and there's an awesome display of bees that you should check out. She'll also say hi to Mana and get a library card if you don't already have one. We're going to take a 15 minute break, but I did want to give away tickets. Sometimes we have an opportunity to do this, and this time it comes from our gracious videographer, Amy. So I was just wondering if people were free on July 16th. That's a Wednesday, and it's actually your night sentence. This goes Wednesday, so you have to not think you'll actually get tickets to that before it sells out. And want to see the long now's Adrian Hong, the history of the future, and 100 objects. The long now puts on awesome talks. This will be a great show. I would go myself, except I know I'm going to leave. It's like this is good. Well, if anyone in theater two feels differently, they can come find me and get these tickets. Otherwise, I'm sure I will finally get home for them. Thanks. We'll be back in 15. Welcome back. Welcome back. Welcome back. My name's Rick. I know an interesting thing about babies. Their heads are kind of shaped like footballs. They're more bendable than adults. I think this is why. It's because man would have wanted to spread his genes as far as possible. And to do this, we punt at them like footballs over different hills. This also explains why babies have apple fat, which protected their organs during quarantine. It explains why babies must be burped often because in nature that gas would have been expelled by the drop gate. And it explains their smooth skin and hairlessness, which makes for good hairlessness. Here's the punchline. This building comic was written by Zach Wienersmith. He's going to give a Nernick San Francisco talk in this family. And his wife, Kelly Wienersmith, who's an actual scientist, will be here. But if you are an actual or almost scientist who could give a pitch like that, you should get your application in now for Baugh Fest, the festival of bad and ad hoc hypotheses happening during the Nernick San Francisco. It will be awesome. You'll hear more about it as potential attendees, but we're really talking to all of the creative speakers who might not have access to it. I did want to talk about child development, except like, as far as I know, babies are more able to condition us adults than we are to condition them. So if there's no food, that makes it easy to cry, which makes what happen. Parents feed them. You know, you buy noise, canceling handcuffs. No, okay. Yeah, so that baby is happy. That, again, unhappy baby. But then, you know, clean diapers. It's cold, especially at night. That's, you know, babies tend to cry at night when the temperature in the house drops. So that leads to your baby mansion. It's not bad, right? I guess it's an upgrade over blankets. This box of an air crib is essentially an air conditioned crib and it was invented by ... It was invented by none other than B.F. Skinner and for some reason it never caught on to try one of your vats and put this as tape. Like that. I'm happy to introduce our next speakers. Oh, those are my favorite speakers. So please welcome to our stage, Karen Walker and Sophie Richards. Can you hear me? All right, so I'm Karen. And I'm Sophie. And we work in the Cognitive Development Lab at UC Berkeley under the guidance of Dr. Alison Dockney. And we are developmental psychologists, which means that we study what's going on inside the minds of children. So what is going on inside the minds of children? Well, just a few decades ago, the answer might have been not very much. So children were generally considered to be irrational, illogical, egocentric, and essentially defective adults. Well, certainly upon first glance, this seems to be an accurate description of childhood. And this view was supported by developmental psychologists at the time who primarily used interviews as a means of studying the minds of children. Interviews as a way of accessing somebody's internal mental states depends on that person's ability to act or communicate what's happening inside their head. And anyone who's had a conversation with a young child will know that you often get little more than a stream of consciousness, which might very well convince you that not much sophisticated reasoning is actually taking place. And actually, this is similarly a problem with adults. So introspective techniques, not quite the same. Introspective techniques asking people what the contents of their head is and having them report it to you has a lot of problems. And in fact led the entire field of psychology to abandon the study of internal mental life altogether with the advent of behaviorism. So this should be pretty familiar to you, right? This is Pavlov's dog. And essentially what the behaviorist movement did was just ignore mental states altogether, call them a black box, and focus the entire study of psychology on things like inputs, like the sound of a bell, and outputs, like drool, in the case of the dog here. So luckily for us in the late 1950s or so, the cognitive revolution reintroduced the idea of mental states back into the study of psychology. But simply acknowledging that mental states exist doesn't necessarily solve the problem of how to access the inner life of the child. Luckily there are new methods now that have completely revolutionized the field of cognitive development. Instead of asking children about their thoughts, these techniques allow us to examine these thoughts indirectly and conveniently, they even allow us to study the thoughts of young children before they can go to school. So one of these techniques is called Looking Time Paradigms, and like this one. And conveniently for us, it turns out that babies will stare longer at things that they deem to be surprising, or something that violates some expectation that they have about the world. It's as if they're looking at this display literally thinking to themselves, what the fuck is going on here? And they continue to stare at the display. So a lot of studies have done this. It's been replicated a lot of times. It seems to be a really consistent finding. Some of the earliest studies on this use this method to examine children's beliefs about the physical worlds and the properties of objects. So we'll walk you through the example of one of these experiments. So babies might be shown an image like this, which is, you can't see, it's not animated, but of a line moving back and forth across the screen, like this. After a while, babies will grow bored of this image and look away. So they're then shown a new image to recapture their attention. And now there's an object in the pathway of the previously moving line. So as the line begins to move again, babies will look longer if the line seems to pass through this object than if the line stops moving when it hits the object. And this difference in looking time and the amount of time that they stare at this event up here versus the amount of the time that they stare at this event here is interpreted to mean that babies are surprised by the impossible event on top here and therefore stare longer at it than the possible event here on the bottom. Right. But we are not just in the baby's surprising business, right? We're learning a lot from looking at these episodes of surprise. What we're doing is inferring the kinds of expectations that babies have about the world and we're seeing what kinds of events they're sensitive to in their environment. So like Sophie said in this experiment, what we're learning is that babies, even very young infants, just a few months of age, have very strong expectations about how physical objects should work, right? So solid things can't pass through one another. One of these fundamental principles is already there in really early life. And these methods have all contributed to the understanding that children know more and are learning much more than we ever thought possible. And in fact, the majority of this learning is taking place prior to five years of age. So back to our baby here. Look what she can do in just two years. She can walk. She can talk. Maybe she can even speak two languages. She can even count to two. What about all of you? What have you accomplished in the last two years? Be realistic. Let's use this guy as an example. We'll call him Jesse. And Jesse, he could be you. Yeah. And let's take a look at what Jesse has accomplished in the past two years. Depending on the value that you place on facial hair, perhaps this is the equivalent of learning language and ambulation and development of mathematical concepts. We're probably not, right? And so the point here is that babies and young children are incredibly good learning machines. So I think we can all agree that children learn a great deal in a short period of time. But the potentially more interesting question to consider is how they do us. And the question, and this is the question that motivates all of our research. And the central problem here though is that learning is really hard. Yeah. So learning is hard. This seems a bit tried, but it's quite true. And I think it's something that we take for granted as adults who are very good at sort of getting around the world and learning. So to give you some insight into what it might be like to be learning as a baby, we're going to walk through a little thought experiment here. Now, this is not my thought experiment. I can take credit for it, but it's Quine's thought experiment. It was a philosopher in the 1960s. And so I want you to imagine with me that you're in the park and you're hanging out with a guy who speaks a language that you've never heard before. Okay? And he sees this little guy hopping by and he points at it and he yells out the word Gava Guy. Okay. So we've never heard this language before, but we all have an intuition about what Gava Guy might mean. Right? What does it mean? Funny rabbit. That's right. So it could mean rabbit, right? But when we start to examine exactly where we're getting this intuition, it becomes clear that it's not totally obvious that this means rabbit. It could mean any number of things, right? So for example, Gava Guy could mean animal, the superordinate property, right? Or it could mean big ears, some property of the rabbit itself. It could mean hopping, right? The action that the animal was doing. It could even mean yellow flowers, right? That appear in the background here. Or we could get a little crazy and it could mean rabbit before time T, but then gorilla after time T. It could mean undetached rabbit parts. It could mean a momentary rabbit stage or even a temporal cross-section of a four-dimensional space-time extension of a rabbit. You don't know, right? So this is called the poverty of the stimulus argument and as Karen just beautifully demonstrated, it illustrates how hard it is to learn from the limited information that we have available to us from our senses. In other words, the rules that make up a mature system of knowledge are really complicated and there just simply isn't enough evidence in the data that is available to children for them to identify what these rules are. But this is actually a much older problem. It dates back all the way to the time of Plato and Aristotle. So since we're doing the entire history here, we're going to start way back at the beginning. And Plato and Aristotle thought about this question a lot. It's called the problem of knowledge. What are the origins of knowledge? And they actually came up with two radically different solutions to this. So Plato's solution was to simply deny that learning occurs at all. So what he said is that everything that we know as adults, we were bored with, okay? And he calls this theory the recollection of the soul. And what he literally means is that what looks like learning throughout life is really remembering, remembering things that our soul has learned in previous iterations of itself, okay? If this sounds a little dated and mystical to you right now, if you stop and think about it, it's actually quite strikingly similar to modern concepts about genetics and inheritance, right? This is basically the idea that you already have everything that you're going to have when you're born. It's the nature side of the nurture versus nature debate. On the other hand, Aristotle makes the opposite claim. So he solves the problem by simply denying that we have abstract knowledge at all. And instead he proposes that knowledge is just the product of learned associations between events. Later on, John Locke called this position the blank slate, meaning that we start out with nothing and that we learn by observing associations between events in the world around us. And this roughly translates into the nurture side of the nurture-nurture debate. So, which view is right? Is it that we're born with everything we know already, nature? Or is it that we're just undergoing a process of learned associations throughout our lives, which is nurture? Of course, the answer here is neither, right? So scientists generally agree that this is, although it's quite popular in popular culture, it's actually not considered to be a reasonable dichotomy. It's a false dichotomy. But if we're going to toss out nature and nurture, we're left with a problem, the same problem that we began with, which is how is it that children are able to learn so much so quickly? And the proposal that we are going to describe today is that learning in childhood is analogous to theory, revision, and science, what we call the theory theory of cognitive development. According to this approach, not all knowledge is innate, but what is innate is a powerful learning mechanism. And drawing further on this analogy between the child and the scientist, this learning mechanism works quite similarly to what we know of as a scientific method. So the idea here is that children start out with a current set of theories about how the world works. And these theories might be innate, they might be learned through experience, and that children observe events in the world around them, and that these events serve as evidence to give them feedback on these theories. So these events might agree with their current hypotheses, and this would then strengthen their beliefs about the world, or they might be inconsistent with their current hypotheses, which would cause them to consider alternative hypotheses or explanations about how the world works. Then they continue to go out into their environment, test these hypotheses against new evidence, and depending on this new evidence, they'll reject some hypotheses and accept others. And this hypothesis updating continues over and over again throughout development. So if this all seems very impossible, that young children and infants are engaging in a process that's analogous to the process of scientific theory revision, I'm going to show you a video that will radically change your mind. Let me give you some background about this video. This is a video of a research participant. He's a young child, about five or six years of age. He participated in an experiment at the University of Texas at Austin in Christine Leger's lab, and the project was basically, he was given a box that lights up when certain objects are placed on top of it. It's a causal system, and he has to figure out how this system works, and what you'll see is him basically running through a whole variety of hypotheses that pretty closely approximates what we just described to you. So I'll let you watch it. If you really want to see this video, I don't know. I don't know. I don't want to know. I'm here to start. Know what that's. I'm going to turn on the bottom. Yeah. It's up. It's up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. It goes all the way down to the bottom. Yeah, I'm just describing it. It's a little late. But you can play. You can see on the bottom. It's still on. Oh. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's how we learn. Yeah, that's how we learn. Yeah, that's how we learn. Yeah, that's how we learn. I'm sorry, guys. We can skip the video. You're reading out the sounds. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why don't we show it during the break? That's fine. That's fine. Let's keep going. I'm not going to talk through the video. Basically, you got it? Keep going. Keep going. Basically what the child is doing, right, is he's cycling through a whole variety of hypotheses. He's absolutely adorable and says all kinds of cute things about frustration and giving up on a hypothesis and then trying another one. So here's a hypothesis. That one doesn't work either. Yeah, this is all just much more effective with sounds. So I'm going to skip it. With your permission. This is okay? Okay. We're going to skip it. Okay. Well, the next thing I'm going to say is clearly, clearly, okay? Children are able to engage in this process, which is very apparent after you actually watch this. But this, yes, this is despair. This is part of the scientific process as well. Very disappointed that this idea was not current. But the fact that children are able to engage in this kind of scientific learning actually isn't the new idea here that we've been doing in our lab. Part of what we've been working on is some recent advances in our ability to formally describe using computational models how this learning might actually be taking place. All right, I'm going to switch, guys. But we'll have to leave. And these computational ideas date back to the Reverend Thomas Bayes and Bayes was a statistician in the early 18th century, and he developed a mathematical model that formalized the way that learning might take place using probability theory. And there are two main points that we want to make about this formula. First is that learning is just a process of coming to accept a hypothesis about how the world works. And second is that coming to accept a particular hypothesis results from assessing the probability that this hypothesis is true compared to alternatives. And that's what this formula here is doing. The main point is that children are able to pick up on statistical regularities in their environment and that they can use these regularities to update what they know. How is this possible, right? Just looking at this formula gives most adults anxiety. Obviously, not any of you because we're all nerds, but most adults, right? How could it be that even very young children are doing anything close to approximating these kinds of calculations? It's really important at this point that we note that we are not arguing that children are doing these calculations explicitly inside their head. What we are wanting to argue is that they are implicitly, unconsciously, reasoning in a way that can be described and explained by the outcome of this formula. So basically, that children are picking up on statistical regularities in the world. So I'm going to give you an example of a study that has shown this in pretty young infants. These are nine-month-old or eight-month-old infants. So in this study, and this uses the kind of looking-time procedures that we talked about with you earlier where babies will stare longer at things that violate their expectations about the world. So the babies will see the contents of this box here that has a particular proportion of red balls to white balls. Then they see as an experimenter closes her eyes and reaches into the box and appears to draw out some random samples from that box. And they either see the random sample on the top, which is a pretty probable sample to come out of this distribution, or they'll see the improbable sample there on the bottom, which is highly unlikely to have been drawn randomly from this box. And what we find is that children will stare longer at this improbable outcome than the probable outcome indicating to us that they have some expectations about what kinds of events are likely to occur in their environment. But if we want to make the claim that children are learning as scientists do, then they shouldn't just be passively sitting back in their environment and observing events and forming beliefs about these events. We should also be conducting experiments to test these beliefs out. And as you would have seen in the video, the child not only does he describe his ideas about how the machine might work to the experimenter, he also engages in actively trying those ideas out to see if he's right or wrong about how the machine works. And the vast majority of this type of experimentation takes place during children's exploratory play. And another really great example of this comes from an experiment at MIT conducted by Laura Schultz and Elizabeth Bonowitz. And I'm going to walk you through this experiment as if you were the child participating. So you come into a lab and you sit down at a table across from an experimenter, a very friendly, nice experimenter, and she shows you this box here. And you watch as she pulls one lever and this toy pops up. And then you watch her pull another lever and the other toy pops up. And after watching this series of demonstrations, it's pretty clear how the box works, right? You know which lever operates which toy. However, what if you saw a different concentration? What if instead of pulling each lever individually, the experimenter pulls both levers at the same time and both toys pop up? Then you don't know. It's ambiguous. You aren't sure which lever operates which toy. So children were shown one or the other of these two demonstrations and then they were given the opportunity to play with one or two toys, either the original toy or a brand new exciting toy. If children were shown the first demonstration where each lever was pulled individually, they were much more interested in playing with the new toy. However, if they're shown the ambiguous demonstration where they aren't sure how it works because both levers were pulled at the same time, they're much more interested in exploring the original toy and not playing with the new toy. And so this experiment, along with many others, beautifully demonstrates that children really are using play as a way to learn about how the world works. But all this experimentation takes a lot of time and you can think of childhood as a way of providing that time to children. And it turns out that the period of immaturity across species will predict the size of their brains relative to their body and the flexibility of their brains in terms of how powerful they are. So if we take one example from the bird community, okay, we have two examples of birds here who are radically different. On this side, we have the new Caldonian crow who has an extraordinarily and uncharacteristically long period of childhood. Fledglinghood. So two years is a long time for a bird and during this time, they're presumably learning. And what we know about the crow is that they're amazing in their abilities to use tools and they can engage in problem solving and do all kinds of things that you wouldn't expect birds to do. On the other side here, we have our friend the chicken. Now the chicken matures in about a week or two until it's reached its full maturity, a pretty short length of fledglinghood. And what we know about the chicken is if you stare deeply into the eyes of a chicken, there's just not a lot going on inside. So chickens are really, really good at doing particular kinds of things like pecking for grain. They're really, really good at that, right? But they're not very good at much else. Now what we also know is that humans have by far the longest period of immaturity compared to any other animal on the species. Yeah, sometimes it's exceptionally long. I'm 26 and my mom still pays for, helps me pay for my balsam. Actually, my mom is here tonight. So, thank you. All for the greater good, right? Because the human brain is by far the most flexible, or again, the most flexible brain in the animal kingdom. So you're doing it all for hope, of course. Yes, okay. So research has shown us that you all take us more seriously if we show you pictures of the brain. But also, neuroscience research has also provided evidence that supports the idea that the brain is especially plastic during childhood. In fact, infants have 50% more neural connections than we do as adults. And these connections allow them to be incredibly flexible learners, adaptive to many different environments, and able to do many different things as they develop. And so we really shouldn't think of children as being defective adults, but rather they are in a completely different developmental stage of our species, a stage in which their primary activity is to learn. And so really, how we should think of childhood is that childhood is just literally for learning. Great. And children are so good at learning, in fact, that researchers in artificial intelligence have begun to collaborate with developmental psychologists with the aim of making robots that learn more like children. And if this seems like a bit of an odd mission, which it shouldn't at this point in the talk, but if it did, just to remind you that kids are really good at things that even our smartest computers aren't very good at, things like learning language or navigating through space or making generalizations from relatively little data that they observe in their environment. And so the idea is that right now we have machines that are really, really good at doing very particular kinds of things, sort of like the chicken in our previous example, but in order to be truly intelligent, to have machines that genuinely learn, indeed robots that are more flexible, that are better able to handle situations of uncertainty and limited data from their environment. So many computer scientists have concluded that the way to do this is to model their robots after young children. So I'd like to leave you with this idea, which is that if you're at all concerned, about a future in which a hyper-intelligent robot race is going to take over and become our overlords, the only thing you have to make sure you have with you is this. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have the baby crows in the, uh... Don't ask me for a question. No problem. There's a big number of being told about the outing. About what? The outing where the child is born, like if he was less than 12 years old. So I was wondering when the baby crow chicks hatched, were they less than the amount of the world? Right, so the question is basically, are crows less able to kind of get around on their own? They're more dependent, basically, on their crow parents at the beginning. Yeah. So I don't know much about crows, to be fair. I borrowed this example from the bird community. I know a lot about children. But yeah, presumably the idea is that this period of helplessness, right, that we associate with childhood, which seems, it might be considered a sort of evolutionarily maladaptive, right? Like why do you want this thing that's kind of flailing around and not able to do anything on its own when you have some danger in the environment? And the idea is that the trade-off is worth it. So basically having a prolonged childhood allows us to be born with brains that aren't particularly developed because we're going to build all those connections during the first few years of life. So it seems to be worth it to have a period of helplessness where you're completely dependent on your parents in order to have this really powerful learning machine. Easier on the hips. Yep. In that experiment with removing the balls from the probability of all that, you said that the person you met can experiment with, like, covering her eyes to indicate that there's no intentionality. But aren't babies that, you know, too young to be able to imaginably be identified with another person and think about what that person knows they're doing or not? Like, don't they think your brand box has brand name and brand name? Yeah. So do you want to answer this, please? Yeah. Yeah, so these are some of the questions about completely competence that you see with working-time experiments that you then don't see in behavioral experiments later on. And so there are questions about exactly what is going on in the mind of the children at that time. But it does seem to imply that there might be something implicit going on about their expectations about how samples should be drawn. So it's really interesting because they went along with these ping-pong ball experiments. We just demonstrated one. But there are several different variations that look at how sample is drawn. So they've also done variations where the experimenter is taking ping-pong balls out of their pocket versus out of the sample. And then children won't look longer at one or the other boxes. So they seem to have some kind of understanding. And we're not quite sure what that understanding is yet of what should be coming out of that sample. And if the person knows what they're taking out versus doesn't know, they also have different expectations about that. But what those expectations actually translate into as explicitly as they get older, that is still something that people are investigating. What last question? Should I finish that out? With regards to the intentionality bit, so failing the false belief task, which is the crayons and whatever task, that's a really difficult task, right, about the false belief of somebody else. But it shows that there's other research that shows that infants are tracking goal-directed behaviors of people in these kinds of looking-time experiments. So in fact, even from a very young age, even though they might not have a complete theory of intentionality, seem to be tracking movements as being goal-directed, which is sort of interesting. Yeah. From your research and from this position, are there implications of the theory on early childhood environments for education differences? This is your field, but yes. Yes, so the question is, are there implications of this kind of perspective about childhood for early education? And absolutely. So a lot of this is about letting the child sort of be free to engage in their own kinds of exploration. So a lot of what we talk about, it's a bit of a putting the, you know, the baby Einstein videotapes and stuff like that, people with index cards sort of training their babies to be smart from a very young age, they used to put them out of business, right? And instead, just providing a sort of loving and caring environment for your child with lots of different stimuli for them to experience on their own is enough to get them to engage with the world and develop their theories about how the world works. So if anything it's promoting, it's not a hands-off perspective at all, it's a hands-on where you're interacting with your child, but basically it's child-directed kinds of learning. Because the main idea here is that children know how to learn. Like they're born with everything they need to know how to learn about the environment. And as Karen was saying, they just need an environment that will allow them to think about it. Thanks, Karen and Sophie. Karen and Sophie are going to be in theater too, answering a few more questions. We're going to only have like 10 minutes and it's going to be like a shortish 10 minutes, but we'll show the video in here to everybody. So we might even do that right now so that people in theater too can actually see it too. Thanks, back in time. Yeah. And this needs to be like this. What should we do now? This box has electricity in here, but this doesn't have electricity. It's not going to make it light up. Y'all jazz about the World Cup? Yeah. Yeah, you want to say tomorrow. It's a good sport for nerds to watch. I was going to lead you all in a rousing chant of I believe that we will win, but maybe it will save that. So speaking of sports, we've got some friends here to talk about dodgeball as like a competitive organized sport that adult people play, not just a PE teacher sanctioned form of bullying. Apparently it's quite a fun thing to do and I looked into it. It's not the only activity or sport from your childhood that is an organized league activity. Some of you may recall we had a speaker who talked about competitive rock, paper, scissors many months ago. That's a thing. We could do that. There's also underwater hockey. That's not from your childhood, but just a weird sport that I thought was worth sharing. Yeah, it's a totally a thing. And the puck is especially heavy so that it stays at the bottom and they have these modified little things to push it with. World Series of Gear Palm. That's an organized thing that people do. Muggle Quidditch. Yeah. This is like amazingly organized and around the world people do this. This is the website of the International Quidditch Association. Incorporated non-profit dedicated to governing the sport of quidditch. Muggle's play. I've never seen it in action and I'm really curious like did you just run around with a broom doing your legs? It's lovely. You know we can all use our imaginations together. This one's my favorite. Have you guys heard of test boxing? It's exactly what it sounds like. They play chess for like three minutes and then they box and then after the boxing round they sit down and continue their chess match. And then I guess we get up and box again. It's really gaining steam in the more easterly parts of Europe. But watch out. She didn't check to get master. Because it's coming. All right. So here I talk about the much more familiar sport of dodgeball. We have Adam and Hunter. Hey there, how's everybody doing? My name is Hunter. This is Adam. Hello to the upper deck. Hello to Theater 2. With the delay going on tonight, we're going to be in there in two minutes answering questions. So just hold tight. We'll be right there. No, but we run an Oakland-based Rad League dodgeball league right over in Rockridge. We've known it for just over a year and then we've been playing in various leagues for four to six years. So we're here to take you on a wild ride of a competitive adult dodgeball. Now, first, I'm really glad we're going to take you through a few things. We're going to start with the misconceptions going to modern history rules set up. And then we're going to actually show you a really cool video to explain some of the strategies. But we couldn't have had a better lead-in than this misconceptions, which is first, it's only for kids. When we hand out flyers or the first people we talk to that come and go, I haven't done this since I was in fifth grade. And they either have a horrible experience, right? Like nightmares. All I can see is a red ball and that's all I can remember. I'm never going to play again, right? Or they really did have this like, just amazing experience, which is why they're here in the first place. However, with adult league, people really are looking for other things. There's no last person pick. There's no bullying. It's honestly, to be honest, it's for exercise. We play two hours a night and it's basically the new Zumba. Two hours go by and you look down and you're drenched in sweat, right? And it's been an amazing time. So a lot of it is for exercise. And then also there is really a social aspect. We get a lot of people that just moved here for the first time or looking to make friends. And they seem to find a really good group of people that are fun loving. The other one is that they are only for athletically elite. And I'm sure looking at us, we are physically imposing. I did it. Let me assure you, it really is for everyone. And again, talking about the chest, right? It doesn't really matter how athletic you are. Obviously if you have hand-eye coordination, more if you have the mechanics of throwing from softball or baseball, it's going to help you, right? But just like a rook or a pawn can be important in chess, every player can find something they're good at and then really dominate in a league. Essentially, you can be the best athlete in the world. When you have seven balls coming at you, there's very little you can do, right? So there really is a lot of strategy and tactics involved, which we'll get to. The other misconception is that it's only for guys. Ladies, you guys are some of the best players in the league. You're smart. You can catch. You can throw. It is truly for everyone. So please don't think it's just a bunch of dudes sitting around, right? Having a go. The ladies are in the house. I kid you not, okay? Now, and then this is the other big one, right? Dodgeball, right? Looking at some of these other crazier niche activities, okay? Is that it's just wild and unorganized and you get a ball and you just start throwing it? This happens to be as an idea of what some of you might be thinking right now. This is the second largest dodgeball game ever. This was at the University of Alberta. There was over 4,000 people playing, okay? They had about 200 balls in the middle and it turned into a mid-evil like arrows going through the air. And the smart people are in the back just waiting for things to go out, right? And these are the crazy people that are just getting pelted. The largest we'll get to in a second, but again, when we play in competitive and there is professional which we're going to get to and then also these adult social rec leagues, right? It really is based more on strategy. If you are out of position, if you go out of your limitations, you're going to get trounced. It really is about teamwork, working together and following the script. There are plays, there are calls, there are positions and all of them will either make you or break you. Now, modern history. I would love to come in here, right? Because we've had all these scientists and experts and tell you about this tremendous past where there was this African tribe that was practicing warfare tactics and they were they're defending a fallen brother and so they would throw rocks at the other people, right? To try to keep them and take them out of harm's way. However, that's not true. We really can't seem to find where dodgeball actually started. That is one theory, right? And then it was brought over. There was one where bricks were involved. I'm not even going to get into that. And then others are just, there was a gym teacher and there was a rainy day and they're like, what can we do inside to keep these kids from going crazy? But the modern history is a lot easier for us to go back to. And this happened before the dodgeball movie. Essentially, it is growing in popularity every day. I don't know if it can compete with quidditch, but I can assure you in a lot of places like London, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, it is a rapidly growing adult league. There's a lot of tournaments between cities. And then there's also national leagues to think about. We do have the national dodgeball league. We also have elite dodgeball. These are tournaments where there's actually cash prizes, if you can believe it, given away. And these teams travel to play each other. So a lot of tournaments in Las Vegas, a lot of tournaments in Arizona, Canada, and then also you probably heard the House of the Air. These are some of the bigger tournaments. $25,000 purse is involved for the winner of these tournaments. I have friends who are making money playing dodgeball, coaching dodgeball, teaching or training dodgeball, if you can believe it. It really is becoming a large thing. We're going to watch a video here in a minute with the World Dodgeball Federation. It was just played in Hong Kong three weeks ago and brought together all of these national teams to compete on the world stage in dodgeball. So again, this isn't just something that's going on in the backyard. Again, this is just a little bit of fun facts here for you. This is actually the first largest. After University of Alberta claimed the title, the University of UC Irvine, any Irvine folk in the house? Okay, well, they came roaring back and they had a game with over 6,000 people. And the blue side won. A few other fun facts is that when we're talking about balls, we're going to talk about different kinds of balls. There are variations on game and size. But the ones that we use, they can get thrown upwards of 60 to 80 miles per hour. If you can imagine that. I know a lot of us are shaking our heads. I promise you, believe it or not, these don't damage you. Maybe not physically, maybe emotionally, but I'm pretty sure that you all could come out of this. Again, in a rec league, I can assure you that you might see mid-60s not much higher than that. But they have been thrown at 80. And then again, the longest game, 43 hours in New York. 18 people, right? Literally playing around the clock. If you play 45 minutes, you can get a five-minute break. A lot of them would accumulate enough to take like an hour nap and then they would jump back in. So 43 hours of dodgeball. I don't know if I love it that much, but I do love it. But keeping it going though. So why do we play dodgeball? What is the point? Let's start getting into some of the nuts and bolts of this thing. Now, as we all probably know from elementary school, it's to eliminate the other team. But while a lot of us being sports fans, the one thing that we probably don't think about a lot when we're thinking about dodgeball, it's one of the only games when you're on offense and defense simultaneously. In baseball, you know someone's on defense. You have your batter on offense. Right? Someone in the basketball, you're trying to get the ball in the hole and defending them. You have seven or six balls, depending on if you're in professional or you're in amateur. And everybody has a chance to get you out, get you in. So there's constantly so much apparatus going on. You always have to be on your toes. Okay? And of course, there are a few things that we understand traditionally about how the game works. And I'm going to let Adam go ahead and take that from here. All right. So basically, we're going to go over a couple of the more poignant rules of dodgeball. And there are a lot more than you think that there are. There's basically two ways. The main point, dodgeball is to eliminate your opponent. How do you do that? All right. So you have two options, two main options. One, you hit them. You throw the ball, you hit them, and they're out. Simple as that. Sometimes you can try to dodge it, but sometimes it's going to hit you. The other way is if somebody throws at you, you can catch their ball. If you catch their ball, they're out. And then actually somebody else on your team comes back. It's actually the same guy. I think they're well done. Same game. So now when you get hit, you can get hit by multiple different ways. You can get hit as long as the ball is what's called live. Once the ball crosses the center line, crosses from your side to the other side by you throwing it, it becomes a live ball. If that ball hits any person on the court, any multiple people on the court, they are all out. As long as that ball stays live. Now the only way a ball becomes dead is if it hits an inanimate object not controlled by another player. So we brought a couple of balls with us. So basically, if I'm throwing at Hunter, all right, and I throw it and it hits the ground and it hits him, he's going to be safe. It's going to be fine. It hits the wall and it hits him. It's any chair, basketball hoop, light fixture, what have you. He's going to be fine. But the ball comes at him straight in the air hits him in the hip, anywhere below the neck. He's going to be out of the game. Now, if I throw at him and it deflects off of him onto another player on his team and they catch it, he's not only saved by his team, but it's still a live ball and the other team is out. And somebody on their team comes back in. So that ball continues to do damage or continues to have the opportunity to be saved as long as it doesn't hit the wall or the floor or anything else like that. Now, when I say in an object that's not controlled by a person, I mean that if I'm holding the ball like this and Hunter throws the ball at me and I block the ball, I'm controlling that ball, that ball is still alive, but I'm safe. It didn't hit me. So I'm reading hopefully, if you guys write down any questions after I talk through that, and we can ask those at the end. Now, we do not like to statistically name anybody, even though we are throwing an object at our friends. At least we would call them our friends. But we do, the rules of the game do state no headshot. So if there's a clean headshot, that ball becomes dead. It can't hurt anybody else. And as we'll pass around another ball, you guys can actually feel them. You'll actually tell, if you get hit in the face with this ball, it's gonna sting for a little bit, but it's not gonna leave a mark. And you guys are gonna be fine. I believe maybe I can speak from multiple experiences. So we have two different types of courts that you will see when playing dodgeball. Some leagues, one of the more professional leagues will play on more of a volleyball-sized court or a single tennis court. It's a lot skinnier and a little bit longer. You're playing with less balls and less people. The other side of the court, which is the court that we play on a more social leagues play in, is more of a size of, if you picture a basketball court, cut it in half, and then you play side line to side line. So you've got a center line in the middle, which you cannot cross. And then you've got attack lines right after the center line, which on the initial rush, which we'll get into a little bit later, the ball has to actually come back. So you can't run up to the center line, pick up a ball, and just throw it right at the opponent's right away. And you do have side lines on the side. You typically, the back wall is the back line. So there's no end line. You can't go anywhere. There's a wall in the way. All right. And then, so there's two other ways you can get yourself out. You can step over the center line. Here it is. Right here. This blue line right in the middle for our gym. And then you can also, if you dodge, dive out of bounds, wouldn't be thrown out. So if you try to dodge and you end up landing out of bounds, you're going to be out. And I'll just give you an example of this on the video that we're going to show you later on. There's two main different types of leagues out there throughout the nation, throughout the world. There are professionally competitive leagues. You'll see usually less people on the court. Games are a little bit quicker. They're a little bit more calculated, a little bit more strategies involved, more communication. Usually there's uniforms involved and everybody looks the same. Then there's also socially competitive leagues. So I say competitive in that somebody has to win. So that is a competition. But you see that it's usually a mix match of people, anywhere between eight and 25 people on a team, depending on the size of the gym and how many people show up. And you play with a lot more balls. Usually you play with seven. If you get a lot of people involved, you can get up to 12 balls on the court as well. Speaking of the balls, we've got basically four different types of balls. You play in different leagues. You've got really competitive leagues, like the National Dodgeball League. We'll actually use the big 8.5, almost like kickball size balls, big rubber balls. You've got the seven inch nose thing, which we are holding right here. And then some other social leagues, we'll use foam balls. You find these in a lot of leagues that play, that have dodgeball as part of their adult rec mantra. So they have the leagues that do basketball and softball and what have you. They'll use these a lot of times too. They'll also mix in the five inch stinger balls, which are very similar to the foam balls, but they're half the size. And they're a lot harder to catch and they, well, they sting a little bit more. We do use the seven inch nose thing rubber balls. They're a lot easier to grip with one hand. Would you see on the next slide? There we go. They're also made to not hurt you. So no matter where you get hit, whether it be the face, the leg, or any other area, they're meant to maybe make you notice that you got hit, but beyond that, you'll forget all about it once you get back on the court. And so for the lack of, there's lots of different variations of how the game is played. And most of the time when we play, in most of the league leagues, you'll see is that there's one game, you play one team for the whole night, usually in about a 50 minute span, 25 minute halves, you switch sides half so that everybody has the same, because not every gym is the same, some gyms have bleachers, some gyms have windows, and other things can happen. I start off with seven balls. So we've got four balls on one side, three balls on the other. So you see that on the initial rush, you can only get the balls on the right, and this is so nobody's headbutting each other, or I know I played in a league where this wasn't a rule before, and I had a guy who was the very first game, he played, he broke his toe, because he stuck his toe into another player. So we don't allow that to happen. And then once you get the balls, you can't throw the balls until you have the ball across the attack line. So you'll see, we actually use the key of this basketball court as the attack line, you see the orange lines on the side, you've got to bring that ball all the way back behind there, and then you can start playing. So you can throw the ball back to your teammate, you can bring it back to yourself, there's a lot of different strategies involved, and how quick you want to play the game, how much accuracy that you might have as a thrower, or what your teammates might be strategizing behind you. So you've got different types of things that talk about blocking. So you can block the ball with your hand, as long as you don't lose control of the ball, that's a very viable option to use. So if a hunter throws the ball at me, and it hits my ball, and I lose control of the ball, I'm gonna be out, simple as that. If I lose control and I can hold onto the ball, I'll be okay. But if he throws the ball at me, I block it, and I hit this guy right up front, he's gonna be out. So it's happened and it's embarrassing. You feel bad, but you're safe, so it's okay. You can catch the ball, which again, can't emphasize this enough, best play in the game. If you catch the ball, not only are you safe, but the person who threw it is out, just like hitting somebody, and somebody who's out on your side, first in, first out, comes back into the game. And there's a couple different types of strategy that could be used, and I'm gonna let Hunter talk about that. All right, hi. So, really right now what we're gonna do is we're gonna prep you for the video that you're gonna see in just a second, because this is where we're really getting into these strategy ideas. I know you hear it, and I know sometimes it might be hard to believe, because it is dodgeball that we're talking about. But there are a few surefire ways to make sure that your team has the best opportunity to win as possible. And the first is, like going back to the slide of the volleyball, or basketball court, is to control the center line, because simply the closer you are, then the harder you're gonna be able to hit that person, because a lot of leagues, no matter how hard, even 80 miles per hour, it starts to slow down tremendously. If they're at the other end of the court, throwing a volleyball-sized throw, you're gonna be able to catch it at the end. So you wanna get to that line, and you want the other team to get back on their heels to the wall, because it's gonna be much more of an aggressive play. The next one is that you wanna control ball count. Let's go back to that whole thing we're talking about. Even the best player, your eyes don't work this way. Again, I wish I had some studies if someone wants to give me some grant money. I will do it, I promise. But your eyes just can't pick up on those many objects being flown at you at the same time. So you're gonna get out. You also can't dodge it. You can't jump. You can't duck. You're done. So you wanna make sure, when you have a team, that somebody always has at least one or two balls on the other side, so the other team can't go up to the front of the court or line and basically shoot, fish, and a barrel, right? Five people with five balls and then nobody on the other side with a ball, okay? The other one is also the timing. Now, we're talking about camera attacks here, right? Again, you're always on offense or defense. So when you have timing, you do wanna have a ball up. People put their ball behind their back. They'll sit there like they're maybe out. They'll just stand there quietly. And then they're gonna find the most opportune time to hit the other team. This is also known as sniping, which we have a video for this. But essentially, you're trying to catch the other team off their game. Sometimes you're gonna be trying to pick up a ball and bending over. Sometimes they're gonna turn their back. You never turn your back in dodge ball. Don't ever do it, right? Sometimes you might be talking to another player, trying to talk about who you're gonna hit, and then you get hit, right? Or throwing it, you're off balance, and then somebody knocks you out that way. So timing is a huge part of the game. And again, you do not have to have an amazingly strong arm. You don't have to have some amazing intuition, right? It's just simply understanding the game and going from there. And then last, throwing as a team, right? If I had a bunch of kindergarteners, this would be the first thing that you'd teach them about in teamwork, right? But if you go up there and you throw a ball again, no matter how hard you can throw, you're gonna get caught or you're gonna get dodged. But if you have everybody going up, throwing together, right? You're gonna have pretty good results. And also, if you throw together, another team can't respond. Those balls are probably gonna bounce back to you because you do have a wall behind you getting these back to you, which is a whole other rabbit hole situation. We won't go into that right now. Now, here's just a little video or tidbit of sniping. This is Casey. This is actually Adam's wife. She's lovely in the other room. Hi, Casey. And essentially, she's having a lot of fun. What you can't notice from the video is that she's sitting on the sideline and nobody understands that she has a ball, right? She's dancing around. She's having a good time. And her team is completely thrown without her. What she's doing is she's waiting for somebody on the other side who doesn't even know she has a ball to step up and they're looking to see who they wanna hit, right? And Casey's taking advantage and then knocking out the other player. So sniping goes into our next section, which is about positions. Yes, there are positions in dodgeball, believe it or not. A lot of your snipers are also known as corners. Corners goes back to this idea of always having a ball on your side because you always want them thinking about the person with the ball as opposed to who they're gonna try to hit if there is a better player on the other team that they're trying to ging up on or if there's a certain area that they want to throw. You always wanna know that someone has a ball. And you are on the corners because if you are on the sideline, that means that no one has a real direct shot that either can throw from in front of you or they can throw at the side. So you can't put your ball, your back to the sideline. Usually you play if I was left handed, I'd be on the right. If I was right, I was on the left. And you have a better option to take out the rest of the team. Corners are essential because again, you don't want everyone coming up to the front of the line. And as you'll notice on the video, you're also gonna have catchers and throwers. Again, very simple, something we've known about dodge ball forever. But this is again, knowing your niche and understanding what you do best. You will see a lot of catchers take their ball, right? You think you want a ball, right? It's called dodge ball. So you wanna dodge, you wanna deflect. And they'll actually hand it over to a thrower. So now they're gonna have a better opportunity to catch the ball. And the funny thing is, you'll notice a lot of those people that look vulnerable or ready to be thrown at, no one will throw at them because they understand that they're gonna catch you 100% of the time unless somebody else is throwing with you. So when you take all of these strategies, all of these ideas, throwers are pretty self-explanatory. They usually have the best arms. They're the most accurate or a combination of two. It can make a pretty deadly team if everyone understands their positions. So what we're gonna do on the next slide is it's actually gonna be the video of the finals of the World Dodge Ball Federation. Again, this was in Hong Kong. The finals was between the United States and Canadians. But whenever Canadians say they're passive, they're joking. They're very good dodge ball and they're very aggressive. And you're gonna see it here in this video. The United States will be at the bottom. The Canadians will be at the top. Okay? But this is gonna be six on six. This is all men. They do have women's. They do have co-ed. We just chose this because, frankly, it's the best video to give you the best view of what you're looking at so we can explain it. Okay? So as we go to the next slide, here are the United States. Now, the United States have balls. Notice at the very top, you have your throwers in the middle. They do not have a ball. I'm sorry, Canada has ball throw. And then you have your corners. Now, what they're doing is they're trying to own the center line. They're trying to get up as high as possible. Now, this guy, Nate, here, he did not get back. And because him and his friend, Ish, decided to go up without the help, they were both picked off relatively easy. Now, notice that we have a distinct advantage of numbers. But notice that they're not just throwing crazily, trying to take advantage of this number. They are being patient because they understand that this team has to throw. They have ball count. So they're waiting patiently using their balls to either deflect, ride, or have a counterattack to keep them from just being able to throw as much as they would like. Now, also notice we do have our corners in play. We have guys on the both sides near the sideline. They're not in the middle. This is going to make it easier to defend on the counterattack and also get a straight attack. They keep going for this guy on the left. He's very good. He has good ball control and body control, and he's able to deflect and jump. Here we are controlling the line again and throwing together. Now, notice that they're not throwing all four of their balls. This is because, again, they are trying their best to keep as many as they can, so nobody has a clear advantage and can throw. And there you have your catchers in the middle, and we're going to see the counter, the corners up here, waiting for their best opportunity. You'll notice that they fake throw a lot. Fake throwing. They fake throw almost 10 times more than they actually throw. Again, this goes back to the idea of eyes. You're picking up all these people doing this. So even when someone throws it, you don't know who's throwing the ball. It's yet just another strategy to try to fool the opponent. Now, if we're looking at the lines also, notice that we do have the outline on the right, and we do have the outline on the top left, and then we have our ball girls. But here we are, those that also are having their knee pads. Knee pads, most professional players and even amateur players use them. So again, get on the ground, get dirty, slide around, and be able to have more opportunity to catch or to dodge the ball. Now, Rad League, what are we? Everyone's excited, right? You guys are stuck around, most of us? So we might want to play or at least try it out. We have multiple opportunities. Essentially, Rad League is a co-head adult dodgeball league. It really is social and fun first. It's competitive second. We have over 120 members. We're growing every day. We just started our second league, or we started our second league on Monday nights. So when you're not here at the end of every Monday night, you can come and play dodgeball. But we have two ways to play. We have basically open gyms, which is essentially, you come, you pay $5, it's two hours, and you get to see if you like it. Do you even have fun anymore? Is it like what you remembered or is it not? Right? And we also have league. It's a little more responsibility. It's a little more competitive, a little more strategic. We have nine week and six week sessions. But it's not just about dodgeball. We also do other things. We have fun names, like Occupy Ball Street or Ferris Ballers Day Off. We get as creative as you want to be. There's some obvious ones like blue balls, but that didn't probably take that long to figure out. But we also have a lot of social events, like A's tailgates, beer pong tournaments. Okay, we're going to pick up Quidditch. I like this whole Quidditch thing. Not a chess boxing. We need to have a meeting. But we'll figure it out. So essentially, if you would like to come out, we'd love to have you and have a lot of fun. You can find us at radlake.com. Thank you. Are there any questions? Two questions. Sure. In the back? Yeah. You said games between two games for the last about 50 minutes. How many games within that time period would you expect to play? We'd like you to get out earlier than the 15 minutes. Yeah, yeah. So that's a great question. Honestly, sure. So the question is, is we're talking about matches and we're talking about games. And we're saying that essentially there's 50 minutes in a match and then each game in between. Games can last, honestly, depending on how good the strategy is. We've played in 50 minute matches where the score might be 10 to 14. Other times I've played in matches, 50 minute matches that are five to two. So it really depends how fast are the balls being thrown, as part of people holding on to the ball, like a ball count, right? Being very specific on who they throw, how they throw. It's very up in the air. So we're giving an average, essentially. And then, of course, if you're playing with 22 people on a team, it's still going to take a good amount of time. And then one more question. Do I need one place to play? Yeah. So essentially a match is 50 minutes and then you play as many games in that 50 minutes as possible. And again, a game is determined by when one team is completely eliminated and the other team has people. And so essentially you play as many games in that time as possible. And for each game you win, you get a point. Yeah. Thanks. Awesome. Thank you guys so much. I want to thank all the speakers, as well as the new Parkway, the Oakland Public Library, DJ IonThePrize, and thank all you for attending. There are a few events coming up over the next month. I want to call out basics, in particular, as Bay Area Art Science Interdisciplinary Collaborative Sessions. I think I got that in the right order. They're awesome. NerdNight is at Comic Con. If any of you want to go down to San Diego, I think that National Geographic has somehow been suckered into sponsoring NerdNight in San Diego. I don't know how we'll get that, but it won't be nearly as overpriced as every month because of that, and the speakers will be awesome. We're also back next month. Here's our lineup. We'll have talks about Easter, about the climate, as well as mental illness. So we'll see you then.