 Just to the point of the lady right there, I've read our clinical trial list as early as the 1880s, which is kind of a stay on the head. I'm going to start off in the 19th century, so that's what we're going to do. Let me start off in 1874. In that year, a New York faculty focused in his letter to the while other letters in his column, it's for health, just to be part of these patients, one anonymous reader instead wondered, quote, is the hair, including stiff, straight, black hair and beard, indicating coarse, strong, rigid, straightforward character? Find our brown hair signifies the combination of exquisite sensibilities with great strength of character? Harsh, a bright and sour spirit, a stubborn and harsh character, and finally, great hair people are therefore a safe passion. A great way in which the hair flowed past a clever person could be a shrewd guess at the manner of a man's oral misdisposition. For the final comment that sounds really weird to 21st century readers, how could anyone expect to know anything as meanable as a person's temperament or character just by looking at their hair? But this actually is still part of a surprising cultural belief and practice of the 19th century America, the widespread understanding that hair can reveal the truth about the person from whose body it had grown. 19th century Americans from different regions, class backgrounds, racial groups, and religious traditions share the common belief that it was way more important to believe that they understood and interacted with each other than historians have previously realized. This is the subject of my dissertation research in progress right now. So the 19th century is to provide a little context for this coming up. The 19th century, with a period of many of its accomplishments, really troubling change in the United States. It's really hard to underestimate just how many aspects of daily life changed during this 100-year period. Between 1800 and 1900, the nation began to shift from a raring economy to a capitalist market economy, and industrialization changed the world. A bloody civil war ended in sleeping in American Americans, but the nation's black population continued to suffer political disenfranchisement, economic struggle, and extreme acts of violence. Voting rights were extended first to all white-leveled men, then to Western territorial expansion, dramatically enlarged the size of the United States, and new forms of transportation made in nation increasingly connected and accessible. Immigration from Europe and Asia exploded only to be legally restricted according to ethnicity and race, and major cities like New York, seen in this photograph, emerged and expanded dramatically. Between 1800 and 1900, the percentage of Americans who lived in cities grew from just 6% to 40% of the population. And the common theme, like just described, is that they put Americans in contact with people they did not know. For the first time in the nation's history, interactions with strangers became part of everyday life for hundreds of thousands of people. And this made many Americans anxious about their inability or their inability to discern each other's identities. The potential for pretending to be something you are not felt ever greater in this modernizing world, and this actually seemed to work around every corner. One example is a confident man, better known to us as a common man, who was thought to haunt American cities. Furthermore, older indicators of identity and methods of verifying identity fell increasingly unstable, such as a network of trusted neighbors that one could previously rely on. In a world of strangers, which the 19th century increasingly resembled, how could you figure out who was representing yourself truthfully and who was faking it? How could you know who you trust? In an update to these questions, 19th century scientific and cultural authorities increasingly placed their faith in a human body, attempting to identify specific body parts that they called to reliably signal the real person inside. After all, they argued, even the best common man's performance could not obscure the truth that was evident in his physical form. This search for fixed meaning in bodies led to a field of study that you might already know. That's chronology. This is a chronological image. Chronology, as you might know, is the careful examination of the shape of the head, and it was thought that this examination could reveal precise qualities of a person's intellect, personality, and character. Chronology was believed in the scientific view, even though now it's scientific nonsense. But at the time, around the starting of the 1830s, Americans of means attended chronology lectures, purchased chronology journals and books, and had their chronological profiles taken by expert chronologists, all opposed to a veteran between identity and the human body. This interest in chronology and other similar types of civil sciences has become well known about historians over the past four years or so. It's become extremely clear to us that 19th century Americans were meaning and significance from body parts like the connoisseurs of the skull. But if we fail to think of the body in the way that 19th century people thought of the body, that is to say, we assume that people living 150 years ago understood the body in the same way that we do. Well, actually, we miss something really important. This is one of the arguments of my research, which is that in the 19th century, care actually counted as part of the body. Care was understood in many ways to be much more like an appendage, like an arm or a leg, than the way that it's thought to stay much more expendable, like a fingernail. It is, of course, very different from other body parts. Care and that's understood then as it is now. Care can be separated from the body painlessly, like an arm, and because care is not composed of soft tissue, like an arm, a piece of care usually resist decay for decades or longer. As part of my research, I looked at a lot of care objects, lots of care reserved over time, and I see things as old as about 150 years old and look like they were pretty remarkable how old care was. Despite these differences from other body parts, care was, as one scientist wrote, an essential part of the human body. And for this reason, it held significant meaning about the person inside. An understanding of care is in the 19th century to feel more confident as they traverse the streets, trains, and markets of their increasingly modern society. Confident that their care they saw on a stranger's head had the power to reliably tell them who was who and who to trust. During the 19th century, there was one aspect of identity in particular about which white Americans were especially anxious and that's grace. As a vision a few minutes ago, 1970 people were really kind of freaked out about deception and falsifiable identity and they were especially freaked out by racial passing, that is specifically black people passing as white, presenting publicly as white. I just wanted to mention here that the need for grace has changed a lot over time throughout American history. When the first European colonists arrived in the New World in the early 1600s, racial ignorance actually got to be environmentally determined. Best to say, a person's skin color or physical features were thought to be a reflection of climate, soil, food, etc. of the place where that person lived. And moreover, if you moved to a new climate, your race, your specific race, would actually change over time. It would hold the course of your lifetime to reflect your new climate. But by the 19th century this environment told the definition and created a way and they've been replaced instead by a new conception, one that's much more familiar to us today, which is that a race was then understood to be fixed on changing and supporting inheriting from your politics. He had still, as a reliable entity, was far from settled in the 19th century and thus was open to a lot of faith. And in these stories, and I think we've played out some of these forewinds and pages of the newspaper, some people argue that it's actually a hair that was more reliable than any other index of a person's race. The idea that a hair can resonate with a person's racial identity may not sound too surprising to us today because in many ways these kinds of associations linger. Just one example, around 14, the military updated its uniform standards to forbid women soldiers from wearing dreadlocks, twists, and many thousands of graves. This is a page from the PowerPoint presentation that was circulated among military officials, so they could implement this new policy. I downloaded it when I first found it and went back to find it and recently it's now disappeared from the Internet. And now they need it because although the language of this policy was grace neutral, unknowable in detail, black women's elders came from these styles, many people didn't have to view these changes as specifically targeting black women because these styles are so heavily associated with black women's hair here. And actually in response to the backlash against these policies, the military were candid in many of these prohibitions, which may actually be why this PowerPoint no longer exists. But what was different about the 1900 comparison of something like this was that hair wasn't just associated with a racial group. It was instead understood to actually be biological evidence of a person's race, like an external manifestation of this internal unchanging body. And in no situation did this brand of evidence have more great meaning than in the pre-Cittal War part where the hair could become evidence in a slave's case for freedom. The centering local and state courts throughout the South have heard of our call for racial determination cases. These are cases in which the outcome hinges on the determination of either of the race. Some of these cases dealt with the crime that was specified by race. For example, many states in North and South forbid black people from owning guns. And so if a person accused of this crime or arrested for this crime could prove that he was not black, he could, you know, must be allowed in the charge of fraud. But among the civil cases, far and away the most time of racial determination case was when a slave sued for his river of freedom claiming that he was actually white or Native American and not black, and thus his owner and slave was leaving. In these cases, judges and juries often were contradictory evidence from both sides, and so they wanted to decide what kind of evidence was the most compelling and reliable in deputators of racial identity. The skin color has always been the most important indicator of a person's race, but for a long time skin color was just one of many features used to assess race both in the court and in the elsewhere. And often times not even the most important legal definitions of racial status in the 19th century vary from state to state, but before the civil war they generally shared two characteristics. One, children follow the status of their mothers, so does state their mother was black and their father was white, their child would be, because they're legally black. And the second feature is that some fraction of black ancestry made someone black, typically one quarter or one eighth beyond that that person converted back to white or Native. The infamous one-drop rules that you might be familiar with in which case, you know, any tiny fraction of black ancestry made someone black, you know, you weren't passed until after the civil war, and in some states not until well into the 20th century. But moreover, and you weren't standing in point here, is that these distinction for whether the law practiced in these local courtrooms are talking about individual jurors, judges, witnesses, made their own decisions about where to draw the line to be black and why and what evidence was the most compelling. And so looking at these far cases is really to a way for historians to understand what would happen when it came to determining a person's race in the first half of the 19th century. But one thing that I discovered in my research is that one thing that happened immensely in many of these cases was hair. One of the first known examples of these slave freedom cases was a case from 1806 called Hudgens v. Wright. In this case, Jackie Wright, who was enslaved, argued that she and her children should be freed because they were suspended on her mother's side from Native Americans. You remember what I said about this natural, linear, inheritance of the slave status. So Jackie Wright's family got a lawyer and brought in a sister court, and they testified that they knew Jackie Wright's grandmother and her great-grandmother, and that these women were of copper complexion. They had long black hair, and that their neighbors knew them as they did. So three different types of evidence was presented to the judges. After hearing all this evidence, the states of Supreme Court of Virginia ruled in favor of the Wright family, saying that they should be freed. Here's an excerpt of one judge's opinion. Nature has stamped upon the African, and his descendants two characteristic marks, the signs that differ as a complexion, which often remain visible long after the characteristic distinction in color either disappears or becomes doubtful, a flat nose, and a glee head of hair. The latter of these characteristics disappears the last of all. Moreover, this judge continued, this particular hair texture, the hair texture evident of African Americans was, quote, so strong an ingredient in the African constitution that it can't continue to be evident in all sentiments, quote, never with a party distinguished by it cannot trace as many as purely from the race of Native Americans. In other words, since Jackie Wright's grandmother and her great-grandmother have strayed hair, these witnesses said, without any trace of a king, they must be the American, and therefore they and all their descendants must be freed. According to this judgment, hair texture was in fact a single most reliable indicator of race. The texture was not really sleazy through the cases. In some programs, the racial being of hair actually came down to a single strand. One of the most bizarre and incredible cases that I've studied as a part of this research is an 1857 case from Louisiana called Morrison versus White. He couldn't be in but one of the practices made for White to hold him. He'd keep track of that since we're having a lot of race. In this case, this case involves two people, a teenage slave named Alecina Morrison, who would run away from her master, James White, claiming that she was the fact away woman who had been kidnapped and forced into bondage. We don't know how to use photographs of Morrison, but everyone on both sides of this case testified that she had blue eyes and blonde hair. This was not up to debate, but what was up to debate was the question of whether she was nevertheless a slave. The lawyers who represented James White, her owner, produced really incredible evidence. They had bills of sale and witnesses that went all the way back until tracing her slave from Stats since birth. She had about six owners by the age of 15, and they got every single owner to testify. Going back to the guys, yeah, we watched her being born. So you think this is pretty compelling evidence that she was not kidnapped. She was a fact, or as a slave, a religious one up until the point she ran away. But despite having all this evidence on his side, none of the juries who were in this case in Louisiana, there were three separate juries who heard the case. None of them ruled in favor of the slave master. Just briefly ago, each of the leads of this kind of complicated case, Morrison versus White went through three jury trials and one trial for the state's Supreme Court. The first trial ended up hung jury, so the court could be the second trial. This trial ruled in favor of Morrison's age. White, she should be free. But White, her owner White appealed as the case went to the state's Supreme Court. And they were really like, okay, these juries are idiots. This case should be to be re-tried sending you back down. So the case is to try to learn from the new jury using the same evidence as the second trial. And this again ended in a hung jury. But this kind of juror said, look, we're 10 and two, and they work for her. We just can't have this as two guys on to our side. So again, hung jury. Before a new trial would be arranged, because at this point, it's been almost five years, and new new troops were able to settle war now. So new new troops had made their way to New Orleans, shut down the court system, and that is where the trial goes cold. So if we don't actually know what happened to Alexine Morrison or James White, others where I suspect she probably freed herself effectively because of the way she looked, but we don't know for sure. But all of this is very winding and happy to an obvious question. Since White, her owner had the oldest documentation on this line, what made Morrison's case for freedom so compelling the eyes of these juries who kept trying to set her free? Every single witness who tested right on her behalf, emphasized not her history or her ancestry, but instead they focused on the way she acted, saying she acted white, but especially on the way she looked. These witnesses told the jury that they had examined Morrison's body, and sometimes specifically touching her body, and that that body was consistent with the white person's body. And of all the physical features, they looked at no feature retention morphic they did for her hair, for straight blonde hair. In order to say this case, I have a copy of the original transcript. This is a screenshot of one page of this transcript. This document has 180 pages of it like this, but it includes every single motion, every ruling, every piece of testimony in the re-exhibit presented throughout the five and a half year process of this whole case was described. So I read through this document and I reported every bit of witness testimony, categorizing what type of racial knowledge each witness relied on to argue that Morrison was black and thus a slave, for that she was white and thus a free. Combining all the evidence presented in these three of her trials, there were 45 total mentions of specific parts of Morrison's body that the witness had neither proved she was white or she was black. They include her hair, eyes, nose, teeth, mouth, lips, cheeks, ears, armpit, breasts, back, fingers, nails, legs, feet, complexion of the same color, and the confirmation of the body. Out of the 45, and each trial witness mentions one of these things they say, I don't know if they have armpits, and they tell me for sure that she's got something like this. Of the 45 different times that witnesses mentioned these features, hair was specified 15% of the time. That's more than any of these other features listed here. As one witness said in this testimony, Morrison's hair was simply more reliable than her skin color, quote, so this is a quote from the video. It's a sensei-based plaintiff as Morrison, white from her hair. For a person of African origin, they have very white skin, but still hair will in time to curl. Someone that's actually even beyond the visual appearance of Morrison's hair or the texture. One witness in particular, a local medical school professor named Dr. Reddell, testified that he had exactly Morrison's hair under a microscope to prove that she was white. In his testimony, Dr. Reddell said that he had both cut off a piece of her hair, and then he prepared the sections of the hair curl and then examined it with a microscope. He discovered it to be the moderate, oval characteristic of the Caucasian or white race. This is that we need the shape of a single strand of her hair to prove definitively that Morrison was white. When Dr. Reddell mentioned here the moderate, oval characteristic of the Caucasian or white race, he was referencing scientific research that had just been published a few years earlier by a lawyer and amateur scientist named Peter Brown. Peter Brown is trying to assess for the hair, both human and animal hair, in the late 1840s and 1850s, where he had at least six different books and articles on the subject. His signature claim in his publications was about the shape of hair follicles. Brown argued that a fin, oh shit, they mentioned the show. Okay, so what is this publication, the classification of mankind? Brown argued that there were three hair follicles shapes. One of them, even if it's perfectly round, and that is the, you know, this is cylindrical, this is seen only in Native Americans. The next shape is, this is the hair seen only in white people. And the third is called, he is centrally illigible. He says it's seen only in black people. I want to be totally visible, like this one. There's no, it's between the shape of the follicle and some of these things. And nevertheless, for example, he had the world's largest collection of loss of hair cut from both dead and alive people. And because it was scientific, his work was biochemical and thus perfectly reliable. We'll have to persuade him. After all, it was to this research that Dr. Griddell turned to prove that Alison Morrison with her oval follicles must be white. But Brown's research effectively reversed the scientific process. Rather than conducting experiments and then drawing conclusions from his findings, Brown instead started with a pre-existing racial conclusion. And that is if a human world could be divided into three different species. He divided up this way. This is Native American, white, and African. This is where some of these Chinese people are. So he said, the world can be divided into these three races. And that, while these three species evolved him, this is where the time that three species of man can be arranged along a hierarchy. Brown's hair research doesn't merely attempt to substantiate this claim of racial hierarchy. We need to look no further than this sentence, which comes out of Brown's maddening opus, chirology of women and men, of perfect hair. So Ebbl, or Ebbl, a German physician, is of the opinion that the most perfect hair is the whisker of some of the lower animals, such as the seal, the lion, the rabbit, et cetera. But we vote she's like me. But I, considering these whiskers as organs of touch, place the hair of the scalp of the white man at the head of the list of piles. Piles is meant for a hair check. Wine is a white person's hair better than all their types of hair. Brown's research should explain how this hierarchy goes into talking about something totally unrelated. And barely operating in his boat does he ever address this question. When he does not do it, his explanation is so nonsensical that I can barely explain it, but everyone takes it out of it. Basically saying that if you look at strands of hair under a microscope, why do people's hair have one extra feature? And that's this internal shaft where hair pigmentation resides. And therefore, he says because any body part that has more features that have one function each, that's the definition of a perfect body part. Think about it as genitalia. So if you think about, female bodies have your retros for urine, and the giants have the reproductive function, whereas male bodies have just a real retros for both semen and urine. And they're the ground. We probably argue that women's bodies are more perfect than men's bodies, because everything has one one correspondence between feature and function. This is my brother scientist in New York City. My conclusions were not rooted in the data, but to create scientific justification for racial beliefs and structures that old religious system. In this way, his work will illuminate one of the problems which with much of the biological sciences that were produced during the 19th century in the United States. And then these sciences were so shaped by their surrounding social and cultural context that they lacked any real relationship to observable reality. And in this way, the science of hair is no exception. Thank you. Any questions? Two questions. I have to go for this dreadlock to be worn in the workplace, that this is not a violation of the protection of racial discrimination. The question is whether in my approach, I'm not a legal historian, so I don't need to wait intently into legal history. So I don't know about the case law behind this case, but I was a scientist who probably overturned it. I mean, the early military era of prohibition was not a legal challenge. It was a social pressure, right? It was like, how many are relieved, for example, are farmers going to grow something? Publicly about this, you know, there were policies, there was a social pressure that encouraged the military to change into policy. So you'll actually know the role of the case law, but I was astounded because there is this fairly long history of this very close association between this hair style, between Dresden and the African Americans, that it seems hard for me that it would stand a screening that is so important. Yeah? So the question is, absolutely, absolutely. We are in a little bit of a pretty history of the John X-Town, because it's more of a 1930, 20th century science, but it is absolutely the same kind of process whereby the claims of objectivity are very hard to substantiate from the historical perspective, right? That the choosiness of particular types of evidence, of particular specimens really does reflect a desire like, if you're going to re-upply and naturalize with the prestige of science, racial inclusion that I've already been working on. So this is, I think these are the direct, you know, the four points like that of New Jersey science a few decades ago, absolutely. All right. Thank you. So thanks Sarah. Okay, and last one, the project, I'm on very early note of the stage. Now we're going to take a very short break, there's a drone right there, so I'm pretty excited to actually see that fly, so Eric's kind of talking about pretty soon. I mean, if you go grab a brownie, so if it's soon, for the last frame, we'll be back in like 500 minutes until it's out on a big stretch, and we'll talk about some things. I'm going to talk about volcanoes, and show you some really awesome pictures, and so I was thinking about the kind of intro experience with volcanoes. Literally, everyone on earth, for a school science fair, has done the being sort of in every volcano, right? And so, you know, why do you do that? Well, there's a couple reasons. One, your kid thinks volcanoes are cool, and the other option is mommy or daddy had a headache, and there was baking soda in the kitchen, right? Those are your two options. And so we're looking at all these pictures of baking soda volcanoes, a couple things struck me. The biggest one is that not only can Lacey parents have their kids do baking soda volcanoes, now they could even send their all-pair to Amazon to buy a pre-made kit for volcanoes, which kind of made me sad, because it's the easiest possible science fair project. I also realized, I didn't want you guys to feel left out that we were one of the kids that didn't do a volcano as your science fair project, so I totally just threw up Potatoes Make a Literacy, which I'm pretty sure covers the rest of you, right? In this room, those are the two projects you do when you have parents who are hungover than they before. So what's actually going on in the baking soda vinegar volcano? So the part that we care about, we add sodium bicarbonate and vinegar, acetic acid, the part that we care about is that the hydrogen from acetic acid can work with a component of sodium bicarbonate to form carbonic acid, these are called the really nerdy people left in the room, and that carbonic acid breaks down into other components, water and carbon dioxide. And it's actually that carbon dioxide gas that makes a baking soda volcano bubble up and explode, and they look like this and it's cool and there's bubbles everywhere. And so like for this prep, I mean this is embarrassing, I literally looked at like 600 pictures of baking soda volcanoes trying to find the cool one, but essentially, god damn it, they all have feet tall, but I'm like, why is that? Like why are they old? And so I got to thinking, what is the biggest baking soda and vinegar volcano in the heck can they get? So we're here to answer that question tonight. 2008, Mount Hood Community College in our hard-hitting science program made a volcano that was, oh it's covered, damn it, it's drinking, why did you put me on a nap? What was I thinking? Well, I'll have to do the video, no I don't. This is my error. Basically, this volcano was 20 feet tall, okay, so they built a baking soda volcano that was 20 feet tall as my video totally crashes. Here's to the picture, it's my problem. For the biggest baking soda vinegar volcano, next slide. But you know what, the Canadians said, I don't really like the Mount Hood Community College holds that record, so I think what we're going to do is we're going to take those poses and we're going to one-up them. And we built it out to 23.5 feet. By the way, if you're Canadian, I'm not trying to consult you, I'm probably going to move to Canada after this election and crap is saying, my accent, so it's high. I'll see you all there, if I know our audience. So they built a white feet tall, here they are, here they are, there's a giant mound of sand, here they are putting water slurry into the cauldron, I guess technically cauldera, actually a vinegar. And it's actually coming down and it's erupting and this is cool. And this is the Guinness Book of World Records, record for the biggest baking soda vinegar volcano. But let me tell you, things move pretty quick in the cutthroat of the amateur baking soda vinegar volcano making. This record, the Elton-Spiders School in 2015 built a volcano that was 28% setting the record, they're either celebrating or running until, or I actually can't tell you, it is a big volcano, it's 28 feet big, right? And so this is still, because I don't want to like pull the rug off of you, this is still the record currently, 28 feet tall, the biggest baking soda volcano history, volcano industry. And to some, it's kind of white in the spotlight, so it's hard to see, but you know, there's always one in every audience, in every crowd. So this is something like when you were a kid, you ate a volcano, it was two feet tall, interrupted for like 10 seconds, you won that green ribbon at the science fair, right? Like that's what you got. These guys made the biggest fucking volcano in the history of baking soda vinegar volcanoes, and here's this one kid in the crowd, just like that, who even he is not impressed with this accomplishment. To impress you with accomplishments, Eric Chang is going to show you some really awesome pictures of actual volcanoes. Thanks so much for having me, thanks for staying until the very end. So I'm here to talk about drones and volcanoes, but before I get to that, I want to just take two really quick detours. I have known Rebecca Cohen since high school, and I want to show you a picture. Is here? Ready? There she is. Okay, but then I'm up right here, so I can see the beginnings of being a co-boss of the bird night from the very beginning. Okay, second detour, and I promise I'll get to the drone stuff. My history is actually an underwater photography, and I promise you that it's related, but I spent thousands of hours underwater as a photographer, and what I really liked about the ocean was that it was absolutely beautiful, and that beauty was sort of unusual and hard to access in some ways, but once it was unlocked it was accessible in a way that was really difficult to reproduce on land, and you know the main horrors are things like bringing life support with you, bringing weights, airbags, things severe to breathe, these sorts of things, but the reward was incredible, and what I found is that the ocean basically gives you what it has to offer, and it's very very easy to access. This is one of my most, my most stolen images I should say, but it's great, that is popular because I think kids liked it, and what's really great about being underwater is that you can get really close to wildlife, and most underwater photography is actually shot just within a few feet of the subject, sometimes even closer, just inches away, and there are unimaginable forms underwater that are pretty easy to access again. There are also big things underwater, big animals, which you can also get close to, get really close to them, and of course some of the biggest animals on the planet are underwater, and you can get close to them too, and what's amazing about this is that if you imagine getting close to an animal that's being on land, probably bad things would happen, and you can't, you know, you can get in the water with a 40 foot carnivore of water and emerge relatively unscathed. So some of my most amazing memories about the time I spent underwater with those animals, and underwater photography is also extremely gear-intensive, the cameras, the underwater housings, the lighting that we use, they're all specialized, fairly expensive, they take a lot of time to master, and I guess what I realized is after spending most of my life over 10 years being in the water, the movement underwater was what was really striking, because underwater it can take many hours to learn how to move without thinking, but what you get is the unlocking of the third dimension, you know, underwater we call it ascending and descending, and on land we call it flying. So they're really the same thing, and what I didn't really put together until after I had kind of jumped into the drone business is that most, you know, all that time I spent in the ocean really paved the way for me to have this interest in learning how to unlock the third dimension on land as well, and of course these are called drones now, when I got into them they were called multi-rotors or quadcopters, you had to build them yourself, and that's all obviously changed. So this brings me to volcanoes. In September a couple years ago, I suddenly found myself in Iceland at an erupting volcano, and this was really the result of sending one Facebook message to a friend in Iceland saying, I think it was, hey, do you think we could fly the volcano? And a few weeks later, maybe two weeks later, I was in front of this volcano, and you know, I had spent most of my life around nature pursuing these stories about interesting animals and relationships and ecosystems, but nothing really compared me for what it was like to be in front of something like this, like a volcano, erupting a volcano with a lot of the other sides of Manhattan sums up, so how I felt at this time, and the other thing that I was unprepared for was how beautiful all of it was, and as a photographer really, I was always pursuing these sorts of forms and colors, and it was really things like the clouds reflecting the color of this lava lake, those are the things that are very difficult to explain to reproduce kind of in normal life, but I wanted to bring drones to fly because drones have a very different, I mean, the current cameras you have on drones give you a very different perspective in the air than you might get from a helicopter or from an airplane or a hotter balloon. Most of the pictures you see from those sorts of flying machines are using long lenses, you know, they're telephoto pictures, and what we had on drones, especially at this time, which is a couple years ago, was fish on a very, very wide angle, and what that meant is that we would be able to get very, very different perspectives and to fly very close to the lava, which is also too dangerous to do from manned vehicles, so we stayed at the eruption only for a couple hours, mostly because the wind had shifted bringing this stuff close to us, which is very dangerous, and so we left, but I managed to get some good video for that trip. So when we seen that video, it was me getting braver and braver on successive flights, because I didn't know what would happen, you know, no one had ever done this, and I wasn't sure that the gear would actually survive, and in fact, it did survive, but I had to rely on the quadcopter coming home by itself to get it back, because in fact the camera had melted on that last flight, which was, you know, when we saw the lava above the volcano. So I was pretty pleased that it came back, the footage was intact, I got a great portrait photo of it, pretty hard to beat. So I've been doing these experiments and things like that, and also live broadcasts, and we're live broadcasting this talk right now. I've been experimenting with how to get these live broadcasts from drones, and so what happened was Good Morning America called, this doesn't really happen every day, and so at the time I was working for DJI, which is the company that makes these drones, and this was only a few months later, like four months later, and the difference four months makes between September and January in Iceland is pretty significant, because this is what it looks like in January, in winter, and this is also what we've had on that second trip, whereas on the first trip I basically had a backpack, and you know, we had a 2x4s of a guy, but suddenly this is like a 3% drone and 97% live broadcast gear, and we had a chanboy being lost in trucks. I have a 19 month old son who loves trucks, and this would have been his pretty much his ultimate dream. And the trucks were on these very, very loosely inflated tires, so we could just sort of bounce it around. This is actually footage from a drone that we're flying while driving the car, which is a huge amount of fun. And I think in this video, this is sort of a behind the scenes moment, this is a prototype Phantom 3, the first one that left the factory, and as you can see, we're not able to get back to the cars, because while we were driving, the winds had increased to like 40 knots, and as soon as you're getting further and further away, they're out really far away. It's going to get out really far, that's us right there. And then of course, drones went on batteries, so this is the drone dying. It's a pretty funny story, only because this driver pretty much drove to that spot and picked it up, and we had no visibility from the bottom two meters, because of the wind, the wind blown snow, and so it was probably, I mean, we were really lucky, and it was, now it's a great story, but it could have been really tragic. Yeah, it was really hard, yeah, white on white. Okay, so back to the clock, you know, this is what it looks like in the winter, and it was incredible to be able to return to this same spot, and I didn't think I'd be able to go back. This is our base camp, I use the quotes, people look better on TV, and there's actually terrain behind the trucks, but these whiteout conditions were pretty common over there, and this is what we spent most of the day, so we spent maybe three and a half days testing gear to establish working, predictable satellite connections. Those of you who have done satellite broadcast work, well you had to call a satellite over, and they actually brought it over here so that you could talk to it, so we had to do that to test it before, you know, whatever, six minutes we were going to be broadcasting on. So it's extremely remote. Okay, in four months, drones have changed dramatically. This is now, this is actually probably still useful now, the Inspire 1, I don't have to sell anymore because I don't work for the company anymore, which is great, but there's a lot of incredible tools still in it, and Tech had improved a lot, and despite being more or less packed with snow during the time there, including cameras, they actually worked really well, and this was a surprise because again, we haven't really, and I had never tested the drones in this sort of condition. The broadcast gear was incredible. It was literally left like this for four days, and it still worked. It was a big truck. We pushed these engineers to the limits. He had fallen through, I think he went out to have a peek, and fell into some very more, very spiky lawn, dry lawn, luckily, and so he was resting there. It was a pretty harsh environment, and often there were 20 to 30 not crosswinds blowing, and so flying was a little bit hairy, and luckily the technology was good, and we were both experienced pilots, the ones that the pilot took there was incredible. And so this is what flying drones looks like now. It's really not that sexy. It's like playing a game. This is a Sony phone, which we had to use because all products out there would refuse to work in the cold, and luckily we had these Android phones to use as backup, and this is actually, this is the picture of us flying live. I mean, it was incredible to just essentially be navigating as if we were playing a game. We didn't have a mobile data connection, so we couldn't see, this is normally a satellite map that we could see, and this is our route, these white lines. So this is me flying, the stakes were really high, it was sort of broadcasting to 60 million people, and this earpiece sort of became, I mean, we had a director from New York yelling in our ears, these guys don't get it, you know, oh we get it. This is very difficult, what's going on here, and luckily it worked out really well. So I'm not going to show you a live broadcast, but instead I'll show you footage from one of the flights. So this is a footage that's been sort of sped up, and what we did was we flew two helicopters at a time with one flying being behind the other, so that we would almost have a view of what, you know, how we were doing this. There's no music, because there's good quite the music that I have on this video, so I'll talk over it. So I'm flying this one right here, anytime you see footage without a drone in it, it's my camera, so this is my camera, and I just thought it'd be really interesting to see this, I mean it essentially starts to look fake, you know, you have this drone that looks like it came out of a science fiction movie flying over an environment that looks like it was rendered for a science fiction movie. And if that would be surreal to be doing this, we were working about a mile away, so it took about three minutes to fly to the lip of this calvara, and then we noticed there was this sort of river a lot that flowed out of the lake, and what was great is we could just go and support it. It was really easy to fly a couple miles away with these drones, and you'll notice the stability of the footage is incredible, you know, when I'm not moving, it's like having a tripod in there. And again, we really couldn't take risks during the live broadcast, because we probably would have to lose one during it, but in our exploratory flights, we did get pretty close and sort of even flew through some of these plumes, which I think would be very loud. Let's set up. Sorry, is there a question? How far away? So we were standing about a mile away. How far is it down? Oh, so I actually don't know, I know that we were pretty far below the level of the lava lake, and the drones were flying at what they thought were 60 meters, so anywhere between, I would say maybe 40 meters above. This is really cool. We didn't show this on the broadcast, but this is where the lava flows into the lava tube. So it's really, I mean, it's really incredible to be able to just explore visually this amazing thing that happened only for a few months there. Now, something I want to show you a few times in talks is what we did after the successful live broadcast. So all the way out, so everyone's literally patting up because it was time to go. We decided that it would be required to land the drone on the waterfall. And so here it is going down. And what's interesting is that it's very hard to get one of these drones to do this because you lose radius signal when you drop your low lip in the caldera, and then it says, oh, I don't know where I am, I have to go home. So then it tries to come back to you. And so what I had to do to make this work, and this monitor is much better than you can see, it just landed, I had to actually slide that spot and tell the drone, now you're home. So you should just land yourself, and that's what you can see out of the carbon fibers burning. And I was very sad. I was sort of imagining, you know, like in Terminator at the end, I really wanted it to kind of sink, but then I realized that it's trying to sink into a lot. And now the drone that's following has decided it's had enough, because enough of that melted that it's now trying to fly home, but clearly had no problems. And luckily we were able to bring that drone back and have a successful overall mission. This is the team as we were leaving, and of course the isomatic team, which we were going to have, it's hard to get them to smile. Okay, so it's been a year and a half since I did that, and a lot has changed. And one of the things that has changed the most is that it's now very, very easy to live stream from a drone. And a couple weeks ago I was on an exhibition in Indonesia, I was actually on the rest of Papua, the easternmost part of Indonesia, which is extremely remote. Yeah, I was in Rajapap. And my phone suddenly came up with a 3G connection and thought, well this is kind of weird, let's do some live streaming. And we live streamed a flight to check out the next dive site. And there it is, right there. And this actually obviously might be off the site. There it is. This is the dive site we were diving in at. It's called MaxPoint. It's named after MaxConor's son. It takes you through everything you're doing during that flight. Obviously you have to be in the middle of the night. And it's recording from the phone, so there's the 2x2. That's which is 4x3 on the phone. And what's really cool is the people who are meeting it are commenting. I'm seeing the comments coming real time. So I'm able to respond to that during that live video. Thanks for watching! So how many of you actually own a drone back in live streaming? One, two, one, two, okay. I was thinking you should give it a try here. Is that what you're all about? Okay, this is gonna be the minute. We're live streaming from there. We'll have lots of live streams coming. So maybe we can turn the lights up and see how this works. So we did test this before everyone arrived. But it's always different, of course, with people in the room. Okay, first of all, does anyone object to be flying over them? Okay, it's worth that momentum there. It, for some reason, falls. Just, you know, did anything on the airplane that we tell you to do? So we cover your head and pull for it. We can't really hurt you. And just my sports experience. Okay, this is a last-generation DJI Phantom 3. So all I'm gonna do is connect my phone to it. I'm just gonna run a standard DJI app that I don't educate with. Facebook. So what I thought pretty fun is that we could go to the live stream itself and watch it offline. So let's see if this works. It's kind of a three, two, one, and live. So now I'm gonna browse through it here, of course. As I can see, it might take a few seconds. Okay, so I'm just gonna fly it around a little bit. And I am Eric Chang, a CH treatment chief. I always put a bunch of things to browse through it in the announce. I am Eric Chang. Watch out for your Matthew. Everybody, what do you think? Do you have a drone? I recommend going and checking out. Some of these, finally, I always wanted to see if they had a fly drone. If you just didn't learn how to fly drones, I did write a book about drones. It's about this model here of DJI Phantom 3, mostly about this model. And then we gave a couple of flyers, some of them as well. And of course, I'm here for questions. Thanks so much. Voluntarily, mostly early on, in one case, I was flying way out of the water, and I think a bird hit it. It still had power, because I could watch myself in some way. But in another case, I was running beta software, the Athrash, and that was a mile away, and it had flown out. And so when it came back online, I had no situational awareness, and it took a long time for it to tell me where home was. And there was no map, so I wasn't sure if home was home. It was home where I am now, or somewhere else. And I just flew around trying to find, using the camera on the drone, trying to find where I was, and eventually, it didn't matter. So two over the course of years. Can we put an open ROV? There is a fantastic impact we should have on the speakers in the background. Oh, you did? Okay, great. So people are working on it, and I think it makes sense to use drones to explore the water. But what's really difficult is having them untethered. So what open ROV is doing, and maybe some others who enter the market hopefully, is they're tethering to a boy, and the boy talks to you over the lineup. It's super exciting. And you can, of course, already do things like last year for business. Oh, okay. You're interested in underwater photography. WreckPixel.com is a site that I've been running for many years. It's focused on underwater photography. There are a lot of technical challenges to getting pictures that you'd want to share with someone underwater. Has anyone taken a camera underwater? It's incredible, and I recommend using the drone. And it's easier than it's ever been now because of water production matters. Any other questions? Great, thanks so much. Can I have the last big question? I'm sure it's going to take you some time to pack up. So we always conclude the night with a set of events in the Bay Area over the next month, as well as announcing our next event. So Eric's going to hold it up. But essentially what I want to tell you is going to the Bay Area Science Festival, which is the last week of October, the first week of November. There's some other stuff, like mushrooms, or like weird places in Mary Roche that you're welcome to check out. This is where our money is. Excellent. We're a week early. It turns out that the last night of the month is Halloween, and it's also just packed out in the middle of the Bay Area Science Festival. We're already planning that takeover of the Alamo Draft House. So we're on October 24th. If you get tickets now or in the near future, they're only six dollars. We're going to have a talk on soppy signs and a talk about the guy who created the Frankenstein makeup, as well as some other Halloween-ish themed talk that we will still have a bit of time to find and announce. So please get tickets and we'll see you next time.