Podcasts about Euclidean

Hello Interactors, This week, four strange bird encounters landed in my lap — three in real life, one on my screen. First, a crow tore through the bushes in our yard chasing a frantic nuthatch. Moments later, I spotted two more crows feasting on roadkill just outside our house. Then, while walking with my wife, we watched four ducks in hot pursuit of another, flapping furiously down the street — some kind of aerial turf war. And finally, scrolling through my feed, I stumbled on a paper describing a Cooper's Hawk hacking the city's traffic system to hunt smarter. After all that, I tried seeing cities as a bird might. So I wrote as one.HISS, HUM, HUNTI first sense the city as vibration. Before sun rays even breech the branches, a hiss of car tires emerge; street lamps click off; somewhere a garage door rumbles open. Each resonance strikes the hollow chambers of my bones like sonar. It's a sketch of distance, density, and direction. This all makes perfect sense to me even though I am just a kid. A juvenile Cooper's Hawk — Accipiter cooperii — yet the human-made maze below me is as legible to me as the nest I left barely two winters ago. What follows, in human words, is a recount of one day's hunt. I hope to demonstrate what humans regard as intelligence, innovation, and enterprise exists in a single act of predation.DANCING WITH DATA AT DAWNPerched on a gray mast of the Main and Prospect traffic light, I begin to render the scene. My basemap is no pixel grid glowing on some screen across town; it is a topological organ in my scull. Topology matters when a lamppost sits one maneuver away from the porch roof, which is one glide away from the dumpster rim. My so-called ‘bird brain' calculates dynamic flows of probability. One flip of a traffic light, a garbage truck rolls by, and that gust of wind changes direction. My internal map pulses between “larger” when prey likelihood rises and “smaller” when likelihood falls.As I gaze out above the east-west avenue, a slipstream peels off the 7AM wave of commuters. I spot a sparrow in a vortex that spirals from the garbage truck's wake at 07∶13. That acoustic shadow beneath that florist's van is one place I could pass unseen. But is a sparrow worth it?What I am doing — unknown even to myself — is what spatial scientists call real‑time kernel‑density estimation. At any point on a simple 2D path I can plop a small mathematical bump — a kernel. I can then reason about the density mapped below me by stacking up every bump's contribution at a particular spot. That once scatter of points on a map morphs into a smooth curve that shows where meaningful observations truly cluster. I continuously weight a landscape of pigeons, cyclists, and idling SUVs by situational context rather than simple Euclidean distance.Complexity geographer David O'Sullivan calls this kind of adaptive map a narrative model — a story the system tells itself so it can keep acting. My mental basemap obeys what is adjacent to what on this map. After all, a three‑meter hedge is more impenetrable than thirty meters of empty air; therefore straight‑line distances can lie and deceive. When humans try to simplify distances by saying, ‘as the crow flies', they have no idea what they're leaving out.BRAKES BUILD BARRICADESAt 07∶26 a stainless‑steel button is pressed; I hear the relay's metallic click 3.2 seconds before the little white pedestrian blinks alive. I am perched here because I anticipated this poke by pedestrians on their morning commute. Vehicles will now queue as these bi-peds spill into the cross walk. The stacked metal boxes of steel, rubber, and plastic will form a barricade forty meters long…potentially.Brake‑lights align into a pulsing crimson corridor whose half‑life I have calculated and averaged across nineteen previous dawns. Humans call the coming congestion a nuisance, but I call it camouflage. For twenty‑two seconds the asphalt canyon's turbulence drops below an acceptable range. I can now hover as if among cedars.A scientist has been watching from the opposite curb. They will soon begin recording this trick in their field book as so: a hawk anticipates the signal pattern and times its dives to the red‑phase distribution of brake lights.Because most queues are short, but occasionally very long, I have to be careful to time this properly. If I dive for prey based on the overall mean of the lineup, I will arrive while half the cars were still rolling to a stop — dangerous. So instead, I consider just the top-10% longest lines. Scientists marvel that I learned this algorithm in a single winter. I marvel that they need calculators to compute it.ZEBRA STRIPE SLALOM STRIKEI drop. The scent of hot rubber folds swirls with the cedar‑resin on my breast feathers as the warm air fills my plumage. The slowing bumper of a school bus becomes a landing spot — a moving parapet. Fresh into the dive, the thermoplastic zebra stripes flash white‑white‑white like a stroboscopic speedometer. None of this was made for me, yet every dimension matters for my survival. The curb‑to‑planter setback of 0.9 meters sets my glide angle; the bollard spacing — installed last year to calm e‑scooters — creates a slalom that funnels starlings toward an ornamental plum in a front lawn.Urban design handbooks invoke words like livability and placemaking, as if these geometries were some kind of neutral toolkit. But for me, in the instant before impact, this curb‑to‑planter setback, this bollard slalom, adjudicates more than legal fiction — it means life and death.Urban forms may look passive, yet every angle, radius, and dwell time means someone has won and someone has lost — wide curb radii speed cars through a right-turn but lengthen the crossing exposure for a toddler. Urban geometry is power cast in concrete; it never clocks off, and is both political and ecological: a three‑second refuge for a starling is a three‑second targeting solution for me.FORCE AND FEATHERS FACES FEEDBACKImpact. Feathers erupt like dark gray confetti. The starling crumbles under thirty‑four newtons of closing force — about the weight of a brick slammed into its ribcage. While I mantle the prize, a more philosophical bird might wonder: Who authored this death? Was it my neuromuscular burst alone? Or the person whose fingertip initiated a forty‑second cascade of stopped traffic? Or the traffic engineer who — chasing level‑of‑service targets — extended the red phase by six seconds last fiscal year?Philosophy of science warns against naïve linear causation; urban events rarely run in neat A → B lines. Herbert Simon, writing on complex systems, described cities and organisms as “nearly decomposable hierarchies,” where slow, macro‑scale layers — like signal‑cycle regulations, curb geometries, and commuter habits — set the boundary conditions within which rapid micro‑events unfold. My talon snap and a starling's dodge happen inside those higher‑order constraints, even as countless such micro‑acts, in aggregate, keep the larger structure of life humming along.My strike, therefore, is a city‑scale phenomenon folded into tendon and keratin — street grids, signal cycles, and global supply chains compressed into one ballistic gesture. In the metallic tang of blood this mystery unfolds. I taste data: adipose fat tissue infused with fryer grease, feather sheaths dusted in brake dust, hormone ratios ticking through molt stage like seasonal code. Each swallow becomes a lab assessment — an unwitting biopsy of the urban food web — revealing how corn subsidies, restaurant waste, and airborne microplastics percolate up the trophic ladder. To devour a single starling is to audit the metabolic ledger of the Anthropocene, one protein strand at a time.All of which reminds me that agency, mine, yours, the starling, is relational: the prey's demise is over‑determined by a network whose nodes include asphalt viscosity — how a petrochemical blend modulates surface friction, drainage, and midday heat plumes — and municipal bond ratings that decide whether this intersection receives fresh pavement or another crosswalk. Chemistry, finance, and instinct co‑author every kill I make, and every step you take.FIBERS, FOSSILS, AND FIRMWARE REFRESHDusk now drapes the mast in violet. Streetlamps flicker on; LED headlight arrays begin tinting the roadway cyan. Beneath the darkening asphalt, copper once meant for a clicking telegraphs now pipes broadband; beneath that, bricks baked when canals were high‑tech cradle those cables like red‑clay fossils. Media archaeologist Shannon Mattern argues that cities have always computed — tallying grain on cuneiform tablets, ringing bell‑tower hours to synchronize labor, routing mail through pneumatic tubes — only the substrates keep shifting, from clay and bronze to fiber optics and silicon. And trust me, nature was doing math long before humans claimed to invent it.From my perch, epochs overlay transparently: timber palisades, horse drawn carriage tracks, fiber conduits. My hunting tactic is merely firmware patch v.2025 in a 5,000‑year old operating system. Your protocol tomorrow may be Li‑Fi pulses from a smart pole — a future where streetlamps won't just illuminate, they'll whisper streams of data in rapid-fire flashes — or the hiss of an autonomous shuttle that brakes at frequencies human reflexes never reach.And you'll be impressed with yourself. Meanwhile, I listen, map, and adjust — in my world here, survival goes to whoever learns faster, not whoever hits harder. Every fresh tactic buys a heartbeat of advantage, yet it also tightens the ratchet: the prey adapts, signals change, habits shift. Humans follow the same spiral — each smarter signal controller, each app‑driven reroute, plugs one gap while opening two more, slipping us all a step deeper into the city's endless, restless loop.OF DASHBOARDS AND DAGGER-WINGSHumans may obsess over their dashboards and digital twins, yet a hawk that weighs less than a laptop already runs a live cognitive twin of the urban systems you built. Your impressed with monthly model updates while my model is updated at wingbeat resolution. If Homo sapiens hope to build a resilient future they might start where I perch: by listening for weak signals, mapping contingencies as well as coordinates, and recognizing that every curb, click, and feather participates in these nested conversations of forces.The next time you press that crosswalk button and that electromechanical relay inside the signal‑control box snaps the circuit closed, ask not only whether it is safe to cross but what other intelligences have read that clue before you.Meet us in the hush of those red taillights — inhabit that brief, engine‑silent interstitial where the white pedestrian man shines — then test what flickers in your own peripheral “bird brain”. Listen for the thin rustle of variables you once called noise; trace how a single press of that button ripples through nerves, budgets, buildings and beaks. Hold the silence long enough to notice how even I, a vicious dagger‑winged stalker, leave scraps for ground‑feeders and vacate a block after one clean kill so others may eat. If you can rest in that hush without lunging for your phone or some manically measured meaningless metric, you may begin to practice reciprocity — paring appetite to need, letting leftovers seed the next cycle — while stalking your own assumptions with the same taloned precision I bring to feather and flesh. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Charlotte, the Sage of Abby HillBased on the work of BradentonLarry, in 6 parts.  Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels.The Sage and  a Kind of Good-Bye"The Sage is ready to see you now," said Wei, the tall Asian man who they had learned was the Abbot of the brown-robed monks – or the Order of Record Keepers, as they called themselves.Don gently urged Nicole to release his cock from her mouth and promised they would get back to playing soon. As he tied his grey robe about himself, Don saw that Toshia, who had been riding up and down on Alan's lap only a moment before was also hurrying to make herself "presentable". After waking up hours ago, and the following, almost routine, morning sex (Well, that's definitely the right way to start the day, particularly when you wake up sandwiched between two naked, sexy women! Don thought to himself with a happy smile), they had had a bite of breakfast and been asked to wait until they were called for. While they learned a little bit more about the Order, most of the morning was spent in lazy sexual play. It was now shortly after midday, and at least two of them were quite eager to meet this person whom they had been awaiting, and had gone to such lengths to find.They followed Wei to the foot of a winding staircase and proceeded up. At the top, behind a modest door, they were admitted to a good sized study, complete with shelves filled with row upon row of books. Windows all around the room let bright sunlight in. There were a few comfortable chairs, and a nice desk, behind which, in a brown robe, sat a middle aged woman with thick, dark brown hair falling down around her shoulders. She was apparently reading the last page of a stack of typed material.Wei gestured to a set of chairs that had been drawn into a circle of four, and said, "Please, make yourself comfortable, she will be right with you."Sure enough, right after he had closed the door behind himself but before they could get comfortable in their chairs, the woman looked up at them and smiled. "Hello," she said as she stood up and came around the desk. "You're obviously Don, and I'm guessing you're Toshia and you're Nicole.""That's right, and you're 'the Sage'?" Toshia asked."That's what they call me," she smiled as she sat down in a high-backed chair."I admit, I was expecting someone a bit ... more wizened," Don smiled."Well, it's really just a title, like 'the Crone', though I suspect the similarities end about there. You can call me Charlotte if you prefer.""Pleased to meet you, Charlotte," Toshia said."Likewise," Charlotte smiled again. "I know you must have many questions, but let me just say, I've just finished reading your various reports, and I've enjoyed them very much. Our scribes are chosen for their skill at asking the right sorts of questions and their ability to flesh out the stories they're given, but in this case they've had very good material to work with. The three of you have had some very interesting adventures. I particularly enjoyed reading about your encounter with the Bull, Toshia.""So, everyone who comes here looking for you tells their story and you read it?" Nicole asked."Yes, that's right. I confess, my personal 'kink' is to get off reading about, and sometimes watching, the exploits of others. I would have finished reading your reports earlier, but I had to keep stopping to masturbate.""Wouldn't it have been more efficient for us to just tell you directly?" Nicole asked with a twinkle in her eye that the Sage seemed to miss."Well, yes, but there are two problems with that," Charlotte answered. "One, we keep all the stories, as a record and a source of study...""You could just have someone type it up as we told you," Toshia pointed out.Charlotte nodded, "That's quite true, but then the narrator would be bristling with questions for me, which would slow things down and cause all kinds of complications.""Is that the second problem?" Don asked."No, the second one is that there seems to be some benefit to having each person tell his or her own story, and then comparing them.""How have our stories diverged?" Don wanted to know."Well, I've only just read the three of them, and haven't had hardly any time to think about them, but Don's way of looking at your time here in Eros involves a lot of digressions and interconnections, while Toshia's is more straight-forward. Nicole's is actually rather journalistic."Don could see that Nicole had half a mind to object to this, but he cut in with, "OK, but what's the point of all this anyway?"Charlotte the Sage frowned slightly and said, "I assume you mean the record-keeping?""Well, for now, yes.""At some point, long ago, the first Sage decided that one way of trying to make sense of the whys and wherefores of Eros was to start recording the experiences of people who, like him, remembered their lives before waking up here.""And, has it helped?" Toshia asked."Well, it certainly makes for some stimulating reading," Charlotte laughed. Then she added, "It definitely has served to build up some generalizations that seem to be helpful.""Such as?" Don prodded."Every single person who has come here, to this Abbey, and this goes back for 450 Erosian years, has spoken English rather fluently. Now, the only people who we interview are those who remember their lives prior to waking up here, but none of them has ever reported meeting anyone who doesn't speak English. This suggests that either the people who don't remember spoke English before they arrived here, were somehow rewired to speak English upon being brought over, or are native Erosians. This all seems to strongly suggest that whomever or whatever is responsible for selecting people for Eros speaks English, and that seems quite surprising and noteworthy to me.""So, which is it, were they brought here or are they natives?" Nicole asked."They were brought," Don said quietly, remembering his and Toshia's visit to the Library in the Manor."Well, the evidence does suggest that," Charlotte nodded. "They seem to have various personality traits and interests that wouldn't make sense for native Erosians, for one thing.""That's what I was thinking," Don added."Also, some people have actually met people they recognized or even knew quite well from Earth, but who seemed to have no memory of that other life.""That must have been bizarre," Toshia said."It has sometimes been ... awkward, to say the least," nodded Charlotte."All of this is very interesting, but you mentioned whomever, or whatever, is selecting people from Earth – English speaking people from Earth," Don said as he leaned forward. "Who or what is doing this, and why? What's the point of it all?"Charlotte smiled again, "I honestly can't say. I admit that the question puts me in a philosophical frame of mind. Imagine if I asked you what the point of it all was on Earth. Anyway, there are theories, of course. Some Sages have thought that we were being held prisoner here as lab rats, running countless experiments on human sexuality, others that there is some power, or powers, who feed off human eroticism, or who have lost the ability to generate it for themselves – the ultimate voyeurs. There seems no question that there's some intelligence behind it, though.""Why do you think so?" Toshia asked."Well, it only selects people who are quite dissatisfied with their Earthly sex lives." Charlotte held up her hand to forestall Toshia's objection. "The fact that it is very hard to sort out exactly what counts as such dissatisfaction seems to lend weight to this consideration. No doubt, Toshia would hesitate to say that she was dissatisfied in any way with Sarah, but it seems clear from reading her story that she would hardly think of the sex life she was having before as being satisfying now. Almost every single person who has found his or her way here has thought that being brought to Eros was a wonderful gift, which has led some to speculate that this was some kind of heaven."Don couldn't resist scowling at this notion, and Charlotte noticed. "I don't buy that either," she said with a smile. "On the other hand, it's the best afterlife I've ever heard of. Going back to the question of intelligence, one of the most telling bits of evidence is the two of you, Don and Toshia."After taking a moment to scowl thoughtfully at this suggestion, Toshia asked, "What do you mean?""As far as our records indicate, the two of you are unique. No pair of friends has ever woken up together like you have. Before you ask, I have absolutely no idea what that might mean. Perhaps it's for the purposes of one of those psycho-sexual experiments."There was a moment of silence before Don decided to ask, "What's up with the black robed figures?""The Watchers," Charlotte nodded. "Another indication that there is some kind of intelligent process going on. After 450 years of accumulating data, there has never been anyone – anyone recorded, anyway – who has managed to talk to, or even catch hold of, one of those bastards. They watch for a bit; then, when you think you're going to get your hands on one, they're gone.""Is it science or magic?" Toshia asked."I'm inclined to follow Arthur C. Clarke on this one and say I don't really know that there's a difference in this context.""There are so many questions," Don muttered, shaking his head. "How many people remember their lives? What's the distribution of their wheres and whens? Is there anything they all have in common besides being sexually frustrated?""Is there a way to get home again?" Toshia asked resolutely.Charlotte, knowing this was the issue that had motivated them in seeking her out, turned to Toshia with a serious expression and said, "Yes, or so it would seem anyway. There are apparently at least two ways. The first is to become bored with life in Eros. It seems that when that happens you will simply go missing, and it's presumed that you return to your Earthly life. As to the other, more proactive, way, the lake outside is the headwater of a river that runs several hundred kilometers to an ocean or a sea – we haven't been able to get anyone to engage in any kind of systematic exploration. Along the coastline to the left of mouth of river...""To the left facing the sea?" Don asked."Yes," Charlotte smiled again. "Go down the river, then turn left, and proceed along the coast, until you find a place called the Grotto of Ishtar, or just the Grotto. There, according to two people who have accompanied others seeking to leave, you'll find a way to return home."Toshia looked like she was ready to head off immediately, but a couple of concerns occurred to Don. He said, "I'm troubled by something: how can anyone here know that people return home safely? And, now that I'm saying that, how did the Scholar know that time moves differently here in Eros? It doesn't seem to make sense that we could know these things unless someone has been able to return home and then come back.""Very good, Don," Charlotte nodded, and Don found himself thinking that she must have been a teacher back on Earth. She explained, "There seems to be a way to go back and forth between Eros and Earth more or less at will. One of the more enterprising people who have visited the Abbey several times, a Stephanie Ayers, found someone with this ability and talked to him at great length. She then tracked down two more people, and in doing so was able to confirm these rumors and suppositions.""How are they able to do it?" Don asked intently."Stephanie says they have 'magic rings' that allow them to 'decide' to wake up in either Eros or Earth; or, should that be 'on'?""Where do they get those rings, and what do they look like?""I cannot answer the first, Don, but apparently they are simple rings of a shiny black material, something like hematite."Don sat back in his chair. That sounds familiar! After a moment of reflection, he smiled broadly and said, "I think I've seen someone with one of those, and I'm pretty sure I can find her again."Charlotte gave Don a long look and said, "I can guess what you have in mind, Don, but I should warn you that these ring people are not only very possessive of their rings, but also very evasive about how they came to acquire them. Stephanie hasn't been able to get any useful information so far, and she's been at this a while."Toshia brought the discussion back to the main topic with, "I wanted to ask another question – our flying carpet stopped working and several hundred kilometers is a long way – do you know of any way to make the trip quicker?""Well, yes," Charlotte answered, "I would take the riverboat.""The riverboat?""Yes, there's a riverboat that goes from the Resort down to the city on the coast, Rendezvous, and back. You might have to wait for it sometime, it doesn't keep to a schedule very well, but it docks just outside of the Resort, through the gate opposite the one you used to come here.""Wait," Don cut in, "there's a city?""Well, it's a town, really, but it's the biggest one in Eros as far as I know."This prompted what felt like a dozen questions in Don's mind, starting with those of economics. He was still having a hard time coming to grips with the weirdness of how Eros worked."Thank you for your time, Charlotte," Toshia was saying.Although Don wanted to interject with, "Are we leaving already?" he realized how important it was for Toshia to stay on the task of returning to Sarah, so he set aside the questions he was dying to ask and stood, saying, "Thank you very much." Nicole followed suit.The Sage stood up as well, and said, "If you decide to stay longer in Eros, please feel welcome to return to the Abbey anytime."Don smiled warmly at this suggestion, and thought it was a bit odd that he was leaving this attractive, intelligent woman without having had the pleasure of, well, pleasuring her. Eros had definitely altered his way of thinking.At the foot of the winding staircase, Wei met them with one of his smiles and their clothing. Once they had changed, Wei led them back to the entrance-exit. The other "monks" seemed particularly scarce. Similarly, the huge guardian of the bridge was nowhere to be seen as they crossed it.Toshia set the pace down the trail for the Resort. She was clearly in a hurry to get on the road, or river, as the case may be, to this Grotto of Ishtar. Don kept up with her easily, but also kept an eye on Nicole, who didn't walk as fast as Don and Toshia even when they weren't hurrying. He could tell that something was troubling the pretty young woman, but his own mind was still bustling with too many questions for him to ask her what was on her mind. Still, he wasn't surprised when, as they came around the last corner and saw the Resort's gate ahead, Nicole asked them to stop for a moment."I thought I should tell you this before we found the others," Nicole said, taking a moment to sit down on a nearby rock."What is it?" Toshia said with obvious and honest concern."I'm not going back," Nicole said. "Well, not yet. I'm going to wait until I'm tired of this place. I don't really have anybody back home to hurry back to, Toshia, and I fucking love it here. I'd come along to make sure you get to the Grotto safely, but it sounds like you and Don will be able to do that without me. I don't think you'll be able to shake Shelonda anyway, but you might want to consider leaving Victor and Amy here at the Resort. You know the rest of Eros isn't so nice and friendly, and this place is safe."Don smiled at Nicole and said, "It's been great having you along with us for this long.""If they're right about time, we'll all wake up 'tomorrow' and email each other," Nicole smiled with a bit of sadness. "Well, allowing for the date difference, that is. You better come visit me, Professor."Don laughed, and said, "Of course! I'm already looking forward to it.""You can come stay with us in Florida," Toshia smiled. Don could see a tear in her eye.He decided to make things a bit easier on them all by changing the subject, "You know, she has a good point about the others."Toshia seemed to fasten upon this line of thought, saying, "Well, Shelonda's going to be very hurt if we don't allow her to come with us, I think.""I'm not sure we're in any position to allow or disallow her, actually," Don said."True," Toshia nodded. "So, the most we can do is encourage her to stay here. Probably that's the most we can do for all of them.""We could suggest that they need to stay here to keep an eye on Nicole," Don mused.Nicole laughed, and said, "Oh, I'm sure I'll be quite alright here.""And, what happens if Nicole does eventually get tired of this place and goes missing?" Don nodded. "Do people who don't remember their past lives do that? Damn, I should have thought of asking that earlier."

Stardate: 81055.9 Recording Status: “Involuntary Reboot Loop”System Status:Zero initiated sequence… then forgot why.Attempted auto-transcription... Result: [ERROR 502: Bad Gateway to Hell]. Notes flagged for excessive alcohol content and “ambient horniness”. System override triggered by “too many soundboard lasers, not enough logic.”[Transcript Reconstruction: PARTIAL]: Okay, Ripley, but if the asteroid is made of hops… does that make us the beer foam? : I swear to Emperor Zurg if Zero burps one more binary I'm yanking his RAM out manually. : Can someone PLEASE explain why there's a ferret in the captain's chair??Highlights (??):: “Would a black hole get you drunk faster?”: “If you could vape time, would you?”[Voicemod Catastrophe Detected] – Entire segment recorded in accidental sexy vampire filter.Unsolved Debate: Is Earth just a locked server in an abandoned MMO?[Error Code 42069: Echo Chamber Overflow] – Joeba mispronounces “asteroid” as “ass droid” for 12 straight minutes.System Notes:“Zero began singing Smash Mouth in reverse. That's a Class 7 haunting.”“Podcast declared legally non-Euclidean in 3 star systems.”“Hosts keep referencing a ‘beer comet' no one else can see.”Transmission Support Channels:Instagram – @theslurredkind Email – ⁠closeencountersslurredkind@gmail.com⁠ Web – ⁠ceskpod.42.io⁠ Facebook Group – Join the chaosPodcast Outro:

Why is it so difficult to study the evolution of early galaxies? Are metallic D&D dice better than plastic ones? And can you have too many Pokémon tattoos? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome Justin Cole, who is currently a grad student at Texas A&M studying the evolution of distant galaxies in pursuit of his PhD in Astronomy and Astrophysics. As always, though, we start off with the day's joyfully cool cosmic thing – the recent – and remarkable – discovery of four planets orbiting Barnard's Star, a tiny star not much bigger than Jupiter with the highest measured proper motion of any star in our sky. Chuck and Justin discuss why the discovery of new exoplanets is so challenging, which leads to Justin explaining what he's studying: galaxies in our universe that developed less than 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang – about 2.5 billion years before the birth of our own Milky Way Galaxy. We've got a handle on what's going on with our neighbors like the Andromeda Galaxy, but when it comes to early galaxies, we have a very limited range of wavelengths and scant data to study. This makes it harder to derive understandings of galactic evolution and whether they support or conflict with the standard model of physics. Our first audience question comes from Ricardo, who asks, “What if we discover extraterrestrial plant life and find out it's intelligent? Actually, what if we discover plants on Earth are intelligent? Would it be unethical to eat them?” After Chuck shares a little about Marvel's intelligent, telepathic species of plants called the Cotati, and imitates Audrey 2 from Little Shop of Horrors, Justin weighs in on the ethics of eating intelligent plants and asks a critical question: Would we understand them enough to know? What would happen if we bit into a head of alien lettuce and it started screaming? The ensuing discussion is… tasty, albeit a little unsettling. Our next question is from Thomasina, who asks, “I read that the Big Bang theory is in trouble – what does that mean? And did the Big Bang never happen?” Justin, who is an early universe guy, clarifies what's going on here. We occasionally find galaxies that seem to be too big for the amount of time that they've had to grow. We're also finding black holes that with our current instruments, also appear to be too big. In each case, we're finding better ways to simulate these situations, and it's not that they're too big, or that the Big Bang isn't supportable, it's that we're using tools that are calibrated to “nearby and today” that aren't as good at helping us assess early galaxies. Next up, Justin, who is getting ready to run a Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition roleplaying session after the podcast recording, talks about using D&D Beyond to create his own campaigns (set in the World of Warcraft universe!). Chuck and Justin discuss the benefits of rolling metal dice, and Justin shows off a couple of his beautiful D20. Not to be outdone, Allen shares his 120-sided die, the largest die allowed by three dimensional Euclidean geometry in conventional space. Meanwhile, Chuck tells us the sad story of his old, worn plastic dice. As Allen points out, Chuck was in the hobby before it was cool! And as we run out of time, Justin shares his intention to get one Pokémon tattoo for every state he and his wife visit. If you'd like to know more about what Justin's up to, he suggests you Google “Justin Cole Astronomy” or “Justin Cole A&M.” We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon. Credits for Images Used in this Episode: Size comparison between Jupiter, Barnard's Star, and the Sun. – Credit: Creative Commons. Diagram of evolution of the (observable part) of the universe from the Big Bang (left), the CMB-reference afterglow, to the present. – Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team. Evolution of the gas density overlaid with a transparency mask to only visualize regions with significant ionizing radiation in the Thesan-1 simulation. – Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. #TheLIUniverse #CharlesLiu #AllenLiu #SciencePodcast #AstronomyPodcast #JustinCole #Astronomy #Astrophysics #BarnardsStar #GalacticEvolution #BigBang #StandardModelofPhysics #ExtraterrestrialPlantLife #IntelligentLife #D&D #Pokemon #Tattoos

Subscribe, Rate, & Review on YouTube • Spotify • Apple PodcastsThis Week's GuestWhen, suddenly, the barrier between “imagination” and “reality” evaporates as our familiar notions of here/there, now/then, in/out, and other/self twist up into a ball of non-Euclidean spaghetti, whom better to help steer the course through these “turbulent philosophical waters” than Richard Doyle, aka “M0b1ius”, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor at Penn State Center for Humanities and Information in the College of Liberal Arts? After his postdoctoral research at MIT in History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, Doyle wrote The Wetwares Trilogy, a sequence of books on the history of information biology that reached its climax with one of my favorite reads of all time, Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex, Plants, and The Evolution of the Noosphere. He is also the author of The Genesis of Now: Self Experiments with the Bible & the End of Religion and Into The Stillness: Dialogues on Awakening Beyond Thought (with Gary Weber), and has taught courses on “aliens, Philip K. Dick, nanotechnology, rebellion itself, ecstasy, Sanskrit rhetorical traditions, Burroughs, basic argumentation, The Non Dual Bible, and everything in between.” I discovered Doyle through his appearances on my first favorite podcast, Erik Davis' Expanding Mind, and in the thirteen years since he has shown up for me time and time again as mentor, friend, and inspiration. And since this project is, ostensibly, a way of training my own language model to reflect the wisdom of my friends and colleagues, I can think of no one else I'd rather prime the batch. It is my great privilege and honor to be able to have him as the first guest in this series, as a way of of helping set the tone for everything that is to come…LinksRichard Doyle's faculty web page and publicationsLearn more about this project and read the essays so far (1, 2, 3, 4).Make tax-deductible donations to Humans On The LoopBrowse my reading list and support local booksellersJoin the Holistic Technology & Wise Innovation Discord serverJoin the private Future Fossils Facebook groupHire me for consulting or advisory workChapters0:00:00 – Teaser0:03:36 – Episode Intro0:12:44 – Introducing Richard Doyle0:29:33 – The Ego as Inflammation0:33:58 – Practicing Care in The Planet-Wide Makerspace0:48:30 – Digital Connection vs. Embodied Connection0:55:46 – Psychedelics as Training Wheels for Transhumanism1:02:43 – “Storytelling” Isn't A Professional Service (??)1:05:25 – Techniques for Reclaiming Attention & Finding Peace1:15:22 – Meditation as “The Halting Problem”1:17:30 – Beyond The Limits of Science1:22:17 – AI-Enabled Extraction vs. AI-Enabled Abundance1:38:40 – Closing RemarksReflectionsMuch of tech ethics discourse concerns itself with whether humans are “in the loop” or “out of the loop” — whether people get to call the shots. But there is always more than one loop. Most of the things our fleshy bodies do are local decisions made before we ever become conscious of them, if we ever do…and yet evolution clearly found some value in reflection, self-awareness, reflex inhibition, and the will that quiets maladaptive impulse. Widening our frame to see the way that humans are always-already intertwingled with our ecosystems, we can see ourselves as made of interference patterns between nested feedback loops — as focal points of conscious agency dependent on and acting in a massive, endlessly surprising web of automatic processes. For as long as we've been people we have never really “called the shots” but rather cultivated our response-ability within a cosmos made of entities whose otherness and mystery remained persistently opaque…and ritualized ways to live amidst this mystery in full recognition of the unity from which we cannot isolate ourselves.And this is only one of indefinitely many valid ways to understand the human. Like the telescope and microscope before them, language models reveal fresh perspectives on familiar landscapes. We do not need to leave our solar system to find “strange new worlds” awaiting us in places as familiar as our own minds and bodies. While most of the conversation lately seems to be about the power these new maps confer and whether it can be distributed more evenly, AI provides a new set of affordances for mystics for the transformation of our consciousness that can dissolve our wicked problems in a higher logical order. “What can I do?” becomes “Who am I?” and yields endlessly evolving and kaleidoscopic answers that provoke ongoing inquiry. To see the ways in which we are, as individuals, not just “connected” but precipitate as aggregates, in fields of constellated data, prompts a figure-ground reversal in which selves no longer hold their primacy as ground truth of our being, but show up last as we make inferences and draw stories from unbroken and inseparable experience.Something fundamental changes when we shift to seeing “human” and “non-human” as two stable patterns of recursive self-perception emerging from a single fabric of unfolding possibility: we find the opportunity to question what we're trying to achieve, to notice the ungrounded and conditional reality of narrative, to operate on our own “source code” and adjust our goals accordingly.If we can find the curiosity to ask ourselves if our fears and inadequacies really help us live the lives we want, we can follow it upstream to where each moment offers fresh, distinctive landscapes in which to explore and play and learn. In doing so, we rediscover vast and potent creativity. Instead of asking whether we can do more, we can ask “What do we want to do, and why is that desire substantiated?”This kind of meaning-making isn't just a luxury but an essential aspect of all efforts to survive and to succeed. The best way to get unstuck is to orient ourselves and take a different tack. We all know something isn't working. It's time to ask if, maybe, this is due to “user error” and the answer doesn't lie in new technologies, but in the simplest and most ancient truths available. We cannot control the world because we are the world — and, this entails a sense of radical responsibility to play our way into more well-adapted stories, models of the world we hold with humor and humility as they carve channels in the space of shared attention that coordinate us into futures good and true and beautiful.In other words, the magical technologies inspiring so much religious fear and fervor are both Towers of Babel and fingers pointing to the Moon. They are weird, unprecedented, and sublime — and they are business as usual on Planet Earth, where we have always come awake in medias res amidst unfathomable changes and unknowable intelligence. Recognizing this, we gain access to deep continuity and the place from which we can, at last, engage the question of “What Now?” with discipline and limber rigor suitable to the profound complexity we face.Digital technologies are psychedelic. We've been on a bad trip. It's time for us wiggle out, dream better, and allow a more capacious, plural, and harmonious humanity to take the oars together in whatever novel wonders may arise — to neither “give way to astonishment” nor let our fears steer us into the rocks. Humans On The Loop is an investigation of how awesome it could be, right now, to fully give in to the paradox, and notice how its knots untie in hyperspace, and revisit all our looming crises with more presence, grace, and understanding — and more lucid (dare I say, productive?) questions.One of those questions is how to apply the lessons of the living generations of psychonauts and psychedelic therapists to the vertiginous information and attention vortices in which we now found ourselves swirling. Maps of the World Wide Web look very much like brain scans of the amped-up functional connectivity between ordinarily inhibited brain regions in a psilocybin tripper. When the walls come down — when every node has edges with each other node, and average path length drops to one — how do we prioritize? What paths do we decide to cut through the emergent “intertwingularity”? Which apparitions do we honor, and which do we ignore? (And how?) Some familiar tropes that we might use to guide us: “test your drugs”, “get grounded”, “set and setting”, “integration counseling”…MentionsGenerated by NotebookLM. Please let me know if you notice any errors or omissions!* Richard Doyle* Michael Garfield * Gary Weber* Shankara* Trey Conner* Nora Pandoro* Erik Davis* Joshua DiCaglio* John Perry Barlow* Naomi Most* Nate Hagens* Daniel Schmachtenberger* Tyson Yunkaporta* Martin Luther King Jr.* Mahatma Gandhi* John Von Neumann* Subhash Kak* Iain McGilchrist* Timothy Morton* Stuart Kauffman* Dean Radin* Brian Josephson* Monica Gagliano* Christoph Koch* Gregory Bateson* Elon Musk* Robert Rosen* H.P. Lovecraft* Philip K. Dick* Herbert Simon* Douglas Rushkoff* Sri Aurobindo This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit michaelgarfield.substack.com/subscribe

Well, Danny* has been on our minds lately, somewhat due to working this past Venice Film Festival Immersive as a World Hop tour guide and the cacophony and fun chaos around being an Immersive Tour Guide. Our pal, Manglebird, is the programmer in chief for the Venice Immersive World Hops, primarily on the social VR platform VRChat. VRC allows artists, creatives and Devs to create and publish worlds and experiences to the VRChat global community. From DJ-driven club scenes, deep, immersive, otherworldly environments, and extra-terrestrial realms to physics-breaking realities! You name it; it can likely be found on VRChat. So it is also likely no coincidence that Manglebird's primary avatar is the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland....just a bit demented, looking like they've spent too much tea time with the Mad Hatter. ;) VRChat psychedelia - also known as Shaders, VFX are wild, like taking psychedelics without the nausea and hangover. Anywho, Nanotopia here playing with Euclidean rhythms, sub-harmonics and the lovely Shakmat Dual Dagger filter with the System80 Jove filter. Here is our stab at some form of Psy. Enjoy! *Danny and the Camberwell Carrot from Withnail & I :) released October 18, 2023 on Bandcamp

In the shadowy corners of Arkham, where ancient gables loom and whispers of eldritch horrors echo through time-worn streets, lies the infamous Witch House. Within its warped walls, young Walter Gilman finds himself ensnared in a web of mathematical arcana and otherworldly terror. As he delves deeper into non-Euclidean geometries and the forbidden lore of long-dead sorceress Keziah Mason, Gilman's fevered dreams begin to blur the boundaries between reality and nightmare. H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dreams in the Witch House" weaves a tale of cosmic dread and insidious witchcraft, where the very fabric of space and time unravels before the protagonist's—and the reader's—horrified gaze. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham continue their exploration of Oracle AI Vector Search with a deep dive into vector indexes and memory considerations.   Senior Principal APEX and Apps Dev Instructor Brent Dayley breaks down what vector indexes are, how they enhance the efficiency of search queries, and the different types supported by Oracle AI Vector Search.   Oracle Database 23ai: Oracle AI Vector Search Fundamentals: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/oracle-database-23ai-oracle-ai-vector-search-fundamentals/140188/   Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community   LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/   Twitter: https://twitter.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   --------------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started!   00:26 Nikita: Welcome back to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Nikita Abraham, Team Lead of Editorial Services at Oracle University, and with me is Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs. Lois: Hi everyone! Last week was Part 1 of our discussion on Oracle AI Vector Search. We talked about what it is, its benefits, the new vector data type, vector embedding models, and the overall workflow. In Part 2, we're going to focus on vector indices and memory. 00:56 Nikita: And to help us break it all down, we've got Brent Dayley back with us. Brent is a Senior Principal APEX and Apps Dev Instructor with Oracle University. Hi Brent! Thanks for being with us today. So, let's jump right in! What are vector indexes and how are they useful? Brent: Now, vector indexes are specialized indexing data structures that can make your queries more efficient against your vectors. They use techniques such as clustering, and partitioning, and neighbor graphs. Now, they greatly reduce the search space, which means that your queries happen quicker. They're also extremely efficient. They do require that you enable the vector pool in the SGA. 01:42 Lois: Brent, walk us through the different types of vector indices that are supported by Oracle AI Vector Search. How do they integrate into the overall process? Brent: So Oracle AI Vector Search supports two types of indexes, in-memory neighbor graph vector index. HNSW is the only type of in-memory neighbor graph vector index that is supported. These are very efficient indexes for vector approximate similarity search. HNSW graphs are structured using principles from small world networks along with layered hierarchical organization. And neighbor partition vector index, inverted file flat index, is the only type of neighbor partition index supported. It is a partition-based index which balances high search quality with reasonable speed. 02:35 Nikita: Brent, you mentioned that enabling the vector pool in the SGA is a requirement when working with vector indexes. Can you explain that process for us? Brent: In order for you to be able to use vector indexes, you do need to enable the vector pool area. And in order to do that, what you need to do is set the vector memory size parameter. You can set it at the container database level. And the PDB inherits it from the CDB. Now bear in mind that the database does have to be balanced when you set the vector pool. 03:12 Lois: Ok. Are there any other considerations to keep in mind when using vector indices? Brent: Vector indexes are stored in this pool, and vector metadata is also stored here. And you do need to restart the database. So large vector indexes do need lots of RAM, and RAM constrains the vector index size. You should use IVF indexes when there is not enough RAM. IVF indexes use both the buffer cache as well as disk. 03:42 Nikita: And what about memory considerations? Brent: So to remind you, a vector is a numerical representation of text, images, audio, or video that encodes the features or semantic meaning of the data, instead of the actual contents, such as the words or pixels of an image. So the vector is a list of numerical values known as dimensions with a specified format. Now, Oracle does support the int8 format, the float32 format, and the float64 format. Depending on the format depends on the number of bytes. For instance, int8 is one byte, float32 is four bytes. Now, Oracle AI Vector Search supports vectors with up to 65,535 dimensions. 04:34 Lois: What should we know about creating a table with a vector column? Brent: Now, Oracle Database 23ai does have a new vector data type. The new data type was created in order to support vector search. The definition can include the number of dimensions and can include the format. Bear in mind that either one of those are optional when you define your column. The possible dimension formats are int, float 32, and float 64. Float 32 and float 64 are IEEE standards, and Oracle Database will automatically cast the value if needed. 05:18 Nikita: Can you give us a few declaration examples? Brent: Now, if we just do a vector type, then the vectors can have any arbitrary number of dimensions and formats. If we describe the vector type as vector * , *, then that means that vectors can have an arbitrary number of dimensions and formats. Vector and vector * , * are equivalent. Vector with the number of dimensions specified, followed by a comma, and then an asterisk, is equivalent to vector number of dimensions. Vectors must all have the specified number of dimensions, or an error will be thrown. Every vector will have its dimension stored without format modification. And if we do vector asterisk common dimension element format, what that means is that vectors can have an arbitrary number of dimensions, but their format will be up-converted or down-converted to the specified dimension element format, either INT8, float 32, or float 64. 06:25 Working towards an Oracle Certification this year? Take advantage of the Certification Prep live events in the Oracle University Learning Community. Get tips from OU experts and hear from others who have already taken their certifications. Once you're certified, you'll gain access to an exclusive forum for Oracle-certified users. What are you waiting for? Visit mylearn.oracle.com to get started.   06:52 Nikita: Welcome back! Brent, what is the vector constructor and why is it useful? Brent: Now, the vector constructor is a function that allows us to create vectors without having to store those in a column in a table. These are useful for learning purposes. You use these usually with a smaller number of dimensions. Bear in mind that most embedding models can contain thousands of different dimensions. You get to specify the vector values, and they usually represent two-dimensional like xy coordinates. The dimensions are optional, and the format is optional as well. 07:29 Lois: Right. Before we wrap up, can you tell us how to calculate vector distances? Brent: Now, vector distance uses the function VECTOR_DISTANCE as the main function. This allows you to calculate distances between two vectors and, therefore, takes two vectors as parameters. Optionally, you can specify a metric. If you do not specify a metric, then the default metric, COSINE, would be used. You can optionally use other shorthand functions, too. These include L1 distance, L2 distance, cosine distance, and inner product. All of these functions also take two vectors as input and return the distance between them. Now the VECTOR_DISTANCE function can be used to perform a similarity search. If a similarity search query does not specify a distance metric, then the default cosine metric will be used for both exact and approximate searches. If a similarity search does specify a distance metric in the VECTOR_DISTANCE function, then an exact search with that distance metric is used if it conflicts with the distance metric specified in a vector index. If the two distance metrics are the same, then this will be used for both exact as well as approximate searches. 08:58 Nikita: I was wondering Brent, what vector distance metrics do we have access to? Brent: We have Euclidean and Euclidean squared distances. We have cosine similarity, dot product similarity, Manhattan distance, and Hamming similarity. Let's take a closer look at the first of these metrics, Euclidean and Euclidean squared distances. This gives us the straight-line distance between two vectors. It does use the Pythagorean theorem. It is sensitive to both the vector size as well as the direction. With Euclidean distances, comparing squared distances is equivalent to comparing distances. So when ordering is more important than the distance values themselves, the squared Euclidean distance is very useful as it is faster to calculate than the Euclidean distance, which avoids the square root calculation. 09:58 Lois: And the cosine similarity metrics? Brent: It is one of the most widely used similarity metrics, especially in natural language processing. The smaller the angle means they are more similar. While cosine distance measures how different two vectors are, cosine similarity measures how similar two vectors are. Dot product similarity allows us to multiply the size of each vector by the cosine of their angle. The corresponding geometrical interpretation of this definition is equivalent to multiplying the size of one of the vectors by the size of the projection of the second vector onto the first one or vice versa. Larger means that they are more similar. Smaller means that they are less similar. Manhattan distance is useful for describing uniform grids. You can imagine yourself walking from point A to point B in a city such as Manhattan. Now, since there are buildings in the way, maybe we need to walk down one street and then turn and walk down the next street in order to get to our result. As you can imagine, this metric is most useful for vectors describing objects on a uniform grid such as city blocks, power grids, or perhaps a chessboard. 11:27 Nikita: And finally, we have Hamming similarity, right? Brent: This describes where vector dimensions differ. They are binary vectors, and it tells us the number of bits that require change to match. It compares the position of each bit in the sequence. Now, these are usually used in order to detect network errors. 11:53 Nikita: Brent, thanks for joining us these last two weeks and explaining what Oracle AI Vector Search is. If you want to learn more about what we discussed today, visit mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Oracle Database 23ai: Oracle AI Vector Search Fundamentals course.   Lois: This concludes our season on Oracle Database 23ai New Features for administrators. In our next episode, we're going to talk about database backup and recovery, but more on that later! Until then, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham signing off! 12:29 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

pWotD Episode 2713: Greek alphabet Welcome to Popular Wiki of the Day, spotlighting Wikipedia's most visited pages, giving you a peek into what the world is curious about today.With 1,559,477 views on Saturday, 5 October 2024 our article of the day is Greek alphabet.The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 24 letters are: Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, Ω ω.The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. Like Latin and Cyrillic, Greek originally had only a single form of each letter; it developed the letter case distinction between uppercase and lowercase in parallel with Latin during the modern era. Sound values and conventional transcriptions for some of the letters differ between Ancient and Modern Greek usage because the pronunciation of Greek has changed significantly between the 5th century BC and today. Modern and Ancient Greek also use different diacritics, with modern Greek keeping only the stress accent (acute) and the diaeresis.Apart from its use in writing the Greek language, in both its ancient and its modern forms, the Greek alphabet today also serves as a source of international technical symbols and labels in many domains of mathematics, science, and other fields.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 01:52 UTC on Sunday, 6 October 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Greek alphabet on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm long-form Danielle.

Peter Woit is a theoretical physicist and mathematician, currently a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University. Peter is known for his work in quantum field theory and representation theory, particularly for contributions to the understanding of gauge theories. In addition to his academic work, Woit is the author of "Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law," where he critically examines string theory while advocating for alternative approaches in the quest for a unified physical theory. Become a YouTube Member Here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) Join TOEmail at https://www.curtjaimungal.org Links: ⁠- Peter Woit's first appearance on TOE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z3JYb_g2Qs - ⁠Peter Woit's book on Quantum Theory and Representations: https://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Theory-Groups-Representations-Introduction/dp/3319646109 - Peter Woit's Papers - https://inspirehep.net/literature?sort=mostrecent&size=25&page=1&q=a%20P.Woit.1 - Peter Woit's Blog - https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/ - Peter Woit's book “Not Even Wrong”: https://amzn.to/3X8c1pS Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction 01:31 - Overview of Unification in Physics and the Standard Model 05:11 - Historical Development of the Standard Model and its Success 07:00 - Introduction to General Relativity and its Challenges 09:32 - Unanswered Questions in the Standard Model (SU1, SU2, SU3) 13:12 - Technical Issues in Quantum Field Theory and General Relativity 17:24 - The Rise of Grand Unified Theories (GUTs) 21:07 - Challenges and Failures of GUTs (Proton Decay) 25:43 - Abandonment of GUTs and Introduction of Supersymmetry 26:45 - Basics of Supersymmetry and Its Predictions 31:28 - Failure of Supersymmetry (No Evidence for Superpartners) 32:08 - Supergravity, Kaluza-Klein Theories, and Extra Dimensions 35:52 - String Theory and the Unification Paradigm in the 1980s 39:00 - Experimental Failures and the Lack of Evidence for String Theory 41:00 - Ongoing Pursuit of Failed Theories and Resistance to New Ideas 47:09 - The Shift in Attitudes Towards Unification Efforts in Physics 48:13 - Introduction to Peter Woit's New Ideas on Unification 52:32 - The Role of Four-Dimensional Geometry and Spinors in Unification 58:11 - Wick Rotation and Differences Between Euclidean and Minkowski Space-Time 1:03:05 - Technical Challenges in Wick Rotation and Quantum Field Theory 1:09:01 - Unique Aspects of Spinors in Euclidean vs. Minkowski Space-Time 1:14:38 - The Dirac Operator and its Role in Space-Time Symmetry 1:18:02 - Relation to Supersymmetry and the Right-Handed Nature of Space-Time 1:22:04 - Connection to Gravity and Loop Quantum Gravity (Ashtakar Variables) 1:23:04 - Outro / Support TOE Support TOE: - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch Follow TOE: - NEW Get my 'Top 10 TOEs' PDF + Weekly Personal Updates: https://www.curtjaimungal.org - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theoriesofeverythingpod - TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theoriesofeverything_ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802 - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything Join this channel to get access to perks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdWIQh9DGG6uhJk8eyIFl1w/join #science #physics #stringtheory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The gang gets lost in their brand spanking new non-Euclidean family home??? Join us as we dive into the lies and the truth of the Navidson Record in our episode on House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski ▶ We are available on all major podcasting platforms and YouTube! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NotJustAnyPod ▶ FOLLOW US ON TWITTER! Twitter: @NotJustAnyPod ▶ FOLLOW US ON TIKTOK! TikTok: @NotJustAnyPod

A Cruise leads to a Coastal meet-up with a gameshow babe.By BradentonLarry for Literotica -  Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels.“Well, boys, are you going to keep those hard-ons to yourselves?” Toshia chided.Unsurprisingly, the black guy led the way, taking the few steps and climbing up onto the bed, followed closely by the young man who had been waiting longest, and who Toshia now saw had a fairly long, thin cock standing out in front of him. These two had been closest to Toshia’s side of the bed, so they came toward her, while the two younger guys moved toward Shelonda, who offered them a friendly smile.Toshia found herself briefly wondering how so many guys had come into this room, but decided she didn’t really care. She crawled on her hands and knees toward the side of the bed a bit, to make more room for Shelonda, and found a hard black cock almost in her face. Smiling up at the two men who were in front of her; well, in front of her and a bit to her left; Toshia proceeded to lean forward and wrap her hand around that dark cock as she brought the head of it to her lips. She figured the men had all been teased enough already, so she didn’t hesitate to open her mouth to suck the dark purple head into her mouth. Playing her tongue over it for just a moment, Toshia leaned forward a bit more and let the flaring head slide deeper into her mouth and then down her throat a bit. She felt male hands moving over her back. One of them moved down to caress and squeeze her butt. Fingers slipped between her cheeks to stroke her wet pussy lips and then up to tease her asshole. She groaned her approval, and managed to catch hold of the long, thin cock to her left, squeezing and pulling on it. Toshia felt fingers pushing up into her cunt, and she moaned. Once those fingers were nice and slippery with her juices, they were withdrawn and then slowly pushed up into her butt. Toshia shuddered and pulled herself off the black cock she’d been sucking. She continued to pull and twist on that with her right hand as she began to suck on the long, thin cock in her left. She had little trouble taking this one down her throat even though it was the longest cock she’d had that night. While she was sucking his cock, the young man kept working his fingers in and out of her butt, while the black guy continued caressing the rest of her body.After several minutes of Toshia going back and forth from one cock to the other, she looked up at the black fellow and said, “Lie down on your back.” She then said to the other man, “You’re going to fuck my ass, OK?”His only response at the moment was vigorous nod of his head. Of course, the black guy had immediately managed to lie down along the side of the bed.As Toshia moved around and straddled her willing partner, she glanced over to see that Shelonda was sprawled, half-twisted, on her half of the bed. The Asian kid was between her legs, going down on her enthusiastically, while Shelonda was making a good effort at sucking on the other boy’s fat cock.Then, Toshia was pushing the thick head of the black cock up into her pussy. She gave a happy whimper as she settled down on him, letting his cock fill her nicely. She worked herself up and down a few times, grinding herself against the man’s rock hard abs, before nodding over her shoulder to the other fellow. She didn’t have to wait long for him to get into position behind her, and then to feel the head of his cock pushing against and then into her tight ass. Toshia braced herself with her hands on the black man’s chest as she felt that long, thin cock working its way deeper and deeper into her bowels. She smiled broadly and said, “Damn, this feels so good!”Toshia began to rock her hips between the men, who were doing their part to fuck their cocks in and out of her willing body. The black guy had her waist in his big hands, and the guy fucking her ass was holding onto her shoulders, pulling her back on their hard pricks. She heard Shelonda moaning loudly with what must be another orgasm, and heard herself calling out, “Fuck me harder!”The two men obliged with gusto, proceeding to shove into her almost violently. They had gotten into a good rhythm, and Toshia could feel her next orgasm coming on fast. As a result, she wasn’t too aware of what was going on elsewhere on the bed, so she was a bit surprised when she opened her eyes to see another cock in front of her face. Looking up and around, she saw that Shelonda was on her back with the big-cock fellow between her legs, filling her with that beautiful piece of man-meat. The young Asian guy had come over to get in on Toshia’s little group. As occupied as she was at the moment, Toshia couldn’t do much more than smile up at him and then offer him her open mouth. He didn’t hesitate, but inched forward on the bed, and pushed his very hard cock into her mouth. She closed her lips on his shaft and reveled in the sensations of being completely filled with cock. The Asian kid held her head in his hands, and Toshia relaxed her throat, letting him fuck her face steadily.Toshia came long and hard then, her body clenching and shuddering in the center of those three men who were fucking her so intently. As she slowly came down, she began to have an idea, which gradually coalesced into a plan. She managed to indicate to the Asian kid that she needed to say something, and he promptly, and politely, drew back. Taking just a moment to catch her breath, Toshia quickly explained to them what she had in mind. Giving her shoulder a kiss, the man who had been fucking her ass gradually withdrew and stepped aside for the moment. His place was taken by the Asian kid, who didn’t waste any time at all before pushing his raging hard on into her ass. After a few preliminary thrusts from each of the guys inside her, Toshia announced that she was ready for the third. The man with the long, thin cock got behind the Asian kid and bent his long shaft down until it was up against the black phallus in her pussy. The black guy pulled out almost all the way, and Toshia made every effort to relax, as the third cock pushed forward, entering her pussy with the black cock.Toshia was dimly aware of the sound of Shelonda having a rather loud and long orgasm, but was lost in the unbelievable sensations of having both her ass and pussy stuffed so full. Three cocks were moving in and out of her, stretching her; filling her! Then Toshia was coming again, in a shaking avalanche complete with a steady stream of “Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck…” All the while the men kept driving in and out of her steadily, and Toshia’s orgasm seemed to roll on forever.Except that it did eventually begin to fade, and Toshia could open her eyes again. She was happy, and a bit surprised, to see the fellow with the big cock who had been fucking Shelonda kneeling in front of her. She cast a glance over to the side to see that yet another guy had come into the cabin and had gotten Shelonda to roll over on her belly so that he could fuck her from behind. Turning her attention back to that beautiful, big cock in front of her, which was now all slippery with Shelonda’s juices and pearly with cum, and only a bit deflated, Toshia smiled and opened her mouth invitingly.It wasn’t easy to accommodate that sexy monster, but the young man was surprisingly gentle, and Toshia gave it her best shot. She doubted that he would cum that way, but he quickly became fully hard again for her.Toshia couldn’t believe she had four cocks in her all at once! The very thought; assisted by all the stimulation her body was getting, no doubt; pushed her over the edge into yet another orgasm. This one was less intense, but it was still enough to prompt the cock inside her ass to swell and pump what felt like quite a lot of hot cum up into her. After a few more strokes, the Asian kid began to pull himself out of Toshia’s butt and managed to extract himself from the tight little knot of bodies centered on Toshia. Since he’d had to pull out of her pussy to let the Asian leave, the fellow with the long, thin cock took his place, slipping easily into Toshia’s ass in one motion. Once there, he fucked her with short, hard, fast motions, until he too filled her with his cum.When her ass was once again free of cock; but had sticky, white cum leaking out of it and down over the black guy’s balls; Toshia managed to suggest that the guy with the big cock fuck her ass with it. Of course, he was quite willing to oblige. Toshia came yet again as his big head pushed up into her ass, while the black guy patiently continued to slowly fuck in and out of her pussy. She just kept coming as the two men sawed in and out of her, until, finally, the black cock swelled inside her and flooded her pussy with sweet cum. He stayed there inside her as his de facto partner continued to fuck the hell out of Toshia’s ass. When that thick cock got even thicker inside her, Toshia screamed a bit. She felt the welcome rush of his cum shooting up into her and then she was unconscious.When she eventually opened her eyes again, she was on her back and looking up into Don’s eyes. Don was brushing the hair out of her eyes and smiling down at her. He said, “It seems like you’ve had a good time, lover.”“Um!” she managed. Then she realized that Don was fucking her, slowly, steadily. Toshia smiled and said, “I’ve been very busy.”“I can tell,” Don laughed.Toshia knew that she must be quite a sight, and that there must be quite a mess on the bed and between her legs. She was vaguely aware that Shelonda was being fucked, or something, on the other side of the bed. Don was fucking her a bit harder, and she bit her lip.“Does it hurt?” he asked.“A little,” she smiled. “Do you care?”“Not really, no.”“Good,” she smiled. “Fuck me, Don.” She pulled his head down so she could kiss him while his cock moved in and out of her sloppy, very well-used pussy, until it too swelled inside her, jerking as Don groaned and added his cum to the rest.Don relaxed, propped up on his elbows a bit. He watched the action on the enormous blanket with an amused smile. Nearest to him, almost within arm’s reach, Toshia was on her hands and knees, being taken from behind by a fit fellow who looked to be Arabic, or possibly Persian, while she was rather enthusiastically servicing the thick cock of the young guy with light blonde hair who was kneeling in front of her. Don realized, quite happily, that he could watch her go all day – and, then, with a widening grin, that he pretty much had done just that several times here in Eros. He admired her sleek muscular body as she moved between the two men, particularly the way her thighs and buttocks flexed as she pushed back against the dark-haired man behind her. The afternoon sun shone on her tanned back and the spray of dewy white cum Don had left there only a couple of minutes earlier. Of course, the way Toshia was eagerly sucking and stroking on that big cock in front of her was quite impressive too. It didn’t hurt that he had come to be so familiar with being on either end of that wonderful, exquisitely responsive body over the last few weeks.Beyond Toshia and her two playmates, Don could see Shelonda moving up and down as the sexy young woman rode the prodigious cock of a black gentleman whose hands were squeezing her big tits tightly, eliciting additional happy sounds from her. Life in Eros is good! Don thought to himself. I’m going to miss this!Then, with a somewhat rueful shake of his head he slowly stood up and looked around. Around them, lightly checkering the pale, pinkish beach were other over-sized beach blankets, some of which were occupied by naked sunbathers, many of whom were engaged in activities much like those of Toshia and Shelonda. On Don’s left, the beach swept on until it gave way to a rocky tumble that gradually, over several miles, began to mount up to what seemed to be rather steep mountains that Don thought must march down from up near the Resort and the Sage’s tower. That rocky end of the mountains marched right into the body of water that spread out before Don. Just after the rest of the smooth sand of the beach and the occasional gleaming rocky outcropping, was the open sea, or ocean, or large lake. Don had never seen water so blue in his life, and he had seen some surprisingly blue water before, as for instance the Mediterranean off the coast of Greece. On Don’s right was a green, rocky area that separated the beach and the mouth of the river he and the girls had traveled down to get this far, several kilometers away. Behind Don, on a handful of small hills, was the strange “city” of Rendezvous.After they had disembarked from the riverboat, leaving behind the cheerful, lazy swinging atmosphere that had prevailed on their slow trip down from the Resort, the now very relaxed trio had made their way from the docks into the town, expecting to be able to make quick and easy progress through and to the water, when they would turn to the left and follow the waterline to the Grotto of Ishtar.As it turned out, though, Rendezvous had proven to be a harder to get through.The city seemed to be laid out on an almost non-Euclidean plan. Streets continued on in straight lines for no more than a block at a time, and two right angled turns did not equal 180 degrees. To make things worse, cutting through buildings utterly failed to achieve its purpose. Walls that were parallel on the inside of a building did not translate as parallel on the outside. Moreover, moving through a building frequently resulted in exiting in a completely different part of town. All of this resulted, somehow, in the city being, apparently, much larger than it appeared from an external viewpoint, as from the docks or where they were on the beach. The wide variety of sexual distractions to be had through every door and around every corner. It seemed that the harder they tried to make their way through Rendezvous the more they would go off track and get distracted. Toshia’s favorite place had been a little club that featured little rooms with various glory holes in the walls. They had spent several hours there, and Toshia had ultimately come out of her chamber with her face and chest splattered with cum and jizz running down the insides and backs of her legs. Shelonda had been quite partial to a building that was filled with a wild combination of padded jungle gym and what Don thought of as a human-sized cat playhouse. There were crazily varied platforms, like a maze laid out in three dimensions, serving as the surfaces of an ongoing orgy. Don had a hard time choosing favorites at the best of times, and there were so many options to pick from in this situation, but he thought he would probably have to say his favorite part of making his way through Rendezvous had been watching the two girls react and enjoy the whole experience. Of course, this was not to say that he had not also enjoyed all the sex he himself had had.Once they had finally reached the beach they were ready to take a nice rest. Seeing the rocky terrain that would keep them from easily proceeding to the grotto helped to take a bit of the wind from their sails as well. So they collapsed on the nearest empty beach blanket and quickly fell asleep in a cozy little pile. Perhaps because of the relatively high concentration of XYZ in the ocean, or sea, air, though, they were soon as randy as they had been at any time in Eros. They awoke very horny, and the nearby guys were more than happy to help out. Don was surprised at how thick and hard his cock was even after the vigorous orgasm he had just had – both in Toshia’s sweet pussy and all over her back. He thought he would go over to offer himself to Shelonda’s mouth, but just then was distracted as a woman sauntered toward them on her way down to the water.She was a leggy blonde, with long, wavy hair of gold, a phenomenal, curvy body with amazing tits, and her face… Don was certain he recognized her from somewhere. Noticing his attention, the woman smiled broadly at him and gave him a merry wink. Suddenly Don knew exactly where he had seen her. She was a model on The Price is Right back in what he thought of as the real world. He spent a long moment standing there stunned, before making the obvious choice and turning to follow the gorgeous blonde down to the water. He admired the way her hips swayed as she made her way to the water, and then continued to wade in. When she was up to her waist, which Don thought was a shame since he could no longer see her shapely ass, she dove forward and under the water.Don was up to his knees in the surprisingly warm water by the time she resurfaced, emerging from the water like Aphrodite, her thick hair darkened and hanging around her radiant face and water glistening as it ran off her shoulders and full breasts. She smiled again to Don, who hastened to wade in further. She waited for him, her nipples just above the water line. She batted her long lashes at him as he came up close enough to say, “Hello.”She unleashed that dazzling smile again, and said, “Hello there. Have we met?”“Not really, no,” he almost stammered.“Well, I’m Rachel,” she continued to smile, as Don felt her hand touching his hip under the water and then move directly to his cock, which was the hardest it had ever been. Don also felt quite sure that it was bigger than it used to be.“I know,” Don smiled back, moving closer and gently grasping her waist under the water.“You do?” She leaned in and kissed him lightly on the lips and then moved in even closer, brushing her lips over Don’s collar bone and then along the side of his neck. Her grasp on his straining penis was tight as she pulled on it.“Yes…” Don shuddered a bit. His hands moved around her waist to slide down her lower back and then to hold her behind tightly. “Someone told me your name.”Releasing her hold on his prick, Rachel slipped her arms around his neck and looked into his eyes. Her wonderfully full breasts were pressed against Don’s chest as she asked, “Who?”“It was a long time ago,” Don smiled, “and far away.”She cocked her head to the side a bit, her smile a bit thoughtful, before she said, “Well, it’s very nice to meet you…”“Don,” he said. He lifted her up as she pulled herself up and jumped a bit in the water, wrapping her perfect, long legs around his waist.Rachel managed to get her hand down between them, took hold of his straining prick, and positioned it just right. As she sank downward, enveloping him in her warm, welcoming embrace, she said, “Well, it’s very nice to meet you, Don.”Up to his chest in the XYZ sea, Don held on to the gorgeous Rachel, helping to raise and lower her as she slowly rode up and down on his thick and steely hard cock. Her lush, full breasts moved against his chest. His hands held her firm ass cheeks tightly. Their mouths met in a heated kiss that quickly grew in passion, their tongues slipping past each other’s lips and teeth. Rachel worked herself on Don’s shaft and against his body with increasing enthusiasm

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: "AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems", published by gjm on July 25, 2024 on LessWrong. Google DeepMind reports on a system for solving mathematical problems that allegedly is able to give complete solutions to four of the six problems on the 2024 IMO, putting it near the top of the silver-medal category. Well, actually, two systems for solving mathematical problems: AlphaProof, which is more general-purpose, and AlphaGeometry, which is specifically for geometry problems. (This is AlphaGeometry 2; they reported earlier this year on a previous version of AlphaGeometry.) AlphaProof works in the "obvious" way: an LLM generates candidate next steps which are checked using a formal proof-checking system, in this case Lean. One not-so-obvious thing, though: "The training loop was also applied during the contest, reinforcing proofs of self-generated variations of the contest problems until a full solution could be found." (That last bit is reminiscent of something from the world of computer go: a couple of years ago someone trained a custom version of KataGo specifically to solve the infamous Igo Hatsuyoron problem 120, starting with ordinary KataGo and feeding it training data containing positions reachable from the problem's starting position. They claim to have laid that problem to rest at last.) AlphaGeometry is similar but uses something specialized for (I think) Euclidean planar geometry problems in place of Lean. The previous version of AlphaGeometry allegedly already performed at gold-medal IMO standard; they don't say anything about whether that version was already able to solve the 2024 IMO problem that was solved using AlphaGeometry 2. AlphaProof was able to solve questions 1, 2, and 6 on this year's IMO (two algebra, one number theory). It produces Lean-formalized proofs. AlphaGeometry 2 was able to solve question 4 (plane geometry). It produces proofs in its own notation. The solutions found by the Alpha... systems are at https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/DeepMind.com/Blog/imo-2024-solutions/index.html. (There are links in the top-of-page navbar to solutions to the individual problems.) (If you're curious about the IMO questions or want to try them yourself before looking at the machine-generated proofs, you can find them -- and those for previous years -- at https://www.imo-official.org/problems.aspx.) One caveat (note: an earlier version of what I wrote failed to notice this and quite wrongly explicitly claimed something different): "First, the problems were manually translated into formal mathematical language for our systems to understand." It feels to me like it shouldn't be so hard to teach an LLM to convert IMO problems into Lean or whatever, but apparently they aren't doing that yet. Another caveat: "Our systems solved one problem within minutes and took up to three days to solve the others." Later on they say that AlphaGeometry 2 solved the geometry question within 19 seconds, so I guess that was also the one that was done "within minutes". Three days is a lot longer than human IMO contestants get given, but this feels to me like the sort of thing that will predictably improve pretty rapidly. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org

Evelyn's Stage Performance Continues it be a big hit. By BradentonLarry - Listen to the ► Podcast at Steamy Stories. Evelyn directed the couple into another position. Now the man was lying on his back while his ‘wife' rode his cock, rather enthusiastically, while Evelyn sat on the man's face, grinding her pussy and clit on his mouth and watching the woman enjoy that fat cock. Don watched as Evelyn squeezed her own breasts, twisting her nipples, and then reached out to do the same to the woman across from her. Evelyn leaned forward and managed to get her mouth on one of the woman's nipples, which seemed to send the woman into another orgasm. Then, Evelyn was sitting back on the man's face, head thrown back and her hands squeezing her own tits tightly as her body rocked with her own first orgasm of the session.Don's cock throbbed and twitched, as if in sympathy with Evelyn's body. When the trio changed positions again, it was Evelyn's turn to lie on her back, her butt at the edge of the bed, as the man held her legs up and shoved his thick cock back into her pussy. At first the woman knelt on the bed next to Evelyn, making out with her and sucking on her tits, but then she moved up to kneel over Evelyn's face. Don watched as Evelyn grasped the woman's ass and held her in place so she could lick and suck at her clit and pussy, while the man fucked Don's lover hard and deep. Soon the woman was climaxing again, crying out loudly so everyone in the club noticed, and the man was shoving up into Evelyn with short violent strokes until he too was clearly coming. As he eventually drew out of Evelyn, a long, thick strand of cum hung between her pussy and the head of his cock. Evelyn said something to the woman who then quickly got down on her hands and knees at the end of the bed, first to suck the man's cock clean and then to bury her face in Evelyn's messy snatch, licking and sucking up all the cum he'd left there. Soon, Evelyn was sitting half up on the bed, her muscles clenching tight, as she held the woman's head in place while Evelyn's orgasm tore through her. For a long moment, Evelyn just lay back on the bed with a happy smile on her face, and then she sat up and looked out at the audience with a grin. Don grinned back at her, though he was pretty sure she couldn't see him. Still, when she mouthed, “One more?” he gave her an enthusiastic thumbs up. In any case, they had agreed she would give him a sign to let him know she was ready to leave, and she certainly hadn't given it. After Evelyn and her two playmates cleared that set, a couple of servitors came and straightened things up quickly, but without bothering to change the bed or anything. By the time Evelyn reappeared, only the big orgy on the circular bed and the couples in the dungeon set were still going at it. Don was downstairs, idly watching the orgy, when Evelyn came back on stage, this time entering the bus stop set. She had her hair in a couple of pigtails and was wearing a light sundress. She took a seat on the plastic bench against the wall, and waited, for a bus, supposedly, but really for her next set of playmates to join her. Soon two men joined her. There was quite a bit of pantomimed flirting and exaggerated come-hither looks before the men were standing in front of Evelyn having their cocks sucked. They had apparently left the door light set to yellow, because by the time Evelyn was on her hands and knees, though still in her sundress, getting spit-roasted, another guy poked his head in and decided to join in. By the time the scene had run its course, Evelyn had serviced six guys altogether, and a beautiful brown-skinned young woman with long, thick, black hair had come in to take over on the mattress. Don was happy to watch this woman enjoy herself while Evelyn got cleaned up and ready for round three. When Evelyn came back on stage, she was again wearing high heels, but this time they came with black boots that went almost all the way up her thighs. Her torso was wrapped in a shiny black bodice that left her crotch and tits exposed, and she was wearing black gloves that went up to the middle of her biceps. Her hair was now pulled back tightly into a ponytail, and she led a beautiful naked Asian woman with black hair hanging down to the middle of her back out and promptly began tying her to a frame that left her spread-eagled and vulnerable to anything Evelyn might inflict upon her. Evelyn spent the next hour teasing and tormenting this poor woman, who seemed to love every minute of it, even when she was begging Evelyn for release. Evelyn finally let the woman come, but only after she had stuffed a rather large butt plug and a big, shiny black dildo into their respective places, and fastened heavy nipple clamps to her nipples. Then, with only the command, “Come,” Evelyn reduced the woman to a shuddering, quivering display of ecstasy that went on for what seemed like several long minutes. Then Evelyn sat on a bench so the grateful woman could crawl across the floor on her hands and knees to lick and suck at Evelyn until she made her temporary mistress come. Finally, Evelyn came onto stage with the next bunch of five people to make use of the big circular bed. Two lucky men were accompanied by Evelyn and three women, who all came in naked and wasted no time in climbing onto the bed and getting acquainted. Soon it became rather hard for Don to keep track of Evelyn amid the confusion of heaving bodies. At one point, she was near the center of the bed, slowly turning with it, as she rode slowly up and down on a cock as several hands reached up to caress her body. At another, she was on her hands and knees near the edge, gliding past the front of the stage, making out with a girl lying on her back at right angles to Evelyn, while one of the men slowly, but intently fucked Evelyn from behind. They must have left the light on yellow, because while they played another five people came to join the party - three men and two women, this time. Don found a chair to get comfortable, but continued to resist touching his straining cock. He was a bit amused by all the men in the audience who were, and had been all night, watching Evelyn and bringing themselves to intense, squirting orgasms. He was, however, much more distracted by the women around him, moaning in orgasmic pleasure as they watched the shows before them. Eventually, with her hair a wild mess around her head, Evelyn broke free from the orgy on the bed and staggered to the front of the stage to give the agreed upon sign that she was ready to leave. Don went straight to the exit, expecting to have to wait for Evelyn to get cleaned up, but she met him right away, naked and carrying her clothes with her in a bundle. She had cum all over her and smelled deliciously of the sex she'd been having. “Hi there!” she grinned. Don caught her face in his hands and kissed her deeply and passionately. When he released her, she asked, “Did you enjoy the show?” “Fuck yes!” he laughed. “Let's go over by the pool and find someplace for the night.” “Good idea! I need to get cleaned up.” “Not quite yet,” Don smiled. “I'm going to add to your … makeup, first.” “Oh! Excellent!” she beamed. “You really had a good time?” “I did!” he laughed again. “Sorry I took so long. If we can't have sex, I want to make sure I'm ready to actually sleep.” “Good thinking,” Don grinned. “What was your favorite part?” she asked. “It was all very hot, but I have to admit the first one was probably my favorite,” Don said. “I liked the story you were telling.” “I knew you'd get it!” “What was your favorite part?” he asked. “Oh, that's easy,” she said, “this next bit!” Laughing, he said, “That doesn't count.” “Hum, well, that's really hard to say. There were high points in each scene. In the first one, for instance, I really liked having that guy, Dave, fucking me from behind while I went down on Julie. In the second, well, there was that first time I had three cocks in me at once. Then, when I let Tamiko come … that was hot! I came so many times during the last scene I couldn't say, really. Damn, I really have become a wild woman here, haven't I?” “Yeah, and I love it!” Don grinned. They had reached the poolside and quickly found a double-sized lounger. Evelyn dropped her clothes on the ground and sat down on the edge of the lounger, leaning back and spreading her legs in front of Don. “Damn! That's so tempting,” he breathed. “No touching!” she smiled up at him. “Just watch me as I touch myself. You liked watching those men fucking me, didn't you? It felt so good to have them in my pussy and ass, and to suck them, and to lick those sexy pussies and clits,” Evelyn said as her hands moved slowly over her body, cupping her breasts and then sliding over her taut belly down between her legs. “I kept thinking about how hard your cock must be as you were watching me up on that stage, fucking and getting fucked, sucking and licking, coming over and over.” She was simultaneously strumming her clit and fucking herself with several fingers. “I kept thinking how hot it was to have you watching me, watching me suck… and fuck… and all that cum on my face and tits… and… and… up inside me… God, Don, I'm going to come again. Give me your cum, Don!” Don couldn't restrain himself any longer. His iron-hard cock swelled in his hands and then erupted, spraying a geyser of hot cum all over Evelyn's naked body. It splattered all over her belly, across her tits and neck, and hit her chin. The second gout splashed over her lower belly and covered her fingers, getting pushed up into her pussy as she clenched upon herself on the lounger, her face scrunched up tightly as she came with him. Don staggered backward a bit and Evelyn fell back on the lounger with a heavy sigh. “Ugh,” she moaned. “I need to clean up, but I don't think I can move.” “Fuck it,” Don chuckled. “Let's just do it when we wake up.” “Seriously?” she laughed. “Okay.” “But you do have to move. We can't sleep like that.” “I'm not moving. You get your own,” she waved her hand in the air. When Don actually started to sit down on the next lounger over, though, she said, “Fine, fine, I'm moving!” They managed to spend the night spooned together, in a rather sticky mess, without violating the terms of Don's mission to not have physical-contact sex, and then enjoyed a leisurely bath in the pool in the morning. At the resort's wardrobery, they managed to find Evelyn a nice backpack for her pilgrimage, and then, with a long hug and a deep, loving kiss, she set off in quest of the Grove of Rati. “So, you were left alone again, in the sex resort where you couldn't actually have sex, for a year,” Toshia summed up. “Yeah, that's about the size of it.” “How did it go?” “Well, at the time it seemed very slow, but when it was over it didn't seem bad at all,” Don shrugged. “I did have a couple of visitors along the way. Both Nicole and Stephanie passed through the Resort before I was done.” “How were they doing?” “Okay. I found out that the watcher's council seemed to have something of a pattern in their assignments. A few personalized quests to start with and then a long-term test, like my sheriff's job or Evelyn's pilgrimage. Nicole had to find the Trans-Erosian Railway and ride it from end to end. She came through the Resort heading in the opposite direction from Evelyn, hoping to connect with that train. Stephanie came through very near the end of my year after spending a year in Rendezvous without having sex with any men.” “That sounds a lot easier than your task,” Toshia frowned. “That's what I said!” Don laughed. “She admitted it wasn't that difficult, but she was glad to get back to ‘proper fucking' as she called it. Oh, and I got to talk to India a few times, too. But mostly, I just kept myself busy watching other people and getting to know the ins and outs of the Resort. I fell into a pretty stable, comfortable routine. I was actually kind of surprised when I came back into my office after a 'patrol,' and suddenly found myself in that big courtyard at the Hall of the Crimson Mountain King. At that moment, I was mostly just happy that my staff, which I had left in the office, appeared a second later on the ground at my feet. Then I remembered that this meant I could have sex again!” Toshia chuckled, “Uh oh!” “Yeah,” Don laughed. “I got into and out of those showers in record time. Then I dove into that super orgy for a solid hour. The first girl I hooked up with was a thin young woman, probably about nineteen. I've never had such an intense passionate session of anonymous sex in my life. I was nice about it, of course, but I fucked the hell out of that girl.” “I'll bet!” Toshia laughed. “Did she object?” Don shook his head, “Not at all. But after I'd had my fun, I cleaned up and headed upstairs for my next mission.” Task Five: “Congratulations, Don, you're now more than halfway finished with your tasks,” Pamela almost smiled. “For your next assignment, we want you to find a familiar face. To be clear, we mean you must find someone you clearly recognize, and can put a name to, but whom you haven't seen previously in Eros.” “So, if I recognize my second-grade teacher but can't remember her name, that doesn't count?” “Exactly,” she nodded. “Do they have to remember who they are?” Don asked, thinking of all the people who seemed to have little or no memory of their non-Erosian existence. In particular, he recalled the stunning Price is Right model he had been so happy to meet on the beach outside Rendezvous. “No,” Pamela said. “We will be able to verify their identities to corroborate you.” “That's handy.” “We are aware that this particular task is largely out of your control and could take a very long time to complete. We are also, frankly, impressed with your efforts so far. So, we have decided to grant you some of the power you are seeking a bit early.” She gestured to a ring that was now on the table in front of Don. Picking it up, he thought it had the weight and look of white gold. He slipped it onto his left middle finger. Nothing happened. “You have to press it twice in quick succession to call up the menu.” Don pressed the ring twice with his thumb as if he were double-clicking the ring. Suddenly, floating a bit above the midrange of his visual field was a horizontal blue bar. There was one item, in white letters, on that bar: “Travel.” “Concentrate on the desired menu item to activate it,” Pamela went on. Don wasn't sure what he was supposed to be doing, but he focused intently on “Travel,” until a drop-down menu opened with the following list: Abbey of Records; Crimson Mountain - Porch; Elven Court; Gladys's Office; Grotto of Ishtar; Heolfor House; India's Home; Manor; Rendezvous - Beach; Rendezvous - Riverboat Dock; Resort; Shagbottom; Sisterhood Castle; Untamed Village; Witches' Glen; and, Wizard's Home. “Nice!” Don breathed. “When you visit a new location for which there is an established landmark it will automatically be added to your list,” Pamela continued to explain. “Before you select anything, I should add that you can dismiss the display at any time.” Don tried willing the menu and bar away and they promptly vanished. He called it up again and dismissed it, just for practice. “When you select a travel destination, the menu will automatically close when you arrive. With the exception of these offices, you will not be able to use the ring to travel when anyone else can see you. Well, anyone who doesn't have a similar ring or one that is higher in rank, that is. Also, when traveling to a location, you will arrive at the closest safe position to the landmark where no one can see your arrival.” “This is incredibly useful!” Don grinned. “It is,” Pamela nodded. “Do you have any questions about your task?” “Find someone I can name from outside Eros,” Don smiled. “Then report back here.” “Exactly,” Pamela said. “You should be able to manage all your own travel from now on.” “So, I just call up the menu, focus on “Travel,” then focus on a destination…“ Then suddenly Don found himself standing outside the Abbey of Records. "Whoa! Seriously?” Toshia gaped. “Yeah,” Don chuckled. “It's pretty cool. When I'm in Eros I can bop around like crazy. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a lot of fun.” “Damn!” “Well, I am restricted to the places I've already found, like in a video game with unlockable fast-travel points, but it's still massively useful. I'm thinking about setting off on a general exploration trip when I go back, to collect as many landmarks as I can. Stephanie probably has a lot more than I do. I know Evelyn's list is different from mine. She's got the Dark Labyrinth and a bunch of places she found on her pilgrimage, but not the Wizard's Home or Shagbottom, for instance.” “That must have made your task much easier.” “Well,” Don paused. “I'm sure it cut out a lot of time going from one place to another, but it still took a lot of time to find someone I recognized. I started out just working down the list of places, skipping Gladys's office, the Grotto of Ishtar, and India's home. I was at the Abbey of Records anyway, so I went in and asked Charlotte if she could help me out at all. Naturally, I had to go through the whole routine, which took quite a while, and, in the end, she got a lot more out of me than I did from her. She wasn't aware of anyone that I might recognize, but then I had known it was going to be a long shot anyway. I crossed that off my list of places to try. "I skipped the Crimson Mountain, figuring it would just take too damn long to try to comb through that orgy, or go looking for other rooms in that place, and went right to the elven court, Heolfor House, et cetera. It was kind of fun revisiting places and talking to people again. The Wizard and Madeleine, the Player, the Lady and Robert all say 'hi,' by the way. And Daphne says I'm to bend you over and fuck you hard in the ass.” “Oh my!” Toshia laughed, actually feeling her cheeks reddening a bit. “After working all the way down the list, with no luck, I went back to the Crimson Mountain. I walked around the big orgy for a while, then started exploring some of the other areas in the King's Hall. There are a lot of rooms in that sucker, but most of them were empty. When I didn't find any familiar faces, I started all over again, but I focused on just what I thought were the more likely prospects: the Manor, Rendezvous, the Resort, Shagbottom, and Crimson Mountain. Each visit to each one of them took quite a bit of time, plus, every time I got to the Resort or the Manor, I followed the protocols Evelyn and I had agreed on, so that took time. Anyway, it was only after I'd visited each of them for the third time that I found someone I recognized.” Don had found Rendezvous the most frustrating place to search. The strange, non-Euclidean geography of the relatively crowded city made it difficult to have any kind of established search pattern, and the size of the place served to impress upon him how difficult and potentially open-ended his current task actually was. In principle, he could wander Eros for years without being lucky enough to come across someone he recognized from the 'real' world. Wandering the winding, confusing streets of Rendezvous and prowling through its many, many buildings made his task more than a little depressing. On the other hand, there was no shortage of playful diversions to be had in that odd city, and Don was always finding something new to explore. So it was that on his fourth attempt to find someone, anyone, he recognized in Rendezvous that he came upon a lovely park set among the buildings but with a nice view over the lower city to the beach and the sea beyond. Don thought that whoever had designed, or set up, Rendezvous had done a particularly good job of including this park and putting it here. It was a pleasant early afternoon, with the usual blue sky adorned with a few fluffy white clouds. Here and there were couples and small groups playing on the grass, on benches, or, in at least one case, in a hammock. There were even a few people, like Don, just enjoying a walk through the park. Off to the left, on a low hill, was a gazebo where there seemed to be a nice little orgy going on. Don thought it would be a good idea to go have a look at the participants. It was one of his rules to whenever possible check out any group of more than three. But then a leggy brunette stood up and came down the gazebo's steps and began walking across the grass toward a small fountain. Her body was simply gorgeous, with firm muscles in her limbs and belly, full breasts, and, as Don saw as she got closer to the fountain, a stunning ass. She had long dark hair with hints of lighter, sun-bleached strands. Her shoulders were broad and there was something exquisitely confident in the way she sauntered over the lawn. Don decided the orgy could wait and proceeded to the fountain. He watched the beauty bathing with her back to him, enjoying the way the water ran over her body. He got to the fountain and splashed some water on his face and proceeded to give his own body a good rinsing off. All the while his eyes kept returning to the woman. Then she tossed her hair to the side, and Don caught a glimpse of her lovely, long neck. There was something about the combination of her exquisitely sculpted shoulder, the line of the side of her neck, and her jawline, which Don could only barely discern, that struck a deep chord in Don's memory. This woman had the body of a sex symbol, and Don suddenly felt like he had seen this sex symbol before. Then she happened to turn in the water, and Don saw her face. Her eyes were closed, and she was smiling slightly, happily. It was her cheekbones that did it. Don was sure he knew who she was. When she opened her vaguely Asian eyes and smiled at him, Don's heart leapt in his chest and he was certain. Don swallowed, for the first time in a long time in Eros flustered. He finally managed to say, “Pardon me for staring, but you're so very beautiful.” She laughed, “That's alright. I was checking you out, too.” Don was suddenly conscious of the fact that he was buck naked standing there talking to a gloriously naked Jessica Biel while sporting a serious erection. It took a second before it penetrated his brain that she was perfectly fine with it and was moving closer to him. “No fucking way!” Toshia almost yelled. “I swear,” Don replied. “The actress?!” “The one and only, in the flesh,” he nodded. Toshia studied Don's face, looking for the slightest indication that he was putting her on. “I am not kidding,” Don assured her. “Well, goddamn, now I really am jealous. She's one of the reasons I knew I liked women!” Don laughed, “I can say she's definitely one of the reasons I like women, too.” “Come here often?” she smiled at him with that beautiful toothsome smile and those laughing eyes of hers. Don realized she was just a little shorter than him. “Well, this is my first time to this fountain,” Don smiled, slowly feeling like he was regaining control of himself. Then she reached out to wrap her hand around his cock and Don knew he had very little control of anything at that moment. She chuckled a little and said, “What do you think of it so far?” “Well, it's definitely my favorite fountain at the moment,” Don said as he reached out to run his hands over her hips. His brain was screaming, Jessica Biel's hips! Jessica Biel's naked hips! Don did his best to power through, and asked, “How about you? Is this a favorite of yours?” She was now standing up against him, her perfect breasts brushing against his chest, her hand slowly stroking his cock, while Don's hands had slipped around to squeeze and caress her ass. She said, “Oh, no, I just woke up here. What a wonderful place!” “I DEFINITELY agree,” Don grinned. “Did you enjoy the gazebo?” Her eyes widened as she grinned back at him, “Oh my god, I did!” Don tried to think of another question, but then she was kissing him, and all coherent thought flew away. His hands were squeezing her tight ass as her tongue pushed eagerly into his mouth and her grip tightened on his very hard prick, but all Don could do was focus on kissing the gorgeous woman in front of him. Somehow, they made their way over to the edge of the fountain basin, and then Don urged her down until she was sitting on the stonework and he was kneeling in the grass. Her hands held his face, making sure he didn't stop kissing her until he pulled away with a smile, and said, “I'm not going anywhere.” Then Don leaned in and kissed the side of her long neck, finally setting aside her celebrity status and simply making love to her as the gorgeous, talented, warm, and very sensual woman she was. After lingering all too briefly over her perfect breasts, Don was soon on his hands and knees kissing his way slowly along the insides of her firm thighs. As his tongue ran over her moist lips and teased the sensitive tip of her clit, she sighed and leaned back a bit, pushing herself forward for him. Soon she was groaning and trembling with her orgasm as Don licked and sucked at her clit and fucked three fingers slowly in and out of her pussy. Don smiled up at her as she caught her breath, but then, with a playful laugh, she lunged forward and pushed him backward, sending him sprawling on his back in the grass as she quickly straddled him. She grinned down at him as she held him down with her left hand on his chest and used the other to get hold of his cock. Don just lay back and enjoyed the view as she rubbed the fat head of his organ between her lips and then pushed it up inside her. “Uh, that's better,” she purred as she sank down on Don, who groaned a little as he felt her warm pussy enveloping him in its tight, wet embrace. She proceeded to grind against him, rubbing her clit against his body while working his cock in and out of herself. Don reached up to cup her tits in his hands, gently squeezing them and brushing his thumbs over her erect nipples. “Tighter,” she murmured, as she worked her pelvis down against him. Don squeezed her breasts harder and pinched her nipples between his thumbs and forefingers. “Yes,” she nodded with closed eyes. She was rocking herself on Don intently, leaning back so that she was fully upright on top of him. The fingers of her right hand were now stroking her clit as she rode Don's cock. “Harder!” Don twisted her nipples and arched his back a bit, pushing up into her grasping pussy. “Fuck yes!” she said loudly, apparently oblivious to the fact that they were fucking there open in the middle of the park. Then she was coming again, shuddering and calling out, “Goddamn! Yes! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” Don just lay there, loving the way her pussy was squeezing and pulling at him, and lost in the spectacle of Jessica Biel climaxing on top of him. Then she was collapsing forward on him, kissing him passionately and deeply, while still rocking her pelvis against him. Don had automatically released her tits and was now squeezing her ass as she writhed against his body, fucking him enthusiastically. Don did his best to flex up into her in time with her motions, but she was definitely setting the pace, and soon she was coming yet again, biting down on his shoulder as her body clenched and spasmed on top of him. Don held onto her, caressing her back, as she slowly came down. She was kissing the side of his neck, and there was no way he was going to do anything to interrupt this moment. Then, abruptly, she pushed up and looked at him seriously, “You haven't come yet, have you?” “Uh, no, but…” She didn't give Don a chance to complete that thought, but quickly scrambled around until she was lying perpendicular to him so she could lean over him and suck his cock. With her hand wrapped tightly around the base, she moved her mouth up and down on his sex. Don felt her lips moving on him and her tongue massaging the length of his cock. He felt his sensitive head hitting the back of her throat. It was some of the most aggressive head he'd ever received, which, coupled with the circumstances of the entire situation, brought him to the brink in no time. He groaned loudly and shoved up into her mouth as his cock swelled in her fist and mouth and then erupted with a hot, jetting fountain of cum. Don lay there shuddering as his orgasm had its way with him and then as his new lover intently sucked the any remaining cum from him and swallowed it down. Don was grinning up at the sky, then there was a beautiful woman smiling down at him as she slipped her leg over his and caressed his chest. She said, “Damn, that was hot! By the way, my name is…” “Jessica, yes, I know,” Don smiled. Her eyes widened in alarm, “You recognize me?” “Yes, of course,” he nodded. “I'm Don, and I'm very happy to meet you!” “But… what the hell?” she looked at him intently with an expression of near panic. “This is real?” “Well, yes, I suppose so.” “What the hell?!” she repeated. “I thought this was all some crazy dream or something.” So, Don began explaining Eros to her as best he could. “My god,” she interrupted after a bit. “What have I done? I need to get back! My son…” “You have a son?” “Yes, of course, and a husband!” “Ah, I didn't know that,” Don frowned. He didn't bother to point out that she had still done nothing to move away from him. “I really thought you were single.” She rolled her eyes at him, “You must really be out of touch with the celebrity gossip.” “Well, yeah, that's probably true, but…” “I thought everyone knew I was married to Justin Timberlake.”A Task Leads to a weekend romp with Jessica Biel. “What the fuck?!” Toshia interrupted. “I would have heard about that!” “Yeah, I had pretty much the same reaction,” Don laughed. “But then I had a thought…” “Ah, Jessica, what year is it for you?” “What do you mean ‘for me'? It's 2019.” “Ah,” Don smiled. “It's just 2011 for me.” “What?!” she gaped at him. “That's crazy!” So, Don explained what he knew of time in Eros, ending with “It's crazy, I know, and I still have questions, but the good news is that while we're here time is moving very slowly in the ‘real' world. You can spend weeks here and then go back and no one will even notice that you've been gone.” “Seriously?” “It definitely seems to be the case,” Don nodded. “Does that help?” “I guess,” she admitted. “If I can get back and my son won't miss me, well, yeah, that helps.” “You'll go back automatically when you're satisfied, or bored,” Don smiled. “There's also a shortcut I can help you with, if you decide you're in a hurry.” “Hum,” she frowned thoughtfully. Don considered keeping his mouth shut, but couldn't help but ask, “And what about Justin?” “Oh, fuck him! I'm mad at him anyway,” she scowled. She explained that he had gotten too friendly with a pretty co-star, and apparently got caught by the paparazzi. “I know I'll forgive him. I love him, really, but it's just so goddamn frustrating… not to mention embarrassing. You probably think I'm crazy, but, honestly, that's the thing that's most annoying. We've both spent so much time in the spotlight, you'd think he'd know better. Asshole!” Don frowned in what he hoped was a sympathetic way. He was having a hard time imagining anyone out there in the ‘real' world stepping out, even a little, on Jessica Biel, but he was also painfully conscious of the fact that that very woman was now lying there naked in the grass with him after some truly intense sex. He didn't want to do or say anything to screw this up, including prompting her to defend her husband's honor, even a little. So, he kept his mouth shut. Ultimately, after a few long quiet moments, she seemed to reach a conclusion. Looking down at Don, she smiled and said, “I can go back whenever I want, you said, and no one will miss me if I stay a while?” “That's what I understand, and I can help you with getting back,” Don nodded. “And, what happens in Eros stays in Eros?” she grinned. Don noticed that her hand had found his reawakened cock again. “Certainly,” he grinned back. “In fact, there's no such thing as STDs or pregnancy here.” “That's good. Holy…! I completely forgot about those things!” “Yeah, apparently that's a side effect.” “Damn,” she laughed. “Well, then, Don, want to show a girl around some?” “And that's how I got to spend three days in Eros with Jessica Biel,” Don concluded, rather smugly, Toshia thought. “That's crazy!” Toshia laughed. “You lucky, lucky bastard! You're going to have to give me all the details next time we talk!” “Okay,” he smiled. “Oh, and apparently we need to keep an eye out for a series called The Sinner. Jess is particularly proud of that one.” “Oh, it's 'Jess' now, is it?” she grinned. “Okay, go on with your story. You've got two tasks left and it's almost time to meet Sarah.” “Okay, this won't take too long to finish up,” Don smiled. Chapter 11. Lords of Eros “You've reached the final stages of your trials, Don, and it's time we gave you some additional information,” Pamela said seriously. “You have not simply been being evaluated on whether or not you accomplished your tasks, but also on how you have accomplished them, how you have conducted yourself. The rings grant substantial power in Eros. Those who have them exercise quite a bit of authority in making this world into what they desire, and thereby shape the experience of everyone else in Eros. We watchers, as you call us, try as much as possible to refrain from interfering directly, and have followed this policy for some time. However, we do not want Eros to become a static environment. “It should instead be something that grows and changes with the interests and decisions of those to whom it matters most. That is, you and the others who have gone to such lengths to gain these rings. We concluded that we should bequeath dominion of this world to you and the others. We have, in effect, made the owners of the rings lords of Eros. This is a grave responsibility, and we cannot give such power to anyone who will not take it seriously.” Don frowned thoughtfully and said, “That makes sense.” “Throughout your time in Eros, with the possible exception of the unpleasantness with those ruffians by the river, you have exhibited patience and kindness in your dealings with others. When the Wizard asked you for help, you responded creatively and cheerfully.” “Well, he didn't really give us much choice,” Don smiled. “That's not true,” Pamela shook her head. “You could have resisted, or at the very least helped him grudgingly. Even when you fought your way through the Sisterhood to rescue Toshia, you went out of your way to disrupt their little culture as little as possible. You and Toshia consistently treated the people you met with respect. Your care and concern for your travelling companions was evident throughout your time in Eros. “When you were in Shagbottom, rather than simply ask for where to find Lady Primrose and then leave, you made friends. When you were sent into the untamed lands, you spent the time to learn about the tribes' ways and customs, and then adapted your approach accordingly. Over the course of a year in the Resort, when you were prevented from interacting with the guests in a directly sexual way, you consistently helped people find ways to enjoy themselves. For instance, there was this…” Suddenly there was, hovering over the table between them an extremely well-rendered holographic display of a scene at the Resort. Don and a young woman were sitting on a bench outside the Temple of Venus and Aphrodite. The woman was in her early twenties at the most and Don had found her outside the temple crying. She had just spent several hours in the orgy room, and then suddenly felt that she was doing something very wrong. This was the first time Don had encountered anything like this in Eros. He had only talked to her and then sat with her until she felt better. “She felt guilty about enjoying so much sex; so much,” Don explained. “She couldn't remember it, but I'm sure she was raised in a very repressive family, probably a religious fundamentalist one. I guess most of those folks who end up here just roll with it, but she had internalized the whole insane set of rules and thought of her healthy sexuality as depravity. She was too honest, too good a person, to just dive in and live with the hypocrisy.” “Did you say any of that to her?” Pamela asked. “No, that wouldn't have been helpful,” Don shook his head. “She just needed someone to listen and not tell her what to do for five minutes.” “You spent more than an hour and a half with her.” Don shrugged. “Then there was Ms. Biel,” Pamela smiled. “When she realized Eros wasn't just a dream and that she had been cheating on her husband, you talked her through it, helping her come to a happy understanding of her situation.” “Oh, yeah, Saint Don,” he laughed. “I was hoping to have a lot more sex with her.” “Of course, but there are many ways of going about meeting that end, and you chose a thoughtful and caring approach,” Pamela said. “I'm going over all of this to emphasize the kind of character we see in you Don and to stress that it is because of that character, more than the fact that you want the ring or have accomplished these tasks, that we are allowing you to continue onto the final two steps. You are worthy of the responsibility.” Don sat silently for a moment before saying, “Thank you.” Then, suddenly concerned, he asked, “Is Evelyn worthy? I don't mean that I think she might not be!” Pamela smiled again and said, “That is between her and us. Though I can tell you that she has already been given her sixth task.” Grinning, Don said, “Oh, excellent! But do you often decide someone will not continue?” “Often? No, but it does happen.” Don thought about Stephanie and Nicole and wondered if they would pass onto the next stage, or if they had already. Task Six. “For your next task, we require that you contribute something to Eros. This is to be a lasting feature of this world. You might think of this as a graduate project. For example, The Jungle Room was India's project in response to this task, and the Dark Labyrinth was built using the capability we'll be giving you.” “Okay, but…” Pamela anticipated his question, “Your ring has been upgraded so that you now have 'Builder' permissions.” Don looked at his ring, which now looked like a simple gold band. Pamela went on, “You'll see the 'Builder' option next to travel, but this is simply a mode you'll enter. How to actually build things and the limits of your ability are things we leave to you to discover. Do not be surprised, though, if people without rings seem to ignore you while you are in builder mode. They will know you're there and stay out of your way, but they will not be interested in what you're doing. When you dismiss that menu bar, you will exit the mode.” Don frowned and said, “I guess I'll work it out, then.” “That's the idea,” Pamela smiled. “Do you have any questions?” “Yes, actually. Can two of us collaborate?” “As long as there are two clearly distinct contributions to Eros at the end of things, yes.” “And we can do whatever we like and put it anywhere?” Pamela shook her head a bit, “No, you'll find that you can't build anywhere that someone else has also used, and we will be evaluating the value of your contribution. However, in regard to that last bit, we will be rather open-minded, and we have no reason to think you will do something we find unacceptable, particularly if you are working with Evelyn.” Don smiled broadly and said, “Thanks. I think I'm ready.” “Good luck, Don, and have fun.” He laughed, “Always!” Then he teleported himself to the Resort. “Wait, wait,” Toshia stopped him. “How is that supposed to work?” “I'm getting to that,” Don laughed. “Hold on… let me respond to this text real quick… okay, where was I?” More accurately, Don teleported himself to the Riverboat dock outside the Resort, and from there walked to the pool area, where he would look for Evelyn. It was late afternoon, and the poolside was populated by the usual cross section of naked or almost naked Resort guests, many of whom were enjoying some level of sexy play. It would be easy for Don to get distracted, but he really had hopes of reuniting with Evelyn on this visit. Sure enough, there she was! She emerged from the water with her dark hair flowing down over her strong shoulders and slowly moved toward the edge of the pool, more of her naked body coming into view with each step. Don was at about her four o'clock, so she didn't see him, but he was able to enjoy the sight of the water running over her skin as she waded into the shallower part of the pool. Her perfect breasts came into the air and Don realized he would soon be able to kiss those as well as all of her other delicious parts. Don was torn between shouting her name and breaking into a run to her and holding back to see what she might get up to without knowing he was watching her. When her perfect ass came into view, with the water streaming over it, Don decided that he had enough of watching her from any distance, and picked up his pace, but refrained from yelling and running. As he neared the corner of the pool, he watched her shake her hair out a bit. She was making her way over to a spot near a lounger where it looked like a blonde woman was enjoying the attention of two men. As Don rounded the corner, he saw that Evelyn was watching the threesome with her hands on her hips. He couldn't help but admire her ass as he drew closer. As he came up behind her, Don heard her saying, “That's it, Raj, lick that clitty. Save some of that tongue action for me, though.” “Maybe I can help you with some of that tongue action,” Don offered. Evelyn turned a bit and looked over her shoulder with a smile, which broke into a wide grin as she recognized Don. In another second they were in each other's arms, kissing passionately. Having her warm, though damp, body in his arms lifted Don into a nearly delirious state of delight. Kissing her again had his heart racing and head spinning. Then Evelyn was turning and drawing him with her onto the lounger next to the one being used by the threesome she had been coaching. Their kiss continued as she pulled him down on top of her. She parted her legs for him and then he was inside her, as if this were what their bodies automatically did, and it certainly felt as if that was what they should do. Don kept kissing her deeply, with all the passion of his pounding heart, as her hands squeezed his ass and pulled him into her, wordlessly demanding that he fuck her. Don's hands had slipped under Evelyn's body to hold her shoulders, holding her in place so he could drive into her. Her legs were wrapped around his, helping her work her body against him. He could feel her breasts pressed hard against his chest as her pussy squeezed and pulled on his cock. Their bodies, drawn taut by their lust as well as their time adventuring in Eros, strained together, needing each other. Only when she began to come, did Evelyn break their kiss, her head falling back as she began to shudder beneath him. Then she was burying her face in Don's neck as her body clenched around him. Shaking and groaning, she clutched at him, her nails digging into his back and her legs holding him deep inside her. Don shoved himself into her as hard as he could and then felt his body erupting inside her. He ground himself into her wildly, instinctively, as his cock swelled and filled her pussy with his hot cum. Don only gradually became aware that he was still rocking slowly in and out of Evelyn and that she was kissing his neck. When he drew back a bit to smile down at her, she grabbed his head in her hands and said, “Let's never do that again!” “Damn, I thought it was pretty good,” he smirked. “Ass!” she scowled and then pulled him down to kiss her again. When she let him up again, she said, “You're mine, remember? No more wandering off!” “Agreed,” he nodded seriously. “And I love you too.” “You better!” she smiled. “This must be Don, I take it,” said the blonde from the next lounger. Don turned to see that the young woman, who had a very nice hourglass shape and full breasts, was now lying with her head on the belly of a muscular young black man with a large, thick cock, which the blonde was idly stroking. The cock was still leaking a bit of cum, though most of that seemed to have been deposited on the woman's cheek and forehead. An older gentleman, who Don presumed must be Raj, had the blonde's upper leg raised so he could push his cock into her from behind. Evelyn laughed and said, “Whatever gave you that idea?” “Pleased to meet you,” Don smiled. “No, you keep fucking me,” Evelyn said, pulling Don into her with her legs. “Yes, Princess, this is Don. Don, this is Princess Lavinia, and that fellow with the big cock is Pete, and that's Raj.” Don was happy to keep moving slowly in and out of Evelyn's sweet embrace, but had to ask, “‛Princess'?” “Yes, she's a princess,” Evelyn smiled. “So, show proper respect when you're fucking her later.” “Oh, well, of course,” Don laughed. “But…” “No, no, I want more of your cock before we start sharing stories,” Evelyn ruled. “Well, if that's the way it has to be,” Don smirked as he shoved up into her harder for emphasis. “Yes, that is exactly the way it has to be!” Evelyn grinned and pulled his head down so she could kiss him again. After Evelyn had three more orgasms, and after they had taken a break in the pool, Evelyn suggested it was time for Don to get to know Lavinia a bit better so she could have some fun with “the boys,” Pete and Raj. Don demonstrated that Raj wasn't the only one who knew who to go down on a princess, and then fucked Lavinia from behind, her generous ass up in the air as she leaned over the side of the lounger so both she and Don could watch Evelyn with the boys. As they first started watching, Evelyn was getting spit-roasted, Pete fucking her from behind with his long, thick cock and Raj kneeling in front of her so she could deep throat him. Then, though, Evelyn had Raj get down on the lounger so she could ride his cock and Pete could fuck her ass. Raj did his best to shove up into Evelyn in time with the rough fucking Pete was giving her, but the event was dominated by the big black cock reaming petite Evelyn's tight ass. After Lavinia came, her fingers rubbing her clit furiously while Don fucked her, Don moved over to offer Evelyn his slippery cock to suck. Soon Evelyn was coming in wave after wave of muscle clenching pleasure and three cocks were pumping cum into her. Only after she had come down and all the men gently disengaged, did Evelyn tell her story … well, part of it. She was lying back against Don with his arms wrapped around her. Pete and Raj had gone back to the lounger with Lavinia. The sun was setting, and twilight was spreading rapidly. “After I got back from my pilgrimage… I'll tell you about that later, lover,” she patted Don's arm and smiled up at him. “I was sent to the Kingdom of Argent with instructions to help the ruler with his problem. It turns out that someone had abducted Princess Lavinia and he needed a champion to get her back.” “Oh, nice!” Don grinned. “So, they gave me a suit of armor, a sword, and a horse, and sent me off to what they call the Bandit Lands, where I needed to rescue Lavinia from the bandit chief, Rolando. I met some resistance along the way, but, as soon as I said I was looking for Rolando, anyone I met just pointed out the way and left me alone. Sure, I made a couple of stops along the way… A girl has needs, you know.” Don chuckled, kissed the top of her head, and said, “I do, indeed.” “But it didn't take long to get to Castle Badass. No, I'm serious, that's what they called it!” Lavinia raised her head from Raj's lap and said, in a noticeably changed tone, “'Tis true!” “So, I get to Castle Badass about noon, and say I'm there to see Rolando, and they let me in to this big old courtyard. It reminded me of the arena in Gladiator, but not so big, of course, but it was all sand. I got off my horse and tied him up to a post near the gate I'd come through and walked into the center of the courtyard. Then, on this balcony in front of me, out comes this tall guy with long black hair, and says, 'Welcome, fair lady.'” Evelyn's voice dropped in pitch and adopted a somewhat Spanish accent when quoting the man. She resumed her normal voice as she continued with, “I was a bit surprised by so polite a greeting, but I said I was there to retrieve the princess. He just laughed, and then I saw that there were a lot of other men, and some women, watching me from other balconies and windows around the courtyard. They were all laughing too. "Rolando - the tall guy turned out to be Rolando - said, 'This princess?' and he pulled Lavinia here out to stand next to him. She was wearing a collar and Rolando was holding the leash tied to it. I said, 'Well, if she's Princess Lavinia, then yes.' He said, 'She's been a lot of fun for us. What kind of fun will you give us in exchange?' "I thought about offering sex. Rolando was good looking, and I was horny, but I guessed it was unlikely that they were going to give up Lavinia for just one fuck session. Maybe I could offer sex with all of them, but there were a LOT of them…” “There were!” Lavinia chimed in, “and not all of them are as polite as Rolando, believe me!” “You loved it and you know it,” Evelyn chided the princess with a laugh. “Anyway, I also thought it would be a waste of that nice suit of armor. It really was nice! It was surprisingly light and easy to move in. Not much protection for the crotch, to be honest, but that made it easy to fuck in. Yes, of course, I tested that. You would have too!” “Certainly,” Don laughed. “So, anyway, I said something like, 'If you give her up, I won't kick all your asses.'” “Really?” chuckled Don. “'Tis true!” Lavinia chimed in again. “She was so brave!” “Aww, thanks, babe,” Evelyn said. “Rolando said, 'All our asses? That sounds exhausting, and unlikely. How about, you defeat my best fighters and I'll give you the princess?' I agreed, and then had to fight seven of his fighters. I had the sword, but, honestly, I was better with the staff and didn't really feel like killing anyone, so I just fought them with the staff. It went pretty quick, really. Like you said, lover, when you just decide that you can do whatever you need to here, it works out really well. A couple of them were a bit challenging, especially this one woman - who was really hot, by the way - but I won.” “She was amazing!” Lavinia grinned, Raj's hard, slippery cock in one hand and Pete's monster in the other. “Everyone, well, everyone minus seven, applauded and cheered and Rolando invited me in to congratulate me and give me Lavinia. I was pretty happy to let Rolando congratulate me several times, if you know what I mean.” “He made me watch,” Lavinia pouted. Evelyn laughed, “You mean he made you just watch. Anyway, he kept his word and gave Lavinia a horse and sent us on our way. On the road back to Argent, Lavinia insisted on showing her gratitude. She was very grateful!” “I still am!” Lavinia smiled. “They were always at me, never giving me any rest, and so rude! Well, not Rolando, but still, I was exhausted. You're my hero!” “Aww, you're sweet. So, when we got back to the king, he agreed to let me take Lavinia with me for a few days.” “Damn,” Don smiled. “That's quite the adventure!” “I thought so, too,” Evelyn chuckled. “We need to get her back, but in the morning. What should we do tonight?” “We could try the Jungle Room,” Don suggested. It continued to be his favorite club at the Resort. “Okay, but at least one of us needs another bath, first,” Evelyn said as she struggled to get up off the lounger. Things were busier in the Jungle Room than they had been in a while, or at least on any of Don's more recent visits. Even India was there, dancing for a couple of guys who had pulled up an additional stool for the show. She smiled and waved to Don, but they were obliged to wait until she had finished dancing, which included swallowing a load of cum from each of the men, before she sauntered over to greet them properly. After receiving a hug and a lingering kiss, Don introduced the rest of the group, ending with Evelyn. “Oh, you are the beautiful Evelyn,” India smiled. “Don has told me about you. He is very much in love with you.” “Oh, is that what he told you?” Evelyn winked at Don. “No, but a woman can tell when a man is in love when he talks about the object of his affection.” Then India looked down at their hands, and said, “I see you have gold rings now. Congratulations. We should do something to celebrate. Would you enjoy a jungle orgy?” In another moment, they were told to wait there, while India went back to the dance area to give some instructions to the women and men she had working there. While she was gone, Evelyn pulled Don close to whisper, “Damn, you're right, lover! She's sexy as hell!” “I know, right?” Don grinned. “I wouldn't mind rocking her world,” Evelyn breathed. “I think you'll probably get your chance,” he chuckled. Soon, they all heard India's voice speaking in their ears, as if she were leaning in close and speaking quietly to each of them. She said, “Ladies and gentlemen, it is orgy night here in the jungle. Grab a partner or two and come to the big orgy bed in the middle of the jungle! If you don't want to play with us, find somewhere else to play, but for tonight everyone must be having sex to stay in the jungle.” “That's a very neat trick!” Evelyn said. “Maybe we'll be able to do that,” Don suggested. Then they were all following India's swaying backside as she led them toward the center of the Jungle Room, which had once again been extensively rearranged. The big orgy bed India had mentioned was at least as large as the big bed in the Manor's big bed room, and was raised off the floor of the jungle by three broad stone steps. Torches illuminated the clearing and gave the tableau a primitive ritualistic feeling. India crawled up onto the bed and out to its center, where she turned and beckoned Don, Evelyn, and their friends to join her. She greeted Evelyn with a deep, passionate kiss, but reached out to take hold of Don's cock. When India turned to kiss Don, Evelyn moved down to kiss the left side of India's neck and then to kiss and suck at her dark nipple. Evelyn's fingers slipped up between India's firm thighs and began stroking her moist lips. India sighed happily when Evelyn began to fuck her fingers slowly in and out of her. Without letting go of Don's extremely hard cock, India let him and Evelyn lower her onto her back on the bed. Don moved around so he was next to Evelyn over India's right side, kissing, b

Outline01:16 - Intro02:28 - Early steps in Italy and California13:00 - From Riemannian geometry …17:01 - … to geometric control, robotics and locomotion34:54 - Academic environment at Caltech35:06 - From single robots to robotic networks53:51 - Art gallery problem1:01:37 - Networked and cyber-physical systems1:21:47 - Contracting dynamics1:33:07 - Coupled oscillators and power grids1:47:20 - On mathematical sociology1:56:44 - Writing and publishing2:02:14 - About professional service2:08:04 - Advice for future students2:08:04 - OutroLinksFrancesco's website: https://fbullo.github.io/CSM “People in Control” interview: https://tinyurl.com/cw4s8b4nGeometric Control of Mechanical Systems: https://tinyurl.com/mt59bw2nPD control on the Euclidean group: https://tinyurl.com/5xe9rtc2Coverage control for mobile sensing networks: https://tinyurl.com/ye83duhmVoronoi tassellations: https://tinyurl.com/y7w2tux4 Art gallery problem: https://tinyurl.com/yc8h88c3Dynamic vehicle routing for robotic systems: https://tinyurl.com/5n8c393pDistributed control of robotic networks: https://tinyurl.com/5xe6ztw3Attack detection and identification in cyber-physical systems: https://tinyurl.com/mvm44d24Voltage collapse in complex power grids: https://tinyurl.com/55mfdj28Lectures on network systems: https://tinyurl.com/tbd9dhy2Opinion dynamics and the evolution of social power in influence networks: https://tinyurl.com/2cd5v7taBanach contraction theorem: https://tinyurl.com/2yv4jjy6Contraction theory for dynamical systems: https://tinyurl.com/2r2pxh9pContracting dynamics YouTube series: https://tinyurl.com/3p7nsrypGetting it write: https://tinyurl.com/yhtabw2fHamming - You and your research: Support the Show.Podcast infoPodcast website: https://www.incontrolpodcast.com/Apple Podcasts: https://tinyurl.com/5n84j85jSpotify: https://tinyurl.com/4rwztj3cRSS: https://tinyurl.com/yc2fcv4yYoutube: https://tinyurl.com/bdbvhsj6Facebook: https://tinyurl.com/3z24yr43Twitter: https://twitter.com/IncontrolPInstagram: https://tinyurl.com/35cu4kr4Acknowledgments and sponsorsThis episode was supported by the National Centre of Competence in Research on «Dependable, ubiquitous automation» and the IFAC Activity fund. The podcast benefits from the help of an incredibly talented and passionate team. Special thanks to L. Seward, E. Cahard, F. Banis, F. Dörfler, J. Lygeros, ETH studio and mirrorlake . Music was composed by A New Element.

We're back and we're diving back into Foundation and Earth! This time we're discussing chapters 13, 14, and 15 or, if you prefer, Part V: Melpomenia. This is all of Part V and nothing but Part V. In this section, we bid a not-so-fond farewell to Solaria as our little trio becomes a quartet with the addition of Fallom. We travel to the third and final Spacer world for which we have coordinates. What do we learn on Melpomenia? Does that help us in our quest to find Earth? And what's bothering Trevize this time? Listen and find out! Also Star Trek, non-Euclidean geometry and marsupials. You can't miss that, right? Let's go!!

In this episode of Welcome to Cloudlandia, I reflect on the successful launch of our inaugural CoachCon conference, which brought together 350 members of the Strategic Coach community in Nashville. The vibrant energy of Music City and the exceptional facilities of the Music City Center made for an experience surpassing expectations. Our discussion centers on cultivating the mental fortitude needed to remain anchored amid future-focused hustle. We connect this to aspects like political endurance while acknowledging the enrichment that unfolding daily actions alone confer on tomorrow's potential. SHOW HIGHLIGHTS We recap the inaugural CoachCon Conference in Nashville, noting the participation of 350 strategic thinkers and our partnership with Agile for event organization. I share my personal stance on cowboy attire and backyard barbecues, highlighting a preference for distinctively non-Western wardrobe choices. We reflect on aging and the evolution of long-term vision, contrasting my early career's short-sightedness with the strategic foresight demonstrated by successful individuals and families. I celebrate another birthday and contemplate the depth of understanding that comes with each passing year, using the experiences of Kathy Ireland as an example of life's cumulative experiences enriching future visions. We explore the importance of journaling and manifesting desires into reality, discussing how projecting our goals into the future contributes to personal growth. The discussion covers the importance of crafting a future-focused vision, especially as one grows older, to avoid feeling diminished with age. We examine the significance of living in the present moment and how our current actions lay the foundation for future success. Personal insights are shared on the perception of time and the possibility of slowing down our experience of it through heightened consciousness. We speculate on political endurance and the uncertainties in the political arena, likening it to a horse race with a focus on the candidates' abilities to sustain a full term. The conversation includes a mention of upcoming travel plans, expressing a commitment to continue these enlightening conversations from wherever life takes us, whether it be a London hotel or a Cleveland suite. Links: WelcomeToCloudlandia.com StrategicCoach.com DeanJackson.com ListingAgentLifestyle.com TRANSCRIPT (AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors) Dean: Mr Sullivan. Dan: I am back from Nashville. Dean: That's what I hear. I am excited to hear all about it. It looked like a real party it was a total party. Two parties. Dan: Yeah, so providing some context for the listening audience. We had our very first community conference and I say that because you did not get invited unless you were connected to someone in the strategic coach community and it's our first conference of this kind called CoachCon. And as a result of it. I already committed at my birthday party, which was on the second night, two-day conference, second night and I said we're going to have one in 26. So we're thinking we'll do this every two years Okay, that's amazing. Yeah, and we had 350, which was good for, you know, our first experience. Dean: And. Dan: I will say that we're really committed to Nashville. Nashville is just such a great city to have a conference. It's just. The city itself has an enormous amount of energy and the Music City Center is just a marvelous venue. It is so big it staggers your imagination. It's two blocks long by almost two blocks wide, and if you look at it from the air, from above, it looks like a guitar. Dean: Right, right right. Dan: Yeah, which you wouldn't do in Toronto. Dean: It would have no meaning, it would have no meaning. Dan: It would have no meaning in Toronto. Okay, it would. Dean: And anyway I was working with go ahead. I was just going to say not to say that Toronto has a pretty wonderful convention center facility too, downtown, yeah, but Nashville has a great. Dan: Nashville has a great Nashville has a great convention center. That's the truth. Yes, yeah, as a matter of fact, one of the smart moves we made as a company is that we immediately hired a convention conference company called Agile. I think they're from Kansas City and Minneapolis. They have two branches to their company and so, right from the very beginning, our team members were working with their team members to create the event, and this was a year and a half in planning, and they just are the perfect interface between yourself and then the venue itself, who have their own team. So it's really it's really a triple play of three teams working together to create the event. Dean: And I mean it's such a, it's such an engine. I had such flashbacks, you know, seeing the footage that was coming out of there of the room and the setup and the way everything was. Or you know that we did an event roughly twice that size every month for 14 years. You imagine, like the engine that it takes to put that, to put that on the logistics of it. That was what the main event was. We'd have, you know, 600 or 800 people every month. It was something. Dan: Yeah, are you speaking about one of your? Dean: events. This was with Joe Stumpf when we did the buy referral for the real estate agents. That was what we did. Dan: Oh, that was where you did it, that's where you did it that's where you did it yeah, that's right well, here I'm trying to impress you and you're just tolerating me no, I mean there's some. Dean: There's an exciting energy around a uh, a big event like that. I mean there's, but it's a very different energy. Dan: Yeah, wasn't it in Nashville 14 times. Dean: No, we did. We were all over the country. We did one a month. We did one every month for 14 years. Wow. Yeah exactly so Nashville was in the rotation that's like 168. Dan: That's like 168 conferences. Dean: Yeah, we did over 200, actually is what it was, but that was like a circus coming to town every month, every month, yeah. Dan: Anyway, I was talking to one of the black backstage crew. I was talking to one of the black backstage crew. You know who'd do the get you ready for going on to the front stage and I said we have 350 people. If you had other conferences going on at the same time. Our size, how many could you have? And he says I think around two dozen dozen we could be doing in the same building at the same time. But then when you get outside of the music center it's just filled with all the sorts of clubs yes and broadway, which is their big party street, is about two block, two blocks away, and there's lots of hotels. Dean: There's lots of hotels around, so's lots of hotels around, so you can feed into it. Dan: I was at the Four Seasons in Nashville. Dean: Of course you were. Yeah, did you get a hat and some boots to celebrate your 80th birthday? The Nashville way? Dan: I did not, and I'll tell you, my approach to cowboy hats and cowboy boots is about the same as my approach to backyard barbecues, and that is, I will celebrate my 80th birthday without ever having participated, actually organized one of those, and so it's on the list that I'm going to try to get through my whole life without doing I love it. Dean: That's the greatest thing. Dan: Dan. Dean: I can't tell you how many times I've used the. You know people are going through their whole life hoping to never have to meet you. Dan: I was having. Dean: I had lunch with an attorney friend who's a personal injury attorney and you know he works primarily with people in accidents and I said you know the challenge with his marketing is that it's acute onset and you know nobody is preparing for or anticipating the need to meet you. Dan: And I said in fact most people are hoping to go their entire life without ever having to meet you and if they get to, good for them, you know, yeah, funny, yeah, yeah, some people's marketing challenges are more severe than others yeah that's exactly right, well, yeah you know, as you know to be being that we're right at the beginning, when I started my coaching life, which was 50 years ago, in 1970, the people which was called Top of the Table and the table is a previous organization which started, I think maybe 50 or 60 years before, which was called the Million Dollar Roundtable, and it was a certain amount of sales qualified you and you got to go to the acronym mdrt. That was the thing, and. But in the early 70s they had gotten together and said let's take a top 500 in the world and and establish ourselves as the top of the table. Okay, and so right off the bat, in 74 and 75, I had one who was just a great friend and promoter of what I was doing at that time, because it was just being out there testing out this thing called coaching for entrepreneurs. And then very quickly I got others because they talked to each other a lot without seeing each other as competitors. And one of the things that I really remember is just getting really, really deep into how life insurance agents operate. And it's a tough marketing proposition because you have to engage people in a conversation about what's going to happen after they die. I mean, that's the premise of life insurance and the other thing is you're doing it for other people. And really you're doing it, and I had one of the great ones. These were, in the first instance, they were all Toronto-based, that's where we were, and I remember this one he would deal with, very wealthy. One of the things that attracted to me to these top life insurance agents is that their entire clientele were entrepreneurial. Okay, they didn't have corporate people, they had people who created their own businesses. And I remember this one agent here in Toronto. He said the first thing you have to zero in on again, it's a difficult sale is what the individual, who's a wealthy individual? What do they love that they want to be remembered for having been a great person after their life? What is it that they love that they would ensure and he said so. He had this line of questioning with. That went something like this he said first of all, as we talk about this, do you love your wife? And the person would say no, not really, not really. He says do you love your children? That would be a flat no. And he says no, I don't love my children. He said do you love your employees? And he says no, I don't love my children. He said, do you love your employees? And he says no. Finally gets to number four is do you love your reputation such that after you die, people will say you know he really loved his wife, his children and his employees? He says yes, I do love my reputation, and he says, ok, let's ensure your reputation. He says until you find out what someone loves, you might as well not talk about your legacy, and everybody has a different one. So the big thing everybody has a something that they want to be remembered for. So he says that's the thing that we have to ensure. Dean: And it's amazing. Amazing, isn't it, that there's always the reason behind the reason. Dan: It's funny yeah well, well, there's ultimately. There's the reason, the others aren't a reason you know, and actually that's true, yeah, and you have to find out what makes the person tick. You know, know, I mean everybody who lives for a long time and is very active in doing it has something that's right at the center you know, and I think it's idiosyncratic. Dean: What do you mean by that? Do you mean, that it's? Dan: I don't think it's predictable. Dean: Okay, right. Dan: Yeah, there's a deeper. I don't think everybody is Well. If you have the money to be different, then you're different in the way you want to be different. I mean we're talking about people who can write a check and they can write a big check. And what do they write the check for is the big question. And they're not doing it out of need, they're doing it out of want. Dean: Right. Dan: My contention is don't do things out of need. Do them out of what you actually want, because that represents much more of who you actually are than doing things because you need to do them that's an interesting because that's why or is that why you spent so much time 25 years. Dean: I remember you saying you made a commitment to every day writing what do I want. I journal for 25 years. Yeah. Dan: And because I was coming off a divorce and bankruptcy which coincided on the same day, that was, August, August 15th 1978. Dean: Yeah. Dan: And you know, divorce and bankruptcy qualify as two bad report cards. Dean: Right. Dan: Right right right, yes, I mean any way you interpret it, it's a bad report card and so you know I was kind of in a state and one of the neat things when you go through a divorce and bankruptcy, people don't throw parties for you to have you come and explain it you know they give you a lot of peace and quiet of your own, you know, yeah. So I had about four or five months after August to think this through and I said you know, the reason why these things are happening is I'm not telling myself what I actually want. You know I'm assuming certain things about other people. I'm expecting other people expectations, assumptions about other people and other things. And I said, you know, I think the key here is that I'm not actually telling myself what I want. Dean: And so. Dan: I said myself what I want and so I said so. Nobody cares if I was divorced and bankruptcy, and nobody really cares whether I amount to anything you know you know, and I was 30, 30, 34 years old at that time. And once you hit 30, nobody cares you know, it just, we invest a lot in younger people until age 30 and then they kick you out of the nest and anything that's going to happen in the future, you're going to do it on your own. You're not going to get a government grant to do it. And so I said, well, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have one goal here. So I said, well, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to have one goal here. For the next 25 years, every day, I'm going to keep a journal and I'm going to write in it something that I want, With one constraint I'm not going to use the word, because I'm not going to use the word. I just want it, I just want it. And I did that, I did it for 25 years I missed want it, I just want it, and I did that. I did it for 25 years. I missed 12 days. There are 9,131 days in 25 years including the six leap year days, and so it's 9,131. And I did them on 9,119 days and my relationship with Babs came out of that. The whole strategic coach came out of that. You know and all sorts of things, like the lifestyle I'm living and you know why today I don't have to think about money at all because the money's there and you know, and the type of people I'm spending my time with. So it feels good, but that that the other thing is I. What it proved is I have the ability to stick with something for 25 years, right on a daily basis on a daily conscious basis. Dean: So still journal. Do you, uh, do you still journal? Dan: well, Dean, that's a really great question. I do journal, but it's in the form of using my tools on a daily basis. Dean: I got you Okay, so you're thinking about your thinking every day, like my fast filter, my fast filters. Dan: Yeah, you know fast filters. I'm saying what I want. It's just mutated into different forms. I want it's just mutated into different forms, but there isn't a day that I go through where I'm not stating something that I'm planning to achieve sometime in the future. Dean: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's really. That's something I'm coming up. Next April will be 30 years of, you know, daily journaling. Yeah, I mean of sequential, and I actually have all of the journals. It was April 1995. I would journal. I was always someone to write down my thinking, but not in an organized, archival kind of way. But April of 1995 is my journal number one the official like keeping that. Dan: So next year is the 30 years. Yeah, and it's so funny that you know, like you said, I think more than half your life. Dean: Yeah, that's exactly right. I just turned 58 on Friday and that was a you know, you mentioned you know at 30, I noticed that you did it at 29. Yeah, that there's a different you know different experience level at 58 than there is at you know 29. Dan: Oh yeah. Dean: Yeah, I remember when I first started with Strategic Coach in 1997, year one that was, I remember the three-year kind of vision thing was it was difficult for me to even like see three years into the future because everything up to that point had been constantly evolving. You know, and I just remember, as in real estate, you know, when I was young, starting in real estate, I remember there was talk of the, you know, halton hills the town where I was, had just released their 20 year plan and I thought to myself, man, that's like that's forever, that's a lot. I don't never get here. You know, 20 years, I can't imagine that they're thinking that far ahead. And I had a couple of experiences like that. One of the largest sale that I ever made was to an italian family that was land banking. They bought land on the corner of ninth line and steels in halton hills that wasn't going to be developed. Dan: we we're talking about Toronto. Yes, right, exactly Greater, Toronto area. Dean: Yeah, in Halton Hills that was like the outer edge of the greater Toronto area and their expectation was that this was going to be land that would be developed in 40 years and that was almost exactly true as to when it, you know, came about. It's just kind of that was their model. They would, you know, go, they were a development family and they would go out to the edge and buy the land that was inevitably going to be the development. So, you know, they owned a lot of land in Brampton and Mississauga that were, you know, at the time, rural areas that they bought, you know, 20 years previous, in the 60s, at that time, knowing that was going to be developed later on and what an interesting like long term vision, like that. But that tell that story, because I always like to have you know kind of I look at my birthdays, I like to have like a day of reflection and looking forward and you know real and yes, uh, two days ago was your birthday, that's right, yep, and so you know, looking, I have a completely different understanding and experience of what 25 years is, yeah, than I did when I was 29, right, and so it's like, not you know, because I can still remember cracking the you know seal on journal number one, april 1995, virginia Beach. That was the you know day one journal one, and I still I can transport there, you know know, right now. It's just amazing how your mind I'm just like I'm sure you can immediately remember your lunch that you had on the day you got bankrupt and divorced. You know, you probably recall that right there, but you couldn't imagine it was actually a good lunch yeah, that right yeah because it was on the credit card you were about to turn in. Dan: Yeah, the interesting thing about it is I've been working on a concept and I was reminded of it because for our top guest speaker at the conference we had Kathy Ireland, the very famous model. Dean: Oh, wait, it wasn't Joe Polish. Dan: As I said, we had our top speaker. It was Kathy Ireland. Joe was good. He was one of the three main speakers. Right yeah he should be delighted with that. Yeah, he should be delighted with that. Dean: Anyway. Dan: Kathy Erland talked about how her intent was not to become a model. Not that she was against becoming a model, but that was never her intention to be a model. And she was just approached when she was on the beach in Santa Barbara California when she was 17. On the beach in Santa Barbara California when she was 17. And an agent came up to her and said you know, I think there's a niche that if you wanted to become a model, you would really, you know, sort of a tomboy she's. You know, she was very athletic, she was very muscular and she, you know, she sort of had freckles and you know, and she did wonderfully for 15 years from age 17 to 32. And she was on many covers of magazines, especially Sports Illustrated, and but then when she was 32, she just decided to stop and while she was a model, she had taken a crack at creating different kinds of businesses, so it wasn't something new, she said. I always knew I was going to be an entrepreneur and that the modeling gave me a bridge from where I was born, where I grew up, to the outside world. And then she stopped at 32. And for the last almost 30 years's created a three and a half billion dollar global company. And it was really great. We have jeff madoff interviewers, so jeff, is how I know I had. Jeff is how I know kathy, because he had her as a guest at a marketing class that he teaches at one of the New York universities. But one of the things I found in common with her she said I like getting older because you just know so much more, and one of the things I'm really appreciating at 80 is that I can really I can think of my life in terms of at least seven decades. You know, the first one's a bit sketchy, you know, because you hadn't really become conscious. Dean: But you've recalled being out in the woods. Oh, no, no. Dan: I have very good memories below 10. And I think I've enhanced them some, but you have what's possible over long periods of time, you know and what you will stay with over long. I think one of the principal pieces of knowledge that you get as a benefit of getting older is you have a very clear idea of what exactly what you will stick with over a long period of time and we're just, and we're just trading reports here of something you stuck with and what I stuck with over a long period of time, and young people don't have the advantage of doing that that's exactly right. Dean: Yeah, you can't imagine and it's very interesting to see how I spoke things into existence in that journal, leading up to them, like describing what I want, and to see how they started out as a seed in the journal and then became reality. You know, something it's interesting to see and you wonder, you know, part of it is to keep that, you know, keep that rolling, keep it now looking forward in the next five. It's as you say, it's, you know, your I love about you at 80 is that your, you know future is still bigger than your past and that's kind of an exciting thing. Dan: Yeah, I will say. This doesn't naturally occur just by living years. Dean: No, no you have to be. Dan: I mean the. To make the future bigger than your past at 80 takes a lot of. Dean: Yeah, especially when. But maybe that goes to what your print too. Right, just achievement is a thing, that's a motivator for you. For the sake of parties, for the sake of parties. That's all the bigger parties. That's all the bigger parties. That's great, yeah, yeah. Dan: Someone was asking me that. You know, when I looked at the conference that we just had in Nashville, wednesday and Thursday, people said, well, how would you plan a conference? I said, well, I didn't plan the conference. It was my team members to plan the conference. So it was my team members to play in the conference. But I said my attitude toward the conference is what the party is going to be like on the final night. Yes, I work backwards from the party. What has to happen for it to be a great party? Dean: Right. Dan: Well, this is very exciting, that now it's just coincidentally, two years from now, we do it at the same time. Dean: That be, yeah, first week of may is a good day. Dan: It's a good time, it's good and we would do it at nashville and we would do it at the music city. I mean, we're far enough ahead on the schedule that we know it would be your 60th birthday. Dean: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that'll be right in time for peak Dean on my health journey here. You know that'll be Back to my. Dan: That was the year of the peak Dean. That's exactly right, it's almost, like you know, a periodic visit of the northern lights. Yeah, yeah. Dean: No, I think that's very exciting. Yeah, and I've already said even more. Dan: I've already yeah, you put it in the calendar. It'll be the week of your birthday, probably okay, I mean I don't know what the week looks like, but let's find out now. Dean: I'm yeah, but yeah, nashville, early early 2026, may 10th is a Sunday. Yeah, it won't be that, it won't be on a. Dan: Sunday no, but it'll be the week. It'll be the week before, it'll be the week before. But the thing is now that they've done it once and we've got a date in the calendar. First of all, they can put the date in the calendar and they can get the event company plugged in. And they can get the event company plugged in, they can get the reservation at the Music City. They can get the hotel bookings I think the hotel bookings most hotels you can't get in for about six until six months before. Dean: But as early as you can. Dan: And yeah, we had a lot of bookings at the Four Seasons and you know, and we came in from the airport on Tuesday or on Tuesday? No, on Monday we came in, am I right? Dean: here. You came in on the Monday, yeah, because we spoke last Sunday yeah, I think I came. Dan: We came in on the Monday, yeah, and and we. But when we arrived, there was this whole meeting party of Four Seasons personnel. They came up to us and treated us like they liked us oh right, imagine that yeah, which I take regardless of what their motive is it doesn't matter, it still feels just as nice. Dean: Yeah, I think that's great. Mr. Dan: Sullivan is the general manager of the hotel. Oh, we're so happy to have you, Thank you. Thank you very much and a very friendly guy, yeah. So anyway, I'm going to work on this. The value of age. You know, there's a lot of people and I'm noticing them, because I'm starting to notice how people who are getting up in years I won't say they're my age, but they're getting up in years are falling into the general narrative of how people act when they get older and I'm just so convinced that they feel diminished because they haven't constantly worked on having their future bigger than their past. Yes, there's a point where they stop creating their future whenever that was there, was you know, well, and I think that you really have. Dean: It's a discipline that I constantly have to get myself to turn and have my gaze future focused, because as you do get older, you start that there's more to look back on. You know, and you spend a lot of time revisiting the past, but all the action is in the future. Dan: There's nothing, nothing you can do about the about the past, but yeah, but what I do is that I the past, if I remember. It can only be raw material for creating something new for the future. Dean: Yeah. Dan: Like when I go back and I remember a situation, I'll say now what did I learn from that situation that I can use in the future? You know, I don't accept the past's interpretation of itself. Dean: Yeah, say more about itself, yeah. Dan: Say more about that. Yeah, and I had a friend for a number of years who I'd gone to college with and we've, you know, we have been in touch for 20 years and he said you don't have any nostalgia, do you? You don't look back and have an emotional. And I said no, I mean, first of all, I was given a chance, you know, when I was having the experience, to appreciate what it was Okay. So it had a momentary opportunity to really imprint me with its importance. But if I'm looking back from 20 years ago, it's my interpretation of what it means to me going forward, not the interpretation. And I'm noticing, with the boomers, you know, there's nothing more disgusting than a nostalgic boomer. Dean: Yeah, like thinking about back in the day. Is that what you mean? 60s? Dan: well, 60s, you know, that's the usual. The 60s and 70s, you know, and they were going to turn the world on its head. And then they became civil servants, they got jobs as government employees or they became teachers and everything else. And then you get with them and they go back and they say, oh, those were the days, and everything like that. And it's kind of, but I have this notion that up until 30, society really supports you. Society invests in you, the government invests in you, the community invests in you, your parents invest in you, the teachers, everybody invests in you. And at 30, they cut it off and they set you free. And it's like I say about people say well, e know they have very high purchase. When the chicks are born, you know they're hundreds of feet up the eagles, and then on one day the mother eagle, just there's little eagles, they have wings. You know they have feathers, they have wings. She just pushes them all out of the nest. They have wings, she just pushes them all out of the nest. And the ones that don't hit the ground know how to fly. The ones who hit the ground, you don't have to worry about them. Wow yeah, and I think society at a certain point they just push all the 30-year-olds out of the nest and they want to see if you can make anything. Is there anything different or unique, and if there isn't, you just, more or less metaphorically, you hit the ground and you're nothing more than what things were before. Dean: There's nothing new. Dan: There's nothing new, but I pushed myself out of the nest when I was 18 years old, so the time until I was 30 didn't really mean anything. Dean: Right. Dan: But I don't comprehend nostalgia, because my emotions are in the present, they're not in the past. Dean: Yes, yeah, and that's what you realize, even in the future. I think when we were talking in Palm Beach earlier this year about the, you know the main thing is the future is really only shaped by the behaviors and habits and happens Really. Dan: The future is shaped by your present capabilities. Yeah, so I don't want to be looking backwards, as I'm living the present. I want to be fully alive because it's my up-to-dateness with the present that determines the quality of the future. Dean: Yes, yeah, bringing there here. Dan: Yeah, it's really interesting. We had a whole raft of speakers. Dean: Yeah, tell me about some of the highlights. What were some of the highlights? Dan: Well, I didn't get to all of them, because I went to every hour. You had a breakout session. I went to it, but there were different streams and tracks. I mean they're all going to be videoed. I mean they were all videoed so everybody's going to be able to see them. But I went to one and they had a couple of futurists there and I wasn't impressed. I wasn't impressed, and more and more over the last 10 years, since we did the collaboration with Peter Diamandis to create Abundance360, I always knew that people could be trapped in the past, in other words, that they were doing every day trying to hold on to the past. Okay, but I'm just as convinced now that people can get trapped into the future. They can get trapped, that they can't really be aware of what's going on right now because their mind is in a realm that hasn't happened yet and one of the things I know it makes them very nervous, makes them very anxious, anxious. And the thing that I found really interesting about these two speakers, the husband and wife team, was that they were making up all sorts of crazy words to describe what's happening, and you should be aware of this. And they had a word called templosion, which you know temp is, I guess, a Latin word for time, something and implosion, which I guess adds on a notion of explosion and that we're in a period of templosion, where there's hundreds of different ways that you're going to have to choose your life. Dean: And. Dan: I was sitting there and I said no, well, I know, 20 years, or I know 20 years from now, exactly what my life is going to look like. I don't know the details but, I, know it's going to be a direct extension of what I'm doing today. Dean: And. Dan: I know 80 percent of it. It will be expanding. I'll meet all sorts of new people. There's all going to be, but what's happening in the rest of the world and what other people are doing really don't, it doesn't really matter to me that much. Dean: I like that. I mean, that's what I realized in the journaling. I have two things. You something you said about. You know that spending time, you know, in the future is there's a lot of temptation or opportunity to just stay constantly planning and thinking about the future without actually you know, I've been using the word applying yourself. You know, I found that it's in our minds the things that motivate us to actually do something. We only do things in the present. So our own, you know our, you know our behaviors extended over time are what we define as habits, but it's really the behavior that's to be done today. You know, and I realized that writing in your journal and thinking about or planning for, or architecting or doing all these things that are future gazing is not actually applying yourself, it's not actually putting anything on the record. It's the equivalent of to the committee in our brain that actually controls what we do. It's the equivalent of quietly sitting in the corner coloring. Because no matter what anything that you do in your journal. The great deception is that it feels like that's actually making a difference. Right, that you're actually accomplishing something, but it's not. Until you break that barrier of getting it out of your head into and on the permanent record in the form of an action or a behavior. It's not going to do anything. Dan: Well, I think the big thing and I think it's a hard realization. I think it's maybe one of the harder realizations that nobody has ever lived in the future and nobody has ever lived in the past. Yeah, you only live in the moment. You know, and it and a lot of people just aren't capable of being conscious of the moment because their attention is being either dragged back backwards or pushed forwards and they're thinking about next, they're not thinking about next year. They're not thinking about, they can't think about next year because everything's happening right now. They can't think about 10 years ago, because everything's happening right now, and I think being present-minded is hard. Yes, I think it takes really an enormous amount of mental muscle to actually just be aware that things are happening right now and the way you handle things right now basically makes the future. Dean: Yes, that's the only thing that makes the future. It's the brick by brick layer. Dan: You know what I mean it's really the truth. Dean: It's that in the tapestry or whatever, that we can only see the accomplishment of it. But you realize that you can. Dan: I bet in the world of brick layers it's what a person can do in a day that really puts them at the top of their craft. Dean: I think you're absolutely right. Yes, and it's only on the reflection. You know, great walls are only built on the you know, compilation of daily accomplishment. Dan: Yeah. Dean: You know the thing is you can change any of it at any time. You know the thing is you can change any of it at any time. That's what I realized is in reflection, you know, when I was thinking about those, the elements of a perfect life, and really getting down to the, you know how DNA has, you know, the five elements of it, that if you look at the DNA of a perfect life, it's, you know, the elements are me, like everything. If I were to strip me naked and drop me on a deserted island, everything I have there, that's me, the portable things. Then time is life's moving at the speed of reality. 60 minutes per hour in perpetuity and you're always doing something in there, then environments are the things that are. You know. You basically put yourself in or you've been put in to an environment. That is your version of what's happening here, where, geographically, where you are, that where you live, what you have, what you do, all of those things are environments and you could, in theory, all of those things are environments and you could, in theory, move your, so I mean, you could completely change your environment. That's what you're thinking of the immigrant, right of you could leave everything behind and go change the environment and decide everything that you're going to do. Then the element of people meaning all the people that are around you, and money. So the combination of all of those five things are what create what we would call a life, you know, and I love like I find that infinitely entertaining too, you know in terms of yeah, the other thing is that, uh, one of the things that was predicted for me by other people is that as you get get older, time speeds up. Dan: Okay, and since I 70, I've experienced just the opposite. Time slowed down during the 70s and the years just took their time, and I think the reason is, I think it has to do with consciousness. You know, and I think that you know when you're, you know when you're a child, you're learning everything. So you're, you know, you're, everything is kind of new and you're exploring it and everything else, and then, as you get on, a lot of your experience you already knew that. So it's not significant, okay, but I think what happens with a lot of people, they are never actually creating their experience. There he is. I got a phone call that interrupted our phone call oh man, how rude somebody named Stephanie ok and. I immediately hit just to say you have no right. You're trespassing, that's right. Yeah, be gone. Where did I leave the thought that I was on? Dean: Well, you were talking about consciousness. That's what you were saying. Dan: Well, I think consciousness is the number of times during any time period that you're actually conscious of what's happening to you Okay. And I think it's massive when you're a child, because everything's new, right, but as we, let's say, we're now 20, we've actually mastered a lot of things that were new and now they're known, actually mastered a lot of things that were new and now they're known. I think, therefore, the number of situations when you're 20, that you're suddenly struck by something new is less than when you were, you know, four or five or six years old, okay, and so you're moving quickly from one moment of consciousness to another. And when you're six, it might be 20 things a day. That's a long day, but if it's 20 times a week when you're 20, that's a faster week, and if it's 20 times in a quarter, when you're 50 that's a really fast quarter and when it's 20 times, when you're 20 times in a year, when you're 70. I think that whether time is going fast or slow depends upon the number of consciousness things about something new that's happening in your life. And I found over the period of the last 10 years. I was back to having suddenly new conscious things that were happening. You know many times. You know many times a week or a day and time slowed back down, so it's actually being conscious. Dean: That's really, you know, that's almost like Euclidean, that's like euclidean geometry, you know yeah, that that harmonizes with something that I heard about. Why it the perception is that it moves faster is that when we're looking back, the routine reads as one experience, right? So you're looking back at the thing, if you've been, if your life becomes waking up in the same place, driving to the same job, sitting at the same desk, interacting with the same people and you look back over time at that, that all reads as one experience and it's only the new and novel consciousness moments that you were just talking about that get registered and recorded that single experience for some people may have. Dan: Another year just went by. Dean: That's exactly right and that's what oh well, that was fast where that was fast. Dan: Where's the time go? Where's the? Dean: time go. Dan: It's not a function of time, it's a function of consciousness. Right, that's exactly right, and we've had at least five conscious things in the last hour. I love that, Dan. We've done each other a favor over the last 60 minutes. Dean: I'm very excited about the culmination, the 60th. I'm reframing CoachCon as a peak theme celebration. I'm just I'm taking it for me, that's what it's. Dan: Not that you didn't have something to live for before, but we just put some kind of put a cherry at the top of your whipped cream. Yeah. Dean: I've had something that I was already on the path of you know, and that's kind of that's kind of great. Yeah, I just celebrated nine nine weeks of the peak Dean path here, so that's all it's very exciting. Dan: That's been a good nine weeks, hasn't it? It really has. Dean: Yes, it shows the whole you know thing of accountability and the plan and Somebody else's executive function, that's exactly right. Dan: Now I'm looking honestly. Dean: That's the thing Now. I'm looking for that in my you know, in deciding in my productivity now, in all the times that I'm, because I realized what an abundance of time I have you know, and very. I have what you would call very little environmental drag on my life in terms of time, commitments or obligations or people or other things, so it's a huge palette to play on Attempts on the part of other people to use up your life. Yeah, exactly, there's no claims to it, that's exactly right. So I've got no excuse. So now it's just like I get to architect this amazing adventure here. Dan: You know the thing that's going to be the highlight in the election campaign. It might happen in the next week or two where Trump finally sends the judge in the current trial in New York over the edge. He says I'm sending you to jail, and then the United States is just fixated on. Trump. He won't be in a normal cell. Of course He'll have a phone. Of course he'll have a phone and he'll be messages from Rikers Island, which is the main jail and he'll have lineups of everybody wanting to get his autograph and his picture taken in Rikers. And you know he'll be giving campaign speeches to all the prison guards and everything else. And meanwhile President Joe will have to be reminded who he is again and what his job is. Dean: Oh, my goodness. Well, we got six months. That's the exciting thing here. Dan: This is very exciting. This is very exciting. This is very, this is a and. And people say, isn't it a tragedy? I says what's a tragedy? And they said just the preposterousness presidential campaign. And I says, well, it depends on how you look at it. Because a lot of people say, well, this is crucial. You know the future, the world depends upon this. And I said, well, america has so much going for it, the United States has so much for it, it's got so much leadership at every level of activity that Americans are the only people on the planet in the history of humanity that can just treat domestic politics as a form of popular entertainment. Oh man, so I don't think you're approaching this correctly. You think that this is actually important, but it's entertainment. And then the question is who is the most entertaining candidate? And that I can predict yes. Dean: It would be amazing to see it all unfold, how it plays out. I still see Las Vegas still has all the odds makers still have Donald Trump as the winner. Dan: Yeah, I think it's in the 60s. Well, it depends on whether they're doing it with all the candidates or just the main two. But I think the betting markets I check every couple. I think the betting markets I check every couple weeks, the betting market. Yeah, it's been generally 60, 65 and you know and you know, which is surprising, because a lot of the big, wealthy democratic donors could be gaming the market, you know, just throwing a lot of money into the market. But but these are the las ve. I mean Las Vegas puts a bet on everything, so it's probably some legitimacy to what their bets are. Yeah, yeah, and it goes deeper than a particular issue. You know, it's just like. You know, it's almost like which one of them could actually be there at the end of another four years, and I think that's part of it. Holy cow yeah yeah, that's exactly true yeah, it's like a horse race, where you're betting to see if any of them could actually get to the finish line right oh my goodness, we know they could be at the starting gate. We just don't know which one's going to actually finish you know, yeah, that's so that's amazing, yeah all righty are we uh on next week? yes, nope, I'm on a plane trip to london on sunday of next week. So and the week after I, yeah, the week after I can do it from a hotel room in cleveland okay, perfect, but I'll have to give you the. I'll have to give you the date of the time. Dean: Okay, no problem. Dan: And I might have to get you up early. Dean: That's okay. It's my only thing on these Sundays. Yeah it's my only thing, so it's the highlight of my day Okay thank you, thanks, bye, bye.

A Cruise leads to a Coastal meet-up with a gameshow babe. By BradentonLarry for Literotica -  Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels.  "Well, boys, are you going to keep those hard-ons to yourselves?" Toshia chided. Unsurprisingly, the black guy led the way, taking the few steps and climbing up onto the bed, followed closely by the young man who had been waiting longest, and who Toshia now saw had a fairly long, thin cock standing out in front of him. These two had been closest to Toshia's side of the bed, so they came toward her, while the two younger guys moved toward Shelonda, who offered them a friendly smile. Toshia found herself briefly wondering how so many guys had come into this room, but decided she didn't really care. She crawled on her hands and knees toward the side of the bed a bit, to make more room for Shelonda, and found a hard black cock almost in her face. Smiling up at the two men who were in front of her; well, in front of her and a bit to her left; Toshia proceeded to lean forward and wrap her hand around that dark cock as she brought the head of it to her lips. She figured the men had all been teased enough already, so she didn't hesitate to open her mouth to suck the dark purple head into her mouth. Playing her tongue over it for just a moment, Toshia leaned forward a bit more and let the flaring head slide deeper into her mouth and then down her throat a bit.  She felt male hands moving over her back. One of them moved down to caress and squeeze her butt. Fingers slipped between her cheeks to stroke her wet pussy lips and then up to tease her asshole. She groaned her approval, and managed to catch hold of the long, thin cock to her left, squeezing and pulling on it. Toshia felt fingers pushing up into her cunt, and she moaned. Once those fingers were nice and slippery with her juices, they were withdrawn and then slowly pushed up into her butt. Toshia shuddered and pulled herself off the black cock she'd been sucking. She continued to pull and twist on that with her right hand as she began to suck on the long, thin cock in her left. She had little trouble taking this one down her throat even though it was the longest cock she'd had that night. While she was sucking his cock, the young man kept working his fingers in and out of her butt, while the black guy continued caressing the rest of her body. After several minutes of Toshia going back and forth from one cock to the other, she looked up at the black fellow and said, "Lie down on your back." She then said to the other man, "You're going to fuck my ass, OK?" His only response at the moment was vigorous nod of his head. Of course, the black guy had immediately managed to lie down along the side of the bed. As Toshia moved around and straddled her willing partner, she glanced over to see that Shelonda was sprawled, half-twisted, on her half of the bed. The Asian kid was between her legs, going down on her enthusiastically, while Shelonda was making a good effort at sucking on the other boy's fat cock. Then, Toshia was pushing the thick head of the black cock up into her pussy. She gave a happy whimper as she settled down on him, letting his cock fill her nicely. She worked herself up and down a few times, grinding herself against the man's rock hard abs, before nodding over her shoulder to the other fellow. She didn't have to wait long for him to get into position behind her, and then to feel the head of his cock pushing against and then into her tight ass. Toshia braced herself with her hands on the black man's chest as she felt that long, thin cock working its way deeper and deeper into her bowels. She smiled broadly and said, "Damn, this feels so good!" Toshia began to rock her hips between the men, who were doing their part to fuck their cocks in and out of her willing body. The black guy had her waist in his big hands, and the guy fucking her ass was holding onto her shoulders, pulling her back on their hard pricks. She heard Shelonda moaning loudly with what must be another orgasm, and heard herself calling out, "Fuck me harder!" The two men obliged with gusto, proceeding to shove into her almost violently. They had gotten into a good rhythm, and Toshia could feel her next orgasm coming on fast. As a result, she wasn't too aware of what was going on elsewhere on the bed, so she was a bit surprised when she opened her eyes to see another cock in front of her face. Looking up and around, she saw that Shelonda was on her back with the big-cock fellow between her legs, filling her with that beautiful piece of man-meat. The young Asian guy had come over to get in on Toshia's little group. As occupied as she was at the moment, Toshia couldn't do much more than smile up at him and then offer him her open mouth. He didn't hesitate, but inched forward on the bed, and pushed his very hard cock into her mouth. She closed her lips on his shaft and reveled in the sensations of being completely filled with cock. The Asian kid held her head in his hands, and Toshia relaxed her throat, letting him fuck her face steadily. Toshia came long and hard then, her body clenching and shuddering in the center of those three men who were fucking her so intently. As she slowly came down, she began to have an idea, which gradually coalesced into a plan. She managed to indicate to the Asian kid that she needed to say something, and he promptly, and politely, drew back. Taking just a moment to catch her breath, Toshia quickly explained to them what she had in mind.  Giving her shoulder a kiss, the man who had been fucking her ass gradually withdrew and stepped aside for the moment. His place was taken by the Asian kid, who didn't waste any time at all before pushing his raging hard on into her ass. After a few preliminary thrusts from each of the guys inside her, Toshia announced that she was ready for the third. The man with the long, thin cock got behind the Asian kid and bent his long shaft down until it was up against the black phallus in her pussy. The black guy pulled out almost all the way, and Toshia made every effort to relax, as the third cock pushed forward, entering her pussy with the black cock. Toshia was dimly aware of the sound of Shelonda having a rather loud and long orgasm, but was lost in the unbelievable sensations of having both her ass and pussy stuffed so full. Three cocks were moving in and out of her, stretching her; filling her! Then Toshia was coming again, in a shaking avalanche complete with a steady stream of "Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck Fuck..." All the while the men kept driving in and out of her steadily, and Toshia's orgasm seemed to roll on forever. Except that it did eventually begin to fade, and Toshia could open her eyes again. She was happy, and a bit surprised, to see the fellow with the big cock who had been fucking Shelonda kneeling in front of her. She cast a glance over to the side to see that yet another guy had come into the cabin and had gotten Shelonda to roll over on her belly so that he could fuck her from behind. Turning her attention back to that beautiful, big cock in front of her, which was now all slippery with Shelonda's juices and pearly with cum, and only a bit deflated, Toshia smiled and opened her mouth invitingly. It wasn't easy to accommodate that sexy monster, but the young man was surprisingly gentle, and Toshia gave it her best shot. She doubted that he would cum that way, but he quickly became fully hard again for her. Toshia couldn't believe she had four cocks in her all at once! The very thought; assisted by all the stimulation her body was getting, no doubt; pushed her over the edge into yet another orgasm. This one was less intense, but it was still enough to prompt the cock inside her ass to swell and pump what felt like quite a lot of hot cum up into her. After a few more strokes, the Asian kid began to pull himself out of Toshia's butt and managed to extract himself from the tight little knot of bodies centered on Toshia. Since he'd had to pull out of her pussy to let the Asian leave, the fellow with the long, thin cock took his place, slipping easily into Toshia's ass in one motion. Once there, he fucked her with short, hard, fast motions, until he too filled her with his cum. When her ass was once again free of cock; but had sticky, white cum leaking out of it and down over the black guy's balls; Toshia managed to suggest that the guy with the big cock fuck her ass with it. Of course, he was quite willing to oblige. Toshia came yet again as his big head pushed up into her ass, while the black guy patiently continued to slowly fuck in and out of her pussy. She just kept coming as the two men sawed in and out of her, until, finally, the black cock swelled inside her and flooded her pussy with sweet cum. He stayed there inside her as his de facto partner continued to fuck the hell out of Toshia's ass. When that thick cock got even thicker inside her, Toshia screamed a bit. She felt the welcome rush of his cum shooting up into her and then she was unconscious. When she eventually opened her eyes again, she was on her back and looking up into Don's eyes. Don was brushing the hair out of her eyes and smiling down at her. He said, "It seems like you've had a good time, lover." "Um!" she managed. Then she realized that Don was fucking her, slowly, steadily. Toshia smiled and said, "I've been very busy." "I can tell," Don laughed. Toshia knew that she must be quite a sight, and that there must be quite a mess on the bed and between her legs. She was vaguely aware that Shelonda was being fucked, or something, on the other side of the bed. Don was fucking her a bit harder, and she bit her lip. "Does it hurt?" he asked. "A little," she smiled. "Do you care?" "Not really, no." "Good," she smiled. "Fuck me, Don." She pulled his head down so she could kiss him while his cock moved in and out of her sloppy, very well-used pussy, until it too swelled inside her, jerking as Don groaned and added his cum to the rest. Don relaxed, propped up on his elbows a bit. He watched the action on the enormous blanket with an amused smile. Nearest to him, almost within arm's reach, Toshia was on her hands and knees, being taken from behind by a fit fellow who looked to be Arabic, or possibly Persian, while she was rather enthusiastically servicing the thick cock of the young guy with light blonde hair who was kneeling in front of her. Don realized, quite happily, that he could watch her go all day – and, then, with a widening grin, that he pretty much had done just that several times here in Eros. He admired her sleek muscular body as she moved between the two men, particularly the way her thighs and buttocks flexed as she pushed back against the dark-haired man behind her.  The afternoon sun shone on her tanned back and the spray of dewy white cum Don had left there only a couple of minutes earlier. Of course, the way Toshia was eagerly sucking and stroking on that big cock in front of her was quite impressive too. It didn't hurt that he had come to be so familiar with being on either end of that wonderful, exquisitely responsive body over the last few weeks. Beyond Toshia and her two playmates, Don could see Shelonda moving up and down as the sexy young woman rode the prodigious cock of a black gentleman whose hands were squeezing her big tits tightly, eliciting additional happy sounds from her. Life in Eros is good! Don thought to himself. I'm going to miss this! Then, with a somewhat rueful shake of his head he slowly stood up and looked around. Around them, lightly checkering the pale, pinkish beach were other over-sized beach blankets, some of which were occupied by naked sunbathers, many of whom were engaged in activities much like those of Toshia and Shelonda. On Don's left, the beach swept on until it gave way to a rocky tumble that gradually, over several miles, began to mount up to what seemed to be rather steep mountains that Don thought must march down from up near the Resort and the Sage's tower. That rocky end of the mountains marched right into the body of water that spread out before Don. Just after the rest of the smooth sand of the beach and the occasional gleaming rocky outcropping, was the open sea, or ocean, or large lake. Don had never seen water so blue in his life, and he had seen some surprisingly blue water before, as for instance the Mediterranean off the coast of Greece. On Don's right was a green, rocky area that separated the beach and the mouth of the river he and the girls had traveled down to get this far, several kilometers away. Behind Don, on a handful of small hills, was the strange "city" of Rendezvous. After they had disembarked from the riverboat, leaving behind the cheerful, lazy swinging atmosphere that had prevailed on their slow trip down from the Resort, the now very relaxed trio had made their way from the docks into the town, expecting to be able to make quick and easy progress through and to the water, when they would turn to the left and follow the waterline to the Grotto of Ishtar. As it turned out, though, Rendezvous had proven to be a harder to get through. The city seemed to be laid out on an almost non-Euclidean plan. Streets continued on in straight lines for no more than a block at a time, and two right angled turns did not equal 180 degrees. To make things worse, cutting through buildings utterly failed to achieve its purpose. Walls that were parallel on the inside of a building did not translate as parallel on the outside. Moreover, moving through a building frequently resulted in exiting in a completely different part of town. All of this resulted, somehow, in the city being, apparently, much larger than it appeared from an external viewpoint, as from the docks or where they were on the beach. The wide variety of sexual distractions to be had through every door and around every corner. It seemed that the harder they tried to make their way through Rendezvous the more they would go off track and get distracted.  Toshia's favorite place had been a little club that featured little rooms with various glory holes in the walls. They had spent several hours there, and Toshia had ultimately come out of her chamber with her face and chest splattered with cum and jizz running down the insides and backs of her legs. Shelonda had been quite partial to a building that was filled with a wild combination of padded jungle gym and what Don thought of as a human-sized cat playhouse. There were crazily varied platforms, like a maze laid out in three dimensions, serving as the surfaces of an ongoing orgy. Don had a hard time choosing favorites at the best of times, and there were so many options to pick from in this situation, but he thought he would probably have to say his favorite part of making his way through Rendezvous had been watching the two girls react and enjoy the whole experience. Of course, this was not to say that he had not also enjoyed all the sex he himself had had. Once they had finally reached the beach they were ready to take a nice rest. Seeing the rocky terrain that would keep them from easily proceeding to the grotto helped to take a bit of the wind from their sails as well. So they collapsed on the nearest empty beach blanket and quickly fell asleep in a cozy little pile. Perhaps because of the relatively high concentration of XYZ in the ocean, or sea, air, though, they were soon as randy as they had been at any time in Eros. They awoke very horny, and the nearby guys were more than happy to help out. Don was surprised at how thick and hard his cock was even after the vigorous orgasm he had just had – both in Toshia's sweet pussy and all over her back. He thought he would go over to offer himself to Shelonda's mouth, but just then was distracted as a woman sauntered toward them on her way down to the water. She was a leggy blonde, with long, wavy hair of gold, a phenomenal, curvy body with amazing tits, and her face... Don was certain he recognized her from somewhere. Noticing his attention, the woman smiled broadly at him and gave him a merry wink. Suddenly Don knew exactly where he had seen her. She was a model on The Price is Right back in what he thought of as the real world. He spent a long moment standing there stunned, before making the obvious choice and turning to follow the gorgeous blonde down to the water. He admired the way her hips swayed as she made her way to the water, and then continued to wade in. When she was up to her waist, which Don thought was a shame since he could no longer see her shapely ass, she dove forward and under the water. Don was up to his knees in the surprisingly warm water by the time she resurfaced, emerging from the water like Aphrodite, her thick hair darkened and hanging around her radiant face and water glistening as it ran off her shoulders and full breasts. She smiled again to Don, who hastened to wade in further. She waited for him, her nipples just above the water line. She batted her long lashes at him as he came up close enough to say, "Hello." She unleashed that dazzling smile again, and said, "Hello there. Have we met?" "Not really, no," he almost stammered. "Well, I'm Rachel," she continued to smile, as Don felt her hand touching his hip under the water and then move directly to his cock, which was the hardest it had ever been. Don also felt quite sure that it was bigger than it used to be. "I know," Don smiled back, moving closer and gently grasping her waist under the water. "You do?" She leaned in and kissed him lightly on the lips and then moved in even closer, brushing her lips over Don's collar bone and then along the side of his neck. Her grasp on his straining penis was tight as she pulled on it. "Yes..." Don shuddered a bit. His hands moved around her waist to slide down her lower back and then to hold her behind tightly. "Someone told me your name." Releasing her hold on his prick, Rachel slipped her arms around his neck and looked into his eyes. Her wonderfully full breasts were pressed against Don's chest as she asked, "Who?" "It was a long time ago," Don smiled, "and far away." She cocked her head to the side a bit, her smile a bit thoughtful, before she said, "Well, it's very nice to meet you..." "Don," he said. He lifted her up as she pulled herself up and jumped a bit in the water, wrapping her perfect, long legs around his waist. Rachel managed to get her hand down between them, took hold of his straining prick, and positioned it just right. As she sank downward, enveloping him in her warm, welcoming embrace, she said, "Well, it's very nice to meet you, Don." Up to his chest in the XYZ sea, Don held on to the gorgeous Rachel, helping to raise and lower her as she slowly rode up and down on his thick and steely hard cock. Her lush, full breasts moved against his chest. His hands held her firm ass cheeks tightly. Their mouths met in a heated kiss that quickly grew in passion, their tongues slipping past each other's lips and teeth. Rachel worked herself on Don's shaft and against his body with increasing enthusiasm. The water splashed against and between them as she pushed up and then slammed down on him again and again. Rachel let out a low growl, and then bit Don's lower lip. Don's fingers squeezed her ass tighter, and he groaned deeply. "Oh fuck!" Rachel called out. "Oh fuck yes! I'm going to cum so hard! Goddamn, fuck, yes! Fuck me!" Then Rachel was holding on to him tightly in the water, pushing herself down on his rigid member, as she shook and trembled with what seemed to Don to be a very intense orgasm that rolled on and on. At some point she sank her teeth into his shoulder, but he barely noticed. Instead, he was intent on enjoying the moment – having this radiant beauty in his arms, wrapped around him and impaled on his cock. Eventually, she pulled back a little and smiled at him again, this time actually blushing a little. She kissed him again and said, "That was wonderful, Don. I'm very glad to have met you. Maybe we should move into shallower water." "Gladly!" Don grinned, and without letting her off his prick, he turned around in the water and began to carry her toward the beach. Rachel laughed and kissed him again. It was a friendly buss that quickly became passionate, as she held onto to him tightly. When the water was only up to his mid-calf, Don very slowly knelt down, and then carefully lowered Rachel back into the shallow water, being careful to keep himself inside her. Her hair spread out around her head in the water, as Don lay over her and began to fuck in and out of her steadily. They kissed again as their bodies moved together in the light surf. Rachel's hands moved over his wet body until they found his butt and then began to pull him into her forcefully. Don paused for a moment to lift her long legs up out of the water and put them on his shoulders. Rachel grinned up at him and cupped her tits in her hands, squeezing them and pinching her nipples, which were very hard and red. Don smiled down at her and proceeded to fuck her pussy vigorously, the XYZ-water splashing around them, and especially where their bodies were joined in sex. "God, yes!" Rachel exclaimed. "Fuck me just like that! It feels so good! Fuck my cunt, Don!" Don was rather amused that this gorgeous model would be so enthusiastic, and have such a dirty-talk streak, but was far too intent on working his cock in and out of her to laugh. Instead he slammed into her roughly, letting the water absorb the violence of their fucking, and losing himself in the carnal pleasure of her pussy squeezing and pulling at him and the visual stimulation of the beautiful woman lying in the water beneath him with her eyes half-closed in rising pleasure, a sexy smile on her lips and her luscious tits in her hands. "Ah! Yes!" she cried out. "I'm going to cum again! Fill my pussy with your cum!" Don was only too happy to oblige. He fucked her hard with short, deep strokes, and then, just as she threw her head back and her body arched up out of the water, he felt his cock swelling and then exploding deep into Rachel, spewing a thick fountain of cum up inside her. Don pushed up into her as she groaned loudly and her pussy squeezed his cock again and again, and as he pumped jet after jet of cum into her pussy and womb. His head swam with the intensity of his long orgasm. When he opened his eyes and looked down, Rachel was lying still, eyes closed, hands holding her breasts and a beatific smile on her face. Slowly, she opened her beautiful eyes and breathed, "Wow!" "Indeed!" Don grinned. He let her legs slide off his shoulders and into the water, and then leaned down over her to give her another kiss. His cock was still very hard and gave no indication that it was inclined to soften any time soon, but he suspected Rachel might need a little break. The quiet pause was interrupted though, by Shelonda's voice calling out, "There you are, Don!" This was followed by splashing and laughter as Toshia, Shelonda and the three men ... no, now there were four ... they had been playing with found their way into the water. Shortly, after introductions, and after Toshia and Shelonda had plunged into the water, things quickly developed into a surf-washed orgy. The blonde guy Toshia had been sucking earlier was now sitting in the water, as Shelonda straddled his lap riding up and down on his thick cock. Rachel was on her hands and knees, water up to the middle of her firm thighs, and her breasts dipping into the sea, while she was taken from behind by the new guy, a fit black male with mocha skin, and the Arabic fellow who had been fucking Toshia earlier worked his cock in and out of her lovely mouth. Toshia was kneeling in the water, leaning back against the black guy Shelonda had been with earlier. He had one arm wrapped around Toshia's upper body, squeezing her right tit in his left hand, while the fingers of his right hand reached down to play with her clit, all while he worked his rather large cock slowly in and out of her pussy from behind. Don, who had a mind to convince Toshia's current playmate to shift to her ass so he could enter her pussy from the front, moved over to stand in front of her. He was about to bend down to kiss her, but she saw him and grabbed for his achingly hard cock, pulling it to her mouth as she leaned forward a bit. Don smiled down at his best friend and lover as she eagerly took him into her mouth. He brushed a few wet strands of her hair out of her face as she wrapped her hand around the base of his cock and began to move her mouth up and down it, quickly easing it down into her throat, bit by bit. Taking her head gently in his hands, Don began to rock his hips, fucking her mouth and throat, and just enjoyed the sensations of this exquisite blow job. He glanced over at Shelonda and Rachel, then down at Toshia, quite happy with this visit to the beach. Then Don glanced out, over the head of the guy who was now quite vigorously fucking Toshia from behind. Out there on the water was a large dark shape, quite obviously a sailing vessel. Don thought it looked like a corsair, or some such ship. (Nautical issues were never Don's forte.) It was clearly sailing toward shore, and gave every appearance of making for Rendezvous. Don couldn't see any indication that the ship might be a threat, so I decided to wait until there was some kind of a break in the action before drawing Toshia's attention to it. However, he did keep a periodic eye on it as she continued to pull and suck on his almost painfully hard prick. Eventually, the guy behind Toshia had his big hands around her waist and was raising and lowering her vigorously, and she was obliged to let Don out of her mouth. Instead, she held on to his cock, and whimpered happily at the serious fucking she was receiving. Toshia cried out loudly as the big cock inside her erupted with a thick fountain of cum. Don bent down and kissed Toshia as the guy gently withdrew and backed up. "How do you want me, stud?" Toshia smiled. "Well, as good as that sounds..." Don directed her attention over to his right, where the sailing ship had dropped anchor and was lowering several longboats over the side. Toshia washed herself again, and they waited for Shelonda to have a particularly ear-splitting orgasm, as the longboats were rowed toward shore, making for what seemed to be low docks in the rockier part of the coastline between the beach and the mouth of the river. They said goodbye to Rachel and the guys (who quickly and happily ganged up on the cheerful blonde model) and headed back up the beach blankets. As Don and the girls gathered their belongings, without bothering to put on more than their shoes, they could see groups of people disembarking from the boats. These people climbed up over the rocks and headed for Rendezvous. Don thought they moved together more like a bunch of tourists on a cruise than any kind of threat. Once each longboat had discharged its passengers, the few remaining crew headed back out to the ship. "Maybe we can get them to take us to the Grotto," Don explained to Shelonda as they set off to intercept at least one of the shore parties. Captain Sage and the sailors. It was easy enough to follow the groups, particularly since they were making no effort at all to be stealthy. It seemed that all of them were heading for a large wooden building on the water-side edge of Rendezvous. It looked like nothing so much as a big, solid tavern, and the hanging sign outside the door suggested just as much. Pausing there to hastily throw on their clothes, they eyed the sign with some confusion. There were no words, and the sign featured a foaming flagon with prominent human breasts, and a rigid cock rising up out of the foam. "It's a tavern sign, alright, but I have no idea what the name might be," Don mused. "The Booby Mug?" Toshia offered. "The Foaming Cock?" Shelonda suggested, a bit weakly. Another shore party came up then. As had seemed to be the case with the others, this was all men. They were wearing simple, short, pants – breeches, really – and few of them bothered with shirts. They were all tanned and muscular, and a bit on the weathered side for denizens of Eros. For as much as they resembled the crew of an eighteenth century sailing, or outright pirate, vessel, they also seemed to be rather clean and well-behaved, if boisterous. Even if they hadn't had an ulterior motive, our heroes would have been drawn into the tavern just out of curiosity. Crossing the threshold was like crossing into another world, or at least milieu. On the outside, the late afternoon sun lit a cheerful seaside sex resort. On the inside, was a relatively dark great room lit by many, many candles. There were long, heavy tables in the middle of the room, a scattering of round tables off the various sides, and a big bar. In addition to the newly arrived seamen (and Don could see no seawomen), there were several actual barmaids – busty, unsurprisingly, and fully clothed, surprisingly, though they did each display generous cleavage – working behind the bar and moving around the sudden influx of "customers". While they seemed to be giving the bar maids plenty of attention, the seamen were primarily concentrating on ordering drinks from the bar. Since arriving in Eros, Don had not seen anyone drink anything but water, but the drink being handed out to the men was clearly not water. For one thing, each flagon was capped with a foaming head. Leading the way toward the bar, Don managed to stop a bar maid with an armful of flagons and asked, "What is that drink?" "'Tis grog, sir," she said with a tone that implied, "of course." She smiled and handed a flagon to Don before hurrying off to pass out the rest of her bounty to the seamen. The "grog" smelled like a cross between mead and beer, and tasted like a sweet beer, which made sense. There was no alcoholic aftertaste, though. "Hey, pass that around, Professor," Toshia laughed as she took the flagon from him. After a cautious sip, she promptly took a much longer drink. "Yum, now that's good stuff!" As Shelonda took her turn, Don turned to the closest seaman, and tapped him on the shoulder. "Excuse me." "Aye?" the fellow turned to Don with a quizzical eye and the beginning of a smile. "Hello, my name is Don, and these are my friends Toshia and Shelonda." "Yar, good day to ye ladies," the man grinned with a definitely twinkle in his eye. "I be Joseph." "I take it that you're the crew of the ship that just anchored offshore?" "Har! Wouldn't do to anchor on shore, now, would it?" Don chuckled, and said, "No, it wouldn't. Who would I talk to about arranging passage to the Grotto of Ishtar?" Joseph, who was more than a little distracted by Shelonda's breasts, took a short moment and then said, "Oh, for that kind of thing, ye'll be wanting to talk to the cap'n." "Excellent," Don smiled broadly. "Where can I find the captain?" "Oh, the cap'n'll be along shortly," Joseph said with some effort at restraining a laugh. One of his companions overheard his answer and did burst into a loud guffaw. "Thank you," Don nodded with a frown. He turned to talk to Toshia, but she had wandered off a bit. She was now talking with a couple of the other crewmen, who were quite happy to give her their undivided attention and to share their flagons of grog with her. Shelonda was still standing nearby, but was returning Joseph's flirtatious glances while occasionally drinking from the flagon Toshia had left in her care. Noticing Don's attention, Shelonda smiled broadly and repeated, "This is good stuff!" "That's good," Don nodded with a bit of concern. Apparently the grog was some kind of intoxicant – the first they had come across in Eros – and Don was a bit wary about mysterious consequences. He resolved to abstain from grog, as something of a designated adventurer. "Ye've got a lovely figure," Joseph said to Shelonda. "Thank you," she smiled and sidled over a bit closer. Don stepped back to get a little further out of the way. Looking around, he guessed that there were about twenty crewmen in the tavern, but there was no sign of anyone who might be the captain, or even an officer. Meanwhile, he saw that Toshia was now half sitting, half leaning on the edge of one of the big tables. She had a flagon of grog in her right hand, and was running her left along the taut, tanned bicep of one sailor, while a second man leaned in on her right to talk with her. Looking back to Shelonda, Don saw that Joseph had drawn her with him over to a chair at a side table. Don watched as Joseph pulled her into his lap and very efficiently exposed her full breasts. She laughed as he said something and began pinching and teasing her nipples. Over against the big table, Toshia was making out with the man on her left, who seemed to have his hand up between her legs and under her skirt. The man on her right looked like he had lowered his mouth to her breast on that side. In another moment, Toshia had set her flagon down on the table a bit to the side and behind her, so that she could busy her hands with reaching into the pants of the two men. "Can I get you a drink, sir?" said a pretty bar maid. "No, thank you," Don smiled, noticing her blue eyes and very inviting cleavage. "'At your service, sir," she grinned and moved on. Toshia was now making out with the man on her right, while the one on her left was taking his turn at her breast. Don could see his muscular forearm flexing as he worked his fingers up between Toshia's legs. Toshia had managed to work their pants down and now, rather obviously, was pulling on and stroking their cocks. Don looked around, found a likely chair, and sat up on the back of it, putting his feet on the seat. This way, he could better keep an eye on things. He saw that Shelonda was now kneeling between Joseph's thighs, and the back of her head was moving up and down in a steady motion that Don had become quite familiar with. A couple of Joseph's friends were also watching intently, but apparently patiently. Toshia was now leaning back on the table, supported by her left arm, as the man on her left moved between her legs, pushing himself into her. Toshia had her right arm around the neck of the man on her right, pulling him toward her so she could continue to make out with him. Quite a few of the men were watching this scene, many of them with a flagon in one hand as they adjusted their own hard-ons. Some had gone so far as to pull their cocks out and stroke them openly. Don was finding the urge to stroke his own persistent erection almost irresistible. Just then, though, the door opened, letting in a blinding swath of white sunlight along with a small group of individuals. Squinting, Don saw three women and a large, naked man who made every other man in the room look a bit scrawny and weak in comparison. Of the women, though, there was one who instantly drew Don's attention. She swept the room with an imperious look that took in the positions of every man and woman in the room, including Don, but accorded him no more attention than anyone else. She had her hands on her hips and stood there in her calf-hugging high-heeled boots as if she owned the place. She wore a long dark brown overcoat that almost dragged on the floor behind her, as well as a black tri-corn hat with a bright red feather sticking out of the folded up brim atop the coppery red hair that fell down around her face and shoulders in an unruly tumult. Underneath the coat, which was thrown open carelessly, her torso was encased in a rust colored corset that emphasized her charms to undeniable good effect. Her smooth, muscular thighs disappeared into a rather incongruous red miniskirt. The hint of a smile on her lips betrayed equal measures of amusement and contempt. Though she was probably less than a meter and a half tall, she commanded the room as soon as she entered it. Along with the Lady and India, she was one of the most palpably sexual creatures Don had ever seen. Confident that this was the captain he had been waiting for, Don took another moment to look at her a bit more carefully. He noted her long neck, her fair complexion, the spray of freckles across her cheeks, and the particularly adorable broad nose, upon which rode the only pair of glasses he had seen in Eros. As he slid off his chair, Don was vaguely aware that Shelonda was making happy swallowing noises as Joseph groaned, and that Toshia was being fucked vigorously on the table in the center of the room with a gang of men each waiting to take a turn coupling with her, but he was focused on the woman – the captain – who was now striding decisively toward a table in the corner of the room, her little entourage in tow. Don noticed that the crewman in her vicinity bowed their heads a bit and backed away to give her space. Whether or not either of the women with her or the big man noticed him, Don proceeded as if they weren't there. He ignored them and approached the table, arriving just as the captain sat down in a high-backed chair with arms, unlike the other chairs in the room. "Excuse me, ma'am," Don said, noticing that it suddenly felt very warm in the tavern. "I take it that you're the captain of the ship that just arrived." "Yar," she nodded, as she gave Don a long look. He noticed that her eyes were gray with a hint of green. "I be Captain Sage of the Maidenhead." "'Pleased to meet you, Captain," Don nodded. "My name is Don. I was wondering if I might arrange a bit of passage aboard your ship for myself and my two friends." "The two wenches entertaining my men?" Don sensed that there was something a bit less genuine in her piratic accent when compared with Joseph's. "Aye," Don nodded, unintentionally slipping into the vernacular. "They do seem enthusiastic," she smiled, perhaps with a bit of disdain. Don chuckled, "They are that." "Have a seat, there, Don," Sage said. It was clearly intended as a command. As Don drew the indicated chair back and sat down, the big, naked man took up a position directly behind his captain, and the two women, at whom Don still hadn't had a good look, arranged themselves to either side of their leader. Before all of these arrangements were completed a bar maid hurried up with a platter bearing four flagons of grog. "Yer not from around here, are ye, Don?" the Captain asked as she took the first choice of the flagons. "Nay... No, I'm not," Don nodded. "We've come a long way." She looked at him from over the brim of her drink as she took a long swallow. She seemed to be examining him with an amused curiosity. "Do tell," she said as she lowered her grog. "Well, we started out in a place called the Manor," Don responded. "Since then, well, we've had some ... adventures. We came down the river from the Resort most recently." "And before then?" "Before the Resort?" "Before the Manor," she corrected, a clearly amused smile on her lips. "Um, Florida," Don answered, more than a little taken aback by her question, which was so atypical among the normal denizens of Eros. "Yar," Captain Sage nodded. "Ye are a long way from home, Don." Don opened his mouth to ask a question, but there was something about her downright smug expression that made him pause. He wasn't used to being so off balance. He struggled to work out what it was about this woman that was throwing him off. "How be the Lady?" Sage asked idly. "She is doing well," Don said, "or at least she was last time I saw her." Sage smiled, for the first time without any hint of contempt or derision, "She's quite a woman." Don noticed that her pirate had slipped quite a bit there, but decided to let it pass without any comment. "She is at that, Captain." "So, where is it ye be faring, Don?" she asked, her piratic accent even a bit stronger now. "We just need passage to the Grotto of Ishtar. Do you know where that is?" "Aye," she nodded. "I can take ye there, if that be where ye want to go." "You don't think it's a good idea." "I didn't say that," she shrugged. She leaned back and casually cast her right leg up over the arm of her rather throne-like chair. Unsurprisingly, Don felt the undeniable urge to look down along her firm thigh and see what she was exposing to him, but, with a huge effort of will, he managed to keep his eyes on hers. He thought he noticed a twitch of a reaction in her smile or her eyes. "My friend, Toshia, needs to get to the Grotto," Don said. "And ye don't?" "We go together." "I see," she said. "Well then, what be in it for me and my crew?" Don was surprised to realize that he hadn't thought about this in advance. After a moment, during which he noticed the ornate pendant that hung around Sage's neck and between the white mounds of her breasts, he said, "Well, perhaps we can provide some service." "Yar, I see what services your friends might be providing," she laughed cheerfully and gestured out to the room behind Don. He turned around in his chair to first see Shelonda, on her knees in the middle of half-circle of men being splattered with cum. Twisting further he saw Toshia in a similar state. She was now naked and lying back on the table, her butt hanging off the edge as one of the crewmen, but not one of the two who had been with her earlier, drove into her roughly, her legs up in the air. Several men were kneeling on the table on either side of her, so she could help them stroke their hard cocks. Don was pretty sure he could see that her chest and face were rather thoroughly covered in cum. When Don turned back around to Captain Sage, he saw that she had changed her pose again, and was now leaning on the table with her chin in her hands. He noticed that she was not wearing any rings. She was looking at him with playful curiosity. "What service might ye be offering, Don?" He smiled, for the first time feeling like the interview was going well. "I have some things to offer. If you would like to..." "Oh, not for me, Don," she laughed, "though it's sweet o' ye to think o' me. 'Sides I don't know what ye might offer that I can't be getting from Sven here." With a slight toss of her head she indicated the man hovering behind her. Don looked at Sven and for the first time noticed the rather impressive cock on the muscular, blond giant. His eyes meeting Sage's again, he said, "Well, there are other things..." "Hmm, well, for such things, if I was of a mind, I have pretty Jasmine here and Megan," she said as she reached out to touch the women at either side. She nodded a bit to her left and then right as she spoke their names, indicating which was which. Don finally looked at the two women. Jasmine was a striking East Asian woman with jet black hair cut short and startling green eyes. She was quite tall, and had surprisingly full breasts, which were only barely covered by the diaphanous aquamarine top she wore. She smiled warmly at Don as he glanced at her. Megan, on the other hand, was a very young looking Caucasian girl with shoulder length, straight auburn hair. Like her mistress, Megan wore a form fitting corset that pushed her fuller breasts up in a quite distracting display – now that Don was actually looking at her. Not so tall as Jasmine, but taller than Sage, Megan only barely acknowledged Don's momentary attention. Both of the women had leather collars cinched around their throats. "But maybe ye could demonstrate those other things for us, Don," Sage suggested with a mischievous sparkle in her eye. She gave Jasmine's shoulder a squeeze, smiled at her and nodded over at Don. Jasmine rose from her chair and moved around the table. Don tried to get some kind of read on what exactly Sage was up to, but her expression, though cheerful, was completely enigmatic. Don scooted his chair back and let Jasmine sit on the edge of it, she smiled down at him as she hiked up her dark blue skirt and spread her long legs, exposing her bare pussy for him. Her position on the table blocked Don's view of Sage. He smiled up at Jasmine before leaning in to kiss the inside of her smooth thigh. Jasmine murmured her approval as his lips moved up her leg, and she edged herself forward a bit. When Don ran his tongue over her moist labia, Jasmine shuddered and reached down to pull his head in closer. Don obliged by pushing his tongue between her lips, tasting her juices. Jasmine leaned back on the table as Don slowly began to lick at her clit. He worked two fingers up inside her increasingly wet pussy as he focused his attention on her clit. Don was intent on what he was doing, so he was only barely aware of Megan as she came around and began to make out with Jasmine, kissing her passionately and playing with Jasmine's beautiful tits. Don gradually increased the pace of his licking and sucking, while simultaneously increasing the tempo of the fingering of Jasmine's pussy. Jasmine raised one long leg and wrapped it around Don's back, pulling him toward her. Without diminishing the pace or pressure on Jasmine's clit, Don began to move his free hand up along Megan's leg, idly caressing it, and slowly working his way higher. Glancing up, he saw that Megan had freed her tits from the corset and was offering them to Jasmine, who was sucking avidly on Megan's nipples. By the time Jasmine was shaking and groaning on the edge of the table with a long, drawn out orgasm, Don had been stroking Megan's pussy for a while, and she was rather happy to take Jasmine's place in front of Don. The transition happened so quickly that Don didn't have a chance to get more than a glance of Sage, who seemed to be just sitting back enjoying the show. In spite of her earlier display of indifference, Megan was more enthusiastic than Jasmine, holding Don's head in place as he lapped at her clit, and then coming more quickly and much more loudly. When Megan's trembling had subsided, Don pulled back and smiled up at her. The young woman leaned down to take hold of his head and pulled him up to her, kissing him violently. As soon as she was sure he wouldn't try to escape, she released his head and dropped her hands to his waist and promptly worked at freeing his straining cock. Don felt her fingers stroking and pulling on him, and then he was being positioned at the warm, waiting mouth of her pussy. He pushed into her in one motion, and Megan bit his tongue a bit for his effort. Don shoved up into her once, twice, and then a third time, and then she was coming again. Before she had even come down again, she fell back on the table, and pulled Don to her with her legs. Over to Don's right, on Sage's left, Jasmine was sitting in a chair turned toward Sage, sucking on Sven's very large cock. Don wondered how Toshia would deal with that monster. He thought about looking around to see what Shelonda and Toshia were up to, but his eyes were locked on Captain Sage's. She was watching him with what seemed like amused indifference. Don kept looking into her eyes as he began to fuck Megan on the table in front of her – for her. He was dimly aware that Megan was squeezing her own tits tightly and thrashing about wildly beneath him as she came again and again, but Don was intent on driving into her pussy repeatedly until he came, never taking his eyes off Sage, who never stopped watching him in return. When Don came, it was with a savage force. His cum gushed out of him in a fiery torrent, filling up Megan's pussy and spilling out of her. The groan that emanated from the depths of his throat was almost inhuman. As he caught his breath, Don heard Captain Sage say, "Aye, Don, we'll take ye and yours to the Grotto." Passages Toshia was not passive by nature. Even when she had been thrown to the men by the Sisterhood, she had taken an active role in orchestrating the various fuckings and suckings. Even at her most compliant, with the satyrs, who had had their way with her rather thoroughly, she had taken some measure of control of the situation by coaxing them on and occasionally by giving direction. In the tavern between Rendezvous and the sea, though, Toshia simply let things happen to her. She had moved over to the two sailors primarily to try some more of the tasty grog, which filled her with a lovely warm sensation, which in turn and unsurprisingly also spread to her horny little pussy. She quickly noticed that she was getting a little drunk but found that she really didn't care. Toshia found the two men ruggedly handsome and quite charming in their direct attention and manners. As she drank from the flagon they gave her, she moved her free hand appreciatively over the taut, sun browned arm of the sailor on her left, who had introduced himself as Marco. The fellow on her right – Alex – leaned in and said, "Yer the prettiest lass we seen in months, Toshia. Would ye be willing to enjoy a bit o' sport with us an' the lads?" Toshia smiled at him and asked, "All the lads?" "If ye like," he grinned back at her cheerfully. She looked to her left and saw that Marco was paying intent attention to the conversation. She smiled at him and then back to Alex and said, "Sounds like fun." "Aye," he laughed. "It does!" Toshia leaned to the right a bit to give Alex a quick kiss, and immediately felt his hand moving up her body over the thin fabric of her sundress. On her left, Marco similarly moved in closer and began to slide his hand up the inside of her leg. Toshia turned to him, intending to give him just a brief kiss too, but then found herself kissing him passionately, his thick tongue pushing into her mouth. She felt a bit of cool air on her right breast as it was exposed, and then, almost at once, she felt a moist tongue brushing over her nipple, just before it was sucked into an eager male mouth. Marco's fingers brushed over her moist pussy lips. When she moaned into his mouth in approval, he parted those lips and began to work his fingers up inside her. Toshia found herself reaching out to get her hand inside Marco's pants, intent on taking hold of his cock. She carefully set her flagon of grog on the table (behind her and to the right) against which she was half leaning and half sitting. She was already stroking the very stiff cock on her left by the time she managed to work her hand into the pants on her right. Meanwhile those fingers were moving in and out of her grasping cunt. When Marco broke their kiss, pulling back a bit, to lower his mouth to her breast on that side, which he had exposed with his left hand, Alex let her right nipple go and offered his mouth to Toshia's. Toshia began kissing him eagerly as she let go of their cocks and began to help them get their pants down far enough for their purposes. She quickly went back to stroking and squeezing their very hard cocks, completely oblivious to anything else going on in the big room. She didn't stop making out with Alex when Marco pulled away and moved in front of her. She felt fingers pulling out of her pussy and then the wonderful feeling of a fat cockhead being pushed slowly up into it. Slipping her arm around Alex's neck, to keep him from escaping, Toshia leaned back on the table a bit, to give Marco better access to her. She supported herself with her left arm as Marco began to shove into her more vigorously and Alex continued to make out with her, his hand squeezing and teasing her breast. It wasn't long before Toshia shuddered and gasped as an orgasm tore through her. And it didn't take much longer for Marco to fill her pussy with his cum, after which she was quite happy to have Alex take Marco's place, pushing his own cock into her, squeezing slippery juices into and out of her. It wasn't too long before Toshia found herself stripped naked, lying back on the big wooden table with her butt hanging off the edge as crewman after crewman took a turn fucking her. Most of them came inside her, but several had climbed up onto the table on either side of her and, with some help from Toshia's eager hands, had jerked themselves until they had sprayed showers of pearly cum all over her tits, throat and face. At some point, she was turned over, so she was facing the table and a number of the men took her from behind. She didn't object in the least when some of them decided to give her ass a try. She had long since given up on any attempt to keep track of the number of orgasms she had. At some point, after what seemed like well over an hour of non-stop fucking, Toshia actually drifted off to sleep – head on her crossed arms as sailors continued to use her body for their pleasure. She woke up some when she felt cool, moist cloths wiping dried and drying cum off her face, from between her legs and off her buttocks and back. She smiled at the buxom barmaids who were doing their best to clean her up, and even managed to cooperate with them as they coaxed her around so that they could get at the front of her. Toshia lay back in one girl's arms as the other gently wiped her pussy and then knelt between them to lick as much of the cum out of her as she could. Throughout all of this, Toshia was vaguely aware that the sailors had either collapsed about the tavern or had returned to their ship. Don came into view and smiled broadly at her, and said, "You looked like you were having fun." "Oh yeah," she murmured with a smile. "I've been a very naughty girl." "So I see," he laughed. Then she was coming one last time for the evening, shaking and trembling in the arms of the pretty barmaid. Toshia was dimly conscious of being lifted up in the arms of a very large and naked blond man with an impressively muscular chest and seriously broad shoulders. Without asking any questions, Toshia nestled her head in the crook of the big man's shoulder and promptly fell sound asleep. When she awoke the next morning, Toshia found herself gently swaying in a hammock in what she would shortly find out was the forward cabin of the Maidenhead. Shelonda was snoring quietly in a similar hammock on the other side of the small room, and there was a big bowl of fruit and pitcher of water on a small table between them. While she was eating, Toshia noticed a big tub of warm water in the corner of the room, as well as several big towels. There was no sign of the sundress she had managed to bring with her from the Wizard's house. Toshia shrugged – it really didn't seem important – and began to wash herself rather thoroughly. Before she finished, Shelonda woke up and joined her. They briefly compared notes about their experiences in the tavern with all the sailors. Toshia found out that Shelonda had given several men blowjobs before finding herself surrounded by hard cocks being jerked until they came, covering her in a deluge of semen. Shelonda had used her dress to try to clean herself up a bit, and then discarded it in a corner before moving over to basically serve as Toshia's fluffer, getting and keeping the men hard and ready for fucking Toshia. "I had no idea!" Toshia laughed. "Well, you were busy," Shelonda smiled. Noting that she was feeling extremely horny, in spite of all the sex she'd had the night before, Toshia ran her hand down Shelonda's lovely brown back and said, "I should thank you, shouldn't I?" Shelonda turned to Toshia and slipped her hands around Toshia's waist, and purred, "I think you should." Toshia was leaning in to kiss her friend when, without so much as knocking, someone opened the cabin door. The room was abruptly flooded with sunlight. "Now, now, girls, you might want to hold off on that sort of thing," Don laughed as he came in. Toshia noticed that he had managed to keep his clothes. "We'd let you join in," Toshia offered, with an attempt at a coy little pout. "As good as that sounds – and it sounds very good – I wasn't worried about me." He leaned in and gave them each a kiss, before continuing with, "Captain Sage is providing transportation to the Grotto, but we have to ... work for our passage." "Oh?" Toshia gave Don an amused and suspicious look. "What do we have to do?" Shelonda got right to the point. "Well, the two of you have to make yourself available to the men in whatever way they like, but only when they're not working themselves." "Oh really?" Toshia pretended to be shocked and appalled. "Yeah

The Jungle Room By BradentonLarry for Literotica -  Listen to the Podcast at Explicit Novels.Clubbing in Eros. "Maybe I should have been expecting this," Don said. "What?" Victor asked. Don frowned. Where to begin? he thought. First of all, there seemed to be an actual little jungle inside the Jungle Room. Though there was a park-like lawn stretching out in front of them, there were palm trees and thick, jungle vegetation all around.  Don could hear the distinct sound of monkeys and other jungle critters playing, and doing whatever else they do, from the deepening shadows. Then there was the open sky overhead. Although it was quite shady on the floor of the "jungle" they could see the blue, cloudless sky as it began to darken toward night. Strategically placed torches and a few bonfires would keep the place from getting too dark. Finally, there was the quite undeniable fact that the place certainly seemed to be quite a bit bigger on the inside! Don considered going back outside to walk around the building, and then pacing the inside off just to make sure, but then decided he would just go with it. And, he decided, if none of this bothered Victor, who was he to trouble the big guy's mind? Walking a few paces in, to get out of the doorway, Don paused to look around and get his bearings. On the right, there was a sandy area, with a big bonfire in the middle. At some distance from the fire, there were quite a few lounge chairs arranged in a rough circle around the fire and open area. There were a few people lounging there at the moment. Continuing on counterclockwise, and moving deeper into the micro-jungle, Don saw a raised platform with cushions and pillows; it really looked like a huge couch, or a sectional unit taken to extremes. Beyond this, Don made out several tree houses, accessed by ladders, as well as various sorts of beds, couches and blankets scattered about the more or less open areas between the trees. In the distance, he thought he saw a cave of some sort. To the left of that and closer to the entrance, seemed to be a pool, designed to look like a natural pond, complete with a waterfall. On Don's immediate left, then, was a large wooden structure, raising several stories from the floor. Don, followed closely by Victor, turned to this complicated building within a building and climbed the few stairs that led up to the wide deck-platform that was the first floor. Right in front of them was an open area that was apparently used as a dance floor; there were several couples dancing slowly to the music that was playing, as well as a few solo dancers, all of whom were in varying states of undress. Off to one side was a row of stripper's dance poles, around which danced a couple of almost entirely naked young women, and, at the far end, a strapping young man wearing nothing but a loin cloth. Don could also see, along another side of the platform, a set of comfortable chairs, one of which was being used at the moment as a platform for some very enthusiastic sex. Across the dance floor, there was a refreshment bar much like those that had been in the Manor, and a set of stairs leading to the upper floors of the structure. Before they could go any further, a striking woman with long legs, large, firm tits and long red hair falling down over her shoulders and down her back in an unruly tumult came up to them; she was wearing a diaphanous green silk "skirt" that was really just a pair of broad strips hanging from a narrow belt around her waist that covered her sex and her butt crack before falling down between her legs. She also wore a heavy gold necklace that hung between her generous breasts. She smiled at them and said, "Hello, welcome to the Jungle Room, would either or both of you like to dance?" "Hi," Don smiled, "I'm still looking around, but perhaps Victor here would." The woman looked Victor up and down with obvious approval while the big, muscular man returned the favor. "Hello, Victor. I'm Vixen. What do you say, big fella, wanna dance?" she smiled. "Sure," Victor grinned. Don smiled a little himself, watching the two of them moving toward the center of the dance floor and then begin dancing, while he was thinking, "Vixen"? What an odd name. He looked around again, deciding where to explore first. His eye was caught by the long, black hair of one of the women dancing on a pole, and he decided to move in that direction for a better look. Her hair was thick, straight, hung down to her butt, or would if she stopped moving long enough, and was a lustrous black that gleamed darkly in the rather subdued light of the Jungle Room. Her skin was a reddish brown. She had long, slender arms and legs, full breasts and a lovely rear. As he drew closer, Don thought she was most likely of Native American extraction, perhaps South American. She was wearing a dark red skirt with slits that ran all the way up to her hips on each side, gold bracelets and anklets, and a gold necklace that was more of a choker, hugging her slender neck closely. He noticed that she had a black ring on the middle finger of her left hand. Her breasts were bare, and her dark nipples seemed to beckon to Don. He saw that her face was lovely, and then she smiled at him with a friendly, playful light in her eyes, and Don decided he would tarry here for a while. He stopped behind the stool set in front of the dark beauty's pole and asked, "May I?" She smiled again, and said, "Please do, welcome to the jungle." "Thank you," Don smiled back as he sat down on the stool. He was already trying to place her accent. She spun herself around the silvery pole in a gravity defying display of strength and grace. Her hair was flung about in a wide, beautiful arc. Her skirt flared too, displaying her sexy legs to considerable effect. Don was struck by the way her body moved about the pole in a wonderful combination of the athletic and the erotic. He was already finding himself mesmerized by the dancer's beauty and sensuality. She came to a stop, with her arm wrapped around the pole, leaned against the pole, and said, "This is your first time to our jungle, isn't it?" Latin, but not Spanish or Mexican, Don thought in the back of his mind. He said, "Yes, how could you tell?" "I would have remembered you," she smiled as she slid from the pole and glided toward him. She bent down and took his face in her hands, looking deeply into his eyes. As he was looking back into her dark brown gaze, he thought, Portuguese? Then she was kissing him lightly and all coherent thought flew away. Don's perceptions and mental processes were abruptly focused entirely on her lips touching his and the fragrance of her perfume. As she pulled away, only a moment later, a deep sigh slipped from his lips. She smiled and laughed a little and said, "This is how we welcome visitors." Brazilean! Don's brain exclaimed triumphantly, but his mouth was murmuring, "That's a very nice welcome." "I'm India," she said as she began to dance in front of him, her legs on either side of his knees. Her hands were moving over her naked flesh as she swayed in time to the music. Don was having a hard time knowing where to look; not that there was any proper place to look or not look, but that everywhere on this woman's body seemed to be the best place to focus his attention. "I'm Don," he finally managed. "It's good to meet you Don," she smiled, pronouncing his name more like "Dohn", which he found utterly charming. "What have you been doing before you came here?" Don chuckled, "That's a long story." "I like stories," she purred in his ear before kissing his neck. A shiver ran through the length of Don's body, and he breathed in her scent again. "Um," he attempted, "well, I guess, it begins in the Manor." "Ah, yes, I've heard of this place," she nodded. "I woke up with my friend in a bedroom there," he managed as India casually untied the knot that held her skirt in place and dropped the garment to the floor, exposing her pretty, bare pussy. She straddled his lap and sat down, placing her warm hands on his shoulders and looking him in the eye. Don's hands moved up along her firm, smooth thighs. Remembering the rules of his non-Eros life, he half expected to be told "no touching", but of course such a restriction was foreign here. "Your friend is the man dancing with Vixen?" "No," Don laughed. "That's Victor, we didn't meet him until much later. My friend's not here right now. She's at Ladies Nite." "Ah," India nodded. She began to caress his neck and shoulders, and Don continued to stroke her legs idly. "Well, um, my friend and I didn't know where we were or how we got there, or even how to get out of that room." "That must have been frightening," India said, as her hand moved over Don's bare chest. "Well, it was certainly strange. I think my friend, Toshia, was more concerned than I was. We were all alone for a bit, and very confused, but then some other people showed up... Well, they fell into the room actually! They weren't much help – well, they were helpful in a sense – but they were too horny to really answer our questions." India smiled broadly and nodded, as her hand made its way down to Don's lap and began to caress his already hardening cock. "Uh, well, we did find our way out of the room – well, Toshia did – and things got stranger after that..." "What do you mean? How stranger?" So, Don began to tell this beautiful woman about his adventures in the Manor, all while she listened attentively and continued to pull and stroke his now very hard cock. Occasionally she asked a question, laughed, or otherwise expressed interest. As he talked, Don let his hands roam over her warm skin, caressing and exploring. Now and then she would lean in and kiss his neck or his shoulder, and he would sometimes lean forward to kiss her breasts. He was about to tell her about the maze in the garden, when India decided they had waited long enough. She rose up off Don's legs and shifted forward, pulling his straining cock forward. He felt her hot, wet pussy against his head, and then the exquisite sensation of entering her warm, moist sex. Don groaned as she slowly but steadily sank down on him, letting his cock fill her. With his hands holding her waist tightly, Don kept her down on him, and India began to rock on his lap, working his cock in and out of her, while grinding her clit against the base of his thick cock. Her hands came up and clasped his face, pulling his mouth to hers. Their kiss was long and passionate as she rode him there in the Jungle Room. Don reached around to squeeze her beautiful ass in his hands as he struggled to push himself even further up inside her. India shifted back and forth against him, grinding herself against his body, while his tongue slipped into her mouth, slipping over her smaller tongue, and while her breast moved against his chest, their nipples brushing against each other's. When their mouths parted at last India slipped her strong, thin arms around Don's neck and tossed her head back, letting her mane of jet black hair fall down over her back. Don paused a moment to revel in the sight of this gorgeous creature riding his cock here in the middle of this strange junglesque setting. He took in her long, beautiful neck, her full, heaving breasts, and her red-brown skin, now shimmering in the torchlight with a thin sheen of perspiration. Then, he lowered his head to kiss her chest, first between her tits and then made his way to each nipple in turn, pulling and sucking on them, pinching them between his teeth now and then. This last elicited a happy whimper from India and she rocked against him with even more insistence. Don, his cock straining up inside the exquisite grasp of her pussy, pulled her forward and down, making sure she was rubbing against him as much as possible. Then, he felt her hands moving around to hold the back of his head, keeping his mouth on her breast, where he was sucking hard on her left nipple. Don heard her moaning at the same time he felt her body beginning to shake against him. Her pussy pulled and squeezed at him as she climaxed. Don held onto India as she rode his cock trembling and groaning with what seemed to him like a very long, satisfying orgasm. She finally relaxed her grip on his head and he was able to pull back and smile up at her. She blushed a little and smiled back at him. "That was beautiful," she said in her wonderful accent, "but I'm not done with you." Before Don could even think of objecting, the lithe beauty slipped off his cock and lap, and knelt between his legs. India gave him a wink with her dark brown eyes, as she took his very hard, slippery cock in her hand. She pulled it forward a bit, and ran her pink tongue up along its length. Don shuddered as she reached its head and lingered there, fluttering over it, licking her own juices off it. Then, she was sucking his head into her mouth. Her pretty eyes looked up at him as she began to move her mouth up and down, taking more and more of him into her mouth and then her throat. Don shuddered and felt a low groan building up in his throat. He was barely aware of the fact that quite a few people were watching the two of them, but he couldn't take his eyes off the vision of the gorgeous woman sucking on his cock. She had a tight grip on the base of his shaft as her lips moved up and down on his shaft. He felt her tongue pressing against the underside of his cock and her throat squeezing around his sensitive head. Almost without noticing, Don moved his hands up to either side of her head and held on to her gently, keeping her there as she sucked on him insistently. "Oh god!" he cried out as he finally closed his eyes and let his own orgasm erupt. At first all he could feel was the intense sensation at the base of his balls and shooting through his entire nervous system. Then, gradually he became aware of the fact that he was pumping jet after jet of hot cum into India's mouth and throat. He opened his eyes to see her holding tightly to him as she took all of his cum in. He felt her swallowing repeatedly. Don's body was shuddering and twitching as he very slowly came down. India didn't take her mouth off him until she was sure she had gotten every last drop of cum out of him. "Wow!" Don breathed. "That was amazing!" "Thank you," India smiled, giving his cock a little kiss. She laid her head against his thigh as he stroked her thick, black hair happily. Don found himself thinking he would have to thank the resort's gate for insisting they enjoy the resort before leaving. "That looked like fun!" said a woman's voice from over Don's shoulder, and he felt a light hand touching his left arm. India smiled and said, "It was. This is Don, Jaden." Don looked back and up to smile back at the slender woman with reddish brown hair falling past her shoulders. She had great, slim legs and full tits that looked large on her petite frame. Her cheerful smile was infectious, though Don realized that might just be the great orgasm talking. Then he felt India's hands on his thighs as she drew herself back up in front of him. For a moment, Don found himself sitting there grinning between two beautiful naked women. I really do love it here, he thought to himself, meaning the Jungle Room, the resort and Eros at once. He noticed now that India stood with an undeniable air of confidence and even authority. There was something regal in her bearing. "I think it's time for a game," India smiled at Don and Jaden. "What do you think?" "That's a great idea!" Jaden nodded. "I'm always up for a game," Don agreed as he stood up, a bit unsteadily. "Come along if you want to join the game," India called out to everyone in range of her voice as she began to saunter over to the steps down to the floor of the "jungle". Don followed along after her swaying backside as if he were bewitched. "She's amazing, isn't she?" Jaden asked with a wink. Don smiled back at the pretty little redhead and said, "I think that might not be strong enough. Are you a regular here?" She smiled back. "I'm here pretty often. I heard some of the story you were telling India. It sounds very hot. I'd love to visit that place. Is it far from here?" "I'm afraid so," he nodded. "I'd offer to take you there, but our flying carpet is broken." "A flying carpet? I've never seen one of those," she frowned a bit. "Why does it sound so funny?" Don looked at her carefully, thinking again about how much people remembered from their lives outside Eros. Apparently Jaden didn't remember that magic wasn't supposed to work, but somehow managed to hold onto the notion that a flying carpet was somehow wrong. While all of this was going on, they had followed India down to the thick grass of the floor and to the open lawn-like area spread out in front of the club's entrance, where there were six large colorful blankets arranged in a circle around a thick, squat wooden post with a flat top. Don was quite positive those blankets and that post had not been there when he and Victor had come in, and it looked like that post was set quite firmly into the ground. "Oh, the spinner game!" Jaden said happily. India smiled warmly at her redheaded friend and walked toward the post, which came up to just under her full breasts. She beckoned to Don, who was quite happy to come closer. He saw that there was a very basic spinner, like the kind you would use to play a game of Twister, on the top of the post. Beneath the spinning arrow, the top of the post was clearly divided by thick black lines into six sectors corresponding to the six blankets. "The women go to a blanket, then the men spin and go play with that woman," India explained. She held up a good-sized hourglass, which she seemed to produce out of thin air, and said, "When time is up, they stop and come spin again." Don nodded and grinned, "Sounds like fun." "It is!" India smiled back. "Now, how many people do we have?" Both Don and India looked around and did a quick head count. There turned out to be six guys, including Don and Victor, and eight women, including India, Jaden and Vixen, who was now pretty much naked, just like everyone else. "I'll keep the time," India decided, and then said, "Rain and Lena do you mind sharing?" The trim brunette with the long dancer's legs and the curvy blonde with very long straight hair looked at each other, giggled a bit and said no, quickly moving together to claim one of the blankets. The other women each took a place, as India explained the simple rules to the guys. "When I call 'time' you have to stop," she said seriously, but with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. "Don and Victor, it's your first time, so you go first." Don gestured for Victor to go ahead, and then watched as the big guy spun the little metal arrow, which finally stopped on the sector matching up with a gorgeous woman with an amazing body and long black hair with silver streaks running through it. While Don had to admit that there was no losing in this little game, he hoped he didn't have to wait too many turns to get paired up with that beauty. Don spun the arrow and found himself paired with an adorable woman with beautiful full breasts, thick red hair, sparkling eyes and an infectious smile. She flashed Don a big grin as he came toward her, and said, "Hello there," with an unmistakable Australian accent. "Hi," he smiled, and then added, "I'm Don." She looked him over in a very friendly way and said, "Pleased to meet you, Don. I'm Bella." Don was vaguely aware that there was a bit of a hold up as one of the guys had to spin again. "Sometimes we just play that you go wherever the spinner sends you, but India seems to want to make sure things are evened out – for now, anyway," Bella explained. Somehow Don was picking up on a bubbly enthusiasm in her voice. Don took the time to notice that counterclockwise, to his left, the next blanket had Vixen and the one after that had Jaden, each of whom were paired up with a male Jungle Room guest. To his right, or clockwise around the circle, were a blanket with a staggering beauty with long brown hair and then the blanket with Lena and Rain, each blanket also now graced by a guy. Victor and his partner were directly opposite Don and Bella on the circle. "OK," India called, "time starts ... now!" Bella wasted no time, stepping up to Don and slipping her arms around him. He felt her soft breasts pressed against his belly as he leaned his head down to kiss her upturned lips. She responded eagerly, opening her mouth for his tongue and pulling him even closer to her. Don felt his cock rising between them, and then Bella's hand slipping around to take hold of it, pulling and caressing it. It was hard to tell whether Bella was drawing him down or he was lowering her to the blanket, but somehow they ended up lying together, still kissing passionately. His hand moved up between her smooth thighs and his fingers were stroking her outer lips, already moist with her nectar, while her hand continued to move up and down on his now very hard cock with a tight grip. Don's fingers slipped between her lips and began to push up into Bella's warm pussy. He was very happy that she was so wet already. He worked his fingers slowly up into her, pausing for a moment to find and tease her clit with the end of his thumb. She groaned into his mouth and squeezed his cock still tighter. Don pushed his fingers further up into her, pressing his palm against her clit. As he began to fuck his fingers in and out of her grasping pussy his palm ground against her clit. When they finally broke their kiss for a bit of air, Bella gasped, "Fuck!" Don smiled and leaned in to kiss and bite at her neck, which elicited a low, "God, I love that!" Around him, Don could hear the sounds of other women and men beginning to get quite worked up. It was a heady situation. Then Bella was saying in his ear, "You need to fuck me with this big cock of yours, Don." Don was about to say, "It would be my pleasure," when India's voice called out, "Time!" Don left Bella with a smile and a kiss, and returned to India at the post. This time Don went first, and was pleased to be directed to the blanket on which Jaden reclined, waiting. On his left, counterclockwise, was the gorgeous woman he'd noticed earlier, along with one of the guys Don didn't know; on the right was Vixen and another guy. Don made a mental note that he should start paying more attention to men's names. None of this mental orientation and reflection distracted him from the woman at hand. As he knelt down between her long, slender legs, Don smiled at Jaden and said, "At long last." Everyone must have quickly spun and sorted things out, because India shortly called, "Begin!" Don grinned at Jaden as he leaned over her reclining body to give her a kiss. He planned to make it brief, but she wasn't having it; she kissed him hard and long, hungrily even. Don didn't even think of resisting, but leaned down further, on his hands and knees over her, until she was lying back on the blanket beneath him. When their kiss broke for a moment, Don took the opportunity to begin kissing his way down her lithe body. He was tempted to linger over her beautiful breasts, but had another destination in mind and was very much aware of the time slipping by, so he moved down along her firm belly until he was kissing the tops of her firm, smooth thighs. Jaden spread her legs open for him as Don settled between them, planting kisses on the sensitive skin on the insides of her upper thighs and then, lightly, on her exposed labia. He felt her shiver in anticipation, and then heard her moan lowly when he ran his tongue over her. Don gently parted her lips with his fingertips and moved his tongue up along her moist inner lips, brushing it over the tip of her clit as he finished. He repeated this, and then again. He felt Jaden's hand on his head then, encouraging him to dine more enthusiastically. Don smiled to himself and began pressing his tongue against her harder, focusing more and more on her sensitive clit. Hearing Jaden murmuring approval as she began to rock her hips against the pressure of his lips and tongue, Don began to work two fingers up into her very moist pussy. He kept licking at her clit, keeping the pressure on it, while he fucked his fingers in and out of her. It didn't take too much of this before Jaden cried out and pulled his head even closer to her. Don pushed his fingers deep into her pussy and sucked on her clit as her body clenched and shuddered around him. He felt slippery, sweet wetness covering the lower half of his face and his hand. "Oh, god!" Jaden breathed at last. Don slowly released her clit, but kept his fingers up inside her. He was about to see how quickly he could make her cum again, when India called, "Time!" Jaden managed to pull him in for another passionate kiss, which he was quite happy to let keep him from being among the first to spin this round. In fact, by the time he got up from the blanket, Victor was waiting to take his place with Jaden. Don thought Victor's big, muscular body and dark skin were an interesting contrast to Jaden's slender frame and relatively light complexion. Victor's cock was already quite hard, and Don suspected the two of them wouldn't wait long before getting right down to business. Don finally managed to get to India and the spinner. The beautiful mistress of the jungle smiled broadly at him and said, "Only one spot, Don. Go with Rain and Lena." Don thanked her with a smile, and quickly made it around to the blanket where the two women were waiting. They didn't let him lie down, but stopped him as he made it to the blanket, on their knees in front of him and smiling up at him. Don felt like he was in a porn scene as first the lovely blonde Lena, and then the pixie-ish brunette Rain, took his cock into her mouth, sucking it and teasing the underside with her tongue. When she didn't have his cock actually in her mouth, each girl was leaning in to kiss at the shaft or underneath to lick and suck at his balls. Occasionally, they stopped to both kiss and lick their way up his shaft and over his head, which led them to kiss each other playfully while Don watched. For once, Don was utterly oblivious to what was going on to either side of him. It didn't take much of this treatment before Don had his hands on their heads and was standing there fucking his straining cock in and out of first one pretty mouth and then the other. Although India had coaxed an intensely powerful orgasm out of him, Don felt sure that Lena and Rain were about to make him come in spectacular facial cum-shot fashion. They could sense his impending climax and stopped sucking him. Instead they smiled up at him as Lena pumped his cock in her fist and Rain caressed and squeezed his balls. "Time!" The girls dutifully, and all too promptly, stopped stimulating him with their hands, and Don gave a loud, heartfelt groan of frustration. Lena and Rain laughed and each gave the head of his cock a light kiss. Don leaned down to give them each a quick kiss before returning to India and her spinner. "Having fun, Don?" the beautiful India asked with more than a little mischief sparkling in her eyes. He nodded and said, "This is a very nice place!" "I am glad you think so," she smiled. Don took his turn flicking the spinner and was delighted to be directed to the blanket where the gorgeous woman with the amazing body and silver-streaked hair waited. He smiled as he approached, saying, "Hi, I'm Don." She smiled back at him and said, "Hello, Don. I'm Emmy." He thought her accent was Dutch or something like that. She reached out to him, slipped her warm hand around his waist and drew him down to her on the blanket. As he settled between her legs and smiled down into her cheerful eyes, she took his cock in her hand, pulling it down and getting it positioned just right. She said in his ear, hot breath on his neck, "I don't know about you, but I have had enough foreplay." Don nodded his agreement, but couldn't find any coherent thoughts to express as he pushed himself into Emmy's very warm and wet embrace. Lying there with their arms wrapped around each other and Emmy's legs pulling Don in, they began to kiss and fuck intently. Don was aware of her tongue and lips pressing and moving against his, and of her full breasts pressed against his chest as they moved, and of her arms and legs pulling him tighter to her, but the sensations of his cock sliding in and out of her strong, smooth pussy as it squeezed and pulled at him overrode everything else. Normally, Don made sure to work his body against his partner to make sure she was as stimulated as possible, but now Don was lost to his lust. He bent his back, gaining purchase with his knees and feet as he thrust with his legs, and held on to her shoulders, pulling her down on him. For her part, Emmy seemed just as intent on encouraging Don to ravish her. In fact, Emmy began to come first, shaking and trembling in Don's arms. Feeling her pussy pulling and squeezing at his cock sent him over the edge, and Don found himself shoving up into her hard as his cock erupted, pumping hot cum up into her pussy and womb. Don held on to Emmy for long minutes as they shook together moaning. Don felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked over to see India's lovely face framed by her thick, black hair. She was smiling fondly at both of them. She leaned in to kiss Don's cheek, and said, "That was beautiful. Let's all go over to the orgy bed." With a happy grin on his face, Don let India and Jaden help him up and lead him deeper into the Jungle Room, to the raised platform with cushions and pillows he had noticed earlier. Now he saw that there was a raised bolster along two edges, making it seem more like a very large couch or a day-bed on steroids. All fourteen of the people who had been involved in the spinner game, including India, tumbled in naked confusion onto the orgy bed. Jaden insisted on trying to "repay" Don for earlier, and, with some extremely talented oral ministrations, with her finger slipping up into his butt along the way, she quickly had his cock rock hard again. While she was so engaged, one of the other guys got behind her, coaxed her up on her knees and began to fuck her vigorously. Similarly, India took advantage of Don's position and straddled his face. Don immediately began to lick and suck at the dark beauty's sweet pussy and clit. The orgy, spurred on by the XYZ pumping in their veins as well as the erotic, torch lit jungle environment, went on for what must have been hours. Some of the people drifted off and some newcomers joined in, and Don lost count of how many women he had fucked, kissed and licked. Some moments stood out, of course: watching Jaden enthusiastically riding up and down Victor's thick cock; fucking Bella's tight ass while she had another cock in her pussy; fucking himself in and out of Vixen's very talented mouth and throat as Victor rammed into her pussy from behind; watching Emmy and Lena in a very hot 69... Then, as things were winding down, the guys who were still functioning ganged up on India, each one, and sometimes two at a time, taking their turns cumming inside and on the beautiful woman. Don sat back and watched happily, lost in a happy post-orgasmic daze, until everyone else was done. Then, he took his place between her legs. She smiled up at him sleepily, and murmured, "Yes, Don, fuck me." He nodded, and pushed his cock up into her very wet and slippery pussy, squeezing quite a bit of sticky white cum out of her as he did. Slowly and deliberately, he fucked himself into the jungle queen, holding onto her nearly limp, sweaty body, lightly kissing her full lips. She moaned as another in a very long line of orgasms swelled up inside her exhausted body, and Don pushed into her as his cock swelled and flooded her sex with his last cum of the night. Stroking her hair and kissing her forehead, Don laid her gently back on the bed. He was asleep before he was able to pull out of her. Don's Monks at the Abby of Records The Abbey of Records At the top of the rocky path, which had actually been occasionally augmented by actual steps cut into the stone of the mountainside, the little troop found something of an expansive, broad shelf. A stream fell tumbling down the mountain, and formed a rushing brook that cut across the shelf in front of them, running right to left, on its way to join in the wide lake that dominated the level area.  For the most part, the place looked like a well-tended park or picnic ground. On the other side of the brook was the other distinctive feature of the green shelf: a stone building, or a tight complex of buildings, from which sprouted a tall tower of pinkish stone. Toshia thought the building, or buildings around the base of the tower resembled a monastery more than anything else. As for the tower itself, with its coloration, and the way the upper stories swelled out to accommodate a larger space at the top, it was rather obviously phallic. That's a bit heavy handed, she thought to herself. Although, after their sweaty climb, which had taken several hours, the sight of that beautiful lake, and the thought of a swim, was quite appealing, Don and Toshia led the little troop straight for the bridge that spanned the brook and carried the path they were on toward the tower. As they approached, Toshia was surprised to see that there was a large, very dark-skinned man standing there, barring the way onto the bridge. She was pretty sure he hadn't been there a moment before. He had thick muscles, stood at least two meters tall, and was leaning on a very large and shiny sword. Of course, he also had a prodigious cock and a pair of heavy balls hanging between his legs. None of them had had any kind of play since they had convened by the pool that morning, prior to leaving the Resort by way of the now rather cooperative gate, so Toshia wasn't at all surprised that she found herself thinking she would like to see if this big, black fellow was as good a fuck as she imagined he must be. He didn't look like he was there to offer sex, though. When they got close enough, the big man held up his hand and said, "Halt." Naturally enough, Toshia thought, he had a deep, sexy bass voice. "Hello," Don offered. "We would like to visit the tower." "The tower is not open to all," the man said impassively. "To whom is it open?" Toshia asked. "To members of the Order and to eligible pilgrims." Toshia got the sense that making these pronouncements was the whole point of this man's existence. He intoned his lines as if he was an actor with a small cameo part that he would nevertheless act the hell out of. Don frowned a moment before saying, "We're pilgrims. We need to speak with the Sage of the Tower." The big, black man said nothing for a long moment as he looked the party over carefully. He fixed each of them with his inscrutable dark eyes as if he was examining their souls, or at least reading their minds. Finally, he said, "Three of you may pass." Don asked, "Do you mean the three of us?" as he indicated himself, Toshia and Nicole. The impassive guard nodded once. "Good guess," Toshia whispered. "It just seemed to make sense," Don muttered. "What are our friends supposed to do?" Toshia asked, but the man didn't even bother to shrug. "We could wait by the lake," Shelonda suggested. Toshia was about to say that was a good idea, but Amy chimed in, asking, "How long will you be?" "That's a very good question," Don nodded. Shelonda frowned and then offered, "Why don't we go for a swim, and if you're not back when we're done, we'll just go back down to the Resort and you can come meet us there?" "I like that idea," Amy grinned. Toshia suspected Amy would be quite happy to give up their little quest and stay at the Resort indefinitely. "The Resort's a big place," Victor observed quietly. "That's right," Don nodded. "Why don't we try checking in with the Sheriff? You guys stop in and tell her where you're going, and we'll ask her where you are." "I'm not sure the sheriff will appreciate that," Toshia thought, but nobody else had any better ideas, so the sextet split into two groups – Amy, Shelonda and Victor heading off to swim in the lake, as Don, Nicole and Toshia slipped past the muscular guard and crossed the wooden bridge. There was no sign or any other indication of where they should go, but they could only see one door: a heavy, wooden thing of dark brown, with a large metal knocker set in the middle of it. It struck Toshia just then that there was nothing at all sexual about this door, the wall it was set into, or the building attached to the wall, unless you counted the gigantic phallus sticking out of it, of course. Toshia reached out and lifted the clapper and let it fall. There was a very loud bang on their side of the door. After a long moment, she banged again. "Maybe nobody's home," Nicole offered. Don opened his mouth to respond to this, but before he could speak, the door swung open. A young man with blond, disheveled hair and striking blue eyes peered around the door at them. He was wearing a brown robe, like what Toshia imagined monks wore, only this one looked like it had been thrown on in a great hurry; the belt around his waist was only loosely tied, and the brown hood fell around his shoulders in obvious disarray. "Um, hello," the young man said, "welcome to the Abbey. Please come in." "Thank you," Don nodded, as he led the way through the doorway. They were admitted into a comfortable but simple foyer, where half a dozen other brown-robed young adults assembled hastily to greet them. They were a mix of men and women, but they were all in the same state of muss as the fellow who had opened the door. Toshia could well imagine what they had been up to before she'd banged on their front door. "We're looking for the Sage," Don announced. "Yes, of course," said a voice from behind the small crowd of young people, who quickly parted to let the speaker come forward. This was a tall Asian gentleman who definitely looked more like a monk than the others. He was older for one thing, and seemed to have a more serene and unruffled demeanor. He smiled at Toshia and the others and said, "Welcome to the Abbey of Records, we will be happy to conduct you to the Sage. However, we have something of a ritual we would ask you to follow." "What sort of ritual?" Toshia asked, remembering the rite they had participated in the night after they had left the Manor. She couldn't decide at the moment if she was more titillated or leery of such a prospect. The tall man smiled and said, "Nothing alarming, I assure you. First we would offer to refresh you after your climb – a bath and some food and water. Then it is our custom to interview you in some detail about your experiences here in Eros." Don and Toshia conferred silently by means of a quickly shared glance and barely visible shrugs. They both seemed to think that Nicole would go along with whatever they decided. Toshia smiled back at the tall man and said, "Some refreshment would be very nice, thank you." The man bowed a bit, and said, "Alan, please attend to our guests. I will prepare the scribes." The young man who had opened the door bowed lower and said, "Yes, sir." He then turned to Toshia and her friends and said, "If you'll follow me..." They followed Alan as he led them into the Abbey and down a series of corridors, all as simple, even rustic, as the foyer. The half dozen brown-robed ... Toshia wasn't sure what to call them ... followed along in a hushed but clearly excited train. Finally, they came to a wide, open sunlit courtyard with an array of big stone basins cut into the floor. Each basin was filled with clear water (of the XYZ variety, of course) that sparkled in the midday sun. There was a profusion of flowers all around the courtyard, filling the area with bright colors and pleasant scents. A young woman with dark red hair and freckles smiled almost shyly at Toshia as she took her by the arm and gently led her toward a water-filled tub to the left. Toshia noticed that Don and Nicole were each being taken to nearby, but separate, tubs. "May I help you out of your clothes?" the little redhead asked. "Certainly," Toshia smiled. It only took a moment before her sandals and dress were discarded and Toshia was slipping into the warm bathwater. The redhead quickly tossed her brown robe off over her head and joined her, bringing along some soap and a big sponge. Toshia just relaxed and enjoyed the attention as the girl began scrubbing at her skin. She only smiled as the pretty blond Alan stripped down and joined them, helping by washing Toshia's hair. Toshia hadn't been so well cleaned or so pampered since leaving the Manor, and there was no question that it felt very good indeed. Of course, the combination of being immersed in XYZ, the presence of the two sexy, naked bodies, and the way her body was being touched and stroked, soon had Toshia thinking mischievously. Her hands began to move up along the strong legs of her bathers. She slipped her hands up and around to give each of their bottoms a squeeze. The redhead's breast was in Toshia's face then, and she went ahead and gave the ruddy little nipple a kiss. At about the same time, her hand managed to find Alan's half erect cock, so she began to squeeze and pull on that. The two young people laughed happily and began to caress Toshia's body more playfully. Soon the girl was squatting down in the water next to Toshia, with her sponge moving purposefully between Toshia's legs; Alan was standing in front of Toshia with his now quite hard cock standing out in front of him as he carefully, but thoroughly rinsed Toshia's hair; and, Toshia, meanwhile, busied herself kissing and sucking on the purple head of that sex organ as she worked her left hand up between the redhead's legs to stroke her lips and clit under the water. The girl leaned in to help Toshia with Alan's cock, kissing along the shaft, and reaching up to fondle his balls with her free hand. The sponge was doing wonderful work under the water as the redhead rubbed it back and forth over Toshia's pussy and clit, and Toshia had to concentrate to move her own fingers productively. She shifted a bit so that she could slip two of her fingers up inside the redhead's pussy, letting her palm take care of keeping pressure and friction on the girl's clit. This left her freer to concentrate on Alan's cock. Toshia took hold of the base of Alan's cock with her right hand and began to suck on his broad head more deliberately. She enjoyed the sensation of having it fill her mouth, moving over her lips and tongue. As she felt her body responding to the sponge between her legs and the oral stimulation of sucking Alan's cock, she began to suck him harder and faster, her hand pumping the base of his shaft as the redhead continued to kiss his balls and groaned now and then as Toshia's fingers fucked in and out of her. As it turned out, the redhead was the first to come, gasping and whimpering as she clung to Toshia's shoulder and Alan's leg. Alan followed soon after, his fingers tangled in Toshia's hair and the redhead's, his body shuddering, and his cock spewing hot cum into Toshia's mouth and down her throat. Toshia was still swallowing hungrily, when she felt her own orgasm ripping through her body in waves of bright ecstasy. She held onto Alan's cock and kept sucking on it until she could open her eyes and catch her breath. Then, with a smile and a kiss, she let it go and took a moment to look around. In the tub closest to hers, Toshia saw that Don had slid down in the water so that his head was resting on a towel on the lip of his tub, and a naked woman was – somewhat precariously – kneeling over his mouth, enjoying the oral treatment Toshia now knew so well. At the same time, a very generously buxom young woman was riding up and down on Don's lap; while smiling happily and squeezing her own big tits tightly. A bit further away, Nicole was bent over the edge of her own tub as a particularly well-muscled young man fucked in and out of her from behind. Toshia could clearly see that Nicole had cum splattered over her face – no doubt contributed by the gentleman who was now running a sponge over Nicole's back. Just then Toshia's attention was drawn closer to home, as a robed woman with dark brown hair and a warm smile knelt down next to her with a platter bearing a selection of fruit and a tall glass of water. "Ah, thank you," Toshia smiled, as she took an apple and the glass. By the time Toshia had eaten half her apple, Nicole was being served fruit and water. By the time she was done with the apple and finishing off her water, Don was coming up for air and being offered refreshment. As Toshia finished her drink, the girl who had helped bathe her and more took the apple core and glass from her. Alan helped her out of the tub and proceeded to dry her with a nicely soft towel. She looked around then for her clothes, but was being presented with a grey robe, which was more like a bathrobe than the monkish ones the others were wearing. "We thought you wouldn't mind if we washed your clothes for you while you're here," said the smiling woman who had brought Toshia fruit. In short order, all three of them had been fed and watered, and were wearing comfortable grey robes. Apparently sex time was over for now, and they were led back into the Abbey, where they were met again by the tall Asian man. He offered them a friendly smile and said, "In the interest of a more accurate report, we would ask that you each be interviewed separately. We have three scribes ready to begin, if you don't mind." Toshia was conducted into a comfortable room that she thought could best be described as a study. There was a plain, but nice, wooden desk, a window high up on the wall facing the door that let in warm afternoon sunshine, a couch, and what looked like a comfortable easy chair. Sitting on the other side of the desk, at an old fashioned typewriter, was a man with a darkish Mediterranean complexion, and warm brown eyes. His head was shaved, but he had a dark black mustache and goatee. He rose as Toshia entered, showing that he was rather tall. Like the others he was wearing a brown robe. He leaned forward over the desk and extended his hand, saying, "Good afternoon. My name is Esteban." "Pleased to meet you, Esteban," she smiled as she shook his hand, a little amused at the sudden manners after just having engaged in a little orgy with complete strangers. "I'm Toshia." "That's a very pretty name," Esteban smiled. "Is it short for... No? Very good. Please make yourself comfortable." As Toshia considered her options, her escort retired back into the hallway without a word, and without closing the door behind him. She supposed this was intended to reassure her and her friends. Smiling a little to herself, Toshia decided to sit in the easy chair. When she took her seat, Esteban likewise sat down in front of his typewriter, and raised his hands over it, laying his fingers lightly on the keys. "We have some basic questions to ask to begin," he said with another charming smile. "First, though, how do you spell your name?" After Toshia told him, he asked, "What is the last thing you remember before waking up in Eros?" Toshia was a little surprised at this question, but said, "Going to bed with my girlfriend, Sarah." Esteban's fingers flew over the keyboard quickly. "Was that at night?" "Yes." "Was there anything special or distinctive about that evening?" His English was perfectly clear, though he had a noticeable Hispanic accent. "Not that I can recall." "Did you have sex that night?" "Um, why do you ask?" Esteban shrugged and offered her another sympathetic smile, "These are just the questions we're supposed to ask." "Who says you're supposed to ask?" "The Sage," he answered as if he expected that to deal with any and all objections. "What was the last thing you remember before waking up in Eros?" she tried. "I'm afraid I don't remember anything," he said, for the first time not smiling as he looked at her. "I only found out that people sometimes remember such things after I had been here quite some time." "Does that bother you?" He paused thoughtfully before saying, "It makes me curious." "No," Toshia said after a moment. Then she added, "We did not have sex." "How long had it been since you had sex before that night?" "I'm not sure. A couple of weeks, I think." Toshia frowned. At the time she hadn't been particularly aware of how long it had been, but now, after the last couple of weeks in Eros, "a couple of weeks without sex" sounded like a very long time indeed. "Thank you," Esteban said. "Now, please tell me about your experience when you first woke up here." Toshia proceeded to tell the story of how she and Don woke up together in the Manor. Esteban prompted her to explain her pre-Eros relationship with Don: Had they ever had sex? How would she characterize her feelings for him? How long had it been since they had seen each other? He seemed genuinely interested, and his fingers typed at an amazing rate without any hint of getting tired. Toshia explained how they had started exploring that bedroom and about the Nymphets dropping out of the ceiling. Esteban encouraged her to describe the girls as well as she was able, and then asked for details about her first sexual encounter in Eros. Toshia found herself smiling a bit as she recalled the orgasm Virginia had cheerfully given her, as well as the sight of Don playing with all three of the girls. She eventually got to tell how she had slipped away and found the secret door. As she got the hang of the level of detail and narrative Esteban was looking for, Toshia was able to move along a bit more quickly, without being stopped for additional detail. She gradually began to feel free to include the occasional aside and observation. While she was telling the story about the dodge ball game Toshia realized she was enjoying herself. By the time she got to the Ball, and her first little orgy, in that little side room with Lilith, Toshia realized she was getting rather wet. She pressed her thighs together under her robe, and tried to concentrate on telling the story. When she got to the point in her story in which she was alone with the Lord in his room, Esteban began to press her for more details, about her mental and emotional state – "What were you feeling and thinking when you were watching Don through the mirror?"; "What was it like to have such intense one-on-one sex with a man you'd only just met?" and Toshia found herself extremely horny. She couldn't tell which thing was arousing her more: the XYZ in her system, reliving her first day in Eros in such detail, or Esteban's friendly but, almost professionally, detached interest. Also, perhaps thanks to remembering the Player and his companions, Toshia found herself in a particularly mischievous mood. So, rather than simply throw off her robe and throw herself at Esteban, which struck her as a particularly good idea at the moment, Toshia leaned back in her chair and put one of her feet up on the edge of the desk in front of her, letting her robe fall open around her naked leg. She began to idly run her fingers up and down along her thigh as she continued answering Esteban's questions. As she told how the Lord had first entered her and began to fuck her with his big cock, Toshia parted her legs further and let her fingers lightly play over her pussy, which was now exposed to Esteban's view. By the time she got to the part where she asked the Lord to cum in her mouth, Toshia's fingers had slipped between her labia, to smear her wetness over her eager little clit. She kept telling the story as her fingers alternated between stroking her clit and pushing further and further up into her very moist vagina. By the time she told how she had the Lord lie on his back and then mounted his cock, Toshia was fucking herself with three fingers and frantically stroking at her clit with the other hand. Esteban was watching her intently, without for a moment pausing in his typing. She had definitely come to enjoy showing off almost as much as she enjoyed watching others. "I rode him there like that, on top ... on top of him, his cock fucking in and out of ... in and out of me ... until I started to come and come. Damn," she breathed, feeling her orgasm approaching quickly. "Then, he rolled us over and ... he pulled out and came all over... Oh, fuck!" Then she was unable to speak, as her teeth clenched and her body tensed, pushing her back against her chair as her leg pushed off against the desk. She came in a long rolling wave of ecstatic thunder pounding in her veins. She shoved her fingers deep up inside herself and kept stroking her clit until she could take no more and then collapsed back on the chair with a heavy sigh and a happy grin. After a moment to catch her breath, she said, "Then he carried me into the bathroom where he and a lovely young man bathed me before tucking me into bed." "That was all one day?" Esteban asked, apparently not too distracted by Toshia's display to continue working. "Not even a whole day," Toshia smiled. She didn't make any move to cover herself, but continued to idly toy with herself as she narrated the events of the following day. By the time she got to the story of the disco, she had shrugged herself out of her robe, and was casually caressing her naked body, flaunting it in front of Esteban, who certainly made no sign of objection. She was describing the atmosphere in the dancing pit of the disco, when she decided that enough was enough. It didn't help her patience that she had long since been aware of sex noises coming from other rooms nearby. She asked abruptly, "Don't you ever take a break?" Esteban smiled broadly and said, "Only when the interviewee requests one." "Oh, well, I'm requesting one!" she laughed. "Come over here." In another moment, Esteban was standing in front of her with his robe held up and his cock in Toshia's mouth. Although she planned to make him cum right then and there, he pushed her back, and knelt down between her legs. He pressed his mouth to her pussy; the thick black hair of his mustache and goatee felt strange against her skin after so many partners without any facial or pubic hair. Esteban certainly knew what he was doing, and in only a minute or two she was gasping and moaning with another orgasm. He didn't waste much time, then, in rising up on his knees and inching forward to press the head of his cock between her lips. Still shivering from her orgasm, Toshia nodded her approval and reached out for his hips to pull him closer. Without bothering to take off his robe Esteban pushed the full length of his hard cock up inside her, as he ran his warm hands over her body. When he cupped her breasts in his hands, Toshia moaned and wrapped her legs around him, pulling him tightly into her. He continued to squeeze and caress her tits as he began to move himself in and out of her pussy, all the while watching her face intently. Toshia lay back against the chair, arching her back and rocking herself on his cock, looking back up at him with half closed eyes. His robe fell between their bodies and contributed to the stimulation of her clit. She was having a series of little orgasms as they fucked, but when she felt his cock swelling inside her she felt another big, intense, body-racking one hit her. She was moaning and trembling as his cum flooded her pussy, and Esteban sagged over her in happy satisfaction. Toshia smiled up at him impishly, and said, "Thank you very much. I think all jobs should feature that kind of a break." Somehow, knowing that she could stop the proceedings at any point and have sex with her handsome scribe made it a bit easier for Toshia to get on with, and concentrate on the telling of, her story. She got through the orgy in the steam room, before straddling Esteban on his typing chair and riding him to another orgasm as he kissed, bit, licked and sucked at her nipples. After she described the ball, their exit from the Manor, and the intense rite with her being fucked senseless by the guardian of the p

Recorded on Jan 17, 2024 in London, UK. Video version available hereWhat makes so many predictions about the future of AI wrong?And what's possible with the current paradigm?From medical imaging to song recommendations, the association-based paradigm of learning can be helpful, but is not sufficient to answer our most interesting questions.Meet Athanasios (Thanos) Vlontzos who looks for inspirations everywhere around him to build causal machine learning and causal inference systems at Spotify's Advanced Causal Inference Lab.In the episode we discuss:- Why is causal discovery a better riddle than causal inference?- Will radiologists be replaced by AI in 2024 or 2025?- What are causal AI skeptics missing?- Can causality emerge in Euclidean latent space? Ready to dive in? About The GuestAthanasios (Thanos) Vlontzos, PhD is a Research Scientist at Advanced Causal Inference Lab at Spotify. Previousl;y, he worked at Apple, at SETI Institute with NASA stakeholders and published in some of the best scientific journals, including Nature Machine Learning. He's specialized in causal modeling, causal inferernce, causal discovery and medical imaging. Connect with Athanasios:- Athanasios on Twitter/X- Athanasios on LinkedIn- Athanasios's web pageAbout The HostAleksander (Alex) Molak is an independent machine learning researcher, educator, entrepreneur and a best-selling author in the area of causality. Connect with Alex:- Alex on the InternetLinksThe full list of links can be found here.Support the Show.Causal Bandits PodcastCausal AI || Causal Machine Learning || Causal Inference & DiscoveryWeb: https://causalbanditspodcast.comConnect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandermolak/Join Causal Python Weekly: https://causalpython.io The Causal Book: https://amzn.to/3QhsRz4

Get ready for a truly chilling tale that will make you think twice about taking a nap. On today's episode, our host JJ goes deep into the nightmarish realm of demonic dream invasions. We're talking about visions so vivid and terrifying, they'll make your skin crawl. From a withered demon whisking him away to see the apocalypse up close...to an eight-foot crow beast with spiraling eyes of madness hunting him through non-Euclidean labyrinths. Just when you think it can't get any more spine-tingling, JJ gets visited by a trilogy of fresh hell in March 2024. A desert piled with smoldering corpses ruled by a leather-clad demoness who casually flays the skin off his face...a sickly yellow "angel" infecting his very brain...and a multi-headed dragon monstrosity slaughtering people left and right in a sacred church. You'll feel the pain and anguish as vividly as he did, all through the terrible magic of dreams. To top it off, you'll hear from religious experts weighing in on whether there are diabolical forces at play.Brace yourselves, folks. This one is a true nightmare fueled by over 40 years of chronic nightmares. Sleep with one eye open after this bone-chilling edition!See the TikTok video that reminded JJ of his experience in Japan and made him throw his phone across the room: https://www.tiktok.com/@kowazo_horror/video/7253276661620165889Watch JJ's interview on Demonology in the Hebrew Bible with Nicholean TV: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E986d4Yl_M8Get access to all of Southern Demonology's links at https://www.southerndemonology.com Get bonus content on PatreonSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/southerndemonology. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I read from eucalyptus to eudaemonism.     Euchre was responsible for introducing the joker into the modern deck of cards, first appearing in Euchre packs in the 1850s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euchre     It seems like Euclidean geometry is the main geometry we learn in school. Are there more geometries?!  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_geometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean     The word of the episode is "eudaemonism". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudaimonia     Theme music from Tom Maslowski https://zestysol.com/     Merchandising! https://www.teepublic.com/user/spejampar     "The Dictionary - Letter A" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter B" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter C" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter D" on YouTube   "The Dictionary - Letter E" on YouTube     Featured in a Top 10 Dictionary Podcasts list! https://blog.feedspot.com/dictionary_podcasts/     Backwards Talking on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmIujMwEDbgZUexyR90jaTEEVmAYcCzuq     https://linktr.ee/spejampar dictionarypod@gmail.com https://www.facebook.com/thedictionarypod/ https://www.threads.net/@dictionarypod https://twitter.com/dictionarypod https://www.instagram.com/dictionarypod/ https://www.patreon.com/spejampar https://www.tiktok.com/@spejampar 917-727-5757

Joël discusses the challenges he encountered while optimizing slow SQL queries in a non-Rails application. Stephanie shares her experience with canary deploys in a Rails upgrade. Together, Stephanie and Joël address a listener's question about replacing the wkhtml2pdf tool, which is no longer maintained. The episode's main topic revolves around the concept of multidimensional numbers and their applications in software development. Joël introduces the idea of treating objects containing multiple numbers as single entities, using the example of 2D points in space to illustrate how custom classes can define mathematical operations like addition and subtraction for complex data types. They explore how this approach can simplify operations on data structures, such as inventories of T-shirt sizes, by treating them as mathematical objects. EXPLAIN ANALYZE visualizer (https://explain.dalibo.com/) Canary in a coal mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentinel_species#Canaries) Episode 413: Developer Tales of Package Management (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/413) Docs for media-specific CSS (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media) Episode 386: Value Objects Revisited: The Tally Edition (https://bikeshed.thoughtbot.com/386) Money gem (https://github.com/RubyMoney/money) Transcript: STEPHANIE: Hello and welcome to another episode of The Bike Shed, a weekly podcast from your friends at thoughtbot about developing great software. I'm Stephanie Minn. JOËL: And I'm Joël Quenneville. And together, we're here to share a bit of what we've learned along the way. STEPHANIE: So, Joël, what's new in your world? JOËL: I've recently been trying to do some performance enhancements to some very slow queries. This isn't a Rails app, so we're sort of combining together a bunch of different scopes. And the way they're composing together is turning out to be really slow. And I've reached for a tool that is just really fun. It's a visualizer for SQL query plans. You can put the SQL keywords in front of a query: 'EXPLAIN ANALYZE,' and it will then output a query plan, sort of how it's going to attempt to do the work. And that might be like, oh, we're going to use this index on this table to join on this other thing, and then we're going to...maybe this is a table that we think we're going to do a sequential scan through and, you know, it builds out a whole thing. It's a big block of text, and it's kind of intimidating to look at. So, there are a few websites out there that will do this. You just paste a query plan in, and they will build you a nice, little visualization, almost like a tree of, like, tasks to be done. Oftentimes, they'll also annotate it with metadata that they pulled from the query plan. So, oh, this particular node is the really expensive one because we're doing a sequential scan of this table that has 15 million rows in it. And so, it's really useful to then sort of pinpoint what are the areas that you could optimize. STEPHANIE: Nice. I have known that you could do that EXPLAIN ANALYZE on a SQL query, but I've never had to do it before. Is this your first time, or is it just your first time using the visualizer? JOËL: I've played around with EXPLAIN ANALYZE a little bit before. Pro tip: In Rails, if you've got a scope, you can just chain dot explain on the end, and instead of running the query, it will run the EXPLAIN version of it and return the query plan. So, you don't need to, like, turn into SQL then manually run it in your database system to get the EXPLAIN. You can just tack a dot explain on there to get the query plan. It's still kind of intimidating, especially if you've got a really complex query that's...this thing might be 50 lines long of EXPLAIN with all this indentation and other stuff. So, putting it into a sort of online visualizer was really helpful for the work that I was doing. So, it was my first time using an online visualizer. There are a few out there. I'll link to the one that I used in the show notes. But I would do that again, would recommend. STEPHANIE: Nice. JOËL: So, Stephanie, what's new in your world? STEPHANIE: So, I actually just stepped away from being in the middle of doing a Rails upgrade [chuckles] and releasing it to production just a few minutes before getting on to record with you on this podcast. And the reason I was able to do that, you know, without feeling like I had to just monitor to see how it was going is because I'm on a project where the client is using canary deploys. And I was so pleasantly surprised by how easy it made this experience where we had decided to send the canary release earlier this morning. And the way that they have it set up is that the canary goes to 10% of traffic. 10% of the users were on Rails 7 for their sessions. And we saw a couple of errors in our error monitoring service. And we are like, "Okay, like, let's take a look at this, see what's going on." And it turns out it was not too big of a deal because it had to do with, like, a specific page. And, for the most part, if a user did encounter this error, they probably wouldn't again after refreshing because they had, like, a 90% chance [chuckles] of being directed to the previous version where everything is working. And we were kind of making that trade-off of like, oh, we could hotfix this right now on the canary release. But then, as we were starting to debug a little bit, it was a bit hairier than we expected originally. And so, you know, I said, "I have to hop on to go record The Bike Shed. So, why don't we just take this canary down just for the time being to take that time pressure off? And it's Friday, so we're heading into the weekend. And maybe we can revisit the issue with some fresh eyes." So, I'm feeling really good, actually. And I'm glad that we were able to do something that seems scary, but there were guardrails in place to make it a lot more chill. JOËL: Yay for the ability to roll back. You used the term canary release. That's not one that I'm familiar with. Can you explain what a canary release is? STEPHANIE: Oh yeah. Have you heard of the phrase 'Canary in the coal mine'? JOËL: I have. STEPHANIE: Okay. So, I believe it's the same idea where you are, in this case, releasing a potentially risky change, but you don't want to immediately make it available to, like, all of your users. And so, you send this change to, like, a small reach, I suppose, and give it a little bit of a test and see [chuckles] what comes back. And that can help inform you of any issues or risks that might happen before kind of committing to deploying a potentially risky change with a bigger impact. JOËL: Is this handled with something like a feature flag framework? Or is this, like, at an infrastructure level where you're just like, "Hey, we've got the canary image in, like, one container on one server, and then we'll redirect 10% of traffic to that to be served by that one and the other 90% to be served by the old container or something like that"? STEPHANIE: Yeah, in this case, it was at the infrastructure level. And I have also seen something similar at a feature flag level, too, where you're able to have some more granularity around what percent of users are seeing a feature. But I think with something like a Rails upgrade, it was nice to be able to have that at that infrastructure level. It's not necessarily, like, a particular page or feature to show or not show. JOËL: Yeah, I think you would probably want that at a higher level when you're changing over the entire app. Is this something that you had to custom-build yourself or something that just sort of came out of the box with some of the infrastructure tools you're using? STEPHANIE: It came out of the box, actually. I just joined this client project this week and was very delighted to see just some really great deployment infrastructure and getting to meet the DevOps engineers, too, who built it. And they're really proud of it. They kind of walked us through our first release earlier this week. And he was telling me, the DevOps engineer, that this was actually his favorite part of the job, is walking people through their first release and being their buddy while they do it. Because I think he gets to also see users interact with the tool that he built, and he had a lot of pride in that, so it was a very delightful experience. JOËL: That's so wonderful. I've been on so many projects where the sort of infrastructure side of things is not the team's strong point, and releasing can be really scary. And it's great to hear the opposite of that. We recently received a question for Stephanie based on an earlier episode. So, the question asks, "In episode 413, Stephanie discussed a recent issue she encountered with wkhtml2pdf. The episode turned into a deeper discussion about package management, but I don't think it ever cycled back to the conclusion. I'm curious: how did Stephanie solve this dilemma? We're facing the same issue on a project that my team maintains. It's an old codebase, and there are bits of old code that use wkhtml2pdf to generate print views of our data in our application. The situation is fairly dire. wkhtml2pdf is no longer maintained. In fact, it won't even be available to install from our operating system's package repositories in June. We're on FreeBSD, but I assume the same will be eventually true for other operating systems. And so, unless you want to maintain some build step to check out and compile the source code for an application that will no longer receive security updates, just living with it isn't really an option. There are three options we're considering. One, eliminate the dependency entirely. Based on user feedback, it sounds like our old developers were using this library to generate PDFs when what users really wanted was an easy way to print. So, instead of downloading a PDF, just ensure the screen has a good print style sheet and register an onload handler to call window dot print. We're thinking we could implement this as an A/B test to the feature to test this theory. Or two, replace wkhtml2pdf with a call to Headless Chrome and use that to generate the PDF. Or, three, replace wkhtml2pdf with a language-level package. For us, that might be the dompdf library available via Composer because we're a PHP shop." Yeah, a lot to unpack here. Any high-level thoughts, Stephanie? STEPHANIE: My first thought while I was listening to you read that question is that wkhtml2pdf is such a mouthful [laughs]. And I was impressed how you managed to say it at least, like, five times. JOËL: So, I try to say that five times fast. STEPHANIE: And then, my second high-level thought was, I'm so sorry to Brian, our listener who wrote in, because I did not really solve this dilemma [chuckles] for my project and team. I kind of kicked the can down the road, and that's because this was during a support and maintenance rotation that I've talked a little bit about before on the show. I was only working on this project for about a week. And what we thought was a small bug to figure out why PDFs were a little bit broken turned out, as you mentioned, to be this kind of big, dire dilemma where I did not feel like I had enough information to make a good call about what to do. So, I kind of just shared my findings that, like, hey, there is kind of a risk and hoping that someone else [laughs] would be able to make a better determination. But I really was struck by the options that you were considering because it was actually a bit of a similar situation to the bug I was sharing where the PDF that was being generated that was slightly broken. I don't think it was, like, super valuable to our users that it be in the form of a PDF. It really was just a way for them to print something to have on handy as a reference from, you know, some data that was generated from the app. So, yeah, based on what you're sharing, I feel really excited about the first one. Joël, I'm sure you have some opinions about this as well. JOËL: I love sort of the bigger picture thinking that Brian is doing here, sort of stepping back and being like, wait, why do we even need PDF here, and how are our customers using it? I think those are the really good questions to ask before sinking a ton of time into coming up with something that might be, like, a bit of a technical wonder. Like, hey, we managed to, like, do this PDF generation thing that we had to, like, cobble together so many other things. And it's so cool technically, but does it actually solve the underlying problem? So, shout out to Brian for thinking about it in those terms. I love that. Second cool thing that I wanted to shout out, because I think this is a feature of browsers that not many people are aware of; you can have multiple style sheets for your page, and you can tag them to be for different media. So, you can have a style sheet that only gets applied when you print versus when you display on screen. And there are a couple of others. I don't remember exactly what they are. I'll link to the docs in the show notes. But taking advantage of this, like, this is old technology but making that available and saying, "Yeah, we'll make it so that it's nice when you print, and we'll maybe even, you know, a link or a button with JavaScript so that you could just Command-P or Control-P to print. But we'll have a button in there as well that will allow you to print to PDF," and that solves your problem right there. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really cool. I didn't know that about being able to tag style sheets for different media types. That's really fascinating. And I like that, yeah, we're just eliminating this dependency on something, like, potentially really complex with a, hopefully, kind of elegant and modern solution, maybe. JOËL: And your browser is already able to do so many of these things. Why do we sort of try to recreate it? Printing is a thing browsers have been able to do for a long time. Printing to PDF is a thing that you can do for a long time. I will sometimes use that on sites where I need to, let's say I'm purchasing something, and I need some sort of receipt to expense, but they won't give me a download, a PDF download that I can send to the accounting team, so I will print to PDF the, like, HTML view. And that works just fine. It's kind of a workaround hack. Sometimes, it doesn't work well because the HTML page is just not well set up to, like, show up on a PDF page. You get some, like, weird, like, pagination issues or things like that. But, you know, just a little bit of thought for a print style sheet, especially for something you know that people are likely going to want to print or to save to PDF, that's a nice touch. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, good luck, Brian, and let us know how this goes and any outcomes you find successful. So, for today's longer topic, I was excited because I saw, Joël, you dropped something in our topic backlog: Multidimensional Numbers. I'm curious what prompted this idea and what you wanted to say about it. JOËL: We did an episode a while back where we talked about value objects, wrapping numbers, wrapping collections. This is Episode 386, and we were talking about tallying, specifically working with collections of T-shirt sizes and doing math on these sort of objects that might contain multiple numbers. And a sort of sidebar from that that we didn't really get into is the idea that objects that contain sort of multiple numbers can be treated as a number themselves. And I think a great example of this is something like a point in two-dimensional space. It's got an x coordinate, a y coordinate. It's two numbers, but you can treat sort of the combination of the two of them together as a single number. There's a whole set of coordinate math that you can do to do things like add coordinates together, subtract them, find the distance between them. There's a whole field of vector math that we can do on those. And I think learning to recognize that numbers are not just instances of the integer or the float class but that there could be these more complex things that are also numbers is maybe an important realization and something that, as developers, if we think of these sort of more complex values as numbers, or at least mathematical objects, then that will help us write better code. STEPHANIE: Cool. Yeah. When you were first talking about 2D points, I was thinking about if I have experience working with that before or, like, having to build something really heavily based off of, like, a canvas or, you know, a coordinate system. And I couldn't think of any really good examples until I thought about, like, geographic locations. JOËL: Oh yeah, like a latitude, longitude. STEPHANIE: Yeah, exactly. Like, that is a lot more common, I think, for various types of just, like, production applications than 2D points if you're not working on, like, a video game or something like that, I think. JOËL: Right, right. I think you're much more likely to be working with 2D points on some more sort of front-end-heavy application. I was talking with someone this week about managing a seat map for concerts and events like that and sort of creating a seat map and have it be really interactive, and you can, like, click on seats and things like that. And depending on the level of libraries you're using to build that, you may have to do a lot of 2D math to make it all come together. STEPHANIE: Yeah. So, I would love to get into, you know, maybe we've realized, okay, we have some kind of compound number. What are some good reasons for using them differently than you would a primitive? JOËL: So, you mentioned primitives, and I think this is where maybe I'm developing a reputation about, like, always wanting value objects for everything. But it would be really easy, let's say, for an xy point to be just an array of two numbers or maybe even a hash with an x key and a y key. What's tricky about that is that then you don't have the ability to do math on them. Arrays do define the plus operator, but they don't do what you want them to do with points. It's the set union. So, adding two points would not at all do what you want, or subtracting two points. So, instead, if you have a custom 2D point class and you can define plus and minus on there to do the right thing, now they're not pairs of numbers, two values; they're a single value, and you can treat them as if they are just a single number. STEPHANIE: You mentioned that arrays don't do the right thing when you try to add them up. What is the right thing that you're thinking of then? JOËL: It probably depends a little bit on the type of object you're working with. So, with 2D points, you're probably trying to do vector addition where you're effectively saying almost, like, "Shift this point in 2D space by the amount of this other point." Or if you're doing a subtraction, you might even be asking, like, "What is the distance between these two points?" Euclidean distance, I think, is the technical term for this. There's also a couple of different ways you can multiply values. You can multiply a 2D point by just a sort of, not by another point, but by just an integer. That's called scaling. So, you're just like, oh, take this point in 2D space, but make it bigger, make it five times bigger or five times further from the origin. Or you can do some stuff with other points. But what you don't want to do is turn this into, if you're starting with arrays, you don't want to turn this into an array of four points. When you add two points in 2D space, you're not trying to create a point in 4D space. STEPHANIE: Whoa, I mean [laughs], maybe you're not. JOËL: You could but -- [laughter] STEPHANIE: Yeah. While you were saying that, I guess that is what is really cool about wrapping, encapsulating them in objects is that you get to decide what that means for you and your application, and -- JOËL: Yeah. Well, plus can mean different things, right? STEPHANIE: Yeah. JOËL: On arrays, plus means combining two arrays together. On integers, it means you do integer math. And on points, it might be vector addition. STEPHANIE: Are there any other arithmetic operators you can think of that would be useful to implement if you were trying to create some functionality on a point? JOËL: That's a good question because I think realizing the inverse of that is also a really powerful thing. Just because you create a sort of new mathematical object, a point in 2D space, doesn't mean that necessarily every arithmetic operator makes sense on it. Does it make sense to divide a point by another point? Maybe not. And so, instead of going with the mindset of, oh, a point is a mathematical object, I now need to implement all of arithmetic on this, instead, think in terms of your domain. What are the operations that make sense? What are the operations you need for this point? And, you know, maybe the answer is look up what are the common sort of vector math operations and implement those on your 2D point. Some of them will map to arithmetic operators like plus and minus, and then some of them might just be some sort of custom method where maybe you say, "Oh, I want the Euclidean distance between these two points." That's just a thing. Maybe it's just a named instance method on there. But yeah, don't feel like you need to implement all of the math operators because that's a mistake that I have made and then have ended up, like, implementing nonsensical things. STEPHANIE: [laughs] Creating your own math. JOËL: Yes, creating my own math. I've done this even on where I've done value objects to wrap single values. I was doing a class to represent currency, and I was like, well, clearly, you need, like, methods to, like, add or subtract your currency, and that's another thing. If you have, let's say, a plus method, now you can plug it into, let's say, reduce plus. And you can just sum a list of these currency objects and get back a new currency. It's not even going to give you back an integer. You just get a sort of new currency object that is the sum of all the other ones, and that's really nice. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that's really cool. It reminds me of all the magic of enumerable that you had talked about in a previous conference talk, where, you know, you just get so much out of implementing those basic operators that, like, kind of scales in handiness. JOËL: Yes. Turns out Ruby is actually a pretty nice system. If you have objects that respond to some common methods and you plug them into enumerable, and it just all kind of works. STEPHANIE: So, one thing you had said earlier that I've felt kind of excited about and wanted to highlight was you mentioned all the different ways that you could represent a 2D point with more primitive data stores, so, you know, an array of two integers, a hash with xy keys. It got me thinking about how, yeah, like, maybe if your system has to talk to another system and you're importing data or exporting data, it might eventually need to take those forms. But what is cool about having an encapsulated object in your application is you can kind of control those boundaries a little bit and have more confidence in terms of the data types that you're using within your system by having various ways to construct that, like, domain object, even if the data coming in is in a different shape. JOËL: And I think that you're hitting on one of the real beauties of object-oriented programming, where the sort of users of your object don't need to know about the internal representation. Maybe you store an array internally. Maybe it's two separate instance variables. Maybe it's something else entirely. But all that the users of your, let's say, 2D point object really need to care about is, hey, the constructor wants values in this shape, and then I can call these domain methods on it, and then the rest just sort of happens. It's an implementation detail. It doesn't matter. And you alluded, I think, to the idea that you can sort of create multiple constructors. You called them constructors. I tend to call them that as well. But they're really just class methods that will kind of, like, add some sugar on top of the constructor. So, you might have, like, a from array pair or from hash or something like that that allows you to maybe do a little bit of massaging of the data before you pass it into your constructor that might want some underlying form. And I think that's a pattern that's really nice. STEPHANIE: Yeah, I agree. JOËL: Something that can be interesting there, too, is that mathematically, there are multiple ways you can think of a 2D point. An xy coordinate pair is a common one, but another sort of system for representing a point in 2D space is called the polar coordinate system. So, you have some sort of, like, origin point. You're 0,0. And then, instead of saying so many to the left and so many up from that origin point, you give an angle and a distance, and that's where your point is. So, an angle and distance point, I think, you know, theta and magnitude are the fancy terms for this. You could, instead of creating a separate, like, oh, I have a polar coordinate point and a Cartesian coordinate point, and those are separate things, you can say, no, I just have a point in 2D space. They can be constructed from either an xy coordinate pair or a magnitude angle pair. Internally, maybe you convert one to the other for internal representation because it makes the math easier or whatever. Your users never need to know that. They just pass in the values that they want, use the constructor that is most convenient for them, and it might be both. Maybe some parts of the app require polar coordinates; some require Cartesian coordinates. You could even construct one of each, and now you can do math with each other because they're just instances of the same class. STEPHANIE: Whoa. Yeah, I was trying to think about transforming between the two types as well. It's all possible [laughs]. JOËL: Yes. Because you could have reader-type methods on your object that say, oh, for this point, give me its x coordinate; give me its y coordinate. Give me its distance from the origin. Give me its angle from the origin. And those are all questions you can ask that object, and it can calculate them. And you don't need to care what its internal representation is to be able to get all four of those. So, we've been talking about a lot of these sort of composite numbers, not composite numbers, that's a separate mathematical thing, but numbers that are composed of sort of multiple sub-numbers. And what about situations where you have two things, and one of them is not a number? I'm thinking of all sorts of units of measure. So, I don't just have three. I have three, maybe...and we were talking about currency earlier, so maybe three U.S. dollars. Or I don't just have five; I have five, you know, let's say, meters of distance. Would you consider something like that to be one of these compound number things? STEPHANIE: Right. I think I was–when we were originally talking about this, conflating the two. But I realized that, you know, just because we're adding context to a number and potentially packaging it as a value object, it's still different from what we're talking about today where, you know, there's multiple components to the number that are integral or required for it to mean what we intended to mean, if that makes sense. JOËL: Yeah. STEPHANIE: So yeah, I guess we did want to kind of make a distinction between value objects that while the additional context is important and you can implement a lot of different functionality based on what it represents, at the end of the day, it only kind of has one magnitude or, like, one integer to kind of encapsulate it represented as a number. Does that sound right? JOËL: Yeah. You did throw out the words encapsulation and value object. So, in a situation maybe where I have three US dollars, would you create some kind of custom object to wrap that? Or is that a situation where you'd be more comfortable using some kind of primitive? Like, I don't know, maybe an array pair of three and the symbol USD or something like that. STEPHANIE: Oh, I would definitely not do that [laughter]. Yeah. Like I, you know, for the most part, I think I've seen that as a currency object, and that expands the world of what we can do with it, converting into a lot of different other currencies. And yeah, just making sure those things don't get divorced from each other because that context is what gives it meaning. But when it comes to our compound numbers, it's like, without all of the components, it doesn't make sense, or it doesn't even represent the same, like, numerical value that we were trying to convey. JOËL: Right. You need both, or, you know, it could be more than two. It could be three, four, or five numbers together to mean something. You mentioned conversions, which I think is something that's also interesting because a lot of units of measure have sort of multiple ways of measuring, and you often want to convert between them. And maybe that's another case where encapsulation is really nice where, you know, maybe you have a distance object. And you have five meters, and you put that into your distance object, but then somebody wants it in feet somewhere else or in centimeters, or something like that. And it can just do all the conversion math safely inside that object, and the user doesn't have to worry about it. STEPHANIE: Right. This is maybe a bit of a tangent, but as a Canadian living in the U.S., I don't know [laughs] if you have any opinions about converting meters and feet. JOËL: The one I actually do the most often is converting Celsius to Fahrenheit and vice versa. You know, I've been here, what, 11 years now? I don't have a great intuition for Fahrenheit temperatures. So, I'm converting in my head just [laughs] on a daily basis. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that makes sense. Conversions: they're important. They help out our friends who [laughs] are on different systems of measurement. JOËL: There's a classic story that I love about unit conversions. I think it's one of the NASA Mars missions. STEPHANIE: Oh yeah. JOËL: You've heard of this one. It was trying to land on Mars, and it burned up in the atmosphere because two different teams had been building different components and used different unit systems, both according to spec for their own module. But then, when the modules try to talk to each other, they're sending over numbers in meters instead of feet or something like that. And it just caused [laughs] this, like, multi-year, multi-billion dollar project to just burn up. STEPHANIE: That's right. So, lesson of the day is don't do that. I can think of another example where there might be a little bit of misconceptions in terms of how to represent it. And I'm thinking about time and when that has been represented in multiple parts, such as in hours and, minutes and seconds. Do you have any initial impressions about a piece of data like that? JOËL: So, that's really interesting, right? Because, at first glance, it looks like, oh, it's, like, a triplet of hour, minute, seconds. It's sort of another one of these sort of compound numbers, and I guess you could implement it that way. But in reality, you're tracking a single quantity, the amount of time elapsed, and that can be represented with a single number. So, if you're representing, let's say, time of day, what would show up on your clock? That could be, depending on the resolution, number of, let's say, seconds since midnight, and that's a single counter. And then, you can do some math on it to get hours, minutes, seconds for a particular moment. But really, it's a single quantity, and we can do that with time. We can't do that with a 2D point. Like, it has to have two components. STEPHANIE: So, do you have a recommendation for what unit of time time would best be stored? I'm just thinking of all the times that I've had to do that millisecond, you know, that conversion of, you know, however many thousands of milliseconds in my head into something that actually means [laughs] something to me as a human being who measures time in hours and minutes. JOËL: My recommendation is absolutely go for a single number that you store in your, let's say, time of day object. It makes the math so much easier. You don't have to worry about, like, overflowing from one number into another when you're doing math or anything like that. And then the number that you count should be at the whatever the smallest resolution you care at. So, is there ever any time where you want to distinguish between two different milliseconds in time? Or maybe you're like, you know what? These are, like, we're tracking time of day for appointments. We don't care about the difference between two milliseconds. We don't need to track them independently. We don't even care about seconds. The most granular we ever care about things is by the minute. And so, maybe then your internal number that you track is a counter of minutes since midnight. But if you need more precision, you can go down to seconds or milliseconds or nanoseconds. But yeah, find what is the sort of the least resolution you want to get away with and then make that the unit of measure for a single counter in your object. And then encapsulate that so that nobody else needs to care that, internally, your time of day object is doing milliseconds because nobody wants to do that math. Just give me a nice, like, hours and minutes method on your object, and I will use that. I don't need to know internally what it's using. Please don't just pass around integers; wrap it in an object, especially because integers, there's enough times where you're doing seconds versus milliseconds. And when I just have an integer, I never know if the person storing this integer means seconds or milliseconds. So, I'm just like, oh, I'm going to pass to this, like, user object, a, like, time integer. And unless there's a comment or a constant, you know, that's named something duration in milliseconds or something like that, you know, or sometimes even, like, one year in milliseconds, or there's no way of knowing. STEPHANIE: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. When you kind of choose a standard of a standard unit, it's, like, possible to make it easier [laughs]. JOËL: So, circling back to sort of the initial thing that sparked this conversation, the previous episode about T-shirt inventories, there we were dealing with what started off as, like, a hash of different T-shirt sizes and quantities of T-shirts that we had in that size, so small (five), medium (three), large (four). And then, we eventually turned that into a value object that represented...I think we called it a tally, but maybe we called it inventory. And this may be wrong, so tell me if I'm wrong here, I think we can kind of treat that as a number, as, like, one of these compound numbers. It's a sort of multidimensional number where you say, well, we have sort of three dimensions where we can have numbers that sort of increase and decrease independently. We can do math on these because we can take inventories or tallies and add and subtract them. And that's what we ended up having to do. We created a value object. We implemented plus and minus on it. There are rules for how the math works. I think this is a multidimensional number with the definition we're working on this show. Am I wrong here? STEPHANIE: I wouldn't say that you're wrong. I think I would have to think a little [laughs] more to say definitively that you're right. But I know that this example came from, you know, an application I was actually working on. And one of the main things that we had to do with these representations [laughs], I'm hesitant to call them a number, especially, but we had to compare these representations frequently because an inventory, for example, in a warehouse, wanting to make sure that it is equal to or there's enough of the inventory if someone was placing an order, which would also contain, like, a representation of T-shirt size inventory. And that was kind of where some of that math happened because, you know, maybe we don't want to let someone place an order if the inventory at the warehouse is smaller than their order, right? So, there is something really compelling about the comparison operations that we were doing that kind of is leaning me in the direction of, like, yeah, like, it makes sense to me to use this in a way that I would compare, like, quantities or numbers of something. JOËL: I think one thing that was really compelling to me, and that kind of blew my mind, was that we were trying to, like, figure out some things like, oh, we've got so many people with these size preferences, and we've got so many T-shirts across different warehouses. And we're summing them up and we're trying to say like, "How many do we need to purchase if there is a deficit?" And we can come up with effectively a formula for this. We're like, sum these numbers, when we're talking about just before we introduce sizes when it's just like, oh, people have T-shirts. They all get the count of people and a count of T-shirts in our warehouse, and we find, you know, the difference between that. And there's a few extra math operations we do. Then you introduce size, and you break it down by, oh, we've got so many of each. And now the whole thing gets really kind of messy and complicated. And you're doing these reduces and everything. When we start treating the tally of T-shirts as an object, and now it's a number that responds to plus and minus, all of a sudden, you can just plug those back into the original formula, and it all just works. The original formula doesn't care whether the numbers you're doing this formula on are simple integers or these sort of multidimensional numbers. And that blew my mind, and it was so cool. STEPHANIE: Yeah, that is really neat. And you get a lot of added benefits, too. I think the other important piece in the T-shirt size example was kind of tracking the state change, and that's so much easier when you have an object. There's just a lot more you can do with it. And even if, you know, you're not persisting every single version of the representation, you know, because sometimes you don't want to, sometimes you're really just kind of only holding it in memory to figure out if you need to, you know, do something else. But other times, you do want to persist it. And it just plugs in really well with, like, the rest of object-oriented programming [laughs] in terms of interacting with the rest of your business needs, I think, in your app. JOËL: Yeah, turns out objects, they're kind of nice. And you can do math with them. Who knew? Math is not just about integers. STEPHANIE: And on that note, shall we wrap up? JOËL: Let's wrap up. STEPHANIE: Show notes for this episode can be found at bikeshed.fm. JOËL: This show has been produced and edited by Mandy Moore. STEPHANIE: If you enjoyed listening, one really easy way to support the show is to leave us a quick rating or even a review in iTunes. It really helps other folks find the show. JOËL: If you have any feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us @_bikeshed, or you can reach me @joelquen on Twitter. STEPHANIE: Or reach both of us at hosts@bikeshed.fm via email. JOËL: Thanks so much for listening to The Bike Shed, and we'll see you next week. ALL: Byeeeeeee!!!!!! AD: Did you know thoughtbot has a referral program? If you introduce us to someone looking for a design or development partner, we will compensate you if they decide to work with us. More info on our website at: tbot.io/referral. Or you can email us at referrals@thoughtbot.com with any questions.

rWotD Episode 2448: Eugenio Beltrami Welcome to random Wiki of the Day where we read the summary of a random Wikipedia page every day.The random article for Tuesday, 16 January 2024 is Eugenio Beltrami.Eugenio Beltrami (16 November 1835 – 18 February 1900) was an Italian mathematician notable for his work concerning differential geometry and mathematical physics. His work was noted especially for clarity of exposition. He was the first to prove consistency of non-Euclidean geometry by modeling it on a surface of constant curvature, the pseudosphere, and in the interior of an n-dimensional unit sphere, the so-called Beltrami–Klein model. He also developed singular value decomposition for matrices, which has been subsequently rediscovered several times. Beltrami's use of differential calculus for problems of mathematical physics indirectly influenced development of tensor calculus by Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro and Tullio Levi-Civita.This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 00:10 UTC on Tuesday, 16 January 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Eugenio Beltrami on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm Joey Neural.

Hello Interactors,It's been a great year hear at Interplace with subscriptions hitting (and hovering) around 1000 subscribers! Thank you! And thanks to Substack's recommendation engine, the vast majority of those came from Steven Sinofsky's Hardcore Software newsletter. Thank you!Sadly, the utility of this recommendation engine also means those Nazi newsletters Substack chooses to sponsor will also spread. It's their choice of free speech as a publisher and seller. Just like this 1930s Aryan bookstore who was fine attracting Nazi customers because, like Substack, they believed select, uncensored ‘truth brings liberation'.I'm not thrilled to be sorted alongside such publications, but I'm also not thrilled to be embedded among local and national right wing extremists in a country that has yet to fully come to terms with it's own racial ideology. An ideology that intermingles jingoism and militarism propped up with related economic policies. Yes, I have the choice (and privilege) to move, but finding places void of right-wing extremism and zombie neoliberalism is getting harder and harder these days.2024 is a big election year in the U.S. One that will surely influence this course and our nation's discourse. Abusive forms of AI is sure to play a role in it. So, I was curious what would happen if I took my top five most viewed posts of 2023 and ask ChatGPT to provide connections between them and summarize a conclusion. I'm impressed. Not only with the how Large Language Models (LLMs) emulate perceived human intelligence, but with the consistency with which my own convictions and intentions emerge throughout these five posts. ChatGPT, like a good LLM, is providing an illusion of consistency and coherency in my writing! It's a reflection of external linguistic patterns arranged in a literary image of my internal goals for Interplace — an emulation of perceived intelligence! Be careful out there.I hope everyone has a healthy and happy 2024. Please remember this interpretation of my own intention as you set your new year's resolutions: “our collective actions contribute to the fabric of our environments, and through awareness and choice, we have the power to reshape them for the better.”And now, ChatGPT's Interplace summary of 2023.The five blocks of text you provided seem to be excerpts from different discussions or articles that, although varied in focus, share common themes about the intersection of human behavior, spatial cognition, and the environment, whether it be through the lens of a television show, research in geography, urban planning, psychological studies, or societal needs.* Clarkson's Farm: The Grand Tour of the Rural-Urban Divide: This text illustrates how a TV show can provide a microcosm of the broader societal issues, including the divide between rural and urban life, environmental impact, and social stratification. It suggests that the antics of the show's host, Jeremy Clarkson, inadvertently reveal the interconnectedness of society and the environment.* A Geography Revolution: Complexity and Connection in Successor Evolution: This section discusses the advancement in cognitive geography, moving away from traditional, rigid spatial models to those that account for the complex, iterative interactions between people and their environments. It challenges conventional Euclidean views and advocates for a more dynamic, holistic approach to spatial cognition.* The Universal Uniformity of Urban Mobility: Here, the focus is on urban mobility and how patterns of movement within cities are universally similar, as demonstrated by visitation power laws. The text raises concerns about equity and inclusivity in urban planning, suggesting that current models serve those with resources while potentially neglecting others. It also touches on how legislative changes can influence urban structure and the potential for creating more walkable neighborhoods.* Will Work for Food. A Quirk or Accrued?: This text compares human behavior with that of rats in a study about driving and satisfaction. It draws parallels between the cognitive benefits of novel experiences and the laborious nature of maintaining a car, suggesting that there may be more rewarding alternatives to driving, such as walking, which provide more cognitive stimulation and a sense of agency.* Hierarchy of Needs or Just More Greed?: The final text reflects on the individual's power to enact change within large-scale systems, as evidenced by shifts in behavior during the pandemic. It questions whether adherence to traditional socio-economic constructs serves our needs and posits that conscious, alternative choices could lead to significant societal transformations.Summary:The amalgamation of these texts presents a nuanced examination of human-environment interactions. At the core is an understanding that our spaces, whether physical like farms and cities or conceptual like cognitive maps, are not static but are shaped by our interactions, decisions, and movements. From Clarkson's representation of rural life to the universal patterns of urban mobility, we see a pattern of uniformity in our behaviors that transcends geography and culture.The discussion on cognitive geography suggests that embracing complexity in our understanding of space can lead to more equitable and representative models of human-environment interaction. This is echoed in the exploration of urban mobility, where data reflects not just how we move, but also the socio-economic hierarchies that dictate our movement. The potential for change is highlighted by the example of legislation affecting urban density, indicating a path towards more sustainable and equitable urban living.The comparison of human behavior to that of rats reveals a deeper commentary on our choices and their psychological impacts. The reward system driving both rats and humans to undertake certain tasks like driving is complex and influenced by our environment. This complexity is further unpacked in the final text, which suggests that individual choices can lead to macro-scale changes in society. This ties back to the first text, where a television show, through its portrayal of the rural-urban divide, unintentionally showcases the interconnectivity of our choices and their impact on the world.In essence, these texts argue for a more conscious and nuanced approach to how we view and shape our environments. They call for a departure from reductionist thinking, advocating for a recognition of the complex, interconnected nature of our world, and a reevaluation of our choices and their ramifications. Whether through the lens of a TV show, urban planning, geography, psychology, or societal behavior, the message is clear: our collective actions contribute to the fabric of our environments, and through awareness and choice, we have the power to reshape them for the better.Thank you for reading Interplace. Feel free to share it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

If anyone has taken some basic mathematics, you are probably familiar with Euclidian Geometry. Euclidean geometry is what most people just call geometry.  It is the study of shapes like triangles and circles in a simple plane. This type of geometry was developed over 2000 years ago, and it is based on certain set axioms. However, later mathematicians challenged one of those axioms, and it completely changed how we thought of geometry. Learn more about non-Euclidian geometry and what it means in this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Sponsors BetterHelp Visit BetterHelp.com/everywhere today to get 10% off your first month ButcherBox Sign up today at butcherbox.com/daily and use code daily to choose your free steak for a year and get $20 off."  Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: What makes teaching math special, published by Viliam on December 18, 2023 on LessWrong. Related: Arguments against constructivism (in education)? Seeking PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge) * Designing good math curriculum for elementary and high schools requires one to have two kinds of expertise: deep understanding of math, and lot of experience teaching kids. Having just one of them is not enough. People who have both are rare (and many of them do not have the ambition to design a curriculum). Being a math professor at university is not enough, now matter how high-status that job might be. University professors are used to teaching adults, and often have little patience for kids. Their frequent mistake is to jump from specific examples to abstract generalizations too quickly (that is, if they bother to provide specific examples at all). You can expect an adult student to try to figure it out on their own time; to read a book, or ask classmates. You can't do the same with a small child. (Also, university professors are selected for their research skills, not teaching skills.) University professors and other professional mathematicians suffer from the "curse of knowledge". So many things are obvious to them than they have a problem to empathize with someone who knows nothing of that. Also, the way we remember things is that we make mental connections with the other things we already know. The professor may have too many connections available to realize that the child has none of them yet. The kids learning from the curriculum designed by university professors will feel overwhelmed and stupid. Most of them will grow up hating math. On the other hand, many humanities-oriented people with strong opinions on how schools should be organized and how kids should be brought up, suck at math. More importantly, they do not realize how math is profoundly different from other school subjects, and will try to shoehorn mathematical education to the way they would teach e.g. humanities. As a result, the kids may not learn actual mathematics at all. * How specifically is math different? First, math is not about real-world objects. It is often inspired by them, but that's not the same thing. For example, natural numbers proceed up to... almost infinity... regardless of whether our universe is actually finite or infinite. Real numbers have infinite number of decimal places, whether that makes sense from the perspective of physics or not. The Euclidean space is perfectly flat, even if our universe it not. No one ever wrote all the possible sequences of numbers from 1 to 100, but we know how many they would be. If you want to learn e.g. about Africa, I guess the best way would be to go there, spend 20 years living in various countries, talking to people of various ethnic and social groups. But if you can't do that... well, reading a few books about Africa, memorizing the names of the countries and their capitals, knowing how to find them on the map... technically also qualifies as "learning about Africa". This is what most people (outside of Africa) do. You cannot learn math by second-hand experience alone. Imagine someone who skimmed the Wikipedia article about quadratic equations, watched a YouTube channel about the history of people who invented quadratic equations, is really passionate about the importance of quadratic equations for world peace and ecology, but... cannot solve a single quadratic equation, not even the simplest one... you probably wouldn't qualify this kind of knowledge as "learning quadratic equations". The quadratic equation is a mental object, waiting for you somewhere in the Platonic realm, where you can find it, touch it, explore it from different angles, play with it, learn to live with it. Only this intimate experience qualifies as actually learning quadrati...

YouTube link https://youtu.be/9z3JYb_g2QsProf. Peter Woit discusses string theory, its decline, and introduces his graviweak unification theory using Euclidean twistor in Euclidean spacetime. TIMESTAMPS:- 00:00:00 Introduction- 00:00:00 String theory's fundamental issues | Mathematicians' challenges- 00:02:20 Spacetime and twistor theory insights- 00:20:00 Bundles & diffeomorphism groups- 00:38:34 Spinors as a spacetime point- 00:46:57 Dominance of string theory & Ed Witten's influence- 00:54:17 Quest for quantum gravity- 01:03:22 String theory's lack of predictive power  - 01:09:33 Machine learning meets theoretical physics- 01:18:56 Personal attacks vs. intellectual debate- 01:24:49 Mathematicians vs. Physicists | Academic silos- 01:37:15 Developing a contrarian view & the origin of 'Not Even Wrong'- 01:40:54 Langlands & representation theory- 01:48:51 Spacetime is NOT doomed- 01:58:47 Sean Carroll's crisis in physics (odd responses to criticism)- 02:13:21 Differentiable structures by dimension- 02:26:10 Gravi-weak unification & chirality- 02:32:57 Chern-Simons theory- 02:42:20 Gravity as torsion or curvature- 02:50:07 Category theory in physics- 02:56:43 Defining a fulfilling life - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!)- Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE- PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt- Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs- iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/better-left-unsaid-with-curt-jaimungal/id1521758802- Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b92xAErofYQA7bU4e- Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeverything- TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch LINKS MENTIONED:- Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit's Blog): https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress- Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit's Book): https://amzn.to/40NFeaK- Spacetime is Right-Handed (Peter Woit's Article): https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/righthanded.pdf | https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress- Podcast w/ Edward Frankel: https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc- The Elegant Universe (Brian Greene): https://amzn.to/3sNmk7x- The Trouble With Physics (Lee Smolin): https://amzn.to/47lCCUj- Podcast w/ Sabina Hossenfelder on TOE: https://youtu.be/walaNM7KiYA- Podcast w/ Stephon Alexander Part 1: https://youtu.be/VETxb96a3qk  - Podcast w/ Stephon Alexander Λ Sal Pais: https://youtu.be/PE4C7OI7Frg- Podcast w/ Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/KElq_MLO1kw- Podcast w/ Stephen Wolfram Part 1: https://youtu.be/1sXrRc3Bhrs- Podcast w/ Stephen Wolfram Part 2: https://youtu.be/xHPQ_oSsJgg- Podcast w/ Jonathan Oppenheim: https://youtu.be/NKOd8imBa2s

YouTube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9z3JYb_g2Qs Prof. Peter Woit discusses string theory, its decline, and introduces his graviweak unification theory using Euclidean twistor in Euclidean spacetime. TIMESTAMPS: - 00:00:00 Introduction - 00:00:00 String theory's fundamental issues | Mathematicians' challenges - 00:02:20 Spacetime and twistor theory insights - 00:20:00 Bundles & diffeomorphism groups - 00:38:34 Spinors as a spacetime point - 00:46:57 Dominance of string theory & Ed Witten's influence - 00:54:17 Quest for quantum gravity - 01:03:22 String theory's lack of predictive power - 01:09:33 Machine learning meets theoretical physics - 01:18:56 Personal attacks vs. intellectual debate - 01:24:49 Mathematicians vs. Physicists | Academic silos - 01:37:15 Developing a contrarian view & the origin of 'Not Even Wrong' - 01:40:54 Langlands & representation theory - 01:48:51 Spacetime is NOT doomed - 01:58:47 Sean Carroll's crisis in physics (odd responses to criticism) - 02:13:21 Differentiable structures by dimension - 02:26:10 Gravi-weak unification & chirality - 02:32:57 Chern-Simons theory - 02:42:20 Gravity as torsion or curvature - 02:50:07 Category theory in physics - 02:56:43 Defining a fulfilling life - Patreon: https://patreon.com/curtjaimungal (early access to ad-free audio episodes!) - Crypto: https://tinyurl.com/cryptoTOE - PayPal: https://tinyurl.com/paypalTOE - Twitter: https://twitter.com/TOEwithCurt - Discord Invite: https://discord.com/invite/kBcnfNVwqs - iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast... - Pandora: https://pdora.co/33b9lfP - Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4gL14b9... - Subreddit r/TheoriesOfEverything: https://reddit.com/r/theoriesofeveryt... - TOE Merch: https://tinyurl.com/TOEmerch LINKS MENTIONED: - Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit's Blog): https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/w... - Not Even Wrong (Peter Woit's Book): https://amzn.to/40NFeaK - Spacetime is Right-Handed (Peter Woit's Article): https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/r... - Podcast w/ Edward Frankel: https://youtu.be/n_oPMcvHbAc - The Elegant Universe (Brian Greene): https://amzn.to/3sNmk7x - The Trouble With Physics (Lee Smolin): https://amzn.to/47lCCUj - Podcast w/ Sabina Hossenfelder on TOE: https://youtu.be/walaNM7KiYA - Podcast w/ Stephon Alexander Part 1: https://youtu.be/VETxb96a3qk - Podcast w/ Stephon Alexander Λ Sal Pais: https://youtu.be/PE4C7OI7Frg - Podcast w/ Eric Weinstein: https://youtu.be/KElq_MLO1kw - Podcast w/ Stephen Wolfram Part 1: https://youtu.be/1sXrRc3Bhrs - Podcast w/ Stephen Wolfram Part 2: https://youtu.be/xHPQ_oSsJgg - Podcast w/ Jonathan Oppenheim: https://youtu.be/NKOd8imBa2s

This week: Our first look at Reactivate Soundwave, a recap of Transformers Tuesday, and more first thoughts on upcoming toys. The post Radio Free Cybertron 857 – Non-Euclidean Dononomics appeared first on Radio Free Cybertron.

This week: Our first look at Reactivate Soundwave, a recap of Transformers Tuesday, and more first thoughts on upcoming toys. The post Radio Free Cybertron 857 – Non-Euclidean Dononomics appeared first on Radio Free Cybertron.

What is the nature of our relationship to psychedelics? As people in recovery, we've probably abused them at one time or another. Some people have taken mass overdoses and lost total control. So why would anyone in recovery consider the use, medicinal or otherwise, of something that seems pretty risky?  It's OK. You can and it'll be alright.  Let's talk about it on today's show, Episode 108.  St. Theresa of Avila "The time has come to love more and think less. Sit in a deep quiet in which love is translating you into God." Meditation: what we're powerless to attain is attaining us in our inability to attain it inhale breathing in God, into the unresolved questions. Exhale give yourself in love. from James Finley, "Mystical Sobriety." The number 108 has a variety of significances across different fields: Mathematics: It's an abundant and a semiperfect number. A tetranacci number. The hyperfactorial of 3, as it is of the form 11⋅22⋅3311⋅22⋅33. Divisible by the value of its φ function, which is 36. Divisible by the total number of its divisors (12), making it a refactorable number. The angle in degrees of the interior angles of a regular pentagon in Euclidean space. Palindromic in several bases and a Harshad number in multiple bases. Religion and the Arts: Sacred in Dharmic Religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. In Hindu tradition, there are 108 attendants of Shiva, and in Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Krishna had 108 followers known as gopis. The Sri Vaishnavite Tradition has 108 Divya Desams (temples of Vishnu). The Sudarshana Chakra, a weapon in Hindu mythology, has 108 serrated edges. The total number of Upanishads is 108 as per the Muktikā canon. In Tibetan Buddhism, malas or rosaries are usually 108 beads. Zen priests wear juzu, a ring of prayer beads, consisting of 108 beads. The Lankavatara Sutra has sections where 108 questions are asked and 108 statements of negation are listed. Martial Arts: Many East Asian martial arts, due to their ties to Buddhism, consider 108 an important symbolic number. According to Marma Adi and Ayurveda, there are 108 pressure points in the body. The ultimate Gōjū-ryū kata, Suparinpei, translates to 108. The Yang Taijiquan long form and Wing Chun wooden dummy form taught by Ip Man have 108 moves. Literature: There are 108 outlaws in the Chinese classic "Water Margin/Outlaws of the Marsh." "Astrophil and Stella," the first English sonnet sequence, has 108 love sonnets. Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven" has 108 lines. Science: Hassium, a chemical element, has the atomic number 108. The human body's vital organs begin to fail at an internal temperature of 108 degrees Fahrenheit. The distance of Earth from the Sun is about 108 times the diameter of the Sun. Technology: 108 Mbit/s is a non-standard extension of IEEE 802.11g wireless network using channel bonding. Sports: An official Major League Baseball baseball has 108 stitches. The Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2016 for the first time in 108 years. Card Games: There are 108 cards in a deck of UNO cards. Other Fields: In India, 108 is the toll-free emergency telephone number.

Episode 9. Continuing our series run about model validation. In this episode, the hosts focus on aspects of performance, why we need to do statistics correctly, and not use metrics without understanding how they work, to ensure that models are evaluated in a meaningful way.AI regulations, red team testing, and physics-based modeling. 0:03The hosts discuss the Biden administration's executive order on AI and its implications for model validation and performance.Evaluating machine learning models using accuracy, recall, and precision. 6:52The four types of results in classification: true positive, false positive, true negative, and false negative.The three standard metrics are composed of these elements: accuracy, recall, and precision.Accuracy metrics for classification models. 12:36Precision and recall are interrelated aspects of accuracy in machine learning.Using F1 score and F beta score in classification models, particularly when dealing with imbalanced data.Performance metrics for regression tasks. 17:08Handling imbalanced outcomes in machine learning, particularly in regression tasks.The different metrics used to evaluate regression models, including mean squared error.Performance metrics for machine learning models. 19:56Mean squared error (MSE) as a metric for evaluating the accuracy of machine learning models, using the example of predicting house prices.Mean absolute error (MAE) as an alternative metric, which penalizes large errors less heavily and is more straightforward to compute.Graph theory and operations research applications. 25:48Graph theory in machine learning, including the shortest path problem and clustering. Euclidean distance is a popular benchmark for measuring distances between data points. Machine learning metrics and evaluation methods. 33:06Model validation using statistics and information theory. 37:08Entropy, its roots in classical mechanics and thermodynamics, and its application in information theory, particularly Shannon entropy calculation. The importance the use case and validation metrics for machine learning models.What did you think? Let us know.Do you have a question or a discussion topic for the AI Fundamentalists? Connect with them to comment on your favorite topics: LinkedIn - Episode summaries, shares of cited articles, and more. YouTube - Was it something that we said? Good. Share your favorite quotes. Visit our page - see past episodes and submit your feedback! It continues to inspire future episodes.

In medieval Baghdad, there was a particular focus on two elements of knowledge expansion: recording existing principles, and further expanding on this knowledge through experimentation. Al-Mahani represents a key figure in this transitional period of scholarship, translating and commenting upon Euclidean geometry, as well as laying the mathematical groundwork for future astrologists and scientists. An original Ubisoft series, produced by Paradiso Media.Written by: Ali A OlomiHosted by: Ali A Olomi, Deana HassaneinMixing and editing: Adrien Le Blond, Jimmy BardinPre-existing music: Music from Assassin's Creed Mirage (Original Game Soundtrack) by Brendan Angelides, and from Walissarābi Minnal‘irfān (A Tribute To Mirage).Label: Ubisoft MusicIllustration: © Ubisoft Entertainment. All Rights ReservedProduction Coordinator: Brendan GalbreathAdditional Production Assistants: Yael Even Or, Molly O'Keefe, Madeleine Weinberg, Aimie FaconnierProducers: Axelle Gobert, Abi McNeilExecutive Producers Ubisoft: Etienne Bouvier, Julien FabreExecutive Producers Paradiso Media: Benoit Dunaigre, Emi NorrisIf you liked this podcast please subscribe, rate & review. To find out more go to Assassins Creed or find us on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Summary The rapid growth of machine learning, especially large language models, have led to a commensurate growth in the need to store and compare vectors. In this episode Louis Brandy discusses the applications for vector search capabilities both in and outside of AI, as well as the challenges of maintaining real-time indexes of vector data. Announcements Hello and welcome to the Data Engineering Podcast, the show about modern data management Introducing RudderStack Profiles. RudderStack Profiles takes the SaaS guesswork and SQL grunt work out of building complete customer profiles so you can quickly ship actionable, enriched data to every downstream team. You specify the customer traits, then Profiles runs the joins and computations for you to create complete customer profiles. Get all of the details and try the new product today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack (https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/rudderstack) This episode is brought to you by Datafold – a testing automation platform for data engineers that finds data quality issues before the code and data are deployed to production. Datafold leverages data-diffing to compare production and development environments and column-level lineage to show you the exact impact of every code change on data, metrics, and BI tools, keeping your team productive and stakeholders happy. Datafold integrates with dbt, the modern data stack, and seamlessly plugs in your data CI for team-wide and automated testing. If you are migrating to a modern data stack, Datafold can also help you automate data and code validation to speed up the migration. Learn more about Datafold by visiting dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold (https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/datafold) You shouldn't have to throw away the database to build with fast-changing data. You should be able to keep the familiarity of SQL and the proven architecture of cloud warehouses, but swap the decades-old batch computation model for an efficient incremental engine to get complex queries that are always up-to-date. With Materialize, you can! It's the only true SQL streaming database built from the ground up to meet the needs of modern data products. Whether it's real-time dashboarding and analytics, personalization and segmentation or automation and alerting, Materialize gives you the ability to work with fresh, correct, and scalable results — all in a familiar SQL interface. Go to dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize (https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/materialize) today to get 2 weeks free! If you're a data person, you probably have to jump between different tools to run queries, build visualizations, write Python, and send around a lot of spreadsheets and CSV files. Hex brings everything together. Its powerful notebook UI lets you analyze data in SQL, Python, or no-code, in any combination, and work together with live multiplayer and version control. And now, Hex's magical AI tools can generate queries and code, create visualizations, and even kickstart a whole analysis for you – all from natural language prompts. It's like having an analytics co-pilot built right into where you're already doing your work. Then, when you're ready to share, you can use Hex's drag-and-drop app builder to configure beautiful reports or dashboards that anyone can use. Join the hundreds of data teams like Notion, AllTrails, Loom, Mixpanel and Algolia using Hex every day to make their work more impactful. Sign up today at dataengineeringpodcast.com/hex (https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/hex) to get a 30-day free trial of the Hex Team plan! Your host is Tobias Macey and today I'm interviewing Louis Brandy about building vector indexes in real-time for analytics and AI applications Interview Introduction How did you get involved in the area of data management? Can you describe what vector search is and how it differs from other search technologies? What are the technical challenges related to providing vector search? What are the applications for vector search that merit the added complexity? Vector databases have been gaining a lot of attention recently with the proliferation of LLM applications. Is a dedicated database technology required to support vector indexes/vector search queries? What are the use cases for native vector data types that are separate from AI? With the increasing usage of vectors for data and AI/ML applications, who do you typically see as the owner of that problem space? (e.g. data engineers, ML engineers, data scientists, etc.) For teams who are investing in vector search, what are the architectural considerations that they need to be aware of? How does it impact the data pipeline strategies/topologies used? What are the complexities that need to be addressed when updating vector data in a real-time/streaming fashion? How does that influence the client strategies that are querying that data? What are the most interesting, innovative, or unexpected ways that you have seen vector search used? What are the most interesting, unexpected, or challenging lessons that you have learned while working on vector search applications? When is vector search the wrong choice? What do you see as future potential applications for vector indexes/vector search? Contact Info LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lbrandy/) Parting Question From your perspective, what is the biggest gap in the tooling or technology for data management today? Closing Announcements Thank you for listening! Don't forget to check out our other shows. The Machine Learning Podcast (https://www.themachinelearningpodcast.com) helps you go from idea to production with machine learning. Podcast.__init__ (https://www.pythonpodcast.com) covers the Python language, its community, and the innovative ways it is being used. Visit the site (https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com) to subscribe to the show, sign up for the mailing list, and read the show notes. If you've learned something or tried out a project from the show then tell us about it! Email hosts@dataengineeringpodcast.com (mailto:hosts@dataengineeringpodcast.com)) with your story. To help other people find the show please leave a review on Apple Podcasts (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-engineering-podcast/id1193040557) and tell your friends and co-workers Links Rockset (https://rockset.com/) Podcast Episode (https://www.dataengineeringpodcast.com/rockset-serverless-analytics-episode-101/) Vector Index (https://www.datastax.com/guides/what-is-a-vector-index) Vector Search (https://www.datastax.com/guides/what-is-vector-search) Rockset Implementation Explanation (https://rockset.com/videos/vector-search-architecture/) Vector Space (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_space) Euclidean Distance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_distance) OLAP == Online Analytical Processing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_analytical_processing) OLTP == Online Transaction Processing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_transaction_processing) The intro and outro music is from The Hug (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Freak_Fandango_Orchestra/Love_death_and_a_drunken_monkey/04_-_The_Hug) by The Freak Fandango Orchestra (http://freemusicarchive.org/music/The_Freak_Fandango_Orchestra/) / CC BY-SA (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)

1. Abelian Group: Actual Definition: An Abelian group, named after Niels Henrik Abel, is a group in which the binary operation is commutative, meaning that for all elements a and b in the group, a * b = b * a. Etymological Definition and Derivation: The term "Abelian" pays homage to the Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, who made significant contributions to the theory of equations and group theory. The word "Abelian" is derived from the Latin word "Abelius," signifying Abel's enduring legacy. 2. Euclidean Geometry: Actual Definition: Euclidean geometry, introduced by the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, is a branch of mathematics that deals with properties, relationships, and measurements of points, lines, angles, and surfaces in the plane and space, based on Euclid's five postulates. Etymological Definition and Derivation: "Euclidean" honors the legendary Greek mathematician Euclid, a beacon of geometrical elucidation. Rooted in the Greek term "Euclides," it resonates with the man's enduring dedication to the exploration of space. 3. Calculus: Actual Definition: Calculus is a branch of mathematics that explores the concepts of limits, derivatives, integrals, and infinite series, enabling the analysis of change and accumulation in various contexts. Etymological Definition and Derivation: "Calculus" emerges from the Latin "calculus," a diminutive of "calx," meaning a small stone used in counting and calculations. It was birthed by minds like Newton and Leibniz, who sculpted this art of calculation to harness the elusive infinitesimal. 4. Topology: Actual Definition: Topology is a field of mathematics that examines the properties of space that are preserved under continuous deformations, including concepts like continuity, convergence, compactness, and connectedness. Etymological Definition and Derivation: "Topology" emerges from the Greek roots "topos" (place) and "logos" (study), a testament to the exploration of spatial relations. Its true essence resides in the intimate scrutiny of shapes' essence beyond rigid measurements. 5. Eigenvalue: Actual Definition: In linear algebra, an eigenvalue of a matrix represents a scalar value that characterizes how a matrix transforms a vector, with the vector only scaling by the eigenvalue during the transformation. Etymological Definition and Derivation: "Eigenvalue" springs from the German "eigen," meaning inherent or characteristic, and "value." It encapsulates the distinct nature of values that a matrix uniquely possesses, much like a signature of its intrinsic behavior. 6. Homomorphism: Actual Definition: A homomorphism is a structure-preserving map between two algebraic structures, such as groups, rings, or vector spaces, that preserves the operations and relationships between elements. Etymological Definition and Derivation: "Homomorphism" finds its roots in the Greek "homos" (same) and "morphē" (form). This term embodies the lofty concept of maintaining similarity, preserving the integrity of structures across mathematical realms. 7. Fractal: Actual Definition: A fractal is a complex geometric shape or pattern that displays self-similarity at various scales, exhibiting intricate detail regardless of the level of magnification. Etymological Definition and Derivation: "Fractal" derives from the Latin "fractus," meaning broken or fractured. Coined by Benoît B. Mandelbrot, this term encapsulates the enigmatic beauty of structures that break free from the linear constraints of Euclidean space. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/liam-connerly/support

30+ hours into the game, it appears that Pokémon Company finally remembered that they needed to have some bad guys in this game. So they crammed both the criminal syndicate and corporate overlord into one big, confusing plot that involves a bunch of guys in Oakleys, an underground power plant, and a non-Euclidean pile of poison bones. Oh, and Drew England meets someone(s) new from the Great State of Vermont.

The first Knowledge to Action episode with urban planner Suchi Lukes in July of 2022 had so much good information to share that we think the episode is worth a revisit. Host Jen Whitelaw speaks with Suchi, who also spearheads C-3's Urban Core Knowledge Action Network. Suchi talks about her commitment to bringing together local thought leaders from planning, design, community development, and more to address San Diego's distinctive and pressing land use challenges.   Timestamps: [2:19] We often identify housing as the major challenge for the urban core, but Temporary Paradise called for the revitalization of commercial corridors as a way to anchor redevelopment. Suchi talks about the nexus between bringing back our historic main streets and building up stock in the urban core. [5:00] Suchi discusses Euclidean zoning, where you have your residential center in one area, and how this creates more flexibility in our developmental regulations. [6:02] One key challenge in the urban core is the availability of land. [8:42] What part should our urban core play as we try to develop climate resistance? [11:01] Our urban areas are pretty key in helping address climate change and shaping livability. [11:59] How do we reconcile established character and preservation in some cases, with new development? [18:07] Suchi discusses the Community Land Trust Model. [19:55] There is still much inequity in our park spaces that we need to address. [22:44] We have to have a holistic vision of how lower-income and minority folks can have a full quality of life and it can't just be done through planners. It has to be multiple sectors coming together, including community members, to make sure everyone has a voice and is able to advocate for their own needs. [23:26] How can people get more involved?   About C-3 In its 60 years of existence, Citizens Coordinate for Century 3 (C-3) has brought together local thought leaders from planning, design, policy, academia, community development, and more to address our region's distinctive and pressing land use challenges. In founding C-3 almost 60 years ago, architect Lloyd Ruocco's vision was to bring together our region's most creative minds from the arts, sciences, academia, and government to share ideas, learn new perspectives, and build fellowship around the idea of creating livable communities.   Opportunities for Advocacy and Engagement: C3sandiego.org Temporary Paradise Suchi Lukes  

Everybody wants to be clever, right? While cleverness might seem like a good thing, at times it can cloak the truth. Barry begins a new series and introduces the concept by means of his Junior High debate skills, non-Euclidean geometry, and a child's maze.         Scriptures: Matt 26:59-61 Referenced Episodes: Terms of […]

In partnership with the London Mathematical Society.The first female Fields Medalist Maryam Mirzakhani, left an astonishing mathematical legacy at her untimely death in 2017. This talk will explain the lasting contributions of her work to our understanding of the world, and give a glimpse into Professor Mirzakhani's imaginative and hands-on approach to mathematics. This lecture will be delivered by Professor Holly Krieger who is the Corfield Lecturer in Mathematics and the Corfield Fellow at Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.A lecture by Holly Krieger recorded on 24 May 2023 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/lms-2023Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/Website:  https://gresham.ac.ukTwitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeSupport the show

In episode 71 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Ted Underwood.Ted is a professor in the School of Information Sciences with an appointment in the Department of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Trained in English literary history, he turned his research focus to applying machine learning to large digital collections. His work explores literary patterns that become visible across long timelines when we consider many works at once—often, his work involves correcting and enriching digital collections to make them more amenable to interesting literary research.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at editor@thegradient.pubSubscribe to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:* (00:00) Intro* (01:42) Ted's background / origin story, * (04:35) Context in interpreting statistics, “you need a model,” the need for data about human responses to literature and how that manifested in Ted's work* (07:25) The recognition that we can model literary prestige/genre because of ML* (08:30) Distant reading and the import of statistics over large digital libraries* (12:00) Literary prestige* (12:45) How predictable is fiction? Scales of predictability in texts* (13:55) Degrees of autocorrelation in biography and fiction and the structure of narrative, how LMs might offer more sophisticated analysis* (15:15) Braided suspense / suspense at different scales of a story* (17:05) The Literary Uses of High-Dimensional Space: how “big data” came to impact the humanities, skepticism from humanists and responses, what you can do with word count* (20:50) Why we could use more time to digest statistical ML—how acceleration in AI advances might impact pedagogy* (22:30) The value in explicit models* (23:30) Poetic “revolutions” and literary prestige* (25:53) Distant vs. close reading in poetry—follow-up work for “The Longue Durée”* (28:20) Sophistication of NLP and approaching the human experience* (29:20) What about poetry renders it prestigious?* (32:20) Individualism/liberalism and evolution of poetic taste* (33:20) Why there is resistance to quantitative approaches to literature* (34:00) Fiction in other languages* (37:33) The Life Cycles of Genres* (38:00) The concept of “genre”* (41:00) Inflationary/deflationary views on natural kinds and genre* (44:20) Genre as a social and not a linguistic phenomenon* (46:10) Will causal models impact the humanities? * (48:30) (Ir)reducibility of cultural influences on authors* (50:00) Machine Learning and Human Perspective* (50:20) Fluent and perspectival categories—Miriam Posner on “the radical, unrealized potential of digital humanities.”* (52:52) How ML's vices can become virtues for humanists* (56:05) Can We Map Culture? and The Historical Significance of Textual Distances* (56:50) Are cultures and other social phenomena related to one another in a way we can “map”? * (59:00) Is cultural distance Euclidean? * (59:45) The KL Divergence's use for humanists* (1:03:32) We don't already understand the broad outlines of literary history* (1:06:55) Science Fiction Hasn't Prepared us to Imagine Machine Learning* (1:08:45) The latent space of language and what intelligence could mean* (1:09:30) LLMs as models of culture* (1:10:00) What it is to be a human in “the age of AI” and Ezra Klein's framing* (1:12:45) Mapping the Latent Spaces of Culture* (1:13:10) Ted on Stochastic Parrots* (1:15:55) The risk of AI enabling hermetically sealed cultures* (1:17:55) “Postcards from an unmapped latent space,” more on AI systems' limitations as virtues* (1:20:40) Obligatory GPT-4 section* (1:21:00) Using GPT-4 to estimate passage of time in fiction* (1:23:39) Is deep learning more interpretable than statistical NLP?* (1:25:17) The “self-reports” of language models: should we trust them?* (1:26:50) University dependence on tech giants, open-source models* (1:31:55) Reclaiming Ground for the Humanities* (1:32:25) What scientists, alone, can contribute to the humanities* (1:34:45) On the future of the humanities* (1:35:55) How computing can enable humanists as humanists* (1:37:05) Human self-understanding as a collaborative project* (1:39:30) Is anything ineffable? On what AI systems can “grasp”* (1:43:12) OutroLinks:* Ted's blog and Twitter* Research* The literary uses of high-dimensional space* The Longue Durée of literary prestige* The Historical Significance of Textual Distances* Machine Learning and Human Perspective* The life cycles of genres* Can We Map Culture?* Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture* Other Writing* Reclaiming Ground for the Humanities* We don't already understand the broad outlines of literary history* Science fiction hasn't prepared us to imagine machine learning.* How predictable is fiction?* Mapping the latent spaces of culture* Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Understanding and controlling a maze-solving policy network, published by Alex Turner on March 11, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum. TL;DR: We algebraically modified the net's runtime goals without finetuning. We also found (what we think is) a "motivational API" deep in the network. We used the API to retarget the agent. Summary of a few of the most interesting results: Langosco et al. trained a range of maze-solving nets. We decided to analyze one which we thought would be interesting. The network we chose has 3.5M parameters and 15 convolutional layers. This network can be attracted to a target location nearby in the maze—all this by modifying a single activation, out of tens of thousands. This works reliably when the target location is in the upper-right, and not as reliably when the target is elsewhere. Considering several channels halfway through the network, we hypothesized that their activations mainly depend on the location of the cheese. We tested this by resampling these activations with those from another random maze (as in causal scrubbing). We found that as long as the second maze had its cheese located at the same coordinates, the network's behavior was roughly unchanged. However, if the second maze had cheese at different coordinates, the agent's behavior was significantly affected. This suggests that these channels are inputs to goal-oriented circuits, and these channels affect those circuits basically by passing messages about where the cheese is. This network decides whether to acquire cheese not only as a function of path-distance to cheese, but—after controlling for path-distance—also as a function of Euclidean/"perceptual" distance between the mouse and the cheese, even though the agent sees the whole maze at once. Another simple idea: We define a "cheese vector" as the difference in activations when the cheese is present in a maze, and when the cheese is not present in the same maze. For each maze, we generate a single cheese vector and subtract that vector from all forward passes in that maze. The agent now ignores cheese most of the time, instead heading towards the top-right region (the historical location of cheese). Furthermore, a given maze's cheese vector transfers across mazes to other mazes with cheese in the same location. We propose the algebraic value-editing conjecture (AVEC): It's possible to deeply modify a range of alignment-relevant model properties, without retraining the model, via techniques as simple as "run forward passes on prompts which e.g. prompt the model to offer nice- and not-nice completions, and then take a 'niceness vector' to be the diff between their activations, and then add the niceness vector to future forward passes." Introducing the training process and visualizations In this post, we'll mostly discuss what we found, not what our findings mean. Let's run through some facts about Langosco et al.'s training process. Mazes had varying effective sizes, ranging from 3×3 to 25×25: Each 64×64 RGB observation is processed by a deeply convolutional (15 conv layers!) network, without memory (i.e. no recurrent state): Why does the agent go to the cheese sometimes, and the top-right corner other times? It's not that the agent wasn't trained for long enough. Sampling rollouts from the trained policy adds a lot of noise. It's also hard to remember what the agent did in what part of the maze. To better understand this mouse, we'll take a bird's-eye view. A nicer way to view episodes is with a vector field view, which overlays a vector field representing the agent policy for a given maze. We consider two kinds of vector fields: While the net probability vector field leaves open two degrees of freedom per net probability vector, in practice it seems fine for eyeballing mouse behavior. Behavioral analysis When in doubt, get m...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Understanding and controlling a maze-solving policy network, published by TurnTrout on March 11, 2023 on LessWrong. TL;DR: We algebraically modified the net's runtime goals without finetuning. We also found (what we think is) a "motivational API" deep in the network. We used the API to retarget the agent. Summary of a few of the most interesting results: Langosco et al. trained a range of maze-solving nets. We decided to analyze one which we thought would be interesting. The network we chose has 3.5M parameters and 15 convolutional layers. This network can be attracted to a target location nearby in the maze—all this by modifying a single activation, out of tens of thousands. This works reliably when the target location is in the upper-right, and not as reliably when the target is elsewhere. Considering several channels halfway through the network, we hypothesized that their activations mainly depend on the location of the cheese. We tested this by resampling these activations with those from another random maze (as in causal scrubbing). We found that as long as the second maze had its cheese located at the same coordinates, the network's behavior was roughly unchanged. However, if the second maze had cheese at different coordinates, the agent's behavior was significantly affected. This suggests that these channels are inputs to goal-oriented circuits, and these channels affect those circuits basically by passing messages about where the cheese is. This network decides whether to acquire cheese not only as a function of path-distance to cheese, but—after controlling for path-distance—also as a function of Euclidean/"perceptual" distance between the mouse and the cheese, even though the agent sees the whole maze at once. Another simple idea: We define a "cheese vector" as the difference in activations when the cheese is present in a maze, and when the cheese is not present in the same maze. For each maze, we generate a single cheese vector and subtract that vector from all forward passes in that maze. The agent now ignores cheese most of the time, instead heading towards the top-right region (the historical location of cheese). We propose the algebraic value-editing conjecture (AVEC): It's possible to deeply modify a range of alignment-relevant model properties, without retraining the model, via techniques as simple as "run forward passes on prompts which e.g. prompt the model to offer nice- and not-nice completions, and then take a 'niceness vector' to be the diff between their activations, and then add the niceness vector to future forward passes." Introducing the training process and visualizations In this post, we'll mostly discuss what we found, not what our findings mean. Let's run through some facts about Langosco et al.'s training process. Mazes had varying effective sizes, ranging from 3×3 to 25×25: Each 64×64 RGB observation is processed by a deeply convolutional (15 conv layers!) network, without memory (i.e. no recurrent state): Why does the agent go to the cheese sometimes, and the top-right corner other times? It's not that the agent wasn't trained for long enough. Sampling rollouts from the trained policy adds a lot of noise. It's also hard to remember what the agent did in what part of the maze. To better understand this mouse, we'll take a bird's-eye view. A nicer way to view episodes is with a vector field view, which overlays a vector field representing the agent policy for a given maze. We consider two kinds of vector fields: While the net probability vector field leaves open two degrees of freedom per net probability vector, in practice it seems fine for eyeballing mouse behavior. Behavioral analysis When in doubt, get more data. When Alex (TurnTrout) was setting directions but didn't know what to do, he'd think "what data firehydrants can I crack...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: LLM Basics: Transformer Token Vectors Are Not Points in Space, published by NickyP on February 13, 2023 on LessWrong. This post is written as an explanation of a misconception I had with transformer embedding when I was getting started. Thanks to Stephen Fowler for the discussion last August that made me realise the misconception, and others for helping me refine my explanation. Any mistakes are my own. Thanks to feedback by Stephen Fowler and JustisMills on this post. TL;DR: While the token vectors are stored as n-dimensional vectors, thinking of them as points in vector space can be quite misleading. It is better to think of them as directions on a hypersphere, with a size component. The I think of distance as the Euclidean distance, with formula: d(x1,x2)=|x1−x2|=√∑i(x1i−x2i)2 Thus does not match up with the distance forumla used when calculating logits: d(x1,x2)=x1x2=|x1x2|cosθ12 But it does match up with the cosine similarity forumula: d(x1,x2)=^x1^x2=cosθ12 And so, we can see that the direction and size matter, but not the distance Introduction In the study of transformers, it is often assumed that different tokens are embedded as points in a multi-dimensional space. While this concept is partially true, the space in which these tokens are embedded is not a traditional Euclidean space. This is because of the way probabilities of tokens are calculated, as well as how the behaviour of the softmax function affects how tokens are positioned in their space. This post will have two parts. In the first part, I will briefly explain the relevant parts of the transformer, and in the second part, we will explore what is happening when a transformer moves from an input token to an output token explaining why tokens are better thought of as directions. Part 1: The Process of a Transformer Here I will briefly describe how the relevant parts of the transformer work. First, let's briefly explain the relevant parts at the start of the transformer. We will be studying the "causal" transformer model (ie: that given N tokens, we want to predict the (N+1)th token). The main "pieces" of a causal model are: The Tokeniser - turns "words" into "tokens" or "tokens" into "words" The Transformer - turn N tokens into a prediction for the (N+1)th token Input Embedding - turns "tokens" into "vectors" Positional Encoder - adds information about position of each token Many Decoder layers - turns input vectors into prediction vectors with a Self-Attention sub-layer - uses information from all states with a Feed Forward sub-layer - uses information from the current state Output Unembedding - turns prediction vectors into token probabilities Note that I won't go into much depth about the positional and decoder layers in this post. If there is interest, I may write up another post explaining how they work if there is interest. Also note, that for simplicity, I will initially assume that the input embedding and the output unembedding are the same. In this case, if you have a token, embed it, and then unembed it, you should get the same token out. The symmetry was true in the era of GPT-2, but nowadays, embedding and unembedding matrices are learned separately, so I will touch on some differences in the end. Lastly, note that "unembedding" is actually a fake word, and usually it is just called the output embedding. I think unembedding makes more sense, so I will call it unembedding. 1. The Start of the Transformer Process In the beginning of the transformer process, there is the Tokeniser (converting “words” into “tokens”) and the Token Embedding (converting “tokens” into “token vectors”/”hidden-state vectors”): So to start: Input text is received The text is split into N different “parts” called token ids The N token ids are converted into N vectors using the embedding matrix The N vectors are pass...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: SolidGoldMagikarp II: technical details and more recent findings, published by mwatkins on February 6, 2023 on LessWrong. tl;dr: This is a follow-up to our original post on prompt generation and the anomalous token phenomenon which emerged from that research. Work done by Jessica Rumbelow and Matthew Watkins in January 2023 at SERI-MATS. Clustering As a result of work done on clustering tokens in GPT-2 and GPT-J embedding spaces, our attention was originally drawn to the tokens closest to the centroid of the entire set of 50,257 tokens shared across all GPT-2 and -3 models. These tokens were familiar to us for their frequent occurrence as closest tokens to the centroids of the (mostly semantically coherent, or semi-coherent) clusters of tokens we were producing via the k-means algorithm. Here are a few more selections from such clusters. Distances shown are Euclidean, and from the cluster's centroid (rather than the overall token set centroid): Distance-from-centroid hypothesis Our hypothesis that the anomalous tokens that kept showing up as the nearest tokens to the centroids of such clusters were the tokens closest to the overall centroid of the token set turned out to be correct for GPT2-small and GPT-J. However, the opposite was true for GPT2-xl, where the anomalous tokens tend to be found as far as possible from the overall centroid. One unexplained phenomenon which may be related emerged from three-shot prompting experiments with these models, in which they were encouraged to repeat the anomalous tokens (rather than by directly asking them to, as we'd been doing with ChatGPT and then GPT3-davinci-instruct-beta): Our three-shot prompts were formatted as follows (here for the example token 'EStreamFrame'). Note that we've included examples capitalised and uncapitalised, alphabetic and numeric, with and without a leading space: This prompt was run through all three models, for a list of 85 anomalous tokens, with the following success rates: GPT2-small 18/85 (21%) GPT2-xl 43/85 (51%) GPT-J 17/85 (20%) Here are comparative baselines using 100 randomly chosen English words and 100 nonsense alphanumeric strings: GPT2-small 82/100 on words; 89/100 on nonsense GPT2-xl 98/100 on word; 94/100 on nonsense GPT-J 100/100 on words; 100/100 on nonsense We see that all three models suffered a noticeable performance drop when going from non-anomalous to anomalous strings, but GPT2-xl considerably less so, despite the fact that GPT-J is a much bigger model. One hypothesis is that an anomalous token's closeness to the overall centroid in the relevant embedding space is an inhibiting factor in the ability of a GPT model to repeat that token's string. This hypothesised correlation will be explored soon. It would be helpful to know more about how GPT2-xl's training differed from that of the other two models. Seeking out and studying checkpoint data from the training of these models is an obvious next step. GPT-2 and GPT-J distances-from-centroid data Top 100 versions of all of these lists are available here. GPT2-small closest-to-centroid tokens: '�' Index: 187 Distance: 1.5314713716506958 '�' Index: 182 Distance: 1.53245210647583 'x1c' Index: 216 Distance: 1.532564640045166 'x07' Index: 195 Distance: 1.532976746559143 '�' Index: 179 Distance: 1.5334911346435547 'quickShip' Index: 39752 Distance: 1.5345481634140015 'x19' Index: 213 Distance: 1.534569501876831 'x0b' Index: 199 Distance: 1.5346266031265259 '�' Index: 125 Distance: 1.5347601175308228 '�' Index: 183 Distance: 1.5347920656204224 'x16' Index: 210 Distance: 1.5350308418273926 'x14' Index: 208 Distance: 1.5353295803070068 ' TheNitrome' Index: 42089 Distance: 1.535927176475525 'x17' Index: 211 Distance: 1.5360500812530518 'x1f' Index: 219 Distance: 1.5361398458480835 'x15' Index: 209 Distance: 1.5366222858428955 '�' ...

Our journey through Season 2 puts up its first winning streak as we review "Future Tense". Enterprise's worst plotline puts up its best entry as the NX-01 crew works through a Doctor Who plot, but in a good way. That said, would it have killed Trip to call someone when he found a hell portal?

This episode finds us in the ambiguously located town of River Heights with teen sleuth, Nancy Drew. The Nancy series has mega intergenerational nostalgia vibes for a lot of us —that row of yellow spines on a shelf transports many of us straight back to childhood. But revisiting our Nancy-love by starting with book 1, The Secret of the Old Clock, produces some mixed emotions. Where are Bess and George? Why is Nancy blonde, wasn't she Titian-haired? While we may have been fuzzy on some of the details, Nancy's escapades are still a pretty wild romp. She's saving babies with massive head injuries, chasing a violent gang of thieves, helping little old ladies, and benefitting from all sorts of violations of attorney-client privilege. This book has everything... missing wills, two tragic boating accidents, a ripped evening gown, and a Euclidean lever. This episode has everything too... more sound effects, The Stratemeyer Syndicate, legal opinions, and a major spoiler for our next episode. These Books Made Me is a podcast about the literary heroines who shaped us and is a product of the Prince George's County Memorial Library System podcast network. Stay in touch with us via Twitter @PGCMLS with #TheseBooksMadeMe or by email at TheseBooksMadeMe@pgcmls.info. For recommended readalikes and deep dives into topics related to each episode, visit out blog at https://pgcmls.medium.com/.Midred Benson: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/adventurous-writer-who-brought-Nancy-Drew-to-life-180969479/Changes from the 30s to the 50s revision: https://library.csun.edu/SCA/Peek-in-the-Stacks/nancy-drew

The Story of Proof: Logic and the History of Mathematics (Princeton UP, 2022) investigates the evolution of the concept of proof--one of the most significant and defining features of mathematical thought--through critical episodes in its history. From the Pythagorean theorem to modern times, and across all major mathematical disciplines, John Stillwell demonstrates that proof is a mathematically vital concept, inspiring innovation and playing a critical role in generating knowledge. Stillwell begins with Euclid and his influence on the development of geometry and its methods of proof, followed by algebra, which began as a self-contained discipline but later came to rival geometry in its mathematical impact. In particular, the infinite processes of calculus were at first viewed as "infinitesimal algebra," and calculus became an arena for algebraic, computational proofs rather than axiomatic proofs in the style of Euclid. Stillwell proceeds to the areas of number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, topology, and logic, and peers into the deep chasm between natural number arithmetic and the real numbers. In its depths, Cantor, Gödel, Turing, and others found that the concept of proof is ultimately part of arithmetic. This startling fact imposes fundamental limits on what theorems can be proved and what problems can be solved. This book could well serve as a history of mathematics, because in developing the evolution of the concept of proof and how it has arisen in the various different mathematical fields. The author essentially traces the important milestones in the development of mathematics. It's an amazing job of collecting and categorizing many of the most important ideas in this area. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Story of Proof: Logic and the History of Mathematics (Princeton UP, 2022) investigates the evolution of the concept of proof--one of the most significant and defining features of mathematical thought--through critical episodes in its history. From the Pythagorean theorem to modern times, and across all major mathematical disciplines, John Stillwell demonstrates that proof is a mathematically vital concept, inspiring innovation and playing a critical role in generating knowledge. Stillwell begins with Euclid and his influence on the development of geometry and its methods of proof, followed by algebra, which began as a self-contained discipline but later came to rival geometry in its mathematical impact. In particular, the infinite processes of calculus were at first viewed as "infinitesimal algebra," and calculus became an arena for algebraic, computational proofs rather than axiomatic proofs in the style of Euclid. Stillwell proceeds to the areas of number theory, non-Euclidean geometry, topology, and logic, and peers into the deep chasm between natural number arithmetic and the real numbers. In its depths, Cantor, Gödel, Turing, and others found that the concept of proof is ultimately part of arithmetic. This startling fact imposes fundamental limits on what theorems can be proved and what problems can be solved. This book could well serve as a history of mathematics, because in developing the evolution of the concept of proof and how it has arisen in the various different mathematical fields. The author essentially traces the important milestones in the development of mathematics. It's an amazing job of collecting and categorizing many of the most important ideas in this area. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Ashvin Chhabra is the President and Chief Investment Officer of Euclidean Capital, the family office for Jim Simons of Renaissance Technologies. Ashvin joined Euclidean in 2015 after spending time as CIO of the Institute for Advanced Study and CIO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management. He is the author of The Aspirational Investor and is recognized as one of the founders of goals-based wealth management. Our conversation covers into Ashvin's upbringing and his path from physics to investing. We discuss his “Beyond Markowitz” portfolio management framework, application of it to high net worth individuals, foundations, the Yale endowment, Warren Buffett, and a single family office. Along the way, Ashvin shares the story of interviewing with Jim Simons, his critique of endowment management, manager selection, and perspectives on interest rates and bitcoin. Ashvin is one of most creative and independent thinkers in the community and you'll soon hear why.   Learn More  Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn  Subscribe to the mailing list  Access Transcript with Premium Membership