SOEP meets Dame Steve Shirley – a coding female pioneer

SOEP meets Dame Steve Shirley – a coding female pioneer
Dame Stephanie (Steve) Shirley is a game changer in whatever she does and we were delighted that she agreed to chat to Somewhere on Earth.  She arrived in England as an unaccompanied child refugee on the Kindertransport in 1939. She convinced her all girls’ school to allow her to learn maths at the boys’ school and in 1962 started a software business from her dining table which grew to have 8,500 employees and was worth US$3bn. The company initially only employed women working from home. Since retiring in 1993, Dame Stephanie’s life has been dedicated to philanthropy in IT and autism including setting up the Oxford Internet Institute.  

Brazil’s Supercomputer to predict natural disasters
Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) has finally received funding for a new supercomputer that will significantly improve climate forecasting.  The new supercomputer is 15 times more powerful than the institute’s current one and scientists hope it can help the country deal with a massive rise in extreme weather events – last year they averaged more than three a day.  Angelica Mari speaks to Clezio Nardin, Inpe’s Director about the project.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Angelica Mari.   

More on this week's stories:
Dame Steve Shirley
Brazil’s New Supercomputer

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello everybody, it's Gareth. This is the Somewhere on Earth podcast. It's Tuesday, the 2nd of April 2024 and a big hello to you from our studio here in London. 

00:00:20 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, joining us today again she was with us last week as well. Angelica Mari, two weeks on the trot. How about that? I'm getting used to this now and I think this is lovely. How how are you? 

00:00:25 Angelica Mari 

Hey. 

00:00:32 Gareth Mitchell 

That OK. 

00:00:32 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, I'm happy to be back. 

00:00:35 Gareth Mitchell 

Good stuff, because you've been as always out and about covering things and you've been to an especially interesting summit, haven't you recently? 

00:00:44 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, I just returned from South Summit Brazil. It took place in Porto Alegre, the capital of Rio Grande do Sul. And it’s a state in the extreme South of Brazil. It's very close to Uruguay and Argentina. 

00:00:57 Angelica Mari 

Yeah. So it's a Brazilian version of a Madrid event in, in its third edition, and Brazil is a continent, right? And every state right now wants to develop their own tech market and the state of Rio Grande do Sul is trying to evolve what they already have. So when it comes to events, I've been to a few of these recently and I think they can be a bit samey in terms of content, Gareth. 

00:01:20 Gareth Mitchell 

And yeah. 

00:01:31 Gareth Mitchell 

What? 

00:01:31 Gareth Mitchell 

You pick up your lanyard, you get your swag bag. There's that awkward hanging around on the first day. 

00:01:34 Angelica Mari 

Yeah. And also you can sort of, uh, what they discuss is, uh, you know, how AI is gonna take over the world and all of our jobs and all that. But I think the main attraction here, beyond the the local context of course, is networking. So I've been thinking about the role of these large events as a way to sort of sophisticate regional tech environments and also how fast they manage to do that. 

00:01:46 Gareth Mitchell 

Blah blah. 

00:02:07 Angelica Mari 

And the conclusion here, Gareth, is that it all depends on the amount of influential people from the traditional companies involved and how much money is invested as well. So. 

00:02:17 Angelica Mari 

No. 

00:02:21 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, so the legacy companies and. 

00:02:24 Gareth Mitchell 

Money entrepreneurs in it for the long haul. I just wonder if that might become a theme today. 

00:02:31 Angelica Mari 

Yeah. 

00:02:31 Gareth Mitchell 

That's beautifully teased. My goodness. Looking forward to that, let's jump in. 

00:02:40 Gareth Mitchell 

Coming up in this edition. 

00:02:45 Gareth Mitchell 

We have a tech visionary view. Yes, another one. It was Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales the other day. But today I'm talking to the woman who kind of invented IT outsourcing, having set up a small programming company in the 1960s that grew into a giant that created a whole bunch of millionaires, most of them women, when it sold off in the 1990s. 

00:03:06 Gareth Mitchell 

Not bad for someone who started out in life as a child refugee fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s. 

00:03:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Also today, a supercomputer in Brazil, so just how super is this computer? That's all right here on the Somewhere on Earth podcast. 

00:03:29 Gareth Mitchell 

Well first, then few tech or business stories are more remarkable than that of Dame Stephanie, Steve, Shirley. Ohh. And that named Steve, by the way. It comes into things because as Stephanie built up her first businesses in the 60s and 70s more people replied to her letters when they were assigned Steve than when they were assigned Stephanie. 

00:03:48 Gareth Mitchell 

Anyway, now aged 90 Dame Shirley’s life well, it really has been astonishing. She created one of the UK's first IT outsourcing companies in 1962, selling it for millions when it finally floated in 1996. Born in 1933, Stephanie moved from Germany to Britain as a kinder transport child refugee. She went on to work for a while at the Post Office’s Dollis Hill research centre and then went on to have a stellar business career and as a philanthropist. Dame Stephanie is also the author of the book Let it Go - My Extraordinary Story, and what an extraordinary story it is. Well, I caught up with Dame Shirley the other day, just after she'd spoken at Tech Show London. She told me that her main message to the delegates was that in business, we should all get better at well, taking our time. 

00:04:43 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

I think many people think in terms of projects that are weeks and months, whereas the really strategic ones actually take years. And what I talked about was the 17 years it took to make my first charity free standing managerially and financially independent of me, the 25 years before we paid  our first dividend and it was purely dividend compared with Microsoft. even the mighty Microsoft took 10 years to pay its dividend. These things are long term and today's entrepreneurs are very used to getting capital in very early. I didn't have that and so my progress I suppose was very slow and steady before we actually reached any sensible size. 

00:05:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you about that. This was freelance programmers, wasn't it? 

00:05:34 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

That's right. 

00:05:34 Gareth Mitchell 

You. 

00:05:34 Gareth Mitchell 

Know it's really one of the first UK tech startups, wasn't it? When when did it start? 

00:05:40 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

We started in 1962 at the 10th of August. I shall never forget it. 

00:05:46 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

We celebrated, we celebrated 60 years, even though the company no longer exists. It's it's been taken over. But we celebrated 60 years and and lost, 88 people turned up or some something still from the early days. 

00:06:01 Gareth Mitchell 

Which is lovely. I mean, because this was, I mean, in itself an incredible story and worth just bringing the listeners up to speed with, all about women working from home, wasn't it in technology, doing coding, doing projects, you know, outsourcing effectively or taking outsourced work from companies. 

00:06:21 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

It really was a social business. I didn't go into business to make money, though. Eventually, of course, I made serious money, but I went into business to provide work opportunities for women with children. People who'd left the industry on marriage or when their first child was expected and wanted to come back, wanted to be active in the industry but didn't want to go back into an office, so it was a very family friendly way of working very flexible to to the extreme. You could work part time. You could work home based, you could work summertime only. You could work term time only. We really flexed the arrangements we, I think we did one of the very first job shares for example, just because we're prepared to consider any way of getting work done. 

00:07:14 Gareth Mitchell 

And people around at the time may have, especially the more forward-looking ones may have said, well, this is the way of the future. Now surely by about the mid 70s a lot of people will be working from home and doing this kind of work in a very flexible way. But it kind of took until the twenty 10s for anybody really to be doing that. Seriously, didn't it. 

00:07:33 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

It's taken a long time for it to become fashionable. 

00:07:37 Gareth Mitchell 

Why do you think that is? Especially if you proved it as a business model, as a working model so early on? 

00:07:44 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

I think people assumed that it's the success of my company was due to the technology and it wasn't. It was due to a management style, a business style and so it will it will transfer into into other arenas. 

00:07:59 Gareth Mitchell 

It was women only to start with, but that did have to change, didn't it? 

00:08:03 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

Well, in 1975, amid 13 years from start up, equal opportunities legislation came in in Britain and so what we were doing to do positive discrimination for women was actually illegal. So we had to welcome the men in and thereafter it gradually became well balanced between the sexes. 

00:08:27 Gareth Mitchell 

Yes, indeed. Or as I think one person put it at the time, well, we let the men in at the end but you welcomed them too, of course. 

00:08:33 Gareth Mitchell 

Very welcoming company culture, absolutely. I don't know if this is just apocryphal, but is it true that you or some of your fellow colleagues, were you had to have typewriter sound effects playing in the background to cover up maybe the sound of all the domestic hubbub in the household, In order for clients to take you seriously, is that just one of those myths, or did that happen? 

00:08:58 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

No, it it didn't have to happen, but certainly I had a tape recorder playing office noises in the background so it sounded as as if I had office noises in the background so that it sounded as if I was in a busy office. Everybody typing hard typing in those days. Of course, very, very fast. 

00:09:19 Gareth Mitchell 

Wow, so that story is true, or at least the way you've put it. I probably didn't summarise it particularly well, but the business did float at the end, didn't it in 1996 and you created a whole load of female millionaires, didn't you? 

00:09:31 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

I think 70, 7 O, and I'm very proud of that. And it's all part of sharing. We always worked in teams. I think it's quite a feminine characteristic. We were not really competitive with each other. We have really helped each other, perhaps because we felt we had to. 

00:09:52 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

And that developed into a very collegiate culture, so that when we had a success, I wanted it to be shared by everybody who'd contributed. 

00:10:03 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

And to a sense everybody contributed it, including the girls on the switchboard. So we went for Co Co ownership and I'm very proud to have got 24% of the company shares into the hands of the staff at no cost to anyone but me. 

00:10:22 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

And by a complicated system of of double voting, 62% control of the company was in the hands of the staff. It took eleven years to make that happen. So these things are never easy. 

00:10:40 ADVERTISMENT – AI PODCAST 

00:11:24 Gareth Mitchell 

So at the tech show, London, you've been talking about the business lessons you've learned from that example, and then the many other organisations both profit for profit and not-for-profit that you've gone on to be a part of since. So one of the messages is to is to kind of take your time and to understand that it takes a while to build a business. It can take a decade before you even get a dividend, often longer. Do you get a lot of pushback on that when there's so much emphasis now on piling in a whole load of venture capital so companies can have a lot of money, but they're not actually making money. Is yours quite a difficult message to get across, do you think in the tech culture and dare I say the tech bro culture that we're in at the moment? 

00:12:06 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

I I I think things have moved on. I don't think a company like freelance programmers would survive in today's environment. What you do always has to be appropriate for the time and the and the place that you're doing it and with your own skills. I mean, I wasn't capable of of running a corporate when I started. You gradually have to learn on the job. 

00:12:51 Gareth Mitchell 

So learning on the job and I suppose understanding that things take time because I know that one of your messages at the tech show has been about being prepared to be in it for the long term, or at the very least the businesses that really go on to survive are the ones, if I'm paraphrasing correctly, are the ones that maybe grew from the outset with an idea of the long term, the idea that it's a marathon, not a sprint or maybe a marathon and a sprint. Having that mindset is more likely to give business success. Could I summarise it in that way? 

00:13:11 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

I think that's fine. I mean it, the quick fixes seldom work. 

00:13:06 Gareth Mitchell 

Why not? 

00:13:08 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

Because they're they're ill thought out. They're they're done in a hurry. They're not done quality. They're not planned. They're not experimented with. They're not trialled properly. They're just rush ahead. 

00:13:20 Gareth Mitchell 

So we're recording this interview as it happens on Friday the 8th of March. It's going out on the podcast a bit later, but as we sit here recording this now, it is International Women's Day and yours is an incredible story to tell in terms of bringing more women and girls into technology. We've talked about freelance programmers. But when did it first occur to you then that there was this difference between how boys and girls were treated in the business world? And of course, even before that, through their education. 

00:13:51 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

I think it was probably when I was at school and girls, they were all unisex schools in those days, and girls, schools didn't teach science, the only science thought respectable for girls, was botany. So I had to really fight to get tuition in mathematics, which is what with my passion and I finished up actually attending the boys school, again unisex, which was a salutary introduction to the sexism of the workplace. 

00:14:23 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

You know, I was helped by the powers that be to get my tuition, and it's made an enormous impact on my life because, of course, it led to computers and computers have led with, have made my life really apart from the charitable work. 

00:14:40 Gareth Mitchell 

And of course, famously you have changed your name, or at least you go by the name Steve. And you did that then in order for people to take you and inverted commas seriously, didn't you? Was it a suggestion of your husband’s that you go by a man's name, not a women's name? 

00:14:56 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

I was working in a very simple way. I was sending out letters to people who were advertising in the the media for programmers and my letters were pretty standard letters saying I'm not applying for the your programming job, but I can offer you programming services and at that time software was given away free with the hardware, so people thought that was a bit extreme. I've got this double feminine name. Stephanie, Shirley, Shirley being my marital name and happened to be also a girl's name in the UK. So Stephanie Shirley got no, absolutely no response to her letters at all. And it was my dear, late now, late husband who suggested that I use the family nickname Steve. So I wrote the same sort of letters to the same sorts of prospects, signing them, Steve Shirley, and that apparently made a difference, because people started to reply and I started to get some meetings and I started to get some work. 

00:15:59 Gareth Mitchell 

I suppose whatever works. Very sad that you had to do that. I mean, do you think that should be a strategy now? Possibly. I'm I'm being deliberately provocative here. But, you know, let's just get down to it. 

00:16:00 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

You would you, would you, you would hope it wouldn't be necessary at all, but I I do notice the number of women who use androgynous names. Leslie, Jo. JK Rowling, the the the author, for example, didn't use her own name because she didn't think she'd be able to get published. 

00:16:48 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, it's still pretty shocking even in this day and age. What would your advice be then based on your many experiences to well, just split this into two parts, partly into younger people, like girls, maybe going through school, choosing STEM subjects over others, and then of course, later in one's career as a woman, going through business, going through technology and succeeding. 

00:16:56 Dame Stephanie Shirley 

My advice to young women is exactly the same as the as the advice I'd give to young men. To find an area in which you're really interested, which you find fascinating, which you can get enthusiastic about and then really do some research and get trained in in that area. And then get retrained so that you're at the leading edge and then forgetting what everybody else tells you. Just go ahead and do it and make it happen. Take a risk and make it happen. 

00:17:35 Gareth Mitchell 

That's Dame Stephanie Shirley. And there's more from her in the podcast edition of this of this podcast. So if you want to subscribe, then it's pretty easy to do, often depending on your podcast, you might see a little kind of padlock logo. Just click on that and work it out and you'll be able to be one of the marvellous people who subscribes to us for just ten U.S. dollars a month and in return you get some podcast extra content and you get an awful lot of love from us because you're keeping the lights on round here. OK, now, Angelica, you were sitting listening to that interview with me, weren't you? How do you thinking a little bit about different ways of working business models, working models and so on, didn't it? 

00:18:15 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, at first it is an absolute delight to hear Dame Shirley isn't it. Such a role model? When I, when I interviewed her back when I was a rookie, I was in awe because she's such a visionary and I think particularly regarding working models, she was truly ahead of her time, wasn't she? When she started her company and and she proved that building a solid company has nothing to do with whether you're sitting from a desk at the office or not, it has to do with culture, right? You see that nearly 100 people turned up to celebrate the anniversary of a company that not even exist anymore with her, so that kind of illustrates the kind of environment that her company was, the appreciation that management had for people, circumstances, their needs, what they actually wanted, which in many cases was working remotely and that point about making people happy. Something you wonder when you when you see companies reverting to office-based work and I think businesses have to consider people's satisfaction and work as much more than just salary, I think remote work really enables folks to adjust work to their life circumstances, and I understand there's value in face to face interaction. I like a bit of water cooler conversation, but it is quite concerning that so many companies are trying to force people to work from the office all the time. It's like winding a clock back, don't you think Gareth? 

00:20:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, exactly. I think it's just about getting the balance right. And I think another thing is it just depends on the business. I think having a blanket rule like, hey, everyone, every business should do 2 days in the office a week, 3 days remotely. Of course, it depends on the sector. It depends on the business, maybe even depends on your seniority in the company. There are lots of different factors at play. 

00:20:45 Gareth Mitchell 

But I think just calling people into the office for the sake of it, and even worse, if maybe the directors thinking, well, I just like to see people here, it just maybe makes me feel important to see all these people sitting at their desks. Yeah, that presenteeism it does make me wonder and just, I mean. Yeah. 

00:20:32 Angelica Mari 

Just peer over your shoulder, right? 

00:20:38 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, yeah. And it's really strange companies that prove just prove to themselves that they could make it work during the pandemic. Like just trying to to reverse things, it is really strange. 

00:20:54 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, I think the trouble with the place I work is they put people in offices who get on well with each other because I, I have two office mates and we all get on so well. And to be honest, I never get any work done in the office because and I I'm the guilty one. I I'm just chatting all the time and I do have to just say, oh, should we just do some work and the other two are probably think. Gareth can we, can we just bit of quiet time, please. So anyway sorry folks, if I do that too much. 

00:21:20 Angelica Mari 

So you have to work at home and make your own cups of tea. 

00:21:23Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, the the indignity of it. Yeah. The other thing that came out from that interview with Dame Shirley was about this whole being in it for the long run as well. And her message to startups just come on. Take your time. The gratification is not always instant, and it shouldn't be. There was that. Did that resonate with you? 

00:21:47 Angelica Mari 

Well, I've been a freelance journalist for many years. As you know, and the listeners might know, which is kind of being an entrepreneur on your own. But today I also run a research business focused on futures with two other people, and I can relate with what Dame Shirley said about building a business for the long run, bootstrapping, finding ways to do things with limited resources. And all that. But I think the point about wanting things too quickly can be about growing really and showing the world what you're made of as soon as possible. But it can also be a growth in order to divest, to sell your company as soon as possible too, and move on.  

00:22:35 Angelica Mari 

But I think Gareth that very often the ability to to achieve things quickly is conditional to having the capital needed to scale. And let's remember, female founders only get like 2% of all venture capital invested in companies led by women, and only three, 2% and and 3% of funds are led by women. So wanting to succeed quickly may or may not be a good thing. 

00:22:54 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, is that still the case? Wow, 2%. That's rubbish. 

00:23:06 Angelica Mari 

But achieving that today is not reality for most women leading a business. 

00:23:13 Gareth Mitchell 

OK, yeah. Wow, those statistics. Astonishing. You might have hoped things would had changed a bit. Clearly not, or not enough. 

00:23:10 Angelica Mari 

They actually are getting worse. It was actually close to 4% and recently it has  

00:23:23 Gareth Mitchell 

Ohh God. 

00:23:24 Angelica Mari 

decreased by two 2% or so. Yeah, so not really a uplifting scenario. 

00:23:38 Gareth Mitchell 

I'm afraid not.  Angelica, while we're chatting then and the subject change here, there's no easy transitional segue here. You can hear the gears crunching in the Somewhere on Earth gearbox here. Let's talk about supercomputers. And this is people who maybe are frequent Flyers to this podcast. And who, perhaps, remember our previous incarnation as Digital Planet may remember. 

00:24:04 Gareth Mitchell 

That in the Digital Planet days you spoke to the head of this agency, wasn't it space agency in Brazil about this astonishing supercomputer for predicting the weather. And that story was quite initially it was quite early days. And I probably said something like, hey, well, we'll keep an eye on this one and we'll report on it at some other time. So here we are reporting on it some other time, having kept an eye on this story. So what's the latest? 

00:24:30 Angelica Mari 

So yeah, when we spoke to the director for the National Institute for Space Research in Sao Paulo, it is an organisation, by the way, that is linked to the Ministry of Science and Technology and Innovations in Brazil. So they finally received funding for a new supercomputer that will enhance climate forecasting capabilities in Brazil. So the the background for this Gareth, is that things are not very uplifting, either for, in terms of climate change in Brazil. We've recorded over 1000 disasters linked to extreme weather events in 2023. So that's more than three a day, and that's a record high. So there were floods and landslides. 

In the Amazon region has suffered with historic droughts. So unfortunately, several hundreds of people have died and the cities have suffered significant financial loss. So the supercomputer, the promises that scientists will be able to predict the weather, understand space and also do business, see things like. 

00:25:49 Angelica Mari 

calculating risks and for that insurance, companies needed a lot in in the scenario of climate change. So then your machine will have processing power equal to 8 petaFLOPs. So sometimes Gareth, you know that journalists asked for things to be explained very simply so the explainer I got for what 8 petaFLOPs is like, it's something like this. Imagine you have like a superfast calculator that can do 8 billion math problems in just one second. That's what a petaFLOPs is like. It's like as if you could count to 8 followed by 15 zeros faster than you could blink. 

00:26:38 Angelica Mari 

So yeah, the this project will cost 200 million Reals in total and it will be made in stages. This investment starting in 2024 and is expected to conclude by 2027. 

00:26:39 Gareth Mitchell 

Powerful. 

00:26:40 Angelica Mari 

So the cherry on the cake of this project, beyond the actual machinery, according to to the Space Research Agency, is a new numerical weather and climate forecasting model called Monan. So that's the model for forecasting the Ocean's land surfaces in the atmosphere and that's still under development. 

00:27:19 Angelica Mari 

So that is special because in addition to to traditional methods based on the solving physical equations, this Monan model we use artificial intelligence and machine learning to predict the beginning and the end of severe rainfall and also extreme weather events like 3 days in advance, and forecasts also climate change trends 

00:27:46 Angelica Mari 

and three months in advance. So currently forecasting is really a strange thing, isn't it, Gareth? You hear on the television there it's going to rain and then you have to be carrying your umbrella for like 3 days. And that's because forecasting is limited to a 15 day range. And accuracy is high only in the first 48 hours and it falls below 50% after seven days. 

00:28:16 Angelica Mari 

I've interviewed Clesio Nardin, the director at the National Institute for Space Research, to find out what will change in terms of Brazil's ability to deal with extreme weather events and how Monan could be a game changer. 

00:28:36 Clesio Nardin (Brazilian language) 

00:28:46 Clesio Nardin (Translation (male) 

Inpe’s new supercomputer kit system will enable the development and implementation of the unified Earth system community model Monan.  It’s a meteorological model and an environmental model that includes several gases that have not been modelled before. The model can cover the whole planet or just a region through an adaptive mesh. Monan has several advantages over current models, and it can run on the new supercomputer that's being built here. 

00:29:19Angelica Mari 

According to Clesio, another important characteristic of Monan is the fact there is a community based model and there is a national scientific committee that was set up around it and there are Latin American and European groups focused on numerical modelling for the validation of the agencies scientific advancements, but that openness also has to do with technology. 

00:29:57 Clesio Nardin (Translation (male) 

It is not a community-based project, just because of the fact that it was developed by a scientific community. But it is an open source initiative. It can be continually developed and can be used by everyone who wants to use it. It can be tested by universities and the great advantage is that it is licenced in such a way that anyone can use it. You just can't sell it. And that represents a major effective advancement in terms of quality, reliability and predictability of meteorological events, especially extreme events such as heat waves. 

00:30:34 Angelica Mari 

I also wanted to find out how other governments around the world might be able to use Monan for more precise forecasting of extreme weather events. 

00:30:47 Clesio Nardin (Brazilian language) 

00:30:53 Clesio Nardin (Translation (male) Given that Monan is open source countries will be able to use this state-of-the-art forecasting level for the atmosphere and oceans. This will allow them to produce applications and technologies with massive socioeconomic impact in their regions, giving rise to a new generation of numerical weather, climate and environmental products on a time scale that is relevant to society. Countries that rely on numerical weather forecasting carried out in Brazil can move forward because now they will have open source codes to be able to develop their own regional models and include their own data. Look at the advances we are promoting in the country with this new supercomputer.  The integration of the supercomputer with the Monan model will bring a lot of benefits to society. 

00:31:47 Gareth Mitchell 

So Clesio Nardin there, director at the National Institute for Space Research, talking to you there, Angelica Mari and lovely factoid around this whole supercomputer, it would be the world's first ever supercomputer to be powered by solar. Wow, there's there's an achievement. 

00:32:03 Angelica Mari 

That's right. 

00:32:04 Gareth Mitchell 

And appropriate, given its role in forecasting weather as well and climate events and all that. Angelica. Thank you. Just before we go, can we do a quick bit of SUDs, a quick bit of allocating subscriber numbers to our dear listener/subscribers. It is quite important. 

00:32:21 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, that's really important. We should do that, let the listeners speak. So we'll just do these two and then I've got a few lined up for the weeks to come. 

00:42:31 Gareth Mitchell 

So Adrian Warren says, I'm hereby requesting my SOEP SUD number, the number I'm requesting is 2782, and the reason is that it's in Hex. I'm a nerd, says Adrian. And so in Hex, that's ADE8, which of course, is Adrian's nickname. 

00:32:52 Gareth Mitchell 

He's ever so clever, and he did this request apparently, as his Digital Planet listener number, but alas never got response at the time, so Adrian's hoping for better luck this time. 

00:33:03 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, can we grant Adrian that we need a yes, at least two other yeses? I'm getting a thumbs up from Ania behind the glass. And what do you reckon, Angelica? Casting vote. 

00:33:15 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, I I agree to it. Yeah, it's Ade should have his number. 

00:33:19 Gareth Mitchell 

Brilliant.  Ade, there's your number. Put it on your LinkedIn profile. Some listeners do really and and just this. 

00:33:32 Angelica Mari 

Can I can I claim one as well? 

00:33:33 Gareth Mitchell 

Because I wasn't expecting that to happen. Yeah, I I think so. I mean, Ania and I would have to approve it. I think we need at least three approvals. So Keziah would also have to approve as well, so. 

00:33:44 Angelica Mari 

I'll give it some thought. I'll, I'll have a chat with Ade to find the good Hex. 

00:33:47 Gareth Mitchell 

Oh. 

00:33:52 Gareth Mitchell 

OK, so you're not requesting something now. Alright, but when you do, we'll hastily convene the committee and make that happen for you.  And Martin from Mozambique of goat fame says can, Oh yeah, amazing to hear how different we sound on playback as opposed to the way we think we sound, says Martin, having heard a recording of his voice, his very nice voice, I should say. And Adrian, sorry, Martin says my request is for listener #17 if it's still available, for no other reason than I really do love a nice round number. Now, just before I put that to the committee really quickly, I'm just checking on the database here. No 17 is still available, so can Martin have 17? 

00:34:35 Gareth Mitchell 

Thumbs up from Ania. And how about you, Angelica? 

00:34:39 Angelica Mari 

I love that number, is the day I got married. So yes, you can have that number. 

00:34:45 Gareth Mitchell 

Ah, hey, lovely. So we've got a beautiful human story behind that as well. Martin, that you did well with that one. You got 17, good number heaven 17. Good band. Martin wear. Lovely right there we are. That'll do for this week we'll carry on. We'll do some subscriber extra for you. But if you're saying good bye for now, then see you next week, from all of us here on the team at Lanson's Team Farner. It's been lovely to have you so, Keziah doing the audio, Ania doing the production, Angelica doing a lot of the talking. Me, Gareth doing even more of the talking. And Liz, who's the grown up in the room who just manages the production, which is incredibly important. Thanks for listening. 

00:35:19 Gareth Mitchell 

See you soon. Bye.