hi everyone before i head out i wanted to make one more video uh recently some sad news came to my desk and i was thinking what was the best way to pay tribute uh from time to time people die of charlie daniels and others and i make videos because these people some way impacted or touched my life and i but just for better for worse like to pay homage to them i if the more public the figure the more controversial it is uh but this one was interesting because it's a person who was in our community uh the cardano community uh vassal double uh vassell was a very unique man uh he was in his 60s when i met him and he lived a long rich life he was from bulgaria and he studied mathematics and he had a keen interest in algebra and analysis and and other areas and he was an incredibly brilliant man and then somewhere along the way he developed almost a druid-like passion for nature and he decided to go on a personal mission to plant thousands of trees ginkgo biloba trees sequoias all kinds of things and over his life planted over 10 000 trees he was a fairly unique person and had a very unique perspective on humanity uh he heard my amas years ago and said wow this cardano community is something truly special uh so he just started showing up at our events and eventually we ran into each other at places like plutus fest and edinburgh back in i think it was 2019 and uh or 2018 and then uh eventually at the iohk summit that we did in miami back in 2019 uh and i just enjoyed talking to him so much that i decided that for the second year anniversary of cardano that i'd go to bulgaria and actually spend some time with vossel and plant some trees so in september of the i think it was 2019 the second anniversary uh we actually flew out the plodive and went to the uh agricultural university there and i went ahead and planted a bunch of uh ginkgo biloba trees and i think a sequoia tree uh with vasel and his family and a lot of friends there it was a great event and we really enjoyed it and we just had a chance to talk a lot now one of the cool things is that vassell always would give me a book recommendation something he was reading or something that touched him and there was a particular book that he recommended the tree of knowledge and i have a copy of it right here and it's kind of a book on cognition and the human experience and how humans relate understand each other and i think this is probably one of the most complete representations of his life philosophy and there's a lovely book by the same authors called the embodied mind cognitive science cognitive science the human experience and i highly recommend it uh but you know i think he represented truly the best of our community and it was always helpful always curious uh always willing to relate and talk to people and he carried his heart on a sleeve and he'd just tell you how he thought the world ought to be and shared a lot of love and peace with people and he spent a quite a bit of time really connected to the natural world and planted so many trees uh and reminded us of an old greek proverb which says great societies are built when old men plant trees whose shade they shall never know the trees we planted imploded they're very young and it will take decades for them to become big trees and the shade that they cast vassal will not enjoy but because he planted them with us uh he will and i think it is a fitting tribute to the man that he was so i thought a lot about what would be a good way to honor someone who is so good to us as a community and immortalize a philosophy that ought to be remembered in a certain respect especially because it's so deeply connected to the philosophy of cardano this idea of planting seeds for the future and looking for the long term and giving back and so as many of you know we have hard fork events hard four combinator events and next year we are planning three of them one in february one in june and one in october september time frame uh and those three hard four combinator events are usually named after great computer scientists or philosophers uh people who are intimately involved in the history of of academia or society and somehow interconnected to hear us so for example we just claw across the alonzo hard fork here in september uh and that hard fork was named after alonzo church a very prominent computer scientist who invented lambda calculus uh which is the foundation for haskell the next hard fork in february is going to be the babbage hard fork after charles babbage who was a pioneer in computer science basically the first computer builder and a mentor to ada lovelace so i think it would be very fitting to honor one of our own community members who gave so much to us and has now passed on uh and named the june hard fork after vassal doubles uh so what we're going to do is look through a bunch of pictures of him and create some artwork uh in the spirit of the artwork that we created for bacio and voltaire and gogan uh and immortalized that and go ahead and issue uh some artwork on the chain i and named the june hard fork after davos hard fork it's a small tribute but it is permanent because cardano will be here forever and now he gets to be part of the history of cardano and be immortalized on a hopefully project that will be here for the centuries to come he didn't get to enjoy the shade that the blockchain will give the world but he did help plant the seeds for he was a good friend and if you really want to understand how he thought and how he approached the world i'd highly recommend reading the two books that i just recommended but more practically i just recommend buying some seeds of some plant somewhere maybe an arrow garden a little pod or maybe actually a tree and taking the time to plant one and take care of one and watch it grow there's a lot you can learn from that so farewell my friend you were a good one to all of us and you will be missed and because of the technology we've built forever remembered cheers
