So that one you didn't create you found that I found that one. That's amazing Did you just sit up? What are you doing? Wow? Everything's all a kerbobble. It is kerbobble Why is there such a this because this chair was moved?  What do you want from us? Yeah, exactly Today we got a this is actually a Brahmastra video It's behind the climax a little behind-the-scenes action for you from the I like that the hit film behind the climax The climax all well you want to be behind the climax in certain situations, but I'm not gonna take If you haven't watched Brahmastra go watch obviously Brahmastra, yeah Why haven't you seen Brahmastra? You probably should have watched it in theater. Yeah, you really should have better experience So getting your time machine and go back I think it's on hotstar now. I think that's where your mom's on hotstar. I think that's where it landed, but If you haven't seen our review you can go watch that as well. I liked it Rick loved it, right? Yep It was the consensus that was the consensus I kissed the screen He didn't I was there.  No tongue. I would have been inappropriate Here we go I want to do that so bad. Yeah Has been our next look any of the Marvel background work. He did was on a set like that or no No, it was partially like that It's actually mostly practical effects with some some green screen. I want to do wire stunts so bad. I think it'd be so fun I Started with the climax Let us So it's quite unbelievable to actually have this experience Part one is Love is the light And Nice that was fine like a man I to be I've never been on a set of This magnitude of the fee. I mean few have Yeah, and I've never done background work either. So No, I have You would there I think early on Anyways, yes, I was there But the fact that something like this is so massive and you really get to see the movie magic part of it Yeah, being there because that's not what you saw on screen. No everything that you saw on screen was recreated Yeah via movie magic. Yep practical effects rain coming down fake rain Grass like the stunt work they're them going on and then everything else is CGI And I wonder one of the things I'd love to know or just be a fly on the wall for is the decisions that are made pre-production about what will be practical and what will be digital and How often that changes when they actually get to the to the day and how many things they like because there were some Moments they're like at the one moment. She opened up her shield and they had a light panel there to get the lighting Because someone made the decision. It's gonna be easier to do that lighting that way than try to add that lighting later and all of those decisions It's just the complexity is Staggering yeah of what has to transpire and then you have schmoes like us Watching it and if the slightest thing is off We're like, yeah, no could tell that that was I saw that I saw it. Hey, I knew it was CGI But what amazes me too dumb That's what we're trying to is not not just those kinds of things where it's a full soundstage in total blue or green screen But like when I Had you had mentioned when dr. Strange you on dr. Strange the thing about dr. Strange that was so strange Was but I'm changing when we walked to set mm-hmm It was an exterior that they had made we were on the lot and And they had made the alleyway Basically really practical with not a lot of blue or green screen and there was some Back there at the very back end there was a big green screen and there were a couple of small green screens But it was full sky above us and then when I saw the finished product. I'm like They made it look like we were in a metropolis and we were on one just street And I'm pretty sure what they did was they took that because when you do those kinds of shots They'll have you stand still and they'll take a dead shot of the space And then they'll do another shot and get a panorama of the space So that they can do like a cut and paste and turn one street into four or five streets And then just move the people around incredible. That's why vfx artists. Yeah should be paid really really well Yep Marvel looking at you And why and why so much of the budget is the visual effects especially nowadays is I mean can imagine I did imagine more than half the budget of avatar was The effects all my stars. Yes more than half. Yeah, and the technological advancements are insane Like did you hear about what Jordan Peele said about? the cinematography for nope I'll say something. What do you say? All of the night shots were filmed during the day Yeah, yeah, I did see that that they use two cameras simultaneously to grab capture in for red light and then put it It's flawless. I had no Question in my mind as to whether or not they were night shoots. I actually feel that that's done a lot It's makes sense. Why wouldn't you yeah, your lighting is better and you can recreate I mean you can in post make stuff nighttime You're not screwing with people's timelines on the crew in the cast You are safer because people are in daylight rather than in the dark and they're not sleep-deprived or messing with their sleep cycles Like that the climax from what I remember was all at night all at night But it's obviously the exact deal with that versus back in the day Like many of you would know that it's legendary They made shirts for the cast and crew of the Lord of the Rings the two towers that said I survived Holmes deep Because that was three months of night shoots. Oh, that sounds terrible three straight months Vigil Morton said said we were vampires when it was all done three months of not just night shoots Wet night shoots because it's raining for the majority of that sequence ain't worth it Obviously one of the most iconic films and one of the battles of magnificent, but my star is like, yeah Could you imagine? Three months in the rain in New Zealand New Zealand be cool, but yeah at night and in the rain Yeah, crazy that is insane. Anyways, that was fun I'm hoping that part two doesn't take too long to come out obviously take enough time to Make sure it's good. Yeah, make sure the VFX are up to par right not 15 years that it took you to make that first one I would imagine they've got to think about the summer of 2024 and not to take much longer than that And that would be fast. That would be real quick. I'd be real quick. It's like how long it took Wakanda Yeah, but they had a death and so that's true. They had to revamp everything, but we do avatar Well, yeah, but also nobody asked her part two either worth three or four. They're all coming Maybe have you seen the new trailer? Yeah, it looks looks good. Not a surprise. We'll see. Well, we'll see how it is Anyway, it's fantastic video. Let us know the ways we can react to down below


Welcome traders to another wave analysis session with me, Patrick Manley. I want to review where we're up to with Dollar Index. Obviously we've been in this major impulsive move to the downside. Subdivided nicely, we've got an interim wave 3 low here in place. We corrected the beginning of the year into wave 4 high and we're now extending to the downside in what should be the major fifth wave low for the first leg of this decline. So what I'm looking for now is an extension down. Ideally to test this 8750 area which is an equality objective versus the weekly chart. And as we hold momentum divergence here, triple momentum divergence that should set a major wave 5 low in place. And I've been looking to play that on a break of the trend line resistance to close above the trend line to set long positions. Ultimately we look for an extension higher than to test the wave 4 again at 9330. As always traders, plan the trade, trade the plan, manage your risk.


I was just awesome. I actually wasn't very nervous, just kind of ready for the moment and tried to put a good swing on the ball. Most people would be nervous in that situation. How were you able to remain calm? I think last night helped a bunch. Just trying to go through it the first time and I was just trying to enjoy it and have fun with it. Did work a walk. How would you evaluate your first time out there? I saw a lot of pitches tonight so I'm happy with that. Staying within my own plan and build from there. Put a few good swings on it. Just missed a few balls and we'll go from there. How would you sum up this experience that you've been waiting forever for? More than you can ever imagine. All the guys have been great. Two in one since we've been here so that's been nice. Just hopefully keep having fun with it and keep enjoying it. What was your family doing to the offense? It seemed like it really shut you guys down after a couple of hits in the first inning. I had a splutter working pretty well today.  Just one day. We'll come back tomorrow. That last pitch? Ah, no comment.


Hi, my name is Christian MacMillan. I'm from Saratoga Springs in upstate New York. I did my undergraduate studies at Castleton University in Vermont and my graduate studies in Texas State University in San Marcos. I'm most excited about learning from and collaborating with the world-renowned healthcare team here at the Stendham Clinic.


That was you. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPFM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, August 21st, 2022. I'm Larry Rhodes, our daughter five, and as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello Wombat. The Wombat is in town. What's up everybody? Yay. And I guess today is the John Richards from over in England. Welcome to the show. And we've got to flex our muscles now. Is that the new thing? There we go. Do both. Right, Bosch. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, freethought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religions, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in your town, well, I'm betting you're just not. In Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over a thousand of us, 80th Society of Knoxville, or ASK. And we'll tell you more about that after the mid-show break. Wombat, what's our topic today? Why you be virtue signaling God and all the fun stuff that comes with that. This is a topic that I wanted to do for a while. And I'm glad we finally have the opportunity now.  I want to see how everyone's been up to, you know, in a while back. You got 30 seconds. John Richards first, go. Well, I went to London. This place behind me, on behalf of atheism UK. And I spoke at an event which was called Stand with Salman. And it was where we all spoke our sympathy and solidarity with Salman Rushdie for standing up for free speech and getting stabbed for the privilege of it. Wow, wow, wow, wow. Very impressive. Always doing cool things, going to London, standing up for everybody. Like you have, so like it's cool how the, when I check back in on everybody every week, it's like Dreadpire, what are you doing? I'm slowly breaking down the false premises of our church state separation biases that we have in our state by like tattooing spaghetti to my head and getting a picture of it. And then John is like, hey, I set up 14 new channels today. And this one is interviewing the president. I was like, oh my gosh, this is cool. And then meanwhile I'm here and I'm like, well, today I did cook spaghetti and I didn't use a microwave and that's, that's, that is my own. I've got a couple of other things I could report that happened last week, if you like. Go for one more, one more, one more. Well, we also had the AGM of atheism UK and the opening speech was done by Professor AC Grayling. Nice. Oh, very good. Cool. So this weekend, I was always looking forward to doing some work in my car. I took some PTO on Friday and did some car repair and I had problems and I overcame them and I have a working car now, which is not something that was the case Friday morning. And you know what, I didn't pray, I didn't ask God to help me with one bit of it. It was just one whole weekend of nothing but engineering science and problem solving. And it felt really, really good to accomplish something entirely on my own. If God gave me that problem, I resolve them and that's what science does. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not only that, but I reached out to my mom and she was just like, she was problem solving with me and none, and she's very religious. She's an overwitness, but not once did she say, well, I'll pray for it. I'll think about it or anything like that.  I call very, yeah, all very rational things. And now she's back in her meetings, but like it's cool to see that even when there is an issue with her own family, she's willing to like step this push aside the religious spectrum and just be like, all right, so let's, let's critically think about how to resolve this problem. It's like she's still got it. She's still got it somewhere there. Larry, what's up with you? Well, I use my motorcycle riding time on Saturday, taking my car to the shop so that I wasn't that fun. But it's stuff I couldn't do. And I don't usually work on my own car, but it was like aligning the front, the front end. And I could rotate the tires, I guess, but I couldn't balance them, things like that. Just stuff taken care of. I have been watching this series, all only murders in the building. That's fun. They're in their second season now. So that's about it. There's not only murders in the building. Yeah. What is this? You just can't casually say that on an eight years radio show. Martin Short and Steve Martin, and this lady can't remember her name, but the three star and kind of a mystery series where they, they live in this building in New York, and it's a huge building. It has a lot of people in it. And, but these people started a podcast to figure out who caused the murder, who was the murderer in this particular case in the building. And somebody else asked them if they'd look into another another murder and they said, no, we only do murders in the building. So that's where the name came from. But it's pretty funny. Not bad. Now I get it. That's actually kind of sounds enjoyable. So I mean, the link to that one we're done with this. Guys, you know, being charismatic is something that we all love. Being funny is something that we all love. You know what else we also love? Things that are all powerful, all knowing, and wholly virtuous completely. And I always ask myself, why is that the case? Why is it that these are the things that we apply to God characters in holy books as if that's a good thing? Because if you were to ask me, a lot of that stuff isn't actually worthwhile in characteristics that I would apply to something that I would have as like the best thing ever. Like, is it really that important to be powerful? Is it really that important to be all knowing? And is it really that important to be completely and wholly virtuous? Larry, what do you think? Well, I think they're just taking the opposite to the extreme. Like, you don't want to be unknowing. You don't want to be ignorant. You don't want to be powerless. You know, so it's these are things that you would just like to, you'd like to have some power. You'd like to be knowledgeable in a situation. And then if the best person would be the most powerful, the most knowledgeable, etc. So I think they just, you know, try to create something that would have all of those attributes, much like they created Superman back in the 50s. Yeah, but if you look at Superman, now think about this Superman nowadays is being pushed more in a different direction. But superman was essentially a guy who, you know, lost his planet, lost his family, found a new planet and a new family on earth was just raised with some good gumption and good knowhow from like local folks. And while he has the ability to block bullets, the OG Superman was just a really nice guy who was willing to help out people. And when the people were like, well, we're going to shoot you.  Didn't become the president of Bolivia. He became just a news reporter. He's working slightly above minimum wage. Doesn't drive the best car. He doesn't date the most attractive woman. Like he's always just a really humble, nice guy. And I feel like that's what people try to connect to.  I'm sorry, did I say I said human and John Richards is like, excuse me. I was like, true, true, true. But he has humanity behind him. That's what I'm saying.  That's, that's the cool thing, the limitation there and the fact that, you know, like he makes mistakes. Like he, he has weaknesses that we all are aware of. And he, he, and while he is, you know, faster than a speeding bullet, he's not as fast as the flash. While he, while he has strength, there's other characters that can punch harder than him. And while he, you know, he can jump over single buildings, like there's characters that already can fly and probably even better than him. So like, it's good to see that, you know, we, we have this, we have this automatic, you know, transfer of, of willingness to worship to characters who have these like three tenants. But I wonder why we give it to them. John Richards, just saw your hand up. What's up?  Yeah, his fashion sense isn't very good and primary colors. Come on, dude, what are you doing? So I'll also throw this out too. I have an opinion that there's a concept that I like to call machismo, right? Machismo is the guy who is like incredibly confident and super ultra masculine, never apologizes, always is right, can do anything, including kickstands, drink all the beers, gets all the women that he wants. Like that is a really, you know, to some degree toxic, but also like a very stereotypical ideal that people who don't have those qualities aspire. And if anything follow in the sense of, well, if I, if I, if I placate myself to someone who does have that, then maybe I through just osmosis can also claim association as well. Exactly. It's, it's cool by association or virtue by association or power by association. Yeah, that's why bullies in school, you know, will have their followers. Sicklefans, if you will. Yes. And it's always, yeah, go ahead, John. Well, now we're into a pronunciation contretown because I would call it machismo, but if maybe machismo is something else, maybe some cheesy impression. Well, pants in America is different than underpants, you know that. True, very true, very true. So basically we got this idea that, you know, you have people in Mesopotamia who don't have a lot of things who aren't very rich, who don't know a lot about the world, who don't have a lot of power. And so they've come up with this character God who has all the virtues and all the things that they want to have. And Egypt, you know, they're projected on their pharaohs or they claim the pharaohs claim it. John. Well, I've got a theory as to how that arose. I'm not, I'm not an anthropologist, but I suspect, and I've got an anthropologist who comes into our group sometimes, but and we might meet him later on tonight, you and ITI in Global Atheist News Review. Because I think it's all a product of tribalism. I think that a tribe has to have a leader. Yep. And everybody is subordinate to that leader. So they have to worship that leader. And that leader becomes a role model. Everybody aspires to always copying whatever that person does or deems to be desirable. And so we've ended up with a Lord culture. And when you want to invent a God, naturally, he is that supreme Lord. He has to be on top, right? Unquestionable. I also feel like on top of that, there's like a pack mentality behind that too, right? Like if you have a tribe, you will, you also have like a pack with a specific sort of leadership structure. And as you get, so where everyone's at, that's who everyone can congregate. But at the next level, you don't lower levels, don't talk to that upper level. And maybe they have a particular representatives who help transfer that level. But for the most part, each striation of power is smaller. And the access to it gets smaller and smaller and smaller and that in its own right as a power to the point where I feel like at the very top of that peak is God. But then one guy who says, yeah, I talk for God. I'm the guy that talks for God. I was very lucky in that I chose some very good parents who weren't religious. Very good for you. They gave me everything they could, but they failed me in one respect. They weren't royal. Yeah. And you know, I see you have to do better next time. I also want to highlight an idea that the pack mentality can be given to people without their consent.  So like we're expecting 20% of your grains or whatever each year, because now you're you listen to me and I talk to God. Do you understand how that works? Like, all right, fine, whatever, whatever it takes. Like, I'm sure that proposition has been given to people in the past. But now that we have some ideas of like, why is the fact that God being or any gods, most gods are, we'll just stick with the Christian God, all powerful, all knowing, all virtuous. Now that we understand like the idea or the mindset of people who would make a character like that. I also, and I think we've maybe touched on the idea that maybe that's not all it's cracked up to be, at least in previous episodes. I did want to bring up an interesting idea in that I don't actually think God's all powerful, even if you were to take the book literally as true, right? There's literally a lot of things that are overlooked when a God is all powerful that God can't do, right? And then also want to knock down the all knowing. I also want to knock down the all virtuous. But I don't want to be the only one talking. Maybe we can do all knowing first. Does anyone have examples of why God may not be? I know you wrote a book on it. All right, Frank, Larry, you can go first. I'll do one second. John, get some time to think about it. Well, apparently he didn't know that a serpent was going to invade his garden. And he wasn't powerful enough to keep it from happening. And he wasn't omniscient enough.  Right. He's supposed to be everywhere at once. So just that one example. It's also it's also the idea of like God knew we would get to this point by the end. So he set up everything at the very beginning to basically lead us to this point with the goal of having people worship him. Yet we have such little reliable information aside from that book to support a belief in a God, right? And there might be some very willing atheists who would just be like, hey, listen, if I just had a reliable way to get to your your your claim that you exist, if you just had a better system or a better methodology for me to reach that conclusion, I would totally believe it. And I think most atheists would believe in God if they just had a credible way to reach that point. But if you make faith, the method to arrive at a conclusion, when people use faith to arrive at many, many conflicting and contradictory conclusions, you had to have known that was the system at the very beginning. Like you have to God has to know how I think about things and still came up with his process. And if he is truly a God who had the end goal of I want people to worship me, I want everybody to generally be saved or at least have the ability to. What a terrible system to put it in like that's not the way you would do it if you if you knew how or if anything, it'd be a really terrible way to set up a reality. I will throw out one more too.  And I think that that's come about the idea of him being all of these attributes, you know, perfect in every way. That's come about because previous gods had specialisms, you know, they weren't they were rain gods, they were sitting, they were farm gods, they looked after the cattle, they looked after the crop, or they they cured you when you were sick. They just had their own special little thing that they were good at. They weren't good at everything. They weren't all gods. But that, of course, isn't a very good business model because your God, whatever God you support, you worship, can only supply one sort of need. So he doesn't get called into action very often.  Yes, exactly.  But then people realized that they could make them more desirable if they could also spray paint and dry your hair, you know, so they turned them into the machines of all purposes. It's very true. Very true. This is the same. Go ahead.  And I can't imagine when that thing flipped. There you go. And now it's my house. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you've got a God that can do everything, obviously you can sell more vacuum cleaners. Exactly. Yeah. Or are a higher cost, right? Larry, what's up? Well, that brings us on the problems with it when if a God is all powerful and things go wrong, then it brings into question whether or not he's all good. Why would he allow children to get cancer or whatever? That's not good. That's Satan. He knew Satan would exist. So like it's just weird. Yeah, it's this weird conflicting thing where it's just like I've both made paradise and a trap door in paradise at the same time too. Or I've made the poison and I made it look just like all the delicious other apples. It's like there's something you can't be both. Back in the days when there were multiple Gods, they worked at cross purposes a lot of times and they would use humans as their sport. They would give them a certain pass. And you could explain things going bad because this God is trying to best that God. But when you've got one God in charge of everything and he's all virtuous, why do bad things happen? That is a problem because my favorite God, Goddess actually from the days of polytheism, is Chloe Cena and her job. She had one job. And that was to keep the sewers of Rome flowing. Yeah. So she only got blamed when they were blocked and the rest of the time she wasn't needed. Right. I also throw this out to this is sort of a nuanced idea. But the idea of God being all knowing he can't know everything because I know what it feels like to forget a song that I used to love and just recognize that I'll never hear that song again. So when I was a kid, I had a cassette tape and I loved and I used to record songs off the radio and I had this really eclectic appreciation for old school jazz.  And I had some great tracks there, but there's no words on there.  And when I came back and I found the cassette tape like 20 years later, I put it in my cassette tape player. I had to buy one and all the magnetic strip on that tape is gone. Like there's just no feedback. It's all just a blank cassette tape. And I'm like, that music is gone forever. And I used to like define my childhood based on the songs that are on there. And I don't know how to like find that music again. I just have to recognize that I now know what it's like to forget something forever. And God does not know what that feels like if he is all knowing that is a thing that I know that God doesn't know what it feels like to forget something forever and just like recognize that that's that is a feeling God can't know. And I'm like, well, God, then you don't know everything. What's going on there? Larry, I saw your hand. What's up? Well, you're the age I would think that those songs may have been midi format, you know, just computer tunes. No, they're orchestra. They were like an actual trio sometimes. And it was just played over the radio. Yeah. Okay. We didn't call it a playlist then, did we? No, it was what you call a mixtape. That's what he used to do back in the day.  And I know I have a feeling of empathy that I feel like God wouldn't necessarily have either. But like when you lose someone forever, or like when someone dies in your family and you lose them, or and they're not just moving to a different place like heaven or something like that, but like, you will never see them in your life again. That's like a sadness. I feel like God doesn't know when you lose a song, that's like a song you don't know when you have a pet that dies. That's a feeling that God doesn't know, because he knows only, you know, that death is a change of address, not necessarily a permanent loss, permanency of loss is something that I've just feel like God doesn't know. Right. Here's the thing though. God can't be omniscient and omnipowerful at the same time. Talk to me. Because if he knows everything, then he can't change it. Because if he did change it, he wouldn't have known it. Ooh. Yeah. But if he can't change it, if he can alter it, the future, then obviously he's all powerful, but not omniscient because you certainly didn't know it, because he didn't know he was going to change it. And I'm going to throw this up before we go out to the break, but like why, before we touch all virtuous, why is all powerful and all knowing even extolled on such a pedestal? Like I'd be happy enough. Listen, one of my favorite heroes growing up, one of my favorite heroes growing up and this is this is a obscure pool, but it was a guy whose superpower was getting tomorrow's newspaper today. That was his only power. Like you'd wake up in the morning, you'd open up his door and there'd be a newspaper from tomorrow in front of him and he has no powers. He has nothing except for just being able to read it and see who's dies or what bank it's stolen and just does his best with his own human two feet and goodwill and borderline charisma to just try to stop or talk with the robber out of stealing the bank or trying to find that kid and make sure like, hey, don't go to the park today, kid. And we're doing whatever we can to make sure the best stuff in the news doesn't happen and he gets no money for it. He gets nothing for that, but like it works out for him. Seeing a guy struggle, like I feel like the underdog tale, the Rockies, the Luke Skywalker's, maybe not, well, I guess to an extent, but like I feel like we are attracted more to underdogs and because we can recognize the ethos and the pathos and the struggle of trying to do good in a world that's not necessarily in your best interest or in your favor. So when you have this, when you have this being that's all powerful and all knowing, I'm already so disinterested in this character. It's like this character has no weaknesses. Why do I care? Why do I care? And why would I ever worship that being? Like it makes no sense to me. I think that's only some of us though. Some of us relate to the underdog, but there are other people and I'm thinking of a former president of America who do not relate to the underdog at all. Why? Humans, man. Larry, what's up? I'm intrigued. I hadn't heard of that person with the superpower, but getting a newspaper. Can you come up with the name? Can you remember the name? Gary Hobson from Chicago Express. Gary Hobson? Yeah, I believe his name is Gary Hobson. He's not a superhero.  But yeah, I mean, it's a TV show that came on and his, let's say, Hey, how about this? We go on a break. I'll look it up and we'll come right back. I looked it up. It says, Gary Hobson, early edition. Yes. That name is tattooed on my brain. It's another example in my head of guy who has power, but doesn't use it in a bad way, is limited in his capability, limited in his knowledge, and relies on other people in a great deal to help him get basically good things done. Yeah. And I feel like that is comedy drama is what it's called from 1996. Yeah. And I just love that. But I guess you're right, John. There is a cast of people who don't want that in their, in their, in their heroes. They want the all powerful, they want the all knowing, they want the all virtuous. And we'll talk about why God isn't any of those things to hopefully get those people off that bandwagon in the second half. Larry, why don't we take a step? Sure. Stay tuned for the second half of the digital free throw radio hour. We're on W O Z O radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be back right after this short break. Okay. Okay. All right. Very good. I don't need to go anywhere or do anything. Nope. Can I to Hello and welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour on W O Z O radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's talk for just a moment about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 20th year now and have over 1000 members. We have weekly in person meetings. If you'd like to join us in Knoxville's old city at Barley's Taproom, Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top to tables or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. We also have a Tuesday. That's every Tuesday evening, by the way, I didn't put the day of the week in there. Anyway, we also have a Tuesday evening zoom ASK meeting. If you'd like to join us, if like, can't get to Knoxville or can't get out, join us via zoom. You'll need the link though. So email us at askanatheistatnoxvilleatheist.org or let's chat SE at gmail.com. You can find us online on Facebook, meetup.com or go to the website at eighth, I'm sorry, Knoxvilleatheist.org or just Google Knoxville atheist. You can get it to us that way. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Where do we want to pick up? Some quick little comments, not little comments, big comments that we love. Dottus Trader Room said from our last episode, mail bag when we went over a bunch of mail comments. Christians often use the false false Christians often use false psychotomies that either the universe came from nothing or God created it. The question to ask them in such a case is, what did God create the universe from? Because if matter had not preceded God, then God must have created the universe from nothing. Yeah, absolutely. You know why I also say that? There's also this idea of a false dichotomy is presented when you don't know what all your options are. And so you pigeonhole yourself as the one that you hope is right and a bunch of other ones that you'd already know are wrong. And you only examine the ones that you know are wrong. So that by the default position, the one that you're right, the one that you want to win wins. And I'm working on an analogy. It's long. I'm not going to go into too much here. But essentially, like, if you don't know what a sock is, if you have no idea what a sock is, how can you be so confident? I don't even get into it. I won't even get to it. I'm going to have a much more I'll bring it up. Okay, Larry's like, just say it. All right. All right. So basically, like, the idea of like, you only know, you need to have a good frame of reference that the problem with when someone presents the false dichotomy is that they lack a frame of reference. And, and the frame of reference can be easily presented to them by just showing them like, Hey, if you don't know what something, if you think God created the universe and everything's created, can you point to something that's not a creation? Because if everything is creation, you have no idea what something that's not a creation is, then you don't know what a creation is from what something isn't a creation. So if you don't have that firmer reference, how can you claim that anything's created? The premise behind the false dichotomy in this case is there's no or no recognition of what something that's not a creation is, there's just a claim that everything's created. Larry, what's up?  You know, so how could everything else not be created? Well, then how do you tell the difference between the watch and the sand if everything's created? I mean, what makes it stand out is different. But you are claiming that it is different. So you yourself are saying that there's a difference between what's created and what's not. Right. Like if I had, I'm going to try it again.  Like, can I really be 100% confident that the thing that I pulled out was sock and not like other some other garment or shirt or pants? And I need to know what something looks like and what something doesn't look like. I need to have that frame of reference before I can claim anything. And so if I claim the whole universe is created, I'm in that universe smack dab in the middle somewhere. How can I look at something that's not created as an example so that I have a frame of reference to recognize what creations are? If I don't have that, I'm just working off the premise that I believe someone when they told me that God created everything. I don't have a way of testing that myself. Until then, you can't go forward with that. What's up, John Richards? Well, the thing here is that we know that the watch you find in the desert is made because we know that there's an agent behind it. We know that there are such things as watchmakers. But the rest of creation, we don't know what the agent is. There's no evidence for any agent. So that's nature doing it, not creation at all. It's a natural outcome of processes. Another example of that would be if you took me to an alien planet, just outflung on another planet, and I saw like a spire. I couldn't tell you if that was by nature just through the dynamics of that world's physics or an intent by some culture that I don't understand. I would need to have a frame of reference of what life on that planet was capable of and what sort of weather patterns they're experiencing before I can tell you if this cylindrical rock was made either by intent of people or by nature. I need to have a frame of reference before I can claim anything's created. It could be an anthill, couldn't it? It could be an anthill, right? So the argument of the false dichotomy is not to tackle them with more challenging false dichotomies or how, let me see, what did God create the universe from? You're going to go down to deeper levels of turtles at that point. Just ask them if they have a frame of reference for what a creation is because once they realize that they don't, that takes away the false dichotomy completely. It works really, really easy. Speaking of which, I got another comment from Philip Ziegler who commented on the balloon analogy, which is a street epistemology video I have way back in the day. The idea behind the balloon analogy is people hold on to their beliefs in the same way that people hold on to balloons. There's like a little string and that string is held to the balloon, which is their belief. And the more you try to attack that balloon, the more people hold harder on that string and maybe even pull that balloon closer to them because that balloon is valuable to them. It's how they think they can be a good person. It's how they're judged by society. It's how they make sense of the world and how they get comfort. Like that balloon is them. So don't tackle the balloon.  Instead, look at the string. Make sure that string is good because less people put a lot of attention in the string and they only care about the balloon. So if you talk about the methodology people use to arrive at their conclusions, without attacking the conclusion itself, you get a lot better mileage in your discussions. So whenever I talk about things with people about there's deeply held beliefs, I'm always talking about the methodology they're using to reach their beliefs, the string, not the balloon. And Philip Ziegler says, great way to clarify the difference between a challenging a person's belief and exploring the reliability of the reasons for their confidence that the belief is true. Instead of people getting defensive to protect themselves, they become curious about their own methodology, which in most cases, they have never really examined. And if you participate as genuinely, if you and if you participate with a genuinely curious partner, the conversations can be transformative for both people. I agree completely. Great comment. Great comment, Ziegler. Before I go for it. Paley's watchmaker analysis analogy, rather, I think it's an attempt to sidestep the real question by putting it into a false dichotomy there. They're saying, I don't have to show you the agent. Right, right. They're avoiding the real question is, you know, show me the agent because I can show you a watchmaker.  They don't, they try to divert your attention away from into the area of is this or that. Also, different societies have different gods. So, I mean, you have competing theories for the same creation.  You know, and the scientists say, it could happen naturally. This God's giving away free candy. What can your God do for me? It's quite, and you mentioned, what was it, everything being made from dirt? Was that it? You said something about me or what did God make it from? There must have been some stuff there beforehand. And of course, that's what they argue is a weakness of the scientific explanation, because they say you're claiming that everything's made from rock. Well, we are not claiming that, but they are. They're claiming that Adam was made from dirt. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why is there still dirt? Again, yeah. Again, listen, when you talk to someone who believes very hard in Star Trek or Star Wars, there's always some other when if you putting out some like why do lightsabers only stop three feet? If they're light, they should just keep going. It's like, no, no, no. The crystals from the Mandalorian are all it's like, there's always going to be some weird, more nuanced level of swamp for them to go down. Why don't they just pass through each other instead of stopping when they. Again, that's like attacking the balloon. They're just going to put an extra set of hands on it to protect it. You got to attack that string. If they use a false economy approach, it's a frame of reference to dismantle that, because if they're curious, if they're genuinely curious, they will realize, oh, I don't have a frame of reference for understanding what a creation is from what it's not. And yeah, I should be able to recognize what something isn't before I claim with 100 percent certainty that it is.  Why do I believe that? I need to come up with a better way to reach this balloon. That at least gets them to a better methodology to reach their balloon, which I'm cool with. If they have one that works, I'll believe that too. But if they don't, at least they got rid of a bad methodology. And when you cut that string and the balloon keeps flying away, hey, that solves the problem too, because you got rid of a bad conclusion. Nate also let the comment says, you're the dude, Dr. Wells. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you guys so much for all the comments. We go through them each week. Feel free to leave them on any of our channels. We'll go over. I'm here at Let's Chat. Feel free to leave some comments. Guys, we got one last one. Let's buckle up. Buckle up. It's the big one. God is all virtuous. We talked about the problem of evil a little bit earlier on in the show. We talked about the intentions of a God who would make terrible things happen. And here's my thought process.  I'm like, you know what, though, you could have stopped unneedless suffering if you just stepped in now. One of the things that I love to watch is police interviews of people who definitely did a crime and are being tricked, essentially, by the police officer to confess about these crimes to alarming detail. And in my head, it's just a staggeringly brilliant process of interrogation, but also this cunning that makes this person explain step by step how they thought about this murder or this assault that they were about to do, all the things they did to prepare for it, and just them casually explaining to this officer of law about all these premeditated stuff they were doing leading into this final thing. And I'm like, the police officers doing their job, they're bringing justice to something that was out of their control, that they had nowhere with all of, that they had no way of stopping until the bad thing happened. But God knew the whole step of the way.  I'm going to wait for it to happen, though. And then I'm totally going to punish this guy. And he stabbed in the person or he's like waiting for him outside of a bush. He's like, God's like, oh, that guy's totally going to stab that guy with the axe and hack him into 40 pieces. But I'll let it happen, because I totally am going to punish this dude. Then he does it. He's like, oh, that's so terrible. Oh, well, I wish there was a way I could stop it. Anyway, I'll let him finish.  Larry, what's up? I'm sorry. No, I was just going to say that in America, we have laws against knowing about a crime before the crime happens. And not doing anything about it, not reporting it. And you can also be an accomplice after the fact as well. Yes. But so that makes God an accomplice before and after the fact. Yes. So he's culpable for a lot of these stuff because obviously he can act, you know, according to every believer on the planet, he can act to interfere with human affairs, but he doesn't. It's criminal intent. That's what it's called, at least in the United States of America. You have the intent to do a crime, but we stopped you from doing it and we can still punish you to a different code, but we can still punish you for it, maybe even give you rehab for it. We can punish you for knowing about the crime and not doing anything about it, even if you didn't do the crime. But if you knew about it beforehand, didn't notify the authorities or didn't step up, then you can be held culpable for that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I want to throw out, if God did one sting, maybe even like one sting a year, just like it's God's sting. Like, hey, listen, I left some gold out, but I told you not to steal.  I'm just letting everybody know I exist. Does everyone be cool? This is criminal attempt to sin. Criminal intent to sin.  That's fine. That's pretty virtuous. You stop the crime from actually happening instead of letting it happen completely, even if it costs needless harm or the expense of a person's life or their well-being. Like, I can't imagine anything worse. John Richards, you want to weigh in on this? Sure. Yeah. Well, I'm wondering if his book is anything to go by, how can he be described as being all virtuous? I mean, in chapter one, he drowns everyone except Noah's family. Right. Babies, too. Yeah.  How virtuous is that? You know, the saddest thing for me, too, is when I hear and I've had this conversation recently, it was like two weeks ago, I was talking to a guy who was a Christian, wanted to ask me questions because I'm an out atheist at work. And he's just like, where do you get your morals from?  And I have no problem answering that, but it's like, it's sort of like a kid being like, like a third grader coming to you and being like, I don't believe in blue.  It's like, well, there's colors. If I bought you box of crayons and we pulled out everything that wasn't blue, there'd be one crayon left. It's like, how can I make this more simple? Well, that's not actually blue. That's just the blue that the news. So anyway, so I'm talking to this guy. He says, where do you get your morals from? I'm explaining him about like the concept of well-being and reducing needless harm and stuff like that. And so at the end of it, he's like, well, I guess that makes sense. And I ask him like, where do you get your morals from? He says, I get them from God. And he's like, is your opinion is God very moral?  And like, that's where morals come from. I'm like, so would he ever tell you to drown a baby? He's like, no, drowning babies is bad. And I'm like, would God ever drown a baby? He's like, no, God would never drown babies. And I'm just like, no, no, he's not. Not critically. And so I said, well, Noah's flood drowned like the whole world's worth of population, including babies. Like, well, they deserved it. That was the switch in his head. And I'm like, but that wasn't the premise of the line of questions that led you up to. And he's like, well, I'm sure he had a reason for it. And they were acting really, really bad. I'm like, the babies were acting really bad. He's like, well, and then we did the same thing with slavery because Ecclesiastes specifically tells you groups of people to enslave, how to beat them so they don't die within three days so you don't get punished for it, how to take their children from them so they don't run away from you, how to own their family so they can always own them as property. And you can ransom them for additional... Go for it, Larry. And according to the book, God's single most common interaction with humans is killing them or giving them plagues, which kill them. Yeah, it's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. And the one that breaks my heart the most is when I bring up the slavery option and they're like, well, that was just the accepted thing to do back in the day. And I was like, the slaves didn't want to be slaves. I'm pretty sure that people who wrote the Bible were like, yeah, we're cool with this, but the ones who were enslaved had a problem with it and it wasn't cool with them even back then. And would you agree that they had a right to at least have that feeling, if anything? And yes, of course he gets it, but like the idea that you could take a well-meaning person and destroy their sense of morality and taint it so poorly by extolling like this terrible example of virtuosity in front of them, one that they don't apply any sort of critical thinking to. It's tragic. If anything, in my opinion, it's child abuse. I think in the most simplest form, when you raise a kid to not appreciate morality in the real sense, in the systematic way, and instead hold this bully, this tyrant and say, this is the example of morality that you need to follow and everything that Sky does is correct. That is child abuse in my head. That is an affront to us because we have to live with the circumstances of that. We have to live in a world where people can just be rude to each other, pray in their own private quarters and think they're completely resolved of any issues. That's a terrible world to be in. John Rogers. Yeah, well as president of atheism UK, I get invited to do interesting stuff. And one of them is to debate this very topic, the title is, can we be good without God? Hell yeah. And it's to happen at the Bishop Stortford College, which is one of our near top private independent schools. And my opponent will be a bishop. So this isn't going to happen until March, unfortunately, but I can't wait. No, I'd like to see that. Let us know. Another thing about when Christians say that they get the morality from the Bible, I usually just jump in and say, so you think that the Bible is the apex of morality and you do everything it tells you to do. And they say, yeah. And I point out that, you know, it does tell you which is a real and that we need to find them and kill them. Right. And that you should find and kill homosexuals as well. Do you do all that? No, I don't. Then you don't get your morality from the Bible. You pick and choose which things that you want to do and which things you don't want to do. Therefore, you're getting your morality from the rest of society and from what your Dean is good or bad. When I hear, when I hear people say I get my morality from the Bible, I asked them, what do they mean by that? And they say, well, it tells me not to steal, not to hurt people, not to kill, not to blah, blah, blah, blah. And I say, okay, if the Bible just just for the fun funsies of this argument, if you found out tomorrow, the Bible wasn't true, right? Would you start killing people? They say no. Would you start stealing things around like, no, I want to do that. Like if you would you start, you know, cheating on your wife? No, I wouldn't do that.  So it can't be from the Bible. What do you mean then that you got it from the Bible? What do you what do you mean by that? And let them think through that. What do you mean? What's up, Larry? No, my thought process has moved on. I'm afraid. Yeah, yeah, I'll fill in for you, Larry. On this very topic of stoning gay people, I think you mentioned is from the Bible, one of your candidates, a GOP grand old party candidate in Oklahoma is getting attention at the moment because he's running in the Republican primary runoff. And in some years ago, it's true, but everything stays, doesn't go away on the internet, does it? So he made some extreme comments. And he was, he was saying that there's a long list of people in the Bible who sinned and who are worthy of death. So he's now trying to have to roll back on that because he realized he's not a vote winner. I remember now. I get people asking me. Yeah, it was. Sorry. I get people in my conversations, they get people who watch stopping us from killing or raping as much as we want to.  I don't want to. And, you know, we are stopping ourselves because of our mutual empathy and compassion with a fellow man. That's a very interesting point. You have this. So Larry, you might realize has a bag of cheeky comments.  But if someone says, why aren't you killing or raping as much as much as I am doing exactly as much as I want to, which is zero. Why is that? And listen, I and here's the other thing, too. If if the Bible is the only thing keeping you from stealing, sexually abusing, murdering people, like whatever terrible thing you want to add to that, then you are welcome to keep the Bible. I mean, I wish there was a better, you know, I bet there was a better safeguard than a fantasy book to keep you from causing all these harmful things from happening perpetrated by you. But if that's what it takes for you to be a working member society, fine, fine, I'm willing to take that. And I think that works for some people. But I do not think that it works for the number that it's currently indoctrinated for. And I guarantee you that if we were to at least have the freedom of of not being indoctrinated at such a young age, we would come up for better systems for those people who believe in those falsehoods that keep them as as operational functioning people. We would come up with better systems for them or find a safer place to keep them or to reduce their harm than this this book of lies. And I want us to work towards something like that. What's up? Well, a big problem there is the the idea of salvation and heaven and forgiveness and a second life. So it reduces the importance of what you do in this life. Yeah. So you can get away with murder to coin a phrase and just go and and say, you know, I'm sorry, and you will go to heaven. That's a very bad idea. Very good, very, very good points for for a very bad idea.  Why didn't it stop Hitler?  Yeah, speaking of letting things happen, right? And the church was behind him, you know, during all that time. Why did he do good? Why didn't he do good instead of harm? And you don't have to reach as far back as Hitler. You can look at Russia and Ukraine, you can look at just the Trump legacy. Like there's just so many examples of harm going unobtain or uninhibited. Yeah. And if you can't believe in a virtuous God, if we allow that to happen with them being all right. And even even done by the church itself, like in the inquisitions in the name of God, right, doing all this harm. And the distinction here is we're talking about needless harm, harm that comes without any need for it. Why do we have that? We should be able to go without that by definition. Why do we allow it to happen? Why does God allow it to happen? If we if there is no God, let's work on our own ends to stop that from happening because we work in a universe where there isn't necessarily purpose given to us. We can come up with a purpose to enhance our well-being. But lacking that, if there is a God that's controlling everything, that God is not all powerful. That God is not all knowing. That God is not all virtuous. John Richards, what's coming up next week? Oh, next week we have the return of Pastor Alan Cartwright on Freethought Hour. He came on about a month ago and he reckons that we were too kind, too gentle to him. He wants to come back and have a more abrasive encounter. So he's preparing a PowerPoint presentation. Oh, no. Yeah, he's going to tell us why Jesus is God and he's right and we're wrong. And Teresia and my co-host and I are going to say things that challenge that. Yeah, it's actually kind of embarrassing. Like it's been a while since I've dealt with Christianity at that degree. And now when I see someone who is a Christian, that's just like, to the point where they're willing to put up a PowerPoint presentation to like extol how much they believe in this thing.  But you'll never see me being like, quantum leap and why it actually could actually happen. Slide number one. So what's your dictionary defines quantum leap? It's like, okay, calm down guy. All right. You can find me on less chat. I'm here. Feel free to leave a comment. We'll go over him over next week's show. Larry, I'm still, you know, you brought up a lot of points, but I still don't understand what atheism is and what it's all about. We're just going to have to call it, you know, let's all become Christians. There's no way we can resolve this. I've actually put those ideas in the book called atheism. What's it all about? It's available on Amazon. My content and cute, including a lot of the articles in the book are digital free thought.com. Be sure to click on the blog button. There you'll find our radio show archives, atheists, songs and many articles on the subject of atheism. My YouTube channel can be found by searching for doubt or five. If you have any questions for the show, you can send them to ask an atheist at Knoxvilleatheist.org or let's chat s e at gmail.com and we'll answer them on future shows. If you're having trouble leaving religious beliefs behind, you can get help from recoveringfromreligion at recoveringfromreligion.org. And you can find this show on podcasts everywhere. Just search for digital free thought radio hour.  The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life and we'll see you next week. Say bye everybody. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.


What is going on guys welcome back to the channel and I appreciate you being here today I bring you another destiny 2 video and today I will explain the steps in getting the Paloalos Lance and on your way to getting this exotic you'll also be getting the Braytech RWP mark 2 scared which looks epic by the way But hey guys before we get into that if you would like to support that channel hitting that like button does help out And I do appreciate that support Okay So if you haven't completed the story or adventures on Mars and any extra missions and a break gives you within a warm mind DLC You need to so go ahead and do that then come back here If you have then you will have already got or done last week's one or five of the nascent dawn quest step given by anabrae Steps for part one can be seen on screen now. They were honestly quite straightforward This week upon going to anabrae you will get step two of five of the nascent dawn quest step The first part is to get 25 Valkyrie kills to make this a little easier on yourself people if you have any Rescue and armor code simply starts off an escalation protocol and simply spawn in a Valkyrie You should be able to get this done within one or two escalation protocols once you have the 25 Valkyrie kills You then have to move on to and do step two which is to complete the heroic adventure Signing potential which is an easiest thing to do I'm not gonna lie once this is completed The next step is to go on to the last sector within the glacial drift area as I do on screen Halfway through this you'll see a node which you have to collect Once you've done that the next step is to simply head back to anabrae and here you need to insert this data Into the servers and then speak to anabrae herself She will then reward you with the braytech WRP mark to scout rifle And as we can see on screen now is identical to the Polaris Lance now This is all the quest steps for this week next week will be step three or five which will consist of part one This iteration is looking for new data to specific frequencies are related to the hive look for areas Where rush Bruton has initiated the escalation protocol step to the module has successfully connected to CB.nav But it seems to be queuing for data and vanguard initiatives Obviously this isn't data that CB.nav was designed to handle it will need to be acquired by manually spinning up strike protocols Objective vanguard strikes completed So you have to complete vanguard strikes here part 3 the module requires interface with a unique cord in a Limpus descent the signal is fairly strong meaning that the node may not be bowed in an icy cavern So you have to find here a cache in the Olympus descent part 4 the module has unlocked another lug for anabrae It can be uploaded to Anna's personal server in a bray facility and part 5 is to return to Anna Bray herself For the specific reward she has for you Which we don't know what that is as of yet the week after which will be week 4 will consist of step 1 These modules have become more curious as though they were an intelligent entity gathering data through them testing limits and prodding at boundaries This one is requesting telemetry on prototype weaponry through CB.nav It's yet another data type that the system wasn't designed to handle objectives position Multi-kills without reloading kills with prototypes scout rifle So here you have to get kills with Raytech scout rifle part 2 the module is now requesting data from a warm-mind vault Not located on Mars. Currently the only system of all is the one on IO Objectives complete mission fury on IO Part 3 after connecting to CB.nav the module is requesting Rasputin's mind lab telemetry suggests that it's near Rasputin's doorstep Part 4 the module has unlocked another lug for Anna Bray it can be uploaded to Anna's personal server in the bray facility And part 5 again visit Anna Bray and she will reward you again and week 5 people will consist of Part 1 the module requires stabilization from the Rasputin neural net using the Valkyrie will open up the next layer of data And you need Javelin multi-kills part 2 the module is stabilized But it curious have it immediately become more suspicious has begun requesting entries unguiding combat patterns kills death Resurrections everything objectives PvP matches completed part 3 here There was yet another layer of data within the module repairing a lot of lug entries on the hive The volume request may require rethinking normal scouting protocols perhaps disrupting a major ritual is in order Objectives hive ritual disrupted part 4 the module requires interface with a sleeper node in autumn dynamo CB.nav seems to be associating it with several dozen server crew Objective here cash found in autumn dynamo part 5 the module has unlocked another lug for Anna Bray It can be uploaded into Anna's personal server in the bray facility Part 6 the module is spent Anna Bray will continue to increase with it But in return for covering her memories she has finished construction and what she is calling the production line model of the rifle Prototype she gave you and you are rewarded here to Polaris Lance for visiting Anna Bray And that is all five steps of this people now the reward at the end will no doubt be Polaris Lance But what you get for week 3 or week 4 step 3 and step 4 we don't know yet I'm probably guessing we may have something new to come, but we will just have to wait and see people now the Polaris Lance in My opinion needs to be something of a special weapon because five weeks of waiting for something that will just be Vaulted will be a complete waste of time and it will not do bungee any favors But guys like I said only time will tell but yeah people this is how you get the Polaris Lance Exotic scout rifle I hope you enjoyed the video if you did leave a like truly does help me out if you're new around here and enjoy Daily Destined videos be sure to subscribe and hopefully people I will see you on that next one You


Welcome back everybody, so in this talk I will tell you a few things about how to use polymer physics in order to understand the chromosome organization inside the nuclei of the cells. So this is now a very nice and very developing topic and there are many research group working on this. So before moving to the specific subject I just want to tell you a few things about polymers for those of you that you know too much about that. So of course I mean polymers are central in let's say in soft matter theories and are also objects of very extensive computational modeling so which is probably almost of a great interest for this workshop. So polymers are, what are polymers? Polymers are big molecules which are made of many repeating units. Each one of these repeating units is called generically monomers and because of these chain reaction which is called polymerization you get from one single unit I mean through this chain reaction a very big molecules and in principle I mean this chain reaction can go on forever so in the end you have molecules composed of many many single of these repeating units. So polymers I mean depending on the constituents they can be relatively simple like polyethylene like where you have I mean single repeating units which is ethylene which repeats many many times or it can be more complicated okay and here you have examples of more complicated polymers that exist in more complex architecture like for instance alternating copolymer where you have let's say repeating units like AB, AB, AB etc or they can I mean the ordering of these constituents units can be just random can be organized in block and they can also be let's say more complicated not just linear but they can be like branched or circular I mean not the example of this but I mean they can be existing many many architecture so it's very complicated I mean let's say the kind of architecture you can have in polymer domain. Then polymers can exist also in different states so you can have a gas of polymer for instance or you can have a liquid of polymer like a similar solution or melt and they can be solid okay for instance the main constituents of your of the tires of cars are made of polymer which are cross linked in such a way that you keep the structure together lacking a solid although they are not really solid since there is no a really longer range of order in that but they can be considered solid since that they they have elasticity or I mean things like that. So now to our concern specifically for this workshop there exist of course I mean biopolymers and biopolymers are of these three different kinds let's say they there exist proteins where I mean which you will have heard about I mean in other talks more about proteins there exist nucleic acids and nucleic acids are more I will tell you a few things about nucleic acids during this talk and there exists chromatin okay chromatin is basically the basic constituent of chromosomes and let's say it comes out of DNA plus constituent proteins and these constituent polymers are necessary in order to fold the DNA inside the cells but all of these I'm sorry all of these are all of these are I mean besides being biopolymers they are polymer nature so they share many of features that normal poly that I mean the normal polymers that I told you before so now one essential feature of polymer is that because you have a small fluctuation I mean between the orientation of the monomers that constitute the chain it happens that polymers do not exist typically in one simple conformation okay but you have many actually it was realized a long ago that the number of this conformation is high I mean it's potentially high in the number of monomers so that means that and it was the basic ideas formulating the I mean from the 30s to the 60s by I mean all this bunch of outstanding people that basically can treat polymer physics like statistical mechanical problem okay and that was what I mean the fundamental idea that was of course developed by many of these people but I mean basically earned the flurry and noble pricing chemistry where he applied the statistical mechanical ideas to study the polymer problem and there were other developments from the 60s to the 90s where more advanced concepts were applied like correlations entanglements that were developed especially in the works by Sam Edwards, Pierre Gilles Degène and Decloseaux and they were so important this I mean the contribution that earned I mean Pierre Gilles Degène a Nobel Prize in physics now for applying the statistical physics concept to the study of polymer conformation so it's a very it's a very important subject I mean in in in soft matter so now there are many models I mean that you that you can direction statistical mechanics in order to understand the polymer properties the fundamental model is the ideal polymer model by ideal I mean that what it implies that you I mean this is as fundamental as the ideal gas model in statistical mechanics in sense that you completely neglect interaction between the different monomers and you treat polymers as a string a chain of beads and sorry a chain of of links and these links can take any random orientation in space so I mean this is a relatively simple problem to treat and then if you use this formula to understand that basically the typical chain conformation for polymers to be the same over and over so this if you neglect if you neglect interaction between the monomers there are more complicated relatively more complicated models that you can introduce for instance the freely rotating chain but the important thing sorry the important thing of this model is that you are neglecting interaction so in the end you always end up with a linear relationship between the typical chain size the typical square chain size and the number of monomers okay so this is relatively so this is a strict a strict law that you can derive from this from this model well a typical feature of polymers that they are the obey scaling variance in sense that they are fractals which means that a single part of a polymer looks like the old part so and because polymers sorry oh sorry I heard some boy so because polymers are basically invariance well sorry before before saying that I have to tell you that if you start introducing exclusive volume in the in your model so things become slightly more complicated and of course this is a necessary ingredient if you want to understand the properties of real polymers because of course I mean two monomers cannot occupy the same portion of space and immediately you end up with a scaling namely with you end up with a relationship between the typical chain size versus the total number of constituents that it's no longer does not longer respect the random workflow but it's a bit larger than that so that the effect was highlighted by flori and course realized that basically the properties of polymer do not I mean the large scale properties do not depend really on the specific interaction of the between the constituents but it depends on a very few essential parameters okay and in this sense you can apply if you let's say renormalize this interaction you can apply the same tools of course grading renormalization group and basically you can use the same tools of just some typical tools that were derived in statistical physics to derive the properties of polymers that was done in many works in the 60s to the 70s by especially by Pierre Gilles DeGeneres and Saint-Maitreaux okay that derive the complicated that derive I mean a very full complete understanding of of this of the properties of real chain so this was a very I mean superfast introduction so of course it cannot be exhaustive but this is somehow necessary to understand a bit on the properties of chromosome folding and where you can apply you can use polymer physics in order to understand how chromosome falls inside the nuclei of the set sorry so what is basically the problem of chromosome folding okay so first of all what are chromosomes as I said that DNA is a special polymer okay so in sense that of course is very important but it's I mean it's a it's a special process it's made of a sequence of of of the chromosomes of g t c and and a and it's and it's very long so it's typical so for instance if you think about the humans so we have a single filament of an a per single chromosome is made of about 100 million bases okay and so this long sequence is wrapped around specific proteins these proteins are called the estons and so then they form so a structure which is called the 10 nanometer fiber so the reason why it's called the 10 nanometer fiber is because the diameter of the compound between DNA and this wrapping is the size of about 10 nanometers and then it was observed that under physiological condition although I mean this part is a bit debated oh well it's actually it's quite debated these 10 nanometer fibers fold into a I mean a coarser fiber if you want and of the diameter which is about 30 nanometer so because of that this folding is called the 30 nanometer fiber okay so then what is I mean what does what does what is exist between the 30 nanometer fiber to the let's say the large scale for the homochromosome is completely unknown so today we know many things about that how it works but we don't know anything we don't have the complete picture so basically all this realm here is needs to be explored and this is where I'm trying to to tell you that where polymer phases can be can be useful at least to say some I mean to predict something and to tell something which possibly isn't on trivia so this is I mean the kind of things that you find in most tech I mean most biological text but what was done I mean during the during the I mean the past years about the work on homochromosome so it was a one I think one of the first important discoveries in the field was realized by these two guys two German scientists Karl Ravel and Todok Borelli who realized that I mean we made a very important discovery in the I mean in the late 50s of the 19th century so notice that was much before that let's say then the discovery of DNA was realized so at that time probably was just a curiosity so what they found they found that chromosomes were not just randomly organized inside the cell but they can be found in specific portions of the nucleus okay and they made so these are pictures of the works I think of Todok Borelli who made the pictures of chromosome inside the nuclei of the center so he really observed and he said that I mean he noticed that these chromosomes are not randomly organized but they obey certain patterns okay so now at the time as I said this was a some kind of a curiosity because I mean the time they didn't know too much about I mean about genetics or about this kind of stuff then much later actually in the 70s I think these these two German scientists actually two brothers Thomas Kramer and Christoph Kramer they made a very clever experiment so what they did they did the following they they have some cells some actually nuclei of some cells and they started they used the lesser beam to destroy the nuclear contact of of these of these cells okay so they beam the chromosomes and then they said so what they made the following hypothesis they said okay if chromosomes I have many chromosomes they look like this way like a spaghetti bowl so then the damage that they create to chromosome should be let's say uh randomly distributed across all the all the all the chromosomes okay I mean because sometimes I let's say I kill the chromosome one I destroy actually chromosome one sometimes chromosome two on average I would destroy all of them in some in some in some pieces and actually but actually it's not what they found they found that damages were really localized to some chromosome and not to the others okay like the the fact that I use the lesser beam I can touch only one chromosome and not the others and so this is only let's say compatible with the hypothesis that chromosomes were localized into a specific portion of the nucleus okay and they should be let's say confined to regions which are smaller than than than the total size of the nucleus okay so that was some kind of direct observation but it came out much I mean more recently always by the same people that used a very clever technique which is called fluorescence and situ hybridization which is a technique that allows you to color I mean to color chromosome each single chromosome inside your favorite cell with some specific probe and then to see it and this is a picture for instance of a chicken fibroblast so each color here identify a single chromosome and this picture shows beautifully that each chromosome is localized to a specific portion of the nucleus so it's not like spread around okay it's it's it's it occupies a specific specific region so imagine that this is sort of the a picture of the world so each chromosome is like a country okay and the the borders between chromosomes are pretty neat with some intermingling between them but otherwise you can really identify a chromosome so now this picture is called this hypothesis this theory let's say it's called the hypothesis of chromosome territoriality today is now is very well accepted and it's it's very general in sense that all let's say superior all organisms provided that the chromosomes are long enough they show territories even humans human minds I mean in mamas this is very difficult let's say and it holds for all cells it's not just like in in a specific cell line it's it holds in all cells because it's a general feature so now it's so general actually they start I mean wondering if it's let's say if it has any biological meaning and the chromosome territories and in fact they show that basically the way chromosomes so chromosomes they form territories but the territories they have also some randomness but actually this randomness is related to how the specific cell line was so for instance they found that in some cells we were chromosomes were found close to the gene so sorry chromosomes were found to close to the cell center and in other cells were found close the same chromosome were found close to the nuclear periphery and this seems to correlate with the functionality of the cell I mean how certain genes are expressed and how certain genes are repressed and in this very beautiful work they finally were able to show that in the same cell line which is the road foster receptors so the distribution of let's say of the chromatin material is inverted in the I mean according to the fact that if the mammal this is the mammal is the urinal let's say is the urinal mammal or is a nocturnal mammal so meaning that the chromosome organization is completely reversed and this according to me it shows that I mean how beautiful somehow evolution works that you have evolution pressure on your chromatin chromosome distribution inside the cells and that also has an implication for the functionality of the specific cell okay so later on I think I'm concluding with a bit with this biological introduction there were other developments in particular probably one of the most probably the most important one of the most important ones is called the chromosome conformational capture so this is a relatively recent technique developed in the lab of Job Decker in the United States and defined by many other groups especially the group of Bingren and University of California San Diego where those people have invented a protocol which allows you to probe chromosome contacts inside the cells why are so important chromatical contacts are important because well people believe that whenever the different chromosomes come into contact they these contacts are related to the fact that some genes are expressed and some genes are expressed okay and so these maps these heat maps here tell you how certain sequences along the genomes interact with the corresponding sequence on the on the same chromosome okay and so now you have all these contact maps are I mean you can find for many many many different organisms they show many features they have many features in common across the organisms but they also display differences and you can quantify these differences and I mean according to these differences you are able also to correlate the let's say the the intensity of this map to specific properties of the genome okay so this is a very important field that let's say that is currently under development I mean strong development and also by studying these maps you can tell something about how chromosomes fold inside the cells I mean how what is their shape or you can reconstruct their shape starting from these from these matrices so now before I mean after this maybe a strong introduction on the on polymers and the chromosome folding problem I tell you if you think how you can use let's say you can use some polymer physics consideration in order to understand how polymers are packed sorry how chromosomes are packed inside the nucleus of the cell okay the first important consideration one has to do is the fact that each so we focus on human cells because it's well it's the ones that are more familiar to us of course and so think that each human cell contains about six times ten to the nine so six about six billion base pair of DNA which so if you stretch them from hand to hand it's about two meters of DNA folded inside each one of our cell okay and this DNA is occupies a very narrow region a region of about 10 microns okay so it's a five order of magnitude less than the total length of the DNA inside the cell okay and so of course I mean this is I mean if you make the proportion this is like putting a rope of 100 about 100 kilometers inside the backpack okay and so the question is how of course I mean this DNA stays inside the nucleus because otherwise we wouldn't work but the question is how you can put all these I mean immense rope inside the narrow space in an efficient manner how it would look like if you if you use a microscope or if you I mean I mean how it should expect that should work I mean inside the such a narrow space so okay this is an astronomical comparison this is the same so if let's say if the nucleus is the earth let's say that it's the same distance of the for DNA like the center of the sun to run so it's I mean it's a huge difference in in landscape so in order to understand the problem or to let's say to be to focus on the problem one so as I said so we have this we have DNA which has all this structure and we have to think a bit I mean how the cell works so you have basically two two stages during the cell cycle and these two stages are one is mitosis and the other is interface so mitosis is the part of the cell cycle where chromosome have this let's say familiar rod like shape in at the end of each mitosis stage the DNA which has this shape of each chromosome started to swell inside the nucleus and occupies its own territory as I said so this is a typical picture of a so this is the nucleus okay and so this is one single chromosome and each color here is one of those okay and so the question is how I mean what it happens here at the end of the code the mitosis of the mitosis when cell enter interface and is it possible to let's say by using oops sorry is it possible to say something here at this point let's say by using let's say simple physical concept so this is basically what motivated me and my collaborator say now a bit slightly more than 10 years ago where we developed a model a polymer physics model computational model in try to somehow understand the formation of chromosome territories now because at the time people well let's say the idea was to use a simple physical model in order to understand a bit the physics of this object and try to also give a possible physical explanation for the presence of for the formation of these territories because you thought maybe since these motifs these territories are spread I mean are general and you can find in all the cells of the organ that should be maybe also a simple physical mechanism that can originate them so what we did basically we did exactly what is here so we simulated the the condensation of chromosomes let's say at the end of the mitosis of mitosis when entering interface in order to do that we constructed let's say model mitotic chromosomes each one is some is basically a big polymer so each one was made of about 30 000 monomer particles each one of these modern particles is this is a normal polymer so there is no sequence information i think it's very simple model let's say it's a it's a kind of model to have in let's say in in any polymer solution any polymer mesh okay we arranged four of this chain in order to keep the simulation doable inside the simulation box with the periodic boundary condition and so we did some as I said we did some coarse graining in the sense that so DNA so we intended to model mammalian cells so each so the typical mammalian genome is the human one each chromosome is very long so you cannot model things let's say at the DNA scale you have to do something coarser but as I said I mean coarse graining is a typical technique that you apply in polymer physics so that thinks maybe it's not so dramatic so just to give you an overview of the scale so here each monomer means that we are modeling a chromosome at a scale which is compatible with 30 nanometer farmers so namely each monomer here is about a three kilo base yes three kilo base pair so it's a it's a coarser model okay and then we use the Brownian dynamics to simulate these these these objects so for those of you who are not familiar with Brownian this basically like numerical integration of let's say of Langevin equation okay so here so for each monomer has some friction Newtonian forces between the monomers plus some plus some noise okay and the noise respects the standard relationship for for for for gush noise so it's very simple and the rational to to use Brownian dynamics is because the chromosome live in a let's say kind of aqueous environment so they are also they also kick they are also and they are also subject to some random noise so this model should work quite okay so if you are if you want these modeling is like saying that chromosomes are a semi-dilute solution of polymer chains okay and the interaction we used to model so the Newtonian interaction between the monomers are simple in sense that they are simple and medium so you have only chain connectivity so basically two monomers which are closed along the chain cannot cannot be separated so you have some stiffness between the I mean along the chain in order to well to cope some with some biological measurement of of chromosomes and then you have to do some mapping in order to model to model with real let's say to map this into real biological problem so the the the sides of the simulation box which is in such a way that the DNA our I mean the density of our polymer is compatible with the natural DNA density and then this is a very important ingredient you have hard core repulsion between monomers namely this means that whenever this thing during the course of simulation I mean each monomer encounter another monomer in his let's say random displacement cannot cross each other I will pump and then we'll we'll go back okay so this is a actually this is a very important ingredient so if you apply that and you you let the simulation go you at the end of the simulation you end up with something like this so the your chains open I mean and after some random displacement they get stuck into some of this conformation okay and this conformation so I've used different color for each polymer actually the result is that they strongly resemble territories in sense that they also occupy specific region of the let's say of the cell of the simulation cell without mixing without liking to mixing with the other with the other with the other polymer and so because you have done molecular dynamic simulation you can attract also the let's say the mean square displacement the random mean square displacement of each one of these bead and you can compare to the experimental results so this was a comparison between our simulation and let's say experiments on the mean square displacement of real genomic loci this allows you to basically to fix the let's say the diffusion coefficient of your simulation I will tell you a bit now I don't have the time to really spend this but I will tell you a bit more details if you're interested this during this question now it's our session this afternoon but I want to just give you an overview of what you can measure because this is quite important so you can now compare the structure of your chains of your similarity chain to experiments for chromosome and here I'm going to give a bit more detail on this so the lines here corresponds to mean square and 20 distances between genomic loci on the simulated fibers this one and symbols refer to the same quantity mean square and 20 distances between genomic loci but now on experiments so real chromosomes okay and the different colors here are referred to different organisms this is the red ones are on refer to east the while this so this is human this is human too and this is a fruit fly the drosophila melanogaster I mean the typical the common fruit fly and what you can see here is that the simulation this simulation although they are somehow relatively simple they are able to reproduce the let's say the average they are able to reproduce the the average conformational chromosome that we're really measuring inside the cell so you can somehow probe the typical structure of of chromosome inside the cells another important observation that you can ask how frequently chromosomes interact in fact that you can measure how out the let's say the the the mean contact frequency between the two loci on the same chromosome decays as a function of the genomic separation between them so there is a consensus now that provided the chromosomes are big enough this law has to be as to decay roughly as one over L huh so this is related to a particular structure of the chromosomes and we found that our sorry the model is able to reproduce indeed these these features so somehow although it's very simple this kind of coarse grain computer simulation is able to capture the average behavior of chromosome in many different conditions for many different organs okay so of course this not all of it I mean there are other features that that should be understood but at least now with this model you can somehow understand detail something about the physics of the process that leave that gives birth to these chromosomes territories and maybe I think I will yeah just tell you about a few things about this so as I said to you so here to to to formulate this model we use the very um so basically no more is this based on a normal polymer structure of course I mean you can object think that okay but chromosomes for sure are not homopolymers because and there are I mean you have DNA sequence and so on and so forth you have many proteins going around in nucleus now because this is perfectly true you are right and so you can ask what it happens if I introduce noise in my model in sense that I I use models I mean together models with the different resolution in sense that some portion of my fiber are more condensed and some portion are less condensed that was that we did a few years later and we saw that so I'm going a bit faster here we saw that basically the model shows some stability in sense that on the larger scale nothing really happens what it happens it really happens here on the small scale and and this of course I mean it's quite important in sense that we interpret that as a sort of stability of the chromosomes and also stability of the model so we have something that works really well on some scale but I mean on large scale if on small scale something changes this is of course perfectly acceptable but then the overall structure remains stable and since I think my time is a bit over so I prefer to leave a few minutes for questions I will well I leave this this consideration out because a bit maybe a bit more advanced but I'm happy to answer your question if you have if I'm more curious about that I just want to finish by acknowledging two people that work with me on this on this I mean on this chromosome story first of all Rath Evers which with whom we started this work together many years ago now more than 10 years ago and Ana Maria Floresco was a postdoc with me in CISA and together with her we developed this mixed fiber model for for chromosome and of course since this is a numerical workshop it's important to acknowledge HPC resources because these simulations are quite intensive so in particular the TSM in Lyon and in China in Italy and also the our local CISA cluster here in CISA and with that I think I'm done so I'm happy to take questions so if you want to ask a question you can I guess unmute yourself and go ahead can you hear me okay good hello Angelou thanks for the talk I was wondering is it possible to model a change of methylation on the distance a change of methylation yes so it depends what you so you want to somehow change the state let's say of your monomer somehow yes I would like to write yes I understand that you you don't model the distance specifically so yes no yes it's a very good question thanks for it yes so there are actually there are already many a lot of work on that so I remember at least two groups now maybe there are more so there are there are there for sure there is work from the from the group of Edimbra of Davide Marenduzzo I don't know if you know him so Davide has done a lot of work on that where they basically they assign a specific state to to each monomer let's say up and down where you have a particular state of methylation and you call state up and in particular another state of methylation down so it's a sort of spin system okay and this change dynamically in the course of the simulation and in particular it's related to when these two spins for instance come together they are allowed to change in order to see the spreading of the methylation on the chromosome otherwise there is also a work so this is an approach and also there is a work from the group of Andrew Spackowitz in so it's it's in California I think it's Caltech yes and so basically what they did they also used polymer model and I think they did not study the spreading of methylation but what they study they study so they assume that somehow methylation is fixed and they study what's what's the consequence of some specific proteins that attaches to the let's say to the metadata states of the chromosome and they see the consequence on the chromosome conformation okay so in the end yes that can be done of course there are certain assumptions because then you have to let's say you have to to I would say you have to assume how this thing's changing so in the end the idea is that you formulate this simple assumption you see that for instance if you can reproduce the methylation patterns of your specific cell because of course they also change from cell line to cell line okay so but in the end yeah in principle it can be done yes I don't know if I if I answer the question sure yeah about the first approach you mentioned is it like an icing model it's like an icing model or even a pot model because maybe it depends on how many states you assign okay then it's a bit of course that's relatively easy to change so then what it's important the kind of rules you assign in order to change the state in general what they do if I remember correct is that whenever two monomers come close to each other in space either because they are close in space because they are close in sequence or because they're close in space because just because of the random fluctuation of the fiber you are allowed to change the to transmit or if you want the methylation state of the event and then yeah this kind of thing because I mean this fiber is very long but then even if it's long because we have a polymer can come close to each other just because of the random clash but in principle it can be done yes cool thank you okay I guess well there'll be time for more Q&A in the afternoon so thank you very much Angelo