Live from the MGM Grand Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's The Cube at Splunk.com 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Splunk. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Jeff Kelly. Okay, welcome back everyone. We're live in Las Vegas. This is The Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the students of noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media with the number one big data analyst from Wikibon, Jeff Kelly. And we're psyched to be here, covering the Splunk conference live in Las Vegas. And our next guest is Mark Devney, principal engineer, DevOps, B Sky B, welcome to The Cube. Great, thank you. So we, before we came on with the intros, we were talking about DevOps, which we love, and security, which we've really been riffing on all day today. So I got to get your take on the following. The keynotes here are all about using data with security, actually security is the top issue on everyone's plate these days. And then you get the cloud, which is perimeter-less, it's no perimeter in the cloud. How do you make it all work? What's your take on all this? I mean, are we in early inning, we're scratching our heads? Is there some solutions coming to the table? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a really interesting field and we're kind of, we've really just started kind of looking at, we've developed a lot of our own tools and now we're kind of struggling with kind of capacity and kind of scaling those tools out because the security's becoming a harder and harder battle to fight. So we're looking at tools like Splunk to kind of allow us to scale up to- And you guys are building out a capacity, more capacity, more capacity, right? Yeah, so we've just gone into a couple of new data centers for our platform and along with that we've kind of implemented a new Splunk infrastructure to go along with that, yeah. Awesome, talk about the security angle because you and I were talking earlier about the patterns, big data surfaces up and you can see things. Tell us about how you look at the security attacks. I mean, is it one by one? Is it a global kind of threat? Is there individuals, what's the landscape look like? So we look at attacks on a kind of a long term basis. So there are lots of products out there that can, they can block the DDoS attacks, that sort of stuff, but we're looking at the attacks that are slow burn, they go on for hours or even days and it's about trying to track those and just the normal, they kind of hide really well under the normal traffic. So you start to kind of recognize these kind of individual attacks. You get like a bit of a personal relationship with these guys, you know, they're trying to get in. You can recognize their particular attacks and you can kind of. It's like dance moves, right? Like you can see their moves, you can get this. So you're saying, you can see their moves, you're saying, okay, I've seen that, I know that guy. He's going to do the head fake again. And they definitely, you counteract and then they do another counterattack. So, you know, you got to keep on how they. Sounds fun. I mean, it sounds like a, it sounds like my kids playing Call of Duty or Destiny. It sounds really good. It is a bit of a game, but it's a game that you can never stop playing. You've got to keep on going. So Mark, so how do you actually, how do you adapt? How do you handle the never ending onslaught of security threats coming at B Sky B?  They are always changing. As you mentioned, you kind of get, I mean, a personal relationship, but they're always adapting as well. So how do you approach it? So we've got a really neat group of guys which are like a dedicated team and they sit within our identity platform. They work closely with the development teams that are building the identity platform. My DevOps team and the network engineers, they also participate in that security team. And that's basically what they do. They look for attacks and they counterattack them. So it's about having like a dedicated team. You're prepared to put the resources in and the time to actually fight them. So it's Godfrey Sullivan, the CEO of Splunk mentioned his keynote that security, fighting the bad guys, network security, is very much an analytic challenge versus a reporting problem. Yeah. Do you agree with that approach? I mean, how do you look at the challenge from a analytics perspective?  So it's, you know, it's really difficult to say if you're winning the battle or not, because as soon as you find one attack vector, you know, you clear that off the board and then you find another couple more. So it's kind of a, you know, you can't say that you're necessarily winning. You can only say that you're kind of holding your grounds. So. Well, so let's take it a little bit in terms of specifically what is Splunk helping you do? I mean, how are you approaching this? So we've got a number of real-time rules that analyze the traffic that's coming in that looks over quite a long period of time and we can find those small little tweaks. So it's kind of looking for the impossible. So, you know, it's very unlikely that a user would sign in in one location and then half an hour sign in from a completely different country, say. So you kind of, that's a very simple example, but then you can kind of build on that and make really complicated rules to try and track down and narrow down whether or not this is, you know, maybe it is someone's just gotten a plane and, you know, the last thing they did was check their email and then check their email again as soon as they touched down. So you've got to kind of look across, you know, large amounts of data to kind of determine whether or not something to attack or whether it's, you know, just normal behavior that might look a bit odd to you. So when you're, so that was a really, you said simple but a good example, I think. It helps kind of illustrate the challenge. And so when you're looking at finding those kinds of patterns, is it a manually a manual effort where you have to basically use some common sense and say, look, it's pretty unlikely that this person 30 minutes later is going to be in another country or does Splunk and some of the other tools you use help automate that process? We definitely try and automate it as much as possible. And I think once you've got a good rule set, you definitely need to go back and review them on a pretty regular basis, but you can automate large chunks of that, especially the easy kind of easy to spot ones. But there's also a need to have that kind of human interaction where if you kind of presented up and Splunk can say, this is an attack or potential attack and someone can eyeball it, confirm it is or not, or do it maybe modify the rule and then go from there. So obviously you must be taking in a lot of data. So talk a little bit about the data sources you've got, you're checking the logs from your applications. Where's all this data coming from? So the identity platform is basically the gateway to all of Sky's services. So that's, you know, there's some really good services in there like streaming media, so SkyGo, now TV, that kind of stuff, it's like really high profile traffic that people are really trying to get into. But there's also things like email and account management, which are also really key and real prime targets for attackers. So, but we've got devices coming in from the web, but also iPads and iPhones and Roku devices and Samsung TVs have now got apps and so it's coming from everywhere. And how does that diversity of data sources make your job harder? It makes it a lot harder because you've got to take into account where people are coming from to determine whether or not an attack. So if you're logging in on your phone, you're more likely to get your password wrong because it's so much more difficult to type it in. But so it's just another waiting onto the problems that you have. And compare this to what you were doing before or what the organization was doing before or maybe walk us through how this evolved. I imagine trying to do some of these things in a more manual approach just isn't sustainable and it's probably part of the reason you look to a company like Splunk, but take us back a little bit and kind of give us the before and after a little. So we've been looking at, we've been doing this for actually quite a long time and well before we had Splunk as well. And so that was using a lot of in-house development. So we created our own tools to do this and we had basically the security team was spending a lot of their time writing the application and making it scale to kind of cope with and keep up with the growth of the actual identity platform. And it became kind of, yes, we were coping and surviving but we were spending a lot more time scaling out than we were actually fighting the security attacks. And what role does outside data sources play in terms of helping you be a little more proactive? So you've got security threats around the world or hitting more than just a beast guy of E. Do you look to either your peers in other industries or do you look to outside sources to help you get a sense of what's going on at any given day, any given point in time? Yeah, we do. So we look at a number of kind of different appliances and things that are kind of giving us feeds on what the latest sort of attacks look like. But unfortunately a lot of the people that are doing what we're doing they keep their security rules as guarded as we do. Yeah, well I thought that would probably be the case I think there would be, there is an opportunity for industry if we can find a way to facilitate more data sharing to improve the collective security capabilities overall. But obviously if part of your value proposition or if your security capabilities are actually a value add for your company and is creating value for you a differentiation then you don't want to necessarily share that with competitors or even others that may not be directly competitive. You want to hold on to that. So that is a challenge. So talk about your DevOps journey because one of the things I wanted to talk about and now is this notion of infrastructure as code which is kind of a sexy term. We love it because it means it's adaptive, it's programmable, it's got virtualization. Certainly the cloud as a perimeter list market. Everyone who wants to move to the cloud it's not that easy. So you got trade-offs going on right now. The banks lock down their data. They're kind of taking it slower but people move it faster. What's your take on that cloud migration? Because developers are a key part of this new modern infrastructure. The apps are being required for user experience to be awesome, fast, iteration, but yet cloud economics work well but yet the security issue. So balancing. Yeah, it is, it's a real balancing act. I mean, if I could get a couple of devs to cross over and become DevOps then that would make my day. We've been doing DevOps for quite a while at Sky. Probably before it was even called DevOps. So I started out as a system administrator basically in a development team and kind of the need came from the development teams wanting to work in a more agile way and wanting their operations side to kind of join them in that path. So we were building our VMs and things in the same sort of model and style that the developers wanted to work at. Now we've kind of skies really taken that a lot more seriously and we've kind of got lots of DevOps across Sky working on lots of different projects and it's about kind of consolidating the skill sets and really working with the central operations teams and working with the development teams. So it's more focus on forward progress less about maintenance of what you're building. I mean, that's the trade-off, right? Yeah, absolutely. And there's some things that we allow the central operations team to kind of maintain and look after because, you know, I don't particularly mind that an ESX host goes down as long as the application stays up and the HA take care of it. You know, I'm more focused on spinning up VMs as fast as I possibly can. And it puts the emphasis on development. It does, yeah. So describe the folks out there, you mentioned DevOps. What does a DevOps person look like to you?  What's the equivalent of throwing a touchdown, scoring the goal? I mean, what's the equivalent version of a DevOps star? It's really odd, but I actually look for someone that's really lazy. I want someone that will not want to do the same job twice. I want someone that will always be looking like... Smart and lazy. Smart and lazy. Always looking to automate... Automate my son. Yeah, automate everything that they can. Yeah. So it's definitely the pushes for more and more abilities to actually write good stuff. Oh, lazy. I'm joking about my son. He's super smart. He's got a great initiative. But lazy, you mean like they're not going to tolerate redundancy and like boredom. Like, okay, this is useless task. Let's automate that. So it's really around, okay, someone thinking like automate that. That's an easy thing we can replace. Checking out friction. Yeah, absolutely. And kind of joining steps together that would have been manual. Or like you've got automation here, automation there. Let's automate that bit in the middle and make it one single. So is DevOps people a unique breed?  You know, like they're tough and they're different today. But you're starting to see it become much more popular. Cloud ops, some say.  So it's not like they're just, you know, throwing code around like it's like a website, but here's some engineering involved. Right? What else do you see as DevOps becoming more stream? What does it look like? What's some of the general sentiment around DevOps? Do you think there's pigeonholing guys that be superheroes type role? Or do you see it becoming much more mainstream? I think it's going to become a lot more mainstream. It's really difficult though because you've got, you tend to be have to be very broad in your skill sets. So you've got to be great at automating, writing code. But you've also got to be able to, you know, pick up a new technology. You've always got to be looking forward at what's coming out there and be able to implement that and pick it up as fast as you can. You know, the devs are always going to drive you because they're also looking forward as well. They're looking at the latest version of Java, latest kind of key bits and they need you to kind of keep up. Okay, so I want to ask you a personal question or a personal industry question, not a personal, personal question. What is the craziest thing that you've seen either here or in your job where you went, wow, that I never would have thought that use case could be security, could be a hack, it could be an impact, it could be something awesome and elegant.   But what's crazy, what's crazy? We've got some really unusual traffic profiles. So, you know, when we start a football game or soccer over here, as you call it, we get massive spikes. So no one ever actually seems to want to sign in early and watch the pre-game commentary. They like to sign in right on tech off. So we get these massive spikes. So it's one of the things that we look at when we're looking at security is kind of taking into account these spikes. So we had an issue a while back where we got this massive spike and we couldn't figure out what on Earth was going on. And it was in sign-ups and it was coming out from all around the world. Lots of people were signing up. Had no idea what was going on. And it turns out that it was Harry Styles from One Direction tweeted something saying that he was going to be on a sky show. And all of a sudden, all of this traffic from around the world just started signing up and getting in there. And we took it a while to kind of track down so it really didn't have, it was the pattern that wasn't a pattern.  We were thinking, this is an attack. This is a really odd attack. We've got no idea what they're trying to do here. But they're, you know. Yeah, it's kind of like a new movie. Hey, we got a new guy and a new guy in the attack cycle. But it turns out it was actually legit. Yeah, yeah. So thankfully we didn't start blocking traffic. Well, Mark, I want to thank you for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your insight and candor and commentary. I'll give you the last word. I want to share with the folks out there what's going on at the event here. People who aren't here watching on the interview. What's the vibe? What's the show like? What's the themes? What are some things in the hallway you're hearing? Quick summarize. What's going on? Yeah, I mean, it's just been absolutely epic. I mean, the scale of it is just incredible.  And some of the new features that are coming out, I just can't wait to get my hands on it, basically. It's like a playground for you, right? Yeah, it is, absolutely. So Splunk, as you like, you're happy with Splunk, obviously? Oh, very happy, yeah. What is the one thing that you can say it's changed your world in terms of being in the spirit of good lazy? What has it done for you in lazyness and also productive? For us, it's about giving visibility to teams outside of the density. In our density, we're very kind of closed about very protective of our data and that includes our logs, but we're now able to kind of surface dashboards and give visibility back to the business on what's exactly happening, what our capacity is, and how we're currently going. So that's really great. All right, Mark, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate you. We are live in Las Vegas here for Splunk2014.com, Splunk Conference is the hashtag. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back after this short break.


So my name's Todd Worth. I'm co-founder of Infinite Red with Ken Miller over there. I'm the creator of RMQ, and I'm the writer of the dispatch. How many out there of you guys know about RMQ and GALS? How many use it in the reroution projects? That's cool. That's a decent number. So I'll go over the basics of RMQ first, and then I'll get into what this talks about. First, we have a super secret announcement for RMQ. I'm a pro. OK, so RMQ was written for Ruby Motion, and it's done very well. But today, I'm really excited to announce that we're no longer going to be supporting Ruby Motion. RMQ will now be for MS-DOS phone. It's a much simpler interface. Animations are as simple as this, and that's literally the only animation. OK, real talk. So I'm going to do a quick overview of RMQ. I'm going to go through it really fast. This is an entire presentation in itself, but just for the people who aren't familiar with it. What is RMQ? It's nothing. Core values, performance matters. If there is a choice between nice code and performance, we choose performance. Lightsaber, not Deskstar. Simple tools that do simple things, not an all-encompassing thing. Don't pollute my work with yours. Self-explanatory, RMQ pollutes nothing. The concepts are based on jQuery, in case you aren't familiar with that. And so it has almost no pollution at all, which makes some things difficult for him. And then make it easy to the right thing. RMQ is a front-end library. It's like jQuery. It chains. It's non-polluting. It's not magical as much as possible, and it's fast. It's designed to be fast. It's going to be faster later. So if you're familiar with jQuery, just right here is what you wrap your elements in. In RMQ, we wrap our elements in this. I wish I could have done this, but I can't do that in Ruby, of course, because that's global variable. Oops, that. Okay, so RMQ is a front-end library. These are all the things that it does. It does a lot of things, but it's only has to do with a front-end. There's no data. There's no HTTP. There's nothing like that. It's just all UI views, UI view controllers. This is some of the stuff. Okay, so selectors is the first thing. You select views or view. And the most typical one is the top one, which is you select one view, or you can select an array of views. And once you select them, then you can do things on them. And there's a variety of other different ways that are very similar to jQuery. You don't use those as often. Typically, you select an actual view. And then you can do things on them. I'd show, remove, that kind of stuff. You can move views around with layout and frame in your styles.  Sorry. New little clicker here. Events and gestures. If you're familiar with iOS dev, you have gestures and you have events and they're two separate things. Even though they kind of work exactly the same. RMQ normalizes that into one thing. So the top one's a gesture, on tap, and then you pass it a block and you do something and then off removes the gesture. The same as jQuery does. Right here, start and touch in, those are events. But it's done in exactly the same way. Traversing. Traversing is just like jQuery. It allows you to go up and down the subview stack. You don't use this too often, but when you actually need it, it's awesome. UIView lifestyle, lifestyle, life cycle, appending views, creating views, that kind of thing. And RMQ style sheets, which was a replacement for us for T-Cup. MotionKit's actually much more similar to this. Both MotionKit and this one are pretty good. Animations makes animations easy. And generators. Creating your app, creating models, creating controllers, views, that sort of thing. Okay, RMQ version 0.6. One note on the version number here, I believe version 1.0 is super solid. So every 0.6 is the fourth major upgrade. So it'd be like almost like 4.0. But I'm in the school of thought, to get to one is a big deal. So we're gonna talk about what's new in version 0.6. New docs. Gantz and Steve Ross are helping me work on docs, starting now, actually. And our goal is to make the best docs in the Ruby Motion community of any gem. It's the new RubyMotionquery.com. It's up there right now. I pushed this morning. Here's some of the documentation. That's the new rec system we're gonna talk about. Style, style sheets, lots of diagrams. Cool search. This is actually in the search results. When I said grid, found that diagram, okay? And by the way, RMQ comes up number one in Google. A pen, now this is a very simple thing. Actually a client of ours created this. I didn't like it at first. Ken Miller then convinced me that it was a good method of ads, so I added it and now I love it. This is it right here. This is a very common pattern. You set an instance variable after you create a view and then you normally have to do a get on the end of if you guys are familiar with RMQ and this just removes that with a bang and makes sure you don't have to do parentheses. So Ken was right and the client was right and now it's wrong.  But anyways, data. This one's similar. It should look familiar. This is a really small feature. We'll go through it real quick. Basically you can do data to get the data of whatever view it is or you can set the data. And what that does is it sets and gets the most common data for that particular view. For example, a UI label, the most common data is text. For a UI button, it's title of whatever state. Some ridiculously long thing. For image view, it's an image and for text view, area view, it's text text. You can just use data. But the reason we want this is we can do chaining this way. So I can set this image and then continue the chain because it's in line here. RMQ chain. So every time you do something in RMQ, it returns an RMQ object. So you can do another method on RMQ and you can do another method in RMQ, just like jQuery. Rectangle, this is new. So originally in RMQ in the styles we had frame equals. This is the old way. So basically all we had for layout is this frame equals and that was just a styler method. It was literally just one method. And it was very basic. You could pass it a hash with top width, height, whatever. Then we added new methods like from bottom, centered. But it was all just separate methods and it was only a styler. So what we wanted to do is create a rectangle system that encompasses all that stuff and made it and added some new features and actually made an object called a Ruby motion query, colon, colon, wreck. This is the new one. Okay, you see from bottom and center now is inside a hash. Because of that, it doesn't matter what order you do it. It's smart. It always knows the order that you want to do it. The documentation shows Zach's order. New, below previous 10 points. That'll put it below the last thing you did layout on. 10 points, very cool. From bottom, that kind of stuff. This is the wreck. Top, left, width, height, right. Right and bottom, from bottom, from right. Now those two are different and you can see why they're different in this diagram. So that's your wreck right there. If you want to access the wreck, you do frame or bounce and then it gives you the rectangle and gives you all the left, bottom, from bottom, whatever. In this case, I'm assigning left. And then in the console, because RMQ, wow. Because RMQ loves the console. I guess now that we have the new features in Ruby Motion where you don't have to be in the console that much, we'll have to change that. But anyway, everything in RMQ has really good console output and frames included. That's when you do that. Okay, let's see an example using it. Now I'm not gonna go through all the stuff here you guys can look at it, but basically some of the interesting parts is the number five there is right of previous five. So if you change that from right 80 to say 100, it would make it, that one's smaller and that one would get bigger. The second, the second, hold on, so I don't have the wrong button. The second yellow one right here is actually below previous five, from right five. Now let me, this is a cool thing. Let's say you had a super view and you had a sub view and you wanted that to be the full of the super view but with a five point border. What you would do is left five, top five, from right five, from bottom five. And it does it, really simple syntax that way. So you can see a lot of this is done and then go on. Low previous five, that kind of stuff. Okay, this is actually very interesting. These blue ones right here, I did them backwards. I probably wouldn't do it this way, this is kind of fun. I did eight, nine, 10 because what I did is I set this one and then I set above previous five, above previous five. And you notice all the options have abbreviations which is typically what you use in a real application. So that's actually kind of fun. And to do that before was kind of a hassle or you just have to hard code the points which is lame. Okay, we're just gonna go up and down for some reason. The inspector, I created this when I was creating the rack and the grid which is coming up and it was so cool I decided to rip out the horrible, horrible code that I wrote it in and make it where I was embarrassed to push it to the repo and made it a tool for RMQ. So let's check it out. Okay, so this is a little video. We're gonna play this right now. Right here we're gonna go RMQ all, it's gonna select all views and then we're gonna start the inspector. That's the inspector. Okay, close that down. Now I'm gonna do RMQ only buttons open the inspector. That's the inspector with just buttons. Okay, now let's show some of the options that we can look at. You can turn on the grid, which we'll talk about later. You can turn on the different sides of the grid. You can dim out the actual view and you can turn on and off those outlines. Despite the way it was written on RMQ, it's two files, style sheet and not so big Ruby file. Okay, now this is the cool part. So if I click on anything, every view that's below what I click gets selected and shows up over here. If it's more than one, it shows you the tree. If it's one, it shows you the rack. Which is, what sucks about a lot of visual tools is it's hard to get the code. So this pumps out the code always on the right. Now on here, there's another way to get to your views. That right there. This is a tree view and also this shows invisible views. Like those ones that have no graphics right there are invisible. So yeah, most of this was done in RMQ. It's not that big. RMQ does a lot of fancy stuff like all the animations and stuff. The grid, when I do layouts of screens, I always use a grid, not always, I mostly use a grid. Usually a designer created that with a grid and so there's a grid that exists and so I lay it out that way, why switch? What I typically do is I do a hash. Do the rows, do the columns and I just manually do it because there's no system for it. So I thought it would be cool in Ruby Motion Query to have a grid system that was a lot easier than the manual one I was creating. So this is how we set our frame. That is Excel syntax. From A1 to B4, does top left, bottom right. Just with that one little string. Yes, yes. Okay, here's an example. The green one, D1 to H4, boom. Now this grid here, I created, you create the number of rows, number of rows, number of columns. The gutters between the columns rows and the margins around all four sides. So as you can see, that does that. This right here, we're only using partial one, as you see what I'm doing. See how I don't have to do the whole thing? I just do B6 to H. There's no bottom because I want to set the height of 35. So you can mix and match or just do that. You can actually use any form of this. You could do colon six. Colon six would set the bottom to the sixth row. Frame AB, this example, fifth row right here, sets the frame. Now you can do this with the layout command too. You don't have, this isn't a style, ST, but you can do it in a layout and stuff too. Sparkles there, first constraint, that's cool. By the way, this does not use constraints. When I started doing the new rack and the grid I looked into using constraints and I looked at, I forget the gem name, whatever it is, auto layout, gem. Frankly, it's very complex and really, I only need a few features is what I really needed. And constraints, it's like everything in the SDK, it's just ridiculously complex. It's like designed for the worst case scenario and you have to do that every single time. Oops, what happened? Where are we? I don't know. Okay, yes, yes. So this is kind of a fun one. I grab a rate of views, which in this case is five views. I set it, I laid it out to C2 to C2, which is just basically that little block. And then this is another command that existed in RMQ before, which is distribute, that should be vertically, not horizontally, but whatever. Distribute vertical and it does that. Anyone figure out what that means? Thank you. Too short, didn't read. Subviews follow grid. I was working on this at six a.m. this morning and I had to hack it because I was having troubles, but this is the way it's gonna work. So normally subviews have their, they exist inside their superviews space. And in the grid, that doesn't make much sense because you always wanna follow the grid. So in this case, you'll see that that pink one is the subview of the green one and you can see that it actually B5 to I6 is not in its superview space. It's in the controller space. Make sense? App has a grid, it comes with a default one. The default one is the one you saw on the screen. You can replace that. There's no feature for orientation but it's trivial to do it. If the user changed orientation landscape, just simply swap out the grid with your landscape grid. A lot of times you have one grid per app and very simple app, but a bigger app, you don't. You have a main grid and then you have grids per screens. So you can do this. My style sheet grid equals my grid and if that exists, it'll use it. If that doesn't exist, it will use the apps. How do you create a grid? This is how you create a grid. Grid new and you give it all of these params, pretty straightforward. What's cool about this is you can change one of these, reapply all the styles, everything will adjust. I do this. I take the app grid, I dupe it and I change the settings because most settings are the same, okay? Oh yes, logging. Want to log a grid? That's what it looks like. Okay, this is an example. Pretty cool. That one is straightforward, right? Boom to boom. The second one is a little different. The second one, let's say, is a UI label with multiple lines. So depending on the data, it's gonna change its height. So we set the grid that A2 to E, no bottom. As you see, there's no number on the second one. Then we do a size to fit, which is a typical SDK, size to fit, and it's gonna size to fit that, to fit the text. The green is just another simple one. Let's say it's an image. But here, this is cool. So this right here, we do a grid A to J12. No top, right? Because we don't know the top because we wanna make it come underneath the pink. But it does fill in the rest and then we say below previous 10 points. So you can do all that with constraints. I didn't think we had a big enough projector to show what constraints looked like on the screen, so we just went with this. That's a joke, people.  Okay, so if you didn't wanna use grids, below is how you could do with the rec system. Left 10, below previous 10, from right 10, from bottom 10. It's just almost as easy. Now with the cool thing that Eloa showed where code was just automatic, where you could be sitting in your style sheet, you could just set your grid A4, save, see it, change the grid, save. That's gonna be awesome. I didn't know that existed until today, so. Definitely be putting that in. Yes, constraints. Version 0.6 is in Edge now, so it's up in GitHub. So you wanna install revision query and then you're gonna have to use the actual Git gem for now until it's fully tested. I mean, it's fully tested as in far as unit testers, 440 tests or something like that. But I mean tested in production apps. What's coming in version 0.7? This, I've had a roadmap for RMQ for a while. I don't know if this is consistent with it, but if it's not, then I'm rearranging it. Then seven will be all about benchmarking RMQ super docs or what we saw there. And then once we benchmark it all, we're gonna do performance enhancement. Now, our RMQ is designed to be performant, meaning anything that we know that's not performant, method missing, that kind of stuff is not an RMQ. It will never be an RMQ. However, we don't know how formative it is really until we benchmark it and then tweak it. So we hope to get some good performance enhancement. I mean, RMQ is in a ton of production apps, so I mean it's performing. Last, I would like to thank my contributors. I don't think people do that enough. Jayman did, that's awesome. So here's all my contributors. Mark Rickard, who also works on Jayman's promotion. I don't know if he knows this, but he also works on RMQ. Anyways, that is it and open for questions.


Hey there, we here at BuzzFeed want to make sure that you're living life to the fullest so we came up with these 12 awesome life hacks. Let's go! Life hack number one if you fold a chip bag into itself becomes a perfect serving bowl for parties It's fiesta time! Awesome. Life hack number two you can use an old paper clip to tie together your laptop and phone cords. No more tangles Fun! Life hack number three when people say hurtful things they They don't always mean it Life hack number four contrary to popular belief suicide isn't technically illegal Life hack number five yarn can be used to bundle up your books if you don't have a backpack It can also be used to track your loved ones even if they don't want you to be tracking them Life hack number six. You can't be arrested for kidnapping someone if they wronged you first. It's called double jeopardy How do you like that Karen? Life hack number seven was I never good enough for you dad? Life hack number eight you can't be arrested for breaking and entering if you've already been convicted of that in the past It's fiesta time! Hack number nine Karen Smith the apartment to be on Maple Street is usually in her bedroom after three on weekdays Fun little fact about her.  Well, who's fun now? Life hack number ten a little bit of duct tape can help you clean up those pesky crumbs right into a dust fan It can also help you restrain your victim again not technically illegal Hack number 11 Karen can stop being a goddamn bitch and admit that she misses me Hack number 12 the sticky part of a post-it makes a great keyboard cleaner. It's fiesta time


Hey friends and happy New Year's. Tomorrow is 2021 and I am so excited for a new year and I hope that you guys have the best new year. Anyhoo, last year, 2020, I made 185 vlogs. So I thought it'd be a good way to say goodbye to 2020 with a little video montage starting off at the beginning of the year and my New Year's resolution from 2019 and then continue in order from there. So let's go do this. Hey friends, tonight I'm hanging out at Epcot. It is almost the end of 2019, only two more days to go but this will be my last vlog for 2019. I have to work on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day so I won't be able to come out to the parks but I decided I wanted to come here to Epcot and I wanted to do something that has to do with my New Year's resolution, which is be happier. Oh, look at you, you're ready. We're going. That didn't tell me. Are you blocking me? I got a notification on my phone and I found out that Disney is gonna be closing. Yeah, they're closing March 16th to the end of the month and I'm just finding out about this. Today, I am hanging out at Epcot. As you guys mostly know, Disney World is closing on the 16th which is just two days away until the end of March because of the coronavirus. So I wanted to come out to Epcot, see what it was like here, see what the crowds are like and kind of enjoy it before I take a nice little vacay from Disney World, a vacay away from Disney World which could be great. I'm very excited because I feel like if you spend a couple of days away from something, it's more you're gonna appreciate it once you get back. So let's go do this. Seriously, is nobody waiting? Oh, well, thank you. Hello, hello, hello. I'd like your, oh, here we go. I like this floor. It makes it, what? Magic. Disney World has shut down already. Same thing with Universal and SeaWorld and now Disney Springs and the resorts are gonna be closing soon too. So I wanted to come out and see how all those theme parks closing has affected the local tourism that's happening here on International Drive. I very much underestimated my ability to drive this and vlog at the same time but it is the quickest and most efficient way to get around down here. As you can tell, I have a lot of time on my hands during the quarantine and I decided to go out and see what else I could find and do a little case test on them to kill the time. I mean, I'm sure a lot of us are all cooped up in their homes so I thought this would be a little fun experiment. Anyways, let's go to bed. Hey friends, today is a great day because it is phase one of opening up Central Florida. It's the first day of it actually. And I wanna say thank you to Amber for making me this wonderful face mask. Mickey, look at him. I am gonna be wearing a face mask, things that are not allowed to be open are bars and service friendly establishments so barber shops. Traffic is still just very empty also.  Look at those guys. Hey friends, today at four o'clock the Universal Studios City Walk is gonna open and we are lined up outside right now. It is three o'clock and we are in the garage. Vince divisions here, Jackie Super and Zeus. Here's some emplorium. Howdy. Thank you. Hey friends, today is the opening day of Disney Springs. I am super excited to be here. Hold that. Hold that. I'm gonna get soup but I will not touch you. That was great. Thank you. Welcome to a group of people here. Look at this. World of Micah. What's up? Paging this tomorrow. Then we got Dany 702, Tampa J, Jackie Super and Zeus, Vincent Vision, and the Queen Cairns. Oh, here we are. Are they little coffee beans? Oh my God. Oh, the markings for some of these little coffee beans I think. Hey friends and good morning. We are at Universal Studios today. It is the first day for the annual pass holder previews and I am so excited to get back in a theme park. But I don't know how me and Josh got so lucky but we are literally standing here with nobody around us. It's a little crazy, isn't it? I mean, there's no better way to social distance than right now. We are in a theme park and I would say there's not a single person besides us and probably 100 feet. And yeah, I like it a lot. I like it a real lot. It's really nice. No, it's not like that. It's so long. No, it's not. Oh, look. No, it's not like that. Hey friends, today is the day we are finally back in Disney World. It is July 7th. It's the cast member previews. I am just overly excited to be back actually here. And LaCouche with me. Hey. Jackie. Super exclusive. Are you excited? Oh my gosh. I haven't been able to look before. That's how excited I am.  They actually tell you you can remove them because they have the safety separators. Oh, black rhino is sitting right there, Jackie. I don't get to wear them. Straight ahead. There's not many rides where you can actually ride without wearing your face mask. Actually, I don't know any of them. Hey friends, today is the day I finally get to go to Magic Kingdom. It has been open for a week and today's my first time actually being back out here. I am so excited. Let's go do this. Health and safety of everyone. Please wear a face covering. Wash your hands often and thoroughly.  Thank you for your cooperation. Look at how awesome this is. Get to walk in and right here. No big crowds, just literally Walt and Mickey. Which one's the real brayer bear? There's three of them. Three of them. You're duplicating like gremlins. They got wet in the rain. Why are they shaking like this? I don't know. I got influenced. A one of our staycation and I'm gonna be hopping around to some other resorts that I'm gonna be doing videos at and I'm very excited to share them with you. A place of hopes and dreams, backs and fancy, all in one. We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams. Today is stop five on our epic Walt Disney World Resort Hopping Staycation. We've already stayed at the Polynesian, the Grand Floridian, the Wilderness Lodge, the Boardwalk and tonight we are staying at Animal Kingdom Lodge Jumbo House. Hey friends, today we are doing one of my favorite things. The monorail crawl. I was feeling you're gonna like this and I'm probably not gonna like it. Oh yeah. Today is the day the Magic Kingdom transforms into Halloween. I am so excited. I just can't wait to see the Mickey pumpkins and all the Halloween decorations. Something good to start off 2020. This bridge is beautiful. I love it. At this, this has to be the coolest looking drink so far. Right here at Pop Century. Today, we are hanging out at Fort Wilderness Campground. Bear path. And there's a big one. Oh wait, no one's showing off at the big bear. They're like all sitting around watching. Oh, look at that. Oh, car with the eyes. There it is. Halloween cheer. Happy Halloween. It's because Magic Kingdom is testing fireworks. I am so excited. Oh my God. So excited to show you the Christmas cavalcade, the holiday treats, and even the projections on the castle later on tonight. So, let's go do this. A little hubgrass nap was much due. Oh. It's a monorail crawl. So we gotta go back to the monorail. We gotta go back. Back to TTC. Giddy up jingle bells.  Oh, jingle bells. That's the jingle. It's left for me to say, except I wish you happy holidays and the best of everything for the new year. I know it's been such a crappy year for 2020. Nobody has actually benefited from this. It's been really rough. And I just, you know, I'm just thankful that I've been given the chances and the opportunities to entertain you guys and show you guys some of the greatest things around Walt Disney World and all around like Orlando. And I just feel like happy about that. Like if anything I've ever accomplished in life, it would be what I am doing now. And it's just, it's an amazing feeling. Like it's an amazing feeling when I see the Christmas cards, when I see people write me messages and like just to know that I can bring like a smile or something happy to somebody. It's like, it's amazing. It's simply amazing. And I don't know, it makes me feel like I'm worth something. So like, thank you guys so much. Thank you all of you. I love every single one of you. So I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. We'll see you next time. Bye.


Hello, everybody, and welcome to episode number three of Paterson in Pursuit. I won't give too much preface because this is a continuation of the conversation I had with Dr. Emerus Westacott. He was such a conversationalist that I intended to talk to him for the entire interview about objective truth and epistemology. And then he started asking me questions about my own philosophy and metaphysics. And naturally, because I talk a lot, I couldn't resist having a dialogue about the philosophy of mind. The commentary that I thought I was only going to last a few minutes ended up lasting a half an hour. And it was fantastic. We actually had some more agreement on this issue, just like we did on the epistemological issue. So Dr. Emerus Westacott is a professor of philosophy at Alfred University. He is genuinely somebody that cares about big ideas. So I really think you're going to enjoy this. If you are interested in the question, what is the nature of consciousness? Enjoy the conversation. You know, Descartes said, of course, I think therefore I am, and people have criticized that saying he's not entitled to use this word I, for instance, a very controversial concept. Because it is true, once you start talking about selves, then you've got some work to do to specify exactly what you're referring to by that term. I would absolutely love to talk to you about that. That question is something I'm grappling with right now is because this is kind of as far as I've gotten in my own metaphysics that it appears to be that there are selves. What does that mean? I am tempted by this concept of a soul just because that seems to be the way that we can explain the concept of selves, but I don't really like that conclusion. And if there's not this objective boundary of the self, it seems like you get kind of a hindu mystical conclusion that phenomena of mind experience is everywhere. There's no independent minds, it's all ultimately, and I like neither of those conclusions. And what about the, what's your take on the scientific view of we have evolution producing the brain, producing consciousness, and eventually a sense of self? That is illusory, ultimately. Well, not that it's illusory, but rather that our concept of the self arises out of a sense of self that arises out of the fact that consciousness comes packaged the way it does, attached to bodies. So what I would say is something like the way that I think about the self, the way that I like to phrase metaphysical questions is ultimately about boundaries. Is it the case that there is an objective boundary where there is self and there is not self? And what I would say is in that circumstance, if there is the process of evolution results in this phenomena of consciousness, I don't think that there's anywhere that you can say, ah yes, at this point there is the self, at this point there isn't the self. I think what I would say is that means the self is illusory. I think it's certainly a logical possibility, but I have trouble with that. I'm very drawn to this idea of the dualism of Descartes. I don't even see how you get awareness from bits of matter. I consider myself a reluctant dualist, that's my metaphysical perspective. I am a dualist, but I wish I weren't, just because I can't easily reconcile subjective experience with objective physical phenomena. Right, I know that in philosophy of mind these days, people talk about the problem of consciousness and the hard problem and the easy problem. And basically, as I understand it, the hard problem is simply, how do you get consciousness out of matter, which is what the brain is. And my answer is, I don't know, but I assume that's what happens. It's just, you know, so we don't understand how it happens, how matter can give rise to consciousness. But I don't feel a pressing need to posit any sort of, any things or forces or processes beyond what we can already be knowledgeable about. We just don't know how the whole thing works. In the same way, I mean, I think it's an analogous to how do you get life? I mean, still, it's a bit of a mystery, how does life get going? But the best theory we have is that inorganic chemicals do eventually produce organisms. That one strikes me as much more conceptually complete, that the inorganic matter eventually producing living creatures. The problem that I have is, from my perspective, there appears to be this complete category distinction between third-person matter, what we consider to be the constituents of the physical universe, and the contents of subjective experience. So if it were the case, for example, that human beings didn't have this phenomenon of awareness, then I think it would be complete. I think physicalism would be a complete theory. Even though you're right, we don't exactly know how life started. That's just a matter of time before we do. But it appears to me that you can give a complete description of the physical state of the universe and completely leave out this gigantic realm of information which is about the contents. Well, this is great. We're absolutely on agreement on that. I mean, there's a lot of academic philosophy on this topic, and I'm very much on the side of the position you just articulated. There's a famous essay by Thomas Nagel called What Is It Like to Be a Bat, where he argues exactly that point, which is that when you've drawn up a complete description of every physical phenomenon in the universe, you've still left something out, which is basically subjective experience, which is real. And important. I mean, it's in central, really. Totally, yeah. And so no description that sort of tries to reduce subjective experience to the physical can be adequate. Now, the physicalists, they're being misunderstood that they're not trying to do that, but it always seems to me that they are. I agree. I wrote a little piece about this, and it's called The Case Against Physicalism. And I kind of take my reluctant, doulust approach from an epistemological standpoint, which is this, that you can have, in theory, you could imagine at knowing the position and the momentum and every single bit of information about the physical state of the universe, and there is still what I call information loss.  There is, and if the whole point of trying to think and understand things about the universe is to describe things that we're experiencing, it seems like you're cutting off half your body when you're only using physicalist terminology when there's so much more. I think the reason why this has become such a sort of pressing issue in contemporary philosophy, there's no question that, you know, the problem of consciousness and actually the pretty closely related problem of free will, I think, why they've become such pressing issues with a huge amount of literature written about them is because of the historical juncture out where, you know, the scientific revolution kicks in, there's just been this fantastic explosion of scientific knowledge and tremendous success of the physical sciences. I mean, absolutely amazing. And they're continuing a pace to perform miracles. And the question is really, well, do the physical scientists, the way they're structured and the way, you know, using their concepts, do they basically give us everything? Or is there stuff that somehow evades the grasp of those methods, those concepts? And I think we seem to be on the same page here because I think, yeah, because subjectivity just doesn't seem to lend itself to the physicalist, you know, account. It just doesn't. But you can, just like you say, you can describe the movement of every atom in the brain and you still haven't quite said what it's like to have a headache. And this is, I don't think this is unimportant. This is the reason why I'm coupling this Socratic journey I'm taking. We're doing philosophy and I'm going to talk to physicists and get that side of the spectrum. But that the phenomenon of subjectivity exists seems like a really big deal, especially when we're talking about it from a human standpoint. Like the entirety of my life has this feature, which I'm saying is there's like a category distinction between what I'm experiencing and, you know, the movement of billiard balls on a table. There's this other thing which is, again, drives me towards this uncomfortable, but it seems at this point an escapable conclusion that there's just something more. Maybe this is where we get concepts of God, this is where we get religious ideas, when you start incorporating the experience of living in the world as this apparent being who is experiencing things. But why can't consciousness or subjectivity simply be an emergent property? Well, just like life. Life is an emergent property of the inorganic. Because it depends on what you mean by life. So I could imagine a circumstance in which, let's say we're talking about insects and worms, or we'd say, yes, now that is life and there's nothing unique going on there. It's just matter that is moving in a particular way. But I don't know if there is an internal experience of being worm. I don't know if there is consciousness. But I do know that at some point you get advanced creatures who have bodies and at least assume that there's this entirely different realm that they have access to that is different than just the mechanical moving of matter. It's the internal subjective awareness. So it would be easy to dismiss life, especially like viruses, for example. You go down to that level and it just seems like you have proteins moving around. But I don't have reason to believe that that's what's going on in my circumstance. No, but in both cases you do have a spectrum.  You have different life forms of greater or lesser complexity that seem more or less mysterious. And in the same way, presumably you have degrees of sentience or degrees of consciousness. You assume that a mouse has some level of sentience but not quite what we did. Nothing like our self-awareness or anything like that. When it comes to worms, we've got no idea. But worms and that kind of thing, they do respond biochemically to their environment. What I would say is it depends on what you mean by they when you're talking about the worms. Because the way that I would put it is you're putting boundaries around the worm and saying that is something that is perhaps more than just the bits of matter that are there which constitute the worm and I don't think that's the case. So I would say in my metaphysical belief, I have a very particular idea of concepts that there is no, so you were talking about the mug on the coffee table earlier, all that there is is just the bits of matter that are constituted in a particular way. And we just reference that area of the universe as a mug. And so I think you can do that with something like worms and lesser life forms. But it's, again, it seems like, and I could imagine the philosophical zombie where you have this very complex machine that's acting in all these ways, but it lacks what seems to be this category difference of the internal subjective awareness. Right. And I mean, there's a debate here with the development of ever more complex computers, whether at some point they put together a silicon-based computer that is so complex as to have subjectivity, or whether, I mean, John Searle argues, no, that'll never happen, John, he argues, for some reason subjectivity has to be based on squishy, slimy stuff like brains, you know. I simply, I don't have an opinion about that. I don't want to rule out the possibility that a computer could have consciousness and subjectivity in my, I don't know. So let me ask you, I wanted to stay on epistemology, but this is such a good topic. Let me ask you something that I'm sure you know more than I do, because I've been studying the works of Bertrand Russell a little bit because I'm interested in the philosophy of mathematics. And what I have read is that on this question, actually I read just a little, I don't even know what it was called, a little essay that he gave about how, kind of, ultimately subjectivity comes prior to objectivity, because we're these beings that are seeking out knowledge. And I have read that he took a position that has been called neutral monism, where instead of the physicalist worldview where you might say all of the conceptual tools are physical, instead of the dualist position where you have this category distinction between the physical and the physical tools and the mental tools and there's this impenetrable boundary between them, he took a third perspective which is that ultimately mind and matter are not fully categorically different and yet neither fully explains the world. So there are kind of two derivatives of this other stuff that we don't know anything about. Do you know it? Can you elaborate on that? I'm not familiar with that, but I would be inclined to say it. I wonder why there has to be a third item there, when you say the derivative of a third item. One of the philosophers I've studied extensively is Hillary Putnam who died a couple of weeks ago. And he says in one place, he said, the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world. Right, which I think is fair enough. Again, it's in the pragmatist tradition. To me, I think that perhaps makes more sense than saying that mind and world are as it were attributes of a greater, mysterious, something we know not what. If we were to try to be precise, doesn't that kind of take the dualistic perspective when you're referencing mind and the world as these two separate things? And I would agree, in a sense, even as a reluctant dualist, the mind and the world make up the mind and the world, but that implies that there's this sharp boundary between the two of them. Well, I think he's trying to say there isn't a sharp boundary in the sense that he's saying the world is constituted by both mind and world and the mind is constituted by both mind and world. I mean, you can't talk about mind separate from the material world and the world that we have knowledge, the world that we know, and you can't talk about the reality that we know, the empirical reality, without reference to the mind. Because as I was saying before, the mind sort of carves it up and shapes it and structures it. In that worldview, though, is there not a difficulty? Well, I suppose there is certainly a difficulty, but I don't, at least maybe I'm missing a part of it, but to me that doesn't seem like it satisfactorily explains the radicalness of the difference between when we're talking about objective matter and we're talking about this subjective awareness, just to say, well, they're together. Well, how does that? No, I think that's right. I don't think he's kind of addressing that particular problem. I mean, you keep coming back to this kind of Cartesian point because Descartes' argument for mind-body dualism is precisely when it boils down to the fact that they just seem to be so radically different. I mean, he may overstate the case, but he's just impressed by how very different they are. I'm inclined to agree with you that they are very different. I accept the general picture for, you know, anything better that life emerges out of in and around matter. Consciousness and sentience emerges out of basic life forms. And so while I agree with you that there is this difference between subjectivity and what is not subjective, and I agree that at the moment we don't really understand how it happens, so there is something mysterious about subjectivity. I agree with that. At the same time, I don't think its mysteriousness leads me, perhaps it doesn't lead me to posit anything like a soul substance or it doesn't lead me to posit anything like a pre-existing form of consciousness that somehow makes it possible. It could just be that the world in some little bits of the universe gets so complicated that they produce this extra phenomenon. I guess what it comes down to is whether or not, it's how bright that distinction is between the subjective and the objective. And for me, if that is a metaphysical category distinction, then you can't have the one giving rise to the emergence of the other. I was reading an interesting claim that was talking about epiphenomenalism, essentially the idea, which of course you know about, but for my listeners, the idea that what we consider to be awareness is an epiphenomenon of physical happening, so the analogy they give is this sound of a steam whistle. How that sounds kind of emerges just from the movement of the atoms, you get this phenomenon. I forget who said it, but somebody said that still doesn't solve the metaphysical question from the subjective or the objective. In fact, it presupposes there is still this category difference.  Why are you so sure that it can't be analogous to the problem of how life emerges? People for many, many centuries said exactly the same thing about life. Life is special. Life is radically, metaphysically different from anything that's not alive. Anything living must have this sort of flame of livingness that the inorganic lacks, but we don't really believe that anymore, we just think it's more complicated. My answer would be that I can have a fully complete explanation for the phenomena of life without consciousness, just using the physicalist toolbox. I have no problem with that because what we're talking about life in that circumstance is just the movement of atoms. All that there is is just the complex movement of atoms. I have no problem even if we were to posit the human being absent the consciousness just saying that's just ultimately the incredibly complex movement of atoms. No problem explaining it. When I'm referencing my subjective experience, I'm not talking about any movement of atoms. Now there might be a correspondence of the movement of atoms in my brain, but I'm talking about the essence of what it feels like to be me, but certainly not the movement of atoms, because there's two different things. You could have, assuming that I don't have free will or anything, you could have somebody who could see every single position of the atom in my body and they could say, oh, look, I'm explaining that life, but they're still missing this other thing, which is how it feels to be me. Yeah, I know. I'm puzzled over this as well, because, as I say, going back to something I said before, I do assume there is a spectrum of sentience, and I assume that plants, when they lean towards the light or something, it's just biochemistry, there's no sentience there, and I assume that mice and even smaller things do have a degree of sentience, that they don't just move towards the cheese, that they actually have the experience of smelling the cheese. One of the things, I mean, your view presumably has to accommodate the fact that there does seem to be a spectrum of sentience, and so, you know, there's a point where it's not just biochemistry without awareness, but there's biochemical reaction with some very, very basic primitive element of sentience. And this is why I consider myself a reluctant duelist, really, that's one of the central issues is because if you take this line of reasoning and the explanation for the boundaries of consciousness as something like a soul, then you're kind of forced in the position of saying, oh well, so the rat has a little rat soul, and the baboon has a little bit of another soul, and at what point, when that consciousness isn't there, you know, maybe at the fly it's not there, but maybe at the lizard, do you have a little lizard soul? I mean, I think I'm forced in that position, but I don't like that conclusion either, because that strikes me as kind of preposterous. Not to mention where these souls come from or anything like that, which though, one potential resolution is this neutral monist or even potentially the panpsychist perspective, that that potential for conscious awareness is everywhere. Right, and yeah, and that is one of the philosophies, one of the potential explanations, except that it seems flamboyantly extravagant, doesn't it? It does, yes. I mean, to think that we are all in some way, you know, parts of aspects of this larger kind of consciousness or something like that. Though, in the research that I've been doing in the last several years, that claim seems kind of preposterous to us. There is perhaps even the majority of people on earth who don't think that's a preposterous claim, that they have, they tie that, well, if they get that far in understanding the metaphysics of what we're talking about, they say, oh, that's God. That idea of the global universal consciousness is God, and in fact, lots and lots and lots of people have claimed that they've felt that conscious awareness from the universal perspective.  Another variation is Spinoza's point of view, and Spinoza is a pretty interesting character there, and he kind of seems to think that there's one substance, that's the God or nature, he says, one substance, and there's two main ways of viewing it. One view, the more material way is to see it as kind of a great sort of mass of, I guess, space and matter. I mean really, there's only one sort of material substance, and bits of it are congealed, called those matter and bits of it aren't, we call those space, but it's really just one substance. And it's not separate from what we call mind, it's actually the same thing as mind, it's just that when we think of it as mind, when we talk about consciousness, subjectivity, experience, all that kind of thing, we're viewing it simply from a different point of view. Now, I'm not saying I can make full sense of that, but that seems to be what he thinks, that instead of with Descartes, you have these two radically different metaphysical substances. For him, you have one substance, and you can, when you look at it one way, then it looks like consciousness. When you look at it another way, it looks like matter. I find that very profound. If that's true, that's a very big deal. And the way that I put this, and I wonder what you think about this, kind of tying all this together both with the epistemology and the metaphysics, I say that absurd conclusions are kind of inescapable. If you take the hard-line physicalist perspective, you kind of arrive at this silly idea of the bits of matter eventually being congealed in a particular way where you get parts of the universe that are so constituted that they start talking about the universe. Like if you and I are just congealed blobs of matter, no different than the rock, isn't that remarkable? That the rock has the same potential constituted as us, and now it's like talking about us and has these little individual lives, and the parts of the universe go around caring about what happens when it dies. That strikes me as absurd. If that's not the case, even the idealist perspective, that everything is mental, strikes me also as kind of absurd. The dualist perspective strikes me as absurd. The panpsychist, the spinosis, all of it, it seems like the absurdity is just inescapable when you try to, when you fully realize just how radical it is, specifically that there is such a thing as experience. The encouraging thing though is that almost, you know, a good chunk of what we now absolutely believe and take for granted would have been regarded as completely absurd by previous generations from the roundness of the earth to the equality of men and women. So you think it's just a matter of time, and then we'll be able to sort it out? I certainly don't think we should be afraid of the absurd in the sense that, I mean, and Bertrand Russell would certainly agree with this, that, you know, when you're faced with these kind of problems, I mean, the fact is we can't make full sense of things using our ordinary ways of thinking. Common sense is what, the new common sense, which includes the theory of evolution, and it includes quantum mechanics and the new common sense can't make sense of everything yet, so presumably there's something wrong with common sense. So in a conclusion to everything here, would you say this, that it is true that things appear absurd, it's difficult to explain all the phenomena that we experience, certainly with our current level of understanding. But my claim, and I wonder if you would agree with this, is that there are certain life rafts that were thrown in this ocean to use another analogy that we grab onto that represent certain knowledge, that in metaphysics it is certainly the case that of all the things that are out there, of all the existent phenomena that exist, certainly subjective experience exists. Maybe rocks do, maybe suns do, maybe other things do, but certainly subjective experience. Yeah, I don't see it as a life raft, I see that as a datum. But it's different, so we could say something like the cup on the table exists and we have a really high level of confidence, but ultimately we can't fully know that that is the case, but that's not true with the subjective. You say a life raft, that implies that we're faced with this confusion, we need to be saved as to how is all this possible, and what's going to save us is the fact that we can be certain about this thing called subjective experience. I don't see how that saves us, I say, actually that's part of the problem isn't it, the fact that it's subjective experience, the reality of it, the phenomenon of it and the fact that it has to be described in a certain way that doesn't quite match the way we describe the rest of the world, that's the problem. Well maybe I can extend the analogy and say it starts that way. So if somebody, we wake up and we're in the ocean, what the heck is going on, does it make sense, and then sure enough a datum floats by, this life raft flows by, we grab on, okay now I'm solid, now I can start somewhere, and then you get in the life raft and then you can, there's sure enough, there's sure out there and you can find epistemologically certain truths, logically necessary propositions. You say okay well now I can start building this, I can start certainly making sense of the world, both epistemologically and metaphysically, and you can make grounded progress, rather than always thinking oh well maybe the tide's going to come in and I'm going to drown and we just can't know anything. What I'm really interested in and I think a lot of people are interested in and inspired by is this idea that the mind and ourselves do have access to certain knowledge. We can know certain things to be true and by extension denials of true things are certainly false and we can make progress and all is not hopeless if you value discovering truth. Well I agree but I'll go back to something I said before which is that I distinguish between truth and certainty. Descartes demanded certainty and ever since then philosophers have sort of to a large extent until the 20th century tended to rather uncritically go along with that demand and that's why even today a lot of philosophers think that philosophical propositions have to be more or less analytic. They're kind of just the analysis of concepts, they're not interested in sort of vague plausible empirical generalizations or something like that but I don't agree with that. I actually think that certainty is very hard to establish in many spheres. I think there are degrees of certainty. When you talk about subjective experience you're talking about probably the highest degree of certainty, mathematics and another very high degree of certainty but it seems to me that we should not fret too much if some of our knowledge isn't certain. We just accept that. Aristotle says in the ethics doesn't he, says that it's the mark of the mature mind to not demand more precision and more certainty in a field of knowledge than it's capable of delivering. I can certainly accept that and agree with it however only with the understanding that there is that certainty.  The existence of the external world is something that almost everybody assumes is the case is very central to our lives but that sliding scale of certainty goes to 100% and if that's true then any proposition which contradicts one of the certain truths is necessarily wrong and we can't say that, for example a lot of people especially who are interested in quantum physics they say oh well even the idea of the physical world separate of our minds is false and really the world is illusory and they draw really grand conclusions because certain, the premises they're challenging are maybe 90% certain but not fully certain but what I would say is anybody who challenges those handful of propositions which are out there which what I would say they form the framework or the bedrock, those are untouchable and then that almost makes all the other ones more exciting because it's like okay I have this certain knowledge and then I can build given reasonable assumptions that other minds exist and cups exist and tables exist and all this I'm not going to base my, I'm not going to those aren't the most important beliefs that I have but I'm fine with 99% certainty or something like that I don't know, I mean it seems to me that once you allow there's a spectrum of certainty that slides go, then when you also you should be fairly content with the fact that most of human knowledge is not certain I'm perfectly content with that as long as, as long as, if we, if you acknowledge that there are some foundational truths I'll certainly acknowledge that they're greatly outweighed by the uncertain ones As I said before I'm not, I'm not comfortable with the word foundational because that implies at the end that's a kind of Cartesianism that implies that you're going to build the rest of human knowledge you're going to rest it on that foundation and I don't necessarily see that with the hope that some of the certainty is going to seep through Yeah, and I'm fine with that because it would correct me if I run but Descartes tried to prove the existence of the external world too, didn't he? Right, using God Right, right, I'm not particularly persuaded by his argument but where I think we might even have more agreement is then you and I might disagree with Descartes on this that it's perfectly fine to say I don't know that the physical world exists but if it does, here's what follows and here's how it works I'm totally fine with that and that in fact is given that we appear to live in a physical world one of the most central and reasonable propositions one of the most foundational maybe not ultimately bedrock one of the most foundational ideas that we have in building our entire world view is assuming that this thing called the physical world exists even though I totally grant it's not something we can know a certainty On that note, thank you very much Dr. Westacott for talking to me I have greatly enjoyed this Great pleasure Alright, so that was my interview with Dr. Emerus Westacott the issue of consciousness is going to keep coming up in this interview series it's one of the central questions that I just don't have a great resolution for and I'm sincerely trying to find an alternative to dualism but so far I haven't found anything I find particularly persuasive and hopefully in the Socratic journey when we start going to maybe Southeast Asia or India I'm going to be able to talk to more Buddhists and Hindus that have a very very different conception of consciousness than we do in the West and be sure to tune in for the next episode where I'm talking with Professor Brian Kaplan who's a fascinating and awesome guy he's got a lot of really interesting ideas and he wrote a book a little while ago called the myth of the rational voter that I think was a best seller caused all kinds of waves I talked to him about that what is the myth of the rational voter we talk about democracy potential alternatives to democracy talk about some radical libertarian ideas we also talk about his upcoming book which is called the case against education I won't give away any details but I think the title of the book is a sufficient enough hook that people will want to tune in to listen to that episode because it's awesome alright thanks for listening everybody hope you enjoyed it


What's a lectin, exactly? Short answer, it's a dangerous plant protein designed to poison you. Yes, you read that right. Poison.  But they'll make you pretty sick. You see, plants don't want to be eaten. But it's not like they can run and hide or even bite back. So instead they make lectins to make predators sick in hopes that the next time they'll pass by that plant and eat something else. It's actually pretty smart, right? So that's lectins for you in a nutshell. But how do they make you sick? Well, it helps to think of lectins are like little barnacles that look for specific sugar molecules in your blood, the lining of our gut and on our nerves. When they find a good spot to land, they cling to these cells, breaking down their ability to communicate with our immune system and then ripping them to pieces, which could lead to things like leaky gut, a weaker immune system, weight gain, food poisoning, and so much more. After all, there's nothing worse than an intruder in your system.  So clearly they should be avoided at all costs, but what exactly does that mean? Well, there are certain lectins in most fruits and veggies, but some are worse than others. And there are five categories of food you want to avoid at all costs. First, beans and legumes, including peanuts, lentils, and cashews, they carry more lectins than any other food, which is why eating undercooked beans makes so many people sick each year. So skip them entirely, or if you must eat foods like lentils, which do have health-boosting compounds, make sure to pressure cook them, because pressure cooking kills the majority of lectins outright. Second, squash. Most squash are New World foods, which means our bodies did not evolve to eat them, plus they're heavy in lectins, so skip pumpkin, butternut squash, even zucchini whenever possible. And if you must eat squash, although I don't recommend it, peel it and take out the seeds first, because that's where the lectins are. Third, grains. For the most part, grains are a relatively new food to us. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't search for grains. Without processing, there was no way to eat them. Plus, most grains, even gluten-free grains, are lectin bombs, as well as those gluten-free grains substitutes. Fourth, the nightshades, tomatoes, potatoes, even eggplants. These lectin bombs are another leading cause of food poisoning, and they're closely related to some of the most poisonous plants on the planet.  And remember, if it's got a seed, it's a fruit, so skip that pineapple, papaya, and strawberries in the winter. But also peppers and cucumbers. Remember, they're fruits, too. So now you know what they are, what they do, and where to find lectins. But why should you avoid them at all costs? This one's simple. Lectins are designed to cause disease and weight gain in humans.  But one of the guys who really turned me around on the power of lectins and how we reacted them was a guy who I talk about Tony in the plant paradox. And Tony is a friend of mine, he still is. He came to me early when I actually wrote Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution. He was one of the original adapters of that book. And Tony had vitiligo, the loss of pigmentation that Michael Jackson had. And he had it on his hands, he had some on his face, Tony, great looking guy. And he came after he started on the plant paradox, and he came up to my office and he said, hey, you've got to look at this. And I knew him before. He says, my vitiligo is gone, all the pigments back in. He says, what do you think is going on? And I'm going, well, I know this is an anti-inflammatory diet, but boy, that's a real stretch. And then I go back to medical school and I go, wait a minute, melanocytes are what make pigment. And to get really nerdy here, a melanocyte is a nerve cell that in the embryo migrates basically from your spinal cord and brain out to the skin. And it's a nerve cell. And lectins were originally devised by plants to paralyze insects, which makes great sense. If you have somebody who is eating you and eating you makes them paralyze, that's a really good defense system.  And this was first described not by me, but by the famous paleo doctor, Lauren Cordain from Colorado State, who actually wrote the original paleo diet. And Dr. Cordain said that lectins mimic other proteins in our body, other cells in our body to get our immune system to have friendly fire, attack normal cells by mistake. And it's called molecular mimicry. He coined the phrase. And so I said, son of a gun, I've been taking lectins away from Tony. And he's no longer attacking his nerve cells, just like Dr. Cordain's theory predicted. So then I lost track of Tony. And I actually saw him at a meeting a few years right before the plant paradox came out and his vitiligo was back. And I said, well, what's the deal? How'd that happen? He says, ah, I'm cheating. It's pretty hard to do what you want me to do. And it's OK. I said, well, wait a minute.  Let's run the experiment again. I said, here's the list. It was called The Matrix back then for my longtime listeners. Take this and let's see. See you in a couple of months. Come up to my office. And sure enough, he came back and the vitiligo was gone. And I went, holy cow. That actually proves that, in fact, for him, lectins were the cause of his problem. Then actually kind of right after Tony, Jackie from Oregon came down. She's a nurse. And Jackie had massive migraine headaches. And she tried everything. Now Jackie was a home gardener. And Jackie loved to can a tomato and zucchini relish that she dearly loved. And she was telling me about all this. And I said, oh, wow, this looks like the problem. Because zucchini and tomatoes have lots of lectins in them. I said, I want you to get rid of all the lectins in your life. Don't come near that relish. And watch what happens. So she called me a few weeks later and said, migraines are gone. That was it. Migraines are gone. And so the next time I saw her about a year later, she said, things are great. No migraine medications, no migraines. But I miss my relish. I really, really like my relish. And my garden is just finishing up. And I got all the zucchini and tomatoes. Please, what are we going to do? I said, OK, this is great. Let's have an experiment. I want you to can your zucchini and tomato relish the usual way. But I also want you to can some in a pressure cooker. And let's see what happens. So sure enough, her regular stuff, when she ate the relish, she called me. She said, oh my gosh, migraine. That caused my migraine. I said, OK, just calm down. Let's give it a few days. And then I want you to try the pressure cooker stuff. Sure enough, no migraine when she pressure cooked her zucchini and tomatoes, just like we would predict. So Jackie through the years has become one of my best canaries. And Jackie eventually had grandchildren. And she wanted to give them steel cut oats. And she wanted to try cream of wheat. So she decided to use a pressure cooker. And she pressure cooked her oats for like a half an hour. And then 45 minutes and finally an hour. And every time she ate it, she would get a migraine. And she said, oh my gosh, I can't eat oats. And I said, that's interesting. I said, I tell you what, do it with cream of wheat. And so she did the same thing with cream of wheat. And even after an hour of doing this, it wouldn't work. And I said, you know, that's interesting. I don't get it. So I went down a rabbit hole and I found this obscure paper. I don't even know if I have it anymore. That says you cannot destroy the gluten lectin with high heat and high pressure cooking. It will not break. And so that's why you see on my list, do not pressure cook wheat, rye, barley, oats. It will not work. And that's actually all thanks to Jackie making me say, why doesn't that work? And sure enough, somebody had figured that out. Now subsequently I've published papers in abstract form, in circulation of 102 patients with autoimmune disease, including moi, me personally. I have had a marker for anti-nuclear antibody, which some people associate with lupus, or other autoimmune diseases. And after I had that discovered, I believed it because my father's side of the family has massive psoriasis. And I wasn't surprised. So I was perfect on my diet for two months. And it went away. It became negative. And we published the results of 102 people who followed my program for six months. At the end of six months, 95 out of those 102 were negative for their autoimmune marker, or markers, off of immunosuppressants. The other 6% were actually on less immunosuppressants. Interestingly enough, in that published data, seven people, once they were in remission, went away from the diet, and all of them subsequently became positive for their autoimmune marker. And all seven of them became negative again when we reinstituted the diet.  I'm going to reintroduce over a weekend, aggressively, lectinous. I ate bread, I ate pasta, I came back, I drew my blood, and lo and behold, I'm positive again for anti-nuclear antibody. And I go, well, that's pretty cool. I'm going to be perfect for just one week. All I'm going to do one week, let's see what happens. One week later, same lab, same blood drawer, one of my blood drawers, negative for anti-nuclear antibody. So what's going on here? So number one, okay, so I'm a canary. Number two, I'm very sensitive to these things as anyone with autoimmune disease is. I can guarantee you, if you have autoimmune disease, you can't cheat. Sorry about that. But number two, the reason things have changed so much, the reason most of the commercials you see on TV every night for an immunosuppressant, for an autoimmune disease like Crohn's, like rheumatoid arthritis, like psoriasis, you choose the disease. These were very infrequent diseases 50 years ago. Yes, they existed, but they were so infrequent that the tests we used to look for them in our little days were called funny tests because they were so funny, we rarely got them because we rarely saw these things. And now most of the commercials you see at night are for these diseases. And as I tell all of my patients, these are immunosuppressants. These are transplant drugs that I use when I do a heart transplant. Look, you don't have a heart transplant. You don't have a kidney transplant. You don't have a liver transplant. There is absolutely no reason for you to be on a transplant medication to treat your autoimmune disease. You have to treat it by removing certain foods. Thanks so much for watching, but don't go anywhere. This next one is sure to surprise you. And people who ate one bowl of curry per week had dramatic, better memories than people who did not eat that bowl of curry per week. And the reason for is the two essential ingredients to make turmeric work is black pepper and curcumin.


Yeah, I picked up more puzzles and I don't really have any more space for them, but that doesn't matter. Hello there, guys. So not too long ago, I placed an order on Amazon and this was during one of their, I think it was like a prime sale they were having. So of course, with the sale going on, you know I was going to look up some puzzles to see what good deals they had. Hit the like button if you tend to go on the hunt on Amazon when they're having their prime sales. And if not, what is your favorite place to find good puzzle sales at? So not only did I see this prime sale as an opportunity for me to pick up some puzzle sets at a lower price, but I figured it was probably a great way to pick up ones, specifically ones from brands that I don't currently own. So of all the puzzles that Amazon had on sale for that day, there were three in particular that fit both criterias that I set. It had to be inexpensive and it had to be from a brand that I do not currently own. Yeah, I picked up more puzzles and I don't really have any more space for them, but that doesn't matter. So here's what I picked up on the online sale. First one we have is one from a company called, I'm going to mess up this name really bad. And if so, I apologize. Our first one is from a company called, oh gosh, please forgive me. I'm not doing this on purpose. If any of you know how to pronounce this, please don't hesitate to write down in the comments, kind of a breakdown on how I'm supposed to pronounce this. This one is 1000 pieces. It is when completed, 27.56 by 19.67 inches. And it's a pretty solid box. It's in plastic wrap. The puzzle box itself doesn't have too much information. It has this really long address, which I believe is from Asia. Then there's a address for Germany. So I'm not really sure where this originates from exactly. It does say that it is made from China, but the back of this puzzle box has other images from their other sets. And these look really amazing. Now, aside from the fact that this puzzle was fairly inexpensive and I do not own this brand, I've actually never heard of this brand before. But then again, there are a lot of well-known brands that I haven't heard of yet. Or I haven't been introduced to yet. This puzzle really caught my eye because as soon as I looked at it, I came up, of course, with a story in my head. I immediately saw myself in this image. There's my boat.  I can definitely see myself sitting on that chair with a glass of wine, just living in the moment. It's a beautiful day. I'm taking in the beautiful mountain views, the beautiful trees around me. I got some wine. There's a little, what looks like to be a fruit basket sat on the bench behind me. My boat is docked on the side. I could sit here all day.  Now that I think about it, this is a little concerning. My boat is not tied to anything and it seems to be drifting away. That doesn't seem too good. That could be a problem.  That doesn't sound too bad. I'm sure some of you would love to end up in a little place like this after a little nice boat ride. I'd be interested to find out more about this company and if there's anything special about them. The next set that I picked up is from the company UbiSize. Is that right? I'm so bad at this. And this puzzle is 1000 pieces. This one is called Goddess of the Village. This one says it's made in China. And I'm not seeing much else on the box aside from its size, which is 27.5 by 20 inches when it's completed. And that's pretty much it. Doesn't have a lot of information, but you do have a lovely image in the front of this. I mean, just listen to the name of this. Goddess of the Village. That sounds very like, I love fantasy movies and games. So immediately I was so drawn to this image. The artwork kind of reminded me of Thomas Kincaid.  They're pretty big looking houses too. I would love to say, yeah, that's my house back there. But then you have like this goddess blended into the image on the bottom with the leaves and the grass. This place looks so magical. I love that stuff. There's my boat again. I always have a boat. This definitely transports me to fantasy lands, not Disney fantasy lands. But you know what I mean? That kind of, you know, Lord of the Ringsy kind of feel. Legends. I think it was the 80s movie. I love that movie. It's so good. All right. I'm getting off topic here. Let's move on to the last one that I picked up. The last one that I picked up from Amazon, that I believe ticked both boxes. This one may have cost me a little bit more than I would have liked. This may have been more towards the $8 range, maybe more. It's from the company, Eboo. Eboo or Ebo? Oh man, I'm trying. And this one is called Venice Open Market. And it's 1,000 pieces. It is 23 by 23 inches when it's completed. And the puzzle box actually gives you some information about the illustrator. And their name is Uta Krogmann. And she is actually from Southern Germany. This brand looks to have his headquarters in New York City. Oh, look at that 170 West 74th Street. That's actually like a five minute walk from my middle school. But it also states that this is made out of 90% recycled board and printed with vegetable based inks. Another interesting fact about Eboo is that it is woman owned. That's fantastic. This is a very nice looking box. And what makes it even nicer, I mean, come on, look at this image. This is Venice. Back when I was in that middle school, my mom pulled me out of school for like two weeks and was like, hey, we're going to Italy. And I was like, okay. And one of the places we spent the day at was Venice. And this image really takes me back to that time. Another thing I love about it is that it is so colorful. The colors are bright. There's so much happening in this image. There's just people going about their day. You got a market going on here. I love farmers markets. You got food. You mix that together with Venice. That's it. My head is going to explode. I just, I just love food. You mix food and puzzles together. That's it. I'm going wild. I'm really interested to learn more about this company. And I would love to check out more of their puzzle sets because I do remember seeing other ones.  I love the illustrations. It's just something about it as well also reminds me of certain children's books that I used to read when I was little. It kind of gives me like a nostalgic feeling. I'm all about nostalgia. So yeah, this one's going to be really fun. I'm excited to do this one. And when I finally do my review on this particular puzzle, I will research and talk more about the company and what they're especially known for. Well, that's it for my Amazon Prime sale haul. Do any of yous know about any of these sets that I talked about today? And if so, let me know your thoughts on the quality, you know, their images, what you know about them. If you want to see me put these puzzles together and others that I have showed in my other hauls, please subscribe so you can follow me along my jigsaw journey into completing as many puzzles as I can. Thanks for watching guys and I will see you next time. Now I really don't have space for these.


just a quick video today about a very simple game and one of my favorites Spyhunter was originally created as an arcade game way back in 1983 where it was then ported seemingly everywhere to Atari 2600, Coleco vision, DOS, x&y spectrum Palm PDA and BBC micro and of course the NES which is what I'm looking at here there's also a pinball version of the game a remake for 6th generation consoles, followed by a sequel, there were even plans for a Spy Hunter movie, but eventually it just ended up being another video game, this time starring The Rock. It's pretty crazy that all that spawned from this quaint little game, just an overhead vertically scrolling shooter where the goal is to simply survive as long as you can. What makes Spy Hunter so interesting is that it's such a perfect match of accessible and frustrating. Anyone can pick up this game and play, and just get the gist of the gameplay within like 5 seconds, or in other words the same amount of time it takes to crash and crash again and again. You know, it's one thing to have an extremely difficult shoot-em-up, but it's another entirely to restrict the space in which you can move around, my god man, but at least you do get some help in the form of these orange 18-wheelers. Just park your car in there, come on, get in there, get in there, come on, sheesh. And they can provide you with power-ups like oil slicks or smoke screens, and that's in addition to your hood-mounted automatic machine gun fire.  After the timer runs out, it's up to you to shoot cars to accumulate enough points for extra lives, otherwise when you crash, it's game over. So yeah, the game is forgiving enough to let you get a feel for the speed of your badass interceptor car, the speed of enemy vehicles, and to let you find out which paths you want to take in the first couple forks in the road. Would you rather head this way, or get bombed to Kingdom Come by this helicopter? I do really like that aspect of this game, it adds some incentive to just get past your initial frustration, just to see what's over to the right instead of to the left, or what's just past this bridge and past these friggin' helicopters. Of course, it's impossible to talk about Spy Hunter without mentioning that iconic music. It's lifted from the late 50s TV series Peter Gunn, that's literally all the music that's in the game, but let's face it, you don't need any other music other than that.  So yeah, even though you might only play Spy Hunter for literally like three minutes before you're frustrated with it, it's still a worthwhile play today, plus if the game gets the best of you, you can always take advantage of the many, many glitches that are available, like being able to let the road just push you over like this without having to steer, for example. The Spy Hunter cartridge is also still around $7 average, so it's pretty easy to get your money's worth. So yeah, Spy Hunter is a great NES example of a game that's very easy to play, but very difficult to master.