103.9 FM, WOZO Radio, Knoxville. Ladies and gentlemen, Digital Freethought Radio Hour. Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Today is Sunday, April 11th, 2021. I'm Larry Rhodes, our Doubter 5, and as usual, we have our co-host Wombat along with us. Hello Wombat. What's up, everybody? Yay. I'm doing good. I'm doing well. And our guests today are George Brooklyn and Dreadpire Higgs. Hello. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious thought and atheism. I lost the line there somewhere. Anyway, Wombat, what's our topic today? I'm sorry, Larry, were you talking to me, my body, or were you talking to me as in my mind? Your mind, definitely. On the spiritual plane that will outlive my body. That's right, your mind. Okay, okay. If you're talking to my mind, then I'll say gladly. I don't know if I'll live your body, though. Okay. I'll gladly say either way. We're going to be talking about dualism today. I think it's going to be a fun conversation. But before we get into the meat and potatoes, I'm going to throw it up to our own Dreadpire Higgs for a weekly invocation. Oh, problem be me, Captain. I shall not want. He maketh me to float in salt waters. He stireth me through glassy seas. He filleth my bowl. He stireth me through the straits of noodliness for goodness sake. I, though I sail through the heaving of tempestuous waters, I will fear not sinking or now arch with me. I must, and I rather, they comfort me. I'll preparest a feast before me in the presence of me mates. I'll quenchest my thirst with grog. My goblet runs over. Truly, pasta and grog shall follow me all the days of me life. And I will dwell in the galley of the quab forever. Grog. Guys, I've been having some weird problems because I'm getting back on that whole, this is not true. This is obviously, this is my bit. This is a fair warning. I'm getting back on that eharmymatch.com, Tinder, Grindr, all that stuff. I'm getting myself back out there at springtime. Let me tell you something, though. I have to ask myself, am I into the body or am I into the mind? I feel like those are the two biggest questions. And every single time you sign up on one of these websites, you have to check these boxes and be like, hey, are you a mind person or are you a body person? And I want to make sure I score points good. So I'm always like, yeah, I'm not into the body. I'm into the mind, right? Because that's what's going to give me the points. I've been thinking about this, though. I'm thinking actually that you should actually say body. And the reason why I say body whenever you're asked if you're a mind or a body person is because, in my opinion, the mind seems to be a product of the body. Like, I need muscles. I need proteins. I need salts. I need liquids to keep my mind working. And I feel like very much my mind is an emergent property of my body. So the better I take care of my body, the better I have access to my mind. I don't know if that's necessarily the case, though, because there are people who believe that there are two separate things. And I think that falls into the category of dualism. Like, the mind and the body are very distinct and objectively different things. But I'm not sure if that's what everyone here in this conversation believes. So let's do a round table. Dread pirate, what do you think dualism is? Do you think it's like what? I think it's precisely as you put it. And certainly what René Descartes was alluding to when he said, I think, therefore I am. He was a dualist. And his philosophy is based on the idea that the mind or the spirit or there's two aspects to our existence. One which is encapsulated by our bodies and one which is sort of inhabiting the body as something outside of the body. Yeah, that's what I understand dualism to be. Could you throw this out then? So like, does it stop at just two? No, I mean, you think of even Catholicism, right?  So there's different sort of non-corporeal aspects to existence aside from just the body and the spirit. I guess what I was alluding to is like, do you have, we can measure a body and we can be like, hey, that's one body. But like, you know, Scientologists would say there's a collection of souls, for example, that could be inhabiting a body. And that's not just one thing. How do we have any idea of like this soul or at least for René Descartes point of view? Like, yes, it's more than one, but how do we know it's two? Dualism seems to apply to you. Yeah, I think it's arbitrary. It could be a vileism. Oh, that's interesting. Vileism. Yeah, like, or Trinity within myself or something like that. It's a weird thing. Once you get past one, it gets a more murky thing if we can't measure it. Larry, I'd like to get your point of view. Dualism, what do you think it is? I think it's nonexistent. I think. Hey, hey, let's be nice. Let's be nice. What? You don't look that up in the dictionary, like fairies in the dictionary. It's like they don't exist. Next word. It exists in the dictionary. I think that your, your, your eye, the eye of our psychology is affected directly by drugs, surgery, prefrontal, prefrontal lobotomy, injury, anything that you do to the brain, you also affect the mind. So it's inextricably entwined into the physical presence of our brain. It's an emergent property of the brain and without the brain, it would not exist.  That's the end of the mind. That's my take. So I'm going to ask, I'm going to not, I'm just poking this like it doesn't seem, is there any tools that we have that can measure mind activity? Because we can definitely measure brain activity. Sure. How do I, I think we'll do it. Talk, talk to me, talk to me. How do we do it? MRI just what it does is it looks at the brain activity. When, in other words, when you have an activity in a certain area of your brain, like on the right side of your brain, it may be because you're doing something with the left hand. And it physically controls the impulses that make your hand react. So it's going to show more activity and will light up certain areas of the brain in an MRI. So that's the way of showing the mind activity outside of brain activity. I don't think there's any way to evaluate that unless maybe you're just talking about speech. So Brian, I mean, this speech can represent what's going on in the mind. It sounds like you're saying brain activity is just a word that we might, I'm sorry, mind is just a word that we've come up for with for brain activity and that they actually are one and the same thing. And so without brain activity, you're not going to have a mind. Sure. Whoa, powerful, powerful, powerful. So I'm going to fill this out.  Are you saying then like dogs have a mind, dogs have a mind? I'm not sure. What? I've seen dogs poop outside. This is a treat for my dog. And my dog is here asking for the treat. He has an agency and a will. Let me tell you something. Hey, Vinny, come here. I want a treat. Vinny, here. Like cats have minds. Okay. Dogs, not so much. I feel like they're kind of... There you, sir. We can talk about this later. George, I'd like to get your opinion. From our conversation about dualism so far, what do you think it is and what's your opinion on it? Well, from an early age, I have always enjoyed cats. Yeah. Great. It's hard to answer. Both of them. So if I asked the cat, are you dual or are you... What's the word? Unitary. I think that's what George Bush used to say. I am the unitary executive. So if I said to the cat, are you a unitary thing or are you dual? Do you have a mind and a body? What's the cat going to ask me? What's the cat going to answer me?  And to me, as you know, I will say this for anybody who's new to the show that I was raised without God, without God, without religion. So to me, the concept of a soul is kind of strange. So I'm sort of equating that with, okay, the soul is the mind and that is thought by many people to be distinctly separate from the corporeal existence. But at that mind, that soul will continue to live after I die. But I can't relate to it. It's not organic to me. I'm not programmed with this. So you've never had an inclination maybe even when you're working out or if you are doing like a particularly hard task, maybe it's just focusing in class or trying to teach a kid a clarinet or a recorder and he's just not paying attention. And you feel your body getting angry. You're like, come on, kid, just do this thing. But in your head, you're saying, hey, self-George, calm down. We got to walk through these steps. We got to stay awake in this class. We got to make sure we don't cough in this person's face who's not wearing a face mask.  Don't you feel like sometimes your body wants to do something and your mind says, no, no, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to say. Oh, yeah, of course. Yes. So what is that? I won't go into detail right now because it's not fit for radio. Sure. So what is that if that's not like a dualistic set of forces? Well, it is dualistic. No argument for me.  Why are you shaking your head?  These other emotions that you have adrenaline pumping through you in times of danger or sexual arousal when you're not really wanting to be there. Yeah. Massage table or something. And your body is basically not doing what your mind wants. Sure. But it's still your body reacting to outside stimulus. It is not something supernatural, not something physical. Yeah. Not autonomic from the body. So it's different parts of your body reacting different ways. George from Buffalo. Okay. Are you are you connected with us? Fantastic. Yeah. So we're talking about dualism today and the nature of like, is it possible that you might exist outside of your body? Or in a way where it's like you can command your body, what to do?  Like what is your opinion on that? Do you have a perspective on dualism? I'm a chemist. Need I say more? Yes. Because I've seen it before. And trust me, I'm a biochemist too. But I have gone to the labs where it's like, you know, you see crystals, you see rabbits foot, like I don't, I, it's a shame to admit this, but like high degrees in like very necessary fields do not necessarily imply a good critical thinking regimen on the supernatural. And so Dreadpile, I'll get to you real quick. I'm just wondering, George, what's your opinion on dualism? What's the opinion, but what do you think dualism is? And do you have like any hot takes on it other than you don't believe in it? Yeah, I guess, I guess maybe, maybe I'll pass on to the next person and give myself a chance to think on it. Cool. I can respect that. Dread, what's your thoughts? I was thinking, you know, about some of the arguments against this whole idea of the spirit or soul. And the fact that it actually violates the second law of thermodynamics, right? All things are, all things are moving towards entropy.  So if there's a spirit that exists beyond us, what is powering it? Right? Because if we stop feeding ourselves, we will die. Okay. So what is the soul as an energetic form in some way being powered? How is it being sustained?  And I always say, like, whenever you have these conversations, you want to get, you want to skim that top of the surface because when you're dealing with supernatural things, you're effectively working with magic, which means I can make up rules to make sense now that you're playing my game. I can say, oh, well, souls are just special things that sometimes absorb energy from XYZ or God gives you energy. And I don't have to make sense because it's magic. And I try to avoid that as much as possible. I just try to appeal to, you know, reason and sense. I do like the idea of the brain being not a complicated thing. Like a lot of people have the assumption that there's this thing called Occam's razor, which is unfortunately known as the simplest answer, the truest answer, and that's not what Occam's razor says. Occam's razor is the path that makes the least number of assumptions, tends to be the most true, and it's not an absolute law, but sometimes convoluted answers are absolutely true. Sometimes things that are very complex can be totally true. And I think the brain is a very complex thing. And I think you have unfortunate, not unfortunately, but just through our development, we've had primal brains, lizard brains, brains, a part of our brains that are more for higher level functions and then like metal level functions all in the same cranium. Like it's all there still. And so because of that, we may come up with, like as Larry said, the sensation of like, hey, I am hungry. No, I'm not hungry.  It's like, I want to read a book and they have a little conflict. And you're like, I don't know what to do. Should I get my keys or should I get on the couch? And I can feel someone who's having that sensation being like, what's going on? I don't really understand what's going on. There must be identity crisis. Maybe my body is trying to do something and maybe I exist outside of my body and I'm trying to tell my body to do something else. I can see that. It can be a lot more complicated than that. If you have split personalities, you could have several personalities residing in the same brain. Very true. Very true. That's the actual thing. Dredd, what do you got? Well, you brought up Occam's razor. Sure. And I thought a good corollary to that is Hitchens razor. Are you familiar with that? No. Talk to me. Just for Hitchens. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Sure. Sure. Good point. Good point. So if you don't have a way to prove a supernatural concept like, I don't have an out of the world mind controlling my body, I can dismiss that just as well. It needs to be shown as an option. It needs to be proved as an option before we can consider it as an option. Right. I have this funny idea. And actually I'm stealing it from Larry, but there's this movie called inside out where it's like a panel of emotions controlling or not controlling but helping a girl get through her, through her life. Right. So the girl has the girl will go through her day and then something will make her angry. And then it zooms into her head where there's like a panel and there's like all the emotions at a table pushing buttons. And there's an anger emotion and a fear emotion and like a happy emotion. And they're all like, we got a, I'm pushing the button harder. I get to control the machine now. And then when the anger takes control, that girl gets angry. The funny thing is though, at the end of that movie, they jump into one of the emotions head. There's another panel of people and I'm thinking, oh man, how many, it's like a Russian doll. How far does this go down? And if, if we have the idea that we are not controlling our body or that we are controlling our body and that we are an agent that's controlling our body, what's controlling that agent? Right. Right. George, have you ever thought about this? Am I blowing your mind? No, I've never thought about it. And you're blowing his mind. Oh man. What's the good thing he's got that cool beanie on? Buffalo, I want to check. This is because it's cold in here. I don't doubt it. I don't doubt it. Here in the sunny South, I'm freezing. Buffalo, check it in. I want to get your feedback. Anything on dualism. What do you think? Who are you talking to? Buffalo, Buffalo. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I have a hard time conceptualizing what the basis of that might be. From a biological perspective. And maybe I'm oversimplifying the biology because we don't understand it. We don't understand the biology of the brain. Really, much less so than the biology of all the other organs. So I have a hard time conceptualizing the soul or some outer influence. I just don't see that there's any evidence for that. I don't understand how it would be possible given our current knowledge of the human brain. I feel like it's just an appealing thing that people want to believe. It's a very, very nice thing to believe that you might exist outside of your body. Because if something bad happens to your body, you might live on past that. I have a quick analogy. I'm not sure if this makes sense. I'm still formalizing it. But it's sort of like a lot of people feel as if they existed before their body existed.  Or like a concept of some sort. And then the human body was born. And they're like, I'm going to be in this body. And the reason why I say that is because I've often heard people say, man, I could have been anything. Like I look at the world and I'm so lucky to be a human being. I could have been a mosquito. I could have been a bush stuck in the ground all day long. I could have been a Miba and a pond. But no, I get to be a human being. I get to be the number one thing I can walk around. I can sing. I listen to music. I'm like, I'm so lucky. I'm like, why are you saying that? It's almost a hundred percent chance that you are a human being. Because in my head it's the human being that was born first.  And then formulating the personality that's talking to me right now. Like it didn't happen the other way around. And the analogy that I had was like, it's sort of like imagining that there's a lobby for fires in the world.  And like no one raises their hand except one in the back. It's like, I'll go to Chicago. And then that fire goes to Chicago and burns down half the city. And then people are like, oh man, of all the fires in the world, it was this fire that burned down Chicago. When really it's like, no, the fire happened in Chicago. It was manifested within Chicago.  Right? Yeah. It's an appealing idea to think that we could outlive our body. And it's an appealing idea to think that we had a choice in who we wanted to be. Though I feel like it leads to a slippery slope where you can start believing in more obscure supernatural concepts like souls. Or karma or reincarnation or our justice that's taken care of by the universe and not by your own responsibility and your own actions. And that can lead to some problems. Yeah. Everyone on the same page. We can't agree. We can't all agree on this. We can't. Absolutely. So I want to, I want to make a quick little point. Scott was supposed to be here in this conversation for dualism because I imagine he would go to the bat for this a little bit more. But I feel like, I feel like, are we all saying like dualism, not a thing that exists? It's a nice thing. It could be a nice thing, but there's no real metric for, for measuring or having it. Is that what we're all on? Is that the same thing? I think a lot of people think of the spirit, you know, human spirit is kind of a soul thing. But I mean, like if your spirit is high, it's a good thing. You know, you need to keep your spirits up. You need to, they talk about their emotions as if they were spirits. Okay. Something we might want to identify. I'm fine with that idea. I think like in the capacity of how far am I willing to go on the dualism plank? I would say, yeah, I have thoughts that sometimes come about without me having any control over. And I can either dissuade them or reinforce them. As someone might say, hey, you can totally do that. And I'd be like, I'm not sure if I can fight that tiger yet. And then I have some of them be like, you can totally run an extra mile. And I'd be like, yeah, I'll do that. Yeah, sure. So there is an agreement or a conversation going on in my head. And I feel like as long as I'm aware that that's me talking to myself. That's my body talking to my body. I'm totally fine with that. I think that's good. You know, you just to rate an interesting point with me is that I used to be big on running long distances when I was young. And I did experience the so-called second breath. And that may be one time I experienced the third breath. And I often wondered, what is that? And I've sort of concluded that it's just a conditioning of your body to the point where your body has a higher capability than what was not in condition. But still, it was sort of like a magical moment. I've often wondered, I'd be interested in other people that may have experiences as to how they think this might come about. Because it's the physical versus the mental maybe. Right. And yeah, anybody got an explanation for that? I got a weird one. And how much time do we got, Larry, before we head out? Five minutes, four minutes. OK, perfect. I think a lot of the time when I'm running, it is a conversation of saying yes when my body says no. And then at a certain point, I don't have to say yes as hard. And it's just more of like, stay engaged in the run. Because my body is saying, I'm bored. And I'm like, yeah, I'm kind of bored too, but we're still going to do this. And then even that goes away. And then it's more of just like a, how long are we going to do this for? Because I'm not tired. And I'm not really bored. I'm just waiting for this thing to be done. So I hear what you're saying. You have a conversation with yourself in different stages. And based on your physical fitness, it changes the dynamic of the conversation a lot of times. And so there is, I would agree with you wholly that there is a relationship between physical and mental, especially as you work out. Larry? Well, I think about the old religious men, the old, I don't know, priests from long ago, you know, to have a religious experience, they would often not eat for 20 days or something and only subsist on water. So depriving your body of certain physical nutrients can actually trigger psychological events and hallucinations, even audio hallucinations. Which you normally would think would be as a product of your mind and thinking, but in senses, but it's actually something produced because of lack of nutrients. Right. And that's actually a good account for an explanation for Jesus, you know, when he went into the desert for 40 days and fasted and then met the devil. I mean, I probably meet the devil. We could probably do that. I'd probably meet the devil, too. Get me out of this desert. This might be a good time to take a break. Sure. This is the Digital Freethought Radio Hour at WOZO Radio 103.9 LP FM, right here in Knoxville, Tennessee. And we'll be right back after this short break. 103.9 FM WOZO Radio, Knoxville. After the second half of the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio, right here in Knoxville, it's 103.9 LP FM. I'm Dr. Five. This is Sunday, April 11th, 2021. Now, let's talk about the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK for a second. Founded in 2002, we're under 19th year. ASK has over a thousand members and we have weekly Zoom meetings during COVID, but we will be starting back with physical meetings probably in May. You can find us online on Facebook, meetup.com, or noxfolatheist.org, or just Google Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to Meetup and start or search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start one. Thanks, guys. Start one! Good. Dreads on me. Oh, where do we want to pick that? Sorry. We're not going to do some listener feedback because we got so many fans. What a fan. What a fan. What a fan. What a mighty good fan.  Nice, guys. All right. So here's our first comment. Actually, we had some comments on our Reddit page at r slash street at Pistemology that was talking about what we're talking about right now. But before we go into that, Loma sent a comment on last week's show. Last week's show was something about Skynet, where we were talking about AI.  This was also the only teacher out of the 25 in the public school who did 15 minutes of reading the Bible as part of class every morning. I believe George would say that I'm an organic atheist, so not very hurtful to myself. I have to say things in just the people I know well like, you're going to hell for that. Or that's karma. I wonder how that would affect others who believe in those things and how it affects the believers saying those types of things. George also mentioned that Glenn Gold, which was a reminder of this teacher as she was also Glenn Gold's cousin. Glenn Gold being the pianist that. Gould Gould Gould that George Birkland George is very fond of.  Have you ever considered how someone who might actually believe that would take that?  No one's ever told you that? No, not at all. You want to try it out, right?      You want to get on this? You'll be first in line.  Oh, that's perfect. We got any place to record her. Oh, we got the special table, you know, discount for you. When you say, when you say, uh, hey, you might be going to hell. Have you ever considered how someone who might be absolutely serious about hell would take that? And have you ever been accosted by like, hey, don't say that. I have been when I was growing up. I have actually said I like Powerpuff Girls that has a character that looks like Satan that's, that's named him. And I was like, I love Powerpuff Girls. And then someone stopped me and said, hey, you can't like that show because Satan's on that show. I've had people come up to me and say like, hey, you can't like Dragon Ball Z because there's super Saiyans on it. And for some reason they considered saying and Satan the same thing. I know I'm not talking to the people in this room right now. I'm talking to the internet. But I've had people say you can't like Pokemon because there's psychic Pokemon and that's anti-Christian. I've had all sorts of things like that happen. And I just look at them and I'm like, you guys are have completely missed the zeitgeist on this thing. It's a fun, great thing. Yeah, man.  I can't like this. What's wrong with you? Well, I mean, I was raised Roman Catholic.  Um, or pardon my. It's okay. That's acceptable. Uh, yeah. So I mean, again, and like I said, I was actually working towards being a Catholic priest at one point. So I was pretty wrapped up in this stuff for a long time. And, um, and it was, and it took a long time to get out of it.  I feel it. Yeah. So yeah. So I've been there. Speaking of Roman Catholic, Buffalo George, you said you were from Poland or you had family in Poland. Hungary, Hungary, Hungary. Are they Roman Catholic? Yeah. Okay. Um, did you have a similar notion of like, Hey, there's some things that I say colloquially when I'm in America, but I can't say what I'm in Hungary. Well, I, um, yeah, I don't really know the answer to that because I've only been in Hungary to visit. Ah, okay. Okay. In my Hungarian community, it was very ethnic when I was a, when I was small. Um, yeah, there were things like that that, uh, one wouldn't say because I think it's because it was considered offensive to others. Whether it was because they presumably were believers in that or not, but it was just a very sharp sense of not wanting to disturb other folks. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like a lot of, a lot of the hangups that I still have in religion are still the, the sensation of, but I don't want to make you upset even though I know I'm right about this. I feel like I don't want to, I don't want to trigger you. So I will, I will continue to be quiet or I'll continue to avoid saying these things to keep everybody happy. A nice day is better than. And I certainly do that here where I'm located halfway between Knoxville and Chattanooga in the Bible belt. I'm very, very conscious of that. And I'm also very conscious of the fact that I don't seem to understand these people. I'm, you know, in a way it's like I'm in quicksand. I just, I don't understand it. I feel like that is the fun of living though. I feel like you are here. I'm not going to say this in like a destiny sort of way, but I feel like part of the fun of being a human being, even though I am a human being and I'm part with my body is understanding other human beings and how surprisingly we're all different, but it's still worth the work to try to understand each other. You know, I believe that. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Oh, go for it. I was going to say I read in the newspaper this morning about a recent poll that says that the number of active religious persons that go that actually belong to assign themselves to a religion has decreased yet again. And wow. I'm pretty fast. Nice. Now it's at like 47%. It's finally below 50%. Yeah. Yay. Can we celebrate that? That includes the folks that belong to a church, but don't go, don't participate. And they made a guesstimate of that. And they came down to the final number that only tend to maybe 20% of all religious people run their lives according to their religion. Okay. Really pretty low. So we talk about when we talk about these things, how religion influences your behavior with other people. We're now, you know, practicing these, these nice ways of dealing with folks to a really a minority. I think. Dred, what do you think? Well, I was just going to say that this year is a Canadian census year. And every 10 years, it includes questions on religion and religiosity. So this year is a year where they're going to be asking those questions, you know, like, do you affiliate with a specific religion or are you, do you consider yourself very religious? And over the last few, of course, that the number that, you know, consider themselves a religious has been growing. And it would be nice to see if that is actually turning into kind of like an exponential curve. Yeah. Where, you know, it's building some kind of momentum. It'll be interesting to see what the results of that are this year. I would also say just my pre sense. We tend to move things in history as a cycle. And America did wasn't always as ardently religious from the beginning, from the get go. In fact, a big part of America was like, we don't want to be that religion. We want to be a separate thing.  And everyone glammed onto that because we are very inclined to, you know, be very tribalistic with what we not like and like. And so we, even though we are migrating to what I, what I consider the true equilibrium, the idea of like, I'm not convinced that's true. Give me good reason to believe it. We can very, very easily fall back into the state where we are very religious again. And so I say it's great that we are moving back down, but that's only through hard work of people asking the right questions and raising kids to ask the right questions. And we shouldn't stop doing that. So the, so the concept I think that I hear from you is it's a pendulum goes back and forth. Hmm. Okay. Yeah, pendulum works too. Yeah. I like that. You know, and history seems to work though. It works very slowly. Hmm. Yeah. You know, maybe at 50 year increments and I'm not quite sure where we are. A wrecking ball. Yeah. Yeah. I like that. Climate change isn't going to change all of it. When, when climate change really imposes its hardships on many different people, like it is in, in North Africa, for example, like the Arab spring situation. And tomorrow, really forced Indonesia. Will we shift back? And is it all because our, because religion is really based on hope. You know, people want hope. And if, if the dire nature of climate change effects on the great number of people might bring it all back. So I'm kind of, I'm kind of hoping in my lifetime, I may see that which way, which way it happens or if it happens. So Larry, I'd love to get your weight on this. There is actually sci-fi movies where they have a new religion like Star Trek. While everyone there has a respect for different cultures. Someone's going to correct me on this. I know it. But there's also a religion called scientism, which is not Scientology. It's more of like the idea of like the science and the, and the acts through observation dictate how I see the world and things like climate change are things that I'm very actively trying to reduce my impact on. Cause I believe in science as almost like a dogmatic point of view. And I feel like science is the best method for everything. And, and these are the best and the most appropriate things. It's very, it's like very Vulcan-esque. It's very Vulcan-esque in a way. If you guys know that character, but it's, it's a religion that's like, if we just do this, we can make less harm in the universe. That's actually a good thing. And we can actually improve life at that same time too. Like we figured out this method. Maybe religion might migrate towards that. Maybe we may get rid of like the, hey, I made fish out of a bread basket. Let's worship him and kill all these other people and move towards more of like, hey, let's respect each other based on like these. I think of science is basically the, the true path to the truth and to the facts about a universe and nature and ourselves. The philosophy can fill in whatever gaps that science itself, per se, leaves or may not cover. I dig it. However, I don't, I think when you use the word religion, it conjures up worship. So I don't, I don't even subscribe to that. I don't believe in worship. I don't think we should worship anything. However, we should value things highly that can return value to the society or to people in science as one of those. All right. Dredd. And I agree with, I agree with Larry there that, you know, for some folks to use scientism as, as a term for maybe atheists or whatever, as a replacement of religion, I think is incorrect. And I just brought up, you know, the definition of scientism is the promotion of science as the best or only objective means by which society should determine normative and epistemological values. So it's not really religious because the method, sciences of methodology, right? It's not a, it's not a, it's not a thing. It's not a, it's not like kneeling before a microscope and or sometimes you do that. Sometimes you just need to get that paper out of the way. He's like, please be red. I died. You read, please turn red. Please be red. Oh, right. Thanks. That's science. I can publish and graduate. Yeah, I've been there before. I, so I do like the idea of religion becoming less extreme. And I feel like the, I feel like it is a pendulum, but I think one of the reasons why it's swinging more slowly is because we are becoming more mixed as a culture and we have technology that allows us to travel anywhere in the world, communicate with anyone around the world and very, very easy. Like I'm doing this for free. Like I'm calling all you guys for free. That's crazy.  It would take forever. I'm just doing this for free. This is a fun thing. I feel like because of that, the exchange of ideas will eventually increase everyone's standard of evidence. It will take some time, but it's, it's even more inhibited to go backwards now. And I, the thing that makes me more convinced that this is true is when I hear, when I hear really terrible acts against humanity, even if it's by our own, like political administrations, like, oh, there's a guy who's like the postmaster general and he's trying to defund the post office so that mail in ballots don't get counted as much in America. I'm like, ah, I know this now. Like why is this in the news? Like it's suddenly something that like that could have happened 20 years ago and no one would have cared or no one would have noticed. Now it's not only something that we are aware of, that it's something that we're generally upset about, that we're having a discussion about. And I'm like, whoa, this exchange of information is a good thing. People are reacting. Even though it's a bad thing, people are reacting in the right way. I feel like, what do you mean we pale face? What do you mean we? What do you mean we? You're going to have to explain that one, George. I don't understand what you're talking about. I don't know if I can. That's the first time in my life I've ever been called pale face. It's a joke about the Lone Ranger and Tonto. I don't, I don't know the whole joke, except that's Tonto's comeback. It's 11, Larry. It's 11, 2021. I've been called pale face. Yeah. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were out riding and they get attacked by Indians and they circle around them and they pin them down and the Lone Ranger turns to Tonto and says, well, it looks like we've had it this time. Tonto, he says, what do you mean we pale face? Yeah. So my takeaway is I think the way how we are reacting, even to bad things that are existing is a good sign that things are getting better. And I love that. And so, yes, pendulum swinging. Let's be mindful of that. That it can swing in both ways and let's try to do our best to make sure that we move towards a better equilibrium as a group. Guys. Oh, there's someone in the background buffalo. He's watching it. I see you. I see you. Hey, what's up? How are you? What's going on? And she's saying it's almost time to go to our, our kids soccer game and Eric is probably on the way to that game and expects us to be there. So, Larry, what's our time? Is it almost time? I still have about eight minutes. Okay, okay. I have several because we took a long break. That's not really going to play. What's something that you would recommend that we check out before next week? Oh boy. You're on the spot. Any good books, any good exercise tips that you would recommend? I'd like to study further or talk further about this, the trend in terms of religious either gaining as a result of people seeking hope or falling back because I'm not so sure. Okay. Okay. What would make you more convinced that it was going down? Yeah. Okay. See you later. All right. Something to consider. See you, George. George. I'll throw out that question that Buffalo was asking us. Like he is a little doubtful that religiosity is going away, at least as far as America goes.  Well, it's interesting because I read the same thing that George Buffalo did. I mean, it was, it was in the media. So I read it in The Guardian and what would it convince me? I believe it. I believe it. It's very hard for me in my, quote, soul. Okay. To grok that being here in the middle of the Bible Belt. Sure. Well, what it takes me to be like, oh, Bible Belt's getting a little more woke these days. Like what would that be? You know, I don't know because I'm scared. I'm afraid that that's wrong, you know, or that these people are also going to get guns and go around killing people.  It's very hard for me to, on an emotional level. I see. To buy into it.  Sure. And so I have very distant relatives who didn't make it through the 1930s. Got it. Or the 19, early 1940s. And I don't think about this very often, but, you know, there were a lot of Jewish people in Nazi Germany who thought, oh yeah, that this will just go away. It'll just blow over. I hear you. I can tell you this. Here's my three thoughts. One quick thought. And then we get to dread as a black person, especially if someone who thinks that my life matters, it's really important for me to have a standard of what it would take for me to be convinced that things are getting better or not, because that keeps my emotions rational. Otherwise, we may be gripped by irrational fears or rational sentiment. And I'm trying to say, okay, if this guy gets convicted or if funding drops this amount, or if less, if the percentage of black people that get sent to jail for nonviolent crimes drops by this much, it will be more convinced that we're getting towards a better path. I have to have those metrics. And I would recommend that you think about those. Dread. Dread. Dread. I was going to say that one thing that would indicate that to me, that America was moving away from religiosity is what I don't hear the president say at the end of the State of the Union address. Ah, okay. Well, it's less America, right? Yeah. Yeah. If the president no longer says that, that's a pretty strong indication. I'll be waiting for that day. I'll be waiting for that day. Yeah. Same here. Larry, what do you think?  It's not just a number and a newspaper. Well, the number of representatives that we're having in Congress who self-proclaim as atheist or nonbelievers has gone up quite distinctly this last election. So that's a good metric. That's a really good metric. I wasn't even aware of it. Yeah. That's fantastic. One thing that us atheists and nonbelievers have always lacked is representation. And we're starting to get some of that at least in the House. I don't know so much about the Senate. I think Bernie Sanders is on our level. I think he is. I'm good with God. It deals our problem with me. I don't want to talk about him anymore. It's no good deal. You do that well. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I would say this. My metric would be the tone of how that news article was. If it was like people aren't going to church anymore. Oh, no. Please run to your nearest church and get indoctrinated. Well, that's a problem. It was a neutral article. I like neutral. I like that as a neutral story. People aren't religious anymore. OK, anyway, so this dog can dance. Look at this dog dance in Mariachi. I'm like, I feel like we're getting on more of the level because if we went back to the 1600s, that would have been front-page news. People would have been tarred and feathered. And now it's just like, eh, we're only religiosity dropping down no big deal. One thing I want to mention about the article is that they made a very important distinction about age ranges so that it's the young people who are coming forward who are the most inclined to simply not have. I'm sorry, I think a lot of that has to do with the kids are online more. And online is where religions go to die. But some of them are accelerating their effect online too. Yeah, there are some toxic mind thinking that does get accelerated on the internet for sure. But old school toxicity is definitely on the dying. So I'd love to see how that evolves over time. George, is there anything that you'd recommend that we check out before? Yes, absolutely. We've been talking about the mind and the body. And I want to recommend the Doctor Who story. OK, go for it. OK, it's from the 1960s. I think it's the story is called the brain of Morbius. And it's a it's a great Frankenstein romp. Nice. So it's Doctor Who. The doctor is played by Tom Baker.  And it's a lot of fun. It includes a brain in a jar. Wow. And what's the name of the doctor? Oh, the doctor. No, the doctor doesn't get the joke. I just love it. The doctor never has a name. But this is the years that were played by Tom Baker. Cool. Is there anything that you'd recommend that we check out? Yeah, I've got my YouTube channel, MinePirate, P-Y-R-A-T-E. And I'm just going to start posting these recordings on here until I get it figured out how to live stream again. Very, very cool. Yeah. On my page, I would say I'm playing Tetris again. It's a beautiful game. Very, very simple. It's the falling blocks. But what I really love about Tetris is there comes a point where the pieces are falling so fast that you start to pen it and you feel it in your body. But you have to tell your brain. If in a weird way you're telling your brain calm down and just look at what the next piece is, figure out where it needs to go and just do the inputs to make sure where it needs to go because we already have another piece on the way. Just stay calm, stay relaxed. So your body is like, oh my gosh. And your brain is like, you've got to chill out. And I do feel that it applies to the dualism talking to yourself sort of mindset. But it is just your body talking to your body. But I do love the conversation that you have as you get into like higher speeds of Tetris. It's always a fun little sensation. Larry, what's your takeaway? Well, my content can be found on digitalfreethought.com and on Facebook, digital freethought radio, our Facebook page. The digitalfreethought.com site is also a blog where we have archives of our Atheist radio shows and podcasts. We have a YouTube channel under doubter five, Larry S. Rhodes. I have a book on Amazon called Atheism, What's It All About? And if you have questions for the show, you can email them to askanatheistatnoxvilleatheist.org and we'll get to them on future shows. If you're having trouble relieving religious beliefs behind, you can get help at recoveringfromreligion.org. And if you're watching this on YouTube, be sure to watch, sorry, like and subscribe. This has been the digital freethought radio hour at WOZL Radio 103.9 LPFM right here in Knoxville, Tennessee.  The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your lives and we'll see you next week. Say bye everybody. Bye everybody.


Thank you very much. Hello everyone. So a Gefi doesn't exist in the web world in JavaScript, right? But what if it existed in this different world? So we are. So let us present ourselves. So I'm Mathieu Giacomi. I'm the the original author of Gefi and I'm a researcher and Eduardo here is the lead developer of Gefi since quite recently and if you know Gefi a little he has been developing the data laboratory view right among other things and we've teamed up with JavaScript experts that know very well the the the web world for network visualizations Alexi Giacomi who is also my brother and Guillaume who is in the Guillaume pick who is in the in the room So they've helped us See what it would look like right see if you want so but I Need to talk about the context on why we are in this situation right now. So basically The multi-platform is moving from Java To web technologies right so the browser is now the new Multi-platform if you prefer and this is an effect from instance of So multiple factors, but one of them is the policies of Oracle, right? So they want Java to be more a back-end thing and less a front-end things So there are less and less user interface Features in Java. They are less maintained and we are kind of stuck in this general movement, right? And for instance a very technical real practical consequence for Gefi That's the the library the open GL library We currently use is not maintained anymore, right? And it will not be better in the future because of the general movement right of having less UI stuff in Java generally So at the same time the JavaScript is more powerful, right? We have crazy efficient applications now. It's more mature than what it was before We are switching from a web of documents to web of applications. So should we consider? moving Gefi from the Java world to the web world right in this talk that we will split in different parts We will see first how to fix Gefi and how to deal with these issues of deprecation of open GL libraries in Java currently and basically Eduardo redeveloped a new open GL engine for Gefi and then into the JS world What would we have to do to transition to JS? What it takes what it costs and what we would gain and Alexi will present that and Then we have a small benchmark that shows if JavaScript can really be as efficient as Java for graph visualizations and Without the further ado, I'm gonna pass the mic to Eduardo. Thank you so before talking about JavaScript, we will first stay in the Java world and I want to present you some problems that we found over the years with the the heart of Gefi, which is the rendering engine And there are a few problems first. It uses a deprecated open GL Functions very very old so they don't even work in some older or incomplete drivers and can crash many computers especially on Linux and OS X Also, it has a problem of a scale it cannot scale with the modern GPUs that you can buy nowadays because it has a lot of CPU overhead and that's because of calling a lot of functions of open GL on the CPU, which is just too much Too much calls every frame of the rendering and also We have listened to our users and they they want to use a Gefi rendering engine as a as a library they would like to have it on their own programs, but that's not possible at all because It's not modular and it's not clean and it's just not portable And also at the same time we are going to improve all of this we say We also want it to be Extensible with plugins so it's not just what it is but it can be changed by any developer And of course we can improve it so before creating a new engine. I found very few difficult choices to make mainly to one is to Java library for dealing with open GL in Java so get phishings Always has been using the geo gel library, but the problem with it is that is not maintained anymore We also want to thank the geo gel developers for the work during the years very awesome work, but Nowadays we have to Make the switch to another library And that's the likewise lightweight gaming Java library And it's great. It's great. It was very well It has many many functionality, but it has a small problem and it's that it doesn't officially support a Solution for building a graphic user interface which for Gefi as you saw before it is a deal breaker because We don't want to build a game. We want to build a desktop application or web the Integrates a graph, but the graph is not everything and also Last year we found that The future for open GL in Java or the desktop is a kind of uncertain that's because first bull can is the is supposed to be the successor of open GL, but still is unsupported by all their drivers of their GPUs or Or all their systems and at the same time Apple decided to deprecate open GL in 06 and They also said they want super bull can which makes them the only ones not doing it and It seems they are trying to infer metal, which is the their own graphics API, which is only for all sex and Ios But is that too bad, I don't think so Open GL still works in no sex. It will continue to work and Also, there are starting to appear solutions to fix this problem in the future So you can write open GL programs that work on top of metal. So It should become it should continue working for the future and also this Software being created in open GL nowadays So I don't think we should move that So now I will talk about the new engine that I have been developing To replace completely replace the the current engine of Gefi So you will see that it looks exactly the same but fixes a few known glitches or glitches It's also written from scratch only depending on the graph API the core graph So that should make it very very easy to integrate both in Gefi and other applications Also, it offers extension mechanism. So you can plug in some components to draw anything for example a background map or a Legend whatever and you can also extend the the input so you can write Plugins to deal with the user in user interaction for example And also I wanted to make it work with all their All their versions of open GL which some older machines Might support but no the new the new shiny things of open GL for for example so this engine Tries to use what whichever functionality is available going for from best to to older Which affects performance bad? If the new version of open GL is available, it should work really fast and much better than than nowadays and the other aspect of designing this new engine is that is It changes from the fixed pipeline of open GL to this shader based modern open GL which makes it easier to to write some plugins to render anything and also it tries to be high performance by using the following the Approaching zero driver overhead design principles, which in summary means that you do All the data preparation work on the CPU in a buffer in a low-level buffer You don't call open GL functions at all and when you have all the data already you call the Open GL function once to tell it to draw everything in a single batch or two batches or whatever so that makes it get the use correctly the powerful GPUs that nobody are available And also the geometry of nodes and edges Before it was being repeated and sent again and again now we have one instance of the node geometry and we Transform it on the shader. So that saves memory for the graphics card and that saves That interchanged And about the previous problem that I talked about geogl or the lightweight Java gaming library I think the correct choice is this one first because It's maintained nowadays. It also offers Vulkan support. So in the future if we need it we Just can use it But the IWT problem. Why what can we do to build a user interface? well There is one small project in github and official that offers that it works quite well only for Windows and Linux at the moment, but We would like to Implement it for OS X2 and make it better and contribute that Let's do a small demo Okay, so we close Gefi with the same graph and we are using the the new engine We are using it with a very Simple card, which is the integrated Intel card It works much better if you if you use a powerful card, but as you can see this is a this is a window That is completely out of Gefi. So you can you can Use it in your own programs. It's also tested on different drivers. For example Gefi currently crashes on my linux Installation, but this engine doesn't crash and will work fine and this is a smaller graph, but We have seen it work with millions and millions of edges Which is not possible with current Gefi and Matthew will tell us about that later. So now Thank you So know that we've seen the whole part about how fixing Gefi in the Java world I'm going to try to Explore what it could make possible or impossible to write Gefi for the web first, I think the most important thing is to Describe what I think is challenging is in writing Gefi I've been using it Years ago and I think there's two free main qualities of Gefi The first thing is that it must be able to render hundreds of thousands of items or millions of items Really smoothly like as often as possible if possible like 30 times per second Without freezing the whole computer or even just software itself Also, it needs to have a Performance graph model. We need to be able to at the same time that we're drawing this whole graph 30 times per second compute like Community detection algorithms or ranking algorithms all of this still smoothly and without Freezing the whole computer or the software itself And finally one of the main qualities of the of Gefi is its plug-in capabilities You have to be able if for your needs your business needs to implement a specific ranking algorithm or something To integrate it inside Gefi without having to rebuild the whole thing Also, the solos like the current marketplace of Gefi you can download a lot of different features That make Gefi around Gefi and that makes it solve your business needs So those two those three things are I think the three main challenges About web development there is some obvious trade-off when you come from the Java world going to the JavaScript world. Let's see like this first The most web technologies have been mainly designed for Writing interfaces. So this whole block management styling forms inputs. This is so easy in the web this is Made for it. I don't know exactly how it is in Java, but I think it's okay Thank you and also if we successfully bring Jeffy to the web we will still have it work in every OS and Also on mobiles. I don't see that asian is working on Gefi on mobile right now, but This is quite imaginable, but tablets. I can imagine a lot of people want to work with Jeffy on tablets and Minority report effect to move the graph with your fingers things like this This will become possible if we move to the web and without any effort But at the same time those big losses that we will meet instantly Memory kind of doesn't exist in JavaScript. We never know how much memory we are using We do not know how much memory we can use and this boundary is actually unpredictable. It depends of The user's computer his browser if the browser has all the tabs open, etc So we know at some point it might crash and make the whole thing stop working, but we never know when this is quite uncomfortable to work with Also, we do not have multi-threading in the web. I Speak about it later, but we do not have very much usable multi-threading and finally One minor point that is not written here I will not speak about canvas and edgy etc because this is all CPU based and this doesn't scale So we will already accept that if Jeffy moves to the web it's going to be with WebGL But WebGL which is our best solution is just a subset of OpenGL It's based on the OpenGL yes specification that is a portable OpenGL And it lacks some features of it and other features are actually badly implemented so That's Something we will have to work with So let's talk about web performances I think One way to synthesize all the research is an improvement that have been brought to this community in the last few years There's a lot of people who've been working to make the web more Perfomant by improving the JavaScript engines themselves and I think the most famous success of this part of of This field is V8 from Chrome. It's maybe one of if not the best interpreted Interpreted language engine that we have now you can write JavaScript like Without caring about performances and V8 will make it like Perfect, that's very very nice and on the other hand those people who are trying to make the web a Perfomant platform to allow people to actually run byte code in it So you will develop low-level applications with C++ or REST and compile it and put it in a browser and The browser becomes kind of a new JVM or something that will make people able to just run fast code in it But it's no more JavaScript so the JavaScript part let's say it's all the web development that is modern now like react application Angular all those frameworks and ECMA 6 ECMA 7 the new debugging tools All this part that is what I think is web development today It's really great because as I said you can just write any kind of JavaScript and it will be fast But we have kind of a specific use case here Writing thousands of DOM nodes and having run smoothly is something Drawing millions of items is really different. So I think All this web development ecosystem doesn't actually solve all our issues and on the other hand Writing low-level code and running it in the browser as a as if it was a virtual machine only Is not webby. I'm a web developer and I want to keep beneficiate from all those nice things the debuggers The the new specifications of the live scripts that are brought every year, etc So what I don't like in this part is that it's no more web development We were writing in the slides No, not in the web culture so many times that we just created a label for it. That's gonna make it easier to identify So to wrap up this part we don't have the same needs as classic web apps WebGL is the best we have and we want if we move to the web To create some things that is webby we want to beneficiate from all those nice things that are that have been brought in web development this last few years no Liam and I have been developing Sigma J s for some years and we have some feedbacks about what is doable and what is hard and Yeah, about writing a web web-based graph visualization library So first let's speak about a bit about webgl For a web developer working with webgl means working with low-level data structures Which is not very in the web culture to say quickly you work with byte arrays That's nice, but you don't have you don't have the API is to actually do what you want You cannot allocate or unallocate memory as you want because this is not JavaScript This is not what JavaScript does and so this is kind of painful to work with a jail for a web developer also Rendering efficiently custom shapes is hard. I mean The first time I started working with a jail I spent more than a week to just draw a plain disk and another week to draw a plain disk in front of another disk That was kind of awful and it requires lots of tweaks and every side and The home has been working just to draw curves efficiently and he could speak two hours about it and This is quite painful Also, it is not 100% stable if you work with a jail you have to accept that at some point It will break and stop working and you will not find out why and also you will see a lot of weird artifacts really a lot of them Okay But it's the best we have about the graph model we have kind of a dilemma here because working with Efficient dynamic JavaScript structures such as objects and arrays etc. Is really nice because the APIs are nice And it's all fast because V8 is awesome, but it takes a lot of space in rum It takes so much space in rum that we expect that at some point we might cross this imaginary boundaries that we cannot identify so This is not our Solution we cannot base our old rough model on these Data structures with all the indices we want because at some point this is gonna be the issue and at the same time We could work with by the rest, but It's not in the webculture state There's a lot of things that are very hard to do and the code will be hard to maintain and hard to test so We think the best solution would be to have a hybrid solution, but still this is be this is gonna be something challenging Finally, I want to speak a bit about threading so We have no multi-threading in JavaScript, but this is how it works You open a web page and you have one thread that will be shared between the JavaScript engine So as long as you have JavaScript training nothing else runs in the thread and the rendering engine So this is called the event loop if you have a synchronous task running into the main thread The event loop will be blocked and you won't be able to scroll the page or hover simple buttons elements of this kind of things But first of all if we stop If we stop working with canvas and SVG or DOM and we start working with WebGL the rendering will not Free the event loop. This is kind of the good thing even if the GPU takes time to render the image The event loop will still be properly running and Finally, we have web workers that allow us to actually run heavy computations aside from the main thread so without blocking the event loop But you have to share your data and actually transfer it So as long as the web worker is running is working with your low-level structures, you cannot access it anymore from the JavaScript main thread, which is very real. It's like all your references are broken and you cannot do anything So you cannot render it anymore We know that there's a new API that's named offline canvas API that might allow us to actually Trigger rendering from the web worker So we might have actually the whole rendering and computation engine working on a web worker and keep the event loop running smoothly and safe so It's actually not that bad. We might be able to do something working nice So how to actually move Jeffy to the web? We do think there's two main solutions The first one would be to actually recreate everything in JavaScript with all those modern tools, etc We already have graphologies that have been presented here by Guillaume one or two years ago So it's a graph model, but it's mainly an API so you can reimplement it while benefiting While benefiting from all the plugins that have been already in developed so algorithms implementation mainly Sigma's rendering engine in the new version that Guillaume's been working on is becoming faster and faster So we already have some code. We might actually Wrap it up and create something that works and also it's working on the web With the web development spirit and tools. So this is something that I quite like we could also go to the developing everything in surplus plus or rust and compile it to bytecode and having a faster in software but This won't be a black box because we need actually APIs that will be able to communicate with JavaScript and I think that's the main issue with this solution Having a low-level code that will open APIs that will work with simple JavaScript without having to Work only with low-level structures. I mean in for plugins developers Could be painful and I think it's better to actually not do this without this plug-in constraints I think the black box would have been something acceptable, but quite not So our recommendation finally would be to actually embrace web culture and if we want to develop Jeffy for the web not trying to do the brother as a virtual machine thing but more Developing something with JavaScript and all those tools We have more solutions that we expected Starting working with this talk. We actually didn't expect to say this at the end Especially you'll see the benchmarks, but the situation is not that bad for the website implementation without having actually Try to do anything special for this talk and I think Developing Jeffy for the web is something that would be totally possible. We have to rethink it With the capabilities of the web and then we might be able to solve the actual same problems, which is our goal That's nice. Thanks. So let's talk about The speed right on the web world. So we've done a benchmark Right, so I'm gonna show a few charts and they have the frames per second on the y-axis and Pay attention that is log scales. So Right, it goes 10 101 Thousand frames per second right and so here we test on different networks Three engines the current Gefi engine in open gel in orange in blue in the middle We have the the new open gel engine that has just been presented by Eduardo and in gray We have the web gel engine In JavaScript. So basically it's a Sigma. We just did not try to display the labels in this benchmark And it has been done on this same computer, which is a kind of researchers computer and These benchmarks have been done with the Nvidia chip But it's not a it's not the powerhouse right and the resolution is like 2000 and a few hundreds by one hundred one thousand and four hundred so quite a big resolution And as you can see on these big networks Let's talk about the size of just the end after the end you have the number of nodes and after the e You have the number of ages so that this one the Marvel superheroes network has 10,000 nodes and 100 almost 200,000 edges and it's rendered quite comfortably with the new engines above 50 frames per second and what you can see is that The JavaScript is already quite largely overperforming existing Gefi, right? so sigma j s on the full-screen resolution is much better and the new open gel engine is also a even little better and The new open gel engine allows to display huge graphs that we are not currently able to visualize in Gefi Right, so like the Google graph this one has a 800,000 nodes and five million edges so We have different options for the open gel the new open gel engine So we have joggle and LWJ GL The two libraries and we have different options in terms of when do you swap the buffers? Do you wait for the full rendering? How do you give more reactivity to the users by allowing the buffers to swap at any moment? Whatever these things? Produce kind of the same Range of performance, so they don't matter so much for our performance. We can pick whatever is good For us in terms of design and user experience. So it's just good to know And now let's talk about scalability so here It's different networks that have an increasingly large amount of nodes So an order of magnitude each time up to 10 million nodes. They have this network has no edge and So first of all you see that we have this kind of plateau in the beginning This is just due to the fact that you have a cap in the number of frames per second We don't see us human more than maybe 100 frames per second So whether you cap it at 30 or 60 or whatever actually all these engines could could go much beyond We just don't do it because it's useless. So the plateau here is not really representative But then it starts to drop and it starts to drop Because there are too many nodes for the GPU basically or the CPU depending and what you can see first is that all of them start to drop at kind of the same moment right between 10,000 and 100,000 nodes and Then so they don't drop necessarily at the same rate but you can see that for instance the The we can reach 10 million nodes with the new open GL engine also we couldn't load Such huge networks with the web GL engine That's why I must talk a little bit about that because you've seen a lot The issues that arise with web technologies. So here the file was too big and We can actually find the turnaround to be able to load it So we didn't take the time to develop that in addition to do this big benchmark with we didn't have the time but basically web technologies Are not used to load huge file and that's why it's break. So solutions exist So we could we will be able we would be able to find turnarounds to use to load huge files But currently it's kind of not available because that's not in the practices of these people So we don't have the figures So let's look at the edges now that we have seen for the notes and basically it's kind of the same picture So it drops at the same point. So it means first that in terms of Scale ability one node on one edge are kind of worth the same Right, so you could estimate the size of your network in terms of nodes plus edges, right and it gives you How you how far you would go so basically to have an idea things are Usable with your in your Interactions with your with the software above 10 frames per second or around 10 frames per second on Above below that it becomes so laggy That you cannot really interact with the network. It's kind it works kind of a Static thing right and you can see that we can almost go to one million edges With the new open-gill engine and we could also Achieve quite decent performances with the webgm We also tried so though it looks like a stupid idea to to see what what it looks like if we have Networks with a huge amount of metadata Let's say nodes have many many many attributes like full-text stuff or whatever Well, it shouldn't change the rendering right and that's it doesn't change the rendering for the open-gill engine But it turns out that it actually takes a toll on the on the performance of the webgl Engine even though the metadata doesn't matter to the rendering and the reason is the crazy magic optimizations done by V8 Are different with objects that have a lot of keys and a lot of stuff So it makes different optimizations and then the performance drops so this would mean also We would require this would lead us to develop a hybrid engine where we would Split the rendering part and the metadata part for instance or such strategies and Let's talk about the screen resolution on the left you have on different Networks the frames per second on a small screen and on the right on the huge screen that screen and it's actually quite flat It means that it depends much much more on the size of your network Than the size of your screen and this is quite specific to open gel webgl. I think canvas is not the same So it means that we could have a much bigger screens even on small chips It will still work and that's a really great news Including for the webgl. So this is just the open gel, but it's also the came the case for a webgl and let's look at the influence of a GPU right if you use a huge graphic card, so we've tried with the on the right the g-force GTX 970 which scores like eight thousand on G 3d mark while the left one scores only one thousand and three hundred and basically webgl in Yellow and the new opponent gel engine in red Gain performance, but current Giffy engine doesn't so it seems to go down But actually it's like one or two frames per second basically you just you should just consider it's kind of the same But the thing is we have a CPU overhead which caps the gain we have with a future GPU so we would gain more performance in the future So let me wrap up that very quickly If you're a developer the ticks away the takeaways here are that web technologies We think are the new multi-platform for graph visualization Webgl allows you to visualize 10 to 100,000 of node splurges on your browser today With a normal computer with no special graphic card, so this is great news But the challenges are different I will not dig into that again, but you've seen that and We just have a few things to know if we go that way, which is that the libraries are not mature for data science So we have to develop stuff in JavaScript that is more compliant with data science practices and this will come and These practices are not in the web culture as you've seen and also for plugins development and stuff like that the researchers Or the users would have to learn a new culture that is different from the Java world And if you are a Gefi user know that we will transition from a software to a project with maybe different tools And that the web will be part of the future of Gefi, but this doesn't mean that we will drop the Java Gefi and especially not in the moment, but if things go even Worse with Oracle and stuff like that and they really want to I don't know for instance completely stop the open GL supporter Whatever I know we have a fallback, which will be the web technologies But right now we don't plan to drop Java and this might finally lead us to get a decent user experience for Gefi Thank you very much for your attention in JavaScript Okay, so that's the that's the running of the force at last impact the performances for the rendering and I think that Considering that the rendering is almost only on the GPU in the ideal world Which means with the new engine and the force at last is only on the CPU So it we wouldn't lose too much of the performance, right? Yeah So do we plan to use clustering algorithms to only show the edges that are relevant to the analysis and not all of them because it's too much and The answer I mean I will want to Say Joker here. So this is a methodological question. There is no problem for implementing these such algorithms, right? But because we are so few of us we focus more on the Basics of Gefi like the core engine and stuff like that and this can be done as a plug-in and like for instance The Leiden algorithm that is a kind of another version of the Louvain algorithm for modularity clustering The guys who published the paper with the help of Eduardo just published a plug-in for Gefi And this is the right path So if these things comes we will we will create the plug-ins host them and might we might even include them in Gefi And the same applies to the Java script world where graphology is an engine That can host this kind of algorithms and it's also possible to make a pull request in that direction Another question maybe Did we consider webGL frameworks like 3js? Maybe this is a question for you Yes at the beginning we thought about it, but the thing is it brings us Far from the metal as Guillaume says so basically it brings like a one megabyte Java script just to draw disks and lines Which seems overkill we prefer to go trying to actually work with WebGL directly especially since we have only 2d needs and there's no except for pixie.js Which is actually something we can't think about the most webGL engines are more 3d oriented Which one? Regal, okay. I'll take a look at it. Are we Quick Not only So this is an excellent question I would just say that doing this kind of stuff is a UX issue So we will be able to address these kind of issues in the web world and not in the Java world because it's so costly right now To develop advanced UX stuff in Java It is something interesting. I think we already have a few initiatives in that thing. We can discuss about that later Thank you very much


Exciting that we're excited to talk about still goofy and I love it But before we do that, let's before we actually go to gameplay. Let's talk a little bit about cameos themselves like Stephanie What do you what do you see cameos as? Cameos are kind of an Extension of the way we've looked at player expression in the last few games You know, we had a customizable loadouts Variations and now this is something new where your roster character is gonna be You know set, but then your cameo is you can go back and forth with and you could maybe show up your weaknesses by giving yourself a projectile or you could show up your defense by having new mobility options or Maybe if your roster character doesn't have the best combos, you could have a combo centric cameo So it's kind of a way to Change the way you play while keeping your base roster character the same And I would imagine some people are gonna switch back and forth depending on a matchup Some people are just gonna have their favorites. So we're gonna base it off of lore sure I will sure absolutely. I will only do it if it sort of makes sense in my head And that's what I found about cameos too is that like for me It's like I as a fighting game player do have a lot of weaknesses. Yeah. Yeah, you do Yeah, they're really there to just compliment how you want to play Right, and so if you want to have like Some if you want to be kind of a zoner and have a cameo that also does is additional zoning attacks You can do that or like Stephanie was saying if your character is maybe has a little weakness over here I quit a cameo that will complement it so that you have this full kit that you feel is the best for you And everybody's gonna play differently and that's what's really really exciting.  Yeah, they're out there. So that you'll be very excited about from for me It's just it's such a cool Just extra thing to think about and it and it really it just multiplies the matchups Oh, yeah, like oh, they're using this cameo this time now. I have to think about this now I now I can maybe they're not a combo centric this time now I have to watch out for traps like that's interesting and they introduce a new level of just chaos too Which is a lot of fun right like they can absorb attacks So you can almost use them as like a decoy at times and things like that like it It's gonna be exciting to watch the The community explore the the the cameo system right it's awesome So I guess what we should do now Stephanie. Would you like to go through Kung Lao? Yeah, that sounds like fun So cameo Kung Lao is one that we've shown in gameplay trailers But he wasn't in the stress test and all that so we haven't really got a full look at his moves So let's go through them for sure One of the cool things about cameos It's an opportunity to have like these classic versions of characters and cameo come out is based on Mortal Kombat 2 come out It allows them to also they look like the classic characters and they have kind of classic moves exactly awesome Like the spin and like the effects look just like they did exactly like a little silver outline. Yeah So this is your classic combo starter. Maybe you're playing a character who doesn't have great pop-ups Kung Lao can help you out or like Derek said you can also double down Maybe combos is your thing and you can do even more. Oh, yeah. So he also has Low hat, which is a pretty quick projectile and you can actually combo out of it and Then lastly he has this teleport. Let's go and this is a great example of that Cameo moves are not just like combos or like offensive moves Someone could be mobility tools right buffs e-buffs weird stuff like that like it can be pretty creative Yeah, across all the cameos that will be coming out. You're gonna see a lot of different like Things you would not necessarily expect for them to do exactly like we've talked about it It allows you to really like our biggest the biggest thing for us that the the line is, you know player expression Exactly and this is gonna let the player really choose what they do with their camera. Yep And the same character can be with a number of different cameos. It's just there's so many iterations We also it's also really cool because it's allowed us this opportunity to bring back characters You haven't seen and over a decade in some cases, which is really awesome There are definitely ones like that coming. That's for sure But yeah, no, and of course come on. We'll have a classic throwback fatality, but I think we're gonna show it Not today, but I do also love the classic fatalities. It also accompany the cameos It's just another way for you to you know finish a match. It's so cool They're pretty much across the board exactly what you'd want to see and they have just never looked better. Yes I don't want to tease too much for like Cameo come loud you can probably guess and it's just so good. Yes. Yeah, it looks Looks great and you'll see it soon. You'll see it soon enough. Yep so that so cameos just generally like A huge part of this game. Yes They are involved in your combo breaker your fatal blow Your throws They are just the cinematics the intros the victory screens like they're integrated in the gameplay Anesthetically pretty much as much as possible. Yeah, and I like we talked about like the one thing We were always talking about is player expression. This is just another way to bring Your like the one thing that we've and we've seen it during the online stress test One of the coolest things about our community is the creativity that they have. Oh, yeah I've been in this building for a while seeing stuff that I think is awesome I mean, you know every just awesome stuff here and all of a sudden I'll see somebody pick up something and see on the online stress test and be like Oh, that's that's possible. Yeah, I've still never seen that. That's the first time I'm seeing it. Yeah, absolutely And I always kind of look at the the cameo system is like you've got your main fighter And then the cameos kind of your teammate like you're building almost like a loadout sort of right and it's sort of like How do I want to play my main character and complement him? What's my loadout going to be my team loadout? And that's always how I've seen like the whole cameo system One of the ways I like to look at it is my favorite thing about it is it kind of allows you to I guess you could say break the rules of the game or the balance like there'll be certain moves that Well, this is an armored move, but it doesn't pop up for a combo So you have a armor, but you don't do a lot of damage There's some situations with like cameo sonia where now you can't combo off that like sub zero is ex slide You can actually get combos off of it or there's certain moves that you're not supposed to be able to combo off of But you can't you can like you can use the sonia cameo to combo off an uppercut Exactly. It's like for 30 years You normally can't combo off an uppercut.


Everybody forced here rip in a box of 2022 tops five-star baseball hobby for Nester are Thank You Nester and here we go. All right first up rookie base auto of Patrick Mazzica Patrick Mazzica Nets Mets catcher is a Nets Mets catcher and Golden graphs other side of town from that team is a Don Mattingly golden Goddard 26 out of 40 Whereas he's known at Donnie baseball You go Nester solid box there We appreciate it. We will get these out to you


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