Hello and welcome to the Digital Freethought Radio Hour on WOZO Radio 103.9 LPF. I'm here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We're recording this on Sunday morning, October 23rd, 2022. I'm Larry Rhodes, or Doubter 5. And as usual, we have our co-host, Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. Hello. And our guest today is D. John Richards, all the way from across the pond in England. Welcome. How the devil are you? Doing well. Thank you. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, free thought, rational thought, humanism, and sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religion, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition, and today, scientism. And if you think you're the only nonbeliever in your town, well, you're just not. In Knoxville, in the middle of the Bible Belt, we have a group of over a thousand of us, the atheist society of Knoxville or ASK, and we'll tell you more about them after the mid-show break. Wombat, you want to get into our topic for today? I do, but I did want to touch on something that happened to me last night. I was watching a fighting event, USC 280. And it took place in Abu Dhabi and they have a lot of different fighters from all around the world fight in a cage and they go through combat. And when they're done, they do an interview with the person. And it turned out this is strange enough, but every single winner wanted to thank God for their performance. And I was just like, what a bizarre thing that we don't allow fighters to take, like, certain supplementals or like testosterone, but we allow them to use God as a way to enhance their performance. Can we please ban God as a performance-hancing drug? Because that's really unfortunate. And if anything, God should just let us know which one he picked ahead of time so that way the other person doesn't have to get beaten up. Because it seems to be 100% of the time. Well, the other aspect of this is that presumably the losers also invoked the assistance of God. So he's obviously any successful 50% of the time. Now, here's my thing. I thought about that. I thought about that long and hard. I was thinking to myself, maybe God just didn't like that person was lying. And if God was just more straight up about with who his favorites were, that would help the betting lines. It would help people not have to go through needless harm of getting beaten up. Just be like, oh, God chose this person, not you. Fantastic. We already know who's going to win. You're done. You're done.  I mean, if he gets credit, he should also get the blame. And there's another can of worms as well, because if God has favorites... Yes. What's his criteria?  Is he homophobic? How's he picking these people? If there's one thing we know about God, he loves to pick and choose. God's love to pick and choose. I'm just saying, just make that public that way. Because I can't be in a person if someone's using God and I only have push-ups and fish filets. I need more stuff on my side. What do you think, Larry? Yeah, true. I saw a meme the other day. It was kind of funny. It showed some Hasidic Jews in their traditional dress. And it says, these are God's favorite people according to the book they wrote. Right, right, right. Good one. According to the book the Mormons wrote. Right. God's favorite people. Hindus or whatever. It was a weird thing because there were both Christians and Muslims at this event in Dubai. And it was weird when the Islamic winners were like, they were saying in their language, I love God. God's good, great. And everyone's cheering. And then when a Christian wins, and I did this through the blood of Jesus Christ and everyone's booing. And I'm like, what in the world is going on? Just like, at least consistently pick the God that's in the area. At least that way everyone can have a good time. That's all I was saying. Got to work on the favoritism a little bit. Just make it more clear. God is so generic. The word God, I mean, everybody claims it. That's why it's on our money, I'm sure. The job description, not a identity. We have to remember that. John Rich is just like to check in with you before we dive into it. How you been? Yeah, I've been fine. Thank you very much. I've been doing my usual nefarious deeds. We had an interesting, it was just to us here and I again, because our guests didn't turn up for free thought hour. We don't know why. So we're hoping that he's not fallen a victim of some nasty incident. But anyway, if you need a new guest, let me know. I'd be happy to tap in or if you need someone to just if the hours work out right, just let me know. Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Very kind. We shall definitely do that. Thank you. Shoot me a reminder too. I should be able to drop in depending on the course. Excellent. Yeah. The problem with having a cat is just wake up with a bed full of cat points. We try to schedule. We try to schedule guests throughout the calendar. And so we have our vacancies start in November, I think now. But yeah, we definitely put you on the list. Great. Thanks guys. Cool. So what else have I done? I've been preparing to go on holiday because I am taking three female children to France tomorrow. Very fancy. Wow. Yeah. So is it as impressive in England when you say we're going to France as it is in America? Because when you say that in America, it's just like, whoa, you guys are going to Mars basically, but for you, it's just a hop skip and a jump across the. It's a drive nowadays. Yes, that's right. 35 minutes through the tunnel. 35 minutes through the tunnel. Wow. Yeah. Beautiful though. Okay. Well, that's great. Larry checking in with you. How you been? Oh, speaking. Fun. Yeah. One quick thing in sign language holiday because Larry is wearing suspenders going on vacation is doing this. So like. Or.  I think that's the rule for it. Strange. The etymology behind it is weird. Let me, I'm going to have to look. Larry, how you been? Fine. Fine. Playing my computer games and working every day. I did take the bike out yesterday for the final ride of the year. I say that because all summer long, I kept it parked outside with a cover over it. And, but during the winter, I put it in. In the garage and I put it in yesterday. So I don't guess I'll be getting him back out until next year. Okay. Not bad. All right. Looked it up real quick. It is this, but the problem is, is like you're snapping your suspenders as a farmer taking a break. So you're not working.  That's what the word vocation vacation comes from. By the way, it's a different thing in a British sign language. So it will be. I was going to say that is so American sign language. And this makes such good radio. Very true. Very true. Very true. We're not only not a farming community basically, but we also don't have what you call suspenders. We have braces and they're out of fashion. Oh my bad. So yeah, you know, I've been looking for a good sign language podcast. I haven't found one yet. So, you know, there's a good one out there. Hopefully we'll, we'll find it. But on radio, it's kind of rough guys. I've been talking about. Scientism all week with our friends over on Reddit. Who have listened to last week's shows and let us some really great comments and thoughtful ideas about the idea of people worshiping science. And I thought, well, what do you even mean by that? And it turned out to be this whole, you know, Mount Hills of Canada, Canada worms of pejorative terms that Christians use against people who argue science or people who think that science is the absolute best way to understand the universe exclusion to any other point of view. And I'm like, well, this is a lot to think about. I'd love to have, you know, some of these ideas mold around by you guys. And I think we're a better place to start with. Then what are the different usages of scientism and how do you guys use those terms? Larry, we'll throw it up to you first. What do you think of the word scientism?  Oh no. Scientism. I think it, well, it's a prerogatory, a prerogatory word. It's a demeaning word. In other words, they're trying to throw the onus on scientists and people who believe that scientists reveal truth about the world.  And of course there are, it's not in the dictionary and it's not a real word. It's just something they made up so that they could kind of put it, could put us down with it. Well, that's how it's come to me. And yes, originally. Yeah, I'm, I'm aware of the word in the dictionary, but not in the use that you are using it because I agree that. Scientism is an insult. Scientism is a word in the dictionary. Yeah. But it's also, it's also an insult that people throw out at each other. And I don't know if that usage is in the dictionary, but I'm aware of that in pulp culture where people will be like, oh, well, you're, you're claiming that I'm wrong because I believe in the Bible, but you just believe in whatever Einstein wrote in his book or what Darwin wrote in his book. And it's just a scientist and we're both using faith. You want to see we're both using the same thing. What makes your system better than mine? Yeah. Yeah. Jonas is, what do you think? Well, the trouble is here, people have taken a word which was coined fairly innocently. Right. It's just to mean, and I have got a dictionary definition in front of me here. The opinion that science and the scientific method are the best or the only way to render truth about the world and reality. Now I don't entirely agree with that. Same. That is the gist of how the word came about. That's what people originally meant it to me. But of course, what's happened since then is it's been bowed their eyes. It's been manipulated by people with an agenda who want to use it to agandize their mission. And as, as Larry said, it's become it's become to be used pejoratively. And so it's now taken the assumption is by these people who aim it target science scientists with this word. They're claiming that these scientists are claiming to know everything, which no real scientists would claim to know. Right. I do. I'll go ahead Larry. I was just going to say they wouldn't even claim to know anything outside of their specialty. Right. Right. You know. So I have my science. Yeah, I have an issue. I have an issue with both terms. Obviously, we can go into the pejorative in more detail, but at least from the strict term of. Science is the belief in a general sense going off the top of my head that all things in the universe can be empirically tested. And that through empirical testing, we can come up with the best way to derive actionable certainty. So like when it comes to determining what we're going to do next, the scientific method is the best way or empirical testing is the best way to do that test. What do you think John Richards? Well, yeah, I got a couple of things to respond to with that. So currently, not everything can be measured. Right. So, so a lot of things are outside the purview of science right now. However, science continually extends its boundaries as, as new technologies are invented to investigate new phenomena. Right. Like, you know, when microscopes were invented up until then we didn't know there was a microscopic world. We were following microscopes. We did. How terrifying was that for the first kind of you like, eww, they're everywhere. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. Oh, this is terrible. Yeah. Imagine that. Absolutely. Don't drink that pond water. So we've been doing that for hundreds of years. And of course the most recent one was LIGO. The technology which enabled us to detect gravity waves for the first time, which was successfully detected gravity waves in 2017. So we're continually pushing the boundaries of science outwards and being able to apply it to areas where it couldn't previously be applied. So, but at the moment it would be a foolish thing to do to claim that we can use scientific method to apply to everything because you know somebody's going to come up and say, love, you can't apply it to love. Well, you know, we're working on it. If you can define the variable well enough, then yeah, I believe to an extent we can be measured. I also say this. Science has this very useful thing. In fact, in my opinion, the most useful thing in science. And it's, you might have seen it in math like UND or undefined or I don't know. Or just plain X. Yes. Or unknown variables. Science has explicit unknown variables, which means we can't come to determination yet because we don't have the mechanics or the criteria to properly figure out what this thing is. Science has room for that. There's room for I don't know in science. And I don't mind that to be the most useful impact and any sort of method because you're not forcing yourself to a conclusion that could be wrong. You're emitting when you don't know something and science has that. And so when I say there's room for application and science and everything, I mean, even in the areas where it's I don't know, that is the scientific indication of pursuit because you're not making any claims of knowledge. You're at least recognizing I have room to grow here. And science does grow. And I find like that's such a great. Intellectually honest way of going about trying to figure out how everything in the universe operates. Not only that, but even the measurements that we can make. They have probability bars. Don't they? Yeah, they do. They get that little place in this range somewhere. Yeah. So when I say, at least when I say, I feel like science could be used for anything in the universe. Obviously things that aren't things wouldn't be applicable in that statement. So like gods, ghosts, souls, we can't apply science to that, but it's still be one big. I don't know, but also with the caveat of being. Please at least determine that this is a thing that's worth investigating first before we actually spend any time doing it because right now there's no evidence for it. Just like unicorns or pixie dust and stuff like that. Yeah. Oh, go ahead, John. Good scientists wouldn't claim to know everything or even to know to know anything with absolute accuracy. Correct. However, what people who accuse us of scientism want us to do is to do that is to claim that, you know, we can solve everything. But the thing is what alternative method do they have? There, there's the crux that I have a problem with. That's the crux. That's the crux because it's a, it is an argument that sounds very tantalizing to me, but it's also. So like the idea is you have to exclude all other points of view except for science because there's no other method that has been equally as good as science. Right. There is something better out there. Please present it to me because I don't see it. Isn't that bordering along the lines of a black swan fallacy where it's like, I've never seen a black swan. I'm only seeing white swans. If you're saying there's a black one presented to me, otherwise there's only white swans. It's like, just because we can't demonstrate to you in this moment, the better method doesn't mean that there couldn't necessarily be one out there. What I like about science is that it is willing to adapt to the best method. Science isn't necessarily its own codified thing. It's just the best method and process that we can use to understand the universe. If a better method is presented to us, that becomes our new science. That's the way how I see it in my head. Larry, what do you think? Yeah. It's like those people who say you can't trust your senses. You know, they're trying to make a point or something. Yeah, I saw them. Well, you can't trust your senses. What else are we supposed to use? That's it. Right. Right. We have a hard limitation on like our five sentences, our five senses and how or our many sentences, and how we interpret the universe with our own cognitive biases and all that other stuff. But if we can find a way to subvert that maybe and like a robot showed us like, Hey, this is how we can do it without limitations of smell, sight, understanding, childhood trauma, all this stuff. This computer is the best way of doing it.  That will become our new science. So we'd still be using science. Our science would evolve, but it's not necessarily the idea that the science that we have now is the end all be all best method possible. It's just this evolutionary process. Larry, what do you think? Well, we do have science that will develop technology to extend our senses. I mean, we can now see things in infrared. We can hear things. You know, all of that stuff, but it still comes down to our senses reading the readout of those instruments. Right. I mean, we still have to depend on those senses. Right. Like, for example, we have this device in our lab called a scanning electron microscope. It sees things that are too small for you to see with light because light doesn't travel in a straight line. Light travels in waves. And those waves are so big that things that are smaller than the wavelength of light can't really be seen very well. So we have to use electricity to zap it because electricity moves through space more or less in a straight line. And it hits our sample. And what the SCM does is convert an electrical signal into a visual signal that we can that we can appreciate. All the SCM is the microscope that we have is a electric city to light translator just so that we can appreciate what we're looking at. But at the end of the day, it's still our eyes looking at it and who knows what what small, you know, defects come about from that translation process. But it is a way for us to see things that we can't necessarily see with our eyes. We are extending our capability of seeing things through technology. And, you know, I can't imagine that what we have right now is going to be the best method a thousand years from now. Like a thousand years from now, we're going to have something substantially better. That's still going to be our science. Thankfully, that's still science. That's still that's just the progression of what we've developed. And I want us just to recognize that. Yeah, we may not be able to find a better version of science right now, but we're making a better version every day. And so if you give us tomorrow next week, we're going to have something better than when we had last week ago. That's huge. When we say, Hey, show me a better method than science. It's like science isn't a thing that's stationary. It's not a snapshot. It's a process. Right. You got to remember that constantly moving, constantly improving, which makes it better than dogma because it's always willing to change and recognize when it doesn't know something. That's what I value so much about it. John, do you have any points? Yeah, well, something that's moving but never gets anywhere is my vote here. My background. But I wanted to say that the important thing to get here is that it's, it's not about knowing everything. It's about discovering. It's the best method for investigating that we have. And as you say, tomorrow we'll have a better method like the, up until 2017, we didn't have the, the LIGO interferometer. So we couldn't reject gravity waves, but now we can. Correct. Yes. So now let's get into the more, I think, hot topic, which is we've discussed scientism in the, the empirical sense. We understand what science is. What do Christians mean when they call us scientists or scientism, scientism. And we can't speak for Christians, but we at least have, you know, comments from Christianity blog posts where they equate their religious points of views with how atheisms. Appeals to experts in science. And they say, you know, this guy isn't a biologist yet.  And in my head, I get little red flags where it's like, you know, it's not so much that we're believing it just based on because someone said it. It's that there's a substantial degree of evidence to support it where every step of the way of that evidence is a fairly mundane claim to where it's a much less extraordinary claim to, to interpret all of this than a God did it, which is still a substantiated and a very extraordinary claim that needs more than a book for me to believe that it's true. My problem generally with the, the pejorative sense of scientism is that it tries to equate baseless faith with. And I find that to be a very dangerous equivocation. John, do you have an opinion? Go for it. Yeah. What you're talking about there is the appeal to authority fallacy, which, which Christians and other thieves are very prone to do. They, they love a big powerful now all in, and they have subsidiary novels in their hierarchy who represent God's just a big no at all. Like, Yes, I am. Okay. But, but, but what we have, what we, if you look at a science book is written very differently from the way a Bible or other scripture is written. They're all about stories. Right. There's no story in a science book. It's boring stuff. It's about this. These were the ingredients that we used in the proper, the, you know, they, what we started out with this is the method that we applied. And this is what we observed and it's, it's very dry reading. It's not a page turner. No. So, and the point about that is anybody, it's like following a recipe to cook a pie, you know, anybody with access to the correct equipment could repeat that claim and get the answer for themselves. Right. It's not about appealing to an authority. It's about the potential ability to repeat it yourself. It's also falsifiable in the sense that if I don't get the same result you do, I can contact the author and be like, this doesn't work. You need to revise something because I did everything exactly as you said. And if enough people say that, then the passage, something needs to change. You can't do that with the Bible. Every single time I don't get a prayer answer and I can't be, you're not allowed to criticize or, or complain about the Bible's claims. But the thing about science is we love to be criticized and to find fallacies in our thinking because that's how we progress. Right. Larry. Yeah. No, even today, if you're, if you talk to believer, you won't be very long before they bring up an anecdote about somebody in the church or the next church over in the next date who had a miracle performed on in church and everybody saw it. It's an anecdote. And they rely so much on these anecdotes that just go around between the parishioners. It's, it's obvious to anybody outside, but not inside because basically the Bible is a book of anecdotes that you're supposed to take on based on how you. So here's the scary thing is for some of the people, a significant in my head, a significant percentage. It is just as obvious to them that it's just a book of claims, but in order for them to rationalize the time that they're spending staying in the church and avoiding all the backlash that they'll come from them leaving their faith, they have to say, well, I guess this is okay to come to the conclusion that a God exists. And I guess this is a good method for figuring out that things are true. A book where people just say that it happened. And when I look outside at science, I see them looking at books where they, there are people who are claiming things happen. So that just must be the way that, you know, that's a good way to determine things are true. And the problem is that that's a very dangerous mindset because then they read the news and they're like a billion people said that this country should be bombed. They're like, well, I guess that's true because, you know, that's what my news is saying. That's what my president saying. That's what my local friend group is saying. I'm just going to go with the flow. What do you think Larry? Yeah, but they don't take it one step further that every religion has their own holy book. And they contradict each other. They can't all be right. Yeah. And not only that, but they'll vote on stuff like that too. That's why this is a problem because, you know, we're in midterm elections right now. Stuff like your beliefs matter because they inform your actions. And so when it comes to like actionable certainty, I prefer empiricism rather than spiritual claims. And when people want to call me a scientist or say I'm using scientist for that, let them because I also think gravity is a thing. Does that make me a gravitism as well?  And I find like what we understand science to be, it's a very useful method for determining true things from false things. Larry, we're near the end, the bottom of the half. We are listening to comments after the break. Well, sure. Be sure to stay tuned for the second half of the digital free thought radio hour here on W O Z O radio. 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Welcome back to the second half of the digital free thought radio hour. I'm doubter five and we're on W O Z O radio. 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. Let's talk for just a moment about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002 and we're on our 20th year. We have over a thousand members now creeping up on 1100. We have weekly in person meetings every Tuesday evening at Knoxville's old city at Barley's taproom in Pete's area, which starts around 5 30. Look for us inside at the high top tables or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. Also, we have Tuesday evening zoom meetings on ask. If you'd like to join us, email us for details at ask an atheist at KnoxvilleAtheist.org or let's chat s e at gmail.com. You can find us online on Facebook meetup.com or at our website, KnoxvilleAtheist.org, or you can just Google Knoxville Atheist if it's easier to remember. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you can still go to meet up into a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start. Oh, no. Oh, no. I looked up how to say holiday in British sign language and it is the most offensive thing I've ever seen. Oh, no. I can do this because it's radio. I'm not making this up, but the sign for holiday or they don't say vacation in British sign language. It's called exclusively holiday. Oh, my God. Oh, no. I know. And we can't repeat that. We can't repeat the radio, but that's exactly what that is. How bizarre. Wow. What a beautiful language. The double finger. The double finger. Great. Anyway, guys, we are talking about Scienceism today and we're going over some listener comments. Feel free to leave more in the YouTube channel. Our posts when we open up a chat room on Reddit, we'll be happy to take them. We're going to go through some comments that we've selected before the show. First, we'll just do a recap of the first half because SpaghettiO asked, what is Scientism? And John Richards, would you mind giving us a quick recap on what Scientism is? Well, sure. The first original meaning is that it's the proposition, the concept that scientific method is the best or only way to discover the truth about the world and reality. And I subscribe to that, but that doesn't mean that I could claim that it does, that it's finished, you know, that it has already discovered everything. But when theists use it pejoratively, what they are claiming is that scientists and people who believe that science is that best investigative tool are claiming that they've solved all the mysteries. That isn't the case. Right. Larry, anything to add? No, there still be mysteries no matter what. You were saying a little earlier that we can investigate things like souls. And we could, if we had an example, but in 2000, 3000 years nobody has ever supplied us with an example to examine. Not even the ghost hunters. And they're professionals. That's right. Give us a sample and science will take off. Right. If it's not ghost hunters, who are you going to call? My whole thing is when you can demonstrate that it's worth pursuit, then we will begin the pursuit. But until then we live in a world where we have a limited amount of time. Right. And pixie dust, unicorns, souls, ghosts, the Kraken and all these things need to be demonstrated that there's an option for them to exist first before we even begin to analyze it. Because when I do research, it's not from the idea of like, well I'll just Google it and determine if it's right or wrong there. No, it's like we're going to actually spend money on this. We're going to actually try to figure this out. We're going to take man hours. We're going to investigate it. Let's make sure it's worth our time. And until you can demonstrate that it is at least potentially worth our time, don't waste our time basically. John Richards, what do you think? Look at the alternatives to scientific method that we've experienced in the past. They include a crystal ball, you know, palmistry, reading the tea leaves. Boris Gobs. Yes, they're just laughable. So at the moment, science is the winner. And willing to adapt and change as needed. That's the most powerful tool behind it. Absorbs good ideas and gets rid of bad ones. That's why science is so great. Larry, I'm going to throw this one out at you. This is a comment from formerly committed scientism evolutionist Darwinists. You know, it's all noise used to generate or used to try to bastardize people from the rest of society to make it easier to attack them. Should people who believe in gravity be called gravitas or a Newtonian? What do you think? Or electricians. Right. It's all a way of demonizing the other as religion is so famous for doing. They've separated people and individual groups for centuries, millennia saying we've got the truth you don't and therefore, you know, we shouldn't have to pay attention to what you're saying or what you do. We should accept hateful labels should we? We should. We are so good at making them. If anybody's going to label me, I want it to be me. Okay. I actually know a guy named me at our lab and it's very I know a guy named you. I know a guy named me and I know a guy named her. But so it's just a very, very well, the very, very interesting lab space that we're in. Let's see. Schizmo also concurs. He says just another label. We don't need scientism. Thank you. But no thanks. Larry, I'm going to throw this one out at you. John Richards, this is for you. This is on evolutionary creationism. So, and this is by text bliss. She writes. So how could one affirm evolutionary creation while at the same time try to claim or embrace the historical Christian faith. It's like understanding that all the toys under the tree are Christmas are from your parents. Reindeer's can't fly and elves don't work at all in the North Pole, but still believing that Santa is real. What's that cognitive dissonance all about? It's a desperate attempt to justify belief in creation, isn't it? Because what they're saying is that evolution is true, but it was actually kickstarted by our God. And there's no evidence for that. We call that wishful think he annity. Whoa, say that one more time. Wishful think he annity. I love it. Wishful think he annity. Okay, cool. I'm going to keep that in mind. Go ahead, Larry. Oh, I thought my audio went out. I was scared for a second. Oh, and it's also a way of putting God in the gaps. We don't have a particular explanation for a phenomenon, so we'll shoehorn God in there.  So have fun. As we discover stuff, so he retreats. I couldn't think of a more pointed, you know, indictment against the being than the more you understand the world, the smaller they become, you know, like, what does that say about the religion in the whole? All right, so I have a heavy topic right here. This is from a commentator from last week and she mentioned that she wanted to stay anonymous this week and she says, thanks for taking this topic from last week's discussion.  Scientism, to me, is real and defined as people taking scientific claims as fact or faith without applying the same degree of skepticism that generated the claim in the first place. Quality research produces reports that are accessible to anyone, including folks who just sit and skim information online from their arm chairs. However, armchair research isn't the same as the process that generated the data in the first place, yet people can just as easily identify and fight on reports as if they internalize them despite lacking credentials, practice, experience, or authority on the subject. Just like dogmatic people can read a verse from their holy book and assume that they're experts on morality and wisdom. I understand that this reckoning will be difficult to swallow and may even hurt a lot of people's feelings, but honestly, there's a reason scientists are hired from academia and not Craigslist. It's annoying to see niche areas of science get popularized by people who don't understand it, because then it just mystifies what science is.  When science is used in the same way, it can be just as annoying and dangerous. Even the most scientific claim from the most confident person is not an excuse to stop being skeptical. Question everything. Wow, I'm glad that that was accepted well. I generally believe everything that was said, and I think there was a longer discussion in the chat thread on the idea of well, is that being actually scientism or not? In a nutshell, in a nutshell, what that person was saying, and thank you for phoning it in, was that dogmatism is universally bad. We should not, nobody, scientists, atheists, whatever, nobody should be dogmatic. If you watch scientists being interviewed, they're always very careful about their expression. They don't claim that anything is perfectly correct. They say the evidence indicates And that's why I don't have really much of a problem with deism. They don't have any dogma. They say God created the universe, but it's not a God we ever heard of. We don't have any idea what's in his mind or her mind or its mind. We can't tell you what it or she wants you to do. There's no book. Deism, to me, is harmless, but there are atheists that don't want to stop there, don't want to allow that to happen and continue berating a person who believes in deism. And I don't know, I don't go along with that. If every religious person was a deist, yeah, a lot of things would be a madly better. We wouldn't be on the radio. We'd be like, my job is done and he'd fly into the sun. Right. To me, deism is mother nature and I can accept that. Right. Except again, deism seemed to, like any God would think that it has a purpose or what a mind will per se. And I don't think nature does. No. I've had an analogy brought to me before that I always like going back to, but it's sort of like, if you're on an island that has worms underneath a banana tree and you only eat the worms under the banana tree because you don't want to climb up to get to the bananas because that takes effort. And so you're just spending your day just eating worms, gross worms from the dirt when there are bananas right above you, if you just were willing to climb up high enough to get them. That's how I kind of see deism is sort of like if you're right there, you don't have any of the baggage of dogma, but you're still using this weird methodology to believe in a supernatural being even if it is dead and it's not affecting your life, you still have this hang up. If you just took one extra step, you'd be able to at least be in a position where you have a better methodology of appreciating true things and false things because if you're still convinced that a God is, that was real, but is just dead, that's still bad because you don't have any evidence or any rational basis to convince that that's true. Speaking of evidence, it really gives me when believers question the evidence that scientists presume, I mean presented, like carbon dating, things like that. You have all the mountains of evidence and they say, well, it's not real, it's not true because blah, blah, blah. And it's almost like if you had good evidence, but they don't and they don't demand any evidence from their own beliefs, their own religious teachings, you just have to take that on faith. Yeah, slight blast there. A little bit. I got a comment from YouTube that I think would be useful. Please guys be nice to this person. Alright, so this one is, oh Ty, remember that story where you talk about the guy drowning and what God answered him according to your version? Well, you are wrong about that. You see, the afterlife is the goal. It doesn't matter how one dies and gets to the live in eternity. Does God can not like or dislike any type of death because always dying should satisfy the goal which is getting to the afterlife. So if you guys don't understand the context behind this, I told a story where a guy was drowning and he asked for God to help him, but he ended up drowning anyway and he goes to the pearly gates and God's like, I like drowning people. Haven't you read my book? I do it a lot. I love it. I love it.  What do you think about that? So if the goal is the afterlife, what is stopping and not corresponding from suicide now? I said be nice. I said be nice. Didn't I start that anyway? Larry, I don't know how to respond to that. Well, he's glorifying death in one vein and minimizing the harm of it or the badness of death in the other. Remember for the religious death is just to change vajras and you know, it's almost like why should we avoid it and type of mentality. Also, excuse me, if they say the purpose of life is death, what is the purpose of life after death? Because once you're there, you've received your goal and you've got the eternity to sit there with no purpose. Right, right, right. So Dada's trading room has responded and I'd love to get your feedback on this and why people just don't suicide. He says, if that would be the truth passed on to people, most people would likely choose to die instead of suffering on life on Earth. After all, the quicker ones get their internal paradise faster and that's better, right? So some justification for staying alive, even if in misery had to be invented, one such justification is sin and the threat of internal torture in hell. And so that's the reason you kill yourself with sin. Yes. So is he in favor of assisted dying for the terminally ill then? You know, I remember that argument being brought up for assisted suicide. People being like, you're condemning these souls to die and people who are literally in pain for the rest of their short lifespan are like, please don't let this story, you know, completely delete my quality of life from my last, you know, a couple of months. I like, I want to go as soon as I possibly can. Please. Wow. It's depressing how this actually does affect people's lives. We can have this like, cordial conversation here, but there are people actually suffering as a result of the dogma that people leave. Yes, we've gone to a dark place. Hmm. All right, let's go into the next comment. Thank you, Dottice Trading Room, always for the comments. Next one, I'm going to throw out to Larry. Larry, full disclosure. Oh, here's, here's three rules. Number one rule, and this is given to us by Grumpy Kong. Doing science is awesome. Number two rule, worshiping science is not. And number three, the tendency is not limited to the scientifically illiterate. It does nothing to forward the cause of scientific excellence to worship science. At best, it encourages fanboy behavior. At worst, it justifies charlatans. Sometimes those charlatans cost people their lives. Larry, what do you think? Well, he's just made a series of claims. I'm not sure there's a question in there to answer. I want your feedback.  Just doing science is awesome. Worshiping science is not, and the tendency is not limited by the scientific illiterate. So, you know, I agree with him on the worship. I don't think we should worship anything. Worshiping is counterproductive. It sets your mind to not asking questions, not holding anything to accountability. We shouldn't worship anything, not in science. Absolutely. Who's educating worship? Not me. Not me. And we're all saying we shouldn't worship science, right? No, we just, we're convinced that it's the best approach to take to find out, find answers from nature. Right. All right. So I got another one for you, John Richards. This is a comment that I'd like to get your feedback on. It's written by, uh-oh, Ibear. And I bear says, scientism is essentially just another word for empiricism. It's just the belief that the scientific method is the correct way to understand the universe. That's the definition that you guys were talking about originally. That's what scientism actually is. But most of the time when you hear scientism, you're hearing a believer accusing a non-believer of worshiping science. Right. It's an attempt to pretend that the non-believers position is equivalent to the believers in foundation and support. And that's a lie. Um, that's not scientism, not by the official definition or the more common pejorative meaning you are talking about something else. If you say otherwise, something that is not scientism, you need to understand that. What do you think it's, it's distorting definitions as a weapon to try and get your message across. Right. I agree. Bellability is not the same thing as scientism. Uh, what do you think Larry? Well, one of the things you said earlier was, uh, intriguing. I thought I'd address it. Uh, it says, um, why do people just believe science? They can't, uh, the, we're talking about people who don't do the science. We just, uh, listen to what the scientists say and believe them. And, uh, generally, uh, that's the, that's the concern of believers when they see us, um, quote, worshiping science as it were.  Right. Well, you know, it says, there's a meme here that I'm looking at. I can't give the credit to whoever wrote it because I don't know who it is. It says creation, evolution. Nobody really knows for sure how that stuff began, but I'd rather trust the dudes in the lamp coats who aren't demanding that I get up every early, every Sunday and overdress and apologize for being human. I mean that there's a lot to that in that, um, religion makes an awful lot of demands on people.  And they do want worshiping. Yes.   Uh, it's, you know, they, they present the results. Their peers evaluate the results. And when they agree, they publish the papers and we have a new science. Well, something we need to respect and recognize is that religion is marketing in its peak form, right? The product that no one can see taste smell here, but yet everyone has a personal experience with it.  Uh, people are shunned if they don't have the same idea or the brand loyalty that you profess to have them yourself. This whole strategy is just very targeted propaganda towards a particular product or a brand. And alternatively science has a very good brand as well. It's brand association would be tied to credibility, smart people, authorities and fields that like seem to be technologically very useful and everyone loves technology and having new cool things. So what religion is trying to do oftentimes is pool the useful aspects of the science brand and, and accommodate it in its brand of dogma. And I find that to be, you know, a scary thing because who can champion against that other than adherence for critical thinking and who's listening to us compared to like who's listening to religious people. But also it should be indicative. It should be indicative that science is doing a good thing on its own. It's not asking you for your typing. It's not asking for your soul. It's not asking for your worship yet. The people who are are trying to borrow as much as they can from it to get the credibility from it. That should be telling because science isn't doing the other way around. Science is like, you guys have nothing to want. I have nothing for your gods. I don't even want them. I'm just going to keep doing our own laboratory thing. And people are going to keep trying to pull credibility from us because we are, in my opinion, the most credible way to try to figure out two things from false things. That's why you have religions called Scientology or why people try to lambass scientism because they're trying to denigrate science down a little bit and propose their religion up just a little bit or at least put them on equal footing. I think we should hit back at them and coin a word religiology. A religionist. Because your religiology is telling you that. Is your scientism telling you that? What they're trying to do is make claims that they can't justify. But they want us to adopt. That's definitely like scientism. With the easement bit on the end. An ideology of sorts. But it's without the foundation that science actually has. Right. I got a closing comment. Before we end up the show. There is a very, very speaking of cool technology. There is a website called writer. RYTR. And it's an AI research. It's an AI writer. And all you have to do is give it a prompt. And you say make an article about why the. The. Why France's economy is. 2% higher today than it was yesterday. You just put that as a sentence and it will. Generate. Like a one page report, three page report, whatever you want. That sounds like if it was written by a human being. Sounds like there's all the same tones enough because it's just using algorithms to pull together. Artificial intelligence. And it is terrifying because now I realize that a lot of the articles I'm reading are basically pulled by the same algorithm as well. So two things I'm learning one, even for things that I, I respect the sources. I should be willing to be skeptical about them because I don't know what was produced or what was used to make the articles that I read. Right. Or what the agenda was behind them. So even scientific articles, I need to be, you know, skeptical against, but also if you prompt this AI robot to write an argument for the existence of God, it just flat out says, I don't have a belief in God. I'm sorry. You have that problem. So. What's the name? What's the name of this? It's D pack Chopra. Okay. Okay. Okay. I just hope the high school students don't get a hold of it. No, I'll never, I'll never turn in a paper again that it's their own.  They're like, no, that's not worth my time. I'm not going to do that. Anyway, we're near the end of the show. John Rich is anything that you like to play before we head out. Yeah. Well, I've, I've done a, a, a UK. Anything is a UK podcast this morning. That was very good. I had Esther, our guest. And we talked about. Not my religion. Because there's a lot of people who begin to perceive that there's something wrong with their religion. But they don't want to give up the entire thing. So they put it on the pick and mix counter. And select the bits they like and say that these are in my religion and these aren't. So they're, they're sorting it out, sort of watering it down. And they won't go to that last step. It can mix. I've never heard that before. That's great. That's like cherry picking what we say. Yeah, yeah. I'll say, I'll leave this. Thank you guys so much for your comments. Feel free to leave more and we'll get to them in next week's show. Thank you everybody. And Larry. I still don't know what religion is all about or atheism. You've got to figure out a way to, you know, people write books on that. Oh man. You should. I happen to have done that. You can go to Amazon and find my book. Atheism. What's it all about. And actually you can go to my website. Digital free thought. Dot com. Click on the link. I'll see you guys next week. Actually, you can go to my website. Digital free thought. Dot com. Click on the blog button and read many of the articles that are in that book. Also, we have a radio show archive there. Atheist songs and many articles on the subject of atheism. That's digital free thought. Dot com. If you have any questions for the show, you can send them to ask an atheist at Knoxville. Atheist. Dot org. Or let's chat. At gmail.com and we'll answer them on future shows. Remember, you can find the atheist society of Knoxville at Knoxville Atheist dot org or just Google Google Knoxville Atheist. And if you're having trouble re re leaving religious beliefs behind, you can get help at recovering from religion. Their website is. Rationally enough, recovering from religion.org. You can find this show and podcasts everywhere. Just search for digital free thought radio hour.  The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. I don't believe they are until then don't sweat it. Enjoy your life and we'll see you next Wednesday at seven o'clock p.m. Say bye everybody. Have a nice day. And good. Thank you very much. Thank you.


Hey guys welcome back to Six Sister Stuff. Today I'm sharing with you how to make some pot and pot recipes. So my name is Kristen and every Monday I share an instant pot recipe with you. So I get a lot of questions about how do I use pot and pot? Why should I ever cook anything inside of it? So I just want to show you a few recipes that you could use a pot inside of your instant pot. So the first recipe is steamed vegetables. Now you can put water in your pot and put your vegetables in and cook them. The only bad thing is that if your vegetables are sitting in the water sometimes they get a little soggy. So I like to put them inside a pot. So I'm going to add about a cup, cup and a half of water to the bottom of the pot. Next I'm going to add the pot in the pot and then I'm just going to add some vegetables. So we have broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, they all kind of cook around the same time so I'm just going to pour that into. Now when you're steaming vegetables you still want the moisture to go into your vegetables so we're not going to put a lid on, we're not going to do foil, we're just going to leave it just as it is here and we're going to put the lid on and cook it. So you're going to turn the lid, make sure it's closed, you're going to turn the little knob to sealing not venting. Now with these vegetables I love steaming vegetables in the Instant Pot because it only cooks for about a minute so you're going to push the manual or the pressure cook button go down to one minute. You have to wait for a few seconds until it says on. Once it says on you're good to go and you can walk away. So once the Instant Pot is done this little L will appear that means that you did it right. It's starting to count up so when that's done you can turn this little knob over to venting so you're going to vent all of the pressure out of the Instant Pot. All right so once all the pressure is out that little pin goes down and then you can open the lid. Oh and these vegetables are steamed perfectly. They look so good. Okay pull that on out. I'm just going to stab it just so you can see how good it looks. Oh yeah those are like perfect. They're not too hard but not too soft. They're not the soggy vegetables. Now I love to cook my vegetables. I add a little bit of garlic salt and a little bit of cheddar cheese and mix it together and that is my favorite way to eat steamed vegetables. Okay going on to recipe number two. All right so the second recipe. Now using a pot and pot you can do all kinds of delicious things. One of my favorite things to make in it is like dips. So today I'm going to make a spinach artichoke dip using the pot in the pot and the Instant Pot. So first we're going to start out with about 10 ounces of frozen spinach. So I'm just going to pour it right into my bowl. Okay next we're going to add the sauces. So this isn't a healthy dip but it sure tastes amazing. So we're going to do about a cup of mayonnaise. You can use Miracle Whip if you want but I like mayonnaise a little bit better. And I'm just kind of eyeballing this. So it's about a cup of mayonnaise and then a cup of some sour cream. Now it doesn't really matter what kind of sour cream if you have low fat or normal it just doesn't matter. So just about a cup of that. Here we go and we're just going to mix this all together. Now I let my spinach sit out for about I don't know five minutes or so just so it's not so frozen so it will mix a little bit easier. Okay so next we're going to add the artichoke hearts. Now this one is a 12 ounce can. You can do anywhere from like 10 to 14 ounce. Now I've drained it so you don't want a ton of liquid in there but I'm just going to pour it right in. Now you can chop these up smaller if you want but I personally love the the giant chunks of artichoke. All right so after we have the artichokes then we're going to add about a cup of mozzarella cheese. Okay so once we get our mozzarella cheese now we just need a little bit of seasoning in there so we're going to add about a half teaspoon of garlic salt and again I'm just going to eyeball it. And then just a pinch of cayenne if you choose to you don't have to do this. And then about a fourth teaspoon or a pinch of some pepper. All right then we're just going to mix that all together. Okay once it's all mixed together then we're going to put it just right into the new pot so we don't want to put this right and directly into our instant pot because we don't want it to be all wet and soggy so we use that another pot so we'll actually cook but not be soaking wet. All right so we're just going to lay this flat the best that we can. All right you guys see that? Yeah okay so now we're ready to put it in the pot so we're going to just grab about a cup of water and just pour it right in then we're going to lower down our pot so we're going to use some foil and just put it on top to seal in the artichoke dip.  Then we're going to push the manual or pressure cook button whatever instant pot you're using and we're going to go to about 10 minutes.  So when your instant pot is done cooking you're going to see that little L and the timer is going to start going up so that means you did it right so we're going to turn this little knob to venting it's going to be a quick release so you just turn it to the side oh and if all the steam is already out we're good so we can go ahead and open up our lid and it should be all cooked ready to go. Okay we're going to take off our foil very carefully also it's really browned on the outside but what I'm going to do is I'm going to stick it in the broiler for about a minute or two to just get it nice and bubbly on top so we're going to pull it out now it's this handle is going to be really hot right now it's going to get extra water out and then just throw it right into the oven. Okay the spinach artichoke is done and it smells so good I just want to show you guys this I mean it is nice and creamy and it's a little oh my and cheesy so good. All right guys thank you so much for stopping by we will see you next week bye.


Okay, can everyone hear me okay? Hey, good morning everyone. Thanks for coming. I'm Adam Johnson. I'm from Mido Kura and Mido net project and Today we're gonna talk about Mido net go through a one-to-one And cover the the architecture if we have time. I'll attempt a demo as well So before we get started just curious how many of you have actually tried Mido net so far Just raise your hand. All right a decent number great And I'll kind of go over how you can actually get started and try Mido net if you haven't if you're interested You can see the agenda there. I won't go through it because I'll Start with this so First of all, you know, why do we need why do we need Mido net or net virtual networks in general? You know, this is pretty basic stuff, but you know, basically there are requirements, you know Infrastructure as a service especially open stack has requirements like multi-tenancy More agility on the networking side open stack in general has allowed, you know, people to spin up VMs and storage in a matter of seconds or minutes but a lot of the People running in production still have kind of very crude networking that requires Manual intervention whenever you need to make network changes so you're either forced into very very simple networking models where you don't have advanced networking services or Your provisioning time is just very slow. You know, we talked to several people who run These environments in production with a you know, very basic networking models and you know They're provisioning times are lengthened by two to ten times Just because of networking changes that have to occur in production so Moving networking into software certainly can fix that just as it has for storage and compute So that's what this is all about is just making things faster making it more scalable and multi-tenant of course So before I get into how Mido net works This is kind of a slew of features that meet and that covers today. It's I'm probably missing some stuff But in general we're doing layer two through four Services and some other services around neutron. So our our goal was to Essentially provide all of the networking services that neutron needs in a fully distributed system So to do that we've embedded all of these services into Mido net itself And I think it's it's it's very cool. So so essentially we've As of the latest version that's that's in RC right now. We've we actually have Pretty much everything you don't have to run any of the Python agents of neutron anymore And you just run a single media net agent on every compute hosts So, you know the last pieces we had to do were basically distributed metadata. So even metadata DHCP And then all the normal networking stuff like layer two layer three switching and distributed routing firewall like security groups NAT Everything is covered in in media net There are some other advanced Kind of use cases that we also cover You may have heard of courier. It's was covered in the keynote in a few other sessions this week so we've been contributing to that project with the with the intent of connecting media net into Docker and in other you know related projects as well We also can connect into physical Networks using VTEP. I'll cover that briefly and then of course, you know the the main one we're talking about today is Open-stack and neutron integration So just a little bit of a background on media net media net started from Mito Kura the company We actually started Mito Kura back in 2010. We started here in Tokyo and It was originally a proprietary project our original version of Mito net we called middle man it's kind of a Japanese plan words and It was written in Python We hacked it up really quickly it was Essentially connecting to open v-switch in user land And we had some extensions And then you know it was providing basically layer three on layer three with encapsulation using GRE We decided to rewrite it Quite some time ago into Java for the 1.0 release and the reason we did that was mainly because we were As we were adding a lot more functionality and doing a lot more distributed stuff. It was you know becoming very difficult to maintain quality and There was just a lack of Tooling that we needed for kind of distributed debugging and things like this So we decided to rewrite in Java and very quickly after that we started introducing Scala I think most of the code now is in Scala if you go to our github page It says we're a Scala project We actually open source Mito net back in November 2014 in the Paris open-sack summit So it's been almost a year now We decided to open source Mito net because You know we were just seeing Demand from the market for an open source solution We saw a lot of fragmentation in neutron with a lot of different proprietary plugins. There's like 20 some plugins in neutron doing various things And it felt like you know there was just a need for this to you know try to get people to avoid You know reinventing the wheel and just provide something that people can use whether they want to pay for it or not so they you know Just to kind of solve a lot of the problems that we were seeing around the OBS project for production workloads and Also get into a little bit of meeting at 5.0 and actually a lot of the architecture is that I'll talk about is based on the 5.0 We actually jump from 1.9 to 5.0 because of the open-sack versioning changes So this is actually our fifth release. So we decided to kind of match Versioning schemes that way as well. So that's why there's a weird jump So You can go to metonet.org. There's a lot of information on there. That's the the home page of the community And I'll talk about the community a little bit later as well So getting into the architecture so Metonets architecture is fairly straightforward and simple This is like the 10,000 foot view here and I'll zoom in to get far greater detail in the next slide But I just wanted to show you the the concept of a virtual network with overlays So if you see the bottom of this diagram, this is the physical infrastructure And it is very simple on the left hand side where it says internet these boxes are just x86 boxes The little metonet logo there denotes that this is the metonets agent or meto man Running on those boxes. It's talking to the internet using BGP multi-homing Then on the bottom middle you see this network state database This is actually just running some minimal metonet software to do some Commands like VTAP and things like this and it's mainly a patchy zoo keeper So this is our topology storage, which I'll get into as well So this there's three of these because they run in a quorum. You can run some odd number of them Defending on how much you want to scale and the points that I want to make here is that this is not a Controller it's not doing any computational flows here. We do the computational flows at the edge So that would be on the left-hand side or the right-hand side So the left-hand side being the gateway nodes and the right-hand side being the compute hosts where the VMs or containers are So on the right-hand side the the metonet agent is also installed on those That's the same agent that runs on the gateway nodes and then on the top you can see the logical topology So in the logical topology, it's very familiar to neutron Those concepts pretty much map identically the only one that might not map On this in this diagram. It doesn't show it. We have a provider router Which which is proposed in neutron and I'll talk about that later So kind of zooming in a little more you can see more details of of the components here So really the only components of metonet in an install are the metonet agent or metoman the network state database Which is zookeeper and we have some cluster Things in in 5.0 which we're introducing and then the metonet plug-in in neutron and We have metonet API and metonet CLI These are just talking to the network state database So that's pretty much it. There's not much there's not much to it. It's very straightforward. It's very simple There's very few moving pieces But this basically allows you to have a fully distributed network so zooming into the compute hosts on the compute hosts we have the metonet agent which is talking directly to the Open vSwitch Datapath it's using a netlink channel to talk down to that So we're actually replacing the the open vSwitch user space agent with the metonet agent And the reason we did that was because we are adding a lot more higher layer networking functions into that So instead of you know having another agent that talks to user space OBS We just decided to talk directly to the kernel. It was simpler for us to do and a little bit more efficient and You can see the VMs on this host. We'll just have normal interfaces So if you do if config you'll see a bunch of tap interfaces metonet will plug into those to to to have control of the network and the metonet agent also connects down to the Network state database. You can see a little peek of that at the bottom So this is where the metonet agents get all of their states. So this is getting all of the high-level states And they'll cache that information locally as well So you don't have to always go off-box to get that the topology And you can view the metonet agent as kind of a network simulator So it's not like a virtual appliance or anything like this So when we show the logical topology those you know logical devices don't exist in any certain physical location They're just Computated on a flow-by-flow basis at the ingress of the network So how do we get packets from one place to another? It's just overlays. So we're using tunneling and encapsulation so Between two Compute hosts if you're sending VM east-west traffic, it's gonna set up a tunnel between two two boxes And then encapsulate that we can use the x-ion or GRE If the kernel supports other things like a geneve or or other types of encapsulation formats It's fairly easy, you know to add those into metonet as well And then if we're going outside to the external networks like the internet it would be going out these BGP gateways We show two but you can actually run as many as you like the metonet agents are They don't have any hard state. We're not using any namespaces to do any of the services So we don't have to worry about Storing state and and having to synchronize those Across each other we do synchronize some states between each other which I'll get into for stateful networking But in general you could run three or five gateway nodes And the return traffic is allowed to come back through any of those And since they're just talking to the network state database for the topology they can figure out what to do with that traffic so the network state database is Is kind of the you know very simple Heart of metonet, so we use a patchy zookeeper And the reason we use a patchy zookeeper is because it's you know, it's first of all It's a distributed database, so it's it's very easy to run And and we're not storing a lot of data in here. It's just very high-level network topology So this is very similar to the neutron model. Our model differs slightly, but we can map the neutron model into metonet Very easily and the other reason we use zookeeper is because it has a watcher Kind of public pub sub mechanism that we take advantage of And this allows the metonet agents to get topology updates. So if you were to Change the security or brewell or do a live migrate zookeeper knows which agents are actively processing Flows for that topology and it will send updates to those agents saying your topology has changed You need to redo your flows. So this is a really Essential feature of zookeeper that we use In the in the 5.0 version we did a lot of re-architecting to make metonet a lot more modular So we we actually have abstracted out zookeeper from From the rest of metonet so you could actually program into what we what we call zoom So we actually program proto buffs which are then converted into zookeeper So it's possible we could replace zookeeper with some other database like ecd in the future There's been some some talk of that And then how we integrate with open stack We actually have two ways to plug into open stack today The the main method right now is the monolithic plug-in to neutron So you'd install our metonet plug-in. This is written in python. The metonet plug-in is is in open stack project and essentially all it's doing is taking the neutron API calls and converting them into Metonet API API calls, which are fairly similar. Is it just a little bit different? It's writing that into zookeeper And then neutron is also writing into mysql So it's making two copies of that so you can interact with metonet via You know horizon horizons neutron functions, or you can use neutron CLI or you can use metonet CLI or or API if you the thing to note is if you make changes to the Neutrons so the metonet CLI those are not seen in neutron So if you create a router in in metonet through the metonet CLI it will not be seen in neutron But it will exist so that's you know most people are interacting via neutron itself That's the intent is user facing API is neutron But if you need to do some advanced functions Like setting up a dynamic routing which is not part of neutron You could use the metonet CLI or API to do that. So it's more admin admin functions So so we Have a concept of active active gateways, which we call sometimes we call L3 gateway or BGP gateway And this is very cool actually because it's exactly the same software that runs on the compute host That's running on the gateway nodes those gateway nodes are connecting to some upstream physical router or switch That speaks BGP It is using eBGP and it's essentially advertising the floating IP pool. That's that you've set up So this is handling the the external network All of those hosts are advertising the same pool. So they're all multi-homing and the so this allows The physical network for the inbound traffic to use equal cost multi-path to balance across all of those gateways And then we do the same thing going out. So you have a nice Balance of traffic there So just kind of a quick recap of the of the architecture as you can see, you know We have the compute hosts which are Identical to the gateway hosts except we're not running VMs in there you could but it's not not ideal But we have the network state database And then we have the the API and the plug-in. It's very very straightforward And then again zooming back up 10,000 feet you can now see the logical topology And you can see the the v ports on the logical topology are you know connected down to the physical infrastructure That's the only part where the logical topology touches the physical topology so in in media net you'll have virtual ports you can bind those ports to interfaces in Linux seen in any interface so it could be a physical nick or it could be a tap interface With our plug in an open stack Libvert is doing the vif plugging for you automatically and for the gateway nodes. Basically you just bind a port on the admin or provider router to the To a to a nick in in the in the x86 boxes acting as the layer 3 gateway So zooming in a little bit more to go through some of the How some of these features actually work? So we'll cover a few of these so distributed L2 switching so on the top of this you see the virtual Virtual topology or logical topology on the bottom left you see the physical topology And then the right is kind of explaining what's going on essentially all of the state is stored in zookeeper. We are storing The host IP to virtual Mac mapping so whenever you spin up a VM in open stack We are storing the virtual Mac of the v port And we're that's associated with the host and IP that's associated with that. This would be the tunnel IP So so when you set up meat on it When you add a physical compute host you're adding it to a tunnel zone And you're basically saying I want to put ETH one on on this tunnel zone So we know which physical nick to send the traffic to for tunneling So since this is stored in zookeeper when you are doing a Ping for example from VM 1 to VM 2 which is on the same neutron network. We don't actually have to do a physical ARP We already know that In the logical topology so we can just assume that this we I mean we already know where to go So we just kind of fake an ARP And we program the flow directly And then just send it across so there's actually no traffic sent off the box other than the The tunnel and the the encapsulated traffic itself and When you do make a change to that again They're subscribing to that change in zookeeper So if you were to do a live migrate of VM 2 to another hosts that mapping will update and the The host where VM 1 is living would would get that update so it would know to make a change to the To the flows so to invalidate all of the flows related to that Resimulate and add new flows Now if we want to connect this same neutron network or virtual switch, that's the same thing basically to a Physical hardware without going through some routing like like say you have a Database that can't be virtualized. So you want to connect that to a vlan We can use vtap to do this hardware vtap. So hardware layered to gateways. So there are some switches capable of Allowing us to program them and send them this host to virtual Mac IP mapping Those these are the Broadcom Trident to chipset switches basically and we're using OBS DB To to program those switches. So it's fairly standard now Most of the switch manufacturers have this capability and essentially What you can do is you can create a port on the virtual switch That's a that's a VXLine Gateway ports or vtap ports and you essentially are pointing that to a port or vlan on a hardware switch and Then meet on at the this is where the cluster API comes in so On this on the zookeeper nodes. We also are running some code which acts which is acting as the cluster API This is actually doing the OBS DB calls to the switch. So it will set that up. It will then also send the The physical host IP to Mac mapping to that switch. So when you're doing a A ping for example from VM one to some physical hardware that tunnel will go directly to the hardware vtap and not go through the the software gateways anymore, so So you can see basically with this distributed networking model We can do a lot of interesting stuff and as you have you can have multiple These multiple multiple layer two gateways spread across the physical network Going to multiple different Vlands all with the same neutron network So logically on the right-hand side, you see it's very simplistic on the right-hand side You know it could be you know spread across the data center all going over layer three And really it's very simple. So the the network admins don't have to do any changes to the physical Network as long as there's IP connectivity. So it's it's quite nice So going up the network stack to L3 routing We have as I said this concept of BGP routing Dynamic routing so we in in meat on it. We have a concept of this provider router. So this is not Something you'd find in neutron yet. There's some blueprints that's been around for a while Trying to add this capability but essentially Right above the the tenant routers in meat on it if you look in meat on that You'll see the tenant routers are connected to a provider router This is done. This is done automatically when you set the external network in in open stack So the provider router you have one of these typically although it's it's not built-in you can you can do a lot of different Models, but this is very standard and this provider router will have multiple up links usually these up links are Separate physical boxes so two or three physical boxes you bind the the v ports on this provider router to Physical mix across three three different boxes. These will then peer to some switch upstream physical switch using BGP And then you'll you'll have the connect connectivity out So this is very neat So we can also handle security groups and firewalls of service So in neutron, you know, you're defining the security groups, you know, very straightforward And we we actually have a slightly different model within meat on it. It's a little bit more low layer And we but we can convert the security groups automatically into what we call chains and rules. So this is very much mapped after kind of Security groups, sorry after IP tables in Linux. So It's not exactly the same, but it's very similar. So this allows us to have You know chains and in a chain you have rules and we can have jump rules to jump to other chains So it gives us a lot more control. We can do a lot more interesting things. We have access to all of the layer two through four Fields and we can do things like anti spoofing rules. We can do wild guards and ranges And you can apply these chains to any of the logical Topology so this could be ports or it could be on routers pre and post routing You can do it on on in and out filters on the bridges as well So it's very flexible where you put things and it can be dynamically updated or removed at any time The the very cool thing here is that since this is also distributed it means that the the the Gateway nodes and the compute hosts are able to do these firewall function. So Depending on where the traffic is coming in so if it's from the VM, it's handled locally So the security groups will be handled locally if it's coming from the external network It's going to be handled by the gateway nodes. So if you're if you have a VM that's Blocking traffic from a particular source that's attacking it That traffic will be blocked on the gateways themselves not on the private network I say it will never go through the private network as opposed to If you're using OBS plug-in right now That's going to go all the way to the compute hosts and then run on IP tables locally and dropped So so it still traverses the private network and affects all of the VMs on that hosts. So this reduces a lot of unnecessary traffic across the across the network So just to kind of see an example of what a security group would look like and meet on it You know, we have a chain and on this chain. We have some drop rules and accept rules And you can also have jump rules to other security groups. So this is kind of the idea It's not really meant for users to program it But if you have some advanced functionality that you want to create it's pretty flexible So you could you could add features to meet on it by doing this We can also do NAT Stateful and stateless which is which is also very cool. So It's basically the same idea here Meet on that agent since it's just simulating it's able to do essentially all of these functions and And the tricky part about NAT for for us was there is some state that has to be exchanged between the agents So in our first implementation, we were using Cassandra. So we were storing the stateful connection information in Cassandra so that the agents can both have those and the the main use case here is that The gateway nodes since we're running active gateway nodes They all need to have access to all of the stateful connection tracking information So the return flows, you know can can go across any of the gateways Going through Cassandra was kind of problematic because it requires a ton of calls off-box to Cassandra This can't be cash because it's updated frequently And it was pretty poor at performance. So recently we introduced Stateful connection transfer between the agents so now the agents are actually doing a kind of a peer-to-peer Communication between each other. So when you set up the gateway nodes, you add those gateway nodes to a port group And that port group is basically the the group that is getting sent the connection tracking information So as a packet will come out of the VM as a flow is set up it will send the connection tracking information out of band to the To the to the gateway nodes the port group and then we can also optionally send that Connection tracking information to Cassandra as a backup. So there are some edge cases where If you're not storing that in Cassandra, it will fail So those would be for example, if you restart a meet an agent, it's going to lose that state So it may not get the it may not know what to do with it So if you're running Cassandra as a backup if it doesn't have the state for that flow that's returning It will be able to go off-box and call that from Cassandra This is the other use cases for live migrate. So if live migrate happens, it's gonna have to do the same thing We still so even if you're using Cassandra, that's out of band and it so it doesn't actually affect the the traffic or performance So Getting into the community a little bit It has been about 11 months since we open sourced It's been growing steadily. We have a metrics website You can you can go to and and see some of the stats, but we have about 77 developers 4,800 commits 32,000 downloads from about a thousand a thousand IPs and we have 20 supporting companies We don't have a lot of external contributors though. We recently we have a large company who's Putting a full-time developers on internet. So our goal is to have not a single vendor project We really want this to be a community-led project So, you know, if any of you guys are interested in contributing definitely come talk to us We have a lot of infrastructure and Ways to get involved. So we have a slack chat channel That's you know, you can always hop in there and if you have any questions or want to get involved It's a great place to go to talk to us. The mailing lists are pretty active as well We also have a lot of code walkthroughs on YouTube. So if you go to the meat on that org There's a link Mito TV and you can find some of those walkthroughs as well And if they're if they're kind of outdated you can also ping us in slack And we were happy to hop on a hangout and walk through some code with you guys if you're interested in contributing And then we're using the similar infrastructure as open stacks. We use Garrett hub We're using Jenkins for CI It's really quite really quite similar So you can see some screenshots of all of these things and docs And and help so so we have a pretty good wiki. We're having weekly Meetings in slack the the meet and a plug-in is actually an IRC, but the other meetings are right now in slack You can find the logs of those on the wiki Our docs are fairly good as well And we are using JIRA for for issue tracking our docs. We actually introduced Japanese Language documentation just recently as well. So for the Japanese people in audience You know, please check it out. And if you find mistakes, you know, let us know and we're happy to have your contributions So if you want to get started, it's very Very straightforward. We have a couple ways. There's actually a lot of ways to get started But the easiest is just to run this quick start Essentially just run this on a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 box Probably eight gigs is better if you're gonna spin up VMs because this is gonna install OpenSack and metonet and configure it all for you. It takes about 20 to 30 minutes. I ran it last night It took about 20 minutes But I had a good connection. So the the stable one is this this top one But if you want to try the latest 5.0 version, which is in kind of release candidate stage Which I did last night it worked You can run that as well And I'll try to get into a demo as well. I think we have some time Little I'll maybe a little bit. So just to kind of sum up These things you can read that I'll kind of skip through because I want to show a little bit of metonet See if this actually works Okay, so when you run the quick start you can you can go to a horizon. It's gonna be set up for you The there were basically not setting a BGP gateway. We're just doing a static static routes for the you know It's just an all-in-one. So it's fairly straightforward But if you want to kind of see the internals of metonet, we have this mean at CLI So you can just run metonet CLI so you have to log in as root or you or you have to you know set up a definition file and then you can basically Start Checking it out and it has tab complete So it's pretty nice, but you can say list routers so you can see all the routers. I can do things like List the routes of the routers It's kind of hard one-handed. It's a router router zero and also I'm on shoddy pretty Bad Wi-Fi, but I'm using mosh. So it should be okay So I can list the routes like this. You can also see the This security groups. So if I do just a list chains Or list chain you can see all the chains.  So OS SG and then this you you ID This is this is the same you a you ID that's in neutron So you can easily find the security group that maps to a chain And rules in metonet so you can see the egress in the outbound We also have the anti spoofing rules that we put on every port So you can then do a For example chain Chain see what's an interesting one chain three list Rules it's low oops So you can see the rules. It's very low-level In here as well. You can also obviously you can create rules. You can modify them delete them and See if the tab complete will show us anything good. See there's all there's a bunch of stuff You can do there you can view the tunnel zones. We also in 5.0 have some tech previews of L2 service chaining L2 insertion mirroring We also have some some troubleshooting tools like a trace virtual trace route So that we're actually have a demo at 1245 to go through that. See I'll share that information as well Is there any questions? Yeah, so the question was if you want to use hardware offloading with the for for VXLan for example The excellent yeah, so we do support VXLan offloading So the if the nick supports VXL offloading that works fine You don't see a huge performance gain for 10 gigabit networking, but for 40 It's it's recommended to do that. Yeah, we have customers running that There shouldn't be we're running out the We're running on the standard tunnel ports So it should it should work, but it depends on the nick hardware So it depends on if the nick hardware assumes a certain port We may have to change the port or change the configuration of the the driver But it just depends We've done testing on emulax and melanox cards so far and they seem to work pretty well. Yeah For For for like a production we recommend setting up three a minimum But if you like this this is setting up one in the all-in one, it's just setting up one It's not highly available, but it can run Yeah, so if you set up three nodes you can handle You can handle one failure if one of those fails you can still read but you can't write So if you want two failures, you'd set up five. Yeah Any other questions? Yeah, sorry So so for no net use cases we can support it, but it requires some manual config so basically You would just you need to add the routes So if you want to just do static static routing you can add the routes in the media topology that could be scripted And we have some customers and users who do that So that whenever they create a new tenant they automatically create the tenant a router and network and add the routes So it's just routed through. Yeah, it's pretty straightforward though Yeah, I think the latest one nine and further you can actually stop running Cassandra and it's it will still work Yeah, but those edge cases will not work where I mentioned before or live migrate or restarting an agent for the for the nap Stateful nap. Yeah, but it works this this 50 quick start doesn't actually install Cassandra Yeah, so it's a little bit lighter weight Any other questions? Okay, so stop by our booth if you have any questions or want to get involved and if you want to see some cool troubleshooting tools At the marketplace theater at 1245 today. We have a demo of some of that stuff. So I recommend checking that out as well Thanks a lot everyone