Church, I would like to share with you a message today. They will be called God's Chosen Fast. As with all of our messages, the notes for messages are on your YouVersion Bible app that you can just download straight into your computer or they will be available in whatever people will be consuming and re-watching that. If you have your Bible, let's go to Isaiah chapter 58 and verse three. Why have we fasted, they say, and you have not seen? Why have we afflicted our souls and you did not take notice? And if we go a little bit further, we see that in fact, in the day of your fast, you find pleasure and you exploit all of your laborers. Indeed, you fast for strive and debate and to strike with the fist of wickedness. You will not fast as you do this day to make your voice heard on high. And then God begins to kind of again correct the issue of fasting. So I'm gonna share with you today about the way God sees a fast. I will be very honest, my first confession will be this, is that I avoided this chapter. I did not like this chapter when I was fasting because it almost felt like God was dissing on fasting. The same way as this quote that is going around, if you're fasting and gossiping, then go ahead and eat. And of course that quote is said by people who are not fasting and anybody who shares it usually doesn't fast.  And so when I read this, I'll be honest with you.  That's how I've read it before. And so today what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna, as I've been reading for the last few weeks during this fast, I'm actually gonna dive into the context of what this means. I have two short points. One will be about the requirement of God's fast and the other one will be about the reward of God's fast. But before we dive into that, God rebukes Israel and he says, you're saying we fasted and you didn't hear us. We fasted, you did not notice us. And God responds and he's like, you're right. So that tells us not every fast is created equal. Can I say that again? Put the people in the back. Not every fast is created equal. That means that just because you forego food and the church is doing it, it does not mean that it actually pleases God. Now it's not wrong. God is not gonna strike you or punish you for that. You might lose some pounds and actually feel better afterwards. There's health benefits, but the fast that God expects or God honors is the fast that has to honor God. God ignores the fast that ignores him. Now the Israel was given only one fast to do a year. It was on Yom Kippur. So at the end of September, beginning of October, this fast, it was recorded. I'm gonna read to you one verse about this fast. It's in Leviticus, chapter 16, verse 29. It says the following, this shall be a statue for you forever. In the seventh month, so that's at the end of September, on the 10th day of the month, you shall afflict your souls. That's what we've been doing for the last seven days. But this is what God says, and do not work at all. Whether a native of your own country or a stranger who dwells with you. So God had two requirements for the Old Testament believers during a fast that he commanded only one fast a year and only one day a year to fast. Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement, pretty much where the priests killed two goats, one goat was sent out as a goat of scapegoat. It pretty much represented Israel's sin being separated and the other goat was killed and the blood was sprinkled on the mercy seat and this symbolized your sins are paid for. And God says, when this procession is happening, when your sins are being atoned, covered, I want you on that day to afflict your soul. Now in the original language, it simply means, and as Israel practiced it for 3,500 years, is to fast. This was a fast of walking in brokenness before God and part of this fast, God commanded Israel to do this. Do not work, okay? So in Isaiah 58, have you noticed, God is coming in and rebuking Israel and he's saying this, on the day of fasting, he's like, I've chosen that day, but he said, you are working. And on the top of that, he says, all of the people under you are working. You're making people pull in double shifts and he's like, you're exploiting your workers. So God is coming in and saying, he's like, that's not what I asked you. I asked you very clearly on the day of Atonement, do not work. So the problem with Israel was that they were disobeying God while fasting. So anytime that we disobey God while fasting, well, that fast is not going to bring the results that God wants us to bring. So the goal is not to stop fasting. The goal is to stop disobeying God. Come on somebody, all right? So now for us as Christians, that is not the requirement. There's nowhere in the Bible, in the New Testament where the scripture tells us that if you are fasting, stop working. So that doesn't apply to us and Jesus' blood covered our sin. We no longer have priests bringing once a year to goats killing one and sending one into the wilderness. So that is done and completed in Jesus Christ. To receive salvation, you don't have to fast but you still have to humble yourself. Come on somebody. To receive the gift of eternal life, you don't have to mourn and walk afflicting your soul but you do have to surrender your soul. You're with me. Now, when it comes to Christian fasting, which is different than the Old Testament fasting, we don't have to stop working. We're not doing it on the day of Atonement. We don't have the day of Atonement. We have the day of salvation. And the day of salvation could be any day for anybody. The rest of the principles will still apply to us. Now I want you to notice five things got correct. So five things he requires during his fast that will still apply to us even in the New Testament. And now this is what I'm going to agree with the quote that if you're fasting and gossiping, well, go ahead and start eating. I would like to say go ahead and just stop gossiping. But let me highlight five things in the scripture that God says he requires on his kind of a fast. And we will take the verses. So I'm going to do a little bit of reading.  This is Sunday morning. This is a church time and this is time for the Bible. In verse six of 58, it says the following. Is this not a fast that I have chosen to lose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, to let the oppressed go free and that you break every yoke. So the first thing that God expects us during a fast is while we're fasting, if we've been doing this before fasting or we're still doing that, this has to stop. And that we have to stop hurting other people. It's plain and clear. Now none of us in here have slaves. If you still have slaves somewhere in your basement, stop it. Like that's illegal. But that's wrong. But since we don't have slavery, that's been abolished, praise God. And we no longer have whole people in slavery who owe us money. We simply report them to collections and then the other people deal with them, lawyers deal with them and everything. We still as Christians are possible to hold people hostage and hurt people with our words and with our behavior.  This is a good moment. When you're fasting, it's a good moment to examine your heart, make sure your heart, fasting has to lead to forgiveness. Come on, somebody. Fasting has to lead to forgiveness. Maybe it's your ex, maybe they, you are right to be angry at them.  But you are not the judge. You have to release them. And God says this, is this not a fast I have called? And he says, hey, stop binding people. Stop putting unnecessary restrictions, bondages on people's lives that's not supposed to be there.  Guys like, let go of that. Stop doing that, come on, somebody. Number two, I want you to notice, and it's verse seven, is it not to share your bread with the hungry and that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out? When you see the naked that you cover him, the second one is God is saying, when you're fasting, start helping people. So the first one is stop hurting people and the second one is start helping people. During a fast, it's normal for the Lord to lead you to someone you can help. It could be financially, it could be with an advice, it could be with a contract, it could be with a good deed, it could be with a good word. Pay attention to those promptings, why? Because God is far more interested, not only in the food not coming into our mouth, but also things exiting our heart, like love, charity, peace, and joy. Many times during the fast, so this is called the sin of omission. Sin of omission simply means it's when you have the opportunity to do something good and you choose not to do that. The sin of commission, it's the other one where we mentioned where you're not supposed to do something and you are doing that. And so it may seem like, well, I'm fasting already, everybody leave me alone. See, but God looks at fasting and he's like, I want you to help the poor. I want the church to help the poor. I want the Christians to help the poor. Now it's easy to tell, eh, you know what? They made poor financial decisions, it's their problem. I'm gonna go ahead and pay taxes and let the government help the poor. There's a welfare program, there's homeless shelters, it is not my job. But my friends, when you are beginning to draw closer to the Lord, you have to submit yourself to God's requirements. And God is saying, I hold you accountable to help the poor. I want you to help the poor. The number three, I want you to notice what the Lord says. If we further into verse seven, it says, and do not hide yourself from your own flesh. Number three means don't avoid your physical and your spiritual family. Do not hide yourself from your own flesh. That simply means don't run from your family.  You didn't choose them. It's like God in heaven chose you, put you into them.  And after that, you're like, you know what, I still at least, I'm gonna see you at Christmas and Thanksgiving. And I'm not even sure about the Thanksgiving at Christmas because none of you are vaccinated or maybe you're not vaccinated so they're not inviting you. And so you're like, you know what, I'm gonna see you later. I'm gonna send you a few emojis every few weeks. And so you're beginning to avoid your family.  It's a place of hurt. It's a place of disappointment. It's a place of they rejected you, they called you with names and everything. But you guys, that's still your family. Even if it's dysfunctional, it's still your family.  Christian, as a Christian, how could you? Did God ever disown you when you hit into trouble? Come on somebody. Well, my family doesn't serve God. So what, they're still your family. Do not turn your back on your family. It's part of the fast.  And it also means your spiritual family. You know, some of us are really good with the physical family, but we sure do not like other Christians or be close to them. We're like, I just wanna come to church. And then honestly, the moment I'm doing an altar call, you're hitting the road. You're like, I don't wanna talk to anybody. I don't want nobody to talk to me. And the last thing I need to do is go to a small group on Tuesday night. And somebody to ask me, so how do you feel about that? No, I'm not going there. And so you're avoiding your spiritual family. I wanna challenge you this season. Stop running from your physical and your spiritual family. Come on somebody, drop that fire emoji in the chat if you're receiving this right now. Number four, Isaiah 58, verse nine. And this says the following, the last, the latter part of verse nine. If you take away the yoke from your midst, as we mentioned, not to do bad stuff, but listen to this. The pointing of the finger. Now I'm pretty sure it's not talking about the middle finger because at this time, this was not the practice of the middle thing. This is talking about a person who is in self-judging, self-righteous, condemning way points the finger at other people. Whether it's at the ungodly or at godly people. In other words, the Lord is saying, remember, when you're pointing a finger, you got three ones pointing back at you. So stop pointing your finger at other people. Stop judging other people. That does not mean that if your brother or sister sins that you cannot come alongside and bring correction, but you need to pray for them first and then you speak truth in love. There's a difference between speaking the truth in love and the pointing of a finger. The pointing of the finger, some people have a gift. They think they have a gift of the Holy Ghost. And some of them today, it's pretty obvious, online especially, all they have is internet connection. And they think that because they have an internet connection it entitles them to be an internet police. And everybody's live shim and they're doing videos about how this man is wrong. That man is wrong. This person is wrong.  All they're doing is pointing a finger. And God's like, if you're fasting listen, stop pointing a finger. Come on, fasting is the time to repent. Fasting is not a time to begin to point fingers at other people. Are you with me? Number five, if we read that verse further, it says the following, the pointing of the finger and speaking wickedness, speaking wickedness. Amplified Bible says speaking harsh, speaking wicked words. And so what this means is that God is saying as the food is not going in, the Hebrew word for fasting is close your mouth. That's fasting. And we're doing, it's easier to close your mouth with food.  Come on. I know it's early in Sunday morning, talk to me.  Did you see him?  Come on, Subah. So the fast that God has chosen requires five things. We stop hurting, we start helping. And then it says, don't avoid your family. Stop pointing fingers and stop spreading rumors. Stop gossiping. The church is supposed to be united. The church cannot be united if we backbite everybody. A fasting is a beautiful time to repent of our speech sins, of our vocal sins.  With our mouth we can speak things about other brother, other sisters. We can speak against the pastors. We can speak against other leaders. We can constantly judge and spread that. And I just wanna encourage you, if you're one of those people that it seems like everything that is wrong in the family or in the business or in the church comes to you and it seems like all of the people trust you because you're such a godly person. It seems like all the wounded people come to you. I wanna ask you a question. Is it because you're also wounded? And what are you doing with that? Are you helping to fend the flame of gossip? Mal is speaking. Or are you simply bringing water buckets every time somebody's bringing fire and saying, you know what, we shouldn't talk about like this. If you can't talk to their face, don't talk behind their back.  Why? Because sooner or later, whatever you hear about somebody else, that person, mark my word, three months, four months, six months, will have exactly same conversation about you to somebody else. Some people just have that gift of walking around and gossiping, walking around and spreading rumors. And it divides the body of Christ.  We're gonna speak love. We are going to speak peace toward each other. Come on, somebody, those of you on live stream, drop that, I don't know the emoji for stop gossiping, but I'm pretty sure somebody can figure out an emoji for stop gossiping. But we are not going to gossip. We are going to pray for people instead. And we are going to, if you have a really a big problem, we're gonna speak to them, not about them. Come on. That's the requirement of the fast that God has chosen. And the Lord says, if we correct these behaviors, if we change these behaviors, He promises us few things. And so this is now, I'm going to go into the seven rewards of this fast. If we do it the right way. The seven rewards of God's chosen fast. The seven rewards of God's chosen fast. And let's look into the first one. And that is verse eight. So I'm still in the same chapter, verse eight. Then your light will break forth like the morning. And later on, God said the similar thing. Then your light shall dawn in verse 10. Your light shall dawn in the darkness.  So this simply means that your light will break through.  So the Lord is saying, when I and you, us as believers, we're fasting in God's way. He promises this. Your light will break through. God doesn't say you will get the light. That means as a Christian, you already have the light, but this light will break through. How many of you notice that about, you know, first week of fasting or something, your spiritual sensitivity to the Holy Spirit is greater than before?  Something about this shell life, something about this flesh, something about these carnal desires. I'm not saying that they're gone, but they seem to kind of fade away and the light seems to shine brighter that's inside of you. I'm not talking about the new age way where, you know, everybody kind of has their light and they're trying to keep that light. I'm talking about the light of the world, Jesus Christ shining brighter. The Lord's saying, when you're fasting the right way, I will cause your light not to get brighter. I will just cause it to break through because all these restrictions of the flesh and the soul and other things will begin to fade away. In fact, I will cause your darkness because everybody who has light also has some parts in their life that are dark, where we delete things that nobody, hope nobody will see it, or we simply, oh Lord, I'm sorry, I did it again, kind of a stuff, or maybe certain behaviors, attitudes, maybe some people live in having addictions. The Lord is saying, I will turn your darkness into a noon day. I will turn your addiction and I will turn it into something else. I will take your bad habits and I will turn it to something else. I will take your darkness and turn it into a noon day. I will take your weakness and I will give my strength in that weakness. I will bring revival to your problems and your inner struggles. Somebody give God some praise right now. The second thing I want you to notice, he says in verse eight, your healing will spring forth speedily. And if you go a little bit later in verse 11, the similar thing the Lord says, and he says the following in there, he says, he will strengthen your bones. So twice God says, when you're fasting the right way, not only your light will break through, meaning there will be a spiritual breakthrough, but he's saying there will be healing to your body. That's incredible. This has spoken hundreds and hundreds of years before Christ, that's over 2,500 years from now. There is a lot of scientific data that has been done and released already on the power of intermittent fasting. The fasting is actually pretty popular in our culture today, especially the small fastings and the intermittent fasting. There's a lot of science that is behind that and I'm gonna read to you just few of the things that fasting does to your body. Fasting promotes blood sugar control by reducing insulin resistance. Fasting promotes better health by fighting inflammation. Fasting may enhance heart health by improving blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Fasting may boost brain function and prevent neurodegenerative disorders. Fasting aids weight loss and boosts metabolism. Fasting increases a growth hormone which is vital for metabolism. Fasting could delay aging and extend longevity. There's been a science, it's not as much science as the one that I've just read from mainly the smaller fasts, but there are clinics and I watched few of the doctors this week, some of them are in Germany, some of them here in the States, videos that get millions of views on YouTube and these are legitimate doctors. There's not just people who bought their degree on eBay. These are legitimate doctors who, for example, in Germany, they have a clinic where they host people, I think it's over 30 years, host people for extended fastings in the clinic and they do studies on them. They've released a lot of studies, but because it's not a lot of people doing this, they cannot necessarily say, well, this is it, but studies have been done on people who fast for 21 days, including 40 days, just on water. The improvements in their health is remarkable. Like I've read some testimonies and these are not Christian doctors, these are not Christian people fasting. These are people who are simply fighting depression, fighting some other things, fighting, taking 20, 30 medications and they're giving 21 days, they're locking themselves in this clinic, the doctor is watching their vitals and they're drinking a little bit of broth during the lunch, they're still exercising, you see all of their regime or what they do throughout the day and these testimonies are incredible of what is happening with these people. God is promising this in His word. If we're fasting the right way, your healing will spring forth. Your bones will be made stronger. Why? Because first few days when you're fasting, your body is getting rid of all the toxins, that's why you feel sicker, that's why you feel dizzy a little bit, that's why you have bad breath for the remaining of the fast, but that's why all of these things are happening, why? Because the body is like, finally, you stopped eating. Finally, we can focus all the energy on repairing the rest of the stuff you've damaged. And the body is removing all of those toxins and finally, and you're like, oh, but I'm gonna die, no, no, no, listen to me very carefully. There's a difference between hunger and craving. Hunger goes away after three days. Why? Because the body begins to eat off of the rest of the cells that, not the good cells, don't worry, they're not eating the good stuff, plus we don't have much good left anyway. Okay, so because of the sin and the curse, a lot of our stuff is already damaged, but the body begins to eat the extra fats. Therefore, your body is fine, but the craving is here. Ask any person who went on a 21 day or 40 day water fast, they'll tell you one thing. After three days, no problem. All the craving you get is right here. Why? Because you're used to eating. Food, for us, is a source of pleasure, it's a source of comfort, and it's a source of community. Like, I miss those moments, you know, where we get a chance to chew on something that's not water, you know?  You're like, it's still two o'clock, and it's still only the fifth day. It seems like I've been fasting already for three years, and it's only one day and a half, because everything slows down. Why? Because the body is working on the inside supernaturally by God to repair certain things, to restore certain things.  Please do not fast. You will hurt yourself, and you will hurt the baby. But those of you who are healthy, hey, jump on. Let's do it. Two weeks left, let's do it.  It's, when you're fasting in the first year, in the first month of the year, you're tithing your time. Not just your money, you're tithing your time. Even if you do three days, and then take a break and do another day, or do some kind of a fast in the next 14 days, I believe God will bless it. Let's go further. Benefit number three. The Bible says in here that your righteousness will go before you in verse eight.  I love this. It says this. Your righteousness? Now, it does not mean that if you and I are fasting, that God's gonna make us more righteous. We are righteous by the blood of Jesus Christ. Righteousness is a gift from God. But righteous living is we work out what God has worked in. And this is what God is saying. As you're going into this year, I want your righteousness to go before you, and my glory to go behind you. That means that you and I are gonna be surrounded. Your righteousness, meaning the right living, pursuing the Lord, doing what is right before God, not just before the society, not just being politically correct, not just doing what everybody's doing, but doing something that you know is right before God. God's like, your righteousness, that means you're not gonna be a person of compromise.    God's gonna conquer your weaknesses. I'm not saying you'll be perfect, but God is saying there will be righteousness about you. And God's like, when your righteousness goes before you, my glory will go behind you. Come on, somebody. Not the devil, not your ex, not your past sins, not the pharaoh trying to hunt you down. God's like, my glory, the same way as it happened with Israel, will go behind you. I will protect you behind you.  A lot of people adventure into businesses, into families, but because they have a lot of hidden sin, what happens is the sooner or later people find out those sins and everything falls apart.  Come on. Number four. I want you to see in verse 11 and verse 12, the Lord will guide you continually. No, verse nine, I apologize, verse nine. Then you shall call and the Lord will answer.  I want you to notice twice, he says, then. So when we do the fast in God's way, then he says, your light, your righteousness, my glory. And then he says in here, then you will call and I will answer. I love this because God pretty much guarantees a quick answers to prayer. I wonder if lack of fasting and fasting in a way that pleases God is one of the hindrances for answered prayer.  Maybe you're tired of living life praying and not seeing answers. I wanna encourage you to fast because the reward of fasting is you will call, I will answer.  God help! And God's like, I'll get that, I'll pick that up. I'll answer that, come on somebody. Number five, and that is in verse 11 now, he says the following, the Lord will guide you continually. I believe that for our church and I wanna speak that to every person for this year.  It might be a conversation you will have with somebody. It will be a random email that you might get. It might be the shower thought. Have you ever had those shower thoughts? Like the changes to trajectory of your life? It could be a message that you'll receive. It could be somebody will say something behind this pulpit and that will have nothing to do with what the Holy Spirit will use it to spark in your heart. But the Lord is saying, I will guide you and I love this word continually. So not just one time, I will guide you continually. A testimony that I have last year when we did the fast. And one of the things that I prayed and as I'm praying for this year and I'm praying for all of us as well is the Lord guide each one of our people individually and continually. Isaiah Saldivar was in my house, he was here speaking and then we went after the service to my house. We were just chatting, eating and Isaiah starts unloading me about how important for me, he talks about himself first and he's like how important it is to be on YouTube, how many people it can impact. And I'm listening at first, I'm very defensive. I'm like, bro, you're not a pastor. We have a local church. I got a lot of stuff to do. I don't have this thing to be, to do this thing that you're doing. And he keeps, you know, he's persistent. So he keeps on going and going and going and going. And then came a point where something just switched. My heart caught fire. I mean, literally, I'm like burning on the inside. That this, this is it. So I drop him off at the hotel. I'm going to sleep. I can't sleep at night. I'm tossing back and forth. And I'm literally getting this like, like, that's it. God is like speaking to me. So wake up very early, like three or four. I'll run to church. I'm praying and like, I'm literally like on fire. Like I need a fire truck to put the fire out. And I'm texting Isaiah. I'm like, Isaiah, something happened to me. Something happened to me. You know, I fasted three months before for God to lead me. It was a casual conversation on Wednesday night at my house. But see, God knows, listen to me.  You won't miss it. You will know. You will plan not to come to hungry Jen, but God knows that's what you're supposed to be. And he will bring you here. That's where you'll find your wife. You just won't miss it. It will be that one decision. It will be that one call. And he was just like, man, so much of my life changed by one thing. But please understand, God will guide you continually. Hey. So three weeks later, you know, on Thursday night, I launched in my basement, start streaming. Everything changed. We started to see now, this week, I think I broke 220,000 subscribers on YouTube. The amount of testimonies that I get today, the amount of people that come to our church because of that, it's incredible. I look back, I was in the morning today, in the early morning prayer, and I was kind of reflecting and praying for the church, touching the pews, praying for people who will sit here, praying for people online. And I was remembering, then I said, Lord, that's incredible. You never showed that to me during a fast. But I know that you were planning for that. I could have missed it. But God's like, no, you won't.  It will be clear. Your heart will catch fire. All of your cylinders are gonna be... Waaah! Or sometimes there's a still small voice. You just know that you know that you know that you know. This is God. You won't miss it, my friend. Are you with me? Two more. The Bible says in here, he will satisfy the afflicted soul. So not only the Lord will guide you, he will satisfy your afflicted soul. That means that when there is another translation says, he will satisfy your soul in the land of desert or in a parched place. That means that if you're going through this year, through a parched place, through a dry place, the Lord promises this, that he will still satisfy your soul. Now this doesn't mean that everything in your life might be all right, but he says you will be all right. Yesterday we had a volcano in the ocean. There's waves hitting our shores in Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska, and California. Just yesterday one guy came in and tried to take out a Jewish synagogue in Texas. Thankfully he was, everybody was safe and the shooter and that person was taken out. There's a winter blaze heading east coast. We're in the highest rate right now of COVID infections in our region. I'm gonna tell you one thing. This year, the world is only gonna get crazier.  There's no going back. The world is just getting crazier. There's gonna be more misinformation online. There's gonna be more lying, more political control online, and not just online, but in the world. Everybody's gonna try to control your life and God is not saying that your world is going to be wet. Sometimes the world will be dry. He says, I'll satisfy you in the midst of it. I'll satisfy your soul. I'll satisfy your heart. I'll satisfy your family. I will take care of you. I will help you even in the parched ground. You may say, but I will lose my job. You won't lose God's provision. God will satisfy you. Come on, somebody.  Those of you online, I want you to get ready to pray with us right now. I'm gonna read to you the last thing. And he says the following. You shall be like a watered garden. Come on, touch your neighbor. I'm like a garden. You're sitting next to a garden.  Those of you online, drop that in the chat. I will be like a spring of water whose waters do not fail. Those from among you shall build all waste places. You shall rise up the foundations of many generations and you shall be called the repairer of the breach and the restorer of streets to dwell in. The last thing, God is promising if you fast the right way, I'll make you a blessing. The first six things I mentioned how God will bless you.  Two things I want you to watch. He's saying, first, I'll make you a garden. You go to a garden to get food. The second thing he says, I'll make you a spring of river. No, no, I'm not talking about glass of water. A spring of river. And then he says this, some of you guys are going to rebuild the foundations for future generations. That means that in your family, nobody believed God, you're the first one. In your family, nobody had a successful marriage, you're the first one. In your family, nobody was there who did not battle with illness. You will lay a foundation for future generations. I don't know who I'm speaking to. And then he says in here, he says, you will restore the ruins of old cities. That means that in our city, we will make an impact for the kingdom of God. That means in San Antonio, we will make an impact for the kingdom of God. That means the devil, the racism, drug dealers, listen, pedophiles, rapists, all of those bad people. Whatever they've ruined in our city, maybe some bad pastors or bad Christians who ruined faith for other people, God is saying, I'll watch that you will restore the ruins of an Asian city. That's our church. That's you and I, come on somebody. That is Hungarian family. We will repair the ruins of our city. Hallelujah. The last thing that he said there is he said, and you shall be called the repairer and the restoreer. That means the people will start calling you by a different name.  You'll be known with a different name because of what God is about to do in your life. I wanna stand in agreement right now with each and every one of you for these rewards. I'm praying for these rewards for your life. I'm praying for these rewards for my life and for our church. Lord, may your light spring forth. Lord, may healing spring forth. Those of you with diabetes, those of you with problem with insulin in your body, but those of you who have problem with maybe memory already, or you have problem with different challenges in your health. Lord, we're believing for total healing in Jesus' name. For those people who feel like everywhere they go, their past hunts them. Lord, may righteousness go before them and your glory go behind them.  Man, what am I supposed to do? And you constantly live your life in reaction to everybody's problems instead of in response to your purpose.  For those of us in here today who maybe feel dry and this economy and this political time, as well as in this pandemic has really brought your faith down. And you really just, honestly, you're just tired. You're afraid. You're afraid of building.   The world is so crazy. God is saying, I wanna satisfy you in the partial place. Even in tri-cities, the desert, I will satisfy you. Come on, somebody, whatever you are at right now, you may be in the poor country. You might not have access to education. You might not even have access to living, to water. God is saying, I wanna satisfy your soul in the desert. But I believe this is what for everybody.  I wanna make your home to be an open door for other people to be a disciple.  Some of you this year, you will go on the mission trips. Some of you, you're gonna participate in healing and deliverance services. Some of you will go out and evangelize on the streets. Some of you are gonna join the intercession. Why?  Come on, lift those hands right now. I want us to begin to pray right now just for that. Begin to intercede right now just for that. Begin to ask the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit, let these rewards fall upon me. Let your light break through. Come on, pray through these seven rewards right now. Those of you online, I want you to pray through these seven rewards right now over your life. Place your hand up on yourself, one hand up to God. Those of you on Zoom, raise your hands right now. Pray over these seven rewards over your life. May this be the year. Father, we ask you, Lord, that this would be the year, Lord, where things will break, Father. We ask you, Father, that this will be the year, Lord, where financial burdens, Lord. Financial curses over our life will break, Father. We ask you, Lord, for the things that you have asked us to receive from you, Lord. We ask you, Lord, that you would allow this year, Lord, to break, Lord, the things off of our life that has caused stagnation, Father. We ask you, Lord, that your word is true and evident in our life. We ask you, Father, that you would, Lord, break the curse, Lord, of what you have. Father, I pray that blessing over every person online and those in person. May your light break forth. May your healing break forth. Lord, I ask you in Jesus' name, when we call, may you answer us. Lead us this year into prosperity. Lead us this year into breakthrough. Lead us into wisdom. I pray for those that are overwhelmed with their prosperity, that you will give them wisdom. Lord, God, let supernatural leading happen this year. Father, I pray for those that you will let their righteousness and the glory of God follow them in Jesus' name.  And Lord, I pray that each and every one of us that this year we will be a blessing, that we will be like a garden and like a spring of water, that we will rebuild ruins, that we will lay foundation for future generations and that we will be known not by our wealth, but by our generosity, but by our giving, by the people we're helping. Lord, we choose to fast your way. We choose to repent. We repent of gossip. We repent of rumor spreading and malice. Lord, we repent of hurting people. We release forgiveness. Lord, we choose to help the poor. Lord God, we are not going to point our fingers at other people. We're gonna examine our own heart in repentance. Lord, we're not going to avoid our family and our spiritual family. We're not gonna run. We're going to run to them, Lord, in Jesus' name. Hey, thanks for watching this video. If you enjoyed this content and this was a blessing to you, would you help us and hit thumbs up so that it could help more people to discover this video. It costs you nothing, but it can go a long way to help with the algorithm. As well as if you're not subscribed to our channel, hit subscribe, click on the bell so that you can be reminded each time that we upload videos. Thank you so much for being a part of this community. If you're interested in learning more about Hungry Gen, our internship, our conferences, deliverance, and so many other things, go to HungryGen.com for more information. And as always, remember, better is not good enough, the best is yet to come.


TikTok said it has suspended live streaming and new content from its platform as it assessed tough new laws to crack down on fake news about Roshan's armed forces. Netflix said it was pulling out its protest at the Invasion Visa MasterCard PWUC has also joined a list of Western film's cutting ties. TikTok, which has around 36 million users in Roshan said its move was about ensuring the safety of its staff and users since Friday, anyone who writes news dim falls about the military could face up to 15 years in jail.


Good morning everybody. Wonderful day, first talk of the graph processing death room here at FOSSTEM. And the title of the talk is Open Cipher and Evolving Query Language for Property Graphs. And my name is Stefan Plantico. I'm the lead of the Open Cipher Language group at Neo4j. That is the group at Neo4j that dominantly works on the design of the Cipher language. And it's not just me, that's also my colleagues, Petra Salmer, Anders Taylor, Tobias Lindaker, Mats Whitberg and Alistair Green. And I'd like to talk about Cipher today. And for those, this is I guess a pretty diverse crowd since the topic of the death room is graph processing in general. So I thought I'd give a quick introduction to property graphs. And Cipher, I'd like to talk a little bit about what we're doing in the Open Cipher project in order to establish Cipher as a standard for graph querying. And then the meat of the talk will be a bit of a sneak preview. I won't be able to go deep into all the topics, but I want to talk about some of the things that we have planned for Cipher 10, the next major addition of Cipher language. And of course some closing words on how you could get involved if you're interested, if you want to try your hand at language design, if you're working on a graph database product, etc. So property graphs with Cipher. Who here knows what property graphs are? Okay. Works as property graphs. Still reasonable. Okay. Who knows what Cipher is? Okay. Good. So it's good that I have this section. Good. Property graphs. Well, data, right? How do we model it? And people have been doing that for a long time in 15 different ways. Everybody knows SQL and tables, maybe some here know RDF as a dominant way of modeling. The way that we are interested in from Cipher is property graphs, which is the graph data model that was, I think, born out of observations of application engineers. Right? So if you're writing an application, an enterprise setting or some other setting, and you want to model your data and it feels natural for you to model your data as a graph and in many cases that is just a natural way to model your data, then this data model is for you. So what do you have here? We have two nodes or two people in the real world and they're friends. Hopefully that happens at the end of Boston for some of you guys in here. So let's capture some of that. Let's say one of them is a person. The other is also a person. And then another, also a director maybe for a movie. And then they could capture all kinds of information about them. So one of them maybe is called Ed Jones and he's 37 and his favorite color is blue. And the other is called Peter Fry and he has a nickname and maybe we even have information about his biography or something like that, right? And that's great. And then they're friends but they're not just friends but they have a really good friendship. It's going strong. And they're friends since 2003, right? And just the way it pops up here on the screen. Can you see that by the way in the back? Is that visible? I'm not sure if I can do it. Is there a way to broadcast the link to the slides maybe, Michael? Could you look into it? Could you look into that? Cool, thanks. That's what I can do, sorry. So the way it pops up here, right? If you were trying to model that situation that's maybe what you would put on a whiteboard. It probably wouldn't look as pretty on a whiteboard but generally that's what you would do, right? And so that's exactly what you do in the property graph model because the property graph model, this is a node, right? A person. It has labels that kind of classify it like being a person or a directive. And this thing here in the middle is called a relationship. They're friends, right? And then of course both nodes and relationships can have properties and that is the property graph model. So how do you query it? Well, we invented this language called Cypher at Neo and the property graph model is very visual and we try to keep that flavor or that was really key to Cypher, I think, in the design of Cypher. So the way you query graphs is by essentially writing tiny little graphs of data that you're interested in in ASCII art. And then you're getting all the instances in the database that match that ASCII art pattern and that's the result that you get. And here we see a bit of an example of Cypher. So you see my mouse, I guess. Here we have match. I'm looking for a person, a binary variable called me. So relationship friend to some other friend over here. Could be a person, could be something else, actually. Maybe I am also friend with an animal or so. And then I'm saying where, me.name is Frank Black. So I can filter this predicates, right? And I can say, okay, I'm looking for friends that are older than me. That's nice. So that finds me little pieces of graph. And then, of course, in the end for my application, I may want to have a tabular projection so I can say something like here, okay, give me the name of my friend in uppercase as a name. And maybe they have a title and I want the title as well. This is kind of the style of querying of Cypher. And then we have, of course, it's nice to get data out of your database but you also want to get the data in. So we have an update language that also uses the pattern syntax which makes the whole language very visual.  That means you have just created a new note called person and then we can maybe record the name and say something like set you.name. Here's some name, Aaron Fletcher. I stole this slide. And then we can, of course, create a relationship. And I say, okay, I want to connect this guy to me. In this case, me here is this Frank Black from above and now they're friends, right? And then the last point to highlight here, Cypher is already to a degree a compositional language in the sense that you cannot just write queries like find me something and then return it but you can find something and then, you know, do other projections, do aggregations and kind of create these linear pipelines of processing your data until you actually have the result that you want. Here, in this case, we're kind of collecting friends together with the number of enemies they have if you would have such a graph, right? And here the highlight a bit is how we do aggregation and Cypher. Yeah, they're all kinds of patterns. Patterns are the central concept, right? So we have note patterns for kind of saying, I'm talking about this note in the graph and then you can specify the labels or what properties you expect. You have rigid relationship patterns. Rigid here means that we're only talking about a single relationship, not many, right? So you can say, okay, it must be outgoing, it must have this relationship type, it must have these properties or maybe I don't care about the direction, all kinds of variations. It's very visual, right? And then there are also variable length relationship patterns. That's when you're looking for sequences of arbitrary lengths, right? When you're saying, okay, someone over there, someone over there connected, I don't care through how many steps, that kind of thing. And Cypher also supports paths as first-class values. So you can also not only find persons and their relationships in the graph, but also longer chains and treat them as values that you return to the application, right? It's a little primer to Cypher. So what is the open Cypher project? And again, who is here aware of the open Cypher project as opposed to just Cypher? Oh, okay, some, good, good. So open Cypher is a community effort to evolve Cypher and make it the de facto language for querying property graphs. And there are a couple of open Cypher implementations. I would expect that the most known still is the implementation by Neo4j, of course, but there's an implementation by SAP, there's an implementation by Redis, there's an implementation on top of Postgres by a Korean company called AgentsGraph. There's a Polish implementation about to be released. There's Cypher for Petri Spark. There's another thing I'm going to talk about in a minute. So there's a couple of implementations already. And what is this community? This community are the people who take part in either the calls or the meetings of the so-called open Cypher implementers group. And that's a group of vendors, researchers, implementers, interested parties, very diverse. It evolves Cypher through an open process, right? And so last year we had like three meetings, presented discuss, agree upon new features, and in this way things are driven forward. We have a website, yay, which actually has grown quite a lot last year. It has quite a few features, things you can find there. There's a blog, you have some overview about new features or features under consideration. It has all the information on meetings. It has, if you really want to dig deeper into all of this, it has a lot of upcoming meetings, recordings, slides, references, links to papers. We try to maintain a bibliography for the property graph space, right? Not just for Cypher there. And it has a bunch of artifacts, which are the actual outcomes that we kind of publish for people to help people adopt Cypher beyond what I already listed here. And these are right now the Cypher 9 specification, which just went online last Friday. We have Arntler and EBNF grammars for the language. We have formal semantics. We have a test suite. There's a style guide. So how should you write Cypher, those kinds of things, right? And then on the GitHub repository, the associated GitHub repository, we also host implementations of Cypher, namely that's going to be three. Right now it's one. It's mainly open Cypher for Apache Spark. You'll learn more about that in the next talk. It's going to be soon open Cypher for Grandin. Can't talk too much about this at Foster, but stay tuned, that's going to happen very soon. There's also going to be the open source front-end, which currently still lives in the Neo4j repository, but is more liberally licensed than Neo4j itself, and it's going to be here very soon. Yes, two of these artifacts I'd like to highlight. We just got a notification that our SIGMOD paper on the formal semantics of Cypher has been accepted, so there's now a proper mathematical definition of the semantics of Cypher, which is very important for implementers and also for proper academic treatment of the language. And we're going to see how we're going to, probably not the paper, but an excerpt of the paper is going to be published on open Cypher org. And the other thing that I'd like to highlight here is the TCK. So we have an ever-growing and very extensive suits of cucumber tests, which help you. If you want to build and implement Cypher, you could use that test suit to make sure that your implementation covers the features. Yes, I'm going to skip a bit as I'm running a bit short on time now. Okay, so much for open Cypher. Cypher 9 is what we have. That's essentially what you find in Neo4j today, minus some features that we think are two implementation-specific to be put into the standard, plus some clarifications, plus some other specification documents. But you want to move Cypher to the next level, and for us that is called Cypher 10. And we're working towards that, and we actually have begun to actively work on a natural language specification for that in hope to have that also out this year. And it will cover new features, more extensive subqueries, support for working with multiple graphs in one query, past patterns. It's a bit unclear if that will be part of Cypher 10 or be treated as a separate specification. At this point, configurable pattern matching semantics as well. And I want to talk a little bit about those things in this talk briefly. And the focus here is concepts, not syntax today. Okay, because the syntax of a lot of these things are still in a bit of flux. If you want to be involved in that, then, yeah, join the open Cypher implementation group or join the discussions on GitHub. So here it's about concepts. I was thinking about yesterday going over the slides again what is actually the underlying theme. The underlying theme is really query composition. And what is query composition? Well, what is composition in general? The meaning of the whole is determined by the meaning of its constituents and the rules used to combine them. So what does it mean? You try to organize your query into multiple parts so that you can extract parts of your query and put them somewhere else. And that gives you a lot of flexibility. That means you can reuse pieces of your code. And also it allows you to build more complex queries, more complex data processing workflows, programmatically also. So subqueries. So subqueries is actually an old idea, right? Subqueries are self-contained queries. They run somehow within the scope of an outer context. And that could be a clause. So it's a level of like a select statement in SQL or it could be within an expression. Cypher already has some forms of subqueries, but we want to generalize this and make this better than what we have today. And why is it a good idea to have subqueries? Well, it makes it easier to construct, maintain and read queries. And as I already said, subqueries enable composition, they enable post-processing of results. So the types of subqueries that we want to look at are nested subqueries that basically run any complete request. So you can have two queries, run result, two results, do the union. But you cannot go on after the union, right? And one of the main motivations of adding nested subqueries is what on GitHub is one of the most highly, highly voted up issue is post-union processing, right? To ability to do a union and then on top of the union do sorting and slicing. And here we see a bit of syntax, right? Curlies, then we have a full cypher query with a union in the middle, curly, and then we can go on, right? And say, okay, I have the union of author treats and favorite treats, and now I want to filter those and I'm only interested in the ones where the country of the treat is Sweden and then I sort them by time or something like that, right? That's going to be enabled by this. So let's talk a bit about the other kinds of subqueries because they come in three flavors. The first one is an existential subquery which you see quite a lot in graph querying. You say, okay, find me all instances of the patterns but make sure that this other thing also exists. I don't really need it back and I certainly don't need all of it back. I just need to make sure that something like this pattern also exists to the side. So to give an example here, find me all the actors where something is off here in the example. Yes, it's okay. Find me all the actors that played in a movie with someone that had the same name as them, right? So all the actors, there exists an actor that acted in a movie, right? With some other guys such that the other guy and himself had the same name, right? Other subqueries are scalar subqueries. That's when you just want to use the query to get a value at an expression level. So in this case, we find a director of a movie and then for that director, we want the minimum age of that guy and that we do with a scalar subquery and there's a similar form where we're just retrieving a list of matches. That's going to be subqueries. Let's talk about another big topic for Cipher 10, multiple graphs. So what people sometimes want to do is they want to take an input graph, select something and then they return a tabular projection. But what if instead of returning a tabular projection from my graph, I actually want to return a subgraph and then maybe do something with that subgraph, right? Instead of extracting a table. That's the whole idea. And there's a lot of reasons for wanting to work with multiple graphs. One is this use case I just outlined combining and transforming graphs from multiple sources, versioning, snapshotting, computing, difference graphs, so maybe you want to, you know, yesterday's data, today's data, what is the difference, those kinds of things, right? You might use graph views for access control. It might be helpful for shaping and integrating heterogeneous data. So it's a real feature. There's a lot of interesting topics in multiple graphs. And also it might, graph views also give an interesting, damn it, I shouldn't have done that. Sorry. Give an interesting mechanism for extracting data for kind of saying, okay, I have a graph with a lot of detail and now I'm trying to build up a graph that kind of contains an aggregation or a summary, right, in essence, essentially, of my dataset. So we want that in Cypher. But of course what we have today, usually you have a graph database system, you have a client that talks to it and it talks to a single graph, right? And there we want to move. There's a system that looks more like that, where you have a multiple graphs model, where you have an application server with a client that talks to the graph database system and the graph database system now has a catalog of graphs, right? Many, many graphs separate from each other and you can encourage them, you can combine data from them, you can build new ones, right? That's kind of the goal. And what does it mean for language like Cypher to do that? Well, you need to pass both multiple graphs and tabular data into a query to return both multiple graphs and tabular data from a query and of course you need some means of saying which graph you're talking about, am I matching data from here or am I matching data from there, right? And of course, that's the big topic, I think, you need to be able to construct new graphs from existing graphs, right? And how do you do that? Well, here's a little slide to show an analogy, right? So if you think about how pattern matching works, you write out an Asciate graph pattern of the kind of things you look for, right? And then you find all the potential matches against your data, right? Basically all the actors and the directors that play together in the same movie or something like that, right? And you get all the possible matches, right? You can talk of them first as matches, right? And then of course in language like Cypher that gives you a tabular projection, these matches are turned into records, right? Into tabular data, right? And then if you think about all the records together, that's a table, essentially, at the client side. Well, if matching means going from a graph to a table, then graph construction obviously could mean going from a table to a graph, right? And that's the idea you're pursuing here. So assuming you have a table of, let's say, a node, a relationship and a node, A, R, B, right? And you want to turn it into a graph. Well, you kind of have to describe how to take each row, bundle it up again in a single graph, and then if you take all these single graphs together, you have one new big graph, right? This is the style of processing. We want to explore here for Cypher. And we'll see some of that also in the next talk. So I'm not going to show too much syntax, but the, sorry, need to wait for this to go away. But the upshot is that we want to move to a model where you have a query language that can take data from multiple graphs, that can take tabular data's input, and then produce as part of its processing new graphs and tabular data. And we want it to be compositional, so it is not just in one step, but in multiple steps so that you can really build complex data processing pipelines. There's a lot of things, a bit still up in the air. I think they will become more clear in the first half of 2018, a lot of this. Graphs are addressed using catalog names, or maybe also through some kind of graph URI, right? There's a lot of extensions planned here, like set operations, subqueries over multiple graphs, managing graph persistence, creating views. I don't have the time to double click on all of that. But in this, if you're interested in those topics, there's a lot of material really on openscypher.org to look a bit deeper, or get, of course, involved in the discussions around this on openscypher.org or via Twitter. And a first prototype of how this could all come together, as I already said, will be shown by Martin and Max in the talk on Cypher for Patchy Spark. That's coming up next. Okay, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about path patterns. So, the meat of the graph is patterns, right? Which I already said, so you can kind of find things that are connected. But how can you describe how those kinds of ways in which they are connected, you know, how much expressivity you have there? Right now in Cypher, you can say, okay, connected via relationship, or connected with the relationship of this type in five steps, or in any number of steps, and shortest paths. Roundabout, that's what we can do, right? And we want to take that to the next level. And the next level, actually, there's a lot of research about regular path patterns. There's a language called GXPath from academia that has explored this in great depths. And we want to add these features to Cypher. And what that will give us is the capability to describe essentially the kind of chain of labels along the path that you're matching, in the same way that you would match a piece of text using a regular expression. Roundabout, right? And this also, there's also the desire to combine this with costs. So, just to give a brief example here, is so-called Bacon Path, right? So, if you have an actor who acted in a movie, outgoing, no, yeah, outgoing, and then incoming in a note called Bacon. So, the actor's name we take from a parameter from when we run the query. And there's an end missing here, sorry. And of course, the name of the note called Bacon over there is Kevin Bacon. But what we're looking for is essentially these chains, right? So, we have always actor goes out to movie and then goes again back to another actor. But we want to repeat this. So, we want to have this pattern of outgoing, movie, incoming actor, right? And we want to have this little piece of two relationships with the movie in the middle. We want to have that repeated multiple times, right? We kind of can express this through this language here where we have here the little plus similar to how it works in the Ragex. So, you can say, okay, repeat me this pattern, right? And there's a lot of syntax around this. There's a very long sip by my colleague Tobias Lindaker. So, that's our language change proposal. So, you can find that on GitHub. There's a lot of material on opencypher.org about this. Right, of all the things you can do there. But essentially, very close to Ragex. I already said it, you can sequence. You can do alternatives. You can do grouping. You can do transitive closure. You can also do relationship that you're traversing. And that gives a lot of added power in kind of the kinds of patterns you can match from your graph. We're also looking into a thing called a pass pattern which allows you basically to define some kind of macro so that you can define such a pattern once and then reuse it in your query multiple times. And then also nest those within each other. I'm not going to show that in depth now due to time. Last but not least, another thing we're looking into here is to add a notion of a cost function on top of that so that you can kind of with these defined pass patterns you can associate a way to calculate cost and that is intended to be a means for allowing weighted shortest paths and similar things in the language going forward. Yeah, that's pass patterns. Gets me to the last topic. Configural pattern and path matching semantics. Gets a little technical now, but it's necessary. So the way patterns are matched today in Cypher, if you have a chain, I'm going to read it for those in the back, from A via R1 to a node called B via R2 to a node called C. What it finds you, it finds you all the possible nodes for A, all the possible nodes for B, all the possible nodes for C, all the possible relationships for R1 that connect in A and B, all the possible relationships that connect a node B and a C for R2, but, and here comes the catch, R1 and R2 must be different. And that is called uniqueness, and we've had that in Cypher from basically day one. And the reason we do that is to avoid, if you have a variable length relationship pattern where you can bind arbitrary long chains, if we wouldn't have the uniqueness criterion, variable lengths would give us infinite result sets. So we need some kind of bound on the size of the result sets. That's what happened, that's why we have Cypher morphism. And it works reasonably well in practice, but some people have qualms with it. There's some critique from the theoretical community because certain variable length patterns under different semantics are not tractable from a complexity point of view. There's a lot of discussion on this. So there are these different classes of matching semantics called homomorphism, cypher morphism, and node isomorphism. And our stance on that is that you want to change the language so that the user has a choice of the pattern matching semantics that they can use. And there will be essentially a way of saying, this homomorphism, match with this morphism, match with that morphism. There are other variations of pattern matching semantics like saying I want all the match, or I just want any match. Sometimes that's desired. It's very similar to an existential subquery. And then there's a related topic also because this is called morphism. The whole topic of morphism is repeated because you can ask the same kind of question, not just for arbitrary complex patterns, but also just for the linear patterns. And there's a nice symmetry that in graph theory you have the notion of walk, trail, and path. And it may be a good idea to add that as well to the language so that you can say, OK, overall I want to match with homomorphism, but this little sequential piece in my pattern, I want that to be a trail or I want that to be a node path, et cetera. And also then, of course, other forms of semantics. Once you have a good means of making this configurable, other forms of semantics become possible like saying I want to do shortest paths. I want to do cheapest paths. This is a new cost function that we are going to introduce as part of path patterns. So the summary of all that, we will move, I think, in the direction of having configurable matching semantics so that you will have more flexibility. That will be out of the way of most standard users, but for those users who care, they will kind of have this feature. Not all combinations of the matching semantics are compatible or make sense, so it's a bit tricky to get that configuration matrix right, actually. And the end goal of all of that is that you want to give full control to the user here. OK, so slowly closing down. If you find all of this interesting and intriguing, I'd really like you to get involved. Follow the news at OpenCypher.org or via the OpenCypher Twitter account. There's a great Slack channel for implementers. I think that's also linked via the OpenCypher website. So you can kind of, we have, as I've run this Slack just for people who want to talk about OpenCypher. There's going to be a face-to-face meeting in Europe. Likely in May, we haven't fixed the date yet. And also not the location, but somewhere in Central Europe. And we also schedule new video calls, I think, for 2018. And another way to get involved is, of course, to go to GitHub to look at the discussions, to look at the Cypher improvement request, which are essentially issues. Or to look at full proposals, which are called SIPs. Or talk to us, or just create a pull request if you have a good idea for OpenCypher. And then, yeah, summary. So Cypher 10 is the next evolutionary step for creating property graphs. It will enable multiple graphs composition, subquery composition, configurable matching semantics, and potentially also other features like pass patterns. Thank you very much. No, I didn't get the second part, sorry. Yeah, I'm not sure if I got, okay. So the first question, the first part of the question was, how do you control the runtime characteristics? I think that is, I'm assuming you're referring to performance there, right? Yeah, you don't. Because that you achieve in a different way. You specify the semantics. And then people try to build good implementations, right? That's how it is, right? I think that's really hard to achieve, right? And also that could be very restricting. Even if you did some kind of bound or complexity bounds there, it might be restricted for implementers to do that. It's not even sure that that is a good idea, right? And the second part, I mean, we provide a lot of tooling for analyzing queries. You can use the Cypher front-end. You could use the formal semantics in order to try to better understand what the semantics of a query should be. So we provide some toolings, right? Cool. Other questions? There was one. Existing use case where I need to construct a pipeline consisting of different databases, even different kind of databases, some relational, some not. I'm sort of constructing this myself in code with something like implementing an open Cypher layer on top of that, the solution. That could be a solution. I can imagine that. And you really may want to listen to the talk of that's coming up next. Well, the question was how to use multiple databases together in one query. And if putting an open Cypher on top of that might be a great idea. And I was saying, yes, that's a splendid idea. That's why we're doing something in that direction in the Cypher for Apache Spark project. Okay? Cool. Otherwise, you can also grab Stefan. He's here the whole day. So if you have any questions or if you want to implement open Cypher for your database, then... I want to know you if you want to do that. The next talk? Yes.


Have you left a piece of bread outside and forgotten to throw it off and noticed greenish or bluish spots forming on it? Have you noticed how a bread raises after adding yeast and allowing it to rest for a couple of hours? What about mushroom Manchurian? Have you eaten mushroom Manchurian? Well, all these are examples of fungi. Now fungi as we know are eukaryotic, non-photosynthetic sap profiles. This means that they depend on dead or decaying organic matter for food. As with any organism, fungi are easy to study once they have been classified into different taxa. They have their own kingdom, kingdom of fungi, under which there are many phyla. To classify fungi, biologists use a few major characters. Let's recall those characters of fungi. First off, fungi are made up of long tube-like filamentous structures called hyphae. Now these hyphae interlink together and form a network called mycelium. Now there are two types of hyphae. One is senocytic, which means that the hyphae is continuous. You see here the hyphae is continuous. There is no break in between and the other is septate in which the hyphae are interspersed with cross walls. These lines that you see here are cross walls. Senocytic hyphae are multi-nucleate. They have many nuclei. Septate hyphae, for each part, there's only one nucleus. Fungi are capable of reproducing vegetatively, asexually and sexually. Asexual and sexual reproduction occurs to the formation of spores, which then germinate to produce new fungi. Now these spores are formed inside structures called fruiting bodies. So the structure of the hyphae, the mode of reproduction and the type and structure of the fruiting body produced form the basis of fungal classification. Based on these characters, fungi are classified into four major phyla, phycomycetes, ascomycetes, besediumycetes and dutromycetes. Let's first start with phycomycetes. Examples of phycomycetes include mucor, albugo and rhizopus, which is the infamous bread mold. Phycomycetes have a senocytic mycelium, which means their mycelium is continuous and they are majorly found in aquatic environments. Some are even found in decaying wood like moist places and soil and some are obligate plant parasites. Albugo is extensively a plant parasite. Phycomycetes are capable of reproducing asexually and sexually. Asexual reproduction in phycomycetes occurs through zoo spores or aplanospores. Zoo spores are motile. They have a phlegelum, which helps the spores move. Aplanospores are non-motile. Now these spores, asexual spores, are produced inside structures called sporangium. They are produced endogeniously, which means inside this structure called sporangium. So these dots you can see here, these are the spores. The zoo spores are the aplanospores. Sexual reproduction occurs through zygospores and zygospores look something like this. Now, how are these zygospores formed? Well, when two compatible haploid hyphae come together, they cytoplasm first fuses and then eventually the nuclei fuse to form the diploid zygospore. And the diploid zygospore then undergoes meiosis to produce haploid spores. The next phylum is Ascomycetes or sac fungi. I'll explain in just a minute why they're called sac fungi. Ascomycetes have a lot of economically important fungi. For example, penicillium, from which we get the antibiotic penicillin. Moral, which is considered a delicacy in many parts of the world. And yeast, which is baker's yeast, which is extensively used in baking and brewing industries. They're all examples of Ascomycetes. Ascomycetes have a septate mycelium, which means that their mycelium is interspersed with crosswords. Ascomycetes are mainly decomposers, but some are parasites. For example, candida, which infects humans, is an Ascomycete parasite. Ascomycetes can reproduce asexually through the formation of conidia. Now, conidia looks something like this. Like this white bead-like structures that you see here, these are the conidia, the asexual spores. These conidia are produced exogenously on structures called conidia force. So, conidia force are nothing but modified mycelium, special mycelium. So, on the tip of the mycelium, the conidia are formed. Sexual reproduction in Ascomycetes occurs through the formation of Ascospores. Ascomycetes, Ascospores. Ascospores are arranged in structures called ascii. The plural form is ascii and the singular form is ascus. Now, the ascii look something like this. They are sac-like structures within which the ascospores are arranged. Because of this, Ascomycetes are also called sac fungi. These ascii are sac-like structures. Now, altogether, Ascospores and ascii are arranged inside this bigger structure called Asco-carp. So, this entire thing is the Asco-carp. These gray lines here, they are the ascii. Inside those ascii are the Ascospores. So, Asco-carps are the fruiting bodies for Ascomycetes. The fruiting bodies from which the spores are spread around and germinate. The next phylum is Bacidium Icetes. Examples of Bacidium Icetes include agaricus, which are mushrooms and puffballs and smut. Bacidium Icetes also have a septate mycelium like Ascomycetes. And they are the plant parasites, smut and raster examples of plant parasites. Some also grow in moist places like soil and decaying wood. Bacidium Icetes can reproduce asexually but not through the formation of spores. This is what makes Bacidium Icetes unique. Asexual reproduction in Bacidium Icetes is through fragmentation. Now, what is fragmentation? Basically, it's just one hyphae splitting into many pieces. And each of these hyphae then form a new fungal network. Sexual reproduction is through Bacidium spores. Bacidium Icetes, Bacidio spores. Bacidio spores are formed exogenously on structures called Bacidia. Let's take a look at this image to understand Bacidio spores better. So, this entire structure here, this is called the Bacidio cap within which you have these finger-like projections which are the Bacidia or the singular is Bacidium and exogenously on the Bacidium for haploid Bacidio spores are formed. So, this bigger structure is the Bacidio cap. These finger-like structures within the Bacidio cap are the Bacidia and outside the Bacidia exogenously these Bacidio spores are formed. So, this entire structure of Bacidio cap is the fruiting body for Bacidium Icetes. Like Asco carps are the fruiting body for Asco mycetes, these Bacidio carps are the fruiting body for Bacidium mycetes. The last fungal phylum is Dytromycetes which are also called Imperfect fungi. Why are they called Imperfect fungi? We'll get to that in just a minute. Some examples of Dytromycetes include Altenaria and Celomycetes. Dytromycetes have a septate mycelium. Dytromycetes are found growing in litter and some are even parasites. Now, Dytromycetes is generally for fungi that don't fit the mold. This is because they reproduce only through asexual or vegetative means. There is no sexual reproductive structure formed. Vegetatively, Dytromycetes reproduce through fragmentation and budding. Asexualy, they reproduce through conidious pores. Now, these Dytromycetes are a bit of a grey area in fungal classification. You see, there were a few species of fungi whose sexual structure was quite different morphologically from its asexual structure. So, those sexual structures were classified under some other phylum like Ascomycetes maybe. But their asexual structure was classified here under Dytromycetes, thinking that these fungi didn't have sexual structures at all. But later, research and evidence indicated that the sexual structure and the asexual structure belong to the same species. So, whatever was classified here, whatever asexual structure that was classified here, was then moved along with the sexual structure to a higher phylum. So, this grey area is important in highlighting that classification is not a rigid structure. There is always room for improvement. When scientists discover new evidence, they may have to reevaluate the taxon and witchin organism as classified. Keep in mind that the evidence need to be solid. It has to be concrete evidence and scientists just can't move organisms willy-nilly. In fact, many of the older phyla that were used to classify fungi have now become obsolete and have been replaced with newer phyla.


Nuri, what can you tell us about the growing dystopian reality in Xinjiang? Imagine that you just wanted to go about with your daily routine. You get up in the morning, try to go to work, try to go to school, take your children to daycare. You have to pass through security checkpoints. You are forced to surrender your phone for data scan. You are allowing the officials to do iris scans, in some instance, biometric data collection. And while all this is happening, you see non-weager individuals waving hands or not showing any sympathy for you to go through a different method to allow yourself to be subjected to this kind of surveillance illegal search. So that's kind of the daily routine for the Uyghurs. And this is so invasive and pervasive around the region. Some policy experts liken it to an unopened prison. Oftentimes we focus rightly so on the people who have been detained in the camps, but the life of the Uyghurs who are outside of the camps are probably even worse to the extent because it's happening every day to them.