Peter. 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 29th, 2023. I'm Larry Rhodes, our DJ, Dowder 5, and as usual, we have our co-host Wombat on the line with us. Hello, Wombat. Hey, it's me, the Wombat. Digital Freethought Radio Hour is a talk radio show about atheism, freethought, rational thought, humanism, and the sciences. And conversely, we'll also talk about religions, religious faiths, gods, holy books, and superstition. And if you get the feeling that you're the only non-believer in your town, well, you're just not. You're in Knoxville in the middle of the Bible, but we have a group of 1,100 of us. We're the Atheist Society of Knoxville, or ASK. I'm going to tell you more about us after the mid-show break. So be sure to stick around. Wombat, what's our topic today? You know, I was looking over comments from last week's show while we're talking. There have been some interesting ones. The topic today's show is God Detector, something that we had talked about way, way, way back when, maybe about two years ago. But I wanted to revisit the subject because I thought it would be interesting to talk about not just what we would do with a God Detector, but what people who are religious would do if they had a God Detector. And how honest would they be if it comes to switching lanes. But before we get into that, we'd love to check in with you, see how you've been doing. I could tell you personally, I've been having a hard time trying to find a good video game to get my head into. And I've been bouncing back and forth between a lot of games and realizing that I just don't want to commit the time to get good at a very complicated mechanically driven game. I just want to be able to jump in, have a good time and jump out. And so I've been having some fun with like very short experiences. Some that I would recommend is there's one called Metro City. I believe that's the name for it. It's basically a minimalized city design. It's a simulator. Many motorways is what it's called. It's basically design a town with all the streets. And you have cars that need to get from their homes to a location. And you can bounce back and forth between designing, making roundabouts, trying to figure out the best way to have roads curve into each other, making highways. And it's all very plug and play. You can play it for five minutes. You can play it for a half hour and you're out. What's it called again? Many motorways. And what I like about it is it's like Tetris. It's a game where you will lose eventually, but half the fun is just experimenting and trying to keep up with the system as the demands continue to build on top. I wouldn't have thought that it would have had a win-lose scenario.  I don't know. My personal win is if I can make over a thousand points, if I can help a thousand people commute, then I'm happy. So some people will come up with their own challenges. So you're right. There is no like Tetris. There is no like true lose. Playing is the fun. And I had never played that game and felt like I was wasting my time. In fact, I've only felt like I've had a deeper appreciation for how roads are designed today. And when I see like a right turn on something, I'm like, why did you make this curse so sharp? Or if I see traffic lights, I think to myself, that doesn't solve problems. It creates problems. They create traffic. Traffic lights create traffic. Waste of gasoline and brake pads and all kinds of things at the time. Yeah. You're just making my where I need to go slower. You should have. Yeah. We need more roundabouts. That's for sure. Larry, how you been? Oh, I'm fine. I've been playing the star, star field.  It does have some longer scenarios later on in the game.  And it does save the game. It has a quick save and auto save and all these other things so that you never lose any playtime. And as you get stronger, the game gets a little harder, but you're leveling up to meet that. So you can really play from the beginning. And it's not that hard. You can set it to normal, hard, easy or very easy. And I've always been a fan of being able to set it to easy because I want to play a game for fun, not for frustration. Exactly. Larry, you hit it the nail right on the head. There are so many games out now that are like you have a badge of honor if you complete it because it's so challenging and so hard. And we're both adults here. Like the greatest things that we'll ever do will not be complete a video game. So when we go to video games, we're here to just have fun and relax. We're not here to be like, I beat this game. It's like no one cares. We're all having enough stress through the day. I don't need relaxation time. There's new elections coming up. Like we're all stressed out. We don't need more stress in our lives. We don't want to like die and like find some weird new er-tree or like some bonfire. It's like, no, I don't have any satisfaction from being a very difficult boss. I have satisfaction for completing things and having a good time with my weekends. You know? I will say this. At my job, I've been feeling really good recently because we had two new babies. I'm part of my team. So like both of the people who work for me successfully had healthy babies. I just want to give a quick shout out for them. Even though they're out, I'm happy that they're well. But I've been more or less by myself because we've been strapped for people since they've been out. We've had to dedicate other people in my team for dedicated support in other groups. And so it's basically just me right now. Like if you talk about who's responsible for testing, I'm doing the, I'm wearing the hat of a lab manager as well as our quality technician, as well as our test engineer, as well as our general laboratory analytical support. I'm wearing a lot of hats right now until we come back to everything and look for the people to come back. There's some stress. It is. But you know what? I've been accomplishing goals still. And I've been going to work and I told you before I had this training program a while back ago when I was in Cleveland training. And I came back to work and I was utilizing two things that I felt were valuable that we had talked about on the show, which was providing recognition and awards effectively. And there's a lot of people who will hold back on recognizing when people are doing a good job. But I found that by recognizing when people are doing good work or making it personal and having that one-to-one feedback for them has enabled a culture at my job that I've seen change where people are recognizing each other for their works and actions, including Pat's on my back. I recognize when I tell five people that are very concentrated, very direct, and very related, good things that they're doing, they feel better. And then it starts to trickle out to where people are coming to my door and it's like, hey, I just wanted to say, you're doing a good job, and blah, blah. I was like, that makes me feel good. I feel the morale just really, really pulling up. You're doing a good job here on the show. Thank you, Larry. I can see that. I don't want to do that here. That's a really big impact. But what I would love to have at my job to make things easier would be like a detector that could just be like, hey, there's your problem, fix it.  Wouldn't be great to just have, particularly as an atheist, just a single God detector or like a modular God detector. Maybe it's even an app, whatever it is that we can test and reliably demonstrate that it does work. And I want something that can at least just tell us there is a God. This is the God. This is it. This is the one that's correct from all the pantheon of different mythologies from humanity. It's this God. We can test it. We can verify existence. We can do this whole falsifiably and objectively and you can test it. I can test it. And we're all satisfied. It's this God. And I thought to myself, we had talked about this on the last show. We want that as atheists. We would love to have a God detector, right? It would make things so much easier. But then I thought to myself, man, if I had this conversation with, I don't know, a Muslim, and it turned out that Christian God was real, I imagine they would have... Oh, vice versa. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They would have a lot of concerns and probably, you know, a lot of anger. And it would probably take them a while to get on board with the idea that it's this version of the God that exists. Or they end up being an atheist. Say, that's not the right God. It's not the right God. I don't believe it. Yeah. How do you know that tester works? Like, because we can test it. I mean, just push this button. Like, check it out. Like, look, I mean, like, we can say, like, make 14 bunnies up here right now. There's 14 bunnies. Like, you know this works. Like, well, how do you know it wasn't a device that made it work? It's a God-powered device. It's a bunny device. So I always thought to myself, man, there's going to be billions and billions of people who will be upset if there's ever a God detector. It's never a good business to bink a God detector. Well, let's take a time just to step back just a little bit. Sure, sure, sure. You remember back in the old science fiction movies, they'd have like a little remote that would be in the hand like you're talking about. And it would be a detector. And the only thing about it would be a red light. You know, a little red light. And if it detects something, a little red light would flash. Yes. Okay. So at this point, we've got a God detector. We wander around for a minute and it starts flashing. Okay, we have a God. At this point, we have a generic God. We have a deistic God. We don't know which God it is. We just know it's a God. So I mean, you know, we've got to start at least there. And if you had that, that would immediately, you know, if you could get the atheists all to buy in on it, then that would eliminate atheism. But it would also wouldn't be any closer to where we wanted to be because all of the different religions would claim it was their God. So I think it would eliminate atheism, but only for a brief period of time. And this is why I wanted to bring up the topic in the show. Because I think if it got rid of atheism, that would mean essentially we would want to iterate on that technology. And maybe we can get to the point where we can have a definitive answer for which God or what kind of nature of God actually does exist. And the closer we get to that specific answer, then we reach that point where brand new atheists are forming. Not because of the fact that they lack a belief in God, but because they refuse to believe in that God or they're spurned by... Or they lack a belief in that device. They say that device... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Doesn't work. Yeah. But at that point, science can continue to iterate and test on that device. I figure it like, let's just say for sake of argument in a hour long show that we had a God detector that works as the nature of the title of the show. We know it works. We know a specific God. What I'm thinking of is the timeline for atheists like you and I, who are just looking for a good reason to reach a God. Now we have an objective way to determine that. We have something that's somewhat more reliable than it was before. And we will lose our atheism, I imagine, for the benefit of having a more reliable answer for whether or not there is a God. And we can say, yeah, we believe in a God because we have an objective testable God detector. Whether or not I believe the tenets of that God is a completely different question. But whether or not it exists, that's unquestionable. I do or it's it's so reliable that this detector you're talking about does identify the God, right? The God it is. So yeah, if you want to do it in two phases where at first it just says the God does exist, but we don't know the nature of the God. Okay, sure. We'll iterate on top of the technology and then figure out which God. And as we get closer between those two points, as we get closer to defining which God we're talking about, that's when we have this new second generation of new stage atheists who are, well, I was Christian, but now you're telling me it's some jade God or some Egyptian God or some Roman God. Like, I know I'm out. I'm out. I'm out. It's like, I don't believe in that guy. It's like, how can you not believe in that God? You were just on board with the idea that God exists, that this machine works. And as we trickle down to one answer, we have all this fallout from people who used to be religious. Yeah, well, look at it. It would have to be Mars. Mars is the old Roman God of war. Look around the planet. It's got to be Mars. Sure. Sure. Sure. So if we found out, yeah, listen, I can tell you something right now. I would be worried. It would be a really good sci-fi book, honestly. I don't want to. It'd be a terrible sci-fi book, but interesting concept of we have atheists, as we understand them today, people who just don't, who aren't convinced that a God exists. But then we would have a second generation of atheists who were, well, I was religious, but you're now telling me that a different God exists than the one that I believed in. And if that's the case, I'm upset and I don't want to worship that God. I don't want to believe in that God. I choose to reject this being. And then you would have the, this new brand of atheism, the second wave of atheism that's like almost religiously inspired, which is almost the same conflation of how religious people think what atheists are, people who are hate God, people who don't want to follow God's work. Like that's what we might expect when we actually find out a way to figure out that a God does definitively exist. And the scenario in my head that I'm throwing out, why I think this is interesting is because there's no way to avoid that scenario if we were to actually have a definitive way of determining if a God exists, because there's billions of people who believe in many, many, many different versions of a singular God or pantheons of God, and you're not going to make them all happy if you figured out that one of them was real.  Well, I mean, we couldn't build a Geiger counter without some actual uranium that's giving off radioactivity to test in a lab and build a device to detect it. I mean, we wouldn't know what it was, what its properties were, what to, what to build around to detect until we had a sample of it in the lab to be able to know what its parameters are, whether we could test for those parameters. And since we don't have a God and probably never will have a God in the lab to test what its parameters was, we talked about this earlier but the subject was souls. You know, we're talking about these ghost detectors and ghost hunters out there that a user of all these devices to detect ghosts, but we'd never had a ghost in the lab. We don't know what their parameters are. We don't know what kind of stuff they radiate if they radiate anything at all. So what, how can we build a detector to detect the stuff we don't know what they do? Right. If you were to go, yeah, and if we were to go off of, how do I put it? If we were to go off what we had and just say the Bible, the only sort of evidences that we have are inherently subjective and are not supposed to be used to get yourself closer to God because in the Bible specifically they say, you will, you believe with faith, not because of evidence, but because of faith. Faith is the desired way to reach God. Oh, we're going to talk about faith now? Well, I'm just saying like it's not a good method to power anything or to verify a belief, but it's very compelling that going ahead, going ahead. Oh, the problem with faith is that you can believe anything in the world using faith. Every religion on the planet believes their things about souls and afterlife and gods based on faith. Faith is not an end. It's well, it's an end to questioning because once you start using faith to get your answers, you no longer really question anything. You just stop questioning, and that is something the preachers really love, and that's why they tell you to use faith. It stops your question. It does, and it also lowers your standard of evidence for sure, and you can be trained to do stuff like that. It's like the belief of the substance of what's asked for. It's like the assurance of things that are hoped for, the conviction of things that were not seen. If you have all the evidence in the world that says, you know, you know, apples are red, you're supposed to use faith to believe that apples are purple because that's what God values. Like he wants you to think like that. That's very, very telling in my opinion of a deceitful, deceptive practice because they don't want you to use the highest faculties you have to figure out things. They want you to use a substandard criteria of evidence. However, like I said, if we're going back to this God detector, you know, I'm not arguing that a God detector can exist. What I can say, though, is we've certainly discovered things without having an example of it firsthand. What we've typically done is either observe it for the first time and just didn't recognize what it was, and maybe it was a limitation of what we were able to explain or perceive or comprehend, but then realize after the fact it's like, oh no, these giant cracks in the earth are actually moving plates. Like we just had to like update our model. And so now we know tectonic plates and like continental shift and stuff like that. We can see galaxies with like telescopes before we didn't understand what we were looking at. We thought the bright lights in the sky were pinholes in a blanket that the gods were holding up and that the lights were coming from heaven. And now we know they're stars. We know germs. We didn't understand what germs were from to begin with. We thought they're like weird demons. Now we understand like they're like organisms. So there's there's been cases where we've seen things already, didn't understand what we were looking at. And then through better contemplation came to a better understanding what we're at now and better instrumentation in a lot of cases. And who's to say that we're not in the same situation now? I'm not saying, listen Larry, I'm not saying that a God detector can exist. I'm just saying, what if we already see God every day? What if we already see souls every day? But our but our dumb, smooth, atheist brains just didn't allow ourselves to believe it was Carl Sagan. It said the time to believe something is when the evidence presents itself. Okay. You could also say the time to believe something is when the evidence and understanding. Oh, I like it. If you don't understand something, why would you believe it? I mean, why would why would you give it properties that you don't know that it has? Right. And if you misunderstand something, you would. But even in the best case scenario, let's say the God detector, all it is is a machine that gives you the understanding and points in the direction of the God that you can see already, but just aren't comprehending it because you lack the understanding. Wait a minute, this thing always points north. It's not a God. So you do it. So you do it. And it's like, there's the God. And you're like, Oh, no. So like, you finally figure out, okay, so it's this guy, or like, it's this person who's just been walking around for all of eternity, just on planets. And he's just like, Oh, no, I'm Ted. I'm God. Yeah, you found me. You finally found me. Congratulations, guys. You found me is like, Oh, wow, we found God. How many says no, you didn't with the old Jedi and mind trick. No, you didn't. But we would, we would, there's no, there's no, so like, there's no scenario where we would find the God and everyone would be would be happy. There would be a period of time where people at least who are atheists would be like, Oh, okay, that's God. Well, I'm not worshiping Ted because like, one, he doesn't seem like he deliberately wanted me to like he's been hiding for a long period of time. And we had to like, build a whole sophisticated network of technologies just to find one person like that's crazy. But like, cool, cool for him. He exists. Like, I'm fine. We're not atheists anymore. We know who God is. But, you know, we're not Ted, it's tonight's, if you will. Right. But there's no book of Ted. There's no book of Ted. And like, everything's fine. Maybe we found like, the flying spaghetti months or whatever it is. I'm just saying, on top of that, there would be the immediate fallout of the people who've deeply invested in telling the Christian line or the Muslim myth or, you know, any other popular Judeo religion, Catholicism, all the branches of Protestantism, all these huge, huge markets where they only sell false hope and make a lot of money from it because there's no overhead costs, where they have tax incentives to build their churches and their mansions and buy their cars and private jets. And now they have to start paying taxes because now, like, wait a second, wait a second, you're saying just because we know who God is, I still can't have freedom of religion to not have to pay taxes? Well, I don't see why because we already know who the real God is. Like, well, I protest that time for protests, time for wars, time to put people in and sells to to establish my power and demonstrate that Ted is, if anything, a demon, a terrible person and not worthy of anyone's worship even if he may be the one responsible for wars and cancers and everything else. If he's got a God like power is then why can't we pin it on him? Right, right, right. Yeah, the subject of a great deal of ire from a lot of people, even well-meaning people who are willing to worship him would have a riddle of Epicurus assault. Yeah, it's a terrible situation. No, it's a terrible situation. It's a terrible situation for both all humanity. It's a terrible situation for Ted who now has to answer all these terrible questions from people. Is this like, I just wanted some privacy. I left you guys your own devices. I'm sorry. I don't, I'm not involved. I'm trying not to be involved. Like, I am taking like the deast route. Like I have tried my best to like not, you know, participate in a lot of things, but, you know, I dropped the ball in some places. I made mistakes. I made some good things. I don't know what to tell you guys. Like, fix it, fix it. I gave you brains to like cure diseases. I gave you, you know, the authority to be able to like make packs and work with each other and like do it, like just do it. There's no reason why you can't do it. Yeah, I don't remember who said it, but he says, why would God give us the ability to think and then issue its use? Right. Right.  Right. And believe me, it's not God telling you that it's the preachers who wrote the book because the Bible was written by preachers of that day. Right. Now, here would be the, here would be the slightly darker version of it or other interesting. Maybe the God detector doesn't work by pointing to a guy named Ted and saying like, this is God. Maybe it's more of like, I'm going to let you see your soul. And then when you die, we're going to see the soul leave your body and we're just going to follow it to wherever it goes. And we can see all the souls converge to like a point in space. And we'll be like, ah, that's supposed to be where all the souls go. So like, how do you know that even works?  Here's your soul just being like, I want to be free. I want to get out of this mortal coil. This is terrible. And then when you die, it's like, it unplugged the USB stick. That's you as best as it can. And it's like, see you later. I'm out of here by and you're like, okay, well, that's interesting. And you can just follow the trajectory. It just goes in a straight line towards space. And with these glasses on or whatever, you can just see all these souls leave the planet and converge to one point in location.  Some math and you're like, oh, OK, that must be where heaven is. It's like 15 light years away. That's just outside of our visible space. That makes sense. And it's right there. Like we're not going to be able to fly there. But at least now we know where souls go. We can see souls. We know the timer is right. So everybody's satisfied. Maybe who knows who knows. But at least we now know that souls are real. Would that at least convince you, Larry, that so what? Why not? Why not? Well, if we could see them and we measure them and and know that everybody's got one. And when the whole leaves the body, it dies. Yeah, that would that would make a convincing argument. But what it would be evidence that would be a time to bleed it. OK. And then would that make you believe in a God just by virtue of not necessarily. I mean, look at the Eastern religions, Shintoism, Taoism. They all believe in what? Worshipping ancestors and which they believe are still around. In some form. So they, you know, Buddhism even believes in reincarnation, but none of them believe in an all powerful God. Interesting. A creator God. OK, OK. So even the existence of souls won't be enough for you. No, no, it's an independent issue. That's interesting. Ah, OK, I love it. All right. So we need to take a mid show break. This is the digital free thought radio hour on W O Z O radio 103.9 LP FM here in Knoxville, Tennessee. We'll be right back after this short break. Hello and 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 take just a moment to talk about the atheist society of Knoxville. ASK was founded in 2002. We're in our 21st year and have over 1100 members now. We have weekly in person meetings. You want to come down every Tuesday evening in Knoxville's old city at Barley's taproom in Pizzeria. Look for us inside at the high top tables or if it's pretty weather outside on the deck. You can find us on Facebook, meetup.com, or at KnoxvilleAtheist.org, our website, or just Google Knoxville Atheist. It's just that simple. By the way, if you don't live in Knoxville, you should still go to meet up and do a search for an atheist group in your town. Don't find one. Start. That's right. One that where do you want to pick up? All right. So we had some listener comments from last week's show. Last week we had a guest on by the name of Keith Simple, wonderful lad all the way from Ireland. Now a multimedia guru. That's Keith. S-E-M-P-L-E. S-E-M-P-L-E. And I saw some of his videos on YouTube. Wonderful skilled artist and a great presenter just has a wonderful crowd presence. And a great accent. And a great accent. That goes without saying. That goes without saying.  Please announce it on your show incessantly. Joey Burr 29 also commented, great discussion gentlemen. We're all going to someone else's hell. That really resonated with me and my experience is low. Keith is an extremely talented musician. I was actually at his first show when he formed his namesake band. And I love what he does with his music. And now his new podcast. I'm glad to have found your channel through him. So thank you guys so much for providing comments on a side table. There's also so Larry, you may not know this, but actually you do know this. I know sign language. You see me do some talking with some people. I'll do like additional sign language tutorials on my channel where I'll watch cartoons that have deaf characters in them. And I'll translate the signs that they use in the show and I'll talk about what they how so often times what happens is a character because animating is so difficult. The character will just do this, like barely move it all. And the character will be like, Oh, you know, sign language. She's saying she wants dinner tonight. I'm like, no, not really, not really. Let's let's talk and let's show how to actually show that sign and like what the concessions have been in the history of like trying to like present, you know, deaf culture to watch some of that. There's a TV show called The Dragon Prince that has a prominent deaf character on the show. For the last three seasons out of four seasons, I've done breakdowns of how the characters use sign language in the show. I think it's the best depiction of sign language because it's CGI animated, so they don't have to drive your frame. And when they were first doing it, it was pretty poor because the frame rate was pretty low. So you didn't really get to see the details. But there was been efforts to like make the gloves white, so there's better contrast with the person's chest. So you can see the signs to have the person face the camera when they're signing rather than like from the back. You know, like there's so many other things that they've done to make it better. However, there's season four out that's now that has signing in it. And there's been some people who have been asking if I would do the translation for season four. Blazing Studio 882 says, I know it's been a while, but do you think you can translate the sign language in Dragon Prince season four? The reason I asked is because I checked the community tab, translate season four anyway, the poll for it. And it has translate season four anyway, as the majority now. My thing is season four is so bad. The cartoon has just gotten worse progressively as far as writing is going because it should have ended in season two. It should have ended like two seasons ago. Now they have no plot and they're just like the characters are just running around doing nothing. And so it's been a painful experience for me to even try to watch the show that I just I've fallen off of it. That's why there's not a translation of season four. All right, guys, thank you so much for all the comments. Feel free to leave more. You know how to do it. Just continue to do so and we'll go over them in this show. I want to talk a little bit more about how God detector. Yeah, how sci fi devices may, you know, exist in the future that gives us better answers for these big questions. And one of them I thought this is one that I think is probably of all of them, the most potential for existing. And that is a viewfinder time machine. Now it's not a time machine that lets you go back into the past, but it is a viewfinder that somehow runs a simulation of all the photons that have bounced off of Earth and just like correlates their past back to Earth such that you can actually have a visible image of what existed in the past. I know the math, the science sounds sci fi because it is sci fi. It would take an extraordinary amount of energy and calculations to be able to do that. But let's just say for the sake of argument, we had a window or a glass pane, maybe even like a phone or something that can run models on what existed at where we are. That's interesting. Let's say that you had a TV station on Earth that was broadcasting your image or a certain sporting event or something like that. Yes. And then you put a receiver on an alphacentury, proximate sanctuary, which is four light years away. Correct. Well then the person who watched that would see a picture of time. They would see the sporting event like it was new. Correct. Now the thing about it is if they turn around and rebroadcast it back to Earth, it would be another four years, but so the people on Earth could see it eight years ago. Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe like a window in time. Yeah, excuse my language. What if it was simply that? Like what if it was just another planet receiving our, you know, light signals and we're like, hey, let's broadcast this back and just see what they do with it or like show we can communicate with each other. And all of a sudden we're getting video feedback of things that happened during old sporting events, during like wars, during Mesopotamia area, you know, it's just like weird things that we never thought to be able to visualize again. We're getting this visual signal again and we can verify that they've happened. This is actually really interesting because now it can actually give us the ability to verify claims that were made in holy books. Well, yeah, like a crucifixion, we'd have to find a planet that was 2000 light years away, build some kind of little receiver up there and point it to Earth and be able to, I mean, a telescope that it recorded, you know, into video and then focus it on Jerusalem at the time and record the events that happened then. Yeah, like what if we had a benevolent planet with a benevolent society that was saying, oh, we're seeing Earth is going through a lot of stuff because they're confused about what happened at a certain time. We have the technology to just send them the video. Let's just capture all the data, clear it up and hyperspeed it back to them. And it's like, there you guys go. That'll solve your problem. Yeah, can you imagine? That's awesome.  He's like, no earthquakes, no earthquakes. Oh, no, this is a problem and he's black. Oh, no. And John Wayne wasn't there saying, oh, surely this is the Son of God. It's almost as if like this is like, and he didn't have a six pack either. This is terrible. He didn't look at him. And the stone didn't roll away. That type of thing. Right. So what do you do in a situation like that? Does that, okay, so let's do the inverse of it. Let's do the inverse of it as atheists. We will say, okay, so now we have the video feed and we can see the three crucifix on a hill. We do see Jesus. We do see earthquakes. We do see a strangely Italian confirmation of all this stuff. Yeah. Now what? Larry? Well, we'd be, we would have evidence and we would have reason to believe at that point. However, you could say, all right, let's say that it was a God. Why couldn't it have been just some really powerful aliens doing all this stuff? So now if we, if we open the book to, now aliens exist, how do we know like the Jesus wasn't an alien? Is that what we were saying? Well, not only that, but I mean, it could have been that, you know, aliens fabricated the video and sent it to us or fabricated this viewer to show us what they want us to think, you know, and one of the things I've always thought would be the easiest task for an atheist to take over the world, not atheists, aliens to take over the world is to come to earth disguised as Jesus or whichever religious figure they happen to want to land in, like land in China as Buddha. And you would have all these people ready to capitulate and hand over all the reins of government to that person because of their beliefs. You say that. I actually think the opposite would happen because I don't think the racket of Christianity is open to ever having a prophet. No, no, I'm not talking about just him showing up on the street and saying, Jesus, I'm talking about the sky is opening up. The Jesus Ray is coming down. He giant Jesus floating down to the Capitol in Washington, D.C. Covered on ABC, NBC, like there's a bullet proof. But that would not be beyond the capabilities of some really advanced aliens to pull it off.  Now, if they did that specific version of the reins of government, you think government would do so? Like, honestly, I don't think I think the Republicans are infiltrated totally deeply with mega religious zealots. I hear you say that. Most of the Democrats are Christian. If you think about it, I agree. But when we know about politicians isn't such that they're doing so because they care about people from a genuine point of view, that's from a self serving interest.   But you but you are one thing you're not recognized as that there's an inherent profit to misinforming people. And it's it's been employed by almost every single person that's in our politician group. And if there's a truthful answer, even if it's a disguise, if a truthful new agenda comes down and it's popular, but it's counterintuitive or counter to someone else's profit, and they also have power, there's a conflict of interest. And my OK, OK. So which can you identify the conflicts here? Yeah, power. This guy's asking the specific entities involved in the conflict you're talking about. If you want to do specifically Republican Party, if you want me to name a specific person, I could talk about aliens versus humans. OK, you got the aliens who are coming down presenting themselves as Jesus incarnate. Yes. Right. Yes. On the other side, you have humanity, half of which are ready to capitulate. Yeah. The other half are going, I don't know about this. No, I totally hear you. I totally hear you. But you know for a fact that the aliens if in our state, we have two churches with the exact same name on different sides of the same block who don't even agree with each other because they have two completely different versions of Jesus. You're not following me. If the aliens were powerful enough to pull off this kind of thing, they are powerful enough to punish the people who do not capitulate. Ah, now there's a different. That's a new element. That's a new element. So you're saying they are not only are they revealing themselves, but they are actively destroying, pointing at and blowing up the ones who don't follow.  Just the third street Baptist church and the fourth street Baptist church. But the first and second and fifth are OK. You're OK. But I'm just I'm showing you I can. All right. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Well, now you have a complete. I'm not saying to be the easiest. Yeah. I'm saying it would be the easiest way for them to take over. Yeah, a demonstration of power where my self interest isn't so much my influence on others, but my own self interest of staying alive. Now you've I'm still not believing you because you are God.  Like that's that's the that would be the political route that gets most people on board with this. That would be the James Kirk's of Earth. Yeah, they would be working to undermine this illusion and throw overthrow the power that's come to take over. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it'll be like the Terminator. But again, it wouldn't come from a point of self interest or a point of what's the right word? Altruism. Like I'm not doing this because I believe in this being I'm doing it because I'm afraid of this being that being would have to make a clear demonstration of power to get most people on board. Interesting, interesting tangent. But I think we're on the same page where yes, there would be some people would be susceptible to it. But I can definitely see conflict of interest for those who are already in power to deal with it, unless if there was some greater demonstration of power such that they would have to realize, OK, at least for now I'm capitulating, but not willingly. And in the same sense, even as an atheist, when I see a being blow up people who don't believe in him, that doesn't I believe the God exists, but it doesn't mean that I believe that this entity has some power over us that they can blow us up. But it doesn't mean mean that we have to believe their claims of supernatural. It's the exact same thing. Yes, tyranny does not make a point any more valid than it was beforehand. It just is duress. It's just obedience enforced through, you know, duress and punishment. It's all. Listener comments. No, no, that was our listener comments from last week. I'll throw out some more too. So time machine viewfinder. We did discuss that. I would like to talk about a miracle detector. And a miracle detector. Now, we are we are still we're still dipping a foot into the supernatural. However, we are now talking about shared observable phenomena that whether or not it's a miracle through supernatural intervention or not is the is the point of contention. And so why I bring this up is I've talked to a lot of Christians. I'd videotaped it. When I say that, don't don't think I'm just like, oh, he talks a lot. I was like, no, it's been a concerted effort on my part. And oftentimes when I asked when they say, well, miracles exist, that's why I believe in God asked them what they mean by miracles. And they will present to me an example of what a miracle is. And oftentimes what they will present is there was a person who was sick, and then he wasn't sick.  It's like, yes. And it's like, well, then how do you distinguish that from a miracle? Like, what are you using to determine if a miracle exists? And that's when the conversation stops and we jump to a new topic because they don't have a good answer. But in some conversations, I was actually able to delve into the idea of what actually the what would it take for someone to admit that something is a miracle. And so I use an example where I would do a trick where I would show them like a deck of cards and be like, you can hold this deck of cards, you can have the deck of cards, you hold it yourself, look at all the cards and they look at all the cards, standard deck. And then I snap my fingers and they look at the deck of cards again, it's all aces. It's just all aces. And I asked the person, would you consider that a miracle? And they said, yes. And it blew my mind because in my head, I could just say, you know, that could just be a really advanced magic trick on my part. You mean illusion? Yeah, I could have just tricked you. Why would you, why would you, why would you ever put yourself in position where you would consider that to be a miracle? Because the answer should always be, well, I don't know because I don't have a supernatural detector. I don't know when supernatural intervention has ever occurred. And until then I could just fool you with very advanced trickery or I could pay someone to tell you that they saw that and then you would believe them because you already have a standard that that's a miracle. We could start a whole religion just on secondhand information. And when you look the Bible, that's that's functionally what you have. Just a book of people saying, I saw this and someone saying, well, that's a miracle. Like you didn't see it. You didn't test it. You didn't talk to those people yourself. You're just believing a book of claims. And if one thing I noted with your say claims. Exactly. And one thing we don't know who wrote any of the books in the Bible. I mean, any Bible scholar will tell you the authors are unknown. And every single time I've done a magic trick or every single time I've heard someone explain a magic trick to me, it's never the they always tell me a different thing than what actually happened.  Then he pulled out all the kings on the top. It's like he didn't shuffle the cards. He put the kings on the top and then he showed you the kings that he put on the top.  Like there's so much stuff that you don't see that the way how I express myself when I'm in our wonder is never truly the mechanics of how things exist. And if a world like that exists, and we could demonstrate it exists, then why would I ever be inclined to call something miracle? But I'll tell you why because we have a miracle detector. And now that we have a miracle detector, Larry, now that we have a way of actually saying, Ah, no, you can walk on water if your faith is big enough. No, you can move a mountain if you have enough faith. No, no, you can make water turn into wine. Yeah, like all like you can detect you can test it and you can tell the difference between magic tricks and actual miraculous events with this device. Now that we have that and we can go through testing miracles just by people who have a lot of faith and are capable of doing these these stunts. Would that make you more any more inclined to believe in their claims? Supernatural claims? Larry, I wonder. Again, I don't see how you could create a detector without knowing how to detect. Larry, don't go that. I don't change the question. I gave you the question is now we have a detector we now can tell the difference between stunts and actual miraculous events with supernatural intervention. Now that we have that, are you willing to believe the claims of the people who have these miraculous events at their capabilities? If I say this is America, I can turn water into wine. Okay, look, we can verify that it's a supernatural effect. It's not a stunts. We can do it over and over and over again. That's all we would know. That's all we would know at that point. We have a we have a detector that can actually detect supernatural events. Yes, that's all we know. That's all you know. Causing the supernatural events. We don't know if they're verifying any particular god or religion. We don't know anything more than that. It's just a miracle detector. Just a miracle. We know now that miracles happen. Yes. Now, we don't know if they can do miracles. We don't know that they're uh what is Buddhist miracles or uh Muslim miracles, Christian miracles. We don't know or some miracles who have a source we've never heard of. Right. But to me, a miracle is just something we haven't scientifically examined enough to understand. I see. I see. I see. I see. In my opinion, um before we go to a miracle detector, a miracle is just defined as a miracle, an inexplicable event, right? At at best. But with some thought understanding, it's not may be an event that never happened. It could literally just be a claim of an event, right? Um but if we had a system where it's like, hey, you have cancer, let me pray for you to my one specific god and we'll see if you're healed and if you're not healed, move on to the next person and pray for you and they'll pray to their specific god and then suddenly you're miraculously healed and the miracle detector says a miracle just happened. We'd be like, oh my gosh, it's this person's god. We figured it out. We figured it out. I'll tell you jumping to conclusions. What happened? What would you say? I mean, we're concluding that because that guy has a particular religion and a particular god and he can perform miracles that is the religion's god that's performing them. We don't know why they were being performed. Maybe he's just a magical person. Maybe he's a leprechaun. Maybe he's dead at the end of the day. Or a leprechaun or a fairy in the human disguise. We don't know anything. True. Ask what we know. Maybe there's a separate benevolent god that doesn't want the attention and it's just like listening to some other god's voicemails. Yeah. Right. It's the old thing about deism. You know, if you believe in a god, you really don't know which god that is. Right. And there's no even if the universe is evidence for the creation by a god. You have no idea. You have no proof, no evidence that it's your particular god. I'll throw out another one too. Say when I send you an email, it doesn't go to you instantaneously, right? Like it might take a couple of minutes for it to go up into one server, transfer over and then drop back into your computer, right? So if I if we had one person come in and pray to someone's cancer and nothing happens and then we bring in the next guy and then they pray and then their cancer gets solved, how do we know it wasn't just lag from the first guy? Right. That's true. And there was a first guy could have been like, guys, I'm telling you this works. It's like, no, but it lit up when the second guy came. It was like, but I already had mine processed in. That's not fair. That's not fair. All right. Nine fifty five. We got maybe eight more minutes. I want to do one called direct intervention detector. Okay. It's pretty close to miracle detector. You want the idea is when you see a boxing match and they're like, hey, what got you through this match? God. God helped me beat that other human being. God, the supernatural creator of the universe chose me to win and it was me and the supernatural being with unlimited power versus this or whatever sport you you choose to insert here. Right. Right. Right. It was just me and my God versus this guy with two pillows around his fists and that's a fair fight.  But what if we had a way to detect that? So if we had a direct intervention detector that we could pull up to a person who was explaining from a sports team, we won because of God and you push the button and you're like, no, he's right. God did help him. I say we take it back that guy's trophy. I say we put we penalize the teams like as a bylaw in our code of ethics for sports, you cannot have God help you. How could you do otherwise?  Yeah. In sports, you're not even allowed to use steroids like you were saying. Right. That's an unfair advantage. Right. It's the David and Goliath story where most people don't realize that Goliath was the underdog in that situation because David had not only was his weapon just better clearly like a projectile weapon is going to be the guy with the sword, but that plus God, you have literally the most strongest tag team partner in a two on one fight. And what's the other guy have height? That's it. A reach advantage versus a guy with a projectile weapon. That's not a fair fight. Goliath was Well, that's the point I think of the Bible and the story itself. It's not a fair fight because God will kill any of your opponents or at least take them out. Yeah. I mean, that's that's the point of the story in the Bibles. I think the point of the story was like God will protect you even if it seems like you're at a disadvantage and that feels great. But Goliath was at the disadvantage there. And I say we take back the win for David. Say we take back any sports team that says who I got hook out you through this fight. God, you don't get you. We take back the win. You get penalized. We're going to take back your trophy. We'll take back. We'll find you. We'll find you. Our law says that you cannot have God help you and we verify that God did. We know God exists. There's no more atheists, but you can't use God to help you win sports teams, man. That's not fair. It's unfair. So that's my point. I think I think that's overall it. My final thoughts, at least on this is we think a detector would solve a lot of our problems. But if anything, it would only highlight the amount of differing opinions and differing approaches that we're using to believe in God, which isn't based on the fundamental system of caring about what's true and caring about understanding or recognizing what's false. It's because there's agendas at play, people who finance off the fact that people are misinformed by the gods, people who benefit from the versification of power. And whenever that system's upset, even if we had a detector to objectively guide us, there's going to be conflict of interest. Right. We only get another. Oh, go for it. There's another aspect of this. It was me and God. God and I, one, is that they're bragging on themselves, saying, I am the worthy one. I'm the one who has been living a good life doing what God wants them to do. God shines his light on me because I'm more worthy than that guy. Yeah. And how upsetting would that be if the other team was also Christian too, or the other guy? Well, of course they are. Most of them are. God, what was up with that? They're not going to blame God for the loss. Right. I would love to see an atheist win a match and be like, how did you win? I don't know. I guess God loves me more than that other God, even though I'm an atheist. You can't say that. It's like, what? Christian, say that all the time. Christian, say that all the time. All right. Larry, where can we find your stuff at? Oh, mine is at digitalfreethought.com. Be sure to look for the blog button. We keep all of our show archives there, atheists, songs, just all kinds of great articles on atheism there. Also, we keep a lot of our stuff on YouTube. Your channel is what? Let's chat. Yep. Let's chat is at let's chat or what? It's just you search let's chat on YouTube by pop up. Okay. Mine is at doubter five to find all my YouTube stuff. You can find my book, Atheism What's It All About on Amazon. And if you remember, if you're having trouble leaving religious beliefs behind, you can get help leaving religion and the problems that it happens, emotional societal, etc. at recoveringfromreligion.org. Give them a look.  The time to worry about it is when they prove that heavens and hells and souls are real. Until then, don't sweat it. Enjoy your life. And we'll see you next Wednesday night at seven o'clock. You're on wzoradio.com. Cool. I love it. Say bye, everybody. Bye, everybody. Bye.


As we've looked at previously, there's a number of the tasks or the outcomes, learning outcomes that are required of you that actually involve the carrying out of experimental work, not just the application of your knowledge. This is another area where it's important that you are involved practically in identifying the different pH of a range of acid base and neutral substances. So again, this video just gives you a little bit of background, hopefully, just to remind you of some important things about the pH scale. pH is an idea that's over 100 years old, pretty much originated from the work of the Danish chemist Søren Sørensen and his biochemical application of the effect of hydrogen ion concentration on enzyme activity. You remember in a previous video, we looked at the fact that in biochemical systems, in body systems, the pH is very important in a number of different types of places in the body and for a large number of chemical reactions which occur within the body. So the idea that hydrogen ion concentration could actually impact on enzyme function was a pretty important idea and one that really needed to be explored in a lot of detail and one about which we are still learning even 100 years later. It was Sørensen who created the pH scale. Now people get kind of caught up with what the P in the pH scale, so you can talk about this as a probability of hydrogen ions as a proportion of hydrogen ions. The most important thing we need to be aware of is the fact that pH is a negative log scale. It's a log base 10 scale. What that means is the higher the value of the hydrogen ions, the lower the pH. So a pH of one is stronger acid than a pH of three. So this is how this scale works. You get smaller and smaller and you get stronger and stronger acid solutions. It took a little while for us to be able to measure or at least to build technology that was sufficient for us to conveniently measure pH. In the 1930s we were able to develop, or scientists were, I didn't, were able to develop sensitive millivolters which were able to use electrochemical means to measure pH. So we had this pH scale.


If you shine a parallel rays of light on a cardboard with a tiny hole in between, what would you expect to happen to this light after it went through the hole? Well, if you think in terms of Newton's idea where light is a bullet, then we'll all see that these bullets will get blocked and these bullets will just go straight through. And this is the picture that gets painted. But careful experiments show that when the light goes through the hole, it actually spreads out and forms a bigger spot if there was a screen over here. How do you explain that? How does light just bend like that? Well, if you think of light as a wave and use Huygens principle, then we'll be able to explain this. And that's pretty much what we want to do in this video. So we want to introduce this idea of Huygens principle. But before we do that, let's do a quick recap of what we've already seen before. Huygens assumed that light is a wave in the aether medium that exists everywhere in the universe. And the ripples that these things are carrying, we give a name to that. These ripples are called wave fronts. And one of the important things that we saw about the wave fronts is that the angle between the direction on which light is traveling, the rays of light, and the wave fronts, that is always perpendicular. Look at this. The rays of light and the wave fronts at every point will be perpendicular to each other. That's important. That's going to be important for this video as well. And this will be true even if you go very, very, very, very far away. You will now see that the rays of light are pretty much parallel to each other. But if you look at the wave fronts, notice the rays are perpendicular to the wave front. Rays of light always perpendicular to the wave front. Okay, but how does this wave theory explain our original question? For that, we need one more piece of information from Huygens. How do these wave fronts evolve in time? Here's what I mean. Let's say we have a light bulb giving us light. And let's concentrate on one of its spherical wave front. This is what it looks like right now. I want to know what this wave front is going to look like, say, two minutes later. How do I figure that out? Now, at first, it might look like a silly question. You might think, or at least I should think, that that's easy, right? A little later, this new wave front is just going to be a bigger version of our old wave front, right? Isn't that the solution? Well, yeah, that's true over here. It works. But that's that this only works provided there are no obstacles over here. But what if there is a mirror? Or there is a lens somewhere over here? Or if there is a, I don't know, a cardboard with a small hole in that, then what the new wave front looks like? That's not so easy to answer now, is it? And this is why people went to Huygens and say, hey, Huygens, tell us. If I know what the new current wave front looks like, how do I know what the new wave front is going to be sometime later in general in any situation? And that's basically what Huygens principle is all about. It's going to help us reconstruct wave fronts. So what does the principle say? Well, according to Huygens, every single point on this wave front is an ether particle, which is oscillating pretty much with the same frequency as the original wave, and it starts producing its own spherical mini waves. So here's what it says. Remember that there is ether particle everywhere, and the ether particles on this wave front, they're all oscillating. They're all moving back and forth as you saw in the animation. And as a result, he says that every single one of them is going to produce its own mini ripples, own mini waves. He calls them secondary waves. So this is going to produce its own secondary wave. This is going to produce its own secondary waves. So all of them are going to produce their own secondary waves. Now, since it's a little hard to draw, I've already drawn it nicely. So this is what it would look like. And you have to draw that for all of them. And there are infinitely many because every point he asks us to assume it to be a particle oscillating and producing its own secondary waves. So these are all our secondary waves. And then he says you draw a common tangent to all the secondary waves, a common envelope. So if I use a different color to do that, a common envelope might look somewhat like this. This common envelope, according to him, a common tangent that represents the new wave front. So he says this is a new wave front. Again, let me show you an animation so you can see it better. So here is our current wave front. And these are the ether particles which are going to oscillate and act like a point source giving out secondary waves. I've not drawn all of them. There are infinite as many. And notice these secondary waves keep expanding, keep expanding, keep expanding. And a common tangent to all of them, that now represents a new wave front. So if I draw a common tangent over here, that common tangent would be our new wave front. And the same thing would hold true for some other shape as well. So if I take, let's say, a plain wave front. Again, these are our ether particles oscillating and they're giving out secondary waves. And notice if the waves are going towards the right, this now common tangent will represent our new wave front. So this method works for any shape of our wave front. The particles will always give you spherical ripples and the common tangent will give us the new wave front. And if you're now a little bit curious, you might have some questions like why are we drawing the common tangent only on one side? Why not on the other side, for example? Well, Huygens was able because we know in which direction the waves are traveling. We know the waves are not traveling backwards, so we'll ignore them. But you could ask why? And Huygens doesn't have an answer for that and that's one of the drawbacks over here. But you could have more fundamental questions like why does this method even work? I mean, why are we drawing a common tangent? Why does that work? These are some great questions which we can try to tackle in a separate video altogether. But remember, just like any scientific theory, Huygens theory is also not a perfect picture or representation of the world. Then why do we use it? Because it's simple and it's pretty powerful. As we will see, it will be able to explain a lot of phenomena including deriving the laws of reflection and refraction in the future. Anyways, let's come back to our original question and see if we can answer that using Huygens' principle. So we were shining light on a cardboard, apparently a blue cardboard. And we want to know why does a light bend? That is our question, right? So let's use wave theory, Huygens' principle. Well, since there is a parallel, our wave fronts are going to be plane wave fronts. So it's going to look somewhat like this. It's not a line. It's supposed to be a plane. And if I want to know what the new wave front looks like after some time, I have to use Huygens' theory. But until here, I know the wave front is going to look just like this. Because there are no obstacles. I don't need Huygens' theory till here. But once I reach here, now comes the question, what does the new wave front look like after this? Is it just going to be like this? Is it going to be this way? Let's find out. For that, we need to think of every single point on this as a source for secondary waves. We call these Huygens' sources.  I want you to pause the video and see if you can give this a shot. All right. If you've tried, let's do this. So here are our Huygens' sources. These are the ether particles which are oscillating. And they're going to start giving out their own ripples. So here's the ripples that I'm drawing. Here we go. And now, what does the common tangent look like? Well, just like before, let me draw in white. Just like before, over here, the common tangent is going to look like this. But what's important now is that because this is a finite wave front, there will be one last Huygens' source over here, which will give you one last circular ripple over here. Sorry, spherical ripple over here. And as a result, the tangent is not going to end here. It's not going to go straight like this, but it's going to end like this. This is what the new tangent looks like. And the same thing over here. Remember, we're drawing an envelope to all these secondary sources. And this is what the envelope looks like. And so notice that the new wave front is not completely plain. It has this curved edges. And as a result, after this, it's just going to be a larger version of this. So the new wave front after this is going to be, let me try and draw it nicely. It's going to be like this. And again, like this. This is what the new wave front is going to look like. And now, if I try to draw the rays of light over here, the rays of light are going to be like this. They're always perpendicular. Remember to the wave front. But over here, notice the rays of light have to be going this way, somewhat like this. And over here is going to be somewhat like this. And so there you go. Huygens theory helps us understand why the light spreads out because when the wave exits this slit, it is no longer a plain wave. It gets curved towards the end. And as a result, it starts spreading out. This and some other phenomena of light can only be explained by thinking of light as waves and not as bullets. And this is how a wave theory gained popularity. All right. So to summarize, here are the two questions that you should try and answer yourself now. How do you explain Huygens principles to maybe a friend or maybe to someone in your family and explain how you construct new wave fronts from a given wave front? And can you then use Huygens principle to explain why when you shine light through a tiny hole, it expands. The light tends to spread out. If you have difficulties, you can just go back and rewatch parts of the video.


Hello, everyone, welcome to Rix 5, both background, background, Cascadian will be presenting this session. Thank you. Hello. So great to see a pretty good turnout. I am mostly a RISC 5 jury leader. I don't have a huge amount of background in ISA development or anything like that. But I'm pretty excited about the prospects. And I wanted to get together and chat about it with other people. I'm trying to leave the IRC session open on here. So if anybody sees a question that can be brought to my attention, feel free to highlight vagrancy in IRC on the DevConf 18-Z room. And then we'll try and get more remote participation engagement. Basically, mostly I don't have a lot of slides prepared for this at all, really. But I'm going to go over the Wiki page on wiki.debian.org slash riskv, or RISC 5, as it's supposed to be pronounced. So RISC 5 is an open source instruction set architecture based on established reduce instruction set computing risk principles. So this is kind of a more low-level opening and hardware at the processor level, which is pretty exciting. We've made a lot of progress on RISC 5 just in the last six months. So this is a fairly new port. It's currently in the Debian ports repository. There is a 64-bit variant of RISC 5, is basically what's being targeted initially and quite possibly for the foreseeable future. The status is roughly, it's been hovering at about, let's see here, I believe it's been hovering around 80% complete, give or take a little, for the last several months, which is pretty impressive for a very important port. A lot of thanks to the people who've been doing a lot of work on bootstrapping to make that a lot easier. There is the riskv.org website and upstream mailing lists. The tool chain support is pretty widely. Almost all of the major tool chains already have support. The notable lack is GDB. If there are any people interested in doing GDB hacking, we would love to have people working on the RISC 5 port for that. There's actual real-world hardware in actual real Debian community hands, which is pretty exciting. The high five unleashed is the main board, which was unveiled earlier this year at FOSSTEM, if I remember correctly. There are, of course, future plans. We'll believe it when we see it. But there's a lot of work going into that, and look forward to it. And for people who like tinkering with PGAs, there are also implementations for that. One of the main blockers for the Debian port, let's see. One of the main blockers for the Debian port was fixed recently, and that is getting support into Stable's dPackage to acknowledge the existence of the RISC v64 architecture at all. So that opened the door for several key packages. The Linux package now has Linux libcdev. Glibc was able to be uploaded and binutils. So a lot of the core tool chain is already available no longer requires a porter to do a custom build and then upload that to Debian ports. They can just rebuild a source package from the official Debian archive, simply adding RISC v64 binaries. And there's also, for those who don't have access to hardware, keymuse support was recently added, and I did some nudging to get that into Debian a little earlier, which is maybe one of my more significant contributions, though I mostly just nudged patches to happen quicker. And very, very recently, mostly because of the dPackage change, you can actually even use regular old Debootstrap to at least get a minBase variant without having to pull in the unreleased portion of the Debian ports archive. And that's probably about all I really have going on right now. So if you would like to chime in or bring up some ideas, issues. Yeah, hi, this is BDL. One of the things that's sort of important to understand in RISC 5 space is that while the instruction set architecture is a completely open architecture and an open design, the actual implementation of that into a particular chip may or may not stay really open and without binary stuff, I have one of the sci-fi unleashed boards with me. If you haven't seen one before and you'd like to see one up close and personal, I'll be happy to pass this around as long as I get it back. This one was expensive because it's one of the very first ones that was sent out. But the problem is the sci-fi folks have happily pulled in intellectual property from other places to get to where it's a complete chip that does useful things. This is a quad-core 64-bit processor with reasonable performance for playing around and doing Linux stuff. But the chip's implementation is not particularly open. It has sort of the same level of documentation about how everything works that other people's processor chips have. And it's based on RISC 5, which makes it a reasonable platform for doing RISC 5 development. But this chip itself is certainly not transparent in terms of all of its content and how all of its peripheral bits work. That's why my personal interest is sort of leaning more towards, in the long-term, can we actually get to the point where we have implementations that are completely open and that are either the chips are being developed by people that we know and trust and are willing to sort of collaborate with on future development or in some way we end up with chips where we can actually sort of trust what the content is all the way down to the sand. To that end, I've been playing around with some of the FPGA targeting stuff and I have with me one of the Digilent boards that's the default target for use with the low-risk version of RISC 5, which is another FPGA targeting thing akin to the rocket things that you mentioned in the Wiki. Folks, want to look at that board you're welcome to. This is a relatively inexpensive board. I heard someone talking a couple of days. You were talking about actually targeting a lattice part with a completely open tool chain. I would love to hear more about that and I have it in my head that it might be really, really interesting for us to find or pick some or make some board that has a suitably large suitably fast FPGA that we can target with a completely open tool chain to not only collaborate on making a devion port that works better but maybe in this community there's enough enthusiasm that we could collaborate on a chip implementation that was completely open too because I worry that the existing FPGA targeting communities that are trying to do completely open things are right now sort of silos. They're each working on the things they care about and maybe some place like devion is where some of this could come together and we could have a larger, more collaborative approach. Anyway, that's enough for me. Yeah, yeah, D-Dale made a great point that there is a piece of these chips that is open but there are other parts. Although to sort of play the apologist here, I think it's great to see any major component opened and it sort of creates the, it sort of breaks the chicken and egg problem and gives you something to hang all of their buses on top of and all of the other chips. So I'm a big fan of incremental improvement and so in that sense, I think it's still a great step forward but yeah, there are some currently not free components that are attached to the RISC-5 chips. Anybody else? Has anyone in the room been running RISC-5 port or tried to run it besides V-Dale? So what's back of these boards so far? Right, the Hive-Hive Unleashed has about eight gigs of RAM. I think a processor that can run in the 1.2 to maybe as high as 1.5 gigahertz range, quad core, they don't have much in the way of IO. So they have gigabit ethernet, but your typical dev board connect a whole bunch of just about anything to it. So yeah, so I didn't bring it because it's too big and too heavy to put in a carry-on bag but one of the things the Sci-Fi folks collaborated with Micro Semi on is there's this huge expansion board for the Sci-Fi Unleashed and I have one of those too and what it basically does is extend the, it's kind of open but seems weird to me, serial interface bus thing off the processor through a big chunk of Micro Semi programmable logic to implement the things you normally expect to have, PCI, all that kind of stuff and that board has a lot of IO and the ability to hook up real disk drives and video cards and stuff like that but the Sci-Fi Unleashed board by itself, it's basically a cat five connector and not a whole lot else in a Micro SD slot and not a whole lot else that seems useful. Right, Merkur from IRC was talking about some of the FPGA implementations noting that the ICE-40 series is probably too small to actually build a RISC-5 chip that's Linux capable. Project Trellis is a similar FPGA bit stream that looks promising, targeting the ECP-5 which would probably be large enough to actually run Linux I'm inferring so it sounds like there are some options. I am interested, it sounded like there was somebody in the audience who actually had experience doing at least one of the FPGA implementations using the Debian tool chains, is that correct or did they not show up? Cause I talked to somebody briefly about it and I'd be really curious to hear. Sounds like they're not here. Okay. Oh, please grab a mic and. Okay. I accidentally have the ICE-40 board I mentioned on the IRC and yes, it doesn't run some kind of Linux or those kind of huge operating system on it and mostly can just run some kind of bare metal program that blinks some LEDs or those kind of stops and the open source Torch and the author of the open source Torch and Clifford Wolf is actually working on reverse engineering some side links, AC something FPGAs and maybe one day when the reverse engineering process is complete, maybe we can have the implementation that is capable of running Linux that day. I guess there's a org.org links to the status of the free FPGA tool chains, anything else? Anybody kind of interested in getting involved, cutting their teeth on helping with some of the porting work? There's the DebianRisk5 channel on your typical offset.net server for IRC. So which hardware is currently used for build demons? It's mostly a bunch of Kimu virtual machines emulating the hardware, so there may be one or two of the high five unleashed boards just to have at least one bare metal or actual physical implemented Risk5 board, but they're mostly running Kimu virtual machines. So that might possibly introduce since it's such an early implementation, there might be bugs in the Kimu emulation. I'm not totally up to speed on what those might look like, but yeah, that's definitely a blocker for inclusion into the proper Debian archive. Yeah, it's not clear to me that we're anywhere near actually putting Risk5 support in the main archive, and I've been involved, as those of you don't know me, I personally was involved in starting five of Debian's ports back in the day, and so this is something I spent a lot of time thinking about, certainly until there's sort of generally available larger volume hardware that average users could run, pushing really hard to have this be a release architecture doesn't make much sense. Having said that, I know at least one company that's trying to figure out how to build a laptop design around the Sci-Fi of Unleashed, I think mostly to sort of prove to people that this is a credible thing to want to do. I'm personally, as I said, very interested in driving forward towards a nicely performant for something like a laptop completely open chip design. I was joking earlier that putting low risk on an FPGA board I could do something like put it in my wife's greenhouse or the temperature sensor to track what's happening out there. I don't know how long it will be before people think it's amusing to actually try and run something like a minimum Debian install to do useful work of one kind or another with risk five, and I certainly don't want to hold that back, but right now I also believe that almost everything in the way of building is being done in the QMU environment, because I think it's actually faster than building on real hardware right now, particularly if you got a really fast server to run it on. But I do know that there are a number of people actually running Debian on sci-fi of unleashed boards every day, and I ran out of time before I came here, but I intend to put it up on the unleashed board with the expansion board and see if I can't just use it as much as I can to help bring all of that out and make sure things are actually working. I would like to share something that is not related to Debian or Linux, but I posted the link on the IRC that is a micro Python port to the Pico RB32 that is a very tiny and a small RB32 implementation, and I would like to say that it's kind of operating system because it has multitask support and it has hardware abstraction and those kind of stuff, so in some sense that is an operating system, but it's very tiny, maybe, just saying. Yeah, I think one of the risk five Debian people had suggested that the actual, the main advantage with the Kimu board is you can actually give it a lot more RAM for ability and you actually get a reasonable speed with the IO, although even on a fairly fast machine, the on a fairly fast x86 machine Kimu, it sounded like maybe actually got comparable performance to running on the real high five on leash board, maybe for different workflows, obviously it varies, but they're reasonably close, maybe a little slower on the real hardware, ironically, but hopefully that will eventually change. So what kind of work is pending to do? Right, good question. You can go to udd.debian.org, well actually off of the wiki page is a link to the bugs that are tagged. There are a lot of bugs that are just simple, trivial like one to three line patches that maintainers could really, if they just applied it, it would save the risk B64 porters, it's really an unfortunate name. It would save the porters a lot of work of just applying those patches, building it in a custom location, building it and then uploading it to Debian ports. So maybe how many people have a rough idea of how Debian ports works? Okay, so maybe even just briefly explaining that. So Debian ports typically has at least two repositories, one of which is just packages rebuilt on the archive but based exactly the same source, the exact same source as what's in Debian unstable. The other repository is where we put our ugly hacks and that's typically called unreleased. And in many cases, these ugly hacks are actually just small patches that really can't possibly hurt anything in the official Debian packages on other architectures. So it's just a lot of busy work. Every time a new version gets uploaded, the risk porters need to then upload a correspondingly patched version. So one thing that would be really helpful is if you do get a bug about this on one of your packages to apply those patches, I don't know how people would feel about a very gentle NMU campaign to sort of resolve some of those undeltwith bugs. Fortunately, most of the real core blockers like the Linux libc and glibc and binutels have recently been patched and uploaded to the official archive. But I think also, I don't know off the top of my head exactly which ones, but probably last I checked system D didn't have support, I don't know if there's an outstanding patch for it. But mainly, it'd be nice to actually be able to get a DebootStrap, which can only support a single component. All of the things necessary to DebootStrap, a base to root would be nice. Right now you can do a minimal base to root, but let's bump it up a step further and maybe target some of the remaining patches necessary to do those. It is a fairly immature port at this point. So it's a great time to get in and get a lot of work done. And if that's the kind of thing that motivates you, small changes can make big differences. Yeah, I think talking about how the port stuff works is really useful. And in the same vein, I'll offer up a couple of thoughts based on experience about what it takes to actually port packages to a new architecture like this. One of the challenges is that if you look at the build dependency graph for the Debian distribution, it's horribly complicated. And part of the reason it's complicated is we have single source packages that build multiple kinds of outputs. For example, you might have a base essential package that you have to get built before the entire rest of the set of packages can be able to be built. But maybe that package also provides documentation that needs some fairly complex document processing tools in order to generate those outputs. And so a lot of the time, what you have to do as a porter is you have to be willing to temporarily do things like hack the source package to just not build any documentation so that you can get a working executable. And we spent a lot of time over the years coming up with ways to make this easier because we've done a lot of ports now. But if you look at this list, there are a number of places where it's like, you just need to add this architecture to a list of architectures that the package knows about and knows how to configure for. Or there may even be some packages out there that still have old ways of handling things like config.sub and config.guest versions which used to be a really huge problem. And so a lot of times when you get down to it, the patch required for packages really, really small once you get past this sort of bootstrapping problem and have enough of the distribution built to have a lot of those other dependencies, build dependencies available for building things like documentation and data and all of that stuff that may not be essential for breaking the build dependency graph. Are you using build profiles at all? Is that at all helpful? Because that was what this was for. I believe build profiles are definitely used. A number of the patches recommend, a number of the risk five tag patches are basically build profile, like please enable build profile support. I think we're past some of the very basic bootstrapping and so to some degree it's moving on to more, actually we don't need all of the build profiles but in general when build profile related bugs are really helpful to bootstrapping ports. Question, another question on another topic. Do people think it'd be useful to have the architecture documentation in Debian in a normal package? Because we can't have that for most other architectures, they're mostly proprietary sir. But for this architecture it's possible. Yeah. Also another thing, Karsten Merker mentioned on IRC was upstream really could use some work on getting the kernel driver bits upstream and a proper boot loader. I have one other comment. This is gonna be very predictable. So I should have known of course that Debian is itself maintaining several Debian derivatives. Your unreleased suite is obviously a Debian derivative. I wrote a tool you may have heard me plugging which is supposed to help with this kind of thing. Maybe people involved with ports stuff should talk to me after the session about how we can make all of this automatically rebasing all of your patches more automatic. I believe you're referring to Deget and Git Rebase? Deget. Okay. I saw there was an open risk part at some time. What's the big difference between open risk and risk five and... Right. My understanding which please correct me if I'm wrong was some of the core GCC patches to support open risk. The person who wrote the bulk of that actually blocked some sort of agreement in order to get those patches into GCC upstream. And so basically there was no possibility of getting the GCC patches upstream. So in that sense which that's pretty much going to kill any porting effort at least for a while until somebody rewrites it from scratch without looking at the other code which is highly publicly available. So yeah, that was a pretty unfortunate thing. I know one of the main porters involved in the risk five actually was also involved in the open risk port for Debian as well. Marker also mentioned, yeah, no upstream support in the tool chain. So the fact that we have all the most core major tool chains available upstream in risk five is just a huge win and sometimes that takes a long time for a new port. So any ideas when you think you might be ready to get into the main archive or maybe release? I'd want to see some real world build decapable hardware before that's even a dream. Sure, exactly. It's kind of hard to say with hardware, especially one that's so new and yet come so far. So really just takes some vendor to jump in and make better reality or maybe some huge community driven crowdfunding campaign. I have no idea. So BDEL says sometime in 2019 maybe. That sounds very awesomely optimistic. But yeah, I think once we get some decent build hardware, there's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here too is like who's going to invest in this open architecture when there's not a working operating system for it? It's maybe a little, you know, other architectures will do that but maybe it requires some driving force behind it to actually carry that through. I think the attendance in this room shows that's really not going to be much of a problem. But I had a different, I'm sorry I came in late. So maybe this is already being covered. A speculative execution has been much in the news as I understand it, the current risk five calls don't do out of order so aren't vulnerable. Does anybody have any knowledge about whether that's in fact true and what the future plans of anybody that's making designs are? Because I know the architect was designed to support out of order but that's starting to look like a thing that you might want to ask questions about. You might prefer more slower calls for example. Right, as far as I know there are no implementations that support out of order execution and obviously going to be hesitant to actually bother building any at this point, I hope. Well this is part of the reason I think it'd be awesome if we could actually see the guts of the processors that are coming along the pipe. And I didn't mean any slight to the sci-fi folks earlier. I'm really thrilled that they built the chip they did and that that board's available but I hope that people aren't confused in the belief that that's what all we ever really want. With respect to the chicken and egg problem, the vagrant, I can report that the people that are thinking about doing things like building laptop designs around risk five are already really, really excited about the fact that the Debian port has gotten as far as it has as quickly as it has and I think that that has proven the sort of, there's a sense that the operating system port is already viable even though it's in Debian ports and not in the main tree and I think that that, I really wanna thank everybody that's been working on the port so far because it really has enabled folks that are thinking about doing business things around risk five to feel like there is a credible likelihood of being able to ship stuff that runs Debian. I'm really encouraged by this. There's two kind of ways of looking at that. One is it's really, really good for risk five which I like because I'm really keen to have open hardware but also I think that in Debian we sometimes underestimate our influence and our ability to change things, our ability to maybe disagree with other people and do our own thing and this kind of thing, this is us making a big strategic impact in like the CPU architecture in like the CPU marketplace. We are making something possible that would otherwise be very difficult and we're doing it for all the right reasons so I'm very proud of everybody else here in the room. Thank you. Somebody mentioned, is there anybody from Andy's technology who wants to say something? I know they're based in Sintu Science Park and maybe got nudged to show up. I know they do manufacture some risk five chips. Guessing that's... Oh, hello. Hello. Cool. Hello. Okay, in fact I don't know how to say it. What? We have our FPGA boards and yes it can run the linux for the risk five, yes. But sadly our company don't intend to sell the board so I think it's a main problem in the risk five world is only the sci-fi guy are intended to build a board to sell other than the company so I don't know. And I think sci-fi even, at least some of them have told me they don't actually want to be making boards, they just wanted to get something out there to kind of seed the world plan so that people actually start doing this though. But yeah, because it's almost no profit. So in that sense it might suggest moving towards some sort of crowdfunding effort but that's a non-trivial task. Josh follows and this talk. Is there any public example or demo we could find on the internet that is running strong on your and this core? We send many pages to the linux kernel and for our port in our SOC we may upstreaming our implementation to QEMU in recently the months I guess. Okay, so that way you may run the linux on our QEMU implementation, yes. And in our app page I'm not sure the schedule, yes. And we may provide a MCU version to run some kind of Arduino compatible programs in the app page at both. But there is no MCU in it. Who mentions from IRC what are the options for security applications that need a multi-core RISC-5 SOC capable of running linux but still need an MMU? Don't need multi-core, correction. Anybody know of anything like that? Are the Andes tech, those are 32-bit RISC-5 or are you also making 64-bit versions? We implement 32 and 64 version, yes. And we send Jullibusy patches for RISC-532 for the last few months and Palmer said he would do the following patch sets. We sent version three, yes. And he said he would follow the, yes, he would do the following things, yes. Cool, it's really great to see projects doing the work to push stuff upstream. In fact, that's astounding. I know in certain other architectures that sometimes happens, but really exciting to see that with RISC-5. There have been a couple of public comments in this debcon earlier about the fact that we're sort of starting with the 64-bit port because of course that's what's of greatest interest the most of us going forward. And there was at least an implication that maybe Debian wouldn't do a RISC-532-bit port. I commented at the time that I think we're gonna have to be careful about that attitude because as we go forward with public pronouncements by people like Martin Fink who's the CTO at Western Digital and happens to have been my boss at a certain point in history, he made a big public announcement about Western Digital's commitment to using RISC-5 and future products. And I think that that means that we're going to see in the industry a number of 32-bit implementations of RISC-5 embedded in various devices that we might very well want to be able to use to repurpose that silicon or maybe we might be able to get access to low-cost 32-bit implementations that are fun for doing embedded, network edge, security, whatever kinds of devices. And so I'm not jumping on the bandwagon to push starting a 32-bit port before we get 64-bits in good shape. That would be ludicrous. But I do want people to sort of keep an open mind about the fact that there may come a time when doing a 32-bit RISC-V32 architecture and Debian makes a heck of a lot of sense. We'll see. Of course, there's also the plausibility of a 128-bit port. Could be the first. But yes, focus on one at a time. So what are people's personal interests in RISC-5? Do you hope to run it on someday, maybe run it as your primary computing platform, as an interesting little hobby, as a handheld device? Like, anybody have any hopes, dreams, visions? Yes, all of us. Freedom! Right. There's a distinct call for freedom in the room. I think there's nothing wrong with speculation. If you can verify the layout of the CPU or so, I want to use a CPU where there's... which is at least tested and can be reviewed to find some security holes. So speaking of someone with experience from previous new architecture ports, please tell me you've got things like ABI nailed down, you've got cross-distro agreement for things like your Elf interpreter path and whatever. I do think... I think at least Fedora is also targeting the same instruction set with all of the extra bells and whistles, the same bells and whistles. I'm not positive. And I know they did a port once and they did it kind of the hard way and then they had to redo it. Debian's also... This is maybe the second major iteration of the Debian port for RISC-5. So, yeah. I think it's pretty much nailed down. I know... I also know the sci-fi folks in particular have really been like, we want to push... They kind of wanted to get a piece of hardware out there to sort of also solidify the spec to some degree. Yeah, there's a RISC here, Steve, that things could, you know, if we're not careful and if as a distribution, we don't sort of make our thoughts about such things known and through action sort of follow through on all this. It could be much worse than the arm situation in the kernel was at one point in history because even the base architecture is wide open and if somebody really wants to go create, you know, RISC-6 or RISC-42 or whatever, there's ample opportunity to do that. But I think you and I and everyone else who's been playing this game long enough understands that for there to be critical mass and for us to be able to do things like build and maintain a distribution, there has to be some consistency, some uniformity, some willingness for people to come together and standardize. And so I hope that by getting involved early in building a distribution around a particular ABI that, you know, until and unless somebody comes along and says, here's why we really, really, really want to change that and why it's going to make the world a substantially better place, that we won't see the kind of silly diversification that drove us nuts with IO structures on arm for a while, for example, and which finally is somewhat rationalizing. So yeah, there's an opportunity to get it right, but there's also an opportunity to really screw it up when we have all the knobs. Absolutely, so, I mean, is there, for example, a cross distro list to discuss this kind of thing or is it way too early? It's probably a little early, but I think people, I've seen conversations back and forth with at least Fedora folks. I don't know if there's actually lists. Sure, so if there isn't such a thing, I would strongly recommend start one and invite the other people to get involved. You know, it's easier to discuss this kind of thing early and make sure that, for example, you get binary, you know, binary. Did the answer to the questions on the screen there? Okay, awesome. Yeah, great. Make sure you have a cross distro forum so you can discuss things as they come up rather than a year later and realize, oh crap, we need to rebuild. Right, definitely, yeah.  Yeah, we're pretty much wrapping up. Yeah, thank you all for coming and let's keep this thing real.