Well, I see that everybody's survived day one of Drupal Khan, and in Chicago we have a name for this particular time slot in a day. It's called dinner. So, you know, I apologize for the fact that you're going to have to delay yours for yet an hour. Yeah, let's see if we... I may end up resorting to carrying one around. I added a couple words to the beginning of my title here. I added the architect in the organism, because I wanted to convey, you know, through this title, a kind of mental image of what we're talking about. And I'm going to be talking about Plato and Aristotle and Drupal, okay? And, you know, I've been a software developer since 1995. I also happen to be a bona fide philosopher. I have multiple degrees in philosophy. I've taught it in universities. And so I'm really excited because this is like the only time in my life I've actually gotten to talk about both the things I'm really interested in. Yet I'm worried that my excitement about it might, you know, turn into long spouts of technical jargon. So I'm going to do my best to kind of explain as I go what I'm talking about. Right now I work for HP. I work in the HP Cloud Group in developer experience. I work on the team that interfaces with people who are going to use the HP Cloud. Yesterday we released the HP Cloud PHP bindings. HP Cloud provides kind of like AWS service with HP OpenStack-based solution. We also released an HP Cloud Drupal module. I'd love to talk to people about that, but not right now, okay? But in order to kind of celebrate the HP, you know, our launching of a couple of products, I thought, hey, I'll give away a couple of t-shirts, okay? So I've got a couple of trivia questions. And if you get the question right, I'll give you a t-shirt, okay? So raise your hand if you know the answer. Question number one, who was Plato's teacher? How about you in the red shirt? So I've got a couple t-shirts up here on the stage. You can come pick it up after. Question number two, who was Aristotle's most famous student? I see you in the white shirt with the beard that's better than mine.  So what is it? Alexander the Great. Very good. I actually thought I might stump some people with that one. You guys are impressive. So Alfred North Whitehead was a philosopher in the last century. And he made this kind of pithy remark at one point that all philosophy can be viewed as a footnote to Plato. And this is interesting because you want to say, oh, come on. But he's actually really on to something here. You know, in Athens during this period of time, there's this kind of explosion of a particular kind of thought that was such a sea change for the way people approached problem solving that it really is true. Even today, you couldn't make it through a philosophy program without talking about Plato and Aristotle. You probably can't make it through a liberal arts program of any sort and probably not even a science program. Which makes me think that maybe Whitehead was perhaps a little myopic. He focused only on philosophy, right? But these thinkers really triggered something that's much broader. And I want to even say today that all of computer science can be viewed. And I mean computer science like the big, broad thing, not the narrow academic study, but the stuff we do every day combined with the academic study. All of this can be viewed as footnotes to Plato and to Aristotle. So does anybody know who the first philosopher ever in history was? Oh, this one I'm surprised about. It was philosopher Raptor, who was known for his short, witty, grammatically incorrect questions. He's also extinct and that really hampers your ability to carry on a tradition. But given that he was unknown virtually until very recently, generally people tend to point to Socrates as the beginning of philosophy. There were of course other philosophers who were before Socrates. And actually I should characterize this as Western philosophy. But Socrates was basically in the fifth century, he's an Athens. He's a very controversial teacher. He's controversial on many different topics, but also because of his teaching style. Because he, you know, in the tradition of the Sophists, he gathers kind of young men and he teaches them on a broad variety of things. But he doesn't necessarily feel compelled to stay within the norm. And so he ruffles a lot of feathers. He's probably best known for the Socratic method. How many people have heard this term, the Socratic method? It means beginning with questions. When you have a complex problem, you state, you know, your kind of basic understanding and then you start asking questions about your basic understanding. And as you go, you kind of hone in on what the true nature of the problem is. And as Socrates, you know, purportedly goes about this, he's engaging with various people, other philosophers, his students, random people on the street. And using the Socratic method to try and understand, right? Sophia, the love for wisdom. Now, really there's not a lot of historical evidence about who Socrates was and what he did. There are only three people from his general lifetime who would have written, who wrote about Socrates. Aristophanes, Xenophon, and Plato, right? And Aristophanes and Xenophon don't have a whole lot of nice stuff to say about Socrates. He actually becomes a comedic character in one of Aristophanes' plays. But Plato writes volumes and volumes about Socrates. However, the Socrates and Plato might have been the historical Socrates or might have been just a character in Plato's dialogue, a vehicle for Plato to explain his philosophy. And scholars can debate endlessly about this. Anyway, ultimately Socrates is sentenced to death. He dies by drinking hemlock because he was convicted of corrupting the youth because he refused to kind of go along with the established norms. He challenged a lot of the power structures of the day. But he's considered, because of this, even in spite of the fact that we don't know a whole lot about him historically, to kind of be the father of Western philosophy. Now, this is Western philosophy as opposed to Eastern philosophy, because it has a profoundly different sort of lineage that does not include Socrates. So I want to make that clear. So Plato is Socrates' student, right? Probably in his mid-20s Socrates dies. Nobody knows how long Plato was a student of Socrates, but Plato was very young when Socrates commits suicide or is, you know, forced to commit suicide. And like Socrates, he's in Athens as he's studying under Socrates. But after this, scholars think that he probably traveled around a bit, possibly as far as the Middle East, and he took in a broad range of influences, and this comes out a lot in his writings. He wrote numerous books. Most of them are in the form of a dialogue where you have Socrates usually as the main character engaging with between two and five or six different characters, all addressing one problem or a small range of problems. Okay, so we're not talking like a treatise. It's all very conversational. Now Plato himself has a very famous student named Aristotle. But Aristotle and Plato, after Aristotle's become sufficiently steeped in philosophy, don't necessarily agree, and so they sort of split up, right? And Aristotle's school stands in some competition with Plato's. Now Aristotle is a very interesting character because he's like this fountain of thought on these broad, broad ranges of topics, right? Of course he's a philosopher. He also worked in natural science, really shaped the way natural science has been done since his time, even today. He contributed to literary theory, probably developed the most formal literary theory system. He wrote the rhetoric, and he also employed this method called the Indoxic Review at the beginning of his books that basically is a form of literary criticism against his contemporaries or evaluating his contemporaries. And of course, like Plato, political science is a big deal to Aristotle, but he considers it very broadly, including probably one of the few really interesting analyses of friendship and what a fundamental relationship that is. And then I wanted to highlight biology which was one of his passions really informs a lot of the other areas because what he sees and why he's credited with kind of contributing to the natural sciences is instead of seeing a phenomenon and trying to explain it by appeal to some kind of abstract cosmic principle, Aristotle looks at things and looks for physical explanations of why they're happening. He starts looking at causes. He has four different kinds of causes that he describes, and he wants to understand what thing causes what other thing to do, what action. He's very interested in the dynamism of the world. Absolutely crucial. And he has a very biological model of this. We've just had like the nine-minute and 25-second introduction to western philosophy, but what does any of this have to do with us? I think this is the most important slide. If I could like carve this on the back of your eyeballs, I would. I think this is an incredibly profound painting. This was done by Raphael probably in the early 1500s, and it's called The School of Athens. Hey, can you see you've got all these people standing around? And then take a look at that archway in the middle. There's a close-up. This summarizes what I'm going to talk about today. You've got two people standing there. On the left, that would be stage right, you have Plato, and on the other side, you have Aristotle. Now, take a look at how Plato is standing there. In one hand, he's got a book. In the other, he's pointing up toward the sky. The book that he's holding is called The Tamaeus. It was one of his dialogues. And this dialogue was what's typically called a cosmology. He was trying to explain the order of the universe, and he was trying to explain this in kind of a combination of a mythology, but grounded in a philosophy. And it's a big vehicle for explaining the platonic view of reality. And he's pointing up. He's pointing upwards because Plato has this kind of sensibility toward the ideal. He thinks that we look at reality and we try to build an abstraction, or try to understand it in a more abstract way, and so we're looking up to try and understand the more pure version of reality. This is going to be a big deal, and I'm going to talk a lot about this. But before going that way, let's talk about Aristotle because he's holding a different book in his hands. It looks like The Ethics. Probably the Nicomachian Ethics, which was a book that he wrote probably for his son that explains not specifically a moral system, but kind of a broad code of how you ought to live in the world. And it too, it's based on this idea of dynamism that I talked about before, this kind of biological understanding of the world, a bunch of things that are moving and working together to create various things. They're always changing, and his ethics becomes to reflect that because it reflects human beings as creatures that change over time, that have the capability of changing, of first learning and then acting on what they've learned. And he's pointing down to the ground. Like his natural science, he wants to look in the world to understand what's going on outward, not upward toward some kind of abstraction. This becomes a very, very fascinating distinction between Plato and Aristotle. And let's start with Plato, and let's look, and we're going to go through a philosophy in order to explain a computer science. There are three words here that I kind of want you to be attuned to as I talk. Forms, perfection, and reality. Now every once in a while, philosophers use words in ways that are unexpected. And so I try to highlight words and provide definitions where I think they might cause confusion. And this one is a good example to start with, ideal. A lot of times when we say ideal, what we intend is perfection, right? But that's not typically what a philosopher, particularly not someone like Plato, meant by the term ideal. It means primarily having to do with an idea or with a mental object. What's a mental object? I mean, phrased briefly, we're talking about an object that does not exist in a physical sense of the word. It exists in a mental sense of the word. Probably the easiest way to describe this is to think about a number. Okay, let's keep it simple. Let's talk about one. There is no one that we see lying around. We might say, well, I've got one of those. Or we might say, here's the digit one. But it's a symbolic representation that points to whatever one actually is. Whatever oneness actually is. That's one example of a mental object, but it's by no means the only. Numbers aren't the only mental objects. And as we see in Plato, there are a whole lot of mental objects. But this does all kind of raise the question, what exactly is an ideal boyfriend or girlfriend? If it's something that's an idea and not a reality. We have a physical manifestation, right? One of Plato's most popular stories is the story of the cave, Plato's cave. This great artist, whoever writes XKCD, once tried to capture this idea. Here you've got an individual calling as some kind of support desk and trying to describe this existential dilemma in which he finds himself. And the support desk person is trying to figure out what he's talking about. And finally she says, I'm sorry, but we can't send a search and rescue team into Plato's cave. We don't solve philosophical problems here. It's interesting for two reasons. First of all, because the problem he describes has nothing to do with Plato's cave. It's actually Descartes' evil deceiver is the root of this kind of problem and became later the brains in a vat problem. Philosophers have fun naming things. But I do want to tell you the story of Plato's cave. So Plato says, here's the story. Imagine you've got these guys who are chained to a wall in a cave. They can't turn their heads. They can't really see anything except the wall opposite them. And somewhere in the cave are torches or something, you know, this flickering source of light. And it casts shadows against this wall. And as other things move in front of the flames, there are shadows cast against the wall.  And they mistakenly believe that the shadows are what's actually out there. Those are the real things. Now one of the prisoners happens to break free from his chains at some point. And he walks away from his wall and turns the corner and sees the torch. And then he walks out of the cave up above ground and he sees the sun. And he sees flowers and trees and birds and chirping birds. And he realizes that all along he'd been looking at the shadows thinking that those were reality and they're not reality at all. They're the remnants that cast off of what's real. They're a shadow of what's real, quite literally in that case. So he returns to the cave and says, Hey guys, you will not believe this. All our lives we've been staring at the wrong thing. You've got to come with me out here and see reality. And his friends refuse to go. Now Plato I think is describing himself and what he saw as his mission in life. But the question that lies behind this is what is real? Plato is saying you're looking at the wrong thing. That's not real. Now to understand what's motivating Plato and what he thinks is real, you should understand another distinction in Greek philosophy, the distinction between being and becoming. For something to be means that it's in this kind of static, finished and complete state. It's done. If it's changing, it's not done. And it can't be perfect if it's changing because it's moving from one thing to another. So it's neither a perfect one of this nor a perfect one of that. It's something in transition. It's becoming. This is a very important concept to the early Greek philosophers, being and becoming. And Plato is drawing on that distinction throughout his philosophy. And he introduces this term called eidos in Greek. We call it the idea or the forms. You probably have heard people refer to Plato's forms. This is what we're talking about. The forms are what is real to Plato. The forms is what he metaphorically sees when he leaves the cave, what he discovers. They are perfect mental objects that are in this state of being. They don't change. They're already done. They're static and they're perfect. Now the shadow world, as Plato describes it, is the physical world. What he's describing is the shadows on the wall. That's the physical world. That's what we all mistakenly call reality, says Plato. But all it really is are bad copies of the forms. We've got these ideal objects that don't change. And then all the stuff around us that we can see and that we can feel is constantly changing, including us. We're kind of this corrupt amalgamation of the spirit, of the soul, and of a body, says Plato. And the body keeps distracting us from what's real. So if all of our physical reality is just a bad copy, is something that's becoming, what do you do, right? So let me give a little bit of an example before I move on, because I know that what I just said is probably really abstract and I'm actually surprised that nobody threw anything while I was saying that. Did anybody see this chair in DIA? This is called the LSD chair, because it looks like an L and S and a D. I'm sure that's the only reason why. No, Plato would look at this and Plato would say, this is like a corrupt copy of whatever the ideal chair is. Somewhere out there in the non-physical part of the universe, there is the ideal chair. It is the chair, right? All these chairs that are filling the room are nothing but bad copies of that idea of chair that we are aware of the idea, but we just can't quite get it and we can't possibly put it in the physical world because the minute we do that, we're introducing change and it's not the ideal anymore. So we have to begin to find our way back to understanding what the forms are, the kind of true nature of reality. Now this has a very interesting consequence that I want to point out here. So in the Platonic view, what you ought to be doing as the philosopher, your motivation is what is the word eros, love, intense, passionate love of discovering the forms, of discovering reality as it really is. So for Plato, your ideal life ought to be a life of contemplation where you're trying to understand from the world, you're trying to separate the becoming part of the world, the messy part, and understand the actual architecture of the world as forms. Now the funny offshoot of this that Plato acknowledges and makes a pretty big deal of is that on the other hand, from this Sophia toward the forms, this seeking after wisdom, we have the technique, the art in the world, right? We've got art. Art on Plato's account is an attempt to capture the physical world in a medium, which means art is a copy of a copy. And since art can never quite capture the real world, it's a bad copy, and since the physical world is already a bad copy, you've got a bad copy of a bad copy. So Raphael's painting that we looked at would clearly not be something that Plato endorsed. He does not like art. Okay, with that kind of basic idea here, let's move on to programming. I'm going to give you object-oriented programming without a line of code. Okay, this little model is designed to point out what I'm saying here. You have, in object-oriented programming, two big categories of stuff. You've got a class, you've got an object. Now a class is the real stuff of object-oriented programming. The class is the description of the entire encompassed state of an entire encompassed number of states that an object can be in. You define what properties an object can have in its class. You define what it can do in its class. You're setting the boundaries on what counts as that object and what counts as something else. Okay, and it's sort of an ideal state as you look at it, because you're working in your editor, you're looking at the class, and you're trying to describe the ideal boundary, the whole of your object in this class file. Now what happens in an object-oriented programming is an object-oriented program is that when you run it, you begin this process in which the interpreter or the combination of whatever stack you're using, the interpreter, in the case of PHP, is creating a runtime, and then it's creating instances of these objects and manipulating them. Okay? The runtime is the source of all evil in object-oriented programming because it's where the bugs happen. But it's important to notice here that when you instantiate an object in object-oriented programming, you're not exactly getting the class. You're getting this specific state of a thing that has some of the stuff on the class, but not all of it, and it can change over time. And sometimes it can change in bad ways because it's part of the runtime and it's forced to interoperate with other things and sometimes unpredictable ways. So you've got classes, which are Plato's forms, and then what we, you know, the platonic physical reality in programming, this is the objects interacting in runtime as the program executes, okay? That's kind of a very different way of looking at it than seeing a code sample, but it's like uncanny how well this describes what object-oriented programming actually is. So we've got Plato. We're looking up toward a kind of ideal things in their perfect state. Plato is, in that way, an architect, right? The perennial complaint of the physical architect is it looks so great as I design it. The problem is that when you've got to run into it and build the dumb thing and all the load-bearing stuff, you know, the real world spoils the true beauty of architecture, right? Well, if Plato is the architect, then we've got, on the other hand, Aristotle, the biologist. Now, again, I've conveniently tried to distill Aristotle into three words that I want you to watch out for. Three is a nice number, I think. I got it from Kant. Metaphysics, change, and this great Greek word, well, actually, it's kind of an anglicized, formerly Greek word, a hylomorphism, or it would actually, hulomorphism is another pronunciation. You'll hear for that. So keep those three words. Metaphysics, change, hulomorphism. You can see those as we go through here. But where Plato is all about this kind of bifurcation of the objects and the classes, the physical world and the forms, Aristotle's philosophy is all about becoming and all about change and all about dynamism. Those are the things Aristotle wants to explain. Those are the things he wants to talk about when he's talking about what the world is really like. So Aristotle writes this book called The Physics, where he wants to explain what happens when a couple of bodies smash into each other, or what happens when you drop something, or what happens as time elapses. This book, The Physics, is great. He's really happy until he realizes that there's stuff that he should have said at the beginning before he undertook this physics. And so he writes a book called The Metaphysics, which literally means the thing that comes before physics. The life of the philosopher captured there for you in black and white. Aristotle is explaining in the metaphysics how there's this kind of... What exactly is the rudimentary stuff of the universe? What do we mean when we're talking about matter? We're not talking about matters made up of atoms, and atoms are making... That's just shifting the focus of the problem farther and farther down. The eventual problem is what is all this stuff that makes up the universe? Who cares what the smallest component is? What properties does it have? What is this thing we call time? What does it mean? What is this thing we call motion, and what does that mean? He's interested in all these changing things. That's what the metaphysics is all about. So Aristotle begins working through this metaphysical system that permeates his philosophy. Yeah, sorry, that's a little on the vague side, isn't it? And in three words here, I want to kind of give you an overarching view of the kind of gist, the really meaty core of Aristotle's metaphysics. There are three words here, stuff, which in Greek is hule, which, as I understand it, is close to the word for wood in ancient Greek, the kind of basic building block, hule, stuff. Potentiality is the second word, and actuality is the third. So you've got matter, you've got stuff. You can impress your friends and loved ones with this one. Matter and stuff, but it has shape and it has extension, it has qualities, it has all of these things. How does some kind of primal stuff turn into all these things? How is it that an acorn and a tree and a wood statue can all be made of the same stuff, but yet look and have all these very different qualities? And so he explains this by this process of holomorphism, which is the taking of stuff and the combining it with what he calls a form, different from Plato, implementation detail there. You inform the object and inform the matter and it becomes a thing, but it's not just staying that thing, it's changing. And it's changing because it has, any given piece of matter has vast potential to be other things. And so you get this very interesting, very famous, very vexing philosophical model out of Aristotle of potentiality and actuality. And scholars tend to call it the kind of potentiality, actuality, models one and two. There you go, more vague philosophical stuff for you. Now Aristotle is saying here, you've got potential. Any given thing has potential to become other things. But in Aristotle's model, as it becomes something else, it again picks up a new potentiality to be actualized in another way. How is that for vague? Aristotle ends up explaining this as an ethical point and talking about how we as humans, we as children begin to develop virtues, right? Particular behaviors and characterization, hopefully virtues and not vices. But once we've actually got the virtue inside of us, that doesn't mean that we're just automatically virtuous. We just have the potential now to act virtuous. And each time in reality where we follow our virtue, we play out our virtue, we're actualizing the virtue in a different way. This is his two-tier model. It's really easy to see as code, okay? You open up your editor, you've got a blank screen. You have all of this potential. What is it going to become? You code it, and as you finish writing the last line of code, you now have something. You've actualized one of those many potential things it could be. But if we all just wrote code for the sake of that first actuality, we'd have a world filled with even more useless code than the code we already have, right? So we've got this code, but it only really actualizes. It's got the potential to run now, and it's really only actualized again when we actually execute the program, and that's when it's hitting its second layer of potentiality. This is Aristotle's model for how the world kind of works. It's the development of potential into actuality, and then the exercising of that actuality in this kind of second potentiality actuality model. Again, as I noticed these things, it was just like, wow, you know, that is, it's what we do. It's how things work. It describes how we built our computers to work. It just, yeah, amazes me. So now we've got this interesting juxtaposition that in computer science we tend to talk about as the functional versus the imperative models, and object-oriented programming is on the imperative side, okay? And we've seen Plato's system for this already. The focus is on being, right? The focus is on what's the current state of something. What's the ideal, you know, what are these... How do we describe the kind of stuff that exists in our universe, and what's it gonna be like when it's in the runtime, okay? Focus a lot on data structures. We need things like encapsulation where certain objects are under the control of wrapped around objects, and the wrapper object is manipulating the inner objects. A lot of focus on structures. I'm gonna come back to this because it's amazing how Plato would design a system. Now, Aristotle, on the other hand, is interested in becoming, in things constantly transitioning, okay? He's interested in what transformation is occurring. What's first class to him isn't how you describe the data, but how it's moving through the system, and how the system is changing, and how the end result differs so much from the beginning, and how you get predictable paths, but you have different potentialities that actualize depending on the inputs, right? All very, very functional, just like you would see in a functional programming language. One of the more core ones, like, I don't know, maybe a Haskell or a Closure or something like that. And I'm gonna avoid talking about functional programming to that level because I'd bore you, I think, if not myself first. But the important part about functional programming is that the focus of functional programming is on paying attention to the process, the functions that are happening. Here you go. You got a pony. Plato's pony looks like this. All right, it's got four legs. It's got a head. It's got some ears. It's got this potential range of motion for these things. It's got a tail. It's got a color. That's how Plato describes his pony. The functional take on the pony is it's a running thing. It's a hay-eating thing. It's something that eats hay. It's something that runs. It's something that, you know, describing what it does, how it interacts, okay? That's really kind of a good way to distinguish between these two. So Aristotle would worry about Plato's model because, for him, about the whole object-oriented model because it places too much emphasis on the data structure and the state and the objects and classes and the design patterns and things like that. He thinks you should focus more on the kind of dynamic aspects, the runtime, the capability, the potentiality, the actuality. All right, what in the world does all of that have to do with Drupal? Now, I'm going to suggest here that Drupal is lost in medieval philosophy, okay? It's stuck between the two. It's halfway between Aristotle and Plato. Now, an interesting thing happened in the history of philosophy. Platonism, Aristotelianism, you know, they get off to a good start. They develop schools. These schools develop themselves. Well, gradually, history has a way of working through these things and Platonism kind of gets adapted into another system and grafted in and then sort of buried underneath it. And that system becomes sort of so ingrained that the Aristotelians sort of fall out of favor. And they start moving Aristotle out of Europe and down into the Middle East, and they kind of smuggle out the Aristotelians and they get their manuscripts out. And for a while, it seems like both of these guys are absent from Western philosophy.  And around the same time, a lot of the Platonic stuff starts to come back up again. And the philosophers of the day start looking at this stuff and trying to understand it again. And they've lost the context behind it because it's been gone, so they have to relearn everything. And their first take is, all right, we've got these two guys and what exactly were they getting at together? They didn't understand at that time that they were trying to merge two systems that didn't work together. They were two different systems. Now, let's talk about Drupal. Drupal has a lot of Aristotelian underpinnings in it. Now, the kind of stuff of Drupal is these basic, simple types. We don't spend much time, didn't spend much time. Think back to Drupal 5. We didn't spend much time describing formal data structures as classes or anything. We add stuff like FAPI, but they're really just arrays and they're really malleable. And we don't really monitor what goes into them and what comes out. We just assume that sometimes we'll need something in here. We look and see if it's there and if it is we use it. So the stuff model is pretty basic. But what makes Drupal so interesting is the hook model because any module can kind of be loaded in here and imbue the system with a new potential to be something else. And as it gets executed with these new modules enabled, we get new reactions and new outputs. We're like adding new potential and seeing new actualizations of that potential. It's a very Aristotelian model. I think it might actually be one of the most Aristotelian programs ever in spite of the fact that it actually wasn't written in a functional language and isn't actually truly functional. But it captures something of the essence of Aristotle's model and something of the essence of functional programming in this kind of beautiful way. Yeah, here you go. Here's what you can toss out to your friends. You've got the perennial, plaguing question of whether Drupal is a CMS or a framework. Just say, no, no, you got it all wrong. It's neither of those. It's a hyalomorphic engine. Drupal is the only hyalomorphic engine on the planet, right? It's all about potentiality and actuality and informing the raw stuff of your data into something greater than that. But Plato doesn't like this, right? Plato hates this. You know, he thinks hyalomorphism is dumb. He thinks it's the wrong thing. He thinks it's scary because it's unpredictable. It doesn't have structure. And it's missing the top layer, right? It's missing reality to Plato. It's focusing on the shadows and not on reality. So Plato wants you to go out and rewrite Drupal using classes and objects, right? What would Plato do with Drupal? Yeah, he's gonna do classes, right? He's gonna do static wrappers around things in order to expose global state in a good way. So he can access it, find out what's really happening there. He wants a persistence layer because the more still your data is and the less it moves, the better. And the abstractions that describe what it means to persist something, that's a form. Design patterns are like, I mean, Plato would be like, yes, the design pattern. That's exactly what we need. We need a pattern that describes exactly how your code should function. And look, it applies to all these other places because all those places where you put it, they're just imperfect copies of the design pattern, right? And over and over, Plato's going in state, state, state, state. It's not the motion. We want to know what, at any particular time, how close are we to the ideal object? What's changing? Plato would rebuild all of Drupal in symphony. Symphony is a beautiful platonic system. So that's what Plato would do. Now, that leaves us with the philosopher's question. Quo watis, it's Latin. It means, oh, crap, what are we going to do now? It means, actually, where are we going? We've tried something. We're kind of in the process of trying something. But what I really want to get at is that we can learn a lesson from philosophy here. We can learn a lesson from the medieval philosophers who found Plato and found Aristotle and thought they could build a single system out of the two of them. Plato and Aristotle are fundamentally different, and as the medieval's began to unravel that, we saw this huge resurgence in philosophy that began then and has carried through to now. It was kind of like a rebirth of philosophy because they understood there was more than one model there. Aquinas loved Aristotle so much that he called him the philosopher. He called Plato, Plato. So what is it exactly that the medieval's kind of tapped into and eventually realized and what kind of moved them beyond that? Well, the answer to the question is to point us back to software development and to say, well, what's a big, big problem that perennially plagues software? Complexity. It's the arch nemesis of software. Complex models are hard to work with. Complex code is hard to read. Complex operating parameters are bad. Complex APIs give us headaches, okay? And by no means is computer science the only one that's realized this. Here are a couple of philosophical jargon-y sorts of things that are all ways to respond to complexity. You've probably heard of Occam's razor. It's probably the most popular of these up here. It's the incredibly bad principle that the simplest solution should always be favored over the complex solution. Bad only because it's probably an oversimplification. But it captures exactly what I'm talking about, right? It's complexity we're waging war with. Logical positivism in the last century was this attempt to say if we could just define everything and rigorously apply formal logic, then we could get rid of all those plaguing things that we don't want to talk about like God. The categorical imperative that Kant develops, this is his single moral principle that he believes can unravel for us the mystery of morality by giving us a principle that explains why we've got all these other ones and tell us how to generate new ones. It's like a meta-moral principle. It's fascinating. And I'm not going to talk about it because I'm already jazzed up enough. Taxonomy is Aristotle's baby, right? He says, here's how we classify things. An elephant is a pachyderm. A blue jay is a bird. A platypus is a physical reductionism. This is a model that's actually popular right now, and the attempt in physical reductionism is to say our problem with complexity is we keep using the wrong words. If we can describe reality as a series of physical interactions, then we get rid of all those terms that tend to confuse us because we're focusing on the physical interactions, and thus we get rid of complexity. And then the one closest to our home is probably model and simulation theory, which is how is it that we can figure out and identify which of these little pieces of data we don't need to capture and which we do so that we can model a system and get a pretty decent predictive simulation out of it? All of philosophy is about taming complexity. So what is it about complexity that makes it so noxious to us, especially as computer programmers and computer users and tech people? Ambiguity is one. Complexity breeds ambiguity. So we've got our platonic model. We've got our Aristotelian model. We want to use them both. Which one do we use in any given situation? Should a form field be a class? Or should we stop worrying about those details and focus on what happens with the form data? Can we do them both? If we do them both, what happens when any kind of conflict between our philosophical systems arise? Because they're going to happen. They're happening already. At lunchtime, I had several discussions with people about this scary symphony stuff when it comes in. What are we going to do with the menu router? Are we still going to have hooks for the menu router? Are we still going to have configurate? Are we still going to have variable get? Are we still going to have variable set? What about my arrays? Am I going to have to learn how to write classes for every single thing I want to do? There's an ambiguity that comes up and it might look like something we contain, but it's going to keep coming back and biting us with the models that are going to continue to be incompatible. Now, anti-reductionism is another... complexity resists simplification and reductionism. Because the more complexity we introduce into a system, the harder it becomes to reconceptualize it without starting to lose important bits. Right? I mean, now that we currently have a theme model that has both the kind of function-driven model and the array-driven model, it gets kind of complicated. Actually, it's a good one for ambiguity, too, because it gets hard to tell which we're supposed to do, and it gets hard to say exactly what we're trying to encompass when we're talking about this. And every time we try and capture it, it seems like we have to say, oh, yeah, and this thing, too. Oh, and this thing, too. Well, this is something that's going to get worse. The more metaphysical overhead we bring in, the more different kinds of models we capture under our umbrella. And then I think what the most important part of complexity is understanding cognitive limitations. We think very highly of ourselves, both individually and collectively, in this regard. We think of our intellect as essentially unbounded. We say to ourselves, and we say, there is no problem that we can't solve if we work at it hard enough. Except I still can't remember what I ate for breakfast last Tuesday. In fact, I can't remember the names of all these people that I met yesterday, and I see them today, and I say, oh, hi. Because I have all these cognitive limitations. I don't understand some things. I don't understand quantum physics. Some of you are probably thinking, I don't understand why this guy's rambling on about this. That's probably not your cognitive limitation. That's probably mine. But this is the issue. We hit boundaries in our reasoning that some of them we can overcome. Some of them we can't overcome. Some of them we just simply can't devote the attention necessary to overcome them because we've got other stuff we've got to do. So complexity, ultimately, is this big problem. And a well-constructed program is one that reduces complexity so that it's only as complex as it has to be and no more so. So what's the moral of this story? What do we learn from the philosophers? What do we learn from Plato, Aristotle, and the Evels? That really, we would be doing ourselves all a favor if we attempted to clarify what we really think reality is and stick to one model and figure out a good way of proceeding forward on a model that's not going to constantly reintroduce complexity and more things to argue about and more things to bike shit. So I wish that I had a solution to this problem and could simply tell you, Aristotle wins, right? But one of my mentors in philosophy says, you know, there are philosophers who believe that they should answer the questions that are out there. But really, the philosophers are doing the best? Are the ones who ask really hard questions?  I thought, well, that's good advice and particularly good because I have no idea what the right answer is. But I want to raise the question because I think that by taking it out of the code, we're moving it from the dollar signs and the arrow symbols and the ampersands and moving it back to a layer of sort of a conceptual viewing of what the actual models and conflict are. We can actually have a more productive conversation, perhaps more inclusive and perhaps one that doesn't get bogged down in the, well, if we just use references here, it'll solve this problem because we tend to bike shed, but we also tend to latch on to the little details and forget that we're, you know, multiplying complexity by doing that sometimes. So if you have a solution, you know, bring it out, talk about it and that sort of thing. And I hope that's what's happening here today. It's interesting because when I originally proposed this session, I knew only a little bit of what was going on with Symphony and then, you know, as the conference unfolds, we're hearing about each of the core teams reporting on how much Symphony can bring to the table here. And so it sort of ended up being surprisingly timely to talk about this sort of thing. But, you know, this is the end. This is the end for me. I got you to the model, I got you to the conversation point, and I can't take you any farther, so. But I can try to answer questions if you have them. So I've got a few minutes left. I would be, I'm perfectly understanding if your stomach is growling as loudly as mine is. But if you've got some questions, I'd love to hear them, maybe address them or maybe say, hmm, yes, very interesting. I'd have to think about that. Right? Yeah? There's a mic right back here if you want to. Oh, I just, a very interesting conversation you're setting up. What I'm wondering about is when you talk about Aristotle and Plato's view of the world, and you say that, you know, in their own way to reduce complexity, and if we try to meld these two things together, then we're only introducing ambiguity and we're making the world even more complex than we should. But I was sitting there thinking that maybe that's not true, because they both describe, they're both a way of thinking of the world, and often, depending on the situation, it's a good idea to use one versus the other. Even in the same system, doesn't mean that you're introducing more complexity. And what I think reduces complexity isn't what tool we choose to reduce it at the moment, or what tool we choose to think about the complex situation. But the language that we use, so I think the problem with language creating sort of bite-size bits that are easy to digest and not necessarily put these two things fighting with each other. Right. And that's something that a lot of people will say. There are two concerns I have with that approach, and why I make such a big deal about it. The first is that while we can talk about them as being easily compartmentalized, once we actually start building applications, the boundary dissolves between the two, because we have to make systems where all the parts can interoperate. And one of the virtues of Drupal is that it's tried to expose as much of the interoperation as possible. So we can dig as deeply into the guts as we can when we need to manipulate something or change it. That's where that becomes problematic. And the other thing is that we have to move data through the system. And we have to have some kind of form for meaningfully moving that data. And we don't necessarily want to pass all data back and forth as CSV files and then kind of expand them in each function. So do we use arrays? Do we use classed objects? Incidentally, when Drupal uses an object, it's using basically an array, a dictionary style underneath the hood. Classed object is more what I described here. When we've got a classed object and we've got an unstructured or basically unstructured array, somehow we've got boundaries that the data structures have to permeate to some extent or another. And that's a big problem. That's what worries me. The good example for what you say is absolutely true is the fact that if you write a good operating system, it can run programs that are functional and programs that are... It has a well-defined scheme for how data is passed back and forth and it's file.io and socket.io and things like that. But of course we have lots and lots of overhead to deal with things moving in and out of that. That's not necessarily the best model for a single... I don't think it's the best model for a single application. That's what I'm essentially arguing. Yep. Hi there. I'd like to say, nice talk. Very interesting. Love it. Thanks. Number one, Dries has basically said we're going with symphony, so it's going to be part of D8. And it solves so many problems and we don't have to rewrite the wheel. That's wonderful, so we're going to have a dual system for D8. If we buckle down on this and decide that this is what we want to do, then it looks like D9 is going to be either... well, it very well could just wash out the rest of the functional bits. And I mean, I know that's probably what Larry really wants. He's been saying for quite some time. And really, that doesn't have an answer or anything. It's just one of those, hey, think about it, this could be. Yeah, you know, I really wish Dries had consulted me before making that announcement. I know he should have. What is wrong with Dries not asking every single person exactly how they feel? Didn't they say Drupal was mine? I think he has his little... Isn't that the opening today with... Yeah, I think it should be. I mean, with a great beard like that. Number two, monitoring. Monitoring? That's a platypus. Oh, good. Oh, I'm glad to know that. That's his type. He was filling in my taxonomic gap there. A platypus of a monotreme. Which I bet it is the only member of the monotreme. One other? What's that? Okay. I'm going to be doing some Wikipedia research tonight. I'll give the talk again tomorrow. Go ahead. Hi, I also really like the talk. As far as the main point which I at least got across in your presentation was choose one model. And I sort of had problems with that because I think complexity is unavoidable. Let's say you choose the functional programming model. Many things are very hard in Haskell. If you like to do simple things, you use monads. So choosing an ideal approach runs into complexity. Choosing an approach that you mentioned, two approaches at one time which Drupal has functional plus imperative, also runs into complexity. So I think it's also if you look at it from the physics because I did study physics. You have of course the theory of the very small and the theory of the very large quantum and gravity and in many areas of physics you use both the small and the large and you get a lot of positive results. So in summary my point of view is that it's okay to choose two models and in some areas those two models can help rather than compete or cause problems and it may not be at least to me a big problem if Drupal has the functional and the imperative side by side fighting it out in certain subsystems. Maybe the functional is better and it wins and in certain subsystems the object oriented symphony style could be better. So that was my thought process. There are two things to say about that. The first is that the issue can't be totally eliminating complexity because all of us globally speaking would be out of a job if we had managed to eliminate it. Physics is going to deal with complexity chemistry is going to deal with complexity programming is unavoidably going to deal with complexity and we're always going to run up into cases where there are very complex problems to solve but what we don't want to do is introduce more complexity into the system and what I'm claiming is instead of reducing or managing complexity the danger here is in multiplying complexity by bringing in things that are already conflicting theories. Your point on physics is interesting because the kind of holy grail of the idea is that we can come up with a unified theory that we'll get rid of having two different models. That's what we would like to do in physics. Physics is moving the other direction and saying we know because it's observable that a system like this is best described by applying this model and we know that this one over here is best described by using this model and then we've got these cases in the middle where and they're not always even exactly in the middle where it seems like if I can use some elements of this and some elements of this I end up getting the most precise description of the phenomenon. But what ultimately the desire is to bring them together to make one single grand unified theory. When you're dealing with two models that are really intrinsically conflicting it's a high hope to think that you can take them and somehow merge them together and it is not something that hasn't been tried. Scala is a great example of a language that tries very hard to blend object-oriented programming and functional programming and it's a very, very complex language. But also in its way it's a very beautiful one but you don't hear about a lot of Scala jobs right now and part of that is because the complexity bumps up against cognitive limitations and this isn't a system that was designed from the ground up to have this. We're taking existing models and trying to you know kind of push them together but at the same time you know you're onto something there about the fact that sometimes you just are stuck working with two models and maybe that's the answer to the Drupal 8 conundrum here is that if we can't actually say by fiat we're eliminating one of the models then the best we can do is apply the lessons that theoretical physics in general gives us and say well we can do our best to merge them together until the opportune time comes to simplify on a grander scale. That was a really long answer and I hope we can do go for it! I wanted to chime in with my agreement there are two disagreements I think you actually did a very good job of presenting a debate that's going to be now it's going to spark a really good conversation over drinks tonight I think this is a really good question so that was more of a statement because I know like I come from Java background and I miss being able to open Eclipse look at what I'm overriding see all the public methods I'm allowed to override eventually I got used to Drupal's hook system and once I got familiar with it I was able to just type in with Eclipse's plugin hooks and then control space and see what I can override giving my scenario but it became a pain in the butt when the two when object orientation became as popular in Drupal as it is today now I have to use the examples module or memorization for everything I'm about to implement you know what I mean? Or I live in Xdebug but I can't predict how I'm going to implement what I'm going to implement if I haven't been exposed to it before so it's just this chaotic unpredictability that I agree would actually be solved with some sort of unified model or at least I don't know something cleaner than what we have today at least but I do have a question which is do you know a lot of people because I know the object orientation discussion has been going on for a very very long time and every time I've seen people bring it up why isn't Drupal object oriented? People have had like an answer of sorts like Drupal technically has to be the way it is given certain circumstances and I I've never really known what the canonical answer is to that question why has it I mean do you know I think I hear the same answer as you do well the hook system wouldn't work in object oriented well what about an observer model well it wouldn't work the same way I think the closest to the true answer is that when Drupal was authored we were stuck with PHP4 whose actual implementation of object orientation was really very clearly a bolt on and didn't had some very bizarre side effects statics didn't always work the way you thought inheritance had some little quirks to it and I think it really wasn't until well past 4.7 or so that PHP5 was common enough that we could use it as a target platform that I think is the that's the best actual answer I've gotten I think most of the ones that tend to argue about models are more polemical than factual I think interestingly if you look at Drupal 1.0 there's a lot of it that's object oriented the entire template system is object oriented so so it was experimented with early on and then jettisoned because of its limitations cool thanks I'm going to go ahead you want to do your question really quickly and I'll try and answer it very very quickly yeah this is actually more of just a comment first of all great talk this is something that I've been thinking a lot about myself too and it's also really nice to kind of step back and look at these issues after spending most of the day steeped in more specific code one thing that I've kind of thought about is it seems to me that the contrib and the core space tend to are more of the platonic approach whereas when you're actually working on a project for a business or for something in the real world you take more of an Aristotelian approach and I think that's kind of how they are melded together and that they're scenario based and I also really liked the thing about Aristotle how the potentiality the potentiality feeds into the actuality of the next potentiality right yeah the actuality of the first feeds into the potentiality becomes the potentiality of the second right so in that way the core and contrib modules serve as the potentiality for what you actually create in your real world projects and then the real world projects if you create in your custom modules directory or something if you create something that ends up working great for contributing back then it kind of feeds back on itself in the same way so that's almost a way of thinking of bridging the two yeah it's even a more cyclic approach than Aristotle because it's a feedback loop of sorts right your first point is really interesting to me because we've been talking about the mechanics of the code and you just took the conversation and bumped it up a level to the actual business process or the you know kind of broadly concerned the development process of how we actually have to work on code when we're building stuff you've got the core model where the focus is on building just a system that can do this kind of stuff and then you've got the those of us who actually build stuff for clients or for our companies or whatever have to take a kind of different approach because we're looking on implementing a solution to a problem and I think that's true I have to think about whether or not that's truly platonic or Aristotelian but it's a really interesting observation that that model is actually different and could be described in similar terms but at a different layer you have like tears of it alright well I'm gonna I'm gonna let you guys go get dinner and thank you all very much I really appreciate it


Ads heard during the podcast that are not in my voice are placed by third-party agencies outside of my control and should not imply an endorsement by Weird Darkness or myself. Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Gory tales of blood-sucking vampires have been around since at least the 17th century. Vampire myths have survived throughout the ages, and vampires are now a permanent fixture in modern pop culture. But why are we so obsessed with the blood-drinking creatures? One of the reasons people love vampires is because they are perceived as sexy. At the same time, they are also terrifying. The combination of these feelings is oddly compelling. Drinking blood is also very close to cannibalism. The taboo nature of these practices is part of what gives vampires their allure. Vampires are not afraid of anything and have been depicted as smart, independent and extremely powerful, making them a prime fantasy for many disaffected people. For most people, vampire movies, books and games are just harmless fun. There aren't any real vampires. Or are there? A few people take vampirism very seriously. Imagining they are real vampires, they carry out heinous deeds to satisfy their lust for blood. For these people, vampirism isn't just pop culture, but a deadly way of life. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode, when it comes to horror and fantasy, you'd be hard pressed to find something more dangerous or terrifying than the vampire. Skulking around at night, feeding off the blood of the living, shape-shifting into a wool for a bat, hypnotic powers, it's creepy stuff. It's just fiction. But when you discover criminals in our actual world who think they are vampires, that horror and danger becomes all too real. If you're a fan of U.S. history, you might already know that camels once roamed the American Southwest, brought to Texas by the military because they would be perfect for the desert climate. But once it was all over, a legend remained, a terrifying one. But first, just because an official government report is released about a UFO sighting or incident doesn't mean that ufologists and researchers are going to accept those findings, or the story the government tells. Thus is the case with a UFO incident in 1952 outside of Tokyo at the Haneda Air Force Base. We begin with that story. If you're new here, welcome to the show. While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, to visit sponsors you hear about during the show, sign up for my newsletter and her contests. Connect with me on social media. Listen to my other podcasts like Retro Radio, Old Time Radio in the Dark, Church of the Undead, and a classic 1950s sci-fi-style podcast called Auditory Anthology. Listen to free audiobooks I've narrated. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, dark thoughts, or addiction. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.  Although the content report would offer an explanation about the UFO incident over Haneda Air Force Base just outside Tokyo, Japan in 1952, many researchers reject it. Not least as a study of the case and the testimonies of the witnesses suggest that the explanation itself simply dismisses details of the incident. The incident over the air base is far from the only one to have occurred over Japan, especially since the late 1940s at the end of the Second World War. Might the fact that several, although not all of these sightings occurred over American-occupied bases in the country, suggest some kind of clandestine involvement of the United States military? It might prove to be the case that the incident is simply a victim of the U.S. government's attempts to distance itself from the UFO and alien question, rather than to cover up a huge secret not fit, in their opinion, for public consumption. Just before midnight, on the 5th of August, 1952, two American servicemen were on duty in the control tower of Haneda Air Force Base. It was as they were gazing outward to the night sky that they noticed a strange, bright light moving ahead. The glow appeared to be heading in their direction from Tokyo Bay. They would reach for their military binoculars and view the strange light through them. It was clear that whatever the light was, it was moving toward them. As well as the two servicemen, the two operators who were just finishing their shift also witnessed the bright light. The nearer it came, the clearer the controlled nature of its movements were, suggesting an intelligent control. It then hovered near the control tower, allowing the men to see that a distinct, dark, circular shape was behind it. From their viewpoint, it appeared this object was approximately four times the light's diameter. The closer it came, the clearer a lower section with a secondary light also became.  Perhaps of more importance while this was taking place, the anomalous object also showed up on the radar and was currently being tracked. As it moved and danced in the night sky, the object appeared to move away from the base, eventually dimming slightly. On several occasions, the object would appear close to the base once more, as if out of nowhere, before vanishing just as quickly. It was as this was happening that one of the witnesses viewed a pilot in a C-54 in the same approximate area over Tokyo Bay. He would radio to him, asking if he could see anything out of the ordinary. He radioed back that he couldn't. The operator would then check with another nearby control tower. They, however, confirmed they did indeed have the unknown craft on their screens. A short time later, First Lieutenant W.R. Holder would take to his F-94 in an attempt to intercept the bizarre craft. With him was First Lieutenant A. M. Jones in the capacity of his onboard radar operator. They would leave the runway of Johnson Air Force Base a short distance away. The jet would ultimately lock on to the object with the radar. However, they could no longer see the craft with their own eyes. The craft, however, was still moving away from the jet, seemingly in circular motions. The F-94 continued to pursue the craft, relying only on the radar and the control tower as to its whereabouts. After about 15 minutes, though, it broke away from the pursuit and returned to its base. Before the chase was over, the strange craft suddenly left the area at great speed, estimated to be around 350 miles per hour. As it did so, though, the one object became three on the respective radar screens. The radar would track the UFO in total for around 30 minutes. During this period, there were sporadic visual sightings, and what's more, these were in sympathy with the radar data, which further suggests that the object, whatever it was, was very real. There were several immediate theories tossed around as to what the strange object might have been. Some would suggest that it was a lighted balloon, however, such suggestions were soon dismissed. For a start, the object was moving far too fast to be a weather balloon, even if the wind was carrying it. And furthermore, weather balloons have a distinct yellow-type glow, which this object did not. There was also more than a hint of intelligence behind the movements and actions of the craft. Perhaps not least that it disappeared shortly after the arrival of the F-94 jet, only to reappear several times near the base following their departure. Was this a purposeful action to prompt the jet to be called off? Basically, though, the FEAF investigators at the time would offer no explanations for the sighting. They would further state it was something that they had truly never seen before. It's perhaps interesting, then, that later investigations into the incident would appear to disregard these statements and even large parts of the witness statements, essentially turning the incident into nothing more than a sighting of a faraway object. Captain Edward Ruppelt, who was head of Project Blue Book, despite what we now know of the apparent attempts to discredit the UFO and alien question through the project, would offer later that ultimately, despite the apparent explanations, the UFO could not be identified as something we knew about. He would further offer that it very well could have been an interplanetary spaceship, although this itself was just a theory among many. The incident was not the only one of 1952 to feature the United States Air Force personnel in Japan. A truly bizarre encounter would feature in the book Unexplained Mysteries of the 20th Century by Janet and Colin Board, which I'll link to in the show notes. Although the date is not certain, at some point during the year in question, Air Force Private Sinclair Taylor would witness what he described as a giant winged man. Even more bizarre, this creature was coming out of the sky in his direction. The serviceman was on guard duty at the time. He simply watched in awe as the winged man simply hovered a short distance away from him. He would later estimate that the winged figure was around seven feet tall. The height was a similar size to its wings when they were outstretched. It was at this point when the serviceman reached for his gun. He pointed it toward the winged being and without thinking, he opened fire. However, when he finally opened his eyes after squeezing off a round of shots, the figure had completely vanished. The incident does indeed remain a complete mystery. Was this some sort of strange alien creature? Or might it have been an unknown Indigenous being? Perhaps it was nothing more than a bizarre illusion. Leader UFO Military and Government Investigations of the Haneda Incident, perhaps most notably the Colorado Project, would suggest that the sighting was nothing more than a light that looked like a star, which was far from the actual reports at the time, and appeared to dismiss entire sections of the incident, specifically when the object hovered over the base. Many believe this was an attempt to simply wash their hands of UFO sightings in general, and this could very well be true. If they achieved this, they would perhaps dampen the enthusiasm and interest of the vast majority of the population. However, the fact that we are talking about this now over a half century after the incident took place is perhaps a testament to the failure of such attempts. Whatever the truth of the incident, the incident remains one that still intrigues researchers and enthusiasts around the world. What was witnessed that evening over Tokyo, and why were there apparent attempts to disregard and even lessen the credibility of the incident by the powers that be? What might have been so significant that years later, there was an apparent need to discredit a sighting, as intriguing as it is, that led to very little interaction? Perhaps it is these attempts to suppress the more dramatic and fascinating details of the incident that increases this interest? Or perhaps UFO investigators and researchers over the years have simply stuck with the initial statements of those involved? Seeing through the attempts to minimize this and other incidents, whether any further details come to light in the form of documents or whistleblower information remains to be seen. When Weird Darkness returns, when it comes to horror and fantasy, you'd be hard pressed to find something more dangerous or terrifying than the vampire. But when you discover criminals in the real world who believe themselves to be vampires, that becomes downright terrifying. Up next. There are very few among those with a love for the supernatural who don't also have a passion for Edgar Allen Poe. Poe wasn't simply a melancholy author who wrote about premature burials, sinister black cats and talking ravens. He was much more. If you've ever read a modern mystery or horror novel, you can thank Poe. Poe invented the modern mystery story, mostly invented science fiction, and was the first writer to take the horror stories of the gothic era and set them in modern times, starting a trend that continues today.  He invites listeners along to delve into the strange and bizarre world of Edgar Allen Poe, from his early life to his tragic marriage, his insane grief, his dramatically failed career, his links to an unsolved murder and the mystery of what happened to the writer in the five days before his unexplained death. Even more than a century and a half later, no one knows what happened to Poe before he was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, or what killed him. Why did he disappear and then show up in an incoherent state, wearing another man's clothes? Where did he go when he vanished and who was the mysterious Reynolds that Poe whispered about in his dying breath? And perhaps strangest of all, does he haunt the mysterious graveyard where his body is buried? Nevermore, The Haunted Life and Mysterious Death of Edgar Allen Poe, written by Troy Taylor, narrated by Darren Marlar. Find a link to the book on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. For most people, vampire movies, books and games are just harmless fun. They know vampires aren't real, but then there are a few of the mentally unbalanced that take vampirism seriously. Very seriously. Imagining they are real vampires, they carry out heinous deeds to satisfy their lust for blood. For these people, these vampiric villains, vampirism isn't just pop culture, but a deadly way of life. I am about to tell you about some real-life vampires who took the blood-sucking myth way too far. Those who actually think they are vampires can be scarier than any fiction, Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, Stephen King, or Stephanie Meyer could ever imagine.  The young couple self-proclaimed Satanists and vampires married on the sixth day of the sixth month, June, to signify the number of the beast. Manuela sometimes slept in a coffin. She also had her teeth removed and animal fangs implanted in their place. Their first forays into blood drinking took place with consensual volunteers at gatherings they attended in England and Scotland, often held in cemeteries or in old ruined buildings. The couple said Satan told them they needed to end their friend, 33-year-old Frank Hagan. They picked Hagan because, according to Manuela, he was, quote, so funny and would be the perfect court jester for Satan, unquote. They invited Hagan over, telling him that they were going to a party. Daniel had Hagan in the head with a hammer, then they stabbed him 66 times, that significant number for the couple. After he passed, they carved a pentagram into his stomach, then they drank his blood, had sex in Manuela's coffin, and prayed to Satan. Manuela was disappointed that she didn't become a real vampire after enacting the order to end Hagan. When authorities came into their apartment several days later, they found Hagan's decomposing body near the coffin. At the time of their sentencing, Daniel was 26 and Manuela was 23. They made a show of the trial, flashing Satanist hand signs and threatening witnesses. The pair denied all blame, saying they were simply Satan's instruments. They compared their trial to blaming a car for a vehicular collision. Manuela testified that their actions were, quote, the execution of an order. Satan ordered us to. We had to comply. It was not something bad, it simply had to be. We wanted to make sure that the victim suffered well, unquote. The jury disagreed, however. In 2002, they were both sentenced to psychiatric hospitals, Daniel for 15 years, Manuela for 13. In November 1996, Rod Ferrell was 16 years old when he used a tire iron to take the lives of Richard and Naomi Wendorf, the parents of his friend Heather Wendorf. He committed these ghastly actions as the ringleader of a teenage vampire cult. Ferrell looked the part of a high school goth, long, dyed black hair, all black clothing and a trench coat. He befriended Heather Wendorf when they both attended high school in Eustace, Florida. The following year, Ferrell moved to Kentucky but kept in contact with Heather. In Kentucky, Ferrell began collecting members for his vampire cult. Ferrell and his friend Howard Scott Anderson were charged with cruelty to animals after they broke into an animal shelter. They tormented and beat more than 40 dogs, claiming the lives of two in the process in what looked like a satanic ritual. Ferrell and other teenagers hung out at a place called The Vampire Hotel, drinking each other's blood consensually. Ferrell became obsessed with the role-playing game Vampire, The Masquerade. He claimed to be a 500-year-old vampire named Visago. Just before the targeting of the Wendorfs, Ferrell drove from Kentucky to Florida, with Howard Scott Anderson and two girls. Heather Wendorf was planning to run away from home with Ferrell and the rest of the vampire cult. She did not know, however, that Ferrell was planning to target her parents, although other cult members did know. After breaking into the Wendorf home and committing his infamous deeds, Ferrell and Anderson met up with the girls. The five teenagers went on the run for several days before getting caught. In 1998, Ferrell was sentenced to capital punishment as the youngest person on death row for two years. His sentence was then changed to life without the possibility of parole. In an interview with Investigation Discovery, Ferrell said, I was in a maelstrom of my own madness. He has since been diagnosed with Schizotypal Personality Disorder. The 2002 movie Vampire Clan was based on Ferrell's infamy. Richard Trenton Chase, dubbed the Vampire of Sacramento, is known for taking the lives of six people in 1977.  He chronically used alcohol and drugs as a young man, which psychiatrists believe may have led to Chase's hypochondria. He believed terminating animals and drinking their blood would stop his own heart from shrinking. He also believed that he was being secretly poisoned by the soap in his bathroom, which was turning his blood into powder. He needed fresh blood, in his mind, to replace what was being lost. He ended many neighborhood pets, including his mother's cat and bit the heads off birds. In 1976, he tried to inject rabbit blood into his body, which landed him in a hospital. That led to him being placed in a mental institution. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Soon after, he was released from the institution into his mother's care, and then his behavior escalated. Chase was looking for game larger than just neighborhood pets. He started entering people's homes, and true to vampiric lore, he would not go into a locked house. On January 23, 1978, Chase targeted Teresa Whalen, who was pregnant. After taking her life, he assaulted and mutilated the body. He ate parts of her flesh and used a yogurt container as a cup to drink her blood. Four days later, he struck again. His next claimed four people in one day, two adults and two young children. He also treated the adult female in the same manner he had with Whalen. Police found human body parts, including brains in his refrigerator. He also had a calendar that said, Today, on those dates where he struck down victims, and the word was written on the calendar 44 more times. Chase was sentenced to receive capital punishment, but he ended his own life before it could be carried out. The 1987 movie Rampage was loosely based on his life. Australian Tracy Wigginton is better known as the lesbian vampire killer. Wigginton told a jury that she didn't live on food, but on the blood of pigs and cows. Wigginton's lover, Lisa Pacinski, also said that she cut her own wrists so that Wigginton could feast on her blood. On the night of October 20, 1989, Wigginton decided to take things a step further and end a human life to satisfy her bloodlust. Wigginton was 25 years old. She and Pacinski, along with two other women, were driving around when they spotted 47-year-old Edward Baldock walking home, presumably intoxicated. The women coaxed Baldock into the car and took him to a park near the Brisbane River. They promised him sexual favors, but instead, Wigginton stabbed him 27 times. After Wigginton drank Baldock's blood, the women left his body in the park to be found in the morning. It wasn't hard to catch Wigginton. Her ATM card was found in the victim's shoe. Wigginton pleaded guilty, and Wigginton and Pacinski were given life sentences. On January 11, 2012, Wigginton was paroled. She's not allowed to contact the victim's family or the other women involved, but she is a free woman in most aspects. It's a condition of her parole, however, that she cannot profit from her story, for example by writing a memoir about her experiences. James P. Riva is known as the Vampire Killer for two reasons. He claimed the person that he ended was a vampire, and then he later said that he was a vampire himself. He's also known as the Schizophrenic Vampire. As a teenager, Riva became obsessed with vampires. He claimed that he needed to drink blood, and that he would often consume a blood-like drink he made himself made of ketchup and oil. In 1980, Riva was 23 years old and living in Marshfield, Massachusetts. He had a history of mental illness and had been in several institutions. He had dealt with voices telling him what to do nearly all his life.  He painted some bullets gold, which he said another vampire told him would terminate vampires. He then went to his grandmother's house and stabbed her in the heart.  Riva later told his mother from prison that he was a 700-year-old vampire and that he had tried to drink his grandmother's blood, but she was too old and dried up. Riva was sentenced to life in prison and has repeatedly been denied parole. Elizabeth Bathory, called the Blood Countess, is one of the most famous female real-life vampires of all time. In fact, she may have been the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula, even more so than Vlad Tepis or Vlad the Impaler. Between 1585 and 1609, Bathory sadistically harmed as few as 37 or as many as 650 young women. She holds the Guinness World Record for the most murders committed by a woman. A world record I hope no one tries to beat. Bathory was a Hungarian Countess who was married and had four children, but she also had a sadistic streak. She started her infamous spree by tormenting and ending young peasant girls who came to work for her. Though unsubstantiated, there are rumors that she drank and bathed in those peasants' blood in order to keep herself young.  Bathory, however, wasn't actually put on trial until she began targeting the daughters of nobles. At her trial in 1611, more than 300 witnesses spoke of the atrocities that she had committed. She was found guilty, but was imprisoned in her castle instead of executed. She lived there for four years before passing from an illness. The location of her body is unknown. Matthew Hardman from North Wales was described by friends as a normal, quiet boy. The 17-year-old attended art school and worked part-time as a kitchen porter. No one suspected that he would take the life of his 90-year-old neighbor, Mabel Leshawn, but that is exactly what happened in November 2001. Hardman came into his elderly neighbor's house while she was watching TV and stabbed her 22 times with a knife. After she passed, Hardman carved out her heart and wrapped it in newspaper. He drained her blood into a kitchen saucepan and drank it. He also placed candles and a makeshift crucifix at her feet. Before the incident, Hardman had become obsessed with vampires. He believed drinking blood would make him immortal. He even accused a German exchange student of being a vampire. He begged her to bite him so he would become one too. Hardman was apprehended and subsequently confessed to smoking pot at the time of Leshawn's passing. In 2002, Hardman was sentenced to life in jail. In 2003, near Edinburgh, Scotland, Alan Menzies ended the life of his best friend, drank some of his blood, and ate a piece of his skull. The reason? He said the vampire Akasha, a character from the 2002 movie Queen of the Damned, told him that he had to if he wanted to become a vampire and live forever. Menzies had known the victim, Thomas McKendrick, since he was four years old. Menzies had become obsessed with the vampire movie based on a book by Anne Rice, seeing it more than a hundred times. According to BBC News, Menzies also claimed the character Akasha visited him. Quote, I basically agreed with her, Akasha, that if I ended people, I would be rewarded in the next life, unquote. On the day of the incident, Menzies said McKendrick said something against the Queen of the Damned, sparking Menzies rage. He hit his friend with a hammer at least ten times. Menzies then stabbed McKendrick 42 times with a bowie knife, as well as a kitchen knife. After his friend passed, Menzies drank his blood and ate part of his skull. It was several weeks before McKendrick was found in the shallow grave Menzies dug for him. After his apprehension, Menzies tried unsuccessfully to plead insanity. Two psychiatrists said that he was not suffering from mental illness when he targeted McKendrick, and Menzies received a life sentence. In 2004, Menzies took his own life in Shots Prison near Glasgow, Scotland. Kayas Weowis isn't exactly someone who can blend into a crowd, and that's the way he likes it.  His mugshot has been called one of the scariest ever, but even scarier are the actions he has committed, cutting and drinking the blood of a 16-year-old girl and later terminating three Hell's Angels. Weowis' given name is Roy Govinsky Jr., but he legally changed his name in 2008. Many media outlets reported that he changed his name to Kayas after a vampire character in the Twilight books and movies, although Weowis denies this. Weowis is a long history of violence and Satanism. In 1999, he stood trial for assault. He had a former girlfriend, cut another girl who was 16 at the time, and kissed while they drank her blood. Weowis has professed to being a vampire. In 2001, Weowis, along with two other men, snatched three Hell's Angels before taking their lives. One of the Angels was said to have been about to give testimony against Weowis' friend. The dismembered Hell's Angels bodies were found in a trench in Beckett, Massachusetts. Found guilty on numerous counts, Hampton County Superior Court sentenced Weowis to three consecutive life sentences without parole. Fritz Harman is one of the most famous vampiric perps of all time. Between 1918 and 1924, he took the lives of at least 24 boys and young men in Hanover, Germany. His nicknames include The Vampire of Hanover, The Butcher of Hanover, and The Wolfman. Harman was a petty criminal and police informant. He started a life of wrongdoing at a young age. At 16, he was apprehended for inappropriately touching younger boys. He was placed in a mental institution but later escaped. Harman would lure young men and boys into his home by promising them jobs. He would then assault them, biting their Adam's apples and drinking their blood until they passed. Harman said that he didn't intend to terminate his victims, but that he was overcome by a rabid sexual passion. After claiming a victim, Harman would dismember the body, removing the skull and internal organs. The bones would be dropped into the Lina River. One of Harman's enterprises was selling meat on the black market and it has been guessed but never proven that the meat from Harman's victims was sold as mints or sausages. After the discovery of more than 500 bones in the Lina River, suspicion turned to 45-year-old Harman. He had been questioned regarding several disappearances and was a known homosexual, which at the time was considered illegal. Many items belonging to the victims were found at Harman's home and he confessed. Harman claimed to have ended between 50 and 70 men, although he was only convicted in relation to 24 of them. In 1924, he was sentenced to death. Of his conviction, Harman reportedly remarked, quote, condemn me to death. I ask only for justice. I am not mad. Make it short. Make it soon. Deliver me from this life, which is a torment. I will not petition for mercy, nor will I appeal. I want to pass just one more merry night in my cell with coffee, cheese, and cigars, after which I will curse my father and go to my execution, as if it were a wedding, unquote. Marcelo Costa de Andrade is one of Brazil's most infamous, called the Vampire of Nitroi. Andrade targeted young boys, ranging in age from 6 to 13, and he claimed the lives of at least 14 boys. Andrade grew up poor and was reportedly sexually and physically harmed as a young boy. By age 14, he was selling himself on the streets. In 1991, Andrade was 24 years old and he began luring impoverished young boys into desolate areas. There, he would assault them before strangulating or beating them. He also had relations with some of the boys' corpses after they passed and reportedly drank the blood of at least two victims. When asked why he did it, Andrade said that he wanted to, quote, become as beautiful as them, unquote. He apparently suffered from religious mania, stating that he ended the boys so they would go to heaven. Andrade was caught after one of his potential victims escaped. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a psychiatric hospital. In 1997, he escaped, but was returned to the hospital several days later. Joshua Rudiger is known as the Vampire Slasher. In 1998, he took the life of a homeless woman and injured three homeless men with a knife. When asked why he did it, he said that he was a 2600 year old vampire and that he wanted to drink the victim's blood. Rudiger was just 22 years old at the time. He had a troubled past and a history of aggression and mental illness.  Rudiger, who also claimed to be a samurai, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The woman he ended was 48-year-old Shirley de la Honte. He stabbed her with his knife while she was sleeping in a doorway. Rudiger later said that he didn't intend to take her life, he just wanted to make a small incision to drink her blood. The other victims did not report Rudiger trying to drink their blood. Rudiger was sentenced to 23 years to life. Coming up, if you are a fan of U.S. history, you might also know that Camels once roamed the American Southwest, brought to Texas by the military because they would be perfect for the desert climate. But once it was all over, a legend remained. A terrifying one. That story is up next on Weird Darkness. Are you a member of the Darkness Syndicate? The Darkness Syndicate is a private membership where you receive commercial-free episodes of the Weird Darkness podcast and radio show. Behind the scenes, video updates about future projects and events I am working on. You can share your own opinions on ideas to help me decide upon Weird Darkness Contests and Events. You can hear audiobooks I am narrating before even the publishers or authors get to hear them. You also receive bonus audio of other projects I am working on outside of Weird Darkness. You get all of these benefits and more, starting at only $5 per month. Join the Weird Darkness Syndicate at WeirdDarkness.com We all know tales about the Wild West. Cowboys and Native Americans fought. Adventurous settlers fanned out into the frontier. Prospectors struck gold. But where do camels fit into that chaotic American landscape? As it turns out, Arabian camels were a big, yet mostly forgotten part of the settlement of the Southwest and the foundation of a classic Arizona campfire story. The camels were initially imported to Texas for use as army pack animals, due to their suitability to the desert climate. Their story was full of twists and turns that led some to traveling circuses, some to glory as war heroes and others to become treasured riding animals long after the army's camel experiment was over. Many of those camels ended up loose in the desert, with camel sightings occasionally reported throughout the region. So why did the camels disappear from the United States? And who was the red ghost? The answers prove fact can sometimes really be stranger than fiction. In the mid-1800s, the idea of using camels to expand into the more arid regions of the Southwest was met with enthusiasm by many military officials and politicians. After they petitioned for the funds, Congress set aside $30,000 to purchase 50 camels and hire 10 camel drivers. In 1856, the first group arrived in Texas. A herd of dromedary camels was established in Camp Verde, Texas in 1857, when a second shipment brought their number to 75. In the 1830s, surveyors of the American West noticed the territory was similar to the land in the Middle East and Northern Africa, the home of the camel. The country's borders were expanding rapidly and explorers needed pack animals that were hardier than the traditional horses, burrows and mules. Camels consumed much less water and food than the other animals, and they were faster too. They were incredibly well suited to both the terrain and the climate, and soon proved their usefulness on surveying and supply trips. Haji Ali was one of the camel drivers hired by the United States Army when they first purchased the camels. He was an excellent camel driver and an invaluable part of the corps, assisting Edward Fitzgerald Beale with many missions. The soldiers reportedly had a hard time pronouncing Haji Ali though, so they just called him Hi Jolly. Ali continued to live in the Southwest after the camel experiment ended, and he died in 1902 while out looking for a stray camel. A true camel lover until the end. He was found with his arms around a camel's neck. They had both died in a sandstorm. Edward Fitzgerald Beale was already an experienced surveyor when he took on the challenge of traveling to California with a herd of camels in 1857. The odds were against him. The camels had never been used for a long surveying trip like this one from New Mexico to the Colorado River. What's more, most of the soldiers hated the camels. However, Beale completed the trip to the river along the California-Arizona border with his 25 camel herd. Although he initially shared the soldiers' opinions of the beasts in the beginning, he soon came around and realized just how useful they were. Although Edward Fitzgerald Beale sang the praises of the camel corps in the late 1850s, not everyone was as enthusiastic. Their biggest and loudest opponent was the mule lobby in Missouri. They had numerous complaints about the newcomers and may have blocked further attempts to import camels in Congress. They were angry about the camels spooking the mules and horses of most pack trains, which stampeded and shied away at the sight of camels. The lobby was likely also concerned about competition, since the camels could carry much more weight and travel longer distances than the mules. The camel corps was initially intended to survey the potential route for a transcontinental railroad. The main problem for the Southwest was the tyranny of distance, as they called it, a lack of a way to reach the outer frontier and connect it to the rest of America. Ironically, the camel's hard work was their undoing. Although people invested time and money into forming camel pack trains to send goods and travelers across the harsh desert, once the railroad was complete, there was no longer any need for these animals. If the mule lobby didn't end the camel experiment, the Civil War certainly did. When the Confederate Army seized Camp Verde, Texas in 1861, the camels remaining there were either sold as army surplus or just turned loose in the southwestern desert to fend for themselves. Confederate troops took a few camels to carry supplies, instruments, and other baggage. One camel, known as Old Douglas, served with the 43rd Mississippi Infantry of the Battle of Vicksburg. Samuel McLaughlin bought the remaining herd of camels in Los Angeles in 1864 with money that he'd made organizing a camel race. He was looking to make a profit off the animals and sold a few to a salt mine in Nevada. The rest of the camels he sold off to circuses, zoos, and other exotic entertainment venues. McLaughlin even sold some of them back to Edward Fitzgerald Beale, who used them around his homestead and for pleasure riding. While the U.S. Army imported around 75 camels by 1857, they weren't the only ones who thought the animals could be useful. Private businesses brought hundreds of camels into the United States and bred them with the former army camels. Because they were sold to traveling circuses and outfits of that nature, it became difficult to track down which camels came from the army and which didn't, and the same went for their offspring. Today we only know the fates of a selected few. Said Edward Fitzgerald Beale's prized riding camel was killed by a herdmate at Fort Taion in California. Old Douglas was killed during the Battle of Vicksburg in the Civil War and buried near the battle site. In the years following their release into the wild, the camels thrived in the American desert. The average lifespan of a camel is about 50 years but some lived much longer. One named Topsy trekked from Arizona to California. A zoo took her in where she died at the age of 81. Reports of wild camel sightings came in steadily until the 1940s, after which they dropped off significantly. People reported seeing the camels in Texas, Nevada, Arizona and California and some camels even made their way down to Mexico. The camels are generally considered long gone but people still spot them from time to time. Most likely, there just weren't enough wild camels to start a thriving population, even though the environment suited them. The last accepted sighting was in Douglas, Texas in 1941, but reported wild camel sightings happened as recently as the 1980s. The legend of the Red Ghost began in Arizona in 1883 when a woman discovered the trampled body of her neighbor after hearing a blood-curdling scream. She found a tuft of red fur near the body. Soon, other settlers claimed to have seen a red-furred, horse-like beast roaming nearby. For ten years, the Red Ghost terrorized the residents of the Arizona desert. Sightings were reported by frontier families, miners, teamsters and ranchers. At least one report claimed the creature was a camel but most people simply knew the Red Ghost as a huge beast with long red hair, cloven hooves and a skeletal rider. Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the Red Ghost story is what people reported seeing strapped to the camel's back, a body, a headless human body. But whose body was it? Some believe it was a young soldier from the camel corps days who was afraid of the camels and strapped himself onto one so he could overcome his fear. But then the camel got loose and escaped, dooming the rider to die of dehydration in the desert without a way to cut himself down. Terrified settlers supposedly found the man's skull after startling the Red Ghost one day. The Red Ghost was finally shot and killed in 1893, so yes it was a real camel. The rider's body however was gone, but the camel still wore a saddle and it bore the scars supposedly showing where the strips of rawhide tied the man down. Thanks for listening. If you like the show please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters or unsolved mysteries like you do. You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren at WeirdDarkness.com. Darren is D-A-R-R-E-N. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find information on any other sponsors you heard about during the show. Find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, sign up for the email newsletter, find other podcasts that I host including a retro radio, old time radio in the dark, Church of the Undead and a classic 1950s sci-fi style podcast called Auditory Anthology. Also on the site you can visit the store for WeirdDarkness t-shirts, mugs and other merchandise. Plus it's where you can find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression, addiction or thoughts of harming yourself or others. And if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell of your own, you can click on tell your story. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. All stories on Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise and you can find links to the stories or the authors in the show notes. The Hanata Incident is by Marcus Louth for UFO Insight. Real-life vampiric villains is by Amy Roblesky for unspeakable times and The Red Ghost of Arizona was written by Rachel Sowerby for Weird History. WeirdDarkness is a registered trademark. Copyright Weird Darkness. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. Psalm 82 verses 3 and 4. Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless. Maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed. Rescue the weak and needy. Deliver them from the hand of the wicked. And a final thought. Progress is impossible without change and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. George Bernard Shaw. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness. Thank you for watching this video. I'll see you in the next video. Hey Weirdos, be sure to click the like button and subscribe to this channel, and click the notification bell so you don't miss future videos. I post videos seven days a week. 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