Despite the Covid-19 pandemic efforts to counter massive swarms of locusts across East Africa have continued. In many places this has been very effective, killing up to 90% of locusts. However, the threat of repeated waves of locusts remains says Cyril Ferrand, who leads the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's Resilience Team in East Africa.
Conversely West Africa is unaffected by locusts and with a block on imports local producers have seen demand grow for their produce, an unusual positive effect from the pandemic according to Sandrine Dury from the French agricultural research agency CIRAD.
We examine the potential for a second wave of coronavirus as many countries relax lockdown measures, businesses reopen and mass protests take to the streets. Epidemiologist Carl Bergstrom is interested in working out which of these movements is likely to have the most impact.
And from South Africa, how radio telescope engineers there have turned their hands to developing new ventilators appropriate for regional needs.
And we were bowled over by a question from one CrowdScience listener in Australia wants to know how likely it is that the atoms in his body have been used in someone else’s body? We all like to think we are unique; no one is quite like us. But is that really true?
Presenter Marnie Chesterton tackles Moshe’s question with help from every area of science. From geologists helping us work out how many atoms are on the Earth’s surface to biologists helping us work out how many atoms each body uses. Perhaps we are much less special than we think.
Richard Myers says the future of ad-hoc mesh networks for SMS messages and bitcoin transactions on your smart phone is here, but it needs the lightning network to succeed.
On today's episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin! you're invited to join Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine, Stephanie Murpy and special guest Richard Myers for an in-depth look at the past, present and future of 'Mobile Mesh Networking' technology.
Just as cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin don't rely on static infrastructure and professional providers, mobile mesh networking allows the creation of inexpensive, high range, low bandwidth and power consumption ad-hoc networks that'll let your phone send text messages or even bitcoin lightning network micro-transactions, even in areas with no coverage.
According to Richard, Bitcoin's lightning network is a what's needed to make mobile mesh networks catch on by bootstrapping on top of the payment routing infrastructure.
"...the Lightning Network currently sends payments from A to B to C and then all those intermediate nodes can connect a small fee if the payment is delivered at the end. All we're doing is saying 'Not [can you send] a payment, but [you can send] a small message. In our case it'd be a SMS message. So you sending an SMS message along with a lightning payment from A to B to C to D, and when D receives that message they return proof that it was delivered and that's what flows back through the network. In the lightning sense, that's your pre-image. It's computed from the message, that's how the nodes are able to collect payment even if they lose touch with the original person who sent it."
But the way the lightning network uses data isn't ideal for mobile mesh. The open source Lot49 protocol is another layer on top of lightning that Richard says is necessary to make it work at scale while using mesh devices as an extremely low-bandwidth TOR-like privacy layer.
"In many ways we're not making a new protocol, we're literally using lightning. Lot49 is custom communication protocol that's optimized for mesh. For example, right now there's a 1300 byte onion that's used to route messages over the internet and that's very important because you lose a lot of privacy... you lose all your privacy... if you were to just send messages over the internet without onion routing.
We're sending over more or less a physical TOR network since it's going from node to node, not through a central ISP who can associate who you're trying to pay. We're also doing it over a low bandwidth network, so if you were sending 1300 bytes it may not sound like much in the age of the internet but we're talking about devices that [have a maximum data transmission capacity of] about a kilobyte a minute so that's a significant amount of the bandwidth that you have [tied up just in the web's onion routing]
So for example with LOT49, we take out the onion and we use the native routing at the mesh device [level] which is optimized for mesh communications. And there's a few other little changes we make like that in order to reduce the bandwidth by chunking up messages... the ultimate goal is to minimize the lightning protocol overhead so that there is more bandwidth available for data... For things like sending an SMS and as bandwidth increases there may be things like internet protocol..."
This episode of Let's Talk Bitcoin features Stephanie Murphy, Andreas M. Antonopoulos, Adam B. Levine and Richard Myers. Music provided by Jared Rubens and Gurty Beats, with editing by Jonas.
In this episode we speak with comedians Ashley Ray, Josie Benedetti and artistic performer Angela Oliver about how systemic racism has impacted Chicago’s improv and comedy scene, what they’ve experienced onstage and off and what it will take to change things.
Joscha Bach is the VP of Research at the AI Foundation, previously doing research at MIT and Harvard. Joscha work explores the workings of the human mind, intelligence, consciousness, life on Earth, and the possibly-simulated fabric of our universe.
This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to get more information about this podcast go to https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or support it on Patreon.
Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
03:14 – Reverse engineering Joscha Bach
10:38 – Nature of truth
18:47 – Original thinking
23:14 – Sentience vs intelligence
31:45 – Mind vs Reality
46:51 – Hard problem of consciousness
51:09 – Connection between the mind and the universe
56:29 – What is consciousness
1:02:32 – Language and concepts
1:09:02 – Meta-learning
1:16:35 – Spirit
1:18:10 – Our civilization may not exist for long
1:37:48 – Twitter and social media
1:44:52 – What systems of government might work well?
1:47:12 – The way out of self-destruction with AI
1:55:18 – AI simulating humans to understand its own nature
2:04:32 – Reinforcement learning
2:09:12 – Commonsense reasoning
2:15:47 – Would AGI need to have a body?
2:22:34 – Neuralink
2:27:01 – Reasoning at the scale of neurons and societies
2:37:16 – Role of emotion
2:48:03 – Happiness is a cookie that your brain bakes for itself
Interview with Angela Saini; COVID-19 Update; News Items: Seeing Color, fMRI Research, Fast Radio Burst Origin; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: ISS Update; Science or Fiction
The stock market has long been disconnected from the underlying economy, but much of what happened this week - particularly the pumping of bankrupt company stocks - suggests that something new is afoot.
In this episode, NLW breaks down three long-term trends suggested by the so-called Robinhood Rally, including:
The “insurgency” aspect of a generation of young professionals who are willing to play the financial game rather than have it be played for them
A totally new force in financial media, which could hit like a wrecking ball in one of the stodgiest, traditional media industries
An embrace of a certain type of cynicism or nihilism when it comes to the values of financial markets
This week on The Breakdown:
Monday | Why War Reporting Is the Right Mental Model for Today’s Media, Feat. Jake Hanrahan
The founder of Popular Front joins NLW for a discussion about protests, media and how the people being covered tend to not reflect divisive politics.
Tuesday | What the Stock Market’s ‘Robinhood Rally’ Means for Bitcoin
The largest 50-day rally in stock market history and even shares of bankrupt companies are up more than 100%. What is going on?
Wednesday | A Vision for Digital Property Rights, Feat. Nic Carter
Most people today look at social platforms like any other private company, but what if we saw them as alternative jurisdictions with a new set of property rights?
Thursday | Why the Fed Keeps Denying Its Role in Increasing Inequality
The Federal Reserve expects low inflation, says rates will stay close to zero through 2022 and keeps lying about the role of central banks in increasing inequality.
Friday | Bitcoin Is More Than an Inflation Hedge
While fears of a “great monetary inflation” have driven the recent bitcoin narrative, other aspects like censorship resistance and peaceful protest matter just as much.
This podcast series tells how Byzantium was central to the Crusades. It is based on the book "The Byzantine World War" by Nick Holmes. In this episode, we look at the fall of Byzantium after the Battle of Manzikert. We start with the civil war that followed the battle between the Emperor Romanos Diogenes and the powerful Doukai family who had betrayed him at Manzikert.
Please take a look at my website nickholmesauthor.com where you can download a free copy of The Byzantine World War, my book that describes the origins of the First Crusade.
In this audio interview, CoinDesk’s Leigh Cuen and adult content creator Allie Awesome talk about payments and money in the sex industry, especially the trends impacted by the coronavirus crisis. From how porn performers and entrepreneurs deal with Bitcoin Twitter to the ways the pandemic changed our digital sex lives, Cuen and Allie explore what actually drives demand for censorship-resistant systems.
The biggest problem? Allie and other performers and sex workers basically have their digital advertising and distribution platforms controlled by third parties that aren’t responsible to the workers. For example, OnlyFans briefly froze Allie’s account earlier this year. Although she regained access, her distribution conduits remain at the mercy of tech platforms. This is where peer-to-peer transactions come in. Allie said she knows how to use a cryptocurrency wallet and would gladly do so if more customers wanted to pay her directly. The fact is those customers are few and far between.
“To those people who want to come up with a solution, my first question is ‘well, are you paying for porn’?” she said. “I think a lot of people want to make money off of ‘adult’, but they aren’t really willing to invest in ‘adult’”.
Another major issue according to Allie, is an increase in traffic or visibility doesn’t always translate to profits. Plus, many crypto fans see her industry as something they want to profit from, by building their own tech solutions, rather than contribute to experienced performers. Compared to other bitcoin or ether holders, sex workers are even more likely to rely on social networks like Twitter than exchanges like Coinbase, which deplatforms them just like Paypal. Performers require either a high degree of technical skill, to use decentralized exchange (DEX) platforms like Bisq, or a de facto social liquidity network in order to use cryptocurrency without trusting third parties. Allie shares why she is excited about cryptocurrency, even if it’s a challenge to use it for censorship resistance.
The police killing of 26-year-old EMT Breonna Taylor has rocked Louisville, Kentucky. Radley Balko argues that the warrant used to enter her home was illegal. Louisville has since banned the use of no-knock warrants.
