Edgar Allen Poe is perhaps most famous for his expertise in building dramatic tension and the macabre subject matter of his short stories and poems. Equally remarkable are the poetic principles he helped form and the “art for art’s sake” movement that he inspired.
the memory palace - The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX.
This episode contains a full reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The Masque of the Red Death. Use your discretion before listening. It is both one of the more macabre stories from Poe and it is hitting harder than usual during these peculiar times.
CoinDesk Podcast Network - RESEARCH: Confessions of a Sharding Skeptic
With final preparations for the launch of Ethereum 2.0 soon to be underway, CoinDesk's Christine Kim spoke to Cayman Nava, technical lead at ChainSafe Systems and Alexey Akhunov, an independent researcher and software developer about the kinks in ETH's evolution that still need to be worked out.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.co.
The Ethereum blockchain processes about three to four times as many transactions as Bitcoin. It’s still not enough, however, to meet rising user demand for the cryptocurrency and prevent network congestion.
See also: DeFi Frenzy Drives Ethereum Transaction Fees to All-Time Highs
One of the most highly anticipated fixes to Ethereum’s transaction bottleneck and its lack of scalability is an ambitious software upgrade called Ethereum 2.0. According to Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, Ethereum 2.0 will boost network speeds from around 15 transactions per second (TPS) to 100,000 TPS.
How? The solution is sharding. Cayman Nava, technical lead at ChainSafe Systems, explains sharding as “a natural way to break things up.”
“If you’re wanting to process a lot of data but you don’t want any one party to be overloaded with that data, you can naturally think of breaking up your problem into smaller pieces,” said Nava. These “smaller pieces” Nava is referring to are called shards. In Ethereum 2.0, 64 shards will be created to break up the transaction load of Ethereum.
See also: Ethereum 2.0: How It Works and Why It Matters
While sharding sounds effective in theory, there are other Ethereum developers who are skeptical about the benefits of this technique in practice.
“If I were to design scaling [for Ethereum], first I would squeeze as much as possible out of Ethereum 1, which I think hasn’t been done yet, and then after that I would actually introduce sharding logically in order to see whether users would actually be able to use [sharding] effectively,” said Alexey Akhunov, an independent researcher and software developer for Ethereum that has been contributing code to the network’s development since 2016.
Sharding logically refers to breaking up data within the same blockchain as opposed to sharding physically, which necessitates the creation of multiple mini-blockchains. As mentioned, Ethereum 2.0 will spawn a physically sharded system of 64 linked databases. Optimizing the communication between shards in this environment, Akhunov goes on to explain, may pose an even greater challenge to network scalability than a transaction bottleneck.
Nava agrees there are kinks and holes in the design of Ethereum 2.0 and its sharded system that need to be worked out. But in Nava’s view, these problems that call for further detailing and research can be delayed in the short term while developers work toward an upgrade launch.
“I think we can delay these harder problems like how sharding should work or what it should look like. That can be pushed off a little bit so we can think about it and get it right. In the near term, we can get a lot of the benefits from the [Ethereum 2.0] work that we’ve been doing,” said Nava.
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Everything Everywhere Daily - Károly Takács: Ambidextrous Gold Medalist
If you are from Hungary, you have probably heard the story of Károly Takács. If you aren’t from Hungary, you probably haven’t, but probably should.
His story is remarkable not only for what he had to overcome but how he managed to overcome it.
Learn more about this remarkable Olympic Medalist on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Unexpected Elements - Are children the biggest Covid-19 spreaders?
An analysis of Covid-19 data from South India shows children more than any other group are transmitting the virus both to other children and adults, Epidemiologist Ramanan Laxminarayan tell us the data also shows the situations in which the virus is most likely to spread, public transport is of particular concern.
The WHO has launched an initiative to roll out rapid testing, particularly to countries that don’t have access to lab based tests, Catharina Boehme who leads one of the WHO’s partner organisation in the project tells us the test, which looks similar to home pregnancy tests should give results within fifteen minutes.
Andrea Crisanti led a ground-breaking testing initiative in Italy which eliminated Covid-19 in a small town in a matter of weeks. We look to the lessons learned.
And in California residents have been in a kind of self- enforced lockdown, not because of Covid – 19 but due to wildfires fires. Molly Bentley from the Seti Institute podcast ‘ Big Picture Science’ tells us about how the fires have created an atmosphere of toxic smoke, even in the cities.
Also, What makes things sticky? Listener Mitch from the USA began wondering while he was taking down some very sticky wallpaper. Our world would quite literally fall apart without adhesives. They are almost everywhere – in our buildings, in our cars and in our smartphones. But how do they hold things together?
To find out, presenter Marnie Chesterton visits a luthier, Anette Fajardo, who uses animal glues every day in her job making violins. These glues have been used since the ancient Egyptians –but adhesives are much older than that. Marnie speaks to archaeologist Dr Geeske Langejans from Delft University of Technology about prehistoric glues made from birch bark, dated to 200,000 years ago. She goes to see a chemist, Prof Steven Abbott, who helps her understand why anything actually sticks to anything else. And she speaks to physicist Dr Ivan Vera-Marun at the University of Manchester, about the nanotechnologists using adhesion at tiny scales to make materials of the future.
(Image: Getty Images)
CoinDesk Podcast Network - BREAKDOWN: Inflation Is the Cruelest Tax
A reading of a new piece from the Wall Street Journal that NLW argues shows a shifting mainstream narrative.
This episode is sponsored by Crypto.com, Nexo.io and Elliptic.co.
Today’s Long Reads Sunday selection is “How To Avoid Paying the Cruelest Tax: Inflation” from the Wall Street Journal.
NLW argues the piece reflects a changing conversation in mainstream financial circles about the possibility of inflation on the other side of new Federal Reserve policy.
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Curious City - Here’s How Climate Change Is Impacting Lake Michigan
Recent wildfires on the West Coast and Mayor Lightfoot’s plan to replace lead service lines in Chicago have brought the environment to the top of our minds. And as reporter Monica Eng found last year, Lake Michigan is already being affected by climate change. For a look at what we can expect moving forward, we return to a question from 2019. Plus, we take another peek inside the new school year in the city.
Everything Everywhere Daily - The Eradication of Smallpox
On May 8, 1980, officials from the World Health Organization announced that smallpox, the disease which had ravaged humanity across the world for millennia, had been eradicated.
Over the last century before the eradication of smallpox, it is estimated to have killed half a billion people.
Learn more about humanity’s deadliest disease and how it was eradicated on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe - The Skeptics Guide #795 – Oct 3 2020
COVID-19 Update; What's The Word: Decrement; News Items: Electric Vehicles and Climate Change, Black Holes and Wormholes, Neanderthals and Y Chromosomes, Paranormal Naval Ships; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Time Travel Paradox; Science or Fiction
Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts - Testing the Election
Dahlia Lithwick is joined by election law professor Rick Hasen of UC Irvine, author of Election Meltdown, for an update on the state of the election given the president’s COVID diagnosis.
They are joined by Professor Carol Anderson, Charles Howard Candler professor of African American Studies at Emory University, to discuss the president’s undermining of the election.
Podcast production by Sara Burningham.
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