Amidst rosy reports about Trump's condition, we also learned that he received multiple drug treatments over the weekend including dexamethasone, which is typically reserved for patients with severe cases of coronavirus. We look at what his diagnosis, along with other positive cases among Senate Republicans, means for the country and the Supreme Court confirmation process.
Following a negative test on Friday, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden tested negative again on Sunday. VP Pence and Senator Harris have also tested negative and are planning to move forward with their debate this Wednesday, though their podiums will be moved six feet further apart.
Only three US states are reporting a decline in new Covid-19 cases compared to last week. Wisconsin is having a major outbreak, with new daily case numbers doubling in the past two weeks.
And in headlines: Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron releases audio recordings from Breonna Taylor Grand Jury, continued fighting between Armenia and Azerbaijan, and James Bond kills movie theater chain.
Disturbing parallels can be drawn between the United States and the Soviet bloc of Eastern Europe, commentator and bestselling author Rod Dreher says.
Dreher, a senior editor at The American Conservative, received a phone call in 2015 that sent him on a journey to investigate whether America is losing its freedoms in the same way that Eastern Europe lost its liberty to the Soviet Union. What he found inspired his latest book, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.”
Dreher joins The Daily Signal Podcast to discuss the book and what the future may hold if Americans do not stand against the agenda of the radical left.
Also on today’s show, we read your letters to the editor and share a good news story about a Coast Guard veteran who saved multiple people from a fire in Washington state.
“The Daily Signal Podcast” is available on Ricochet, Apple Podcasts, Pippa, Google Play, and Stitcher. All of our podcasts may be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You also may leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at letters@dailysignal.com. Enjoy the show!
What makes it relatively easy for New Hampshire to maintain low taxes and spending? New Hampshire's Republican Governor Chris Sununu has a few ideas. Sununu received an "A" on Cato's new Fiscal Policy Report Card for Governors.
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 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.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is a neuroscientist, psychologist, and author. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
– Athletic Greens: https://athleticgreens.com/lex and use code LEX to get free vitamin D3/K2
– Magic Spoon: https://magicspoon.com/lex and use code LEX to get free shipping
– Cash App: https://cash.app/ and use code LexPodcast to get $10
OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
00:00 – Introduction
06:35 – Are we alone in the universe?
08:03 – Life on Earth
12:55 – Collective intelligence of human brains
21:43 – Triune brain
27:52 – The predicting brain
35:48 – How the brain evolved
41:47 – Free will
50:40 – Is anything real?
1:03:13 – Dreams
1:09:00 – Emotions are human-constructed concepts
1:34:29 – Are women more emotional than men?
1:43:05 – Empathy
2:14:46 – Love
2:18:40 – Mortality
2:20:16 – Meaning of life
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
