Bidding farewell to the sweetest and spookiest month, we traipse past graves with archeologist, conservator and Taphologist Robyn Lacy. What’s the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery? Is it wrong to picnic in one? And can tombstone scrubbing help the world and soothe your living soul? Plus, font trends on headstones, old-timey gravestone emojis, a coffin-within-a-coffin, the best epitaphs and knowing the difference between slate, marble, and granite monuments. To celebrate Halloween, stop by the cemetery gates to do zinckies with your best ghosties. (That will make sense later.)
What began as an exploration of sources of authority - citations, rankings, reviews, sales - now continues with our inside look at book writing and publishing. For those who have considered eventually writing a book themselves - and who among us hasn’t? - we take a deeply honest and nuanced look at all aspects of the process, including many most of us take for granted. Professor Amar’s personal approach to book writing is discussed, and one short example of it tells the story of Story himself - Joseph Story, that is, and his ongoing role in Akhil’s ambitions.
The infrastructure that networked applications lives on is getting more and more complicated. There was a time when you could serve an application from a single machine on premises. But now, with cloud computing offering painless scaling to meet your demand, your infrastructure becomes abstracted and not really something you have contact with directly. Compound that problem with with architecture spread across dozens, even hundreds of microservices, replicated across multiple data centers in an ever changing cloud, and tracking down the source of system failures becomes something like a murder mystery. Who shot our uptime in the foot?
A good observability system helps with that. On this sponsored episode of the Stack Overflow Podcast, we talk with Greg Leffler of Splunk about the keys to instrumenting an observable system and how the OpenTelemetry standard makes observability easier, even if you aren’t using Splunk’s product.
Observability is really an outgrowth of traditional monitoring. You expect that some service or system could break, so you keep an eye on it. But observability applies that monitoring to an entire system and gives you the ability to answer the unexpected questions that come up. It uses three principal ways of viewing system data: logs, traces, and metrics.
Metrics are a number and a timestamp that tell you particular details. Traces follow a request through a system. And logs are the causes and effects recorded from a system in motion. Splunk wants to add a fourth one—events—that would track specific user events and browser failures.
Observing all that data first means you have to be able to track and extract that data by instrumenting your system to produce it. Greg and his colleagues at Splunk are huge fans of OpenTelemetry. It’s an open standard that can extract data for any observability platform. You instrument your application once and never have to worry about it again, even if you need to change your observability platform.
Why use an approach that makes it easy for a client to switch vendors? Leffler and Splunk argue that it’s not only better for customers, but for Splunk and the observability industry as a whole. If you’ve instrumented your system with a vendor locked solution, then you may not switch, you may just let your observability program fall by the wayside. That helps exactly no one.
As we’ve seen, people are moving to the cloud at an ever faster pace. That’s no surprise; it offers automatic scaling for arbitrary traffic volumes, high availability, and worry-free infrastructure failure recovery. But moving to the cloud can be expensive, and you have to do some work with your application to be able to see everything that’s going on inside it. Plenty of people just throw everything into the cloud and let the provider handle it, which is fine until they see the bill.
Observability based on an open standard makes it easier for everyone to build a more efficient and robust service in the cloud. Give the episode a listen and let us know what you think in the comments.
If you're not so fond of spiders, you may find kindred spirits in other spiders! Researcher Daniela Roessler worked with jumping spiders and found that they know to get away from the presence of other possible predator spiders, even if they've never encountered them before. She talks with host Maria Godoy about her research and what Halloween decorations do to the poor spiders, if arachnids can have arachnophobia.
The bestselling author Louise Penny is a prolific writer of mysteries and thrillers — but for her latest book, she decided to bring a partner into the fold, a novice to the world of mystery-writing: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Their book, State of Terror, brings readers into a world in which a president picks a former rival to be his secretary of state (sound familiar?) — and she must then contend with what Clinton calls one of her greatest fears: nuclear-armed terrorists. In this interview, Penny and Clinton discuss the messages they hope readers take away from the book.
What's more dangerous that UFOs? What REALLY goes on at Area 51? Join us as we watch the CIA and Air Force repeatedly bring us to the brink of nuclear war
Rob explores Cleveland rap group Bone Thugs-N-Harmony’s hit “Tha Crossroads” by discussing the origins of the quintet, their innovative musical style, and the power of singing about grief.
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
(07:50) – What is complexity
(20:51) – Randomness in the universe
(25:12) – The Wolfram Physics Project
(37:14) – Space and time are discrete
(49:19) – Quantum mechanics and hypergraphs
(58:33) – What is intelligence
(1:09:16) – Computational equivalence
(1:17:36) – What it is like to be a cellular automata
(1:32:00) – Making prediction vs explanations
(1:45:20) – Why does the universe exist
(1:51:01) – The universe and rulial space
(1:59:44) – Does an atom have consciousness
(2:10:10) – Why does our universe exist
(2:18:41) – What is outside the ruliad
(2:29:15) – Automated proof systems
(2:45:10) – Multicomputation for biology
(3:03:41) – Cardano NFT collaboration with Wolfram Alpha
(3:10:41) – Global theory of economics
