Janus is the roman god of beginnings and endings, portals and passages, times and duality. He is depicted as having two faces looking spatiotemporally all around, one towards the past and the other towards the future. Ras is an Ethiopian Epithet that conveys authority equivalent to Duke.
This podcast is an all round, unspecialized discussion of two heads, looking all around. The global perspective is tinted with our personal and Ethiopian identity. The specific color of the podcast shall emerge in due time.
It's officially The Holiday Season, or is it? Holidays are times of celebration and coming together. What is celebrated and how differs from society to society and home to home drastically. In many cultures, many holidays have been celebrated over centuries, particularly religious holidays. The nature of these legacy holidays have been changing quite drastically over the years. Many other holidays have also gone extinct along with the society that celebrated them and the context they were celebrated in. It is fair to say holidays have a life of their own, coming into existence, growing, evolving and eventually dying. As much as they affect the society that celebrates them, often in quite profound ways, they are affected by society alike. In this podcast, the Janus Crew, Dawit Asrat Wachelo and Michael Legesse Shiferaw, discuss the purported origin of holidays, the various holidays around the world, their personal experience and the evolution of celebratory culture they have personally witnessed.
18 Jan 2021
Episode 4: Economics is Fun, Sometimes!
At the sound of the word of Economics, most brains of most human beings in most modern societies buzz with wiggly charts, unfathomably large numbers and folks with dark suits and a brief case, with an air of omniscience, walking the sides of Wall Street. Economics, however, is a field with its own unique and intertwined history, albeit short in comparison to fellow Social Sciences. It has a very special place, on par with the likes of Philosophy and Psychology, in that it is beyond a field of study: it is a way of thinking. In fact, it is accurate to say that Economics, more so than it studying balance sheets, money and currency, micro- and macro-economics and the economy itself, studies decision making, on the grand policy scale, and perhaps in a more relevant stance to our listeners, on the personal day to day scale. In this Podcast, The Janus Crew, Dawit Asrat Wachelo and Michael Legesse Shiferaw, discuss Economics in a holistic lens, studded with historical and personal anecdotes. Enjoy!
29 Dec 2020
Episode 3: DNA, Twists and Turns.
DNA (DeoxyRiboNucleic Acid) is the fascinating organic compound that universally encodes genetic information of almost all organisms on our planet, RNA viruses being notable exceptions. From the brilliant experiments of Gregor Mendel to the cutting edge of DNA sequencing, Dawit Asrat Wachelo and Michael Legesse Shiferaw discuss the discovery of DNA, its structure and function in grinding detail. Besides its linear sequential nucleotide base structure, DNA has twisting and folding structures that are only being discovered contemporarily, the entire weight of Mathematics and Computational modeling coming to the rescue. Although the main impetus of this Episode is to understand the nitty-gritty details of DNA, ultimately, we are interested in understanding the overwhelmingly exceptional fitness of DNA that puts it in a club of one in encoding genetic information and eventually answer the question, "is there anything beyond DNA that could encode genetic information?"
21 Dec 2020
Episode 2: The Greatest Inventions
Modern Humans have existed for a few millennia. In the even shorter span of Civilization, human beings have been quite innovative. From detaching from their fire-lit hominid circles and making foraging and combat tools, to having space stations that orbit the Earth at 410 km above its surface at a tangential speed of 27,600 km/hr, from developing farming to engineering life forms, humans have brought into existence incredible inventions. In this Episode, Dawit Asrat Wachelo and Michael Legesse Shiferaw, discuss what they consider the greatest inventions of all times. They start their discussion with the inventions of "primitive" modern humans, arguing the importance of conceiving something anew, and traverse a non-linear timeline, all the way to modern inventions in Artificial Intelligence, Genetic Engineering and Space Telescopes! Enjoy!
14 Dec 2020
Episode 1: Life and The Universe
In this maiden podcast, The Ras Janus Crew, Dawit Asrat Wachelo and Michael Legesse Shiferaw, have an extended conversation on the Fascinating improbability and design of life, the dirty, slow, brutish yet effective process of evolution, the nature of life, our neighborhood, that is the solar system and the universe at large, going into personal anecdotes at times.
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