Chad Clark's Open Journal : 2006-06-25

1) Stephen Wolfram Lecture MP3.

I recently listed to a lecture by Stephen Wolfram from over at itconversations.com
(for a second time).  The lecture contains a lot of discussion of cellular
automaton and the idea that sets of simple rules can describe systems that
contain a lot of complexicy.  The MP3 is roughly an hour long and can be
found at:

http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail202.html

There is a video of a similar lecture in RealMedia format (about 90 minutes
long) that can be found in the MIT World archives at:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/149/

The subject of both of these lectures comes from the book "A New Kind of Science"
written by the speaker.


2) Phil Greespun's ArsDigita University.

A couple years ago Philip Greenspun (author of Philip and Alex's Guide
to Web Publishing and MIT professor) started a project to provide an
undergraduate education in computer science and make video of all lectures
available on the internet.  The result was the ArsDigita University at:

http://www.aduni.org/

The project is no longer running.  Their FAQ reads:

  ArsDigita University (the brick and mortar school) closed it's doors in
  July 2001 because it lost funding. ADUni (the website) isn't a school at
  all, not even a distance learning program. What we do is provide course
  materials, not courses. So, you're welcome to watch our lectures, do our
  problem sets and learn all that you can, but we can't give you credit and
  we don't have any teachers on staff (actually, we don't even have a staff
  - just some alumni volunteers who keep things going).

3) Charles Darwin's tortoise died at 176 years old.

Charles Darwin's tortoise died at 176 years old.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,19566724-2,00.html

4) Norwegian "seed bank" to preserve crop samples.

Norway is building a "seed bank" underground in the permafrost 1 000 km
from the North Pole.  The facility will have one meter thick concrete walls
and will be home to "around two million seeds representing all known
varieties of the world's crops".

The idea is that this facility will contain seeds to re-populate the earth's
vegetation in the case of a disaster whether natural or caused by humans.

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/norway-begins-building-doomsday-vault/2006/06/19/1150569258582.html

5) Stock ticker names influence stock prices.

Christian Jarrett notes that simple company names and stock ticker names
experience higher stock prices than companies ticker names that are
difficult to pronounce.

Quotes:

- new shares in companies with fluent, easy-to-pronounce names like
  Barnings Inc. tend to outperform shares in companies with awkward names
  like Aegeadux Inc.

- the researchers found companies with pronounceable ticker codes (used for
  abbreviation on TV and on websites) like KAR tended to outperform
  companies with an unpronounceable ticker code like RDO.

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2006/06/why-you-should-invest-in-shares-with.html