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Stephen Wolfram Radio Lecture
Stephen Wolfram, subject of much discussion here, once known solely as the creator of Mathematica, now also known as the author of A New Kind of Science (/. review here), gave a lecture at Boston University this past spring on that book's subject matter. The audio of the lecture was broadcast this evening on the program World of Ideas on WBUR-FM out of Boston. If you don't live in the Boston area, if you missed the program, or if like me you were listening in your car while driving and found that two activites incompatible, the hour-long recording is also available for download in RealMedia format.
vsound -t -s realplay $url | \ .au - -t .wav - | \
sox -t
speexenc --vbr --nframes 4 --quality 7 Wolfram.spx
No, it doesn't appear to be available for download.
Will somebody please post a link to capture it in a format that will really be playable offline?
Bittorrent mp3s here
You need of course bittorrent
There are several deaf persons in the world, who are interested in Stephen Wolfram's ideas.
However, as long as the lecture exists only as audio stream, its gems of wisdom will remain forever out of reach of the deaf in the world.
AARRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!
http://webcast.ucsd.edu:8080/ramgen/UCSD_TV/7153.r m
That's from the University of California Video archive. Lots of interesting stuff.
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
...at least in this case, I wouldn't say anything is 'out of reach' -- the gems of wisdom imparted in the lecture are available in his 6,000 page book that covers the subject. (ok, maybe 1,200 pages but you get the picture). If you're not familiar with the material, you can get a lot more from reading a critique of the book. If you are familiar, you pretty much sit there and wonder whatever made you think *you* were so smart.
There is a lot of relevant content on a number of his websites...he kept telling us to read and re-read different sections of the book.
I saw this lecture in Chicago, and it's not unlike walking off the street into a 400-level physics course. A brilliant professor walks in and immediately gets started, armed with a few powerpoint slides and ultradry jokes, he steamrolls through the first 300 pages of his book in 60 minutes. An audio stream of this isn't going to make or break your understanding on the subject.
I imagine a sign language translator would have their hands full (so to speak) trying to keep up with him.
I don't mean to be disrepectful, but if you're only saying that "life.c" was written a long time ago you should read some reviews of this book. Even a cursory glance at the reader commentary on Amazon will show that Wolfram is not trying to say that cellular automata are neeto. He spent ten years on this thing with the intention of showing that (roughly) Nature is a cellular automaton. I think his desire is to point the way to a kind of Grand Unified Theory -- except instead of finding a simple formula beneath it all the way e=mc^2 summed up Relativity he would have us search for an algorithm that spawns the universe. My take on this could be all wet (and so could he), but he is too intellectually aware, ambitious, and arrogant to merely add an appendix to an old chapter in computer science.