The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: ​If traceroute was disabled, or if all servers refused to send TTL expirations, would there be a way to trace internet traffic? Or would the internet be untraceable, kind of analogous to a TOR network? - ​Can you describe how packets get dropped? Is there a decision made, a timeout, or some physically-mediated loss? Are there different implementations for routers / servers? - ​Would love to hear about the limitations of Moore's law. Is Moore's law still relevant to set corporate targets as companies like Intel use it as a benchmark of progress? - If an alien civilization would sent a spaceship from Proxima Centauri to earth with a speed of light, can we detect it before it arrives? - If we did have a "transporter" to send ourselves to another galaxy as a signal, would packet loss be a severe danger for those intergalactic signals?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: What is the history of bugs and debugging? - ​Did you ever meet Andrei Sakharov? What do you think of his Cosmology? - How did you meet Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and why do you think he was able to take very computational approach to finance instead of reasoning by analogy? - ​How does Log4Shell compare to other historically-significant web vulnerabilities? Does the internet tend to course correct after large vulnerabilities?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Could you build a reverse natural language understanding engine? One that would take in Wolfram Language / JavaScript / Python and output natural language explaining what the code is doing? - ​Dr. Wolfram, any suggestion on what problems/case work to use for introductory programming? - Why is is harder to compute integrals rather than derivatives? - Are there any major changes to the design, architecture, or low level code of computers that are now standardized that you would change if you could? - Are there laws governing the development of human history? - Any tricks for reading textbooks that maximize the understanding of the material?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Do you think of science/technology as progressing in the way Thomas Kuhn suggested in 'The Structure of Scientific Revolution' (i.e., paradigm -> crisis -> paradigm shift, incommensurability, etc...) or in some other way? - Stephen, is science always been based on finding patterns in nature? - Why did networked computing grow relatively slowly between 1969's Arpanet and 1989's HTTP? Was it a lack of imagining the Internet's potential or technical barriers (e.g. packet switching network)? - ​When did you first get introduced to the internet? Who told you about it? What tool(s) did you use...Mosaic? What was your reaction? - Why do you believe it took so long for highly parallel graphics cards to be applied to scientific fields? It seems like a 10-15 year delay from SGI to CUDA etc - Stephen has said once that he knew Julia Robinson. Would be great to hear more about it - ​Any thoughts on the Heideggerian view of technology and modern technology? - ​How does self-organizing order emerge in physics and biology - are they analogous? Can the universe be said to be in the business of self organization?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business, innovation, and managing life as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa Questions include: Can you use Wolfram Language to log onto a website with username and password and read data from a website? - Will computational chem/Biochem programs (Alphafold2?) be accurate enough in its predictions to completely dominate private R&D to reduce the costs and duration of expensive wet lab experimentation? - When did you first decide to hire people at Wolfram Research? How did you recruit & evaluate them? What have you learned about hiring since then? - ​have you ever authentically read and replied to an unsolicited email if someone has an important idea for Mathematica and/or the Wolfram Language? - Do you have developers that work in a large variety of topics (changing monthly perhaps), or are most in a 'fixed' position/topic? - When you reach the level you do with Wolfram Research, what steps do you undertake to ensure that you continue to innovate and don't lose ground to your competitors, and that you don't take the wrong business decisions? - As someone with a technical background, how do you maintain a holistic overview of your company? For instance, do you better attempt to understand the company's financial books? - what is your work out routine? - how do you balance time being creative (for projects) vs the everyday necessary work? - At the start of crypto projects there is always this battle between centralization and decentralization. You need an amount of centralization in the beginning to get things going. How long should a project be given before you let in the masses? - Do you have an opinion concerning "Poor Charlie's almanacs: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger"? - Do you use rules similar to those in Cellular Automata when you manage your company or your company's projects?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Do you think its possible to time travel, for real? - Has Darwinian evolution stopped in humans and of so are we descending to extinction because of dysgenics? - how likely is it for a big asteroid to hit earth? - ​How far ahead can you talk about human evolution adapting with technological progression? - Could gene drive technology replace natural evolution in favor of intelligent design?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Can we consider very early games like the game of Go as an expression of a mathematical thinking? - ​Is science still the place where the best thrive or has that shifted to "industry"? What's the historical context? - Do you credit E=mc^2 to Einstein or to the Italian Olinto De Pretto, who discovered it before Einstein? - Is there a high period of any one institution that's your favorite? (ex: Bell Labs and the young Turks in the 40s, PARC in the 70s and 80s, etc.) - What technology got lost from the moon-landing so they cant repeat it nowadays? And how did they shielded the radiation during the moon mission? - What is your perspective on the growing sentiment of racism in technology, such as algorithmic bias? Do you agree that there is an issue, and if so what are some steps that need to be taken in response? - ​Do you think (monotheistic) religion was in some sense a precursor to science because it presented the world as having a single truth which all people could somehow access? - Why did it take so long to get so technically advanced?

Stephen Wolfram answers general questions from his viewers about science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Difference between Astroparticle Physics and Astrophysics? Which is more interesting in your opinion? - Why do doctors say that no vaccination can be 100% effective? - ​According to Wikipedia, some bowhead whales have been "estimated to be between 135 and 170 years old." Is this alleged estimate correct? Can some mammals live to be 200 years old? - What's different in the vaccines? Like what's the difference between one and another.

Questions include: Has Wolfram Research, Inc., done any research and/or deals connected with household/personal robots such as Amazon's Astro? - Question about your personal data logging: have you identified any low-hanging fruit that could be broadly useful for "managing life"? Have you done any ML on that data? - When did you realize you could do science for a living? Did you ever expect you'd do something else? - Are people the world over losing confidence in fiat money and governments in general? - What do you do to keep up your energy, supplements, omega 3 oils? - What is the difference between planning for the future and envisioning a future? - I work 9 AM to 9 PM, in programming/math. I feel its fine, but people say i work too much and that i should give myself a break. Should i listen? When does your working day end? - Music while working? - Do you advise young professionals to "play the game", as in follow rules, meet requirements, concede to superiors, be political, etc., in academia or commercial? do you respect people who do this approach? - What do you spend your personal money on, do you ever treat yourself to sth nice, jewelry, fine dinner, etc. ? - Did you ever have to live with noisy upstairs neighbors? - How do you decide between accuracy, speed and readability of code? Which tradeoff do you take and why? - What's your opinion on company acquisition? Have Wolfram Research ever acquired other companies? If so, how to quickly integrate an acquired company? - My dad retired very early and he's got no direction, no focus or job. So he's digging himself into a pit. What can I advise he learns/does that would be worth the doing? - ​Building an app that takes human language as input, do you feel that current state of the art in parsers and compilers (based on Chomsky/Trees/AST from >30 years ago) are in need of a rethink? Questions include: Has Wolfram Research, Inc., done any research and/or deals connected with household/personal robots such as Amazon's Astro? - Question about your personal data logging: have you identified any low-hanging fruit that could be broadly useful for "managing life"? Have you done any ML on that data? - When did you realize you could do science for a living? Did you ever expect you'd do something else? - Are people the world over losing confidence in fiat money and governments in general? - What do you do to keep up your energy, supplements, omega 3 oils? - What is the difference between planning for the future and envisioning a future? - I work 9 AM to 9 PM, in programming/math. I feel its fine, but people say i work too much and that i should give myself a break. Should i listen? When does your working day end? - Music while working? - Do you advise young professionals to "play the game", as in follow rules, meet requirements, concede to superiors, be political, etc., in academia or commercial? do you respect people who do this approach? - What do you spend your personal money on, do you ever treat yourself to sth nice, jewelry, fine dinner, etc. ? - Did you ever have to live with noisy upstairs neighbours? - How do you decide between accuracy, speed and readability of code? Which tradeoff do you take and why? - What's your opinion on company acquisition? Have Wolfram Research ever acquired other companies? If so, how to quickly integrate an acquired company? - My dad retired very early and he's got no direction, no focus or job. So he's digging himself into a pit. What can I advise he learns/does that would be worth the doing? - ​Building an app that takes human language as input, do you feel that current state of the art in parsers and compilers (based on Chomsky/Trees/AST from >30 years ago) are in need of a rethink?

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about the history of science and technology as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-qa Questions include: Who are the most famous Mathematica users you know? - ​What separates the greats (Einstein, Dirac, Newton, etc.) from everyone else? Is there a tip you have for a young physics undergraduate to become a better physicist? - ​I am a physicist which didn't get to do any discrete mathematics in his bachelor degree. I got involved in summer school last year, but because of my lack of technical knowledge I didn't get the most of it. Apart from Mathematica and (hyper)graph theory what would you recommend one should study to get more involved with the project? - When do you look at the story of some technology, how far should you go? I tried to study the story of machine learning and in a sense the first decision tree was 500BC, and even earlier in the bible -​ Is Excel a computational tool? - Who invented Polyominoes? Why where they invented what role did they play in mathematics? - Does knowing calculus allow one to make money in the 18 century? Or get a job?