{"id":7805,"date":"2010-04-20T22:27:57","date_gmt":"2010-04-20T22:27:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/2010\/04\/20\/unconnected-interesting-items\/"},"modified":"2010-04-20T22:27:57","modified_gmt":"2010-04-20T22:27:57","slug":"unconnected-interesting-items","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2010\/04\/20\/unconnected-interesting-items\/","title":{"rendered":"Unconnected interesting items."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly Extinct Tree gets  new lease, Elephants invade South America, Python on Wall Street.<br \/>\n<!--more--><br \/>\nThere is a species of tree in New Zealand that has only one individual in the wild. They thought it was a female, but it turns out that there are individuals (among those cultivated by gardeners) that seem to have some kind of male parts anyway, and it is possible now to re-establish the species in the wild.  Originally, the tree, <em>Pennantia baylisiana<\/em>, was nearly wiped out because of goats released into their previously goat-free habitat.  Keep an eye on this story. Interesting things may develop.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/blog\/post.cfm?id=worlds-rarest-tree-gets-some-help-2010-04-20\">More here.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Elephants may have invaded South America (from North America) earlier than thought.  <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/laelaps\/2010\/04\/for_much_of_the_past.php\">Check it out.<\/a> Go have a look at Laelaps post on it. I just got a copy of the paper and will be posting on it in more detail soon.  Interesting stuff.<\/p>\n<p>The American Security and Exchange Commissions (they&#8217;re the ones who get to tell the banks what to do) is calling for the use of a program for keeping track of boring but important banking stuff.  It is called the Waterfall Computer Program.  &#8220;By running the waterfall computer program in combination with other internally-developed or commercially available vendor interest rate, prepayment, default and loss-given-default models, cash flow engines, or computational services, investors  bla bla bla&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The point is that the program is written in the  famous OpenSource langauge Python.  &#8220;The SEC chose Python specifically because it is open source and available freely to anyone. Its status as an interpreted language is also in line with the SEC&#8217;s rule to keep executable code off of EDGAR for security reasons.&#8221; (see <a href=\"http:\/\/www.linux-magazine.com\/Online\/News\/SEC-Proposal-Use-Python-to-Enforce-Wall-Street-Transparency\">Linux Mag <\/a>for the story)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nearly Extinct Tree gets new lease, Elephants invade South America, Python on Wall Street.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5020],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-21T","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7805"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7805\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}