I’ve just received my copy of A New Kind of Science, Stephen Wolfram‘s just-published bid at becoming the next Einstein. It’s a 1200-page hardcover brick of a book, and it contains the fruits of 20 years’ worth of jealously guarded scientific investigation by Wolfram. Wolfram’s scientific career so far has been as grand as his ego, and his decision not to subject his discoveries to academic peer review has raised eyebrows.
His main contention as I understand it (before having read the book)–that many fundamental natural processes are irreducible to equations but instead can only be described by what amounts to simple algorithms–is bound to leave few scientists without an opinion. Are we on the verge of a Kuhnian paradigm shift?
The book, by the way, is aimed at a non-scientific audience.
[Thu, May 16 2002 – 06:14] uppers (email) genius or nutter. . . . hmmm. tough one that.
no, nutter.
[Thu, May 16 2002 – 20:49] Matthew (email) oh no, not another kuhnian paradigm shift.
[Thu, May 16 2002 – 20:51] Matthew (email) by the way, how exactly did you ‘receive’ the book? when the checkout girl handed it to you in barnes & noble, or when mr. wolfram special-delivered a pre-publication edition to you in a bid to solicit your opinions.
[Thu, May 16 2002 – 22:44] Felix (www) (email) Isaac Newton said he could see far because he stood on the shoulders of giants. Stephen Wolfram says he can see far because he stands on the shoulders of a computer-mathematics program he wrote, and really the idea that science is progressive, or that n minds are better than one, somehow doesn’t apply ‘cos he’s such a genius. Like, whatever. I mean, does even Thomas Kuhn believe in Kuhnian paradigm shifts any more? Didn’t I give you a Feyerabend book once?
[Fri, May 17 2002 – 03:26] uppers (email) i hate those kuhnian paradigm shifts. there you are tootling along nicely, and then bang! you get slapped upside the head with a kuhnian paradigm shift, which, as everyone knows are much much worse than any other sort of paradigm shift, as evidenced by the totally unnecessary qualification of the word “kuhnian”. kuhnian paradigm shifts are generally much more pretentious.
[Mon, May 20 2002 – 12:49] Matthew (email) as i understand it, a ‘kuhnian’ paradigm shift refers to david kuhn, the former top editor at brill’s content magazine. if he goes to michaels for lunch instead of da silvano, that’s a kuhnian pardigm shift. if the lunch is a 10-cent special for people wearing fatigues, it’s a kuhnian para-dime shift. got it?
[Tue, May 21 2002 – 04:59] uppers (email) “kuh” is german for “cow”. In german you string lots of words together to make bigger words (why writing a german dictionary is probably frustrating), and they have strange word order in certain subordinate clauses. it is possible that stefan misheard or misunderstood a conversation between germans in cafe pick-me-up, thought they were nietschiean nihilists or something, when in fact they were, er, zoo workers, and he mistook their conversation about a neon cow who moves around when it’s time to feed the parrots at the zoo, about how the “kuh-neon [at] parrot-time shifts”?
[Tue, May 21 2002 – 09:24] Matthew (email) well, i’d accept the zoo metaphor, but your translation doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. the couple in bar pick-me-up were probably talking about the dietary habits of racoons. the two racoons at the zoo usually eat fruit. recently, the elder racoon stole the piece of fruit that usually went to the younger racoon. they fought. hence: coonian pear-dine snit.
[Tue, May 21 2002 – 10:27] Stefan Geens (www) (email) Actually, I was referring to a job from a jobs-wanted ad I had misread. It went like this: “Part-time shifts available. Only goons need apply.”
[Tue, May 21 2002 – 10:41] uppers (email) matthew, i’m concerned that you’re not taking much of what steafan writes here particularly seriously, you with your really awful puns, that frankly beggar belief.
any idiot could tell you that “coonian pear-dine snit” isn’t possible. it would be “coonian pear-dinING snit”. i was thinking however that the shifting around of the neon cows at feeding time may be less of a bother for our german zoo workers, who are probably used to animals behaving in unpredictable ways, moving a lot etc. instead i think the neon cows do a lot of poos. they have to walk though the poo to get to the parrots when it’s their feeding time, which is unpleasant, and that’s why they were complaining loudly enough for stefan to overhear. so they were saying things like, “ja, i am hatink it ven i am having to valk zru der kuh-neon-parrot-time-shit”
[Tue, May 21 2002 – 11:28] Matthew (email) uppers, please. open your mind to the possibilities. the parrots, both of them, like to sing. unfortunately they sing badly, which makes the crooning pair a dim gift.
[Tue, May 21 2002 – 14:31] uppers (email) matthew, the possibilities shouldn’t include utterly unrecognisable puns like that. what might have worked would have been if the parrots also sang on interminably, thus making the “crooning-on pair a dim gift”
sorry. stefan, a good effort, especially for a non-native speaker, but again unrecognisable.
try the idea of a couple of incompetent street performers just about to get splatted by a bucket of custard and disgusting stuff by their irate audience: “goo nigh on a pair o’ mimes”
now THAT’s a pun on kuhnian paradigms. am i on a roll or what?!
[Tue, May 21 2002 – 15:52] Matthew (email) back to your cows. there are ten of them. the ninth ran away to join a circus which was cunningly located on a floating cruise liner. hence: cow nine on pantomime drift.
[Wed, May 22 2002 – 08:38] uppers (email) maybe the same cow has her dainty little hoof caught in a very small Otis elevator, used exclusively by flies who have been genetically modified by the US govt. to be super-flies, far stronger than normal ones. they use it to get out of their secret super-fly base, far underground, to seek out the poo of the aforementioned neon cow (which so upsets our German zoo-keepers, the ones Stefan overheard) and using super-fly strength, carry it back to this secret hideout, where they consume it avidly, using full size human chopsticks.
thus “cow nine in power-fly lift” prevents the power-flies getting their “cow neon power-fly shit” back to base. so “shift the cow nine, power flies”,or no “cow neon power-fly shit” for you.
can we stop now?
[Thu, May 23 2002 – 17:13] Matthew (email) no.
the cows decide to become grafitti artists and start scribbling on structures near the beach. unfortunately, they the structure, rudely, starts to float away. one of them exclaimed: crayon on pier deigns drift.