My head, for unrelated reasons, hurts too much for me to formulate a sensible response to Ted’s comments on the Sapir-Whorf post below. In the mean time, though, y’all can read this snarky yet informative review of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science, by Cosma Shalzi.

Let me try to sum up. On the one hand, we have a large number of true but commonplace ideas, especially about how simple rules can lead to complex outcomes, and about the virtues of toy models. On the other hand, we have a large mass of dubious speculations (many of them also unoriginal). We have, finally, a single new result of mathematical importance, which is not actually the author’s. Everything is presented as the inspired fruit of a lonely genius, delivering startling insights in isolation from a blinkered and philistine scientific community.

(This time merely via The Valve.)