Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind Of Science is online
by Kevin Dangoor
I’ve been curious about reading Wolfram’s A New Kind Of Science for a while, but not quite curious enough to shell out the dough yet. Now I don’t have to… They’ve put the entire book online for reading. If I start reading it and like what I see, I’ll likely buy the book… but this is a good way to check it out.
Which reminds me… I’ve really come to the conclusion that the 30 second song samples that are commonplace in online music stores suck. 30 seconds is just not enough time to tell if a track will be enjoyable to me. They could make a 30 second high quality sample and a full-length, low quality sample and that would let me get a better feel for the song.
Wolfram’s heart is in the right place, his effort commendable, and his donation of the book laudable, BUT this book is not new, it’s not science, and/or it’s not Wolfram (i.e. hints of plagiarism). (borrowed from one of many good reviews at amazon.com)
Read the negative reviews of Wolfram’s book on Amazon. They’re right.
Here’s the URL if it works:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1579550088/qid=1076362282//ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-7750508-7617616?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
That’s a good tip, thanks for the comment!
It looks like Wolfram did a good job of packaging, but calling it “A New Kind Of Science” might have been a bit pretentious. (Actually, that struck me as pretentious when I first read the Wired article about it some time back.)