The joy of bashing, beer bottles, etc.

Here’s a book review that stings, namely of Wolfram’s book, A New Kind of Science, in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

(Those that want more malice can, as always, visit Amazon’s one star reviews of the same. And, please note, I haven’t read the book, but based on what I’ve heard I’m not planning to, either. And I don’t need to read Twilight to enjoy the post-traumatic one-star bashing, do I?)

(Then again, even that’s not as fun as snickering at the one-star reviews of the Bible… like this one:

I picked this up because I heard it advertised as the Gospel, which translates to “good news.” It opens up by telling the reader how the human race is doomed because two poorly developed characters ate an apple that a snake told them to eat. That’s not good news.

Ha-ha! While that’s abuse of the system, with this kind of a book I don’t care.)

In other news, physicians get all the interesting subjects (keywords: breaking energy threshold; beer bottles; blunt head trauma). Then again, they have to use weird Latinate terms while mathematicians get to talk with words like “complex number”, “power tower” and “nonempty set of finite measure” (“O! My kingdom for a set of finite measure!”) without seeming too insane or infantile; that’s worth something. (Project for self: Find some new mathematical thing; name it “blunt head trauma”. Possibly “blunt head trauma matrix determinant”.)

Then again, the Finnish word for department (as in “department of mathematics”) is laitos, which is also used in much the same combinations and circumlocutions as the English word “institution” — as in, “he was institutionalized”.