Jinn of Quality and Risk

Wolfram profile: inside story of how Stephen Wolfram went from boy genius to recluse to science renegade. Wolfram quote: Three centuries ago science was transformed by the dramatic new idea that rules based on mathematical equations could be used to describe the natural world. My purpose in this book is to initiate another such transformation, and to introduce a new kind of science that is based on the much more general types of rules that can be embodied in simple computer programs. 

Apart from the ubiquitous reports that some famous people used an ultrashort polyphasic sleep strategy, I strangely enough haven't found scientific descriptions of that strategy that encourage people to use it. On the contrary, all "sleep" literature asserts that man needs 6-10 hours of sleep, depending on the individual. Maybe the field of chronobiology is too young (less than one century, it seems). Individuals sleeping for 30 minutes every four hours, for a daily total of only 3 hours of sleep, performed better and were more alert, compared to when they had 3 hours of uninterrupted sleep. In other words, under conditions of dramatic sleep reduction, it is more efficient to recharge the sleep "battery" more often. The same article asserts that Leonardo da Vinci slept in 15-minute segments 6 times a day, i.e. 1.5 hours a day, and adds that he was immensely productive. 

Another sailor who is working with Dr. Stampi. You can map out your own circadian sleep pattern by keeping a log of when you sleep and when you are awake and how alert you are at different times of the day. You should also record alcohol, caffeine and food consumption so you know when your alertness is altered by chemical substances. 

Wolfram is guilty of hubris and not paying attention to the work of other scientists. More fundamentally, rule 110 does not explain all that there is, and Wolfram's "science" seems to offer few if any testable predictions. Wolfram asserts that cellular automata operations underlie much of the real world. He even asserts that the entire Universe itself is a big cellular-automaton computer. But Ray Kurzweil challenges the ability of these ideas to fully explain the complexities of life, intelligence, and physical phenomena. ... A New Kind of Science is an unusually wide-ranging book covering issues basic to biology, physics, perception, computation, and philosophy. It is also a remarkably narrow book in that its 1,200 pages discuss a singular subject, that of cellular automata. Actually, the book is even narrower than that...