Sunday, July 21, 2002

Saw Rivers and Tides last night, a documentary on the environmental artist (as in, site specific art) Andy Goldsworthy. It's an exceptional documentary about an exceptional artist. It's incredibly rare for a major artist to come across in a documentary in an approachable manner. I guess the movie will not be released outside of San Francisco for several months, but when it does, I'm sure it will do very well in the arthouse circuit. 3:24:26 PM    comment []

A review of A New Kind of Science in New Scientist makes the excellent point that one of the huge problems with it is that it doesn't make disprovable claims. One thing that's been interesting is that the reviews of ANKoS have been quite mild, while its flaws are obvious. This is certainly due in part to the respect that one should accord Wolfram for his role in developing the theories of cellular automata. But as ANKoS is a book that I feel qualified in making absolute statements about, it makes me wonder about The Skeptical Environmentalist, which has been absolutely excoriated in the scientific press. Is that book just monumentally bad or are the attacks on it just so much more vehement than on ANKoS because The Skeptical Environmentalist is politically incorrect? 3:18:05 PM    comment []