Stephen X: A New Kind of Science

I’ve been hearing about Wolfram Alpha a lot lately, and I finally got a chance to watch a demo screencast today, and I have to say, it looks really cool. It’s a combination of a search engine, a set of computational widgets, and a large, curated knowledge base. Exactly the kind of thing we need for playing with climate datasets, and giving a larger audience a glimpse into how climate science is done. The only thing I can see missing (and maybe it’s there, and I just didn’t look hard enough) is the idea of a narrative thread – I want to be able to create a narrated trail through a set of computational widgets to tell a story about how we build up a particular scientific conclusion from a multitude of sources of evidence…