I was writing my monthly column for Connect Magazine today and as part of that effort reread several times my recent post on Alan Kaye. As I thought about his statements about the real power of computing being their ability to do simulations, I started thinking about Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science and his theory that real world processes are, essentially, just computations. One of the things I need to add to my list of things programming teaches you is "modeling." People who learn to program learn to build models.