No Weird Trick
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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962
When I first heard Arthur C. Clarke's third law, I thought science-fiction. Clarke was a science-fiction author after all. I imagined humanity interacting with aliens and finding them incomprehensible. But the quote doesn't say "alien technology" or "future technology" - just "sufficiently advanced technology." "Sufficiently advanced" is personal.
For a baby, the idea that an object doesn't disappear when it is obscured by another object might be sufficiently advanced. For me, electricity is sufficiently advanced (not to brag about my object-permanence skills). I live with electricity, I am reasonably comfortable with it, but I don't understand it - not really - it may as well be magic to me.
That being said I think that understanding - taking things from the realm of the sufficiently advanced to the insufficiently advanced - eliminating magic - is really fun. I want to write things that help people understand. The reader of those things, sure, but me as the writer even more. As a play on ads that promise "one weird trick to do X," I want to show that, for most things, there are no weird tricks.
Each post is designed to illustrate a certain concept. The posts are literate programs written in org-mode. That means that each post is source code which produces:
- The post itself
- The executable program that is built up in the post