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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." -Arthur C Clarke[1]

This article has been posted at least once onto HN, and I liked reading it then, too. One of the first major insights I remember from my CS curriculum was the concept of abstraction -- in CS it's applied to code-as-data, the OSI model, etc, but it exists everywhere, including all engineering, large bureaucracies, etc. Thank you Prof Harvey!

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarkes_three_laws



I prefer the correlary, as motivation:

"Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced"




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