Retrospective: An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming

-
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2009/10/42360-retrospective-an-axiomatic-basis-for-computer-programming/fulltext

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Elusive Big Idea

-
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinion/sunday/the-elusive-big-idea.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all Excerpts: *) Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world. *) If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. *) In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized. *) There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests. *) Courtesy of the Internet, we seem to have immediate access to anything that anyone could ever want to know. We are certainly the most informed generation in h...
Read more

Why Does Time Fly?

-
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=why-does-time-fly The more energy it takes to process a stimulus the longer it appears as a subjective experience of time.  Something moving toward you has more relevance than the same stimulus moving away from you:  You may need to prepare somehow; time seems to move more slowly. When we experience something as “taking a long time” it is really the result of three inter-twined processes: the actual duration of the event, how we feel about the event, and whether we think the event is approaching us.  There is little we can do about the first factor but there are obvious ways of modulating how we feel about an event and how we think about an event approaching us.
Read more

Why Our Brains Do Not Intuitively Grasp Probabilities

-
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=why-our-brains-do-not-intuitively-grasp-probabilities&sc=WR_20080909 Our senses evolved for perceiving objects of middling size—between, say, grains of sand and mountain ranges. We are not equipped to perceive atoms and germs, on one end of the scale, or galaxies and expanding universes, on the other end. We can detect objects moving at a walking or running pace, but the glacially slow movement of continents (and glaciers) and the mind-bogglingly fast speed of light are imperceptible. Our timescales range from the psychological “now” of three seconds in duration (according to Harvard University psychologist Stephen Pinker) to the few decades of a human lifetime, far too short to witness evolution , continental drift or long-term environmental changes.
Read more