Entries on December 3, 2007
Making magic
In yesterday’s article I spent a fair amount of time talking about the word “magic”, specifically in the context of Clarke’s Third Law, which states that
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
A big part of what I was getting at was that a lot of things which seem to be explicable only by appealing to “magic” are really just cases of technology — sometimes extremely simple technology — being used in a ...
Clarke’s Third Law
Every so often, a TV producer who wants to get ratings will air a “documentary” about some wonder of the ancient world. Say, the great pyramids at Giza. The formula for this “documentary” is pretty simple: you get a bunch of people from modern, industrialized nations to go crawl over these huge ancient monuments in Egypt and speculate on how those ancient Egyptians managed to build them. And, inevitably, a lot of these people will ...
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