о присяжных (ссылки)

Интереснейшая история в трёх частях о том, как проходит в России введения суда присяжных, на примере одного уголовного дела:

http://2004.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/2004/82n/n82n-s11.shtml
http://2004.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/2004/92n/n92n-s17.shtml
http://2005.novayagazeta.ru/nomer/2005/09n/n09n-s27.shtml

(по ссылке от вездесущего bbb)

интервью Кея (ссылки, программистское)

По ссылке от жирафа - замечательное интервью с Аланом Кеем, создателем Смоллтока.

Несколько длинных цитат (но стоит прочесть целиком), особенно меня заинтересовавших (это не значит, что я согласен с процитированным, иногда - наоборот):

• ...One could actually argue—as I sometimes do—that the success of commercial personal computing and operating systems has actually led to a considerable retrogression in many, many respects.
  ( Read more... )
  
  
  
• ...Yes, actually both Lisp and Smalltalk were done in by the eight-bit microprocessor—it’s not because they’re eight-bit micros, it’s because the processor architectures were bad, and they just killed the dynamic languages. ( Read more... )
  
  
  
• that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over. ( Read more... )
  
  
  
• In a history of Smalltalk I wrote for ACM, I characterized one way of looking at languages in this way: a lot of them are either the agglutination of features or they’re a crystallization of style. Languages such as APL, Lisp, and Smalltalk are what you might call style languages, where there’s a real center and imputed style to how you’re supposed to do everything. Other languages such as PL/I and, indeed, languages that try to be additive without consolidation have often been more successful. I think the style languages appeal to people who have a certain mathematical laziness to them.

о китайской математике (ссылка, англ.)

Британский историк Кристофер Каллен перевёл на английский язык Suan shu shu - самое древнее из известных математических сочинений древнего Китая. Оно было найдено при раскопках могилы 2-го века до нашей эры в 1983-м году, и состоит из 190 бамбуковых полосок, на которых написаны задачи, решения и пояснения. На странице его института есть ссылка на полный текст его перевода (вместе с редакцией оригинала) в формате PDF; в этом же файле есть примечания, интересное предисловие, обсуждения контекста и многое другое.

Цитата:

(12) The fox goes through a customs-post
A fox, a wild-cat and a dog go through a customs-post; they are taxed 111
cash. The dog says to the wild-cat, and the wild-cat says to the fox ‘Your skin
is worth twice mine; you should pay twice as much tax!’ Question : how much
is paid out in each case? Result: the dog pays out 15 cash and 6/7 cash; the
wild-cat pays out 31 cash and 5 parts; the fox pays out 63 cash and 3 parts.
Method: let them be double one another, and combine them [into] 7 to make
the divisor; multiply each by the tax to make the dividends; obtain one for
[each time] the dividend accommodates the divisor.