Although not strictly a talk, I would highly recommend the first of the SICP lectures[0], if only to expand your thinking about what computer science: "I'd like to welcome you to this course on Computer Science. Actually that's a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all, it's not a science. It might be engineering or it might be art. We'll actually see that computer s…
can someone please convince me that the use of the word "magic" is justified? yes I know sicp is universally exalted in the cs/programming community and even though I haven't read it yet I support the principle of a principled approach to computation (it's math after all in the purest sense) but I can't support the infantilism of words like magic and the wizard on the cover of the book because the two themes are dire…
Somebody with only a shallow pop-culture understanding of occult tradition is bound to associate it with fuzzy thinking & children's media. The use of alchemical metaphors in SICP indicates that the authors have at least some familiarity with the history of magick, though.
The most important figures in the western occult tradition were mathematicians (like Dee) or invented early computational or permutational devices (like Llul). Magick is very firmly bound up in this kind of mathematical thinking. On the other side, the mathematical foundations of computing come out of mathematicians who had occult justifications: Godel (and Cantor before him) was a mathematical platonist who dabbled in gematria, and his work on computability was part of the ars magna for him. (In case you're not up on the history, Turing's work on universal turing machines was an attempt to rephrase Godel's incompleteness in a way that was accessible to non-mathematicians, and his later work with Church proving the equivalence between Godel's model and lambda calculus was built upon this work. While computing machines predated this formal basis, the formal basis is pretty important -- we all learned it in college, after all!)