readings

A formal proof of this theorem is given in Table III. Like all formal proofs, it is excessively tedious, and it would be fairly easy to introduce notational conventions which would significantly shorten it. An even more powerful method of reducing the tedium of formal proofs is to derive general rules for proof construction out of the simple rules accepted as postulates. These general rules would be shown to be valid by demonstrating how every theorem proved with their assistance could equally well (if more tediously) have been proven without. Once a powerful set of supplementary rules has been developed, a “formal proof” reduces to little more than an informal indication of how a formal proof could be constructed.

C. A. R. Hoare, “An Axiomatic Basis for Computer Programming”

Try, start here, try bringing a pot of coffee out into the sun in despite of the hot weather, and sit at your chair and table ready for all possible assimilations. Include with the coffee something slightly intensely sweet: not slightly sweet but slightly intensely, since all intensities only need to be slight at this point. Sit and drink the coffee and eat the chocolate, and here is the thing: stop making the mistake of trying to show other people that furthermost corner of yourself, it is good for one thing only, walk calmly over and ask them for it back. Remember, for instance, that telling people you are reading Tolkien late at night fatally alters the chemical composition of doing this. Also, stop celebrating. Or, qualifying that a little, remember that celebrating can also be very privately sitting drinking your coffee on a sunny morning, watching people go past in the street and reading a book you may not finish. Yes you have been blessed and baffled with success lately, and also god yes there is the ferocity of having a new lover, but what about behaving as if none of these things were relevant to your own strict project? Sometimes accuracy must take the place of expansiveness.

Rosalind Brown, “Discourse to Self”

Someone said, at first
we want romance, then for life
to be bearable,
at last, undestandable.
I am frightened, now
that the trees look like question
marks, how the moon makes
strange noise but it’s daytime.
Bells have begun to notice me.

Victoria Chang, “Passing”, in The Trees Witness Everything

I must speak about what I regard as the mistaken belief that artists who fail to respond to their social, economic, or political circumstances are turning their backs on the world. So far as I am concerned, no artist who has wholeheartedly embraced an artistic tradition and found something personal within that tradition can be condemned to irrelevance. The artist who has struggled with authority and freedom has confronted one of the most basic human predicaments.

Jed Perl, Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

The strongest of all conditions is false, and the weakest of all conditions is true.

K. Rustan M. Leino, Program Proofs

Photographers see the world differently
from the rest of us. To you and me a day is just a day, but to them, it is a gathering of time or more

accurately of light.

Nick Makoha, “Icarus: A Self Portrait—1984”

[P]art of what I loved about poetry was how the distinction between fiction and nonfiction didn’t obtain, how correspondence between text and world was less important than the intensification of the poem itself, what possibilities of feeling were opened up in the present tense of reading.

Ben Lerner, 10:04

Algorithms may be randomised unless otherwise indicated. Running time is worst case. If is an algorithm, $y \leftarrow A(x_1, \dots; r)$ denotes running with random coins on inputs $x_1,\dots$ and assigning the output to . If any of inputs taken by is $\bot$ , then all of its outputs are $\top$ . We let $y \leftarrow_\$ A(x_1, ...)$ be the result of picking at random and letting $y \leftarrow A(x_1, \dots; r)$ . We let $[A(x_1,\dots)]$ denote the set of all possible outputs of when invoked with inputs $x_1,\dots$ . Adversaries are algorithms. We require that adversaries never pass $\bot$ as input to their oracles.

Martin R. Albrecht et al., “Four Attacks and a Proof for Telegram”

I excelled in forgetting my failures—
for I, too, was a mammal, eager for simple happiness,
to be stroked the length of the back, behind the ears.

Distractions: ordinary. Omissions: rampant.
Thinking any of this peculiar to me.

No, I was not distinctive, among my kind.

Showered with pollen, I sneezed.
I ate, and by morning found myself once again hungry.

Jane Hirshfield, “I Was Not, Among My Kind, Distinctive”

Talent
is an invention like phlogiston
after the fact of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
like it better than being loved.

Marge Piercy, “For the Young Who Want to”