Just read this on XKCD 903:

“Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”.

Tried it with a random article, the first one that came up in my Firefox autocompletion:

Brian Stowell → Isle of Man → Crown Dependencies → The Crown → Corporation sole → Legal personality → Entity (almost there! “philosophy” was the second link) → Existence → Sense → Physiology → Science → Knowledge → Fact → Information → Sequence → Mathematics → Quantity
Property (philosophy) → Modern philosophy → Philosophy

Beyond that it’s a loop Philosophy → Reason → Rationality → Philosophy.

Then I tried to pick something as far from philosophy as I could quickly think of:

Neymar → Association football → Team sport → Sport → Organization → Social group → Social sciences → List of academic disciplines → Academia → Community → Extant taxon → Biology → Natural science → Science → … → Philosophy

Turns out Wikipedians have already studied this phenomenon. Apparently, 94.5% of all English Wikipedia articles lead to “Philosophy”. Cool, huh? There is even a fun web app so you can play around with this.

Some people often tell me that, due to my various interests, they actually find it weird that I ended up studying Computer Science and not some of the Humanities. I try to explain them that my specific field of interest, programming languages, is actually a Human Science. And that is so for one simple reason: if there was no people, if computing was restricted to computers and there was no human factor, machine language — the binary code that processors actually run — would be enough. Programming languages exist because of people, not because of computers.

This quote puts it rather nicely:

“Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don’t understand the physics of software, and it’s rarely if ever taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people.

Specifically, our limitations when it comes to complexity, and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces. This is the science of programming: make building blocks that people can understand and use easily, and people will work together to solve the very largest problems.” — Peter Hintjens et al., ØMQ - The Guide

Programming languages are the bridge we use to communicate our ideas to the machine, but also to communicate our ideas among our fellow programmers, and even to ourselves. Like natural languages, programming languages are constantly evolving (at a much faster pace, even!), as we try to balance the tension between being precise and unambiguous and being understandable and eloquent; to be able, in the same piece of prose, to tell a machine what to do and to tell another person what we mean. And this is by no means a matter of numbers.

In his “Introduction to Metaphysics”, Martin Heidegger starts the book by asking what he presents as the fundamental question of metaphysics. In the Portuguese translation (Ed. Tempo Brasileiro, translated by Carneiro Leão), the question is shown as: “Por que há simplesmente o ente e não antes o nada?”

In the English translation (Yale Nota Bene, translated by Fried and Polt), it comes up as: “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?”

There is a subtle difference in connotation between both translations, so I went to the original. Here it is, from “Einführung in die Metaphysik“: “Warum ist überhaupt Seiendes und nicht vielmehr Nichts?”

And here is the word-by-word translation; reconstructing the phrase is up to you:

• Warum - why
• ist - is
• überhaupt - at all, even, actually…
• Seiendes - that which exists, being
• und - and
• nicht - not
• vielmehr - rather, in fact
• Nichts - nought, nonentity, nothingness…

From what I gather, the English translation seems closer to the original.