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Donald Knuth On NPR
Posted by
Hemos
on Mon Mar 14, 2005 10:39 AM
from the got-your-ears-on dept.
from the got-your-ears-on dept.
StratoFlyer writes "This morning, NPR is running an interview with Donald Knuth titled Donald Knuth, Founding Artist of Computer Science. The persistence of this man is extraordinary, if not heroic. RealPlayer and MediaPlayer feeds will be available at 10am EST, according to the NPR.org site." Indeed they are.
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I'll tell you what's heroic (Score:5, Funny)
Posting Realplayer feeds on Slashdot's main page. If they're available for more than 5 minutes, then that's heroic.
Re:I'll tell you what's heroic (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:I'll tell you what's heroic (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pretty good piece (Score:5, Insightful)
The narrator also mentions he's "abandoned email." Interesting detail, especially as I contemplate the 995 messages in my inbox this morning (80% spam, 19% mailing lists), I am starting to wonder why I don't get around to it myself.
Re:Pretty good piece (Score:5, Informative)
He sure has: Knuth versus Email [stanford.edu]
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Re: Getting Rid of E-mail (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Pretty good piece (Score:5, Informative)
Looking at his response to my email I sent him in 1999, I'm suddenly stuck with a mystery. How did he get my address? I don't see it anywhere on the email I sent him!
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Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:5, Insightful)
There's a world of difference between amusing yourself with puzzles and being obsessive. When you are obsessive, you can't stop yourself from thinking something even when it distresses or harms you.
Being enormously smarter and more creative than the average person is a form of weirdness, but not a form of sickness.
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Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:5, Insightful)
I see no evidence that it's doing any such thing. He's a brilliant mathematician and computer scientist, and that's all. The world is full of different people. It's also full of arrogant, scared, jerks who do not like differences.
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TeX (Score:5, Informative)
Of much more practical importance to most: he is also the creator of TeX (from which LaTeX etc emerged). When he was dissatisfied with the way magazines printed his articles, he did what every other geek would have done, i.e. invented his own typesetting language. Et voilla.
Re:TeX (Score:5, Informative)
So it's both useful and cool.
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Re:TeX (Score:5, Funny)
You mean he didn't piss and moan about it on Slashdot?
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Favorite part (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Favorite part (Score:5, Funny)
A goat will address a wider range of garbage, but has head-butting-related disadvantages.
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Re:Favorite part (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Favorite part (Score:5, Funny)
In my house, the garbage receptacles are seated around the perimeter of the kitchen table.
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Book Revision (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Book Revision (Score:5, Interesting)
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Dyslexic editor gets it all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Knuth was there first (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Donald Knuth on NPR? (Score:5, Funny)
Judging by the strung-out feeling this news junkie gets during the accursed pledge drive week, I'd say yes it is.
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Re:Explain (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Explain (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Open Source editing (Score:5, Insightful)
But I hate how you refer to this as 'open source'. Can you change Knuth's books any way you want and redistribute them? Nope. So really, it is nothing like open source or free software, except for inviting collaboration.
And collaboration did exist long before OSS. Academic peer-review has been around for a hundred years. And collaboration has always been popular in the academic world. It was uses within academic collaboration which turned ARPANET into the internet. It was the collaborative ideals of the academic world which inspired RMS to create free software.
So, IMHO, calling this 'open source editing' or talking about 'open source science' is really putting the cart in front of the horse.
(Not that academia hasn't been influenced by OSS/Free software, but since OSS/Free Software also originated there, that's what you call feedback, not a new and direct influence.)
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