Donald Knuth On NPR 514
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.
Donald Knuth on NPR? (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Re:Donald Knuth on NPR? (Score:2)
Not only does it bypass local pledge drives, but the two flavors of NPR they carry that I listen to are all talk; classical music is reserved for the classical music streams.
Re:Donald Knuth on NPR? (Score:4, Funny)
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)
Re:I'll tell you what's heroic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'll tell you what's heroic (Score:5, Informative)
I have a script that uses a similar method to grab the latest episode of Car Talk every week.
Re:I'll tell you what's heroic (Score:5, Funny)
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]
Re: Getting Rid of E-mail (Score:3, Insightful)
What seems strange to me about this is that getting thousands of letters a year is the same as getting e-mails, just in a different form. I agree that there is an expectation with e-mail that it will get answered quickly, but that is assumption can be changed by anyone who takes time to respond with a thoughtful response.
As to filtering out the useful from the junk, I feel like e-mail tools (web or desktop) are getting better every day (or at least ev
Re: Getting Rid of E-mail (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Getting Rid of E-mail (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Pretty good piece (Score:2)
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!
Re:Pretty good piece (Score:3, Informative)
Anyway, you can see that Knuth really hasn't given up email entirely -- he just does it by proxy so he's not constantly interrupted.
Re:Pretty good piece (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure that he found it by walking the paths from Stanford to your address using Dijkstra's alogrithm to find the shortest route. And he did it without ever crossing the Koningsburg bridge!
Re:Pretty good piece (Score:2)
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.
Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:3, Informative)
Weirdness and sickness is often only a question of degree. History is full of examples of geniuses that were barely balanced between the two, and in fact, their genius often derived from the sickness. Just because someone is functional doesn't mean they're normal and not sick. Sickness also doesn't mean that they have to be cured.
Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, Isaac Newton for one. See Will Dunham's book "Journey through Genius" in which he describes a disgusting little experiment Sir Isaac performed with a pointed stick and his eyeball.
Just because someone is functional doesn't mean they're normal and not sick.
I'd say if a person is productive in society, and happy, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that he's sick. Even Sir Isaac. This sense that somebody who is a genius is necessarily a bit sick is an attractive myth -- it consoles the great body of us that aren't blessed with genius.
Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:3, Insightful)
>
> lacking
Ah, judicious terms like "disorder" and "normalcy".... Woe to those who don't confirm to the
canonical ways of behaviour. Let's be interchangable with anyone else.
Who cares that there is a direct link between extraordinary talent and "weird" behaviour. Who cares that these strange individuals might actually be, well, actually just *nice* people.
Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:3, Insightful)
There are times where typing can be heard in the background, plus paper shuffling, and who knows what else. Knuth comes across as a little incoherent. The interviewer sounds like they've been pasted over the top of background noise of Knuth's life, and when he says something we don't know whether it's "inline" with Knuth (i.e. a question for him to answer) or offline commentary.
Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:3, Informative)
OK, I know this is just a joke, but I can't let it be. I got both my undergraduate and graduate degrees in mathematics, so I've been around tons of people who are extremely good at math. There were some who had trouble getting along with other people, and some who did very well. Overall I don't know that the mix was all that different from any other group of people. As for "the fu
Re:I think he came off as having OCD (Score:2, Funny)
Guess they weren't MIT students then?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Metafont's numbering scheme (Score:2)
Re:TeX (Score:5, Funny)
You mean he didn't piss and moan about it on Slashdot?
Re:TeX (Score:2)
Re:TeX (Score:5, Interesting)
My personal Knuth story: in 1979, when I was just starting graduate school at the University of Illinois, Knuth came on campus to give three lectures as that year's Gillies Lecture [uiuc.edu].
At the time, the second edition of Volume I had just come out, and everybody was eagerly awaiting volumes 4 through 7. The lectures were all packed, and the great man, inventor of LR parsing and author of the definitive tome on computer science, spoke on...
typesetting and fonts.
Don't get me wrong, the lectures were interesting, but it didn't seem all that fundamental to computer science, if you get my meaning. 25 years later, we're still waiting for volume 4 to be completed, but at least the new editions of 1-3 had nice fonts.
The following year, Douglas Hofstadter came to campus to speak. This was fairly soon after Godel, Escher, Bach [amazon.com] came out, so we were all excited to see what cool and interesting CS things he would lecture on. His lecture turned to be on...
typesetting and fonts.
I guess it was just the thing to do at that time; little did I suspect that much of the productivity of US offices in the 90's would be spent selecting fonts for documents. I guess great thinkers are just ahead of their time.
Re:TeX more practical? (Score:3, Informative)
> become obsolete soon
and join all those other technolgies which are "dead"? BSD, Lisp, Smalltalk, ???
When Word ate my latest report for the umptheenth time I decided to stop using it at the office (where its use is mandatory, but rank does allow some privileges
Re:TeX more practical? (Score:2)
Says who? Last I checked, Microsoft word, for example, still did a pretty ugly job of typesetting even very simple equations. TeX isn't that hard to use (though of course you can get as complicated as you want), and produces great output.
TeX still has pretty much a monopoly on academic mathematics, as far as I know. Go to a good technical bookstore and look at the TeX section--there's still a lot of work being done around it.
--Bruce Fi
Favorite part (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Favorite part (Score:2)
Re:Favorite part (Score:5, Funny)
A goat will address a wider range of garbage, but has head-butting-related disadvantages.
Re:Favorite part (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Favorite part (Score:3, Funny)
Ah, but my dear friend, you have failed to take into account the extra counter-advantage of milk! Dogs cannot provide this reliably, and even if they could one would probably be aesthetically averse to dunking their oreos in a nice cold glass of Dog Milk.
Re:Favorite part (Score:5, Funny)
In my house, the garbage receptacles are seated around the perimeter of the kitchen table.
Re: (Score:2)
Molasses race (Score:4, Funny)
vs.
Paul Graham's Arc
Stay conscious, audience: great minds think at a 'medium' pace.
Re:Molasses race (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Molasses race (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Molasses race (Score:2, Informative)
Knuth and Graham are both reasonably good at writing books, but awful at writing software - Knuth because TeX is one of the most poorly designed, difficult to use, impractical pieces of software I've ever had the displeasure of using; and Graham because he hasn't written any software since Viaweb, he now just writes about writing software.
Still, as you point out, I wouldn't hold my breath over ACPv4 or ARC - at this rate, Knuth will be dead, and Lisp will be ma
Direct link to file in a Linux-playable format... (Score:2, Interesting)
The page seems to set a cookie about your prefered video codec and you can't get direct link to the file, and it can either be a ".wax" or a ?"smil" file I cannot play.
Anyone gentle enough to provide a good ol' torrent or something ? and in a Linux-playable format.
Thanks
Re:Direct link to file in a Linux-playable format. (Score:2)
smil plays in Realplayer (Score:2)
A direct link to file in a Linux-playable format! (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.cfconline.co.uk/knuth.mp3 [cfconline.co.uk]
Re:Direct link to file in a Linux-playable format. (Score:2)
Book Revision (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Book Revision (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Book Revision (Score:4, Informative)
It's a little jest. He awards $100,000,000 (in binary) to anyone who finds an error. In decimal that's $2.56.
Dyslexic editor gets it all wrong (Score:5, Funny)
Open Source editing (Score:4, Interesting)
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.)
What I found interesting. (Score:2, Interesting)
Knuth, "Yes I do."
Mr. Knuth goes on to talk about how it is good that there is no proof for God because makes him think about God. If there was a proof for God he would just solve it and to on.
This must make many people on Slashdot very happy. I have seen many posts claiming that only an idiot would believe in God. Think of how many people now have proof that they are smarter than Donald Knuth.
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:2, Redundant)
Its why I always laugh at people who call themselves die hard atheists. They are just as blinkered as the religious fundementalists.
Personally my choice is being Agnostic. I veer on the side of not believeing there is a god, but accept the possibility there is, so try to hedge my bets and not break too many com
Bah (Score:3, Insightful)
If there's no evidence for something, there's no point saying "I may or may not believe in this", it's better to be skeptical and say "I won't believe it unless there's evidence to back it up". Using Occam's Razor, it's better to believe in the simpler option which is "There's no god", unless there's evidence for it.
Some people may find
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:2)
Social stigma, imo. Although at times it doesn't seem like it, we do live in a very religous society. I can't remember the exact numbers, but something like 90% of Americans believe in a higher power. Also note that there are very few athiests/agnostics elected to high public office, our current president's constant references to his faith, and the emphasis placed on faith during last year's elections.
In our current society, to say flatly that one is an athiest is similar to being publicly gay. There
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not crazy at all, it is the foundation of science and critical thinking.
Do you also choose neither to believe nor disbelieve in invisible pink elephants? There's no evidence for them either, but if someone told you they existed, would you keep an open mind about that?
Yes.
An agnostic, however, sees the lack of evidence and yet continues to hedge his bets. Why?
It is not "hedging your bets." And there is no way of seeing a lack of evidence. That's the point -- get it? A scientific mind can only consider the evidence and form hypotheses, not the lack of evidence.
Here's a thought-experiment for you. It's 1940. The atom is the smallest element known to man. Does this mean there is nothing smaller?
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have heard this quip before, but you are mis-using it when applying it to scientific and critical thinking. The original quote is making reference to people who will BELIEVE anything. Scientists must consider all possibilities until proven wrong.
This means invisible elephants MIGHT exist. However, as there is no proof that they do, and no theory for why they might, a scientist will not ponder the question long.
This also means wormholes might exist, and even though there is no evidence of them, scientists are open to the possibility because they'd fit in with other theories that are out there, and so they do consider these.
If someone told you there were invisible pink elephants in his back yard, you would keep an open mind about that and not think that maybe your buddy had flipped his lid? Even after going out and pointing out to your buddy that these elephants left no tracks, dung, or anything else behind to show their presence, or that you could walk over every inch of his back yard and not run into one, you would still choose not to disbelieve him if he insisted they existed and were there? Seriously? That's not science or critical thinking, that's just being foolish.
Would I disbelieve him? Of course. Would I go further and, without proof, tell him there is no way on Earth? For pink elephants -- probably so. For something much more mysterious, why bother?
I know you keep wanting to bring up these pink elephants, however the reality is that agnostics do not worry themselves over the question of God. There is neither proof or disproof, and so it is an interesting but pointless thought experiment.
For someone to see a lack of evidence and firmly come down against something is just as bad as firmly coming down in favor of it. This is why people often call Atheism a religion.
In addition, I would wager that many people that refer to themselves as atheists actually mean they are agnostic, but are perhaps not familiar with that terminology. Many of my so-called atheist friends would admit they are agnostic if you questioned them about what they really think.
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:4, Insightful)
Hogwash. If someone tells you there are magic elephants in their back yard that can not be detected by any means, you have no evidence that they are right and no evidence that they are wrong. If choose to beleive that there are elephants, or choose to beleive that there are not, well, I say one of these positions is more reasonable.
An agnostic would say, it is impossible to determine for sure whether the undetectable elephants exist. This is true, so perhaps that makes me an agnostic.
An atheist would say, "I do not beleive there are elephants". Thus, I am an atheist. Perhaps Atheists and Agnostics are not entirely disjoint sets.
You seem to think an atheist has to say "There cannot possibly be elephants.", but this is not so. Atheist do not (all) say God is impossible. They say they do not beleive God exists.
I do not beleive God exists. I do not beleive undetectable elephants exist. I do not beleive either of those beleifs can reasonably be called a religion.
I submit that it is you who do not understand the terminology. You are not alone. Many people seem to like to redefine Atheism to mean only super-extra-strong-to-the-point-of-obvious-falacy Atheism. This is dumb, because I know of no one at all who subscribes to that beleif set, and so Atheist becomes a useless term. It seems much more useful to ditinguish between people who do not beleive God exists, people who do, and people who are undecided.
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:4, Insightful)
Agnosticism is very similar to atheism with one key difference: agnostics believe that the theory "God exists" is not testable, and is thus disinteresting from the point of view of science.
Some view this as the "easy way out" of the deist question, but it's actually just another way of looking at the question from a scientific perspective. A theory must be testable in order for it to be verified or rejected through experiments. Theories which are not testable are nothing more than nice ideas or speculation from the perspective of science.
Most atheists and agnostics are not openly hostile to organized religion, but some are, and the rest of us get a bad name because of these loud few. Please do not associate atheism or agnosticism with anything more than differing opinions on how the scientific method should be applied to the question of God. Both atheism and agnosticism are closely related and in a different class from all other beliefs regarding God, in that they both reject faith as a way to find truth of God's existence or lack of existence.
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
He also gave some lectures about religion called Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About [stanford.edu].
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm impressed that Knuth actively contemplates the existence of a god, and that he is willing to acknowledge his belief in public. That does not convince me that Christians (or Bhudists, or Muslims or Shintoists, ...) are smarter than athiests or agnostics.
For me, Knuth's belief in a god does not have the same authority as his ability to prove the efficiency or convergence rate of an algorithm. Mathematics and other branches of science are a rational and testable form of knowledge. Belief in a diety must ultimately come down to a personal choice -- a leap of faith -- beyond the realm of rational.
I have contemplated this leap and find a deeper mystery and deeper satisfaction and deeper challenge in not believing in the existence of god. That does not make me smarter than Knuth. It just means that we have reached different conclusions about a very personal matter.
The responses to this post are fascinating (Score:5, Insightful)
It amazes me how many of the responses to this post managed to so thoroughly misunderstand it, and how defensive the reactions were.
Some posters responded by saying, essentially, "Just because he's a smart computer scientist doesn't mean I have to believe what he says about religion." This is obviously true, and a very interesting response because no one suggested that you should believe what he says about religion. What the OP was saying, for those who need it to be spelled out, is that people who try to tell others they shouldn't believe in God "because only stupid people believe in God", need to rethink their position. Not that they need to start believing themselves, but that they should admit that belief in God is not evidence of stupidity.
The OP wasn't ridiculing unbelievers, he was ridiculing the intolerance and arrogant condescension of some unbelievers.
The responses I found really funny, though, were the ones who jumped right in and essentially repeated the claim that people who believe in God are stupid, in a knee-jerk reaction triggered by the word "God", apparently completely oblivious to the fact that they had just been lampooned.
The absolute best of the bunch, though, has to be the one who claimed that the fact that Knuth is Christian places his computer science research in question! That has to be the epitome of closed-minded stupidity -- to base a rejection of well-founded research on grounds of a gently-stated opinion on a non-scientific matter... mind-boggling.
Re:Shhhh! (Score:5, Funny)
The art of the elegant troll.
Re:What I found interesting. (Score:5, Interesting)
The daughter on seeing the shop and the walls lined w/ neatly arranged saws, chisels, draw knives, planes, spokeshaves, clamps &c. shrieked, ``Mommy! You lied! Grandpa doesn't make things by hand! He uses tools!''
IME fundamental creationists exhibit a similar na{\"\i}vet\'e as to how God works.
William
Leftist crap (Score:2, Funny)
In a twist of fate, Microsoft announces Visual MIX (Score:4, Funny)
Re:In a twist of fate, Microsoft announces Visual (Score:2)
Not Slashdoted (Score:3, Insightful)
Knuth was there first (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Knuth was there first (Score:4, Insightful)
MSH
I can get an OGG/MP3 if there's a place to put it (Score:2)
spoken word (Score:5, Informative)
http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_catalog.html?item_i d=421 [ddj.com]
or by searching the eDonkey/eMule network for "donald knuth" or "god and computers"
There are deaf admirers of Donald Knuth (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Explain (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Explain (Score:5, Interesting)
"Hunt, drink, and love"... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Explain (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Explain (Score:2)
Re:Explain (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Explain (Score:2, Insightful)
It may not be the entire meaning of the word, but it is certainly the meaning that has stood the test of time--except perhaps in the current Age of the Wimp where people such as sports stars, movie stars, and rappers are considered heroes.
Real heros are people such as Alan Shepard, Charles Lindbergh, and the men who participated in the Normany landings in 1944. To call people such
Re:Explain (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, but Armstrong and Aldrin (and Collins) were the guys with their asses on the line during the mission. If anything went wrong, they were the ones who might have paid with their lives.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
he didn't abandon email because of spam (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Abandoning Email is Stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
On an unrelated note, I love this note on his page about The Art Of Computer Programming: [stanford.edu]
Re:Why do you like Knuth? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why do you like Knuth? (Score:3, Interesting)