Donald Knuth On NPR

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.

Comments

Re:Pretty good piece

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

He sure has: Knuth versus Email

Re:TeX

[Otik2]

Not only that, but he chose a great numbering scheme for TeX. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX :

TeX has an idiosyncratic version numbering system. Since version 3, updates have been indicated by adding an extra digit at the end of the decimal, so that the version number asymptotically approaches . The current version is 3.141592. This is a reflection of the fact that TeX is now very stable, and only minor updates are anticipated. Knuth has stated that the "absolutely final change (to be made after my death)" will be to change the version number to , at which point all remaining bugs will become features.

So it's both useful and cool.

Re:Pretty good piece

[bunratty]

You can still send him an email. His secretary prints it out on a laser printer, and Knuth stops by and picks it up and reads it. If it's worthy of a response, he writes on the paper with what looks to be a mechanical pencil and snail mails it back.

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!

spoken word

[delirium of disorder]

Knuth's lectures are quite interesting. You can find some more of them here:

http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_catalog.html?item_i d=421

or by searching the eDonkey/eMule network for "donald knuth" or "god and computers"

Re:I'll tell you what's heroic

[theCoder]

If you have mplayer configured correctly, you can download it (no streaming required) under Linux:

mplayer -ao pcm -aofile npr4532247.wav 'rtsp://real.npr.na-central.speedera.net:80/real.n pr.na-central/me/20050314_me_06.rm'

oggenc -b 64 npr4532247.wav -o npr4532247.ogg

rm npr4532247.wav

Ignore any spaces in the rtsp link (slashcode inserts them to prevent page widening). The link itself comes from the smil file you get when you try to listen to the show on the NPR site.

I have a script that uses a similar method to grab the latest episode of Car Talk every week.