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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.
Is NPR some kind of drug? If so where can I get some? I wan't to be on NPR too.
Posting Realplayer feeds on Slashdot's main page. If they're available for more than 5 minutes, then that's heroic.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Someone who accomplishes something important at great risk to his own life is a hero, not someone who plods along for years at a job no matter how important his contributions.
Knuth came across as charming, and funny, and classically geeky, re-computing the size of a piece of paper necessary for making a five-pointed star with one cut and rattling off the equation behind it, or describing his mental process behind brushing his teeth, but also clearly grounded in continuing scholarly work.
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.
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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.
He used graph theory to lay out his kitchen. The most connected resource? The trash can. It goes in the middle.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
perhaps Mr. Knuth is a sandwich made on a long bun.
The Art of Computer Programming, vol. 4 :)
vs.
Paul Graham's Arc
Stay conscious, audience: great minds think at a 'medium' pace.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The original greek word means 'demi-god', and so its use in describing someone who makes an exemplary contribution in a field of endeavour is entirely legitimate. You may wish to use it to only refer to people who have done something risky, but that is not the entire meaning of the word.
anyone ?
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
Heard the interview on the way to work. I love that he gives something like $2.56 or something to everyone who finds a flaw in the book. He has cut checks for around 20K so far and that the first Book had 90% of it's pages altered in some way because of that. We have the same kind of thing where I work. Free 6pack to anyone finding a non-sensical phrase embedded in our documentation. Everyone actually peer reviews documentation now.
It's actually Donald Knuth on RPN. And he says it?s the greatest cause of brain damage in computing.
Interesting note (IMHO) If you look at his website, he is currently writing volume IV of the art of programming. He has posted drafts of chapters up and actively elicits feedback from readers. He goes as far as offering money for bugs found. Another one he adds is in his citations he wants full names...he will pay readers $2.56 per full name discovered on his list of incomplete names. This is a guy who understands the value of community development even when referring to the work of someone head and shoulders above the community.
The fact of our society is that if you sent them to the funnny farm, you'd have very few people left who were good at math.
- These characters were randomly selected.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
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.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"Do you believe that is a God?"
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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 as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Shaquille O'Neil "heroes" is an insult to all of the true heroes out there.
Look at those leftist NPR hacks, going and interviewing an actual computer scientist, rather than the business leaders, CEOs and MBAs who really make things happen. God, they just make me so mad, those commie Public Radio personalities with their "insightful" and "interesting" guests who think they're "oh, so smart" with their "science" and "knowledge" and "thoughtfulness" crap. Someone should shut them down! I want to hear a good old "Proud to be American" conservative commentator screaming at me and telling me how to think! God Bless Red America! Thank you and good night!
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
In other words, he was getting legitimate email, and it was a distraction for that reason.
I'm pretty sure that if the problem was spam, Knuth is one of the few people who'd actually create a system that can, actually, filter spam and spam only.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well, let's hope you never apply for a job doing triage at a psychiatric hospital.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
From his website: "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study."
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
It only becomes an issue if you consider the perfectionism to be a mental illness. Which you do, and I don't. Someone not being the right person for the job is not a mental illness.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
> he came off as having some sever social disorders .... as normalcy is concerned, the guy comes up
>
> 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.
Once in a while, I even pass the Turing-Test
The narrator also mentions he's "abandoned email."
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 every version) at allowing filtering and spam-blocking. I may have a different take on e-mail when I'm in my mid 60's but I just don't understand the reluctance to use a new technology when it allows the exact same type of communication as the old one, as long as you use it the way you want to.
Most of us struggle with basic assembly language. But Knuth goes and invents his own VM (MIX) and programs all of his examples to it. You just have to admire that.
This is my sig.
Finally a good piece of news to share with the other guys that did not get slashdoted. This was definately a good article and a morning edition is always a good show to listen to.
...is an anagram for "Donald Ervin Knuth". So, his parents already knew he would be a great hero and named him accordingly.
Knuth was there first. When "Fundamental Algorithms" came out, there were almost no computer science books. There were vendor machine manuals, and books on programming languages. "A Fortran Primer", by Elliot Organick was about as good as it got. MIT students had a tech note series called HAKMEM, but few others saw those. There was a huge vacuum waiting to be filled. That's why "Fundamental Algorithms" got so much attention.
> TeX is already long in the tooth, and will
...). Instead of going to OpenOffice, which behaves in manners not unlike Word when confronted with big docs, I looked at plain text based markup languages. In the end I just went back to Tex (Latex). it's more readable than XML based markup languages (Docbook, anyone?), and has the best (superb) toolset while still having a large and vibrant user community (in academia).
> 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
So now my documents look superb and they are never eaten by my word processor. Tex has some life in it yet,,,,,
Once in a while, I even pass the Turing-Test
If someone sends me a snail mail letter, the quality tends to be much higher than e-mail. Electronic media tends to make things so easy that folks don't put much forethought into their writings? Want proof? Look at my comment history :)
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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 funny farm"? In my 10 years of studying I think I may have run across 1 or 2 that it wouldn't surprise me to learn actually had serious mental problems. None so incapacitated that they couldn't function at some level--that's why they were in school and not institutionalized....
--b.
On an unrelated note, I love this note on his page about The Art Of Computer Programming:
they were in school and not institutionalized....
Guess they weren't MIT students then?
I was refering to personal letters, with a traditional stamp. However, even my junk mail is a vast improvement over spam. Because it costs money, the ads are at least SOMEWHAT targeted at my interests and demographics. This is the unforunae ide effect of making something free. It quickly becomes devalued as well (and no... those are not necissarily synonymous).
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
And you are...who?
Why should you opinion matter?
Almost all of the very greatest minds in science have been people who believe in something that they can't prove. Even without a spiritual dimension, that thing can be called a 'theory'. How you view the world, even through the lense of less than 100% certainty, changes you. Hooray for God and other less empirical ideas.
Between knowing them and their work, and you shooting that hole in your face off, I'll side with them. Maybe I shouldn't be feeding you, trollboy, but the sheer towering cockiness I hear leaking out of your skull leads me to hope I never have to put my life on the line for one of your scientific theories.
RMW
flames > dev/null
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"
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
History is full of examples of geniuses that were barely balanced between the two,
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
There all idiots who can't even spell!
The art of the elegant troll.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I don't believe in pink fairies on the far side of Mars. Just because the possibility exists, I can't go round all day uumming and ahhing over the existence of such things.
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 god a good working hypothesis, but I haven't seen any justification for that, except making themselves feel better.
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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
The Art of Computer Programming, vol. 4
vs.
Paul Graham's Arc
vs.
Duke Nukem Forever
And the race heats up!
What'chu lookin' at Willis?
and they would like to have a written transcript of the interview with him.
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.
Science and art, when properly done, both seek the same end goal: finding an elegant solution to a problem. If the problem is "how do I represent the beauty of the human form" the problem is deemed art. If the problem is "how do I find the similarities between two bit streams" the problem is deemed computer science. I'm thinking of an essay by Paul Graham:
"Taste for Makers"
This may be why Prof. Knuth's series is called "The Art of Computer Programming"
No. There's certainly an art to programming, whether it be formatting your code so it's readable and maintainable, or choosing the correct algorithm to use.
Great computer scientists are the ones who come up with elegant solutions to a problem, not just hack together something that works. That's art, not science.
Besides which, if math (the godfather of CS) is good enough to be considered an art, then I'm happy to hear others consider computer science an art as well.
Here is the interview in MP3:
http://www.cfconline.co.uk/knuth.mp3
You've probably noticed that people's noses get bigger as they get older. That's because old people are huge liars.
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.
You missed the point here. Knuth is telling us that he thinks deeply about every aspect of his life, but it is not an obsession - it is amusing for him to think about that. There's no reason for a person to not consider an efficient way of brushing their teeth, and as another poster commented, you're awake when you brush your teeth so you might as well use your brain for something useful while you are doing it.
I suspect many math-related geniuses have some form of high-functioning autism - the "absent minded professor" is more than a cliche. However, Asperger's is only one of many forms of high-functioning autism - well known because it has specific associated behaviors. As the site says: "Sometimes people assume everyone who has autism and is high-functioning has Asperger's syndrome. However, it appears that there are several forms of high-functioning autism, and Asperger's syndrome is one form." I'm sure there are may ways the brain can be differently wired that don't produce social disfunction, and so aren't studied, and many unusual but useful mental abilities that show up as a result.
Adam Smith (the economist) once fell into an open manhole while walking with friends - so lost in thought he failed to avoid an obvious and immediate threat to his safety. Brilliant, but beyond absent minded.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Binary $1,000,000.00 would be decimal $64.00. I think what you are looking for is binary 100000000 cents = $2.56.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Wow, didn't know he was the man behind LR(1) (which in case others don't know is probably used millions of times every day) (and I've read the dragon book!). You are correct, Yacc/Bison use the LR(1) parsing algorithm. I just recently studied that algorithm in depth and have never seen a more beautiful algorithm. The way it augments the grammar and keeps shifting tokens with some reduction only to reduce everything that is left at the end is stunning. It's definitely an algorithm I can say I would have never thought of. Not to mention the use of basic data structure primitives it makes use of...beautiful.
But, many modern Parsers use LL parsing, such as Java. The main problem with them is they are not as intuitive and they don't accept left recursive grammars. However, they seem to be really popular now days because they use less memory on the fly. I'm not too familiar with them honestly...usually use LR(1) grammars as they are very flexible and do the trick just fine. Not to mention most "real" languages don't use Bison/Yacc for their parsers and I do so I am forced to use them. But I love them just the same (and folks who know more of compilers could probably have a nicely heated debate on what's better)
Thanx for the info!
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer