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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.
Posting Realplayer feeds on Slashdot's main page. If they're available for more than 5 minutes, then that's heroic.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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.
Judging by the strung-out feeling this news junkie gets during the accursed pledge drive week, I'd say yes it is.
In Soviet Rush, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on you.
perhaps Mr. Knuth is a sandwich made on a long bun.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
They also mention it in the TFA.
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.)
Donald Knuth is actually a Christian and has written a book where he analyses chapter 3 verse 16 of every book in the Protestant Christian bible. Each verse is illuminated with beautiful caligraphy.
He also gave some lectures about religion called Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About.
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.
Agnosticism, on the other hand, is saying "There is no evidence for God, but I choose to neither believe nor disbelieve." How crazy is that?
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?
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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'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.
Random is the New Order.
No, actually, it's not. Having an open mind is one thing, having a mind so open your brain falls out is quite another.
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.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
A classic experience relating to my perception of fundamentalism was w/ a friend's child who was finally taken to see her grandfather's workshop (he was a classic old-school cabinetmaker w/ the only power tool in his shop a band saw 'cause he couldn't find apprentices to do that sort of tedious thing who was said to ``make things by hand'').
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
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
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