> We should note – without seeing it as physiologically symbolic of their respective philosophies – that Kant was constipated, while Nietzsche suffered from compulsive vomiting.
To the contrary, I'm pretty sure it is more than symbolic. Surely it matches their temperament (respectively) and thereby their philosophies.
Funny, but note that Knuth had already published three volumes of TAOCP and a second edition of Volume 1 (1968–1973), won a Turing Award for them (1974), and had the second edition of Volume 2 in galley proofs, and even then it was only a combination of two factors (the publishers moving away from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting with a decline in quality, and the emergence of digital typesetting that he felt more comfortable handling) that led him to take up the problem. And even then, he simply wrote down a design and left it to a couple of grad students to implement over the summer while he was gone, and it was only when he came back and saw their (limited) progress that he realized the problem was harder than two good Stanford grad students could handle, and decided to take it up himself. And even then he basically started in mid-1977 and was done in a year or so (TeX78 and MF79), and only when it became very popular and incompatible ports started cropping up that he decided to (re)write a “portable” TeX and METAFONT himself (1980–1982, ??–1984). And after that there was a constant stream of feature requests so he decided on an “exit strategy” and froze the programs. And continued to do research and publish papers on the side during the years he was working on TeX/MF “full-time”.
So yeah the moral I guess is, tooling may take longer than you expect, but you must at least be trying to get away from it and back to writing. :)
Yes I like that page too, and I guess I was responding to it from memory, more than to your comment :) There's an element of truth to it but also a misunderstanding, so the story can be told in both ways. Maybe I should write this up as a webpage/blog post.
OP here (though I don't claim any special insight, as I said).
It would be interesting to consider the differences between the Charlie Brown and Arthur Dent character archetypes.
One difference seems to me exactly the undying earnestness and optimism you mentioned: in a way, Charlie Brown and other American characters like him are simply not touched by failure (even if bad things happen to them), because of their optimism[1]. This makes them lovable: we appreciate them for this quality that we (most of the audience) do not have.
[1]: (or lack of self-awareness, in some other cases mentioned here like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin)
Arthur Dent, on the other hand, is not gifted with undying optimism. He's constantly moaning about things, starting with his house and his planet being destroyed. This makes him relatable more than lovable: he's not a “lovable loser” (and for the right audience, does not seem a “loser” at all), he is just us, “my kind of guy” — we feel kinship rather than appreciation. We relate to the moaning (if Arthur Dent were to remain unfailingly optimistic, he'd be… different), whereas if Charlie Brown were to lose his optimism or if Homer were to say "D'oh!" to complain about big things in life rather than hurting his thumb or whatever, they would become less of the endearing American institutions they are IMO.
I would not say that Charlie Brown is untouched by failure. He does descend to the depths of despair. But some how rises from it to try (and fail) again. This trope is seen best with Lucy pulling away the football every time he goes to kick it. Even though he knows he's failed every time, he talks himself into this time being different.
This does not contradict your overriding point, just adding nuance to the claim he is "simply not touched by failure".
I suspect that one difference that gives the impression that the characters in Peanuts are "untouched by failure" is that for the most part they don't have real character arcs. Once their archetypes are established they stay the same. Combine that with being the longest running comic written by a single person of all time and it feels like nothing ever changes.
That's not a critique - being a comforting source of unchanging familiarity is part of the point of a newspaper comic. But it is very different to H2G. Arthur Dent might be a bumbling failure who is flung around by forces out of his own control, but his life still changes and he still changes. He still grows a little bit as a person.
Homer used to complain about the big things. He tried to kill himself in the third episode due to losing his job. The first 2 seasons are honestly comparatively depressing with some of the heavy topics they touch on.
The Simpsons just leant so far into 1-note characteristics that they became caricatures of themselves - and the term Flanderization was born.
OP, if you’re still lurking, are you familiar with the Flashman series? I feel like it falls somewhere between the poles here. Either way, would highly recommend it to anyone who likes Adams, history, learning or reprobates.
I'm an Indian, but had sanskrit education only a little not much. It just looks like lots of adjectives bunched together. I mean yes it maybe one word but then it's not a single idea it's just lot of adjectives bunched together to show the entire personality of something or somebody
• That applies to the Greek word too. Obviously these long “words” are compounds made up of distinct morphemes (similar with German examples like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderkennzeichnungs-_und_Rind... or for that matter even shorter English words like antidisestablishmentarianism), the whole thing is one “word” simply because there's a case ending only at the end; you need to read the whole thing as occupying a single role in the sentence it is a part of.
“Ignoring” is not the same as “noticing”; the difference is right there in the words!
You are right that it is undesirable to be a slave to one's emotions, to keep having emotional outbursts or “expressing” all emotions impulsively. But at the other extreme if you try to address this by building a habit of dissociation and “ignoring” your feelings (as you propose), that is also not good, and not how Stoicism or meditation address it. (To use an analogy: it would be bad for a parent to be a slave to their children, or for a charioteer to be led by their horses instead of controlling them. But ignoring them isn't great either!)
Stoicism addresses this preemptively, building a practice of having a proportionate response to things outside our control. Meditation also addresses this by, as you said, noticing emotions when they arise, recognizing them for what they are (creating some distance), and letting them pass instead of indulging them. Ignoring your emotions or letting them burst out are both different from letting them pass/seeing them through.
- The first part says: if you shrug off someone else's cup being broken as just an accident, you should also do the same when yours gets broken.
- Then he clearly says “Apply now the same principle to the matters of greater importance.”
- The last part says that if you respond to someone else's bereavement with platitudes like “Such is the lot of man” or “This is an accident of mortality” (this does not preclude some amount of sympathy and compassion preceding those statements!), then you should respond the same to yours, rather than thinking of yourself as uniquely wretched and unfortunate.
The main point is about being consistent in how you view others' fate and yours: not that you should care equally about someone's wife and yours (or that you should be indifferent to either), just that the story you tell about life and fortune should be the same.
[He's also obviously distinguishing the cup situation (a simple everyday thing where the principle is easy to see and follow, given as an establishing example) from the wife situation (a situation where the principle is harder to apply), by saying “greater things” / “higher matters” / “matters of greater importance”.]
There's logic to prevent you from viewing more than five translations at one time, but I'm happy to see you got right past that by url-hacking. It breaks the layout a little bit and makes the site even worse on mobile.
I see you included all the translations except Stephen Walton's. Yes he took some liberties, but I like it anyway :)
Thanks for making this site; I love it and have returned to it many times. (I don't mind the layout with all translations even on mobile; I just rotate my phone or decrease font size.) I read through the whole thing recently. (https://twitter.com/svat/status/2004591889010643102)
Stephen Walton's translation is actually my favourite! I omitted it here because this is HN and likely someone would complain the translation is clearly incorrect because it talks about “Your neighbor’s car gets hit in a parking lot”. But to include it too just for completeness :) https://enchiridion.tasuki.org/display:Code:e,ec,twh,twr,gl,...
I'm very glad to hear all that! My goal was to make it easy to use, so the following part of your blog post (2019!) absolutely made my day:
> The software too pleasantly just worked, with no setup or install required: just clone the sample app, change the filenames and <base href="..."> in index.html as it mentions. It’s a joy when that happens.
Suffice to say, many people haven't had as much success as you: they fumbled around for 10-20 commits and ended up with something broken. I think requiring people to edit json is just too much :)
The article describes a bad programmer as one whose programs “die young”. I would guess that Knuth is saying is that the longest one of his programs lived (was used?) for 12 years?
If that is what he meant, I presume this remark was written well in the past, as TeX has lasted way more than 12 years.
I see. I was talking about not the article itself, but this handwritten note on the front page:
> This article from Datamation is by someone from ADR - the name might be Moore. (It wasn't meant to be anonymous; that was accidental). A lot of people who knew me thought I wrote it. I wish I had!
> I particularly like his definition of a bad programmer. (My personal record is about 12 years.)
The scan comes from Knuth's personal collection scanned by the Computer History Museum. Many of the documents have similar notes by Knuth, so I assumed this was by him too. Though on closer look, I'm not so sure the handwriting is the same. (It would be ironic if a note about misattribution gets misattributed.) How do you know the note is by Chuck Baker?
∀ᶠ ε : ℝ in [>] 0, ∀ C > (0 : ℝ), ∀ C' > C,
∃ a b n : ℕ,
0 < n ∧
ε * n < a ∧
ε * n < b ∧
a ! * b ! ∣ n ! * (a + b - n)! ∧
a + b > n + C * log n ∧
a + b < n + C' * log n
Yes on the one hand, one needs to know enough about Lean to be sure that this formulation matches what we intend, and isn't stating something trivial. But on the other hand, this is not as hard as finding an error on some obscure line of a long proof.
Live out of a suitcase, travel the world, hang out with a wide selection of excellent mathematicians, write joint papers with many of them, when you get bored or stuck, pack the suitcase and keep moving - for your whole life.
To the contrary, I'm pretty sure it is more than symbolic. Surely it matches their temperament (respectively) and thereby their philosophies.
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