

People of ACM: Donald Knuth - tjr
http://www.acm.org/membership/acm-bulletin-archive/2014-bulletins/poa-knuth

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indubitably
The starkness with which he divides geeks from non-geeks makes me a little
sad. People can learn to reason at multiple levels of abstraction.

~~~
tomswartz07
It's unfortunate to see this, but there are so many constantly reinforced
stereotypes regarding geeks and 'geek culture' that very few want to embrace
it.

Take a look at the (terrible, imo) TV show Big Bang Theory. The main
characters are purposely socially awkward and distant.

Real-world geeks are typically far from that: far more exist on the socialable
side of the spectrum than those who are constantly portrayed in the media. :(

~~~
minopret
The Big Bang Theory got on my nerves until I started reading a biography of
Oppenheimer. Sheldon is not an appropriate symbol of whatever all geeks are.
He might be an Oppenheimer though. He is certainly a Sheldon. I can appreciate
that.

The idea that some people are more technically focused than others works for
me as a definition of "geek". Especially I like when people use the word in a
way that accepts that some people are simply like that, and that that's OK for
them even if it's foreign to a majority of the populace.

Like you, I'd prefer to consider "geek" a category with a permeable boundary.
I'd argue however that there are many people who spend practically their
entire lives inside the category and others outside the category.

Donald Knuth seems admirably sensible about many things, one of which is
publicity. I see him putting himself before the public where he is thereby
able to accomplish something that he considers worthwhile, profitable. So I
think that there's a side we don't see and that the side we see should
surprise us if we imagined that geek behavior is whimsically self-indulgent.
Nevertheless the word "geek" fits his activity that we see. He concentrates
his attention as much as he can in a delineated technical arena where he seems
unlikely to meet with conflict. Look at the good that he does and the grace
with which he does it. If that's being a geek, it must be a really good thing.

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jestinjoy1
Fully Agree

"I think the most common fault in general is to teach students how to pass
exams instead of teaching them the science."

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justizin
pretty neat to see this rendered in a site i built years ago. :)

~~~
frakturfreund
Then why is so much whitespace in the .html? I mean, there doesn't seem to be
a Easteregg encoded in Whitespace …

~~~
justizin
staff designers provided me with an html template to make it render, then
because they made me threaten legal action to get paid for the contract where
about 80% of the work was performed as a volunteer in the first place, i lost
my volunteer access.

the acm are actually a bunch of assholes who mostly spend their members' dues
buying hardware and software licenses, much like the government, but it's nice
to see that at least they have kept around the work i did which was focused on
making the site performant and reliable, which seems to have stuck around for
the better part of a decade.

but they are at times a beacon, and it's neat to just be surfing the web and
stumble into something you've built.

~~~
frakturfreund
That's a sad story … but thank you for sharing it.

~~~
justizin
the cool part was that i got to have an e-mail exchange with steve bourne,
because he was at the time the past president of the ACM. i mean, we'll
obviously never be friends because i had to throw a fucking tantrum over an
entire year of income, but it was kind of like:

hey, steve, thanks for writing that unix shell we all use a clone of. by the
way, i would fucking really like to get paid since i was living on the couch
in fema housing babysitting my friends' kid after katrina the entire time i
worked for you guys.

what's great is that i started doing the work as a volunteer and was
aggressively pushed into a contract, which they later didn't want to pay,
though they had no issues paying for piles of HP servers that went unused or
oracle licenses to solve problems that could probably have been solved with
mysql.

but hey, i'm still alive, so: yo, motherfucker, wheee!

