Knuth Airgaps and Knuth Buffers

I know that a couple of carefully crafted email filters increased my productivity almost twice and cut down unnecessary screen time almost completely. Knowing your vices can be more than half of the solution sometimes.

the other day i also had to take a selfie in a government owned app which required a phone with active google play store service, to allow me to see my own data, with no alternative method (being implemented so they say)

Anyway, Knuth's secretary (shared with several other faculty members) retired from Stanford several years ago (he dedicated one of his books to her), and although he hasn't updated the page, in fact he does all his own email now. (There is someone who comes in once a week to send his replies in the post — if you email Knuth about a bug you may get a reply a few months later from this person, asking for your postal address to mail you the reply: this will be a printout of your email, with Knuth's reply in pencil… and an enclosed cheque if your report/suggestion was accepted.)

so yeah, some (sometimes soft, sometimes drastic) hygiene is the way..

> 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. — DEK

My PhD supervisor got me into writing with pencil and paper. I wrote near enough my entire thesis that way. It was only transcribed to computer for typesetting after it had been proofread at least once.

Computers are distracting.

A prompt like

> You are esteemed computer scientist Donald Knuth's secretary. Your task is to determine which email is prioritized for immediate delivery, and which email is to be gathered and read at a later date. Label them "IMMEDIATE" or "LATER"

But I've also used the internet to great effect when getting up to speed on a research topic because I had lots of access to high quality texts and tools (citation manager for tracking, spreadsheet for glossary of terms). Notably that didn't involve any communications, just searches.

There is A LOT of information in printed books that is not on the Internet.

There was a project to put all books on the Internet -- Google Books -- but that famously got tied up in lawsuits.

As a result, if your information diet consists of the Internet and not books, you're missing out.

I occasionally write something "obvious" from a book on my blog, and people are like "wow how did you figure that out" ?

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For what Knuth is doing, he certainly doesn't need to read much on the Internet. Most of it is in books, or at the Stanford library (or whichever library he goes to).

He's probably so busy with books that the Internet seems UNINTERESTING.

If you want access to newer publications, the Internet is more efficient, but those are also available to the library. (Sadly, Scihub is the best source for those without university access.)

So yeah I'd say 3 main repos of knowledge are: the open Internet, printed books, and Scihub, and many people today only use the first one.

The question was how the phases add or subtract when looking at a phase graph of a cosine wave modulated DFT transform, not exactly rocket science.

It seems like the internet has dumbed down to the point where its front page is very surface level and always requires additional research assistance in the form of SearxNG, AI chats, or turning to less SEO prone engines like marginalia or even wiby to get good and honest results. I don't think adapting to human toxic environments like the current internet is a good model for the future, when we already have the tools to filter the wheat from the chaff.

[0] Though maybe that's just the hilarity of finally finding out who/what Enoch Root is after 4 books and many thousands of pages.

Could have been his secretary in his assignment.

That's at least what his Stanford site suggests

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

The public versions are very redacted, but: 1) they seem to all be from his secretary, not him 2) most of the messages are not dictation or direct copies of messages Knuth wrote elsewhere.