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Comment by knieveltech | Hacker News Reader

For those of us that struggle with his cadence of speech, are transcripts available online?

Yes. It's difficult to listen to live. I'm (we're?) not knocking Knuth - he's brilliant; he's just hard to follow. Once he gets going, he gets tripped up with all that's going on in his head and the "uh uh um" throws off the flow.

Knuth's brilliance and eccentricity (or autism?) are a package deal. He's a guy who wanted to write mathematics papers, got side-tracked into creating a type-setting program (TeX), then got side-side-tracked into creating a font language (Metafont).

I think that's just how old people talk sometimes.

It's got nothing to do with his age, as far as I can tell Don Knuth has always spoken this way (though I suspect it may have gotten more pronounced [ no pun intended ] as he has gotten older).

I agree with what others have said. I think he just has 50 things going through his mind at any one moment, and the part of his brain that is controlling his speech just isn't always sure which of those 50 things it should be sharing at that moment.

I think any of us would be fortunate to be half as brilliant as he is. And the best part is, it is so obvious that he is one of the most humble and likeable people on the planet. Always generous, patient, and never arrogant. I personally would travel a great distance just to have lunch with the man, if ever given the opportunity.

A prime example in this video is the person who keeps interrupting him to tell him he had missed a line in his diagram. To be honest, my first reaction (after the guy had repeated it for like the 4th time or something) I was a little perturbed, and wished the guy would just shut up and let Don continue. But what was Don's reaction? After he finally understood what the guy was saying, he saw the error, corrected his mistake, and thanked the guy for "saving him 20 minutes".

Thank you Don Knuth! Not only are you brilliant, humble, hard-working and kind, you are a gentleman's gentleman, and the the world needs more men like you!

Have you tried speeding the video up? It still sounds choppy, but the earlier part of the sentence will still fit in your working memory.

For me, Knuth becomes far easier to comprehend (but still rough) at 1.6x speed. To put that into perspective, I like the majority of YouTube videos I watch at 1.25-1.33x --- it may seem like a surprising result, but ever since I started watching most videos sped-up, I've found it actually increases my understanding and enjoyment. As a side-effect, 1x now feels annoyingly slow. Perhaps it's indicative of the general information density (or lack thereof) in videos.

It's tangent time!

We're trained to absorb ideas at the pace of film and TV, which are super tightly scripted and edited. By comparison, regular speech has the density of a feather. Thank goodness for that ability to adjust the speed!

I just wish the algorithms used to speed up playback on Youtube, in browsers, etc were given a little more love. They sound really poor compared to the time stretching available in professional audio tools (or even something like Overcast). It's not even a quality vs perf tradeoff — high quality granular resynthesis is pretty darn cheap, computationally. Alas, I often need to listen strictly at 2x, since the artifacts from non-integer multiples are too distracting to me. Too bad speed adjustment is such a niche feature.

I've considered creating dubs of the (recent) Christmas Tree lectures, and I think I have the free time (and equipment) for it as of recent. I sometimes feel something akin to visceral anger when I have trouble understanding what somebody is saying, and I'd hate for that to get in the way of a good lecture for many more people.

I watched it with subtitles (hit the CC button).

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