I picked up “Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About” by Donald Knuth at Barnes & Noble a couple weeks back on a whim after spending 45 minutes looking through the fascinating science/technology section at the back of the Natick store. (sidenote: some Barnes and Nobles have fabulous science/technology/computer science/engineering sections with rows and rows of books… and some have “JavaScript for Dummies”. Why is that?)

It’s not a book about computer science but is rather the transcribed text of his series of public lectures about interactions between faith and computer science (which you can view online). Couple quotes I deemed noteworthy for one reason or another:

· On page 28 he talks about he how he used randomization when grading papers while teaching at Stanford. Reminder to read up on “zero knowledge proofs” sometime.

· The basis of his lectures was a book he wrote called “3:16 Bible Texts Illuminated” which aimed to gain an understanding into the Bible by taking 59 random snapshots (verses) and studying them in detail. His son was inspired indirectly by this book: “… to start up the H-20 project, which is designed to answer the question ‘What is Massachusetts?’ … He and my daughter have a book of maps of Massachusetts at a large scale; they live fairly near campus, at coordinates H-20 in the relevant map of Cambridge. So they’re going to try and visit H-20 on all the other pages of their book. That should give terrific insights into the real nature of Massachusetts.”

· on learning: “… I learned that the absolute best way to find out what you don’t understand is to try to express something in your own words. If I had been operating only in input mode, looking at other translations but not actually trying to output the thoughts they expressed, I would never have come to grips with the many shades of meaning that lurk just below the surface. In fact, I would never have realized that such shades of meaning even exist, if I had just been inputting. The exercise of producing output, trying to make a good translation by yourself, is a tremendous help to your education.”

· A quote from Peter Gomes at the beginning of his book called “The Good Book“: “… The notion that [the texts of the Bible] have meaning and integrity, intention, contexts and subtexts, and that they are part of an enormous history of interpretation that has long involved some of the greatest thinkers in the history of the world, is a notion often lost on those for whom the text is just one more of the many means the church provides to massage the egos of its members.”

· One of the questions asked about Douglas Hofstadter’s book “Le Ton Beau de Marot: In Praise of the Music of Language“.

· “My experience suggests that the optimum way to run a research think tank would be to take people’s nice offices away from them and to make them live in garrets, and even to insist that they do non-researchy things. That’s a strange way to run a research center, but it might well be true that the imposition of such constraints would bring out maximum creativity.” — after mentioning that he was able to come up with several relatively important ideas (attribute grammars, Knuth-Bendix completion, LL(k) parsing) during the “most hectic year of his life”.

· On aesthetics according to C. S. Peirce: “Aesthetics deals with things that are admirable; ethics deals with things that are right or wrong; logic deals with things that are true or false.”

· “Somehow the whole idea of art and aesthetics and beauty underlies all the scientific work I do. Whatever I do, I try to do it in a way that has some elegance; I try to create something that I think is beautiful. Instead of just getting a job done, I prefer to do my work in a way that pleases me in as many senses as possible…. I like especially to be associated with art, in the sense of making things of beauty.”

· Planet Without Laughter: “.. It’s a marvelous parable on many levels, about the limits of rationality. You can read it to get insight about all religions, and about the question of form over substance in religion.”

· Eugene Wigner, a Princeton physicist: “It is good that the completion of our scientific work is an unattainable ideal. Striving toward it is attracting many of us, and gives much pleasure and satisfaction… If science were completed, the satisfaction which research, the furthering of human knowledge, had provided, would disappear. Also, even more men would strive for power and domination…. We know that there are facts and insights which we cannot communicate to animals — no animal is familiar, for instance, with the associative law of multiplication… Is it not possible that our understanding of nature also has limitations?… I hope that, even if this should be true, we will be able to continue the extension of our knowledge indefinitely, … even if the limit thereof will always remain widely separated from the complete knowledge and understanding of nature.”

· On artificial life: “… the Game of Life illustrates the power of evolutionary mechanisms. Stable configurations arise out of random soup, usually very quickly; and many of those configurations have properties analogous to biological organisms.”

· Stuart Sutherland, in the 1996 edition of the International Dictionary of Psychology: “Consciousness: The having of perceptions, thoughts and feelings; awareness. The term is impossible to define except in terms that are unintelligible without a grasp of what consciousness means. Consciousness is a fascinating but elusive phenomenom: it is impossible to specify what it is, what it does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has ever been written on it.“