Tiefgang

“Und denken Sie öfter an Ihre Beerdigung”, rät der Mainzer Psychiater Lieb. “Oder zumindest an den 80. Geburtstag.”

Was wolle man da in den Festreden über sich hören? Dass man ein Mensch sei, der immer funktioniert und alle stets zufriedengestellt habe? Oder dass man gut gelaunt mit den Kindern spielte, in schlechten Zeiten Freunde an der Seite hatte und sich im Job mit Freude engagierte, aber noch lieber mit der Frau oder dem Mann spazieren ging?

“Mit diesem Blick”, meint Lieb, “beginnt man zu verstehen, was richtig ist.”

Aus DER SPIEGEL, 03.01.2020

I welcome their hatred

We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

― Franklin D. Roosevelt

My favorite Knuth story

Attributed to Alan Kay:

When I was at Stanford with the AI project [in the late 1960s] one of the things we used to do every Thanksgiving is have a computer programming contest with people on research projects in the Bay area. The prize I think was a turkey.

[John] McCarthy used to make up the problems. The one year that Knuth entered this, he won both the fastest time getting the program running and he also won the fastest execution of the algorithm. He did it on the worst system with remote batch called the Wilbur system. And he basically beat the shit out of everyone.

And they asked him, “How could you possibly do this?” And he answered, “When I learned to program, you were lucky if you got five minutes with the machine a day. If you wanted to get the program going, it just had to be written right. So people just learned to program like it was carving stone. You sort of have to sidle up to it. That’s how I learned to program.”