Post #2937168

@robinhouston@mathstodon.xyz @ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyz You might be right, but I'd consider a slightly different perspective: the thing that makes email get in the way of being "on the bottom of things" in Knuth's sense is the feeling that when someone emails you you _have to respond fairly promptly_, much more than it is the _total time spent on email_. So even if the only thing Knuth has done is to provide a good excuse for batch-processing his emails, that seems more than merely aspirational to me. (Maybe you have evidence that actually he's as distractible by email as anyone else and the whole thing is mere pretence, in which case fair enough. But from the very little _I_ know it seems possible that it's real enough to mean something.)