I watched Black Panther today, and when there was a particular scene in a museum, the actor looked familiar to me. I had this experience throughout the film, whenever the actor appeared again. Turns out the actor’s name is Michael B. Jordan. The problem is: looking up his filmography, it does not appear I’ve seen any of his other movies or TV shows. So why was he familiar?

(Ten years ago, I wrote a browser extension to answer questions like this for myself… unfortunately it doesn’t work anymore. Turns out IMDb natively has this feature now, but it’s super-hard to discover: see here and here.)

Hours later, I was looking at an interesting blog of someone, was reminded of another person who had an interesting blog, looked up his name and found his homepage, and clicked on a link I’d clicked before… and there it is!

Here’s a timeline of events:

  • Around 1980, writing the second (and portable) version of TeX, Donald E. Knuth invents a system called “literate programming” (paper published in 1984). As part of the idea of “programs as literature”, there’s even a review published by a critic (and turns out, like literary reviews, one using the review as an excuse to push his own schtick—but at least he fairly reviewed the work first), and Knuth expresses the joke (hope?) that one day there may be a Pulitzer Prize for literate programs.

  • In 2004, three authors in computer graphics publish a book called Physically based rendering, which is a literate program.

  • In 2013, turns out that literate programming wins not a Pulitzer Prize, but an Academy Award (during the acceptance speech of which, literate programming and Knuth are mentioned)!

  • Here’s the video, featuring Michael B. Jordan (as one of the presenters).

  • I must have seen the video linked-to from DEK’s page.

Quite a personal coincidence that the mystery arose and was cleared-up in the same day, and I’m quite surprised I remember someone I saw for a few minutes in a YouTube video years ago (but confession: maybe I’ve watched the video more than once).