Haven't watched the whole thing, but scrolling down and reading his closing makes me not want to watch it. He complicates the simple procedure "Completing the Square" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square). Take half of the b coefficient, square it, and add it to both sides gives x^2 + 10x + 25 = 64 or the completed square (x+5)^2 = 64 or x+5 = 8 or x=3.
Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#22Bret Victor is awesome. Check out his website - when I first discovered it, I spent hours there, reading even his poems. ALBATROSS gave me the chills.
Same here! His thinking had a huge impact on my thinking.
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#23Where can I get the tool he showed? Did he publish it?
A friend of mine asked him this after we saw it in his "Inventing on Principle Talk". Here is his response: > Thanks! The tools I showed were just prototypes that I made for the talk. I don't have plans to make them into products myself. (But someone else might!)
Thanks, I can not wait for it. Anybody take this job?
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#24This got posted to HN twice in April and died with only a few points and no comments. glad to see it's finally finding an audience here.
Yeah, the video got posted a while back, but at the time he hadn't created the interactive page. It's cool to see how much thought he puts into presenting each idea. He doesn't stop with just the talk.
Bret Victor also has many other amazing and thought provoking talks:
Inventing on Principle: http://vimeo.com/36579366
Stop Drawing Dead Fish: http://vimeo.com/64895205
Drawing Dynamic Visualizations: http://vimeo.com/66085662
The Future of Programming: http://vimeo.com/71278954
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#25Haven't watched the whole thing, but scrolling down and reading his closing makes me not want to watch it. He complicates the simple procedure "Completing the Square" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Completing_the_square ). Take half of the b coefficient, square it, and add it to both sides gives x^2 + 10x + 25 = 64 or the completed square (x+5)^2 = 64 or x+5 = 8 or x=3.
That's a quote from al-Khwārizmī[1], the medieval Persian mathematician whose name the word "algorithm" comes from.
Victor didn't complicate the process. He used that quote to illustrate his claim that it's precisely because of innovations in symbolic representation (i.e., representing the equation as x^2 + 10x + 39) that you are able to think of the process as simple.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%E1%B8%A5ammad_ibn_M%C5%ABs%C...
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#26IMO - Abstraction is almost a prerequisite for creating anything interesting or innovative.
Meaning: my best ideas always come from playing in non-traditional representational systems within a certain medium. Particularly drawing. I find sketching/scribbling/drawing things generates ideas that I could not have thought of by just writing/brainstorming. You may even be able to apply it to the example of how software development models have jumped paradigms into mainstream business management (eg, agile teams). Bret's onto something here.
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#27Didn't know about this. Blew me away. The editor looks really awesome. What is the software called?
I am somewhat intrigued by the idea to represent arbitrary systems. I wonder where you might hit a wall within the editor, and how you can extend the editor to be able to visualize what might be possible to vizualize now. Like Emacs paired with these capabilities?
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#28Bret Scares me. He makes feel inadequate on so many levels. Am I alone on this? I don't care for most 'successful' startup people and others, but Bret in particular - is amazing.
Bret is a lovely and amazing person, but don’t sell yourself short. I guarantee you if you come up with a topic or problem to work on, and devote 10+ years to full time reading/tinkering/inventing/implementing in the field, allowing yourself to be creative, sweating the tiny details, and worrying more about making your inventions wonderful than profitable, you will be able to amaze yourself and all of the rest of us with what you make.
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#29Didn't know about this. Blew me away. The editor looks really awesome. What is the software called? I am somewhat intrigued by the idea to represent arbitrary systems. I wonder where you might hit a wall within the editor, and how you can extend the editor to be able to visualize what might be possible to vizualize now. Like Emacs paired with these capabilities?
AFAIK, it's just a prototype Bret built to illustrate his point.
Re: Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
#30I 'm not convinced. Such a "media" for thinking the unthinkable already exists. It's called "written language" plus maybe a drawing here or there. Has been used for millennia and once internalized by a mind willing to spend the effort to parse it has never failed to convey the unthinkable, the sublime or the transcendent.
So, it would suck to introduce you to this guy named Ludwig Wittgenstein.