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Bret Victor - Media for Thinking the Unthinkable

Colin McDonnell

12K subscribers • 5 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 4 on Hacker News.
  • Presented by Bret Victor
  • Linked in the descriptiondamelang/nile
  • An opinion. It argues one side of a question engineers disagree on.

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

33K views11 years ago4 recommendations

Software designGraphics and audioCreative codingData visualization

Bret Victor demonstrates how interactive media and new visual representations can help humans understand and reason about complex systems.

For cool updated about the future of computing, follow me at twitter.com/iamvriad. Presented at the MIT Media Lab on April 4, 2013. Talk outline: worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/ Personal preface: worrydream.com/MediaForThinkingTheUnthinkable/note.html For more information about the demos -- 1. Scientific paper. worrydream.com/ScientificCommunicationAsSequentialArt/ 2. Circuit. vimeo.com/36579366 3. Digital filter. worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/ 4. Multitrack signal processing. (first time presented) 5. Nile viewer. github.com/damelang/nile 6. Drawing tool. vimeo.com/66085662 ----------------------------------------------------------- Bret Victor -- worrydream.com

Why it's here

4 people recommend this

What people say. Engineers frequently recommend this talk as a mind-expanding vision of the future of programming, design, and interactive media.

magicink81on Hacker News • Recommends

On “Learnable Programming (2012)”

…ations and symbolic/abstract notations that work in concert together to express our dynamic concepts, and extending those with the use of the dynamism of the computing medium to add interactive aspects to the notations (ala "Magic Ink"). His talk "Media for thinking the unthinkable" goes into detail on this, especially from minute 10 to minute 17: link to this video The essay Magic Ink: INFORMATION SOFTWARE AND THE GRAPHICAL INTERFACE also goes into detail about this topic link…
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vignesh_wararon Hacker News • Recommends

On “A visual introduction to Gaussian Belief Propagation”

What a great article - and the way it's presented is insanely great. It reminds me of a talk given by Bret Victor link to this video (Media for Thinking the Unthinkable)
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yesenadamon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?”

For the people asking who is Bret Victor: When "What are your favourite tech talks of all time?" is asked on HN, he gets more mentions than anyone else, usually. Some of his talks: Inventing on Principle link The Future of Programming link The Humane Representation of Thought link Media for Thinking the Unthinkable link to this video Seeing Spaces link Drawing Dynamic Visualizations link link
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boomlindeon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Ask HN: How do you approach a problem you are not sure has a solution?”

I look for different ways of representing the problem domain or the desired outcome. This will improve your vocabulary/toolbox for reasoning about and subdividing them into more approachable units. For some inspiration, I recommend watching this talk by Bret Victor link to this video (Media for Thinking the Unthinkable)
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kragenon Hacker News • Mentions

On “TensorFlow: open-source library for machine intelligence”

This is really significant. At this moment in history, the growth of computer power has made a bunch of important signal-processing and statistical tasks just feasible, so we are seeing things like self-driving cars, superhuman image recognition, and so on. But it's been very difficult to take advantage of the available computational power, because it's in the form of GPUs and clusters. TensorFlow is a library designed to make it easy to do exactly these things, and to scale them with your available computing power, along with libraries of the latest tricks in neural networks, machine learning (which is pretty close to "statistics"). As a bonus, it has built-in automatic differentiation so t…
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mklon Hacker News • Mentions

On “The Space Doctor’s Big Idea”

…wenty five, and amount you add to thirty nine to give sixty four. Having taken the square root of this which is eight, subtract from this half the roots, five leaving three. The number three represents one root of this square, which itself, of course, is nine. Nine therefore gives the square. He's solving x^2+10x = 39 by completing the square. 1 link to this video…
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mitchtbaumon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: What are some of the best technical talks you've heard?”

on one level, yes on another, they're down right scary and overwhelming, or at least dumbfounding and perplexing ..thinking specifically about The Humane Representation of Thought link I had to stop it half way through.. :-/ see also Seeing Spaces link and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable link to this video
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morphleon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Ask HN: Has anyone fully attempted Bret Victor's vision?”

I cool a wafer scale with a liquid that boils at 43 C and immersing the wafer in this liquid. The bubbles (cavitation) of the boiling liquid should not damage the surface layers of the wafer, of course. This boiling liquid is further cooled by water and a sonic heat pump moving the heat into a water tank where the stored heat is used for showers or cooking 1. Given 45 trillion transistors (45x10e12) times 3 femtojoule (3x10e-15) to switch each transistor at 1 Ghz (10e9) you get 1.000.000 joules/sec = 1 megawatt. These are ball-park numbers, back of the envelope calculations. In reality I make full physics simulations and electrical SPICE simulations of the entire wafer on a supercomputer a…
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snorwickon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Lights and Shadows”

There is the “tools for thought” space I came across where some work felt compelling for computer enabled teaching and learning. Bret Victor 0, Andy Matuschak 1, and Seymour Papert 2 to point to a few names. 0 link to this video 1 link 2 link
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