Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
I'm a big fan of Bret Victor's thinking, but this part struck me as indicative of the criticisms he'll receive:<p><i>"here, they are discussing some relationships: the regular latice, L grows linearly with n, we see L growing linearly with n, and we see C is staying constant. In the random network, L grows logarithmically, and we see L growing logarithmically, we see C going as a reciprocal relationship. When we read the word "logarithmic", we don't need to reconstruct that relationship in our head, you can just see it"</i><p>Does the average reader of Nature need to be shown a graph of what a linear, constant, logarithmic, and inverse relationship looks like? I don't think so.<p>That said, I imagine there are highly terse and technical ideas that cannot be simply represented in the current mediums of publication and which could benefit greatly using a presentation using an interactive widgets, making more complex ideas more easily communicable.