User talk:RDBury

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--Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 13:50, 23 February 2017 (UTC)

Gedankenexperiment
Hi. I would like (without, I hope, jostling your elbow too much) to ask you a "hypothetical" question. Not as something needing an urgent answer, but just to let your back brain work on, taking time to think it through, whilst you're on about your business on other things. (Do other people's minds work that way? Mine certainly does.)

Suppose wiki markup could specify not only text and hyperlinks (and images, and tables, and mathematical formulae), but also interactive elements: things like text input boxes, and dropdown menus, and buttons that would take information that's been input and send it to a page, and of course wiki markup that says what to do with information that's been sent to the current page by a button. Oh, and the ability to do simple computations using the information. It seems to me that, with these sorts of primitives in wiki markup, one ought to be able to build all sorts of interesting things. One of the sorts of things one might be able to do with it, seemingly, would be to build interactive "exercises" for a wikibook. Such as, for example, devices that might help a reader with, say, an introduction to rigorous mathematical thinking.

So my question to think about is, what sort of interactive exercises might be useful to create for an introductory book on rigorous mathematical thinking?
 * [One might also imagine interactive demonstrations.]

My reason for asking is, I have been developing tools to give wiki markup these sorts of primitives, and I'm looking for ways to apply them usefully. As you might imagine (especially if you work with mathematical proof), having the primitives is a far cry from knowing how to use them to good effect. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 12:37, 6 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Not sure how helpful it would be for what I'm working on now, but it does seem like it would be useful for more elementary texts. Suppose that in order to advance to the next section of a book you were asked to take a miniquiz on the section you just read. That way readers could make sure they understand the concepts well before building on them. I've seen this kind of thing in Duolingo, though I don't think you could learn a language from Duolingo alone. It might be more useful for other projects such as Wikidata or Wikivoyage. --RDBury (discuss • contribs) 14:49, 6 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Hm, it would make sense that interactive stuff would be easier to conceptualize for more elementary books. There might be some really cool stuff that could be done for Wikijunior. :-)  The more advanced and cerebral the topic, the more difficult it would be to devise a way of using interactivity for it... though it does seem the rewards of successfully finding a way would remain high.  (It's interesting you think of Wikidata and Wikivoyage.  My sense is that the tools could be useful for really all the wikimedia sister projects, but I originally envisioned and created them for Wikinews, then ported them to Wikibooks with the thought that, because Wikibooks is in effect a confederation of thousands of microprojects, it could be a great venue for exploring a wide range of possible uses.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 16:40, 6 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I thought of another potential application in allowing users to select which of several variations of a page to display without writing multiple versions of the same page. StrategyWiki.com does this kind of thing with games which appear on multiple platforms. So rather than have one version of a page for people playing on the GameCube and other for people playing on the PlayStation, they have a template which allows the reader to select which platform they're using and another template which customizes which controls are displayed. You can see this at work at . I'm not sure how this is implemented but I suspect it uses some custom coding. It seems to me though that dialog boxes could do something similar here but with more flexibility. It could be used for example in books on programming languages where there are different versions. For example there are now two books Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 2.6 and Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 3.0; I happen to know that the differences between the two versions is not that big, even if they are incompatible, so possibly they could be merged with the help of a version selector at the top. Another idea would be to have a selector for metric vs. US measures on recipes. It would be nice of people's selection could be remembered from page to page, but I don't know how far the dialog box functionality extends. It is a drawback of the StrategyWiki.com implementation that you have to keep reselecting the platform on each page. --RDBury (discuss • contribs) 11:25, 7 March 2017 (UTC)

Review
Just wondering if you have any thoughts on something that's been puzzling me. Your account does not have the review bit. Yet, users are supposed to be automatically promoted to reviewer when they meet certain criteria, and I don't really see any of those criteria you don't meet. Maybe I'm overlooking something. The criteria are listed at WB:Reviewers. (I've wished for years there were a way to ask the wiki software which criteria it didn't think a user account satisifed.) --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 15:29, 26 March 2017 (UTC)
 * I think the issue is I have less than 100 edits. I've done a bit of editing on Wikipedia but that doesn't carry over, it seems. Not that concerned about it for now though. --RDBury (discuss • contribs) 23:43, 29 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Oh. Heh.  Yeah, you've been around so long, and have been doing such great stuff, I guess it just never even occurred to me to check that.  Though you're awfully close... 97, I think.  Anyway, I certainly agree it's not a big deal; just a curiosity.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 00:03, 30 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Rofl. I'd been finding it more and more puzzling than you hadn't been autopromoted, and finally decided to investigate closely, called up the autopromotion criteria and your account stats &mdash; only to discover you were autopromoted about twenty minutes ago. :-D  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 18:06, 29 May 2017 (UTC)
 * Hm, I'm currently at about 160 edits so maybe that's the cutoff. Or maybe the script is only run every couple of months. I'm still not even sure if I'll notice the difference :) --RDBury (discuss • contribs) 03:28, 30 May 2017 (UTC)

The reason this book was written
Was just reading this page. Seems to have come out really well; I find myself wanting to read the book attached to it (the book much of which doesn't exist yet :-). Comparing the text as-now-is to the page you inherited from the previous incarnation of the book, I'm thinking this may be one of those times when iterative collaboration works especially well.

I was most interested in the perspective on the history, extending backward and forward from G&ouml;del; I've my own perspective on that history, inevitably shaped by the particular aspects of it engaged by my own pursuits &mdash; neither better nor worse in principle, I suppose, that the perspective on the reason this book was written page, though certainly less suitable for this particular book. Do I detect intuitionism at work, in your philosophy? (Not criticizing, just wondering.) Cf. , first bit about the history (stopping at "Now, about proving Gödel's theorem"). I don't notice anything on Wikibooks atm directly about the history of mathematical foundations... --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 17:21, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the feedback. Actually the "Why this book was written" page was mostly by other authors. I will take credit (or blame) for the history chapter though, but there's still a few sections worth of material to be added. Not really an intuitionist myself, though I have been exposed to the viewpoint quite a bit doing research for the book, so I'm trying to keep an open mind. I'm trying to stay officially agnostic on the philosophical issues anyway; just reporting on what's currently being used, right or wrong, but mentioning the arguments of the dissenters as well. I'm including a history of the foundations because it seemed necessary for the goals the book is meant to achieve and because I happened to have a book or two on the subject. Mathematics is often considered to be a dry subject, and hopefully knowing a bit about why we're where we are and the arguments about where we should be going will help avoid that perception. --RDBury (discuss • contribs) 20:37, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 * Interesting that you see it as mostly by the other authors. I did look at the version before your edits, so I think I have some sense of what was there and what you introduced, but from those facts it's then a subjective judgement whether your contribution is large or small; you certainly did work with what you were given, yet it seems to me greatly enhanced by your part in it.  It's often possible, I think, for a number of editors working on material like that to produce something richer than any one of them would have been likely to produce (when things work out well, which of course they don't always). Having read Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and being exposed to the idea that Mathematics doesn't do that ("In mathematics alone each generation adds a new story to the old structure", as Hankel put it), then studying the history leading up to Hamilton's discovery of quaternions, I was rather stunned when I first realized the events I was reading about were a classic paradigm shift .  Not that I disagree with Hankel, either.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 23:35, 6 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I read Kuhn as well, though I was too young to fully appreciate it at the time. It was an interesting course though; we were also assigned the SciFi Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan. I wasn't familiar with the Hankel quote, but even allowing for the time in which he was writing it seems like he should have known better. I'm pretty sure he wouldn't have used the method of exhaustion to find a volume or geometric algebra to solve an equation. I think the difference is that in math the revolutions are much more protracted affairs, taking centuries rather than generations. But if you try to read a math book from 200 years ago the difference in language and methodology is obvious. --RDBury (discuss • contribs) 07:54, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * The more complete Hankel quote is
 * In most sciences one generation tears down what another has built and what one has established another undoes. In mathematics alone each generation adds a new story to the old structure.
 * Granted mathematics evolves, and mathematicians (like all scientists, actually) try to make the history of their subject seem more purely cumulative than it is, I still think there is something to Hankel's remark, something qualitatively different from other fields. I'm wary of the 'slow-motion revolution' concept. In any science there are "fashions" that change slowly as well as revolutions that happen relatively rapidly.  The mathematical foundations shift in the first half of the nineteenth century (basically from intuition to axioms) was rapid; from a distance, rather like throwing a switch; and the mathematical foundations shift a century later, presumably, like blowing a fuse; about as rapid as you can expect such a thing to be.  Certainly the effect of the early-nineteenth-century shift was explosive development of mathematics.  The effect of G&ouml;del has been somehow less heartening.  (A great deal of naive enthusiasm went out of the world in the first half of the twentieth century; there was WWI, the Great Depression, G&ouml;del's Theorems, WWII.  One might even add quantum mechanics to the list.)  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 18:04, 7 June 2017 (UTC)
 * I guess I'm looking at things more as general trends than as specific events. So I'm lumping the whole 19th century foundation shift to the adoption of category theory as one long movement (probably still ongoing) rather than several short ones, though I certainly see your point of view. There were 200 years between Thales and Euclid, but there were a few landmarks on the way, like Zeno & Aristotle, so it wouldn't be wrong to consider that period as a number of revolutions rather than a one slowly moving one.
 * I don't see Gödel's work as having a disheartening influence, or if it did it was only temporary. Humbling perhaps, but I don't think humility is ever really a bad thing in the quest for knowledge. Giving up the geocentric model of the universe was humbling in the same way, but it was very freeing in that paved the way for modern cosmology, a vastly more rich and interesting view of the cosmos. --RDBury (discuss • contribs) 13:01, 9 June 2017 (UTC)

Names
A few ideas for your book's name:
 * Making game videos (actually this one sucks now I say it out loud.)
 * How to record video games (better than the one above at least)
 * How to record videos of a video game (it made no sense but made me chuckle, so I've put it here anyway.)
 * A guide to recording video games
 * How to become a [youtuber / streamer] (though if the book's scope is not that large, it may cause disappointment to readers)

That's it. My mind is blank. You don't have to choose one of the above, im just trying to give you a few ideas for a better name (as you said you don't like current title that much on Mbrickn's talk page). L10nM4st3r / Roar at me 20:50, 31 July 2022 (UTC)


 * Thanks. I like the second one best, except recording is only part of the process. Perhaps "How to record and publish gaming video"? RDBury (discuss • contribs) 09:49, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Yea, sounds good! L10nM4st3r / Roar at me 14:51, 1 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Should it be "video" or "videos"? L10nM4st3r / Roar at me 09:50, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm thinking it could go either way, but thinking about it, "videos" is better. RDBury (discuss • contribs) 13:41, 2 August 2022 (UTC)
 * @L10nM4st3r: Actually, now I'm leaning toward "video" without the "s". The book should include game streaming as well, though that's not something I have experience with. So instead of "record and publish" perhaps "create". RDBury (discuss • contribs) 13:03, 4 August 2022 (UTC)
 * "How to create gaming video" sounds good enough for me! L10nM4st3r / Roar at me 15:28, 4 August 2022 (UTC)