5 ms·

Can you "invent" a definition?

baseethrowaway 9y ago
Yes.
leggomylibro 9y ago
You can if you want to try and plaster your name all over VR as a facet of soft lock-in and to arbitrarily insert yourself into every potential aspect of a fledgling industry. Next they'll invent the 'Ocu-ternion', which is the same as a normal Quaternion but each scalar value is divided by a constant because...VR? Facebook? Who cares, the point is they own it.
- currymj 9y ago
  i mean this doesn't strike me as any worse than AU or eV or any other unit rescaled for convenience in some particular domain. if they try to claim patent or trademark that's obviously a problem, but otherwise is this so terrible?
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  > Who cares, the point is they own it. The header file they provided is BSD licensed. You can use it freely, forever, for anything you want.
  - ovao 9y ago
    And applies only to this particular implementation. Anyone should be free to implement the flick time unit in any other language, or re-implement the flick time unit in C++.
  - lomnakkus 9y ago
    IIRC the BSD license doesn't say anything about trademarks or patents? (EDIT: Obviously, this doesn't invalidate your conclusion, but your conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, at least.)
    - robotresearcher 9y ago
      It does not. But did you hear anything about patent or trademark protection sought by Facebook for flicks? Does releasing a BSD licensed implementation suggest to you that they intend to protect flicks this way? I don't love Facebook's products, but I struggle to see the downside in them publishing this idea.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    Which is fair, but I still have a problem with the sheer temerity of licensing a unit of measurement.
    - robotresearcher 9y ago
      They licensed the right to use that header file. A concrete implementation of the idea, otherwise protected by copyright.
robotresearcher 9y ago
Planck, Coulomb, Dirac, Fermi, Newton, Faraday, Avagadro, etc might think so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant#Table_of_physical_constants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant#Table_of_phy... Archimedes, Pythagoras and Euler might agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_constant
- nextstep 9y ago
  Those people didn't invent those definitions...
  - mcgarnagle 9y ago
    ... i don't follow, can you elaborate?
    - filmor 9y ago
      The units were names in honpur of those people, they (usually) didn't define them themselves.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    Bah. That's either wrong or overly pedantic, depending on the case. At least Newton's lab of universal gravitation and Coulomb's law defined their eponymous constants directly. In other cases the people doing the defining named them retrospectively after the originator of, or most significant contributor to, the concept that motivated the definition. The point is that we ascribe enough invention to these definitions to commonly name them after the people who invented them.
- jgtrosh 9y ago
  Also, giving a name to a formula is "inventing a definition". If you're a programmer and you write a function, or assign the result of an operation to a variable, the act of naming that function or variable can be considered the same.
unit91 9y ago
If you couldn't, vocabulary would be impossible.
vortico 9y ago
Most freshman undergraduate mathematicians have had their fair share debating whether you "invent" or "discover" definitions and proofs. The general consensus is that you "discover" things that are very natural, and you "invent" things for which different mathematicians would have perhaps come up different ideas. But only one thing is shared between both sides of the debate: the distinction really doesn't matter and is definitely bikeshedding.
- malkia 9y ago
  According to half the linguists, both might be right, just a figure of speech, while the other half would help them find the right word.
pdpi 9y ago
What else do you call the process of coming up with a definition for, say, a second or a metre?
JKCalhoun 9y ago
Can you "invent" a lowest common denominator?
- dmitrygr 9y ago
  Not only that, you can apparently add a code of conduct to it :-)
dahart 9y ago
All definitions were invented. What alternatives are you suggesting exist? It is fascinating to dig into definitions and conventions that we know, and to realize that much of what we think of as universal fact is actually an arbitrary choice of history, canonized by time. It happens often in math that people decide on arbitrary definitions. One fun example is Donald Knuth was fond of defining 0^0 = 1, while some other mathematicians prefer to define 0^0 = 0.

Yes.

You can if you want to try and plaster your name all over VR as a facet of soft lock-in and to arbitrarily insert yourself into every potential aspect of a fledgling industry. Next they'll invent the 'Ocu-ternion', which is the same as a normal Quaternion but each scalar value is divided by a constant because...VR? Facebook? Who cares, the point is they own it.

currymj 9y ago
i mean this doesn't strike me as any worse than AU or eV or any other unit rescaled for convenience in some particular domain. if they try to claim patent or trademark that's obviously a problem, but otherwise is this so terrible?
robotresearcher 9y ago
> Who cares, the point is they own it. The header file they provided is BSD licensed. You can use it freely, forever, for anything you want.
- ovao 9y ago
  And applies only to this particular implementation. Anyone should be free to implement the flick time unit in any other language, or re-implement the flick time unit in C++.
- lomnakkus 9y ago
  IIRC the BSD license doesn't say anything about trademarks or patents? (EDIT: Obviously, this doesn't invalidate your conclusion, but your conclusion doesn't follow from the premise, at least.)
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    It does not. But did you hear anything about patent or trademark protection sought by Facebook for flicks? Does releasing a BSD licensed implementation suggest to you that they intend to protect flicks this way? I don't love Facebook's products, but I struggle to see the downside in them publishing this idea.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Which is fair, but I still have a problem with the sheer temerity of licensing a unit of measurement.
  - robotresearcher 9y ago
    They licensed the right to use that header file. A concrete implementation of the idea, otherwise protected by copyright.

robotresearcher 9y ago

Planck, Coulomb, Dirac, Fermi, Newton, Faraday, Avagadro, etc might think so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant#Table_of_physical_constants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_constant#Table_of_phy... Archimedes, Pythagoras and Euler might agree. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_constant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_constant

nextstep 9y ago
Those people didn't invent those definitions...
- mcgarnagle 9y ago
  ... i don't follow, can you elaborate?
  - filmor 9y ago
    The units were names in honpur of those people, they (usually) didn't define them themselves.
- robotresearcher 9y ago
  Bah. That's either wrong or overly pedantic, depending on the case. At least Newton's lab of universal gravitation and Coulomb's law defined their eponymous constants directly. In other cases the people doing the defining named them retrospectively after the originator of, or most significant contributor to, the concept that motivated the definition. The point is that we ascribe enough invention to these definitions to commonly name them after the people who invented them.
jgtrosh 9y ago
Also, giving a name to a formula is "inventing a definition". If you're a programmer and you write a function, or assign the result of an operation to a variable, the act of naming that function or variable can be considered the same.

unit91 9y ago

If you couldn't, vocabulary would be impossible.

vortico 9y ago

Most freshman undergraduate mathematicians have had their fair share debating whether you "invent" or "discover" definitions and proofs. The general consensus is that you "discover" things that are very natural, and you "invent" things for which different mathematicians would have perhaps come up different ideas. But only one thing is shared between both sides of the debate: the distinction really doesn't matter and is definitely bikeshedding.

malkia 9y ago
According to half the linguists, both might be right, just a figure of speech, while the other half would help them find the right word.

pdpi 9y ago

What else do you call the process of coming up with a definition for, say, a second or a metre?

JKCalhoun 9y ago

Can you "invent" a lowest common denominator?

dmitrygr 9y ago
Not only that, you can apparently add a code of conduct to it :-)

dahart 9y ago

All definitions were invented. What alternatives are you suggesting exist? It is fascinating to dig into definitions and conventions that we know, and to realize that much of what we think of as universal fact is actually an arbitrary choice of history, canonized by time. It happens often in math that people decide on arbitrary definitions. One fun example is Donald Knuth was fond of defining 0^0 = 1, while some other mathematicians prefer to define 0^0 = 0.