This is now my favorite scientific paper headline, beating out the previous champion, "How Many Birds Are There?" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018341530497
Do you have a freely accessible copy of this paper?
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It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
71–80 of 90 posts
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fixed correspondence between leaning and turning is easy to derive on your own: Draw a picture of a leaning bike from behind. Add a horizontal line for the ground. Assume the entire bike/human system is leaning an equal amount, so put the center-of-mass somewhere in the leaning line. If the bicycle is maintaining a constant amount of lean, then the extended line of the force applied by the ground to the bike must…
Yeah, that's a useful breakdown, thank you! Does this help to explain the fixed correspondence between steer and direction of turn? (For example, to someone who doesn't believe counter-steering is a thing.) The physics of the lean seems easier to decompose than the physics of counter-steering. I am interested in finding a way to describe counter-steering so that it's obvious, similar to the way you described the hori…
When you turn the wheel, your wheels move to the right.
Inertia keeps your center of mass moving straight, so your center of mass is now to the left of the wheels.
Think of it as the ground pulling the wheels out from under you.
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#73> There is not a direct or fixed correspondence, but as a general rule, during stable riding, a higher clockwise torque on the handlebars will cause the bicycle to start leaning more to the left It's counter-steering! I was glad to read that counter-steering is accounted for and works in their physics simulation like it does in the real world. I don't have a source handy, but I believe that there is a fixed correspon…
I nearly crashed the first time I rode a quad bike because, having had a motorcycle in the past, I instinctively tried to countersteer into turns.
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
But then it wouldn't look as "scientific" (i.e. anyone could understand it, it wouldn't look complicated). At least that's what I feel like, reading and writing a bunch of papers for my master's. We are encouraged to put math stuff in ours just because it looks more theoretical that way. Whenever I do something of worth I also make sure to blog about it so I can write down in normal terms what we did and found, with…
1) Sometimes it's actually helpful to use greek letters when a convention is used. For example: capitals for matrices (A), lowercase for column vectors (a), and Greek for scalars (α). 2) I agree with the gist of your point, but I'm guessing you're being down-voted because you come off as sort of flippant. Anyhow, I've long thought that mathematics should have hover-text to help remove the mental overhead of translati…
Somehow I never considered hover-text for math. Now I'm actually rather angry that it's not already standard, what with papers being distributed digitally. Keeping track of notation when reading papers is the bane of my existence.
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#75> There is not a direct or fixed correspondence, but as a general rule, during stable riding, a higher clockwise torque on the handlebars will cause the bicycle to start leaning more to the left It's counter-steering! I was glad to read that counter-steering is accounted for and works in their physics simulation like it does in the real world. I don't have a source handy, but I believe that there is a fixed correspon…
I nearly crashed the first time I rode a quad bike because, having had a motorcycle in the past, I instinctively tried to countersteer into turns.
I had the same problem riding a racing course for quads. It was so bad, I couldn’t even finish the course, kept running into the walls.
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
I got the same feeling while I was still in university. I mean if the mathematical notation would at least make it more concise, because there are definitely computations which are easier explained using this notation. But more often than not I look at papers, where I know what they were doing and how and just have to ask myself: Why would you go through the work of translating what you did back into formulas, which…
I'm old enough to have never been tested for dyslexia, because I scored high in average tests.. But come high school years, or in British sixth form studying for"A levels", I scored in the top decile for my class and for Applied Math, but the bottom dectile for Pure Math. I think you can make a very good argument that math notation is not doing the potentially career changing job it could be doing, by not expanding t…
At the level of arithmetic, there are studies of children performing math in the marketplace, but then being unable to do the same calculation on paper. So translation from notation to reality (and back) is probably a significant barrier to success in math.
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#77This is now my favorite scientific paper headline, beating out the previous champion, "How Many Birds Are There?" https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1018341530497
Is this basically just taking a Fermi type estimation and making a paper out of it?
I was just thinking that I like doing those sorts of calculations, and given that so many people on the Internet profess to hate them, there should be an exploitable niche somewhere.
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#78There are no secrets to riding a bike: 1. Do no try to go straight. Move the handlebars violently left and right when you feel you are falling left or right. 2. Going slow is hard. Go fast. The wheels spinning will behave as stabilizers, making it easier to stay on the bike. 3. Moving your body will make you fall at first if you do not counteract by moving the handlebar. Start by going downhill, without pedaling.
The two "secrets" I know to riding a motorcycle are (1) not leaning on your arms, and (2) consciously countersteering.
Seems like a lot of people I see on the street never learned how to countersteer and turn or change lanes with alacrity.
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just a PID controller, they have existed and been used in industry much longer than computers and thus require almost no computing power at all. Everyone taking higher level engineering courses learns how to design these because almost everything uses them. Honestly I thought that the paper was a joke on how everything is called neural network, but maybe it is serious... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PID_cont…
It looks more like a cascade of a P controller (theta setpoint to gamma setpoint) with a PD controller (gamma setpoint to torque). But yeah, basically just classical control.
Yes, except that there is also a threshold applied (sigma).
Re: It Takes Two Neurons to Ride a Bicycle (2004)
#80There are no secrets to riding a bike: 1. Do no try to go straight. Move the handlebars violently left and right when you feel you are falling left or right. 2. Going slow is hard. Go fast. The wheels spinning will behave as stabilizers, making it easier to stay on the bike. 3. Moving your body will make you fall at first if you do not counteract by moving the handlebar. Start by going downhill, without pedaling.
The two "secrets" I know to riding a motorcycle are (1) not leaning on your arms, and (2) consciously countersteering. Seems like a lot of people I see on the street never learned how to countersteer and turn or change lanes with alacrity.
> (1) not leaning on your arms
I can already guess an answer to this, but would you mind expanding on it anyway? I tend to do this on my bicycle a lot.