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Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

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Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#11

Post by Reelin »

lilgreenland wrote: post #9
mncharity wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, apropos the friction page[0], yesterdayish I saw a recent Friction video[1], which told a causation story of transient bonding, which prompted me to dig up a talk[2] by Mark Robbins (Johns Hopkins, but recently deceased). I saw a variant of it a year or few back at Harvard, and IIRC, he suggests Phys101-flavor Amontons'-laws friction was dominated by interfacial debris mechanics. Rather than by boding or direct…

It's always funny/annoying when a teacher confidently presents misinformation. I still remember my biology teacher told me deoxygenated blood was actually blue. (it's dark red) I'll review those slides you linked. Teaching friction is "rough"... Wikipedia is still going with black body radiation as the source of the yellow color of fire. Maybe I should find better sources, although normal wikipedia is great for physi…

> Wikipedia is still going with black body radiation as the source of the yellow color of fire.

Wow. The flame section is pretty terrible and most claims aren't cited (I'm pretty sure many of them are also wrong, which hopefully makes citations more difficult to come by).

GP's point about heating metal to an equivalent temperature (and thus color) is correct AFAIK. Interestingly enough Wikipedia actually has an annotated experimental spectrum of a blue flame elsewhere. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spectrum_of_blue_flame.pn...)

> Maybe I should find better sources, although normal wikipedia is great for physics.

It's indispensable as a time saving overview and index to primary sources. As with any encyclopedia (any non-expert body of text really) you can't trust every last detail to be correct.

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#12

Post by mncharity »

lilgreenland wrote: post #9
mncharity wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fwiw, apropos the friction page[0], yesterdayish I saw a recent Friction video[1], which told a causation story of transient bonding, which prompted me to dig up a talk[2] by Mark Robbins (Johns Hopkins, but recently deceased). I saw a variant of it a year or few back at Harvard, and IIRC, he suggests Phys101-flavor Amontons'-laws friction was dominated by interfacial debris mechanics. Rather than by boding or direct…

It's always funny/annoying when a teacher confidently presents misinformation. I still remember my biology teacher told me deoxygenated blood was actually blue. (it's dark red) I'll review those slides you linked. Teaching friction is "rough"... Wikipedia is still going with black body radiation as the source of the yellow color of fire. Maybe I should find better sources, although normal wikipedia is great for physi…

Yeah, deoxygenated blue blood is a famously common misconception. That horrible and pervasive graphic, reinforced by veins looking blue through skin. Science education content fails both teachers and students, far worse than is often appreciated. I've wondered if it might be pedagogically useful to tell students that, or not.

I wish I had a better friction talk or paper for you. I don't recall seeing that video, but the version of the talk I saw, I recall as benefiting from the audience discussion. Sorry, it's what I had at hand. At some point, perhaps already, we'll get a nice survey paper, which can then be repackaged for teachers and students.

Wikipedia seems to not do well with widespread misconceptions. Perhaps if it had an additional layer of Backstory/WritersNotebook, in addition to Article and Talk. Or at least a similar convention on using Talk. As it its, past talk gets buried, and people come along and tweak things to better match their misconceptions, or some buggy source, so correctness isn't stable.

The google snippet of [1] looks hopeful... but isn't available on sci-hub - perhaps email the author? [2] is eh. I didn't quickly find nice researchy sources. For soot details (eg, I remember it as C-C bonds, but maybe not), there's ongoing work on using soot luminescence as a light source, which might well have good details buried somewhere, but I didn't quickly find them.

If anyone finds anything nice, I too would be interested.

[1] https://www.osa-opn.org/home/articles/volume_27/june_2016/de... [2] https://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/1393371/Chemist...

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#13

Post by krastanov »

lilgreenland wrote: post #2

My attempt at visualizing (and simulating) an online physics text book for my students. https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html I've heard the argument that making it easier to quickly understand something reduces long term understanding. That's probably true if it reduces the time spent thinking about the subject, but I hope that by making the visualization process easier there is more time for reinforcement…

This is awesome work! Is the source code / build files available? Is there a specified license under which this work is published? I would love to link to this from (and incorporate some of it in) a STEM outreach project of mine: spinwearables.com/book which also tries to incorporate exolorables in the educational materials.

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#14

Post by harlanji »

lilgreenland wrote: post #2

My attempt at visualizing (and simulating) an online physics text book for my students. https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html I've heard the argument that making it easier to quickly understand something reduces long term understanding. That's probably true if it reduces the time spent thinking about the subject, but I hope that by making the visualization process easier there is more time for reinforcement…

Nice. Here’s a fun demo that I just recorded from that site:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ji9xvlIE50

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#15

Post by goku99 »

lilgreenland wrote: post #2

My attempt at visualizing (and simulating) an online physics text book for my students. https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html I've heard the argument that making it easier to quickly understand something reduces long term understanding. That's probably true if it reduces the time spent thinking about the subject, but I hope that by making the visualization process easier there is more time for reinforcement…

This some mind blowing work!

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#16

Post by lilgreenland »

krastanov wrote: post #13
lilgreenland wrote: post #2

My attempt at visualizing (and simulating) an online physics text book for my students. https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html I've heard the argument that making it easier to quickly understand something reduces long term understanding. That's probably true if it reduces the time spent thinking about the subject, but I hope that by making the visualization process easier there is more time for reinforcement…

This is awesome work! Is the source code / build files available? Is there a specified license under which this work is published? I would love to link to this from (and incorporate some of it in) a STEM outreach project of mine: spinwearables.com/book which also tries to incorporate exolorables in the educational materials.

The code is open source and hosted on github. It's free to use under the GNU General Public License v3.0. If you have any questions about implementing the code feel free to ask me.

https://github.com/landgreen/physics https://github.com/landgreen/physics/blob/master/LICENSE

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#17

Post by jsteinbach »

edw wrote: post #6

I don’t know about you, but reading that first paragraph of the organic chemistry textbook was not a drag. It may not have been Carl Sagan’s Cosmos but I don’t understand how any generally curious person wouldn’t find it interesting. For the record I never took anything beyond Chemistry I in college.

That might be because your learner type [1] accommodates learning by text/reading, whereas the author appears to enjoy learning by visualizing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Neil_Fleming's...

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#18

Post by madhadron »

mncharity wrote: post #12
lilgreenland wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always funny/annoying when a teacher confidently presents misinformation. I still remember my biology teacher told me deoxygenated blood was actually blue. (it's dark red) I'll review those slides you linked. Teaching friction is "rough"... Wikipedia is still going with black body radiation as the source of the yellow color of fire. Maybe I should find better sources, although normal wikipedia is great for physi…

Yeah, deoxygenated blue blood is a famously common misconception. That horrible and pervasive graphic, reinforced by veins looking blue through skin. Science education content fails both teachers and students, far worse than is often appreciated. I've wondered if it might be pedagogically useful to tell students that, or not. I wish I had a better friction talk or paper for you. I don't recall seeing that video, but…

> Wikipedia seems to not do well with widespread misconceptions.

Maybe the right answer is to expressly mention the misconception and why it is incorrect? That hopefully would deter such editors.

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#19

Post by mncharity »

madhadron wrote: post #18
mncharity wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, deoxygenated blue blood is a famously common misconception. That horrible and pervasive graphic, reinforced by veins looking blue through skin. Science education content fails both teachers and students, far worse than is often appreciated. I've wondered if it might be pedagogically useful to tell students that, or not. I wish I had a better friction talk or paper for you. I don't recall seeing that video, but…

> Wikipedia seems to not do well with widespread misconceptions. Maybe the right answer is to expressly mention the misconception and why it is incorrect? That hopefully would deter such editors.

Hmm, interesting. And a "Misconceptions" section might also help immunize readers too. I wonder if the WP community would find that acceptable? K-12 teaching has been increasingly dealing explicitly with misconceptions, so at some point it might become unremarkable. I'm afraid a sentence or paragraph in isolation, would eventually be edited out.

Checking my personal touchstones, WP currently has the color of the Sun correct, yay. Though there's a bogus " spectral class. As such, it is informally and not completely accurately referred to as a yellow dwarf (its light is closer to white than yellow).", misunderstanding what spectral class "yellow" means, and then creatively flailing to reconcile that. On Stellar_classification, the Vega-relative chromaticity background colors look wrong, which perhaps doesn't help.

One challenge is handling incorrect graphics like [1] (that Planck curve isn't going through white, either from broken code, which used to be common, or there used to be some incorrect math on the web). The graphic is used in many articles. But there have been several such over the years, correct and incorrect. So adding comments to the graphic won't help long-term. I suppose a Misconceptions section could be added to the Chromaticity article, in the hope that the next person to swap in a pretty but incorrect chromaticity diagram, might notice that, as they haven't noticed the associated Talk. Might work? Or, hmm, setting up some later reader to recognize the problem, and giving them the confidence to fix it? Focus on facilitating repair, rather than on prevention? Intriguing.

Correctness seems socially hard. I saw an high-profile OER intro astronomy text, that was obviously written thinking the Sun was yellow. All the graphics have it yellow. But text sections dealing with color, were seemingly edited just enough, that through ambiguity and incoherence, the authors could say "we didn't say that - we don't have it wrong", even if there's no chance students were surviving that minefield intact. As was pointed out to them, on their nice public errata ticket system, and closed as WONTFIX. An important part of why science works, is people fearing being embarrassed in front of their colleagues, but for reasons I don't understand, problems like this don't seem to trigger that, so even long-term, they don't get fixed. If one could figure out how to dial up the embarrassment, that might have a broad non-trival impact on the quality of science education content.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PlanckianLocus.png

Re: Visualizing the textbook for fun and profit

#20

Post by titan101 »

lilgreenland wrote: post #2

My attempt at visualizing (and simulating) an online physics text book for my students. https://landgreen.github.io/physics/index.html I've heard the argument that making it easier to quickly understand something reduces long term understanding. That's probably true if it reduces the time spent thinking about the subject, but I hope that by making the visualization process easier there is more time for reinforcement…

Really great work! I see you have used Fabric. What else? D3?
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