101–110 of 230 posts
They all looked like that first gif (but not animated of course).
This is an absolutely phenomenal 'explorable explanation'. It methodically layers concepts to foster understanding, deploys interactivity to build intuition, and on top of all that provides crisp, clear narrative on top of all of the amazing visualizations.
The illustrations are what draws attention and they are very nice and informative. In context of parallel HN discussion¹ on merits of animated SVG, I consider it a loss for open standards that these animations are not made in SVG. If you try to inspect this page, the design and animation is hidden behind canvas and some (nicely written BTW) imperative javascript. It is hard to replicate, and hard to compose with othe…
The svg is a static weak alternative to true procedural generation.
For reference the postscript language is the same way. hand written procedural postscript is an amazing drawing tool.
If someone ever makes the creation process for this type of visualization accessible to the average university professor, it could blow the lid of the digital textbook market. Most digital textbooks I've seen are basically just putting the text and images on a web page, and maybe integrating multiple choice quizzes. That's seriously under-utilizing the medium. They need to be interactive , and encourage the student t…
The problem is that anything that is easy to produce and configure with a set of options is going to be very limited.
It is certainly possible to create an environment for producing mechanical and physical simulations with visual tools but it would not be trivial to develop.
These animations are running in a .
Any idea what the author used? Is everything produced with math (eg: a gear solver, etc)?
I didn't know anything about gears until someone filed an issue to tell me that a graphic on the Caddy homepage was wrong: https://github.com/caddyserver/caddy/issues/2949 Wish I saw this earlier!
I'm going to add very little to this discussion, but it's the second article from this blog I've seen here, and - like the other one, about the Earth and the Sun - it's absolutely amazing. This is some of the finest work in "explorable explanations". I'm going to save the copy of both just to be sure to show them to my kid in a couple of years; this beats any educational material on the topic I've been exposed to bef…
It is indeed great, and probably one reason you don't see it more is that it's a ton of work! That's 5K lines of hand-written code! (view source and it's at the end of the page) $ wc -l gears.js base.js 4135 gears.js 904 base.js 5039 total I've wanted to make visualizations like this for my blog. Writing a blog post takes me around 10 hours, which is a fair amount of effort. I believe that the visualizations will tak…
I have heard that it is good practice to always chose the number of teeth of two gears to be relatively prime. This is because there can be impurities in the metal, and if you have a small part of a tooth that is harder than the rest it will erode the opposing gear (there is always some friction going on). By choosing the number of teeth to be relatively prime, the wear and tear is distributed uniformly on the gears,…
Here's a fun calculator for it: https://www.surplace.fr/ffgc/
Notice that a very common gear combo, 44/16 only gives 4 skid patches, so if you're after longer lasting tyres avoid this setup.
This is an absolutely phenomenal 'explorable explanation'. It methodically layers concepts to foster understanding, deploys interactivity to build intuition, and on top of all that provides crisp, clear narrative on top of all of the amazing visualizations.
If you enjoyed the article, check out others by the same author which are done in a similar way. For example https://ciechanow.ski/color-spaces/ and https://ciechanow.ski/earth-and-sun/