Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

gianlucagimini.it

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 191 posts

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#121

Post by jonshariat »

edgarvaldes wrote: post #50
jonshariat wrote: post #10

I think this is a great example that shows how our brains remember/recognize things. (Which may be help in machine learning) This is how people have remembered a bike. 2 wheels, spaced apart Metal connecting Pedal in the middle Seat on top Handlebars connected to the front wheel. The details of how it's connected, where, spacing, etc. Isn't really noted by our brains unless they see/use them often. I wonder if this e…

I think it's funny how many comments give great importance to the object being a bicycle or the person being a bike rider to explain the output.

Agreed. It can really be anything. People don't look at things, they scan and store/recognize optimized patterns.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#122

Post by colanderman »

jshevek wrote: post #102
colanderman wrote: post #90

Similar: draw an ant, top-down view. Where DO the legs go?

Is this really a common misunderstanding? I thought everybody knew that ants have three body sections, and the legs attached to the middle. We learned this in elementary school. Putting legs on the head or the back section would create so many unnecessary complications.

> Putting legs on the head or the back section would create so many unnecessary complications.

I mean, so would attaching a bicycle chain to the front wheel.

After all, why shouldn't an ant have one pair attached to its tail segment? 6 is a lot of legs to cram into the tiny middle segment.

I first partook in this exercise in a small group of STEM graduate students preparing for a youth teaching program. Maybe 2/3 of us got it wrong (myself included).

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#123

Post by bhandziuk »

dancek wrote: post #92
stefan_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crucially a front wheel losing traction isn't recoverable. So it has rained, you ride over a bunch of leaves and that is the moment the electric motor decides to apply power, you're going down immediately. And why in the first place, there is no benefit.

Well, that depends. It's easy to lock your front wheel for a split-second on gravel without falling---you just need to keep your balance while the wheel is locked. If there's a certain amount of kinetic friction front wheel drive could even make it possible to recover after balance is lost. AWD (electric front drive + pedaling) is actually quite common among hobbyists in areas that often have snow (say, Scandinavia).…

Locking your front wheel is usually 1) very difficult 2) non-recoverable unless you're good on a bike. If you lock you're front wheel going any speed over walking pace you'll probably go down. If you lock it up in the wet you're almost guaranteed to go down fast.

If you're riding uphill rear wheel drive on a bike is great because that's where you're weight is. The front wheel doens't have much. Put power into the front wheel and it might spin.

Put power through the front wheel while going downhill...well there was not need to because you don't need to have a power boost because you're going downhill.

I'm unconvinced except maybe deep snow with big fatty tires.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#124

Post by xkcd-sucks »

MrFantastic wrote: post #65
jdietrich wrote: post #7

Drawing and painting is almost entirely a visual skill. The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial; the hard part is being able to see what's actually there. A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form. You can doodle one in about five seconds. They're not rare or unusual objects and they're relatively homogenous. Nonetheless, most people have never actually seen a bicycle. They'v…

If you understand how a bicycle works it's easy to draw. Most people don't care to understand things on a deeper level.

Uh if you take the time to imagine pedaling a bicycle and turning the handlebars it's easy to draw. Even people that understand bikes probably default to a visual representation rather than a "mechanical" representation because they're confident in their visual memory

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#125

Post by jdietrich »

WalterBright wrote: post #89
jdietrich wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude. Teachers like Betty Edwards and Bert Dodson have proven that pretty much anyone can learn to draw to a high standard in a remarkably short space of time once they understand the visual principles of effective drawing. Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifeti…

> Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifetime of practice Draftsmanship is quickly learned by young people. I sat next to a 20 year old at Boeing who was very competent at making engineering drawings (and Boeing had high standards - they didn't want any ambiguity for obvious reasons). Though perhaps you mean something else by draftsmanship.

draftsmanship (noun)

1) the art or craft of a draftsman

2) the skill of drawing

Draftsmanship refers to both technical and artistic drawing skill.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#126

Post by theoh »

jdietrich wrote: post #125
WalterBright wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifetime of practice Draftsmanship is quickly learned by young people. I sat next to a 20 year old at Boeing who was very competent at making engineering drawings (and Boeing had high standards - they didn't want any ambiguity for obvious reasons). Though perhaps you mean something else by draftsmanship.

draftsmanship (noun) 1) the art or craft of a draftsman 2) the skill of drawing Draftsmanship refers to both technical and artistic drawing skill.

Come on, mechanical drawing and 'artistic' drawing are totally different skills. The best technicians, with the highest level of mechanical drawing training and experience, wouldn't be able to draw a portrait.

RISD asks applicants to draw their bike as part of the application. It's tough because both originality and observational skills are needed (google "risd bike").

But OMG it is important to realise that being able to make measured, technical drawings is not the same as being a renaissance draftsman, capable of the most incredible evocations of the human body etc.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#127

Post by jdietrich »

nadavr wrote: post #93
ranit wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Look out of your window at a tree ... > Even the drawings in the linked article with their horribly mangled geometry are immediately recognisable as a bicycle. It's not a difficult thing to draw, relatively speaking. I guess, the point is that a bike is easier to draw that natural objects. I bet if people had been asked to draw a tree, 100% of the pictures would be recognisable as proper tree. Conversion from reali…

Ah, this is where it gets interesting. I suspect the author of the (wonderful) book linked above would suggest that 100% of the pictures would be recognizable as a _picture of a tree_ -- a form which we all learn by age 5 but which does not actually correspond to a physical tree much, if at all.

Exactly. We don't learn to draw the tree we see out of the window, but the idea of a tree. Children don't really draw - they write in pictograms. We teach them icons that represent things, but we don't teach them how to translate seeing into drawing. The bicycle drawings show how quickly that habit of drawing the idea of a thing breaks down.

We falter when we try to draw something that we haven't learned the "correct" pictogram for, because our mental concept of the thing is completely divorced from the appearance of the thing. Most adults can just about draw a chair isometric projection, because they learned how to draw a cube. That crude model of perspective usually falls apart when they try to draw a dog - they know that it's supposed to have four legs, but they can't work out where to put them. You end up with a drawing like this:

https://ellenhenderson.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/dog_new1....

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#128

Post by egypturnash »

mrob wrote: post #77
jdietrich wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Giotto story is almost certainly a myth. It's also largely irrelevant; anyone can draw a perfect circle in two seconds with a pair of compasses or a piece of string. There are huge differences in drawing ability, but going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days , not years. Becoming a confident and capable draftsman is a skill that anyone can learn to a surprisingly high degree of proficiency i…

>going from "I can't draw" to "I can draw quite well" takes days, not years Only if you consider a messy "chicken scratch" style good. I can draw things that look acceptable when you blur your eyes enough (which is indeed easy to learn), but I wouldn't claim to "draw quite well" unless I could do it with clean lines, which takes years of practice. When evaluating difficulty of a skill it's more usual to measure by di…

here's a pro tip that I learnt in the animation scene

1. grab a wooden pencil 2. hold it so that the broad side of the lead touches the paper, not the point - you'll get a broad, pale grey line 3. rough in your drawing this way 4. when you feel like you have a solid drawing, switch to the tip of the pencil (or to a pen) and trace the lines you made in step 3

This will make it a lot easier to have a nice, clean drawing done with bold, clean lines. You will also probably end up with a silver patch on the heel of your hand from dragging it across all those light lines, along with a gray haze - a delicate touch with a kneaded eraser can fix that, or just draw with a col-erase pencil, finish with graphite, and abuse the levels in Photoshop to drop out the color.

Being able to knock out a drawing with precise lines and no underdrawing does take years, but being able to simply create a drawing with precise lines can happen a lot earlier once you've picked up a few One Weird Tricks.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#129

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jdietrich wrote: post #71
mrob wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The mechanical skills of wielding a pencil or mixing paint are almost trivial I strongly disagree. Try drawing a large shape without using a template. If you move the pencil with your fingers, you quickly run out of range of motion, and have to reposition your hand and join the new line segment without visible discontinuity, which requires extreme accuracy[0]. If you move it mostly with your arm then you have to lea…

Completely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude. Teachers like Betty Edwards and Bert Dodson have proven that pretty much anyone can learn to draw to a high standard in a remarkably short space of time once they understand the visual principles of effective drawing. Mastering draftsmanship requires a lifeti…

> Completely untrained people can trace a drawing with a good degree of accuracy, yet fail completely to draw even simple forms with any degree of verisimilitude.

I always felt this was an argument against what you are saying. Tracing doesn't require much fine motor control because you can rest your hand on the paper and go over the existing image with very small strokes.

For example, try drawing the simplest of all forms: a straight line. I always found that good drawers can draw an incredibly straight line, freehand. My "straight" lines look like I was standing on a boat in rough seas. Yet certainly visualizing the properties of a straight line seems very simple to me. Even, for example, drawing a straight line smoothly between two other lines on a piece of filler paper is something that a good drawer could do much better than I.

Re: What happens when you ask people to draw a bike (2016)

#130

Post by blt »

jdietrich wrote: post #63
21 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A bicycle is an incredibly simple visual form I disagree, compared with most objects a human daily interacts with - doors, furniture, lifts, cars - a bicycle is one of the most complex visible forms. I'm talking about what can be seen from outside, since obviously a car is much more complex on the inside. Most of the stuff we deal with is composed of square/boxes and circle/tubes. Triangular shapes are quite rare i…

Clench your fist. Take a moment to notice the complexity of the geometry. Consider how you might reduce that shape to simple geometric forms. Consider how you might represent the three-dimensional form as a set of two-dimensional lines. Turn your hand around and look at it from a different angle. Open your fist and make an "OK" or a "peace" sign. Go to your refrigerator and take out a lettuce leaf or a piece of brocc…

You conflate geometry and topology * . The topology of the human hand is right in front of you to examine. A lettuce leaf is like a disk plus a wavy boundary and noise. Broccoli is a tree. A bicycle is topologically complex object with high genus. A bad drawing of a hand can still has the right connectivity, it could be smoothly deformed into a realistic hand. Not true for most of these bicycle drawings.

* using "topology" to refer to the graph structure of the skeleton of the solid, not the typical mathematical meaning.

Post reply on HN