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Gears

ciechanow.ski

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Re: Gears

#51

Post by sparky_z »

andonisus wrote: post #24

This may be a stupid question, but it is something I always wondered. Torque is effective due to the mass of the lever having a force applied to it, right? Is the length of the lever being used as a stand-in for the mass being affected (a longer lever would necessarily have more mass)? If the lever had no mass, would there be no torque? If the lever did not have a uniform mass distribution, would the difference in ap…

No, torque has nothing to do with mass. Even making the level "massless" would not change the applied torque one bit.

Re: Gears

#53

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

nerdkid93 wrote: post #28
jmiskovic wrote: post #11

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…

I personally disagree with people who disable JS and expect the web to continue working as expected, but one of the other downsides of using Canvas for such animations is that there is no good way of exposing that animation to screen readers. Some projects get around this by having an accessibility layer in DOM that overlays the Canvas which renders the actual animations (e.g. https://proxx.app/ ), but I imagine that…

> I personally disagree with people who disable JS and expect the web to continue working as expected

In a general sense, I agree with you.

But pages that are generally static, like a blog or news article, should still work.

I think it's completely reasonable that the animations in the linked article break with JS disabled. Could they have been done differently and had graceful degradation? Yeah, I suppose. But I think it's fine as-is.

Re: Gears

#54

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

function_seven wrote: post #22
nimish wrote: post #15

> Almost by definition, the second hand of a clock rotates at 1 rpm Minute hand, surely ;)

Second hand: 1RPM Minute hand: 1RPH Hour hand: 2RPD

> Hour hand: 2RPD

Joke's on you, I have a 24 hour clock!

https://www.amazon.com/GreatGadgets-1858-24-Hour-Clock/dp/B0...

Re: Gears

#57

Post by julienchastang »

bcheung wrote: post #3

If only textbooks could be this good.

Exactly. Or put another way, why is there not more pedagogic material like this on the web? We have Jupyter notebooks in many different academic subjects but so many of them are half-baked. This website serves as an example of how good web-based teaching material can truly be.

Re: Gears

#58

Post by 1wheel »

chubot wrote: post #9
TeMPOraL wrote: post #7

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…

> another edit: I also believe one reason that this visualization is good is because there's no build process in the JS. The author clearly just edits the code and refreshes the browser. You need that kind of fast edit-view loop to make good visualizations.

You can go a step further and reload code without refreshing the page. This makes it even easier to make the sort of fiddly tweaks that visualizations require while avoid change blindness.

https://roadtolarissa.com/hot-reload

https://github.com/1wheel/hot-server

Re: Gears

#59

Post by whiddershins »

I am super impressed by the smooth animation and the graphic design of the elements.

I wish this were all open source so I could just copy it in to a project I’m in the middle of.

Very inspiring.

Re: Gears

#60

Post by sbarre »

julienchastang wrote: post #57
bcheung wrote: post #3

If only textbooks could be this good.

Exactly. Or put another way, why is there not more pedagogic material like this on the web? We have Jupyter notebooks in many different academic subjects but so many of them are half-baked. This website serves as an example of how good web-based teaching material can truly be.

Lack of incentive to create it?
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