These days, this would all have been done as CGI.
Monthly Archives: November 2012
Yes. This.
Some thoughts and musings about making things for the web.
Art is not born in a vacuum, but it’s not born inside a tornado full of shrieking trolls, either.
I draw the occasional cartoon (though not as often these days), and there are sections of this that are exactly how I have felt about the “creative process”. (especially how I’d react to having to produce according to some schedule, the “pool of ideas will dry up” thought, and, to a large extent, the response to suggestions.)
Nurture, Not Nature
Children Are Not “Natural” Scientists
I think Matthew gets it right: people sometimes equate curiosity with scientific inquiry, but that’s not right. Curiosity is a great trait for a scientist to have, but there’s a bunch of learned behavior that goes into doing science.
Old Physics isn't Obsolete Physics
Why Are Physics Classes Full of Old Stuff?
Chad does a nice job of addressing the issue raised in a Minute-Physics video. Frankly, I thought the video was uncharacteristically naive about this particular subject.
The fact that these courses are service courses first and foremost constrains what we can teach. And much as we might wish it were otherwise, the engineering and chemistry departments don’t particular want us to teach the cool modern stuff. They want us to teach old physics from 1865, because that serves as the foundation for some of their courses. We have to teach classical mechanics first because that’s what the departments that provide most of our students want us to teach.
And, of course, foundational for more physics, as well. It’s tough to talk about things like energy and momentum in advanced discussions if the students don’t know about energy and momentum. Can you discuss what a laser is and does at 8 O’clock on day one of an introductory physics class? It’d be fun to talk about how one might do that, but I’m not seeing how we get there. It’s almost like saying “let’s go read some neat books, because that’s fun, but let’s skip over all that boring vocabulary that we spend years developing”. Like most interesting books, quantum mechanics requires more than a third-grade level of reading ability.
The thing is, I see this same issue quite a bit on the science discussion board that hosts this blog — Science Forums (dot net). People show up wanting to discuss neat new things they’ve heard about, or even propose some new model of how things work, but have no clue about the basics — meaning they don’t understand what’s going on in the article, or why their proposal won’t work, and don’t get the objections people raise.
Building a Better Soccer Ball
Better in terms of durability.
Joy That Lasts, on the Poorest of Playgrounds
The children, he learned, used trash because the balls donated by relief agencies and sporting goods companies quickly ripped or deflated on the rocky dirt that doubled as soccer fields. Kicking a ball around provided such joy in otherwise stressful and trying conditions that the children would play with practically anything that approximated a ball.
“The only thing that sustained these kids is play,” said Mr. Jahnigen of Berkeley, Calif. “Yet the millions of balls that are donated go flat within 24 hours.”
The solution was a foam similar to what is used in Crocs.
[H]e happened to be having breakfast with Sting, a friend from his days in the music business. Mr. Jahnigen told him how soccer helped the children in Darfur cope with their troubles and his efforts to find an indestructible ball. Sting urged Mr. Jahnigen to drop everything and make the ball. Mr. Jahnigen said that developing the ball might cost as much as $300,000. Sting said he would pay for it.
An interesting logistical issue is also brought up: the balls are more difficult to ship than traditional balls, because they can’t be deflated (the reverse of a certain balloon issue I’ve run into)
If you are so inclined, you can go to the website and buy a ball for about $40, in which case one will also be donated, or you can donate one for $25.
Training for the Cat Volleyball Team
AFK
Apologies. I’ve been suffering from a sore neck and shoulder for a bit, and decided to minimize typing on a keyboard for a bit to see if that can help speed my recovery.
The Name is Bond. Frictional Bond.
Have you ever had the impression that heavy items of furniture start to take root – that after years standing in the same place, they’re harder to slide to a new position? Do your best wine glasses, after standing many months unused in the cabinet, seem slightly stuck to the shelf? Has the fine sand in the kids’ play tray set into a lump?
If so, you’re not just imagining it. The friction between two surfaces in contact with each other does slowly increase over time. But why?
P is for Power
Forget apps and useless startups: These four African girls have created a pee-powered generator
14-year-olds Duro-Aina Adebola, Akindele Abiola, Faleke Oluwatoyin, and 15-year-old Bello Eniola have created a urine powered generator.
Silver for the Gold
Silver Medal
Subtitle: Obama’s big win does not mean Nate Silver is a towering electoral genius.
It’s well after midnight on the East Coast, and the results are in: Nate Silver has won the 2012 presidential election by a landslide. His magic formula for predictions, much maligned in some corners in recent weeks, appears to have hit the mark in every state—a perfect 50 green M&Ms for accuracy. Now my Twitter feed is blowing up with announcements of his coronation as the Emperor of Math and the ruler of the punditocracy. Wait—it was even more than that, they say: a victory for blogging, and also one for rational thought. He proved the haters wrong! He proved science right! Is this guy getting lucky tonight or what?
But all these stats triumphalists have it wrong. Nate Silver didn’t nail it; the pollsters did. The vaunted Silver “picks”—the ones that scored a perfect record on Election Day—were derived from averaged state-wide data. According to the final tallies from FiveThirtyEight, Obama led by 1.3 points in Virginia, 3.6 in Ohio, 3.6 in Nevada, and 1.9 in Colorado. He won all those states, just like he won every other state in which he’d led in averaged, state-wide polls. That doesn’t mean that Silver’s magic model works. It means that polling works, assuming that its methodology is sound, and that it’s done repeatedly.
Two things: 1) yes, it does mean — to some degree of certainty — that Silver’s model works, and 2) you’re missing the point of the triumph. This wasn’t Nate Silver vs the pollsters, it was Nate Silver vs the pundits. And most of the pundits botched almost everything having to do with statistics beyond a trivial interpretation, and said that the predictions from the 538 blog were bogus. This was a triumph of statistics done right over the people who abuse, or are clueless about, statistics.
Put another way, the pundits had the same access to the polling data. And they were all over the place in their predictions, because they went with their gut instead of the data. That’s the underlying lesson.
The article points out, quite fairly, that other people use statistics properly, and had similar success in their predictions. Which raises the question — why all the other pundits weren’t doing this? The message here, if you hadn’t already figured it out, is that punditry is not about prediction, it’s about rabble-rousing and guesswork. Claiming that doing the electoral math is easy is a bit disingenuous when almost nobody who had a big platform (i.e. television) was doing it. It’s easy to see in hindsight, and apparently it’s easy to continue to try and marginalize the effort and the results.
Further, when you insist that predicting the result of the presidential race doesn’t prove he was right — with which I agree — you can’t then turn around and look at other individual races to say he was wrong.