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ther than hide its inner workings with a facade eiffel exposed the skeleton of his masterpiece in doing so he revealed its hidden rules of harmony many of the same rules that give your skeleton its lightweight strength eiffel tower photo by benh lieu song wikimedia modified by aatish bhatia to understand eiffel s ingenious design let s start with a little puzzle imagine that someone melted all of the iron in the tower into a solid ball how big do you think that ball would be each of the balls shown in the image are drawn to scale next to their diameters before reading any further take a moment to guess your answer continue reading what your bones have in common with the eiffel tower posted on march 9 2015 november 20 2022 categories science tags bamboo bioinspiration biomimicry bones eiffel engineering optimization what would happen if the earth stopped in its orbit aatish bhatia modifying images under fair use as we celebrate the earth completing another lap around the sun let s take a moment to imagine what life would be like in a world without years a world that somehow ceased to orbit its star admittedly it s a strange question but its s one that i ve been obsessively wondering about lately not because it s of any particular relevance but simply because it s amusing at least to me and fun to think about what would happen to us if a giant space finger were to gently stop the earth in its orbit nothing good here try it out for yourself press start in the simulation below created by michael dubson and the folks at phet interactive simulations university of colorado you should see a planet orbiting the sun now press reset and drag the circle with the letter v to shrink the planet s speed then press start again what happens while you re playing with this you might enjoy trying out some of the different scenarios in the drop down menus and watching the gravitational ballet that ensues if you slowed down the planet enough you should see it crash into the sun to see why let s first remember why things stay in orbit every child looking at the sky has at some point wondered why doesn t the moon fall down the answer is beautifully simple yet it took a mind as brilliant as isaac newton s to work it out perhaps a sign of genius is coming up with simple answers to children s questions newtons response to the child s question would have been the moon does fall it s constantly falling being in orbit is a state of always falling and always missing what you re falling towards in the hitchiker s guide to the galaxy douglas adams describes the secret to flight the knack he writes lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss as it turns out this is also a great description of what it means to orbit something isaac newton a treatise of the system of the world public domain here s how newton explained it imagine a cannonball is fired from a height if you fire the cannonball with more speed it ll travel further before it hits the ground the faster the cannonball the further it travels but wait the earth is round that means that if you shoot the cannonball with enough speed then by the time it would have hit the ground it s travelled far enough that the ground has curved away beneath it so the cannonball continues to fall towards the ground and the ground continues to curve away from it it s now in a state of perpetual free fall the cannonball is in orbit newton s idea is masterfully explained in this wonderful radiolab segment so the only thing that makes an orbit different from plain old falling is having enough speed to miss the thing you re falling towards think dropping a cannonball with zero speed versus shooting it into orbit and for the same reason if the earth were robbed of all of its orbital speed it would fall straight into the sun it would no longer have the speed it needs to miss the sun how long would this earthfall take continue reading what would happen if the earth stopped in its orbit posted on december 31 2014 november 20 2022 categories science tags gravity newton physics what if how small biases lead to a divided world an interactive exploration of racial segregation vi hart and nicky case public domain people learn best by doing that s a simple idea backed by reams of evidence and yet i always struggle with this idea when i m writing online science communication is by and large a passive medium where the writer tells a story and the reader listens it might be an incredibly compelling and engaging story but it s ultimately one where the writer is at the wheel and the reader is taken along for the ride sometimes this limitation frustrates me because i recognize that it isn t the most effective way to communicate ideas but today i came across something that made me see a different way of communicating online one that whole heartedly adopts this learn by doing philosophy and puts the reader in the driving seat it s called parable of the polygons and was built by vi hart and nicky case it s what that they call a playable blog post part story and part game set in an imaginary world of squares and triangles while it might at first seem like an odd mathematical game it delivers a lucid and very relevant lesson on real world segregation vi hart and nicky case public domain the goal of the game is to move the squares and triangles around until they re all happy these shapes like living in a diverse world inhabited by squares and triangles alike in fact they prefer diversity but there s a small problem each shape is slightly shapist here s how hart and case put it these little cuties are 50 triangles 50 squares and 100 slightly shapist but only slightly in fact every polygon prefers being in a diverse crowd you can only move them if they re unhappy with their immediate neighborhood once they re ok where they are you can t move them until they re unhappy with their neighbors again they ve got one simple rule i wanna move if less than 1 3 of my neighbors are like me harmless right every polygon would be happy with a mixed neighborhood surely their small bias can t affect the larger shape of society that much well by playing around with these squares and triangles you ll discover how even slight biases towards similarly shaped neighbors can lead to total segregation it s a tour of the counter intuitive math of segregation first spelt out by the nobel prize winning game theorist thomas schelling but it isn t all gloom for the post also teaches us that if all shapes demand even the smallest bit of diversity in their neighborhoods a slight anti bias if you will then segregation plummets the lesson here is that small individual preferences can create a large societal effect it s up to us to determine which direction we want that effect to go towards a diverse world or a completely segregated one the parable of the polygons is a truly interactive way of communicating an idea and perhaps just as important it s incredibly well designed the disarmingly charming cast of characters delightfully animated circles and squares playfully distill the essence of the idea and allow hart and case to deliver an effective lesson about race and equality without getting embroiled in a heated political debate that s enough talk now go check out the parable of the polygons and once you re done with exploring that if you live in the us you might also be interested in this racial map of the us which shows you how diverse or segregated your neighborhood is posted on december 8 2014 november 20 2022 categories science tags bias interactive race how to dance with a tree visualizing fractals with dance here s a fun project that my friend upasana and i put together some weekends ago it s a visual exploration of fractals through dance a piece of generative art that s part performance and part mathematical exploration the two ingredients that went into creating this were the microsoft kinect sensor which lets your computer track how your body moves and processing a programming language that lets you create interactive visuals with code put the two together and you can use your body to control virtual shapes and objects the idea for this project came about while i was walking home from work late october idly watching the recently bare tree branches swaying in the wind and for some reason that made me wonder what would it be like to be a tree for an evening imagine lifting your arms and a tree waves its branches and then i remembered reading about fractals in daniel shiffman s book nature of code fractals are those wonderfully intricate structures that look the same as you keep zooming in to them benoit b mandelbrot was one of the earliest explorers of the fractal world he coined the word fractal to mean a kind of geometric shape whose parts resemble a reduced size copy of the whole some fractal humor what does the b in benoit b mandelbrot stand for benoit b mandelbrot at the heart of being a fractal is self similarity the idea that each piece appears similar to the whole think of how a coastline on a map appears similarly wrinkly across different levels of zoom the same could be said of the jagged terrain of a mountain or picture the ever branching paths that lightning follows as it travels down to the earth when high voltage electricity passes through an insulator it branches out in fractal like patterns bert hickman wikimedia or the nested arrangement of leaves within a fern sanjay ach wikimedia or the buds in a head of romanesco broccoli each bud contains smaller buds upon it arranged in the same spiraling pattern fractal brocolli jon sullivan wikimedia from coastlines to broccoli and lightning to trees many of nature s patterns are better described by fractals than by the usual cast of shapes like lines circles and triangles in the real world objects can only be roughly fractal at some level of zoom the repetition will end but in mathematics the self similarity of fractals continues forever continue reading how to dance with a tree visualizing fractals with dance posted on december 4 2014 november 20 2022 categories science tags fractals kinect math the physics of doing an ollie on a skateboard or the science of why i can t skate skateboarding is hard when i was about 10 i broke my first skateboard by riding it into a ditch a decade later in college i broke another skateboard within an hour of owning it surely a record in a short lived attempt at doing an ollie surprisingly the store accepted a return on that board even though it was in two pieces then i was gifted a really nice high quality skateboard the first thing i did with it was ride it down a big hill a valiant but ill fated adventure which ended with me jumping off the skateboard rolling down the grass and arriving scraped up deflated and rather disoriented near the entrance to my college cafeteria in my defense the wheels and ball bearings on that skateboard had been pre lubricated to minimize friction and why would anyone do that that s just crazy so believe me when i tell you that i am incredibly envious of skaters who can pull off tricks like this now i might not be able to skate to save my life but i can do a little physics so here s a thought maybe i can use physics to learn how to do an ollie here s the plan i m going to open up the above video of skateboarder adam shomsky doing an ollie filmed in glorious 1000 frames per second slow motion and analyze it in the open source physics video analysis tool tracker the first thing i did was track the motion of the front and back wheels tracker has a very convenient autotracker feature that can do this for you one useful physics trick here is to track the center of mass of the skateboard i e the average of the positions of the front and back wheels here is that curve overlapped in green now if you were to do the same tracking exercise for a soccer ball that s been kicked you d get a neat arc like shape called a parabola this is the characteristic shape you get when the only force influencing an object s motion is gravity but the green curve in the above gif the motion of the center of mass of the skateboard is nowhere close to being a parabola it s lumpy and weird this means that gravity isn t the only force affecting the skateboard unlike a soccer ball in mid flight a skateboard mid ollie is being actively steered this is exactly what makes doing an ollie so hard it s not enough to get the skateboard up into the air you also have to steer it while it s in the air continue reading the physics of doing an ollie on a skateboard or the science of why i can t skate posted on october 5 2014 november 20 2022 categories science tags gravity physics skateboarding hey there little electron why won t you tell me where you came from steve jurvetson flickr i want to tell you about one of the most beautiful ideas that i know it s a physics experiment and it s beautiful because in one elegant stroke it expands our consciousness forcing us to realize that objects can behave in ways that are impossible for us to picture but remarkably possible for us to calculate it s beautiful because it calls into question the bedrock of logic on which we ve built our understanding of the world it s beautiful because it s deceivingly simple to understand and yet its consequences are deeply unsettling and it s beautiful because i refused to accept it until i ran the experiment for myself and i distinctly remember watching my worldview shatter as the picture slowly built up on the computer monitor this was eleven years ago i was a college freshman sitting in a physics lab with all the lights turned out staring at a blank computer screen and for reasons that i won t go into here listening to a best of compilation of 80s pop hits electrons enter the box from the left and strike the screen on the right aatish bhatia here s the setup on the table in front of me there s a box with two thin slit like openings at one end we re shooting particles into this box through these slits i did the experiment with photons i e chunks of light but others have done it with electrons and in principle it could be done with any kind of stuff it s even been done with buckyballs which are soccer ball shaped arrangements of 60 carbon atoms that are positively ginormous compared to electrons for convenience i m going to call the objects in this experiment electrons but think of that word as a stand in for any kind of stuff that comes in chunks really at the other end of the box is a ccd camera that takes a snapshot of whatever hits it every time a particle makes it to the other side of the box i see a dot light up at the corresponding point on my computer screen just to be extra careful we ve set up the experiment so that there is only one particle inside the box at any given time picture if you like very tiny baseballs being flung into the box one at a time the 80s music plays on and we sit and wait what would you expect to see on the other side of the box well if electrons behaved lik...