A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie

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Recommends kens · 2016-06 · on “What are “actual pictures” of atoms actually pictures of?”

The linked video "A Boy And His Atom: The World's Smallest Movie" is entertaining. IBM made a stop-motion animated movie from individual atoms. [this video]

Cites moocowduckquack · 2013-11 · on “Will 2-D tin be the next super material?”

I expect it to be about as difficult as this - [LINK] - but not quite as difficult as this - [this video] - or this - [LINK]

Cites mncharity · 2017-10 · on “The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI”

> I'm not as pessimistic as Bret Victor [...] ABriefRant I'd actually go one step further than that "rant". In the real world, small physical motions usually have little control significance. Mouse movement and keyboards are among the many exceptions. With XR's hand tracking, that can change. For example, while gaming is focused on "feeling like it's real", so game hands overlap real hands, for getting work done, it's nice to have stretchy arms, so you can reach across the room to grab things. For optimal long-term ergonomics, you want a mix - sometimes you want the exercise of waving your arms, and sometimes you want to achieve the same end by merely twitching a hand resting on a knee or ke

Cites mncharity · 2019-05 · on “How to Calm a Crying Baby Like a Mesopotamian”

> It's mind blowing :) When people watch this[1], and I'm standing next to them, they'll often ask about the ripples. But if they were watching it alone, there isn't an easy way to do that. Someone did an art project, where you sit and watch an interesting drama video. But why was it interesting? There's an eye tracker, and the video is a graph of scenes, like an old "choose your own adventure" story. So if you're interested in character A... the video explores/emphasizes character A. AR/VR is coming. With eye tracking (eventually... patents). So... Imagine science education that's consistently mind blowing, rather than boring. What might that be like? Though a cautionary note: there's appar

Cites self_awareness · 2019-07 · on “Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests”

From the first paragraph of the article: > An atom typically can’t be assigned a definite position, for example — we can merely calculate the probability of finding it in various places. Is this really the case? Or maybe author meant 'electron' instead of 'atom'? I mean, if we wouldn't be able of calculating the position of an Atom, how could "A Boy And His Atom" would be possible? [this video]

Cites mncharity · 2020-03 · on “Watching Magnets Rust”

> but without chemical bonds? Metallic bonds. My understanding is all bonding is atoms sticking together electrostatically, with (insanely fast) "slow" lumbering nuclei, nudged around by their local e-field, and wacky electrons, adopting weird spatial distributions based on the current nuclei positions, setting that field. The bond taxonomy descriptively sorts by characteristics. Here, one is delocalization of valence electrons. Perhaps picture [this video] , STM imaging of cold CO molecules sitting on a copper surface, IIRC. You can't see the individual copper atoms, and there are extended ripples in surface electron density.

Cites mncharity · 2020-03 · on “Ask HN: What projects are you working on now?”

IEEE VR starts tomorrow (Sunday-Thursday). Entirely online. Registration is waitlisted, until they see how their infrastructure holds up. But they also plan live streaming video of all presentation sessions (papers, panels, workshops, and keynotes) on Twitch, open to anyone. streams: [LINK] schedule: [LINK] hashtag: [LINK] Also working on a video-rich[1] tweet thread "Atoms are {little, balls, sticky, jiggly, bouncy, stacking, etc}", as motivation while working towards an exemplar of transformatively improved science education content, which I hope will speed conversations about that. Anyone have any favorite media of atoms? Also on desktop panning using head tracking. Also on using RealSens

Cites mncharity · 2020-05 · on “Visualizing Electricity”

Apropos visualizing atoms and their electrons, here's a fun sidebar. This IBM video[1] was made with an STM scanning tunneling microscope, which sees outer electrons. So while it shows the IIRC carbon monoxide molecules, standing up like buoys, as little balls, the background copper surface of delocalized electrons looks smooth, with ripples. You can't see the individual copper atoms. But if you instead used an AFM atomic force microscope, which can feel inner electrons, then you could - here's one of silicon[2]. When crafting and teaching abstract representations, it's easy to forget that these are real physical objects. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]