That appears to work like a denial of service attack on my brain - I was sitting here quite hypnotized until a colleague asked me what on earth I was doing.
omg I know! I was ready to leave multiple times but something prevented me from moving my mouse and I starred at it for five minutes. It is number porn.
Wow, what a terrible article. The disingenuity is astounding.
>Pornography is fake.
True, but that's not why the analogy is used. Pornography is a visual media that conveys some of the pleasure of an act without the viewer actually going through the effort of doing it.
>Pornography's aim is to sexually excite the viewer. Are geeks sexually excited by the eBay data?…
>pleasure comes from many things that are non-sexual such as eating…
>So let's swap 'geek porn' for a 'geek feast'.
But why isn't "feast" defined symmetrically? A feast's aim is to gastronomically excite the user. Are geeks gastronomically excited by the eBay data?
The whole rant is semantic nonsense, defining words in a way that begs the question. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for a good rant. I just like my rants to make sense.
The real reason not to use the Porn Analogy is stuffed in the last paragraph: "Many people are uncomfortable with pornography and don't want pornography analogies in professional work."
It wasn't my intention when writing it to be disingenuous, but I do think there's validity in his/her criticism of the article. Not my finest blog post.
Here is another fascinating visualization that I'm sure will ring a bell for some of you. For those that haven't seen this type of explanation, it's really neat. Eduardo's explanation both easy-to-read--hey, he's a writer--and detailed.
See also You Can Count on Monsters [1] which presents the same kind of factorization diagrams but with each number accompanied by an illustration of a 'monster'. The approach, targeting an elementary-school audience, is a little trippy but it anchors the idea of the number in a unique visual. I've given the book to a few of my nieces & nephews.
I teach math, and I am definitely showing this to my class today! I am pretty sure this will help some students make sense of prime numbers for the first time in their lives.
This looks homegrown. The source code [1] is fairly readable.
New dots seem to enter the world in the position of the last dot placed but below them. Position and size seem to follow a simple linear movement between frames.
I wonder though, why is this done with canvas instead of SVG. Just to cut down on the number of DOM elements?
Feature request: single step. The only way I can slow it down enough to explain it to my kids is to stop it, and it stops in random (usually mangled) states. I wish I could single step it.
Before you say that it should be just a line, let me say that it doesn't break the rules that say you can "draw" a circle with 100 or 12 or 7 dots. The dots don't form a circle but rather fall on the line of a circle your mind draws. Since there is nothing truly between the dots, the "true" shape could jut out and form a corner or any other shape, just like it could be a line between the two dots. The circle isn't really there in any circle of n points, so n=2 (and n=1 for that matter) work just fine.
The original post used the term "formed," and I used "make," both with the intent of using only dots to create a circle. I would say you have "included" two dots in your circle, with this new line being the main element. With all due respect.
not quite - you can't make a circle with diameter smaller than the distance between the two dots. and for any given radius, at most two circles (two centre positions) are possible.
