Explaining the world one sketch at a time

Simplifying complex ideas through fun and insightful sketches. Explore topics from science, creativity, psychology, and more explained in pictures.

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Learn something new in a sketch each Sunday

Recent sketches

Flow

Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life. Mihalyi himself on his research: "What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy." When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity. When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself. Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist: Clear goals Clear feedback about your progress Matched challenge and skills When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive. By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD. I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV. The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work. Also see: Match joy with skills for flow at work Goldilocks tasks The fun scale Hope…Ever since I came across Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi's concept of Flow it has stayed with me as a simple framework and beacon for finding joy, creativity, and total involvement with life. Mihalyi himself on his research: "What I 'discovered' was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person. People who learn to control inner experience will be able to determine the quality of their lives, which is as close as any of us come to being happy." When researching happiness Csikszentmihalyi found that be they climbers, ballet dancers, chess players, or gardeners, people gave surprisingly similar descriptions to how they felt at their peak experience while performing an activity. When in flow people are wholly focused on the present moment, they experience a strong sense of control, they lose their self-consciousness and their ego, their experience of time changes so that time can fly by or a moment can seem to slow down, and the joy of performing the activity becomes an end in itself. Flow has a fairly simple set of conditions which I find myself using as a little mental checklist: Clear goals Clear feedback about your progress Matched challenge and skills When climbing, a prototypical flow activity, it's clear that you are trying to get to the top, you can immediately see if you are making progress and whether an action progressed you or not, and it's wise to pick a wall that is difficult but not impossible, for you to enjoy it. No wonder climbing can be so addictive. By contrast, it was evident to me that none of these were present when studying for my PhD. I also like flow because it reminds me that peak happiness is unlikely to be experienced by sitting around watching the TV. The quote is from, Flow, the psychology of happiness, by Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, who also taught me that any name can work to do great work. Also see: Match joy with skills for flow at work Goldilocks tasks The fun scale Hope

15 Nov 2020

John Muir quote illustration with a Sierra Nevada lake and distant mountains with a mountain chickadee bird on a branch in the foreground and the quote "As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

Hitched to everything else in the universe

It all matters. Be it one person, one bird, or one tree. We are all connected. As John Muir wrote in My First Summer in the Sierra: "As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." Take care of each other. The sketch is Heart Lake in his beloved Sierra Nevada.…

8 Nov 2020

Halloween

Perhaps when you first dressed up as a ghost and went round the houses asking for sweets you thought to also ask what the meaning of Halloween was? In case, like me, you didn't, I can share for you that Halloween is a smush together — or portmanteau — of hallow, of old English origin meaning Saint, and e'en, a contraction of the Scots word even meaning eve. So it's really the night before All Hallows or All Saints' Day on the 1st of November when Christians celebrate the lives of past Saints and martyrs. It's also part of the season of events called Allhallowtide including All Souls' Day on the 2nd of November and sometimes days beyond. The other Halloween traditions come from a mix of sources over hundreds of years that are both complex and somewhat disputed. I did like that the Jack O'lantern, before transferring itself to a pumpkin in the US, was originally carved out of turnips. And I also read that a mighty one quarter of candy sold in the US is sold for Halloween. Some of the better, sources, explaining the origins of Halloween. Also see, Boxing Day.…Perhaps when you first dressed up as a ghost and went round the houses asking for sweets you thought to also ask what the meaning of Halloween was? In case, like me, you didn't, I can share for you that Halloween is a smush together — or portmanteau — of hallow, of old English origin meaning Saint, and e'en, a contraction of the Scots word even meaning eve. So it's really the night before All Hallows or All Saints' Day on the 1st of November when Christians celebrate the lives of past Saints and martyrs. It's also part of the season of events called Allhallowtide including All Souls' Day on the 2nd of November and sometimes days beyond. The other Halloween traditions come from a mix of sources over hundreds of years that are both complex and somewhat disputed. I did like that the Jack O'lantern, before transferring itself to a pumpkin in the US, was originally carved out of turnips. And I also read that a mighty one quarter of candy sold in the US is sold for Halloween. Some of the better, sources, explaining the origins of Halloween. Also see, Boxing Day.

31 Oct 2020

Idling

An average car, sat idling, can produce exhaust emissions to fill 150 balloons. That's a lot of balloons to imagine puffing away out of the cars idling outside a school for a pickup, say. Other tests have found (pdf) that for any time over 10s fuel use and emissions are always greater when idling than turning off the engine and restarting. Spread the word. Of course, if you have an electric car this won't apply. I did draw 150 balloons, but a few of them didn't fit on the page.…An average car, sat idling, can produce exhaust emissions to fill 150 balloons. That's a lot of balloons to imagine puffing away out of the cars idling outside a school for a pickup, say. Other tests have found (pdf) that for any time over 10s fuel use and emissions are always greater when idling than turning off the engine and restarting. Spread the word. Of course, if you have an electric car this won't apply. I did draw 150 balloons, but a few of them didn't fit on the page.

26 Oct 2020

The haversine formula

It might seem straightforward to pull out a map and measure the distance between two distant points, however, the larger the distance the bigger the distortion caused by traveling on the curved surface of the Earth as opposed to flat 2D space. So while the distance you measure to your neighbouring town won't be too bad, if you're measuring between London and Rio the curvature of the Earth will make a big difference to the distance that you'll travel. To help figure out the correct distance there's the haversine formula. The haversine formula allows you to calculate the shortest distance between two points on a sphere using their latitudes and longitudes — this will be the arc between them on the great circle that includes both points. A great circle is a circle on a sphere with the same centre as the sphere, like the Equator. The haversine formula isn't perfect in practice, as Earth isn't a perfect sphere — see the 3 tallest mountains. It was invented around two hundred years ago, together with tables to speed any calculations, to help sailors navigate. Also see, the Mercator projection …It might seem straightforward to pull out a map and measure the distance between two distant points, however, the larger the distance the bigger the distortion caused by traveling on the curved surface of the Earth as opposed to flat 2D space. So while the distance you measure to your neighbouring town won't be too bad, if you're measuring between London and Rio the curvature of the Earth will make a big difference to the distance that you'll travel. To help figure out the correct distance there's the haversine formula. The haversine formula allows you to calculate the shortest distance between two points on a sphere using their latitudes and longitudes — this will be the arc between them on the great circle that includes both points. A great circle is a circle on a sphere with the same centre as the sphere, like the Equator. The haversine formula isn't perfect in practice, as Earth isn't a perfect sphere — see the 3 tallest mountains. It was invented around two hundred years ago, together with tables to speed any calculations, to help sailors navigate. Also see, the Mercator projection

18 Oct 2020

The goal-gradient effect

Intuitively, we can relate to this: as we get closer to completing a goal we can feel more motivation to complete it. Getting close to the last piece of a puzzle, the last clue of a murder mystery or escape room, the final chapter of your book (perhaps), the final kilometre of a marathon, or as you find you need just one more stamp to get a free coffee, being so close to our goal can give us a motivation lift to get to the end. It has a name: the goal-gradient effect*. In the example in the sketch, Oleg Urminksy and coauthors found that as people approached the final stamp towards a free coffee they were more likely to pick up the rate of buying coffees. And when issued with the new card, the coffee buying rate went back down again. They also found that it wasn't so much the absolute 'distance' from a goal, but the perception of distance. So, people who started out on a 12 stamp card with 2 stamps already complete tended to complete the card faster than the people who had a 10 stamp card starting empty even though it was the same number of stamps to the goal. Read more in Katy Milkman and Kassie Brabaw's Scientific American article, Why Feeling Close to the Finish Line Makes You Push Harder. Katy Milkman also educated me about the fresh start effect. *The goal-gradient effect is also known as the goal-gradient hypothesis…Intuitively, we can relate to this: as we get closer to completing a goal we can feel more motivation to complete it. Getting close to the last piece of a puzzle, the last clue of a murder mystery or escape room, the final chapter of your book (perhaps), the final kilometre of a marathon, or as you find you need just one more stamp to get a free coffee, being so close to our goal can give us a motivation lift to get to the end. It has a name: the goal-gradient effect*. In the example in the sketch, Oleg Urminksy and coauthors found that as people approached the final stamp towards a free coffee they were more likely to pick up the rate of buying coffees. And when issued with the new card, the coffee buying rate went back down again. They also found that it wasn't so much the absolute 'distance' from a goal, but the perception of distance. So, people who started out on a 12 stamp card with 2 stamps already complete tended to complete the card faster than the people who had a 10 stamp card starting empty even though it was the same number of stamps to the goal. Read more in Katy Milkman and Kassie Brabaw's Scientific American article, Why Feeling Close to the Finish Line Makes You Push Harder. Katy Milkman also educated me about the fresh start effect. *The goal-gradient effect is also known as the goal-gradient hypothesis

10 Oct 2020

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