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Explaining the world one sketch at a time

Simplifying complex ideas through fun and insightful sketches.

A weekly sketch by email

Learn something new in a sketch each Sunday

Recent sketches

MOSCOW Prioritisation.

A way of helping decide what to do next based on Must do, Should do, Could do and Would do. Strangely, so many of the things you’d really like to do when put in this organisation end up in the Would bucket.
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The piston animation: a short animation of a piston with connecting rod and crankshaft showing how it converts linear motion—back and forth—into rotational motion

The piston

The piston is an amazingly simple, ridiculously useful and successful mechanism that, together with a connecting rod and crankshaft, converts linear motion to rotational motion. This simple system is basically what allows us to take a force produced by, say, steam or an explosion and make a wheel turn. Stick a few of these together and time the rotation of each correctly, carefully controlling the explosions and the exhaust, and you have an internal combustion engine that powers and moves our cars. There are a lot of amazing things to me about it, but I am still impressed with how effectively it takes something moving back and forth and makes something spin around and vice versa.
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Typical gastropod anatomy: identifying the main parts of the shell of a common whelk

Typical gastropod anatomy

For a closer look next time you’re at the beach. Pay close attention to whether you find one with a dextral or sinistral aperture. Gastropods are the largest class of molluscs which includes limpets, snails and sea slugs. For those who weren’t sure. Info from the 1971 book, Discovering Sea Shells by Barry Charles
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The half-life of caffeine illustration: showing the effect of caffeine rising then decreasing over time

The half-life of caffeine

The half-life of caffeine is about 4 hours. The data vary, but for a medium-sized adult, you can probably expect half of the caffeine from that 3 pm cup of coffee to still be doing half of its thing about 7 pm, 4 hours later. Apparently, smokers deal with caffeine quicker, and caffeine sticks around in children much longer. You can expect about 10 minutes before it first kicks in, which, I suppose, is why if you’re feeling tired while driving, it’s a decent plan to take a break and drink a coffee, then have a 15-minute nap. Once it starts to kick in, you might hit peak caffeine any time from 45 minutes to 2 hours later. Caveat: The chart visualisation is extrapolated from reported data, so the shape is only approximate. Some references say longer, and some say from 3-9 hours or so. My source, which seemed pretty comprehensive, was: Bertil B. Fredholm, Karl Bättig, Janet Holmén, Astrid Nehlig and Edwin E. Zvartau, Actions of Caffeine in the Brain with Special Reference to Factors That Contribute to Its Widespread Use, Pharmacological Reviews March 1999, 51 (1) 83-133; Also see: tiredness can kill, take a break.
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Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions: a colourful wheel showing how emotions mix

Mapping emotions

This is Robert Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. I like it because it tries to make sense out of the range of emotions we have by relating his 8 primary emotions to related ones where two primary emotions meet. For example, remorse is like feeling both disgust and sadness; awe is surprise and fear. On opposite sides of the wheel are opposite emotions eg, Joy >< Sadness Other versions of his framework go 3D and map the intensity of emotions as well, for example, rage > anger > annoyance, or ecstasy > joy > serenity. Neat.
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The golden ratio: equation and an example of it in action showing the classic beautiful nautilus spiral

The golden ratio

The proportions of the golden ratio pop up in all sorts of places. They are a handy shortcut to make something we seem to innately find pleasingly proportioned. In Nature, the golden spiral abounds across the shell of the nautilus, the spiral of strawberry seeds, the spikes of cacti, and hurricanes. It’s found in the Pyramids and the Parthenon, the Mona Lisa, violins, photography and, very deliberately, in corporate logos. No wonder it’s sometimes called the golden ratio of beauty. There’s a pleasing simplicity to the equation too, where the ratio of the long over the short dimension is the same as both added together over the long dimension. Check out some golden ratio examples. Even Trump.
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