Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2015 09:45:29 -0700
From: Michael Nagle
Subject: Re: plotting in the world
One thought I had, related to the two things excerpted below: you could imagine giving the predator-prey model to someone with slices missing from it, and asking someone to interpolate or predict what would happen by filling in the gap. Maybe they would do this by drawing a slice (maybe on ordinary paper with a pencil) and it would be possible to turn that into a shape and see how it fit, and then compare with the actual graph. There's interesting variations there (you get the first 5 slices, draw out the next 5, or you get every other slice, draw in the missing ones, etc.)

One of the ways my bodyworker class asks people to learn anatomy is to draw out the relevant structures. One exercise is to look at a picture of connective tissue as seen under a microscope and then draw it. It seems like there's something there about drawing a shape that helps us integrate it more fully than just looking at it. 

Some of the things we were thinking about were:

- The fact that the plot is made of slices that you can pick up and slide out is an artifact of how it was fabricated, but it's an interesting action.  We talked about being able to grab a slice out of the plot, and bring it over to a circuit or signal-processing system, in order to use the slice's signal as input to the system.

...
 
Playing with the mockup, a surprising good feeling came from writing the equations by hand, in pencil (in real mathematical notation, with subscripts etc.), and pretending like I was scrubbing numbers and connecting numbers using motions of the pencil.  It felt so much better than typing ascii into a little box, and dragging pixels with a mouse.  I still do math longhand, generally, on scrap paper, and this strongly evoked that -- the tactile sensation, the freedom to write anything anywhere, the freedom to put the scrap of paper anywhere -- and scrubbing by dragging the pencil on the number (or drawing a plot freehand, etc) felt like a very natural extension of that.