vihart

New Video: Can I Beat My Own Challenge?

Welcome to another episode of “why am I like this, why do I spend my time on things like this when I could be spending my time on things that are beautiful and good”.

But it’s still Pi season, and with the end of March looming I somehow decided this is what I needed to do. And so I did.

And because my brain is melted, that is all I have to say about that.

🐌,

Vi

Edit: also, here is the link to just playing the full 314 digits of pi: 2022-03-26 03:49:24 +0000 UTC View Post

Piano Secrets Masterclass for Pi Day 2022

Another video already? Yes. I thought it'd take longer, because the footage I captured felt like a mess and I thought I'd have to start over, maybe with a proper script. But once I got into the editing groove it only took a couple days to wrangle the footage into something that works.

Or at least I hope it works, for its intended audience, which is pianists and the piano curious. And I'll be curious to hear if people are interested in this kind of video, though I'll probably try to do m...

Pi Day 2022: Chromatic Challenge

This is my 12th annual Pi Day video. 

Our Pi Day celebrations are perhaps the most consistent thing in my life, and part of me is always surprised how I manage to follow through year after year. A few years into this, when people started commenting on how they’re looking forward to Pi Day even if I haven’t posted recently, or consider the annual Pi Day video to be something of an institution, a reliable beacon in the turning of the spheres, I found it very humbling. I don’t k...

New Video: Twelve Threads

Hello everybody!

How do I explain this video? All I know is that it is very much itself.

If you haven't seen the previous video about the BTS Octahedron, you might want to start there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPKUbfIrlL8

Thank you for supporting this video! It ended up taking quite a bit more time and budget than my usual. I'll  be honest, if I hadn't pre-committed to its existen...

How We Reopen

 A month ago I became involved in a bipartisan effort to really understand what it would take to get through the COVID-19 crisis in the US.

My first contribution was helping write a white paper on digital contact tracing. It was inspiring and humbling to work with so many incredible folks jumping...

Outpacing the Virus (new whitepaper)

Hey all you good humans,

Difficult to believe that Pi Day was just three weeks ago, when I wrote about how my goal with the Pi Day video this year was to sneakily get PSA info to people who weren't taking COVID-19 seriously and weren't seeking out information about it.

In the days after Pi Day, the situation in the US changed so quickly that the video soon became obsolete. At this point there is almost no one living in such a bubble that this situation is not affecting them in som...

Well I made a video about a tv show I guess

Hello good humans!

It's been a while since I published a video, and I know this won't be everyone's cup of tea... but I've always enjoyed watching other people's in-depth analyses of movies and TV so I thought I'd have fun and try something new. 

I'm meh about most TV and movies, but I just watched The Witcher and really appreciated how every moment of the first episode serves multiple purposes, which is always how I like to produce. In 18 minutes I managed to cover the first...

Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data

Hello good humans!

I've been in heads-down work mode for the past two months writing this piece: https://theartofresearch.org/ai-ubi-and-data/

It's about AI and the value of data, and why the pairing of AI and Universal Basic Income is attractive on the surface but has some deep problems (particularly regarding general respect for humanity). I also wanted to explain the motivation behind some of ...

Pi Day 2019: 6 Digits of Pi!!! 🍰

Hello Good Humans!

We did it, made it 'round the sun another two pi times, just in time for the 9th Annual Vi Hart Pi Day Video!

I've had this one in mind for many years, a lighthearted bit of fun for the special digits 3-14-19. I hope you're as amused as I am.

I was worried about getting this one done in time but we did it! We did it yay yay yay!

🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌🍰🐌

...

The Meaning of Cake

New video! New video!

Hello good humans,

I could not help but try this bundt cake scutoid experiment based on figure 1 c in the original scutoid paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05376-1 

Of course, this had to be in a video, and I tried to make things easy on myself by mostly copying the format of the previous video in the series. But I wanted to have a bit more o...

The Mathematics of Monkeybread

Hello Good Humans!

The Monkeybread video is live, and I'm pretty happy with it! It looks so tasty in a headset, so if you have a cardboard or other VR headset do check it out in VR! 

If you saw the earlier draft, you'll notice that while much of the content of the script is the same, the tone is now lighter and more casual with all the tiny details that I obsess over for weeks when editing a script to try and make it both deep and accessible, humorous and serious. I'm especia...

Scutoids Are Live!

Hello good humans!

I'm very excited about this video. I've really fallen in love with scutoids in the past few months, and I hope the care and attention comes through.

I appreciate your being patient and supportive as I obsessed over how to make the perfect papercraft scutoid, how to film in VR180 while still maintaining my style, and obsessiveness about every single prop and shot and word. It's done! It's out! I...

The Calculating Stars book recommendation

Hello! I just flew across the country and would like to recommend a book that made my trip fly by. After being given many glowing recommendations, I finally read The Calculating Stars: A Lady Astronaut Novel by Mary Robinette Kowal, and it was every bit as amazing as my recommenders promised it would be.

The Calculating Stars is a hard scifi alternate history where two changes have been made to the universe:

1. Dewey beats Truman, leading to a plausible shift in federal funding where the...

Scutoids

Hello good humans! Today I would like to talk about Scutoids.

Earlier this month I did a lens clip series looking to see if we could find a scutoid in a pomegranate. The compiled video is embedded above, though it might not make sense without some background, so I thought I'd write an article going through my thinking.

What is a scutoid? It's the latest viral math shape sensation in the news! As seen in Nature, cells gr...

How much is "About 2" really?

So last week I was supposed to be working on spidermath 2, and at lunch I noticed something weird about the numbers on a can of soup. 

I thought, oh, grocery store applied math is always useful to share, I'll just quickly make a little video for my second channel or something. Let me just write down this idea...

and 10 hours later I came out of my video-writing trance with a 10-minute script draft and a bowl of ramen.

Winnn!

On the other hand, it's yet more proof that I ...

Four Utilities Puzzle (and how to ruin a bagel)

We did it! New video! Mugs! Bagels! Peachy Rings! Toroidal Graphs!

#3 on my "what videos can I make quickly" experiment is response/puzzle commentary, in this case in response to this collab by 3blue1brown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvCytJvd4H0

What I learned is that this kind of video is not a 1 or 2-day video, it is a one-week video. The script was fairly quick to write, but not as quick as Spider...

Mini-Etude in D

So for the past three days I've been working on trying to make a fun little music theory video... but it turns out the syncing process is not as automatic as I thought. So that might have to wait, possibly forever.

But I did decide to post on my second channel just the short piece I wrote for y'all to fit within a lens clip the other day.

Here's the sheet music if you want: http://...

Spidermath!

Thank you for your support!

Editing to add a little more background story, now that I'm not a morning tiredperson:

On this week's VIM LIVE we talked about rituals, and I talked about one of my current manufactured rituals which is to try to go on a walk at lunch time and identify a new thing in the world (tree, plant, bird, bug, whatever) to write down in my stuff identification book.

Every week we have homework, and M gave me the homework to add more ritual to it by singing a magi...

Deleted Scenes and Making Of Metachirality!

Hello good humans!

I gotta make this quick since the video already finished uploading and it's after 6pm:

1. Deleted scenes and making of video is up! I thought it'd be an easy 2 day project but it took 3 and was a little more difficult than I thought. Creating the deleted scenes and collecting the lens clips took about as long as I thought (even including the hour of fighting with Android File Transfer), but then I went back and forth a few times on how to frame those two chunks. I ende...

Metachirality!

Hello good humans! Metachirality part 2 is here, pastakitties and all.

There's so much more to say about metachirality and screw symmetry, so many tidbits that didn't make it into the final video... I was thinking of doing a little bonus video that mentions these things, without getting fancy about the narrative so it's quick to make.

Mostly this week is going to be an infrastructure week. I've got a bunch of support stuff to catch up on---paperwork, messages, updating software and shuff...

Metachirality?

Well good humans, Metachirality part 1 is live! Thank you for sticking around and helping fund its creation!

This video is based on a true story. More specifically, I was told many years ago that Metachirality was a strange property of some higher dimensional symmetry groups and that only John Conway understands it and that even he doesn't "apprehend"[1] it completely. Which of course made me go "pfff I could totally understand it the best ever, just you wait."

Years later I came across ...

Lens: Awesome and Has Bugs

As you may have seen by the overabundance of email notifications (apparently lens still has some bugs, which I have reported), Patreon has added a new feature kind of like snapchat where I can upload video and image clips that disappear after 24 hours. And it's even easier to use than snapchat, at least from my side of things!

It's got some bugs (besides the ants in my most recent clips) but I hope you'll bear with me as we figure it out. You can remove email notifications in settings on the p...

Pi Day Rant 2018!

It's 3/14/1...8, and we're just going to roll with it. Why not have Pi be 3.1418...?

As I explain, it ends up being the worst Pi Day ever. And that was before we got the news of Stephen Hawking's passing, so if Pi Day 2018 wasn't the worst before, it certainly is now!

My favourite part of making this video was probably putting more sport in Sport Arena Stadium. In a different video we could have gone deep down the path of the curvature of space, but for Pi Day I'm happy to just plant the...

Full Speed Ahead

Two of last week's Pi Poll options were pretty close, and comments hinted that many people thought a Classic Pi Rant would be more fun but maybe a 4th Wall breaking video would be better for them, like eating your vegetables. 

In addition, I didn't realize you could vote on more than one option but apparently you can and many people voted for both options.

So that's what we're doing! After coming back to my scripts today I thought of a way to rewrite the Classic Rant that sets up fo...

Snow Day: Unusual Tracks

Well, the snowy world is full of interesting things to think about, and I thought I'd shoot a behind-the-scenes or dogwalk video just for you. And then as I was doing that I thought why not put a little more effort in and make it public on my main channel?

So, that happened.

Ok now let's talk about wobblers. There's some great ones at the Museum of Mathematics in NY (if they still have that exhibit on the floor) made out of solids of revolution with a twist: 2018-03-05 01:02:25 +0000 UTC View Post

Peace for Triple Piano

It's done! It's live! Woooo!

And here's the making of video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1zJoU6Luss

SPACE TIME DIAGRAAAAMS

I'll write a little more about it all later, but I wanted you to be the first to know it's up :D

Thank you thank you thank you for sticking with me through it all!

Vi

Feb. update and Ambisonic test

Happy February! Thank you all for sticking around while I work on this project. It's wonderful to be able to pay my bills whether I want to work on something easy or something a bit more outside my usual.

The video is looking pretty good at this point, after finally breaking down and getting a Premiere CC subscription. It's a bit different from CS6 but I'm quickly getting up to speed.

Which means I'm starting to focus on the audio! As I mentioned before, I have my heart set on ambisonic ...

Child (documenting a 2014 art game)

As Christmas is almost here, yesterday I decided to try to document an art game called "Child" that I made over Christmas in 2014, and that has long-since deprecated in both hardware and software. 

The flat version still works though, which you can play here: vihart.github.io/child

During my years as a VR Principal Investigator, we usually took the time to document our work as we went. Hardware and software move fast and we couldn't count on an experiment that works today to work ev...

Hexaflexaflakes

We did it! Finally, after many years, mathematical snowflake crafting and mathematical hexaflexagon crafting have been combined to form hexaflexaflakes, and we got it done just in time for the holidays.

I really wasn't sure whether this video would come together in time. Just before the Great Patreon Kerfluffle of 2017, I had worked on the script enough to come to something beyond just the "Let's make hexaflexagons that are snowflakes" aspect, relating abstract mathematical ideas to a science-...

Back to business as usual!

I don't know if you got a notification because I didn't, but Patreon has announced that they are no longer going to implement the fee and payment structure change that they announced last week: https://blog.patreon.com/not-rolling-out-fees-change/

As such, I am no longer suspending payments. Expect them to go through on Jan 1st just as they have every month, no extra fees.

Patreon had a pretty r...