Writing in the Stream

I’m not sure who initially created the above animation in Desmos, but it’s super helpful for understanding how trig works, and how there’s both a right triangle and a circle involved. Maybe someone working at Desmos created the original? Whoever it was, thank you! And let me know if you know, and I’ll give them credit. I modified the original animation a bit (color coding, adding some points in degrees to translate the radians) so that it’s clearer how the angle is graphed on the x-axis.

Geogebra is an amazing tool for tinkering around with different mechanisms to see how they work. Here’s a video for how you can set one up, shared by Darren McGuigan, or Darren_ Mc_Guigan_14164205 on YouTube:

I tried it out and it works. Here’s a link to my recreation Geogebra file

https://www.geogebra.org/geometry/ye7awjsc

that you can play around with yourself if you want. It got me thinking about how this mechanism might work well for creating a robot that hangs from an I-beam and moves itself smoothly along, perhaps with a lot more of these mechanical “arms”.

Next up, a strandbeest! This was created by Stefan Himmelbauer: