Visual guide to airfoils

Bartosz Ciechanowski is at it again with an in-depth explainer that makes heavy use of slider-driven interactive graphics. This time he simulated the patterns of air flowing over and around the wings of an airplane, also known as airfoil.

The length of each article starts to feel kind of long at times, but there’s something to these simple sliders that are useful in keeping you engaged and helping to understand the physics.

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Physics of a bicycle visually explained

Riding a bicycle is a seemingly simple activity that we never forget how to do. However, the physics behind pedaling and movement is a balance between force and resistance. Bartosz Ciechanowski breaks it down in a visual essay filled with interactive demos.

The structure of Ciechanowski’s essays are straightforward with the interactives doing a lot of the heavy-lifting for every concept. The physics are split into many small parts for ease of understanding. It makes me wonder about a data visualization equivalent to explain a complex dataset.

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Interactive explainer for how cameras and lenses work

We use our cameras all of the time, and it almost seems like magic when you press that button and somehow an image is captured. But of course it’s not magic. Bartosz Ciechanowski provides a detailed interactive explainer on how the camera and lens record light.

There are a lot of satisfying sliders to adjust dimensions and see how the mechanics change. It reminds me of those exhibits at kid science museums with the big knobs and handles.

See also Ciechanowski’s explainer of a similar flavor on how gears work.

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How gears work

Bartosz Ciechanowski took a deep dive into how gears work and the physics behind the movement with a series of graphics and interactives:

I’ve always been fascinated by mechanical gears. There is something captivating about the way their teeth come together to create a fluid, unified motion.

In this blog post I’d like to look at these simple machines up close. I’ll explain how gears affect the properties of rotational motion and how the shape of their teeth is way more sophisticated than it may initially seem.

[Thanks, @mtoconnor3]

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