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I was reading a popular OER Astronomy textbook yesterday. Long sigh. "Why did it take so long to..."? Regrettably not. "How very long will it eventually take

I was reading a popular OER Astronomy textbook yesterday. Long sigh. "Why did it take so long to..."? Regrettably not. "How very long will it eventually take to...", write an intro Astronomy textbook, that doesn't bungle the color of the Sun? I still don't know of a single one. With true-color in a leading image, and in illustrations. With no misconceptions about yellow stars, or scattering to yellow, or blackbody color, or color perception. With explicit mention of stellar classification color's non-perceptual white-point of blue Vega. With correctness from clarity, not from ambiguity and omissions. Such a text could have been written any time in the last few decades. People have been suggesting it. So how many more decades will we wait? It's a mistake to confuse systemic communication, coordination, and incentive dysfunction, with "people don't care" (as the interventions needed are different)... but they do superficially look so similar. Similarly, atoms are taught very poorly, even by the incoherent standard of chemistry education content. I'm currently trying to decide whether to create a little exemplar of better, to speed up too-long conversations about transformative content improvement. "Atoms are little balls"; interactive accurate simulations; real pictures. Consider those pictures. There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube. A few show up in talks, also space constrained, also rarely on youtube. So to achieve a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing", would require a lot of mucking about, asking after images, educating about copyright... sigh. At least accurate electron simulation is getting easier with time, with open-source python replacing expensive commercial replacing good-luck-with-that fortran. And yet, for how long will student understanding and careers suffer from rubbish content? One more year? 5? 10? 25? More? As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet".

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet". Most of it caused by "who's going to pay for it? I can't afford to do it on my own". And, sadly, the need to make money at every step of the way is what causes a lot of these problems. You wouldn't have to educate anyone about copyrights when dealing with pictures of atoms if there weren't a couple layers of rent-seekers in between you and the photographer. > a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing" One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do yet is a kind of "continuity of zoom" image from everyday scale to nanoscale. Imagine a video (or better yet, a frame with a slider you can drag back and forth yourself) depicting an object - say, a metal sheet, or a fly's wing, or something - that starts in 1:1 scale, and then the zoom level gradually increases, going through overlapped perspectives of camera, optical microscope, ... [whatever they use in the middle] ... up to a scanning microscope, so you can watch as the image is being zoomed all the way to the atomic level. With no jump cuts in between. Would do wonders for people's sense of scale and understanding of what the world is made of.
- bboreham 7y ago
  This video zooms out to 10^24 then in to 10^-16. Made in 1977, for IBM. https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0 https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0
- ghaff 7y ago
  See Powers of Ten from 1968. Although I imagine there are more recent examples.
  - BlueTemplar 7y ago
    Yeah, I have seen some.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Haven't seen that. All the recent examples I saw were vector drawings (Flash animations, then HTML5 ones, and their renditions on YouTube). Still, I assume that that 1968 video was mostly fiction and artist's imagination between ~ 10^-5 and 10^9. With current-era tech, we should be able to go down to 10^-8 with a real shot of a real object.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      It’s by Ray and Charles Eames and is considered to be pretty groundbreaking. But, yes, we know a lot more and have more imagery regarding the small scales in particular than we did 50 years ago.
- csunbird 7y ago
  Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1416/ https://xkcd.com/1416/
- lambdadmitry 7y ago
  That's what the company I work with tries to do (among other things) https://youtu.be/ojW9d9HIQC8?t=15 https://youtu.be/ojW9d9HIQC8?t=15 Although it's really challenging to do well in realtime in google daydream grade VR
michaelt 7y ago
> There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube. My approach to this, when I was in such a situation, was to put them on Wikipedia with the most liberal license possible. Assuming someone else hadn't already put a better picture, that is! And from there, they made their way into other academics' presentations and suchlike - exactly as I intended.
- mncharity 7y ago
  Good approach. But that's a path, a pipeline, with a lot of steps, and potential for friction. You've learned and been persuaded about what was originally a hypothetical benefit. Curationally sorted through a pile of media and made tradeoffs and selections. Learned about copyright and licenses, and had misconceptions about them addressed. Sufficiently resolved any concerns about its impact on you selling some media to publishers. Made a decision. Learned about the pragmatics of uploading. And executed. The difficulty of facilitating that process varies enormously. Instant email responses, to contemplating the ethics of joining a line of graduate students following their professor like ducklings, struggling for a moment of attention. Self-spun-up on copyright, to repeatedly not getting it, to 'I sent you the image, just use it and cite me, this lawyer stuff is bs'. 'Here's an image' to 'let's make arrangements for you to come by and choose one of them'. A graduate student available and motivated to catalyze the process, or not. And so on. It can be trivially easy, or "this is just not going to converge any time soon". It might be nice to have better infrastructure, to reduce the energy barrier here. Something more than libraries' scattered "creating OER" docs. Or someone for whom such community facilitation is their focus.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

> As with individuals, society has a great deal of "yeah, I really should do that; been meaning to; but I just haven't gotten around to it yet". Most of it caused by "who's going to pay for it? I can't afford to do it on my own". And, sadly, the need to make money at every step of the way is what causes a lot of these problems. You wouldn't have to educate anyone about copyrights when dealing with pictures of atoms if there weren't a couple layers of rent-seekers in between you and the photographer. > a minimal standard of "when introducing a thing, show the bleeping thing" One thing I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do yet is a kind of "continuity of zoom" image from everyday scale to nanoscale. Imagine a video (or better yet, a frame with a slider you can drag back and forth yourself) depicting an object - say, a metal sheet, or a fly's wing, or something - that starts in 1:1 scale, and then the zoom level gradually increases, going through overlapped perspectives of camera, optical microscope, ... [whatever they use in the middle] ... up to a scanning microscope, so you can watch as the image is being zoomed all the way to the atomic level. With no jump cuts in between. Would do wonders for people's sense of scale and understanding of what the world is made of.

bboreham 7y ago
This video zooms out to 10^24 then in to 10^-16. Made in 1977, for IBM. https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0 https://youtu.be/0fKBhvDjuy0
ghaff 7y ago
See Powers of Ten from 1968. Although I imagine there are more recent examples.
- BlueTemplar 7y ago
  Yeah, I have seen some.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Haven't seen that. All the recent examples I saw were vector drawings (Flash animations, then HTML5 ones, and their renditions on YouTube). Still, I assume that that 1968 video was mostly fiction and artist's imagination between ~ 10^-5 and 10^9. With current-era tech, we should be able to go down to 10^-8 with a real shot of a real object.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    It’s by Ray and Charles Eames and is considered to be pretty groundbreaking. But, yes, we know a lot more and have more imagery regarding the small scales in particular than we did 50 years ago.
csunbird 7y ago
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1416/ https://xkcd.com/1416/
lambdadmitry 7y ago
That's what the company I work with tries to do (among other things) https://youtu.be/ojW9d9HIQC8?t=15 https://youtu.be/ojW9d9HIQC8?t=15 Although it's really challenging to do well in realtime in google daydream grade VR

michaelt 7y ago

> There are lots of wonderful images and videos of atoms... on peoples' drives. Not in papers, for space. Not on lab websites, for why bother, when few visit. Rarely on youtube. My approach to this, when I was in such a situation, was to put them on Wikipedia with the most liberal license possible. Assuming someone else hadn't already put a better picture, that is! And from there, they made their way into other academics' presentations and suchlike - exactly as I intended.

mncharity 7y ago
Good approach. But that's a path, a pipeline, with a lot of steps, and potential for friction. You've learned and been persuaded about what was originally a hypothetical benefit. Curationally sorted through a pile of media and made tradeoffs and selections. Learned about copyright and licenses, and had misconceptions about them addressed. Sufficiently resolved any concerns about its impact on you selling some media to publishers. Made a decision. Learned about the pragmatics of uploading. And executed. The difficulty of facilitating that process varies enormously. Instant email responses, to contemplating the ethics of joining a line of graduate students following their professor like ducklings, struggling for a moment of attention. Self-spun-up on copyright, to repeatedly not getting it, to 'I sent you the image, just use it and cite me, this lawyer stuff is bs'. 'Here's an image' to 'let's make arrangements for you to come by and choose one of them'. A graduate student available and motivated to catalyze the process, or not. And so on. It can be trivially easy, or "this is just not going to converge any time soon". It might be nice to have better infrastructure, to reduce the energy barrier here. Something more than libraries' scattered "creating OER" docs. Or someone for whom such community facilitation is their focus.