12 ms·
Bicycles from Sketches (2016)
- informatimago 6y agoWhat's frightening, are the ages noted on the sketches. THEY ARE FROM ADULTS !!! Clearly, this demonstrate information overload on their brains. They definitely should not be allowed to vote. I wonder how/if they can have functional lives. Aren't they all from an asylum?
- reitanqild 6y agoYou are heavily punished for this comment but instead of giving you another flag or downvote I hope there is a learning opportunity here: Think if you met someone who said any of these things while you were listening: - There are adults who cannot fish! - There are adults who cannot swim! - There are adults who cannot milk a cow if their life depends on it! - There are adults who cannot tell you 6 teams from premier league - There are adults who cannot tell you the rules of baseball, basketball, football - There are adults who cannot say even half of the American states or capitals - There are adults who cannot tell you which countries are members of the European Union - There are adults who cannot drive a car - etc It is frightening! Or not. We are just different. And for the record, more than two of the bullet points above covers me, a highly successful software engineer :-) Not everyone has the same skillset, the same background etc. Once we learn to respect others for what they are not for what they are not, we can make progress. I recommend you edit it and I'll try to delete or empty my comment afterwards :-) Edit: I see two hours have passed now so it is too late anyway. My advice still stands for another time: People can be excellent in most areas of live and still struggle mightily in others, at least that is my understanding.
- joejoint 6y agoNext to the name and age it's the profession. Here are some you think should not be allowed to vote. Anna, 24 - Student. Alessandro, 30 - Doctor. Federico, 32 - Professor. Martino, 27 - Doctor.
- egypturnash 6y agoI am a professional artist; drawing stuff from out of my head and making it look plausible, if not actually correct, is literally my day job. I have spent multiple decades practicing to be able to do this. Everything that I can draw out of my head and make look plausible rests on top of a solid foundation of spending time looking at real-world examples of the thing, or photos of the thing, and working from them. There is a huge hump that artists almost inevitably have to get over somewhere in the transition from "amateur" to "pro": amateurs almost inevitably convince themselves that they need to be able to draw anything with zero reference, and if they can't somehow magically do it they are a failure; pros will happily draw a lot of stuff with no reference, but the instant they realize they don't know what a thing looks like, they will put down their pencil and go find something to work from. Part of being a pro artist used to be maintaining a "morgue" - you would be constantly on the lookout for photos of things you thought you'd have to draw someday, and you'd clip and file them. The advent of image search has made this less necessary, but I certainly still have a few shelves full of coffee table books full of really nice photos of distinctive stuff - I have an entire book that is nothing but photographs of staircases. How does the human body work? How do all its muscles sheath the bones and organs, how do you break it down into basic shapes that you can quickly put on the canvas and then flesh out into a realistic drawing? Which parts should you exaggerate when you want to caricature a particular pose? Which parts should you not bother with more than a basic rendering of to best serve the needs of the drawing at hand? That alone is a body of knowledge that artists have to spend years cramming into their head before they can be a pro. We regularly circulate little tip sheets[1] that talk about the ways we have found to simplify these things. How much of your day-to-day work as a programmer comes out of your head? How much of it is looking through documentation and searching Stack Overflow? 1: https://theetheringtonbrothers.blogspot.com/p/every-how-to-think-when-you-draw.html https://theetheringtonbrothers.blogspot.com/p/every-how-to-t...
- jrockway 6y agoA bicycle is a complicated object that has many forgettable parts. Everyone knows that there are two wheels (bi-cycle) and that there's a triangle formed from the down tube, top tube, and seat tube. Except, the triangle has a 4th side to hold the steerer and fork (the head tube). Then there are the other details. The handlebars attach to a stem, which attaches to a steerer tube, which goes through the head tube with bearings on each side, and finally tapers at a "rake angle" to actually hold the hub of the front wheel. There is also the rear triangle that consists of the seat stays and chainstays (and the seat tube). You have to put the saddle somewhere, that's attached to a seatpost that goes inside the seat tube and is secured by clamping it in there. With all those in place, the rest is easy -- where the wheels, pedals / bottom bracket, and chain end up are all very natural. The problem is how often the bicycle is extolled as a simple triangle with some handwaving and two wheels. Turns out all that handwaving is quite complicated. The triangle becomes a shape with 4 edges. There are actually two triangles. And there are complicated details in joining the seat and fork to the bike. So... I don't think these people are dumb. They have been mislead by "it's just a triangle" when it's actually nothing like a triangle. The devil is in the details.
- brudgers 6y agoearlier, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17699017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17699017 and, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11478061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11478061
- reitanqild 6y agoThis has been discussed at least a couple of times before but maybe I have a new angle: Somewhere during the last three years or so I realized I'm one of those people who can hardly see mental images. Even my dreams seems to often be just feelings og having been somewhere and done something. However I can draw bikes my house and everything else that I know well (and I often have too draw things since I cannot keep mental models in my head.) Why is this, how can I draw something I cannot project in my head? Is it just because I understand it so well that if I try to draw it wrong my mind hurts? PS: My drawings are not nice, but they are somewhat correct, the frame makes sense, the chain is in the correct place etc etc. PPS: I keep wondering if I always was like this or if I lost it at some time (if I lost it my best guess is there's a mild form of something like PTSD because of a bunch of stuff that happened from I was 15 to 25).
- amenghra 6y agoDo you think you have some form of Aphantasia? This post by Blake Ross might be helpful? https://m.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ https://m.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-fe...
- reitanqild 6y ago> Do you think you have some form of Aphantasia? Yes, I think so, it is so strong the first time I tried to take the test I was somewhat surprised that you were supposed to be able to do all these things. I'll add the article to my reading list immediately :-) Edit: yep, read a few lines, very similar and interesting. Haven't seen this article before, thanks.
- lqet 6y agoI always wondered whether a good way to describe Aphantasia to people who don't have it is to ask them to "imagine" an odor. Most people can recognize specific oders effortlessly and remember them for decades (example: you smell some brand of aftershave, and you immediately know that this is how your great-grandfather always smelled, who has been dead for 20 years), but you cannot "think" of an odor and actually smell it the same way you can think of an apple and see and inspect its image inside your head. Yet you "know" what gasoline smells like, or fresh bread. This leads to another interesting question: are there people who cannot imagine music and other sounds, like speech? Is this related to Aphantasia? A question even more interesting: are there people who can imagine odors, or combinations of them? I would expect this to be very handy if you are designing perfume, for example.
- blakesterz 6y agoI love these sketches! Having worked in a bike shop for a bunch of years I'm really good at drawing a bike, but recently I tried to draw the outside of my house. The front of the house that I see nearly every day. My house that I've been living in for over a decade. I couldn't do it!
- cosmodisk 6y agoI'm the same.I can draw shoes,houses, spaceship and etc., however I can't draw familiar objects. I think this is partially because I wouldn't be able to describe familiar faces either,even though I see them on daily basis. It's weird how the brain works: I remember the email with some API specs that was sent to me 4 years ago but I struggle to remember what we spoke about over the dinner just a day before.. Would be interesting to see if anyone knows why it's like this.
- mcv 6y agoSome of these are gorgeous! Hilariously impractical, but gorgeous. Nice job. Shame it's rendered; I was kinda hoping they actually made these bikes. Although I suspect they'd be too dangerous to try them out.
- anm89 6y agoI love these more than words can describe. I would love to have them reproduced and put them on my wall.
- thesuitonym 6y ago>Little I knew this is actually a test that psychologists use to demonstrate how our brain sometimes tricks us into thinking we know something even though we don’t. They probably don't pose the question like this, though. I suspect you'd get different results if you asked a person, "Can you draw an accurate representation of a bicycle?" vs pestering them to draw a bicycle so you can make fun of them later. I know for myself, if someone handed me a sheet of paper and said draw a bike, I'd do it for fun, but it would not be correct.
- Sharlin 6y agoYeah, if simply asked to draw a bicycle most people are probably happy to just sketch something that represents the concept well enough to, say, work as a Pictionary clue. Would be interesting to see the results of being asked to draw as accurate a picture as possible. And not just the results, but the drawing process itself—I'd wager that having to think about it would elicit more "wait a minute, this doesn't go here after all" type realizations.
- rohansingh 6y agoI don't think "how to draw a bicycle" is the thing that your brain tricks into thinking that you know. Instead, it's "what does a bicycle look like?" If you ask most people if they know what a bicycle looks like, I think they'd tell you, yes, definitely. But really they don't. They know that it has a couple wheels and some sort of metal tubes, and that's a workable mental model to convince yourself that you know what a bicycle looks like.
- watwut 6y agoPeople can recognize bicycle from non-bicycle perfectly well. If you would make bicycle with unusually large wheels, people would recognize that perfectly. In particular, telling bike from random wheels and tubes is easy. So yeah, people do know how bicycle looks like. What people do not know is how to draw bicycle or any other thing. Unless artists, they don't know to abstract important details from unimportant and they are complete crap at proportions. For fun, ask people to draw face. Everything will be at wrong place with wrong size, but I still would not say people don't know how human face looks like.
- bewuethr 6y agoSome of them have now been built in real life! https://www.behance.net/gallery/77793195/Velocipedia-IRL https://www.behance.net/gallery/77793195/Velocipedia-IRL
- glaberficken 6y agoWow thanks. This one should be "rideable" at least theoretically: https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/ca9dfd77793195.5c920cb34d072.jpg https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/c...
- mactrey 6y agoI don't know much about bikes but why wouldn't the blue one with the solid wheels be rideable?
- kevmo314 6y agoThe rear wheel would likely shear upwards along the seat tube when the rider sits on it. I suppose with enough strength it could work, would be quite a heavy bicycle.
- glaberficken 6y agoI guess you mean this one? https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/fe4d2e77793195.5c920cb34c961.jpg https://mir-s3-cdn-cf.behance.net/project_modules/max_1200/f... If so, it is not "rideable" because you cannot steer it.
- saagarjha 6y agoI’m curious you could still ride it by leaning…
- glaberficken 6y agoOn a normal bicycle when you lean off the vertical axis, a compensation is made by turning the front wheel towards the "inside" of the lean thus bringing the bicycle again closer to the vertical. i.e. the bicycle (with the help of your steering input) turns the front wheel to catch your fall. If you lean without steering you will simply fall over to the side immediately! Don't try to do this by the way =) This is the same principle of balancing an upright broom vertically, handle first, on the palm of your hand. When the broom falls out of balance, you simply move your hand in the same direction to recover the center of balance. A bicycle is balanced by exactly the same principle. Edit: Relevant Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y4mbT3ozcA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y4mbT3ozcA
- nogabebop23 6y agoTell them to only use 2 triangles - they might nail it but most people do even worse!
- martin-adams 6y agoWhat really surprised me is that the bicycles weren't made using 3D modelling, it looks like he used something like Photoshop to compose the images.
- tomcam 6y agoObviously a pitch for yourbike.io, YC’s Winter 2021 batch. It’s one of the better BAAS ploys (Bicycles As A Service)!
- rgovostes 6y agoI didn't know what part was missing from the first bike and it was a little frustrating the author didn't explain! I have an idea now from comparing to real bikes, but I am not confident that this bike would "immediately break." From forces on the rear wheel?
- mkl 6y agoIt's missing the horizontal struts between the pedals and the back axle. Those make strong triangle shapes, and without them the back fork is going to be quite flimsy and unstable. The person's weight on the seat would put a lot of torque on the welds connecting the back fork struts to the frame below the seat.
- praptak 6y agoI wonder what else seems simple but is actually hard to draw from memory. My example is the simplest knot, although the difficulty seems a bit different from that of the bike.
- layoutIfNeeded 6y ago- Try drawing the steering wheel of your car - Try drawing the face of your wristwatch / clock
- tobr 6y agoI would guess the tricky thing with bikes are all the similar looking metal bars at different angles. It’s hard to perceive the overall shape of the bike and remember how the pieces are connected. So maybe other similar things that are assembled from several parts would be hard: a folding chair, a pair of scissors, a suspension bridge, the Eiffel Tower, a catapult, etc.
- vvpan 6y agoWhat blew me away is that the author is using 2d vector graphics to draw all that. I think there might've been a follow up post where he shows the process.
- dredmorbius 6y agoAnimated graphic at the end of the post.
- markkat 6y agoIMO it's underappreciated how these mistakes are not a bug of human intelligence, but a feature. They reveal a default non-literal interpretation of the world, which can be made less abstract when needed. However, it's the default abstractness that prevents us from making gross contextual errors based upon a literal interpretation.
- thangalin 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire
- moreoutput 6y agoI've always wondered -- is there something I can read/see that compares the drawings from savants like Stephen to actual photographs? I'd like to dig into the specifics.
- dvirsky 6y agoHaving fixed my bike so many times over the years, I can easily sketch a correct bike - if not in terms of proportions (at least without any corrections), but in how the frame is constructed and how all the moving parts come together. I guess someone who doesn't need this knowledge will just use a more abstract model.
- jwalton 6y agoI, too, can correctly draw a bike. I think anyone who's spent any time fixing bikes will be able to do this; if you know that it's called a "diamond framed bike", and you know why it's called that, it'd be pretty hard to not know how to draw it.
- glcheetham 6y agoThis feature really is a bug for Chinese speakers. The same phenomenon as people being unable to accurately draw a bicycle, an object you're pretty familiar with, is called "character amnesia" when you're unable to write a Chinese character that you probably see every day and can read and understand with no problems. The meaning of the character is definitely abstracted away somewhere in your brain, but there might be hundreds or thousands of characters you're simply unable to reproduce on paper. The Chinese characters are composed of a specific order of strokes, and sometimes it's like you can't bring a clear enough picture of it into your mind's eye to be able to reverse engineer it with a pen on paper. I probably experience this a lot more as a learner of Chinese as a foreign language, so I'm pretty familiar with the feeling of "Character amnesia". It happened to me the other day with 牙 (tooth) a pretty simple character that you'd think would be easy to remember. Once you get the first two to or so strokes down though muscle memory seems to take over and you finish it almost subconsciously. From anecdotal examples, this is actually pretty common, and in mainland Chinese sources I've read they seem to put it down to people using pinyin (romanised pronunciation) input on phone and PC keyboards instead which gets people out of the habit of remembering stroke orders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
- murican22 6y agoDesigner: "I updated the mocks to match your requirements." Product Manager: "Close enough." Engineer: "..."
- nradov 6y agoIf you showed some people a sketch of something like a Ventum triathlon bike they would probably say it was wrong or fake. The shape of bikes has been held back for too long by tradition and outdated UCI race equipment rules. https://ventumracing.com/bikes/ https://ventumracing.com/bikes/
- devb 6y agoOr the safety bicycle design is so perfect that any attempt to “improve” upon it winds up coming across more as an art project rather than a utilitarian upgrade.
- nradov 6y agoThe point is to go faster, not to be utilitarian. Materials and aerodynamics have improved since 1890.
- thrwyoilarticle 6y agoIf utilitarianism optimises for local travel, the biggest difference I've seen is a curved top-tube on omafiets. If it optimises for moving rider and luggage from A-to-B, touring bikes are pretty standard.
- dredmorbius 6y agoIn the case of standard racing bicycles, it really is rules rather than tech. There are different formulae for road cycling (governed by Union Cycliste Internationale), triathlon bikes (International Triathlon Union), and "human powered vehicles" (International Human Powered Vehicle Association), typically recumbent and with fairings, and others. Top speed (undrafted) for HPV over a timed one mile is 78 MPH. http://www.whpva.org/land.html#220 http://www.whpva.org/land.html#220 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_bicycle#Distinction_between_road_bicycles_and_others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_bicycle#Distinction_bet...
- stinos 6y agoDunno, doesn't look that special to me. But I've had quite a bunch of different bikes (trials/mtb/bmx/cruiser/race/'normal' day to day) and am from a cylcing-heavy country so I'm used to seeing many different shapes.
- loeg 6y agoIt's kind of hard to draw a chain and chainstays clearly. That seems to be one of the common missing pieces. They're in a similar region of the bicycle.
- notatoad 6y agoit's easy to assume that these are people who don't have a lot of familiarity with bikes, but pro cyclists don't do much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hXwbgio5cU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hXwbgio5cU
- leafmeal 6y agoIf you're drawing of a bicycle doesn't look like a bicycle, then you've never drawn a bicycle before.
- tantalor 6y agoMods: add [2016] to title
- amwelles 6y agoMy friends and I did this, but with horses, during a camping trip once. The results were hilarious and still something we joke and laugh about.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pengaru 6y agoI'm disappointed nobody ever asked me to draw a bicycle from memory during a technical interview. That would be pretty fun.