this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[Thread] Mental Math (mander.xyz)
submitted 9 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 37 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (3 children)

Throwing and catching always amaze me. And it's not something that everyone is always great at, for sure, but anyone can try to toss a wad of paper into the waste basket. Whether or not you make it, the calculations under the hood, happening so quickly, always astound me to think about.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

What's amazing is our ability to calculate the path of something in the air.

There's a test they did with Cristiano Ronaldo where someone kicked a ball to him so he could head it. They shut off the lights before the ball was in the air and somehow from the body shape of the person kicking it, he was able to know how to make contact with it without being able to see it.

https://youtu.be/0k2ey_okQ4E?t=1255

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

I'm not a fan of Ronaldo but that was very cool to watch, thanks for sharing!

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 hours ago

I remember when I was younger and would lay on my back throwing a baseball up in the air and catching it, that I could watch it go up and not follow it with my eyes as it goes down and still have my hand in the right spot to catch it

[–] [email protected] 17 points 7 hours ago

Read somewhere that catching is actually dead simple, just "move towards the image of the incoming target" (I'm not talking about the arm kinematics).

There were a robot paper bin that zoomed under stuff you threw up in the air using no complicated algorithms for example.

Funnily many algos are calked on physical and chemical effects in the real workld, like splines for example were made with a thin metal bar and lead weight bending it to get the lines used in boat hull construction.