
Cell and Molecular Biology Animated Textbooks - snailletters
https://www.smart-biology.com
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tasty_freeze
The illustrations and videos are good at conveying the relative scale of
things. But one mistake they make is common to just about every cartoon
depiction I've seen: the molecules seem to have intent. they fly into the
scene and an atom is exchanged with the binding site, then then remainder flys
away again. the stochastic nature everything is completely missing.

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1auralynn
I've made a fair amount of these kinds of animations in the past, and it's
much harder than it would seem to portray the random nature of interactions.
Another common criticism is that a lot of these visualizations don't show how
completely packed full of molecules/cells each of these environments are.

You're tasked with the almost-impossible goal of clearly conveying accurate
information, visually, in realms where a) though there are a lot of structural
data, the visual relationship of things gets VERY complex, b) not everything
is actually known, and c) the time and visual scales aren't naturally
perceptible to humans.

It's definitely not impossible (see Drew Barry's work, and from the glimpses
of this project I've seen it looks pretty great actually), just difficult, and
there's not a huge amount of money in it unless you want to work for pharma.
Personally, I've been moving more towards 3D interactive content vs. linear
videos because you can show a lot more layers, and having users drive what
they're focusing in on can be a lot more powerful than trying to design one
animation for every learning style.

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TeMPOraL
RE random and packed, the first video on the page (about bacterial flagella)
manages to pull out both by exploiting the time domain. First, it shows the
usual but misleading view focused on the flagellum, but near the end, it fills
in all the other missing activity in the displayed cutout - giving a sense of
how it fits into the whole.

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1auralynn
Yeah! I've been seeing bits and pieces of this project over the last few
weeks, and it really does look great.

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mncharity
Computer graphics and XR are part of an opportunity to transformatively
improve science education content, pre-K to graduate. And we're going to spend
years aggressively declining the opportunity.

As with that "Unit 1" video at the top of the page... by analogy,
"<Attenborough voice> We will get to know the animal kingdom, starting with
these airliner-sized mice wearing pink tutus and playing poker. Look at how
beautifully rendered they are! You can just _feel_ the feathers on their
flippers. You're students will find that highly engaging." Ah well, MVP mumble
mumble.

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Myrmornis
Could you clarify what you're saying? I thought the free sample video looked
pretty promising. Did you?

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mncharity
The "Unit 1" video presents atoms using aphysical cartoons misrepresenting
size, behavior, structure, and properties. Nuclei size by more than 3 orders
of magnitude.

One might argue that it's so obviously physically unrealistic and
representational, that it's "clearly" iconic. Except that it could easily be
made _more_ clearly iconic, but wasn't. And arguments of the form "that's so
clearly unrealistic, it won't cause misconceptions" are... just not what
happens.

Then there are all the usual problems with computer graphical representations
of chemistry, biochem, cell and tissue biology. Where "pretty"-but-misleading
is prioritized over the messy multiple representations needed to avoid
nurturing a rich ecology of misconceptions.

> thought [...it] looked pretty promising. Did you?

Better than many paper textbooks, yes. Doing the things we know are needed to
produce good student outcomes... there's a ways to go. Promising? 3D graphics
in general, oh very yes. But this project in particular, I've no idea. The
incentives around education content are very dysfunctional. So actually
providing deep transferable understanding... is usually not the metric of
interest.

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bsmitty5000
This seems to me like someone criticizing introductory physics courses because
they're not taking into account air friction and all the other minutiae from
the very beginning.

If someone progresses to the point where these misconceptions really become an
issue I think they would be corrected organically.

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mncharity
> seems to me like [...] minutiae

Or alternately, perhaps it's like students struggling with high-school
stoichiometry, with atom conservation, because they've managed to remain
unclear on the simple core concept that atoms are real objects, are real,
physical, little balls.

> think they would be corrected organically

Yeah, that's a widespread impression. That say high-school misconceptions will
disappear as students become undergraduate majors, and then graduate students.
It's not been well studied, at least the last time I checked. But at a
minimum, there are notable exceptions. If your 5-year old wants to know which
finger-paint color to use for the Sun, asking a first-tier astronomy graduate
student is likely to get them the wrong answer. Misconceptions turn out to be
highly resilient. Which is why creating and reinforcing them is not something
to do lightly.

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OldGuyInTheClub
Armando Hasudungan's hand illustrated biology and medicine videos are also
excellent.
[https://www.youtube.com/user/armandohasudungan/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/armandohasudungan/videos)

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zjg
This is pretty awesome to see. I have longed dreamed of doing this kind of
work, building interactive tools for teaching science (whether in an academic
setting or in science news media).

I'm planning to spend some time learning three.js in the coming months, but
does anyone else have advice for getting into this kind of work? Should I go
deep into linear algebra and the math behind the graphics? Or just keep things
simple and focus on the actual creative / artistic representation of
scientific ideas? (The latter certainly seems like the harder part).

Also curious where one could find paid work doing these kinds of things.

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Koshkin
A picture is worth a thousand words; a video is worth, well, 24 pictures per
second... (Times two, if it’s 3D.)

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TeMPOraL
It's not, really. Someone needs to make a more accurate version of this saying
that's rooted in information theory, to show that video isn't worth 24
_picture_ length in seconds, but picture + whatever is communicated in how it
changes over time (which is much, much less than a picture's worth).

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chris5745
This is amazing! I think this will really help the visual learners among us.

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notelonmusk
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_styles#Criticism)

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chris5745
Are you suggesting people don’t learn visually?

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notelonmusk
Would it make a difference if I did?

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throwaway_n
If you want something more accessible, I highly recommend the BBC documentary
"The Hidden Life of the Cell":
[https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6agslv](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6agslv)

If this course is at the same level of production values, I would buy it just
for entertainment purposes. It beats watching CGI explosions from movies! It
looks like it's just $65 dollars for independent students. The samples look
decent: [https://www.smart-biology.com/life-unit-1-from-atoms-to-
cell...](https://www.smart-biology.com/life-unit-1-from-atoms-to-cells-free-
sample-lessons/)

