Jamie Simon
4D SIMULATION
It's commonly stated that humans can't understand a 4th dimension. I was skeptical, so I made this simulation of balls bouncing and colliding in 4D. The 4th dimension is shown by color: red and blue are its extremes. The balls bounce in a rectangular prism with gravity pulling downwards. This was coded entirely in Python.
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I find that, after watching it enough, people can actually understand how objects move in 4D. It seems that the strangeness of 4D is mostly just due to it being unfamiliar, and I like that that unfamiliarity can be changed.
STAR NAME ORIGINS
Despite how universal astronomy has been to civilization, the modern names for stars have their origins in only a few ancient cultures. To visualize the origins of the names of celestial bodies, I made star charts for the Northern and Southern hemispheres showing stars' names' language of origin. Star size indicates apparent magnitude. I took star position and magnitude data from http://nifty.stanford.edu/2009/reid-starmap/starmap.html and etymology data largely from Wikipedia. As it turns out, when an American looks upwards on a cloudless night, unbeknownst to many, more than half of the names of the stars in view are Arabic.