Sketchplanations

The Buttered Cat Paradox explained

1. Cats always land on their feet
2. Falling toast always lands butter side down

So what will happen if you strap buttered toast to the back of a falling cat?

Presumably, the cat righting reflex will fight against the pull of the buttered toast.

Please don't drop cats.

In The Clock of the Long Now, Brand describes a coniferous forest:

The needle changes within a year.
The tree crown over several years.
The patch over many decades.
The stand over a couple of centuries.
The forest over a thousand years.
The biome over ten thousand years.

Pace Layers diagram by Stewart Brand explained: fashion, commerce, infrastructure, governance, culture, nature. Fast layers innovate, slow layers stabilise.

Fast-moving layers bring novelty and experimentation, while slower layers provide stability and memory. Together, the layers support, reinforce, and challenge each other—creating robust, adaptable societies.

"Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power." — Stewart Brand

Gaslight (1944) ⭐ 7.8 | Crime, Drama, Mystery 1h 54m | Approved

From Patrick Hamilton's play Gas Light where a husband tries to convince his wife, played by Ingrid Bergman in a 1944 film adaptation, that she imagined the dimming of gas lights in their house, which was due to him searching for jewels in the floor above. It's creepy!
www.imdb.com/title/tt0036...

Gaslighting illustration: an individual making a speech at their lectern tells lie after lie after lie. As the lies keep coming an audience member starts to question their own, previously firm, understanding.

Been thinking about this one a lot this year.

Gaslighting is manipulating someone psychologically such that they start to doubt their own sanity.

Lying or deceiving persistently plants seeds of self-doubt in others' minds. If it continues people can start to question their own reality.

Here's a simple illusion for you.

Our minds love taking mental shortcuts.

The psychology of what we actually do when we read is much more complex and fascinating than I first realised—as I find so often the case with things.

PS
Did you catch the repeated 'are', too?

Rarely have I heard someone so clearly articulate what it usually takes to do well at something and how commonly we misrepresent the path to success.

Sketching an iceberg in which about 90% of the iceberg is unseen under the surface seemed like an appropriate approach.

Biz Stone quote: Timing, perseverance and 10 years of trying will eventually make you seem like an overnight success — illustrated by someone on the tip of an iceberg with a whole lot of it underwater

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone is fond of saying:

"Timing, perseverance and ten years of trying will eventually make you seem like an overnight success."

Adam Savage, Mythbusters host, shared:

"Remember kids, the only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down."

"I don't believe in Computer Science. To me, science is the study of the behavior of nature...You need to know how Nature works in order to make the things, and so you use science in engineering, but you're doing it for a human purpose."
— Richard Feynman

Bell Labs engineer Richard Hamming:

"In science if you know what you are doing you should not be doing it.
In engineering if you do not know what you are doing you should not be doing it."
— Richard Hamming

The difference between Science and Engineering: quote by Theodore von Kármán "Scientists discover the world that exists; Engineers create the world that never was."

What makes science science and engineering engineering?

Aerospace engineer Theodore Von Kármán on Scientists and Engineers:
Scientists discover the world that exists; Engineers create the world that never was.
— Theodore Von Kármán

How to instantly feel better?

Let's talk about it on the podcast!

sketchplanations.com/podcast or on Spotify and Apple podcasts

In practice, as Dan Pink shared in his book When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, these are, therefore, the times when we’re more likely to do something extreme like running a marathon for the first time and, sadly, also committing suicide.

Take care out there.

And in the years just before the end of a decade, if we may have fallen short or feel there’s something else we want to accomplish, we’re much more likely to do it then than in any other year of a decade.

9-enders (nine-enders) explanation: people approaching their 30s, 40s and 50s, examining their lives for meaning and setting off skydiving, running marathons and climbing Everest

9-Enders (nine-enders)

Nine-enders are people in the last year of a decade, say, 29, 39, 49, 59. Adam Alter and Hal Hershfield, who introduced the term, propose that as we approach the end of a decade we are more likely to do a kind of "meaning audit" of our lives.

The Figure Skater's Spin and Conservation of Angular Momentum Illustrated with equations

When a figure skater pulls into one of those incredible spins, they provide one of the clearest examples of the conservation of angular momentum.

More: sketchplanations.com/the-figure-s...

There are natural parallels to other models like the stages of competence, Lev Vygotsky's zone of proximal development, or Carol Dweck's growth mindset.

learning journey of approaching a new concept, uncovering conflicts or contradictions with your knowledge, confusion, beginning to put new ideas together and finally the clarity of a new concept mastered.

The Learning Pit illustration: a journey from left to right; an individual faces a learning challenge represented by a large pit they need to reach the other side of. Having fallen down into the pit, the challenge seems more difficult than first anticipated. As the picture becomes clearer they discover what they need to climb up the other side to a point where they can look back down at the pit having mastered the challenge.

The Learning Pit

James Nottingham's metaphor of The Learning Pit illustrates the struggle before "getting it."

What is chiasmus? Illustration showing JFK's quote "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" arranged as A-B-B-A symmetry of thoughts.

Chiasmus: arranging words, phrases, or ideas in the structure A-B-B-A

The symmetry of thought of this rhetorical technique makes language more memorable, striking, and often more persuasive.

Chiasmus can involve just ideas or the exact repetition of words, called antimetabole.

This sketch, along with plenty of others in the "Starry-Eyed Surprises" section, features in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures.

What is the Goldilocks Zone: the range that supports life and distance from a star which supports liquid water

The Goldilocks Zone is the range around a star that’s not too hot or too cold to support liquid water. Liquid water is vital to sustaining life like we have on Earth, so fortunately for us, Earth sits in the Goldilocks Zone.

Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

In a classic Murphy's Law style example, I've concluded that I generally misunderstood Murphy's Law.

It doesn't have to highlight all the bad luck I have. Instead, it can be a call to consider what can go wrong, and given there's a chance that it will, prepare for that so it doesn't.

You may notice that Wales, which is part of the United Kingdom, is not represented on the Union Jack flag. This absence is because Wales was considered a principality under the Kingdom of England, not a separate kingdom, when the flag was created.

The Cross of St Patrick for Ireland: a red diagonal cross on a white background. Though Ireland is no longer part of the United Kingdom, it is still represented in the design.

The Cross of St George for England: a red cross on a white background.

The Saltire of St Andrew for Scotland: a white diagonal cross on a blue background. The term “saltire” refers to this specific diagonal cross shape in heraldry.

The Union Jack

The Origins of the Union Jack
The Union Jack, one of the most recognizable flags in the world, is a combination of three historic flags. It represents the union of nations within the United Kingdom at the time the Union Jack flag design was created and is made up of:

Temperature palindromes: Handy reference points for converting fahrenheit to celsius - 82-28 and 61-16

Handy conversion between Fahrenheit and Celsius

Like learning a new language or switching between miles and kilometres, the best way is to immerse yourself in a new scale so you just know what 55°F or 24°C feels like. But if you haven't reached that point, it's helpful to have a few benchmarks.

This sketch appears in my book Big Ideas Little Pictures.