iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

I couldn't figure out how to quote steve stonebraker's post about this from a couple weeks ago.

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I don't use AI for anything I write, not just rec letters. Some people do, but baking it right into the platform tied to detailed academic and demographic data, just feels so wrong to me.

I don't know if this model is trained on the backs of letter writers, but all sorts of models are trained on all sorts of unpaid, uncredited, and often unaware sources. I despise how grey and obfuscated the world has become in the last few years, and how ambiguously commodified we have all become.

This year I started putting this in my opening paragraph, "In this AI world, I as a human will try to tell you some real things you don't already know about student."

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

I think this AI wave makes the personal anecdotes and specifics,no matter how trivial,stand out.Typos and all.They are the few scraps of humanity left in the process.Also wonder is the model used trained on the millons of letters uploaded to the platform over the years?Is that in a terms of service?

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Bonus kudos if you make a car with an attachable sail to increase drag. More kudos if you design the cars to be robust enough to tolerate head on collisions.

Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 30/10/2025

How cool would a hotwheels car with an accelerometer, wheel rotation/linear position/velocity/accerlation,Normal Force sensor be?Kind of like a scaled down smart cart + Normal Force sensor. Imagine making plots of position, speed, centripetal and tangential acceleration, Normal Force around a loop.

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

I'm not choked up by that one either.

Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

That's fantastic! Thank you!

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I saw your post, looked and sure enough, there it is when you go to upload a letter. I agree. I don't use AI for anything I write, not just rec letters. Some people do, but baking it right into the platform tied to detailed academic and demographic data, just feels so wrong to me.

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I'd love a native way to control the bounds of the axes to variables, similar to the way we can change the dimensions and orientation of a picture with variables.

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Could also be fun to randomly drop 3 known masses around the center of a bull's eye, students drag the masses to where they think they need to be to get close to the center of the bull's eye. You'd have to restrict the masses to some minumum distance. Then they get a score when their cm is revealed

I just missed the dimension slider the first time I read. I see you already included 2d.

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Could have the user drag the angle of the block and release, then animate it falling one way or the other. Could have the block at an angle fill with water and watch the cm go up until it tips over.

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Could have students predict the cm location by dragging a predicted location, then reveal the actual cm and show them numerically how close they got. A sort of game.

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 23/10/2025

Very nice. You could have a "not flatten" mode where the y-coordinates also vary. Complete tangent, but it could be fun to made a simulation of a block tipping over. Imagine a block you could change the angle of. Show the CM and weight vector, maybe a vertical line at the corner.

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Playing with iterating through preset parameters for a @desmos simulation. A table of values makes it easy to cycle through different scenarios. This particular sim is for equilibrium of a rod supported by a cable. www.desmos.com/calculator/b...

Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

I think it is common to talk about accumulated error in a numerical simulation. I think of simulations with a time step. For example Runge Kutta drastically reduces the error with each time step in an orbit simulation, or a large angle pendulum. I am curious what sparked your question.

Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

In calculus based (AP Physics C) Electricity and magnetism, students learn about Gauss's Law,which we use here for radially symmetric charge where charge density varies with radius.I wanted a way to create a visual of charge density in a sphere varying with radius.The sim above matches the expected

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

#iTeachPhysics Playing with @desmos.com 3d, exploring spherically symmetric charge distributions where p(r)=r^n. Vary n and watch the charge distribution change in 3d. p(r),Q_enc(r),E(r) graphed on XY plane. Toggle each octant on and off by clicking large corner Pts. www.desmos.com/3d/wmp7fkjdyh

[DH-125] 3d Spherical Charge Distribution

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 13/10/2025

For high school physics? incline,pulley,meterstick,stop watch,tiny bowling ball pendulum,ferris wheel,2 cars colliding, 2 vectors and their resultant,tiny mass on a tiny spring, a gyroscope,balancing bird,lens, a diffraction grating,small light bulb and battery,2 magnets,double rainbow,f=ma card

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 12/10/2025

Just playing around some more with Desmos 3d. Specifically Spherical Coordinates and octants. Points generated randomly. Click single dots to hide Octants. Change Vector in Spherical Coordinates. Just for fun ... www.desmos.com/3d/bkcwfvungl

Spherical Coordinate and Octant Play

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

I gelt the same way. It is especially nice that changung N does randomize the masses, so you can toggle back and forth. They don't retandomize until you click a mass.

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

A few more minutes of messing around so a line is drawn automatically for 2 masses, triangle for 3 masses, up to 4 masses. www.desmos.com/3d/0or8l2m0mj

Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Center of Mass

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This is great. I've missed this kind of inspiration. I played around to make the number of masses variable and scaled the size of the masses to their mass. www.desmos.com/3d/4zniktcj6g Click on a mass to randomize. I completely ripped your segment idea. Toggle on and off "ConnectDots".

Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Center of Mass

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What would your graph for "How Old I Feel" vs "How Old I am" look like?

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

Speaking of, I just put this together this week to teach vector addition. www.desmos.com/geometry/ont...

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Typically I would write that in green or black since it represents a time, even though expressed with an X/v_x. I also like to draw an arrow showing that I am substituting. This isn't a standard technique or anything, just how I choose to emphasize.

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When there are enough numbers, I would normally have students solve for the time and plug in the numerical value of time. If you have to plug deltaX/Vx things are getting hairy. If say deriving y(x) for a projectile, I sidestep subscripts, use t=X/[v0*cos()] and sub into y=v0*sin()t-1/2gt^2 for t.

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I also use the Red and Green Vectors in this Desmos simulation of the components of velocity in projectile motion. www.desmos.com/calculator/q... [5/5]

[DH 85] Drawing Vectors in Bulk

Time is neither color. It doesn't belong to X or Y. It is ususually the one thing that links them. Here are some early notes. It leads to somewhat less mistakes, but gives us a languate to talk about the kind of conceptual mixup. "Oh, I made purple". [4/n]

Projectile Motion calculations. All X-component are drawn in Red, All Y-components are in blue, time is in green

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First Draw a picture clearly labeling initial and final position. Then write your knowns and unknowns (It could be a table, but what works for you." I ask students to write "X" or "Y", and importanly I write all X calculations in Red, and all Y calculations in Blue. [3/n]

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Kinematics equations don't soley belong to the X or Y (and certainly not just the magnitude). Just because you have a hammer doesn't mean every nail needs to be hammered. Sometimes you need to use that hammer differently (for example to pull a nail out). [2/n]

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

I find that students struggle with subscripts in general. For projectiles I tell a story about a Sleep Away camp from childhood where the boys wore blue shirts and the girls red. There was a "No Purple" Rule. I have a no purple rule for projectile problems. [1/n]

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Bree is an eternal fountain of physics teaching energy and ideas.

Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

Upside: Path of totality went through my driveway. Downside: It was completely cloudy. Upside: Still got great brightness data, and learned a lot about the logness of our perception of brightness and made a simulation to demonstrate. #iTeachPhysics www.desmos.com/calculator/8...

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

This is one of those interesting phenomena that looks new, but is actually quite an old problem. There is not and exact solution, the math often blows up, and it is still solved by hand.

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

What a lovely and succinct way to compare and contrast horizontal and vertical springs by slowly transitioning the angle. I love the side by side pairing of the physical spring and the corresponding graphs, both force and energy. Really well done. (As always).

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Dan Hosey @danhosey.bsky.social · 19/03/2025

Even if wires manage to get tangled in bag (usually not that much). You don't get a whole class in a traffic jam behind one enormous tangle. They fix their own wires in parallel with the other groups instead of in series. Also makes it easier to restrict resources.