Matt Henderson makes short animated gifs and diagrams explaining math, physics and geometry ideas.
Commenters praise it for presenting math topics clearly with illustrations, and say a gif can explain in seconds what paragraphs of text do poorly.
These rotating circles that are referenced by the article will forever remain a cautionary tale for me:
http://blog.matthen.com/post/42112703604/the-smooth-motion-of-rotating-circles-can-be-used
In pre-Copernican astronomy, where the Earth was considered the center of the cosmos, the erratic orbits of the other planets relative to us were explained away as epicycles within perfect circles. Later, closer examination of the orbits required modeling the orbits as epicycles within epicycles, exactly as depicted in the rotating circles above. In the end, it turned out that there aren't epicycles in the orbits, they were just creating a Fourier transform to explain the orbital paths. We now know that you can create a Fourier transform to generate any arbitrary path.
I sometimes wonder how many of our modern physics models, such as the standard model, differential geometry, and M-theory, are just highly sophisticated versions of the Fourier transform.
My friend and I write a physics/art/geometry/math blog with gifs for illustrations: http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/ - denser posts, but hopefully fun. (Here's also a list of posts, since they're so long that the blog can be hard to browse: http://danielwalsh.tumblr.com/tableofcontents )
I also recommend http://blog.matthen.com/ (tons of math gifs with source code) and http://visualizingmath.tumblr.com/ (lots of gifs and other images along these lines).
Why write 5 paragraphs poorly explaining something that can be understood in 5 seconds with a gif?
https://blog.matthen.com/post/112212054651
Science journalism (at least the SEO-friendly sites I sometimes land on) are so low-effort it smooths my brain. Anyone able to recommend some really, really good interesting publishers/writers on all things science?
Matthen's blog is really good one, he presents various math subjects in a very clear and illustrated way. My personal favorite: http://blog.matthen.com/post/111638712111/how-a-series-of-waves-with-increasing-frequencies
I appreciate the occasional analogue entry.
(also: https://blog.matthen.com/post/21277018974/it-can-be-hard-for-computers-to-find-hidden-causes )
Lucas also has an interesting blog: http://1ucasvb.tumblr.com/
And Matt Henderson has some good animations too: http://blog.matthen.com/