I had a nice discussion with a member on our Discord server. The topic was roughly, “What role do my videos serve, compared to, say, 3Blue1Brown?”
If you aren’t familiar with 3Blue1Brown I encourage you to look him up. He teaches difficult and concrete math concepts with visuals, unlocking an understanding of topics normally opaque to almost everyone, even those who pass the math courses he covers.
My videos, on the other hand, are boring. They cover textbooks. They introduce concepts and say, “Now go solve the homework problems.”
My intention has always been to allow people a ladder to climb out of their ignorance to a complete and full understanding. In that sense, 3Blue1Brown and I share similar goals. I believe we both want people to get smarter, to gain knowledge and understanding.
I have long detested the science shows on PBS and the BBC for many reasons, the least of which is they often get the science wrong, and sometimes dangerously so. That is, if you were to watch certain programs, you would come to understand so many things that simply aren’t so, that you’re probably better off not watching the shows at all.
The real reason I detest those shows, however, is because they give the false sense of understanding. I have met many, many people who understand but don’t know, or haven’t learned. They can talk about black holes but they cannot reason about them. They can talk about the double-slit experiment but they cannot think about a single-slit experiment, or any number of other scenarios. They can describe how to calculate the integral but can’t actually calculate any integrals.
On YouTube today, there are probably hundreds of good people making science videos that convey understanding, but not knowledge. You’ll come away like I do after watching a 3Blue1Brown video with new tidbits of information and an understanding of one or two concepts. But you’ll also completely lack any skills or any depth of knowledge of the topic, and so you’re left as a layperson, unable to climb up to the status of the elite experts in the field.
So much of math and physics occurs inside your own head. You must fill in the blanks, you must make the connections, and it must be done in terms you understand and ways you can appreciate. So much of it also occurs between the pencil and paper when you are trying to solve problems you’ve never even though of before. If there was another way to learn these things, I am sure we would’ve discovered it. So far, the read-lecture-homework cycle is the one with proven results in turning regular people into experts in their field.
The textbook, in my mind, remains the ideal instrument of communicating knowledge and conveying learning. Someone who is a leading expert in the field condensed as much information as he could into a book only a few hundred pages long. He organized it into sections that build on one another. He gives away just enough information to allow you to try and solve the problems and figure out the rest. He allows you to develop skills seen and unseen until you can gain true proficiency in the subject.
That’s my goal. I don’t want to hand out certificates. I don’t want to convey understanding without knowledge. I want to give people the same skills I have, so that we are peers and together we can find new and interesting things.
I’ll try to make weekly update posts with all the activity of the week. This is partially to report to my Patreon supporters, but also to show people thinking of supporting my channel what I am doing.
The most important change to my process was to introduce thumbnails made in Inkscape. Using the tex text extension, I was able to format equations and formulas for the math videos.
As I am more or less “caught up” on Basic Mathematics with several videos uploaded and ready to be launched, I have been turning my attention to the next series to cover. It seems Thermal Physics is the way to go, so I have been exploring textbooks on that subject.
The launch of the Discord server has been going very successfully. Already we have ~10 visitors. If you want to chat with me, the Discord server is the ideal place.
Videos that I did this week include:
For My Basic Mathematics series, I released 6 videos:
For my Theory of Python series, I released
The next will likely see the following videos:
Basic Mathematics:
Python:
We have had 10.4k Views from 168k impressions (2.9% CTR) in the last week corresponding to 23.7k minutes of watch time (2:22 average view time) by 4.4k unique viewers. 75 new subscribers joined us, putting us past the 18.5k subscriber mark. 39% of our traffic comes from our playlists, 25% from YouTube search, 10% from suggested videos, and the rest from external or unknown sources.
We made $11.60 in YouTube ad revenue.
My goal is to increase the CTR by tweaking the thumbnail, as well as increase audience retention by focusing on a better first few seconds of video time.
I am looking forward to the months of August and September as that is a time when many people start searching for and watching the sort of content I produce. I anticipate launching my Thermal Physics videos a week or two before students begin returning to University to take advantage of the college rush.
It’s time to get more lights! Lighting is super-important for cameras. Our eyes are much more sensitive to light and to color balance than cameras are, and our brains auto-correct for low-light and off-balance colors. In a dim room, we can see perfectly fine, but if you tried to put it on video, it would be impossible to make things out. If you rely on your houselights for lighting, then your videos will be red and orange rather than a more natural white or blue color.
I put up white paper all around my filming area. I have lights pointing at the walls, a light pointing at the ceiling, and a light shining in the corner. This provides plenty of diffuse light to make my videos with.
I’ve been using these for over a year and they have been good: https://amzn.to/30VXdf5
Here’s replacement lights I am buying: https://amzn.to/2SJ6Ivk
(All the links to Amazon are affiliate links, so I will get a kickback if you purchase anything after clicking on them. You can learn more about supporting my work here: http://blog.realphysics.info/2018/04/28/amazon-affiliates/)
Here’s a video I recently shot using these lights. I have my Samsung S9 as a camera. I plan to upgrade that one of these days to a more professional camera so I can control the focus and such.
Wrapping up the Basic Mathematics course, one of the directions I can go is Thermodynamics / Thermal Physics.
Schroeder’s book seems to be the top textbook right now: https://amzn.to/2LION7p
Other colleges and universities seem to be using Blundell & Blundell: https://amzn.to/2MhbY84
I’ve heard of a few others as well.
If you have recommendations or ideas on what I should use for a textbook, let me know. Bonus points if your college is using it!
I’m wrapping up the Basic Mathematics by Serge Lang series, and so now my attention turns to where I should go next. I see that there is a dearth of good physics lecture content, so physics students don’t have as many resources as math students.
If you support me through Patreon, you can vote on the poll I place there: https://www.patreon.com/posts/what-series-i-28644380
You can also answer through YouTube, here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/user/jg394/community
The options I am considering right now are:
(All of the links above are Amazon affiliate links. I get a small kickback for anything you purchase through those links — a simple way to support my work.)
If you have opinions on what series you should like to see, feel free to comment on either post above or here in this post.
I set up a class on Simor.org. Sign up and give it a try and let me know what you think.
Which calculus textbook should I cover? Head over to Patreon to let me know.
I’m leaning towards Woods or Slesnick. Woods gives a very earthy explanation and introduction to calculus, and ties it to the sort of math you do in physics a lot. Slesnick gives a very solid theoretical foundation, preparing you to study more advanced mathematical topics.
There’s also Spivak and Apostol, both highly recommended.
I may want to avoid Stewarts, although it seems to be heavily used in high schools.
Anyway, head over to Patreon and let me know what you think.
This videos covers section 1.1 of Serge Lang’s Basic Mathematics. Integers include the positive and negative integers, including zero. Although we won’t cover much about what to do with integers, we’ll get a good feeling for some of the properties by learning some basic algebraic identities. Read my notes here.
You can buy the book using my Amazon affiliate link below:
I you’d like to support my channel, read more here.
It’s up. I’m experimenting with end cards, and I think I’m figuring it out.
