New Video: Scutoid September: Unboxing (Patreon)

References:

Scutoids are a geometrical solution to three-dimensional packing of epithelia: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05376-1 

Scutoid Pair by Laura Taalman: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3024272 

Scutoid, Four Cell Configuration by John Peplinski: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3033602 

Scutoid, Space Filling Duo by John Peplinski: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3042446 

Welcome to the Scutoid September kick-off!

Next up is the papercraft video, still on schedule for a week from today. Then my aspirations are to do a video on what it even means to discover a new shape and how scutoid holds up after 6 years, do a flat cut of the old VR180 scutoid videos, and… well, we’ll see if we get that far. No promises.

Process

Filming the unboxing footage for this video was one of the easiest things I’ve ever filmed for a vihart video, and the editing was relatively straightforward as well, which is one of the reasons I felt confident about being able to produce multiple videos for Scutoid September.

But getting this kickoff set up did have one unusual challenge.

Usually, the writing and research is the hardest part of any video. Even videos that don’t go too explicitly deeply into a math topic still have hints and references toward that depth, and I need to understand everything if I am to say exactly the right one thing.

For Scutoids, I already did all that research leg work. I’d spent months on it in 2018/2019. I took the time to read and understand the original paper, even though it’s not in my field and I had to learn a lot. I had emailed with Clara Grima, one of the mathematicians who worked on that paper, to get more details on the formal definition of scutoids. I’d spoken with a few other mathematicians about scutoids, including Laura Taalman who made the iconic identical scutoid pair 3d model. I collaborated with Laura, Tom Ruen, and John Peplinski, to create papercraft versions of scutoids that worked. I made multiple videos about different aspects of the topic.

Late in 2023 I started to have the time and energy for making videos again, and scutoids was near the top of my list. But there was a problem.

That list of research I’d done and people I talked to? I didn’t remember any of it. 

I don’t just mean I didn’t remember the content of the scutoid paper or the content of the conversations, I mean that I didn’t remember that I’d read the paper at all, that I’d emailed with any of those people, or that I’d gotten further than just a prototype papercraft taking up space in a box. I deleted all that knowledge and applied my entire brain to the next thing I was doing, and coming back to scutoids had felt very unappealing when I knew how much work it would be to get back up to speed.

It wasn’t until I had the idea to make a month-long party of it, with multiple videos that could potentially go a little deeper and use the perspective of time, that it became interesting to me again.

Scutoid September! That I can get behind.

The research I had to do for this video (as well as to be able to plan the rest of Scutoid September) was pointed toward myself, and that was a new experience. I read and learned from my own past writing, which pointed me toward my own videos, as well as to the existence of email threads I was able to search and find and read through. I hunted down old file folders and documents that I wouldn’t have remembered to even know to look for. I learned math things from myself. But I was also able to see myself from a 6-years-later perspective, as I struggled to try to do this work the right way while also trying not to further injure my burnt out self.

I changed a lot in those 6 years.

Thank you, as always, for still being here with me. It is very, very nice to have this to come back to whenever I feel the time is right.

🐌,

Vi