Golden Ratio

It does show up in plants (artichokes, cactuses, sunflowers, pineapples, etc.), as the angle between successive leaves/seeds/petals. This is called spiral phyllotaxis. You can make some cool art out of this idea with a strobe light, https://www.johnedmark.com/phi/

It also shows up anywhere with pentagonal (or icosahedral) symmetry, since the golden ratio is the ratio of the diagonal to the side of a pentagon. So that includes e.g. various viruses with a shape based on icosahedral symmetry.

The stuff about shells, galaxies, etc. (and the supposed advantages of this specific aspect ratio for design / visual art) is generally bullshit.

Disney would never lie to me: https://youtu.be/fwYfuJfIgaw?t=331

Designer here. I went all in on the Golden Ratio for a season. It was good for some things, bad for others—kind of like everything else. I never thought about it with regards to type sizing so I may try that. That said, it will utterly ruin some things.

That reminds me of the classic proportions described by Jay Hambridge in The Elements of Dynamic Symmetry (1926). He was an art historian who argued that the Greco-Roman art and architecture was based on root rectangles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_rectangle#Jay_Hambidge I just noticed that Wersin is mentioned right after him!

Hambridge's theories were quite controversial, but the book is an enjoyable read anyway. https://archive.org/details/ElementsOfDynamicSymmetryHambidg...

Cool experiment, thanks for sharing the code. It would be great if someone took these different ratios to make an interactive designer of something (like a car) where choosing each ratio would update the dimensions of the thing (ex: the car size is the first value, hood size is the second, followed by the doors, wheels, headlight, etc)

And the reason why systems generally default to simpler representations over more complex ones in nature is because the process of evolution is in many ways basically just a very slow random search. Simpler solutions fundamentally are more likely to occur than complex ones. Of course over many iterations of simple changes, an overarching complexity often can seemingly emerge over time.

Also, to be 100% accurate, I should say that technically evolution is a form of a genetic algorithm which is slightly different and more constrained than a pure random search, but it's not that big of a deal with respect to this conversation.

There's an interesting correlation to information theory and compressibility. Someone did an analysis of pop lyrics[1] where they compressed the plaintext using a lossless compression algorithm and determined that (as expected) many pop songs compress very well and are highly redundant. But taken another angle, this could also represent that we as human beings find lyrics which have high degrees of self-similarity with small amounts of variation to be pleasing to the ear, which tracks with what makes pop music (which must be singable and usually danceable to go viral) successful.

[1] https://pudding.cool/2017/05/song-repetition/

"favored by the universe somehow"

With a large enough population, you are going to end up with the same representation (structure of neurons, glial cells etc) in some subset of brains.

As a painter, I am very aware that taste is not as universal as is constantly advertised. Some people like the shades of blue I use and some don't or are indifferent. Why I chose that blue and why they liked that blue is cause we probably share, in some small corner of a trillion brain cells, a small clump of structure that's exactly alike.

It's just unexpected and unnecessary. On mobile I'm pretty sure all the browsers already have it, on desktop it completely breaks expectations for what should happen.

Also it is turned up to an extreme degree here. I'm using Firefox and the scrolljacking doesn't happen in FF, but when I open it up in another browser, a scrollwheel flick that would normally scroll down 1/4rd of the page is enough to continue down all the way to the very end. Even with smaller scrolls, it goes around 1.5-2.5x the expected distance.

Scrolling is muscle memory and the consistent behaviour of it makes us have expectations for what scrolling should do, flagrantly destroying those will cause unease.

The artistic aspect of dentistry is often underestimated

It's the fraction that converges the "slowest", in a sense. (It's the continued fraction of all 1's.)

It’s just like Pareto Principle: it only works in 80% of cases.

Even easier don't think about the ratio! Think about the Fibonacci sequence: 0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 etc. Then you are doing just addition.

It's icosahedron :-)

This relation is seen in the coordinates of the vertices of the solid: all permutations of (0, ±1, ±golden ratio).

The idea is that you can use it anywhere you need to make a decision about proportions. It's not complicated. Designers know that it's no use if you need a proportion close to 1:10 or 1:1, but there is often enough flexibility to use it (say when designing a window or a floor plan.)

It looks like they mean (a) and (b) to represent the lengths of the segments with those labels. Also, they use left-to-right operation order rather than the traditional order. Less ambiguously (and correcting an error),

   (a) / (b) = ((a) + (b)) / (a)

It should be

a / b = (a + b)/a = 1 + b / a = 1.618..

More like Fiction than Design, frankly.