> “This may seem trivial, a cool story, but subconsciously it really makes a big impact: a squircle doesn’t look like a square with surgery performed on it; it registers as an entity in its own right, like the shape of a smooth pebble in a riverbed, a unified and elemental whole.”
Am I the only one who prefers squares with rounded corners?
"Shape of a smooth pebble" is not something I like to see anywhere outside a garden. A "squircle" looks inflated, like Li-Ion battery about to pop and set your house on fire, or like package with food that spoiled, and will stink if opened, and make you sick if eaten. You need to hold your breath around a "squircle", because the moment you breathe out and time unfreezes, it'll start rolling and tumbling. Even nature itself doesn't really do "sqiurcles" unless it must. The last "squircle" I saw was when I burned my back badly and had them pop up on my skin (if you read this and think "gross", well, that's what "squircles" are for me in general).
The most benign connotation I have with a "squircle" is a pillow, which again is something that doesn't belong in almost any context.
A square with rounded corners, in contrast, looks purposeful. An object created with intent. It speaks of precision, of quality, of human workmanship. It looks stable, unspoiled, new. It fits.
I recently tried to draw f holes using Euler spirals, but they turned out too short and fat, and I gave up on them. But they are quite fun to draw on a computer by simple numerical integration, ignoring all the more complicated mathematics in the wikipedia article. Perhaps I could have made my f holes more elegant by understanding the parts I ignored… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_hole
The car's position is not discontinuous, the velocity isn't either (in both cases it has to slow through intermediate velocities).
It is the decelaration that in one case grows suddenly and in the other changes smoothly.
On an egg, there is no place where curvature changes suddenly, and yet on a four point egg there are points where it does exactly that.