{"id":3816,"date":"2013-01-19T11:30:45","date_gmt":"2013-01-19T16:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/?p=3816"},"modified":"2013-01-19T11:30:45","modified_gmt":"2013-01-19T16:30:45","slug":"sagan-pong","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/2013\/sagan-pong\/","title":{"rendered":"Carl Sagan explains why Pong is good for you"},"content":{"rendered":"

From from Sagan’s highly-recommended 1977 book The Dragons Of Eden<\/a>:<\/p>\n

There is a popular game, sometimes called Pong, which simulates on a television screen a perfectly elastic ball bouncing between two surfaces. Each player is given a dial that permits him to intercept the ball with a movable “racket”. Points are scored if the motion of the ball is not intercepted by the racket. The game is very interesting. There is a clear learning experience involved which depends exclusively on Newton’s second law for linear motion. As a result of Pong, the player can gain a deep intuitive understanding of the simplest Newtonian physics – a better understanding even than that provided by billiards, where the collisions are far from perfectly elastic and where the spinning of the pool balls interposes more complicated physics.<\/p>\n

This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. And the important function of play is thus revealed: it permits us to gain, without any particular future application in mind, a holistic understanding of the world, which is both a complement of and a preparation for later analytical activities. But computers permit play in environments otherwise totally inaccessible to the average student.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dr Sagan goes on to endorse Space War<\/a> as a great way to learn about the inverse square law of Newtonian gravitation, which endorsement I second enthusiastically.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From from Sagan’s highly-recommended 1977 book The Dragons Of Eden: There is a popular game, sometimes called Pong, which simulates on a television screen a perfectly elastic ball bouncing between two surfaces. Each player is given a dial that permits him to intercept the ball with a movable “racket”. Points are scored if the motion … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Carl Sagan explains why Pong is good for you”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[928,925,11,12,14],"tags":[123,5,1560,1218,663,1554],"class_list":["post-3816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interfaces","category-miscellaneous","category-science","category-software","category-video-games","tag-carl-sagan","tag-computers","tag-physics","tag-pong","tag-simulation","tag-video-games","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pAPdE-Zy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3816"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9302,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions\/9302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ethanhein.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}