Most Satisfying Video Ever

What happens if you scribble back and forth on a white board that's spinning underneath your marker? What if you scribble in a figure-8? Or a square pattern? This computer simulation by Jason Schattman shows the amazing and beautiful curves that arise from repeatedly drawing a simple shape on a spinning surface. Even the tiniest variation in the speed of the wheel, the size of the pattern you're drawing, or the placement of the pattern within the wheel produces a completely different curve. This video shows just a handful of the infinitude of possibilities. I coded these animations in the Processing programming language. In each frame of the animation, a new point is added to the curve at the current location of the marker. To make the curve look smoother, adjacent points are connected using cubic splines. The path of the marker is computed using simple trigonometry and the formulas for Lissajous curves. The continuous rotation of the curve that has been drawn so far is computed by multiplyi