Thank you :-)

I don’t have a good explanation for why the small waves run in front of the larger ones for capillary waves just yet (it’s one of the things that you learn as “just an anomaly for waves that are so short that nobody cares about them in oceanography”). I have some really cool pictures of capillary waves coming up that I didn’t write about because I still needed to figure out why they behave they do, so that’s very high up on my list of things I want to read up on. I’ll definitely post about it once I managed to figure it out!

Thanks for the feedback on the cartoons! I might have to figure out a different way to generate the cartoons so the focus is on the features I want to show rather than what the app thinks is important based on whatever its criteria are. I’ve something done the .gif things (like here: https://mirjamglessmer.com/2019/03/02/weird-interference-pattern-of-waves/) — how do you think they work compared to cartoons? Obviously not as well in print, and they don’t look as cool either…

BTW, I like the contrast in the cartoons. I read something years ago about how human visual perception processes images separately in three areas (line, colour and texture I think), then overlaps them in the conscious brain. Line communicates very effectively, which is why the eye is immediately drawn to cartoons in a newspaper and grasps the idea so quickly. In the 1990s magazines started using tone-based computer graphics in illustrations (New Scientist did this for a while) – because tone was suddenly easy for graphic designers to use. The illustrations were ineffective and hard to understand. Nowdays digital graphics are usually line based especially where they are really important (you don’t see many photos in emergency instructions for example). So yes, the cartoons are great when the programme picks up the right lines.