Monthly Archive: January 2015

Issue 12 – Deflating My Superbowl Hopes

Well this coming Sunday is the big game. I don’t know how to feel about it but it is unlikely I’ll watch more than a little in passing. On the NFC side, I like Marshawn Lynch (had him in fantasy league) and I don’t dislike Seahawks but I could do without their coach. On the AFC side, I have no specific player on the Patriots that I like (I had Brady in a different league) and I don’t dislike Belichick, but the whole ‘deflate-gate’ is tedious. I wonder if the Patriots can actual win – especially after they’ve been caught in, let us say, irregular behavior. It’s a good thing that there are really fine articles, courtesy of the Blog Wyrm staff to take our minds off of it.

A recap of the saga of the Inhumans continues in this week’s About Comics. Will the grand, star-crossed love affair between Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four and Crystal of the Inhumans play a role in Agent Skye’s future – we doubt it but it was too big a slice of comics history to ignore. And who knows, there may be a piece that actually gets worked into Agents of Shield and some piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Do detectives solve crime using deductive reasoning or do they employ some other mode of thought? This week’s installment in Aristotle to Digital tries to answer this question by looking at a memorable episode of all shows M*A*S*H. Regular maintenance is needed for both the body and the car and yet the method by which each are purchased is quite different. Common Cents compares and contrasts these methods and wonders why we give better and more knowledgeable care to our vehicles than ourselves. Finally, Under the Hood celebrates the wonderful mathematical tool of the Wronskian. Brought to us by Jozef Wronski, this tool is literally the swiss-army knife of differential equations possessing just the right tool for the right job.

Enjoy!

Issue 11 – Janus Unbound

The middle of January is here is and so is Issue 11. The month of January is named for the Roman God Janus, the two-faced god of transformations and new beginnings. That said, there is nothing two-faced about this issue of Blog Wyrm.

In answer to a variety of requests, this week’s About Comics looks at the history of the Inhumans and forward to the possible fate of Skye from Agents of Shield. The age-old question of how language affects thought and how thought affects language makes a cameo appearance as this week’s Aristotle to Digital wrestles with the concept of infinity. The downfall of a once-proud American company is the topic and Common Cents gives its two cents on what went wrong at Kodak. And closing out the field Under the Hood presents the Dirac interaction picture, the perturbation analysis of time-dependent Hamiltonians, and the beginnings of Feynman diagrams.

Enjoy!

Issue 10 – Double Digits

Welcome to Issue 10, which is something of a milestone. We’ve now published 10 weeks of new and exciting material. Many television shows don’t even make to 10 episodes before being pulled (i.e. the unlamented Selfie and Manhattan Love Story). So, needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway) all of us at Blog Wyrm are excited and proud.

Image’s new science fiction comic Roche Limit is featured in this week’s About Comics. As a sucker for gritty futuristic dystopias, I had high expectations. See if Roche Limit can live up to them. Murder meets knowledge in this week’s Aristotle to Digital. Find out where on the epistemological scale your favorite detective ends up. Common Cents lets the genii (or is it Gini) out of the bottle in a data-driven discussion of income inequality. Finally, Under the Hood shows in detail how to calculate the Feynman path integral in one dimension.

Enjoy!

Issue 9 – The Dawn of a New Year

Happy New Year and welcome to Issue 9. As everyone settles into their resolutions, please consider making a very easy one. Tell your friends and family about Blog Wyrm and resolve to comment on a post. Now that I am done begging let’s look at what’s in this week’s issue.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund gets some time in the spotlight in this week’s About Comics. The CBLDF is an worthy group which I support but I take issue with some of the tactics they employ. The musings on epistemology and murder mysteries which were advertised for Week 8 never got published due to a personal issue so the first part appears in this week’s Aristotle to Digital. Front and center in this discussion are the philosophical ideas from Aristotle and Kant on how we characterize what it means to ‘know’ something. This post sets the foundation for Part 2 in which we meet the modern detective stories of Poe, Christi, Stout, and Eco. Common Cents discusses in a light hearted way how some among us may actually be free riders in the truest sense of the word. In the final column, Under the Hood presents a ‘derivation’ of the Feynman path integral. Along the way, numerous connections are made between the quantum and classical worlds.

Enjoy!