The Eclectic Blogzine
Well… we don’t like to accept it but life does get in the way. This week we at Blog Wyrm were overcome by circumstances out of our control and we simply didn’t have time to bring new columns out.
Count on us delivering new material next week.
Like its brother issue last week, Issue 21 is tardy. And like last week, we at Blog Wyrm continue to revel in the afterglow of Graduation events and the hectic fallout of needing to be in 5 places all at the same time.
The major difference is that this being Issue 21 and the graduation activities are finally over and the need for an adult beverage is here. Fortunately, Blog Wyrm has turned 21 so its legal.
This week’s Common Cents presents the other side of the David and Goliath story in modern economics. David can and does win due to diseconomies of scale that make Goliath look more like a brontosaurus. Added bonus: a special appearance by the manager everybody loves to hate
Self-reference, paradox, and natural language are the focus of this week’s Aristotle to Digital. Russell and Godel grapple with the Liar’s Paradox.
Can a comic be a sequel to a movie? Can it be successful if it is? As About Comics shows, the comic version of Big Trouble in Little China is a fun and worthy successor of the famous movie of the same name.
Finally, this week’s Under the Hood covers the numerical modeling of the vibrational energy of H2. Numerical methods based on Numpy and Scipy take center stage.
Enjoy!
Issue 20 is arriving a bit late this week. And we at Blog Wyrm have a great excuse. Graduation – high school and college. Cap and gowns, commencements, and the like. That bizarre craziness that starts with the student and then sucks the parents in.
In some sense, getting twenty issues out the door is a kind of graduation for us a well. Wonder what we’ll do next week when we turn out 21?
The subject of mass-varying systems in general is discussed in this week’s Under the Hood. A general form of Newton’s law is derived and applied to the conveyor belt problem giving a satisfactory answer to the question of where did all the power go?
If the common wisdom is to be believed, the modern-day David and Goliath story between small and big business would always end with Goliath dragging the lifeless body of David around. But as Common Cents shows, the real evidence suggests that David is still alive and well and is capable of pulling off an upset of biblical proportions.
Still thrilled by the connection between Turing and Gödel, Aristotle to Digital tries to outline the logician’s famous theorem using some help from a nice book on that subject.
Finally, we close out this week with a lost classic in comics. Rick Veitch’s ‘Abraxas and the Earthman’ is a thought provoking retelling of ‘Moby Dick’ set in space. About Comics takes a long look at this psychedelic work from the early eighties.
Enjoy!
The weather has finally grown pleasant enough that light jackets and coats can be left in the closet and sweaters need be worn only inside when the air conditioning is too high. The grass is lush, birds are out singing, and school is winding down. Nature seems to be a waxing toward a luxurious summer. And yet the world is filled with such brimming pockets of turmoil that its hard to feel any peace.
This general blending of highs with lows is reflected in this weeks offering in Blog Wyrm.
Common Cents examines some of the more unsettling notes from the economy of late. While not the most cheerful reading, the points raised here are important and ignoring the problems in both the structure of the economy and in our thinking about it is not going to make them go away.
The mood gets considerable lighter in Under the Hood. The intriguing and sometimes frustrating conveyor belt problem is the gateway to a more rigorous understanding of systems with variable mass and how momentum and energy conservation can be applied in more complex situations.
An exciting idea about the logic, computation and nature fills this week’s Aristotle to Digital. Is the Universe a Universal Turing Machine and, if so, what are the implications.
Finally, we close out this week with a fun look at Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. Better known as the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, movie audiences around the world have been tantalized by these new Avengers. About Comics fills in their fictional history straight from the comic books from which they sprang.
Enjoy!
It is the first of May. The skies are overcast, the temperature cool and perhaps even chilly. People are wearing heavy clothing and are staying warm or they are dressing for spring and shivering. The first summer blockbuster is out in theaters in the form of Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, but it certainly isn’t summer. It doesn’t even feel like spring.
Well, Blog Wyrm has just the thing for the sensible person who decides to eschew the great outdoors. Four new columns this week.
About Comics brings some of the those movie goers who no little of the origins of Ultron up to speed on the history of this murderous robot. More interesting than this sociopathic ai is its creation – the Vision.
Modeling systems and their corresponding states is all the rage these days and object oriented programming paves the way for exciting simulations. However, as Aristotle to Digital points out, it is often the case that the objects we don’t define are as important as those we do.
The electricity that flows everyday to power our modern economy comes courtesy of electromagnetic induction and Mister Faraday’s law. Massive hoops of wire move through carefully constructed magnetic fields at 60 Hz to bring all of us the internet, cable TV, and other wonders (or perhaps horrors). Inspired by these technological marvels, Under the Hood presents a working example of the flux transport theorem, which gives the mathematical underpinnings to the science of making electrical power.
Speaking of power, Common Cents talks about a different kind of power in the interactions between Management and Labor – the power to make each other miserable. By making a couple of straightforward observations, the back-and-forth between these two sides can be mapped to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the results show how hard it is for each side to trust and cooperate with the other once they fell betrayed.
Enjoy!