Monthly Archive: June 2015

Things seem to be a bit strange today. As the Blog Wyrm staff got together this evening there seemed to be a general consensus that the world was slight off balance. All of us saw strange driving incidents – cars come at us on the wrong side of the yellow line, people trying to passing where no lane existed, trucks tearing mirrors off cars, and so on. Then there is the general weirdness in the news – killers on the loose in New York and running parts of what once were coherent nations in the Middle East. Being a Friday, our immediate knee-jerk reaction centered around Friday the Thirteenth but of course the date is wrong. That is until someone pointed out that the 26th is the 13th times two. So maybe we are seeing a double-strength case of that ‘bad-luck day’.

Well there may be bad luck in the air but there is good luck what we have to offer today.

Censorship and free speech are once again the subject of About Comics. Central to any discussion of these topics must be a commitment to the truth, which the CBLDF seems to be making take a back seat to sensationalism these days.

What do Christmas lights, Occam’s razor, some basic computations, and an Episcopalian minster all have in common? Bayes theorem, that’s what. Read all about it in this week’s Aristotle to Digital.

Are you passionate about a sport? Passionate enough to step out of the limelight and take a swing at coaching? Ballgame shows just how rewarding that experience can be.

What to stimulate the economy then how the wholesale destruction of an US city. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? But it only differs in size not in principle from what a lot of people have suggested. Don’t think it could be true? Try seeing for yourself in Common Cents .

Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan are all monsters of epic size who have found fame (and fortune?) on the big screen. But it took a more modern movie to introduce the Japanese name for these creatures – Kaiju – to the US public. Come join Green Screen as it examines just what makes Pacific Rim such a cool movie.

Round 1, Fight! The match begins. Your hands are trembling as your arcade stick sits on your lap. You think to yourself, “How on God’s green earth am I supposed to beat this guy? He’s been wailing on me for the past 20 games or so, and I have no clue how to find an opening in him!” You’re not alone in this struggle. Most people who play fighting games arrive at this stage and quit out of frustration. Pretzel Motion can’t guarantee that you’ll get good at fighting games anytime soon, but it hopes that this week’s article, which discusses how to put your foes at a disadvantage in a match, can point you in the right direction in terms of how you think about the structure of all fighting games.

The Kepler problem – one of the most famous, important, and thornier of the class of problems with exact solutions. Its nonlinearity makes it much more difficult to solve than textbook linear problems like the harmonic oscillator. This week’s Under the Hood continues its in depth look Lie series by seeing how the great Norwegian’s method fairs against Johannes’s problem.

Enjoy!

Enjoy

This week marks a landmark in Blog Wyrm’s history. Not only have we gotten a new column but we’ve actually gotten four new ones written by three new contributors. It’s exciting to see all of the hard work and great writing coming being contributed. So without further ado, let’s talk a little about what is in this week’s issue.

In its premiere installment, Green Screen makes a shocking statement about Quentin Tarantino: namely, that his films are overrated. Yes you heard correctly, they are overrated.

Ever try playing a fighting game (you know Street Fighter, Injustice, Marvel v. Capcom etc.) but still can’t get past button mashing? Then here comes a new column devoted to taking you to the next level. This week’s Pretzel Motion starts with the basics cause when you have mastered the fundamentals you are halfway to being a master.

Ballgame takes a look at what one man did for a university and what he means to the community as a result.

Tidbits opens sets the stage with Andy Grammer’s secretly-terrible “Honey I’m Good.”

About Comics dusts off an old format for comics books and shows how older stories were reprinted in the age before comics became mainstream.

This week’s Under the Hood begins an in depth look at the applications of Lie series to solving differential equations. Could it be that there is a ‘linear-looking’ method that solved nonlinear problems?

Common Cents offers a public service announcement for all those journalists who are confused about the debate on trade currently wending its way through the halls of government and shows that if you just apply yourself, you can understand the various Ts that are bandied about.

Aristotle to Digital brings home the bacon with not one but two English philosophers who made significant contributions to our modern mode of scientific thought. How many degrees of separation are they from Kevin? Hmmm…..

Enjoy

I suppose that summer is really and truly here now that the temperatures are pushing the mid-nineties and the humidity is a making each day an adventure in sweating. That said, it is nice to see lots of sunshine for a change and, now that schools are out and graduations are a thing of the past, perhaps there will be some time to unwind during the dogs days that lie before us.

Despite the heat (or maybe because of it – its easier to write inside when its muggy outside), we have a nice set of columns this week.

The final act the initial story arc in Big Trouble in Little China closes out the very fun three-part review in this week’s About Comics.

Owing in part to American Pharoah’s win at Belmont last Saturday and in part to the very weird holding pattern of the stock market these days a small discussion of the finer points of being a bookie are discussed in Common Cents. Find out how to make book and run a hedge fund in one easy lesson.

Plato introduced the concept of the ideal form to Western Philosophy and so changed the way we think about… well, thinking. So what would he say to a discussion of errors and uncertainty in modern science and engineering? Aristotle to Digital explores this hypothetical situation and finds that the answer is rather hard to come by.

Think your intuition is strong enough to explain just how field energy flows in a variety of situations? Under the Hood puts it to the test and ends up Poynting to a way to better understand Maxwell’s equations.

Enjoy.

Well our brief hiatus is now over and the events outside of our control seem to have been resolved favorably. New posts are coming out for our usual columns and new recruitment is underway for several new additions in the weeks to come. Things seem to looking up.

So exactly why do we teach what we do in the classroom and what use is it anyway? On the surface, these types of questions may seem uncouth and uncivilized but its about time someone asked them – and Aristotle to Digital is just the place to start.

What do Arthritis and Moral Hazards have in common? Read this week’s Common Cents to find out how the medical profession passes its risk on to the captive consumers that we all are.

The second act of the Big Trouble in Little China shows up in the ‘Hell of a Thousand Blog Posts’ (Chinese have a lot of hells) and/or in this week’s About Comics.

Under the Hood puts Mister Maxwell and his famous equations under the bare bulb to interrogate just where the charge, energy, and constraints were on the night in question..

Enjoy!