Monthly Archive: March 2016

Blog Wyrm is off this week to spend time on Holy Week and to celebrate Easter with our family. See you next week.

Each and every year, millions upon millions of US citizens grapple with the seemingly endless and labyrinthine rules of the country’s tax code, ever growing in size and complexity. Most of us – even the trained professionals, capable of splitting atoms, probing the limits of the human genome, or the boundaries of knowledge – are left with the uncertainty best summarized as “I’m not sure I filed my taxes correctly.” That uncertainty then becomes anxiety, dull and small though it may be, as to whether an audit is forthcoming. This human misery is bad enough but what is even worse is the lost productivity amounting, literally, to billions of man-hours. Don’t we all have better things to do with that precious commodity of time? Just a thought… perhaps if we all lobbied for a simpler tax code?

Fortunately, Blog Wyrm continues to bring excellent content wholly tax free.

What do coffins and economics have to do with each other? Well…lots if you are the Funeral Directors and Embalmers of Louisiana or a group of Benedictine monks, who innocently threatened the former’s corner market on grief. Read this week’s Common Cents to see a textbook example of how the rich and connected can use the regulatory power of the law to keep competition to a minimum.

The halting theorem is one of the most important results about the theory of computation and also one of the cornerstones of Western thought about logic, philosophy, and the limits of formalized human knowledge. Despite its subtlety and importance, Aristotle to Digital presents a simple, easy-to-follow proof.

This week’s column in Under the Hood ties up several loose ends associated with the recent study of classical scattering. Although the differential cross section naturally arises from the relationship between impact parameter and scattering angle, the column again argues against the notion of a integrated cross section and argues for the Monte Carlo interpretation, as is it more general.

About Comics finishes the ongoing review of the Everything Dies/Secret Wars storyline with Part 5, which is an analysis of some of the things that worked and didn’t in Hickman’s comics epic.

Enjoy!

After what seemed an interminably long Winter, (which wasn’t really – just felt that way), warmer weather is here. At least briefly. There is, of course, no guarantee that it will stay warm for long but beggars can’t be choosers and I have been begging for warmer days and milder nights for some time. Another harbinger of Spring, daylight savings time, is also nigh. But I can do without that.

But what shouldn’t be done without is another week of Blog Wyrm articles. This week Anyway, here is the column lineup for this week.

A lot of attention is paid to the idea of wealth and income inequality. All sorts of plans crop up to redistribute wealth from those that have to those that don’t. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not. But surprisingly, little attention is paid to a kind of redistribution from those that don’t to those that do that occurs everyday under the guise of the common European currency the Euro. Don’t think it is possible? Check out this week’s Common Cents for an argument to the contrary.

Can a set of lines and points and arrows on a blackboard (or whiteboard as you prefer) really hide subtle classifications of and distinctions between mathematical objects? The answer is yes and Aristotle to Digital explains how displacement vectors in the plane are best understood as a set of instructions – a concept closely related to regarded infinity as a process and not a number.

Extending the well known results from classical scattering in a inverse-square force, this week, Under the Hood looks at the numerical results of scattering from a screened potential.

About Comics presents Part 4 of the ongoing review of the Everything Dies/Secret Wars storyline. This week, the revelations of who is behind all of the death and destruction is made and a curious similarity to another creation story is discovered.

Enjoy!

Two seemingly unrelated events have collided in my mind and given me some pause. The first was a piece on NPR that I heard on Monday – the day after the Oscar Awards. In this broadcast, the reporter was exploring why the length of Oscar acceptance speech has grown, especially in recent years, well beyond what was customary through the bulk of the ceremony’s lifespan up until about 20 years ago. One of the conjectures put forward laid the blame squarely at the pressure that actors feel to brand themselves (the other conjecture was that actors are needy and growing needier each year). The other event was that a friend of mine introduced me to the relatively new concept of meteorological spring. Spring had, until fairly recently, been unambiguously defined to begin at the Vernal Equinox. I’m not saying that technical definitions of Spring, found in meteorological or ecological circles, and which differ from the traditional astronomically-based one, aren’t valid. Rather I am saying that there is no reason to have them out there except to draw attention. This sort of branding strikes me the same way as naming winter storms or coming up with terms like polar vortex – it all seems a bit too much like a desperate need for attention.

Anyway, here is the column lineup for this week.

Hidden behind the placid facade of modern life, a bitter ideological struggle exists between the Frequentists and the Bayesians over whose interpretation of probability makes the most sense. As is usual in struggles of these kind, there is truth to both points of view, which Aristotle to Digital explores.

Negotiations on climate change and limitations on global output of carbon are high stakes events these days. One might believe that the negotiators are cold-blooded, strictly rational beings, free and unencumbered by emotion. Perhaps they are and perhaps they are not. Common Cents examines climate negotiations within the context of the Ultimatum Game and finds that the picture isn’t clear.

This week in Under the Hood derives the classical relationship between scattering angle and impact parameter and verifies it with numerical simulations. The beautiful, ensemble behavior is remarkable.

In Part 3, About Comics expands on the analysis of the Everything Dies/Secret Wars storyline by setting the stage for most of the players and the dramatic showdown that follows. Since all the universes are dying its only a matter of time before different groups with different approaches clash.

Enjoy!