Issue 65: Hectic Time of the Year

It’s hard to believe that, for all intents and purposes, Summer 2016 is gone. Back-to-school activities vie for our attention while the last days of vacation dwindle. The heart of the baseball season is interleaved with the beginning of the return of another year of football. The new fall fashions, designed for cooler temperatures, belie the hot weather outside. Truly it is on the most hectic times of the year.

Luckily, this month’s Blog Wyrm can lift you up and away from all the commotion and provide quality entertainment and information.

Speaking of back-to-school shopping, Common Cents narrates some important observations about business cycles gleaned from a recent return to college and wonders how can a failing business become profitable again.

Next up is About Comics, which continues with its comprehensive look at Marvel’s publishing experiment of the New Universe. This installment looks at the 4 shorter runs that made it only through the first year. While brief in duration and initially rocky in their storylines, these series helped to flesh-out the backdrop for the longer series that continued on.

Ever wonder why new scientific studies tend to contradict older ones? Is it that we are just getting more sophisticated or is there some underlying systemic problem with the modern scientific enterprise? These questions are explored in this month’s Aristotle To Digital and the results may surprise you (and, hint, discourage you as well).

Motion of individual charged particles in a background magnetic field is a key ingredient in understanding many plasma processes. And that is what makes it so confounding that many textbooks in the field present an incomplete description of the solution. Under the Hood shows how to get the correct and complete solution using straightforward matrix methods.

Enjoy!