Author Archive: Conrad Schiff

The transition from summer to fall has been surprisingly fast this year.  Of course, the actual astronomical transition took place as always with Earth’s slow and steady progress from the summer solstice to the autumnal equinox.  No… what we mean by ‘surprisingly fast’ is that the mood of the country moved rapidly from summer-time fun to back-to-school serious over a very short period of time.  It seemed that society was ready to put summer away quite quickly, even before Labor Day.  The weather largely cooperated with this speedy shedding of summer frivolity.  Perhaps it is the economy or the politics or the starting of the football season or whatever.  Speaking of surprises and football, it is worth noting that the Detroit Lions are surprisingly good this season; and we don’t simply mean good in the four-weeks-into-the-season unheralded success followed by the regress-back-to-the-mean mediocrity.  The Lions look like they have the makings to be a good team this year, but we’ll see in another 3 weeks.

And now onto the columns.

Things are not always what they seem.  This is a common theme in stories about not judging a book by its cover.  It should also be a theme when working with raw data.  This month’s Aristote2Digital looks at a generalization of the Z-score designed for multi-dimensional data sets with correlated data, called the Mahalanobis distance.  The Mahalanobis distance is particularly useful is peeling away the cover of the book to find out how things really are.

Counterfactual conclusions are hard to deal with.  How can one prove the claim that ‘If only this one thing would have been different the whole course of subsequent events would changed’.  Nonetheless, this seems to be the province of the social scientist and the economist.  And few topics provide a more polarizing landscape for counterfactual argumentation as does the national debt.  CommonCents looks at the debt history and both sides of the current debate over spending.

The genius of Ludwig Boltzmann shines no brighter than in the equation of kinetic theory that bears his name.  Sadly, that genius was not recognized in his own life perhaps because he was too far ahead of his time.  This month’s column in UndertheHood looks at a process by which the Boltzmann equation can be coaxed into reproducing the equations of fluid mechanics through a specialized averaging process.  This method provides enormous insight into how nature works and, perhaps, may have persuaded more of his contemporaries to embrace his ideas had it been more widely known.

Enjoy!

As August rolls to an end, there are many things to prepare for such as the beginning of the football season, the return of students to school etc.  One thing that we can’t prepare for is the new season of television due to the writers’ strike.  We at Blog Wyrm tend to be singularly unaffected as we don’t watch television – at least not the modern incarnation.  We’ve been working our way through various shows from the late 1990s and it is interesting to see just how things changed after 9/11.  Characters were written uttering such lines as “things will never be the same” and “we’ve lost a certain security that we’ll never get back”.  These lines may have sounded sincere and felt poignant at the time but there is simply no way that anyone can deny that for the most part, we no longer remember 9/11.  Much like Pearl Harbor, we can conjure up memories and say it was a dark day, but its shadow no longer seems to darken us, its horror no longer stains our psyche.  And that is all for the worse.  We should remember 9/11 and the fascist roots of control that grew yielded the 19 strange fruits that harmed us that day.  We should remember that desire to exterminate and see its cousins in many of the authoritarian dictates and dictators that have come after from the housing crisis, where ‘experts’ leveraged garbage into phantom profits and almost took down much of the global financial markets, to the pandemic with its hysteria and paranoia, to the cancel culture and perpetually offended class that lurks in every nook and cranny of social media.  We need to remember 9/11 if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that some of us are not so different than the people who carried out that massacre and that we need to remain eternally optimistic, charitable, and vigilant.

Now onto the columns.

Picture if you will an argument as old as time: Ty Cobb was the greatest baseball player.  Are you crazy, Babe Ruth is head and shoulders better. While there is never going to be a final way of settling arguments like these, the Z-score, as Aristotle2Digital shows, at least offers an unambiguous way to statistically compare players (or anything) in an apples-to-apples manner.  

When the word ‘economics’ is used in polite economy there is usually a sharp intake of air through many mouths as concerned looks immediately populate sets of eyes around the speaker.  Clear indications that the word might as well be spelled with four letters.  Nonetheless, CommonCents demonstrates that the content of economics thinking makes for great entertainment that is safe to talk about at any party.

Early in his famous ‘Feynman Lectures on Physics’, Richard Feynman ponders if all civilization were wiped out and only one nugget of learning passed on from the old to the new what should that be.  He asserts that the most useful idea to help the survivors rise from the ashes would be the notion of the atomic nature of matter.  UndertheHood looks at the some of the math behind that idea by presenting the Boltzmann equation which links the mechanics of the atomic picture with the macroscopic world.

Enjoy!

We at Blog Wyrm thought we would build on the theme from last month’s intro column, which was on the Beauty and Hope of Summer.  As we’ve been poking around in an outside world that has largely gone back to business as usual, it is gratifying to see how many beautiful, natural events serendipitously presented themselves to us.  Creation and providence are communicating to us all the time if we just take the moment to listen. 

Take for example this photo of the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean.  The ocean and the sun, of course, move quite slow in human terms and, while lovely, provide little in the way of a surprise but note how the seagull quite kindly provided the dynamic silhouette that provides that special pop.

Likewise, clouds, sky, and the setting sun are common enough but rarely do they conspire to produce a backlit light show just after a set of thunderstorms as was captured below. 

So, we recommend that all of us put down our manmade distractions from time to time and enjoy what is really worth enjoy.

Now onto the columns.

A human being, regardless of how ‘smart’ or how ‘dumb’, has an amazing capacity for intelligent behaviors.  One of the most profound behaviors, and one almost always taken for granted, is the power of speech.  Not just the ability to syllabify without sounding like those electronic voices from electronic toys of yesteryear (yes, Speak-and-Spell, we’re talking about you) but the real talent to convey and understand meaning.  The Winograd Schema provides a set of sentences whose meaning is quite easy for even the most clueless of us to get while providing a stiff challenge for artificially intelligent systems.  Come and join Aristotle2Digital in exploring this interesting intersection between human speech and cognition with natural language processing and machine learning.

To paraphrase The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams: it can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘as smart as a politician’.  Some are stupid.  Some are very stupid.  Some attain a degree of stupidity that can only be the result of a special effort.  Case in point: the state legislature in the golden state of California.  As this month’s CommonCents details, through a variety of special efforts the public servants of Sacramento have managed to produce an economic environment perfect to screw over the new home buyer.  Two of the state’s biggest home insurance policy providers, State Farm (largest) and Allstate (4^th largest) are no longer accepting new home owners policies while other insurers are limiting the ones they provide – all because of a variety of measures designed to protect the home owner.

Computing a theoretical model is one thing, putting the theory into dynamic action with a simulation is entirely another.  This month, UndertheHood takes the hard sphere dynamical theory developed within the context of classical statistical mechanics and extends it to a simulation.  Along the way, an additional set of considerations, falling within the realm of computational physics, are developed for handling a world in finite time steps.  The resulting time evolution allows us to visualize how an out of thermal equilibrium thermalizes into the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution and, once reached, how it fluctuates around the equilibrium.

Enjoy!

Despite pandemics, political upheavals, economics downturns, and domestic unrest and wars abroad, the seasons progress whether we like it or not.  The summer of 2023 is shaping up to be a beautiful season and it has been offering us breathtaking examples of the handiwork of God.  The Blog Wyrm staff just managed to get this breathtaking shot of a cloud bank near the horizon, back-lit by the setting sun, with rays of Buddha akimbo.  A reminder that there is always hope and beauty in the world.

Now onto the columns.

There is a well-worn maxim that states that everything old is new again.  Usually applied to fad and fashion, it apparently also applies to algorithms.  Case in point, the Hoshen-Kopelman algorithm, which was invented to assist in the investigations into physical percolation is now considered a type of machine learning algorithm.  Well, it isn’t clear that that label really applies but nonetheless, as this month’s Aristotle2Digital shows, this deterministic clustering algorithm, clever though it may be, still falls far short of what the human eye can do. 

Labor v. management.  It’s a drama as old of the hills but that kind of drama takes on a new life when the labor is the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the management is the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP).  Is it David versus Goliath or more like the affluent upper middle class against the wealthy upper class?  Who can say? But CommonCents can say just what the WGA is demanding and what the AMPTP is not saying and how various forces of economics are colliding in this fight.

There is a certain elegance to simple rules creating unexpected behaviors.  This is the charm of cellular automata and statistical mechanics and nowhere is this more on display then in simple simulations that demonstrate how analytically tractable scattering processes amongst hard spheres, when applied to randomized collection, inevitably leads to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.  This month’s UndertheHood lays the theoretical ground work for just such a simulation.

Enjoy!

Happy Memorial Day weekend!  Memorial Day is one of those bittersweet 3-day holiday weekends.  On the one hand, it is (and should always be) a holiday commemorating those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.  But as the weather warms, it also serves as the de facto beginning of summer despite claims to the contrary by astronomers and meteorologists alike.  Here at Blog Wyrm, we believe that we can enjoy the burgeoning sunshine and warm weather while also thanking those who make our enjoyment of it in peace and prosperity possible.  So, we are offering as a symbol this contemplative picture to remind us of the beauty that exists and the men and women who fought and died so that others could enjoy it.

Now onto the columns.

Jeffrey Kaplan’s linguistic analog of Russell’s paradox centers on predication.  Kaplan points out that predicates can be either true of themselves or not true of themselves and that the predicate “is true of itself” is the analog of the set of all extraordinary sets.  The key question is whether or not the predicate “is not true of itself” is the analog of the set of all ordinary sets with all the Russell’s Paradox baggage that brings along.  Join Aristotle2Digital as it explores Kaplan’s idea and, following Kaplan, comes to the conclusion that paradoxes aren’t just for math.

Self-awareness seems to be in short supply as is deeper appreciation for what irony isn’t and what it is.  This month’s CommonCents points out one such case:  the ironic discussion between MSNBC’s Chris Hayes and the US Senate’s Bernie Sanders as they discuss, with no hint of self-awareness, what the country needs more of and how one simply plot helps them make the case against everything they state.

This month’s UndertheHood finished the last in a 3-part series on how to link transport coefficients to microscopic motion in kinetic thermal.  The particular coefficient: thermal conductivity; the particular microscopic quantity: kinetic energy.  Along the way, an interesting twist is revealed concerning thermos bottles.

Enjoy!

The Blog Wyrm staff had an occasion to travel to southern climes in the month of April and while on our adventure in the deep south we encountered an incredible phenomenon:  a Buc-ee’s.  For those who don’t know (like we didn’t), Buc-ee’s is a convenience store but a better description would be an amusement park masquerading as a convenience store, country store, gas station, apparel and outdoor goods store.  There is perpetual bigger-than-life atmosphere that is reminiscent of going to Disney World.  To explain this point-of-view, let’s look at some of the photos our staff took in our visit to Buc-ee’s.

First the traffic was backed up on the exit ramp from the highway to the parking lot.

The only available spaces were far from the front door

and we expected to have to wait for a shuttle to drive us from our spot to the entrance.  The scale of the gas station was immense

and everywhere there were colorful, cartoon-like characters to amuse children ages 1 to 100.

Also, the pay scale for the employees was both generous and freely advertised. 

Inside, there was an incredible press of people in every direction, and queues for food, products, and the like were numerous.  Parents were accompanied by children everywhere one looked.  It was a far cry from just a convenience store.

Sadly, Buc-ee’s didn’t have much in the way of stimulating internet content but for that we can turn to this month’s columns.

When it first became known in 1902, Russell’s paradox shook the faith of many mathematicians that the foundations of mathematics could be shown as resting a logical base with no cracks.  Years later, the math community has reached an uneasy détente with patches that have been made to set theory.  But, as this month’s Aristotle2Digital begins to explore in the first of a two-part series, the notion that the paradox’s reach is confined to academic pursuits and that the cracks that have been weakly patched are the parlance of the intellectual few is quite wrong.  The roots of Russell’s paradox spring from the very way we all think.

A common guiding theme in economics is the notion of incentives that lead all sorts of unintended consequences.  As we get a sense of perspective on the March spate of bank failures, inevitable questions start to emerge as to what messages are being sent by the government response to the demise of SVB and Signature Bank.  CommonCents presents some very uncomfortable indications that the bailouts of the depositors who suffered by these events may be doing more harm than good.

One of the most ubiquitous macroscopic physical phenomena is the notion of friction.  Frictional forces, at familiar human scales, result in the loss of mechanical energy and the creation of heat – in other words the transfer of bulk momentum into disorganized microscopic motion.  For fluids, this transfer manifests itself as viscosity.  This month, UndertheHood continues its tour of kinetic theory showing how the mean free path and molecular motion relate to the viscosity of a gas.  Along the way, some interesting and nonintuitive effects are explained and a good time is had by all (although not quite in the same way as at Buc-ee’s)

Enjoy!

Well March has certainly lived up to its tempestuous reputation.  We’ve had spates of good and bad news but, regardless of whether one’s banking, political, and social fortunes rise or fall, there is no escaping it that time moves on.  Spring is here and, with it, boundless hope for the future showcased in some of the finest that nature has to offer.  And it is with that in mind, that we at Blog Wyrm offer this the following sight to remind us all that life is worth living.

It seems no matter where go, there is some buzz about AI running amok.  ChatGTP here, deep fakes there.  Anytime now, Skynet will descend, terminators will pop out from time portals to take us all, as alkaline batteries, into the latest Marvel movie where we will only be rescued by John Wick.  Sigh…  Neural networks may embody a powerful way to ‘curve fit’ statistical data in a huge number of dimensions but there are far from intelligent, let alone malevolent.  This month, Aristotle2Digital examines just how easy it is to fool a neural network.  Makes one think twice about longing for self-driving cars.

Every March, sports fans from around the country try their hand at the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament.  Fondly referred to as ‘March Madness’, this sporting event is designed to provide some excitement in the gap between the end of professional football and the beginning of professional baseball.  Sadly, whatever madness was found in March 2023 is likely to be remembered in terms of bank collapses and shocks in the financial markets.  CommonCents explores just what happened to cause two of the largest bank failures in US history to overshadow sports, gambling, and just about everything else.

Open a bottle of perfume in a room and soon the whole space is filled with a (hopefully) pleasant smell.  Run two engine parts near each other and one finds that the less viscous the lubricant the better the performance.  Put an ice cube on top of a hot plate and watch it rapidly melt.  This month’s UndertheHood introduces how these fundamental macroscopic effects can be characterized by elementary kinetic theory and how the corresponding physical coefficients can be related to the mean free path.

This month’s thought centers around a low-tech, always available (at least when there is light), compact and delightful way of entertaining and informing: reading.   It seems that as more and more people spend more and more hours online the simple pleasure of reading an actual, made-of-paper book is confined to relatively small percentage of the population.  And that is truly sad because perhaps the most charming aspect of reading is when we share a book in common.  Recently, the Blog Wyrm staff have been reading and sharing together the wonderful literary work of The Lord of the Rings.  All of us have consumed it in one way or another for decades but this is the first time we’ve sat down and read it out loud together as a group and the joy of this activity keeps increasing.  Perhaps more people will come around.

Now onto the columns.

While having a reputation for being able to perform some amazing feats of classification, neural nets also have a reputation as being ‘black boxes’.  This label is hung on the neural net as a way of either saying that the math and method behind this common family of algorithms is too hard and dense for most or as a way of avoiding having to deal with or both.  This month’s Aristotle2Digital demonstrates that with a little, everyday calculus – in the form of the chain rule – and some bookkeeping, the math of the neural net is readily understood.

Bad incentives led to bad outcomes.  This common maxim of economic wisdom is (or should be) the cornerstone of every policy decision that is made.  Sadly, that is rarely the case, as has been explored in numerous examples here in this column.   This month’s CommonCents takes a macroscopic view of these various lessons and comparison contrasts the two major ways in which this maxim can come into effect:  adverse selection and moral hazard.

The concept of the mean free path helps to organize the observations and effects seen in many physical systems, particularly gases and plasmas, but, as there are many effects in interplay it is hard to get a feel for the numbers.  This month’s UndertheHood examines some models of the Earth’s atmosphere in order to get a feel of just how big the mean free path is at various altitudes and how a related parameter, the collision time, is defined.

Enjoy!

There is an old sentiment cautioning against confusing the magic with the magician that might be worth bringing back to public discourse in this new age of tribalism and emotional infantilization.  The ‘triggering’ event that prompts this assertion is the exhibited outrage and boycott demands leveled against the eminent release of the Hogwarts Legacy videogame later this year.  We here at Blog Wyrm neither think that the Harry Potter franchise is the best thing since sliced bread nor do we think of it was the work of the devil.  Likewise, we neither find its primary architect and author, J.K. Rowling as either paragon or pariah.  We have no dog in this hunt, but we do have a vested interest in civil discourse.  We are not childish enough to confuse her political opinions with the entertainment she creates.  In other words, we are capable, as all emotionally mature people should be, of separating her magic (literary, such as it is) from her role as magician.  Any autonomous person in this world should be able to recognize that we don’t all have to be friends in order for all of us to be able to cooperate with and tolerate each other.  Only the most stunted and privileged and deluded amongst us can entertain the fantasy that we need to boycott anything mildly connected with an opinion we don’t like.  Guilt by association, far from being mature, is backwards in its thinking and, in this highly connected world, would implicate us all.

Now onto the columns.

It seems that everywhere we turn these days we encounter popular articles, blogs, posts, and videos talking about the profound implications of AI or machine learning, often with the further context involving some flavor of neural network.  One glance at these popular press pieces would convince the naïve that the human mind is obsolete and that there is nothing that these algorithms can’t do.  Of course this is nonsense, but a proper appreciation for just why it is nonsense hinges on the fact that the vast majority of people know nothing about neural networks of any kind.  This month’s Aristotle2Digital begins a detailed look at neural networks from scratch, using simple python code with no black boxes applied to a standard computer vision problem.  The aim here is to provide a proper framework for understand the advantages and limitations of what are effectively complex statistical fitting techniques that only resemble intelligence when one fails to ‘peek behind the curtains’.

There is an age-old tension between human desires for autonomy and free choice and for centralized control and order.  These tensions often present themselves in the writ-large struggle between collectivism and capitalism which have dominated much of the political discussions of the last 170 years, give or take.  But these tensions also frequently show up, writ small, in the individual decisions that businesses make.  The amazing turnaround of Barnes and Noble booksellers is one such writ-small adventure which this month’s CommonCents column discusses.  The economic expansion that Barnes and Noble now enjoys is largely due to decisions about the balance between central control held by the corporate offices and the ability of each individual store to tailor and adapt to its customer base.

Simple ideas are often the best, particularly when they can be applied to complex situations.  Take the air in a room, there are over a trillion, trillion, trillion gas molecules surrounding us, each moving in some random direction with some random speed, distributed, of course, according to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution, as past columns have discussed. However, much of the behavior of the air can be described in a relatively small number of variables such as temperature, pressure, bulk speed and density.   UndertheHood introduces another critical description of a gas: the mean free path.  The mean free path tells us, on average, an individual molecule travels before colliding with one of its fellows.  For such a simple concept, the mean free path helps to organize much of our understanding of how matter moves and interacts with itself.

Enjoy!

Happy New Year

By the time this issue of Blog Wyrm publishes, we all will be looking at New Year’s Eve of 2022.  There are, of course, many things that might be said about 2022 but we would simply like to leave the year with a positive message.  May God Bless each and every one of you and may the new year treat each of you well.

Now onto the columns.

Intuitively it is clear that arbitrary moments of a Gaussian distribution must be expressible in terms of the moment’s mean and standard deviation as these are the only two parameters on which the distribution depends.  Still, it isn’t always clear how to make that expression.  This month’s Aristotle2Digital presents Isselis’ Theorem, which explicitly shows how everything connects.

One of the hottest stories of the last couple of months is the spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency empire of Sam Bankman-Fried.  Once the darling of celebrities, media, and capital firms alike, SBF ran fast and loose with other people’s money and came up short.  This month’s CommonCents looks at the factors underlying this disaster and finds that beneath the digital veneer is an old-fashioned swindle enabled by traditional economic factors.

The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecular speeds in a gas is important for a variety of reasons.  First is its practical importance in describing the makeup of a thermalized gas.  Second, its mathematical form emphasizes the fundamental difference between the mean and most probable points of a distribution.  Finally, it serves as a theoretical baseline for understanding the difference between systems in equilibrium and not.  This month’s UndertheHood explores the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution numerically giving a concrete foundation to these points.

Enjoy!