Author Archive: Conrad Schiff

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!

Well, another year has passed, and we find ourselves again at Thanksgiving.  And here at Blog Wyrm, we like to remind our fellow beings that the reason we commemorate this holiday isn’t the Black Friday deals, nor the triple-header football, nor even the feasting with friends and family.  All those things are great but none of them would have been possible without the first major step that William Bradford took in his management of his fledgling colony.  After several years of hardship and much internal turmoil and debate, Bradford decided to abolish the communal work arrangement that the pilgrims had signed in favor of private ownership.  It was only after he made that move that there was enough bounty for feasting and leisure and so on.  The notion of private ownership and peaceful coexistence while pursuing each person’s ‘happiness’ is the cornerstone of the American experiment as John Stossel’s Thanksgiving video shows:

Now onto the columns.

It is hardly an overstatement to say that the Gaussian distribution is a central if often unseen component of our lives.  This distribution forms the underpinning for how we understand and model the world around us.  Aristotle2Digital looks at how multivariate expectations and moments against this distribution can be calculated in a direct way.

This month’s introduction discusses the importance of private ownership in improving human lives and better achieving human potential.  In addition, privatization also benefits nature by providing one of the most powerful tools for protecting vulnerable species from exploitation and destruction.  CommonCents explores how that can be done in a way that benefits man and beast simultaneously.

How might someone lacking the benefit of modern physical instrumentation figure out the distribution of molecular speeds in a material in which the basic constituents are too small to be observed?  Ludwig Boltzmann figured out how using just his knowledge of basic mechanics and fluid statics and his genius for relating concepts.  UndertheHood presents Boltzmann’s brilliant argument and the distribution that bears his (and Maxwell’s) name.

The great mystery of politics is that it’s one of the few cases in which a person, looking for expert help, selects as their guide someone who is no more knowledgeable than themselves. To illustrate this point, consider an average person needing medical assistance, legal counsel, tax advice, or a car repair.

When hiring a doctor, we don’t search to find someone who looks like us or votes like us, we look for someone who knows the human body better than we do without consideration to appearance or politics.  We want a person who can ‘take us apart’ and ‘put us back together again’ better than we started.

When needing a lawyer, we want someone who substantially understands the law better than we do.  We want someone who’s able to get us out of the trouble we are in, whether that trouble is criminal or civil, and to do it in a way that we couldn’t have done ourselves.  We don’t care about their race, age, or gender so long as this person knows their job.

When we consult with an accountant, we are looking for someone who understands better than we where we can invest our money and what we can claim as an exemption to realize the least tax burden possible.  Whether our accountant is a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim, whether he’s straight or gay, none of this matters as long as he can help.

When our car breaks down, we take it to an expert mechanic.  Whether the guy has a plumber’s crack or didn’t shave this week, whether he has gotten the grease from under his fingernails or knows which fork goes with which course of a formal dinner is inconsequential.  We want someone who knows how to fix the brakes or rotate the tires or figure out why the check engine light is on.

But when we seek to hire a politician, for that is what we are doing when we vote, we suddenly, mysteriously seek to have someone just as dumb if not dumber than we are.  We gravitate to someone who ‘looks like us’ or ‘talks like us’.  If those were the only qualifications, then we should be the ones going to Washington; if we had our act together, it would be we who would be leading.  Instead of voting for someone like us we should be voting for someone who is more politically savvy than we are; someone whose self-interests align with our own but who can ‘play the game’ better than we can.  Why we don’t remains a mystery.

But what isn’t mysterious are the fine columns we have this month.

Typically, the best things in life, in addition to being free, are also multifaceted.  Different qualities and attributes blend and mix to make incredibly important things.  Understanding the correlations and probabilities of these blends is important.  This month, Aristotle2Digital begins looking at multivariate Gaussian distributions, which are, arguably, the most important of all statistical models.

Trends.  There may be good reasons for engaging in a trend because one can enjoy the same things others do.  Then again, there may be excellent reasons for avoiding them because one can see the mob mentality present.  CommonCents looks at a policy pendulum swing that has been happening in our grocery stores and asks why can’t we think carefully about all sides of an issue before jumping on the bandwagon.

Thermodynamics of the 19th century examined macroscopic properties available to everyone via rulers, pressure gauges, and thermometers.  During this same period, the great masters began to connect these properties to the mechanical aspects that lay underneath.  UndertheHood looks at those thermodynamic-mechanical connections found in kinetic theory.

Well, as September draws to a close so too does summer.  Technically, the equinox marks the end of the season two thirds of the way through the month but most of us simple call it done after Labor Day.   That’s a shame really, as there are many more weeks of sun and warmth available in most places in the United States but the start of school seems to suck out all the fun.  We at Blog Wyrm were particularly sad to retire this past summer as it was far more enjoyable to at the beach with the pandemic mostly behind us.  Anyway, we thought we would leave a small trace of perpetual summer behind to bring our thoughts back to good times yet to be.

Now onto the columns.

Many of us enjoy a good mystery but few of us stop and actually take the time to analyze just what makes a mystery good.  There are many reasons:  good characters, rich details, and so on.  But nothing is as good as a satisfying explanation of the solution where we look back and say that we could have solved it had we just put two and two together.  Every mystery writer must walk that fine line between making the crime too obvious that it loses the fun and making so obscure that the reader cries foul.  This month’s Aristotle2Digital explores a philosophical way to strike that balance.

Student loan forgiveness is a hot-button topic these days.  Should we or shouldn’t we forgive student debt.  Afterall, doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance?  Or maybe the correct way to argue is that forgiving student debt just rewards bad behavior.  CommonCents weighs the moral hazards of loan forgiveness by comparing student-held obligations to those held by small companies given COVID relief loans.

After over a year of analysis and discussion, UndertheHood draws to a close its exploration of thermodynamics by discussing a challenging heat engine process called the Sadly Cannot cycle (an obvious shout out to Sadi Carnot).  This deceptively simple two-stroke cycle is a teacher’s gem as it deeply tests one’s knowledge of the first and second laws while being completely mathematically tractable.

Enjoy!

Ordinarily, the Blog Wyrm staff takes a couple months off during the summer to reconnect and recharge.  This year, we’ve decided to do things a bit different by offering beach installments of the regular columns.  Still as insightful as ever, each post is a bit shorter and less in depth.  Afterall, one can’t work too hard when one is getting to sunrises such as these each day.

Now onto the columns.

This month’s Aristotle2Digital returns to a favorite topic of humor and language and the hard time machines, regardless of how ‘intelligent’, will have in dealing with the ambiguity.

Much has been made of the Joshua Bell Experiment and the ‘problems’ of a society grown too cold or too jaded to appreciate real value.  But, as CommonCents argues, value is never object and is strongly contextual, which is just as it should be.

Ocean.  It is a simple word for a vast object filled with a mind-numbing number of moving parts.  UndertheHood explores the concept of state in thermodynamics and discusses why simple words can often describe complex things and some of the problems that arise.

Enjoy!