It is the first of May. The skies are overcast, the temperature cool and perhaps even chilly. People are wearing heavy clothing and are staying warm or they are dressing for spring and shivering. The first summer blockbuster is out in theaters in the form of Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, but it certainly isn’t summer. It doesn’t even feel like spring.
Well, Blog Wyrm has just the thing for the sensible person who decides to eschew the great outdoors. Four new columns this week.
About Comics brings some of the those movie goers who no little of the origins of Ultron up to speed on the history of this murderous robot. More interesting than this sociopathic ai is its creation – the Vision.
Modeling systems and their corresponding states is all the rage these days and object oriented programming paves the way for exciting simulations. However, as Aristotle to Digital points out, it is often the case that the objects we don’t define are as important as those we do.
The electricity that flows everyday to power our modern economy comes courtesy of electromagnetic induction and Mister Faraday’s law. Massive hoops of wire move through carefully constructed magnetic fields at 60 Hz to bring all of us the internet, cable TV, and other wonders (or perhaps horrors). Inspired by these technological marvels, Under the Hood presents a working example of the flux transport theorem, which gives the mathematical underpinnings to the science of making electrical power.
Speaking of power, Common Cents talks about a different kind of power in the interactions between Management and Labor – the power to make each other miserable. By making a couple of straightforward observations, the back-and-forth between these two sides can be mapped to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the results show how hard it is for each side to trust and cooperate with the other once they fell betrayed.
Enjoy!