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!