Monthly Archive: September 2017

Well, it has happened yet again. A behemoth of industry and supposed trusted public entity has, through its carelessness, been hacked by my personal data exposed and/or compromised. Following in the disgraced footsteps of Target, Home Depot, OMB, UMD, and who knows how many more, Equifax the last in a long line of corporate entities, in both the private and public sectors, who have failed to keep our data safe. It is particularly galling from the company charged with making judgements over the trustworthiness of others. Sigh…

Now onto something that doesn’t suck, this month’s columns.

It is rare that a comics story can really pull the reader in and sustain excitement, tension, and expense over a period of months. It is also rare when such a story can repay multiple readings and maintain its charm through each reading. About Comics dips into the past to revisit just such a tale: The Great Darkness Saga.

Politicians, shady salesmen, and boorish acquaintances of all sorts seem to have one feature in common – they all leave the impression that they talk a great deal but say very little. Aristotle To Digital presents a way to analyze such speech and decide what the real content is and what is just hot air; all through the power of symbolic logic.

Most of us have taken a summer ride on a roller-coaster. Fun, thrilling, exciting, all of these words can be used to describe the typical experience. However, as this month’s Under The Hood shows, the more apt word may be complicated, as it is demonstrated that numerical modeling of a ride on a roller-coaster is very hard to do due to the constraint of having to stay on the track.

In a follow-up to an earlier column on the the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate and the Jevons Paradox, this month’s Common Cents looks for direct evidence of these effects in oil prices, especially after the U.S.’s move to a more energy efficeint posture over the last 40 years. After looking at a variety of data, the conclusion is that there is little to support the idea of a large upswing in consumption of the sort predicted (and feared) by those learned men.

Enjoy!

This month, the Blog Wyrm staff decided to take a break from publishing our favorite blogzine. The reasons for this are many and manifold. All of us need a time to recharge; kids need to be ferried back to school; and a once-a-in-long-time opportunity to see an eclipse presented itself.

So, in place of this month’s offering, we instead offer these very beautiful images of the cresent sun produced by the ‘pinhole’ cameras formed by spaces in leaves.

Ordinarily, we only see roundish splotches since the round sun images over lap and the holes in the trees aren’t really pinholes. It is astonishing just how well the sun’s images appeared on the day of the eclipse.

So, we will be back next month with our usual spate of columns. Until then, enjoy!