Every four years the world stops to watch the Olympics, wherein countries, putting aside their differences, send teams of dedicated amateurs to honorably compete on the field of sport. So, the story as crafted when I was a boy. Over time, the various veils and fig leaves of respectability have fallen away. Tales surfaced of East Germans manipulating and experimenting on their athletes, doping became commonplace among teams from the four corners of the world, bad-sportsmanship, rooted in geopolitics was often on display, and athletes are anything but amateurs these days.

So what is the continued appeal of the Olympics? Well, in my opinion not much from the old political point-of-view. But as a display of pure athleticism certainly there is something to admire. I decided to give the Olympics a glance this past weekend and I was pleasantly surprised at how engaging it was. In particular, the most entertaining events were the figure skating, the luge, speed skating, and the shooting portion of the biathlon. It’s nice to see that the Olympics have morphed into something worth watching as a strict physical spectacle stripped of most of the obsolete philosophies of the past.

Equally enjoyable, although clearly not as visually stunning, is this month’s Blog Wyrm.

About Comics picks back up it retrospective of the Jack Kirby Fourth World. This month’s column reviews the X-Men/Teen Titan crossover, one of the high-points in the dark decade after Kirby left DC.

Aristotle To Digital takes a whimsical look at what is a legendary piece of code from the gaming world – the fast-inverse square root. Eager for speed, developers have been known to pull no punches when optimizing for performance but what went into this algorithm boggles the mind.

Common Cents reminisces about the excesses of the past that led to the demise of the steel industry and the blight of the rust belt and finds the same signs of rot in the machine that is higher education.

Starting from first principles, Under The Hood derives the magnetic field for an ideal dipole and then finds the equations of the field lines for the most important dipole we know – the Earth. The resulting relationship gives the famous L-Shells of the van Allen radiation belts.

Enjoy!