Monthly Archive: May 2020

Each year we celebrate Memorial Day, but it isn’t clear that many of us really appreciate the holiday.  Some of us regard it as the beginning of summer, despite the solstice being about a month away.  Others regard it as a time to go to the beach to start working on that all over tan.  Some think it is the event that gives tacit permission to wear white pants.  The Blog Wyrm staff likes to remind ourselves of the men who fought for us.

Some of the men came back with minor injuries.  Some came back lame or dismembered.  Some came back with demons that haunt them forever after, and some came back in a daze of forgetfulness brought on by an addiction acquired ‘over there’.  And some simply never came back.

Each of those lives, marred and warped in some way or another by the horrors endured, is just as noble and successful and inspiring as the ‘most beautiful’ amongst us.  In this age were we cling to life and comfort for their own sakes (after all, what else is the panic over COVID-19 really about), there is a strong tendency to push those who’ve sacrificed themselves on our behalf out of our sight.  Like the elderly, their presence is a downer at a party we pray never ends.  Well, we want to remind everyone of who picks up the bar tab for incessant self-centered hedonism – it is those brave soldiers who fought so we didn’t have to.

Now onto the columns.

Reasoning and language tend to get tied in knots when arguing about probabilities.  These knots take on almost legendary status when we fail to distinguish probabilities of outcome versus probabilities of guessing correctly.  This month’s Aristotle To Digital considers the kinds of knots that can arise from such simple situations as flipping a coin and making a guess as to how many daughters a couple with two kid s has.

Given the new normal of social distancing and virtual meetings, it is tempting to ask ‘what if’-type questions.  How would things be different if most of us didn’t have high speed internet?  What do we do without social media to keep us in touch?  How would we be able to function without Zoom?  Common Cents gives into the temptation and wonders how things would be different if one of the world’s greatest inventors, George Eastman, were alive today.  Prepare an alternative history dripping with drama and economic meaning.

In 1904, at a fairly unknown and unassuming conference, a ten-minute presentation was given that would change the world of fluid dynamics forever after.  In that short span of time, Ludwig Prandtl introduced the boundary layer, a thin section of fluid flow past a solid object such as a wing, in which friction effects dominate.  This concept put to rest a 150-year old ‘paradox’, ushered in practical estimations of drag forces on solids, and gave new insights into turbulence.  Under The Hood examines Prandtl’s astonishingly far-reaching concept.

The narrative below was written and ready for public viewing on schedule.  However, things being what they are, it never saw the light of day when the columns did.  Oops!

Well April is upon us and the world is still topsy-turvy.  At least the weather is beginning to change and the hope for warmer days is ahead.  As we all adapt to social distancing, online learning, and massive stagnation in the economy, it is worth remembering that we still have many blessings.  Despite the strains on our medical system, on our infrastructure, and on our common spiritual and mental well-being, most of us are healthy and sound and will see this troubling time through.  Far more concerning is whether many of our most basic rights will make through unscathed.  That, of course, is up to each of us and only time will tell.

Now onto the columns.

Random chance.  A common phrase that gets bandied about in routine conversation.  But precisely defining what is and is not random is surprising hard to do.  Aristotle To Digital presents a few aspects of the amazingly rich structure found when considering random events with no patterns.

As the Corona virus alters life in the United States, there are things to gladden the soul, to madden the heart, and to disgust common sense and good taste.  As social beings, we can’t help but live in a collective economy where we all depend on each other.  Common Cents presents the good, the bad, and the ugly of living in the socially-distant world of COVID-19.

Somewhere in an introductory physics class, the student briefly encounters simple fluid flow and, typically, Bernoulli’s equation with its accompanying notion of streamlines.  These presentations rarely impart the richness and complexity of real fluid flow, fail utterly to emphasize how important fluid dynamics is in wide swaths of physical research, and sell short the variety of descriptions and tools that practitioners use to understand.  This month’s Under The Hood tries to address this last point by looking at path-, streak-, and streamlines and showing how even simple-looking situations can lead to some counter-intuitive conclusions.