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.