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.