Well, the summer of 2021 is officially here.  In 1967, we had the Summer of Love.  1984 had Don Henley’s Boys of Summer.  What does the summer of 2021 have?  Well, certainly not the good music that came from either the 1960s or the 1980s.  Not the sense of carefree abandon of the 1960s nor the sense of defiant hope of the 1980s.  On the surface, the summer of 2021 is much the same as 2020, pandemic woes hang over everything.  Despite that, there are definite signs of hope as more and more people stand up to the desperate obsession of some of our leaders to control all of our actions and the fear-mongering they use to ensure cooperation.  People again are going to movies, and concerts, and sporting events – exercising their right to free assembly and learning to put the risk of COVID and the inevitability of death into perspective.  We at Blog Wyrm have faith and hope that the summer of 2021 is the starting point for a freer world going forward.

Now onto our columns.

Most everyone appreciates a good example to illustrate the core concepts of an idea.  The more abstract the idea the greater the appreciation for that example.  In the case of category theory, the ideas are often quite abstracted and practical examples are hard to find due to the fact that the combinatorics quickly grow too large to make hand examples worth it.  Thankfully, a little bit of code goes a long way. This month’s Aristotle2Digital presents a python-based approach for producing the family of mappings needed to analyze actual problems in the category of sets.

One of the key concepts in economics is the idea of externalities in which a third party to a transaction either benefits (positive externality) or suffers (negative externality) as a result.  Examples abound ranging from water pollution due to upstream industrial activities to piggybacking on a neighbors unsecured wireless signal.  When the externalities are the result of government laws they are often grouped under the heading of unintended consequences.  CommonCents looks that the unintended consequences stemming from a law in San Francisco that argues that petty shoplifting is a victimless crime.  Tell that to the third-party victims having to live in city areas devoid of pharmacies.

This month’s UnderTheHood presents a fascinating analysis of how one of the most common kitchen staples opens vistas into quantum and statistical mechanics, the structure of phase space, and the ways in which academic traditions are handed down with little self-examination.  The humble substance in question is whole milk and, based on Robert Swendsen’s analysis, it seems that the physics community has been misunderstanding the definition of entropy for decades.

Enjoy!