It seems like only yesterday that we were ushering in the summer and now the start of the 2021 football season is upon us.  Regardless of how we feel about the relentless march of time it is nice to see that some things remain constant.   Training camps have been held.  The anemic pre-season, foisted upon us by the incessant need for more revenues, serves to single out the casual fans who, clueless of the inner workings of the NFL, celebrate when their team is undefeated.  A sense of normalcy will begin to creep back in when fans fill the stadiums to watch the games.  Whoever thought drunken shenanigans and nachos could look so good.

Speaking of looking good, we have a fine set of columns this month.

Aristotle2Digital digs into a very interesting concept that comes from the world of computing but which has profound philosophical implications.  The idea is that a programming paradigm works by taking away degrees of freedom.  In other words, the usefulness of a particular approach to programming (e.g. object-oriented) comes from the fact that it constrains our way of doing things.  This observation, which generalizes to any mode of intellectual inquiry is surprisingly deep.

Recent polling has uncovered the fact that an alarming percentage of young people (~20%) have a favorable view of socialism/communism.  One out of every five college students, provided their discontent with capitalism, using the very infrastructure provided by the system they doubt or despise.  CommonCents explores the depth of ignorance that these unexamined communists exhibits.

In recent columns, UnderTheHood has argued the point made by Robert Swendsen that entropy is misunderstood and mistaught by many practitioners and textbooks.  This month’s column, building on Swendsen’s colloid analysis, presents a simple Monte Carlo model of that demonstrates that the resolution of the Gibbs paradox does not depend on the introduction of quantum indistinguishability.

Enjoy!