Around the middle of this month, we at Blog Wyrm heard a spirited plea from a civic leader stressing the need for people to distance themselves from social media and the need to have a smartphone on hand all the time.  At the time, we perfunctorily agreed with that sentiment but upon further reflection we realized that it is perhaps the most important single thing we can all do.  The internet of things can be a wonderful thing when it feeds our curiosity (such as our own humble blogzine) or mobilizes us to action or connects us with loved ones.  But far too many of us use it as a substitute for living our lives.  We’ve become a society of watchers not doers and each of us is suffering as a result.  We’ve become enslaved to our machines rather than them being our servants.  So, we urge all our readers to put the phones and laptops and tablets down and pick up a paint brush or throw baseball or go for a walk.  Each day that we live vicariously through these small screens is another day where we fail to live to our fullest potential – and that is the true meaning of March Madness.

Equivocation is the bane of clear discourse. How often do people talk past each other simply by using the same words to mean different things.  This problem is pesky when the respective meanings largely aligned but are not exactly the same but it becomes particularly pernicious when the concepts being discussed are technical and precise.  This month’s Aristotle2Digital explores how the phrase ‘conditional probability’ can mean radically different things in different contexts.

Where is the one place in the US where ignorance is cherished in place of logic and fairness and where the accused is guilty until proven?  Most ‘enlightened’ people will point to the deep south harkening back to the court scene depicted in To Kill a Mocking Bird or some similar scenario.  Of course, the real answer is that these folk need look no further than their own prejudice about certain actors within the economy.  Case in point, CommonCents looks for evidence of oil companies price gouging and find nothing beyond ignorance and malice.

The concept of entropy is one of the crowning intellectual achievements of the 19th century.  With no recourse to modern technology or any detailed knowledge of atomic physics, the great physicists of that century, using only logic and the deceptively simple Carnot cycle, developed a profound statement of how entropy arises from the second law of thermodynamics.  UndertheHood presents the capstone of that theory:  the Clausius inequality, which relates entropy to reversible and irreversible process and, eventually, to Boltzmann’s connection to probability.