According to The Free Dictionary by Farlax, the C’mon Man meme is meant to convey “the speaker’s frustration or annoyance with someone else (usually the listener).”  One common usage is in sports entertainment where an analyst or commentator is disgusted with the effort (or lack thereof) that a player exhibits in a game.

Now we at Blog Wyrm don’t usually get frustrated or annoyed and far less frequently do we express any frustration we feel for the good reason that we are mature enough to realize that there people out there who also find us frustrating or annoying. To be clear, we do mock and deride bad ideas often and will continue to do so since that is the way the truth outs but that is a far cry from annoyance.  But sometimes one must simply stand up and hold people accountable lest there be nothing left to stand up for.

What is the particular ‘cause’ that has so energized us to make such a stand?  It is the basic obligation that content providers should have to proofread their bloody content.  Just recently we saw a four-word headline, in large font no less, that read something like: “Tiger Woods Are Happy”.  (Sadly we lost the screen snap of this inspiring bit of prose).

Now we realize that mistakes happen; there are plenty in our columns despite our proofreaders.  Things slip through and we appreciate that.  But on a headline?  By a for profit organization?  Our first thought was that the headline was machine-produced and the so-called AI got confused by the letter ‘s’ at the end of Woods.  Then we thought, just fleetingly, that the headline writer was not a native English speaker.  Then we realized that who cares what the root cause was, someone who paid for this should have enough self-respect to just proofread it.  It was only four words comprised of maybe 20 letters.  We aren’t asking for sterling prose, flawless grammar, proper punctuation, and perfect syntax.  Just a simple proofread of four stinking words.  C’mon Man.

Now onto the columns.

The previous numerical experiments using the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm proved it to be a robust, simple, and general method for producing sequences of random numbers following just about any distribution one could imagine.  But why does it work?  This month’s AristotletoDigital explores the mathematical and statistical underpinnings of the Metropolis-Hastings and shows it is all a matter of balance – detailed balance that is.

Inflation, inflation everywhere and not a drop of relief in sight.  Soaring prices and short supplies are certainly trying enough without having every Tom, Dick, and Pundit gives us their uninformed opinions as to just whose fault it is.  This month’s CommonCents makes the compelling argument, a la Milton Friedman, that inflation was, is, and will always be a monetary effect and that, therefore, the fault dear reader lies not in ourselves but in the Fed for printing too much currency.

Entropy and irreversibility go hand-in-hand.  The second law and the Clausius inequality show us the way to determine which processes are spontaneous and which require some arm twisting by an external agency (e.g., an engine).  But the analysis is awkward.  This is where the other thermodynamic potentials come to the rescue.  Join UndertheHood this month as it introduces the Gibbs and Helmholtz free energies and it explains why chemists love these things.

Enjoy!