Well March has certainly lived up to its tempestuous reputation.  We’ve had spates of good and bad news but, regardless of whether one’s banking, political, and social fortunes rise or fall, there is no escaping it that time moves on.  Spring is here and, with it, boundless hope for the future showcased in some of the finest that nature has to offer.  And it is with that in mind, that we at Blog Wyrm offer this the following sight to remind us all that life is worth living.

It seems no matter where go, there is some buzz about AI running amok.  ChatGTP here, deep fakes there.  Anytime now, Skynet will descend, terminators will pop out from time portals to take us all, as alkaline batteries, into the latest Marvel movie where we will only be rescued by John Wick.  Sigh…  Neural networks may embody a powerful way to ‘curve fit’ statistical data in a huge number of dimensions but there are far from intelligent, let alone malevolent.  This month, Aristotle2Digital examines just how easy it is to fool a neural network.  Makes one think twice about longing for self-driving cars.

Every March, sports fans from around the country try their hand at the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament.  Fondly referred to as ‘March Madness’, this sporting event is designed to provide some excitement in the gap between the end of professional football and the beginning of professional baseball.  Sadly, whatever madness was found in March 2023 is likely to be remembered in terms of bank collapses and shocks in the financial markets.  CommonCents explores just what happened to cause two of the largest bank failures in US history to overshadow sports, gambling, and just about everything else.

Open a bottle of perfume in a room and soon the whole space is filled with a (hopefully) pleasant smell.  Run two engine parts near each other and one finds that the less viscous the lubricant the better the performance.  Put an ice cube on top of a hot plate and watch it rapidly melt.  This month’s UndertheHood introduces how these fundamental macroscopic effects can be characterized by elementary kinetic theory and how the corresponding physical coefficients can be related to the mean free path.