Despite pandemics, political upheavals, economics downturns, and domestic unrest and wars abroad, the seasons progress whether we like it or not. The summer of 2023 is shaping up to be a beautiful season and it has been offering us breathtaking examples of the handiwork of God. The Blog Wyrm staff just managed to get this breathtaking shot of a cloud bank near the horizon, back-lit by the setting sun, with rays of Buddha akimbo. A reminder that there is always hope and beauty in the world.
Now onto the columns.
There is a well-worn maxim that states that everything old is new again. Usually applied to fad and fashion, it apparently also applies to algorithms. Case in point, the Hoshen-Kopelman algorithm, which was invented to assist in the investigations into physical percolation is now considered a type of machine learning algorithm. Well, it isn’t clear that that label really applies but nonetheless, as this month’s Aristotle2Digital shows, this deterministic clustering algorithm, clever though it may be, still falls far short of what the human eye can do.
Labor v. management. It’s a drama as old of the hills but that kind of drama takes on a new life when the labor is the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the management is the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Is it David versus Goliath or more like the affluent upper middle class against the wealthy upper class? Who can say? But CommonCents can say just what the WGA is demanding and what the AMPTP is not saying and how various forces of economics are colliding in this fight.
There is a certain elegance to simple rules creating unexpected behaviors. This is the charm of cellular automata and statistical mechanics and nowhere is this more on display then in simple simulations that demonstrate how analytically tractable scattering processes amongst hard spheres, when applied to randomized collection, inevitably leads to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution. This month’s UndertheHood lays the theoretical ground work for just such a simulation.
Enjoy!