As August rolls to an end, there are many things to prepare for such as the beginning of the football season, the return of students to school etc.  One thing that we can’t prepare for is the new season of television due to the writers’ strike.  We at Blog Wyrm tend to be singularly unaffected as we don’t watch television – at least not the modern incarnation.  We’ve been working our way through various shows from the late 1990s and it is interesting to see just how things changed after 9/11.  Characters were written uttering such lines as “things will never be the same” and “we’ve lost a certain security that we’ll never get back”.  These lines may have sounded sincere and felt poignant at the time but there is simply no way that anyone can deny that for the most part, we no longer remember 9/11.  Much like Pearl Harbor, we can conjure up memories and say it was a dark day, but its shadow no longer seems to darken us, its horror no longer stains our psyche.  And that is all for the worse.  We should remember 9/11 and the fascist roots of control that grew yielded the 19 strange fruits that harmed us that day.  We should remember that desire to exterminate and see its cousins in many of the authoritarian dictates and dictators that have come after from the housing crisis, where ‘experts’ leveraged garbage into phantom profits and almost took down much of the global financial markets, to the pandemic with its hysteria and paranoia, to the cancel culture and perpetually offended class that lurks in every nook and cranny of social media.  We need to remember 9/11 if for no other reason than to remind ourselves that some of us are not so different than the people who carried out that massacre and that we need to remain eternally optimistic, charitable, and vigilant.

Now onto the columns.

Picture if you will an argument as old as time: Ty Cobb was the greatest baseball player.  Are you crazy, Babe Ruth is head and shoulders better. While there is never going to be a final way of settling arguments like these, the Z-score, as Aristotle2Digital shows, at least offers an unambiguous way to statistically compare players (or anything) in an apples-to-apples manner.  

When the word ‘economics’ is used in polite economy there is usually a sharp intake of air through many mouths as concerned looks immediately populate sets of eyes around the speaker.  Clear indications that the word might as well be spelled with four letters.  Nonetheless, CommonCents demonstrates that the content of economics thinking makes for great entertainment that is safe to talk about at any party.

Early in his famous ‘Feynman Lectures on Physics’, Richard Feynman ponders if all civilization were wiped out and only one nugget of learning passed on from the old to the new what should that be.  He asserts that the most useful idea to help the survivors rise from the ashes would be the notion of the atomic nature of matter.  UndertheHood looks at the some of the math behind that idea by presenting the Boltzmann equation which links the mechanics of the atomic picture with the macroscopic world.

Enjoy!