A common theme at the start of any new year is the resolution.  Learn a new language, lose weight, exercise more.  As a society we value making resolutions, it seems, a lot more than we value keeping them.  So, as we start 2024, the Blog Wyrm staff is gratified to point out that our resolution to produce new content has now entered its tenth year.  And while there were some months where we faltered when life inevitably got in the way or some others where we took a well-deserved break we’ve, nonetheless, kept up our resolution.  Not too shabby.

Now onto the columns.

To quote Ecclesiastes, for everything there is a season.  And indeed, the real-world is teeming with phenomena that show trends and seasonal variations: the weather, home sales, catching a cold, etc..  In this month’s continuing examination of time series, Aristotle2Digital presents a simple look at the Holt-Winter trending and prediction algorithm.

Just when you think the governmental mess in California can’t get worse, the gang in charge of that state show that they have yet another card, drawn from the deck of unintended consequences, up their sleeve.  As CommonCents explores, this time the fast food workers are squarely in their crosshairs ready to have their economic livelihood shot down by a well-meaning law.

It’s hard enough to understand the radii of convergence of series expansions of real-valued functions.  It is another level of difficulty in understanding series expansions for operator-valued ones.  This month, UndertheHood takes a ‘experimental math’ approach to exploring when an operator can have a small-enough piece that a formal inverse expansion can converge with a finite (and reasonably small) number of terms.

Enjoy!