Over a year and a half ago our internet service provider produced a systemic fault in all of our blogs and, over the course of a few days, Blog Wyrm was off of the web. It’s taken some time and some ingenuity and experimentation to fit a refurbishing into our otherwise very hectic lives but we’ve managed it just in time to welcome a new year. Almost all of the previous posts have made it and we’ll be fixing the handful of ones that suffered some loss over the coming months.
And speaking of a new year, let us wish everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and Peace on Earth to people of good will. May God bless.
Now onto the columns.
Society deems a working knowledge of algebra, or at least a passing familiarity with it, as essential for most of its members. Most of us are exposed to algebra in middle school and somehow or another we learn to write and solve equations, even if we don’t quite know how. However, computers lack the intuitive learning of humans and teaching a machine to ‘do’ algebra is one of the classic problems of artificial intelligence. This month, Aristotle2Digital takes a looks at some of the technology required to manipulate mathematical expressions by looking developing a rule-based system in the SymPy package in Python.
There are many ways for a human enterprise to fail. The product may be superior in some way but inferior in another, more important way. The effort may be sabotaged by fraud or theft. The timing may not be write and so on. But those failures were failures without being blunders. True blunders come when the people on that enterprise blur the lines separating what it is they are doing from how they should do it. CommonCents examines two separate anecdotes where the blurring between ‘what’ and ‘how’ lead ultimately to catastrophe.
Few problems in classical physics are as celebrated as the circular restricted three-body problem (CR3BP). Once the playground of mathematicians and physicists, the CR3BP has had something of a resurgence as numerous spacecraft missions have targeted either the Sun-Earth/Moon L1 or L2 libration points. UndertheHood starts a multi-part investigation of the CR3BP, which, along the way, will show us the ins and outs of how the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) takes the beautiful pictures that it does.
Enjoy!