Author Archive: Conrad Schiff

As summer deepens and the temperatures climb, the Blog Wyrm staff begins to long for some lazy days outside, around the pool, goofing off, and wasting time. As a result, we will be switching to a more laid-back schedule until early September. During our summer hiatus, only a few of our columns will be posting weekly (About Comics and Pretzel Motion). Others are taking the summer completely off (Aristotle to Digital and Common Cents) and others will be on a irregular schedule (Ball Game, Green Screen, Tidbits, and Under the Hood).

About Comics takes a long hard look at the creative method of the famous EC publication line. The process they used back in the 1950s centered around the creative output of one man – Al Feldstein. Read all about his method.

Is mandatory drug testing a good idea? Using Bayes Theorem, Aristotle to Digital shows that even in the best of circumstances, the probability of a innocent person coming under an unwarranted cloud of suspicion is pretty high.

What do cooking, rocks, Broadway plays, and Marxism all have in common? They are essential ingredients in Common Cents‘s light-hearted exploration of just how the value of a good or service should be determined.

Fighting game fans are in luck, as Pretzel Motion is posting 2 articles this week! The first provides a video example of the concept of rushdown, as demonstrated by Eddie, the infamous top-tier fighter that has reigned supreme over the Guilty Gear series since the early 2000s. The second article introduces aerial combat and explains why it’s such a huge risk compared to staying on the ground while fighting. If you’ve ever wondered why fighting game veterans tell new players not to jump, this is the article for you.

Under the Hood closes out its analysis of Lie series with a numerical analysis of the convergence of the expansion applied to the pendulum to the exact answer.

Enjoy!

Well it is that time of year again when we celebrate what makes the United States such an amazing country in which to live. Yes the Fourth of July does commemorate the Declaration of Independence – the launching of a fledgling experiment in self-governance in the face of tyranny and of uncertainty. This aspect alone should be worth remembering at this time of year. But there is also another aspect of the Declaration of Independence that is worth noting. The founders and framers added the line ‘… that all men are created equal.’

In a world that rewards a constant keeping-up-with-the-Jones attitude and which asks constantly “what have you done for me lately”, it is easy to think that all of us aren’t created equal. Certainly some of us are stronger than others, or smarter, or richer. Only a moron could fail to see that we aren’t equal – if the definition of equal is limited to the idea that we should be equal in outcomes or accidents of birth. But what the founders meant is that we are all equal in fundamental dignity, in deserving respect, and in being entitled to certain inalienable rights. We at Blog Wyrm are grateful for their wisdom and their courage and for giving all us such a wonderful place to live.

Blog Wyrm could not exist without the structure that these men risked all they had to make a reality. So this patriotic edition of Blog Wyrm is dedicated to them.

There are a lot of books out there purporting to help you make your own comic and to give the secrets that the pros use. Are they really saying the same thing? About Comics begins a comprehensive review of these works.

This week’s Aristotle to Digital discusses the real power of Bayes theorem; the ability to link cause and effect in a meaningful way.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are the current cause celeb but does it make good economic sense to shun these man-made organics? Common Cents presents some evidence that suggests that you should think twice before joining the witch hunt.

As you may know, the goal of any fighting game is to defeat your opponent, and the most effective way of doing that is by getting on the offensive. Building on the previously-explored concept of taking advantage of an opening in an opponent’s strategy, Pretzel Motion introduces the concept of rushdown, or limiting the opponent’s options and trying to bait their unsafe reversals while still staying safe yourself.

This week’s Under the Hood applies the Lie series to the problem of the pendulum. An exact solution exists in terms of elliptical integrals. How close does the Lie series come? Read and find out.

Enjoy!

Things seem to be a bit strange today. As the Blog Wyrm staff got together this evening there seemed to be a general consensus that the world was slight off balance. All of us saw strange driving incidents – cars come at us on the wrong side of the yellow line, people trying to passing where no lane existed, trucks tearing mirrors off cars, and so on. Then there is the general weirdness in the news – killers on the loose in New York and running parts of what once were coherent nations in the Middle East. Being a Friday, our immediate knee-jerk reaction centered around Friday the Thirteenth but of course the date is wrong. That is until someone pointed out that the 26th is the 13th times two. So maybe we are seeing a double-strength case of that ‘bad-luck day’.

Well there may be bad luck in the air but there is good luck what we have to offer today.

Censorship and free speech are once again the subject of About Comics. Central to any discussion of these topics must be a commitment to the truth, which the CBLDF seems to be making take a back seat to sensationalism these days.

What do Christmas lights, Occam’s razor, some basic computations, and an Episcopalian minster all have in common? Bayes theorem, that’s what. Read all about it in this week’s Aristotle to Digital.

Are you passionate about a sport? Passionate enough to step out of the limelight and take a swing at coaching? Ballgame shows just how rewarding that experience can be.

What to stimulate the economy then how the wholesale destruction of an US city. Sounds crazy doesn’t it? But it only differs in size not in principle from what a lot of people have suggested. Don’t think it could be true? Try seeing for yourself in Common Cents .

Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan are all monsters of epic size who have found fame (and fortune?) on the big screen. But it took a more modern movie to introduce the Japanese name for these creatures – Kaiju – to the US public. Come join Green Screen as it examines just what makes Pacific Rim such a cool movie.

Round 1, Fight! The match begins. Your hands are trembling as your arcade stick sits on your lap. You think to yourself, “How on God’s green earth am I supposed to beat this guy? He’s been wailing on me for the past 20 games or so, and I have no clue how to find an opening in him!” You’re not alone in this struggle. Most people who play fighting games arrive at this stage and quit out of frustration. Pretzel Motion can’t guarantee that you’ll get good at fighting games anytime soon, but it hopes that this week’s article, which discusses how to put your foes at a disadvantage in a match, can point you in the right direction in terms of how you think about the structure of all fighting games.

The Kepler problem – one of the most famous, important, and thornier of the class of problems with exact solutions. Its nonlinearity makes it much more difficult to solve than textbook linear problems like the harmonic oscillator. This week’s Under the Hood continues its in depth look Lie series by seeing how the great Norwegian’s method fairs against Johannes’s problem.

Enjoy!

Enjoy

I suppose that summer is really and truly here now that the temperatures are pushing the mid-nineties and the humidity is a making each day an adventure in sweating. That said, it is nice to see lots of sunshine for a change and, now that schools are out and graduations are a thing of the past, perhaps there will be some time to unwind during the dogs days that lie before us.

Despite the heat (or maybe because of it – its easier to write inside when its muggy outside), we have a nice set of columns this week.

The final act the initial story arc in Big Trouble in Little China closes out the very fun three-part review in this week’s About Comics.

Owing in part to American Pharoah’s win at Belmont last Saturday and in part to the very weird holding pattern of the stock market these days a small discussion of the finer points of being a bookie are discussed in Common Cents. Find out how to make book and run a hedge fund in one easy lesson.

Plato introduced the concept of the ideal form to Western Philosophy and so changed the way we think about… well, thinking. So what would he say to a discussion of errors and uncertainty in modern science and engineering? Aristotle to Digital explores this hypothetical situation and finds that the answer is rather hard to come by.

Think your intuition is strong enough to explain just how field energy flows in a variety of situations? Under the Hood puts it to the test and ends up Poynting to a way to better understand Maxwell’s equations.

Enjoy.

Well our brief hiatus is now over and the events outside of our control seem to have been resolved favorably. New posts are coming out for our usual columns and new recruitment is underway for several new additions in the weeks to come. Things seem to looking up.

So exactly why do we teach what we do in the classroom and what use is it anyway? On the surface, these types of questions may seem uncouth and uncivilized but its about time someone asked them – and Aristotle to Digital is just the place to start.

What do Arthritis and Moral Hazards have in common? Read this week’s Common Cents to find out how the medical profession passes its risk on to the captive consumers that we all are.

The second act of the Big Trouble in Little China shows up in the ‘Hell of a Thousand Blog Posts’ (Chinese have a lot of hells) and/or in this week’s About Comics.

Under the Hood puts Mister Maxwell and his famous equations under the bare bulb to interrogate just where the charge, energy, and constraints were on the night in question..

Enjoy!

Well… we don’t like to accept it but life does get in the way. This week we at Blog Wyrm were overcome by circumstances out of our control and we simply didn’t have time to bring new columns out.

Count on us delivering new material next week.

Like its brother issue last week, Issue 21 is tardy. And like last week, we at Blog Wyrm continue to revel in the afterglow of Graduation events and the hectic fallout of needing to be in 5 places all at the same time.

The major difference is that this being Issue 21 and the graduation activities are finally over and the need for an adult beverage is here. Fortunately, Blog Wyrm has turned 21 so its legal.

This week’s Common Cents presents the other side of the David and Goliath story in modern economics. David can and does win due to diseconomies of scale that make Goliath look more like a brontosaurus. Added bonus: a special appearance by the manager everybody loves to hate

Self-reference, paradox, and natural language are the focus of this week’s Aristotle to Digital. Russell and Godel grapple with the Liar’s Paradox.

Can a comic be a sequel to a movie? Can it be successful if it is? As About Comics shows, the comic version of Big Trouble in Little China is a fun and worthy successor of the famous movie of the same name.

Finally, this week’s Under the Hood covers the numerical modeling of the vibrational energy of H2. Numerical methods based on Numpy and Scipy take center stage.

Enjoy!

Issue 20 is arriving a bit late this week. And we at Blog Wyrm have a great excuse. Graduation – high school and college. Cap and gowns, commencements, and the like. That bizarre craziness that starts with the student and then sucks the parents in.

In some sense, getting twenty issues out the door is a kind of graduation for us a well. Wonder what we’ll do next week when we turn out 21?

The subject of mass-varying systems in general is discussed in this week’s Under the Hood. A general form of Newton’s law is derived and applied to the conveyor belt problem giving a satisfactory answer to the question of where did all the power go?

If the common wisdom is to be believed, the modern-day David and Goliath story between small and big business would always end with Goliath dragging the lifeless body of David around. But as Common Cents shows, the real evidence suggests that David is still alive and well and is capable of pulling off an upset of biblical proportions.

Still thrilled by the connection between Turing and Gödel, Aristotle to Digital tries to outline the logician’s famous theorem using some help from a nice book on that subject.

Finally, we close out this week with a lost classic in comics. Rick Veitch’s ‘Abraxas and the Earthman’ is a thought provoking retelling of ‘Moby Dick’ set in space. About Comics takes a long look at this psychedelic work from the early eighties.

Enjoy!

The weather has finally grown pleasant enough that light jackets and coats can be left in the closet and sweaters need be worn only inside when the air conditioning is too high. The grass is lush, birds are out singing, and school is winding down. Nature seems to be a waxing toward a luxurious summer. And yet the world is filled with such brimming pockets of turmoil that its hard to feel any peace.

This general blending of highs with lows is reflected in this weeks offering in Blog Wyrm.

Common Cents examines some of the more unsettling notes from the economy of late. While not the most cheerful reading, the points raised here are important and ignoring the problems in both the structure of the economy and in our thinking about it is not going to make them go away.

The mood gets considerable lighter in Under the Hood. The intriguing and sometimes frustrating conveyor belt problem is the gateway to a more rigorous understanding of systems with variable mass and how momentum and energy conservation can be applied in more complex situations.

An exciting idea about the logic, computation and nature fills this week’s Aristotle to Digital. Is the Universe a Universal Turing Machine and, if so, what are the implications.

Finally, we close out this week with a fun look at Wanda and Pietro Maximoff. Better known as the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, movie audiences around the world have been tantalized by these new Avengers. About Comics fills in their fictional history straight from the comic books from which they sprang.

Enjoy!
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It is the first of May. The skies are overcast, the temperature cool and perhaps even chilly. People are wearing heavy clothing and are staying warm or they are dressing for spring and shivering. The first summer blockbuster is out in theaters in the form of Avengers 2: Age of Ultron, but it certainly isn’t summer. It doesn’t even feel like spring.

Well, Blog Wyrm has just the thing for the sensible person who decides to eschew the great outdoors. Four new columns this week.

About Comics brings some of the those movie goers who no little of the origins of Ultron up to speed on the history of this murderous robot. More interesting than this sociopathic ai is its creation – the Vision.

Modeling systems and their corresponding states is all the rage these days and object oriented programming paves the way for exciting simulations. However, as Aristotle to Digital points out, it is often the case that the objects we don’t define are as important as those we do.

The electricity that flows everyday to power our modern economy comes courtesy of electromagnetic induction and Mister Faraday’s law. Massive hoops of wire move through carefully constructed magnetic fields at 60 Hz to bring all of us the internet, cable TV, and other wonders (or perhaps horrors). Inspired by these technological marvels, Under the Hood presents a working example of the flux transport theorem, which gives the mathematical underpinnings to the science of making electrical power.

Speaking of power, Common Cents talks about a different kind of power in the interactions between Management and Labor – the power to make each other miserable. By making a couple of straightforward observations, the back-and-forth between these two sides can be mapped to the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the results show how hard it is for each side to trust and cooperate with the other once they fell betrayed.

Enjoy!