Author Archive: Conrad Schiff

Well two weeks turned into 6 weeks and we at Blog Wyrm do apologize. In our defense, half of our creative team has been busy supporting NASA’s launch of the Magnetospheric MultiScale (MMS) mission and mostly on the midnight shift. So it has taken a little longer to recover and get re-energized to get back to Blog Wyrm.

Anyway, we are back with issue 17 and in our prime (all pun intended).

This week’s Aristotle to Digital examines the Socratic Method and asks if this method was invented or discovered. If you have an opinion leave a comment.

A simple experiment from elementary mechanics involves rolling cylinders down inclined-planes and everyone knows how that experiment turns out – don’t they? Well this week’s Under the Hood argues that this innocent experiment is a lot more subtle than it looks.

No doubt you’ve heard that opposites attract but have you ever heard how they can join forces for a common goal? Common Cents shows how Baptists and Bootleggers can join forces and how the gunless and the gun runners can come to common goal where firearms are concerned.

What do Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, Harry Houdini, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, and Amelia Earhart have in common. The league of distinguished historical figures form the lead cast for Herald: Lovecraft and Tesla. Find out all about it in About Comics.

It may be a little early but we at Blog Wyrm are taking the next two weeks off for Spring Break (there is also this little matter of a few spacecraft getting off the ground…).

We’ll be back on 3/20.

Ciao

The snow has fallen and so has the temperature. The irony of this current issue, is that the number 15 is greater than the reading on my thermometer. And since it is so cold outside why don’t you stay in and read some fine columns in this week’s installment.

While not quite the three-card Monte made famous as a classic New York scam, the two card Ace problem is an interesting study in probability, statistics, and counting and a perfect application of stochastic reasoning in this week’s Aristotle to Digital.

When does multiplying by a matrix look like performing a vector cross product? When you are in the magic that is three dimensions as explained in Under the Hood.

Sure the Godfather can make you an offer that you can’t refuse – by unfairly using force. But can the free market ever be fair and gentle? Common Cents explores the Ultimatum Game and the results may surprise you.

Well it seems that the Marvel cinematic universe has performed perhaps another homage to a little known character. About Comics explores the literary similarities between renaissance religious literature and a big bad super villain on Agent Carter.

Ever been on a merry-go-round and things look different because you were going around in a circle? Well  explains how to describe what you see and we promise it won’t make you sick.

Enjoy!

Do to a variety of small events, we at Blog Wyrm are running a bit late this week for Issue 13. We comfort our consciences by pointing out that this Baker’s Dozen installment is pack full of columns a bit bigger and more eye grabbing than we’ve put out before.

About Comics continues the back story of the Inhumans. In this installment, the connection between the Inhumans and the Kree is center-stage with a fleeting reference to this past summer’s blockbuster movie ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’. Find out the secret origin of the Inhumans why their city doesn’t seem to sit still for very long.

Where does money come from and is it true that time is money? Common Cents answers these questions with a little help from the O’Jays and Schoolhouse Rock and shows how it is better to think of that old saying the other way around.

Aristotle to Digital explores how the simple symbol of ‘=’ can pack so many different meanings into two small horizontal lines. Along the way, we ponder why its seems to be that the smaller the word the bigger its entry in the dictionary.

Finally, Under the Hood explores the various properties of the one-sided Greens function. Connection are made all over the place to the propagator, the Wronskian, and complex variables with a dash of causality thrown in for good measure. This column is the coda to the presentation of time evolution in quantum and classical mechanics that has been filling the column these last ten weeks.

Enjoy!

Well this coming Sunday is the big game. I don’t know how to feel about it but it is unlikely I’ll watch more than a little in passing. On the NFC side, I like Marshawn Lynch (had him in fantasy league) and I don’t dislike Seahawks but I could do without their coach. On the AFC side, I have no specific player on the Patriots that I like (I had Brady in a different league) and I don’t dislike Belichick, but the whole ‘deflate-gate’ is tedious. I wonder if the Patriots can actual win – especially after they’ve been caught in, let us say, irregular behavior. It’s a good thing that there are really fine articles, courtesy of the Blog Wyrm staff to take our minds off of it.

A recap of the saga of the Inhumans continues in this week’s About Comics. Will the grand, star-crossed love affair between Johnny Storm of the Fantastic Four and Crystal of the Inhumans play a role in Agent Skye’s future – we doubt it but it was too big a slice of comics history to ignore. And who knows, there may be a piece that actually gets worked into Agents of Shield and some piece of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Do detectives solve crime using deductive reasoning or do they employ some other mode of thought? This week’s installment in Aristotle to Digital tries to answer this question by looking at a memorable episode of all shows M*A*S*H. Regular maintenance is needed for both the body and the car and yet the method by which each are purchased is quite different. Common Cents compares and contrasts these methods and wonders why we give better and more knowledgeable care to our vehicles than ourselves. Finally, Under the Hood celebrates the wonderful mathematical tool of the Wronskian. Brought to us by Jozef Wronski, this tool is literally the swiss-army knife of differential equations possessing just the right tool for the right job.

Enjoy!

The middle of January is here is and so is Issue 11. The month of January is named for the Roman God Janus, the two-faced god of transformations and new beginnings. That said, there is nothing two-faced about this issue of Blog Wyrm.

In answer to a variety of requests, this week’s About Comics looks at the history of the Inhumans and forward to the possible fate of Skye from Agents of Shield. The age-old question of how language affects thought and how thought affects language makes a cameo appearance as this week’s Aristotle to Digital wrestles with the concept of infinity. The downfall of a once-proud American company is the topic and Common Cents gives its two cents on what went wrong at Kodak. And closing out the field Under the Hood presents the Dirac interaction picture, the perturbation analysis of time-dependent Hamiltonians, and the beginnings of Feynman diagrams.

Enjoy!

Welcome to Issue 10, which is something of a milestone. We’ve now published 10 weeks of new and exciting material. Many television shows don’t even make to 10 episodes before being pulled (i.e. the unlamented Selfie and Manhattan Love Story). So, needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway) all of us at Blog Wyrm are excited and proud.

Image’s new science fiction comic Roche Limit is featured in this week’s About Comics. As a sucker for gritty futuristic dystopias, I had high expectations. See if Roche Limit can live up to them. Murder meets knowledge in this week’s Aristotle to Digital. Find out where on the epistemological scale your favorite detective ends up. Common Cents lets the genii (or is it Gini) out of the bottle in a data-driven discussion of income inequality. Finally, Under the Hood shows in detail how to calculate the Feynman path integral in one dimension.

Enjoy!

Happy New Year and welcome to Issue 9. As everyone settles into their resolutions, please consider making a very easy one. Tell your friends and family about Blog Wyrm and resolve to comment on a post. Now that I am done begging let’s look at what’s in this week’s issue.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund gets some time in the spotlight in this week’s About Comics. The CBLDF is an worthy group which I support but I take issue with some of the tactics they employ. The musings on epistemology and murder mysteries which were advertised for Week 8 never got published due to a personal issue so the first part appears in this week’s Aristotle to Digital. Front and center in this discussion are the philosophical ideas from Aristotle and Kant on how we characterize what it means to ‘know’ something. This post sets the foundation for Part 2 in which we meet the modern detective stories of Poe, Christi, Stout, and Eco. Common Cents discusses in a light hearted way how some among us may actually be free riders in the truest sense of the word. In the final column, Under the Hood presents a ‘derivation’ of the Feynman path integral. Along the way, numerous connections are made between the quantum and classical worlds.

Enjoy!

Issue 8! It’s hard to believe that in the past 8 weeks, we’ve put out 32 columns on a wide variety of topics and had fun doing it. After this issue, we are going to take a well-deserved two week vacation, with new material resuming on Jan 9th of 2015. But enough about the future, let’s discuss this week’s offering.

About Comics finishes the two part discussion on how to put technology to work for a comic collection with a detailed presentation of a Microsoft Access database that organizes and cross references over 8000 individual publications. Musings on epistemology and murder mysteries are the subject in this week’s Aristotle to Digital where philosophical ideas from Aristotle and Kant meet the modern detective stories of Poe, Christi, Stout, and Eco. Common Cents presents an unflinching view of the state of today’s labor market, which may just be the grinch that will steal Christmases to come. Rounding out the field in Under the Hood is the most detailed and careful discussion of the Schrodinger and Heisenberg pictures in quantum mechanics of which we are aware.

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and may God Bless! See ya in back here on Jan 9th. Enjoy!

Well to quote Andy Williams, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.  And as the Christmas quickly approaches and the hectic and frantic pace seems to increase, we at Blog Wyrm are continuing to put out our columns for your enjoyment.  In this week’s blogzine, we have an even mix of thought-provoking items and how-to articles.

Ever wonder how you might put modern technology to use to organize your comic collection? Well look no further than the current entry in About Comics where a simple approach to using a modern relational database is covered in an easy-to-understand fashion. A new type of Turing test is proposed in Aristotle to Digital and the reader is left to consider if the law is actually intelligent. Common Cents discusses a current spat between the government and the taxi drivers in New York City and how it serves as a microcosm for examining the role of government regulation. And to close things out, Under the Hood takes a small detour to talk about Greens functions in their own right as clever ways of solving inhomogeneous differential equations.

Enjoy!