Author Archive: Conrad Schiff

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!

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!