Author Archive: Conrad Schiff

Ordinarily, the Blog Wyrm staff takes a couple months off during the summer to reconnect and recharge.  This year, we’ve decided to do things a bit different by offering beach installments of the regular columns.  Still as insightful as ever, each post is a bit shorter and less in depth.  Afterall, one can’t work too hard when one is getting to sunrises such as these each day.

Now onto the columns.

This month’s Aristotle2Digital returns to a favorite topic of humor and language and the hard time machines, regardless of how ‘intelligent’, will have in dealing with the ambiguity.

Much has been made of the Joshua Bell Experiment and the ‘problems’ of a society grown too cold or too jaded to appreciate real value.  But, as CommonCents argues, value is never object and is strongly contextual, which is just as it should be.

Ocean.  It is a simple word for a vast object filled with a mind-numbing number of moving parts.  UndertheHood explores the concept of state in thermodynamics and discusses why simple words can often describe complex things and some of the problems that arise.

Enjoy!

Shortly after the advent of commercial radio, the industry became sullied with a ‘pay for play’ scandal called payola.  Music producers would pay disk jockeys money under the table so that certain songs would be played more than would be requested or called for by public opinion in the hopes of shaping public opinion.  After decades of controversy, the practice was eventually made illegal and any paid promotions need to be fully and publicly disclosed.  We at Blog Wyrm can’t help but wonder if a similar situation is developing in ‘Big Tech’.

The reason for that speculation is concrete.  While recently visiting a new town, we asked Google Maps to point us towards a local Walmart.  Google Maps provided the following map

Our location, given by the blue circle with the upward-facing fan, was immediately outside a Michaels craft store that was adjacent to a Ross Dress for Less location.  No matter how much we manipulated the map by pinching and turning, we couldn’t get the Michaels existence to appear.  Other stores also find a home in the beige ‘L’ but didn’t appear.  This observation lead to the immediate speculation (as we are sometimes very cynical) that the reason Michaels didn’t appear while Ross did was that the latter had made its ‘anti-hush’ payment while the former didn’t.  Big Tech will, no doubt, have great reasons for this disparity that don’t have anything to do with ‘something shady’ but, so too, did the music industry nearly 100 years ago.  Just sayin’.

Now onto the posts.

Aristotle2Digital has recently explored the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm as a way of producing arbitrary distributions using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method.  So far, explaining how and why the method works and the actual generating of random realizations has been confined to 1 dimension for clarity.  But, of course, the real power of Monte Carlo methods shines in multi-dimensional problems.  This month, Aristotle2Digital looks at how the Metropolis-Hastings method fairs in a 2-dimensional problem of covarying statistical data for the correlated height and weight of animals.

One of the immutable things about human nature is our ability to have short memories about bad things that have happened in the past.  For example, it is relatively easy to look past COVID-19 by thinking of it as a pandemic of the past.  Afterall, most everyone has given up on masks and, while there will always be new variants, it looks as if they’ve regressed to the mean in terms of severity.  Likewise, it is easy to forgot the stupidity of emotion-driven policy making (an adequate, if naïve, definition of socialism) and think that this time making economic decisions based on ideology will be different.  CommonCents explores how the collision of these two ‘amnesias’ has led to a total economic meltdown in Sri Lanka.

Most everyone knows, or at least believes they know, that perpetual motion machines are impossible.  There is even a homage to this in the Simpsons.  But, as UnderTheHood discusses, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is, by no means, on as solid footing as we collectively think; nor is the notion of entropy understood in any meaningful way as there seems to be almost as many formulations and definitions of both of these ideas as there are physicists on the planet to think about them.

Enjoy!

According to The Free Dictionary by Farlax, the C’mon Man meme is meant to convey “the speaker’s frustration or annoyance with someone else (usually the listener).”  One common usage is in sports entertainment where an analyst or commentator is disgusted with the effort (or lack thereof) that a player exhibits in a game.

Now we at Blog Wyrm don’t usually get frustrated or annoyed and far less frequently do we express any frustration we feel for the good reason that we are mature enough to realize that there people out there who also find us frustrating or annoying. To be clear, we do mock and deride bad ideas often and will continue to do so since that is the way the truth outs but that is a far cry from annoyance.  But sometimes one must simply stand up and hold people accountable lest there be nothing left to stand up for.

What is the particular ‘cause’ that has so energized us to make such a stand?  It is the basic obligation that content providers should have to proofread their bloody content.  Just recently we saw a four-word headline, in large font no less, that read something like: “Tiger Woods Are Happy”.  (Sadly we lost the screen snap of this inspiring bit of prose).

Now we realize that mistakes happen; there are plenty in our columns despite our proofreaders.  Things slip through and we appreciate that.  But on a headline?  By a for profit organization?  Our first thought was that the headline was machine-produced and the so-called AI got confused by the letter ‘s’ at the end of Woods.  Then we thought, just fleetingly, that the headline writer was not a native English speaker.  Then we realized that who cares what the root cause was, someone who paid for this should have enough self-respect to just proofread it.  It was only four words comprised of maybe 20 letters.  We aren’t asking for sterling prose, flawless grammar, proper punctuation, and perfect syntax.  Just a simple proofread of four stinking words.  C’mon Man.

Now onto the columns.

The previous numerical experiments using the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm proved it to be a robust, simple, and general method for producing sequences of random numbers following just about any distribution one could imagine.  But why does it work?  This month’s AristotletoDigital explores the mathematical and statistical underpinnings of the Metropolis-Hastings and shows it is all a matter of balance – detailed balance that is.

Inflation, inflation everywhere and not a drop of relief in sight.  Soaring prices and short supplies are certainly trying enough without having every Tom, Dick, and Pundit gives us their uninformed opinions as to just whose fault it is.  This month’s CommonCents makes the compelling argument, a la Milton Friedman, that inflation was, is, and will always be a monetary effect and that, therefore, the fault dear reader lies not in ourselves but in the Fed for printing too much currency.

Entropy and irreversibility go hand-in-hand.  The second law and the Clausius inequality show us the way to determine which processes are spontaneous and which require some arm twisting by an external agency (e.g., an engine).  But the analysis is awkward.  This is where the other thermodynamic potentials come to the rescue.  Join UndertheHood this month as it introduces the Gibbs and Helmholtz free energies and it explains why chemists love these things.

Enjoy!

While we are loathe to make fun of people, we at Blog Wyrm believe that ideas are fair game for ridicule and derision.  Afterall, a person is precious and has feelings and is worthy of respect.  An idea is simply that – an idea.  It doesn’t feel, think, or emote.  It is either good or bad.  Good ideas deserve respect and bad ideas deserve refutation.

Now usually refutation can be done rationally and civilly but when an idea is particularly preposterous it deserve special treatment.  The idea of non-fungible tokens or NFTs is one such idea.  For those who don’t know what an NFT is (sadly we were once innocent of such knowledge), an NFT is (quoting the Wikipedia article) “a financial security consisting of digital data stored in …a distributed ledger.”  It seems that blockchain is the most popular distributed ledger of record but any one should serve.  The value of the NFT comes strictly from the knowledge that the owner uniquely owns the rights to say they uniquely own the NFT.  If that reasoning seems circular then yes you’re right it is.  The owner neither owns a tangible exclusive good (e.g. a car) nor an intangible non-exclusive good (e.g. the knowledge that the Earth is round).  Rather the owner owns the right to brag that they own the only pointer to thing in question.  As near as we can figure, its like the owner can claim to ownership of the invention of an idea without having to bother with all the hard work associated with actually doing so.

As a canonical example, consider the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a series of images similar to the modifed version below.

Anyone can enjoy the image but only one person can lay claim to owning the unique pointer to the image.  According to Wikipedia, the sales of these tokens have totaled over 1 billion dollars, bought by ‘celebrities’ who obviously have too much money, too little imagination, and an unfulfilled need to be ‘special’.  Our only response to these buffoons is to stop monkeying around (doubtful that they have the wit to get that awful pun) and to put their money into something far more useful, like starting a business in underserved neighborhoods or simply a large donation to charity.  Sigh…

Now onto the columns.

This month’s Aristotle2Digital begins a deep dive on the Metropolis-Hastings (MH) algorithm.  The MH algorithm is an incredibly useful way of solving certain classes of Markov Chain Monte Carlo problems enabling us to solve a rich variety of mathematical and physical problems.  This ‘idea’ is one of the most significant numerical methods of the 20^th century and no needs an NFT to use or understand it.

It’s hard to believe, but the United States is suffering through a shortage of baby food formula.  CommonCents examines some of the reasons why a country that could once feed itself and much of the rest of the world now can’t properly care for some of the most vulnerable within its own borders.  Perhaps if some of the economic might that went into buying NFTs were invested in increasing diversity and competition in this important sector things would be looking a lot better for families with small children.

UndertheHood continues to examine entropy that coolest of concepts from classical thermodynamics.  In this installment, a concrete problem of supercooled water is examined because it illustrates the both the second law and the use of state variables in a non-trivial physical situation.  Maybe this makes entropy the supercoolest of the concepts from classical thermodynamics – certainly cooler than buying an NFT.

We admit it, the Blog Wyrm staff enjoys one reoccurring reference and homage during April.  We love quoting, from the Waste Land by T.S. Eliot, the very famous line: “April is the cruelest of months”.  It is a pithy phrase that never fails to delight us due to both the artistry and the meaning and context that it can suggest.  Nonetheless, this April we are not inclined to reference it in any deeper way than we already have because we signs of hope in the waste land.  The signs are small and fragile, much like the first shoot of a germinating seed breaking the surface and seeking the light, but very real and encouraging.  This is hope that is born not out of ignorance of current affairs (worldwide inflation, COVID, the Ukrainian invasion, etc.) but in spite of these.  It is a hope predicated on the tenacity of the human spirit and the common sense shared by all people of good will.  It is with that slender shoot of hope, that wish everyone a happy Easter.

Now onto the columns.

As discussed in last month’s column, there are two quite different flavors of conditional probability; one arising from a joint probability distribution and one arising from the notion of transitions between states.  The problem posed in discussing the latter flavor was how to determine the probability of good weather in particular region given only the conditional probability that tomorrow will sunny or rainy given that today was sunny or rainy.  This month’s Aristotle2Digital shows how to solve this problem analytically and introduces the very powerful method of Markov Chain Monte Carlo.

Back in the nineteenth century, Frédéric Bastiat wrote extensively about economics, drawing particular attention to the concept of the unseen cost as a means of combating the many thoughtless and stupid approaches to economics popularly promulgated during his day.  One can’t help but wonder what he would have to say about our modern stupidity in which much the same thoughtless rhetoric is given a pseudo-intellectual imprimatur of pop psychology and served up surrounded by a shiny patina of social media.  We suppose he would just have to laugh.  And it is in the spirit of laughter that this month’s CommonCents compares the practical, no nonsense economics analysis of Larry Miler against the me-first approach of the modern mind in a little piece we entitle: When Larry Met Sally.

With much of the long hike up the conceptual mountain of classical thermodynamics behind us and the famous Clausius inequality in hand, this month’s UnderTheHood looks at the connections between entropy and the second law.  As part of this mountaintop vista, we can see 1) the well-known version of the second law, featured even in the Simpsons, between the forbidden nature of perpetual motion and the requirement that universal entropy always increasing, 2) what actually distinguishes spontaneous natural processes from those unnatural ones that require human intervention, and 3) a recasting of the first law that allows us to throw off the shackles of ‘inexact differentials’ and embrace a world of thermodynamic state variables.

Enjoy!

Around the middle of this month, we at Blog Wyrm heard a spirited plea from a civic leader stressing the need for people to distance themselves from social media and the need to have a smartphone on hand all the time.  At the time, we perfunctorily agreed with that sentiment but upon further reflection we realized that it is perhaps the most important single thing we can all do.  The internet of things can be a wonderful thing when it feeds our curiosity (such as our own humble blogzine) or mobilizes us to action or connects us with loved ones.  But far too many of us use it as a substitute for living our lives.  We’ve become a society of watchers not doers and each of us is suffering as a result.  We’ve become enslaved to our machines rather than them being our servants.  So, we urge all our readers to put the phones and laptops and tablets down and pick up a paint brush or throw baseball or go for a walk.  Each day that we live vicariously through these small screens is another day where we fail to live to our fullest potential – and that is the true meaning of March Madness.

Equivocation is the bane of clear discourse. How often do people talk past each other simply by using the same words to mean different things.  This problem is pesky when the respective meanings largely aligned but are not exactly the same but it becomes particularly pernicious when the concepts being discussed are technical and precise.  This month’s Aristotle2Digital explores how the phrase ‘conditional probability’ can mean radically different things in different contexts.

Where is the one place in the US where ignorance is cherished in place of logic and fairness and where the accused is guilty until proven?  Most ‘enlightened’ people will point to the deep south harkening back to the court scene depicted in To Kill a Mocking Bird or some similar scenario.  Of course, the real answer is that these folk need look no further than their own prejudice about certain actors within the economy.  Case in point, CommonCents looks for evidence of oil companies price gouging and find nothing beyond ignorance and malice.

The concept of entropy is one of the crowning intellectual achievements of the 19^th century.  With no recourse to modern technology or any detailed knowledge of atomic physics, the great physicists of that century, using only logic and the deceptively simple Carnot cycle, developed a profound statement of how entropy arises from the second law of thermodynamics.  UndertheHood presents the capstone of that theory:  the Clausius inequality, which relates entropy to reversible and irreversible process and, eventually, to Boltzmann’s connection to probability.

Despite it being the shortest month of the year, February never lacks for excitement as it is usually brimming with activity.  Whether the cause is cabin fever and the winter blues, or the fact that we are finally rid of the hangover from the frenzy associated with secular Christmas, there’s no getting around the fact that it packs a lot of action in only 4 weeks.  Sadly, this February is providing more than the usual excitement due to Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, and the Super Bowl.  Europe stands at a crisis with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.  The Blog Wyrm staff prays for a quick end to the violence and hopes that justice prevails but we are too jaded to think that the world will ever end up looking the same.  If there is any silver lining in this unprovoked and naked aggression it is that we may finally be getting the wake-up call we need to realign our own sense of priorities and risks.  While we’ve been wrapped up in petty concerns about appearances and tones and have run in fear from risks that generations ago would have been shrugged away, real villains have been heaping injustice after injustice on the world at large.  Hopefully, each of us will first take a moment to realize that all evil needs to succeed is for good people to do nothing and then turn, in real friendship and charity, to helping one another rather than looking for those minutest of details that divide us.

Now onto the columns.

Aristotle2Digital presents the fifth part of its investigation into Monte Carlo evaluation of integrals by surveying some of the use cases in which multidimensional integrals arise and the reasons why they can be difficult to solve.  One of the surprising results is the role that the number of dimensions play in determining the sharpness of a given integrand and how our ordinary intuition can fail spectacularly in the face of many degrees of freedom.

What could be better than the big game?  How about a thought-provoking analysis in this month’s CommonCents of the incentives for and against doping cast in terms of behavioral economics and game theory?  Depending on the rules of the game, even those players who are least likely to cheat may find an overwhelming pressure to take performance enhancing drugs if for no other reason than to level the playing field with those players who have no issue in indulging an illegal advantage.  That result is certainly a touchdown effort worthy of replay on the highlight reels.

After some buildup in previous posts, the day has finally arrived when UndertheHood introduces the classical concept of entropy.  Contrary to the ‘common knowledge’, classical entropy is not associated with disorder nor does it give rise to the second law of thermodynamics.  Rather it is an extrinsic parameter that is canonically conjugate to the temperature and which is conserved during a reversible cycle.  It comes out of the second law and its form is suggest by the structure of the Carnot cycle.

Enjoy!

The only advice we at Blog Wyrm have for those of you coming into this new year is that the notion of contradiction can be an empowering thing.  An innocent example would be to assert that the only New Year’s resolution you should make is make no New Year’s resolutions.  On the admittedly more cynical side we would point out that if you wish to not comply with a mask mandate run for office and become a politician who calls for the imposition of mandatory masks on everyone for the good of the country.  If you wish to not be bound by fairness and honesty become an objective journalist who decries the lies of those with different views than your own.  If you wish to not live up to anyone else’s standards advocate for double standards one and live by the motto ‘rules for thee but not for me’.  Be judgmental about judgementalism and intolerant of intolerance and, above all, accept all forms of diversity that conform to what you think is diverse.  This kind of totalitarian sophistry is rampant in our country and is ruining what many of us hold dear.

All that said, there continue to growing glimmers of hope wherein good people of conscience, who may not always agree with each other but are always consistent with their respect for each other, are finally putting their collective feet down about this nonsense.  Hopefully, these efforts will increase until we put these modern sophist ideas back in the rubbish where they belong.

Now onto the columns.

Aristotle2Digital presents part 4 of the investigation into the Monte Carlo evaluation of integrals.  This month’s installment introduces a ‘real-world’ importance sampling example where the probability distribution is chosen to match the general behavior of the integrand.  This toy example sets the stage for understanding the sophisticated techniques that exist for evaluating the complex multiple integrals often encountered in math, science, and engineering.

This month CommonCents reflects on how a simple event like a snow fall can provide not just a virgin and pristine landscape outside the window but also an insightful and far-reaching look at how properly constructed incentives make life better for us all.  Amazing what a little ownership does for motivation.

The assertions and laws of classical thermodynamics are unequaled in both their scope and their importance.  This month’s UndertheHood explores the Carnot engine whose simply construction belies the power that it provides in understanding the possible and the impossible of the physical world and for the fact that it sets the stage for that most elusive of all physical quantities: entropy.

Enjoy!

Eat, Drink, and be Merry

Well, the end of 2021 has finally come and, in all the essential measures, it hasn’t been better than 2020 and, in some ways, worse.  COVID has resurged with the appearance of the delta and omicron variants, inflation is a forty-year high, US foreign policy is in tatters, crime rate spiking, and a double standard, autocratic ‘rule for thee and not for me’ mentality seems to be in full swing within the ruling class. But, despite these metrics painting such a pessimistic picture, as we stated last month, we remain cautiously optimistic, perhaps even bullish.  The tide seems to be turning against those who talk out of both sides of their mouths, begging and even demanding for the luxuries afforded them in the US while biting the hand that feeds them with pseudo-intellectual sophistries.  Average people seem to be reacquainting themselves with their God-given rights and their commons sense.  It is with this sense of hope that we wish everyone a very happy Christmas:  Eat, Drink, and be Merry.

Now onto the columns.

With the basics of Monte Carlo error analysis firmly in hand, Aristotle2Digital expands on the basic method by looking at the concept of importance sampling.  The idea here is to draw random samples more often in regions where the integrand is big and less often otherwise.  Of course, these random samples still need to be done consistently in an unbiased way but the results of adapting the sampling to the integrand proves to be very powerful in minimizing (or even eliminating) estimation errors..

The common wisdom we often hear in the media is that competition is generally to be discouraged and cooperation encouraged.  This gets frequently translated into a Capitalism bad/Socialism good dichotomy.  But is cooperation good at any cost?  This month’s CommonCents looks at how the wrong kind of cooperation can lead to terrible consequences by examining how an old adage and the new business of doing science intersect.

After a brief detour into field theory, UnderTheHood returns to looking at entropy.  The perspective here is to go back to the pre-quantum days (prior to any controversy over distinguishable versus indistinguishable particles) when all that the scientist of the day had to guide them was experiments on the bulk properties of matter and the emerging discipline of thermodynamics.  Three key players will be central to the opening act of the drama:  Sadi Carnot, Rudolph Clausius, and Lord Kelvin.

Enjoy!

It’s hard to believe that 2021 is winding down.  And while the superficial signs seem sadly to indicate that it hasn’t been much of an improvement over the previous year, we at Blog Wyrm are cautiously optimistic.  There are definite pockets of common sense that have sprung up, perhaps as a backlash, to much of the tribal stupidity that emerged in 2020.  True that the purveyors of that “you’re either with me or against me” nonsense have doubled down but equally true sensible voices raised in opposition have emerged.  On many fronts, ordinary, live-and-let-live people seem to be summoning their courage to say that some things simply can’t be tolerated.  For that, and for the amazing blessings we have in this country, we at Blog Wyrm are truly thankful this Thanksgiving.

Now onto the columns.

Aristotle2Digital continues its exploration of the Monte Carlo method.  Particular focus for this installment is on estimating the error involved with the method and tracing it back to the central limit theorem of statistics.  This powerful idea makes it possible to use a random sample to not only characterize a population but also to have a quantitative feel for how accurate such a characterization is.

The introduction spoke of the tribal stupidity that’s been crawling out of the woodwork over these past several years.  No place is this type of stupidity seen more often than around the Thanksgiving holiday.  On matters both of colonialism and economic ‘equity’, the crazy ideas flow that the holiday is not worth celebrating.  But as this month’s CommonCents discusses, the underlying concept of Thanksgiving is economic freedom, which is always worth celebrating.  It is the competing ideas of socialism and Marxism that should be shunned.

This month, UnderTheHood completes its two-part presentation of the ‘curvilinear mantra’.  This mantra, designed to be a guide to student and practitioner alike, explains the origin of certain exotic-looking terms that arise when solve partial differential equations in curvilinear coordinates.  The first act dealt with how the omnipresent scale factors that arise in such coordinates have their ultimate root in units.  This installment demonstrates that the additive terms that arise come from how the basic vectors change as a function of space.

Enjoy!