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This issue marks a change in Blog Wyrm. As a two-person staff, putting out new content every week has been fun and challenging. We are really proud of what we’ve accomplished, but four long columns a week in addition to this short summary haven’t left a lot of time for other pursuits. So, for the foreseeable future, Blog Wyrm will be coming out once per month – on the last Friday of each month. Thus the philosophic observer is free to say that this issue is either the last of our weekly series or the first of our monthly. Regardless of which interpretation is preferred, the same core columns will still be there (as well as the occasional guest slots) but at a more relaxed pace for putting content together. The additional time will be devoted to some new projects that may eventually find their way here.

Can there really be too much of a good thing? You bet! And economists know just how to describe when enough becomes too much in dry and boring terms that really drive home why their trade is often called the dismal science. This week’s Common Cents shows just how these dour social scientists do it and why.

The 80’s are often credited as a magical time. Widespread peace and prosperity, great clothes and hairstyles, and a sea change in entertainment and music. Comics were no different. There were a host of new ideas for just what makes a superhero. Join About Comics as it takes a look at one of the most iconic and dysfunctional of these – The Badger.

Under the Hood continues to look at plasma wave phenomena. Simple waves in cold plasmas is the starting point. Don’t know what any of that means? Then read on and find out.

Aristotle to Digital finishes its three-part examination of propositional calculus by asking, can propositional calculus save your life? The answer is a resounding yes, especially if you are stuck in a dungeon trying to hunt a Wumpus.

Enjoy!

An interesting discussion circulated the Blog Wyrm offices this week that is worth sharing. It was about so-called one hit wonders. It started with an overheard, snide remark about how pathetic one hit wonders were. The Blog Wyrm staff reflected on this rudeness and crafted this response. We should be so lucky as to have ever written a single hit song. And to any who deride one hit wonders we at Blog Wyrm respectfully ask just what remarkable thing you have done. That isn’t to say that we all shouldn’t shake our heads at the arrogant attitudes that sometimes spring from having a hit song – simply that we should not diminish the accomplishment just because the accomplisher is acting like an ass.

As an interesting side note, one of us remarked on an analysis once heard on the radio. The commentator was actually pointing out that it is likely far worse to be a two hit wonder than either a one hit wonder or an established artist with many hits. In the latter case (say the Rolling Stones), the entire catalog speaks to the lasting accomplishment of a group of artists who consistently could deliver. In the former case, the notoriety of the one hit wonder (say Rick Astley) has some lasting power (e.g. Rickrolling). The two hit wonder benefits neither from the novelty nor the consistency.

But you, dear reader, can certainly benefit from this week’s articles.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited with saying that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind.” The operative word in that quote is ‘foolish’ and the operative wisdom is determining when doggedness transitions to foolishness. Unfortunately, it has often been the case in comics to dismiss the desire for consistency as a fanboy’s foolishness. About Comics disagrees.

Most of us dread using public restrooms. They are usually less than pristine in their cleanliness. But what is the best method for promoting cleanliness and what connection does this question have with economics? Read the current installment Common Cents to see how uncertainty in the market place and the Paper Towel Wars go hand-in-hand.

Plasma is often called the fourth state of matter. This curious situation of side-by-side coexisting charged fluids leads to strange collective behavior not seen in the more terrestrial examples of solid, liquid, and gas. This week, Under the Hood begins a look at wave phenomena in plasmas by looking at the formalism bases on Maxwell’s equations for the fields and the Lorentz force law for the particles.

Aristotle to Digital continues its three part examination of propositional calculus. This week’s focus is on formal proofs and how much easier it is to logically prove things when words aren’t in the way.

Enjoy!

Okay… this will be two weeks in a row where the Blog Wyrm staff has something to say about sports in the United States. Now don’t misunderstand, we actually aren’t huge sports fans but there is no doubt that professional athletic competition is a big component of American life. There is also no doubt that the two busiest times of the sporting year are early fall and middle spring, so there is a lot that can be said. But this week’s comment is more a matter of marketing and timing than one of actual sport. We find it hard to fathom the idea of how hockey, which, on the surface, is a ‘winter sport’, can persist well into the spring and can even overlap nearly into the summer. It just seems strange to be seeing the Stanley Cup finals in June. We watch from time-to-time each year but we still find it strange. Oh well!

What we trust is not strange is the fine crop of articles for this week.

Sound argumentation and clear reasoning is based on a disciplined and careful application of definitions and rules – the use of a logical system. This week, Aristotle to Digital begins a three part examination of one such logical system known as the propositional calculus. Despite its relative simplicity, this system possesses some powerful applications to artificial intelligence.

About Comics returns to the craftsmanship theme this week with an annotated summary of the recent ‘how-to’ publication by Mitch Gerads. Gerads is the artist on The Sheriff of Babylon and his step-by-step creation process has some interesting nuggets.

Elon Musk is a heck of a salesman and there is no doubt that the Tesla is an example of the wonders of modern engineering, but can electric cars really save the environment. Common Cents‘s economic analysis of electric cars and solar power suggests otherwise.

From day-to-day common applications to statistics to the most abstruse theories of spacetime and quantum mechanics, the Gaussian family of integrals seem to be everywhere. Part of their charm is their broad applicability, part of it is that they are tractable. This week’ Under the Hood shows just how tractable and easy they are to work with.

Enjoy!

It’s a bit hard for those of us at Blog Wyrm to believe, but baseball’s opening day has come. Once again, the Boys of Summer are taking the field, tempting us with a lazy day spent in the park, watching America’s past time. Memories of Harry Carey and ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame’ have come flooding back. The only fly in this all-American ointment is the prospect of snow in various baseball-playing regions. Perhaps we should wait a bit longer before calling them the Boys of Summer.

But you, dear reader, need not wait any longer for this week’s columns.

Can 11 lines of code really bring down computing on a global scale? Surprisingly the answer is yes. Even more surprising is the notion that it isn’t at all clear who really owned those 11 lines and who should. Come read about digital economics in the real world in this week’s Common Cents.

Death Face Ginny to some, daughter of Death to others, Ginny can be quite deadly. About Comics reviews the good and the bad of the ongoing Image series Pretty Deadly.

Expressing the angular velocity in the principal axis frame is one of the central elements of analyzing the motion of a rigid body. However the computation is complex and the usual presentations are confusing. Under the Hood offers a straightforward way that is conceptually clean and understandable.

Sometimes quite a lot can be packed into a small space. This week’s column in Aristotle to Digital, brief though it is, offers some profound thoughts on the question of knowing and uncertainty.

Enjoy!

Here at Blog Wyrm we have an editorial policy of gentleness. We don’t shy away from a well supported opinion but we try not to criticize unnecessarily. We don’t avoid controversy but we don’t try to titillate or provoke. We believe that it is better to propose than to oppose. Nonetheless, there are times when deviation from the rule is needed. And this is one such time.

Put bluntly, we hate April Fools pranks. The whole concept annoys us and we don’t get it. Where in the social contract did we agree that for one day, each year, people have the license to lie, trick, and make trouble for us for no reason other than the perverse joy they receive from being able to say ‘Ah! I really got you’. Pathetic.

Thankfully, our columns this week are neither pranks nor pathetic but rather pithy and priceless.

Each of us uses the basic notions of time and space each and every day. Whether just being able to reach out to grab something we want or using a GPS-navigation system to avoid traffic at rush hour, we employ frames of reference so routinely that we probably don’t even think about them – but we should. As this week’s Aristotle to Digital shows, precise definitions for these basic concepts are hard to pin down but the effort is worth it. In trying to do so, we can learn a lot about frames of reference and how we can know and explain our individual points-of-view.

Adult coloring books are all the rage. About Comics presents a fun idea making your own. All you need is a smart phone (or digital camera or a scanner), some photo-editing software, and some of those DC Showcase or Marvel Essentials black-and-white reprint volumes.

Anytime you hear the latest news from the Large Hadron Collider, somewhere in the article, the energy of the accelerated particles is listed, in units of thousands, millions, billions, and so of electron volts. But just what does this mean and how fast are these little chunks of matter actually moving? Under the Hood explains it all in loving detail.

Central to any analysis of economics is the good – the basic unit of production, consumption, and transaction. Some people want to but them while others want to sell them. But all goods are not created equally. Common Cents shows that much like that famous westerns, good divide up into the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Enjoy!

Blog Wyrm is off this week to spend time on Holy Week and to celebrate Easter with our family. See you next week.

Each and every year, millions upon millions of US citizens grapple with the seemingly endless and labyrinthine rules of the country’s tax code, ever growing in size and complexity. Most of us – even the trained professionals, capable of splitting atoms, probing the limits of the human genome, or the boundaries of knowledge – are left with the uncertainty best summarized as “I’m not sure I filed my taxes correctly.” That uncertainty then becomes anxiety, dull and small though it may be, as to whether an audit is forthcoming. This human misery is bad enough but what is even worse is the lost productivity amounting, literally, to billions of man-hours. Don’t we all have better things to do with that precious commodity of time? Just a thought… perhaps if we all lobbied for a simpler tax code?

Fortunately, Blog Wyrm continues to bring excellent content wholly tax free.

What do coffins and economics have to do with each other? Well…lots if you are the Funeral Directors and Embalmers of Louisiana or a group of Benedictine monks, who innocently threatened the former’s corner market on grief. Read this week’s Common Cents to see a textbook example of how the rich and connected can use the regulatory power of the law to keep competition to a minimum.

The halting theorem is one of the most important results about the theory of computation and also one of the cornerstones of Western thought about logic, philosophy, and the limits of formalized human knowledge. Despite its subtlety and importance, Aristotle to Digital presents a simple, easy-to-follow proof.

This week’s column in Under the Hood ties up several loose ends associated with the recent study of classical scattering. Although the differential cross section naturally arises from the relationship between impact parameter and scattering angle, the column again argues against the notion of a integrated cross section and argues for the Monte Carlo interpretation, as is it more general.

About Comics finishes the ongoing review of the Everything Dies/Secret Wars storyline with Part 5, which is an analysis of some of the things that worked and didn’t in Hickman’s comics epic.

Enjoy!

After what seemed an interminably long Winter, (which wasn’t really – just felt that way), warmer weather is here. At least briefly. There is, of course, no guarantee that it will stay warm for long but beggars can’t be choosers and I have been begging for warmer days and milder nights for some time. Another harbinger of Spring, daylight savings time, is also nigh. But I can do without that.

But what shouldn’t be done without is another week of Blog Wyrm articles. This week Anyway, here is the column lineup for this week.

A lot of attention is paid to the idea of wealth and income inequality. All sorts of plans crop up to redistribute wealth from those that have to those that don’t. Maybe this is a good thing, maybe not. But surprisingly, little attention is paid to a kind of redistribution from those that don’t to those that do that occurs everyday under the guise of the common European currency the Euro. Don’t think it is possible? Check out this week’s Common Cents for an argument to the contrary.

Can a set of lines and points and arrows on a blackboard (or whiteboard as you prefer) really hide subtle classifications of and distinctions between mathematical objects? The answer is yes and Aristotle to Digital explains how displacement vectors in the plane are best understood as a set of instructions – a concept closely related to regarded infinity as a process and not a number.

Extending the well known results from classical scattering in a inverse-square force, this week, Under the Hood looks at the numerical results of scattering from a screened potential.

About Comics presents Part 4 of the ongoing review of the Everything Dies/Secret Wars storyline. This week, the revelations of who is behind all of the death and destruction is made and a curious similarity to another creation story is discovered.

Enjoy!

Two seemingly unrelated events have collided in my mind and given me some pause. The first was a piece on NPR that I heard on Monday – the day after the Oscar Awards. In this broadcast, the reporter was exploring why the length of Oscar acceptance speech has grown, especially in recent years, well beyond what was customary through the bulk of the ceremony’s lifespan up until about 20 years ago. One of the conjectures put forward laid the blame squarely at the pressure that actors feel to brand themselves (the other conjecture was that actors are needy and growing needier each year). The other event was that a friend of mine introduced me to the relatively new concept of meteorological spring. Spring had, until fairly recently, been unambiguously defined to begin at the Vernal Equinox. I’m not saying that technical definitions of Spring, found in meteorological or ecological circles, and which differ from the traditional astronomically-based one, aren’t valid. Rather I am saying that there is no reason to have them out there except to draw attention. This sort of branding strikes me the same way as naming winter storms or coming up with terms like polar vortex – it all seems a bit too much like a desperate need for attention.

Anyway, here is the column lineup for this week.

Hidden behind the placid facade of modern life, a bitter ideological struggle exists between the Frequentists and the Bayesians over whose interpretation of probability makes the most sense. As is usual in struggles of these kind, there is truth to both points of view, which Aristotle to Digital explores.

Negotiations on climate change and limitations on global output of carbon are high stakes events these days. One might believe that the negotiators are cold-blooded, strictly rational beings, free and unencumbered by emotion. Perhaps they are and perhaps they are not. Common Cents examines climate negotiations within the context of the Ultimatum Game and finds that the picture isn’t clear.

This week in Under the Hood derives the classical relationship between scattering angle and impact parameter and verifies it with numerical simulations. The beautiful, ensemble behavior is remarkable.

In Part 3, About Comics expands on the analysis of the Everything Dies/Secret Wars storyline by setting the stage for most of the players and the dramatic showdown that follows. Since all the universes are dying its only a matter of time before different groups with different approaches clash.

Enjoy!

Although they happen fairly frequently, it is always interesting when a leap day appears and that most elusive all dates, Feb. 29th, appears on calendars here, there, and everywhere. Of course, the establishment of the current rule under the Gregorian calendar is an amazing bit of scientific analysis dating from back in the later half of the 16th century. Despite its premier in 1582, the adoption of the Gregorian calendar universally only occurred in 1929 when China was the last country to agree to use it. The most curious thing about the leap day rule is that most people think it occurs every four years. The correct rule is that a leap day occurs every four years unless the year is divisible by 100 (e.g. 1900) excepting it be divisible by 400 (e.g. 2000). Who knew that such a small month could have such a big impact.

Speaking of a big impact here is the column lineup for this week.

Under the Hood continues with its analysis of the classical mechanics scattering from a inverse square law force. This week the focus is on numerical integration of the equations of motion and the validation of theory against numerical experiment. The results show the wonderful predictive power of conserved quantities.

Does anyone remember Sokal’s Hoax? It seems Peter Dreier does and this week he’s decided to come clean with a hoax of his own. Each of these academic episodes seem to prove P.T. Barnum’s old saying about a sucker being born every minute. Aristotle to Digital also shows what they prove about the ‘logic’ (or lack thereof) of the postmodern school of thought.

How much can a simple textbook example really shed on the hidden or unseen costs in the economy. Well, Common Cents argues that it can say a lot. Read about how an innocent homework problem one the laws of supply, demand, and subsidies can be used as a caution against government intervention in a market.

This week About Comics continues its literary analysis of the recent reboot of the Marvel publication universe. The Everything Dies/Secret Wars storyline has a plot that rivals the great epic stories of the classical Western tradition. And the criticism of it is also starting to take on enormous proportions. Read about the story is built on the foundation that the universe is dying and how it is responding to its evident demise.

Enjoy!