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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

This week marks a landmark in Blog Wyrm’s history. Not only have we gotten a new column but we’ve actually gotten four new ones written by three new contributors. It’s exciting to see all of the hard work and great writing coming being contributed. So without further ado, let’s talk a little about what is in this week’s issue.

In its premiere installment, Green Screen makes a shocking statement about Quentin Tarantino: namely, that his films are overrated. Yes you heard correctly, they are overrated.

Ever try playing a fighting game (you know Street Fighter, Injustice, Marvel v. Capcom etc.) but still can’t get past button mashing? Then here comes a new column devoted to taking you to the next level. This week’s Pretzel Motion starts with the basics cause when you have mastered the fundamentals you are halfway to being a master.

Ballgame takes a look at what one man did for a university and what he means to the community as a result.

Tidbits opens sets the stage with Andy Grammer’s secretly-terrible “Honey I’m Good.”

About Comics dusts off an old format for comics books and shows how older stories were reprinted in the age before comics became mainstream.

This week’s Under the Hood begins an in depth look at the applications of Lie series to solving differential equations. Could it be that there is a ‘linear-looking’ method that solved nonlinear problems?

Common Cents offers a public service announcement for all those journalists who are confused about the debate on trade currently wending its way through the halls of government and shows that if you just apply yourself, you can understand the various Ts that are bandied about.

Aristotle to Digital brings home the bacon with not one but two English philosophers who made significant contributions to our modern mode of scientific thought. How many degrees of separation are they from Kevin? Hmmm…..

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!

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.