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May! Memorial Day Weekend! Summer (at least in the commercial or social sense) is upon us; air conditioners, summer driving, cookouts abound. I suppose that I should be talking about all the fun and games and summer delights but there is something I need to get off of my chest, once and for all, in print.

The name of the system of units that most of the world uses and that the US uses for scientific analysis is known as the SI units (Système international or International System of Units in English). It is not the metric system.

The major selling point when the ‘metric system’ began to penetrate the US was that the units were based on decimal divisions. Each increment in units is based on a power of ten. 10 millimeters makes a centimeter, 10 centimeters makes a decameter, and 10 decameters make a meter. And that is a great advantage. Far better than 12 inches making a foot, 3 feet making a yard, and 1760 yards to a mile.

But that doesn’t mean that the SI units themselves are particularly useful for everyday living or that the old English units must be banished never to see the light of day. Let me make some points to support this assertion.

First, the SI units of length and temperature leave something to be desired. The meter is approximately one yard, which is too big for recording ordinary lengths (sports and fabric measurements not withstanding). Typically, the centimeter and millimeter do all the heavy lifting for common objects. Human height is measured in terms of meters and centimeters. No one even speaks of the decameter. Far worse is measuring temperature in units of degrees Celsius. The base SI unit is Kelvin, not Celsius, and one converts between the two by adding or subtracting 273 as appropriate. Considering that the human body can sense about 1 degree Fahrenheit differences in temperature, a SI thermostat should optimally work in half degrees.

Second, there are machine shops all over the US where metric inches are used quite nicely to produce precision parts. One can go to a shop and order a part with a dimension of 3.456 inches. So, the inch is perfectly reasonable as long as one avoids feet.

Finally, with the advent of digital signal processing, twos-based units are more convenient than 10s-based. A great many data sets or simulations are truncated or padded to get powers of 2.

So, please, do yourself a favor, do your country a favor, and do the world a favor and call ‘the metric’ system by it real name and recognize it for what it is, a system of units, some good, some bad, and some ugly.

Speaking of good, we have our usual quartet of good columns this month.

Comics and philosophy are rarely spoken of in the same sentence but good stories can come from deep roots. Join About Comics as it continues its exploration of the origins of the Infinity Stones, focusing on the ontology developed by Steve Engelhart and the philosophy of Jim Starlin.

What do pigeons, bugs, and bits all have in common? Each plays a serious role in Aristotle To Digital light-hearted look at the mathematics of file compression and computer programs.

Do equal-pay-for-equal-work laws really aid those people most in need of economic justice? Contrary to popular wisdom often found circulating in the trendy set, Common Cents argues, using strong economic principles, that these laws in fact harm the ones they intend to help.

One of the core theoretical tools in continuum mechanics is the Reynolds transport theorem that describes how a physical quantity, such as volume or density, changes as the material flows. Under The Hood builds up the mathematics needed to understand this important identity and how it relates to the material derivative.

Enjoy!

Well it’s April again and frankly, the lead in to this month’s posts was (and still remains) elusive. I mean, what’s the point of saying the the temperatures are lower than normal, the stock market is volatile, the four major sports are all active, and so on. Each of these points is interesting only in passing. But were of any of them worth talking about? So we at Blog Wyrm looked around and realized that we should point out just how enjoyable it is to hear (not read) a good book.

The audiobook market has come a long way and it is now possible to listen to stories over a variety of media. Audible certainly has the corner on the pay-for-play market but, perhaps surprisingly, Youtube has a wide selection of material that can be streamed at no cost. Truely we live in an age of marvels.

Speaking of marvels, let’s talk about this month’s posts.

By now it is clear that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is on fire. The incredible numbers associated with the Black Panther seem like merely a prolog for the turnout expected for Avengers: Infinity War. But way back, before all this movie hype, the lore of the Infinity Stones evolved slowly within Marvel Comics. About Comics looks at the roots of what may well be the years biggest blockbuster.

We’ve all experienced it, some routes home are faster than others, even if the total distance is longer. That is the point of a highway. Go further but so much faster that you’re home sooner. This month’s Aristotle To Digital continues to expand on the A* algorithm by taking these types of effects into account using terrain costs – the costs associated with moving across stretch of land – within the charming context of a cross-country trek.

Clashes between economic viewpoints may be a common enough occurance, but it isn’t often that we get to see it play out between pretentious snobs and arrogant slobs. That’s what makes the current tiff between the Cannes Film Festival and Netflix so appealing and the subject of this month’s
Common Cents.

The material derivative is one of the core tools for understanding continuum mechanics. It is the precise mathematical statement that allows us to move between the particle-following (Lagrangian) and the field (Eulerian) points-of-view. Unfortunately, it can be a bit abstract. Fortunately, Under The Hood has some concrete examples that make understanding much easier.

Enjoy!

Here we are, ready to close out the month of March. This month has been so inordinately cold that I understand that folk of western Pennsylvania are hunting high and low for Punxsutawney Phil. But at least we can look at this time, as the Easter Triduum and Passover begin, as warm of heart.

We at Blog Wyrm wish all our readers a Happy Easter and Joyous Passover. May God Bless.

This month, About Comics continues its exploration of Jack Kirby’s legacy in the Fourth World. The focus is on that master of the space opera, Jim Starlin, and his Cosmic Odyssey limited series that set a new tone for the New Gods and launched a spate of new titles.

Strange are the confluences of events that lead to the creation of things. This month’s Aristotle To Digital explores the A* algorithm through a weird amalgam of some PowerPoint diagrams, a dash of video editing, and finally a pinch of royalty free music. And out popped Blog Wyrm’s first video.

Common Cents reflects on the division of labor and the remarkable fact that even the humblest of smart phone apps reflects the collective effort of literally millions of people. Quite remarkable.

Under The Hood begins a long examination of continuum mechanics (elasticity, fluids, etc.). This installment sets the framework, compares the Lagrangian and Eulerian points-of-view, and introduces the material derivative.

Enjoy!

Every four years the world stops to watch the Olympics, wherein countries, putting aside their differences, send teams of dedicated amateurs to honorably compete on the field of sport. So, the story as crafted when I was a boy. Over time, the various veils and fig leaves of respectability have fallen away. Tales surfaced of East Germans manipulating and experimenting on their athletes, doping became commonplace among teams from the four corners of the world, bad-sportsmanship, rooted in geopolitics was often on display, and athletes are anything but amateurs these days.

So what is the continued appeal of the Olympics? Well, in my opinion not much from the old political point-of-view. But as a display of pure athleticism certainly there is something to admire. I decided to give the Olympics a glance this past weekend and I was pleasantly surprised at how engaging it was. In particular, the most entertaining events were the figure skating, the luge, speed skating, and the shooting portion of the biathlon. It’s nice to see that the Olympics have morphed into something worth watching as a strict physical spectacle stripped of most of the obsolete philosophies of the past.

Equally enjoyable, although clearly not as visually stunning, is this month’s Blog Wyrm.

About Comics picks back up it retrospective of the Jack Kirby Fourth World. This month’s column reviews the X-Men/Teen Titan crossover, one of the high-points in the dark decade after Kirby left DC.

Aristotle To Digital takes a whimsical look at what is a legendary piece of code from the gaming world – the fast-inverse square root. Eager for speed, developers have been known to pull no punches when optimizing for performance but what went into this algorithm boggles the mind.

Common Cents reminisces about the excesses of the past that led to the demise of the steel industry and the blight of the rust belt and finds the same signs of rot in the machine that is higher education.

Starting from first principles, Under The Hood derives the magnetic field for an ideal dipole and then finds the equations of the field lines for the most important dipole we know – the Earth. The resulting relationship gives the famous L-Shells of the van Allen radiation belts.

Enjoy!

Be at ease, the Blog Wyrm staff is well aware that the New Years was almost 4 weeks ago but since we publish on the last Friday of each month… well, better late than never. And in the spirit of that fine holiday where media give the best-of-2017-themed content, we offer a special issue filled with lists. Yes, you read that correctly, each article in this issue is filled with a list of the best of those items that fall within the unique scope of each column.

Up first, About Comics judges the superhero by the company he keeps – specifically the shady company that he keeps. Arguing that the measure of a hero is truly understood by adversity, the greatest villains are ranked and compared on an individual basis, by franchise, and by publisher. Have a peak to see just who is the most reprehensible and loathsome bad guy out there.

In the second article, Aristotle To Digital lists the top five accomplishments in mathematics and logic from the Twentieth century. These accomplishments, powerful results in their respective subdomains, also have had a profound continuing impact and on practical and philosophical thought.

Third on the list, Common Cents lists the top five economic myths that people everywhere, in stations great and small believe fervently, but erroneously nonetheless. And, in case you can’t guess what the top spot is just ask the average citizen of Venazuela.

In the fourth and final spot, Under The Hood ranks the top 10 Nobel prizes in physics. While all the prizes reflect truly amazing work, to make this list the prize had to reflect world-wide impact on everyday life. So, unless small scale TeV accelerators are going to become household items in the near future, don’t expect to see the Higgs boson on this list.

Enjoy!

Well the Blog Wyrm staff is taking a break in December to enjoy the holidays and recharge for the coming year. We’ll be back in January with a special New Years issue – each blog will have a top list (top 10, top 5, etc., depending on content). Until then, have a Merry Christmas a Happy New Year and stay warm.

Blog Wyrm Staff

Happy Thanksgiving all! It seems that these days, we are a rather fractured nation, sniping at each other nearly every day. This is a curious thing as we all enjoy so many blessings. From the lowest to the highest of us, we all enjoy a standard of living undreamt of a century ago. Yes there are differences in our station and inequities that keep us apart, but on the whole each of us is much better off than even the most highly placed a century ago.

We sometimes lose sight of this and I believe that this is something our professional agitation class tries hard to bring about. After all, how can we sell products without creating a desperate need to buy and this desperation can only exist in a country so rich if we are convinced it does.

So we at Blog Wyrm beg our readers to reflect on what we have in common rather than on that that separates and to careful count our blessings, including those citizens who secured these blessings by their talents, dedication, sacrifice, and low.

Speaking of our collective blessings, on of the most amazing ones is the ability to produce and publish anything we want on the internet. Truly amazing – just like this month’s columns.

Next time you are driving a car, throwing a dart, or catching a ball, consider just how you accomplish these everyday activities. It isn’t at all obvious. And the mystery deepens when you consider how one teaches a machine to mimic the same tasks. Aristotle To Digital lays out the differences between man and machine and shows just how curious and miraculous being human actually is.

Economic growth is critical to the continued health of an economy and the citizens who comprise it. Unfortunately, the last 10 years have suggested that strong economic growth was a thing of the past. As Common Cents argues, the rumors of the death of 3% growth and the arrival of a new normal have been greatly exagerated.

About Comics continues looking at Jack Kirby’s Fourth World series. This month’s column looks the dark decade that followed the end of the King’s initial take on the tales of New Genesis and Apokolips – a decade filled with fits and starts as DC tried to capitalize on the mythological legacy he bequeathed.

Under The Hood revisits the roller coaster problem from an earlier column with the Lagrange multiplier technology developed last month.
Representing the constraint forces properly, the multipliers provide a dependable way to numerically include the constraints and the resulting simulations show excellent dynamics.

Enjoy!

It is hard to imagine just where today’s writers failed to learn basic grammar, punctuation, and proofreading, but, as most careful readers can attest, publication standards have progressively slid in recent years. Hardly a day goes by without one of the Blog Wyrm staff stumbling across an article with poor writing mechanics, murky storytelling skills, and egregious errors.  Case in point:

Are the statements just defamatory?   Is there another attribute that the writer wished to include?  Is the string ‘andstatements’ simply a new word in the English language that will soon be included in the OED?

No doubt the pace at which today’s ‘writers operate explains some of the gap, but there is a limit to what can be considered as ignorable in this age of spell-checkers and computerized proofreading. Of course, we at Blog Wyrm are hardly perfect, but we don’t make a living doing this – in fact we don’t make a single cent from these posts. Even still, we often do a much better job than our paid counterparts, leading us to ask just what it means when the amateurs are outperforming the pros.

And speaking of our performance, let’s take a look at this month’s columns.

The one thing of which we are often reminded when the subject of the Great Recession arises it that, despite how bad it was, at least it wasn’t as bad as the Great Depression.  And, for the most part, this is true.  But not completely.  This month’s Common Cents presents data that suggests in one key area, economic growth, survivors of the Great Recession may actually have it worse than their counterparts from the Great Depression.

When someone says logic, it is a good bet that Mr. Spock will spring to mind.  Often thought of synomously with reason and dispassionate logic, everyone’s favorite Vulcan is curiously quiet on the limitations of logic, limitations that logic itself painfully uncovers.  Aristotle To Digital presents and explores these limits.

Inspired by last month’s look at the The Great Darkness Saga, About Comics takes a historic look at what started it all:  Jack Kirby’s fertile imagination, his great skill as an artist, and the enduring mythology he created with his Fourth World saga.

Continuing to examine constraints in mechanical systems, Under The Hood compares and constrasts solving for the familiar pendulum equations of motion using either direct substitution or Lagrange multipliers.  Although, both methods led to the same final equations, the differences in approach reveal some of the more interesting aspects of constrained dynamics.

Enjoy!

Well, it has happened yet again. A behemoth of industry and supposed trusted public entity has, through its carelessness, been hacked by my personal data exposed and/or compromised. Following in the disgraced footsteps of Target, Home Depot, OMB, UMD, and who knows how many more, Equifax the last in a long line of corporate entities, in both the private and public sectors, who have failed to keep our data safe. It is particularly galling from the company charged with making judgements over the trustworthiness of others. Sigh…

Now onto something that doesn’t suck, this month’s columns.

It is rare that a comics story can really pull the reader in and sustain excitement, tension, and expense over a period of months. It is also rare when such a story can repay multiple readings and maintain its charm through each reading. About Comics dips into the past to revisit just such a tale: The Great Darkness Saga.

Politicians, shady salesmen, and boorish acquaintances of all sorts seem to have one feature in common – they all leave the impression that they talk a great deal but say very little. Aristotle To Digital presents a way to analyze such speech and decide what the real content is and what is just hot air; all through the power of symbolic logic.

Most of us have taken a summer ride on a roller-coaster. Fun, thrilling, exciting, all of these words can be used to describe the typical experience. However, as this month’s Under The Hood shows, the more apt word may be complicated, as it is demonstrated that numerical modeling of a ride on a roller-coaster is very hard to do due to the constraint of having to stay on the track.

In a follow-up to an earlier column on the the Khazzoom-Brookes postulate and the Jevons Paradox, this month’s Common Cents looks for direct evidence of these effects in oil prices, especially after the U.S.’s move to a more energy efficeint posture over the last 40 years. After looking at a variety of data, the conclusion is that there is little to support the idea of a large upswing in consumption of the sort predicted (and feared) by those learned men.

Enjoy!

This month, the Blog Wyrm staff decided to take a break from publishing our favorite blogzine. The reasons for this are many and manifold. All of us need a time to recharge; kids need to be ferried back to school; and a once-a-in-long-time opportunity to see an eclipse presented itself.

So, in place of this month’s offering, we instead offer these very beautiful images of the cresent sun produced by the ‘pinhole’ cameras formed by spaces in leaves.

Ordinarily, we only see roundish splotches since the round sun images over lap and the holes in the trees aren’t really pinholes. It is astonishing just how well the sun’s images appeared on the day of the eclipse.

So, we will be back next month with our usual spate of columns. Until then, enjoy!