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March 12, 2024

TV Tuesday 3/12/24

I thought it had been a long time (just over six months) since I published a Mystery Monday post, but it has been even longer — close to a year — since my last TV Tuesday post. Again, it wasn’t that I wasn’t watching TV (or reading mysteries), but that I haven’t been moved to write a post about it.

The most notable thing in my TV world is that Netflix finally added the tenth and final season of the NBC show The Blacklist. The show ended last year, and I’ve been waiting to see the final season.

And because I watched it on TV (Netflix, in fact), I’ll tell you about an excruciatingly bad movie I watched. It was directed by Renny Harlin and stars Pierce Brosnan, so I had high hopes, but it was a real stinker.

3 Comments | tags: Cheers, James Spader, MASH, Northern Exposure, The Blacklist | posted in TV Tuesday

March 11, 2024

Catherine Aird

By Wyrd Smythe

It has been just over six months since my last Mystery Monday post. It’s not that I haven’t been reading mystery novels (my second-favorite genre) but that I just haven’t been moved to write a post (a bit of a general problem the last year or so).

But I haven’t been idle, quite to the contrary. I’ve now gone through the other three (of the five) character series by Lawrence Block (Keller the Killer, Chip Harrison, and Evan Tanner). Prolific writer, Block.

And I’ve read nearly all of the Sloan and Crosby murder mysteries (also known as the Chronicles of Calleshire) by yet another British writer, Catherine Aird.

7 Comments | tags: Catherine Aird, Lawrence Block | posted in Books, Mystery Monday

March 4, 2024

BB #91: Modern Childrearing

By Wyrd Smythe

The old saying “Spare the rod, spoil the child” has fallen into, shall we say, severe disfavor these days, even as just a metaphor for strict childrearing. And forget about actually spanking your kid — that’s child abuse by modern standards.

At the same time, we seem to be in the midst of a serious and growing mental health crisis among teens, especially in the USA (but also the UK and Australia).

A new book by Abigail Shrier suggests these may be connected.

24 Comments | tags: children, kids | posted in Brain Bubble, Society

March 1, 2024

Friday Notes (Feb 30, 2024)

By Wyrd Smythe

The weather has been so weirdly warm this month that I never got around to a Friday Notes for February, so I’m extending the month. Call it a leap year “plus one”. Truth is, I’m at long last finally starting to reach the bottom of my pile. A lot of what’s left is trivial, silly, or outdated, and I may end up doing a thorough spring cleaning on them.

The ultimate goal is for the Notes to be about contemporaneous things rather than from old notes that have been fermenting in the pile.

But for a bit longer, it’ll be a combination of both, so off we go.

13 Comments | tags: global warming, language, Lee Smolin, linguistics, Schadenfreude, square, temperature, Weltschmerz | posted in Friday Notes

February 29, 2024

BB #90: The Growth Paradigm

By Wyrd Smythe

My final post in 2023 was about growth curves. It focused on the difference between geometric growth versus exponential growth — which turns out to be not much — and compared them to polynomial growth (see that post for the math-y details; this post isn’t a math post, so relax and read on).

A key characteristic of all these growth curves is that they grow without limit. If we treat the horizontal axis as time, then the longer the growth continues along the curve, the greater whatever growing grows.

The problem is that nothing in the real world can grow infinitely without limit. At some point, something has to give.

9 Comments | tags: Earth population, global warming | posted in Brain Bubble, Society

February 26, 2024

BB #89: The Irrational Square

By Wyrd Smythe

Consider the lowly square, a four-sided shape with sides of equal length meeting at right angles. The embodiment of what we’re referring to when we refer to square miles, square kilometers, square inches, or square whatevers. The two-dimensional version of any one-dimensional length.

A trivially easy shape to draw, all you need is a straight edge and a compass — the latter for ensuring your corners are right angles (see Plato’s Divided Line for more on using a straight edge and compass). The only simpler shape is the circle.

Yet the simple square threw early mathematicians into a serious tizzy!

12 Comments | tags: irrational numbers, Pythagoras, square | posted in Brain Bubble, Math

February 15, 2024

Winter Finally Showed Up!

By Wyrd Smythe

February 15, and winter finally decided show up:

And it’s awfully pretty, I gotta give it that!

8 Comments | tags: snow, winter | posted in Life

February 14, 2024

BB #88: Boltsmann Brains

By Wyrd Smythe

An article in a recent issue of New Scientist caught my attention on two counts: firstly, in what it said about my old friend wavefunction collapse and the measurement problem; and secondly, in mentioning Boltzmann Brains. Both set off my “Yeah, but!” reaction.

I’ll touch (as briefly as possible) on the first point, but this little Bubble is mainly about the second one.

Boltzmann Brains bug me.

3 Comments | tags: measurement problem, quantum mechanics, wave-function | posted in Brain Bubble, Physics

February 13, 2024

BB #87: Two = Zero!

By Wyrd Smythe

You may have, at some point, seen one of those bits where a series of seemingly simple math operations somehow end up proving that 1=0 or something equally clearly wrong. Most of them accomplish their joke by sneaking in a hidden division by zero. From that point on, all bets are off (see Divide by Zero).

Recently, on a YouTube channel I follow, I saw a clever example that uses a much sneakier trick. It’s harder to spot because the operation it uses is legit in two of the three possible cases.

The gag, of course, uses the third one.

7 Comments | tags: fun with numbers, imaginary unit, numbers | posted in Brain Bubble, Math

January 23, 2024

Sideband #80: Divide by Zero

By Wyrd Smythe

You may remember learning way back in grade school that you can’t divide by zero. You may remember being told that division by zero is undefined. But have you ever wondered why we can’t divide by zero? Couldn’t the answer just be zero? We get zero when we multiply by zero, so why not when we divide?

But dividing is the opposite (or inverse) of multiplying, so if multiplying by zero gives zero, then maybe dividing by zero gives us… infinity? But infinity isn’t a number (it’s an idea), so that doesn’t work, either.

In this post I’ll dig into why division by zero is undefined.

4 Comments | tags: division, fractions, zero | posted in Basics, Math, Sideband