Urpriest

Ziz has her whole bit about how Boltzmann's suicide was really because of the spoOoky eternal recurrence implicit in statistical mechanics

These three versions of the same image taken by the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity illustrate different choices that scientists can make in presenting the colors recorded by the camera. The left image is the raw, unprocessed color, as it is received directly from Mars (and as available on the MSL Raw Images Web site: http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/raw/). The center rendering was produced after calibration of the image to show an estimate of "natural" color, or approximately what the colors would look like if we were to view the scene ourselves on Mars. The right image shows the result of then applying a processing method called white-balancing, which shows an estimate of the colors of the terrain as if illuminated under Earth-like, rather than Martian, lighting.

an obvious question is whether 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + ... = 1, because people find it easier to say that it does (what else could it be?) and then it's a short jump to ask whether 9/10 + 9/100 + 9/1000 + ... follows the same logic.

at that point people must either accept that the odometer-like reading of the decimal starting "0.999" misled them or double down and reject the existence of infinities entirely: after all even if an infinite series takes you arbitrarily close to one, doesn't that mean there's always still a gap?

My stepmother did NOT like the way her Libertarian Viking Neighbor framed pregnancy as the fetus "attacking the woman". She incredulously told him this was extremely disrespectful to expectant mothers to portray pregnancy as so violent and negative.

Libertarian Viking Neighbor's response was that people consensually hurt each other all the time, and "there's like a whole community about that, with the acronym the one that starts with a B" And his reasoning was that if the mother was consenting to bring attacked by the baby, it in fact wasn't violent and negative because there was consent.

“This is a day you are to commemorate; for the generations to come you shall celebrate it as a festival to the Lord—a lasting ordinance. For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast.”

and on and on about it

then farther down it does say

With the dough the Israelites had brought from Egypt, they baked loaves of unleavened bread. The dough was without yeast because they had been driven out of Egypt and did not have time to prepare food for themselves.

so the "explanation" is always been told is there but the commandment came first

[image credit]

That's right - it's glacier mice. One of my favorite things maybe on the entire planet. Let's talk about these freaky fuzzy little rats!!

Glacier mice are balls of moss that live in large herds like this in a few select glaciers. They are moss all the way through, with a center consisting of dead moss matter, implying that they begin as small growths of moss and simply accumulate over time, like snowballs. However, their outside surface is alive and well on all sides. Glacier mice have been observed, through tagging and tracking, to roll across the glacier like a majestic herd of wildebeest, exposing all of their sides to the sunlight. They trundle along at a pace of about 2.5 cm per day. That's 30 feet in a year! They're really schmovin'! Certainly further than most mosses can claim to travel.

What's really exciting, though, is that they all move in the same direction, and we're not sure why or how. Scientists experimented to try and attribute their coordinated behavior to wind, sunlight, and the direction that their grazing ground slopes, but to no avail. They speed up, slow down, and change direction in unison, based on some mysterious moss code that we haven't cracked yet.

Cross-section of a glacier mouse. Note the dead moss matter inside, and the short gametophytes on the outside, adapted to harsh winds and sunlight. [image credit]

We have figured out how they roll, though - while the moss ball sits on the ice, it insulates the ice directly underneath it, protecting it from melting. This forms a little pillar of ice that the moss eventually rolls off of. The insulating power of glacier mice also gives it the wonderful ability to host all kinds of microorganisms that otherwise wouldn't survive the glacier's harsh conditions, and their ability to move makes it possible for microorganisms to spread from one habitable spot to another. They're like a bunch of little tardigrade passenger ships, braving the dangerous glacier to go where no water bear has gone before!!

Glacier mice have been found to consist of several moss species, most of which must reproduce asexually in order to survive in the dry climate. They've been observed to live for at least six years, but are projected to live much, much longer. I love them. So much. I hope they know that I love them!! I LOVE THEM!!!!

Can't you do that with index funds too? Or do you just mean it's easier to find pairs when you have hundreds of stocks to choose from?

What I've always done is have a mix of index funds among small cap/mid cap/large cap and growth vs value, along with a few that cover non-US markets and a few fixed-income ones (like a treasury bond index fund, a corporate bond index fund, a mortgage-backed securities index fund). Maybe ten different ones in total. The brokers I've used all have a Portfolio Builder thingy that recommends a specific mix based on your time horizons and risk tolerance, so I bought according to the mix they recommended, then adjusted each year by buying and selling until I had roughly those percentages again. And the one time I've had a portfolio managed by a professional he did the same thing, split things up among ten or so index funds covering different asset classes, and adjust when the mix diverged from the plan.