They are talking about “core” inflation.

The truth is that they report both! And they report dozens of splits of price data as well.

Central banks often like core inflation because food and energy prices can be very volatile and susceptible to changes in commodity prices that are not dependent the current state of the economy. Do they need to raise interest rates to slow the economy and bring down inflation is the main source of higher prices is due to OPEC or some drought? They get better data if the more volatile components are subtracted out.

But total inflation still gets the biggest headlines on news reports. If food or energy inflation persistently beats total inflation for long periods of time, there will be pressure to address that in other ways (oil reserves, trade, etc). But it’s still unlikely that the Fed will feel like they should slow the economy to fight it like they would if there was high core inflation.

Achilles definitely catches the tortoise.

The way the story is told, they keep describing snapshots in time that are closer and closer to the time the tortoise is caught without telling you about that moment.

Like if he catches him at noon and you tell a story describing 11:59, then 11:59:30, then 11:59:45, then 11:59:52.5, etc.

You can certainly tell a story like that where you never get to noon. But we all know how time works. Eventually noon will come.

They are only banning the extreme shift. The fielders can still shift quite a bit but the SS/2B will so longer be able to move so far as to be on the ‘wrong’ side of the 2B bag. If one of those guys is playing right behind the 2B, that’s still a decent shift.

They do this in other sports. NBA has had a couple of ‘illegal defense’ type rules. The NFL is always tweaking what pass defenders are allowed to do.

They did this research almost a hundred years ago. The s and p electronics are the most active chemically and there are 8 of those in each level. The electron configuration if the nearest noble gas is usually the most stable chemically.

This is especially true of the non-metallic elements in the top-right corner which are most often present in large organic molecules. C,N,O and the halogens. P and S are interesting exceptions! They can have 10 and 12 instead of just 8.

Yes, but that’s for people.

Interact can have a more general meaning of two things affecting each other. Alcohol can interact with your medication, etc.

Interact as a verb is more common.

Interface as a verb feels more corporate. I hear it a bit at work, but not common when talking about communicating with friends and family.

So, are there parents on identical twins out there?

Is it obvious how to tell the two babies apart? Are birthmarks in different places easily visible?

I mean infants don’t do much for the first few months so I can imagine a case where they don’t bother trying to figure out which is which for a while. But I never hear a story like that. Parents are absolutely certain which kid came out first. How do they do it?

If we were not orbiting the sun and were directly feeling it’s gravity, it would be about 1600 times weaker the gravity we feel on earth.

I don’t know how weak gravity has to be before you feel “weightless”, though. That’s a good question.

I was under the impressions that the “trillion dollar coin” proposal was an accounting trick to try to get around the artificial “debt limit” that Congress imposes on itself.

There have been structural budget deficits for over twenty years, so every couple of years the debt limit is raised.

Every so often, a group of newly-elected House members decides they are going to engage in brinksmanship with raising this limit — not fully comprehending the global financial meltdown that would occur if the government actually defaulted on its debt. In the end, the debt limit is ALWAYS raised. There is no other option.

So, people get annoyed with this game and try to find ways to render the “debt limit” meaningless. You could pass a law eliminating the debt limit! But if you don’t have the votes for that you get creative.

This old proposal was for the treasury to mint an trillion dollar coin and then deposit it in the Federal Reserve. It is not circulated. I don’t think something like that could even be “spent” (anyone got change for a trillion?). But in accounting terms it would count as an asset which would keep us below the “debt limit”. The government wouldn’t default. Brinksmanship by newly-elected Congressmembers is no longer a thing.

They’ll never do it though. It sounds too insane and “it’s just an accounting trick” is not an explanation that would sit well with potentially horrified voters.

Yes, just to add that Entropy has different units. Entropy is usually multiplied by absolute temperature to compare to heat.

The concept of “Free Energy” (Gibbs) is Enthalpy minus Absolute Temperature times Entropy. The free energy helps determine whether or not you are at equilibrium. The effect of entropy is higher at higher temperatures.

There is no rule of nature.

There is a rule with how you write math. The rules of order of operations can make some equations look simpler. But you have to make sure that you read the equations the same way that they were written.

It wasn’t that long ago (1990s) that scientists themselves would have to go to the library and photocopy their own journal articles (or I guess if you were a prof, you probably had an assistant do it).

I don’t understand the current business model of journals existing as PDF files mailed around. The purchase price of $35 per article is absurd and no one ever pays that. Big schools do subscribe to the journals their research teams publish in. So that’s how scientists get themselves get access.

If they don’t have to actually print as many physical copies of the journal, it should be cheaper than it was before, but it can’t be free. There are still administrative costs. I don’t know how much the senior editors get paid.

And Elbridge Gerry who the technique is named after pronounced his name with a hard G.

Yeah, we had a game when I was little where oddly shaped objects were rolled. I think they were shaped like pigs.

The “less balanced” results were rare but they did happen once in a while. The rarity was worked into the game — you got more points for them.

Edit — I found the old game on Wikipedia.

Because we forgot what life was like when the birth rate was higher.

My dad slept on a cot in his parents room until his oldest brother went off to college. After that he shared a room with two bunk beds with three of his other brothers.

Yeah, you can paint an infinite area with a finite amount of paint.

The area under the curve 1/x from 1 to infinity… infinite.

The volume of the curve 1/x from 1 to infinity revolved around x-axis… finite!

The area clearly fits inside the volume!

But then you need to consider practical issues like the size of the atoms and molecules that make up the paint.