I Thought This Was Really Interesting.. The Subtle Shift Weak Gravitational Lensing Has On The Path Of

153 - A Narcissistic Number

153 is a narcissistic number–a number that can be generated from its own digits (so it’s obsessed with itself? hence the narcissism?) like so:

More precisely, a narcissistic number is a natural number that is the sum of its own digits each raised to the power of the number of digits. So since 153 has 3 digits, each digit is cubed and then summed together. There are only four 3-digit  narcissistic numbers:

A very interesting thing about narcissistic numbers is that, unlike may other sets of numbers (e.g., even/odd numbers, prime numbers, triangular numbers, etc.), there are only finitely many of them. In base 10, there are only 88 (10 of them being the 1 digit numbers). The largest narcissistic number has 39 digits, this guy:

115,132,219,018,763,992,565,095,597,973,971,522,401 

Why is this? Essentially, the sum cannot keep up with the size of the number. More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_number

Even the Wikipedia page on the Catholic relationship with abortion notes that most pro-choice Catholics are those who barely/never attend Mass, while most pro-life Catholics are the ones who regularly show up.

There’s a world you’re living in, no one else has your part.

Vintage knife circa 1919, newly engraved.

Pale Blue Dot

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan

And who said all the good chem jokes argon

POKÉMON FACT

I saw some fine fellows on my morning walk today

My suspension from playing DnD (because I tried to build a nuclear bomb) is almost over. And you know what that means :)))