beholder

When trading stopped earlier today, which effectively ended all trading for 2023, Apple stock was up 49% for the year. And at first glance, that yearly gain for Apple may seem like good news.  But according to a recent CNBC article, looks can be deceiving. Yes, it's true that "Apple's stocks rallied in 2023." However, if you compare Apple to how other tech giants did, its gains seem lackluster: Nvidia was up 238.9%, Meta climbed 194.1%, Tesla rose 101.7%, Amazon jumped 80.9%, Alphabet gained 58.3%, and Microsoft was up…

In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold.Everyone, it seemed, was incredulous. People couldn’t understand how, faced with exactly the same photograph of exactly the same dress, they could reach such different and firmly held conclusions about…

Why do some things combine and others separate? Add nitric acid to gold, and nothing happens. Pour on aqua regia, a mixture of nitric and hydrochloric acids, and the gold dissolves. The chemical doctrine of affinity emerged as a way to explain these reactions. In his 1809 novel Elective Affinities, Johann Wolfgang Goethe applied the idea to human relationships. Charlotte and Edward may form a stable union but if Edward has an affinity with young Ottilie – ah, well, then all bets are off.What is an affinity? A little like…

Image: LegoIs that a treasure chest? What kind of awesome loot might we find inside?Wait... It’s a Mimic!!One of the most iconic monsters in D&D, the Mimic can change its shape at will. This set is meant to be transformative, where you can display an awesome treasure chest - or turn it into a Mimic!There are 3 hinged sections, 2 in the lower chest and 1 in the lid.The bottom panel is hinged to allow room for the lower teeth to flip.The top of the chest has the same functionality allowing the Mimic’s fearsome upper…

What color is a tree, or the sky, or a sunset? At first glance, the answers seem obvious. But it turns out there is plenty of variation in how people see the world—both between individuals and between different cultural groups. A lot of factors feed into how people perceive and talk about color, from the biology of our eyes to how our brains process that information, to the words our languages use to talk about color categories. There’s plenty of room for differences, all along the way. For example, most people have…

Image Credits: TechCrunch The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has brought down its wrath on Coinbase. The publicly traded exchange has been under investigation for allegedly selling crypto tokens on its platform that qualify as securities without adhering to the associated rules and regulations. Coinbase, for its part, is insistent that it does not sell securities on its platform and that the cryptocurrencies called into question should instead be viewed as commodities. All the drama has brought crypto to the…