Specify an image onclick listener within the JQuery Modal Dialog box

Question: I'm working on an application where I'm opening a modal dialog box.  The dialog box allows the users to add checkboxes like criteria to the modal dialog div being displayed.  They enter the text for the checkbox into a textbox on the page, and click a button to append the checkbox.  The checkbox shows up just fine.  Next to each checkbox, I'm also adding a jquery ui-icon icon-close image class so that when the X next to the new entry is clicked, the entry is removed from the page.
The problem lies in the fact that simply having the script specified in the page doesn't work.  The div doesn't appear to be a part of the page and defining an onclick listener for all images doesn't do what it's supposed.  So my question is, how can I define an image onclick listener within the modal dialog.  For example, in defining the modal dialog box, I can specify an on open function that does something whenever the dialog box is first opened.  I want to, in similar fashion, define a function that is actively listening for whenever an image has been clicked within the modal dialog box.
Example:
        $("

<input type='text' placeholder='Add rationale' id='rationaleBox' style='width: 540px;' maxlength='180'>

").dialog({
        height: 300,
        width: 600,
        modal: true,
        closeOnEscape: false,
        resizable: false,
        title: "Comments for " + item,
        open: function(event, ui){
            $(".ui-dialog-titlebar-close").hide();
            $(".ui-dialog-title").after("("+value+")");
            $(".ui-dialog .ui-dialog-buttonpane .ui-dialog-buttonset").css("float", "none");
        },

Similar to the open function being defined, I want to create a listener for image clicks
Answer: To define a global handler which listens when a element is clicked, use the on function on jQuery 1.7 or above. For example:
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('.ui-dialog .icon-close').on('click', function() {
        // an element of *.icon-close* within *.ui-dialog*
        // had been clicked
        $('ui-dialog').hide();
    });
});

If you are using a version of jQuery prior to 1.7, then use delegate instead of on like this:
$(document).ready(function() {
    $('.ui-dialog .icon-close').delegate('', 'click', function() {
        // an element of *.icon-close* within *.ui-dialog*
        // had been clicked
        $('ui-dialog').hide();
    });
});


Is it possible to run in offline mode with mods enabled?

Question: Steam was down earlier today. When that's the case we can still launch steam in offline mode and play some games. Upon starting Cities and loading a save game, I noticed that the mods that I have installed from the Steam Workshop did not work because I was offline. Is there any way to by-pass this? You'd expect that mods are saved locally, so it seems odd that you need an internet connection for this.
Comment: I'm reading forums that are suggesting to make sure that the mods are located in local folders. Have you done that? It also looks like this is a bug that should've been fixed a while ago, though some people are still reporting it (like yourself)...
Answer: Yes. The only problem you're likely to encounter is that the cloud saves and/or sync will be offline. Everything else should be stored locally.


Should I be concerned about rusty exhaust pipe on used car?

Question: We are considering purchasing a used 2015, but Pre-certified car. (which means it passed a 152 point inspection in this case)  Everything is in great condition, but when we looked under the car, noticed that the exhaust pipe was excessively rusty.  Having NO perspective of what's normal and what's not, it still seemed weird given the overall solid condition of the car.  Should this be a concern?  Are there any tests we can run, or questions we can ask, to ensure it's okay? It's in the East coast, so clearly has been exposed to rain, snow, sleet etc for last two years.
Thank you!
Comment: Welcome to Motor Vehicle Maintenance & Repair!
Comment: If you aren't certain, the best solution is to have the vehicle inspected by a third party. Exhaust pipes aren't particularly expensive to replace, so if everything else looks good, I'd use it as an excuse to negotiate the price down. Maybe you can also fit in the price of the inspection.
Comment: what make /model?
Comment: It would very unusual in my experience in the US. Most exhaust systems have been 13 % chrome stainless steel for 20 + years. Although not immune to corrosion by salts it is highly resistant to rust. Are the catalytic converters , mufflers, resonators , etc. rusty ?
Answer: If everything else seems good. I would purchase the car. The main cause for rust in the north is not really the snow, but the salt. The exhaust pipe is exposed to the salt easily, being at the bottom, and so is the rest of the underside, so I would check the entire underside for rust. Exhaust pipes are pretty cheap and easy to replace, as compared to most parts of the car's body. An exhaust pipe leak is not a big deal if it occurs behind the muffler, but will generate a lot of noise if it occurs in front. If the rest of the car including the area surrounding the exhaust pipe and the entire underside of the vehicle is not very rusty, I would try to talk the price down using the rusted exhaust pipe, and then probably get an oil undercoating if I did purchase the car.
EDIT: You asked about running tests. There aren't really any tests you can run for the exhaust pipe, just a visual inspection. If the pipe is completely browned from rust, that is not necessarily a big deal, but if there are holes or a very textured surface, or if there are multiple colors of rust (dark brown and light brown) then that is more of a big deal.
Answer: If it's a factory installed exhaust system, you have no worries.
If for some reason they ended up having to replace the factory installed parts, then that is concerning, in it self.


Is it possible to have long wire connections from an NodeMCU to a servo motor or button?

Question: For my proyect, I need to conect my NodeMCU to a servo motor as well as a push button, the thing is, the distance from the NodeMCU and both components has to have a distance of around 6.10 meters (or 20.0131 feet), I dont know if it is possible to do this connection, I worry if the pwm signal or the voltage would drop by the time it reached either component. I havent been able to try this because I dont have long enough cables to do the connections. In the case that it would be possible, what type of cable should I use and should I add something extra to the circuit to make it work better? Thanks.
Comment: use the long wire for the pushbutton part of the circuit ... use it to activate the LED of an opto-isolator .... basically, pressing the button lights an LED at the arduino ... you can use a battery to run the opto-isolator or use power from the arduino ... adjust the LED series resistor to obtain a good signal
Comment: you _could_ use additional nodeMCUs, they are cheap and wireless.
Answer: I would suggest a pull up resistor forcing at least 1 mA or more of current through the switch contact. This helps keep the switch contact clean if it is not rated for dry switching. Then from the junction of the pull up resistor put a 20 - 100K resistor in series with your input pin. You can also add a 100nF cap between the input and ground to kill noise. This forms a low pass filter and denounces some of the switch noise. The other wire to the switch will be ground.  I did this a lot with 12/24VDC control systems. If you do several inputs check your currents and be sure you do not over power the Arduino. This will forward bias the top input protection diode pushing current into the Arduino VCC. The inputs are typically rated at 20mA but check to be sure yours is rated properly.
Answer: A push button won't be a problem. That is a very simple change in resistance from open circuit to a few ohms. You just need a low enough resistance to force the voltage coming through weak internal pullup resistor down to ground. It looks like 22 gauge wire has about 52.7 ohms / 1000 meters.
I don't think 6 meters of 22 gauge wire will be a problem for a 5V PWM signal either. If it's a very electrically noisy environment you might want to use shielded or twisted pair cable, but it seems unlikely that would be needed.


Are Sheol achievements locked now with Wrath of the Lamb?

Question: I had most achievements before the Wrath of the Lamb update. Most of them, that is, except for the ones given for completing Sheol with Judas and Eve. I then completed the full game with Judas and got the new curved horn achievement, but then the game ended and I couldn't get the monster manual for completing Sheol. Is Sheol not available any more?
Answer: When you complete the Womb by killing It Lives, you can choose where to go. There will be available a beam of light, that brings you to the Cathedral and Isaac, and the trapdoor, that brings you to Sheol and Satan.
So no, the Sheol achievements aren't locked, you just can't get both the new and the old achievements in the same run.
Comment: sweet! thanks for the info, i hadn't noticed the two exits there =D
Comment: @user26805 you're welcome! you can also show your appreciation accepting the answer, clicking on the tick mark on the left :)


Why does the string type have a .ToString() method?

Question: Why does the string data type have a .ToString() method?
Answer: The type System.String, like almost all types in .NET, derives from System.Object. Object has a ToString() method and so String inherits this method. It is a virtual method and String overrides it to return a reference to itself rather than using the default implementation which is to return the name of the type.
From Reflector, this is the implementation of ToString in Object:
public virtual string ToString()
{
    return this.GetType().ToString();
}

And this is the override in String:
public override string ToString()
{
    return this;
}

Answer: As Mark points out, it's just returning a reference to itself.  But, why is this important?  All basic types should return a string representation of themselves.  Imagine a logging function that worked like this:
public void Log(object o) {
    Console.WriteLine(o.ToString());
}

This allows you to pass any basic type and log it's contents.  Without string returning itself, it would simply print out "String" rather than it's contents.  You could also do the same thing with a template function.
Think this is silly?  That's basically what the string formatting functions do.  It calls "ToString" when you do this:
Console.WriteLine("{0}", myString);

Answer: String is an object, it is not a data type. Because String is an object, it inherits from the Root Object the ToString() method.
It just like in Java, Objective-C or Scala:)
Comment: it suprised me:), I just thought that C# is like Java, there is no toString method for those things:)
Comment: it is not capitalized because it is an alias. After compiling, that alias will be converted to the capitalized String
Comment: no, string is never boxed to become an object. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/215255/string-vs-string-in-c
Answer: This is even true for java , I think most of the Object Oriented programing languages have this , a string representation of objects in question, since every class you create by default it extedns from Object thus resulting in having the toString() method , remember it's only applicable to objects not for premitive types.
Answer: You'll get a Null Reference Exception if your string is NULL and you use .ToString();
The following will throw:
string.Format("msgBoxTitle = {0}", msgBoxTitle.ToString())

Best to just write... This won't throw.
string.Format("msgBoxTitle = {0}", msgBoxTitle)

Answer: Any object in C# has a to string method, although i can't think of a reason why one would cast a string to a string at the moment the ToString() is inherited from the object type, which of course a string is an example of.


On a certain level

Question: What does " On a certain level " in " I am looking for my sister ... on a certain level" mean ? I have read it in a play.I checked it in some dictionaries but coulden't find its meaning.
Comment: Definition 8 in the first set, for 'certain' here: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/logodaedaly?qsrc=2446 - I'd say 'level' was used metaphorically to indicate a scale of priorities.
Comment: Are you sure the speaker is not referring to a certain **floor** (21st Floor) of the building?
Answer: The phrase on a certain level is generally used to mean to a limited degree.
In the original example, " I am looking for my sister ... on a certain level", the suggestion is that the speaker is not fully engaged in the effort, but is doing so reluctantly or half-heartedly.

On a certain level, we want the Congress to continue its intransigence. Maybe the electorate will see them for what they are and throw the bums out.

In the above example, in large part, the speaker does not like the intransigence and wants it to end. But she also recognizes that the unwanted activity might have some side benefit. She has mixed feelings and recognizes that a small benefit may come from a generally bad situation.
It also is used to deny the applicability of the characterization on all other levels.

Your fiance is an ideal mate on a certain level. He has a beautiful bank account.

In all other respects -- personality, looks, commitment, values -- he is a loser.
Answer: The phrase can have a literal or idiomatic meaning. Without context, I cannot say for certain which meaning is intended, but I would guess the idiomatic occurs much more frequently.
Literally, it would mean on a certain floor (e.g. on the fifth floor).
Idiomatically, this means that one is engaged in the activity to a certain degree or when looked it in a certain frame, that's the purpose of one's activity. To make that a little more accessible, if I said that I am here to answers questions on a certain level then I would mean that if you look at my purposes in some respect that's why I answer question on English.se. Alternately, I could say I answer questions because of curiosity ... on a certain level.
As such, the idiomatic usage is that if you narrow down what's going on to one thing or one type of thing, then it would be that.
Probably with your example, the speaker is doing what appears to be many things but in answer to the purpose of what they are doing explains that they are looking for their sister -- even if the way they look involves things like say playing video games or earning money working as a bartender or anything else.

On a certain level


Who is going to handle flags on content in the Collectives discussions feature?

Question: A new site area for subjective discussions has been announced in the WeAreDevelopers talk and on SO Labs, scheduled for release in August 2023. My understanding is that the feature is just for collectives. Who is going to be tasked with moderating that content? I assume that regular users with flagging privileges will be able to flag things, but who will be tasked with handling those flags?
Comment: @PeterMortensen the NLP collective is the crash test dummy. From what I understand, it'll get it first, and depending on how bad it goes, it may or may not spread
Comment: Here's hoping there are flags.
Comment: I read it as ***only*** applying to the [NLP Collective](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/425530/new-collective-nlp-scope-community-and-questions) (and an experimental feature), at least in the first instance. Or was it just used as an example?
Comment: @PeterMortensen the talk video shows NLP, and the SO Labs page just says "collectives".
Comment: Why not an AI ? :)
Comment: @M-- this feature _is_ related to Overflow AI. It was announced as being _part of_ the Overflow AI project, and is listed so in SO Labs in the page I linked. Did you just not know that? Or do you know that and still think it's not related to Overflow AI?
Comment: @starball I am aware of the announcement and how it was framed. The reason it got attached to Overflow AI is that they launched the Discussions with the NLP Collective. Now, that this feature spread to other Collectives, regardless of the shattered "crash test dummy", this question doesn't need to be attached to Overflow AI, IMO. So, to be clear, I don't think you made an error when you tagged this question with O-AI, but I suppose the feature "evolved" to be related to all Collectives :facepalm:
Answer: In an internal announcement posted today (and it's the right feature this time, not the private discussions with the exact same name but a completely different purpose; thanks for naming stuff sanely, Stack /s), they confirmed that staff will be handling flags. Similarly to the private discussions feature (that had a grand total of 6 non-staff posts over two months spanning 6 collectives a few days ago), mods do have access to tools, but we've been told we're not expected to handle anything there.
Flags are mentioned, but the details of them are not. They also go on to say that it'll have a very basic moderation system, and rather expand it if it graduates. It does not say who gets to flag. I'd imagine everyone with the flagging privilege, but wouldn't surprise me if they bound it to collective membership or something annoying like that. Everyone can flag, as confirmed by staff in the comments
Incredibly optimistic to base a public feature on the very limited CM workforce if you ask me though, but whatever. Wouldn't surprise me if the answer shifts in the future. We'll see
Comment: Flagging will indeed be available to anyone with the flagging privilege, regardless of collective membership.
Comment: @IanCampbell The public discussions feature hasn't been released yet, and it'll only be released to the NLP collective for the test. You have access to private discussions, a different feature by the same name, which doesn't have flags. The flag button redirects to the "contact us" form. It's also fully moderated by staff
Answer: Current info
See Discussions update: Expansion to all tags in February. Quoting Berthold:

Through March, we'll also be working to further define what is, for now, an informal role on Stack Overflow – the "Discussions moderator." With the moderation toolset separate from what's in place for Q&A, we're able to extend moderation of Discussions to community members who have volunteered to help "pilot" this role. In addition to assessing and handling flags, these moderators can edit, delete, and undelete Discussions posts. They cannot suspend users or redact content.
Right now, this group consists of Stack Exchange site moderators, Recognized Members from community-managed collectives, and users who've been highly engaged with Discussions by offering feedback and putting effort toward curating the content. Future conversations within the community can focus on how users become part of this group and what might be expected from them.
Discussions moderators are: Abdulla Nilam, Laurel, M--, Thomas Markov, Wicket (updated 1/24/24). For now, this list will serve as the official roster for this group and will be updated by Community Managers as needed. As an informal group that is part of the Discussions experiment, Discussions moderators are not yet denoted by badges or other visual role designations. All Stack Overflow site moderators also have access to all Discussions moderation functions, and are welcome to moderate as they see fit, but are not obligated to do so.

Older info
Quoting from Discussions experiment launching on NLP Collective (which is about a specific early experiment with the feature, and I assume is not necessarily representative of how things will work long-term),

For this experiment, we've built the moderation functionality in a self-contained way within the Discussions feature. Any user with the flagging privilege can flag a Discussions post.
Community Managers will moderate the space. While Stack Overflow moderators will have access to all moderation capabilities in Discussions, there is no expectation for moderator oversight of this new content type. Moderators can take any action on users or content that they feel is necessary; Code of Conduct violations are not viewed any differently for Discussions. A collective's Recognized Members do not have moderation capabilities in Discussions.


What do I receive when I get a drop for a character whose constellation is already complete?

Question: On the last couple 10 Wishes I have pulled, I have obtained Noelle on every single pull, so I have received 5 of Noelle's Stella Fortuna. Once I have Noelle's constellation complete, what do I get the next time the character drops on a wish?
Comment: Disappointment?
Comment: @pinckerman After getting Noelle on every single 10 pull? Yeah
Comment: LOL no, that was meant to answer your question.
Answer: For a duplicate 4 star character on whom you already got c6, you get 5 masterless starglitter. For a duplicate 5 star character on whom you got c6, you get 25 masterless starglitter ... and disappointment.

wished item
Additional reward

New Character
None

Duplicate 5★ Character
10 Masterless Starglitter and 1 Stella Fortuna for that character

Duplicate 5★ Character (Constellations Maxed)
25 Masterless Starglitter

Duplicate 4★ Character
2 Masterless Starglitter and 1 Stella Fortuna for that character

Duplicate 4★ Character (Constellations Maxed)
5 Masterless Starglitter

5★ Weapon
10 Masterless Starglitter

4★ Weapon
2 Masterless Starglitter

3★ Weapon
15 Masterless Stardust

Source: Genshin Impact Wiki


How to Identify Song Genres

Question: I write a fair bit of music in my spare time but I don't really listen to any all too much, so I'm not very familiar with what falls under what genres.
I've starting posting my work, but I dont really know what genre(s) to label my songs. (I use many different styles and blend things as well, so its not all cut and dry)
Any suggestions for learning to identify genre types or resources so I can learn to do this quickly?
Sorry I know this is a bit vague.
Comment: If you are comfortable with running neural networks I saw there were some music genre classifiers on github.
Comment: I'm voting to close this question because genera identification is not [on-topic](https://music.stackexchange.com/help/on-topic).
Answer: I've been looking at this question for a couple of days and thinking it ought to be closed but having a hard time articulating why. Questions asking for "what genre is this song" are not covered here (here's a bit about what is, as well as how to get food, focused answers), but this is a question about how to identify genres. I think the real problem is that the answer is: Sorry, there's no quick, easy way. You just have to do the research of actually coming to understand each genre—its values, its methods, the people who contribute to it—and in the process you'll learn what it constitutes.
Even the word "genre" is fuzzy. Sometimes we use it to mean various musical forms—symphony vs sonata. More often it denotes what amount to discrete music-cultures—"scenes," in which the musicians and audiences share many cultural markers and aesthetic values. This gets still more problematic, because many acts actively resist categorization, or fall into gray areas in between the large boxes ("a little bit country, a little bit rock'n'roll"). And because human subcultures are nested fractally, and we can easily split hairs over taxonomy (is this indie-pop post-punk, or post-pop indie punk?).
So anyone who promises a list of musical markers to correlate to genres (a strong backbeat = rockabilly, every chord containing a 7th = jazz) is offering only a very blunt instrument to help with the very broadest strokes. Instead, get to know the people and stories behind the music. In this case, you have an advantage: You're the person, and the story is yours. If there are genres that you intend to inhabit, so be it. If there are genres that you may have something in common with without knowing it, explore and you'll find them. But you have the first say in how you want to be described.
Answer: Modern music genres like country,jazz,pop, hard/soft rock,metal,blues,hip-hop, disco, electro, funk etc will have certain musical or lyrical features to identify them. Some genres have subgenres eg different types of blues or jazz and some will be a fusion of 2 or 3 genres eg John Denver's Vi ntry Roads is "Country/Pop", Linda Ronstadt, the Eagles and others did "Country Rock" (that traditional country music purists hate, mainly because of the rocky beat and electric guitars). There's other fused styles, too, even "classical pop" heard in 60's type pop classicalinstrumentals.The depressing lyrics will often indicate blues genre. Rock will have its unmistakable driving "back best" and deal with everyday lives subject matter eg love lost/found/courtship etc. Heavy rock will involve "riffs" (repeated musical note motifs). Heavy metal employs many "power chords" to achieve its spooky, dark quality and deals with certain subjects, usually about death,spirituality etc, but not the kind modern gospel or blues explores.Try listening to many styles to pick up their unique "style signature". Classical musical also has this eg Romantic era music CF Baroque or Early Music styles, all with unique features distinguishing each style.
Answer: If you don't have the breadth of experience required to categorise your music, you'll have to share it with as many people as possible and get THEIR opinions.
But why are you so bothered about labels?   Give a vague description - enough to warn people whether they're getting a love song or a Marvel-style soundtrack - then let them work out their own reasons for not liking it :-)
Comment: One answer might be metadata and the business of music discovery. Maybe your music is vaguely blues-y; tagging it "blues" will help it show up in searches. (Perhaps inappropriately so; Dave Matthews is "vaguely bluesy" but is in no sense a bluesman.)
Comment: @AndyBonner You're probably right about metadata: When publishing through digital aggregators/distributors, genre metadata is usually required and the value must be selected from a predefined list.

How to Identify Song Genres


What would running a VPN client over a VPN router actually do?

Question: Would it add any additional layer of security to use another VPN client while connected to a VPN router?  Or would it just be overkill and slow things down for no reason?
Comment: It would definitely add another layer of security. But if this additional layer is actually worth the effort or if the bit of additional security does not justify the added slowness and increased costs depends on your specific setups and risks - which are all unknown to us.
Answer: What it would actually do is route your traffic from your device to the secondary VPN's endpoint through your router's VPN endpoint. Theoretically, it would add another layer of security, although depending on your threat model, this layer may be considered security via obscurity. And of course, this will slow down your connection speed and increase overhead.
Without more details, I will hypothesize a couple of scenarios in which one may wish to do this:
If you don't trust your router, LAN, ISP, local government, or gateway VPN's endpoint, then it may be worth the performance hit because (properly configured) it would protect you from attacks on your LAN, and it would hide your real IP address from your device's VPN provider/server.
If you don't trust the client's VPN provider or server's ISP or government... (if you are in the USA, also remember that you actually have more legal protections [or so they say] with traffic that does not leave the United States -- traffic routed overseas actually is easier to legally intercept in certain cases), then this setup (used properly) would effectively hide your IP address.
If you don't trust whatever services you are connecting to, then it never hurts to have another layer to make it harder to trace the origin of your traffic, but be careful of common gotchas such as web-rtc leaks and other user-created points of failure.
In general, this setup would add little anonymity and could be defeated by traffic analysis, application-level bugs/backdoors, and most importantly; mistakes made by the user (the user is usually the weakest link in any security chain).
However, it would make it more difficult for someone trying to track your web activities to obtain all of the necessary log files (depending on the integrity of the VPN providers [or their ISP's] and the legal jurisdiction that the services are hosted).
If your threat model is an intelligence agency or something like that, then a better setup would be to use a chain of proxies (some of which can be tor) in conjunction with your VPN. The exact setup you would want would depend on what you are trying to achieve (ie, do you want to proxy into your VPN, or access a chain of proxies through the VPN, or some combination thereof?). Personally, I would use something like Whonix, routed through a VPN server, and use an anonymous VPS server as your final hop (change it frequently and be careful about sending any data through this final exit that can personally identify you, otherwise this is all a waste of time).
As always, do not leave an audit trail -- whether that be using a credit card in your name to pay for both services, or not taking the proper precautions to hide the source of your traffic while setting up your configuration. I recommend implementing tor into your setup for scenarios that require high anonymity. However, I would not rely on tor alone.
Personally, I like to do something such as client > VPN > Tor > [randomly selected and frequently changed anonymous proxy server] > destination. Be careful about that final hop though. If you can deal with being captcha'd all over the place, omit it because it can act as a single point of failure defeating all of your efforts.
In conclusion, define your threat model, do much research, and make an informed decision about how much performance you should, or are willing to sacrifice to gain security and/or anonymity.


Who are those famous looking people in the video of Pink Floyd's brain damage?

Question: While i am able to recognize some of them but most of them are unknown to me.
Did Pink Floyd mocked those politicians and generals? Like in the line.
The lunatic is on the grass.
P.S. I am referring to the video that was played by them during Earl's Court concert London (1994). Video is available here.
Comment: So precisely which people can you recognize, and which people can you not recognize? It is a long list.
Comment: @WheatWilliams I agree with you. We need more information on your knowledge so we can correctly answer your question.
Answer: Below I've listed out the different people you see, with the corresponded line in the song in parenthesis. I don't know everyone, but I think this is at least a good start. Everyone who might be a politician, military officer, or public figure and whom I don't know is bolded.

Starts with shots from wars
Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush and Former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher ("The lunatic is on the grass")
Former U.S. President Bill Clinton ("The lunatic is on the grass")
Former U.K. Prime Minister Sir John Major, bowling in cricket
Unknown man guiding Margaret Thatcher with a cricket bat
Former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl licking lips with headphones on ("Remembering games")
Unknown man and former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker laughing ("And daisy chains and laughs")
George H.W. Bush with his wife Barbara on the right and former head of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raisa Gorbachova on the left ("Got to keep the loonies on the path")
Saddam Hussein ("The lunatic is in the hall")
Former U.K. Prime Minister Sir John Major and Former U.S. President Ronald Reagan ("The lunatics are in my hall")
Former U.S. President Richard Nixon smiling
Margaret Thatcher ("The paper holds their folded")
John Major ("faces to the floor")
Image from "Lord Kitchener Wants You" poster
Man conversing ("And every")
Image from "Lord Kitchener Wants You" poster ("day")
Maybe Boris Yeltsin giving speech ("the paper boy")
Image from "Lord Kitchener Wants You" poster ("brings")
Ronald Reagan ("more")
Male politician
Bill Clinton
Saddam Hussein
General Norman Schwarzkopf saluting
Bearded man smiling
Former President of the Philippines Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda
Cannon going off
Someone kissing Saddam Hussein
Someone kissing Former U.S. President George H.W. Bush ("And if the dam breaks open")
Someone kissing someone ("many years")
Former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and husband Sir Denis Thatcher ("too soon")
Boris Yeltsin rubbing nose with someone
Margaret and Denis Thatcher again ("And if there is no room upon")
A young Fidel Castro giving a speech ("the hill")
Helmut Kohl
Imelda Marcos in a crowd ("And if your head explodes")
Mikhail Gorbachev crying ("with dark forebodings")
Boris Yeltsin crying ("too")
George H.W. Bush crying
Margaret Thatcher crying ("I'll see you on the dark side of the moon")
Woman crying near soldiers
Yasser Arafat embracing Saddam Hussein ("The lunatic is in my head")
Explosion
Former President of Uganda Idi Amin (laughter)
Small Asian boy ("The lunatic is in my head")
George H.W. Bush
Saddam Hussein and TV host ("You raise the blade")
Unknown woman jogging
Bill Clinton jogging ("You make the change")
Unknown woman jogging again
Margaret Thatcher making something ("You rearrange me 'til I'm sane")
Same woman (I believe) crying near soldiers
Boris Yeltsin eating what I believe is ham on a stick ("You lock the door")
Random child
Boris Yeltsin eating same ham on same stick ("Throw away the key")
Ronald Reagan having what seems like scraps of paper dumped on him ("There's someone in my head")
Oliver North ("but it's not me")
George H.W. Bush giving two thumbs up
Unknown man raising arms
Unknown man giving speech
Boris Yeltsin pumping his fist ("And if the cloud bursts, a thunder in your ear")
Soldiers in battle ("You shout and no one seems to hear")
Imelda Marcos singing
Bill Clinton playing the saxophone ("And if the band you're in")
Imelda Marcos singing ("starts playing different tunes")
Margaret Thatcher tripping ("I'll see you")
Nancy Reagan tripping ("on the dark side")
Ronald Reagan laughing ("of the moon")
Unknown Asian man cracking a smile

And the rest is just battle scenes. If you know someone who is bolded, please let me know so I can add his or her actual name. In addition, if you can identify any of the people in the black and white stock footage, I can add any info regarding that as well.
Comment: "George H.W. Bush with, I believe, his wife Barbara on the right and an unknown woman on the left" -- that is Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife lining up with George Bush and his wife on an airport tarmac. Gorbachev, at far left, is partially cut out of the frame.
Comment: Added a bunch of little bits and pieces, like Yasser Arafat, Oliver North, James Baker, and the "Lord Kitchener Wants You" poster (that was interesting... had to do a Google Images search to figure it out... obviously not a Brit here).
Comment: Don't know, licking lips with headphones on ("Remembering games") and A man who looks like of like John Goodman is Helmut Kohl, german Bundeskanzler at that time
Comment: The African politician is Idi Amin, I think.
Answer: With James Baker is Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir! (daisy chains and laughs) I searched on Google for Israeli Prime ministers and matched his picture.


Is "by being pressed" in the following is correct ? "Clay is deformed by being pressed "

Question: Although I think "Clay is deformed when pressed " is better than  "Clay is deformed by being pressed", I would like to know whether the latter is grammatically correct and sounds natural.
Comment: I assume you meant ***clay***, not ***cray***. Both your suggestions are "grammatical", but they don't sound very "natural". Idiomatically, native speakers would normally just use Simple Present rather than Present Perfect: *Clay **deforms** when pressed*.
Comment: Your rewrite suggests (though it does not entail) that the only way or best way of deforming clay is to press it, which is probably not what the sentence intends to say.
Comment: @StoneyB: I think there are some subtleties involved here. *Clay bricks are hardened by being baked in a kiln* works fine for me (and so does *Clay bricks harden when baked in a kiln*). But *Unfired clay bricks deteriorate by being left out in the rain* sounds pretty weird - I'm guessing that's because ***by*** implies *deliberate, purposeful* action leading to a *desired* result, but there's no such implication (or problem) with *Unfired clay bricks deteriorate **when** left out in the rain*.
Comment: @FumbleFingers Yeah. *By* generally answers the question "How is clay deformed?", *when* generally answers "What happens to clay when...?"
Comment: @StoneyB: My *deteriorate* examples don't really work with "present perfect" (presumably because it's intransitive), but there's also the matter of differentiating between *How **is** clay deformed?* and *How **does** clay deform?*
Answer: There are two problems with your sentences 1) is that there is no reference to the state of the clay,usually only wet clay can be deformed; 2) deformation is usually used to describe a shape change which is not intended, e.g. "the body of the car was deformed in the accident collision".
Your first sentence

Clay is deformed when pressed

means that clay will change shape when an external source is applied.
Your second sentence might be better described as

Clay is molded by being pressed

since "molding" is an intended action to create a specific shape.

(source: konterragroup.net)
"Throwing" clay is usually though of as "molding" clay, not "deforming" clay.


How plausible is a two-way crab?

Question: The two-way crab is an intelligent alien with a strange form: It is biradially symetric, with multiple legs at the sides, 2 arms beside each face, and two faces at opposite ends of the body. It has no defined head. Each face has eyes, other sensory organs, a mouth, and a small internal ganglion.  The brain is in the centre of the body. It has no shell or armour. Its body is roughly as wide as it is long. It can move in any direction with the same ease. Would this bodyplan work, and is it plausible that it could have evolved?
Comment: Evolution on Earth doesn't favor two faces, so I think the real question is why *does* evolution on your aliens planet favor it.
Comment: so where does it excrete waste?
Comment: One big problem, you have effectively halved the size of the digestive tract, the largest organ in most animals. you have drastically  reduced (more than halved) the amount of nutrition it can extract from it's food.
Comment: @John It could have a single digestive tract with two oesophagi
Comment: @IchthysKing its still half the size because they are at opposite ends of the body. And again where is excreting waste?
Answer: Radial symmetry is most commonly observed in organisms that move very little, if at all. The radial symmetry allows the organism to sense and interact with stimuli on any side of the body, without needing to move the body itself. For an intelligent, mobile creature like a crab, having a second face likely won't bring much benefit - since it is not a sessile creature, it can just turn to face nearby stimuli.
Body complexity is a liability, and is unlikely to arise unless there's a evolutionary benefit to doing so. What's the benefit to having a second face? It opens new ingress points for bacteria or infections, and the benefits are unclear. The crab can likely only feed one mouth at a time, and a wider range of vision can be achieved without needing a second face.
Given that there are currently no known creatures that have two faces, and very few mobile creatures that are radially symmetric, the natural evolution of such a creature in an earth-like setting seems unlikely. To make this more plausible, it should be clear what's the benefit of any of these features like a second face that cannot be achieved with just one.
Comment: Starfish move a fair bit.  Jellyfish move all the time!
Answer: In case of two sets of eyes with a single brain, you could have a viable crab.
But I see a few other issues..

there is two vulnerable parts instead of one, predators would finish them off easily.

the eyes would be very primitive, because the connection to the retina will  need to be relatively long. Normally the retina has a very short connection bundle to the brain.

internal competition between the two sets of eyes could arise, the animal would end up having a split brain, the motoric system will get disoriented.

no idea what happened on other planets, but on earth, animals developed from a tube shape, one side to take in food, the other side to get rid of the excrements. Having two mouths on either side would violate the basic design. The mutation would need to be huge. A second mouth would require developing some outlet elsewhere, at the same time ! The probability of two rigorous mutations taking place at the same time is very low.
Comment: A two-mouthed design could arise from the begining, for example if there is already some sort of predator or other such danger in the ocean when the first animaloids evolve, then it would make sense for an animal to be able to move in both directions, and so a biradial design would make sense
Comment: At first, there are no preditors, it's surviving designs. Read Stephen Gould's books. Nature is experimenting with an optimal shape to do the basic things. The pre-Cambrian basic design was a very logical  and minimal choice. You have a tube, or cylinder shape and you have food processed inside that shape. It seems sensible to have one mouth and one anus, residing on either side of the body. Any alternative would become more complex. On other planets, the initial design adapted by most species could e.g. be tripod (triangular), allowing to develop two faces and one outlet.
Comment: Predators could exist in a world without animaloids, feeding on planktonic pre-animaloids, which then evolve muscles and nerves and such
Comment: Of course, but in that case your predator itself would have been part of the initial shape experiments nature got involved in. When the predator is effective, the experiment succeeds. It's interesting you mention plankton.. in fact plankton is an important reason the tube shape works in Earth's water streams. Plankton goes through, the tube absorbs what it "eats". The alternative, a tripod shape would not be effective in case of plankton, because the mouths would not be placed in a good (or optimal) angle .i.r.t. the incoming water stream. A tube is the simplest solution for plankton-eaters.

How plausible is a two-way crab?


Change of temperature of gas in cylinder

Question: Assume we have a cylinder of given volume filled with gas of given temperature and pressure. The cylinder is enclosed from the top by a piston of provided mass. Now, we place a small mass on the piston. Is it possible to find how much does the temperature of gas change? We assume, for the simplicity, that no heat is exchanged with the environment and that the gas is ideal.
Comment: You need to assume something about the characteristics of the gas. For example is it justifiable to think about it as an Ideal Gas?
Comment: You would call it adiabatic.  Since the weight does work on the gas that is energy.  First assume T does not change and get the new volume and calculate work.  The solve for T based on the thermal capacity of the gas.  But then you will have new final V so you have to iterate.  If you remove the weight then the cylinder would do work on the atmosphere so that pressure is potential energy but I am not sure how to deal with that.
Comment: I made an edit, everything should be justified now.
Comment: Since there is no heat exchanged with the environment, the answer would be obviously, "Yes. The temperature of the gas will be changed." However there are three parameters, P, V and T that are all free to change satisfying the Ideal Gas Law. But, I am trying to see how we can tackle the problem mathematically.
Comment: This problem, as it stands, is not solvable as there is less information on the given system. We need three more pieces of information: exact value of the added mass, the cross section area of the piston and the amount of subsidence it experiences due to mass.
Answer: Let $x$ be the amount the piston moves down due to the mass $m$:

The answer to your question is "no, there is insufficient information
provided to find the change in temperature". However, if you know the
cylinder's "shape" (ie, the $h:r$ ratio above) and the gas' heat
capacity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_capacity), the answer is
yes:

To support the extra mass $m$, the force on the piston must
increase by $g m$. Since force is pressure times area, we have

$\Delta  P (\pi r^2) = m g\to \Delta P = \frac{g m}{\pi  r^2}$
Note that $\Delta P$ is independent of $x$.

The change in volume is simply:

$\Delta V=-\pi  r^2 x$

By Joule's Second Law, the total energy of an ideal gas depends
only on its temperature:

$E_{\text{total}}=c n R T$
where $c$ is the gas' heat capacity.
Since the gas gains the $m g x$ of potential gravitational energy that
the mass loses (and $c$, $n$, and $R$ remain constant):
$\Delta E_{total} = c n R \Delta T = m g x \to \Delta T = \frac{m g x}{c n R}$

By the Ideal Gas Law, we know that $\frac{P V}{n R T}$ remains
constant. Since $n$ and $R$ are already constant, this means
$\frac{P V}{T}$ remains constant. Thus, using $P$, $V$, and $T$ as
the original pressure, volume and temperature, we have:

$\frac{P V}{T}=\frac{(P+\Delta P) (v+\Delta V)}{T+\Delta T}$
Using the values of $\Delta P$, $\Delta V$, and $\Delta T$ above, we
can solve for $x$:
$
   x\to \frac{c g m n R T V}{\pi  r^2 \left(c n R T \left(g m+\pi  P
    r^2\right)+g m P V\right)}
$
Plugging this into our formula for $\Delta T$ yields:
$
\Delta T =
   \frac{g^2 m^2 T V}{\pi  r^2 \left(c n R T \left(g m+\pi  P r^2\right)+g m P
    V\right)}
$
We can further simplify, since $n R T\to P V$:
$\Delta T = \frac{g^2 m^2 T}{\pi  P r^2 \left((c+1) g m+\pi  c P r^2\right)}$
(of course, we could've also made this simplification earlier when
computing $\Delta T$)
While this answer is technically correct, it appears to have an odd
dependency on $r$, the radius of the cylinder, and no dependency on
$V$, the initial volume.
However, if we define, $k=\frac{h}{r}$ (which measures the "shape" of
the cylinder in some sense), we have $h=k r$ and thus:
$V=\pi  r^2 h=\pi  r^2 (k r) = \pi r^3 k \to r = \sqrt[3]{\frac{V}{\pi  k}}$
Making this final substitution, we have:
$
\Delta T =
\frac{g^2 m^2 T}{\sqrt[3]{\pi } P \left(\frac{V}{k}\right)^{2/3} \left((c+1)
g m+\sqrt[3]{\pi } c P \left(\frac{V}{k}\right)^{2/3}\right)}
$
Disclaimer: This is a purely mathematical answer. You should check
that it makes sense in real life.


How to get unblocked from asking questions?

Question: I got down votes on some of my questions and some of them closed, so, I got blocked from asking. After a period of time from being blocked, I regained the privilege of asking, but only one question that I could continue asking after it if it was positively recieved.
That question got two upvotes, but, I could not ask any question after it. Also, I have many questions that are well-recieved. So, why am I banned from asking? How to remove that ban?
Answer: I don't really want to rehash what has already been said, so here is the relevant link:
What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"?
Please take a look there, it has all (publicly) available information there.
In particular, you may wish to note that deleted questions still influence the question ban. Out of your 21 questions, 12 are deleted. From another answer of mine to a similar question:

Unfortunately, there is no real answer we can give that is not already found in the meta.SE link provided in the comments.
Diamond moderators are not privy to the internal workings of the automatic question ban; hence, we cannot tell you exactly how many downvotes how many days ago is sufficient to trigger it, or how many upvotes it would take to remove it.
Comment: Based on my observation on other meta sites, some mods did a courtesy to provide all links to the OP's deleted questions (since posts older than 60 days can't be found anymore by OP) so that they (hopefully) could be fixed/improved. Just an idea though...
Comment: @AndrewT., I will admit that I do not pay that much attention to main meta and that I was unaware of the 60-day limit. I (or, I'm sure, any other moderator) would be happy to provide the links to deleted questions if OP would like it.


Deterministic Trends and Stochastic Trends

Question: When dealing with non-stationary processes, can deterministic trends be converted into stochastic trends? If yes, why?
Answer: No (to my knowledge). A deterministic trend is something like
$$
y_t=\delta t+u_t
$$
while a stochastic trend is something like
$$
y_t=y_{t-1}+u_t=y_0+\sum_{s=1}^tu_s,
$$
and these behave fundamentally differently, as you can verify by running something like
<code>t <- 1:100
u <- rnorm(100)
y_st <- cumsum(u)
y_dt <- .1*t + u
plot(t, y_st, type="l", col="red", lwd=2)
lines(t, y_dt, col="green", lwd=2)
</code>


Sc-fi book that uses the sun's energy in a space battle

Question: I remember reading a sci-fi book decades ago which had large scale space battles. One side utilised the power of a sun as a weapon. I recall that the sun dimmed (similar to the latest Star Wars films) as the weapon was used against a fleet of spaceships.
Comment: My first thought was the John Ringo "Troy Rising" series. They use an enormous number of solar mirrors to redirect the suns energy into power beams to vaporize enemy fleets. But the first was written in 2010.
Comment: Not what you are looking for, but this reminds me of one of Stephen Baxter's latest novels where Earth escapes the alien Xeelee by using the sun to generate an enormous wormhole through which the Earth goes.
Answer: Sounds like the Lensman series by E.E. "Doc" Smith which included the "Sunbeam", specifically Second Stage Lensman
Wikipedia

As before in this series, the ultimate weapon featured in the previous book becomes the standard for the opening stages of this one, and newer, more powerful weaponry must be developed to deal with the new danger. In this case the weapon developed is the "Sunbeam", where the entire output of the sun is converted to an energy beam and used to vaporize much of the Boskonian fleet when it shows up.

Unresisted, then, the Boskonian center bored ahead into nothing, until Haynes, through his Rigellians, perceived that it had come far enough. Then Klovia's brilliantly shining sun darkened almost to the point of extinction. Along the line of centers, through the space so peculiarly empty of Patrol ships, there came into being the sunbeam - a bar of quasi-solid lightning into which there had been compressed all the energy of well over four million tons per second of disintegrating matter.
Scouts and cruisers caught in that ravening beam flashed briefly, like sparks flying from a forge, and vanished. Battleships and super-dreadnoughts the same. Even the solid warhead of fortresses and maulers was utterly helpless. No screen has ever been designed capable of handling that hellish load; no possible or conceivable substance can withstand save momentarily the ardor of a sunbeam. For the energy liberated by the total annihilation of four million tons per second of matter is in fact as irresistible as it is incomprehensible
...
The beam winked out; Klovia's sun flashed on. The sunbeam was - and is - clumsy, unwieldy, quite definitely not rapidly maneuverable. But it had done its work; now the component parts of Civilization's Grand Fleet started in to do theirs.
Second Stage Lensman - E.E. "Doc" Smith
Comment: Yes, they positioned drifts of metallic meteors and had atomic power plants feeding energy into the system. They basically made the entire star system into a giant vacuum tube with the sun as the cathode.
Answer: Is it called "Suntaps." I also remember reading a story with weapons using PEETs as a measure of how "stealth" a craft is in space, and 14 aaa max, but the protagonist made a black hole-like weapon with 15 PEETs. I don't know if I'm mixing two stories up. The characters were Will and Rachel, and Will was from a different planet humans colonized he had extra cyborg stuff that allowed him more brain capacity. And they found an alien ship or something at the end they discovered the "transcended" species are waiting for humanity. The suntaps were weapons used to test humanity's self destructive tendencies or something like that.
Comment: If you don't know the title of the book you described, it might also be worth posting a story identification question of your own, which you can do by clicking on the ['Ask Question'](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/ask) button at the top of the page. If you choose to do so, try and tell us everything you remember about the book you read, including when you read it, and when you think it might've been published. Then, if someone manages to identify your book, you'll have an actual title and author which you could post here as a legitimate answer.
Comment: Main story referenced in the answer, not the OP question. Valid point on driving behaviours - have deleted my comment, but happy to post as an answer if asked as a new story-id question.
Comment: Hi, welcome to the site. Are you saying that "Suntaps" is the _title_ of the book the OP is looking for, or just the name of the _weapon_ in the book? If you think that's the title of the book, could you provide a link to a page with some info on this book, or tell us who the author is? I googled the title "Suntaps," and couldn't find any record of a book with that name.
Comment: If "Suntaps" isn't the title of a book, and you're just describing a book with a similar plot which you _don't know the title of_, then this shouldn't have been posted as an answer, as without a title and author, it doesn't qualify as an answer to this question. This would have been fine if posted as a comment, but you need to earn a minimum of 50 [reputation](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/help/whats-reputation) to unlock the [comment everywhere](https://scifi.stackexchange.com/help/privileges/comment) privilege before you can leave comments in threads you didn't start yourself.


Why we say "I am doing the shopping"?

Question: Why we say "I am doing the shopping"? why not "I am doing shopping" like "I am going shopping"?
Answer: The two statements have different implications:

I am out shopping right now.

While this is perfectly correct as a catch-all for any shopping activity; it is most commonly used to describe non-specific shopping where you are browsing stores. For example, when going shopping for clothing or other luxury goods - it would be common to spend the entire day "shopping" (going in and out of shops, seeing what they have and making purchases).
If there's one specific type of item you have in mind, it would be relatively common to state it as:

I am out phone/clothes/wine shopping.
or
  I am out shopping for phones/clothes/wine.

However, the phrase:

I am out doing the shopping right now.

Tends to imply more specifically that you are completing a regular grocery shopping. It wouldn't be incorrect to use this phrase when out shopping for clothing (or other goods), but it gives the impression that this is part of your regular schedule and you are simple completing it like a chore.
Answer: Well, like most "why" questions about language, the real answer is "because that's what we say".
But we can delve into the patterns of English a bit.
"Shopping" in "go shopping" is not a noun like "laundry" or "chores": it is a participle of the verb "to shop". It happens that "go" can be followed directly by a participle, denoting an activity that will happen while going, or after arriving somewhere. Examples: "I went swimming yesterday." "Are you going clubbing?". "Come" can also take this pattern, but I can't think of any other verbs which do.
In particular, "do" does not take this pattern, so "doing shopping" does not work, and we use a different construction, with the noun "shopping".
Answer: The vs. a, an, some
The article the indicates a sometimes subtle signal that the object in question is an instance of something that you and your conversation partner are already familiar with as a possible topic of discussion:
the policeman
the door
the furniture
When you use the there is an expectation that the listener knows which one. For example, imagine you answer the door and a policeman is there. You say to your partner, who is sitting in the next room:

The policeman is at the door!

The fact that you said the policeman implies that you expect your partner already knows to which policeman you are referring. Perhaps you called the police earlier and were expecting a visit. In this case, the policeman refers to a particular instance of the set of all possible policemen. On the other hand, suppose you were not expecting a policeman to visit your house. In that instance, you would say to your partner:

A policeman is at the door!

By saying a policeman you are introducing the fact that there now exists an instance of a policeman here to which you can refer. From now on, you may say the policeman to make further statements about that same policeman:

The policeman wants to talk to you!

What do you do if you don't want to refer to a particular object? For countable nouns, you normally use an indefinite article 'a' or 'an', as appropriate:
a policeman
an apple
a door
For noncountable nouns you normally would use the word 'some' or add a countable quality along with an indefinite article 'a' or 'an'. For noncountable nouns you may also use the null article (no article at all):
some furniture
a piece of furniture
a lot of furniture
two hundred milliliters of water
sugar
money
Once of you have introduced such an object, you may now say the furniture, and your listener will understand it to refer to the previously introduced instance and quantity of that noun. For example the water would refer to the same 200 milliliters of water that I indicated earlier. If I say the sugar after only mentioning sugar earlier, you may have to guess based on context. If the two speakers have not quite reached agreement about the actual instance or amount, you might be able to hear this based on the articles they choose. For example, imagine a customer at a coffee shop asking for sugar:

Customer: "Do you have some sugar?"
Clerk: "Here is some sugar."
Customer: "Thank you for the sugar."

In this fictitious conversation, the customer used some sugar to refer to some unstated quantity of sugar in his head, and it seems the clerk returned to the man with some amount of sugar that she supposed might qualify as some sugar, but she probably realized, at least subconciously, that the amount of sugar that she chose may not necessarily be the exact same amount that the man had in mind. Still, she was pretty sure that the amount she chose would still suffice, so she didn't bother to ask him exactly how much he wanted. For this reason she returned with her chosen amount of sugar and said to him some sugar to refer to the quantity that she was handing him. Now that both speakers are aware of this sugar, it has now become an established topic, and the man refers to this sugar as the sugar when he thanks her. In another situation, suppose you are buying a part for your bicycle at a shop:

Shopkeep: "This part costs twelve dollars."
You reach into your pocket and count twelve dollars.
You: "Here is the money."

Why did you say the money in this situation? Because you and the shopkeep already established the amount of money. If you had said some money in this situation, it would give a strange signal to your conversation partner, implying that you and he hadn't yet established how much you should be giving him. Did you not hear him say that he wanted twelve dollars?
The shopping, the laundry, and so on

Why we say "I am doing the shopping"?

Based on the above explanation, the reason you say the shopping, the laundry and so on when talking about chores is that you and your conversation partner have previously established by some means that those things are something that you might refer to. You and your partner already expect that shopping is an instance of something that you might do, probably because you do it on a recurring basis. So when you say

I am doing the shopping.

You are referring to the particular instance of the action of shopping that you both have already established. Perhaps you have a shared To-Do list in your house where you write down the chores to be done:

Shopping
Laundry
Watering
Dishes

The shopping refers to the shopping on this list. Even if you don't actually have such a list on paper, you probably have something resembling this list in your head, or you can imagine that such a list might exist based on common conventions done by many people in today's society.
The ABC Presentation
The above explanation will work the same no matter the topics involved, even if they are not a regular task, and even if they involve things other than common activities like shopping, laundry, and so on. For example, suppose you work in an office and you see the following items on the team agenda:

XYZ Presentation: 2:00pm
Cost comparison 3:00pm
ABC Presentation 4:00pm
Closeout 5:00pm

You and your colleagues share the agenda, which means you should all know about those items as possible topics of discussion. For this reason it would be quite natural for a colleague to approach you and ask:

Who's doing the ABC presentation?

Then you would say:

I'm doing the ABC presentation.

Or you would use a shorter form such as I'm doing it or I am. However if you had replied,

** I'm doing an ABC presentation.

Your colleague would feel puzzled. He just asked you were if you are doing the ABC presentation, but you said you were doing an ABC presentation. Do you mean a different one than he means?
Now, suppose a remote colleague calls you. Suppose your remote colleague has access to the shared agenda. Then it would be quite natural to refer to that presentation in the same way:

Remote colleague: Hi, Joe.
You: Hi, Bob.
Bob: Can we do a teleconference at four?
You: No. I'm doing the ABC Presentation.

If Bob didn't know about the presentation, he might respond with 'oh, is there an ABC presentation today?' or if he knew about the presentation but didn't know you were giving it he might say 'oh, are you doing the ABC presentation?'
Now, suppose a customer calls you. You have no reason to believe that she knows about your agenda. She probably also has no idea what ABC and XYZ presentations are, because they are specific to your internal organization.

Customer: Hi, Joe.
You: Hi, Alice.
Alice: Can we do lunch at two?
You: No. I have a meeting. Can we do lunch at one?

Why we say "I am doing the shopping"?


Stack in assembly - what's the purpose?

Question: I'm reading about 6502 assembly don't understand what the stack is for. I get it that it's a FIFO memory and understand the push/pop thing but what is it for? How is it different (the use) from the registers or the RAM? What sort of data do you put in the stack and why?
Comment: Stack is generally LIFO, not FIFO.
Comment: Consider what happens when you run out of registers. The data needs to go somewhere...
Comment: maybe that can help. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/79923/what-and-where-are-the-stack-and-heap
Answer: The primary reason for a hardware supported stack is to maintain the return address for function calls. Evidence for this argument can be seen in what machine language operations assume a stack exist. Other than operations which treat the stack as a source or destination in much the same way that a simple move operation does, the only instructions that assume the existance of the stack are call/return operations. The call is really just a push and jump. Return is really just a pop and jump indirect. Since it already exists for this purpose, it is also incredibly convenient to use it for local state of the function invocations (parameters and local variables).
Comment: Specifically with the 6502, look up the instructions JSR (jump to subroutine) and RTS (return from subroutine). They work almost like two JMPs, except that RTS "somehow" knows where to jump, even if multiple JSRs refer to the same subroutine. The stack is the "somehow".
Answer: The stack is for temporary storage, like registers but usually a larger supply.  think about function calls, recursive or not, if you were to use a register for the return address of the first call, then what happens when that function calls a function?  and that function calls a function?  Using fixed registers simply doesnt work, you cannot handle an arbitrary depth to your nesting, cant handle recursion definitely.  But it is trivial with a stack, push a return address, push copies of the registers you are going to modify, allocate storage for local variables and then you can use the general purpose registers in your function, clean up when returning from the function and use that return address.  Each function performs these tasks and so long as you have ram available you can nest as much as you want or call a function recursively, etc.
Answer: There is a thing call memory hierarchy, like this:

The stack is basically the RAM, or the Main Memory, like the image... The main difference between all those levels are the cost, space and the speed. At the top you have the most expensive, smallest and fastest storage devices, at the bottom you have the cheapest, biggest and slowest. The memory architecture works in a way that tries to balance those parameters...
The time that takes to pass data from the disk to the register was to long, so the solution was to create another storage device between the two.. and so on, until we reached a limit. That limit can be break, but its to expensive to do it...
Comment: I'm curious to know if there are any computers with 6502 processor and with more than 1 GB of disk storage...

Stack in assembly - what's the purpose?


Does the miner machine get any other type of reward except confirmation of transaction in bitcoin?

Question: Does the miner machine get any other type of reward except confirmation of transaction in bitcoin?(The answer precedes another question)
Answer: As a result of mining, miners receive income from two sources

The mining reward per block, which halves approximately every 4 years.
The transaction fees for the transactions the miner includes in the block.

Nothing else.
The miner includes as the first transaction in the block (the "coinbase" transaction) a transaction with no inputs and with outputs to one or more addresses of their choice with a total amount which is less than or equal to the sum of other included transactions fees and the current mining reward .
Comment: this is acceptable miners get a reward for proof of work(confirmation transactions the second reward you were mention) but what exactly do miners when say they have a process for creating a block(and get a reward for them)? (In other words what exactly this process? Is it possible to remove it?)


What could be the utmost lowest temperature in the universe/multiverse?

Question: What could be the utmost lowest temperature in the universe/multiverse?
Comment: so the answer is -273.15 Celsius or thereabouts.
Comment: @Scottie, temperature is a property of particles.  If there are no particles, then the concept of temperature is meaningless.
Comment: Do you mean the current observable universe, then ladies and gentlemen please allows me to introduce you to the utmost lowest temperature in the universe and that is... ... ...in the Wolfgang Ketterle's lab at the MIT in Cambridge whereby some nerds are playing with sodium molecules trapped using magnets. They created BEC with a temperature of 810 trillionth of a degree above absolute zero. In case you're wondering outer space is no where near this feats there human 1 known observable universe 0.
Comment: If temperature refers to mean energy of particles (as it does in everyday use), it would no energy at all or absolute 0. On the Kelvin scale, there are no negative temperatures, unless you find a way to define negative energy. As far as I know, particles can't exist without energy, so even absolute 0 is unattainable.
Comment: @barrycarter Aren't there places in the universe where there are no particles?
Comment: There's probably some weird tiny effect from the continual production of virtual particle pairs in the vacuum. If one in 10^93 particle pairs fails to recoalesce, it might raise background temp from 0°K to 10^-67°K. No one has ever measured such an effect, and I doubt anyone ever will.
Comment: @user6760 They are now at 500nK at MIT.
Comment: What good is asking for the *multiverse* as well? It's existence(s) are so hypothetical there are no answers. I suggest editing it out of your question.
Answer: What temperature means...
Temperature is the measure of the energy of particles. The higher the temperature, the more energized the particles. The more energy particles have the faster they move around. This is the particles' kinetic energy that is rising. As it rises, the particles will begin using up more space. Moving particles need more space. In a vacuum this can be measured as pressure which is the stress of thermal expansion on the closed system. In an open system the matter will expand freely. As the particles increase their speed they also move more erratically so the entropy, or measure of disorder, will also increase.
The coldest...
Now understanding all that, what would the lowest temperature, or energy state, be in the universe? The answer is a state of no energy, 0 K, or absolute zero in the Kelvin scale. It is −273.15° on the Celsius scale and −459.67° on the Fahrenheit scale. At this temperature, which is impossible to occur by only thermodynamic means, the particles are completely still and entropy drops to 0.
Temperature reference points...

The surface temperature of the sun is 5,778 K.
Water boils at 373 K.
Water freezes at 273.15 K.
The moon's darkest craters that never receive sunlight are 33 K.
The cosmic microwave background fluctuates around 2.8 K.
The Boomerang Nebula, the coolest natural place currently
known in the universe, measures 1 K.
Absolute zero is 0 K.
Comment: Negative temperatures are not colder than absolute zero. They are instead **hotter** than any finite temperature. Negative temperatures arise in some quantum mechanical systems with a maximum energy. Here it makes much more sense to use the thermodynamic beta, $\beta = 1/(kT)$ in lieu of temperature. The number of available states starts decreasing at some point as the energy of the system approaches the maximum. At this point, $\beta$ goes through zero and becomes negative. When interpreted as temperature (not a good thing to do for these systems), that translates to a negative temperature.
Comment: I'd suggest deleting the last paragraph because those negative temperatures don't mean what you think they do, and because they are specialized to specially-prepared quantum mechanical systems that are far removed from what one could find in space.
Comment: @DavidHammen I have removed my last paragraph about negative temperature since it is not what it seems by it's name and is certainly not a feature of astronomy/nature.
Answer: 0 K,"absolute zero" (-273.15°C) is the theorized measurement of energy at which all motion stops. Electrons, atoms, and particles stop all movement and it would likely be the lowest possible temperature possible anywhere in the universe. Now that temperature may or may not actually exist in the universe because of all of the radiation and energy from various stars, however it may be possible in the middle of a supervoid or other places.
Comment: Motion does not stop at absolute zero.


Can we install multiple simulator versions at same time?

Question: I have currently switched to Xcode 4.5.1(iOS 6 SDK). My doubt is, whether at the same time can we install multiple simulator versions to test our app?
Answer: Open up Xcode Preferences (Xcode->Preferences), then click on Downloads.  You should be able to download previous versions of the simulator from there.
You can then choose which one to use by using the dropdown menus near the top left next to the "Run" and "Stop" buttons.


Sub Resource Integrity value for //maps.google.com/maps/api/js

Question: Where do i find the sub resource integrity value for the script //maps.google.com/maps/api/js?
For example:

Answer: You don't find the SRI digest for that script, and even if you did it wouldn't help you.
You don't:
SRI hashes are for content that doesn't change. Google changes the code that underlies their API all the time. You don't get to pick which version of the API to use; they choose for you, which is why there's no version number in that script path.
Using SRI for the Google Maps API script doesn't actually provide any additional security because that script's whole job is to download the newest version of a set of other scripts that actually provide the API functionality.
You can't use SRI to validate those other scripts, so you're already obligated to trust Google's security or forgo using their Maps API.
Even if you did, it wouldn't be helpful:
For scripts that don't download other JS files, try scrolling a bit lower down on the srihash.org site.
It says you can generate the SRI digest yourself using the Linux shell command openssl dgst -sha384 -binary FILENAME.js | openssl base64 -A
However that still won't help you with sites like this that don't serve the content with CORS headers because the browser requires CORS in order to do the SRI validation. Without the proper CORS headers, the browser won't even try to compare the script to the SRI digest.
There's an explanation of the thought processes behind the decision to require CORS here: https://github.com/w3c/webappsec/issues/338#issuecomment-99766294
The upshot is that since SRI hashes are for all types of resources (not just JS and CSS files that have a legacy exception to the whole CORS thing) it could be used to get around same-origin policy enough to sniff otherwise inaccessible content.
Answer: to generate integrity Hash code,  you can use this website :
https://www.srihash.org/
you paste your URL and then generate the hash online.  However,  I don't think it's possible to do it with google Maps API.  I get the following message :

Error: this resource is not eligible for integrity checks. See http://enable-cors.org/server.html
Comment: Same problem. Does anyone know if google is likely to enable CORS?
Answer: This is not possible for the Google Maps API.
As you can read here https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/javascript/libraries this javascript library is updated once in a while. Also if you use a fixed version number as parameter in the url this get updated.


Fire -Thermodynamics

Question: Could a steel box lined with Rockwool (interior only) be an adequate shelter during a fire? How can I determine the temperature inside of the box at peak fire temp? How long could someone withstand the peak internal temperature? How could I cool the interior? Would a fire extinguisher explode at peak temperature?
Comment: How big is the box, 1 km on each side?
Comment: You probably want the insulation on the outside of the box.  Steel loses mechanical strength at around 900 deg F, so the insulation would protect mechanical strength of the box as well as keep you cool.
Answer: Imagine a box of area $A$, volume $V$, density $\rho$, temperature $T$ and interior heat capacity $C$ surrounded by a fire at temperature $T_f$. It has a thickness $d$ thermal insulation of thermal conductivity $k$. Let's ignore the thermal capacity of the insulator. The heat flow across the area will be $kA(T_f-T)/d$ Watt, and hence the internal temperature will grow as $$T' = kA(T_f-T)/\rho CVd.$$ Assuming all the values to the right except $T$ are constant the solution to this is $$T(t)=T_f - (T(0)-T_f)\exp(-[kA/\rho CVd]t).$$ If the maximum acceptable temperature is $T_{max}$ this will happen after time
$$t=-\left[\frac{\rho CVd}{kA}\right]\ln\left(\frac{T_{max}-T_f}{T_f - T(0)}\right).$$
Throwing some random numbers at this. Stone wool has a thermal conductivity around 0.020 W/m K. If we assume a $V=8$ cubic meter box containing air, $\rho=1$, $C=1.00$ kJ/kg.K ( ignoring temperature and pressure dependency!), A=24 square meter. Let's set $T_f=700$ K and $T(0)=300$K and $T_{max}=400$ K. Let's add a meter of rock wool, $d=1$. Then I get 4794.7 seconds, or 79 minutes. That doesn't sound too crazy given that it is a pretty mild fire and a lot of insulation. Using 1 cm insulation gives you 47 seconds instead.
The other questions like how to cool or when an extinguisher explodes have the answer "it depends".

Fire -Thermodynamics


How to create a metamask address(custodial) for a user who can login with Gmail

Question: I am trying to implement a dApp in which instead of asking users to create metamask account. I am thinking to create a Metamask address(Custodial) for each user when they login with Gmail and Private keys are stored with us and we can only display them public address. Any suggestions are hugely appreciated
Answer: My two cents:
You can create a address normally but you need to use the same mnemonic generator that metamask does to decryptography the key.


Where did accept rate go?

Question: I used to always see my accept rate when I asked a question. Did this feature get removed or is it just not used when a certain reputation is reached?
Answer: The accept rate has been removed as of January 22, 2013. This was requested on Meta SO.
The community found it to negative, and it generated a lot of comments like "Perhaps you should first accept some answers", that got removed anyway because they were found to be inappropriate.
Comment: That sucks.  Beside, if someone has a lot accept rate, then they *should* go back and consider accepting a few answers.  I have in the past not bothered answering someone with a low accept rate.
Comment: I had 0 percent for a while because I didn't know how to accept for like 3 months lol
Answer: There are two problems with answers not getting accepted - a real one, and a petty one.
The real one is that the question doesn't look as if it has been resolved.
The petty one is that the author of a good answer doesn't pick up that 15 points.  This prompts very low-rep users who really want those points to post comments soliciting an accept; for some that becomes a habitual badgering to have a low quality answer accepted just minutes after it was posted.  But those with a few thousand rep probably aren't going to care that much - and if the answer is good, its upvotes will total more than the accept anyway.
All in all, it's easily possible that the pettiness aspect was more serious than the lack of "resolution".
It would be nice though if there were some way that questions without an accepted answer would keep popping back up to get their asker's attention.  But some questions never get a good answer; so maybe there could be an "I saw it but it's not a solution" checkbox, so you'd only get a reminder about questions with answers which you had not "noticed" by either checking that box or commenting on.
Comment: You missed the third and most important problem with unaccepted question, which is that they then get periodically bumped back to the top by "community", even though the OP is long gone and doesn't see it. I do like your idea about the check box *None of these solved my problem*. That would put the question nicely to rest, at least until a new answer is added.  The system could than regularly (weekly?) nag users to do something with their limbo questions.
Comment: @OlinLathrop, I noticed on SO.meta to be bumped they also need to have no upvoted answers. Some of the questions are pretty average which is why they don't get much attention but lately I've been upvoting answers on them if I feel it's about as good an answer as the question is likely to get so they don't keep coming back.
Comment: Getting bumped back to the top is part of the not looking resolved which I was calling the "real" issue.

Where did accept rate go?


Can I ask for help identifying design products?

Question: Is this an appropriate place to ask for help identifying graphic design products? (e.g. web page designs, calendars, posters, etc)
Comment: Its unlikely that this would work out
Comment: Still not clear to me what you mean about "identifying" - do you mean _who_ made it, _how_ it was made, _what style/time/epoch_ it belongs to?
Comment: What do you mean by "identifying graphic design products"? Do you mean if you see for example a plugin on a site, and you wonder what it is called? Or identifying for example the author of those pieces?
Comment: See the examples above. For example, suppose you had a picture of a poster and needed help identifying it (suppose also that google reverse image search gives nothing)
Comment: why don't you try a reverse image search?
Comment: I have tried; no luck.
Answer: I think Identifying a physical product or style is very acceptable.
Tha tags terminology and style-identification can be used for this. Say you saw a type of trade show display but didn't know a good way to search for it online. If you post an image and ask for help with the correct term to use, then I think its perfectly acceptable. As long as its a design related product of course. Even simple things might be taken for granted by some - there was a time when I didn't know tri-fold as an example. If I posted an image of one looking for the correct term, this seems okay to me.
I will say though - try to identify it on your own. Say what type of search phrases you used that turned up little or no results, otherwise it will be downvoted as poorly researched / lazy.
On the other hand, if you're asking for something specific like posting a single page out of a Hooters Girl's Calendar (sorry, it was the only well-known calendar I could think of) and asking us to identify which year and month it belonged to. This would not be okay. Or describing a vague idea of a logo or website and asking us to tell you what company or website it belongs to: again not okay.
Answer: I don't think these types of questions would work very well within our community. Stack Exchange sites strive towards reusable knowledge; questions that are likely to help many are considered better than ones that only help an individual. It's difficult to imagine these types of questions going beyond a "single serving".
Comment: I think if its very specific it doesn't work... like font-id questions which should be closed already :P but broader questions can.


Is there a word that defines "a thing that I/you don't know"?

Question: I'm new here.
Is there a word that defines "a thing that I/you don't know"?
Example sentence:

Hello, why you just draw 'a thing that I don't know' on my avatar?

Thanks if answered it.
Answer: There is no single noun that means "something I don't know".
You could say

Draw something unfamiliar to me.
Draw something I've never seen before.

The adjective strange can mean "not like anything familiar (to me)", so you could ask:

Why did you draw that strange shape?
Comment: There are certainly slang words that mean "something I don't know": thingy, doohickey, thingamabob, whatsit, etc.  All very informal, of course.
Comment: Hmmm. Maybe.  I think of those as words for when you don't know what to call a small device, one whose purpose you might understand.  *There's a doohickey that lets you adjust the pressure.*
Comment: I agree that **doohickey** is most often a device; I think **thingy** is more generic. There's also "stuff" in the sense of "an uncountable amount of something unspecified," which could actually fit in the OP's sentence: "Hello, why did you just draw **stuff** on my avatar?"
Comment: But **stuff** admits the known. *Why did you draw stuff on my avatar? Why a flashlight and a beer can? What's that supposed to mean?*
Answer: There is no single word that means a thing (I / you) don't know in an exclusive sense (where other people do know it).
The closest you're going to get is, appropriately enough, unknown:
[Merriam-Webster]

adjective
  : not known or not well-known
also : having an unknown value
  // an unknown quantity
noun
2 : something that requires discovery, identification, or clarification: such as
a : a symbol (such as x, y, or z) in a mathematical equation representing an unknown quantity
b : a specimen (as of bacteria or mixed chemicals) required to be identified as an exercise in appropriate laboratory techniques
// a disease of unknown cause
  // Much remains unknown about his early life.

In your example sentence, you could say:

Hello, why did you draw something unknown on my avatar?

The use of the word in that context, however, is unusual. It implies that it's not only unknown to the person asking but also to the person who drew it.
Normally, you would have to add to me:

Hello, why did you draw something unknown to me on my avatar?

However, it's also possible that it could be used without any such qualification in a different conversation and if it is meant to apply to everyone:

"What's that symbol you drew on my avatar?"
  "It's unknown. It was found on a wall a decade ago but it has yet to be interpreted."


differential wave equations

Question: By seeking a solution of
∂u
∂t
= c
2
∂
2u
∂x
2
in the form u(x,t) = X(x)T(t), obtain and solve ordinary
differential equations satisfied by X(x) and T(t). Hence write down possible solutions for
u(x,t).
Comment: Please describe the code that you have tried and the problems you have encountered.
Comment: This looks like a home task, is not it?
Answer: May be this will get you started
pde=1/c^2*D[u[x,t],t]==D[u[x,t],{x,2}]
pde/.u->Function[{x,t},X[x]*T[t]]
ApplySides[#/(X[x]*T[t])&,%]
ode1 = First[%] == -λ^2
ode2 = Last[%%] == -λ^2

DSolve[ode2, X[x], x]

DSolve[ode1, T[t], t]

To be able to continue, need boundary conditions in order to solve the BVP for X[x] in order to determine the eigenvalues $\lambda$ and eigenfunctions X[x].  Depending on type of BC, you will get different $\lambda$ and different corresponding $X_n(x)$ eigenfunction. See this page for all possible cases as an example.  In Mathematica, here you use DEigensystem
For each eigenvalue $\lambda_n$ you have corresponding $T_n(t)$ solution.
Then the sum of all linear combinations of all the solutions $X_n(x)$ and $T_n(t)$ give you the general solution to the original pde.
$$
   u(x,t)= \sum_{n=0}^{\infty}  c_n X_n(x) T_n(t)
$$
There will remain one unknown constant $c_n$ from the $T(t)$ ode, which then you will use the initial condition to find it. Make sure to use the initial conditions on the above equation. Do not use the initial conditions directly on the $T(t)$ ode to find $c_1$. This will not work. Initial conditions are applied to $u(x,t)$ itself in the sum.
Without boundary conditions it is not possible to obtain general solution for pde. boundary conditions determine the possible eigenvalues $\lambda_n$ and the eigenvfunctions $X_n(x)$ and hence the form of the general solution.
This is one of the main difference with ode's, where general solution can be obtained even if initial/boundary conditions are not known.

differential wave equations


Recently-answered question does not show up in "Top Questions" list

Question: A question that I answered earlier today is mysteriously absent from the Top Questions list when I visit the site.  However, if I search for the question using keywords, and click the "Newest" tab, it appears right where it should be.  I am not familiar with this behavior -- is it normal?  I do see that the question currently has a vote score of -4 and one close vote, but I don't know if that accounts for what I am (not) seeing.
Comment: I think questions with total score less than -3 are not shown on the Top Questions list.
Comment: This is true, however, I have not found any official documentation stating this.  Perhaps the moderators know.
Comment: @JoelReyesNoche Perhaps you can look on [meta.se] to find some statement and otherwise ask that question there. There is quite some behaviour of SE that is only 'documented' as a meta Q and A.
Answer: Questions are dropped off the Home / Active tab once they reach a score of -4 on Main, or -8 on Meta. Since you mentioned that the question on Main that you were monitoring had a score of -4, this is most probably why it was no longer showing up on the Home page.
Source: Meta sites' front pages should not hide questions with very low scores


What is the memory every node allocates locally for the Bitcoin blockchain?

Question: https://blockchain.info/charts/blocks-size states that the current size of the Bitcoin blockchain is ~134,000MB.  That is 127GB.  Does that mean that every machine that is mining currently allocates 127GB+ for the blockchain?
Comment: I think you meant 134,000MB instead of 131Mb. Lowercase b is bit, while uppercase B stands for byte.
Answer: Not all mining machines need to store the whole blockchain, as a miner you would normally have one or a few nodes which do that, and then just send a block template to all the actual mining machines (ASICs) to mine without caring about the blockchain.
All non-pruned full nodes store the entire blockchain. It's possible to run in pruned mode which means older blocks are pruned and only the newest ones are kept, so you need less space, but this means those nodes can't serve old blocks to new full nodes trying to sync


Can I pigtail a "C" common wire to power a Smart Thermostat to the 24v wires coming from the outside AC compressor?

Question: Hoping someone can help me solve for powering a 24v Common wire to what will be my new smart thermostat.  Currently my downstairs thermostat controls a boiler as well as the central air unit for downstairs.  The thermostat wire does have an unused blue "C" wire but when I checked in the attic where the thermostat wire gets pigtailed into the wires coming out of the AC handler I can see that the blue wire is NOT actually connected to anything up there so I know it won't power anything.  The wire from the outside AC condensing unit has 2 wires (one red and one white) that I believe always carry 24v (but maybe I'm wrong?) and the red is pigtailed into a brown wire that seems to be going into the control board of the AC handler and the white wire is pigtailed into a blue wire that is coming out of a light brown shielding that also has a green  wire that is pigtailed into a gray wire coming out of the AC handler and a red wire that is pigtailed into a red wire coming out of the AC handler.  The wires are then connected to the wires coming from my indoor thermostat using pigtails.   Green is connected to green, red to red, and blue is connected to yellow (the yellow going to the thermostat).  The thermostat wire does have two unused wires that are wrapped around the shielding of it, one white and one blue.  My questions is, can I connect the blue wire that is currently unused, to the same pigtail that currently has the white wire from the outside AC compressor connected to the blue wire (which later is pigtailed into the yellow wire going to the thermostat)?
Comment: Can you post a wiring diagram for your air handler please?
Answer: I was able to answer my own question here.  By knowing what wire from the outside compressor is connected to the wire going to the "Y" on the thermostat (in my case it was the white wire from the outside compressor that was pigtailed to a blue wire which in turn was pigtailed to the yellow wire from the thermostat) I was able to figure out that the other wire from the compressor (in this case the red one) was the common wire (and looking at my AC handlers wire diagram confirmed it), so I simply added another wire to that pigtail junction (turn off all electricity to the AC first!) and pigtailed that to the unused "blue" wire going to the thermostat and everything worked perfectly.
Comment: It looks like you inadvertently created a second account -- you'll want to [merge](https://diy.stackexchange.com/help/merging-accounts) them so you can use the site fully


Would a neutron star-like celestial body made of bosons collapse because of missing Pauli repulsion?

Question: Imagine the neutron star-like celestial body would be built up of bosons (assume that neutrons would be bosons). In that case there would be no Pauli repulsion (the exchange force of the exchange interaction would not be repulsive), so this would apparently lead to an immediate collapse of the neutron star. Whereas the argument for the repulsive exchange force is based on Pauli's principle, in case of bosons could not Heisenberg's uncertainty relation take up a similar role ? If $n$ particles are pressed in a smaller and smaller volume $V$ according to Heisenberg's uncertainty relation their momentum should increase like $\Delta p = \hbar \cdot (V/n)^{-1/3}$, this would generate an enormous pressure and may be prevent the star from collapsing ? I could be even more inquisitive and asking: Has Heisenberg's uncertainty relation ever been tested with bosons? If so, and as I've never heard about an invalidity of the uncertainty relation, can the uncertainty relation save the neutron star from collapsing ? Or is there a flaw in my reasoning ?
Answer: What volume were you thinking of? The bosons are confined within the central region of a neutron star - which is quite a big volume. So, actually I think they would form a condensate with nearly zero momentum and the uncertainty principle doesn't have a role.
Even if we consider the bosons to be confined to much smaller volumes, it isn't the case that gravity can be defeated just by increasing the pressure. In GR the RHS of the hydrostatic equilibrium equation contains a pressure term (see Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff hydrostatic equilibrium). Thus increasing the pressure leads to more curvature and a higher required pressure gradient for equilibrium, and is thus ultimately self-defeating. Neutron stars collapse at finite density and pressure, well before they are small enough to be black holes or for the uncertainty principle to be an issue.
Comment: So if the pressure, in particular pressure from Pauli repulsion,  contributes to the curvature, what prevents a Neutron star (this time made of fermions) from collapsing to a black hole ?
Comment: @FredericThomas A pressure gradient prevents a neutron star from collapsing. If a neutron star becomes more massive than 2-3 solar masses then it *does* collapse because of the phenomenon I describe. Note that degeneracy pressure is not the main factor supporting a neutron star, it is the strong-force nucleon-nucleon repulsion between neutrons in asymmetric nuclear matter. Ideal neutron degeneracy pressure could not support neutron stars bigger than about 0.7 solar masses.
Comment: I try to recap: pure pressure would not prevent a neutron star from collapsing to a black hole since it would generate curvature, but a pressure gradient (may be a particular one) would prevent the collapse to a BH.
Comment: @FredericThomas Not really. The equation of hydrostatic equilibrium is a balance between pressure *gradient* on the LHS, with terms associated with gravity and pressure on the RHS. I will make an edit.


git: recovering server/remote repository from backup

Question: today i lost my remote repository due to a server crash. i installed a backup which was 2-3 hours old. unfortunately i made some pushed after the backup creation and now the master branch of my local is "out of sync" compared to the remote master branch. my local master is a couple of commits/pushed ahead of the remote master and now i do not know what to do. i can not push again, it says "! [remote rejected] master -> master (n/a (unpacker error))". pulling does not help either. is there a way to get them back "in sync" cleanly?
otherwise i would diff the two masters, clone the remote again and apply the patches and commit again. the biggest problem with that is that all my other developers need to do the same (because their master branches are out of sync as well) and we have a lot of unpushed local feature branches laying around.
any nice solution? if not i have to rethink my backup process as well :)
regards,
stefan
Answer: The "(unpacker error)" you get may indicate that your remote simply isn't working properly. If it were working properly, I would expect you to be able to push your local repo to the remote successfully.
Does pushing for another unrelated remote repository work? If you get the same error, it's probably a configuration problem on the remote machine, not anything to do with that specific repo.


How do I install multiple packages from a command where some are obsolete?

Question: I'm trying to compile SLADE, a Doom editor, and I'm having an issue where the instructions require the installation of packages that are old, and because of this, I can't install the packages I need. I get an error like "unable to locate package" probably because it's obsolete. I can't figure out how to install all of the packages the instructions requires. I use the following command to install them:
<code>sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev libglew1.6-dev \
libfreeimage-dev libftgl-dev libfluidsynth-dev libsfml-dev \
libgstreamer0.10-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libgconf2-dev \
freeglut3-dev cmake libmodplug-dev git libwebkit-dev libwxgtk3.0-dev \
libwxgtk-media3.0-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libwxgtk-webview3.0-dev libbz2-dev
</code>
All of the instructions for compiling this program are found here. Any help for making the process a lot less tedious and managable is greatly appreciated!
Answer: I had to add some mirrors to my list. This wasn't clear at first, but now I'm able to install the packages after doing this.


A simple and free guestbook script?

Question: Looking for a free, simple PHP guestbook script - couldn't talk the client out of the idea - and I remember using something fairly easy to set up a few years ago that used a simple txt file to store the guestbook entries. Does anyone have experience with any such script?
Answer: Was it phpbook by any chance? It doesn't need a database. However make sure you read the warning - it's not being maintained.
Answer: I've been there, I empathize!
Take a look over here at hotscripts, the first three are paid ads for commercial products, but I can give a +1 to Online Guestbook Pro, HS have a decent rating system to help you out.

A simple and free guestbook script?