What is Islam's view about women's freedom of taking decision to stay spinster?

Question: Can a Muslim woman choose not to be get married irrespective of her family's stances? I mean is it sinful for her if she wishes to remain unmarried?
Comment: I don't think it is a sin as quran quotes this option.
Comment: @RebeccaJ.Stones that duplicate post doesn't seem to address the actual topic, as it is rather general and it seems to be only answered from the male perspective!
Comment: @Medi1Saif There is a lot of duplicates of this question around (see the column of linked questions at the possible duplicate).  The idea is to prompt the OP into [edit]ing the post as to why these posts don't address the question.
Comment: @Rebecca J. Stones 1st understand the question then mark it as a duplicate. I am seeing that you only mark my question as duplicate. In another question, posed by me, some other guy commented in a very bad way. Then you did nothing.
Comment: @Medi1Saif was right. This question was of different nature.
Answer: The guidance of Islam is to get married:

وَمِنْ آيَاتِهِ أَنْ خَلَقَ لَكُم مِّنْ أَنفُسِكُمْ أَزْوَاجًا لِّتَسْكُنُوا إِلَيْهَا وَجَعَلَ بَيْنَكُم مَّوَدَّةً وَرَحْمَةً ۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَآيَاتٍ لِّقَوْمٍ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ
And of His signs is that He created for you from yourselves mates that you may find tranquility in them; and He placed between you affection and mercy. Indeed in that are signs for a people who give thought.
— Qur'an 30:21

It is clear from the verse above that the drivers are tranquility, affection, and mercy; in addition to establishing a family. The verse applies to both men and women alike. The Prophet ﷺ got married, and explicitly expressed that this was his guidance (See Sahih Muslim » The Book of Marriage » Hadith 1401).
In Al-Mughni (Arabic: المغني) by Ibn Qudamah (Arabic: موفق الدين عبد الله بن أحمد بن قدامة), this specific question is addressed. It is basically left to the individual to decide, man or woman alike, based on their knowledge of their own conditions:

For those who have desire and are capable of marriage (physically, mentally, and financially), it is wajib (obligatory: rewarded when done,and punished when not done) to get married. Ahmad ibn Hanbal said that staying single is not from Islam, unless justified.
For those who have desire but are not able to get married (for valid reasons related to oneself or one's family), then it is mustahab (preferred: rewarded when done, but not punished when not done) to get married. If one cannot get married, then one should revert to extra fasting as a deterrent from falling into sins (see Sahih Al-Bukhari » Book of Fasting » Hadith 1905)
For those who have no desire, it is mustahab to get married if some of the objectives of the marriage can be fulfilled, but it mustahab not to get married if the marriage would deprive the partner from achieving their objectives of marrying.

Here are selected quotes from Al-Mughni (Arabic: المغني) by Ibn Qudamah:
First case:

منهم من يخاف على نفسه الوقوع في محظور إن ترك النكاح فهذا يجب عليه النكاح في قول عامة الفقهاء لأنه يلزمه إعفاف نفسه وصونها عن الحرام وطريقه النكاح
— NOTE: My own translation, so treat with care:
Those who fear for themselves from falling into what is forbidden if they do not get married. For those, it is mandatory to marry in the opinion of the general jurisprudence scholars, as this protects them from sinning and provides a legitimate means [to fulfill their desires] through marriage.

Second case:

من يستحب له وهو من له شهوة يأمن معها الوقوع في محظور فهذا الاشتغال له به أولى من التخلي لنوافل العبادة
It is mustahab for those who have desire that they can control and guard themselves from committing what is forbidden, it is better for them occupy themselves with marriage than to dedicate more time to extra rituals of worship.

Third case:

من لا شهوة له إما لأنه لم يخلق له شهوة كالعنين أو كانت له شهوة فذهبت بكبر أو مرض ونحوه ففيه وجهان: أحدهما يستحب له النكاح لعموم ما ذكرنا والثاني التخلي له أفضل لأنه لا يحصل مصالح النكاح
Those who have no desire, either because this is how they were created, or those whose desire faded due to age or illness, there are two options: The first is that it is mustahab to get married based on what was previously mentioned, but the second is that it is preferred not to get married as the objectives of marriage will not be fulfilled.

For more information, you may refer to Islam Q&A 112000 (Arabic only).
Comment: The answer was very to the point and I am satisfied. Please say the meaning of MUSTAHAB in the 3rd point. My question was intended for the woman who have no desires to have sex and hence 3rd point was applicable. Thanks @III-AK-III
Comment: @SantanuDebnath — Mustahab means preferred . That is, one may get rewarded when the action is done, but no punishment when action is not done. It is left to the individuals concerned to decide. If more benefit exists as a result of marriage, then it is preferred to marry. If there is some harm or risk that may result, and one or the other or both do not accept this harm, it is preferred not to marry.


Solving the integral $\int_0^{\pi/4}\frac{\tan^3(x)}{\sqrt{1-x^2}}dx$

Question: I've come across this integral recently (on a Facebook group):
$$\int_0^{\pi/4}\frac{\tan^3(x)}{\sqrt{1-x^2}}dx$$ and have little to no clue how to solve it. Wolfram Alpha gives a numerical answer of approximately 0.209, but could not evaluate it 'manually'. My gut feeling is that it will involve some sort of contour integral, but I cannot see what might work. If anyone has any insight, it would be much appreciated.
Comment: What sort of answer are you looking for?  Do you have any reason to believe the value is not a transcendental number (i.e., requires numerical methods, similar to the one(s) used by W.Alpha to get "0.209", to evaluate)?
Comment: I'm not really expecting any answer in particular. This was posed as a particularly difficult and interesting problem though, so I'm relatively confident it has a transcendental answer, else I feel this problem wouldn't be posed as 'interesting'. I thought I'd post it here in case anyone had any insight into it, as I am also confident this problem is beyond my level of education, but I'm always keen to learn of methods I haven't come across before.
Comment: May be you could avoid tking problems from Facebook. What about McDonald as a source of inspiration ? (I am just kidding, be sure). Cheers :-)
Comment: If the upper limit was $1$, Chebyshev quadrature would have come in handy
Answer: I am skeptical about a closed form for this definite integral. Its numerical value is
$$0.20852064462921058579012825612057983198834121981775$$ which has not been identified by any inverse symbolic calculator. The closest found is
$$\frac 1 {10}\Gamma \left(\frac{1}{6}\right) \Big(\log(2)\Big) ^{\Gamma \left(\frac{1}{3}\right)}=0.20852064115$$
What I suppose is that this could be done by series expansion to high order
$$\frac{\tan ^3(x)}{\sqrt{1-x^2}}=x^3 \left( 1+\frac{3 x^2}{2}+\frac{193 x^4}{120}+\frac{22979 x^6}{15120}+\frac{275197
   x^8}{201600}+\frac{48228793 x^{10}}{39916800}+O\left(x^{12}\right)\right)$$ and integrated termwise. Let us try with expansions up to $O(x^{2n+3})$ for the integrand. This would lead for the definite integral to the following values
$$\left(
\begin{array}{cc}
 n  & \text{result for series expansion}    \\
 10 & 0.20840782763821602389366491327101465 \\
 20 & 0.20852027116982251348225379128240811 \\
 30 & 0.20852064289873138870614412907285772 \\
 40 & 0.20852064461992536661178971837443094 \\
 50 & 0.20852064462915641583336414649616403 \\
 60 & 0.20852064462921025212195797014568471 \\
 70 & 0.20852064462921058365488869446074788 \\
 80 & 0.20852064462921058577607189472019213 \\
 90 & 0.20852064462921058579003367910543448 \\
 100   & 0.20852064462921058579012760861728633 \\
\cdots &\cdots \\
\infty & 0.208520644629210585790128256120579832
\end{array}
\right)$$


Water running in basement floor drain but no faucets or toilets are running

Question: I can see/hear water running through the pipe just under the basement floor drain in the laundry, furnace and hot water heater room. Nothing is turned on in the house. If I turn off the main water inlet to the house, the water in the above mentioned pipe stops after a minute or so. No leaks in toilets or faucets. What could be causing this?
Comment: Well, it's not magic... I'd start closing shut-off valves for toilets, washer, dishwasher, etc., all appliances connected to the drains, one by one, and check if the water stops. Sometimes water leaking into toilet is not evident,  especially if the flow rate is really slow. If your shut-off valves are old, though, be prepared that they might start leaking once you open/close them.
Comment: Any chance  you have an RO system or water softener that is in back flush..
Comment: Does your water meter move when you aren't (knowingly) consuming any water?
Comment: Or a condensate line... Or in some areas a sump pump.
Answer: in some older homes, the sanitary sewer and stormwater drain lines are tied into one line out to the street mains.  you could be hearing/seeing drainage water from your exterior foundation weeping tiles draining into the main drain.  its often set up so that the basement floor drain acts as a vent, overflow and inspection point just upstream of where it dumps into the gas trap at the entry to the sanitary sewer portion of your household drain.
you can also look for a small plastic line that runs from somewhere just after the main shutoff down into the concrete floor.  this small line is designed to constantly flood water into the floor drain to ensure there is always water in the subslab trap at the aforementioned spot.  this ensures you dont get a dry trap and get methane coming up into the basement from the floor drain.
Comment: To clarify, the scond paragraph is refering to a trap primer. They are not designed to run constently but they often end up so as they offten get stuck open. There are diffrent types, most work on a pressure drop in the water line that allows the trap primer valve to open for a short time. They are usualy on the cold line that feeds a fixture. Depending on when the house was built, this would be my top guess.
Answer: Watch your water meter. For example, check the meter before leaving the house for the workday or something and make sure that all water sources are turned off and nobody uses water for anything, then when you get back home check the meter again.
If the number is different, then you probably have a water leak. If you know that all water sources are turned off, then the meter should not have changed at all.
If the number is the same, but you still see/hear water in the drain, then maybe it's one of the things pointed out in the other answer.


Write a comment or description for an image in Aperture

Question: I have a ton of new pictures in Aperture (from a vacation.) I am trying to figure out the most productive way for me to crank through them and add a comment or new title. What I have seen calls up a dialog box for each image which will take a long time. Thanks
Answer: @terrydev's answer is good if you want to set a lot of photos to the same caption/description.
If you want a faster way of entering individual captions, you can use the "Info" inspector panel (default shortcut is Ctrl+D or via menus: View / Inspector / Info). The drop-down menu at the top lets you choose which set of metadata to display, I think the default "General" one includes caption, version name and headline...
You can type data in any of those, tab between them as usual, and use Cmd+← or Cmd+→ to switch to the previous/next photo in sequence.
This can make it much faster than using the menu + pop-up window for each individual photo. The data will be retained in exported images (if you don't strip metadata on export), and will show up in Facebook/Flickr/etc based on these fields.
Answer: Under the Metadata menu note the Batch Change option (Shift+Cmd+b). This allows you to add metadata to batches of photos at once. Note also that you can customise the fields available in the dialogue, so don't panic if the caption field (or whatever) isn't there. At the 'Add Metadata Info' drop down you can edit the preset and choose which fields you require


What is state in a sequential circuit?

Question: I understand that the output of a flip flop is also called as the state and the output of the flip flop before the clock pulse is applied is called as present state and after the application of clock pulse is called  as next state. But what is state in a general sequential circuit, is it the output of the logic gate from which the output is taken as feedback?
Answer: The state of a general sequential circuit is no different to the state of the flip flop in your specific example (a flip flop is simply a state machine with two possible states). It shows the state the circuit is currently in.
The outputs of the various gates and circuits that feed the flip-flops determine the next state the machine will occupy, but until the transition actually takes place they are just provisional and may change at any time according to changes in inputs or other factors driving state changes.
Answer: A sequential circuit consists of combinationial logic elements (which are said to be stateless) and memory elements (which are stateful). The state of the circuit is the combined state of all the memory elements. If the memory elements are flip-flops, then the state of each flip-flop is the same as its output.
Note that this definition assumes the combinational logic part does not contain any loops - all loops need to contain a memory element.
Answer: 'State' is one stable configuration a circuit can take.
In a general binary sequential circuit with M memory elements, there are \$2^M\$ states. It's possible that some of these could be transient given appropriate asynchronous gating, so that there could be fewer stable states.
A common way to handle the state of a sequential circuit is the 'state vector', a vector that simply lists the state of each memory element. That could for convenience be encoded into some other alphabet, but that's only convenient. For instance, a 4 bit shift register might have a state vector of 0110, but it could be easier to think of that as '6' when tracking what its state is, or where it's going to go next.
Answer: The state of a circuit is purely the collection of all of the current signals within that circuit. It is the status of the circuit.
For a purely sequential circuit the full state can be calculated purely from the inputs to the circuit.
For a simple circuit with memory such as a flipflop the state can be fully described by a combination of the inputs and the output.
For a complex circuit (e.g. a one with internal memory) knowing the state requires either knowledge of some of the internal signals or knowledge of the history of the inputs.

What is state in a sequential circuit?


Reciting Slichot on elul minhag or halacha?

Question: Is it a halacha to recite selichos before rosh hashana or is it only a minhag?
And who wrote the selichos?
Comment: What is the difference between halacha  and minhag, the way you're using these terms?
Comment: A minhag is just the custom of where you're community came from, a halacha is not a custom is a obligation
Comment: It also says מנהג ישראל תורה היא so it is  very strict but there's is a difference
Comment: The different selichos were written by many different people. Did you have a particular selichah in mind?
Comment: The malachei rachamim meshorsei elyon one
Comment: @user27154 customs can be surprisingly binding in Judaism. שמע בני מוסר אביך ואל תטוש תורת אמך
Comment: Artscroll usually identifies who wrote each selicha, when the answer is known.
Answer: As mentioned in the comments, it is definitely complicated to define the exact difference between minhag and halachah. Nevertheless, the language used by various authorities, including the Shulchan Aruch  and Rema (Orach Chaim 581:1) is language of "minhag". This status of minhag is why there are so many conflicting customs about selichot, including which selichot are said and when selichot are said (see Rema there, among others).
The various selichot used by different communities were composed at different times. As per the OP's comment specifically asking about the Pizmon "Malachei Rachamim", that selichah was composed by Rabbi Shmuel ben Rabbi Yehudah of Mainz (source), who lived just under 1000 years ago.
Answer: You can usually distinguish a minhag from halakha when the minhag varies drastically from community to community. Selichot definitely fall under the category of minhag, and there are very different minhagim between the different communities.
In general the texts of the selichot are different between communities. Sephardic selichot are different than Ashkenazi selichot which are different from Yemenite selichot. So asking who wrote "the selichot" is really too broad of a question, maybe you could ask who wrote the Iraqi selichot, or who wrote the German Ashkenazi Selichot.
Even when to say selichot differents wildly between communities. Sepharadim who generally fall under the umbrella of Edot HaMizrah typically recite Selichot for the entire month of elul either after midnight or early in the morning and carry through until the end of Yom Kippur. They do this for Kabbalistic reasons.
Sepharadim from the West typically recite selichot right after 'arbit (ma'ariv), some do it for elul, some do it only between rosh hashannah and yom kippur. Their selichot are also shorter than other Sepharadim.
I believe Ashkenazim only start reciting selichot the Sabbath before Rosh HaShannah (Festival of Trumpets/Shofarot) and according to Wikipedia there are 13 variants of the texts of selichot.
As far as I'm aware, the Rambam didn't codify saying of selichot as halakha, but mentioned the custom of selichot as being only during the 10 days of repentance between Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur. His words can be found in Mishneh Torah, Sefer Madda, Teshuvah 3:4
"וְנָהֲגוּ כֻּלָּם לָקוּם בַּלַּיְלָה בַּעֲשָׂרָה יָמִים אֵלּוּ וּלְהִתְפַּלֵּל בְּבָתֵּי כְּנֵסִיּוֹת בְּדִבְרֵי תַּחֲנוּנִים וּבְכִבּוּשִׁין עַד שֶׁיֵּאוֹר הַיּוֹם:
During these ten days, the custom is for everyone to rise [while it is still] night and pray in the synagogues with heart-rending words of supplication until daybreak."
Source: https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/911896/jewish/Teshuvah-Chapter-Three.htm


Sync apple messages between devices

Question: I'm a novice user FYI. My messages used to be synced so that the conversation kept going on iMac iPhone and iPad mini. Then perhaps after a trip to Alaska it stopped doing that. I'm not 100% sure if that's when it stopped. I've noticed that my iBooks content syncs between phone and iPad but not iMessages. This is very inconvenient. All three, actually I have 2 iMacs so 4 devices are with same Apple ID. THANKS!
Answer: Check if you have the devices under settings/messages/text messages forwarding, and enable all the devices you want to recieve/send messages from. Even if you already enabled it previously, you might of renamed the device, just check if the device with exact name is enabled.
Answer: All syncing of messages is done with your iCloud account. First check the iCloud settings on the working devices and then compare them to the settings on the non-working device. If they are the same you could try removing and re-adding the account.
Note that Messages on iPad is only going to show you conversations with other IOS devices. So if you are texting with someone on a non-IOS device (say Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry, etc.) and the text bubble is green then it won't show up on the iPad (I believe).

Sync apple messages between devices


Flattening the face of a board without using a jointer

Question: I've seen a lot of jigs to do edge jointing on a table saw or router, including this question. I haven't seen much for flattening one of the faces, though. If the board is narrow (less than ~3"), I can run it on the freshly-jointed edge through my table saw and flatten and square the face that way. But what about wider boards? Hand planes would work, of course, but are there other methods using a table saw, router, and/or jigs like there are for edge jointing?
Answer: Possibly the best method to flatten the face of a board using power tools not specifically designed for that job is with a router mounted in a planing sled/levelling sled. There are abundant versions of this posted online so this is just a sample:

It must be said though, this technique is perhaps best kept in reserve for major stock removal, e.g. taking out most or all of the bow or twist from particularly hard or gnarly woods, flattening wide boards or glue-ups and for slabs, not used for everyday flattening of stock. It can however be considered the go-to method for flattening the tops of stumps or trunk slices, and for conventional butcher blocks, where you're dealing with all end grain which is punishing to plane manually and dangerous to run through a thickness planer.
If you want to see these in action here are a few YouTube links:
Joint and Thickness-Plane with a Router from American Woodworker
Flattening Boards with a Router Sled from Matt Cremona
174 - Flattening Workbenches and Wide Boards With A Router from The Wood Whisperer
Comment: @mmathis Hand planes (you need more than one) are the way to go if you can't fit in or can't afford any of the dedicated power tools intended for this job. While flattening, and then thicknessing, *all* your stock by hand is absolutely doable, it is hard work and the effort involved shouldn't be underestimated.
Comment: "not used for everyday flattening of stock" - for that, a hand plane is the way to go then?
Answer: There are jigs which are used for flattening the face of large slabs, which are basically a rail on each side with a rigid beam bridging them to carry a router. As far as I know, the folks who use these follow up with jointer planes and winding sticks to make sure the surface is really flat without dips or twist.
If you have a planer, a jointing sled on the planer might be a suction. If you have a large drum sander, a simar sled on that might be worth trying.
Depending on the size of the job and what you are starting with, going straight to a traditional jointer plane might be just as fast as any of the powered solutions.
Answer: Two additional methods using a planer.
Planer Sled
The first is to make a jig consisting of a flat length of ply or mdf. Put the wood to be jointed on top, and use a series of wedges to "level" the bottom of the board and stop it rocking. (Double sided tape helps to keep them in place. Once ready you can pass the board through the planer as normal to make side level, then flip and level the other side. Picture below for clarity - but if you're going to try this I would recommend watching one of the many youtube videos demonstrating it.

Handplane and Planer
The other option is to use a handplane to roughly level the board. Contrary to popular opinion, a board doesn't have to be 100% perfectly jointed to run through a planer - particularly if it's thick or short.
You can use a hand plane to roughly level the board, making sure it sits roughly flat and fairly stable (ie doesn't rock). Once this is done, you can pass this through a planer, roughly flattened side down. When the top is planned flat and smooth, then flip again to level the other side.
This has worked well for me for wood up to about 3' or 4' in length. If I had need to flatten something longer I would probably try the sled method above.
Cheating
I mill a fair chunk of my own lumber - often this leaves me with wood less than 3' long, but about 2" - 3" thick.  Provided the milling left a reasonable surface I'll run it through the planer as is. The wood is  too thick and short to banana in the planer. The main thing to watch out for here is that the board is hitting the planer relatively level. If the bottom of the board is curved, the curve itself will lift up the board as it goes through, resulting in a non-flat bit of wood.


What is the formal terminology for two species that are "close" to each other in a phylogenetic tree?

Question: Take for example the human and the chimpanzee, they are "closely related" species since they are "close" to each other in a phylogenetic tree. However, this terminology seems pretty informal, what would be the formal way to specify that two or more species are "closely related"?
Comment: What do you mean by "formal"?
Comment: The way that you would find it written in a scientific journal.
Answer: Are you looking for something like "sister lineage" (or "sister taxon" or "sister group")
This term may be more specific than what you're looking for, and to use it correctly you'd want to be a little careful – I guess in this case you might have to say something like:

"the lineage that includes chimpanzees and bonobos is sister to the
  lineage of which humans are the only extant species"

or

"the lineage that includes chimpanzees and bonobos and the lineage of
  which humans are the only extant species are sister lineages"

both referring to this phylogeny.

It's also possible that explaining exactly what you mean by 'close', or what it entails, would be appropriate, be it Ilan's suggestion of % genetic similarity (or maybe genomic similarity?), # of nodes between your two taxa (again, this would have to be in reference to a specific phylogeny), or if you have a dated phylogeny you could refer to the time since divergence, as in "coding DNA divergencies ...place the most recent common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees at between 5 and 6 million years ago."(Wildman et al 2003).
Comment: Sister lineages would have been my suggestion..
Comment: But of course it depends about context, I mean, e.g. fungi and animals are sister lineages just as much as bonobos and chimps..
Comment: Good point 5heikki. It's one of those terms like 'endemic' that is pretty meaningless without context.
Answer: As genus comes above species I'd consider using this term for the species which are close genetically ("these two species are from the same genus"). Above genus comes family etc...
On the other hand, the proximity or similarity of species could be probably "measured" by degree of biodiversity, and especially genetic diversity considering two close species having low biodiversity and very different species as having higher biodiversity.
Thirdly, and I feel that this is the most strong term to use, you can "express" the genetic closeness of species as being "genetically similar":
"Some monkeys and humans have 98% genetic similarity" or "are up to 98% genetically similar" or "... DNA similar"...


Send as user from shared mailbox

Question: I want a few users who use a shared mailbox to be able to send mails on behalf of a user. This option is not available in the exchange administrator tool. How can this be resolved? Would it be an option to give this mailbox an exchange online account?
Comment: What version of Exchange?
Comment: Exchange online for office 365 business premium
Answer: You can have the email of the represented user to show up in Outlook automatically to send and receive.
Go to Office 365 Portal, go to the Admin area, then edit users, then select who you want someone ELSE to email as them, click on the "Mail Settings" towards the bottom, click Edit on mailbox permissions. Click on "Add permissions" button, then you'll want to add the user who's sending the emails to "Read and Manage" and additionally add them to either "Send on behalf" or "Send As". These are represented different when the receiver gets them. For example, a secretary would want to be able to "Send on behalf" of a manager, but the secretary would want to "Send As" the general info mailbox.
After a short period of time (seen as little as a minute, as long as 30 minutes) you'll see the additional mailbox automatically propagate in the emailing user's Outlook. Now the trick is having the email appear from the user, in a new email window click on on the Options ribbon tab, then click on the "From" button to make the from field visible so you can change it if necessary.
Comment: As an added bonus I just discovered that if the user to be impersonated opens Outlook, clicks on File, then Account Settings, there's an option for Delegate Access for the end user to manage!

Send as user from shared mailbox


la115 lawnmower not crank

Question: My john deere LA115 lawnmower wont crank when I turn the key lights come on only.It does not turn over at all but when I took the positive end to starter and grounded it turned over that way.What could it be?All it did was turning over but nothing when key is turned.
Answer: Most likely one of the safety switches is not adjusted properly or is damaged.  There are three that will prevent the engine from starting:

The parking brake.  If the parking brake is not fully on, it will prevent the starter from turning over the engine.
The hydrostatic position.  If the "go" pedal on the right side of the mower is not in a neutral position, it will prevent the engine from turning over.
The seat pressure sensor.  If it doesn't sense enough weight in the seat,it will not start
Comment: There's more than likely a third safety switch, as in most riding lawn mowers, there's a pressure sensor in the seat. If you aren't sitting in the seat, it won't start, as well as if you try to get out of the seat when it's running (and safety items aren't set correctly) the mower will die. Agree with you, though, this seems like a safety switch issue.

la115 lawnmower not crank


How do I quickly get okra to stop being goopy?

Question: It's irritating to cook any recipe with okra. I love okra, but it always takes a long time to burn off all the goopy stuff. Is there a way to get rid of it more quickly so my okra will be ready sooner?
Comment: If the question *is* about okra, see http://cooking.stackexchange.com/q/35879/67
Comment: @CoDeMurDeRer Are you trying to reduce the sliminess in general? Or with a specific cooking method? Your original question kind of suggested you meant specifically pan frying or something like that, while the question Joe linked to is more about soup/stew things.
Answer: When I cook an okra, I've found that adding tomato suppresses the slime. For about one or two cups of okra, I add one small ripe tomato. I do that whenever I cook an okra curry.
Deep frying okra in some kind of batter also works well and is delicious.
Answer: The best way that I have found to cook okra, and prevent it from being slimy is to avoid cooking it with moisture.
If you dredge it in seasoned cornmeal, then pan fry it, you get none of the slime that is common to okra.
I haven't done any tests to verify if a quick fry would then prevent it from developing slime if you then add liquid, however.  If you're trying to add the okra to a soup or a sauce, you might still need to spend some time cooking it to break down the slime.


How to check available Adsense sizes in a website?

Question: I'm targeting an Adsense campaign on a series of specific websites. How can I check the available banner sizes they have? Up to now, what I used to do is to used my browser developer tools (F12), or screencap the page, open it in Photoshop and check the size. But sometimes the sizes I find don't match any standard format: for example, I'm seeing now a 632x60 banner, and another one with 300x90, which don't match anything in Google's Display Ads formats.
Answer: All format size in Adsense is in fixed sizes that you can see at the link.

You forgot something that Adsense also has responsive ads format (managed in google adsense if you log in) which has its flexibility work based on where the codes placed/installed. This format can be the same as fixed as I mention and also has its own size.
Answer: From official documentation -> guide to ad sizes
And also, if you want to do further reading - link
Google is great. It's all in documentation. If you are going out from formats, you're doing something wrong. Optimize your pictures to exact size you need and that's it. Don't put 2000x2000 picture up for a little banner and so on. Best solution is to put exact size picture.
Comment: Thanks, but I had already read that page. I was talking about checking the available ad sizes in *one specific website*, which is where I want to advertise on. As mentioned, I tried screencapping that website and checking in Photoshop, but the banner sizes I see don't match any of the ones mentioned in Google's documentation.


Does Fluctuation Theorem prove the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics?

Question: Does Fluctuation Theorem or Crooks Fluctuation Theorem prove the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics from statistical point of view?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluctuation_theorem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooks_fluctuation_theorem
Answer: Yes, the fluctuation theorem gives (among other things) the probability that a system will evolve from a state of greater statistical entropy toward one of smaller entropy.  The second law of thermodynamics is only probabilistically correct for large but finite systems, and the fluctuation theorem gives the correction to the second law for finite-size systems.  As the number of degrees of freedom in a system goes to infinity, the probability of an entropy-reducing fluctuation goes to zero, which verifies the second law for systems of infinite size.
Answer: Not in general, but is very closely related.
The fluctuation theorems are about non-equilibrium evolution of systems in time, a topic that is outside the purview and capabilities of classical equilibrium thermodynamic theory. In this sense, the fluctuation theorems deal with description more detailed than 2nd law of thermodynamics, and under some assumptions, a conclusion similar to the 2nd law (probability that during a non-equilibrium process entropy increases in time is very high) can be derived from them.
On the other hand, it seems to me the derivations of the theorems rely on special assumptions about the microscopic trajectories - ergodicity. But 2nd law of thermodynamics is not dependent on such artificial assumptions, it is much more general than that. It is believed to apply to any processes that make the system change its state from one to another equilibrium state.
So, I would rather say the fluctuation theorems provide interesting and useful quantitative description of matter not in equilibrium, but they DO NOT derive the 2nd law in its general form.
If you are interested in a derivation of 2nd law of thermodynamics where no explicit assumption about microscopic trajectories is made (except for validity of classical Hamiltonian mechanics) but only experimental facts are assumed, I recommend Jaynes' work. In short, what he had shown is this:
If some equilibrium state A has changed into another equilibrium state B in an irreversible adiabatic process, constancy of information entropy (which follows from the Hamiltonian evolution) together with reproducibility of the resulting state (follows from experience) imply that Clausius entropy of the final state B is greater or the same as entropy of the initial state A.
See
 Jaynes, E. T., 1965, `Gibbs vs Boltzmann Entropies,' Am. J. Phys., 33, 391
http://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/gibbs.vs.boltzmann.pdf sec. 4,5
I tried to explain his point in a more formal way here:
Understanding Gibbs $H$-theorem: where does Jaynes' "blurring" argument come from?


what is the appropriate DMARC configuration for a domain that should fail hard on DKIM but soft on SPF

Question: Messages sent by my domain will always be DKIM-signed and any that are not should be immediately discarded by recipients.  But strict SPF enforcement leads to problems where internal mail-forwarding rules and other sorts of implementation details cause spurious breakages.  What is an appropriate constellation of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records to cause receiving systems to treat DKIM failures as absolute "stop delivery, it's spam for sure", but SPF as just a hint?
Answer: It's by design that DMARC passes if either DKIM or SPF is aligned i.e. matching with the From header. It's known that DKIM alignment survives forwarding, whereas SPF alignment doesn't: a service forwarding the mail should put the mail in another envelope i.e. use a MAIl FROM (Return-Path) address of its own, which will break the alignment despite the SPF passed on its own.
Regarding the configuration:

Sign every mail with DKIM, have the DKIM records in place and keep the DKIM signature aligned with the From header. There's no such thing as hard/soft DKIM failure, as DKIM test is just comparing the signature with the published public key from DNS.
If there's no signature, DKIM alone doesn't have any capability to tell whether there should be one or not. That's where you need DMARC: you can enforce the DKIM by having a p=reject in your DMARC policy.
Having the previous setup in place, SPF becomes less relevant regarding protecting the From header. It would be ok to have e.g. ~all to prevent hard failures on SPF, leaving your envelope domain partly unprotected. As DMARC requires SPF to pass and to be aligned, it will fail on SPF softfail, but it doesn't matter as long as it's aligned through DKIM.

If you want to be absolutely strict with DKIM, keep in mind that an aligned & passing SPF alone will make the DMARC pass, too. If you want to make the DMARC always fail without DKIM, you could use a different domain as an envelope sender and have a v=spf1 -all SPF policy to prevent using this domain as an envelope sender altogether. However, that's not a typical configuration and might look worse on some spam filters.
Comment: That's enlightening. We sign with DKIM, have DMARC with p=reject, and SPF `~all`.  Which seems to lead to the situation where anyone can send an unsigned email purportedly FROM our domain. It soft-fails because of the `~all`, meaning that it is delivered based on the receiving server's policies for softfail. Microsoft 365 seems to be happy to deliver the spoofed mail as if from our domain:  "Received-SPF: SoftFail (protection.outlook.com: domain of transitioning ourdomain.com discourages use of 220.127.116.11 as permitted sender." Nervous to try `-all` as I don't know what will break.


Can I connect an Asian 240v water heater to a US 240v circuit?

Question: How can i wire directly an Asian single 240 volt line with neutral  instant hot water heater to my 240 twin line tap in the United States? Can i tie the two legs on the breaker into a single wire? I am not sure how the neutral would feed then. What is the best way?
Answer: Asian and US power work in a very different way.   Both transformers are 240V.  However Asia applies safety earthing  on one end of the transformer's 240V winding.  America pegs it in the middle.  Philippines is a weird compromise because they have both systems and are in the middle of trying to harmonize on one.
The concept is that American power is safer since voltage is only 120V from earth.
Neutral is not earth/ground.  Neutral is a normal current-flowing conductor like the hot(s), it is simply the one that uses the same transformer lug as earth.  That makes it the "less dangerous" conductor.  It is not earth and should not be connected to earth anywhere except one bonding location specified by Code.
Some appliances are built with weaker insulation on the conductor planned for neutral.  Code doesn't allow them to do that, but they do it anyway. Not mentioning any subcontinents here.
Your water heater wants 240V across its two supply terminals.  in Asia, one of them will be neutral, in the US neither will be.   This use needs to be permitted in its labeling or instructions as approved by UL, CSA or other competent listing agency.  CE is not a listing agency.
In a US installation of a five-continent 240V device, you will have no use for US neutral.  You will need two hots, and this must come off a 2-pole 240V breaker.
Comment: Odds would be excellent that his device is not listed and therefore connecting it is a good way to void your household insurance, at the least.
Answer: Absolutely, if it's a traditional immersion type, you don't need neutral just use only the 2 hots (1 from each leg). Suggest anyway to bring a 4-pole (L1, L2, N, G) cable, just in case.
But if your boiler is heat-pump it's a problem as it's (almost surely) 50hz while in us 60 hz is used.
Comment: I'm not sure I see an "in case" where neutral would be useful on a water heater line.  No 240V water heaters use neutral.
Comment: In case you'll replace it with a heat-pump one, where neutral may be needed.
Comment: I hear you, but I would be surprised to see one of those. It would prevent them from bolting up to existing water heater circuits, forcing people to rewire. The appliance industry is hyper-sensitive to that, hence their constant lobbying to retain dangerous NEMA 10.
Comment: @Harper Doesn't that go against the DIY.SE mantra to "go bigger than you need right now, cause cable / wire / panels / what-have-you is cheap" :)
Comment: @mmathis yes it does.   But as we're seeing in another question, confusion about what to do with an excess neutral has issues of its own.


Custom Setting generates duplicate records

Question: I have a custom setting that has a number field, which is used to generate registration numbers for my Account records. I am incrementing the custom setting field everytime a new record is inserted. But currently if 2 records are inserted from different users at same time, same reg number is assigned to both. How do I work around this, I need unique numbers even if they created at same time.
Answer: Modify your existing Apex class to include a locking mechanism using the FOR UPDATE keyword when querying the custom setting record.
public static void generateRegistrationNumbers(List<Account> newAccounts) {
    // Get custom setting
    Your_Custom_Setting__c settings = Your_Custom_Setting__c.getOrgDefaults();

    try {
        // Lock the custom setting record to prevent concurrent updates
        settings = [SELECT Id, Your_Number_Field__c FROM Your_Custom_Setting__c WHERE Id = :settings.Id FOR UPDATE];
    } catch (QueryException e) {
        // Error handling: provide custom error message or retry operation
        throw new CustomException('Unable to generate unique registration numbers. Please try again in a few seconds.');
    }

    for (Account acc : newAccounts) {
        settings.Your_Number_Field__c += 1;
        acc.Registration_Number__c = settings.Your_Number_Field__c;
    }

    // Update the custom setting with the new registration number
    update settings;
}

Replace Your_Custom_Setting__c with the API name of your custom setting and Your_Number_Field__c with the API name of the number field for registration numbers.
By using the FOR UPDATE keyword, the second user's transaction will wait for the first user's transaction to complete, preventing duplicate registration numbers. If the lock cannot be acquired within the default time limit (10 seconds), a CustomException will be thrown with a custom error message. You can adjust the error handling as needed.
Comment: Thanks a lot! This worked. :)
Answer: If you can, change the Account.RegistrationNumber__c field type to Autonumber and forget about it, let the platform handle it for you.
Delete the custom setting field storing the incrementing number as well, custom settings should be used to provide configuration capabilities, and an Admin should set their values to influence the system behavior.


Risk of driving solenoid with a higher voltage pwm signal

Question: We have a solenoid which is rated to be controlled by PWM signal "Maximum 325 mA at 7.5 Vdc". The problem we have our controller sends in 12 V output voltage. There is a thought that we could still drive it using the the 12V PWM output. Is there any risk especially with power rating. At 325mA at 7.5 Vdc, the power rating could be 2.4 W. At 12 V if we restrict the max current to be 201 mA (0.201*12 = 2.4 W, can we still work with the same voltage. Is there any risk to the solenoid in doing so?
Answer: Driving a solenoid with PWM from a higher voltage to get a lower equivalent voltage is a valid thing to do.
The main thing to watch out for is to use a high enough PWM frequency so that the current ripple in the solenoid is small.
In some cases, there can be audible whine.  Avoid that by using around 25 kHz or more.  That's usually a good enough frequency so that the current changes little during the on and off phases of each pulse, but the period is still "long" for switching purposes.
ADDITION: As long as you do not exceed the power rating you can theoretically use any voltage up to the level that breaks through the insulation in the relay.. which is a couple of orders of magnitude higher than the rated voltage. However, when going over-voltage, even by a few volts, it is prudent to take extra precautions to ensure that a failure in the PWM can not leave the load at full voltage. This is especially true when driven from a micro that could "bug-out" or be "halted".
Comment: Unless you have a dog, in which case I'd recommend 50kHz and up.
Comment: An industrial hydraulic valve would be typically PWM'ed at 2.5khz up to 5kHz.


How much gravel to remove to plant grass?

Question: I'm removing tiny (1cm) landscaping gravel from my backyard in hopes of putting down topsoil and then grass seed.  I'm having a hard time getting all the pebbles up.  I'm going to be adding, at minimum, 6 in of topsoil.  Is it ill advised for me to just remove everything that isn't embedded in the dirt and just add the soil on top?
Comment: Might be a better question for http://gardening.stackexchange.com
Comment: For what it's worth, my house had a dog run covered in pea gravel, with soil underneath. I left it unmaintained and over time, grass filled in. That grass was denser and lusher than any grass elsewhere in the yard. I suspect in large part because of improved drainage due to the gravel. I would not worry at all about getting every last pebble up.
Answer: If you're collecting the gravel to reuse, get as much as practical.  If not, just leave it in place.  6" of topsoil should be more than enough for grass to establish itself, and the gravel won't hurt anything.  Soil will eventually fill in the gaps.
You could speed the process by putting down a thin layer of cheap dirt or sand, and watering it to wash it into the stone, then put down the topsoil.  Or, you could mix the gravel into the topsoil when you put it down.
Until the stone is filled in and it becomes compacted, you will get more drainage than top soil over clay or compacted dirt, so water a little more often for the first season.
Answer: I usually scrape as much gravel as I can but leave the dirt packed gravel. Make sure to grade away from any structures and keep the level 6" below the buildings siding (a requirement in my state) add the topsoil and pack with a roller then fill low spots for a nice even lawn. I usually lightly rake the entire area to provide loose dirt to bed the seeds. I have the best luck with hydro seeding this looks better starting out with the green coloring and starter fertiliser in the mix. I usually will spread additional seeds 6 weeks later and at 3 months have had beautiful lawns.


How to harmonize ^2 - ^4 - ^3

Question: I have at my disposal I, I6, V and V7 and inversions as well as ii, ii6 and IV to harmonize this melody. I am also allowed to use the cadential 64. I am stuck on the beginning part on how to harmonize ^2 to ^4. I could use the cadential 64 on the first beat of bar 2 but I think that, given the bass notes below, the cadential V is on beat 3 of the second bar. That is why I began bar 2 with I moving to ii6. The reason I am stuck at the beginning is because if the ^4 is part of a V7 then having a subdominant chord for the 1st chord wont work because the 7th wont be prepared. Am I right then in saying that the only option I have then is to harmonize the first 2 chords with V7 chords or inversions? That way the 7th would be transferred from an inner voice in the 1st chord to the soprano in the 2nd chord.
Comment: I just realized that a very valid option for my needs could be the vii°6 chord... I forgot to add this as my list of available chords but it is indeed available to me and would be a good candidate for the second chord in harmonizing this melody.
Answer: In addition to your 2–4–3 in the soprano, I would include the next scale-degree 2, as well. This way, a 2–4–3–2 soprano line could be harmonized with voice exchanges in contrary motion in the bass to prolong ii.
The 2–4 in the soprano could be harmonized with 4–2 in the bass, moving from a ii6 to a ii. Then, the 4–3–2 in the soprano could be harmonized with a 2–3–4 in the bass, ending back on your prior ii6.
As for the scale-degree 3, remember that inversions of tonic can prolong predominant chords. Thus, in your progression from ii to ii6, you can insert a I6 that functions as a passing chord to prolong predominant.
All of this, of course, will smoothly move to the cadential six-four on beat 3 of the second measure.
Comment: Ok so the chords in order would be ii6 ii I6 ii6 with the I6 functioning as an expansion of supertonic harmony? And this works even though the I6 chord occurs on the accented beat in the bar?
Answer: You could do this.   If it breaks any rules, I don't think they're ones that matter!
Comment: I am have not yet seen chords like the ones on beat 3 in bar 2 yet so unfortunately cant use them. Is that a sus 4 chord?
Comment: Yes.  You've seen one now, and you even knew what to call it.  Amaze your teacher!

How to harmonize ^2 - ^4 - ^3


Money and ETH upside and downside against hard assets while in the developing stage

Question: Ethereum: has or will Ethereum back up its software with a hard asset in the future? only if the unthinkable happens!
Answer: Each full node hosts a copy of the chaindata, which contains the current state of the Ethereum Virtual Machine. Chaindata can be copied to any storage device large enough to host it. A digital backup of the chaindata would be the most effective form of backing up Ethereum.
Individuals can back up their own digital assets physically by storing their private keys somewhere safe. Cryptosteel offers a good solution for this. A cryptosteel holding a private key, which controls digital Ethereum assets, would be as good of a hard asset as any.


Marine and freshwater geochemistry

Question: As rivers flow into the sea, rivers contain a high concentration of calcium and carbonates, and a low concentration of sodium and chlorine, and for marine water it is vice versa. How come?
Comment: Without knowing too much, I'd say that the sodium and chlorine (and magnesium and sulfate) are mostly coming from hydrothermal volcanic vents. Calcium and carbonate are being used up in living things like forams and stuff and then sink to the ocean floor, making limestone.
Answer: The oceans are not saturated in sodium or chlorine. In fact, the chemical makeup of the oceans has remained fairly constant for hundreds of millions of years. Yet rivers and other sources continually bring sodium, chlorine, and other dissolved elements and compounds to the oceans. This means some processes must exist that remove constituent elements at more or less the same rate that the world's rivers and other sources supply these constituents.
It is true that the Earth's rivers bring substantially more calcium and carbonate ions to the oceans than they bring sodium and chlorine ions. Dissolved carbon dioxide from the atmosphere provides another source of carbonate ions. Yet the oceans are indeed substantially depleted of calcium and carbonate compared to the supply from rivers. So why is this?
The oceans are substantially saltier than are the rivers that supply the oceans. This is primarily a result of evaporation. Even with that, sodium and chlorine are but a fraction of their saturation levels in the world's oceans. This is not the case for calcium and carbonate. Carbonates in general have a low saturation level, and amongst common cations, calcium carbonate has a very low saturation level. Calcium carbonate is typically at or near the saturation level in the oceans, and oftentimes above it, particularly near the surface. This makes it very easy for calcium carbonate to come out of solution.
Because calcium and carbonate are at or above the saturation level, just about anything can cause calcium carbonate to form. The key "just about anything" process that causes calcium and carbonate to come out of solution is life.
This means that calcium and carbonate have a rather low residence time in the oceans. The processes that remove sodium and chlorine are much, much slower. The slowness by which sodium and chlorine are removed versus the rapidity by which calcium and carbonate are removed are why the oceans are "upside down" compared to rivers with regard to calcium, carbonate, sodium, and chlorine.
Comment: What *are* the processes that remove sodium and chlorine?
Comment: This would make a good follow up question, Peter. Sodium, chloride, and other ions in seawater are removed as aerosols and transported to the land, either as dry deposition or in rainfall. I think that there is some removal during lithification and subduction. I was not aware that the removal was significant in controlling the ocean concentration.
Comment: Other processes that remove sodium and chlorine include chemical interactions with clays, and small seas being locked away from the main oceans by plate tectonics. Those small seas generally don't last long. They were the source of much of the salt mined in salt domes nowadays.
Comment: But, as @haresfur mentioned, this would be better answered as a follow-on question as opposed to in comments. Comments get deleted after a while.
Answer: Rivers from land that flow into the ocean supply the oceans salts and chlorine from billions of years of weathering, minerals break down and the salts accumulate in the ocean. The oceans don't flow through land. The river water will never taste salty because the salts are released in small amounts over billions of years.
Comment: Who upvoted this? This does not come anywhere close to answering the question.

Marine and freshwater geochemistry


WIndows Server 2016 - Disk and Network columns are greyed on Task Manager

Question: I need to enable columns disk and network on Server 2016 Standard.
Screenshot Task Manager
Answer: As long as for today I've only found this option: you can use this
<code>diskperf -y
</code>
from your command prompt to enable disk use in "Performance" tab at task manager.
Why these columns are visible -but disabled- at the "Processes" tab is, somehow, a mystery. Maybe the taskman.exe is the same on all recent Microsoft's operating systems and these columns get deactivated (but no hidden) at Server 2016.
Comment: Me too, is the only way ive found.


Secure Flag and HSTS in HTTPS Only site

Question: If I had a site only available in HTTPS should I still enable HSTS and Secure Flag?
Comment: YES!
If you don't enable HSTS, users must type in **https://** manually, which hardly someone does. And, in some cases it may also be possible to connect directly through a specific port, bypassing HTTPS. **Secure** flag is a must, otherwise cookies that aren't _secure_ will also be transmitted over HTTP request. Though it may not seem feasible at the moment, precaution is better than cure :D
Answer:
site is only available in HTTPS

HSTS in this case at least notifies that browser that the site will not be available in HTTP for the foreseeable future. Once the browser knows this (i.e. after the first visit) a downgrade attack like sslstrip will fail, because the browser will not connect with insecure HTTP to the site.
The secure flag for cookies will probably not provide any security benefit because it was already enforced that the site is available through HTTPS only. But it does not harm either and is a cheap feature so in the spirit of multilayered security (i.e. add another layer in case one gets broken) you better add it.
Comment: It is also a good idea to add the secure flag in the case of non host-only cookies. e.g. `foo.example.com` may be protected by HSTS which sets a cookie at `.example.com` level, however the attacker could read the cookie by setting up a plain HTTP connection to `bar.example.com`. An alternative is to also set `includeSubDomains` if all your subdomains are HTTPS.
Comment: Wouldn't the secure flag also prevent interception of the cookie for the initial page view before being redirected to https, assuming the user hasn't visited the website before?

Secure Flag and HSTS in HTTPS Only site


Do I need a Dative Case?

Question: My conlang already has Benefactive and Lative cases, does it really need a Dative case? I'm racking my brain to find situations that couldn't be covered by those two and would require a separate Dative case.
Comment: No it's not needed. Lots of languages don't have a dative case. Lots of languages don't have any cases.
Comment: It depends what you define as a dative case
Comment: @Dr. Shmuel A case denoting the recipient of an action and, in this case, outside of what would fall into the Benefactive case. I'm just trying to figure out what situations would fall into the Dative case but not the Benefactive if that makes sense.
Answer: Yours is a very interesting and legitimate question, but in the light of what we know from the languages of the world, what you ask might not be what you mean to ask. Let me expand a bit below.
To answer your question in brief: no, your language does not need a Dative, but yes, your language needs a device (or "construction" in Construction Grammar terms) to express the third argument (also called the "indirect object") of verbs that take on three arguments (subject, object, indirect object).
Now, whether you have separate devices (constructions, or in your case "cases", no pun intended) for semantically different indirect objects or not, that is up to you. Since you already have a Benefactive case that could express an indirect object (whether that is semantically a recipient or a beneficiary or else), then you can use that to express an indirect object that is a simple recipient. So, note that there can be a mismatch between syntactic arguments and semantic arguments (for example indirect object vs. recipient, benefactor, etc). Moreover, depending on what linguistic framework you assume, things can be slightly different. Here I am adhering to some form of (Radical) Construction Grammar.
For example, since you have a Benefactive case and a Lative case you could use the former in sentences like "I gave the book to the man" and "I opened the door for the woman" and the Lative case for "I went to the market" and "I am throwing a stone at you". But again, that is really up to you, as also hinted at in other answers/comments.
The drafts of the first two chapters of Croft's Morphosyntax: constructions of the world's languages expand on this. See https://www.unm.edu/~wcroft/WACpubs.html.
Answer: Your lang, your rules. But generally speaking, no, you don't need a dative case.
Funny thing is, you don't even need a dative case even if you were to wrack your brain and come up with handfuls of potential situations! Languages are funny that way. Those sneaky native speakers will just come up with some clever way of handling things!
Answer: You might consider something like:
"I gave you it" > "I gave it so that you recieved it"
"I told you it" > "I said it so that you heard it"
"I passed you it" > "I threw it so that you catch it"

Do I need a Dative Case?


android emulator, get the widgets on home screen

Question: i am currently working on getting the list of widgets that are present on home screen, i want to write a code that can create a list of all the widgets present on home screen.
googled it but no luck!
any help is appreciated!
thanks
Answer: There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of home screen implementations. Perhaps one will have an API that will let you accomplish this, but there is no standard API for this.


Significance Levels, Confidence Intervals and P-Values

Question: I'm new to statistics and still learning some of the basic concepts.  Although I am slowly getting them sorted out, I still often find myself getting confused between Significance Levels, Confidence Intervals and P-Values.  Just wondering if anyone can help with a refreshing, clear explanation of how they are each used and perhaps related?
Comment: Take a look at this web page: http://onlinestatbook.com/2/logic_of_hypothesis_testing/sign_conf.html
Comment: A p-value is the probability of obtaining a value as extreme or more extreme than the observed value when the null hypothesis is assumed. Confidence intervals are intervals that in repeated sampling would include the true parameter a certain percentage of time. The significance level is the percentage of the time that the confidence interval will not contain the parameter.  This all depends on the null hypothesis and the assumed family of probability distributions.  David Lane's online text provides more detail.
Comment: Thanks for the feedback guys, this was very helpful.  David Lane's page looks like a great resource too, looking forward to digging into it some more.
Comment: Check out statquest videos on YouTube for a clear explanation of these concepts without getting into confusing details
Comment: Any attempt to explain the nature of and relationships between those things should be set within a discussion of the nature of statistical and scientific inferences. I grew frustrated with the context-free discussions in the P-value controversies and so I wrote an extensive chapter on it. Read it and you will not be disappointed: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/164_2019_286
Answer: Significance Levels and Confidence Intervals
Confidence intervals (only) provide a plausible range for population parameters. For instance, the population proportion would be within the range $(p_1, p_2)$ with 95% confidence level. That's if we take $N$ samples of the same sample size, 95% of the time the sample proportion would be within that range. Note that 95% is the confidence level. And the significance level, often denoted by $\alpha$, is the complement of the confidence level only when the hypothesis testing is two sided. That is $\text{confidence level} = 1 - \text{significance level}$ in that scenario. For the one sided hypothesis testing $\text{confidence level} = 1 - 2*\text{significance level}$. The area of the confidence interval is always symmetry.
The $\text{significance level} = P(\text{Type 1 error} | H_0 \text{true})$, and the type 1 error implies we reject the null hypothesis wrongly, then the bigger the significance level the more likely we would make a false rejection.
P-Values
We suppose that the null hypothesis is true and the p-value represents the probability the extreme(or more extreme) sample proportion is observed by chance: $P(\text{observed or more extreme sample statistic}|H_0 \text{true})$. The bigger the p-value the more likely the observed sample proportion is resulted by chance and the less we would reject the null hypothesis, but the rejection depends on the significance level we set beforehand. If the p-value is smaller than the significance level we would be confident enough that the observed sample proportion is not led by chance and we would reject the null hypothesis.


Ascension and descent

Question: Why is the opposite of 'ascension' still 'descent', and not 'descension'? (Reference. NB: fully aware the answer may be convention, as it is with many things in English.)
Comment: *Ascension* is not interchangeable with *ascent*; it has philosophical/religious/cosmological connotations, especially in Christianity.
Comment: The word *descension* does indeed exist, though it is less used than its disyllabic brother *descent.*
Comment: Could you perhaps give us an example of a sentence which includes the word 'ascension' which refers to anything other than Christ's ascension into heaven? I am struggling to think of one.
Comment: There is no reason. There is also no assumption of regularity with [derivational morphology](http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/Inflection.pdf), so there's no reason why the nominalizations of _ascend_ and _descend_ **should** be the same.
Comment: @WS2 _Ascension_ and _ascent_ are often used interchangeably in secular contexts. For example, a rise to stardom may be described as either.
Answer: The words ascension, ascent, descension, and descent all ultimately derive from the Latin root scandere "to climb," through different routes.
Ascension (c.1300) and descension (early 15c.) are both derived transparently from Latin ascensionem and descensionem, nouns of action formed from the past participles of ascendere and descendere.
Descent (c.1300) is filtered through Old French descente "descent, descendance, lineage"; ascent (c.1610) is derived from English ascend by analogy with descent/descend.
The words are close enough in meaning and etymology to mix and match them as synonyms and antonyms for most senses, although ascension has religious senses that ascent does not, and descent has genealogical senses that descension does not. Descension is less often paired with ascension simply because the word isn't much used in English at all.
Comment: Of course, why didn't I think? Monarchs ascend to the throne, our present Queen's ascension having been in 1952. But the opposite is not 'descension', it is death or abdication! 'Descension' is not in Oxford Dictionaries.
Comment: Very helpful! +1 for the Google ngram reference.
Comment: But I am still waiting for a sentence which contains the word ascension in a secular sense! How about: 'When I flew from Singapore to London recently, I was astonished that the Airbus A380, the world's largest (double-decker) airliner, powered by four Rolls Royce Trents, with over 600 passengers and enough fuel on board for a 13 hour flight, did the runway to 25,000 feet in under 9 minutes. That seemed to an engineeringly uneducated person like me,  a remarkable rate of ascension'?
Comment: I would use _ascent_ for that. Try this instead: "Fan are thrilled with Jennifer Lawrence's ascension to superstardom."

Ascension and descent


Nikon D3100 stuck on Auto Flash

Question: Whenever I turn my camera on it goes on Auto Flash unless it's in the no flash mode. The flash pops up automatically and when I close it and put it in a different mode it pops up again. I need to hit the supressor down a few times when it's closed to get it to go back to normal, but it doesn't work for long and goes back after a while. If I hold it down super tight it goes back to normal though. Is this a hardware error or is something loose? I just want to know any possible solutions and any explanations as to what might've brought about this mishap. And also I want to know the possible issues in the camera (like which parts may be broken; whether or not it's repairable). Thanks!
Comment: What mode is your camera in?
Answer: Is you camera on warranty? Have you bought your camera less than 2 years ago? If so, go to the shop where you bought it and explain the problem and ask for a repair.
When your camera is on auto mode (green icon) the flash will turn on automatically according to the light available. Close the flash and switch to A or S mode (rotating the mode dial). Does the flash pop-up too? Turn off the flash by pressing the flash button on the left side of your camera, next to the lens. Does the flash pop-up too?
If your flash pops up randomdly I would guess there's something wrong with your camera. Maybe your light meter is defective or the software that controls the flash maybe be bugged.
Answer: The camera has a built in light sensor. It will control the aperture, shutter speed and iso to produce the best quality pictures, it sometimes will select to use the flash depending on the light in the area you are taking the picture. I'll try to give you a easy explanation on controlling the manual mode.
In manual mode you gain the ability to control the iso (image sensor) aperture, and shutter speed. Iso is the area that actually turns the light collected into information to be stored on the card. (your picture) If you are in low light for instance, the sensor will need to be more sensitive to gather more light with a slower shutter speed. In brighter settings you want to make the sensor less sensitive and shutter speed faster. ISO lower numbers mean less sensitive vs higher being more sensitive. I personally use manual only when absolutely necessary. The camera is pretty smart! However in certain situations you need to control the system. Low light photography where you want a lot of shadowing like in artistic photography, sensual or romantic portrait photography, and long exposure are some examples. In brighter settings where the area is flooded with bright lights you need faster shutter and lower iso.
I hope this helps!
Comment: The original posting indicated that the camera is stuck on using flash always, unless you expressively forbid it. That would rather be a malfunction.

Nikon D3100 stuck on Auto Flash


How much time one should give to worhsipping /meditating upon god?

Question: According to Gita , Karma Yog and Bhakti Yog should be combinely pursued.
My question is how much time one should give to worshiping god or meditation upon god and devote rest of out time in Karma Yoga (doing worldy tasks).
Is there anywhere mentioned in scriptures like how much time ?
Comment: @Rāmachandra yes. Ab prabhu kripa karahu ehi bhaanti sab taji bhajan karaun din raati
Comment: All the time, if possible
Comment: @Adiyarkku All the time is quite hard(it becomes mechanical at times with no real bhakti bhava) so I don't think no of hours matter(for later stages of intense sadhana they do obvio), but what matters more is Quality and CONSISTENCY(from personal exp).No matter what the situation arises you HAVE to do fixed number of rounds, at a fixed time, at a fixed place as i think dedication and sincerity in bhakti is what causes rapid progress towards developing an intimate connection with the devata and attracts his grace faster....
Answer: Bhagavad Gita 6.3 answers this question.

For a sage, who is desirous of mounting upon the (Dhyana)Yoga, action(karma/bhakti yog) is said to be the cause; for the same [sage], when he has mounted upon the (Dhyana)Yoga, quietude is said to be the cause.. Swami Gambirananda

Upon culmination of karma/bhakti yoga , it is innate for a yogi to indulge exclusively in Bhagavad dhyana.So It is natural for a yogi to seek solitude, over the charms of worldly affairs ,for He is the one ,who has evolved ..
How much time does it take to achieve this state of mind may differ across  individual aspirants.
PS: Indulging in  any Karma with Ishwara(Bhagavad) arpana buddhi, is Karma yoga. Here the attitude with which any karma is done matters. Neither It is about allocation of time for Puja(Yet Puja Vidhi kala ,when should it be done eg. Pradosha kala etc..is according to shaastras as in another ans ) Nor Its about seeking peace/silence outside.Karma yoga is a matter of remaining calm inside amidst of swirl of activities, when will the karmayog culminate cannot be fitted in a time frame. It could be a janmantara(across janmas) endeavour.
Answer: The time you should devote is a personal preference - You should devote time according to your Gati and Mati. There are devatas which are required to be prayed only at a specific time and after/before a ritual. Like Suryanarayan Bhagwan must only be prayed early in the morning after a bath. As you have mentioned - Geeta, I will answer your question in Vaishnav Sampradaya context.
First of all, whichever deity you pray,

भक्ति शास्त्र सम्मत होनी चाहिए|

You should not bend to praying with your own methods, rather ask you pandits, brahman's, Pushti Marga sevaks, and Vaishya's. If you are chanting mantras, be precise in that because a mismatch in swar and uccharan will lead to real harm.
In Vaishnav sampradaya, it is mentioned in the Bhagwat Purana and Geeta that, you can chant Narayan Naam anywhere anytime, it will bring you good. It is to believed that Bhagwat Geeta is written after the Vedas, and it is actually saar of the Vedas. So if you are doing jap of Narayan naam, you can do that any time.
It may not be the answer to your question, but it's all that i know of.
Reference - Ajamil, and his son Narayana, in Bhagwat Purana.


Debian ESP Partition

Question: I am trying to install debain 9 and have a question about partitioning. I install Debian via uefi and use software RAID which distributes my root filesystem and swap partitions to my hard disks. However, I don't know if I have to create an efi partition or a biosgrub partition. As far as I know, the efi partition contains the biosgrub data. However, the Debian website says that it is not yet possible to distribute an efi partition with RAID on several disks. So do I have to create an efi partition on all 3 disks? And what if a hard disk fails, is one of the other 2 efi partitions used? And do I have to activate "boot flag" on the efi partitions?
Comment: AFAIK it's not solved yet indeed (I've implemented UEFI support in ALT Linux and we've got a corresponding bugreport as well); the manual scheme will require manual sync when your /boot/efi contents change (that's at least when grub gets updated); maybe consider a separate SATA DOM or even USB Flash for your /boot and RAIDing down everything else starting with root partition.
Answer: Do I have to create an efi partition on all 3 disks?
No, you can simply create the EFI partition on one of the disks.
However, this may impact how well RAID can utilize you hard disks because in some RAID configurations storage is allocated in equal amounts on each disk. In such a case, the amount of space utilized by the EFI partition will not be utilized in the other disks.
An alternative is to add a disk only for EFI, or for EFI and non-RAID partitions.
If a hard disk fails, is one of the other 2 EFI partitions used?
I don't know.
And do I have to activate "boot flag" on the EFI partitions?
No, the EFI partition is marked as such by the partition type ef00, not by the boot flag.
Comment: Erm, if partitioning is identical and it's Linux MD RAID I don't see any potential for performance impact. ...PS: ah, you meant the *different* partitioning indeed; well doing it symmetrical just makes sense anyways.
Comment: I don't see anything that would stop three distinct copies of grub sitting on three separate ESPs from working but that's not supported by distro kernel/grub update scripts anywhere AFAIK, maintaining those (with e.g. "debian1/debian2/debian3" NVRAM records) will take some manual labour.
Comment: Correct. I suspect having an ESP on each drive would *work* in the sense the system would boot, but I don't know of a distro which supports keeping multiple boot partitions up-to-date. One hack is to write a script which treats one of the ESPs as a *master* and uses `rsync` to keep the other ESP filesystems up to date. A systemd timer can be used to run the script, or it can be executed manually after each OS update. As for the NVRAM records, maybe something can be done with `efibootmgr`.

Debian ESP Partition


What is an alternative to InfoPath for XML editing?

Question: We are look at providing a method for our non-technical users to edit XML and pass it to our existing XML input functionality.  I remembered InfoPath saved its data as XML, and took another look at it.  It's great the way it allows you to define a form based on an XSD (XML Schema), and then allow the user to edit XML without knowing it is an XML file.  The resulting XML validates perfectly due to InfoPath's input constraints.
The one problem is that we cannot assume our user base will have MS InfoPath installed.
Is there another method of auto-generating a form that allows the user to edit XML easily?
Answer: You can host the form on to a Sharepoint. InfoPath Forms Services is a server technology built on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 as an ASP.NET version 2.0 application. It enables users to fill out Microsoft Office InfoPath 2007 forms by using a Web browser instead of, or in addition to, the Office InfoPath 2007 client program
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms540731.aspx
Ofcourse there are other way is to create custom form based on the XML in any technology and give out a form for the users
Answer: Altova, the guys behind XML Spy, have some kind of automatic input form generator for any given XML schema (and DTDs too iirc).
http://www.altova.com/
Answer: Two more suggestions (I don't know for what users/environment you are designing):

Use Word 2007 with Content Controls as form editor. The data entered into the Content Controls are stored in a separate XML file inside the DOCX document which is simply a zip archive.
Adobe Forms. Using Adobe Reader users can fill and submit PDF forms. Reader can submit  or save the data as XML (with a custom schema).

In contrast to InfoPath both of the above clients are widespread and familiar to many users, but of course your decision will depend on my other factors. So please take this only as two suggestions.
Answer: A very customizable way is to provide a WPF UI which databinds to the XML. It shouldn't take a lot of effort to come up with an XML designer in WPF.
Of course this assumes that you have the resources/people to do it.
Take a look at this sample if you are interested


Ethernet switch ic to SoM connection

Question: I need to develop a custom board that integrates both a system on module (e.g. raspberry CM4 or a jetson nano) and a network switch. I found some network switch IC from microchip (e.g. KSZ8795) that support a variable number of ports and the application notes / schematics of the eval boards shows how to make an independent network switch. Can I simply connect the pins of the SoM related to the ethernet direclty to one port of the network switch IC? Because usually they are connected to ethernet magnetics. If it is not possible how can I connect them together on the same PCB?
Answer: You can use capacitive coupling.  Take a look at Micrel Application Note 120, the exact circuit depends on which switch you are using, but typically look something like this:
Comment: It is not so sure if you can, because it depends. Capacitive coupling can be used only if both PHYs are compatible with it. I have used a a chip with a PHY which did support capacitive coupling, but the output driver mode had to be configured over the MDIO registers in a non-default mode to be able to support capacitive coupling. It wasn't directly selecting between current mode output or voltage mode output, but something along the lines how the output drivers drive the output. Some PHYs therefore are not guaranteed to support it.
Comment: Gathering info about the PHY that use my SoM is not easy. And it looks like that capacitive coupling depends by the PHY. To my understanding the best solution would be to wire the (R)MII pins of the SoM to the (R)MII pins of the ethernet switch (but unfortunately I can't). As a general solution (even if more expensive), what do you think about using two magnetics chip wired together on the same board? The connection would be:

SoM CPU -- SoM PHY --- magnetics 1 -- magnetics 2 -- ethernet switch
Comment: The CM4 uses a Broadcom BCM54210 PHY and data on this PHY is hard to come by.  Any solution (magnetic or capacitive) will be somewhat specific to the PHY on the SOM and the switch.  You will have to understand the biasing requirements for both and design accordingly.  Since you are looking at a 10/100 switch it shouldn't be too difficult to get something working.  Also - layout will be important, even at 100Mbps.

Ethernet switch ic to SoM connection


Could a long carbon nanotube be broken by hand?

Question: Assuming we could get a single nanotube a metre long, would it be possible to break it by hand or would it slice through just about everything including flesh and bone? Could we even grip it, or would we need an anchor at each end?
Comment: Single-walled? Double-walled? What kind of break are well talking about (e.g., compression, buckling, etc)? There's a few details missing, but it is an interesting question.
Comment: It takes on the order of micro-Newtons to break a nanotube. So even if I tied you up with one, you'd walk free completely unaware of it.
Comment: Maybe as I walked away the tube would slice me in half? How strong are skin and muscle cells compared to a nanotube?
Answer: Here's a quick and dirty approximation based on some values reported in Wikipedia:

Wikipedia lists the ultimate tensile strength of a carbon nanotube as 63,000 MPa, but in a footnote proposes a "theoretical limit of 300 GPa" for multi-walled nanotubes.
Wikipedia also mentions "most single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) have a diameter of close to 1 nanometer."

Generously assuming the 300 GPa tensile strength limit, a cable of nanotubes 2,000 nanometers wide (containing on the order of a few million individual nanotubes) would most likely snap under the weight of an apple (on Earth):

(300 GPa ) * pi * (1000 nm)^2 = 0.9425 N

For comparison, a human hair is roughly 100,000 nanometers wide.
Comment: True. But now work out what the weight of an apple applied to the surface area of that nanotube in your hand would do to you.
Comment: Mmmm but with that theoretical upper limit, the force required to break a cable the size of a human hair would be much greater than that of a human hair...of course that lower limit would make it much less
Answer: Let's assume a nanotube bundle with a breaking strain of about 1N and a circumference of 5 microns ie 5 x 10^-6m.
It is wrapped around a finger and in contact with the skin for around 0.02m. The area is pressure exerted over that surface is 10 million Newtons per square metre, which is 10 MPa or some 100 times atmospheric pressure.
I think nobody could break it with their hands because it would slice off all their fingers. Unless anyone cares to comment on the resistance of skin and bone to such pressures?
For reference the nanotube is comparable in radius to the edge of a very sharp razor blade. The difference is, the nanotube is "pure edge" with none of the wedge shape characteristics of a knife. When a knife cuts, a lot of the force needed is due to the fact the wedge shape has to push the side of the cut open as the blade goes deeper.
Comment: The problem with this analysis is that by assuming a value for breaking force as 1N, you do not appear to consider the material properties of the nanotube, such as tensile strength or yield stress, instead turning this into a purely geometrical analysis. Unless the 1N value has some significance with nanotubes?
Comment: True, it is a simplified argument, but as nobody else was giving me a reasonable analysis of the problem I decided to gave a go. BTW, the question is NOT "Does a Human have enough strength to break a carbon nanotube". It is whether trying would slice your fingers off. Over to you...


How to unpack 7-Zip.gz (.gz) with Python?

Question: I have a .tar.gz file which I want to unpack (when I unpack with 7-Zip manually, I am getting a .tar file inside). I am able to unpack this .tar file easily then with Python tarfile module then.
When I right-click the .tar.gz file in Windows Explorer, I can see under Type of file: 7-Zip.gz (.gz). I have tried using gzip module (gzip.open), however I am getting a an exception 'Not a gzipped file'. So there should be some other way to go.
I have searched the Internet and seen that people use 7-Zip manually or some batch commands, however I cannot find a way to do this in Python. I am on Python 2.7.
Comment: If it says it's not a gzipped file, it probably isn't.
Answer: The tarfile library is able to read gzipped tar files. You should look at the examples here:
http://docs.python.org/2/library/tarfile.html#examples
The first example might accomplish what you want. It extracts the content of the archive to the current working directory:
import tarfile
tar = tarfile.open("sample.tar.gz")
tar.extractall()
tar.close()

Answer: import os
import tarfile
import zipfile

def extract_file(path, to_directory='.'):
    if path.endswith('.zip'):
        opener, mode = zipfile.ZipFile, 'r'
    elif path.endswith('.tar.gz') or path.endswith('.tgz'):
        opener, mode = tarfile.open, 'r:gz'
    elif path.endswith('.tar.bz2') or path.endswith('.tbz'):
        opener, mode = tarfile.open, 'r:bz2'
    else:
        raise ValueError, "Could not extract `%s` as no appropriate extractor is found"     % path

    cwd = os.getcwd()
    os.chdir(to_directory)

    try:
        file = opener(path, mode)
        try: file.extractall()
        finally: file.close()
    finally:
        os.chdir(cwd)

Found this here:
http://code.activestate.com/recipes/576714-extract-a-compressed-file/
Answer: This is the example from the python-docs and should work:
import gzip
f = gzip.open('file.txt.gz', 'rb')
file_content = f.read()
f.close()


Update 15 digit record id to 18 digit record id

Question: How to update 15 digit record id to 18 digit record id, currently when i click on any account record in URL we can see 15 digit record id but as per my user requirement i need to show 18 digit instead of 15 digit.
is it possible?
Comment: You're not going to have an easy time modifying the url on a standard page if that is what you are after.
Answer: If you just need a one-off conversion, you can use a tool like this
https://www.adminbooster.com/tool/15to18
If you want it in real time and shown and/or accessible on the record itself, you can use the CASESAFEID() function within a formula field
You would want to create a formula field on the Account object of type Text, then the formula is just
CASESAFEID(Id)

Then you can see below how it gives you the 18 digit id rather than the 15 digit in the url.
Comment: and if you need it in the code  (String) Id.valueOf(inputId);


What place does Numerology have on this site?

Question: Should answers/analysis based on what I would call "hardcore numerology" be afforded respect in the context of the Biblical Hermeneutics site? Induction might find the repeated use of the number twelve within the scriptural texts etc. but seeing a link to the "7 Chakras" or other methods of assigning significance to numbers other than induction seem, in my humble opinion to be irrelevant to this site, but I'd like to hear it from someone with some say-so before I down vote such. Should such be down voted?
Answer: Numerology itself is neither sacred nor taboo here. It all comes down the fundamental requirement of the site: that you show your work.
It seems likely that the ancient writers were familiar with particular forms, and that they themselves saw significance in certain numbers. It's also possible that the text says there were four people at such-and-such event, because there were four people at that event, and that the text attaches no significance to this. The onus is on the individual answer to build the case that some kind of numerology is (or is not) in play in a particular text.
In the case of "hardcore" numerology that can't be deduced from either the scriptures themselves or other relevant texts/contexts - numerical connections made not by the author, but by the reader - the challenge will be in showing any kind of reproducible work. And answers that don't show their work tend to get flagged and deleted.
Answer: According to the Reader's Guide to Judaism, edited by Michael Terry.
Gematria is the 29th of the 32 hermeneutical rules countenanced by Rabbis for valid aggadic interpretation of the Torah.
>

Lieberman concludes that, given the employment of numerological techniques before and during the composition of the Hebrew Bible, it is entirely possible that gematria (as well as notarikon, the interpretation of selected words in the biblical text as if they were acronyms) was employed within the Bible itself, encoding hidden messages into the text that were to be discovered by employment of gematria or notarikon analysis (the at-bash code of the Book of Jeremiah being a case in point).

I would expect anyone that started inferring links to the Seven Chakras or any sort of fluff would be downvoted and deleted.
Personally I make a distinction between Gematria and Numerology.  The Wikipedia entry on numerology defines it as

any belief in the divine, mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events

and it's usually practiced by people that think their pareidolia is a type of proof for the existence of God.  Sometimes they imagine that the bible is relevant to the events in today's world (such as elections or disasters). By contrast, the scribal authors of the Tanakh on the whole appear to have used Gematria to record the measurement of rather mundane things; orbits of the planets or concerns of the calendar.
Anyway, I agree with Soldarnals answer but wanted to introduce some references here for clarity sake.


How to implement Intel MPI benchmarks for mpich2?

Question: Many people have recommended the use of Intel MPI benchmarks for mpich2, however the installation is not very simple. Could anyone provide steps for the installation and sample test case for it? Which other benchmarks can be used to test the performance?
Answer: You can use the Ohio MPI Benchmark - OMB Benchmark Homepage

Ohio MicroBenchmark suite is a collection of independent MPI message passing performance microbenchmarks.  It includes traditional benchmarks and performance measures such as latency, bandwidth and host overhead and can be used for both traditional and GPU-enhanced nodes.

(from http://mvapich.cse.ohio-state.edu/benchmarks/)
Answer: Thanks for the help everyone!
Actually we figured out that the problem was with the version(s) we were using. We were trying to run newer benchmark suits on older MPICH2 versions. Once an older Intel MPI Benchmark suite was used, it solved the problems.


What is the difference- be busy, being busy

Question: What is the difference between 'she is busy' and 'she is being busy' (is the second sentence correct?)
Comment: "is" active voice.  "is being" is passive.  The first one is a sentence by itself.  S/V/O. She is busy.  2nd, passive voice makes statement subordinate and requires more information to become a sentence; ie.,  She is being busy today buying flowers, having a haircut, and going to the movies.
Comment: @SteveB053: Curiously, although it's true that *syntactically* "is" is active voice and "is being" is passive, *semantically* it's effectively quite the opposite. In most contexts, *She is being busy* would barely be considered a "valid" construction anyway - but to the extent that it could ever be deliberately used by a competent native speaker, I suggest the only credible interpretation would be ***She is** [actively] **making herself** [appear to be] **busy**.*
Comment: Correct!  Stating "she is being busy"  ques the listener to expect there's something more coming...as what's coming next shifts attention away from the subject, like "She is being busy, as I told you, cleaning her room, putting her things away, and leaving for school in five minutes."  The subject [she] is subordinate, or at least placed equal, but the listener hears the  rest of the info as really more important.  Always a pleasure to read your posts.
Answer: The first sentence "she is busy" is natural and correct but can mean two different things:

She has a lot of jobs to do
She cannot see anyone (but might not be busy at all)

The second sentence is correct but reads, to me, as though she is making an act of being busy,  perhaps

she wants to avoid being talked to
she is trying to prove she is a busy person

In the second case, "she is being busy" could be taken as a facetious remark.
Answer: The answer in terms of grammar is that the first is present simple, and the second is present progressive. With an adjective as the object of to be, this would mean that "she is busy" is describing either her current state, or her habitual state, while "she is being busy" suggests that she is doing something that causes the adjective busy to apply.
However, the present progressive of to be, especially with an adjective, often requires some special handling. It depends on the adjective. After all, what can cause an adjective to apply? For example:

She is being naughty.

That means she is doing something that makes her naughty - or put another way, that she is doing something naughty.

She is being clever.

This again suggests doing something that indicates cleverness, but if you just wanted to say she was clever, you wouldn't say that. This suggests that she's doing something for the purpose of being or seeming clever. You'll hear this about children talking back to adults - if what they say is deliberately misinterpreting the adult's words, or pointing out a contradiction, or so on.

She is being funny.

This one is particularly complex. It might mean someone trying to be funny, even if they're failing. It might mean someone acting strangely, as that's another meaning of funny. It might just mean that they are being genuinely amusing, even if they don't mean to be.

She is being busy.

This one is also complex. It might mean she is making a show of being busy, but it might also be a tart response to the question "what is she doing?".
If you just want to say someone is busy, the safest bet is "she is busy".
Comment: Thank you! I really appreciate your answer!
Comment: I can't really go along with *it might also be a tart response to the question "what is she doing?"*. The only *possible* interpretation I can put on the unlikely construction ***She is being busy*** is the first one you gave. You correctly (and relevantly) identify the difference between ***She's clever*** and ***She's being clever*** - exactly the same *would* apply if people actually used this form with ***busy*** (but ordinarily they don't, which is why we would expect to consider the speaker's intentions very carefully if we actually *did* encounter it from a competent native speaker).
Comment: @FumbleFingers: Oh, I've actually come across it before. Roughly like "I'm afraid she can't see you at the moment." "Oh, really, what's she doing?" "Being busy!" A tart, non-answer answer.
Comment: But effectively that's *exactly* the same distinction that applies when people say ***She's being clever / funny / whatever*** (actively *trying* to be, or to appear to be, X).
Comment: No no, sorry for being unclear, I mean it's used to be snippy - like, "she's busy, and you're not entitled to any more detail than that"


Why does my freshly-formatted disk have 450 MB of data on it?

Question: The answer is probably obvious, but I'm sure enquiring minds want to know: if I erase a disk and reformat it, what's already taking up almost half a gigabyte of space? In this case, it's formatted HFS+ journaled on Mac OS X.
Comment: @houbysoft Disk Utility tells you in the status bar at the bottom, and it's right after formatting.
Comment: How did you determine the initial capacity, and from what do you conclude there is 450 MB of data on it?
Answer: You don't say what make and model disk, how you arrived at it's expected capacity or how you measured actual available capacity - so it could be some or all (or none) of the following:

Disk vendors state sizes in powers of 1000,
Operating systems report sizes in powers of 1024 (recent OSX doesn't)

Filesystems reserve space for Filesystem structures like inode tables.
Journalled filesystems reserve space for Journals.

Some disks have special partitions on them, e.g. for recovery (apparently OSX doesn't)

low-level formatting involves writing data to the disk to mark out sectors, this uses some of the notional capacity of the disk. (or maybe not)

Disks can contain bad sectors that the drive electronics mark as such.
(perhaps not an issue)

450 MB is a lot to explain away on a 1 GB disk, but not so problematic on a 2 TB disk.

There's a discussion on macworld that says

man newfs_hfs
-J [journal-size]
Creates a journaled HFS+ volume. The default journal size is
8MB. Appending an 'M' to the journal size implies megabytes
(i.e. 64M is 64 megabytes). The maximum journal size is 512
megabytes.

and

HFS Plus uses a number of interrelated structures to manage the organization of data on the volume. These structures include:
the volume header
the catalog file
the extents overflow file
the attributes file
the allocation file (bitmap)
the startup file

Apple have published some details of HFS+ I'm pretty sure that if you start to read this, before you reach the end you'll stop worrying about that "missing" 450 MB.

I liked the bit where it discussed a "Metadata Zone" which is only used for metadata (obviously) and "hot files". Obviously less space for all your boring files. Presumably OSX tools that report "free disk space" include free space in the Metadata Zone in the total reported free space?
Comment: Mac OS X reports sizes in powers of 1000. A newly formatted HFS+ disk would not have a recovery partition. Not sure what your last point means. It's most likely to do with your second point although it would be great to include details specific to the [HFS+ filesystem](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HFS_Plus).
Comment: I've also noticed it on new disks, and even on the virtual disks that are provided by my Drobo. Kill options 1, 3, 4, and 5 and I think you're good.
Comment: @fideli: OS X v10.6 reports sizes in powers of 1000; earlier versions used powers of 1024 (meaning your disk appears to get bigger when you upgrade to 10.6!)
Comment: Assuming you lot know what you are talking about, I have updated my answer accordingly. I feel like a man who brought five crates of beer to a party and had four of them dumped in the trash can - oh well.
Answer: You can use diskutil to check the size of the Journal. On a 60 GB partition I just erased, it was about 8 MB:
MacPro:~ mdouma46$ diskutil info disk4s6
   Device Identifier:        disk4s6
   Device Node:              /dev/disk4s6
   Part Of Whole:            disk4

   File System:              Journaled HFS+
   Type:                     hfs
   Name:                     Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
   Journal:                  Journal size 8192 KB at offset 0x1c2000
   Owners:                   Enabled

   Total Size:               60.0 GB (60000002048 Bytes) (exactly 117187504 512-Byte-Blocks)
   Volume Free Space:        59.8 GB (59843522560 Bytes) (exactly 116881880 512-Byte-Blocks)

Using DiskWarrior (a fantastic app, btw), after clicking to Rebuild that volume and looking in Console.app, I could see it report the following:
DiskWarrior App: disk4s6 Extents, Catalog and Attributes tree sizes total 139 MB.
So it appears that the "missing space" consists primarily of the disk directory itself (these are the "files" shown in the image above in RedGrittyBrick's post).