What are some examples of narrowly missed discoveries in the history of mathematics?

Question: What are the examples of some mathematicians coming very close to a very promising theory or a correct proof of a big conjecture but not making or missing the last step?
Comment: Shizhuo- The original title of this post was so unhelpful, I went in and changed it myself (if you don't like what I chose, of course, you're free to change it to something else).  When choosing a title, imagine yourself in the position of someone reading on the first page.  If you read "Can you tell the similar phenomenon in the history of mathematics?" would you have any clue as to what the question was about other than something about the history of mathematics?
Comment: The Riemann hypothesis, when it's solved, will probably show that several people nearly missed proving it.
Comment: With Ben's title change, I at least now understand what the question intends to ask.  But the actual question in the text I still don't understand.  Maybe since this is CW I should just change it, but I can't think of a way to make it a significantly better question.
Comment: I've removed the "motivational" part of the question, since it doesn't seem particularly helpful or correspond with the answers already given.
Comment: ... or perhaps it will show that nobody else was even close.  Evidence: that was what happened with Deligne for the function field case.
Answer: Freeman Dyson discusses a few examples of this in his article Missed Opportunities.  One that I thought was particularly striking was that mathematicians could have discovered special relativity decades before Einstein just by staring at Maxwell's equations hard enough, and also on the basis that the representation theory of the Poincare group is simpler than the representation theory of the Galilean group.
Comment: Did he lift those results, or rediscover them independently?  They're not obvious but not that deep either.
Comment: I always thought that Poincare *did* discover special relativity years before Einstein. His discovery just wasn't noticed our understood well enough.
Comment: My understanding is that Lorentz did not understand the point of the formal time parameter he introduced.  He regarded it as a computational convenience, whereas Einstein's contribution was to think of it as "real" time.
Comment: And let's not forget Minkowski in connection with special relativity. As for representation theory of the Poincare and Galilean group, that's wishful thinking in the extreme: the conceptual development of representation theory to the point that we can compare them took a lot of highly nontrivial effort, even if we tend to forget it nowadays.
Comment: Yes, but the point is that Einstein basically had no mathematical work left to do, but he did not cite any of the results that he basically lifted from Lorentz and Poincaré.
Comment: Late to the party, but I believe Lorentz's equations were developed by Lorentz in a slightly different context than Einstein, and ended up not quite being correct despite being the correct transform equations of SR (more than just the time thing Yuan cites above).  So even if Einstein had known about them, he may not've needed to cite them since they were neither correct nor were they doing the same thing as what he was doing.  And regarding what Victor commented, this is why there was a *lot* of mathematical work to do after Einstein in this area.
Comment: Poincare published in 1905, just like Einstein.
Comment: Yes, there is an ongoing dispute over whether or not Einstein really deserves priority on that one.  Lorentz published the Lorentz equations years before Einstein published the SRT.
Comment: Lorentz derived the first (and maybe the second) order derivation of special relativity, I think Einstein derived the transformation to all orders.
Comment: Actually, you don't even need Maxwell's equations. Using only the principle of relativity you can deduce the form of the Lorentz transformation with some unknown parameter c with units of speed. The Galilean transformation has $c=\infty$, the Lorentz transformation has c = 3*10^8 m/s.
Answer: In the book The Scientists by John Gribbin, he mentions that, in his search for the theory of general relativity, Einstein apparently wrote down a correct equation that would have led him to correctly discovering the rest of the equations for general relativity very quickly.  But, he did not see the equation for what it was and ran down the wrong path for two entire years before coming back to the correct equation.  Here's the quote from the book:
"Einstein himself is often presented as the prime example of someone who did great things alone, without the need for a community. This myth was fostered, perhaps even deliberately, by those who have conspired to shape our memory of him. Many of us were told a story of a man who invented general relativity out of his own head, as an act of pure individual creation, serene in his contemplation of the absolute as the First World War raged around him.
It is a wonderful story, and it has inspired generations of us to wander with unkempt hair and no socks around shrines like Princeton and Cambridge, imagining that if we focus our thoughts on the right question we could be the next great scientific icon. But this is far from what happened. Recently my partner and I were lucky enough to be shown pages from the actual notebook in which Einstein invented general relativity, while it was being prepared for publication by a group of historians working in Berlin. As working physicists it was clear to us right away what was happening: the man was confused and lost - very lost. But he was also a very good physicist (though not, of course, in the sense of the mythical saint who could perceive truth directly). In that notebook we could see a very good physicist exercising the same skills and strategies, the mastery of which made Richard Feynman such a great physicist. Einstein knew what to do when he was lost: open his notebook and attempt some calculation that might shed some light on the problem.
So we turned the pages with anticipation. But still he gets nowhere. What does a good physicist do then? He talks with his friends. All of a sudden a name is scrawled on the page: 'Grossman!!!' It seems that his friend has told Einstein about something called the curvature tensor. This is the mathematical structure that Einstein had been seeking, and is now understood to be the key to relativity theory.
Actually I was rather pleased to see that Einstein had not been able to invent the curvature tensor on his own. Some of the books from which I had learned relativity had seemed to imply that any competent student should be able to derive the curvature tensor given the principles Einstein was working with. At the time I had had my doubts, and it was reassuring to see that the only person who had ever actually faced the problem without being able to look up the answer had not been able to solve it. Einstein had to ask a friend who knew the right mathematics.
The textbooks go on to say that once one understand the curvature tensor, one is very close to Einstein's theory of gravity. The questions Einstein is asking should lead him to invent the theory in half a page. There are only two steps to take, and one can see from this notebook that Einstein has all the ingredients. But could he do it? Apparently not. He starts out promisingly, then he makes a mistake. To explain why his mistake is not a mistake he invents a very clever argument. With falling hearts, we, reading the notebook, recognize his argument as one that was held up to us as an example of how not to think about the problem. As good students of the subject we know that the agument being used by Einstein is not only wrong but absurd, but no one told us it was Einstein himself who invented it. By the end of the notebook he has convinced himself of the truth of a theory that we, with more experience of this kind of stuff than he or anyone could have had at the time, can see is not even mathematically consistent. Still, he convinced himself and several others of its promise, and for the next two years they pursued this wrong theory. Actually the right equation was written down, almost accidentally, on one page of the notebook we looked at it. But Einstein failed to recognize it for what it was, and only after following a false trail for two years did he find his way back to it. When he did, it was questions his good friends asked him that finally made him see where he had gone wrong."
Comment: This is very interesting but not really a near miss. You explain that general relativity is in fact a near near-miss.
Comment: This is the same John Gribbin who wrote The Jupiter Effect? See also http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1977/12/08/only-joking/
Answer: Emil L. Post was very close to proving Gödel's incompleteness theorem,
and the existence of algorithmically unsolvable problems in the early
1920s. He realized that one could enumerate all algorithms, and hence
obtain an unsolvable problem by diagonalization. Moreover, the "problem"
can be viewed as a computable list of questions $Q_1,Q_2,Q_3,\ldots$
for which the sequence of answers (yes or no) is not computable. It
follows that there cannot be any complete  formal system that proves all
true sentences of the form "The answer to $Q_i$ is yes" or "The
answer to $Q_i$ is no," because this would solve the unsolvable problem.
But then Post was stuck because he needed to formalize the notion of
computation. He had in fact (an equivalent of) the right definition,
but logicians were not ready for a definition of computation, and did
not believe there was such a thing until the Turing machine concept came
along in 1936. Gödel avoided this problem when he proved his theorem
(1930) by proving incompleteness of a particular system (Principia
Mathematica).
Comment: Von Neumann certainly would have been frustrated to have missed
Gödel's *second* incompleteness theorem -- the one about the unprovability of consistency. He pointed it out to Gödel in a letter before Gödel had published it, but Gödel still got full credit for the theorem.
Comment: I've had a conversation with John Conway in which he mentioned that von Neumann was very frustrated that he missed Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
Comment: Church's $\lambda$-calculus is essentially simultaneous to Turing's machines, though, IIRC?
Comment: Yes, it is, and of course it is "Church's thesis" that lambda-calculus
captures the concept of computability. However, logicians weren't
convinced that the concept of computability *was* formalizable until
the Turing machine arrived and Gödel threw his weight behind it.
Answer: In their attempts of justifying Euclid's fifth postulate, Girolamo Saccheri and Johann Heinrich Lambert proved many theorems of non-Euclidean geometry. However, they were so convinced that the fifth postulate must be true that they stopped short of actually discovering the new geometry.
Answer: Archimedes and the Integral calculus?
Comment: To Franz Lemmermeyer: you know, I'm not really sure Newton and Leibniz knew what functions are either.
Comment: Here is what David Mumford says about a proposition of Archimedes (cf. EMS Newsletter, Dec 08):

"...he [Archimedes] is evaluating a Riemann sum of $\int_0^\theta\sin(\phi)d\phi$, /.../ No historian will convince me that his idea is not that same of mine when looking at this mathematical proposition."

It seems that Archimedes did indeed discover some of the basic ideas of calculus, expressed in a geometric language.
Comment: I'm not a historian, but I'm pretty sure that both derivatives and integrals were studied in some form before Newton and Leibniz.  Their accomplishments were 1. discovering the fundamental theorem of calculus, and 2. giving a systematic treatment of derivatives and integrals.
Comment: How can you almost discover calculus without knowing what a function is?
Comment: Newton and Leibniz at least had examples of functions, and they knew what a variable was. Archimedes did not.
Comment: @Franz Yeah,RIGHT?My question exactly! Archimedes almost discovering integration is like saying Newton almost discovered general relativity except for some erronous base assumptions and the absence of multilinear algebra.
Comment: And Apollonius, as well.
Answer: Fulkerson came extremely close to a proof of the Perfect Graph Conjecture eventually proved by Lovasz. He was stuck on one relatively easy lemma, which he had apparently become convinced was false.
I don't know a reliable source for this, but I have heard that after learning that the conjecture was proven, Fulkerson went to his office and finished his own proof later that day.
Answer: One of the important conjectures in set theory in the 60s was that strongly inaccessible cardinals are measurable. This was disproved by Tarski in 1960. Soon after this Erdős and Hajnal realized that they were very close to Tarski's result in their paper "On the structure of set mappings" which appeared in 1958.
Another miss was in the paper of Erdős, Hajnal, and Milner ("On sets of almost disjoint subsets of a set") from 1968 where they went pretty close to discovering Silver's famous theorem on GCH at singular cardinals of uncountable cofinality.
Answer: A famous example is that John Conway, who fathered the concept of a Skein relation, didn't discover the Jones (or HOMFLYPT) polynomials. By just searching for knot invariants defined via Skein relations, he would doubtlessly have found them, and the history of low-dimensional topology would have looked quite different.
Answer: As mentioned in Categories for the Working Mathematician, Bourbaki nearly had the right definition of an adjunction 10-15 years before the proper definition was formulated by Dan Kan.  In fact, Bourbaki actually proved the Special Adjoint functor theorem (cf. Categories for the Working Mathematician - notes at the end of the chapter on Adjunctions)
Edit: To explain a little more (from Mac Lane), Bourbaki had figured out most of these notions, but since they had not formulated the general adjoint functor theorem, only the special adjoint functor theorem, they restricted their definition of a "universal construction" to those adjunctions for which the SAFT holds.  I find it pretty impressive that they were able to do all of this without the benefit of a formal framework for category theory.
Comment: A useful piece of information with regards to contacting him is that Serre is *not* dead.
Comment: It was most likely Pierre Samuel, who had a definition of universal construction in a 1948 paper, "On Universal Mappings and Free Topological Groups": https://projecteuclid.org/euclid.bams/1183512049
Comment: Rune-  The Bourbakistes.
Comment: @fpqc:  Thank you for your suggestion. It seems that such editing requires deleting half of the post, and I feel uncomfortable to make such a massive change. I also have some ideas of what should be added: The fact that Bourbaki was looking for something *too* general, and the final verdict given by Mac Lane: "good general theory does not search for the maximum generality, but for the right generality." I think that it would not be appropriate for someone other than the OP to make such a large change in the answer.  [Just to put things in context, I really like your answer and I have +1'ed it]
Comment: Bourbaki is not an actual person. Who exactly had the right definition before the proper definition was formulated?
Comment: @fpqc, just a little correction:  Looking at the notes at the end of the section on limits in Mac Lane, I see that Bourbaki formulated some sort of solution set for the construction of universal arrows (http://books.google.co.il/books?id=eBvhyc4z8HQC&lpg=PP1&ots=5P-0uYKfZe&dq=categories%20for%20the%20working&pg=PA136#v=onepage&q=&f=false).  At least in Mac Lane (p. 130), SAFT does not include a solution set condition (as opposed to the AFT).  Also, I think that there is no reference to the AFT/SAFT in the notes at the end of the section on adjunctions (pp. 107--108).
Comment: Bourbaki published it as a group.  Since everyone involved is now dead, I think it would be difficult to find the actual answer here.
Comment: Although someone like Serre might know, if you could get into contact with him.
Comment: ... reference to pp. 107--108 of Mac Lane from Google books (this didn't fit into the previous comment): http://books.google.co.il/books?id=eBvhyc4z8HQC&lpg=PP1&ots=5P-0uYKfZe&dq=categories%20for%20the%20working&pg=PA108#v=onepage&q=&f=false
Comment: @Mariano: They formulated this before Serre joined the team, is what I meant.  @unknown: Thanks for the correction.  If you want, you should fix the post, as it is community wiki.
Comment: @Unknown: I'd rather leave moral judgements to the reader, especially since I disagree with Mac Lane (his assessment of Bourbaki, not his statement about useless generality).
Answer: Leibniz was extremely close to 'discovering' modal logic.  He definitely understood the difference between intension and extension, and knew about valuations as functions from possible worlds.  And I don't mean that one can "extract" this from his writings by reading hard between the lines -- it is quite explicit, and in many manuscripts.  He did not, of course, have the formal tools in hand needed to formalize these ideas, but then again no one did until the work of Frege after 1880 and Russell after 1900.  That's a 200 year gap!
Comment: And determinants, too! (Found in his manuscripts and published in the 19th century.)
Answer: Schubert came extremely close to discovering the JSJ-decomposition of 3-manifolds in his paper "Knoten und Vollringe" (1953).  With a little more work, one could turn Schubert's paper into something equivalent to the JSJ-decomposition applied to knot and link complements in $S^3$.  That would have allowed people to conjecture the JSJ-decomposition for 3-manifolds, around 20 years earlier than it was.
It's interesting to speculate whether or not the connection between 3-manifold theory and hyperbolic geometry would have been made much earlier, as some of the ingredients were already in place -- Seifert-Weber space, and the Gieseking manifold, but I do not think people knew finite-volume hyperbolic manifolds to be atoroidal until much later.
Comment: A decade after Schubert, Waldhausen also came close to the JSJ decomposition, in his work on graph manifolds for example.  It almost seems as if Seifert back in the 1930s could have discovered the JSJ decomposition.
Answer: The history of good models for spectra might be an example of missed discoveries. To briefly sketch this history: Spectra (in the sense of topology) were introced by Lima in a dissertation under the direction of George Whitehead in 1958; in the year 1964, Boardman gave a definition of the (homotopy) category of spectra and he also defined the smash product of spectra. But in his language, one could only formalize ring spectra up to homotopy.
Peter May gave in his 1977 book $E_\infty$-ring spaces and $E_\infty$-ring spectra the first definition of an $E_\infty$-ring spectrum, i.e. a ring spectrum whose multiplication is associate and commutative in a homotopy coherent way. It was only in the 90s that people found models of spectra, where one can define $E_\infty$-ring spectra just as commutative monoids in a suitable category of spectra: Elmendorf, Kriz, Mandell and May came first with their $S$-modules and shortly after Jeff Smith defined symmetric spectra; shortly after that, Mandell, May, Schwede and Shipley defined the closely related model of orthogonal spectra. Compared to $S$-modules and the earlier formalizations of $E_\infty$-ring spectra, symmetric and orthogonal spectra are rather easy to define and produce a theory that is much easier to digest than the older ones.
The interesting thing is: Peter May already defined commutative orthogonal spectra in his 1977 book under the name $\mathcal{J}_*$-prefunctors. He did not realize at this point though that they are the commutative monoids in a symmetric monoidal category of orthogonal spectra (and that this category has a homotopy theory that is equivalent to that of spectra) - reasons might be that the Day convolution product wasn't really known then to topologists and also that the language of model categories wasn't widespread. It seems that May viewed these $\mathcal{J}_*$-prefunctors only as a convenient technical input to construct examples of spectra in his language.
In the 80s, Gunnarson (1982) and Bökstedt (1985) considered symmetric ring spectra without calling them this way or again without realizing fully their significance.
Schwede's unfinished book project has history sections, which give more information about this. It is certainly fair to say that the history of stable homotopy theory and algebraic K-theory would have been less convoluted if people had found symmetric or orthogonal spectra earlier -- but this history should also highlight that realizing that these definitions were so significant, was a highly non-trivial insight by Jeff Smith.
Answer: In The Sand Reckoner, Archimedes comes extremely close to discovering (inventing?) both the positional number system and some form of scientific notation: he uses the geometric sequence of powers of $10$ to express very large numbers and formulates and proves the fact that $10^m \times 10^n = 10^{m+n}$ (except that since he counts from $1$, it's a bit more messy).
Answer: Issac Barrow very nearly had the fundamental theorem of calculus a generation before Newton and Leibniz, but he failed to see the relationship between the quadrature problem and the fluxion problem, despite making huge contributions to the development of the theory of limits in both.
Comment: In some sense, already Oresme "knew" that $\int_a^b f'(x) = f(b)-f(a)$ - see e.g. here: http://www2.clarku.edu/~djoyce/ma121/ftc.pdf
Answer: One example of a missed opportunity, in my opinion, is the Aleksandrov-Zeeman theorem, which states (in one of its different forms) that any bijection of $d$-dimensional Minkowski space-time onto itself ($d>2$) which sends light ray segments into light ray segments (= Einstein's postulate of constancy of the speed of light in Special Relativity) is the composite of one or more of the following:

A space-time translation;
A spatial rotation;
A scale transformation;
A time reflection;
A space reflection;
And a Lorentz boost.

Particularly, this singles out Lorentz boosts as the only transformation law between inertial space-time frames obeying Einstein's postulate. Einstein did show that Lorentz boosts satisfy the latter, but he did not prove whether Lorentz boosts are unique in the above sense, neither did any of his predecessors (Lorentz, Poincaré). Surprisingly, the answer came only about half a century later, through the work of A.D. Aleksandrov in the 50's (assuming the bijection acts linearly) and independently by E.C. Zeeman in 1964 (Causality Implies the Lorentz Group, J. Math. Phys. 5 (1964) 490-493). Aleksandrov dropped the hypothesis of linearity from his argument in 1967 (A Contribution to Chronogeometry, Canad. J. Math. 19 (1967) 1119-1128).
Aleksandrov's proof was topological, based on the concept nowadays called "Alexandrov topology", which is just the order topology derived from the chronology relation in Minkowski space-time. Zeeman's proof, however, was fairly elementary and classical, relying only on bits of analytic geometry. Both the theorem and Zeeman's proof were perfectly within the grasp of the likes of Felix Klein at the time Einstein's work was published, and perfectly within the spirit of Klein's Erlanger Programm as he noticed himself by dismissing special relativity as a simple special case of his programme and calling it the "invariant theory of the Lorentz group" in his address Über die geometrischen Grundlagen der Lorentzgruppe (Jahresbericht der Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung Bd. 19 (1910), pages 533-552 of his collected works). This indicates that he could have proven Zeeman's theorem at least as early as 1910, if only he had the interest.
Answer: In his final scientific work, the Two New Sciences, Galileo almost discovered Cantor's theory of infinite cardinalities ...
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo%27s_paradox
Comment: I fundamentally disagree with this statement. It's like claiming that Jules Verne almost put a man on the moon.
Comment: Perhaps you would prefer the wording that I use when I teach a first course in set theory?

"In his final scientific work, the Two New Sciences, Galileo blew his chance of becoming a famous set theorist."
Comment: Cantor not only discovered and rigorously defined the idea of equinumerosity of infinite sets, he also gave an  explicit example of two infinite set of distinct cardinalities.  I do not see anything like that in Galileo's argument.
Answer: When I took a course in set theory, I was told that in the early 1920's, Thoralf Skolem essentially proved what is now Gödel's Completeness Theorem, but was unaware of its significance because the concept of completeness was not understood fully at the time.
Comment: Ketil Tveiten:  I don't think they're equivalent.  Compactness theorem can be stated and proved in a simple way without defining a formal proof system at all.  In that case, the theorem claims that if any finite subset of a set of formulas has a model satisfying it, then there's a model satisfying the whole set.
Comment: See the discussion in http://mathoverflow.net/questions/9309/in-model-theory-does-compactness-easily-imply-completeness
Comment: I might be wrong but I thought that what he proved was the compactness theorem.
Comment: I think you are right. They are equivalent, though.
Comment: They are deducible from eachother. That usually means they are equivalent, no?


Can you renew a domain through a different company?

Question: I have a .com domain that is expiring soon (in about a week). Can I renew my domain through a different company or is it stuck with my current registrar?
Comment: What type of domain is it? .com/.net/.org? A country domain? The rules will differ.
Comment: Didn't know that, updated.
Answer: You can indeed renew a .com domain (and many others) through another registrar - it's basically just a normal transfer process.
Providing your domain name is not locked, you can transfer it to a new registrar now and pay for an additional year of registration at the same time (which you have to do when you transfer anyway).
Because transfers can take a couple of days to process though, if I were you I'd do this ASAP so your domain doesn't end up expiring in the process.
If your domain is locked at your current registrar, you'll need to unlock it by logging in to your registrar's control panel. You can also grab your authorization key (sometimes called an EPP key) at the same time, because you'll need that to initiate the transfer. While you're there also double check your registrant e-mail address is up-to-date, because you'll need to approve the transfer through there as well.
Checking each of these above items will ensure the transfer proceeds smoothly and in time. Once you've done this, initiate the transfer and renewal through your new registrar.
Comment: This is not the answer he was looking for.. he asked if he can renew with somebody else without transferring is page..
Comment: @Alain That's not what was asked, but you're welcome to add another answer if you have additional info that could help anyone coming across this!


When does a point count as a winner and when as unforced error?

Question: The tennis statistics at the end of a set always show the number of winners and unforced errors of the players. But when does a point count as a winner and when as unforced error?
Answer: Winner - a shot hit by a player so the ball jumps more than once on the opponent side without the opponent being able to even touch the ball.
Example
Unforced error - a mistake made by the player from quite an easy shot hitted by from the opponent for example hitting the ball wrong, lack of precision or improper position.
Number of unforced errors usually counted for statistics and indicate the level of each player's game.
Example
Comment: This answer is incomplete:  while winners are pretty much unambiguous, unforced errors (vs. forced errors) are subjective, and depend on the judgement of the scorer.
Answer: (quick addition to Dor Cohen's great explaination)/ people checking this question might be interested in:
Sometimes you will see forced error statistics, which are generally calculated when an opponent hits a great shot which is very difficult to get back, and the person returning the ball misses.


How did the Shiite Hadith sources originate? What are the authentic sources of Hadith? (Shia view)

Question: Shiites have their distinct sources of hadith. My questions are:

How did they develop and by whom?
What is their authenticity?
Answer: Let's start with the history of Shia sources...
Actually compilation of hadith among the Shiah started during the life of the Prophet (PBUH).And The texts which were compiled by the early Shiah scholars were called  "Usul".
Most of the authors of these book were those who had heard the ahadith from one of the Imams, in particular, from Imam Muhammad al-Baqir and Imam Ja`far al-Sadiq (A) or someone who heard from someone who had heard the Imam.
These texts compiled from the era of Ali (A.S.) to the time of Imam Hasan al-`Askari (A.S.) (the eleventh Imam).
And the popular ones have four-hundred hadith by different authors without any classification. And most of these traditions exist in the al-Mahasin al-Barqi, al-Kafi,  Man la Yahduruhu al-faqih.
Some of them are found in  Tahdhib.

Most of these notebooks existed in the Shahpur Karkh Library of
  Baghdad and were lost when Tughrul the Turk burnt the city on
  conquering it in the year 448/1056. Others which escaped this
  calamity, and other disasters, were preserved until the time of  Ibn
  Idris and  Ibn Ta'wus
  and were available to them. Some, more than two-hundred of them, have
  survived to our own times. These notebooks usually go with the prefix
  "kitab" and often "nawadir".
Thirteen of them exist in the library of the Tehran University in the
  manuscript file number 962. Twelve of them are "kitab" and one is
  "nawadir". These are:

Kitab Zayd al-Zad;
Kitab Ghasfari;
Kitab ibn Hamid al-Hannat;
Kitab Zayd al-Nirsi;
Kitab Ja`far al-Hadrami;
Kitab Muhammad al-Hadrami;
Kitab `Abd al-Malik ibn Hakim;
Kitab Muthanna ibn Walid al-Hannat;
Kitab Haddad al-Sindi;
Kitab Husayn ibn `Uthman;
Kitab Kahili;
Kitab Salam Khurasani;
Nawadir Abi al-Hasan `Ali ibn Asbat ibn Salim.

Later, Shiah scholars of hadith compiled four great collections from that notebooks or Usul book which became the most important texts of hadith in the Shiah world. These four books are:

Al-Kafi: It was compiled by  Shaykh
  Abu Ja`far Muhammad ibn Yaqub al-Kulayni al-Razi (died 329/940)
  which contains 16,099 musnad (documented) hadith narrated from the Ahl
  al-Bayt (the Household of the Prophet).
Man la
  yahduruhu al-faqih: It was compiled by  Shaykh Saduq Abu
  Ja`far Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Babwayhi al-Qummi(died 381/991) who is
  known as "Shaykh-i Ajal" or "Saduq al-Ta'ifah". This book contains
  9,044 hadith.
Al-Tahdhib:
  It was compiled by Abu Ja`far Muhammad
  ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi (died 460/1068) also known as "Shaykh
  al-Ta'ifah" (The chief of the sect). This book contains 13,590 hadith.
Al-Istibsar: This
  book was also compiled by  Abu Ja`far Muhammad
  ibn al-Hasan al-Tusi, and contains 5,511 hadith. The book is
  divided into four parts.

Reference:
al-islam
Comment: @infatuated But I answered it...It 's clear in the text(chain of Ahadith).
Comment: Thank you beautiful mind. But please note that you didn't answer the question of authenticity.
Answer: In general Shia scholars do not maintain, that all hadith in their major books are authentic, unlike Sunni scholars, who claim that all hadith in their Sahih books are authentic.
When it comes to the authenticity of hadith, each and every hadith is scrutinised, as Shia school of thought accepts only trustworthy narrators. All narrators, in a chain of narrators, must be known as honest and trustworthy people.
Second criteria is, that hadith must not contradict the Holy Qur'an. If an hadith states something, which is mentioned in the holy book in an opposite meaning, then this hadith is classified as being not authentic.


Asimov's short story about a little boy who finds a pistol with an AI. The AI enjoys being fired and teaches/convinces the boy to kill someone

Question: Could be from an old issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. 80s to early 90s.
Comment: The years don't match but based on limited description Rocket Boy could still be potential match. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/113549/
Comment: @Cheeseburger is "Asimov's short story" a short story by Asimov or in Asimov's?
Answer: There's a recent story (2008) which won a hugo, "The Ray-Gun: A Love Story", about a sentient raygun found by a kid.

The story is about an unpopular teenage boy who finds an alien ray gun
  in the forest. Although he does not do much with the gun contemplating
  its design or use, and handling the ray-gun when alone, gives his life
  more direction and purpose. The story has some elements of "coming of
  age" stories in that it follows an adolescent becoming an adult, PhD
  student, and ultimately finding love. The ray-gun played a role in the
  direction of his life in all these things. However, in the end the
  ray-gun itself is abandoned as too dangerous or no longer needed.


Mail app issue with gmail

Question: I have a very frustrating issue with mail app. I am using the mail app for my gmail email address.
The issue is that, when I am writing a new message and would like to save a draft, the app creates a NEW draft for each time I press cmd+S to save the draft state. So, by the time I finish writing the email, I can see 20+ new drafts all sourced from the single message.
I experience this only with mail app. I used another apps, and all did not have this issue.
I am running osx yosemite.
Answer: Don't save drafts !!!
Drafts are auto saved by OS.

Mail app issue with gmail


What is the login username and password for VNC access

Question: I want to use OpenStack VNC console for my instance. The console asks the login credentials in to start. What is normally user name and password for the instance.
Note: I did not give any password when when I created the instance.
Answer: The default users on our Linux instances are not preconfigured with a password. Until a password is set you will not be able to login to your instance via the VNC console. We recommend setting up a password for the default user, or a new user with login access as part of the initial instance configuration process.
Answer: For the first time login it is recommended that you generate a key-pair (In ubuntu, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SSH/OpenSSH/Keys) and inject into the image (http://docs.openstack.org/grizzly/basic-install/yum/content/basic-install_operate.html) and do SSH to the instance using the key-pair.
Once you are logged in, you can create a user and using this user you can login through VNC console.


Particle coupling predictions of the Standard Model

Question: It's widely noted that the Standard Model does not predict the existence of flavor or the three lepton families:  We put those facts into the Lagrangian "by hand" for agreement with observations, not due to any a priori requirement of Quantum Field Theory or the SM.  Less commonly noted appears to be the fact that the same manual process puts in which fields (particles) couple to which interactions. For instance, there seems to be no theoretical reason in QFT or the SM for quarks to participate in the weak or EM interactions. Is there one?
Comment: Misquoting Gell-Mann: *That which is not forbidden is mandatory*. In other words, if there is no reason *not* to include an interaction, you must in fact include it. The SM does precisely that.
Answer: As a gauge field theory, what's postulated are the gauge group, and the existence of fermions (and a scalar) transforming under specific representations of the gauge group. The gauge group and the representations have to be freely chosen, but the interactions then follow.
Comment: Yes, and the quarks, for example, are postulated as transforming under both an EW SU(2)L rep as well as under an SU(3) IRR, due to experimental evidence, not as a math consequence of the initial set of assumptions, no?


Who holds patents for "over-size" golf club grips?

Question: Who holds patents for "over-size" golf club grips for putters, drivers, irons etc.,?  Showed my design to a patent attorney, could not afford a patent search. Later, I saw my idea being sold! It was totally new! Nothing like it on the market at the time!
Comment: I know others often have similar ideas.  But it was just too co-incidental not to check out!
Comment: How much later was "later"?
Answer: Performing a patent search is something you can do for yourself for free. This answer describes my process. Searching with the terms "oversize golf grip" on The Lens resulted in 428 granted US patents dating back to 1977. Please understand that obtaining a patent takes time, typically three or more years. If you saw a product that looked like your idea less than three years later, it is very possible that someone else thought of it first.
The majority of patents don't make it to the market, so the fact that you hadn't seen a similar product doesn't mean there wasn't already an existing patent. If you could link us to the product in question, we may be able to find out what the relevant patents are.


Any exploratory work with AI and Deep learning for First Post Review?

Question: Doing First Post Review is so tedious, is there any project to use trendy Deep Learning and AI to pre-filter this list?
Comment: To the folks wanting to close this question:  this is *still* a legitimate question to pose.  Not liking it doesn't warrant immediate closure of it.
Comment: Well, my NI has some troubles to understand your question, could you please elaborate? There is a https://cs.stackexchange.com and an https://ai.stackexchange.com .
Comment: There are some, AFAIK, regex-level stuff (so not AI) which prevents people from posting too much code or using bad titles, for example, so that's attempting to at least grab some low-hanging fruit for the root this problem.
Comment: @Makoto I think that they're mistaking it for a programming question belonging on the main site.
Comment: We already have "mostly code" and "unformatted code" warning. Probably others too. How SE implements it (is it based on AI), I don't know. Also, SmokeDetector.
Answer: No, this is kinda where real people have to help out.
Don't feel obligated to do it if you don't want to.
Answer: Believe it or not, there are people who actually enjoy reviewing those. There's quite enough of them as-is, so if you think it's too tedious you can just leave it to them.
There are already a number of manually-programmed heuristics that flag posts as VLQ, but they still need human interaction nonetheless.
Final thoughts: with 16,000,000+ questions, and countless more deleted, Stack Overflow would be a great source of training data for CBLSTM.
Comment: My feeling is that First Code Review could  be more enjoyable if the 20% of total garbage questions were already stripped off.  Why ask human to do this task ? ( cutting the so obvious questions that gonna be closed in 2min ?) . Is it because people here don`t trust  algorithm and machines ? Or  maybe because some people have a feeling of power when bashing a noob ?
Answer: If you review 1000 first-post (and late-answers), you get a golden badge.
Having many golden badges doesn't give any privileges, but it has some positive side-effects:

The count of your moderation badges is a well-visible property of the candidates on the mod elections. If you ever want to nominate on an election, it is highly adviced to collect the golden badge for all the review queues.
And having many golden badges has a positive psychological effect against the wonderful people trying to suppress and harm anything what they can see on the sites.

Furthermore, the first-post (and late-answer) review queues are mostly very simple decisions, and access to these queues is the simplest (requires only 500 on graduated sites).
On these reasons, typically the first-post and particularly the late-answer queues are nearly empty on most SE sites. Getting the golden badge for late-answers is one of the hardest to collect.
The important thing in these queues, that they give some "extra attention" to the new users. Typically, beginners are ignored or nearly ignored on the sites, and all the reaction what they get is coming in the form of negative votes (down, close, del). However, to attract a newbie in the system, he needs human interaction. This is one of the few things, what the SE knows from its stats and uses this info to tune the sites. Surprisingly, the newbies aren't really upset by downs, not even by closures. What expels a newbie, if they don't get human interaction: most ideally, an answer, but also comments and edits are attracting them a lot.
On these reasons, although it is an acceptable "solution" for a first-post or review problem is to vote it up or down, if you want to do any positive for the system, then do also something, what only a human can do: fix his post by an edit, comment it, flag it (note: flagging means typically a VLQ flag, it puts their question into the VLQ queue, where they will likely get at least an automatic comment).
I remember as I was a rep1 user. I didn't know from the system anything, but I've seen as I've got positive comments to my first posts, sometimes ups, sometimes downs (I ignored them), they've even fixed my English, for free! This all was simply awesome! Although I didn't know at the time, it is just the result of the first-post queue.
Later I've faced also its negative side: the hairsplitting piranhas, the organized hird downvoters, the closures on crap reasons, the unexplainable limitations of the system, but the important is: it happened already after the strongly positive first impression.
If I get these in the opposite order, I had likely gone away and never come back.
Working on the FP/LA is a way to give some better to other newbies between 1-50, what you've got from the System between 50-500.
I typically try to advice the SE, to use more AI / data mining to tune their site, I think they are too strongly focused on the community management. It seems their business model is that instead of writing AI for themselves, rather they try to catalize us to become their AI. Mainly it works well, but not always (see, for example, the excess mass of the VtC queue on the SO, which was rather re-categorized as "not a problem", instead of being fixed by a structural development).
On these reasons, I think these queues are the few ones where the human interaction should be catalyzed and not an AI should be developed. But, in general, the SE should use much more data minig, AI and soft methods as they are doing now.


APIs for maven dependency

Question: Are there any API that helps to find dependency of maven packages.
I used the examples present in the answer of Programmatically resolving Maven dependencies outside of a plugin - get RepositorySystemSession and RepositorySystem
However the dependency list that I get using aether is different from the list given by APIs
AFAIK. The API did not resolve ranges, I am not sure whether it handles exclusions.
Is there any readily available API that takes care of resolving version ranges, exclusions (simillar to what i get when using "mvn dependency-list/tree)
I am looking for API that exactly returns result provided by mvn dependency:list/tree
Note: My code is running outside mvn plugin
Answer: I recommend to use two tools:
mvn help:effective-pom

This tool provides effective pom - the very detailed pom.xml with all actual dependencies and versions
mvn dependency:tree

Provides the dependency tree

APIs for maven dependency


How to Change iPhone between Silent and Vibrate

Question: I have an iPhone 5s and I only like to use silent and vibrate.  I never use the sound.  Is there a way that I can assign the switch on the side of the phone to be either silent or on vibrate?  I don't mind using the volume buttons on the side either, like i did when i had android, but i noticed that apple doesn't easily let you use move between vibrate and silent without going into the settings menu.  Thanks in advance.
Comment: What do you mean 'silent and vibrate'?  Do you mean no noise and no vibration for 1) and then no noise but vibration for 2) ?
Answer: If you set the phone to not vibrate on ring, but vibrate on silent, then you could swap your ringtone for one that makes no sound.
You'd have to repeat that for each notification type below, if you wanted nothing at all to make a sound.
I made my own, but Google has a lot of results if you search for 'silent ringtone'
The side switch will then swap between silent [on] & vibrate [off]
Answer: No, it isn't possible to change that in iOS. However, Apple's "silent" mode would be Do Not Disturb, which can be accessed in Control Center.
So as an alternative to the side switch, you can make sure that Control Center is enabled in the lock screen and then simply swipe up from the bottom and tap the moon icon. It isn't as convenient as the hardware switch, but certainly much better than opening Settings.
Also, some videos (in certain apps), for example, require that the switch on the side of the phone is On, so you might need to toggle it every now any then anyway.


Is it possible to use Suunto Ambit3 R with multiple heart rate monitors?

Question: I have a Mio Link – a sports wristband that can measure heart rate at the wrist and transfer it to a mobile phone or sports watch – and I got a heart rate monitor (HRM) belt that came with my Ambit3R watch. I would like to know if it is possible to use both heart rate sensors at the same time to record them with the Ambit3R watch and verify that they measure similar heart rates? I did a test run with the watch, and according to the results I viewed in the movescount app it appears to measure only with a single HRM.
Comment: I added a product link, let me know if that's not the right one :) I have a fitbit so I just picked the first Mio Link Google threw at me ;)
Comment: @Aravona Yes, that's it. It is much more comfortable than a belt, I can compare now. :-) I was not able to test the accuracy yet, that's why I asked this question. Btw. I sent the same question to Suunto support, maybe they have an answer.
Comment: if they do it'll be awesome if you can self answer with what they say.
Comment: I guess you mean using two heart rate monitors at the same time, i.e. within the same activity, right?
Comment: @BenediktBauer Yes. So I could compare them. Since Mio Link measures on the wrist, I am not sure how accurate it is compared to a chest strap.
Comment: I took the freedom to rearrange and extend your question a bit to make it more clear. If you think I have gone too far, just revert/edit.
Answer: While it surely is possible to pair the watch with several HR monitoring devices, I don't think it's possible to use more than one at the same time. I cannot tell for sure since I don't have an Ambit3 (which uses the Bluetooth Low Energy protocol to connect external sensors, as far as I remember) but only an Ambit2 (which communicates via ANT+) but in the case of my watch it stops searching for a certain type of external sensor as soon as it has detected one it was paired with.
Technically, it would surely be possible to use more than one sensor of the same type at a time, however that imposes a lot of extra stuff to handle:
The watch needs a logic to handle two data sources of the same type that quite surely will deliver slightly different signals. That means, if you ask it to show "heart rate", what should it display? The signal from source 1 or source 2? The average of both? Should all the measurements that are derived from the heart rate (average heart rate, times in certain zones etc.) also be handled for both sources? Should both of them be recorded in full? All this on a device that has limited battery and storage capacity and computation power.
These thoughts make it quite improbable that such a functionality has been (or will be) implemented by Suunto, since its use case is very limited and the possible issues coming with it are rather significant.
Comment: Interesting. I wait Suunto's answer to confirm this, but I suspect so too. I might be able to verify the HR monitors with a BLE - USB adapter, my PC, and some programming. So I can surely leave out the watch from the equation. I checked the BLE GATT services of Windows 8.1 with my tablet, I did not like it. Maybe there is a better API on Linux. I'll try it out, as soon as I bought a BLE - USB adapter. Another possible solution would be to record two exercises on the same track with similar pace but different HR sensors, and compare the results after that.


Dwellers not consuming resources?

Question: So I was playing Fallout Shelter and my vault dwellers were all dying from lack of resources. I stopped playing for a few days until I got money to buy lunchboxes to fix them up. When I came back, all my production rooms were taking about 8 hours to produce resources. Rushing them fixed the issue, but now my dwellers won't consume resources at all! Can anyone tell me what the issue is and how I could fix it?
Answer: Well there are some issues in the game regarding dying people. Due to the fact that your people are more than 24h dead, they disappeared right? Is your dweller counter correct or does it show the old dweller count?
Did you really check if there is no consummation? You can tab on the ressourcebars to see the values. Really no change or just an optical issue? :-)
Maybe try to close the game completely from the background, lock your phone, unlock it and open the game again. This will help in 90% of the cases.
If nothing works, I think you need to conduct the game developers and make an issue for that.
Answer: All my dwellers are alive. And my resources are max and not being consumed at all. I figured out its from changing the date back or ahead. I accidently changed my date to the next days date and now when I changed it back to the original, same issue. Thanks for the help though.
Comment: Moral of the story, don't mess with the in-game time by playing with the internal clock of the iPhone.
Comment: I didn't, it changed itself for some reason.. :/
Comment: Im going to be traveling from West coast to East coast soon. I wonder if this is going to screw over my game.
Comment: @James, change time zone instead of actual time, the game 'should' be ok with it cos good programmers check UTC time

Dwellers not consuming resources?


Why does my Whirlpool refrigerator ice maker not make ice exactly one day a week every week?

Question: My Whirlpool Gold refrigerator's ice maker does not make ice one day a week. After that day it begins to make ice again as normal. I think I read in the manual about a setting for Jewish households that would halt ice making on the sabbath, but, I can't find it again. I need it to make ice everyday.
Comment: Do you know the model number of the appliance?
Comment: Does it only occur on Friday?  most fridges I know of don't have a setting for date or day of week, rather you just manually turn the setting on Friday before the Sabbath, and manually turn it off after.  during which usually the light either does not operate or is always turned on
Comment: How about consistency? Is it the same time period every week? Do the lights of the fridge stay off at the same time as the ice maker? Does the entire fridge go off, or just the ice maker and/or lights?
Answer: I've never heard of this,
Here's what I could dig up:

Hold down the "Door Alarm" button for three seconds until "F or C" or
  "On or Off" appears on the display. Many Whirlpool food appliances
  comply to Jewish religious law by including a "Sabbath" mode, which
  disables many of the refrigerator's features, including the ice maker.
  Tap the "Freezer +" or "-" buttons until "SAB" appears on the display.
  Tap "Refrigerator +" until "Off" appears on the screen. Hold down the
  "Door Alarm" button for a further three seconds to confirm the new
  settings.
Read more: How to Fix an Ice Maker on a KitchenAid Refrigerator |
  eHow.com
  http://www.ehow.com/how_7954484_fix-ice-maker-kitchenaid-refrigerator.html#ixzz29aiNXHuy


Category conditionals

Question: I have an entry page that lists out specific info for a product. I am using categories to sort the entries. I'm trying to figure out how to write a conditional that pulls in something specific if the entry belongs to a specific category.
Comment: So, you have a categories-field on the entry, and if a specific category is selected, you want to do something?
Comment: ya, in the entry you can select the category it's in and so I want to display something for entries that belong to a certain category.
Answer: The category field returns an ElementCriteriaModel, which means you can use all the methods that you'd usually use to get a specific category on it.
For instance, if the category field is named entryCategories, and you know the slug of the category you want to test for, you could do:
{% if entry.entryCategories.slug('my-category-slug').total() %}
    Do something
{% endif %}

Or you could use the idthe same way.
Please note, this does not work if the entryCategory field was eager-loaded, since entry.entryCategories would then return an array. In that case you could just loop over the array and have a check inside for loop that checks the category you're looping over is the correct one. A bit dirty, but it does the job.
Comment: @MatthewCarleton I just updated the answer to exchange the `length` filter for the more efficient `total()` method. Instead of querying the category models it just queries for the count of rows in the database. The query itself is quicker and it also uses much less memory.

Category conditionals


How to tell the address of the smtp server on my local Ubuntu OS?

Question: I have tested and it seems I do have an SMTP server running locally.
What I don't know is how to get its URL and login credentials.
Any idea how to find those?
Comment: That'll likely depend on which smtp server it is. Can you telnet to localhost port 25 and post the greeting so we (hopefully!) know which one you're running?
Comment: I've never heard of an SMTP server having a URL. They almost always run on TCP port 25. What's your end goal here?
Answer: If it is a standard Ubuntu then you have a Postfix running on it. And there is no user authentication for it. In the default configuration it is only allowed to send mail to local users (not to users elsewhere on the Internet).
You can send mails to any user on your box by just using username@hostname. The server to use is just localhost.


Difference between accounting, finance and budget

Question: What's the difference between accounting, finance and budget? Are some of them included in the others?
Answer: In general terms, accounting is the process of tracking your finances.  Finances are any monetary transaction; a sale, a purchase, a return or exchange, or even finding a $10 bill on the street.  A budget is a guideline for much money you expect to spend or receive as the result of a set of transactions in a given time period.
Everybody has finances; they receive income and purchase goods and services.
Most people have some level of accounting for their finances, even if it's only their monthly bank statement or check register.
Some people use budgets to try to manage their finances, some don't.  In order to use a budget effectively, you need to have good accounting.
In the corporate environment, many places will use "Finance Department" and "Accounting Department" interchangeably.
Answer: These terms all overlap to some degree because they all usually deal with money (though people sometimes use them to describe other resources, such as in computer networking, where there's no money but there is a bandwidth budget and bandwidth accounting).
First the definitions:
Budget:

(noun) a sum of money allocated for a particular purpose
(noun) a summary of intended expenditures along with proposals for how to meet them
(verb) to budget (make a budget)

Accounting:

(noun) a system that provides quantitative information about finances

Finance:

(noun) the commercial activity of providing funds and capital
(noun) the branch of economics that studies the management of money and other assets
(noun) the management of money and credit and banking and investments
(verb) obtain or provide money for a transaction
(verb) sell or provide on credit

So your finances is your money, which you organize into a budget (spending plan), and you use accounting to track spending and income. If your budget (allocated sum) is empty, you might finance (obtain money or credit) your purchase.
Since these terms are related, they are sometimes used interchangeably when referring to budgeting or planning, because accounting and budgeting are a subset of finance management, and without accounting you can't budget. Once you've done the accounting you can budget for spending.  Once you've budgeted you have a budget, and you can say that you have funds in a budget. In an organization you often have hierarchical budgets: the finance/accounting department of the CIA creates a budget and submits it to the government; the government then creates its own budget which contains the budgets of the CIA and the other departments such as the NSA, FBI, MIB, etc.


Get SID in static block in Magento url

Question: I have multistore magento with multi domains.
I want to add store switcher in main menu in mobile view. But giving store1.com as href do not call customers session to get shared shopping cart between stores.
What should i add after href="http://domain1.com" in static block that i use in mobile menu?
Answer: There are 3 possible store configurations:

If your websites are located in one domain, but in different directories, e.g. "www.example.com/stores/store1" and "www.example.com/stores/store2" you can setup your "Cookie Path" to "/stores/" in System -> Configuration -> Web -> Session Cookie Management.
If your websites are located in different sub-domains e.g. "store1.example.com" and "store2.example.com" you can setup "Cookie Domain" to ".example.com" in System -> Configuration -> Web -> Session Cookie Management.
If you have different domains, in this case you can add session ID to the URL for another store. Use this construction "Mage::getModel('core/url')->addSessionParam()->getUrl('...')" to get the URL with session parameter.

After that your customers will be able to switch between multi-stores Magento websites without re-login. In other words, if customer will login in one Magento website, he will be able to see another multi-store Magento website using his first store account.
But the cart will be different for each Magento website.
Comment: it'll grateful to you ,if you can accept my answer above.
Comment: In static block cant use php
here is code I use in block for mobile but does not share shoping cart, no SID:

Stores

domain2

domain1
Comment: you can write php code in a phtml file then call it in your static block like this :    {{block type="core/template" template="path/to/template.phtml"}}
Comment: I am not good at codes
please help me what exactly I can use in my case?
Comment: I tried this, but no any success I want to put store switcher in main menu of mobile view{{block type="page/switch" name="store_switcher_top" as="store_switcher_top" template="page/switch/stores-top.phtml"}}

Get SID in static block in Magento url


How can I show login popup when user clicks on download button

Question: I am looking for adding a login popup to my WP page where the I have a download button to download some file. when a user who is not logged in clicks on the download button, I want to show the login/register popup and once user is done logging in, I want go ahead with downloading the file for him. Is there a pluging for that that I can use. Thanks in advance.
Comment: Let me know you are doing with bootstrap modal or any else ?
Answer: You can try using Popup anything on click plugin. It enables you to add highly customizable popup windows. You can insert any type of content into your popup, including HTML codes, image, shortcodes etc.


What can I use to substitute for Italian sausage to make it appropriate for vegetarians?

Question: I want to make a butternut lasagna which calls for sausage. Is there something I can substitute the sausage with to make it vegetarian that will still taste great??
Comment: I guess it depends what flavor you are trying to go for? There are so many options for vegetarian lasagna like spinach, eggplant, etc. Also straight up cheese lasagna is really good!
Comment: Marilyn, welcome to Seasoned Advice! Could you please post the original recipe just to give us an idea of the ratios? Substituting a main component (volume-wise) is different from substituting a minor part that is included for flavour...
Comment: Onegreenplanet.org has a recipe for a vegan spicy Italian sausage
Answer: You can substitute the sausage meat itself with any suitable veg that's normally used as the star of a dish, such as eggplants or firmer squashes, however if you want that sausage taste the principle flavoring spices of Italian sausage are caraway seed, sage and sometimes paprika. If you want to add an umami element (meaty taste) substitute all salt with soy sauce, and perhaps add a little extra soy (experiment) to get the level of taste you want without making the lasagna over watery.
Answer: One thing always worth trying when sausage or bacon is called for is smoked tofu. It usually comes very firm, which suits the purpose well. I would recommend shallow-frying it before adding it to a sauce/filling if using big pieces, or putting it in the oil a few minutes ahead of other aromatics if using brunoise/small dice-size pieces. In the second case, try adding brunoised/diced standard mushrooms and maybe some (fresh or reconstituted) shiitake too; also make sure these are well fried.
Answer: Depending on your locality, you can certainly substitute in vegetarian Italian sausage made with something like soy instead of meat.
This will give you a really similar taste and texture to the sausage and won't add a bunch of extra water, which would be an issue with some other vegetable options.
Brands to check out are "Tofurky", "Lightlife" and "Field Roast", even some stores offer their own in-house options including Trader Joe's.
Other options for true "sausage" substitutes would be to follow a recipe to make your own, like this one, made primarily out of mushrooms and black-eyed peas or this one made from vital wheat gluten (though it can be difficult to find for some people).

As a note, I do not endorse any of these products or recipes as I have not tried them myself.
Answer: The answer to this is: anything, except meat.  The rest is a matter of taste.
Let me give a few suggestions.  If you want to stay close to the meaty idea, you could use garlic, rosemary, sage, and cumin (cumin goes really well with squash, countless recipes and cultures make this combination). I would put in some nuts as well, preferably pistacchios. Anything really, except peanuts.
Or you could go the other way and use spinach or kale. Or perhaps Cauliflower puree.
Comment: Cindy's edit served you well.
Comment: Hi Marc. I edited your answer to soften the tone. As it is your answer you can change it back if you like. Just trying to be helpful.
Comment: Marc, would you care to join us in [chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/16/the-frying-pan)? Friendly invitation... ^_^
Comment: Let us [continue this discussion in chat](http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms/35652/discussion-between-jefromi-and-shennan).


Client's budget is higher than expected

Question: My client informed me in advance that his budget is 10k while I can comfortably sell him the product for 5k. Should I sell based on their budget or something in between my pricing and their budget? Is there an ethical stance on this matter?
Comment: It may indicate that the client does not know what the market price of what they want is.   You are then saving them money and they may be happy or may not notice.  It may indicate that you are underpricing the market.  You would need to decide if you want to do that.  This may indicate that the client is expecting something more substantial than what you are intending to deliver.  This would probably lead to a dissatisfied client.  Maybe you can deliver what they want but have to do more work to do so.  Maybe you cannot deliver what they want.  You need to figure out what is going on.
Comment: Perhaps the client has requirements which you have not considered, and therefore expects to pay more to have those requirements honored. For example, hospitals and government agencies have extra requirements, such as HIPAA or reporting requirements.
Comment: Consider this: Even if you and the client have a mutual understanding of what your client wants, it may be wise for the client to budget for MORE than you quoted them for. Estimates are, quite often, WRONG.
At the VERY least, you and the client should probably have a mutual understanding of what is to happen if & when the project goes over budget or projected to do so. For example, stopping the work, renegotiating project requirements, the client agreeing to pay more than was originally budgeted, etc.
Comment: Is this a one-time client or could more work be forthcoming?
Comment: @morsor this is a client with forthcoming jobs
Answer: Inform your client that you can save them 4-5K if they go with your recommendations and hand them a breakdown of how you view your side of the budget against their needs.
Bear in mind that the client might have a different idea about how they view the product (and any costs involved), so be clear with them about what you're supplying and what service they require.
There's no real ethics at play here - just be realistic about your pricing in terms of giving value to the customer and also giving yourself a reasonable profit.
Answer: There are those who believe that it is ethical to sell at what ever the client is willing to pay. Others see no such need and will look to give the client a good deal.
You can give a good deal to the client only if you really know all the aspects of delivering what the client wants. If there is anything that you don't know, that will drive your costs up. I only bid fixed price on projects where I have done it several times already, have the proper libraries built, know more about it than the client does, and do a better job of managing the project than the client can.
One aspect may be that the client sees difficulties that you are not aware of and that will double your costs. Or the client knows how much more is in the project description and you don't. It is very rare that a client has a higher budget than you think you can do it for. In most cases, the client thinks it can be done for half or a quarter of what it really costs.
I had a tree service bid one price and I told him that my budget was double that. I wanted a lot more work done on the tree than he expected.
Comment: Well said! It's tempting to think of the client as a novice to one's trade; but the client could as easily be more knowledgeable about aspects of the project which are specific to that client.
Answer: It is important that you can justify any prices you give; if the client gets the impression that you are making up numbers on-the-fly (e.g. simply increasing your price to be nearer their budget) then trust will be eroded, and they will be suspicious that you might overcharge for any future work.
Comment: This is a good point.  However priority can be a justification.  If two clients want similar work and one budgets 10K and the other budgets 5K, then it is reasonable to complete the 10K project before starting on the 5K project.
Answer: As the other answers indicate, there are several aspects to setting a price.
If it is a one-time-sale, one should probably attempt to maximize the payment. This could either be done by setting a price just below their budget - or quoting your preferred price of 5k and adding a retainer of some amount, as there will virtually always be some level of bug-fixing, support, enhancements and so on.
If more work could potentially be forthcoming, being more defensive in pricing could be considered. A drawback of quoting a (for them) surprisingly low price, is that you effectively cast yourself as cheap - which is difficult to break out of.
The retainer model described above could also be used in an attempt to retain a client - and is the closest to a one-size-fits-all approach.
Comment: If you want a relationship with the client and they want one with you, a larger retainer seems possible
Comment: That means in my example, a 5-6k (preferred price) + 1.5-2k (Retainer) is the way to think about it?

Client's budget is higher than expected


SN2 reactions and inversion of configuration in compounds with more than one chiral centre

Question: Suppose I have a compound with 2 chiral centres which are at (S,S). Now, suppose I have an iodine atom attached to the back carbon, and I wish to carry out an $\mathrm{S_N2}$ type substitution in a non-polar solvent. Obviously, the iodine atom would get replaced by the nucleophile, and there should be an inversion of configuration. But is this inversion only for the back carbon or the compound as a whole? Should the product have a configuration (R,S) or (R,R)? Someone please explain this to me briefly.
Answer: Here I have a compound with 2 chiral centers. There is only inversion at Carbon with iodine undergoing $\mathrm{S_N2}$ reaction. The second carbon does not undergo $\mathrm{S_N}$ reaction. There is no change in its configuration.
Example 1

In the example below ,

[Ref : https://en.chem-station.com/reactions-2/2016/05/neighboring-group-participation.html]
before a nucleophile attacks externally, OH of carboxylic group attacks internally via $\mathrm{S_N2}$. The 3 membred ring opens via another $\mathrm{S_N2}$ attack by hydroxide ion. The net result is retention of configuration .
Example 2
In this example , two chilral carbons are at neighboring carbons. As explained earlier , Sulphur attacks internally via $\mathrm{S_N2}$ attack. Again bromide ion attacks via another $\mathrm{S_N2}$ leading to retention of configuration ( Anchimeric assistance ).

[Ref : http://www.chem.ucla.edu/~harding/IGOC/A/anchimeric_assistance.htmll]
Example 3
This example also behaves similarly to one discissed above.

[Ref: Molecules 11(4):212-8 • April 2006   DOI: 10.3390/11040212 ]
In conclusion,

If there exists no lone pair donating group at neighboring carbon to leaving group, then $\mathrm{S_N2}$ attack takes place with inversion of configuration (Example 1).
If there exists a lone pair donating group (Example 2 and Example 3)at neighboring carbon to leaving group, then retention of configuration is seen.
Answer: Inversion will only occur in the carbon in which the substitution takes place. So if the molecule was (S,S) it will become (R,S). If you analyse the Sn2 mechanism you will understand why inversion happens and you will see that there's no reason for inversion to take place in a carbon that doesn't participate in the reaction.
Answer: As Blg90 said, the inversion only occurs on the carbon involved in the substitution. I thought it would be useful, intuitively, to mention that the rear attack on the carbon to leaving group bond instigates a motion that is very much like an umbrella blowing inside out.

You can see, in this image, the hydrogens at the 'back' (which can be swapped out for any substituents that allow $\mathrm{S_N2}$), flip through the transition state to the 'front', but are themselves unaffected. Hopefully this helps you visualise why inversion only occurs at one stereogenic centre.


Difference between 나는 and 저는

Question: I know that they are both pronouns, meaning "I". But people appear to use them in specific situations. How different are they?
Answer: Simply put, 나는 is plain form/not formal. On the other hand, 저는 is used as a sign of deference to the person you are speaking with. It is the "humble" form of 'I'.
Use 나는 when you are speaking about yourself in an informal and casual setting, especially if you are speaking with someone who is your junior. If you are speaking with a superior, use 저는.
Comment: Do you think this rule is subtly modified if you are a foreigner (외국인)? Even after knowing someone for (possibly) years, does it seem rude (to the Korean) for the foreigner to use 나는 ?
Comment: @rajah9 I use 나는/내가 (and all other variants of using 나) all of the time while speaking with people to whom such use is appropriate. It actually sounds weird to use 저 when you should be using 나. It would be like calling someone sir in English when they normally would not be called sir. (Picture calling a 6 year old "sir"). Understanding register/formal speech is a very important part of speaking Korean at an advanced level.

Difference between 나는 and 저는


Why would a circuit like this will not work/or work?

Question: In this circuit the two batteries are not connected to each other but I am still assuming that excess electrons from the negative terminal of the cell should flow to the positive terminal of the other cell hence inducing a voltage and current in the circuit lighting up the bulb. My question is, am I right? explain this please.
Answer: The answer is no, but only because you are using conventional batteries. If, for example, you had a van-de-graph generator with a large negative charge, and you connected a wire to the van-de-graph to the lightbulb and then to the ground, the circuit would work. Strictly speaking, it's nothing to do with the circuit and everything to do with the nature of your battery.
The problem with a battery is that it doesn't actually have a bunch of negative charge on one side and a bunch of positive charge on the other. If it did, you would get a shock every time you picked it up. Instead, each cell is composed of two chemicals separated by a porous barrier. These two compounds, if brought in contact, would react exothermally (they would release energy in the form of heat and/or light). As it is, however, they are separated and the electrons cannot get from one atom to the other because of the barrier.
When a light bulb is connected to the battery, suddenly the electrons have a pathway. By going through the light bulb, they are able to get to the other chemical and make the reaction happen.
But that doesn't really prove anything, since if chemical A reacts with B, and both batteries have A in the negative end and B in the positive end, I should still be able to mix and match? right?
No. This is gonna get complicated:

A half cell is one half of a battery and one half of a reaction. Let's say that the two compounds we are reacting are Lithium ($Li_{(s)} \rightarrow Li^+_{(aq)} + e^-$) and silver ($Ag^+_{(aq)} + e^- \rightarrow Ag_{(s)}$). The things in equations are called their half-reactions.
When we combine their two half reactions, we get $Li_{(s)} + Ag^+_{(aq)} \rightarrow Ag_{(s)} + Li^+_{(aq)}$. Note that the $e^-$ (the electrons) cancel. Also note that a large amount of energy is released by this reaction. What a chemical battery does is harness it. The way it harnesses it is by separating it into the half reactions and forcing the electrons to work to make it to the other side of the equation.
What you do is get a piece of solid lithium, put it in a bowl of water, and hook it up to a wire. Then, you get some silver dissolved in water and stick a wire in the water. The electrons are going to go from the lithium to the silver and solid silver will form on the wire in the silver bath as it is de-ionized.
Well great, so we should be good then? Right? Obviously the silver is in one end of the battery and the lithium in the other, so it shouldn't matter whether they're both in the same battery? should it?
It doesn't matter immediately, but it will start mattering very very quickly. See, both chemicals start out with a net charge of zero. As electrons leave the Lithium headed for the Silver, they will start to develop a charge. Very quickly, the highly positive lithium will refuse to send electrons to the very negative silver, which will refuse to accept any more of them anyway. Both are over saturated with a charge that they just want to get rid of.
The root of the problem is that you can't just separate the two halves of the reaction and expect them to keep going, the Lithium ion still needs something to bond to. The silver needs something to have been bonded to. You can't just have all these ions hang about.
The solution to this problem was an innovation known as the salt bridge, which is what made batteries possible. This involves a having a salt (NaCl in this example) in a tube connecting the lithium bath to the silver bath. When the lithium surrenders it's electron and becomes positively charged, it bonds to the dissolved Cl ion. When the silver gains an electron from the lithium and becomes a neutral atom, the ion that it had previously been bonded to is left stranded and negative. It therefore bonds to a positive Na ion. The whole exchange is pictured below:

Essentially, when the negative and positive ends of the circuit are connected to different batteries, the batteries (which must, ultimately, maintain a zero overall charge) cannot do so and the chemical reactions seize up as an undesirable charge develops.
If you wanted to make this work, you could add another circuit connecting the two unused ends to a second light bulb. If you want to know more, look up electrochemistry.
Answer: If the two batteries are not connected with each other, there is no flow of current.
You have to connect at least other two poles:
Connecting the two positives the flow will be through the cell on the left only.
Connecting the two negatives the flow will be through the cell on the right only.
Connecting both you get a parallel circuit.
You can also connect the positive on the left with the other negative, obtaining a series circuit, but in this case the voltage will double and the bulb can burn.
Comment: Are you sure about this? If I suppose that both batteries are the same, and both claddings of the batteries are of the same potential, then the positive poles will also have the same potential (as do the negative ones). Thus, the potential difference between positive pole 1 and negative pole 2 should be about the same as the potential difference between positive pole 1 and negative pole 1. In my opinion, there should be a current, at least in the beginning.
Comment: "In the beginning" anything can happen. For example, your body might be electrostatically charged to 10,000V while you're making the connection. After that, no current can flow - ignoring the minuscule current through the huge resistance (through the air or benchtop) that connects the 2 batteries.
Comment: But you would agree that the initial potential difference is the same? Afterwards I could imagine that the two batteries behave like a broken voltage source, whose voltage is reduced quickly as soon as any charge is drained from it.
Comment: A schematic circuit is an idealization of reality: for example, a battery has an internal resistance and not connected  means infinite resistance, that is, no current. If you think that there is a flow of electrons, you have to provide a path for that.
Answer:
I am still assuming that excess electrons from the negative terminal of the cell should flow to the positive terminal of the other cell hence inducing a voltage and current in the circuit lighting up the bulb.

I think you could be right in assuming this, but this could only happen in transience. As soon as a few electrons from one cell's negative terminal flowed to another cell's positive terminal, positive charges will build up at one cell's positive and negative charges will build up at the other cell's negative terminal. This will prevent the current from flowing continuously.


idiom, saying, proverb for if things are oversensitized then the ideas lose value

Question: Is there a idiom, saying, proverb for if anything and everything (ideology, news, gadget, media, game or sports, etc) is over-sensitized (continuously spotlighted/too familiarize in public eye) then people become insensitive/lose interest/the idea, news... lose value.
Comment: one word might be "overhyped".
Answer: This definition of overexposed matches your requirement exactly:

a situation in which someone or something appears so much in newspapers, on television, on the radio etc that people lose interest

More idiomatically, you can say that an idea has been done to death.
Answer: There is a part-duplicate, but the adage familiarity breeds contempt is relevant here.
From ODO:

familiarity breeds contempt [phrase] proverb
Extensive knowledge of or close association with someone or something
  leads to a loss of respect for them or it.

Examples from YourWebdesignShop.com:

Can saying something over and over make it more credible and common
  sensical? Or was Aesop right in the Fox and the Lion fable when he
  famously declared that familiarity breeds contempt?

and Billboard...1954:

His second point is that TV has given credence to the axiom that
  "familiarity breeds contempt", by over-exposure with a resultant
  lessening of the welcome by the audience.

[slightly re-formatted]
Answer: When everything is loud, nothing is loud. That is, constant stimulation leads to exhaustion, not interest or focus. This saying seems to get closer to your nuance that "anything and everything" (rather than a single overhyped or overexposed topic) is being thrust at the public.
Answer: I'm not sure if this is what you have in mind, but things that are very common are often said to be "a dime a dozen".
Answer: What goes up must come down.
Definition: Things that rise also fall.
This expression is often used to say that something good will not last forever.
From writingexplained.org


Reason for gold being the most malleable and ductile of metals

Question: I understand how fcc structure enables plastic deformation in metals, but why is gold, in particular, the most malleable and ductile of fcc metals?  Is there something about the electronic structure of gold (such as # of free electrons per atom, density of states in the conduction band, etc) that enable gold to be "soft" under compressive forces, yet strongly cohesive under tension, more so than any of the other fcc metals?
Comment: [Physical Ductility of the Elements](http://www.failurecriteria.com/physicalductilit.html)
Comment: It is the heaviest physically and chemically stable element with a single s-electron on the top orbit (and all lower energy orbits complete).
Answer: There are several reasons: The comments already mention the electronic structure described in https://www.failurecriteria.com/physicalductilit.html
But there is another one: the high purity of Au that is readily available. Since impurities hinder dislocation movement they cause embrittlement. With the Ellingham diagram a special property of Au can be understood: Notice the red circle wich highlights the position auf Au2O3 which is already above 0 kJ/mole at 0 K.
Since the dissociation of Au2O3 into Au + O2 leads to an increase of entropy the slope of the Au curve is positive in this diagram like for the other metals. This means that Au will never reach the negative regime and therefore not form oxides which sets Au apart from all other metals. This is the reason that gold is found in the form of nuggets and not as ore where it would mix with other metal oxides. Therefore gold is a very soft material (not just in theory) that can be hammered into thin sheets as thin as 100 nm thickness


SharePoint 2013 referencing old url after Migration

Question: Recently migrated my SharePoint server 2010 to the 2013 version. The migration was done from one domain to another. All users were migrated successfully and they can all log in to the site accept the my account which I have a way around and does not disturb me that much. When users log in to the SharePoint it also pops the login window with the old site url asking you to login when cancelled it works fine. How do I get rid of the old site login reference. It is really annoying to the users.
Answer: The most likely culprit here is that something on your page is hard coded to the old absolute URL.  Check your Master Page, any custom CSS, or any custom JavaScript to ensure that there are no hard coded references.


How do I use the Omnibus Progression to Modulate from I to iv?

Question: I am composing a piece in which there is a modulation between the keys of Db major and F# minor. Is it possible to use the omnibus progression to smoothly execute this modulation? If it is possible, how do I do it?
Answer: Let's begin with a quick overview of the omnibus. Let's write it in C major for clarity's sake:

The omnibus takes a V7 chord (the second harmony of the first measure) and, keeping the minor third (chordal fifth and seventh) constant, it moves the major-third interval (the root and third) towards each other contrary motion by half step. This creates a large-scale voice exchange between the G/B, but also creates some nice chromatic harmonies in between.
Let's look at this chromatic harmonies:

We begin with a root-position V7. Boring.
With the G♯ in the bass, we can view this either as an enharmonically spelled V42 of ♭III or as a Ger°3 chord that will move to ii.
With the A in the bass, we have a minor triad (ii) in second inversion.
If we spell the A♯ as a B♭, we see that the next chord is a V7 of ♭III.
And finally we have a V65 of the tonic key.

And just to make certain we're on the same page, here's that same omnibus in your key of D♭ major: (listen to this example)

What's great about the omnibus is that you can stop on each of these chords and use it to modulate to anywhere else.
But more importantly, remember that the omnibus begins with a V7 and that it has a different V7 in the middle of it. This means that we can start one omnibus, and when we reach that other V7 in the middle, we can then start another omnibus. Consider the example below:

In the first measure, I have a V7 of my original D♭; this starts my omnibus. But on the third beat of the next measure, I reach the second V7 that's in the middle of the omnibus. At this point, I then start a new omnibus by holding onto the minor third in that V7 and I move the major third (C♭/E♭) towards each other by half step. I then proceed in that omnibus, at which point, when I reach that minor 64 triad of the new omnibus, I just make that a cadential 64 that cleanly modulates to your intended key: F♯ major. (And if you want to get really specific, the chord on the downbeat of m. 3 is an enharmonically spelled Ger°3 in the new tonic.) Listen to this example here.
Answer: Omnibus tonicizes a single pitch class throughout, that is, it progresses without modulation.  One easy idea is to end the full omnibus (Db to Db) with the modulation to the modal iv (gb minor) and use your enharmonic spelling, f#m for the new key.
Db:  V7/iv __  iv
f#m:      V7  __   i
Working backwards from there, you might adjust some chords to properly prepare the modulation.  For example,
Db:  vii6  V7/iv _ iv
f#m: iv6    V7   _ i
I imagine the further back you can prepare the modulation the smoother it will sound.