Built-in display resolution resets when connecting to external monitor

Question: I have my Retina Macbook Pro's built-in display set to the scaled resolution "more space" in System Preferences. Whenever I connect to an external monitor (extended mode), the resolution resets to "default". I have to manually change it back to a larger resolution. Is there anyway to lock it on the correct resolution and prevent this behavior?
Answer: I have got the same problem. It is not that big of a deal to change it everytime, but it still is pretty annoying.
Sometimes it doesn't happen, but most of the times it does.
This morning when I turned on my macbook, it started in my "more space" resolution.
When I connected my second screen, display mirroring was turned on (something I never use and don't want). When I turned off display mirroring, my Macbook display went to the default resolution. I changed it back to "more space".
Then I unplugged the second monitor. After my Macbook's screen went black, it returned in the default resolution again. I changed it back to "more space".
Then I replugged my second monitor and this time it remembered my "more space" setting. I then unplugged the second monitor again and again it remembered by "more space" setting.
It seems as though it remembers the settings until I completely shut down my Macbook. Then, it reverts to the default settings (and sometimes randomly turns on display mirroring).
I have to test this thesis more to see if I am correct.


Collaborative list or document in Slack

Question: My team is new to Slack. A common use case we are finding is "Let's make a list of X that we can all contribute to". Currently we share a Google Doc for every list/collaborative document, but this leads to an unmanageable set of random doc links floating around. Is the a way to do this in Slack in a more integrated way, so it keeps tracks of all our documents or lists? How do people solve this?
Answer: Have you tried composing a "POST" that is editable by the group? Sounds like it solves the problem within Slack.

Compose a post
  Sometimes sharing detailed information with your team takes more than a message. Posts are a way to share and collaborate on long-form content — like project plans, or documentation — directly in Slack.
https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/203950418-Composing-a-post
Answer: I am using /todo for per-channel lists, as well as the custom slackbot responses to list url's for documents or other popular http based local network connections. Unfortunately it doesnt do file:// (yet)
An example of the slackbot command/response (edit to correct conflict with markdown. There should be three "backticks" - the other character on the tilde key - to denote preformatted text. This is what tricks the slackbot response into emitting multiple lines and not one of the lines in the response)
keyword      response
"doclist"    ```here is the doclist ``` ```some docs - http://someplace/somefolder```

Collaborative list or document in Slack


MacOS turn off sync with iPhone for a while

Question: Imagine I want to lend my friend my MacBook for an evening when I'm in the same place playing iPhone synced with the MacBook. I don't want him to check/send messages. Is it possible to turn off that functionality for a while?
Answer:
Create a new user account (or enable the Guest user) on your Mac (System Preferences -> Users and Groups)
Log out of your account
Have your friend log in with the new or the guest account

Using a separate accounts prevents any messages from showing up, it also ensures that nobody will be able to mess with your data.
Comment: @DManokhin It's good practice to give individual users individual accounts, solves/prevents a whole bunch of issues most people don't even know they have. Accessing personal files, looking through old mails or browser history, deleting important files by accident etc.
Comment: But if the user wants to use the same account they can just turn the option off using the method in my answer
Comment: True I see your point
Comment: The problem is that then the iPhone won't be syncing with the computer account.
Comment: Not while your friend is using the computer. What exactly do you want to sync?
Answer: I fully agree with the create a new account option.
Save and simple.
Don't make the account an admin either. For safety reasons.
That way you don't have to fool around with your messages and other iCloud stuff.
If you do need him to use your account, then it's probably safest to sign out of your iCloud account. If you sync your data to the iCloud account as well, that is fairly save as well.
Downside is, that you will also lose "Find your Mac" that way. So you better be very trusting of your mate.
Comment: Is there still guest account support in the newest version?
Comment: @D.BenKnoble Yes, guest account is stil available in Mojave
Answer: To turn off iMessages on your Mac:
Click on the messages app:

Click Messages in the top bar and select Preferences.
The Accounts window will pop up, tap
your Apple ID on the left column.
Uncheck Enable this account or click
Sign Out.


Are there GPS tracker for laptops?

Question: Are there location tracker hardware (GPS receiver) which can be fitted inside of a laptop and it sends live location data to a remote location ? If yes, how to detect such trackers ?
Comment: Searching for the same thing. I would like it to be covert, hooking up to the laptop's battery (so I wouldn't have to open up the laptop periodically to replace batteries). Ideally there would be an antenna which could go next to the wifi antennas on the side of the display (covered). Obviously the device would need a 3G or other independent data connection (with subscription at a provider), since we won't modify the BIOS. So far I saw only trackers which can be connected to the external USB port, that's absolutely pointless.
Answer: Some laptops are equipped with "GPS tracking" but there are conditions. The Dell system (for Dell laptops) is typical and instructive:

Computer will ship with the Laptop Tracking and Recovery software agent and a persistence module embedded in the BIOS. The software agent can survive operating system re-installations, hard drive reformats and even hard drive replacements.
When a lost or stolen computer connects to the Internet, the software agent contacts the monitoring center to report the computer's location.
For systems with GPS technology included, Laptop Tracking and Recovery has the ability to capture and report more detailed location information. It also provides the ability to track your laptops as they change hands or move around the organization.

This gives us the key points:

It is possible to store information in a laptop which resists casual cleanup (even a hard drive change). Savvy attackers will know that and reset the BIOS as well, but this will take some extra effort for them.
Some laptops contain a GPS receiver which can be used to pinpoint the location geographically. For non-GPS able computers, LPS can be used (roughly speaking, inferring the location by using the WiFi access points in the vicinity).
Regardless of the method, nothing will happen without power, and power is a scarce resource on laptops. All these "tracking devices" (most of them being mere software) will do nothing until the machine is powered-up, and when they send data, they rely on an existing "Internet connection" into which they will inject their alert message.

Portable, battery-powered tracking devices with GPS and 3G capabilities (GPS for obtaining the position, 3G for sending it) exist and can even be quite sturdy (they survive being carried by a child). For a laptop, or other similar technological products, the challenges would be:

find some room within the product to protect for the device (free room is not exactly frequent inside laptops...);
conceal the tracking device without impairing its GPS and 3G abilities (radio signals can be blocked by the product casing);
plug the tracking device on the main power line so that its battery gets recharged regularly.

Battery is a critical point: devices meant for cars can draw current from the car battery; devices meant for kids need work for only two days or so (if the device did not allow recovery of the missing kid within 48 hours, despite widespread police alert, chances are that the kidnapper has found and removed the device). For a laptop, which may sit unpowered for days or even weeks at a time, and which will not elicit a nation-wide police operation, a longer autonomy is required, and available power will be a problem.
Comment: great reply. these devices may use battery of laptop even when it is not powered up. are there commercially available such hardwares for laptops ?
Comment: Maybe. I did not find any; but absence of proof is not proof of absence.
Answer: GPS receivers for laptops are normally incorporated into a cellular 3G/4G data card. If the laptop has a slot for a sim card, then it's likely it also has a GPS receiver.

Are there GPS tracker for laptops?


How does Harry Potter keep balance while on his broom?

Question: Just finished watching the very first Harry Potter movie and one thing struck me right away: maybe this is just "fairy tale" logic, but how can people balance themselves on such a slim stick when riding brooms? What is the logic behind that? Am I missing something simple in the whole "broom" idea?
Comment: Magic. Also, a broom isn't too thin for a normal person to keep balance. One of Harry brooms has stir ups, feet holders. Look at motor cycle and gyro scope balancing.
Answer: While the broom is thin on its center radius, they often have stirrups, foot rests that require a wide angle of the legs. This wide angle allows for very simple control of a body's position, similar to a competition high speed bike. By, well, spreading his legs, Harry creates a larger area to balance on. This is how motorcycle and dirt bike racers handle tight turns, widening their bodies area to improve handling. No different than a regular bike really.
Physics aside, these brooms are magical, which would allow for a larger area through magical means, lowering the balancing forces required. Even accounting for magic, Harry seems to be exceptionally skilled at quidditch, as in he is abnormally good at handling a broom. This means he has athletic skills on the broom that the normal witch population does not have. This reflects real life athletic skill at sports, which only a small percentage of the population acceles at.
Toy broomsticks are given to witches at a young age as well, like tricycles. These only go a few feet in the air, and allow young wizards and witches to learn how to use a broomstick, for casual flying.
Of course, the real brooms used for shooting, had bicycle seats/saddles on them:

In the early days of filming before they worked out how to do it, flying on a broomstick was a painful proposition for Daniel Radcliffe. He sat, for hours at a time, on a bicycle seat on a broom about eight or nine feet up in the air. "If you sit completely upright or bend over on a bike saddle, without putting your feet on anything for any period of time, it gets really, really painful – for a man, particularly, although it was obviously not pleasant for a woman either."
Comment: That first picture looks deeply, deeply uncomfortable...
Comment: Old answer, I know but no, bikers do not widen their bodies to get more control.
It is either leaning out of the bike to lower and get the center of gravity to the side for better cornering or putting weight on the arms to better handle heavy straight braking.
Which means that the answer only would be, "it's magic" ?
Comment: As mentioned in *Quidditch Through the Ages*, brooms in the Wizarding world where enchanted with [Cushioning Charms](https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Cushioning_Charm) to make them more comfortable.
Comment: _"This means he has athletic skills on the broom that the normal witch population does not have."_ Somewhat pedantically, Harry's exceptional skill may be caused by something different, e.g. the sight or reflexes to catch a snitch, or pure bravado. He also gets hurt more than we see others get hurt so you could make a counterargument that Harry overextends himself beyond his broom skills more than other players.
Comment: Note that while you are correct about balance in general (and the stirrups on the broom providing strong balance support), motorbikes are have shapes (steering handle, concave seat, a body for the legs to clamp onto) to help riders keep their position. If you were to make the steering handle much sorter and made motorbikes as cylindrical and narrow as a broom, motorcyclists would start falling off as well or would at least need to be a lot more careful not to fall off
Comment: @Flater I don't need to touch the handle bar to stay on my motorcycle, siting or standing. Plenty of scramblers and rat bikes and original 60s to 80s Universal Japanese Motorcycles with plank seats, not concave seats, or trials bikes that don't even have seats! And bicycles are as cylindrical and narrow as a broom yet people seem to ride those just fine. And unicycles are a thing. Also, ***magic***.
Comment: @cde: Not when you consider sitting on a cylinder a few inches wide, which means you don't have a vehicle body for your legs to clamp on to. I didn't say that you need _everything_ at the same time, but motorbikes have many differences from brooms, and a lot of them individually help with a driver keeping their positioning. Also, unicycles have a very concave seat specififally to help the unicyclist to lean without falling off. Also, if "magic" is a valid way to avoid any reasoning, then any question on movies/TV with magic in it should be closed automatically.
Comment: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The movies explicitly show it as a magic **skill**.


Case Emails - Client Replies (email-to-case) - Can SF Be Told To Email The Case Owner?

Question: If a client sends a REPLY to a case email (which is from an "email to case" email address), can SF not be told to send a copy of the email and/or send an alert to the Case Owner?  This seems no-brainer to me, but I'm not finding help for it (Google, Community, etc).  Otherwise, a Case Owner would need to check the case periodically manually to find out if any replies have come - this seems silly.
Answer: From Setup > Customize > Cases > Email-to-Case, check Notify Case Owners on New Emails.

Or if that's not working, in the meantime you could trigger EmailMessage to create a CaseComment instead, then enable Case Comment Notifications from Setup > Support Settings.
Comment: That's already set.  It only affects the intial email  :-/
Comment: Hmm, I'd log into your Partner Portal and raise a support case with Salesforce.
Comment: Somehow I only initially saw your "...new emails" portion of the Answer.  I only now noticed creating Comments and the Notify option.  I will look into that...
Answer: AFter finding no help online, I did some experimentation in SF, and without having to write Triggers (that is not my first preference usually) it seems that "Email Message" which is related to "Case" is available for Workflow logic.  I'm checking this out as a viable solution now.   STILL LOOKING IF SOMEONE HAS SOMETHING BETTER THOUGH.
UPDATE 1:   I note that to make it work with Workflows requires two of them (as far as my skills show).  One to mark a field on the Case temporarily when an email arrives, then another to see that mark, send the email alert, and clear that marker field to be used again.
Next focus is to make it so the INITIAL EMAIL does not trigger this workflow (since we have workflows for various email-to-case / record types to send a "thanks for the email, client, we'll get back to you") OR perhaps alter the existing ones to include a second marker on the Case that would get marked when processing the initial email-to-case to bypass what I've done (and then clear it later).  Not sure yet......
One shortcoming - I do not get access to the EMAIL FIELDS on the email that fires this workflow since the SECOND workflow is a CASE flow.
UPDATE 2:  I will have to update all my initial-email workflows sent back to the client, but this is definitely the right solution to avoid having to go to Apex.
Thanks @User320 for your input!
Comment: Great spot! That's the last time I ever write a trigger on EmailMessage, thanks!


Database.insert(list,false) in apex

Question: I am creating List of Accounts, using database.inser(list,false) if i did give name for record in list,it will skip that particular and insert remaining records, is there any chance to get the details of skipped record.
Comment: You can get that using `Database.saveresult` which will have the failed records as well
Answer: I had a similar problem. For me, it was important to know exactly which inserted object succeeded or failed. I wrote some methods to handle this:
/**
     * @description Method to insert objects to DataBase with improved audit
     * @param sObjects - sObjects to be insert
     * @param field - field that identifies Saveresult with inserted object
     * @return map where key is a value from field specified as param: field
     * and the value is Save result for sObject which is identified by key
     */
    public static Map<String,Database.SaveResult> improvedInsert(List<SObject> sObjects, Schema.sObjectField field) {
        Map<String,Database.SaveResult> saveResultByField = new Map<String,Database.SaveResult>();
        List<Database.SaveResult> results = Database.insert(sObjects, false);
        for (Integer i = 0;i<sObjects.size();i++) {
            saveResultByField.put((String)sObjects.get(i).get(field),results.get(i));
        }
        return  saveResultByField;
    }

Methods give you a map where key is specified as parameter field value and the value is referencing Save/Upsert Result object.
Comment: Post relevant content to your answer or delete it. Links are not valuable here especially when they go stale
Answer: Find the below code refer link

The Database methods return result objects containing success or
failure information for each record. For example, insert and update
operations each return an array of Database.SaveResult objects.

Database.SaveResult[] saveResultList = Database.insert(insertList, false);

// Iterate through saveResultList based on isSuccess capture the failed records
for (Database.SaveResult sr : saveResultList) {
    if (sr.isSuccess()) {
        // Operation was successful, so get the ID of the record that was processed
        System.debug('Successfully inserted account. Account ID: ' + sr.getId());
    }
    else {
        // Operation failed, so get all errors
        for(Database.Error err : sr.getErrors()) {
            System.debug('The following error has occurred.');
            System.debug(err.getStatusCode() + ': ' + err.getMessage());
            System.debug('Account fields that affected this error: ' + err.getFields());
        }
    }
}

Comment: "if (!sr.isSuccess()) { " should be without the !
Answer: Please check the following link of how to access the error records: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexcode.meta/apexcode/apex_methods_system_database_saveresult.htm
Comment: Posting links as answers doesn't help. Links fail or become dead all the time.

Database.insert(list,false) in apex


How do you enable MouseKeys without using the mouse?

Question: Recently, I had to shut down a Mac with no mouse and only a PC keyboard with no Eject key.  (Incidentally, there are several solutions to that puzzle, and the one I settled on was to use the Terminal.) But as I first approached the problem, I thought: There is some universal access feature there to help if one can't use the mouse, isn't there? Yes: MouseKeys.  However, this nice page with the keyboard shortcuts for MouseKeys in Lion suggests that you have to enable a checkbox in a System Preferences pane before you can use it. So, how do you enable MouseKeys without using a mouse?
Answer: You can use the same menus and buttons you would if you were turning on MouseKeys using the mouse, but using them from the keyboard instead. There are a lot of standard keyboard shortcuts that you can use to navigate around without the mouse:

Ctrl + F2 to go to the Apple menu
Arrow keys and Return to choose an item from the pull down menus
Ctrl + F7 to cycle through the sections of a window
Tab to cycle through the controls in a section, and Space to use the highlighted button or checkbox.

This guide from the BBC's site puts it all together.


How to properly access elements of Internet Explorer?

Question: I have a script that tests whether one of our websites is working properly.

Test 1: It checks the HTTP status. (no problem here)
Test 2: It checks whether user authorization is working because we have had issues with this in the past.

Then it waits one hour and runs both tests again.
The overall structure of the script is as follows (pseudocode):
while (1 -eq 1) {
    test1
    if ($result -eq "pass") {
        test2
    }
    start-sleep -seconds 3600
}

Test 2 is where the problem occurs. How this test works is: navigate to the login page, enter credentials, click login button. Check URL, as successful login leads to a different URL from the login page. This works fine, except on (seemingly random) loops it cannot access the elements of the page: the username and passwords fields and the login button. The exceptions that get thrown vary depending on how I change the code around to try to fix the problem.
Some error messages I've gotten include:

System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException The RPC server is
  unavailable. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x800706BA)
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException
  The property 'value' cannot be found on this object. Verify that the property exists and
  can be set.
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException
  OperationStopped: (:) [], COMException
  HResult: -2147352319
  No such interface supported
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException
  OperationStopped: (:) [], COMException
  HResult: -2147352319
  This command is not supported.

The offending code is anything that tries to access a page element with getElementByID, for example:
$ie.Document.getElementByID("username").value = $userame

Again, the weird thing is that the code runs fine for hours and hours... but then, usually in the middle of night, it randomly becomes unable to access the page elements.
Following is the full code of Test 2 in case that helps:
$ie = New-Object -ComObject "internetExplorer.Application"
#$ie.Visible = $true
$ie.navigate2($loginPage)
while ($ie.busy -eq $true) {start-sleep -seconds 1}
$ie.Document.getElementByID("username").value = $username
$ie.Document.getElementByID("password").value = $password
$ie.Document.getElementByID("login-button").click()
while ($ie.busy -eq $true) {start-sleep -seconds 1}
if ($ie.Document.url -eq $landingPage) {
    #success
} else {
    #failure
}
$ie.quit()
[System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($ie) | out-null
[System.GC]::Collect()
[System.GC]::WaitForPendingFinalizers()
$process = get-process -name "iexplore"
while ($process) {
    try {
        stop-process -name "iexplore" -ea stop
    } catch [Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.ProcessCommandException] {
        #do nothing
    }
    try {
        $process = get-process -name "iexplore" -ea stop
    } catch [Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.ProcessCommandException] {
        $process = $null
    }
}

Answer: Until I can figure out what the problem is, I've implemented a workaround. I put the offending code in a try block. In the catch block, I restart the script. Following is not exactly how it is implemented in my script but it gives you the idea:
try {
    $ie.Document.getElementByID("username").value = $username
} catch {
    start powershell {$scriptPath}
    exit
}

When the script restarts, the elements of the page can once again be accessed with getElementByID.


Need ideas for an algorithm to draw irregular blotchy shapes

Question: I'm looking to draw irregular shapes on an x,y grid, and I'd like to come up with a simple, fast method if possible.  My only idea so far is to draw a bunch of circles of random sizes very near each other, but at a random distance apart from a more or less central coordinate, then fill in any blank spaces.  I realize this is a clunky, inelegant method, hopefully it will give you a rough idea of the kinds of rounded, random blotchy shapesI'm shooting for.  Please suggest methods to accomplish this, I'm not so much interested in code.  I can noodle that part out myself. Thanks!
Comment: This mathematica.SE post has some examples you might find interesting: http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/3345/how-to-make-an-inkblot

The top answer basically does what you're doing. another finds the convex hull of random points and then interpolates a spline through it, but that seems a little complicated...
Comment: What about starting with a circle close to the desired size and then permutate it using perlin noise. Either by moving selected pixel, or by fading / extending the circle.
Comment: I would help if you attached some examples of such shapes, but from what I understood, [Marching Squares](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marching_squares) algorithm might be what you're looking for.
Comment: For examples, in all seriousness, think liver spots: rounded, random, but generally ovoid.
Comment: Thanks for your responses!  Unfortunately I think I might be a little bit in over my head.   I  may have to figure something else out.
Answer: You might want to choose some points, choose a vector at each point and draw a spline through them. See this wikipedia page for a simple description of a cubic spline (aka Irwin-Hall spline).
It's been a while since I used them, but if I remember correctly, this was the one that I found to be the easiest to understand and use. If you know the pen tool from photoshop, this works very similar (I'm convinced photoshop uses splines too, but I'm not sure if it is a cubic spline).
If you're interested, there are many more splines: for example, Bezier splines and B-splines are interesting.
Another thing that comes to mind are level sets, although that would probably require a little more research from your side (to find functions that satisfy your requirements).
Level sets are inequalities in the form
f(x, y) = c
where f is some function and c is some constant.
This is a very general description. You might want to fill out some shape, and draw all pixels where
f(x, y) <= c
with some color. For example, for a perfectly round 2d shape, you have the well-known equation:
x^2 + y^2 <= r^2
You can scale the x and y components to get an ellipsoid
With a little experimentation and research, it will be possible to find some funkier shapes (I suppose).
Edit: a little experimentation on wolframalpha.com gave me this.
(created with the command 'plot abs((x+sin(x)*y/3)^3)+y^2<=7'). I have no idea if this is anything like what you want, but it's just to give you an idea.
Answer: Another straightforward approach is by using your own low-frequency noise to draw (or define) a figure in polar coordinates.
Suppose you want a blob centered at the origin, of average radius 1; this can easily be scaled and translated to other positions and sizes.  Imagine with the simple equation r=1 — this would define a circle of radius one at the origin.  To add a little variation to it, you can change the radius sinusoidally - add a term of the form w1*sin(θ+θ1), where w1 and θ1 are constants I'll get back to in a bit.  One sin term won't make a whole lot of difference, but having several different sines of different frequencies will start to add exactly the sort of 'soft' variation I suspect you're after.  The overall form would be along the lines of r=1+w1*sin(θ+θ1)+w2*sin(2θ+θ2)+w3*sin(3θ+θ3)+w4*sin(4θ+θ4)+w5*sin(5θ+θ5) - or more terms if you want, of course.
So how do we pick the values for wi and θi?  Well, the θs should just be picked randomly from (0,2π) - in other words, each 'wave' on the surface's shape should start at a different point around the shape.  As for the w's, there are several different choices.  Choosing wi at random from (0, w) (for some fixed w that represents the 'overall variation' to give the shape; I might start with w=0.25 but experiment with w=0.1) for every i will lead to so-called white noise, where all the frequencies have equal weight — this will be by far the 'blobbiest', with wide variations at all frequencies.  Choosing wi at random from (0, w*(1/i)) — in other words, dividing each random weight by i — gives pink noise, where the weight trails off, but slowly.  This is also known as 1/f noise, and it's the most famous 'fractal' noise.  Finally, choosing the weights randomly from (0, w*(1/i^2)) (in other words, dividing each random weight by i^2) gives brownian noise - this is the 'softest' of the three, with the least variation from a circle - it'll generally be an oval-ish shape.
Here are examples of the three, using a 'total weight' of w=0.25, and using the same set of random values for the wi and θi pulled from random.org:
"White Noise" blob:

"Pink Noise" blob:

"Brownian Noise" blob:

Note that these blobs won't be perfect; in particular, it's impossible for them to curl back on themselves (since for every θ — in other words, for every angle from the origin — there's a single r value), and if you don't choose your weights right they might self-intersect (if r is allowed to go negative).  But they do a decent job of being convincingly blobby, and for most games applications users won't notice any issues.
Comment: (Also note: the fact that these shapes are so close to symmetric is an artifact of (a) the coefficients of the second and fourth harmonics being so small, and (b) the _phases_ of the first, third and fifth harmonics - how much we displace the theta values - being so close, at .468, .464 and .443; most 'blobs' won't have nearly this much symmetry about them.)
Answer: Aside from the other answers, you could use a Perlin noise with a round falloff, if you tweak the settings a little, you could easily create some nice varying shapes.
If you want your code to be fast, you could just use a noise-generation library like libnoise(Assuming you are using c++), which is a noise-generation library, that makes similar tasks very simple, as it provides you with a node-based approach on noise-based procedural generation. It has bindings to other languages too.


Merge DEM and Hillshade to create one file?

Question: I am wondering if I could merge DEM and Hillshade? What are the pros and cons for that?
Comment: What end-product do you hope to produce?  After all, hillshades are derived from DEMs.
Comment: possible duplicate: http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/19386/can-shaded-relief-be-blended-with-dem-colour-ramp-in-arcgis-to-produce-a-more
Comment: For now I don't have the ArcGIS 10
Comment: I removed all the ArcGIS tags to reflect the lack of ArcGIS software to carry out a solution and to keep this from being a duplicate of the previous ArcGIS-oriented question.
Comment: Listen all, I got my ArcGIS 10 upgrade. Finally and I was able to perform Elevation and Hillshade just exactly what I wanted ! I created one Desert tint hillshade ! Thanks.
Answer: Combined pan-sharpening, contrast stretching, and gamma stretching functions
If you have access to ArcGIS (and the Spatial Analyst Extension) you can use the technique described in this blog to "blend" DEM (or imagery) with shaded relief. The main disadvantage of this solution is that it is static; you need to produce an RGB raster from your DEM so if you need to change the original symbology in any way you have to do it on the original DEM raster then re-do the RGB raster and repeat all the steps.  Luckily 95% of my current work is in the same geographical area so I just built various models and schemas that suit the various scales I often use and simply copy and paste them in the map as needed.  As for using this approach with imagery; one unexpected advantage beyond just the wow factor is that field crews and environmental scientists like that use these "imagery-hill-shade blend" maps to get a sense of the terrain characteristics as well as the aerial perspective in one glance.
As a side note; It does require a certain amount of tinkering around with the functions to get the look of the resulting layer just right.
Below is an example and the input rasters. The last image is an example of imagery "blended" with DEM. No transparency was applied, the below examples are a result of the above mentioned functions as described in the linked ArcGIS Resource Centre blog by rajnagi.
DEM & Hillshade:

Input DEM:

Input Hillshade:

Imagery & Hillshade example:
Comment: Thanks for the info. I don't know if this will work with 9.3.1. I don't have the 10 yet.
Comment: I think it might.
Comment: @JakubSisakGeoGraphics Is it possible for QGIS?
Answer: You could 'merge' dem and hillshade.  You could add 1 (grayscale or colormap) or 3 (rgb) bands to the dem.  I don't see any benefit to doing so, and it would probably cause confusion given 2 band images are rare and 4 band images will likely at some point be misinterpreted as and RGBA image.  Personally, I wouldn't do it.
Comment: How do I do that ? Do you mean the grayscale or bands from the Landsat ?
Comment: My thinking is to export each DEM and Hillshade and then merge both is that what you meant ?
Comment: Sorry, I may have misunderstood.  Where does landsat come it?  Some hillshades can be colored as in the example below, that is where 3 bands come in.  DEMs are usually a single band with z values.
Answer: In ArcGIS you can apply a hillshade effect to a DEM - it's a check box on the Symbology tab under Properties.

This will allow you to keep the values in the DEM, but still allow for the visual effect of the hillshade.


In Buddhism can all we percieve / experience b used as teachers?

Question: ...I have been working on this one question for a while so can everything we experience in life internally and externally be used as our teachers from a Buddhist point of view?examples..
Anger = powerful emotion active in a person when one is threatened or insulted ,,an injustice over a issue etc also known to protect the persons personality ( possible to say anger is a friend then ! ) anger is an emotion that is automatically generated ,defense mechanism. It is repetitive and has been for x million yrs within the human psyche.  We could also say it  exists in lower beings birds ,goats , dogs etc so anger could be an important link to other forms of life by now I think you'll get some idea about just one state of mind that's revealed so much ...
Comment: After specific words from Buddha's teachings that clarify weather everything we exp...can be our teachers
Answer: The Buddha told us the three marks of existence, all things which exist in the mind have these properties:

Sabbe sankhara anicca
Sabbe sankhara dukkha
Sabbe dhamma anatta
All conditioned things are impermanent, All conditioned things are suffering, All things are without a self.

This means that everything has the potential to teach us. We can learn about impermanence, dukkha, and not-self from anything which arises in the mind.
Comment: Yes that's what I figured but who is the dicerner as to what's factual and not ? For example if I was blind how does one explain. The sensation of a colored sky.
Comment: The Buddha as a teacher gave us the dhamma which we must see for ourselves. We have to be our own teachers to learn from our experience and see the dhamma. Your analogy with blindness isn't relevant here, you can see when things are impermanent and from that you develop an understanding of the truth.
Comment: Yes ,,to some of your response except for termerlogy like see for your self !! Though the Buddha stated some similar discourse in my question is it fair to say that the self is judge when really there is no permanent self ie it is illusion... A person blind has lost the ability to judge what a sky is like !?
Comment: 'The mind' is the 'discerner' (rather the 'self'). Is there anything you as a 'self' consider your self to be that has not been first discerned by the mind? For example, if you consider yourself to be 'Australian', was your self-belief of 'Australian' something internally born into your mind at childbirth or was it something learned/discerned externally from a sense experience?
Comment: True the mind is the discerner.. As to being Australian I assume the answer is just terminology ...a word construct from society I feel human not Australian even though the Australian society would influence other wise the judgement is flawed..
Answer: Anger certainly exists in lower beings such birds, goats, dogs, etc. That is why, in Buddhism, anger does not represent the 'human state' ('manussa-dhamma'). Instead, in represents 'birth' ('jati') in the 'animal world' (tiracchānayoni).

Sensual desire... ill-will (anger)... sloth & drowsiness... restlessness & anxiety... uncertainty is an obstacle, a hindrance that overwhelms
the mind and weakens wisdom... when a
monk has not abandoned these five obstacles... for him to understand what is for his
own benefit, to understand what is for the benefit of others, to
understand what is for the benefit of both, to realize a superior
human (manussa) state (dhammā), a truly noble distinction in knowledge & vision: that is
impossible.
Avarana Sutta

Although anger is certainly a pre-programmed instinctual survival mechanism, does anger teach us it is the ideal way to respond to perceived threats? Or is there a more 'human' ('reflective/wise') way to respond to perceived threats?
Buddhism explains everything can be a teacher, it that everything has:
(i) a cause/reason for its arising (samudaya);
(ii) a condition for its passing (atthaṅgama);
(iii) an attractive, alluring or stimulating quality (assāda);
(iv) a danger or drawback (ādīnava);
(v) a method to escape from the danger (nissaraṇa).
When people confessed their sins (moral transgressions) to the Buddha, he generally responded their sins were a 'teacher' for their growth & development. For example:

Yes, great king, a transgression overcame you in that you were so foolish, so muddle-headed, and so unskilled as to kill your father — a
righteous man, a righteous king — for the sake of sovereign rulership.
But because you see your transgression as such and make amends in
accordance with the Dhamma, we accept your confession. For it is a
cause of growth in the Dhamma & Discipline of the noble ones when,
seeing a transgression as such, one makes amends in accordance with
the Dhamma and exercises restraint in the future.
DN 2
Comment: In defence of emotional structure and learning from them..the Buddha taught some great ideas but sometimes it's very easy to overlook the minor details or have deslike to negative emotion such as anger ! Who just maybe the only teachers we have as the mind in each person most likely is great at being a trickster as well as teacher. Just for thought a great wise man told me ..in regards to fear ..good snake
Comment: The Buddha found the emotion of anger is suffering; in that it burns the mind internally like a fire. The Buddha found anger endangers the life of oneself & others. The criticism of anger is not related to "dislike" but related to wisdom. From a Buddhist perspective, anger ultimately teaches you that you are not yet complete in wisdom. It is true anger shows their is a threat or social injustice. But anger is generally not the best way to resolve that threat or social injustice. If anger is used to resolve social injustice, generally, the result is a cycle of revenge. Regards.
Answer: A trite answer might be "Yes, everything is a learning experience! You can learn from anything".
A better answer might be "No: maybe not".

To start with, saying for example that "a turnip can be used as a teacher" maybe does a disservice to actual/genuine teachers (including the Buddha himself).

The Bhikkhuni Sutta suggests that various things like food, and even craving and conceit, can be helpful or instrumental. But not sexual intercourse, it says. It doesn't explain why, but perhaps we might infer that sexual intercourse cannot be "used as our teacher".
Although I note that perhaps some forms of Buddhism do teach that, in some circumstances and for some people, there is something to be learned from sexual intercourse.

I suspect that maybe negative emotions, such as anger or jealousy, maybe can't be used as a teacher. Maybe they teach remorse ... however the lesson you ought to be learning instead of that is "skillful virtues" and "freedom from remorse".
You say that anger "protects the person's personality, so it's possible to say anger is a friend then". I suspect however that if you practice anger, then that does nothing but teach you how to be angry (which maybe isn't a lesson worth learning, nor a "personality" you want to preserve).


What are the advantages of wastewater treatment technology that can work in both anoxic and oxic condition?

Question: I was looking at some papers related to moving bed Biofilm reactor and it says that it can be used both in anoxic and oxic condition. So, I want to know what are the advantages of treatment plants that can work in both anoxic and oxic conditions?
Comment: You can use it both anoxic and oxic conditions instead of having to provide pretreatment? I don't really get the question. If you have both conditions, you need to be able to treat both, right?
Answer: the two processes are used to degrade two different classes of contaminants in the wastewater stream. the oxic/activated sludge process is nearly universal but depending on the discharge regulations, the anoxic process may be required to meet the regs. this means the plant would have to contain both processes.
Answer: TLDR: Treatment technologies that can function in oxic and anoxic conditions are more flexible and can be applied in more circumstances.
First, I think clearing up some terminology would be helpful. These terms are not super specific, but this is how they are generally used in my experience.
A Treatment plant is a facility which receives wastewater, treats it, and discharges it somewhere. It is not oxic or anoxic, but it has treatment processes which can be oxic or anoxic. Most plants have numerous processes, including both oxic and anoxic (and anaerobic) processes for treatment of different things. A treatment process uses a specific treatment technology or technologies to accomplish its goals. A moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) is a specific technology involving suspended media to host biofilm growth.
MBBR tanks can be aerated (oxic conditions) or un-aerated (anoxic conditions) depending on the goals of the treatment process. The fact that the technology can be applied in both kinds of processes doesn't usually* benefit the process itself. It does benefit the manufacturer because their potential market is larger however. This does not mean this is just marketing hype; it serves to clarify for customers the potential applications.
*I say doesn't usually benefit the process, but there are some plants that have "swing" zones that can be operated either oxically or anoxically depending on the influent conditions. I don't know of an MBBR that is operated this way, but I don't see why it couldn't be. In this case, the flexibility helps the plant adapt to the current conditions.


Why does my browser not open up a URL that is just an image?

Question: Sometimes when I view an image (just an image, something like  http://www.example.com/blah.jpg), it sometimes opens up the image and other times I am asked which program I want to use to view the file.
Why is that?
Answer: This is usually configured on the host site.
Sometimes the host wants to force the download as shown in this example here.
Answer: It has something to do with the mime-type being sent by the web-server not matching the extension for that mimeType on your computer.
Poke around:
HKCR\MIME\Database\Content Type

i don't know the specifics. i've looked into it a few times in the past; but i've forgotten.
But it can be the fault of a mis-configured web-server; sending you a .jpg when with a Content-Type of image/gif.


Immigrant Visa or Tourist Visa

Question: I am American citizen living in Mexico on a permanent resident visa.  I am to marry a Mexican national.  As we have no immediate plans after marriage to live in the USA, I assume a Visitor's Visa would suffice if, in fact, would be our only option.  A related question is if, and when, we should decide we perhaps wanted to live in the USA, would it require me to be living in the USA for her to enter on a spousal visa?  Thank you for a reply that will make me perhaps more confident of our plan of action.
Answer: I'll speak from personal experience. We are permanently resident in the UK. My wife, at the time an Indian citizen, was given a 10 year visitor's visa no problem. Our situation was basically identical to yours except we were married and live in the UK.
If you've been in a genuine marriage for more than two or three years, getting a 'green card' is likewise very straightforward and likely to be processed quickly as it was for us. You will not need to have an established domicile in the U.S., but they will ask for a address for certain contact purposes. I gave my mother's. Just keep in mind that the intention is that you will be living primarily in the U.S. They expect you to honor that.
Answer: For visiting, a visitor visa is appropriate, although being the spouse of a US citizen may make it slightly harder to get.
When you petition your spouse to immigrate, you will need to show that you intend to re-establish domicile in the US, at least by the time your spouse arrives in the US. You can go to the US together with, or before, your spouse.

Immigrant Visa or Tourist Visa


Can Katsuki Bakugo fly as much as he wants with his explosion quirk?

Question: In My Hero Academia, we see several times Bakugo using his explosion quirk to lift himself to mid-air and fly to increase his speed. How much can he uses this technique to fly? Can he fly as much as he wants or is he limited to fly a few metres above the ground?
Answer: I can't remember this being elaborated in the manga, but since it is very serious of the mechanics of the quirks, we can find out ourselves. I'll use this page as reference.

Katsuki's Quirk allows him to sweat nitroglycerin from his palms and detonate it at will to create explosions.

So as long as he sweats, he can fly. This effect is in fact achieved by being on the right side of the shock wave of the explosion. However:

These explosions, especially when used repeatedly in rapid succession, were actually shown to have a negative impact on Katsuki's arms.

So there is a limit.
To actually fly and not just "jump" midair, he would need to navigate the explosions constantly, adjusting their strength and also needing a really big amount stored if he wants to fly long distances, which on the other hand he needs to carry.
So if Bakugo wanted to fly, think of him as an Iron Man without repulsors in his shoes (allowing him only to navigate and accelerate/decelerate with the hands) on short fuel with every second of the repulsors being on taking a burden on his arms. Not really flying.
Answer: Tl;Dr Bakugo isn't flying at all. He is jumping and augmenting himself using his Explosion quirk. There is no actual flying involved, though he may seem to be floating (much like Midoriya) in the slowmos.
We see him do the exact same thing multiple times throughout the anime/manga.

He does this when he sent threw the baseball flying or the sprint/long jump in the Quick Apprehension Test.

He shows more adaptability with his precision and control by jumping and changing directions during the Trial Battle

The main proof his "inability" to fly while jumping really high comes during the Sports Festival. Cero had to use tape to control his dissent. If he could maneuver himself, Cero wouldn't have needed to help.

The most lengthy and continuous use of his explosion is the so called "Special Move" used by Bakugo using his explosions to rotate while propelling himself like a bullet, the Howitzer Blast seen in finals vs Todoroki
Comment: His inability to maneuver shows a lack of ability, but not the impossibility to learn it.
Answer: he can fly but crudely. He's moving through the air without having to touch the ground so I suppose it counts. His limit would be how much he can sweat and how long he can endure his own explosions. Elevation-wise,he has no real limits there. He's flown all the way up to catch Kirishima's hand which was well above some multistory buildings. He's also flown low like in the Quirk Apprehension Exam.


Cognos Report Studio VS Tableau Desktop (HTML TAGS)

Question: So I am currently using Cognos Report Studio 10.2.2 and I don't know much about Tableau. I have looked online but there is one thing that I want to know more about and I can't find anything on it. In Cognos I can drag over an HTML tag and create custom JS/Jquery or HTML and CSS in them and add more of a custom feel to my reports. Is there something similar in Tableau that I can do to make reports more customizable like I do in Cognos? Right now in Cognos I have created a sliding suite of reports with a custom search engine but I couldn't find anything like this in Tableau. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Answer: Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server are two different products. I suggest downloading a trail http://www.tableau.com/products/trial?os=windows if you're unfamiliar with the product and play around with it. You can trial both Desktop and Server.
Desktop does not have any JS/HTML/CSS functionality. Tableau Server does have a JS API http://www.tableau.com/new-features/javascript-api but it is used as functionality not appearance changes. The aesthetics of your report is controlled by Desktop.


Can roasted coffee as soil burn soft leaves?

Question: Yesterday I well fed my cannabis sativa (Wikipedia) plants with fresh shredded extra roasted Starbucks coffee under the assumption they will grow better, but instead of that this morning I saw the left half of my plant was abused and deeply shrunken. Is this because of the nitrogen in the coffee?
Comment: How did you get this assumption? You can use ground coffee for compost though, but then wait until it is decomposed before using it as fertilizer.
Comment: do you mean you put the coffee grounds on the soil round the plant, or do you mean an actual cup of coffee? Are the plants in pots?
Comment: Thanks for the comments,  @Bamboo yes i mean a cup of coffee
Answer: It appears you watered your plant/s with an actual cup of coffee, and that you did not dilute it beforehand, though hopefully, the coffee did not contain milk or artificial creamers, nor sweetener/sugar, was not still hot and you did not put the grounds on the soil too.
If you must use coffee, it needs to be cooled and diluted with as much water again, should only be applied occasionally, and then only on acid loving plants. Your cannabis plants like a soil ph of between 6-7; coffee is acidifying and has a ph of 5.2-6.9, depending on the beans and preparation, but cannabis prefers more alkaline conditions, so frequent use of coffee will mean a rise in acidity in the soil conditions in pots. Probably best to avoid using at all for your plants https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/garden-how-to/soil-fertilizers/diluted-coffee-for-plants.htm
Answer: Coffee grounds have been found to NOT be any kind of a substitute for fertilizer or for feeding the micro and macro organisms of the soil.  Very acidic as well. I would never use coffee grounds in my soil.  Not worth it.
Cannabis plants like a more neutral to ALKALINE soil, NOT at all a neutral to ACID soil.
Best advice I could give you is to buy! Jorge Cervantes "The Cannabis Encyclopedia".  Incredible detail and this book may be all about ONE plant but this book is so educational about all plants.  Cannabis is the best thing to happen because it is making great gardeners!  No Cannabis grower will be using these lame fads of No Till, No Fertilizer, Back to Eden, Hugelkultur...grins!!


Contacts deleted in Sales Cloud are not deleted in Marketing Cloud

Question: We have to be missing something simple, but when we delete a contact in Sales Cloud, shouldn't that contact be automatically removed from Marketing Cloud?  We tried a bunch of options including many iterations of changing our query in automation studio to try to filter out deleted contacts.  We thought maybe using the isDeleted flag in our where statement, but that wasn't it.  What are we missing?  Contacts deleted in Sales Cloud need to be deleted and removed from journeys automatically in Marketing Cloud.
Comment: Unfortunately, I don't think it works that way. If you are using synchronized data extensions and you delete a contact, they will be removed there, but once they are in journeys or all subscribers, removing them from Sales Cloud will not remove them from Marketing Cloud...
Comment: Did you try to delete the contact by API based on a trigger after delete in Sales Cloud ? https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.mc-apis.meta/mc-apis/DeleteByContactKeys.htm
Answer: Deleting a contact in SFDC will not automatically trigger a delete of the Contact in SFMC. Although there has been great progress in integrating these tools, such core concepts are still split.
Deleting a contact in SFDC should remove the contact from the Synchronized Data Extension, which means that you can cannot rely on the isDeleted flag to be set as the entire record would likely be gone.
Generally, I would say you have three basic options

Run a query to calculate which contacts are in your All
Subscribers (and MobileConnect Demographics and MobilePush
Demographics if you use those) compare with who is in your Contact
synchronized data extension. Then once every week/month you run a
manual delete request ->
https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_cab_delete_contact.htm&type=5
Create a SSJS activity which triggers a delete using Contact Key or List (as calculated in 1) once per hour/day/etc to the API -> https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.noversion.mc-apis.meta/mc-apis/restrict-contact-key.htm
Trigger the above mentioned API as part of an onDelete trigger in SFDC (I would usually go with this one)


Do I have to mention my main character's age?

Question: I finished my novel and realised that I never mentioned my main character's age. In chapter two I said that she in in her twenties, but that's the only mention of her age.
I know that she is twenty-three, should I state this in my novel, or is it okay to leave her age vague?
Comment: "In her 20s" is mentioning her age.  You can choose to be more specific, but
I can only come up with ridiculous pretexts why this would impact the story (she inherits a million dollars, but only if she's married by her 25th birthday, because her rich spinster aunt doesn't want the MC to make the same mistakes she made?)
Comment: How many novels have you read where the characters' age is mentioned?
Comment: FWIW, not mentioning her age at all (including that one bit in chapter two) might help some readers relate to her -- we tend to fill in gaps with familiar elements, and readers may assume she's their age.  If that doesn't change the story unfavorably, it might be a benefit of deliberately leaving her age out.
Comment: I forgot the name of the book but I read a fantasy novel last year and I remember that the age was never mentioned only hinted at which made the characters so much more interesting because there was a mystery around them and I could use my own imagination, if I wanted to, to fill the "missing" information.
Comment: Whatever you do, be sure to remain consistent. Quite a few authors have done some screwups messing up internal consistencies with their books - even some big names like Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. SoD gets hit hard everytime a reader gets surprised by a trait that comes from nowhere and fundamentally changes how they saw a given character.
Answer: There are a lot of things you don't mention in your story. You don't mention how many times a day your MC uses the toilet. You don't mention how many beauty marks she has on her body. You probably don't mention the colour of her t-shirt.
You only mention the things that are important.
If a character is a child, their age is important - it affects the whole story. A child of six is not a child of ten - there's a significantly different level of maturity there. If your character is elderly, on the other hand, it is enough to imply: white hair and dragging footsteps convey a picture much stronger than a mere statement of "70 years old" or "90 years old". In that case, age would only be important if reference is made to a historic even the character has been affected by.
In your case, as @wetcitcuit states, "in her twenties" gives the reader enough of a picture. Unless the specific age is a plot point, it's unnecessary.
There is nothing at all that you "need to mention". Not the character's age, not their appearance - nothing. Any detail you give is because it is somehow important to the story. If it is in no way important, it doesn't set a mood, it doesn't do anything - throw it away.
(Note regarding setting a mood: stating a character is "in her twenties", "has just turned twenty-three", or "is twenty three years, four months and twelve days old" all create a slightly different image in your mind.)
Comment: Saying that the character "celebrated her 23rd birthday the previous weekend" is a fourth option that create a possibly quite different image in the reader's mind.
Comment: I would somehow nuance that point: "Any detail you give is because it is somehow important to the story"... with the possible exception of reader immersion. Some readers do like to have a rough idea of physical appearences, environment details, etc. to feel more emotionally involved in the story. But "in her twenties" is probably more than enough.
Comment: @bilbo_pingouin: I think you might have underestimated the relevance of the character's approximate age. Age, or generation, is a gateway to all manner of character traits from political affiliation to temperament. It colors our perception of those traits in a unique way; the irreverent grandmother is an entirely different character from the irreverent twentysomething, even if their characterization is otherwise identical.
Comment: @Kevin, sorry, I fail to see how your statement contradicts mine. Age is important to the story, as it will change the behaviour of the characters and most of their interaction. But you will notice that I focus on physical appearance, etc. in my statement. They might not be important to the story per se. But it certainly helps getting in.
Answer: Yes, it is fine to leave a character's age vague. If your story includes tales from the past, historical events readers would know, or scenes of interactions with other characters from years ago (like her parents or siblings or friends), then you should keep track of a timeline for each character, how old  they were and where they were, so you don't make the mistake of having a fifteen year old renting her first apartment or buying a used car without anybody thinking this unusual. But that is just keeping your story straight.
I often leave character's ages indeterminate, some could be pretty much anywhere between 50 and near retirement; they are just "older".
And the age of my MC can be vague too, especially if she is an adult and done with school. Exact age becomes more important for pre-schoolers and non-adults when they are (mostly) segregated by age into classes, and how old they are is a significant part of their psyche. To a lesser extent for the ages of consent, driving, tobacco and alcohol use, entering into contracts and voting. Once those "milestones" are behind them, their exact age is increasingly irrelevant, and categories work. College age, young, middle-aged, etc.
Answer: No, if you're describing them then you may wish to mention how old they look but the actual age of characters doesn't matter much. Unless you make it a specific plot point, or there's something odd going on, like a difference between the characters' apparent age and actual age that needs to be noted and/or exampled, I'd leave it alone entirely.
Answer: I don't really believe that the specific age matters. "twenty's" is helpful though as a general age can help us visualize the character better but unless being exactly 23 is important for the story (she probably just got a BA if she's following a traditional schooling path so she would be just out of school or fresh to Grad School), I don't think you really ever need to tell us that she's 23. But, if you really want to, you could just change the fact that she's in her twenty's in chapter two to the fact that she's 23. Although it's not necessary, it appears as if you have a very specific view of who this person is so you might want to note she is actually 23.
Comment: Do not forget that many people do leave school at an age much younger than 23. Many start working at 16, or after a study which is much shorter than till 23.
Answer: In my opinion, leave out "in her twenties" as a direct description, under the "show, don't tell" guideline.  That being said, it would be make sense to have another character notice that she looks like she's in her twenties, or maybe asking a third character how old she is, etc.
Answer: Almost every Animorphs book opens with the first person narrator explicitly saying that their only Personal Identifying Information they would give the reader was their first name and until the final book, they were identified vaguely as teenagers, but not yet of driving age (between 13-16) and were all in the same unidentified grade year.  We only learn two character's ages in the course of the book:  Jake and Ax.   Jake only gives his age up in the final book as the story is almost over and the reason for the anonimity no longer serves a point.  Ax is odder as he is an alien character and it is stated that his planet has a much longer revolution around its sun thus he technically is only 2 years old, but is of the same maturity as the core cast.   At various points in the series, several characters try to explain this by saying that Ax is roughly 14 years old and that one of his years is about 7 of Earth's years, but that Ax uses his own years when he is giving his age.  At no point is an direct conversion given and Ax is never explicitly said to be older or younger than the cast but is generally around their age.  This may have stemmed for a running gag of Ax being ridiculously precise in exactly whose measurements he is giving and it comes to a certain point that it's clear Ax is doing this for his own amusement but the typical exchange is Ax giving a time limit as "2 of your [Earth] hours" to which one of the kid will point out they are all on Earth and making the distinction isn't needed.  It didn't help that his species has a natural sense of time, and Ax is frequently used as an improve stop watch for not missing deadlines.


How to hide my tor exit node from getting detected?

Question: Some websites detect my exit node and understand i am using tor browser and won't let me in their websites. VPN's do not prevent it from happening. neither does proxies. What can i do to hide my true exit node and trick a website into believeing i am not a tor user?
Comment: Unfortunately this is not possible with Tor alone. Some people combine Tor with other proxies/VPNs/etc for this reason, but in some circumstances this can harm anonymity. If it's a smaller website, you can try emailing them and ask them to support Tor users. Some websites don't know that they're blocking Tor.
Answer: Tor exit nodes ips are public and can be easily found. They can be found at dan.me.uk list or Tor metrics with exit flag.
There is nothing you can do except for contacting site administrators and telling them to support connections from Tor (unlikely that they'll do it). If you still want to access the site, you can use a private proxy (you can use proxychains to chain your traffic through tor and then a private proxy).


Two soft questions about spin and the particle nature of electrons

Question: How can we define spin as the spin of an electron around it's own axis if an electron is described by a probability cloud of finding an electron in a point in space? How does that probability cloud spin around it's own "axis"(I find this ill-defined too) and create magnetic field? Also, when is the elctron in an atom described as a particle and follows particle principles?
Comment: I would like to clarify  that the electron is not "a probability cloud" in the sense you use it. The probability of finding the electron is defined by a spacetime function, but the electron in the standard model of particle physics is A POINT, as far as our measurement accuracies go.
Answer: Another way to look at spin, complementary to the other ways, which I find helpful is look at an abstract generalisation of the concept of angular momentum and forget about things like classical tops. This generalisation begins in something called Noether's Theorem which you probably haven't met yet. You need some background but the idea is essentially simple. If we find that a system's physics is unchanged when we impart a continuous transformation on it, then Noether's theorem tells us that there must be one conserved quantity for each such continuous transformation. Thus, Nature doesn't seem to care whether we put our co-ordinate system origin here, or there, or anywhere in between. We can slide the origin of our co-ordinate system around, but the physics stays the same. There are three continuous transformations here: sliding the co-ordinate origin in the $x$, $y$ or $z$ directions. Noether's theorem tells us that there are three corresponding conserved quantities: these are what we call the components of linear momentum. Likewise, most physical laws don't care where we put the time origin: we can slide it continuously back and forth, but the physics doesn't change. There is thus another conserved quantity: this is the one we call energy. Lastly, if we rotate our co-ordinate system around, we don't change the physics, so there are three conserved quantities, one for each of the three possible axes of rotation. These we can define as the angular momentum components.
Therefore, we could imagine being clever beings who know nothing about spinning tops, and yet we could still foretell the existence of angular momentum that is conserved for an isolated system. Electrons, photons, all kinds of particles still have this property because their physics (encoded in something called their Lagrangian) doesn't change when we impart rotational transformations on our descriptive co-ordinate system, even if we can't imagine them as spinning like a top. Our clever beings might have no sense of sight, and therefore might not get hung up on needing to see things "spin" (i.e. beget a particular, highly noticeable sight-sense experience that helped our evolutionary forebears to spot movement when hunting or fleeing predators) before they would declare those things had angular momentum. For such beings, there would be no everyday concept of spin such as we have: for them there would only be conserved quantities whose existence was inferred from applying Noether's theorem to the invariance of physics with respect to co-ordinate system rotation.
I recall being bothered by the same kind of question when I was much younger. You may be finding the assertion that something delocalised like an electron simply has angular momentum without spinning a bit of a spin out, so it may help you to know that this thought was found to be very troubling to some very great minds. Wolfgang Pauli thought the idea was preposterous precisely because he was still thinking of spinning balls, and therefore he calculated that the surface of these balls would need to be spinning at greater than lightspeed to account for known angular momentum. Quantum mechanical spin is widely cited as the first quantum property to be discovered that has no classical counterpart, hence is naturally going to seem pretty weird at first meeting.
Comment: @user148432 I think physical intuition can be important and helpful, but mathematics lets us think of "universal physics": what would beings whose senses were utterly different from ours conclude about physics. Mathematics is sense independent (Gödel would have said that the grasping of logical truth is a physical sense, which is almost another way of saying the same thing) and is thus one way we can take this point of view. Thus our clever beings might be unsighted, and thus probably wouldn't get hung up about things needing to "spin" (i.e. give the observer a particular kind of ...
Comment: @user148432 sight-sense experience that our forebears found helpful in spotting movement either hunting or staying clear of predators) to have angular momentum. There would be no everyday concept of spin: just conserved quantities whose existence was inferred from Noether's theorem. Indeed the use of gauge theories to "force" continuous symmetries so that candidate theories have consverved quantities observed experimentally is one method modern physics has used to formulate candidate theories: see [here my answer here for more](http://physics.stackexchange.com/a/78640/26076)
Comment: Actually this was the kind of answer I was looking for.
Comment: @user148432 Glad it helped. I certainly was bothered by this question a long time ago but recall my dissatisfaction as though it were yesterday. I actually find mathematical abstraction helpful often: recall that we are delving into patterns that our evolutionary forebears did not meet, and so there is no *a priori* reason why we should intuitively understand these patterns.
Comment: In fact, you could just check my account and see that I am active in MSE, thus would prefer and understand bettrr an abstract mathematical explanation over a physical one. But the reason you stated also holds, it's not only not everyday experience, but also experience that I never had in real life and probably will never have.
Answer: Spin is not defined as the spin of electron around its own axis. Spin is the intrinsic angular momentum of the electron - intrinsic meaning it does not arise from the electron's motion, but is a property of electron itself.
The electron in the atom "can" be described as a particle if you are using the Bohr model of the atom. Quantum mechanical picture of the electron is a more accurate description and should be used when dealing with atom-sized objects if you can deal with the mathematics.
Comment: How does a probability cloud have angular momentum though?
Comment: @user148432: it just does. This only seems strange to you because you're trying to use a classical interpretation of spin. Quantum mechanical spin is just a property of the particle, for example like charge, and doesn't mean the partice is rotating.
Comment: I'm not able to explain this very well for spin. However, the electron as a probability cloud also has "orbital" angular momentum for some eigenstates, even though the probability cloud is stationary (which is even more strange imho). The best explanation I can give for this is a mathematical one - if you define angular momentum operators and operate on an eigenstate, you get nonzero eigenvalues (hence nonzero angular momentum). And the results have been verified by experiments.
Comment: The wave function isn't stationary but constantly changes its phase. Only the probability distribution that arises from a measurement of a wave function that is an Eigenvector of the system's Hamiltonian is stationary.
Comment: @CuriousOne: My comment does say probability cloud, not the wavefunction...
Comment: @mihapriimek: It's a bad idea to talk about a probability cloud, to begin with. There ain't no such thing and that's why I am not going to talk about it. The physically relevant quantity is the wave function, and that is not stationary. Only if the measurement is done on a wavefunction that belongs to an energy Eigenvalue, is the measured probability distribution (which has no physical meaning for the actual dynamic of the system) stationary.
Comment: @CuriousOne: I disagree; It is true that the relevant thing is the wavefunction, but it is not the changing phase that gives rise to angular momentum, it is it's spatial part. On the other hand, the probability distribution (what the person who asked the question probably meant by probability cloud) is the closest analogue to "where particle is".
Comment: @mihapriimek: The probability distribution is the analog of "I measured a classical particles at $(x_0, t_0), (x_1, t_1),...$", it's not the equivalent of the equation of motion of the particle in classical mechanics. You are simply mistaking the measurements that one can do on a system for the actual quantity that guides the dynamic evolution of the system.
Comment: @CuriousOne: ok
Answer: Electrons never follow "particle principles", by which you seem to mean the physics of classical point particles. It's only in certain cases that a classical approximation is sufficient for human purposes, i.e. when we don't care about the uncertainty relations that govern quantum mechanical objects.
In general it's better to think about elementary particles as quanta of a field. Physically measurable interactions of this field with itself are always represented by the presence (and exchange) of one or multiple of these quanta. It's the symmetries of this quantum field that give rise to conserved quantities like charge and angular momentum, including spin. It's the quantization of the field which forces quanta to carry fixed amounts of these conserved quantities.
Answer: Quantum Spin of a particle just represents another degree of freedom (e.g $+/- 1/2$ for electrons) and due to its representation as an "angular momentum operator", it is refered to as "spin". However it is not an analog (or actual revolution of a particle around its own axis). At least not in a classical sense.
In summary it represents another degree of freedom (or another dimension if you like) of a particle, which can be represented as a "(gemeralised) angular momentum".
A particle in a specific level of physical description can be taken as a (classical, point-like) particle (and not as a distributed material, like a wave) when the relatve dimensions of the overall system and the particle allow for such a description or the level of accuracy of description allows it. In general it depends on the "characteristic wavelength" (de-Broglie wavelength) of a material wave-particle and its relation to the dimensions of the overall system under study.


How can I add a link to show/hide threaded comments?

Question: I've enabled threaded comments in the comment settings on my Drupal 7 site. Now, on every comment that has threaded comments beneath it, I'd like to add a link (in the same place as the reply/edit/delete links) that enables users to toggle the display of the threaded comments beneath it -- a show/hide replies link.
Comment: Do you want to show / hide all comments at once with one button or individual buttons for each comment? Most likely you can do this with some basic JQuery.
Answer: You can do something like this:
In your theme's template.php file:
/**
 * Override or insert variables into the comment wrapper templates.
 *
 * @param $variables
 *   An array of variables to pass to the theme template.
 * @param $hook
 *   The name of the template being rendered ("comment" in this case.)
 */
function THEMENAME_preprocess_comment_wrapper(&$variables, $hook) {
  // Add jQuery UI accordian to hide the comments in.
  // It is already added in preprocess node but it is safer to also have it here
  // and doens't add much overhead as drupal will only add it once.
  drupal_add_library('system', 'ui.accordion');
  // Add some custom js to collapse comments.
  drupal_add_js(path_to_theme() . '/js/collapsi-comments.js');
}

In collapsi-comments.js (in this case it is in a folder called "js" in your theme.
(function($){
  Drupal.behaviors.collapsiComments = {
    attach: function(context, settings) {
      $('.comment-form-wrapper.accordion').accordion({
        collapsible: true,
        autoHeight: false,
        active: false,
        header: 'h2.title.comment-form'
      });
    }
  };
}(jQuery));

In your comment-wrapper.tpl.php in your theme wrap the comment form in a wrapper div like this (if your theme doesn't have one and you have a base theme that does, copy it from the base theme  and modify it, otherwise copy from the comment module and modify it):
<?php if ($comment_form): ?>

<?php print t('Add new comment'); ?>

    <?php print $comment_form; ?>

<?php endif; ?>


Can you catch a wild Dragonite?

Question: I was just wondering if you could catch a wild Dragonite, because I see them in gyms and it is hard to evolve up to him.
Answer: Yes, you can.
It is very rare, but Dragonite does spawn in the wild. I caught one outside my house in the middle of the night, which was pure luck.
Others I know have had success at local hot spots when there's been a lot of other people around (there's a widely held belief - perhaps with proof, I'm not 100% sure), that rarer Pokemon spawn when there's a lot of players in one area.
So, if you'd like a slightly higher chance of finding a Dragonite in the wild, see if you can find a local park where a lot of players hang out. There may even be a Facebook group of players in your city that you can connect into.
Finally, I don't believe there are any Dratini nests anymore, but Dratinis do often spawn near water, so it might be worth seeing if you can build up to a Dragonite too - especially considering if you find one in the wild, you'd probably want the candy to power it up.
Comment: And of course, with the new buddy feature, you can select a Dratini as buddy...
Comment: Park, or a busy mall. Busy malls are swarming with pokémon.
Answer: You can catch a wild Dragonite! I haven't yet, but I've seen a wild Dragonite on my Nearby radar while on the bus. So you can catch it, but it's very rare to find one, and you'll need luck on your side.
Answer: Yes, Dragonites are able to be found and captured in the wild. As for their rarity... if you go to pokesnipers.com, you will see a real-time list of rare pokemon worldwide and their locations as they are discovered. Someone recently mentioned how Dragonites used to show up on the list fairly regularly, yet now you can watch the list for a long time and not see even one. I have yet to see one on the list and I've been checking for a few days. Not very frequently, mind you, but a month or two ago I would see one every time I looked at the list. So, it seems that wild Dragonites may have become rarer... or one just hasn't popped up yet, who knows?
My advice on finding a wild Dragonite is to go somewhere that is fairly popular with a number of pokestops Put a lure or two on some pokestops, use an incense and walk around for a bit in the vicinity. Dratini are found by (large?) bodies of water and dragonites are supposed to have a slim chance of appearing where a dratini has been seen/found. Dragonites are supposed to have been most commonly reported as appearing near or in parks. Hope this helps.
Answer: Yes you definitely can. According to rankedboost you can find them in golf courses or near landmarks!
Answer: Yes, I caught one at my neighbors house 250 cp.  The IV's were great so I kept powering it up with dratini, now it's at 2400 cp.
Answer: Yes my daughter caught one today at legoland when she caught a snorelax it was in the queue for legends of gaming so both times lots of people in the same area playing! She made me screenshot the journal to prove she caught it!
Answer: Check  Rarity Chart. I second his statement that pokemon have their respective spawnpoints AS WELL as that each step of the evolutionary line can spawn.
Answer: You can't. You have to evolve.
Comment: This is incorrect. Source: I caught one in the wild, and have seen others do so as well.

Can you catch a wild Dragonite?


Exactly how rare are golden snowmen, and is snowmen placement random or fixed?

Question: For the Planetside 2 Christmas event on Esamir:

Exactly how rare are the golden snowmen are compared to the normal snowmen?
How much XP do the golden snowmen drop?
Is the general snowmen placement random or fixed?
Answer: I have not been able to find any info on the exact ratio of normal to golden snowmen, but apparently the golden snowmen will drop a larger amount of XP, according to this Steam discussion post (emphasis mine):

Regular snowmen normally give 500xp per kill (just shoot em), but with
  double xp weeknd they're worth a thousand. You get a title for taking
  out 10 snowmen.
Gold snowmen are normally worth 8,000xp (so worth a buttload this
  weekend) and you get a golden snowman hood ornament for killing them.
The info I have I gathered from the official forums.

The spawn locations also seem to be fixed throughout Esamir, and a Planetside 2 forum thread shows multiple maps updated differently. However, judging by one of the most recent posts, the locations may or may not have changed.

The map on the front page is highly inaccurate. In the area I searched
  southern, around Ymir and up the east (and have found 100+ so far + 2
  golden) there are at least 15 spawn locations that are not marked that
  are a guaranteed spawn spot.
Answer: They used to be very rare, I remember spending days last 2 Xmases looking for them. This time though I jumped on and found a golden one and a regular one side by side.
You get 5000XP (see vid)
Answer: There is only ever 1 golden snowman on a continent at a time.  When it is destroyed it respawns somewhere else.  The spawn locations for all snowmen are fixed,  but there are a lot of locations,  and snowmen randomly spawn at each location.  So it looks random, but after a while you will start to notice them popping up in the same place over and over.  When a snowman is destroyed it respawns elsewhere.
The spawn locations do not change year to year,  so maps from previous years are still valid.  The best way to get snowmen is to get yourself locked on esamir after the continent is locked, use a fighter and go as an engineer because your fighter will run out of ammo eventually,  and you'll need to land and get out and shoot the snowmen with your machine gun.  Unless your faction owns the continent,  of course.


Does a Carnot-efficient heat engine recover all work that was initially done?

Question: There are two adiabatic containers filled with an ideal gas. In container A work is done which eventually turns completely into heat, leading to a temperature difference between container A and container B. Does a Carnot-efficient heat engine between the containers recover all the work that was initially done in container A?
Comment: It doesn't turn into heat.  It turns into internal energy.  The heat exchanged with the surroundings is zero in an adiabatic change.
Answer: The short answer is "no".
In the comments, Chester Miller rightly points out that the work done turns into internal energy, not heat, but it looks like you are indicating a heating process. See Is thermal/heat energy the same thing as internal energy? for the distinction.
Since it is a cycle, the Carnot cycle requires both heating and cooling. Since cooling is the loss of internal energy, and not through work, some of the energy added by heating container A is not converted to work.
The portion of the heating energy which is converted to work is called the efficiency of the cycle. For a Carnot cycle, it is given by $\eta = 1 - T_L / T_H$ (wikipedia). Unless $T_L = 0$, your engine will have to cool down and lose some of its energy thermally.
What makes the Carnot cycle special is that it conserves entropy. That means that the cycle can be reversed without strongly violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics. (Technically the Second Law says "entropy always increases," but for a Carnot cycle, pretend it says "entropy never decreases.") So while not all of the energy is converted to work, it is all still "accessible" in that it could be returned to where it came from.
Comment: Thanks for your answer. Does the Carnot cycle imply the following: when an ideal heat pump does a specific amount of work which creates *both* a hot and a cold reservoir (relative to the initial temperature), does an ideal heat engine recover all the work that was done by the heat pump at the beginning?


Looking for a short story about a box

Question: I'm looking for a short story that I've read a long time ago, I hope you can help me. The plot goes like this : a man wakes up in a strange room, he has no memories of how he's got there. He finds other people in different rooms, but they can't touch each other, there's something around them that prevents them from doing so (like a force field). They start to feel sick if they try to get near someone else. They start to refer to the place as "the box". That's all I can remember. I hope you guys can help me, thanks!
Comment: Roughly speaking, how long was "a long time ago"? 10 years? 20 years? Do you recall if you read it in a magazine, anthology book, or something else? What language was it in? Even tiny details could help us find this.
Comment: Am I living in a box, Am I living in a cardboard box?
Answer: This sounds like "Zoomen" by Fred Hoyle published in the collection Element 79 published in 1969.
In it a group of Terrans is kidnapped by aliens and locked into a series of "boxes" which turn out to be an interstellar spaceship.  The title "Zoomen" refers in part to the fact that the members in the "zoo" are kept separate from each other by various means including inducing vomiting when they try to get too close to each other (particularly male to female contact). The group has 9 people including a man and woman from England, an American, an Asian woman (Chinese I am pretty sure), an Irishman, an Indian man from New Dehli and some others.
We find out that the aliens have kidnapped the specimens to study:

 how humans interact with animals as hunters/predators as well as being meat eaters.  In the case of the Indian man , the "zookeepers" learn that he does not eat meat and ethically abhors violence against animals so he is suddenly returned."

At the end we find

 The zoo "specimens" are allowed to get together. The question is asked what it means. One answers, "It means we are nine months from our destination."

The story then reverts to a flashback in which

 we find that the whole event is described by a scouting party from Earth which finds a journal worshipped as sacred by a group of humanoids who in no way should be where they are in the galaxy.  The humans have red hair and green eyes as the dominant features from the limited specimen group.

Wiki Element 79
Comment: Can't see quotes
Comment: Try holding your mouse over the quotes.  They are spoilers, which by default you can not see.

Looking for a short story about a box


Washing a Shaitel - Wig during the three weeks

Question: This past week a lady told my wife that it is forbidden to wash a Shaitel - Wig during the three weeks. To the best of my knowledge I have never seen such a prohibition. Is there a source that prohibits washing a wig during the three weeks?
Comment: Cutting it for the first time is probably assur in 9 days as tikun begadim. If in fact it was never cut, there is a strong possibility she never made a shehechiyanu on it which is a bracha to be avoided in the three weeks. That's probably the most stringent you'll get. There is no reason to think a wig is actual hair (which would only preclude it being washed during the 9 days). I mean she's not running out of an ir hanidachas, right?
Comment: Check out this article http://www.yutorah.org/lectures/lecture.cfm/735559/rabbi-aryeh-lebowitz/halachos-of-the-three-weeks/ especially 5c
Answer: I could not find a single instance of a Posek forbidding washing or laundering
 anything during the (first 2 weeks of the) 3 weeks.
I searched the Shulchan Aruch, Kitzur SA, Kitzur Yalkut Yosef and Aruch HaShulchan
Even during the 9 days (or the week during which Tish'a B'Av falls, as per the Sefardim) when most laundering is forbidden, clothes that get soiled often and one has a finite supply - like cloth diapers - may be washed.
Similarly, anything a woman needs for her 7-clean days may be laundered, as a Mitzvah trumps the custom of not washing.I would venture to say that if a woman is in the habit of washing her wig every few days because it gets very sweaty, for example, then she may be allowed to do so even during the 9 days since she can't be expected to have a wig collection.

וְאִשָּׁה שֶׁצְּרִיכָה לִלְבּוֹשׁ לְבָנִים לִסְפֹּר ז' נְקִיִּים, מֻתֶּרֶת לְכַבֵּס וְלִלְבּוֹשׁוְכֵן הַמִּטְפָּחוֹת שֶׁמְלַפְּפִין בָּהֶן אֶת הַתִּינוֹקוֹת [חִתּוּלִים], שֶׁמְלַכְלְכִין אוֹתָן תָּדִיר, מֻתָּר לְכַבְּסָ
  - Kitzur Shulchan Aruch 122:9
Comment: Your logic sounds reasonable, except that underwear and diapers don't have substitutes to do the same job. A woman, OTOH, can cover her hair with a tichel, snood (Are you trying to ruin my sister-in-law's sub-business? She sells snoods, and I think the 9 Days brings in some increased business!) , or hat. There's nothing that says that she must wear a shaitel.


This questions is regarding Silat Al Rahim, maintaining ties of kinship. Please see the question below:

Question: I had a fight with my father, left the house and moved to different location, then my father also moved to a different location. I want to patch up with him now but he does not want to keep any relation with me. It has been many years now, I do not know his address and he is not receiving my phone calls. Our relatives and his friends whom I know are not interested to involve and make us meet. So there is no way left for me to contact him. So, if anyone of us dies in this state, who is sinful?
Answer: If you do not know where he lives make dua for him u never know what the power of dua will bring you. Allah knows best.


How to place text in perspective on product mockup

Question: Hi i want to write a letter W on the bag, as you can see it has a kind of perspective to it, so the letter should follow this perspective. I am using Adobe Illustrator.
Comment: What have you tried? This is not a tutorial site so some evidence of effort on your part would help...
Comment: There's a PS extension that can do this type of stuff pretty easily. It's called [Perspective Tools](https://gumroad.com/l/MESl). I wouldn't necessarily buy it for this specific thing, but I thought I'd mention it.
Comment: relevant and an attempt at a blanket answer: [How to mockup a logo in a realistic environment?](https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/113783/how-to-mockup-a-logo-in-a-realistic-environment)
Answer: I would do it by using warp perspective tool. It will rasterize your text effect (you can do it on smart object as well, preserving capability to edit it later). You can get to the tool by selecting edit -> warp perspective.
First you need to create bounding box around the object you want to warp, after you've defined the area, you need to switch mode to wrap, and you can begin to warp the perspective.
I've used all the text instead of a single letter, but the principle will stay the same.

This is what I got after a quick fit-in. I bet you can get it even more precise, and add some effects after (like a blend on the bag shadow to appear on text as well) to fit it even better.
Comment: Cheers, although this is for photoshop, illustrator has same warping tool available - even more powerful in fact as you don't need to rasterize anything.


What is the best way to reduce sql queries in my situation

Question: Here is the situation,each page will show 30 topics,so I had execute 1 sql statements at least,besides,I also want to show how many relpies with each topic and who the author is,thus
I have to use 30 statements to count the number of replpies and use other 30 statements to find the author.Finally,I got 61 statements,I really worry about the efficiency.
My tables looks like this:

Topic           Reply            User
-------       ----------       ------------
id            id               id
title         topic_id         username
...           ...
author_id
Answer: You should look into joining tables during a query.

Joins in SQLServer http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms191517.aspx
Joins in MySQL http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/join.html

As an example, I could do the following:
SELECT reply.id, reply.authorid, reply.text, reply.topicid,
       topic.title,
       user.username
FROM reply
  LEFT JOIN topic ON (topic.id = reply.topicid)
  LEFT JOIN user  ON (user.id = reply.authorid)
WHERE (reply.isactive = 1)
ORDER BY reply.postdate DESC
LIMIT 10

Answer: If I read your requirements correctly, you want the result of the following query:
SELECT Topic.title, User.username, COUNT(Reply.topic_id) Replies
FROM Topic, User, Reply
WHERE Topic.id = Reply.topic_id
AND Topic.author_id = User.id
GROUP BY Topic.title, User.username

Answer: When I was first starting out with database driven web applications I had similar problems.  I then spent several years working in a database rich environment where I actually learned SQL.  If you intend to continue developing web applications (which I find are very fun to create) it would be worth your time to pick up a book or checking out some how-to's on basic and advance SQL.
Answer: One thing to add, on top of JOINS
It may be that your groups of data do not match or relate, so JOINs won't work. Another way: you may have 2 main chunks of data that is awkward to join.
Stored procedures can return multiple result sets.
For example, for a summary page you could return one aggregate result set and another "last 20" result set in one SQL call. To JOIN the 2 is awkward because it doesn't "fit" together.
Answer: You certainly can use some "left joins" on this one, however since the output only changes if someone updates/adds to your tables you could try to cache it in a xml/text file. Another way could be to build in some redundancy by adding another row to the topic table that keeps the reply count, username etc... and update them only if changes occur...


What information is available from the blockchains of privacy currencies?

Question: Some currencies such as Monero and Zcash focus on protecting user privacy as much as possible. What information is available from the blockchains of these currencies?
Number of wallets? Transaction details? Anything else?
Answer: Unlike many users might think, Bitcoin blockchain is completely transparent linking all your transaction history and those who you are transacting with. Everyone who has ever transacted with you or will be in future is able to see what amount you have received from or sent to which address, forever. Some (centralised) mixer/tumbling services try to mitigate this fact changing your BTC into some completely other ones, but they still have their history and you don't know what it is.
Privacy focussed coins try to solve this at protocol level, I'll try to summarise:

Dash (and Pivx fork) offer you an option to use a sort of CoinJoin which is performed by their Master Nodes and can have several rounds. This is pretty similar to tumbling services but you are not at risk to loose your funds. However, you still have to wait for mixing partners in every round you make and this can take minutes up to several hours for every single round. Since the amount of mixing partners is very limited, an attacker could simply offer high supply to mix with and be able to track your mixed funds anyway.
Verge is a joke. It's basically Dogecoin over TOR hiding your IP but having a completely transparent blockchain. Their Wraith protocol just uses some other notation for receivers addresses, but they are stored in plain on the blockchain.
In Zcash, Zcoin you have an option to use ZK-Snarks and send your transparent funds to a shielded z-address. Unfortunately ZK-Snarks are very computation heavy and need several minutes on modern hardware computers for each transaction to be generated, they are not available for mobile devices yet at all. They are fully shielded hiding sender, receiver and amount of a transaction. However, they are barely used and no exchange or payment service is accepting them to date, so you have to claim them back on their completely transparent t-address blockchain before being able to spend them.
Monero (beside some small forks of it) is the only coin with mandatory privacy enabled for every single transaction. Ring signatures obfuscate the real sender, stealth addresses hide the receiver and (ring) confidential transactions hide the amount of the transaction by default. Unlike all the optional private coins you cannot tell how many Monero wallets are in existence nor how much has been transacted. An external observer cannot say who send how much money to whom. Even as receiver you still don't know the sender's address, you can only determine it by your sub-address or payment id used.
Answer: From my knowledge Monero is the most "private". It obfuscates the number of coins held on every account on the blockchain (you wont find a Monero richlist), but most important, it obfuscates in every transaction by default: the sender, the receiver and the amount.
One of the flaws in Monero is that it doesnt obfuscate the ip adress by default but someone using TOR or i2p would still manage to do this. But monero team will implement this in the future with the Kovri release.
I dont like Zcash because there is a 20% block reward for the creators of the coin built in its blockchain, seems not much decentralized, but I dont know much about its tecnology, just that it has a richlist so for me it doesnt work (if someone knows my adress therefore knows how many coins I hold).
Verge: This coin obfuscates just the ip adress of the user, the information is pretty much linkable. And its a fork of Dogecoin '-'
Dash: Not much of a privacy coin, the majority of users dont use the privacy option so if you are one of the few using it someone can link you to a transaction.
Pivx: Hadnt studied much about that one, but has a richlist...
Comment: In Zcash the privacy features are optional, but when used they're similar (but stronger) than Monero's. In Monero, each transaction input still explicitly lists a number of previous coins it could be spending (and proves one of them is actually being spent). In Zcash, every input can spend any previous shielded output.
Comment: Even in Bitcoin, the originating IP of the transaction is just speculation.