What are these black spots on my tree trunk?

Question: I had some deer damage on a sweet bay magnolia tree.  After a week or so of covering the damage with the pictured white tree guard I noticed all these black spots underneath.  What are these spots and should I apply something to remove them?
Answer: First, remove the tree guard - its doing nothing for the tree except providing a home for insects and in this case, fungus. Those black spots are fungal in nature. The next thing you'd see if you left the guard on would be rot - and you'd lose the tree.
Now, lets look at the damage. It looks like you have some deer rub on that trunk and not a canker; the deer rubbing looks to be at least one year old, based on the callous forming on the edges. This is actually good news, because a canker that size would probably kill the tree. Most trees can recover from a deer rub of 50% of the trunk, and I know of a ginkgo and a chokecherry that both recovered from 80% bark loss, so your tree should be fine if you do the following:

Clean up around the wound, removing all of the torn bark. The object is to make the wound easy for the tree to heal. It will heal by growing new bark (the callous along the edges of the wound) over the entire barkless area. This will take years.

Keep the wound as sunny as possible and open to the elements. Putting a guard on it will, as you've seen cause problems with fungi (due to lack of sunlight and trapping of moisture) and insects (due to protection from predators and, when rot starts, ease of access to the heartwood).

Check the wounded area periodically for rot or other issues. You will probably never find any problems, but it never hurts to be vigilant.

Be patient, as it will take years for this to disappear.

Protect this and other small-diameter trees from deer using cylinders of "hardware cloth" (quarter-inch steel mesh). I can give you instructions on how to make these if you leave me a comment.
Comment: Thanks for all the tips.  Is the guard ok to leave on the parts that haven't been damaged by rub?  I put them on to prevent additional rub damage (about a month ago when the damage occurred).  I see that you recommend a different method, but wondering if the tree guard is problematic for the otherwise healthy parts of the tree.
Comment: And as a follow up the fungus, can I apply any fungicide or anything to help it?
Comment: My experience with tree guards has been been entirely negative - they ALWAYS trap moisture and encourage fungal attacks. When I worked in the nursery trade, the very first thing we did when receiving trees from our supplying nursery was to remove and throw away the tree guards (supplying nurseries are in the habit of sending diseased trees to their customers, with the disease - typcally a canker - covered by the guards) - we never sold trees with guards. The method I mentioned is superior because it prevents deer, vole, rabbit, string-trimmer, fungal & Insect damage.
Comment: No need to apply fungicide if the wound remains uncovered and if the tree is in full sun - the UV from the sun should take care of the fungus for you.
Comment: Got it, thanks. What does a making a hardware cloth protection entail?
Comment: HW cloth usually comes in three-foot heights. Use tin snips to cut a section about 3 feet long, then place that section around the tree trunk, tying the two ends of the section together with twist-ties to form a cylinder (the cylinder will be about 10 inches in diameter - wider than most deer racks). I usually secure the completed cylinder to a stake pounded into the ground near the trunk. I recommend using ground staples to secure the cylinder to the ground, then pile wood chips around the outside. This will last years. If painted black, you'll not really notice the cylinder in the landscape.


Beef in my stew isn't tender

Question: My son made a beef stew last night and brought it over to me today.  The meat he used did not become tender. I am 79 years of age and the meat is just not easy for me to eat. I want to try putting it in my pressure cooker to make it more tender for me to eat. Will that work? Or is there another good way to make it more tender?
Comment: Buying good (better) meat is one way.
Answer: There are two possible reasons why the meat might be tough.

The right meat, just cooked not long enough
If your son used "stewing meat", that is, rich in collagen layers and marbeled, you are on the right track. Simply cooking longer until the collagen breaks down will give you the desired results. And yes, a pressure cooker works perfectly for this. The higher pressure allows the liquid in the pot to boil at a higher temperature, thus reducing the cooking time compared to a regular pot. (A crock pot / slow cooker does the same in much longer time.)
The wrong meat, i.e. a lean cut
That is the material for a quick sear, often served medium or rare. Longer cooking results in the proteins in the meat toughening up (not unlike when you cook an egg), giving you a "dry" piece of meat. Unfortunately, longer cooking won't really help, you are missing the collagen layers that - when soft - cause the meat to fall apart into small juicy strands.

Conclusion:
I don't know what's in your stew. For stewing meat, by all means keep cooking. For other types, note that the consistency might go from "not easy to eat" to "almost uneatable".
Comment: Agree in principle, but it would be interesting if you could expand a bit on the pressure cooker suggestion - is it better, worse or equivalent to recooking in a normal pot?
Comment: @rumtscho, done.

Beef in my stew isn't tender


How can I delete all rows containing given text that could be in any column within the row?

Question: I'd like to be able to delete all rows in a Google Spreadsheets where a given text string exists anywhere in the row. The text being searched for could be in any cell in the row, and also could be part of a longer string within the row cell e.g. "xxxx [text being searched for] yyy".
Answer: I think I understand your question. Have you tried using the search and replace feature? I believe there's an add on for that if sheets doesn't have it by default.
Answer: You have not tagged this google-apps-script but with a script is the only way to delete rows 'automatically'. However 'manually' is not tedious. Assumimg your range of interest is confined to ColumnsA:Z, in say AA1 please try:
=sum(ArrayFormula(--not(iserror(SEARCH("text",A1:Z1)))))

and copy it down to suit, where text above represents whatever the offending string is.
This is case insensitive.
Then filter ColumnA:A to select rows that have a numeric value (not 0) and delete these.
SUM
NOT
ISERROR
SEARCH


Is the L2 Mars-Sun point protected from solar radiation?

Question: To what extent is the L2 point protected in comparison to the surface, if at all? Since the L2 point might be in the umbra of Mars, it could be shielded against the sun. It would also be helpful if someone could provide the calculation.
Comment: Id assume since mars has a low magnetosphere the only reduction in radation youll recieve is eclipses of mars and the sun.
Answer: The Lagrange points of Mars might be less useful than that of Earth's because Mars' orbit is more elliptical and so there are more perturbing forces.
Nonetheless we can do a simple exercise.
In this answer to How far would the Mars L1 Lagrangian Point be from Mars? I showed how to calculate the theoretical distances to the first two Lagrange points for a circular restricted three body problem (or CR3BP) scenario.
From geometry we can see that if a right circular cone with base radius  $r_{sun}$ has a radius $r$ at a distance $D$, then the vertex will be beyond that point by a distance
$$ D\frac{r}{r_{sun}-r}.$$
Using radii for Mars, Earth and the Sun of 3396, 6378, and 696392 km, I get the following, which shows that whether or not the Lagrange points are meaningful and/or useful for an elliptical orbit like Mars.

Mars' solar umbra extends about about 30,000 km beyond Sun-Mars L2
Earth's the solar umbra ends about 100,000 km before Sun-Earth L2

numbers:
<code>    MARS      to Sun        to L1      to L2    r    r/(r_sun-r) "end of umbra"
perihelion  206,700,000    981,000    985,000  3,396  0.00490      1,013,000
aphelion    249,200,000  1,183,000  1,187,000    "        "        1,221,000

    Earth
perihelion  147,100,000  1,466,000  1,476,000  6,370   0.00926     1,360,000
aphelion    152,100,000  1,516,000  1,527,000    "        "        1,406,000
</code>
Staying within the umbra near the "L2" point would likely require less delta-v for Mars than for Earth, but either way it's an unstable point and so you need to continually do small station-keeping burns to remain protected.
The umbra protects you from line-of sight radiation like photons (light, X-rays, gamma-rays) but may be less protective for ballistic charged particles from a coronal mass ejection or CME because they may be on trajectories that when projected backwards, come from points beyond the disk of the Sun for various reasons. That's an excellent *next question!
For the "normal" solar wind, it may be even more likely to expand into the shadow since wether it's ionized or not, it will have some transverse velocity distribution associated with it.
Comment: +1 Very good point about the transverse velocity distribution; this is very much the case. "Spiral" might not be the technically correct description but that does help envisage the trajectory of the solar wind.
Comment: sometime in the past I picked up the idea that there is indeed more too it than "just a radial spray from a rotating source", I'm sure I've heard space weather folks talk about the challenge of matching effects measured in GEO with locations on the solar disc in these (i.e. spiral-like) terms
Comment: @Puffin I left "some transverse velocity distribution" vague because while I had some [notion of spiralness](https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/wsa-enlil-solar-wind-prediction) in mind I wasn't sure how much of those shapes indicated actual rotation versus just a radial spray from a rotating source. I also was thinking about frozen-out thermal velocity; random motion of the particles left over from when their density was still high enough for collisions at the thermal velocities associated with their temperature. I should probably post a new question about these I'll ping you when I do thanks!


Macintosh SE 30 displays half of the lower screen

Question: I have a problem with my Macintosh SE / 30. More precisely, I only see the underside on the screen, ie from the center to the bottom. The other half, the one from the center up, appears completely black. I have tried searching all over the web but it seems this problem is not common.
Comment: Schematics for the display hardware are at https://museo.freaknet.org/gallery/apple/stuff/mac/andreas.kann/SE30_P5.GIF -- looks like the main display logic is implemented in a number of PLA chips (UE6 and 7, and UG6), and I'd suspect one of those has failed.
Comment: Please use answers rather than comments to answer questions. Thanks.
Comment: (see also https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/16006/glitch-in-the-display-of-a-mac-se-30?rq=1, which likely had a similar cause)
Answer: Since it doesn't look like the display is "squished" (with the entire display in that area) I suspect one of the two 41264-15 used for video RAM (UC6 or UC7) is at issue. It could just be a bad solder joint causing the IC to be unpowered, or it could be the IC has gone bad and needs replacement. It could also be one of the address lines or one of the counters that drives it.
Comment: In case it adds weight to this theory, and assuming the SE/30 is the same as the older Macs, then a reset bit is white and a set bit is black. So all black would be all `0xffff`s.
Comment: I went through all the pins in that area of the logic board with the soldering, but I didn't have any positive effects, so the next step will be to replace the two chips uc6 and uc7 as you suggested. There is actually no screen collapse of the top half, so I think it makes sense that video memory is the cause of this problem.
Comment: @Chris Hanson. Today I replaced the two 41264-15 ICs (UC6 or UC7) with two new ones but without any changes. I keep seeing only the bottom screen.
Answer: It's probably the output logic (PALs at UG7, UG6, or the binary counter at UF8).


Is FitBit useful for weight lifting?

Question: Does anyone have any real experience with using FitBit or any other monitor for weight lifting. I'm interested in tracking calories burned without guessing.
Comment: I've seen a lot of complaints about the usefulness of pedometers on fitness bands. I'm waiting for one of the bands to come out with a built-in heart rate monitor.  It must be difficult, because none of them do it.  This is coming out at the end of the year and looks kinda cool: http://uncrate.com/stuff/atlas-fitness-tracker/
Comment: No experience, but I'm guessing that it would be of limited use at its very best, and useless as the most likely outcome. I'm basing this simply on the way that it is presented as most functional, and extrapolating to how it might work in a weightlifting setting. Even there, it would only really be applicable in open chain exercises that involve both hands. (It would only count 1/2 in single arm rows, for example.)
Comment: I'm waiting for [THIS](http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/amiigo-fitness-bracelet-for-iphone-and-android)
Comment: @DanAndrews That's exactly what I've been waiting for.  Can't wait for those to come out!
Comment: @Doc I don't know if it will deliver as promised, however on paper, it's what I'm looking for too.
Comment: You can follow the progress here: http://updates.amiigo.co/  It does look pretty interesting, hopefully they will get their manufacturing working soon.
Comment: There are some complaints on the Kickstarter site, however the Facebook site appears more up to date.
Comment: @DanAndrews Another one I came across today that looks pretty awesome is: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hellobragi/the-dash-wireless-smart-in-ear-headphones
Answer: Short answer: NO
If you think critically about the activities you perform during weightlifting, and the activities that the fitbit tracks, you'll understand why.  Let's dig in a little deeper:

Fitbit tracks steps taken (i.e. pedometer)
It estimates calories burned probably by the cadence of those steps and the total number taken
It does not track heart rate.  While you can enter that information in the tracker, fitbit does not sell any device that tracks it.

When you are weightlifting, the following is true most of the time:

You are standing/sitting/laying down in one place as you lift the barbell, dumbbells or kettlebells.
In some cases you are performing a static hold--which while it takes tremendous effort and burns more calories than at rest--will show up as 0 activity on the fitbit.
When performing farmer's walks, suitcase carries, waiter's walks, fitbit will only record the steps taken--it cannot account for the extra effort required to hold the heavy implements.

The long story short, a pedometer is very ill suited for strength training.  You can get a better picture of energy expenditure and calories burned by using a heart rate monitor.  While this does have it's own challenges, particularly when the bar comes in contact with your chest, the information you get from the heart rate monitor is much more useful.  You do need it calibrated for your current level of fitness, but even with the rough ballpark estimates it will be much closer than a pedometer.
I wrote about using a heart rate monitor back in 2011 for weight training.  While it is useful, I only break it out now when I have target heart rate ranges I'm aiming for during training.  For example, if I want to build my aerobic performance while weight training I will try to maintain a heart rate of 120-150 bpm.
Comment: This answer may be a bit dated since FitBits do track heart rate now (not good, but they do).
Comment: Agreed.  At the time of the answer, the product release was still pending.
Answer: For your specific task (calculating burned cals), no matter what fitness band you choose, it's still a calculation to figure out how many calories you've burnt.  With any calculation, there's a level of tolerance and you need to be able to accept the tolerance.  If you're just worried about the number of calories burned, you could calculate it yourself and be pretty close.
With that said, a fitness band is an awesome accessory to help you reach your goals.  But what are your expectations?  Your question is regarding weight lifting, but your inner question is about calculating calories burned.  For weight lifting, you'll find almost no benefit from the FitBit Flex or Force - but they may be helpful for overall fitness.
Some of the most important metrics (IMHO) are missing in a lot of them - such as temperature and heart rate.  Buying a band now instead of later may mean that you're just going to buy one later as well as you'll want the features of the newer models.
I won't try to regurgitate the information in some REALLY good blog posts about the subject, so I'll link them here:

LifeScience
Technology Review
T3

As mentioned in my comment, I'm extremely excited and waiting for Amigo - probably to the point that I won't buy one until this comes out or one comes out with these features.

Added 2/27/14
I just wanted to point to the Moov - COMPANY LINK HERE, Amigo, move over! :)  The Moov is awesome.
Comment: Just to add that Moov (link above) just released the app for an Android.  I'm one happy camper now!

Is FitBit useful for weight lifting?


Why is this question unacceptable?

Question: I asked a question 'Are most skeptics atheists?' and within minutes it was closed,locked and deleted as it had a religion tag(i didn't have enough reputation to create a new tag) and atheism does not mean pertain to religion since religion is a cultural system and a religion can be atheistic or non-atheistic.
Also There is this question 'Are most terrorists Muslim?' it is basically same 'Are most [insert group here] [insert group here]?'
Answer: The term skeptic is too vague. What's the test that you use to decide whether people are skeptic?

Is it about believing claims that
someone tells you. If Alice tells you
that Bob and Carol have an affair is
a skeptic less likely to believe
Alice claims?
Is it about a willingness to update
your beliefs when you are faced with
new evidence?
Is it about whether people self
identify as being skeptics?
Is it about people who attend
physical skeptic meetings?
Can a person who believes that
brushing his tooth is important
without having seen any peer viewed
studies that support his habit be a
skeptic? Especially when the person
advocates that every medical
intervention should be backed up by
placebo-blind trial.
Can a person who believes in the
invisible hand of the market be a
skeptic?
Does it matter whether a person acts
on his beliefs or whether he just
uses the beliefs to rationalize his
actions?
Are AGW-skeptics skeptics?

A good answer for your question would have to solve the semantic struggle. Such semantic discussions are offtopic.
Comment: @apoorv020: This isn't a website for people who are skeptics. It's a website for practicing skeptic inquiry of claims.
Comment: @Alaukik: According to that definition that are no skeptics. Every human being who lives on this earth believes a lot of stuff for which they don't have proper evidence.
Comment: anyone who only accepts a thing as right through the null hypothesis that is, everything is false until proven true through strong, verifiable evidence.
Comment: If the word skeptic is too vague for you, try and have the site renamed first.
Comment: @Christian how can you say that? i don't believe in anything with proper evidence .
Comment: You can't go farther than "I think therefore I am" without making a jump of faith. You don't have any evidence that shows that you aren't a boltzmann brain that floats happily in space. You don't have evidence that you aren't in some sort of matrix like simulation. When it comes to those questions you have to take a leap of faith. On what base of evidence do you make decisions about whether to brush your teeth? If you haven't heard of controlled study that showed efficiency, why are you doing it? There are also millions of beliefs about simple facts. Most won't have proper evidence.
Comment: @Christian:  I was at a talk by Hans Moravec once.  He expected artificial intelligence to leapfrog real intelligence in the not-too-distant future, and our intelligences would be simulated in multiple runs.  If this is actually possible, and happens, then the odds are very great that we're in a simulation right now.
Comment: @David: I know. That's why it's a good example. Most people take the leap of faith and believe that we don't live in a simulation. Even those who speak about the theoretical possibility usually don't accept the consequences about the belief. The creator of the simulation would be for all intents and purposes a god of our world.
Answer: I think Christian gives some good reasons as to why answering that question would be difficult or impossible compared to, say, the Muslim/terrorist question.
But if that doesn't work for you, just read the FAQ:

Skeptics is about applying skepticism — it's for researching the evidence behind the claims you hear or read. It is not for philosophical discussions about skepticism itself.

This isn't some kaffeeklatsch for discussing the tenets of Skepticism or Atheism as a belief system, movement, etc. It's "for researching the evidence behind the claims you hear or read".
Did you hear or read that most skeptics are atheists? Who made that claim, and who were they referring to by "skeptics"? What were they referring to by "atheists"? Such information when asking a question is fundamental to the purpose of this site, and you didn't provide any of it. The result was a sophomoric philosophical question, discussion-fodder and troll-bait. And so it was rightly dispatched as such.
Please see also: Posting etiquette
Comment: I heard it from my friend that most skeptics are atheists (he was a atheist himself). i am therefore researching for evidence behind the claim and not discussing the tenats of Skeptism or Atheism .
Comment: @Alaukik: you're back to the question of what "skeptic" means. Is this group composed of people who self-identify as big-S Skeptics, people who attempt to apply skepticism to all aspects of their daily lives, folks who take a skeptical view of religion, folks who are only occasionally or selectively skeptical...? You run the risk of allowing answers that simply define both skeptics *and* atheists in terms that are either equivalent or so general as to make correlation meaningless. Again: a question of philosophy.
Comment: anyone who only accepts a thing as right through the null hypothesis that is, everything is false until proven true through strong, verifiable evidence. if i give this in the question will it be acceptable .
Comment: @Alaukik: how do you identify a person who abides by that philosophy?

Why is this question unacceptable?


Is it permissible to develop video player and camera app?

Question: These apps may be used for Halaal or Haram purposes. So, by developing such apps, will one be guilty of helping in sin. The apps will not bring any benefit, not even income, to the developer but may make him known for his works.
Answer: You can't control of what others will do with those apps. Therefore you won't be accountable for the sins others will make with your product.
Rest assured with the help of Allah.
EDIT:
And He says (interpretation of the meaning):
"And those who do not bear witness to falsehood, and if they pass by some evil play or evil talk, they pass by it with dignity"
[al-Furqan 25:72]
source :https://islamqa.info/en/96662 (last citation, down in the text)
Comment: Please accept this answer if you the answer helped you. It is v-shaped figure under the 0 and the downsided triangle.
Comment: If you could quote some ahadith, that will be more re-assuring. Thanks.
Comment: @Crimson: I've added a citation from the Holy Quran.


How do concepts like "change" and "structure" fit with the object - property distinction?

Question: I've been pondering about the distinction between the object/concrete/particular vs property/abstract/universal.... (side note: I used to think that properties are more "general" than objects, but then I realized that is not true, since an object can have a "bundle" of different properties, as much as a property can be "spread across" multiple objects.) And the object and property view seemed to satisfactorily describe the world, but then I'm not sure how to fit concepts of "structure," "interactions," and "change," etc. into this view. These concepts seem related to complexity and emergence. Are these also types of properties?
Comment: See [Aristotle's Categories](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-categories/#TenFolDiv)
Comment: This picture of the world is deficient in (at least) two ways. First, it is static, there are timeless objects and timeless properties, but no means to account for change. Second, in addition to properties (one-place predicates) there are relations (multi-place predicates), and interactions are expressed by the latter. "Structure" also requires relations in addition to properties, one could say that it is a system of (abstract) relations with placeholders into which objects are inserted. The result is a composite of objects among which the relations hold.
Answer: In computer science there is a concept of object-oriented data (wholly unrelated to object-oriented ontology). In the object model, every object has two kinds of characteristics, viz. properties and methods.
Properties are passive aspects, while methods implement dynamic changes and can interact with other objects.
Object classes may be defined, specifying the properties and methods which all objects within the class must possess. Any such object is an instance of its class.
It is quite a useful and widespread way of looking at things, but it does not suit all situations. Other paradigms such as structured, procedural or functional approaches are better for some kinds of complexity.
Comment: It's very interesting that you brought up computer science since the notions of properties and methods are part of what I was thinking about - as in, what are methods/behavior/functions? Are they relations? Are relations ordered tuples? Can they be summarized as special types of sets/properties? Are methods dynamic or meta versions of properties?
Comment: Relations exist in object models in two ways. The object tree comprises all the classes, sub-classes and instances of objects. You can trace simple relationships through the tree just like a family tree full of uncles and grandchildren. Methods can be any code you wish, and that code may if you so choose embody relationships between various objects. But the structuring of such relations is haphazard and there can be better ways to approach relational structures. For example a relational database and an object-oriented database store and access data in rather different ways.


Not level where drywall and backer board meet

Question: In process of replacing a one piece fiberglass stall shower. Have removed it and put up backer board but line where backer board meets drywall is not level. I'd say drywall is maybe as much as 1/2" over backer board at worst places. All 3 walls already backer boarded, taped and mudded. How can I get seam more level before I start to install tile?
Answer: Once you tile, it wont' be that far off. However, if you aren't planning to use thick tile, you may worry about that edge potentially seeing a lot of water. However, there's a lot of ways to deal with this:

Install a plastic corner bead where the drywall meets the backer board and plaster over it. (I'd probably solve this way)
Install some matching chair-rail or bull nose tile that could hide your mistake.
If your mud isn't set yet, just remove the backer board from the wall and add some strapping behind it.
Finally, you could just add add another layer of backer board.


Will Android tablets have issues if they are always on?

Question: I plan on using an Android tablet in an always-on scenario (a fancy self-coded alarm clock, but this would apply to numerous uses).  Is there any problems with keeping an Android tablet on and charging all the time?  Is this likely to cause screen issues?
Comment: There's a reason for the tablet to go asleep, as is with most Android devices, it would be bad to keep the screen on all the time as that would drain the battery! In terms of screen issues, you're referring to screen-burn in, like the old days of MS-DOS command line gets burned into the CRT? Do not think this would happen here in this case, allow Android to manage the battery by shutting off the screen where applicable, do not override it as that is a bad thing to do... :)
Comment: @t0mm13b in terms off battery, just read the question again: *charging all the time*, i.e. permanently connected to a power source. I doubt that drains the battery :D And there's a setting to keep the screen on in those cases, yes...
Comment: @Izzy oh hai! Yeah, I have said that and emphasized why the devices sleep, i.e. to conserve battery, and plugging it in permanently would reduce battery life considerably, like laptops, if it has 3hr battery life, and plug it in constantly to mains, then it will have a short life, i.e. possibly 2hrs or worse, this laptop here suffered! :) And yes, there's a screen keep on option when plugged in within Developers options (different in ICS/JB and GB) *Stay Awake*.... :)
Comment: Well, *that's* a different (and valid) point: Once used like that for a year it might be no fun without A/C thereafter. But if there are no plans to disconnect it anyhow, this shouldn't become an issue ;)
Comment: Yep, battery deterioration is one that I did consider but my  intent is that it would be permanently connected, much like any other alarm clock.
Answer: OLED screen are very bad for burn in and colour leaking (even worse that plasma screens in alot of cases) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_burn-in
and so leaving them on the same screen for some time would not be a good idea
You might also find the general life of the device shortened because of the hardware being used all the time, but unless you are putting the device under stress im sure it would be fine.
The battery would likely weaken over time as well due to the constant charging
Comment: Oh... :) suggest you should put that in :)
Comment: What screens are they that suffer from it? Did not think it would. Also the OP seems to have implied, developing their own app *a fancy self-coded alarm clock*)...
Comment: Yes sorry should have included this, OLED screen are very bad for burn in and colour leaking (even worse that plasma screens in alot of cases) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_burn-in


Software Development career - how to add or change languages?

Question: I am a software developer that has primarily worked in Windows development in the Delphi language.  At present, I am looking for a new job, and want to work in a different programming language (C# or Java primarily, but am interested in others as well), but I can't seem to get past the first level, and I think it's because I haven't been allowed professionally to work much in other languages, even though I do write small utilities from time to time for personal use and for a small non-profit I work with.  Essentially, I have very few entries on my resume for my secondary languages, so most companies assume I'm just a Delphi developer, and don't know how to work with their systems, even though I do, or can learn how to very quickly.  How can I overcome this, and should it be overcome in the cover letter or possibly in the resume itself?
Comment: Pick a technology that has demand and learn it.  Microsoft has certifications.
Comment: Also add more text regarding the new languages in your resume and downplay the languages you don't want to use. Many recruiters/HR departments use keyword searches to cull through resume stacks.
Comment: the technology is less important than the career you want to eke out.
Comment: @bharal What?  OP is already in software developer.  OP is asking about the specific technology.
Comment: @Blam no no, you misunderstand. i get that OP is a dev. what i mean is that the *tech*  is just a tool. a dev asking "what language should i learn" is like asking "what language should i make this app in". it is a fair question - but *only* if you know what the app is gong to do! And there are other considerations for our metaphor-app ~ monetising, validity, it is not just about the language. So too for a beginning dev - getting caught up in the *language* at the expense of overall career direction is a mistake.
Comment: @bharal What?? That is not how it works.  An architect picks the tecnology(s) and then looks for programmers with that specific expertise.  You get to be an architect by being very good at something.  No one wants beginning generalist.
Answer: Build an awesome application in that language and show them.  The key for an interview is this : show, don't tell.
Have your resume reference an online code repository(like your github profile).  Many serious development companies may ask to see a github profile anyway.  Being able to show them something in person on a laptop might be good too.  Good interviewers will want to know as much as possible about your skills before hiring you.
Once while interviewing for a job, they asked me about my Objective C skills(iOS development) I mentioned on a resume. I actually had an app on the app store at the time, so the interviewer whipped out his phone and downloaded the app right in front of me.  Even though I had no professional experience with Objective C, he had no doubt I could program in Objective C.
Make sure you highlight you desired language first, and they may assume that is what you are the best at, and thus it will be what's most asked about.
Answer: I'd put it in the cover letter AND the resume. Some HR people read the letter first and others the resume - they are going to throw your application out if they are looking for a Java Dev and there's nothing Java in there.
In the cover letter put that while your main language was Delphi, you are confident that you'll be a good Java developer, because ... list reasons like you've worked in Java in your free time for example software s for company t, you've always been quick to learn new languages for example at internship x you learned language y and finished project z with it in only 3 month, ... whatever you come up with that you can actually back up. A certificate might help, too.
In the resume just put volunteer work: Developed application to do s for non profit t using Java (+frameworks if you used any).
Answer: Building software can be the same for a full-time job, as well as, a part-time job with a non-profit (Linux development has been mainly non-profit and those key-contributors can write their own ticket for job placement.). The main factor is the extent of the project. For example: did you work for a non-profit on a web site with a lot of traffic. Were you working with large data sets?
You have to be able to connect the skills utilized in your non-working projects with what the jobs require. If you can't, you may want to look into additional work to expand on your previous experience. Also, the people at the non-profit should be giving you a very strong reference.
Answer: You might want to change your focus. Many tech shops take it for a given that developers come with skills in multiple programming languages. So, first, make sure you are actually proficient in the additional languages you want to work in. Searching for "code interview questions" in Google provides several resources to assess where you might stand in a coding test.
Second, more important than the programming language, show them you understand the problems their products solve. If you can show me you understand accounting (for example), then I'll assume the programming part comes with the rest of your expertise. This makes a big difference down the road. Many developers who identify themselves only by the language(s) they use find themselves limited because they may not ever understand the big picture topics that would make them excellent senior level developers and architects, etc.
On publicly available code... As a project lead and manager who interviews software engineers, I would not penalize you for not having anything in github (or bitbucket, or anywhere online). But if you do have something available for me to look at, I will look at it, and if it's not good, it will count against you. I'd be looking for coding style, design, comments and other documentation, and an overall coherency to the code. Anything that shows me you've paid dues as a software developer and have learned the lessons that experienced developers should learn.
I would also look for any blog posts or contributions to Stack Overflow, Reddit, HackerNews, etc., that demonstrate your understanding of your craft. No, you don't need your own domain. Signing up for Blogger.com or Wordpress.com, or any other blog hosting site is fine. Just share what you know.
FYI, cover letters only impress the resume screener. After that, they get stripped off, and the tech managers and project leads only see the resume. You need a cover letter to catch the screener's attention, so it's better to make it tell your story in as few words as possible. Don't worry about selling your technical skills in the cover letter. Just help them feel like you are the answer to the problems they are trying to solve. (This implies knowing something about the company.)
Comment: Different companies have different procedures. At my last interview, I got a lot of questions on stuff I wrote in my cover letter from the technical manager and the senior developer who interviewed me.
Answer: The great thing about being a programmer is the ease of being able to dive into new technologies.
If I was in your situation, I'd come up with a few mobile app ideas, code them in either Java or C#, and then publish them in app stores.  Not only will you be learning a new language you'll also be learning to work in non-Windows environments.  Perhaps these apps will need some back end support.  That'll give you an excuse to dive into web development languages as well.
Once you have apps published, you now have something concrete to show off as part of your portfolio, and can add the language to your resume.
Comment: This is along the same lines as what I would answer. The only change I would make is to develop the app for something on the job. I have never had difficulty coming up with ideas for utility apps that would help everyone be more productive (in particular make me more productive). If it just so happens that a good way to write the utility is using this new-fangled language/technology that I've been wanting to learn then that's what I'll use. It's a win-win all around. You get "on-the-job" experience, you (and others) become more productive at your job because of the utility.


Do ranged weapon attacks against creatures restrained in a Watery Sphere have advantage?

Question: Creatures engulfed by a Watery Sphere are restrained, which grants advantage on all attacks against them. However, they may also be considered underwater, which would impose disadvantage on most ranged weapon attacks and negate the advantage. Does attacking into the sphere with a ranged weapon have advantage, or do the underwater combat rules apply to this situation and negate that advantage? (Assume the ranged weapon is not a crossbow or one of the other weapons that doesn't suffer disadvantage underwater.)
Answer: RAW is unclear
The Underwater Combat rules on page 198 of the Player's Handbook are very short and don't give a great ruling on what counts as underwater combat. They state:

Underwater the following rules apply. [...]
A ranged weapon attack automatically misses a target beyond the weapon's normal range. Even against a target within normal range, the attack roll has disadvantage unless the weapon is a crossbow...

These rules seem to assume that all both the attacker and the target are underwater. They also assume the line of attack is underwater for it's entire length.
In the case of watery sphere nowhere in its description does it mention whether or not the target is considered underwater. As spell's only do what they say they do you could argue that this means they are not underwater. This doesn't agree with a logic interpretation of the spell however.

On a failed save, a creature is restrained by the sphere and is engulfed by the water.

I said in an related answer that I consider "engulfed by the water" to be equivalent to being underwater for the purpose of drowning. The same ruling should apply here, although it is open to DM interpretation.
As there is no exact ruling to cover the condition where a creature is firing into water the only correct answer is "up to your DM".
How I would rule it
Here is how I see it and would rule as a DM however.
Ranged weapon attacks miss beyond their normal range due to the drag of the water. If the attack is in the air for the majority of its flight and only enters the water immediately before striking the target this restriction doesn't make sense. The same reasoning apply for why ranged attacks have disadvantage underwater.
With this logic I can see three possible logical rulings:

An attack uses the underwater combat rules if the attacker is underwater
An attack uses the underwater combat rules if more than half its range in underwater
An attack uses the underwater combat rules if more X feet of its path are underwater.

Of the first two, I am not convinced either way which is a better rule and have played with both. This situation is rare enough that it has only come up once or twice with each rule and I haven't noticed a major difference. I have never used the third rule but may implement it the next time this situation comes up.
In the situation of watery sphere all the rules would mean that the attack is made with advantage in most cases. The attacker in not underwater and the attack in not underwater for more than half its range, therefore underwater combat rules do not apply. There is a slight chance that if you are adjacent to the sphere and attacking through it against a creature trapped 10ft from you that more than half of the distance is underwater, but this is an edge case.
In summary I would rule: The attack has advantage because the attacker in not underwater and the majority of the range of the attack is not made underwater.
Comment: You may consider answer this question (https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/140687/how-do-attacks-with-an-underwater-target-and-an-attacker-on-land-and-the-revers/140708#140708) about combat under water when one part isn't under water. This question don't have real answers yet and your answer may contain part of an answer to the linked question.
Comment: Consider game balance: Watery Sphere is the watered-down (hehe) version of Black Tentacles. It is useless against huge creatures, allows a save instead of an ability check, does no damage. It _can_ be moved, but an action is a very high cost. It should at least provide advantage for all attacks like EBT does.
Comment: @SpearCarrier.no2 There is a fair number of differences between them, I wouldn't consider a comparison a useful addition to the post. I agree that from a balance perspective it isn't a problem to allow this to have advantage. Hence why I rule that way, I believe it is RAI.


Carbon offsets mentioned in governmental emission reduction targets?

Question: Multiple states within the United States and other countries have emissions reduction targets. This morning, I listened to a story where the university of California San Francisco achieved their carbon neutral goal, mainly, by simply purchasing offsets. Are there any states or countries where carbon offsets are specifically mentioned in the legislation for reducing emissions?
Answer: Mainly in the EU:

The global carbon market is dominated by the European Union, where companies that emit greenhouse gases are required to cut their emissions or buy pollution allowances or carbon credits from the market, under the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS). Europe, which has seen volatile carbon prices due to fluctuations in energy prices and supply and demand, will continue to dominate the global carbon market for another few years, as the U.S. and China—the world's top polluters—have yet to establish mandatory emission-reduction policies.
On the whole, the U.S. market remains primarily a voluntary market, but multiple cap and trade regimes are either fully implemented or near-imminent at the regional level. The first mandatory, market-based cap-and-trade program to cut CO2 in the U.S., called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), kicked into gear in Northeastern states in 2009, growing nearly tenfold to $2.5 billion, according to Point Carbon. Western Climate Initiative (WCI)—a regional cap-and-trade program including seven western states (California notably among them) and four Canadian provinces—has established a regional target for reducing heat-trapping emissions of 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. A component of California's own Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, kicked off in early 2013, requires high-emissions industries to purchase carbon credits to cover emissions in excess of 25,000 CO2 metric tons.
Comment: ["As of October 2018, the remaining WCI partners are California and the Canadian provinces British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and Quebec."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Climate_Initiative#Membership_changes)


Apache Server Configuration Extension?

Question: I want to install a duplicate version of Apache server that shares almost all the configuration with an existing running version. Either one of the server will be running all the time and since I do not want to duplicate the configuration files, I referenced by httpd.conf file to include the httpd.conf of the original Apache server.
But I want to customize Virtual host setting in the ssl conf, more precisely the mod-rewrite rules, So I created httpd.ssl.conf file with all the changes. But since the original httpd.conf includes the original httpd.ssl.conf file, I am getting "Only one usage of socket address is permitted error ".
 MyHttpd.conf --> Includes Original Httpd.conf
                            --> Includes original httpdssl.conf

              --> Includes customizedHttpssl.conf

Is there a way to exclude the original httpssl.conf and make the system recognize my ssl.conf?  or may be extend the virtual host setting.
Answer: Move everything but the include of the original SSL config out of httpd.conf into a new file called httpdcommon.conf.
Now setup
 httpd.conf --> Includes httpdcommon.conf
            --> Includes original httpdssl.conf

then
 MyHttpd.conf --> Includes httpdcommon.conf
              --> Includes customizedHttpssl.conf

Apache Server Configuration Extension?


Why isn't V. A. Fabricant given the credit for the discovery of the laser?

Question: In another question here I asked for help in finding old Russian papers in physics and as an example I gave the founding papers on the laser by Basov and Prokhorov (from 1945 and 1954). In an answer @voix was so kind as to post this link http://www.lebedev.ru/data/50laser/Beginning_of_the_Laser_Era_in_the_USSR.pdf with a collection of some of the founding papers that have shaped the area of quantum electronics and, in particular, the idea of the laser. In this collection I found with astonishment that it was not Basov and Prokhorov, neither was it Townes who discovered the laser but the discovery of reverse absorption which is at the basis of the laser action is in fact due to V. A. Fabrikant in 1939, years before the ones I have always known to be the discoverers and who got the Nobel prize for it. Fabrikant even has a 1951 patent and a diploma No. 12 for a discovery in USSR regarding the phenomenon of reverse absorption.The astonishing fact is that Basov and Prokhorov do not even cite Fabrikant in their 1954 paper. Neither do Townes et al in their 1954 paper. What phenomenon, different from what Fabrikant has discovered did Basov, Prokhorov and Townes find to deserve all the credit for the discovery of the laser and have Fabrikant sent to obscurity?
Comment: because in soviet russia, laser discovers you!
Comment: Does anyone have H. Kopfermann and R. Ladenburg Experimental Proof of 'Negative Dispersion', Nature Volume 122, 438-439 (22 September 1928)
Answer: Actually V. A. Fabricant was given credit for his laser idea by both Dr. Charles Townes, scientist/inventor of the first working maser and by Dr. Ted Maiman, scientist/inventor of the first working laser. I happen to be writing a book about Maiman, hence my interest in addressing myself to this question. On Pg 61 of Townes autobiography, "How the Laser Happened", he mentions Fabrikant's "rather obscure thesis (his doctoral) . . . however, he was not able to achieve any amplification (coherent or stimulated), and his work was quickly forgotten. After our own maser idea was revealed, Fabrikant claimed a patentable version, dated June 18, 1951. That patent claim was published in 1959, but I learned that Soviet law allowed patents to be rewritten and backdated. Fabrikant was definitely working on relevant concepts as early as 1939, but unfortunately he did not get very far and no one picked up his work as being particularly interesting."
Maiman in his autobio, "The Laser Odyssey", Pg. 57, is less critical and kinder that his rival Townes: "Although Fabricant was not successful in achieving coherent light, his analytical and experimental work preceded the demonstration of any other stimulated emission device."
-Rod Waters
Answer: Thanks for this enlightening quote from Townes. But obviously Basov and Prokhorov could not use such nasty words against Soviet patent system to explain their relationships with Fabrikant.
Little earlier in that quotation Townes calls Fabricant "a Russian". It is not true, Fabrikant was not Russian - he was "a Jew". It is important because right in 1953 there was a culmination of anti-Semitic campaign in USSR (see "Doctor's plot").
Its connection to Fabricant affair was partially disclosed (as a rumour) in Andrey Sakharov memoirs. Wording is quite  equivocal, so I give the quote below in Russian. The trouble is that Sakharov also made an amazing career in 1953 outmaneuvering his numerous Jewish colleagues in thermonuclear project. Furthermore, during his dissident years Sakharov formally still worked at FIAN where Basov was a director. So it is very sensitive topic for Sakharov and even such cautious disclosure looks almost heroic.
Sakharov worked as invited lecturer in 1947-48 at the physical department (headed by Fabrikant) of Moscow Power Engeneering Institute. And in 1965 (next year after laser Nobel prize). Sakharov was a member of commission which awarded Fabrikant some meaningless  consolation medal from academy of sciences.

В МЭИ заведующим кафедрой физики был проф. В. А. Фабрикант. Он очень
  опасался моей педагогической неопытности и давал мне разные полезные
  наставления. Его собственная научная судьба драматична. Примерно в те
  же годы, когда мы общались, он (вместе со своей сотрудницей Бутаевой)
  предложил принцип лазера и мазера (использование эффекта
  индуцированного излучения, на существование которого в 1919 году
  впервые указал Эйнштейн). Но радость осуществления этой замечательной
  идеи – и известность – достались другим. Говорят, что какую-то роль
  сыграло то трудное положение, в котором оказались в годы "борьбы с
  космополитизмом" многие евреи. Впрочем, я не имею тут информации из
  первых рук. Может, просто сказалась общая трудность проведения научной
  работы в условиях вуза – перегрузка учебной и административной
  работой, крайняя бедность в отношении материалов и оборудования. Через
  20 лет Фабриканту была присуждена премия имени Вавилова (я был в числе
  членов комиссии). Явилась ли эта запоздалая премия хоть каким-то
  утешением уже старому и больному человеку, стоявшему у истоков одного
  из самых удивительных открытий нашего времени?
Prof. Fabrikant was the head of MPEI department of physics. He was
  very afraid of my teaching inexperience and gave me useful advices.
  His own scientific career was dramatic. Approximately at the same time
  as we acquainted, he (and his co-worker Butaeva) proposed the
  principle of laser and maser (the use of stimulated emission, the
  existence of which in 1919 first pointed out by Einstein). But the joy
  from the realization of this wonderful idea - and fame - went to other
  people. It is said that some role was played by the difficult
  situation in which many Jews were during the "struggle against
  cosmopolitanism". However, I do not have first-hand information here.
  Probably, it was just  general difficulty of conducting scientific
  research in a university - overloading with teaching and
  administrative duties, extreme poverty in terms of materials and
  equipment. In 20 years Fabrikant was awarded the Vavilov prize (I was
  one of the members of the Commission.) Whether this belated prize was
  any consolation for an old and sick man, who stood at the origins of
  one of the most amazing discoveries of our time?
Comment: It appears that what you have written is not a translation of the quote. Can you please translate the quote for the benefit of those of us who don't read Russian.
Answer: This is not a detailed answer, but western scientists who were number two, were often given sole credit when the Soviet discoveries were prior. I know this happened with the pomeron ( Gribov vs. Chew-Frautchi), inflation (Starobinski-Mukhanov vs. Guth), period-3 theorem (Sharkovshii vs. Li-Yorke), even cold fusion (Steponovich vs. Pons-Fleischmann).
Part of the problem was the Soviet system tended to prevent scientists from properly advertising their work, by travel restrictions and official problems with international communications, but I think the major factor is that western academics just had a stronger incentive to publicize and advertise their work, and this made their work better known.
Comment: The first problem was American scientits inability to read any foreign language paper. Second problem  was that some fields in Soviet science was more fantasy than hard results. I'm not aware where the borderline was within physics, as an example take chemistry, there inorganic, especially silicon was good, whereas organic chemistry was not woth reading. Third problem was/is the chauvinism of Americans and Soviet/Russians when it comes to who was first at inventions.
Comment: @Georg-- JETP was translated to English immediately, so the language barrier shouldn't be a major problem. I agree that Chauvinism was a factor.
Comment: @Georg: while true, the question specifically mentions the Nobel Price, and that's pretty much neutral territory (Royal Swedish Academy). Ron of course has a point; Sweden may have been neutral but Soviet travel restrictions were not limited to the USA.
Answer: Thanks again for this thread. It prompted me to start my own work to look little further into this puzzling controversy surrounding Fabricant laser patent. It is very far from completed, current version is here (sorry its in Russian) http://www.igfarben.ru/index/valentin_fabrikant_laser_patent
Briefly several findings:

Fabrikant's laser patent application received negative review and classified. And then his group was not allowed to work on their invention without security clearance. It's interesting that the same algorithm of suppression was later applied in USA against Gordon Gould.
Recently (2010) nice overview of Fabricant's works was published here http://www.jeos.org/index.php/jeos_rp/article/view/10045s
It completely avoids any explanation or even mention of the theme of relationships between Fabricant and Prokhorov/Basov. Derivatives from Prokhorov/Basov project are now important people in Russian physics, so its little wonder that there is still a strict censorship on this theme.

I got short note from B.Veklenko - Fabricant's successor as head of MPEI phys. dept. written for  100-th Fabrikant anniversary (2007). Actually he said that Prokhorov/Basov were NOT involved in suppressing Fabrikant's invention. Nevertheless this note was rejected by MPEI organizers - just mention of this theme did suffice.
I also received a funny letter from current MPEI "opinion leader" on Fabricant scientific legacy claiming that laser patent controversy: 1. Does not exist 2. it was "settled" during celebrations of 50-th anniversary of first working laser (in 2010).

Prevailing interpretation of Fabrikant works in the West is something like that "Even in Russia his colleagues probably did not take him very seriously and therefore he did not stimulate anybody even there" [M. Bertolotti The History of the Laser]

In Russia itself the more popular view is something like that Fabricant patent "does not signify" because:
soviet patent bureaucrats processed patent application for a too long period of time (8 years)
patent application is somehow not valid without regular academic publications
invention of light amplification by Fabrikant does not signify without invention of generator.
The last idea seems to be most popular and apparently it belongs personally to Prokhorov (suggested to be inventor of adding positive back feed). Veklenko writes that he even asked Fabrikant to support this rhetoric - Fabrikant objected by saying that every student knows that amplifier is converted to generator by adding positive back feed.:

"Ко мне, в основном во время заведования мною кафедрой, неоднократно
  приставали всевозможные корреспонденты с вопросом: кто зарезал заявку
  на изобретение. Бытовало мнение, да и бытует по сей день, что это мог
  быть кто-нибудь из Нобелевских Лауреатов, изготовивших мазер, или
  кто-нибудь из их команды. Это не так. Нобелевские Лауреаты академик
  Н.Г.Басов и академик А.М.Прохоров никакого отношения к этому не имеют.
  Правда лишь в том, что с ними у В.А. были натянутые отношения. Однажды
  А.М.Прохоров предложил «В.А. давайте разделим, Вы предложили
  усилитель, мы –генератор света». На это В.А. возразил «Но ведь любой
  студент знает, что усилитель превращается в генератор путем введения
  положительной обратной связи». Разговор оборвался."

From the cited above review I've learned that there is one other intriguing work by Fabrikant and Butaeva (published in 1959) pretending to be the first experimental demonstration of negative adsorption in optical wavelengths. Review above tells that it was an error.
MPEI physics department (lead by Fabricant for over 30 years) actively worked on  high school physics education in USSR. It led to peculiar attempts by his colleagues to oppose ignoring Fabrikant's laser patent by  telling truth about his contribution in school physics handbooks (not always quite correctly). By the way, that is perhaps  why I am so enthusiastic about this topic now - I am acquainted with this theme since my early teen years - approximately in the same form of dark rumors like Sakharov retells it.
I don't believe that Fabrikant was just "out of luck". In my view the expropriation of Fabrikant's work in favor of Prokhorov/Basov was a cold-hearted and practically effective administrative move. Indeed, it was in line with anti-Semitic campaign of that time, then there was another relevant trend of transferring serious physics into very few central Moscow institutes  - in late 1930-ies this process was dubbed "fianization" (FIAN is physical inst of acad.sci where all these laser events happened).

It appears that it was I.E.Tamm who was the real commander of Fabricant's invention fate - in 1947-49 they closely collaborated with Fabricant on educational projects in MEPHI and 9-th dept. of MPEI  - they merged in 1951. (That's where Sakharov emerged in this story - he was an inexperienced lecturer so Tamm sent him to Fabrikant's established physics chair in MPEI while Tamm's own project of theor.physics chair in MEPHI been created from scrap )
Then Tamm became one of top scientific decision makers in H-bomb project - and therefore most influential person in soviet physics and FIAN. And he did participate in several other episodes of "fianizations".
I have a strange idea that it was a sort of "friendly" expropriation. Both Fabricant and Tamm were most widely admired persons in soviet physics, and it seems they had close and friendly relations for a long time.
Probably it gives an explanation why Fabricant got significant share in revenues from laser invention. He was finally forgotten by soviet powers only by late 60-ies - coinciding with the time of Tamm terminal illness.


What does the Law of Demeter have to do with Demeter?

Question: Is there a story from Greek mythology about the goddess Demeter that somehow motivates the Law of Demeter? If so, I'd love to know it so I can tell it to my students when I teach this topic.
Comment: See also wikipedia: "It is so named for its origin in the Demeter Project, an adaptive programming and aspect-oriented programming effort. The project was named in honor of Demeter, "distribution-mother" and the Greek goddess of agriculture, to signify a bottom-up philosophy of programming which is also embodied in the law itself." [citation-needed], though, so take it with a grain of salt.
Comment: This might be more on-topic on English Language & Usage, Computer Science Educators, History, or Mythology (see each site's scope) but I don't really think it's on-topic here.
Comment: If you're a teacher, I suggest strongly to teach "the principle of least knowledge": the principle is then self explanatory (Like each of the SOLID principles) and you can focus on what really matters. In the LoD, the idea is combined with other principles which are no longer of general truth: a class may nowadays talk to perfect strangers as long as it doesn't rely on their internals but only their public interface.
Answer: The Law of Demeter for Functions ("Only talk to your friends") aka the Principle of Least Knowledge and the related Law of Demeter for Concerns ("Only talk to your friends who share your concerns") were first explicitly discovered, described, defined, and named in the Demeter Project. Not only were the Laws discovered there, they are also part of the Demeter Method and thus a guiding design principle for the entire Demeter System. That's why the researchers decided to name it after the system.
As to why the system is named the Demeter System, there is this quote on the What is Demeter? site:

Agriculture
The Greek goddess of Agrigulture.
The Demeter project was named after Demeter because we were working on a hardware description language Zeus and we were looking for a tool to simplify the implementation of Zeus. We were looking for a tool name related to Zeus and we chose a sister of Zeus: Demeter.
Later we promoted the idea that Demeter-style software development is about growing software as opposed to building software. We introduced the concept of a growth plan which is basically as sequence of more and more complex UML class diagrams. Growth plans are useful for building systems incrementally.

So, essentially the name was first chosen for its coolness factor, and then the association to "growing software in small steps" was ret-conned.
Comment: I've just updated the [Law of Demeter Wikipedia's page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Demeter) with the info you provided. Check it out and see if you have any improvements to it. :)


Can I give vitamin k 25mg on same day as Baytril?

Question: She will be having a CT/Rhinscopy on Thurs. in five days but still has one day of Baytril. She needs five days to complete Vit. K to get her blood to clot. I need to start it today also.
Comment: what type of pet do you have? it might not be important to know to answer this question but to make it searchable it is.
Answer: This type of question is best directed to your veterinarian, who is familiar with your pet's case and prescribed medications.
Per Plumb's Veterinary Drugs, there are no reported interactions between Baytril (enrofloxacin) and Vitamin K. These medications are in general very safe to use together and commonly prescribed at the same time.


What are the stopwords in Tamil language?

Question: What are some of the stopwords in Tamil. The ones I could come up with were 'வது', 'ஆம்'.
Comment: https://tdil-dc.in/index.php?option=com_download&task=showresourceDetails&toolid=1641⟨=en has a downloadable list of what is alleged to be 185 stop words for Tamil. I cannot attest to its quality, but the organization seems vaguely credible. The download link requires you to register; I have not attempted to proceed past that point.
Comment: Ah, I have tried this before. This organization requires you to send a fax.
Answer: You can look for the most frequent words in Tamil and make, e.g., the 50 most frequent words your stopwords.
List of the 50 most frequent words for many languages are available from the Wortschatz portal at Leipzig University, here is a direct links to 2017's TOP 50 words for Tamil.
Comment: This seems a bit crude. Doing some statistics on the frequency distribution and/or checking with an informant who can read the language seem like obvious and not particularly sophisticated improvement ideas, though it is of course possible that they won't change the end result. 50 seems pretty low for a completely arbitrary number to pick for this purpose.
Comment: I agree with @tripleee the list contains words for government and the name of a city.
Comment: The Wortschatz collection happens to make the top-50 available as a separate download by default; but if you speak the language, you could probably download the full corpus and pick out good candidates from something similar (top-200, top-500? This also depends on orthographical conventions of the language etc).
Comment: @tripleee thank you! I am trying to do something of that sort. Do you think using a tf-idf score would help?
Comment: Just the IDF is probably sufficient already actually.


Using "oe" instead of "œ"

Question: Google translates "the eye" into "l'oeil", which should be according to my other sources "l'œil". How common is it to find "oe" instead of "œ"? Very rare or quite common?
Comment: Seulement un problème de clavier et de logiciel. Gogole utilise des claviers anglais et affiche ***oe***, un traducteur francophone utilise un logiciel qui aurait corrigé en ***œ*** qui est la seule graphie admise officiellement, l'autre peut être tolérée dans les SMS et brouillon, mais pas dans un écrit officiel/publicitaire/documentaire ….
Comment: Worth reading: https://wiesmann.codiferes.net/wordpress/?p=757
Answer: The normative usage in French is that "Œ" and "OE" are distinct spellings. The ligature is treated like a diacritic (i.e. like an accent or a cedilla): it is sometimes omitted when there are technical difficulties (French keyboards don't have an Œ key), but this is considered an approximation of the real spelling, not a correct spelling. Spelling *oeil instead of œil is no more correct than spelling *ete instead of été or *ca instead of ça. Serious typography (such as professionally typeset books and newspapers) always uses the ligature.
In practice, not making the ligature is moderately jarring, because it only has a minor effect on the pronunciation. In most common words spelled with œ, it's part of the digraph œu, and the trigraph oeu doesn't exist in French but is close enough that it could be pronounced in the same way ([œ] or [ø]). Apart from words with œu, I think the only common word with œ is œil (and family), where likewise *oeil* would not be too wild. A œ without a following vowel is often pronounced [e] or [ɛ], which it would be jarring to spell oe, but I think all the words where œ isn't followed by a vowel are relatively rare (and several have an alternative é spelling). Not making the ligature is not as jarring as leaving out a cedilla or an accent that changes the prononciation, but more so than an accent that doesn't change the pronunciation or doesn't change it much. But any educated person would consider it wrong, just perhaps not enough to matter.
A sign that Œ is a distinct spelling from OE and not just a typesetting variant is that when a word is typeset with an initial capital, the whole Œ is uppercased, and not just the O. For example see the title pages¹ of L'Œil tourné and La poule et l'œuf, as well as that of Langue de vipère et œil de biche (note how the whole Œ letter is in blue):

Looking online through the covers of books titled "(L')Œil …" or "(L')Œuf …" (I went through the top 50 of https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=oeuf and https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=oeil), I did find a few where the œ word was not spelled with an Œ or œ ligature:

OEIL, L'OEUF,
Oeuf are self-published books with otherwise evidently low production values (and the last one isn't even in French).
"Allez vous faire cuire un œuf" is typeset as oeuf on the cover page but œuf inside, so this seems to be a case of not putting the effort (maybe the font used in the title didn't have an œ character) or perhaps a deliberate stylistic effect to avoid an unusual letter.
"L'Œil de Shiva" and L'Œil de Caine, both from mainstream publishers, make a non-standard ligature with an uppercase O and a lowercase e. This seems to be a stylistic effect; at least "L'Œil de Caine" is spelled with a regular Œil inside and another edition has ŒIL on the cover. Note that even though the letters are not spelled in the standard way (where the E in the capital Œ ligature is an uppercase E), the typesetter or graphic artist went through the effort of attaching the e to the O, so it's still a ligature and not separate letters.

My conclusion from this non-scientific sample is that not spelling the ligature properly is rare, and is either due to technical limitations, not bothering, or a stylistic effect. There are far too few occurrences to consider separate letters a standard spelling variant.
Technically French also has an Æ/æ ligature, but it's only present in a few very rare words and in some Latin imports, and as far as I know an alternative spelling using ae, e or é instead of æ is always acceptable. In contrast, œ is present in several common words (œil, œuf, bœuf, cœur, …) for which there is no standard spelling variant.
¹  Traditionally, title case in French means typesetting the first word in uppercase, and if that's an article, then typesetting the following noun as well as any adjective preceding it. However modern title typesetting often only capitalises the very first letter. Cover page typesetting often has additional stylistic effects such as all caps (very common), all lowercase (not very common), or occasionally cosmetic effects to highlight some words or just to stand out.
Comment: Parmi les quelques recherches effectuées après la réponse de *LPH* à mon commentaire, je n'ai pas trouvé de règle officielle pour la graphie de *æ* et *œ* (vive les claviers BÉPO [https://bepo.fr/wiki/Accueil]  :-) proposée par la réforme de l'orthographe.
Answer: You do find "oe" regularly in the TLFi (œil,bœuf), albeit the  TLFi should be one among the foremost sources from which we are in right to expect a scrupulous upholding of the traditional norms. In spite of this stunning choice of spelling in the TLFi, the ligature is fairly well preserved by all sources that have some authority in the domain of language; in fact, most spell checkers provide automatically the ligature. It is mostly  the text of users of the language  left to their own devices for the production of a ligature by means of a keyboard that shows neglect of the ligature.
According to some, however, the ligature hangs by a thread: « chronique d'une mort annoncée ».
Comment: @Personne Non, il ne s'agit pas du tout des ligatures de nature esthétique, celles-là ne sont apparemment pas menacées. Il y a eu des éliminations de ligatures orthographiques (œ et æ) d lors de la Réforme 90 et elles me semblent raisonnables à première vue : j'ai trouvé un compte-rendu à ce propos mais je n'ai pas eu le temps de m'y intéresser de près ; en particulier je ne me suis pas attardé sur la question de savoir si la réforme était allée trop loin ou pas assez en ce qui concerne ces ligatures.
Comment: Mort annoncée pour les ligatures "entre deux « f », entre un « f » et un « l », un « s » et un « t »  … " probable, ligatures réservées aux puristes et aux bons logiciels francophones, mais que dit « la nouvelle orthographe » de *œ* et *æ* ?
Comment: … alors on ne va plus comprendre pourquoi Gainsbourg chante "Elaeudanla Teïtéïa" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Kkc--aYns8 :-)
Comment: In the TLFi, the presence of "oe" vs "œ" is not a choice of spelling but a OCR related typo. It has been listed in [this document](https://www.dorif.it/ezine/ezine_articles.php?art_id=337): *Un autre cas remarquable est celui de Œ et œ. Dans une tranche alphabétique qui s'étend de la fin de la lettre l à la fin de la lettre p, les digrammes ligaturés Œ et œ ont été dissociés en OE et oe.*
Answer: According to Google Ngram, there was a time, 1709 to be precise, when the two spellings œil and oeil were almost equally used, at least in print (who knows why?). The results are, of course, subject to the availability of the linguistic corpus. There was another, less dramatic convergence in 1994. Now, of course, œil is almost always used. The sudden divergence after 1999 is another mystery (at least to me)...
Comment: No, this diagram is worthless. What you're seeing is what optical character recognition reported. If you check the actual images for thel hits that are supposedly for the `oe` spelling, they're pretty much always `œ`. My guess for the divergence in recent years is that most books became available as text which had `œ` from the start.
Comment: @jlliagre I didn't check the early 1700s, but I did check recent hits when I wrote my answer, and almost all hits reported for `oe` were in fact OCR mistakes. I don't know if OCR accuracy varies by publication date, although it is possible due to printing quality and font choice. My hypothesis is that many recent books are not OCRed at all.
Comment: Impressive chart! The encoding ISO/IEC 8859-15 (ASCII-based standard character encodings), which includes the ligatures, was published in 1999, so it became easy to use them in the Internet and computer-generated publications. That's probably the reason for the divergence.
Comment: @Gilles Checking the hits shows a lot of true positives. In any case, why would OCR accuracy vary depending on the publication date?
Comment: @Gilles Granted A closer look shows many false positives too, so the rates are indeed worthless. There seems to be more separated "o e" in the past, but a different aproach should be used to get the actual figures.

Using "oe" instead of "œ"


Can humans evolve to drink blood?

Question: In A Canticle for Leibowitz, the Plains Nomads conserve water for their animals by men drinking animal blood and women and children drinking milk instead. However, since ingesting any decently sized amount of blood can be toxic for normal humans, would it be possible for the Nomad men to have evolved the ability to process blood?
Comment: When I was a child my sister told me that a friend of my parents had a medical condition and had to drink a glass of cow's blood every day.  I don't know if that was true.  I know that I have sometimes sucked up some of my blood when I bleed.  So I am interested in learning how much blood someone can drink.
Comment: What makes you think eating blood is toxic? it can be dehydrating but that is a very different thing. Drinking blood is only dangerous is you live in a industrialized country and thus have an iron rich diet, even then you have to eat a LOT of it. You can't live off it exclusively but there are very few foods that won't cause problems if you eat nothing else. .
Comment: I agree that blood unto itself isn't toxic.  It might not have much nutritive value, either, but it's part of dishes already, e.g. [BlodPalt](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blodpalt).  I had a friend describe making it with cow's blood also, in Montana. Slaughtering a cow in a old bathtub and just adding flour and snow to it until it made a porridge-like consistency.  Sometimes also turned into sausage.
Answer: They already have, in Kenya
The Maasai of Kenya drink blood and milk from cows.  While it isn't the mainstay of their diet -- current understanding is that it is reserved for ceremonial occasions -- they've been doing this for a long time.  It would not be too far of a stretch to adapt that in your world building as a more prominent source of sustenance.
FWIW, I saw a short film on this cultural practice in high school (about 40 years ago); in that film, it was explained that they typically mixed some salt in with the blood before ingestion.  That additive may be a mitigating factor in your worry about toxicity.
It is likely that the author of Canticle for Leibowitz drew inspiration for that Plains Nomads' practice from the real life custom of the Maasai.  The milk drinking practices of some humans (IIRC, the neolithic steppe people spread it across much of Eurasia1) would be a similar adaptation.
1 David Anthony: The Horse The Wheel and Language
Comment: Beat me to it. Human adaptation doesn't necessarily need to be biological. It can be behavioral as well. When one looks at traditional famine foods from various cultures you will find that they have created methods of rendering typically inedible items edible (though obviously as a method of last resort and not a staple food.)
Comment: @TCAT117 for some reason, I think that olives fit into that category. :)
Answer: Yes, it's possible.
Given a population that has at least some variation in blood tolerance, it's possible for that population to select for enhanced tolerance given a pressure to do so.
Lactose intolerance is actually the default form of humans and many other mammals. However, in cultures where it was important, the survival benefits of being able to cleanly digest more milk products led to lactose tolerance spreading throughout those populations. This would be analogous, in that the survival benefits of being able to drink blood (surviving better in low other-water-level conditions) would be sufficient that people with that mutation would prosper, spreading it to their children.
This is assuming that there is such a mutation giving enhanced tolerance for drinking blood (which I've never heard of but seems plausible), or that one developed at some point in the intervening period.
Comment: Bear in mind that as infants humans are born with the ability to manufacture the enzyme lactase and thus be capable of digesting lactose (as are most mammals). The human adaptation to drink milk is simply adapting to not stop producing lactase after infancy. There is no such enzyme or digestive process within humans that is related to digesting blood, making the ability to evolve this trait a much more difficult and long term affair.
Answer: Is it possible for humans to evolve to be able to drink blood? Yes, there are animals capable of drinking blood. It's not implausible that humans given the right circumstances could evolve to have the ability to drink blood.
That said they will never adhere to 100% Hematophagy. This is for the simple reason that drinking blood has a lot of drawbacks. It's hard to store, especially in primitive conditions, blood is also not well rounded in terms of nutritions (it can have lots of one sort, but very little of another for example way too much iron).
Here's a little article about blood sucking and why it really sucks having to make use of it. Sucking blood isn't an easy life
Answer: This is probably more of a comment, but blood is not going to be a substitute for water as the OP wants. Nor is milk. It's a simple issue of concentrations.
We need water to make up for loss through evaporation and excretion of wastes in our blood. Drinking blood adds water, but also adds equal concentrations of the waste materials our bodies are trying to get rid of.
See answers to: How long can a person survive solely on his own raw excrement and urine?
Comment: The main problem is not the waste materials but the salt and iron. Blood is useless for hydration because it already has the salt concentration of, well, blood.
Comment: @AlexP: Yes, that is what I meant. Salt, urea, detritus of dead cells, bile, so an and so forth...

Can humans evolve to drink blood?


Should I implement all "missing index" suggestions?

Question: Running the SQL Server Performance Dashboard Reports (nice name) gives lots of suggestions for missing indexes in my DB. Should I implement all of these uncritically? Or should I "sort" them somehow and decide which ones I should implement?
Answer: Should you blindly implement every "Missing Index" suggestion the report makes? No.
Should you look at its suggestions, evaluate which ones make sense (would eliminate frequent table scans but not bog down the server with overly-frequent index updates) and implement those? Sure (and if you're having performance issues, absolutely!).
Like all suggestions from software tools you should consider what it's telling you, but never blindly substitute its judgment for your own.
Comment: In the words of Microsoft "Consider submitting your workload and the proposed index to the Database Tuning Advisor for a more comprehensive evalution...".
Comment: I don't often agree with Microsoft, but a second opinion from the Database Tuning Advisor is a good starting place when evaluating a new index.
Answer: No sir you should not. Instead use the recommendations as the starting point for your analyses.
Consider also that the performance dashboard reports will be presenting you with recommendations for queries that are currently in the plan cache only. The missing index DMV's on the other hand will contain a complete history of recommendations since your last SQL Server Service restart.
To learn more take a look at this excellent tutorial video over on SQLServerPedia: Find Missing Indexes
You will also find T-SQL scripts you can use in order to query the missing index DMV's here.


Who is the oldest Greek God?

Question: Who is the oldest Greek God according to mythology? Is it Poseidon or Aphrodite? I have read most of the Percy Jackson books but can someone point out the answer and the story that goes with it?
Comment: I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about mythology and not about science fiction or fantasy. You may find help at [mythology.se].
Comment: If you ask why the oldest is in Percy Jackson, though, that's on topic here (and I can probably answer that).
Comment: Thanks I did not know there was a myth section.
Answer: Well, if you consider Chaos as God, then Chaos.
Otherwise, all together Gaia, Eros, Erebus and Nyx:

In Greek mythology, Chaos (Greek: Χάος), according to Hesiod, Chaos
  ("Chasm") was the first thing to exist: "at first Chaos came to be"
  (or was) "but next" (possibly out of Chaos) came Gaia, Tartarus, and
  Eros (elsewhere the son of Aphrodite). Unambiguously born "from Chaos"
  were Erebus (Darkness) and Nyx (Night).// Wikipedia

See also Hesiod's Theogony:

(ll. 116-138) Verily at the first Chaos came to be, but next
  wide-bosomed Earth [Gaia], the ever-sure foundations of all (4) the deathless
  ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the
  depth of the wide-pathed Earth, and Eros (Love), fairest among the
  deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise
  counsels of all gods and all men within them. From Chaos came forth
  Erebus and black Night[Nyx]; but of Night were born Aether (5) and Day,
  whom she conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus. And Earth
  first bare starry Heaven, equal to herself, to cover her on every
  side, and to be an ever-sure abiding-place for the blessed gods. And
  she brought forth long Hills, graceful haunts of the goddess-Nymphs
  who dwell amongst the glens of the hills. She bare also the fruitless
  deep with his raging swell, Pontus, without sweet union of love. But
  afterwards she lay with Heaven and bare deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus
  and Crius and Hyperion and Iapetus, Theia and Rhea, Themis and
  Mnemosyne and gold-crowned Phoebe and lovely Tethys. After them was
  born Cronos the wily, youngest and most terrible of her children, and
  he hated his lusty sire.

Cronos was a bit afterwards.
Comment: @tonysdg It seems a bit complicated, depending on which period of Ancient Greece you are talking about. Nevertheless, the war of Olympians with Titans is referred to as war of gods, and parents of Olympian gods are also referred as gods and the genealogy is comparatively well established: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Olympians#Genealogy

By cosmology, we may argue that Olympians are more individuals with (human-like) characters, whereas Chaos, Uranus, Gaia are more personifications of nature.

But that is a distinction of modern times and not neccessarily how ancients thought.
Comment: @MatrimCauthon And according to Greek mythology, there is no specific distinction between the Olympian gods and their precursors, they all are Greek mythology gods?
Comment: I buy that argument. My only doubt stemmed from the fact that the ancient Greeks always had more than one word to express various nuanced positions (e.g., the many words for "love"). But the distinction of modern times vs. ancient times makes perfect sense.
Comment: I belive he asked specifically for gods
Comment: I'm not an ancient Greek expert, but I believe the ancient Greeks very much did draw a line between the Olympians and their predecessors, the Titans. Now whether or not they were all considered "gods" (certainly immortal beings, but there's a certain connotation attached to the term "god") is another question that I don't know the answer to.

Who is the oldest Greek God?


get latitude & longitude as per address given for leaflet

Question: In my project I am using leaflet to display points.
I am getting address from my database & want to show point for that particular address.
I dident found anything which will give me latitude & longitude as per address provided.
Can any one help me on this.
Answer: What you want to do (Convert address to a position) is called Geocoding. To get a a location for your address, you need a Geocoder.
Your Options are rather limited when you are working in the FOSS world. You main options  are Nominatim & MapQuest's Open Geocoding Service
if you were working with Google's Map API, you could have used their Geocoder. And If you were using ESRI software, you could use the geocoder available at ArcGIS Online.
You need to remember that the geocoding can only be as good as the data it is running on. In Areas where the data is patchy, or complete geocoding is not possible, you will get bad or 0 results.
Answer: There is a great geocoder already developed for Leaflet.
You can use the results easily like
<code>map.on('geosearch_showlocation', function (result) {
    L.marker([result.x, result.y]).addTo(map)
});
</code>
Comment: While it's great that you are doing research on your own and posting an answer here, let me warn you that if you use the ESRI provider or Google provider, you will be breaking the T&C of both the service providers. It's best to always check the T&C of any service provider before using it.
Comment: I didn't got you. What you want to say ?
Comment: Like vaibhav shah said. L.GeoSearch works great. I use the Bing address search engine. It puts the point in the middle of the parcel most of the time.
Comment: Googles says that you are allowed to you their geocoder only if you use their API on the Same Page. ArcGISOnline also has certain Terms and Conditions, which will not be met if you are calling their geocoder from this library. SO if you use this library, yes you might be getting results, but you are breaking the rules set by these providers and that is not a good thing to do. They could block your IP/Application or even sue you if necessary.
Answer: I have got the same feature in my project and I use the leaflet-control-bing-geocoder:
https://github.com/sa3m/leaflet-control-bing-geocoder1
Bing allows you to use its geocoding service outside Bing Map but you will need a key to access to it. There is a free trial of 90 days then you will have to purchase a public or enterprise license. This key allows you to use Bing layers in your project as well.


Print outline preview in illustrator

Question: Is it possible to print only the outline preview (View > Preview) of an artboard? Taking a screenshot and printing is not an option for me.
Comment: Why is taking a screenshot not an option?
Comment: Because if the page's height does not fit into my screen, I can't take a screenshot of the whole page. I know I can take multiple screenshots and then stitch them together but if there is a way to print the preview version, would save me a lot of work.
Comment: Well, my own Google research suggests that there isn't a way other than doing a screenshot, _but_ I know that there are screen grab utilities out there that can capture a window that extends beyond the edge of your screen. So in theory, you should be able to just expand Illustrator to be big enough to show the entire image and do a screen grab that way.
Answer: Unfortunately no.
I've submitted a few feature requests to have the ability to actually use the Outline Mode in various ways - save it for web, print it. But currently Illustrator offers no abilities to actually export, print, or save the Outline Mode.
A screenshot is your only way.
What I've done in the past is save a copy of the file, Select all. Then apply a .75pt black stroke and no fill to everything. This comes close to mimicking the Outline Mode. But you may need to alter masks afterwards to remove the strokes. And some Effects may need to be removed.
Comment: .75pt black stroke is a good trick, thanks Scott.
Answer: After long Googling I also had to conclude that exporting the outline is not an option. I did work out another method where you take a screenshot, do a live trace of that screenshot and then change the stroke weight to your liking.
In contrast to Scott's method, this approach preserves the gradient mesh outline.
It worked for me, but because of the live trace you lose a bit of the sharp edges which might be a problem.
I have included an example of my approach below so you can judge for yourself.
First I have this circle with a gradient mesh applied:

It looks as follows in the outline view:

Now importing this screenshot in Illustrator gives me the following image:

As you can see it's a bit blocky and doesn't look very good.
Clicking the image and doing a live trace with the following options (adapt to suite your image):

gives me this result:

Expanding it (Object -> Live Trace -> Expand) makes a group of paths of the traced image. Selecting all these paths and setting the stroke weight to 0.5pt gives the following vector image:

I have added a scaled version as well to show that no quality is lost in scaling.

Print outline preview in illustrator


Scheduled emails from Gmail

Question: I would like to send scheduled emails from my Gmail even when my computer is turned off. Is it possible?
Comment: It seems Yandex.com does it. Testing now.
Answer: If you need fewer than 10/month then http://www.boomeranggmail.com is free.
For alternatives, check out http://alternativeto.net/software/boomerang-for-gmail/
Answer: Yandex.com offers the option for free. An email must be scheduled for sending within a year from the scheduling.

Scheduled emails from Gmail


Surrender Ceremonies at the End of WW2: What happened after documents signed?

Question: I understand that the Germans, before the Allies (the Americans, Russians, English and possibly the French) signed the documents and then were very curtly instructed to leave the room after which the Allies celebrated. That the Germans would be part of the festivities seems unlikely (although I think I read that even the Germans were offered champagne and caviar) and indeed Keitel would soon be tried and executed. I wonder if in general, in all such ceremonies, the defeated were instructed to leave after signing. A related question is, were only Germans signing the documents? If so, was this because they had lost all European military alliances at this point and of course the Japanese were still holding out thousands of miles away.
Comment: What Germany signed there was an unconditional surrender. In a way, there was nothing for the Allies to countersign, as they made no promises whatsoever in those documents. However, FWIW, [the documents](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Instrument_of_Surrender#/media/File:German_instrument_of_surrender2.jpg) **were** countersigned ("...in the presence of...")
Answer: Each Axis power signed their own surrender documents.
No doubt the protocol for each such meeting was different, with similarities (we're talking military operations here, there's bound to be a guide book on how to arrange such things somewhere in the military manuals of most nations).
What happened to the signing parties would depend heavily on the terms of surrender.
The Italians surrendered to the allies for example after they themselves overthrew Mussolini, which would have influenced the attitude of the present allied dignitaries towards them.
The Japanese effectively did something similar, the emperor pretty much firing his war cabinet and reducing his status to a far more ceremonial monarch.
I don't think any of them would be happy to take part in a victory party with their (now former) enemies and conquerors. I know I probably wouldn't be (except maybe in case of the Italians, who may well have sent people who had been in opposition to the Mussolini regime).
Comment: @Jeff: They wanted the assent of the defeated. It's like a teacher asking a student to confess, "I've been a bad boy" before he is punished.
Comment: @Jeff: My understanding is they were "guarded" For instance, General Tojo was under house arrest until he was summoned to trial.  There were formalities to be observed, even under those circumstances.
Comment: As I mentioned, I believe the Germans were explicitly excluded by the Allies after the signing. I also wonder, come to  think of it, whether the Allies wanted to signatures of men whom they did not intend to execute although these may be separate issues.
Comment: @TomAu Okay, that is *why* they did it -- not merely symbolic since stray commanders need to know that it is official. But once it was done, interesting to know what happened to those who surrendered. I think one thing is, even though they were told to leave the room, they were not (or were they) immediately imprisoned?
Comment: @Jeff many were placed under guard, either house arrest or in specially assigned facilities (e.g. in the UK there was a castle set aside to house captured German generals from as early as 1942). They weren't generally shoved into regular POW camps. They were much too valuable for the information they had, as well as as propaganda items.


Cannot find 'Design' tab in the main menu

Question: I'm new to the ExpressionEngine but I cannot find 'Design' tab in the main menu. Does anyone know how to add it or the provide the sample URL so that I can reach Design page on my site?
Answer: First, just to check, you are logged into the Control Panel (where the menu is)? Are you logged in as the super user or another user? Is the user a member of the same group as user 1?
If not, this will indicate user group permissions. The "Can Access Control Panel" permission only allows you in, in the same section there is a "Can access DESIGN section" permission, make sure this is set to yes.
Other permissions to check are in the "Control Panel Administration" section, "Can administrate template groups and templates" and "Can administrate design preferences", Test with these set to yes (these should control what is available in menu).
Finally, check the "Template Editing Privileges" section, this shouldn't stop the menu appearing but again might remove links and if a menu has no links it may not show.
If its not Group Permissions, check your "Main Menu Manager" Settings in "My Account" (Click your name in the top right). See if there's anything going on here.
Finally, check you have no extensions or otherwise 'mucking about' wit hthe menu.
Please check the above, and report back if you don't get any results and we'll investigate further. There's no chance of any tom foolary in the database or core files is there?
Comment: Thank you very much for your super- quick reply. I'm sure I can access to the Control Panel and see the tabs the icon of home, Add-ons, Structure and Help only. And also I found my account is set as 'Content Editors'. Is that why I cannot see the 'Design' tab in the main menu?
Comment: It is. Either move your account to the Super Admins (easy way), or adjust the "Content Editor" Group priviledges as per the above. (sorry for late response, I'm at work and real stuff came up :( )
Comment: Thanks a lot, Blatant. I'll ask the admin to update my account. Do your best on your work and have a good day :)
Comment: Happy to help :) If it's not too much trouble Naomi could you mark this as the answer (tick icon on the left), it helps others know that hte question has an answer and helps other Exchangers out. (And gives me 15 Rep points, gotta get the points!!!)


Fudge Recipes - Shelf Life

Question: I am looking for information on how to extend the shelf life of the fudge that I make for my business. Currently it is only lasting about 2 weeks, even when we have it sealed, we take it out and when we take it out it only lasts a couple days. I currently use a variety of methods as we are trying to find the best one.
Comment: Hello and welcome! Recipe requests are off topic. In order for us to be able to help, you will need to edit your question to include recipes and/or methods that you are using. Otherwise, we have no way of suggesting what you may be able to do differently to improve your results as we don't know what you are currently doing.
Answer: Fudge really only has a shelf life of a week or two. First it will start to crystallize on the outside (which is actually very yummy in my opinion), but then it will start to grow mold. Good hygiene will lengthen the time before mold starts to grow, but ultimately fudge is not a preserved food and isn't meant to keep. The individual ingredients will keep better by themselves, and you can make the fudge nearly on demand.

Fudge Recipes - Shelf Life