In the Oxford dictionary, begin has the explanation: to start or to make something start for the first time. An example:   on post-war architecture.  In the , however, it says  Start, but not begin, is used to talk about creating a new business.  She started a new restaurant and it’s been going really well.   So how should I choose the right word?
Today, when looking up the definitions of the phrasal verb "take sth up", I noticed that one of them was written like this: "to start or begin something such as a job." For the first time I realised that probably "start" and "begin" don't exactly mean the same thing.So the question is what the difference is between the two, and if there are cases when they mean exactly the same thing.
Why was the Triwizard cup portkey in Goblet of Fire two-way? At the end of the scene in the cemetery in GoF, the spirits who emerged from Voldemort's wand tell Harry to go grab the trophy (which, of course, was a portkey that took Harry and Cedric from the maze to the cemetery), and that the trophy portkey would take Harry back to Hogwarts.  Why would the portkey do that?  Are all the portkeys 2-way?  If possible, I would prefer as much of the answer based on canon (or JKR) as feasible Including Interaction Terms in Random Forest Suppose we have a response Y and predictors X1,....,Xn. If we were to try to fit Y via a linear model of X1,....,Xn, and it just so happened that the true relationship between Y and X1,...,Xn wasn't linear, we might be able to fix the model by transforming the X's somehow and then fitting the model. Moreover, if it just so happened that the X1,...,XN didn't affect y independent of the other features, we also might be able to improve the model by including interaction terms, x1*x3 or x1*x4*x7 or something of the like. So in the linear case, interaction terms might bring value by fixing non-linearity or independence violations between the response and the features.  However, Random Forests don't really make these assumptions. Is including interaction terms important when fitting a Random Forest? Or will just including the individual terms and choosing appropriate parameters allow Random Forests to capture these relationships? Dropping z dimension programmatically Seeking English term for relationship between two members of extended family? How to check if a 2D point is in a polygon? Topologist's sine curve is connected I just came across the example of the topologist's sine curve that is connected but not path-connected. The rigorous proof of the non-path-connectedness can be found .   But how can I prove that the curve is connected? To be honest, even intuitively I am not being able to see that the curve is connected. I am thinking if it is proved that the limit point of $\sin(1/x)$ as $x \to 0=0$, then it would be proved. But, why is this true? IMO, this limit doesn't exist. Intuitively also, it seems that the graph would behave crazily and not approach a particular value as a tends to $0.$  EDIT (Brett Frankel): There are a few different working definitions of the topologist's since curve. For the sake of clarity/consistency, I have copied below the definition used in the linked post: $$ y(x) = \begin{cases} \sin\left(\frac{1}{x}\right) &amp; \mbox{if $0\lt x \lt 1$,}\\\ 0 &amp; \mbox{if $x=0$,}\end{cases}$$ I read a short story (I think, but it might have been a novel), where most races discover a very easy way to travel faster than light at a certain point in their technological development.   What I remember:   The guys in wooden ships bounced around subjugating the people without FTL travel. Earth had never figured out the FTL, and so had poured its effort in a different path, achieving present day technology. The aliens were freaking out about handing the humans FTL travel. The story was told from the point of view of the aliens. I read it in the last 10 years, but there is no telling how old it actually was, although I do remember them mentioning F-18s or F-14s. I have a scene below where I am wanting to get an HDRI image to come in through the windows and light the scene in the window areas and have a god ray like effect.  I want to do this with a volumetric effect and have the HDRI lighting create throw patterns in the scene.  Is this possible?  To have volumetric lighting where the HDRI creates throw patterns?  Thanks for the help Java2D Performance Issues I'm having performance oddities with Java2D. I know of the sun.java2d.opengl VM parameter to enable 3D acceleration for 2D, but even using that has some weird issues.   Here are results of tests I ran:  Drawing a 25x18 map with 32x32 pixel tiles on a JComponent Image 1 = .bmp format, Image 2 = A .png format  Without -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true  120 FPS using .BMP image 1 13 FPS using .PNG image 2  With -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true  12 FPS using .BMP image 1 700 FPS using .PNG image 2  Without acceleration, I'm assuming some kind of transformation is taking place with every drawImage() I do in software, and is pulling down the FPS considerably in the case of .PNG. Why though, with acceleration, would the results switch (and PNG actually performs incredibly faster)?! Craziness!  .BMP Image 1 is translated to an image type of TYPE_INT_RGB. .PNG Image 2 is translated to an image type of TYPE_CUSTOM. In order to get consistent speed with and without opengl acceleration, I have to create a new BufferedImage with an image type of TYPE_INT_ARGB, and draw Image 1 or Image 2 to this new image.   Here are the results running with that:  Without -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true  120 FPS using .BMP image 1 120 FPS using .PNG image 2  With -Dsun.java2d.opengl=true  700 FPS using .BMP image 1 700 FPS using .PNG image 2  My real question is, can I assume that TYPE_INT_ARGB will be the native image type for all systems and platforms? I'm assuming this value could be different. Is there some way for me to get the native value so that I can always create new BufferedImages for maximum performance?   Thanks in advance... Is there a route that would allow travel to the US from the UK or Schengen area, given the US travel ban? I'm a European citizen living in the US on a work visa. Due to some unfortunate circumstances, I need to urgently visit my home country. However I would like to get back to the US after my visit is complete. Flying from the US to Europe is not a problem as there are still daily flights between some city pairs. However going back could be tricky, as  anyone who has been in the Schengen area in the past 14 days from re-entering the country.   Is there a flight route that would let me from Europe to some country, stay there for 14 days and then fly to the US? Canada is out, as they've banned international visitors. Mexico seems to keep their border open, but I  any direct European flights from their airports. Almost every other country either suspended flights or doesn't allow foreign nationals to enter. Who decides which half of the universe should be destroyed? "It is they who lied" or "it is them who lied?" Which is the correct usage of the third person, plural pronoun?     It is they who lied.   It is them who lied. Checking for a file and whether it is readable and writable I'm trying to write a script that will look for a certain .txt file saved to my desktop.  I want the script to be able to check if this file exists and then check to see if it is readable and writable.  Any hints? $\DeclareMathOperator{\tr}{tr}$Let's consider a $n \times n$ matrix and the sequence of traces $\tr(A)=\tr(A^{2})= \ldots = \tr(A^{n})=0$. How to prove that $A$ is a nilpotent matrix (a matrix so that $A^{k} \times u = 0$ for all $u \in V$ and for some $k$)?  Maybe it would be reasonable to consider $A$'s Jordan form (we assume that the action occurs over an algebraically closed field, such as $\mathbb{C}$). For example, suppose that we have found it and $A'$ consists of $m$ blocks of sizes $r_{1}, \ldots r_{m}$ ($r_{1}+r_{2}+\ldots+r_{m}=m, r_{i} \in \mathbb{Z}_{+}$) with $\alpha_{1}, \ldots \alpha_{m}$ as corresponding eigenvalues to each of the blocks. Then, according to the problem will get the system  $$\begin{align} r_{1}\alpha_{1}+&amp;\ldots+r_{m}\alpha_{m}=0 \\ r_{1}{\alpha_{1}}^{2}+&amp;\ldots+r_{m} {\alpha_{m}} ^{2}=0\\ &amp;\ ~\,\vdots \\ r_{1}{\alpha_{1}}^{n}+&amp;\ldots +r_{m}{\alpha_{m}}^{n}=0  \end{align}$$  But the system's analysis over $\mathbb{C}$ seems to be too much complicated.  Actually, the problem must have more or less simple solution.  Any piece of advice would be much appreciated. This post is the continuation of another post related to a . Basically, at this point I'm interested in a robust way to discover the periodicity/seasonality of a generic time series affected by a lot of noise. From a developer point of view, I would like a simple interface such as:  unsigned int discover_period(vector&lt;double&gt; v);  Where v is the array containing the samples, and the return value is the period of the signal. The main point is that, again, I can't make any assumption regarding the analyzed signal. I already tried an approach based on the signal autocorrelation (detecting the peaks of a correlogram), but it's not robust as I would like. How does linear regression use the normal distribution? How does matchmaking work in Play mode? How does Hearthstone match you with opponents in Play mode, for both Ranked and Unranked? Does your record in Ranked affect matchmaking in Unranked (and vice-versa)? Share menu hangs iOS app The Share menu in iOS 13 got a redesign, and the Stack Exchange iOS app is no longer compatible with it. I can still use it to copy the link, but when I try close the menu, it remains stuck. Opening another app and then returning automatically dismisses the menu, but then I can't use the back button anymore to return to the question list. (I'm still able to refresh the page, so it's a navigation issue.)    Ironically, I discovered this bug while trying to mark  as a duplicate; in the app, the quickest way to do that is to use the Share menu to copy the link to the original question to the clipboard...   App Version: 1.6.6.2 Device: iPhone 7 Plus OS Version: Version 13.1 (Build 17A844) It's common in C++ to name member variables with some kind of prefix to denote the fact that they're member variables, rather than local variables or parameters. If you've come from an MFC background, you'll probably use m_foo. I've also seen myFoo occasionally.  C# (or possibly just .NET) seems to recommend using just an underscore, as in _foo. Is this allowed by the C++ standard? Create a tar archive split into blocks of a maximum size I need to backup a fairly large directory, but I am limited by the size of individual files. I'd like to essentially create a tar.(gz|bz2) archive which is split into 200MB maximum archives. Clonezilla does something similar to this by splitting image backups named like so:  sda1.backup.tar.gz.aa sda1.backup.tar.gz.ab sda1.backup.tar.gz.ac   Is there a way I can do this in one command? I understand how to use the split command, but I'd like to not have to create one giant archive, then split it into smaller archives, as this would double the disk space I'd need in order to initially create the archive.