Several years back, I was on a backpacking trip with a guy whose whole family were huge fans of classic SF/Fantasy.  One of the fantasy books he brought for the long car rides piqued my interest, but I've lost the name.  General things I remember:   It's part of a series It's not very recent (certainly not in the last 20 years)   In particular, the logistics of the magic system intrigued me, and is the main reason for wanting to reread the first book and find the later ones.  Magic is granted by knowledge of words of power, of which there are a finite number in the world.  Knowledge of multiple words of power is possible and grants access to various tiers of abilities:   One word grants somebody a knack for a particular skill.  I don't recall the specifics, but I seem to remember that these were extreme enough to guide somebody's path through life without thoroughly defining it Two words makes somebody an adept, who excels at the acquisition of new skills when intensively trained.  In the book, one example described is that an adept who trained for a day with a master swordsman would be his equal by the end of the day Three words makes somebody a sorcerer.  I have very little knowledge of what this does, since there was only a brief encounter with one (if any).  Knowledge of four or more words isn't brought up, AFAIK. Finally,  the power of a word is slightly diluted by the number of people who know it.  People who know words of power may form agreements to share with each other, but these nearly always ended in one member killing the other(s), as one person could slightly increase their power by offing the other guy   The final detail I remember is that there is a set of individuals who share a space in the world.  These people all know the same word of power, and therefore are all adepts (there is a musician, a stereotypical brute, and maybe a thief?), but only one of them exists in the world at a given time.  I seem to remember that these people could switch out if they reached a consensus.
I read a book of this series probably around 2000. I think the series was quite new then but not sure.  The main thing I remember about it is that magic is based on words of power. If you knew one word you got some extra ability, knowing two words gave you yet some other ability, and if you knew three words you became a very powerful wizard. Only one person at a time could know each word, and telling someone your word meant you died.  The main protagonist somehow gets hold of one word and then for some reason strives to learn more.  EDIT: I think that I accidentally picked up the second book of the series and never read the first one. From what I remember, the protagonist learned one word of power and got some kind of supernatural ability (cannot remember what though). He then ends up in some kind of challenge where he has to cooperate with another person who knows another word that gives super-strength.  Not very coherent memories, but I hope someone knows what series it is. It has been bugging me for years. (Not even sure if the series is good at all, but still would like to know the name.)  EDIT2:  I remember the world as being medieval-ish. I do not think there were dragons, but there may have been other humanoid races (I have a very weak recollection that there may have been an orc or similar in the story, but this could be completely wrong). The protagonist was male.
Replace strings in a file based on a list of strings and a list of corresponding replacements I would like to find the correlation between a continuous (dependent variable) and a categorical (nominal: gender, independent variable) variable. Continuous data is not normally distributed. Before, I had computed it using the Spearman's $\rho$. However, I have been told that it is not right.  While searching on the internet, I found that the boxplot can provide an idea about how much they are associated; however, I was looking for a quantified value such as Pearson's product moment coefficient or Spearman's $\rho$. Can you please help me on how to do this? Or, inform on which method would be appropriate?  Would Point Biserial Coefficient be the right option? Regexp that matches valid regexps Need help to interpret output of free command I would appreciate help in interpreting the output of 'free -m' below.    -bash-4.2$ free -m               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available Mem:          15793        7112          88        7840        8591         611 Swap:         16891        5289       11602    If I have nearly 11GB free then why am I seeing swap usage.  Shouldn't that be 0?   Also, the 'shared' value is 7840.  Is this memory available for a new application? Is only 'cache' memory available for new applications?  In other words, 'shared' and 'buffer' memory are not available for new applications? How should I interpret the 'available' column with a value of 611?  How is this value arrived at? Why can't I destroy or place blocks? I'm playing on a Survival world with cheats on, "easy" difficulty, and at night in-game. I didn't have a sword or anything to make a sword with, and I was starving, so I switched to Creative to give myself a stack of food and a bed to set my spawn point. When I switched back to Survival, I couldn't destroy or place blocks. I'm on single player, and my Internet is fine, and I can destroy blocks still if I switch to creative. I've tried resetting the button one, and reloading the map, and it still doesn't work. I've even tried deleting everything I gave myself in Creative. This happened before on a different world and I ended up deleting it.  This only happens on this world. How do I fix it?  If I know I'm in the correct game mode, what else can cause this?  Are there different causes in multiplayer? Where to start with Oracle? This question only needs one answer: a list of great resources for getting started with Oracle, including Database Administration, PL/SQL and SQL.   You may find your question has been closed as a duplicate of this one, if so, please don't be offended: we are trying to be as helpful as we can without . Closing a question as a duplicate of this one is us saying "What you really need is to spend some time reading some of the best resources available rather than have your specific question answered right now. If you do get through these resources, you'll soon be back with more ! How do I install Waterfox? I’ve recently purchased a new Mac Mini, and I’ve been importing my old pictures into the Photos app.  I want to have these photos backed up to iCloud, along with the photos currently on my iPad. I then want everything synced to my Mac Mini, but not to my iPad, which has limited storage capacity.  Is it possible to have the Mac Mini and iPad set up to backup to iCloud, but only download backed-up photos to the desktop? adding a point in a manipulate command Show that $S + T$ and $aT$ are linear Let  $S:  V \to W$ and $T: V \to W$ be linear transformations. Given $a$ in $\mathbb{R}$, define functions $(S+T): V \to W$ and $(aT): V \to W$ by $(S+T)(v)=S(v) + T(v)$ and $(aT)(v)= aT(v)$ for all $v$ in $V$. Show that $S+T$ and $aT$ are linear transformations. Counting the number of propagating degrees of freedom in Lorenz Gauge Electrodynamics How do I definitively show that there are only two propagating degrees of freedom in the Lorenz Gauge $\partial_\mu A^\mu=0$ in classical electrodynamics.  I need an clear argument that   involves the equations of motion for just the potentials $A^0$ and $\mathbf{A}$, and not the electric and magnetic fields.   includes sources $\rho$ and $\mathbf{J}$ in the equations of motion.  This is to justify the assertion that there are degrees of freedom that decouple from the rest of system. does not critically rely on quantum field theoretic arguments (although any supplementary remarks are welcome).     To illustrate the level of clarity I expect, I provide an argument in the Coulomb gauge $\nabla\cdot \mathbf{A} = 0$:  Of the four field degrees of freedom, the gauge condition $\nabla\cdot \mathbf{A} = 0$ removes one degree of freedom (the longitudinally polarized EM waves).  To show that among the remaining three degrees of freedom only two are propagating, consider the field equations of motion in the Coulomb gauge:  \begin{align} \nabla^2 A^0 &amp;= -\rho/\epsilon_0,\\ \big[\frac{1}{c^2}\frac{\partial^2}{\partial t^2}-\nabla^2\big]\mathbf{A}&amp;= \mu_0 \mathbf{J}-\nabla \frac{1}{c^2}\frac{\partial}{\partial t}A^0. \end{align}  The first equation is NOT a wave equation for $A^0$, and thus does not propagate.  The final equation IS a wave equation, and describes the propagation of two degrees of freedom (Gauss' law in first eq. can be solved, and then inserted into the second equation to show that $\mathbf{A}$ only couples to the Solenoidal part of the current). More examples of Simpson's Paradox, barring the ones on Wikipedia, Titanic, and delayed flights. I hope someone may know fresh examples of  for use in my statistics courses.  The examples I've been using are fine, but I'd like to have some new ones.  I'm familiar with the ones on the Wikipedia page: the gender bias lawsuit at Berkeley, batting averages, mortality rates among low birth babies, party voting on the Civil Rights Act, and success rates of kidney stone treatments.  I'm also familiar with the example of survival rates on the Titanic and the one about delayed flights at America West vs. Alaska Airlines.  These are all good ones, but, like I said, I'm looking for more. Does anybody know any others?  For those who aren't familiar with it, Simpson's paradox is essentially a property of unreduced fractions: It's possible to have, simultaneously, $$\frac{a_1}{b_1} &lt; \frac{c_1}{d_1} \text{ and } \frac{a_2}{b_2} &lt; \frac{c_2}{d_2}, \text{ but } \frac{a_1 + a_2}{b_1+b_2} &gt; \frac{c_1+c_2}{d_1+d_2}.$$   For example, $\frac{1}{3} &lt; \frac{34}{100}$ and $\frac{66}{100} &lt; \frac{2}{3}$, but $\frac{67}{103} &gt; \frac{36}{103}$.  It can be hard to spot this happening in a given real-world scenario. I am running Ubuntu 14.04 and Notepad++ 6.6.4 (through WINE)  Under the 'Run' tab, I clicked on "Launch in Firefox" , but nothing happened   I uninstalled Notepad++ and WINE, then shutdown. I re-installed Notepad++ and WINE and still have the same problem.   Does anyone know what the problem is? According to this , if at least one of the nouns involved is plural then it should take the plural form of the verb. Otherwise, it should take the singular form of the verb. But in the last part it says not all grammars agree to those rules thus proximity rule applies. However, it doesn't explain when to apply the proximity rule and when not to use the former rules. Interpreting coefficient in a linear regression model with categorical variables I will give my examples with R calls. First a simple example of a linear regression with a dependent variable 'lifespan', and two continuous explanatory variables.  data.frame(height=runif(4000,160,200))-&gt;human.life human.life$weight=runif(4000,50,120) human.life$lifespan=sample(45:90,4000,replace=TRUE) summary(lm(lifespan~1+height+weight,data=human.life))  Call: lm(formula = lifespan ~ 1 + height + weight, data = human.life)  Residuals: Min       1Q   Median       3Q      Max  -23.0257 -11.9124  -0.0565  11.3755  23.8591   Coefficients:              Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&gt;|t|)     (Intercept) 63.635709   3.486426  18.252   &lt;2e-16 *** height       0.007485   0.018665   0.401   0.6884     weight       0.024544   0.010428   2.354   0.0186 *   --- Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1   Residual standard error: 13.41 on 3997 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared: 0.001425,   Adjusted R-squared: 0.0009257  F-statistic: 2.853 on 2 and 3997 DF,  p-value: 0.05781   In order to find the estimate of 'lifespan' when the value of 'weight' is 1, I add (Intercept)+height=63.64319  Now what if I have a similar data frame, but one where one of the explanatory variables is categorical?  data.frame(animal=rep(c("dog","fox","pig","wolf"),1000))-&gt;animal.life animal.life$weight=runif(4000,8,50) animal.life$lifespan=sample(1:10,replace=TRUE) summary(lm(lifespan~1+animal+weight,data=animal.life))  Call: lm(formula = lifespan ~ 1 + animal + weight, data = animal.life)  Residuals: Min      1Q  Median      3Q     Max  -4.7677 -2.7796 -0.1025  3.1972  4.3691   Coefficients:             Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(&gt;|t|)     (Intercept) 5.565556   0.145851  38.159  &lt; 2e-16 *** animalfox   0.806634   0.131198   6.148  8.6e-10 *** animalpig   0.010635   0.131259   0.081   0.9354     animalwolf  0.806650   0.131198   6.148  8.6e-10 *** weight      0.007946   0.003815   2.083   0.0373 *   --- Signif. codes:  0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1   Residual standard error: 2.933 on 3995 degrees of freedom Multiple R-squared: 0.01933,    Adjusted R-squared: 0.01835  F-statistic: 19.69 on 4 and 3995 DF,  p-value: 4.625e-16   In this case, to find the estimate of 'lifespan' when the value of 'weight' is 1, should I add each of the coefficients for 'animal' to the intercept: (Intercept)+animalfox+animalpig+animalwolf? Or what is the proper way to do this?  Thanks Sverre I have put a bounty on , however I don't see it appear in the  (also not when I'm not logged in).  Why is this. Aren't all bounty questions supposed to be visible there? What is the optimal path between $2$ fixed points around an invisible obstructing wall? Every day you walk from point A to point B, which are $3$ miles apart. There is a $50$% chance each walk that there is an invisible wall somewhere strictly between the two points (never at A or B). The wall extends $1$ mile in each direction perpendicular to the line segment (direct path) between A and B, and its position can be at any random location between the two points. That is, it can be any distance between A and B such as $0.1$ miles away from A, $1.5$ miles away, $2.9$ miles away.... You don't know if the wall is present or where it is until you walk into it.  You must walk around the wall if present as there is no other way to circumvent it.  Assume the wall is negligible thickness (like a force field), all ground is perfectly flat, and the y coordinates at both A and B are $0$ (although I don't think the optimal path will change much if they weren't).  What strategy minimizes the average expected walk distance between A and B?  How do we know for certain this strategy yields the shortest average walking distance?  To get the $100$ bounty points, I would like a convincing argument from you as to why you feel your solution is optimal and cannot be beaten.  For those of you using computer simulation, anything reasonably close to optimal is a candidate for the bounty.   Can anyone beat the optimal solutions submitted so far?  There are still a few days to try.  Even a slight beat (if not due to roundoff error or some other error) would help prove previous solutions are non-optimal.  You can just use the table of $31$ points (x-y coordinates) and compute that path length and then if you can find better then I will accept that answer.  I think by Sunday night I may have to award the bounty otherwise it may get auto-awarded. How to pass multiple operator properties via UI layout? Basically, I want to have a single operator which can do multiple things, based on some attributes values.  class MyPanel(bpy.types.Panel):     # (...)     layout = self.layout     row = layout.row()     row.operator("my.button", text="Button text")  class MY_BUTTON_OT_Button(bpy.types.Operator):     bl_idname = "my.button"     bl_description = "Button description"     bl_label = "Button"     foo = bpy.props.IntProperty()     bar = bpy.props.BoolProperty()      if bar:         # Do something with foo     else:         # Do something else :P   I know how to set one attribute, like so:      row.operator("my.button", text="Button text").foo=5   But what about multiple arguments? I tried several things that didn't worked, like (e.g.):   With setattr(): row.operator("my.button", text="Button text").setattr(foo=5,bar=True)   With a custom method setVal() in the operator class: row.operator("my.button", text="Button text").setVal(foo=5,bar=True)   Maybe I must use a single EnumProperty? I hope to avoid this, so my question is: Is it possible to pass multiple custom arguments to set attributes in an operator class? And if yes, how ?  Thanks for your help. How to find all graph isomorphisms in FindGraphIsomorphism Using a 'corporate author' in the "author" field of a bibliographic entry (spelling out the name in full) I want to list a company name in the author field of a bibliographic entry:  @book{CUDA,   author    = {NVIDIA Corporation},   title     = {NVIDIA CUDA Compute Unified Device Architecture Programming Guide},   publisher = {NVIDIA Corporation},   year      = {2007} }   But the entry keeps showing up "N. Corporation".  Is there a way to get the full author name to show up?  I'm currently using the siam BibTEX style.