Good pm, I would like to be further clarified if the following sentences are correct or incorrect, but I believe both are correct.     There is a cat and a dog.   There are a dog and a cat.    My point is, are these sentences correct? Yes or no? And why?
It seems I put a   Bounty assigned by outside party, two lengthy, reference-citing answers, one "-1" (awarded the bounty), one "-2", two others scored "0" and "-2" respectively, the answers suggesting one or the other is correct, 73 comments and no consensus so far - and me, as the asker, lost without a clue what to think of the answers anymore -  this is no longer "Learners' Level" question, so I thought I'd bring it here and hear what the experts have to say.    Original question:  Plurality of verb depending on plurality of list elements  An edit was suggested to my sentence.     There was were an orange, some grapes, two apples and a small pile of cherries on the plate.   In my native language plurality of the verb always follows plurality of the first element on the list. There were an orange,... sounds awkward to me, no matter what follows up. My simple solution was reordering:     There were some grapes, an orange, two apples and a small pile of cherries on the plate.   But that's not the first time I faced this situation and I'd like to know what the rules of grammar say about that - was my editor overzealous or am I trying to copy rules of my language that don't apply in English?    Someone linked a  for negatives, where the situation is more clear-cut ("There is no..."). Same applies to connection with "or" apparently, per accepted answer there. Still, nothing for "and".  It seems there is a consensus that in that if the verb goes after the list, it will be plural.     an orange, some grapes, two apples and a small pile of cherries were on the plate.   There doesn't seem to be clear consensus for:     On the plate { was | were } an orange, some grapes, two apples and a small pile of cherries   Adding more to the confusion is the abbreviated form: "There's"     One last note. In North America, at least, there is a widespread use of using a singular form like "there is" and "there was", without regard for the subject item or items, and this "there is" is often shortened to "there's":           There's three apples on the table!      Could you please clarify this mess?
Subfiles failing with custom class Is there the easiest way to toggle (show/hide) navigational grids in TikZ? In PSTricks, we can toggle the grids easily by showgrid=[false/true]. How to do it in TikZ? Doing as follows is tedious.    \documentclass{minimal} \usepackage{tikz}  \begin{document}   \tikzpicture  \draw[gray,very thin] (-4,-2) grid (4,2); \foreach \x in {-4,...,4}   \draw[red] (\x,-1.9) -- (\x,-2.1) node [below] {\x};   \foreach \y in {-2,...,2}   \draw[red] (-3.9,\y) -- (-4.1,\y) node [right] {\y};  \draw (0,0) circle (2);   \endtikzpicture    \end{document}   Is there the easiest way to toggle (show/hide) navigational grids in TikZ?  Edit  The navigation needs not only the grids but also the labeling numbers. Is it ok to put old papers on the arXiv? In my field (I am a condensed-matter theoretical physicist) it is such a normal thing to put papers on the arXiv, that people sometimes look at other people's arXiv list of papers instead of their publication record to get to know what they do, etc.  It just so happens that a few years ago I did a PhD with a supervisor that does not like the arXiv that much (he apparently had some conflict with some authors of a paper that was very similar to one of his papers, but one was already published while the other was just an arXiv preprint -or something like that). As a result, from my list of less than 20 publications, there are four of them from my PhD that are missing on the arXiv.  I was thinking of submitting the latest versions I have of them as arXiv preprints now, four years after their publication. For this I already have the agreement of all co-authors (including my supervisor), and all the journals involved seem to allow to put preprints of the material they publish. Do you see any problem with this? I fear that some people might take it as a way to advertise as new something that was already published a long time ago (though I would of course give the full reference to the published version). There may be other issues I am not aware of. The reason why I would like to do this is that I am applying for fellowships, positions, etc. and I am afraid some of my (best) publications may go unnoticed if somebody looks me up on the arXiv.  Thank you, Stephen Have you ever had a case where you felt compelled to include strange things like a double that in a sentence? If so, then what did you do to resolve this?  For me, I never knew whether it was acceptable grammar. However, what I did learn was that it was a logic distractor, could lead to confusion, and therefore should be reworded to avoid this. Prove that if $n \in \mathbb{N}$, then $$\sum_{d|n}{(d(n))^3}=(\sum_{d|n}{d(n)})^2$$ where $d(n)$ is the divisor function. I have know only information is $d(n)=\sum_{d|n}{1}$. \RequirePackage{filecontents} \begin{filecontents}{\jobname.bib} @article{Arter95,     Author = {David Arter},     Date-Added = {2013-08-11 17:38:06 +0000},     Date-Modified = {2013-09-01 15:13:22 +0000},     Journal = {Journal of Common Market Studies},     Number = {3},     Pages = {361-287},     Title = {The {EU} {Referendum} in {Finland} on 16 October 1994:              {A} Vote for the {West}, not for {Maastricht}},     Volume = {33},     Year = {1995}}  @article{Detlef95,     Author = {Jahn, Detlef; Storsved,Ann-sofie},     Date-Added = {2013-08-11 17:14:34 +0000},     Date-Modified = {2013-08-11 17:16:45 +0000},     Journal = {West European Politics},     Number = {4},     Pages = {18-37},     Title = {Legitimacy through referendum? The nearly successful domino‚Äêstrategy of the Eu‚Äêreferendums in Austria, Finland, Sweden and Norway},     Volume = {18},     Year = {1995}} \end{filecontents} \documentclass{article} \usepackage[ngerman]{babel} \usepackage{natbib} \bibpunct{(}{)}{;}{a}{}{,} \makeatletter \renewcommand\@biblabel[1]{} \makeatother  \begin{document}  \cite{Arter95}  \bibliography{\jobname} \bibliographystyle{plainnat}  \end{document}   Please help. I want the author's name displayed like this "Arter, D." instead of David Arter The limit of reciprocal is the reciprocal of the limit While I was reading the book Exploratory examples for real analysis, I came across this:     to show that : $$\lim_{x\rightarrow x_o}\frac{1}{h(x)} = \frac{1}{\lim_{x\rightarrow x_o}{h(x)}} = \frac{1}{M}$$      Discussion:Let $\epsilon \gt 0$.we want to find $\delta \gt 0$ such that       if  $0 \lt |x-x_0| \lt \delta $,then $\Big|\frac{1}{h(x)}-\frac{1}{M}\Big|\lt \epsilon$.      In order to get expression involving $|h(x)-M|$,we first find the common denominator:        $\Big|\frac{1}{h(x)}-\frac{1}{M}\Big|=\Big|\frac{M-h(x)}{M~h(x)}\Big|$      $~=\Big|\frac{h(x)-M}{|M|~|h(x)|}\Big|$.      As we have to deal with variable term $|h(x)|$ in denominator.We can construct bound .Let $\epsilon =\frac{|M|}{2}$ ,since lim$_{x\to x_o}h(x)=M$,there exists $\delta_1\gt 0~~$ s.t.       if $0 \lt |x-x_0| \lt \delta_1 $,then $|h(x)-{M}|\lt \frac{|M|}{2}$.      As you study steps below,identify that step where $h(x)\neq 0$ for all $0 \lt |x-x_0| \lt \delta_1 $ plays a critical role:      $|M|=|M-h(x)+h(x)|$      $~~~~~~\leq |M-h(x)|+|h(x)|$      $~~~~~~= |h(x)-M|+|h(x)|$      $~~~~~~\lt \frac{M}{2}+|h(x)| \implies$      $\frac{|M|}{2} \lt |h(x)| \implies$      $\frac{1}{h(x)}\lt \frac{2}{|M|}$,where $0 \lt |x-x_0| \lt \delta_1 $.      Now that we've bound for $1/h(x)$,we can apply the definition to term $|h(x)-M|$.      Since     lim$_{x\rightarrow x_o}h(x)=M$,we can find $\delta_2 \gt 0$ such that,       $~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~$if  $0 \lt |x-x_0| \lt \delta_2$, then $|h(x)-M|\lt \frac{|M|^2 \epsilon }{2}$   The thing I can't understand is for what purpose did the author work with such complicated expression involving $\epsilon $ in the end of the discussion? Javascript && operator as if statement? Now that experience does something besides render regions of a server uninhabitable due to  orb lag, what's the most efficient and safe way to get those excellent enchants?  A mob farmer may rank highly, but what about without tons of setup? Forcefully update to new windows How do I convert two lists into a dictionary? Imagine that you have the following list. keys = ['name', 'age', 'food'] values = ['Monty', 42, 'spam']  What is the simplest way to produce the following dictionary? a_dict = {'name': 'Monty', 'age': 42, 'food': 'spam'} Is it possible to instantiate an object at runtime if I only have the DLL name and the class name, without adding a reference to the assembly in the project? The class implements a interface, so once I instantiate the class, I will then cast it to the interface.  Assembly name:     library.dll    Type name:      Company.Project.Classname     EDIT: I dont have the absolute path of the DLL, so Assembly.LoadFile won't work. The DLL might be in the application root, system32, or even loaded in the GAC. Do the laws of physics evolve? Hubble's constant $a(t)$ appears to be changing over time. The fine stucture constant $\alpha$, like many others in QFT, is a running constant that varies, proportional to energy being used to measure it. Therefore, it could be agued that all running constants have 'evolved' over time as the Universe has expanded and cooled. Both the local and global curvature of the Universe changes over time implying that so too does the numerical value of $\pi$. All these things are however constants (well, let's say parameters since they are not really 'constant'.)   In  with astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, Feynman said "what today, do we not consider to be part of physics, that may ultimately become part of physics?" He then goes on to say "..it's interesting that in many other sciences there's a historical question, like in geology - the question how did the Earth evolve into the present condition? In biology - how did the various species evolve to get to be the way they are? But the one field that hasn't admitted any evolutionary question - is physics."  So have the laws of physics remained form-invariant over the liftetime of the Universe? Does the recent understanding of the aforementioned not-so-constant constants somehow filter into the actual form of the equations being used? Has advances in astronomical observations, enabling us to peer back in time as far back as the CMB, given us any evidence to suggest that the laws of nature have evolved? If Feynman thinks that "It might turn out that they're not the same all the time and that there is a historical, evolutionary question." then this is surely a question worth asking.  NB/ To be clear: this is a question concerning purely physics, whether the equations therein change as the Universe ages, and whether there is any observational evidence for this. It is not intended as an oportunity for a philosophical discussion. Closing a window Why doesn't grep using pipe work here? I have the following command:  find / -name libGL.so.1   Which returns lots of lines with "Permission denied". I want to exclude such lines, so I added the following:  find / -name libGL.so.1 | grep -v 'denied'   But the output is the same - my grep -v 'denied' is not filtering out the lines with Permission denied. I've tried many variations, looked over grep tutorials, but I cannot figure out the problem. Any suggestions? Do lenses have focal planes or focal spheres/ellipsoids? How do I install a fingerprint reader on Lenovo ThinkPad? I have a  with a fingerprint reader:    How to make Ubuntu recognise it and use it for login?  I already tried:  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:fingerprint/fingerprint-gui sudo apt-get update   ... but this GUI did not recognizes my device. Does anyone knows any other option? How do I set my DNS when resolv.conf is being overwritten? Most of the info I see online says to edit /etc/resolv.conf, but any changes I make there just get overridden.  $ cat /etc/resolv.conf  # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8) #     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND --  #     YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN nameserver 127.0.1.1   It seems that 127.0.1.1 is a local instance of dnsmasq. The dnsmasq docs say to edit /etc/resolv.conf. I tried putting custom nameservers in /etc/resolv.conf.d/base, but the changes didn't show up in /etc/resolv.conf after running sudo resolvconf -u.  FYI, I don't want to change DNS on a per-connection basis, I want to set default DNS settings to use for all connections when not otherwise specified.  UPDATE:  I answered this question myself:   I think it's the best solution since:   It works. It requires the least amount of changes and It still works in conjunction with dnsmasq's DNS cache, rather than bypassing it. In the movie Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, there's a scene where the students are preparing for the Yule Ball.   Professor McGonagall is instructing the boys and girls, while Filch is choosing a vinyl record to place in an enormous turntable phonograph with a horn as big as Hagrid.   This has me wondering if the wizarding world, in general, plays vinyl records. Or, if this was just a Muggle artifact that Hogwarts kept as a novelty.   Are there other instances of witches or wizards using or owning phonographs or record players in either the books or movies? If so, what are they? (Examples help to illustrate if this was a one-off or a trend) Enabling GPU rendering for Cycles?