I read a book when I was young, it was about space alien cats. I believe the title was Quzzles, but I really don't know. The book was stolen from me before I was finished. I don't know much else about it.
I'm trying to identify a novel about an alien race coming to Earth. They are rabbit-like.    I thought it was Niven or Pournell but I cannot remember the title.  It was Quotzal or something like that.
Implementing a PIVOT query How can I pivot the following SELECT statement:           SELECT sc.CID,                 sc.CodeName     as OverviewText,                 scRAG.CodeName  as RAGStatusText             FROM StatusCode      sc LEFT OUTER JOIN ProjectOverview po               ON sc.CID          = po.ProjectOverviewCID              AND po.ProjectId    = 180 LEFT OUTER JOIN StatusCode      scRAG               ON po.RAGStatusCID = scRAG.CID           WHERE sc.SCID         = 18   Such statement yields the result set that follows:  CID OverviewText    RAGStatusText --- ------------    ------------- 153 Cost            Green 154 Requirements    Yellow 155 Schedule        NULL 156 Technical       NULL 157 Testing         NULL   But, I want it to return one single row with 10 values, as shown bellow:   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  | Cost | Green | Requirements | Yellow | Schedule | NULL | Technical | NULL | Testing | NULL |  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Can I pivot on CID? How to run Java code using Java code? Getting text from last marker to EOF in POSIX.2 I have a text with marker lines like:  aaa --- bbb --- ccc   I need to get a text from the last marker (not inclusive) to EOF. In this case it will be  ccc   Is there an elegant way within POSIX.2? Right now I use two runs: first with nl and grep for the last occurrence with respective line number. Then I extract the line number and use sed to extract the chunk in question.  The text segments may be quite large, so I'm afraid to use some text-adding method like we add the text to a buffer, if we encounter the marker we empty the buffer, so that at EOF we have our last chunk in the buffer. I would like to protect the formatting of a cell (or a range of cells) in a Google Spreadsheet, but still allow changing the data in that (or those) cell(s).  For example, I want to add a validation rule on a cell that says the cell has to contain a number between 1 and 10, and I would like others to be able to change the value in that cell, but not the validation rule itself.  How do I do that?  So far I was only able to completely protect the cell (content + formatting) or not at all (the user can change the content as well as the formatting).  To me this seems to be an important functionality when adding access rights to spreadsheets. Is it possible that it is completely missing from Google Spreadsheets? QGLWidget appears black in Windows 7 Pausing a long running program in the terminal? Is there a keyboard key combination that I can use to pause a program running in the terminal? In case it matters, I don't intend to run anything else inside that terminal while the program is paused. I just want to pause the program execution, and resume it later. How can I do this? I am trying to create an spritz app. Everything was working fine, but since yesterday I keep getting this error:     ./spritz: line 176: syntax error: unexpected end of file   I have checked the script file and everything seems perfect. I am confused, I have an if statement at last and it looks correct! Here is the last portion:  #checks if speed is 150 157 if [[ $2 -eq 150 ]]; 158 then 159 starttime=$SECONDS 160      FS=$'\n' 161      for j in `grep --color=always -iP '\b[^aeiou\s]*[aeiou][^aeiou\s]*\K[aeiou]' $1`; 162      do 163            #Reads the text file in the centre of the screen 164            echo "                                                    ___________________" 165            echo "                                                             $j"; 166            echo "                                                    ___________________" 167            echo "                                                                               Speed 150 wpm" 168            sleep  0.9; 169            clear; 170       done 171 endtime=$(($SECONDS - $starttime)) 172            echo "You read $words_read words in $endtime seconds!" 173       exit 8 174 fi   What could cause that error? Continuously Differentiable Curves in $\mathbb{R}^{d}$ and their Lebesgue Measure Show that the image of the curve $\Gamma\in\mathscr{C}^{1}\left([a,b]\to\mathbb{R}^{d}\right)$ has d-dimensional Lebesgue measure zero (of course, $d\geq2$).  This can be proved using the absolute continuity of $\Gamma'$ (since $[a,b]$ is compact and $\Gamma'$ is assumed continuous, hence in $L^{1}([a,b])$) together with the fundamental theorem of calculus to obtain an $\epsilon$-small cover of $\Gamma$ by balls.  But I am trying to prove this using more elementary means (i.e. without integration).  Intuitively, since $\Gamma$ is smooth, we ought to (for fine enough partitions) be able to cover $\Gamma$ by boxes which arise from its tangent line.  And by taking the partition of $[a,b]$ to be finer and finer, the "tangent box" cover ought to also get smaller and smaller.  More rigorously, the vector-version of the mean value theorem can be applied: $$|\Gamma(t_{i-1})-\Gamma(t_{i})|\leq(t_{i}-t_{i-1})|\Gamma'(t_{i}^{\star})|\leq M_{i}\Delta t$$ where $t_{i}^{\star}\in(t_{i-1},t_{i})$ and $M_{i}=\sup_{t\in[t_{i-1},t_{i}]}|\Gamma'(t)|$ which exists and is finite since $\Gamma'$ is continuous.  But to me, it's not quite clear how to rigorously construct a cover by boxes from here.  NOTE:  In the proof I mentioned (using integration), essentially you sum the left hand side over all partition intervals of uniform length $\delta$ (which depends on the $\Gamma'$), and "integrate" the right hand side.  Actually, to be more specific, for each $\epsilon&gt;0$ there exists a $\delta&gt;0$ such that $||P||&lt;\delta$ implies $\int_{t_{i-1}}^{t_{i}}|\Gamma'(t)|dt&lt;\epsilon$ (e.g. absolute continuity).  This allows you to define numbers $\epsilon_{i}=\sup_{t,\bar{t}\in[t_{i-1},t_{i}]}|\Gamma(t)-\Gamma(\bar{t})|\leq\epsilon$ so that $\sum_{i=1}^{\#P}\epsilon_{i}\leq||\Gamma'||_{L^{1}([a,b])}$.  Then you can use these $\epsilon_{i}$ to put balls at each point $\Gamma(t_{i})$ of radius (say) $2\epsilon_{i}$, thus giving you an $\epsilon$-small cover.  Again though, this is harder to establish without integration theory. So I have learned in class that light can get red-shifted as it travels through space. As I understand it, space itself expands and stretches out the wavelength of the light. This results in the light having a lower frequency which equates to lowering its energy.  My question is, where does the energy of the light go? Energy must go somewhere!   Does the energy the light had before go into the mechanism that's expanding the space? I'm imagining that light is being stretched out when its being red-shifted. So would this mean that the energy is still there and that it is just spread out over more space? Length of a JavaScript object I have a JavaScript object. Is there a built-in or accepted best practice way to get the length of this object? const myObject = new Object(); myObject[&quot;firstname&quot;] = &quot;Gareth&quot;; myObject[&quot;lastname&quot;] = &quot;Simpson&quot;; myObject[&quot;age&quot;] = 21; I accidentally discovered () that a closing square bracket within an optional argument delimited by [ ] can cause problems.  Here is example code illustrating the issue:  \documentclass{article}   \begin{document}  \tableofcontents  \section[Square brackets ([ and ])]{Square brackets: [ and ]} % bad: the TOC now has "Square brackets ([ and", and the actual title is a mere ")".  Some text.  \section[{Square brackets ([ and ])}]{Square brackets: [ and ]} % good (works as originally intended)  Some text.  \end{document}   The text to be used as the optional (as well as the non-optional) argument contains a ], and this character is not supposed to function as the optional argument terminator but as a matching square bracket/parenthesis. Perhaps this is as it should be, but the question is how to best circumvent any potential problems. Enclosing this in a group works, but I don't know whether doing this has other side effects (perhaps not here in the case of \section but hopefully someone else has a better example of where grouping could lead to a problem). There is no (obvious) way other than writing [{ }] because [ and ] are not normally escaped. That [ and ] are normal characters and bear syntactic function (as optional argument delimiters) creates this potentially problematic situation.  Is simply enclosing the entire optional argument in a group ({ }) a good solution? Are there other/better ways? Is it possible to prevent LUDecomposition from pivoting? individual tick label style with pgfplots given the following code, I want to modify the tick labels in such a way, that for negative values of x, the labels are located above the x-axis. How can I realize this?  \documentclass{report} \usepackage{pgf} \usepackage{pgfplots} \pgfplotsset{compat=newest} \pgfplotsset{plot coordinates/math parser=false} \begin{document} \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[% axis x line=middle, axis y line=middle, width=10cm, height=10cm, scale only axis, xmin=-5, xmax=5, xtick={-4, -2, 0,  2,  4}, xticklabels={$-4\pi$, $-2\pi$, $0$, $2\pi$, $4\pi$}, extra x ticks={-4, -2}, ymin=-1.4, ymax=1.4, ytick={-1,  0,  1}] \end{axis} \end{tikzpicture}% \end{document} SQL Server nvarchar(max) vs nvarchar(n) affects performance Picking a $\delta$ for a convenient $\varepsilon$? I'm studying some proofs in a book from the library  and  unlike my own book, it doesn't prove by showing that a certain expression is striclty less than $\varepsilon$ (given an  appropiate $\delta$ and $\vert x-a\vert &lt; \delta$, etc). Instead, it shows that it's less than some expression involving $\varepsilon$.   E.g. Given $\varepsilon &gt; 0$, we can pick a $\delta &gt; 0$ so $|f(x) - g(a)| &lt;  \text{insert stuff} &lt; k \cdot \varepsilon$ when $|x-a| &lt; \delta$, and thus $f(x) - g(a) \to 0 $ when $x \rightarrow a$.  How does this make sense formally? (Intuitively, I am convinced.)  I don't have much experience with $\varepsilon$-$\delta$ -proofs, so I might be missing something obvious. How to get back to a site when viewing one of its questions When viewing a question on a site which I don't use (I never registered on it), I can't figure out how to get back to the list of questions of the site.  See this example  from the Stack Exchange Android app. Where should I click to see the list of questions? (I chose Mathematics Educators because it's the most recent site, it is very likely that most users don't have an account on this website)  Here is a random example:    When viewing a question, I don't know how to view the list of questions. This site can't be found in the sidebar since it's not in my Your Sites list. The top menu containing the site's title only opens the sidebar. I'm reading Galois Theory by Steven H. Weintraub (second edition), and finding that I'm at least somewhat short on the prerequisites. However the following proof looks wrong to me - am I misunderstanding something, or is it actually an incorrect proof?  Lemma 2.2.3. Let $F$ be a field and $R$ an integral domain that is a finite-dimensional $F$-vector space. Then $R$ is a field. Proof. We need to show that any nonzero $r \in R$ has an inverse. Consider $\{1, r, r^2, \cdots\}$. This is an infinite set of elements of $R$, and by hypothesis $R$ is finite dimensional as an $F$-vector space, so this set is linearly dependent. Hence $\sum_{i=0}^n{c_i r^i} = 0$ for some $n$ and some $c_i \in F$ not all zero.  It then goes on to show, given the above, that we can derive an inverse for $r$. However, if I consider examples like $r = 2 \in Q[\sqrt{2}]$, $r = \sqrt{2} \in Q[\sqrt{2}]$ or $r = 2 \in Q[X]/{&lt;X^2&gt;}$, the set $\{1, r, r^2, ...\}$ doesn't look linearly dependent to me. I do believe the lemma is true (and might even be able to prove it), but this does not look like a correct proof to me. Am I missing something? [Edit] Well yes, I am. Somehow I had managed to discount the possibility of any $c_i$ being negative, despite repeatedly looking at each fragment of the quoted text in an attempt to find what I might be misunderstanding. How can I get sql string, generated by Linq2SQL ORM? How to copy a file to multiple directories using the gnu cp command How to execute .sh file on Windows? When I am trying to execute a file(name.sh) in the command line by the command  ./name.sh  , I am getting the error that:     "." is not recognized as an internal   or external command, operable or batch   file   please help me execute the .sh file