Why doesn't a moving object spontaneously slow down and heat up?
Why can the entropy of an isolated system increase?
Since humans are not large in mass, do we exert enough gravitational force for a small object to orbit around us? (Assuming that the only gravitational force acting on the object is from the human). Using Newton's law of gravity and using myself as the human mass, I exert a 10^-8 force on a 1 kg object .5 meter away, but I am not sure if even this small of a force will be acceptable. What is the baseline "force" between two objects for 1 to orbit another?  Edit: I am not sure if this is a SpaceExchange question. How to remove desktop environments? I installed few environments that I wanted to try out on Ubuntu 12.04, but none of them worked at all. It could be that I installed them all at the same time, meaning the OS didn't get a chance to work everything out, but either way, they didn't work. I would now like to remove them.   The one's that I installed are Xubuntu/Xfce, Lubuntu/LXDE, Kubuntu/KDE, Fluxbox, OpenBox, cinnamon, and MATE. I installed them. Everything seemed to have been working properly until I actually tried to use the shells and nothing loaded at all. Except for Fluxbox, I think that one worked. I want to know of any way to repair or perhaps just remove the packages entirely. I might have already removed them because I did the apt-get remove command on all of them, but they were still in the list on the login screen. How to amplify 3.3V to 10V by using an NPN transistor? How to select resistor based on current, how does the amplification happen? I have seen somewhere that classical distances (like Euclidean distance) become weakly discriminant when we have multidimensional and sparse data. Why? Do you have an example of two sparse data vectors where the Euclidean distance does not perform well? In this case which similarity should we use? How can we sum up $\sin$ and $\cos$ series when the angles are in arithmetic progression? I've been reading through a lot of the rookie Java questions on finalize() and find it kind of bewildering that no one has really made it plain that finalize() is an unreliable way to clean up resources.  I saw someone comment that they use it to clean up Connections, which is really scary since the only way to come as close to a guarantee that a Connection is closed is to implement try (catch) finally.    I was not schooled in CS, but I have been programming in Java professionally for close to a decade now and I have never seen anyone implement finalize() in a production system ever.  This still doesn't mean that it doesn't have its uses, or that people I've worked with have been doing it right.  So my question is, what use cases are there for implementing finalize() that cannot be handled more reliably via another process or syntax within the language?    Please provide specific scenarios or your experience, simply repeating a Java text book, or finalize's intended use is not enough, as is not the intent of this question. Steps for going from Polyakov action to low-energy effective action (SUGRA?) in String Theory A lot of string-theory questions have been asked here. This one is, hopefully, different in that this inquiry is specific and the expected answer would be more mathematical than philosophical in character.  To give some context, I'm familiar with LQG, QFT etc. I'm a beginner in CFT and string-theory. On reading papers on AdS/CFT and String Theory the following sentence often appears: "The low-energy effective action for $x$ dimensional ST of type $y$ reduces to that of supergravity (SUGRA) in $z$ dimensions with matter fields of types $a$, $b$ and $c$".  The $64,000 dollar question any noob, such as me, wants answered is what are the mathematical/technical steps or arguments which lead us from the fundamental action of string-theory (the Polyakov/Nambu-Goto action) to a low-energy effective description. Of course, I might be asking a question for which the only concise answer is: "go read GSW". Here's hoping otherwise ;) How to open terminal, split to 9 terminals and switch between them using one script? In the Unity3D game engine, a common code sequence for getting remote data is this:  WWW www = new WWW("http://remote.com/data/location/with/texture.png"); yield return www;   What is the underlying mechanism here?  I know we use the yield mechanism in order to allow the next frame to be processed, while the download is being completed. But what is going on under the hood when we do the yield return www ?   What method is being called (if any, on the WWW class)? Is Unity using threads? Is the "upper" Unity layer getting hold of www instance and doing something?  EDIT:   This question is specifically about Unity3D internals. I'm not interested in explanations of how yield statement works in C#. Instead, I'm looking for an inside view of how Unity deals with these constructions, to allow, for example, to WWW to download a piece of data in a distributed manner across several frames. I have a bunch of files as follows:  04602635_b0294.DAT20120807164534 04602637_b0297.DAT20120807164713 04602638_b0296.DAT20120807164637 04602639_b0299.DAT20120807164819 04602640_b0298.DAT20120807164748 04602641_b0300.DAT20120807164849 04602650_b0301.DAT20120807164921 04602652_b0302.DAT20120807164956   I need to rename them to exclude the prefix. It needs to look like this..  b0294.DAT20120807164534 b0297.DAT20120807164713 b0296.DAT20120807164637 b0299.DAT20120807164819 b0298.DAT20120807164748 b0300.DAT20120807164849 b0301.DAT20120807164921 b0302.DAT20120807164956   EDIT  I forgot to add that I am using Solaris. iOS 7 Locked Bug via Ubuntu 13.10 I wanted to bring up an issue with the latest Ubuntu release that I hope can be solved. Although I will agree with the community that iOS 7 is not the most open platform release, it still is my desire to be able to grab Photos, Music, and Files off my Phone similar to what I would do to any other device.  Every time I connect my device to Ubuntu, I receive the following notification:  The device "Justin's iPhone" is locked. Enter the passcode on the device and click "Try again".   On my iPhone, I select the following   Unfortunately, this is where problems start to arise. It appears that Ubuntu either does not recognize the permissions from my iPhone or the iPhone is not allowing itself to truly be unlocked. As we can see the permissions are   Browsing askubuntu, I encountered the following   After running the code, I receive the following error:  justin@justin-CT15:~$ idevicepair unpair &amp;&amp; idevicepair pairERROR: Device d1fea2c56e51199f901eb34020a1581ea31a2a50 is not paired with this host   If I call the command again, i receive another error:  justin@justin-CT15:~$ idevicepair pair ERROR: Could not pair with the device because a passcode is set. Please enter the passcode on the device and retry.   Ultimately, I am stuck to experiment with solutions that end up not working. I am troubled by the lack of information and support for the iOS 7 platform on Ubuntu's latest release. If anyone has a workable solution or experiment for a workaround, I am happy to try  Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day! Normalizing constant in Bayes theorem I read that in Bayes rule, the denominator $\Pr(\textrm{data})$ of   $$\Pr(\text{parameters} \mid \text{data}) = \frac{\Pr(\textrm{data} \mid \textrm{parameters}) \Pr(\text{parameters})}{\Pr(\text{data})}$$   is called a normalizing constant. What exactly is it? What is its purpose? Why does it look like $\Pr(data)$? Why doesn't it depend on the parameters? What should children call a step-grandparent? My mom remarried to a great guy who has been absolutely wonderful to my kids. Ever since my mom and he were dating my kids have called him Mr. Joe. Lately my mom has been bugging me to get the kids to call him Grampa.  I agree that he deserves more respect than Mr.  The problem is that he isn't their real grampa so I don't really want them calling him that. Does anybody have any suggestions on what we should have the kids call him? They are 9 and 12 years old.  EDIT: I appreciate the comments regarding different variations of grampa and hearing how others have no issues with calling their step-granddad grampa. But I was hoping maybe someone has some suggestions for names that show the importance of the step-granddad without calling him some variation of the grampa name but still has a feeling of warmth and family in the name (I hope that makes sense). Why is the application of probability in QM fundamentally different from application of probability in other areas? Is there a way to set initial state with rigid bodies? Let's say I set up a Rigid Body simulation in Blender (not in GE), and then run the simulation for a number of frames. Is there a way to tell Blender to use the current state and position as the initial state? So that when I go back to frame 1, the rigid bodies stay in the same place they did in frame X.  For instance, if I want a pile of bricks, I first place the bricks in the air and then let them drop down on the ground, coming to rest. When they have come to rest, I want to use that position as the starting position. Enable thumbnail preview when uploading files in Google Chrome/Firefox? I have google chrome and when I upload photos to Facebook or Imageshack I cannot find a way to show thumbnails, only detail view. I also tried this in Firefox. This is quite important as it is stopping my friend from switching to Ubuntu over Windows.  Included a picture of the File Upload window, how do I  change this to a thumbnail view rather than the current list? How do you plot time on the X axis in excel? I need to plot the decay of my phone's battery against time over night. My starting time is 23:17:47 and my ending one is 07:05:49. I don't have any issue in changing the time format in the current one, selecting an XY chart and plotting time on the X axis.   The problem arises because Excel doesn't start the X axis at 23:17:47, but instead at 00:00:00, so my first value is drawn from the end of the graph and the goes back at the beginning when time values are over 00:00:00.   In other words, how do I set up the min time value to 23:17:47 and the max to 07:05:49 in excel? How do we play multiplayer minecraft on iPads? We have two iPads, and both of them have Minecraft PE. My son wants to connect the two and play with me. I have absolutely no idea what I am doing here, so I do not know how to do this.   One game says "Broadcast to LAN", and the other one says "Local Server Multiplayer". I have switched both to on.   What do I need to do to be able to play joined? We are both on the same WiFi. Node only partially rendered near edge of plot I'm trying to draw a relatively simple chart of a number line, and when one of the nodes is too close to the edge of the plot, it gets cut off.  The code:  \documentclass{article}  \usepackage{natbib} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{pgfplots}  \begin{document}  \begin{tikzpicture} \begin{axis}[   width=\columnwidth,   axis y line=none,   axis lines=left,   axis line style={-},   xmin=0,   xmax=1,   ymin=0,   ymax=1,   xlabel=$\mu$,   scatter/classes={o={mark=*}},   restrict y to domain=0:1,   xtick={0,1} ] \draw[ultra thin] (axis cs:0, 0) -- (axis cs:0,.05); \draw[ultra thin] (axis cs:.4, 0) -- (axis cs:.4,.05); \node[coordinate,label=above:{$B$}] at (axis cs:0.0,0.05) {}; \node[coordinate,label=above:{$A$}] at (axis cs:0.4,0.05) {}; \node[coordinate,label=above:{$b$}] at (axis cs:0.2,0.02) {}; \node[coordinate,label=above:{$a$}] at (axis cs:0.7,0.02) {}; \end{axis}; \end{tikzpicture} \end{document}   The Result:    How do I get the B to fully render? Proof of continuity of Thomae Function at irrationals.