Finding points of intersection of a function and x-axis
About multi-root search in Mathematica for transcendental equations
Why does connecting a battery's positive terminal to the negative terminal of another battery not create a short circuit? What is the name of a small unluxurious restaurant? Is there a name for this kind of restaurant? Searching Google, I can't find any synonym of restaurant. I've tried to search for images of unluxurious restaurant, small restaurant or mundane restaurant, with no satisfactory result. The restaurant I'm looking for is small, not so clean and definitely not a place that high class people go to eat.  It can be a house:    Or lie on a side of the street: I've had a few concerns over a new form of &quot;spam&quot; - that is, through voting. A while back, I had seen some wild reputation increases to my account, amongst others, that seemingly felt weird - as I've barely participated in asking questions or providing answers. Earlier today, this sentiment was echoed by another user in chat:  and like 250 this month? it seems like someone is spam upvoting  This was another user that saw a 250 rep increase, but has been inactive for quite a while. For a site that hasn't seen more than 5 questions a day, that was really weird. To put things even more out of hand, it seems like each vote has been placed on a question.  I did some investigation of my own, and it seems like I've found a badge hunter. More of a... gold badge hunter. This user is among the top 3 voters of the site. Looking into this user's profile, this user only has under 200 rep, and has posted a single question, which was received differently. One thing caught my eye:  Votes all time              by type 581   up              535    question 1     down            47     answer   Each vote is an up vote (with the exception of one), and there are 535 up votes on questions. There are 535 questions in the entire site. Using reputation stats from user profiles, I came with the conclusion that these votes are...  Done within a short period of time. 5 question votes within a couple of minutes Done in [near] perfect chronological order: The earlier the vote, the earlier the question was asked. As if the user had gone through the list of questions in order, and placed an up vote on each one.   I see this as incredibly problematic. First:  It dangerously inflates reputation. Votes are not done based on their content, but simply for voting. Therefore, reputation loses it value as a way to measure expertise.  It's like serial up voting. Generally, when we hear the term &quot;serial up voting&quot;, we think of a voting ring, where one user continuously up votes another. This is negative for the targeted user. Well, here, we've got a voting ring with the site and this user. A user continuously up votes the site, causing negative damage for the site.  We mix good and bad content. Since low quality questions are a victim of the voting spree, many get meddled with the rest of &quot;good quality&quot; questions, despite being closed as off-topic, too broad, or whatever the reason. We can no longer reliably sort questions by quality with the very system that was designed to help us.   ... And the rest of voting fraud issues outlined in .  I've got a couple questions on this:  Is this comparable to serial voting? Should such votes be reversed? How should we determine whether or not to reverse them?  Should we stop this? Let it be? Is this really that big of a problem for sites? (I would argue that it's less of an issue for graduated sites that receive large amounts of content, but what about beta sites that rarely see more than a few questions a day) Why doesn't the Related question list show that questions are closed? I saw a question on Meta that was obviously going to be a duplicate:        And indeed, looking at the "Related" questions list for that question showed a number of duplicates:    Being the good citizen I am, I tried to vote to close (technically Flag as duplicate as I've not got the rep here to vote to close) it as an Exact Duplicate only to find myself falling into a rabbit hole of Closed, Duplicate questions. Is there any way to flag a closed question as such in the Related list?  Mostly because the first one I picked was closed as a duplicate of the second one, which was closed as a duplicate of the one that is now listed as the duplicate/linked answer.   Edit to respond to comment:  I take the point about "not voting to close on title alone", and normally wouldn't, however as the questions had identical titles, and it's pretty clear what they should be asking, I clicked the first one:    which lead to:  which leads to:  - but I'd got bored following links and didn't check that one as the first two were identical, so assumed this was too and didn't want to see how deep the rabbit hole led.   In the related list, there's only one other question in there that is an exact duplicate, but hasn't (currently) been closed as such which is:      Reasoning for highlighting closed questions:  The "Questions with similar titles" does display the closed titles when asking the question, so it should be fairly possible to include.  If there are clearly duplicate titles, then as a reader/reviewer would be helpful to know which ones are already closed as duplicates so you can either:   Use the remaining open questions to focus on which of those is the canonical answer to close this with. Use the closed questions to find the canonical answer (which failed for me with my route of clicks). Was or is? Confusion Why I can't connect to VPS after changing OS from CentOS to Ubuntu? Let's say you tell me to produce randomly a number from 1-100, and I choose the number 47. Can it be said that there is a specific reason I chose the number 47, and that it is not completely random? By random I mean that there is absolutely no reason this number in particular was chosen.    It seems odd to me, since it seems like since I have applied conscious effort to produce or choose a number within that range, or even without range, that it can't be truly random, but there might be a reason why I chose that number amongst the many others I could have chosen.  I guess the general question, which I'm interested to know if any philosophers in the past have discussed, is whether our thoughts are necessarily based on prior thoughts, or if thoughts can be truly spontaneous and random? I installed Ubuntu (twice actually) onto the same drive. I wanted to 'try again' since one of them didn't install correctly and the other installed differently, but it worked.   I was getting frustrated with the GRUB menu because it was really sloppy (There were two Windows options - one with the Windows bootloader to go into Ubuntu, and two different versions of Ubuntu from the first install for some reason and memtest, etc.).  In my attempts at getting rid Ubuntu to do a fresh installation, I went ahead and deleted the partitions that weren't swap or main via Windows 7. As I said, I am a noob.  Now, even though I though I completely got rid of Ubuntu, including the GRUB menu, when I boot my PC I am brought directly to GRUB Rescue. And from what I've found from other forums, GRUB rescue isn't even completely functional for me (it doesn't recognize any commands that it should support besides ls. It also returns unknown filesystem for any partition I try to view or boot.)  Is there any way that I can boot straight into Windows? I fear I may have gone about deleting those partitions in the wrong way. If so, what are my options? Solve simple trig equation Where is a good place to learn classical optics for high school competitions? I need to learn basic optics for a high school academic competition. Does anyone know any good places, preferably free and online, to learn the basics of optics, like lenses, angles of incidence, etc.? I can't seem to find an MIT OpenCourseWare course addressing the issue. Why doesn't pressing enter return '\n' to getch()? #include &lt;stdio.h&gt; #include &lt;conio.h&gt; main() {     char ch,name[20];     int i=0;     clrscr();     printf("Enter a string:");     while((ch=getch())!='\n')     {         name[i]=ch;         i++;     }     name[i] = '\0';     printf("%s",name); }   When I give "abc" as input and if I press enter it's not working. Can anyone let me know why the condition ch=getch() != '\n' is not becoming false when I press enter? I have also observed that ch is taking \r instead of \n. Kindly let me know. Thanks "Ten times fewer the number" versus "one-tenth the number" Lately I've been hearing and reading statistics that are communicated in wording that, frankly, confuses me.  Forgive me for not citing specific instances, but I can give a hypothetical statistic that exemplifies the kind I'm referring to:     Comparing the number of tax returns the IRS audited in 2002 and 2010, the number of unlucky folks who had their returns audited in 2002 was ten times fewer than the number in 2012.    There is something about that wording that bothers me, and I'm not sure why.    After a fruitless search on the internet using numerous combinations/permutations of words and phrases such as "X times fewer," "X times less," "mathematical expressions of 'times fewer' as opposed to 'a fraction fewer,' or 'a fraction less,'" and more, I came up empty. Perhaps this question is more appropriate on a math website, but in the off-chance members of EL&amp;U might give their imprimatur to this question, here goes:  Here's a second hypothetical example.  Is it grammatical—not to mention mathematical—to say the following?:     There are ten times fewer pollinating honeybees worldwide today than there were in 1912.  [Though this is a made-up statistic, there has been a dramatic reduction in the number honey bees in America of late!]   Should not the expression be:     There are one-tenth fewer honeybees worldwide today than there were in 1912.     On the surface, the "ten times fewer" locution seems to me to be a contradiction in terms.  How can something less be 10 times fewer?    I can understand readily how, for example, 2012's bee population of, say, 90 million can be one-tenth (point one) less than 1912's population of 100 million, but ten times fewer?   I'm confused.  Which expression is "more" correct? Consider the following snippet:  $$\text{d}_{H}(A,B)  = \max\left\{ \sup_{a\in A} \inf_{b\in B} \text{d}(a,b),\sup_{b\in B} \inf_{a\in A}\text{d}(a,b)\right\}$$     In the output, the text under the inf's is significantly smaller then the one under the sup's. The same happens when I have it in an align environment.  You can see the same problem in the wiki definition of the . How can I have the typeset under the inf's and sup's in the same size? Does this email mean that I have been granted the visa? I received the following email this morning. Does it mean that my visa has been granted?  UK Visas &amp; Immigration has now assessed your UK visa application and made a decision. Your documents and the decision will be sent back to either the UK Visa Application Centre where you applied, where we will contact you by email over the next few days to collect them, or if you are using the courier return service, will be sent directly back to the address provided. Please note that TLScontact does not know the outcome of the assessment and has played no role in the decision-making process. Kind regards, TLScontact UK VIsas &amp; Immigration Suppose $\sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n} = S$ where $S$ is finite.  Then  $$S =\sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{n}= \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{2n-1} + \frac{1}{2n} &gt; \sum_{n=1}^\infty \frac{1}{2n} + \frac{1}{2n} = S$$  which is a contradiction.  Is this valid? Regex to match only letters One thing that made me curious while watching a football game on TV was the numbers that appear on the ground. For instance, there's a "1st &amp; 10" beside one team, but there was a "3rd &amp; 6" a few minutes prior (and I think it was beside the other team). What do these numbers mean? Snap face to grid I need to move an entire object, so that one of the faces is exactly at Z=0. What is the best way to do this? Basically, if I could select Grid or 3D Cursor in the Snap To menu, that would be perfect:    My current workaround is to select the face, copy its Z coordinate, select all, move it all down by that same amount. Is there a faster way? I found a video on YouTube that shows someone using the command tasksel from the server's boot menu after a fresh install of Ubuntu Server. Simple enough it looked like, but when I go to the options I want to choose for installation it has no information on how to select them, and when I click Enter on one of them it takes me back to the command prompt.  So how do I make a selection of the items listed under tasksel?  I have tried Shift++ to add, but no luck. Anyone know?  I want to install Ubuntu Desktop, as Ubuntu GNOME GUI is not an option in the listing for Ubuntu 17.10 Server. How can I disable Ctrl+Q for all applications (system wide)? A lot of applications like Firefox, Chrome etc, get closed when I accidentally press Ctrl+Q instead of Ctrl+W because of the proximity of the Q and W keys on the keyboard. Is there a way this shortcut can be removed or reset on a system wide basis?