Converting a string to a numerical value
How to extract a floating number from a string
Generalizing a sequence. Consider a sequence of the form:  $x[n]=-1,-1...,1,1,...,-1,-1...,1,1... \quad n&gt;0$  One can think of this as a square wave ($\pm1$) with a 50 % duty cycle (coming from EE).  For the simplest case of such a series i.e. $-1,+1,-1,+1,-1...$, a general equation is quite trivial ($x[n]=-1^n$).  Can we have e general equation for the other cases i.e. when there are multiple $-1$'s followed by $+1$'s ? Creating and configuring .bash_profile I was setting path for anaconda. an answer to a question  has the following solution. I searched for .bash_profile, but I can't seem to find it. How do I setup this file and get it to run on startup? Why doesn't hydrogen gas exist in Earth's atmosphere? The root mean square velocity of hydrogen gas at room temperature is: Gas constant: $R=8.31\ \mathrm{J\ K^{-1}\ mol^{-1}}$ Molar mass of hydrogen gas: $M=2.02\times10^{-3}\ \mathrm{kg/mol}$ $$\begin{align} v &amp;= \left(\frac{3\times8.31\ \mathrm{J\ K^{-1}\ mol^{-1}}\times300}{2.02\times10^{-3}\ \mathrm{kg/mol}}\right)^{\frac12}\\ &amp;= 3356.8377\ \mathrm{m/s}\\ &amp;= 3.356\ \mathrm{km/s} \end{align}$$ The escape speed of Earth is $11.2\ \mathrm{km/s}$, which is larger than the root mean square velocity of hydrogen gas. But still, hydrogen gas doesn't exist in Earth's atmosphere. Why? Have I made any mistakes in my calculations? How bad is it to use display: none in CSS? I've heard many times that it's bad to use display: none for SEO reasons, as it could be an attempt to push in irrelevant popular keywords. A few questions:   Is that still received wisdom? Does it make a difference if you're only hiding a single word, or perhaps a single character? If you should avoid any use of it, what are the preferred techniques for hiding (in situations where you need it to become visible again on certain conditions)?   Some references I've found so far:       If you're straight-out using CSS to hide text, don't be surprised if that is called spam. I'm not saying that mouseovers or DHTML text or have-a-logo-but-also-have-text is spam; I answered that last one at a conference when I said "imagine how it would look to a visitor, a competitor, or someone checking out a spam report. If you show your company's name and it's Expo Markers instead of an Expo Markers logo, you should be fine. If the text you decide to show is 'Expo Markers cheap online discount buy online Expo Markers sale ...' then I would be more cautious, because that can look bad."   And  on the same article     We can flag text that appears to be hidden using CSS at Google. To date we have not algorithmically removed sites for doing that. We try hard to avoid throwing babies out with bathwater.   Eric Enge      The legitimate use of this technique is so prevalent that I would rarely expect search engines to penalize a site for using the display: none attribute. It’s just very difficult to implement an algorithm that could truly ferret out whether the particular use of display: none is meant to deceive the search engines or not. android expandablelistview how to set space between groups items Steps to solve this system of equations: $\sqrt{x}+y=7$, $\sqrt{y}+x=11$ Clipboard for copying and pasting files in command line? In Bash, suppose I visit a directory, and then another directory. I would like to copy a file from the first directory to the second directory, but without specifying the long pathnames of them. Is it possible?   My temporary solution is to use /tmp as a temporary place to store a copy of the file. cp myfile /tmp when I am in the first directory, and then cp /tmp/myfile . when I am in the second directory. But I may check if the file will overwrite anything in /tmp.  Is there something similar to a clipboard for copying and pasting a file? Is there a good tool/program that allows me to clone a system drive to another, smaller hard drive?  I've bought a new 64GB SSD drive and would like to move my current Windows 7 Professional 64-bit installation to that new drive. My current drive is a 200GB SATA drive with one partition only. Of course there's enough free space to shrink my current partition to less than 64GB. Is there anywhere within the Blender UI that displays the dimensionality &amp; bounding sets (e.g., all floats, floats in [0,1], floats in [0,255], etc) of arbitrary shader node inputs &amp; outputs?  I consistently find myself digging through stackexchange/the Blender docs/experimenting with less-than-equal-to to try to figure out what I need to divide by to normalize shader nodes' input/output values to within a specific range, or to center them at 0, etc. This seems like functionality that Blender's very rich UI might already have built into it, though, so I am wondering if I am just overlooking it somewhere.  As an example, I can do something like this, varying the threshold between 0, 0.5, and 1, and observing that in rendered view my sphere switches from all black to mixed black/white to all white, to convince myself that Blender's (Perlin) Noise Texture's Fac output naturally outputs floats in [0,1]:    But it seems odd that I should have to experiment, or search through docs or stackexchanges, to discover something like this. Is this information maybe already neatly displayed somewhere inside the Blender UI, and I just don't know where to look? How come SG-1 couldn't get back to Earth? In Stargate SG-1 S02E16, , SG-1 (Captain Carter, Teal'c and two other members, who replaced Colonel O'Neill and Dr Jackson) is "trapped" on planet in binary system, where second star has risen and is slowly raising temperature - Samantha Carter says, in one moment, that it's going to reach 200°F soon - and dialing device is locked mid-dial. Yet, SGC manages to dial the planet and send them instructions how to repair the device and off-world team makes it back.  Why didn't they come back when Earth first dialed P9Q-281 to contact SG-1? I mean, from my understanding, stargate wormhole is two-directional, meaning it doesn't matter which end it was activated from, yet it seems like it is one-directional from the events of this episode... Count how many lines start with which characters I have a file with a number of lines in a file filename.  I want to count how many lines start with character 'a', with 'b' and so on in one go.  What command i should execute.? Motivated by , can one prove that the order of an element in a finite group divides the order of the group without using Lagrange's theorem? (Or, equivalently, that the order of the group is an exponent for every element in the group?)  The simplest proof I can think of uses the coset proof of Lagrange's theorem in disguise and goes like this: take $a \in G$ and consider the map $f\colon G \to G$ given by $f(x)=ax$. Consider now the orbits of $f$, that is, the sets $\mathcal{O}(x)=\{ x, f(x), f(f(x)), \dots \}$. Now all orbits have the same number of elements and $|\mathcal{O}(e)| = o(a)$. Hence $o(a)$ divides $|G|$.  This proof has perhaps some pedagogical value in introductory courses because it can be generalized in a natural way to non-cyclic subgroups by introducing cosets, leading to the canonical proof of Lagrange's theorem.   Has anyone seen a different approach to this result that avoids using Lagrange's theorem? Or is Lagrange's theorem really the most basic result in finite group theory? no wifi in Ubuntu 15.04 Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute I can't get to the bottom of this error, because when the debugger is attached, it does not seem to occur.  Collection was modified; enumeration operation may not execute  Below is the code. This is a WCF server in a Windows service. The method NotifySubscribers() is called by the service whenever there is a data event (at random intervals, but not very often - about 800 times per day). When a Windows Forms client subscribes, the subscriber ID is added to the subscribers dictionary, and when the client unsubscribes, it is deleted from the dictionary. The error happens when (or after) a client unsubscribes. It appears that the next time the NotifySubscribers() method is called, the foreach() loop fails with the error in the subject line. The method writes the error into the application log as shown in the code below. When a debugger is attached and a client unsubscribes, the code executes fine. Do you see a problem with this code? Do I need to make the dictionary thread-safe? [ServiceBehavior(InstanceContextMode=InstanceContextMode.Single)] public class SubscriptionServer : ISubscriptionServer {     private static IDictionary&lt;Guid, Subscriber&gt; subscribers;      public SubscriptionServer()     {                     subscribers = new Dictionary&lt;Guid, Subscriber&gt;();     }      public void NotifySubscribers(DataRecord sr)     {         foreach(Subscriber s in subscribers.Values)         {             try             {                 s.Callback.SignalData(sr);             }             catch (Exception e)             {                 DCS.WriteToApplicationLog(e.Message,                    System.Diagnostics.EventLogEntryType.Error);                  UnsubscribeEvent(s.ClientId);             }         }     }          public Guid SubscribeEvent(string clientDescription)     {         Subscriber subscriber = new Subscriber();         subscriber.Callback = OperationContext.Current.                 GetCallbackChannel&lt;IDCSCallback&gt;();          subscribers.Add(subscriber.ClientId, subscriber);                  return subscriber.ClientId;     }      public void UnsubscribeEvent(Guid clientId)     {         try         {             subscribers.Remove(clientId);         }         catch(Exception e)         {             System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(&quot;Unsubscribe Error &quot; +                      e.Message);         }     } } Install Headers on Kali apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r` Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package linux-headers-4.9.0-kali3-amd64 E: Couldn't find any package by glob 'linux-headers-4.9.0-kali3-amd64' E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'linux-headers-4.9.0-kali3-amd64' Construct a field of 25 elements. We need to construct a field of 25 elements.  By using a result : For a prime p and a monic irreducible polynomial $p(x)$ in $\Bbb F_p [x]$ of degree $n$ , then the ring $(\Bbb F_p [x] / &lt;p(x)&gt;)$ is a field of order $p^{n}$.  So , for the question problem above , we need a irreducible polynomial of degree $2$ in $\Bbb Z_5 [x]$.  Solution says , $x^{2} + x +1$ does our job , since it's irreducible in $\Bbb Z_5 [x]$.  My question : Can't we take $ x^{2} + 2$ , it has no zeroes in $\Bbb Z_5$ , and is irreducible. In every solution I've gone through , the polynomial $x^{2} + x+1$ is taken. Can't we consider $ x^{2} + 2$ ? How to prove that the sum and product of two algebraic numbers is algebraic? Suppose $E/F$ is a field extension and $\alpha, \beta \in E$ are algebraic over $F$. Then it is not too hard to see that when $\alpha$ is nonzero, $1/\alpha$ is also algebraic. If $a_0 + a_1\alpha + \cdots + a_n \alpha^n = 0$, then dividing by $\alpha^{n}$ gives $$a_0\frac{1}{\alpha^n} + a_1\frac{1}{\alpha^{n-1}} + \cdots + a_n = 0.$$     Is there a similar elementary way to show that $\alpha + \beta$ and $\alpha \beta$ are also algebraic (i.e. finding an explicit formula for a polynomial that has $\alpha + \beta$ or $\alpha\beta$ as its root)?    The only proof I know for this fact is the one where you show that $F(\alpha, \beta) / F$ is a finite field extension and thus an algebraic extension. $$ \lim \limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1} - 1} $$  According to my textbook the limit equals $2$.  What I have tried:  Using the squeeze theorem:  $$ \lim \limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1}} \le \lim\limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1} - 1} \le \lim\limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1} - 2} $$ $$ 0 \le \lim\limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1} - 1} \le 0 $$  I have also tried to use the squeeze theorem with two other equations and obtained different values:  $$ \lim\limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2 - 1}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1}} \le \lim\limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1} - 1} \le \lim\limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2 + 1}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1} - 2} $$ $$ -1 \le \lim\limits_{(x,y)\to (0,0)} \frac {x^2 + y^2}{\sqrt{x^2 +y^2 + 1} - 1} \le -1 $$ In my team, we use Selenium for automation of functional testing. We also do a lot of manual regression testing to make sure the appearance of the rendered web pages is ok. I would like to develop a framework, that would allow comparing screenshots of the "base" live web page, and the web page on the test server after applying the software update. I believe this will drastically reduce the amount of manual regression testing we need to do.   I would like the framework to be able to detect portions of web pages that were rendered differently from each other. An example of such functionality can be  (first image in the article)  I have never worked with image processing and would need ideas on what algorithms are already publicly available that would help me with the task. From what I can see, the simple pixel-by-pixel comparison would not work well, because it does not account for the concept of elements.  Or am I approaching this problem from a completely wrong direction? "Failed to create user" due to regular expression error