After initial contact, how long should I address a professor as "Dr. Smith" or "Professor Smith"?
How to address a professor in letter?
How can I speed up combat with a large number of enemies? I'm DMing for a campaign where the player characters will sometimes face small squads of creatures, most recently six ground troops and two archers helping out. In this setting, these creatures dominate the land the PCs are in and have an organised military, hence squads of enemies.  Combat tends to go quite slowly, however. Eight enemies and three players means the players spend a lot of time waiting between their turns!  Without reducing the number of enemies in the encounter, how can I speed up combat when the players are fighting many enemies? What lens characteristics are important in star photography? In optimal world I would buy a lens that is good in every way. But I'm on a budget and have to find a balance in quality and price. I'm looking for a lens for star photography, so in my case it will be a wide angle lens with good characteristics for capturing points of light in a dark sky. What would those characteristics be?  So far I've learned about , which seems like a thing to note when comparing different lenses for star photography. It would be quite disappointing if stars turned into long teardrops on the edges of a photograph even when every precaution was taken to make all stars sharp round points of light.  Vignetting would be an example of lens characteristic not so important in this use.  Many characteristics of a lens turn better when aperture is slightly stopped down, but I suppose I'd be wanting to use a lens with wide open aperture when trying to capture the stars in a dark night sky.  I'm not asking for lens recommendations. But, as an example of what kind of lenses I've been looking at, I name  manual focus lens. Its price level is $350'ish in Amazon and seems to run with name Rokinon too. It seems to be reasonably sharp even when wide open - my camera is an APS-C sensor camera. What's the current state of LaTeX3 (2020)? There are a few questions on this forum asking about why Latex3 is taking so long to come out. However, all of these are from the early 2010s. I'm just wondering what the current state of the project is and whether it's ready (or nearly ready) for prime time? Running junit tests in parallel in a Maven build? Is WUBI freely available? I checked the link to download WUBI and the only way to proceed is by giving some amount as donation. I will surely do it, but I don't have a Paypal account and I am in urgent need to install Ubuntu. Can someone help me? Create a tar archive split into blocks of a maximum size I need to backup a fairly large directory, but I am limited by the size of individual files. I'd like to essentially create a tar.(gz|bz2) archive which is split into 200MB maximum archives. Clonezilla does something similar to this by splitting image backups named like so:  sda1.backup.tar.gz.aa sda1.backup.tar.gz.ab sda1.backup.tar.gz.ac   Is there a way I can do this in one command? I understand how to use the split command, but I'd like to not have to create one giant archive, then split it into smaller archives, as this would double the disk space I'd need in order to initially create the archive. Mathematica Sec and Csc According to the Page 87 in Kruschke: Doing Bayesian Data Analysis, the author says that the mean of a distribution is a value that minimizes the variance of a probability distribution, for example, a normal distribution. The following is what is mentioned in the page:  It turns out that the value of $ M $ that minimizes $ ∫dx p(x)(x−M)^2$ is $E[X] $. In other words, the mean of the distribution is the value that minimizes the expected squared deviation. In this way, the mean is a central tendency of the distribution.  I have read the paragraph and kind of understood what the author is trying to say but I wonder how this can be written mathematically using the above equation or any other ways. Customizing tray/taskbar date display in Ubuntu with GNOME 3 After upgrading from 10.04 to 12.04 I am trying to install different packages.  For instance ia32-libs and skype (4.0).  When trying to install these, I am getting the 'Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages' error message.   Output of commands:  sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.   After running this:  sudo dpkg --configure -a foo@foo:~$ sudo apt-get install -f Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. For which real values of t does the following system of linear equations:  $$ \left\{  \begin{array}{c} tx_1 + x_2 + x_3 = 1 \\  x_1 + tx_2 + x_3 = 1 \\  x_1 + x_2 + tx_3 = 1 \end{array} \right.  $$  Have:  a) a unique solution?  b) infinitely many solutions?  c) no solutions?  I haven't done linear algebra in almost a year, so I'm really rusty and could use some pushes in the right direction. How to encrypt a file or directory in Linux? What's the most popular command to do such things as encrypting a file or directory in terminal in Linux? Views indicator inaccurate, shows one views on question with two close votes Two close votes and only one person has viewed the question?    How did this happen? Why does the degree of freedom of SSR equals 1 in simple linear regression Up arrow under a sequence Support for OpenID ended on July 25, 2018 NOTE: Signing up or Logging in via OpenID is no longer officially supported from any of our sites. Currently,  is still on the internet, but we are in the process of completely removing it.    Stack Overflow was an early and strong supporter of . We built our sign up/log in flow around it. We were idealistic and had , but these hopes weren't realized. Over the years people have wondered if  is . We've had to remove support as OpenID providers  or .  The time has come to part ways. The reality is OpenID support has created a ton of complexity in our codebase and the number of users actively using OpenID simply don't justify that cost. Users have spoken with their actions. You prefer Google, Facebook and Stack Exchange (aka email/PW) based account auth.     Of our 9,813,747 accounts around one-tenth of a percent are actively using OpenID (defined as having visited a site in the past 12 months). If you include all the inactive accounts it is still less than 2.9% of all accounts.  So, what is the plan?   DONE - Remove the ability to create a new account with most OpenID providers DONE - Add the ability to  DONE - Convert Launchpad (used on  ) to OAuth DONE - Remove creating new accounts with Steam from  (Steam removed support for OAuth. Only 454 accounts that use Steam have visited Arqade in the past 6 months.) DONE - We will email all users that rely on deprecated OpenID credentials and request that they  DONE - Run an announcement banner for any user who signs in with deprecated OpenID credentials urging them to  DONE - End support for logging in via OpenID  In progress - Remove  (note: only 0.2% of authorized sites in the last year have been non-Stack Exchange sites.)   Obviously, if your account relies on OpenID, then make life easy and go now and .   If you've forgotten what you credentials you use to login, then  to refresh your memory. If you don't see one of the three account types shown in the image below (Google, Facebook or Stack Exchange) then click the "add more logins" button to add one of them to your account.    Remember, SE OpenID accounts are really email/pw accounts handled through complicated OpenID code path. They will be migrated to a simpler email/pw only code path as a part of this change. No extra work required on your part. How frequently can you ask for a personal reference without being disrespectful? Switching between windows with scroll wheel on Ubuntu Dock I would like to switch between windows using the scroll wheel of the mouse over each app icon in Ubuntu dock, as we could do in Unity, but apparently this doesn't work in Ubuntu 17.10. Is there a way to enable it?   Related: If $z_n \to z$ then $(1+z_n/n)^n \to e^z$ We are dealing with $z \in \mathbb{C}$. I know that $$ \left(1+ \frac{z}{n} \right)^n \to e^{z} $$ as $n \to \infty$. So intuitively if $z_n \to z$ then we should have $$ \left(1+ \frac{z_n}{n} \right)^n \to e^{z}. $$ If $z_n \in \mathbb{R}$ I would be happy writing $$ \exp \left(n \log\left(1+ \frac{z_n}{n} \right) \right) = \exp \left(z_n \frac{\log\left(1+ \frac{z_n}{n} \right)-\log(1+0)}{\frac{z_n}{n}-0} \right) \to \exp(z \cdot 1) $$ where here we are using the definition of derivative. But if $z \in \mathbb{C}$ the logarithm is multivalued and I'm not sure that the same calculation is allowed. Is there a different way to show this for complex $z$? I would like to know where to find the source code of Ubuntu. I'd like to see how far it is "open source".