Why Blender Rendering and Previewing Wrong Colors in Video Editor?
White background with filmic blender
How to contact professors for PhD vacancies? I know many master's students who get an opportunity to talk to their potential PhD advisors well before applying. In most cases this opportunity is available by the professors with whom they worked for their master's. Moreover, there are many others who establish a contact with professors by mailing them and enquiring about PhD vacancies.   My questions are:   How important is knowing an advisor prior to applying for PhD?  Does an email interaction play a vital role when the department makes its admit decisions? If email contact is important, can a student send out mails to 2-3 professors (working in the same area) in case one of them does not bother to reply? To sum up, is applying of any use (especially in top universities) when you have no contacts and only your credentials to bank on? Where did the "Magic Blood" of the Harry Potter Universe Originate From? What is a wizard that makes them non-Muggle? Or, more directly, what ancestry does the witch/wizard gene follow? Is there a patriarchal wizard (or matriarchal witch) that Muggles have no part in? Elves perhaps? Stop reading here.  Purpose of the Question/History/Don't Read There seem to be solid consequences associated with being Muggle, or Muggle-related. A dominant theme in the novels is discrimination against the non-gifted race, but, when read into, the wizard bloodline doesn't appear all that well defined. JKR indicates that wizard-ness is genetic, or inherited:  &quot;Muggle-borns will have a witch or wizard somewhere on their family tree, in some cases many, many generations back. The gene resurfaces in some unexpected places.&quot;  By the above, it stands that a family that produces a squib (non-magical born of magical parents) must be a half-blooded family in some way, since half-blooded only requires one non-magical ancestor. Of course, we are dealing in magic genetics. Any other form of genetics would make this inherited, seemingly recessive trait (or squibs couldn't exist), never appear at all. Unless they were XMen. If it is so important, what does the wizard-bloodline follow? Other Mythos In other literature a wizard can be nearly anything, but magical powers are typically inherited as well as learned. Merlin of the Arthurian Legend (also mentioned in HP) is Cambian, meaning he is born of demonic intervention; this explains his source of enchantment. Gandalf of Middle Earth is a Maiar, as are all Wizards of Middle Earth. Wizards in Harry Potter seem to follow a bloodline, and it has been mentioned (in the question Gabe linked) that genetics have a heavy play in it, meaning that squibs and parents of Muggle-born wizards should have identical genetics. This bloodline must come from somewhere. Magical Creatures In Harry Potter it is common for magical creatures to &quot;mingle&quot; with humans, these beings are typically somewhat magical. Elves have been described to have very strong magic, but are for some unreasonable reason subservient to humans. I may be mistaken, but believe it was hinted that elves and the wizarding lineage had intersected at one time. Maybe I'm imagining this. Genocidal Allusions Voldemort hates muggles, and half-bloods, and whatever else is non-wizard. The presence of this theme, suggests that this wizardly bloodline must be at least defined if the main antagonist is so obsessed with keeping that mysterious bloodline pure. Since Slytherin himself was said to be a supremacist (circa a really long time ago) it suggests that this bloodline should have existed long before he was around, especially if he founded a school with people he was not related to, but were also magical. What are the Minecraft Easter eggs? I was looking at  and I didn't realize that Minecraft had some Easter eggs in it. Besides the Christmas chest Easter egg, and the sheep Easter egg, what else is there? What is a good introduction to statistics for a mathematician who is already well-versed in probability?  I have two distinct motivations for asking, which may well lead to different suggestions:   I'd like to better understand the statistics motivation behind many problems considered by probabilists. I'd like to know how to better interpret the results of Monte Carlo simulations which I sometimes do to form mathematical conjectures.   I'm open to the possibility that the best way to go is not to look for something like "Statistics for Probabilists" and just go to a more introductory source. Need to understand parallel query execution error Today we experienced a degradation in performance on our production sql server.  Durring the time this occurred we logged several "The query processor could not start the necessary thread resources for parallel query execution" errors.  The reading that I've done suggests that this has to do with how many CPUs to use when executing a complex query.  However when I checked during the outage our CPU Utilization was only at 7%.  Is there something else this could be referring too that I haven't come across yet?  Is this a likely culprit of the performance degradation or am I chasing a red herring?  My sp_configure values for this are as follows:  name                                minimum maximum config_value run_value cost threshold for parallelism      0       32767   5            5 Saving image from PHP URL Unable to install "quickly" on Ubuntu GNOME 15.10 When running:  sudo apt-get install quickly   To install quickly I get this output:  Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree        Reading state information... Done E: Unable to locate package quickly   Why the error and how can I install it then? Why Listen to Music, why not Listening Music Is a "split plot" ANOVA with two factors the same as two-way ANOVA with repeated measures in one factor? Is a "split plot" ANOVA with two factors identical to two-way ANOVA with repeated measures in one factor? if not, what is the distinction? I just got a new hat! :D screaming with joy Looking at so many users looking all exquisite with their stunningly 'fitted' hats, I'm wondering if there's an option to resize or rotate a hat?  PS: Happy Winter Bash everyone! :) Why does a find field value in one application show up in a the find field of another application? On my MacBook Pro I have found that several applications seem to share the value for a find.  For example, I searched 'applestackexchange' in Safari's unified address bar, then I switch to Xcode and click into a Find field.  The first word of my search in Safari then appears there.  iTerm2 and Sublime Text 2 also seem to participate in this sharing.  Running latest Mountain Lion on  a 2012 MBP. $$ \sum_{i=1}^N\left\lfloor\frac{N}{i}\right\rfloor $$ Is there a closed form expression to the above sum? (Mathematica doesn't give me anything) How to remove duplicate values from an array in PHP Spanning volume disk usage I have two SSD disks of 256GB and I want to create a single spanning volume of 512GB. I am using Windows 10. What I want to know is how will Windows handle this under the hood.  Will the first disk fill up before the second one starts being used, or will Windows use both disks. For example, if I have 256GB of data on the spanning volume, will it be divided to 128GB on first and 128GB on second physical disk or will it all be on the first disk with the second disk empty? Would this behavior be any different if I were using two HDDs? Order of the Rubik's cube group If a friend wants to transfer $7000 to me, what is the best way to do it, especially if we don't share the same banks? We could do wire transfer, but that comes with its own fees. Could we also do direct deposit? Paypal doesn't allow such large lump sum transfers.  This would be US-to-US transfer. Small snap loop devices visible in gnome-disk-utility OR what is the function of snap ubuntu-core My furnace pilot light keeps going out so I changed the thermocouple. Now the furnace will come on and heat up to the degree set on my thermostat, then the pilot light will go out and the furnace will not come back on.    Could the thermostat be bad and cause the pilot light to go out? biblatex broken overnight As late as last week my setup for biblatex worked fine. Going back to the same project today not even a minimal file compiles:  \documentclass{article}   \usepackage{biblatex} %\addbibresource{biblatex-examples.bib}   \begin{document}  test%foo\nocite{*}    %\printbibliography  \end{document}   but breaks off with   /usr/local/texlive/2017/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty:3776: LaTeX  Error: Missing \begin{document}.  See the LaTeX manual or LaTeX Companion for explanation. Type  H &lt;return&gt;  for immediate help.  ...                                                l.3776   australian,newzealand} ?  /usr/local/texlive/2017/texmf-dist/tex/latex/biblatex/biblatex.sty:3776: Math f ormula deleted: Insufficient symbol fonts. \expandafter -&gt;american|  l.3776   australian,newzealand}   And keeps repeating the last one until    (That makes 100 errors; please try again.)   when I ignore it.  Files without biblatex work as expected.  Using tlmgr to go my two backup versions of biblatex back in time to 1st Jan I still get the same errors.  Could this be another update from the last week or so that causes this?  If I swich back to TL 16 things work as expected. (For my work I need TL 17 because of packages.) How can one prove that $\pi^4 + \pi^5 < e^6$?