What to do about repeated PhD rejections?
How does the admissions process work for Ph.D. programs in the US, particularly for weak or borderline students?
So I'm pretty sure there's at least 2, one for both X &amp; Y.   Much like other iterations of the other Pokemon games, are there other Legendaries? How many legendaries, and what are their names? Ubuntu 14.04 LTS live USB boot error (gfxboot.c32:not a valid COM32R image) Looking to achieve frame effect with shadows at corners Can someone remind me of the name of the author, the name of the hero and the name of the series if any? Adventure Sci-Fi books, short by today's epic standards ( = about same length as Heinlein's shorter youth books), probably published late 50s?, early 60s? by Bantam? or Del Rey? I think at least 30, possibly more than 40 books in the series. Not comic books. The author is not a well-known writer. At least, I don't remember seeing the name on any other books, ever.   Subject: a man who can move and respond to threats extremely fast learns about a secret potion that allows a person to change bodies with someone else and thus control them. A powerful organization does not want the secret to be known, because they use the potion to control politicians on many planets. The organization's goons are people who had surgeries to remove their emotions, and function like organic computers. They can communicate over interstellar distances and follow and murder anyone who learns the secret. I remember the following detail about the potion: there are two nearly identical molecules that have to be assembled in a certain sequence. Two of the components had to be switched around and that determined who would be dominant and who would be controlled during the mind switch / body swap.   Every book finds the hero on another planet with new adventures, and usually taking another deep-sleep-passage to another world, fleeing his pursuers. The background story about the secret potion is dished out little by little in each book.  One book in the series starts like this: hero is on very hot planet, diving for valuable marine life, catches a deadly fungus disease and is rescued last moment in exchange for his catch...  One of the themes that returns often is that the hero is an excellent knife fighter.  Of course he's a womanizer. In the second (or close to 2nd) book in the series, he's involved with a woman who rules a planet.  To travel to another world, he usually takes the cheapest dead-sleep passage, and there's always a 10-25% risk you won't wake up from that. I have read that positional parameters start at $1 (for example: $1, $2, $3 and so on are positional parameters). But $0 is not a positional parameter.  But why $0 is not a positional parameter?  I think this could be a reason, but not sure:  Positional parameters only take their values when a script is executed. For example: if we do ./myScript Hello, then $1 will have the value Hello. But $0 can take its value on two occasions: when a script is executed (it would have the value of the script name), and when bash itself is executed without a script (it would have the value bash or -bash). I would like to create a half-turn staircase without a landing. Is there an easy way to accomplish this without having to manually calculate and create each step individually?  Here’s an image similar to what I would like to achive:    I have found the Archimesh add-on including . While I can bend the created stairs, I haven’t found any way to get anywhere close to the image above. My stairs just always look out of shape and I don’t know how to get the outline of the staircase into a square.  I should mention that I only have very little experience with Blender modeling, so it’s well possible that I’m just missing some curve modification basics. Perhaps Archimesh is also the wrong approach for this in the first place? Process substitution and pipe Recently I bought a new laptop that came with Windows 10 installed but not activated. I use both Windows 10 and Ubuntu 18.04, so I tried making a dual boot with a USB flash drive. It was recognized by the BIOS, I tried Try Ubuntu without installing and Install Ubuntu. With both options the PC freezes, and I need to press the power button. It's shown very fast some errors that are listed below:  [ 0.064522] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed \_SB.PCID.RPOB.PXSX, AE_NOT_FOUND (20170831/parse-550)  [ 0.066316] ACPI Error: [_SB.PCID.RPOB.PXSX], Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND (20170831/download2-191)  [ 0.066325] ACPI Error: AE_NOT_FOUND, During name lookup/catalog (20170831/psobject-252)  [ 0.246232] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND. Evaluating _PRS (20170831/pci_link-176)  [ 0.246248] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND. Evaluating _PRS (20170831/pci_link-176)  [ 0.246260] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND. Evaluating _PRS (20170831/pci_link-176)  [ 0.246272] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND. Evaluating _PRS (20170831/pci_link-176)  [ 0.246285] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND. Evaluating _PRS (20170831/pci_link-176)  [ 0.246297] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND. Evaluating _PRS (20170831/pci_link-176)  [ 0.246310] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND. Evaluating _PRS (20170831/pci_link-176)  [ 0.246322] ACPI Exception: AE_NOT_FOUND. Evaluating _PRS (20170831/pci_link-176)   I'm using NVIDIA GTX 1050 Ti graphics card and Intel i7-8750H processor.  I talked to the customer support and they just said that my laptop might not be compatible with Ubuntu. I also tried Ubuntu 16.04, but there were no changes.  EDIT: Thanks a lot for all the answers, but unfortunatelly I returned the PC to the store, neither the technical support found a solution for the problem, they just said: "Our PCs are just able to work with Windows, anyother OS might work but without our warranty". Hump, Rump, Lump, Bump I’m referring to the similar definitions of these four nouns – something raised and rounded.  Why do these four rhyming words have similar meanings?  I have not found very specific sources for these words on the  and . Hump is “probably from Dutch homp.” Rump is “from a Scandinavian source,” “from Old Norse rumpr” ultimately from Proto-Germanic “rumpo.” Lump is “perhaps from a Scandinavian source” and finally, Bump is “perhaps from Scandinavian,” “probably of North Germanic origin.”   Could these words come from the same root? Other than the fact that they all might come from northern Europe, the only hint I have in this direction is the following from , tracing the origin of Hump through Dutch, Middle Low German, Old Saxon and Proto-Germanic, to Proto-Indo-European *kumb-, *kumbʰ- (“curved”). Could this PIE root, which is not given in these online sources for any of the other three words, be a common root to all four words? I find myself looking at other –ump words and “seeing” a curved or rounded line: jump (a curved trajectory), grump (a downturned mouth), pump (the action of the pump handle), clump (a rounded clod of earth, not sharp), etc. Am I just seeing this because the words sound similar, or is there something more to my tendency? For example, the  suggests the origin of jump is "perhaps onomatopoeic (cf. bump)" although this view is not echoed on Wiktionary. Is it possible that these words do all share a common root and are simply onomatopoeic variations of each other? Are there other pairs or groups of words like these in English? (Wham! Bam! Ka-blam!) Does     this phenomenon have a name? Manually change filetype icons in Windows 7 I'm trying to find the dialog tab in Windows 7 that allows a user to change the icon used for a particular file type.  In Windows XP it would be under the Folder Options properties dialog.    Where is it on Windows 7?  I only want to change the icon of a specific filetype, to anything I want but this tab is no longer present in Folder Options of Windows 7. I can't destroy blocks in Minecraft Creative Mode (singleplayer) Root filesystem check fails after power failure during installation During the "install" phase of the upgrade there was a power failure. After when starting up again the following errors are reported:  init: udevtrigger main process (420) terminated with status 1 init: udevtrigger post-stop process (428) terminated with status 1 init: udevmonitor main process (419) killed by TERM signal The disk drive for / is not ready yet or not present Continue to wait; or press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery   Pressing M gives me the following message:  Root filesystem check failed. A maintenance shell will now be started. CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and reboot the system. Determine if $.ajax error is a timeout There are tons of questions I could maybe post this as an answer to, but before choosing the best one, I'll just post this as an announcement question that can be linked elsewhere. The short story From now on, intra-word emphasis is possible in our Markdown version. That means you can now write  The &quot;V&quot; is for Model**View**Controller. That's un*fricking*believable.  and it renders like this:  The &quot;V&quot; is for ModelViewController. That's unfrickingbelievable.  This only works for asterisks, not for underscores. It works in posts and comments. The reasons There are two big reasons for this. For one thing, this is more or less the behavior of , which we eventually . &quot;More or less&quot; because CommonMark's emphasis behavior is still in flux, and supports a few things that we don't support yet, but at least with this change we're closer. The other reason is languages that don't even have the concept of &quot;words separated by spaces&quot;. See  and  for two examples. This change allow posts in those languages to emphasize words without having to resort to HTML tags. To use an example from the first linked post,  **北京**和**上海**是直辖市。   now renders like this:  北京和上海是直辖市。  Possible issues In the 99% cases, this should only make things better; I've only found very few posts where this change causes unintended bolding/italicizing. And even in those cases, note that the rendered versions of questions and answers are not re-rendered until a post is edited, so this will not affect anything in posts retroactively. Unlike posts, comments are rendered , so this immediately applies to all comments. In most cases this doesn't change anything or actually fixes things. Should you discover a rare case where this breaks an important comment badly, we can always edit it to fix. There's one side effect that I'd like to mention: If you find a great quicksort implementation on GitHub that has a bug that causes a crash when sorting Windows versions, and the author doesn't want to fix it, you may be inclined to say  f**k this s**t   (i.e., &quot;fork this sort&quot;). With intraword emphasis, this would however look like this:  fk this st  So you would have to escape the asterisks (one of them would actually be enough). I'm not worried about this case too much, since if you must put censor-worthy words into a post, you might as well have to jump through a little hoop. Some details This being Meta, there are probably lots of people interested in a more detailed description of the new behavior (don't feel bad if you're not one of them; just skip this section). Here are the major rules regarding intraword-emphasis:  As mentioned, it only applies to asterisks, not underscores. Underscores  this restriction was in place at all; asterisks are much less of a problem.  If a single or double asterisk is supposed to be interpreted as intra-word emphasis, it cannot have punctuation on one side; it actually must be inside a word. An example of an edge case this solves is  It's a web*-based solution. *see Wikipedia for a definition of &quot;web&quot;  where the asterisks after &quot;web&quot; could cause unintended italicizing if there was a second asterisk in the same paragraph somewhere.  For italics, the &quot;inside a word&quot; part of rule 2 is even a bit stricter. For bolding, any word or digit character is allowed; for italics, digits don't work either. That's because the asterisk is often used as a multiplication symbol, so  The game worked in 320200 and 640480 resolution.  wouldn't look right without this restriction.  A minor addition that I made that's only tangentially related to intra-word emphasis is that a sequence of more than three underscores or more than three asterisks will no longer take part in any emphasis. This shouldn't really cause any problems, but fixes some (e.g. the underline in the second blockquote in , while not really visible, is a weird combination of bold and italic underscore characters; after this change, it would just be (more) underscore characters). This behavior also matches CommonMark. As the question title suggests, how do I see that every left ideal of a square matrix ring over a field is principal? I found this question in a book.   How many terms of the Maclaurin expansion of $(1+x)^{82}$ are needed to guarantee finding a value of $1.1^{82}$ to an accuracy of $10^{-6}$?  This is how I tried to do it:  We want the Lagrange error to be less than $10^{-6}$:  $$R_{n}(0.1)&lt;10^{-6}$$  Now to find $R_{n}(0.1)$:  $$R_{n}(0.1)=\frac{f^{(n+1)}(0.1)\cdot0.1^{n+1}}{(n+1)!}$$  After writing the values of ${f^{(n+1)}}(x)$, I find a pattern and say that  $${f^{(n+1)}}(x)=\frac{82!}{(82-n)!}(1+x)^{82-n}$$  $${f^{(n+1)}}(0.1)=\frac{82!}{(82-n)!}(1.1)^{82-n}=\frac{82!(1.1)^{82-n}}{(82-n)!}$$  Now just substitute all of this back to $R_{n}(0.1)&lt;10^{-6}$:  $$\frac{\frac{82!(1.1)^{82-n}}{(82-n)!}\cdot0.1^{n+1}}{(n+1)!}&lt;10^{-6}$$  Great! Now I have an inequality that I can solve. I can't graph this so I just use trial and error (which seems like quite an intensive way to do it, so if anyone has a better way I'd love to know).  $$\frac{\frac{82!(1.1)^{82-n}}{(82-n)!}\cdot0.1^{n+1}}{(n+1)!}-10^{-6}&lt;0$$  This seems to work first for $n=28$. That means the highest power of $x$ that I need is 28, so the number of terms in the expansion needs to be $n+1=29$. But the book's answer is       30   What am I doing wrong here? I'm still quite new to the power series expansions so if there's anything unclear in my working, please let me know (also, as a side note, the book itself may be wrong, though that isn't very likely I'd assume). How can I make my ad hoc iPhone application's icon show up in iTunes? I've got an iPhone app with icon file Icon.png.  This icon shows up properly when the app is on the phone itself, but it doesn't show up in the applications pane in iTunes.  What do I need to do to get it to show up properly? What is a valid use case for an "execute only" file permission? I was reading up on chmod and its .  I saw that 1 is execute only.  What is a valid use case for an execute only permission?  To execute a file, one typically would want read and execute permission.  $ echo 'echo foo' &gt; say_foo $ chmod 100 ./say_foo $ ./say_foo bash: ./say_foo: Permission denied $ chmod 500 ./say_foo $ ./say_foo foo Why "think bright" is used with adjective instead of adverb (think brightly)? I find "think bright" is much more common usage, but why? In my opinion, "Think" is a verb, so it is reasonable to use adverb to describe it.  Examples:      THINK BRIGHT!      The National University of Science and Technology MISIS   () Is there a name for this database schema of key values?