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I am typing up formal invitations, and I want to say that transportation will be provided from Point A to Point B (but also from Point B back to Point A). In order to clear up the to-from/from-to confusion, I tried to use 'between' as follows: Transportation will be provided between Point A and Point B. Is it grammatic...
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In a sentence where we have two listed words that are hyphenated, we can omit the latter part of the first compound and still be grammatically correct: I don't believe we will ever find helium-based or hydrogen-based life forms. I don't believe we will ever find helium- or hydrogen-based life forms. However, if we have...
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I'm currently a PhD student in mathematics at a decent sized graduate school, but I've been questioning my desire to continue on and finish my doctorate after I achieve my master's, which will occur within the next year. I've been thinking about trying the actuarial exams so I might have a route to leave academia. I've...
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I am writing tourist information for a city that has areas known for similar shops (fabric, jewelry, musical instruments), similar services (spas, funeral, automotive), and similar industries (textile, software, manufacturing). I am currently referring to all of these areas as districts (e.g. the fabric district, the f...
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I have this combinatorial assignment problem: K candidates apply for a job. There are R referees available to review their resumes and make a recommendation. Suppose that we would like M referees to review each candidate (M < R). How would you assign candidates to referees (or, conversely, referees to candidates)? Ther...
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Quite a few times now, a waiter or shop assistant has asked me: Will that be fine? I've noticed that I've only ever heard Indian English speakers use this turn of phrase. To my (British) ear, it sounds unidiomatic: I would always ask Will that be OK? expecting the answer Yes, that's fine. I'm intrigued to know what's g...
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Like many programming books, there are mathematics books which do not provide exercises. Although similar in theory, how can I come up with exercises that will help illuminate a subject? The difference here is that when I pick up a programming book, I generally have an application in mind for whatever subject it is. Th...
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What does the word cousin mean when used as a verb? By context I take it to mean that someone is putting someone else on or being difficult with someone else. For example, in The Dark Tower (Stephen King) series Wizard and Glass, a character, Eddie, is pressuring another character, Roland, to tell a story of his youth ...
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I have a general question when it comes to deciding if an infinite series is convergent or divergent. The tests im familiar with are ; Ratio test, Direct comparison test, Limit comparison test, Root test and the Integral test. My question is if there is any way to tell what test is appropriate to start with just by loo...
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I recently read an article in the NY Times called A Black Hole Mystery Wrapped in a Firewall Paradox. I really liked the article, but reading one quote immediately made me think of asking Physics.SE a question: From the material in the smoke and flames of a burning book, for example, one could figure out whether it was...
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To me (an American), "what to study in college" sounds acceptable. Meanwhile, "what to study in university" sounds wrong. This suggests that these words have different grammatical attributes. This is shown somewhat in the example sentences on m-w.com: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/university I applied to se...
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The answer to the question "Could it be that Goldbach conjecture is undecidable?" claims that it is possible for something such as the Goldbach conjecture to be undecidable, meaning that assuming that it is true and assuming that it is false would both lead to no contradiction. But if it is undecidable, then, if we ass...
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Because of English's lack of a gender neutral third person singular possessive pronoun, whenever the need for such a referent presents itself in the course of writing, we seem to be left with alternatives that are either cumbersome or otherwise awkward. There is the informal gender neutral "himself", and the informal s...
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When calculating the ideal class group of a number field, it is common to start with the Minkowski bound, followed by decomposing finitely many prime ideals of norm less than that bound, and finding relations between these primes. Is there a way of avoiding the use of Minkowski bound in the computation of the ideal cla...
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This is a data sufficiency question - Q - How is A related to B? Statement I. B is the only son of D who is the daughter of A's father. Statement II. B is the father of C and is the only son of A's mother. A - I. If statement I alone is sufficient to answer the question. II If statement II alone is sufficient to answer...
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I have a question related to this: Projective modules I'm trying to understand the "philosophy" of the statement, because it seems too similar to the statement "a module is free iff every element can be written uniquely as a finite linear combination of elements of a basis". Is this "projective basis" property saying t...
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I learnt about an experiment to show that acceleration is proportional to force. It was done by placing a trolley (like a toy car) on a smooth track. At the end of the smooth horizontal track was a pulley connected to the trolley by a string which hung masses over the edge of the table. So the trolley experienced accel...
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Once again, a problem encountered while marking German pupils' exams. We teach them the following rules: A present participle can be used to shorten an active relative clause: The boy who was driving the car didn't stop = The boy driving the red car didn't stop A past participle can be used to shorten a passive relativ...
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I recently stumbled upon an interesting quirk regarding words that are both nouns and verbs. They seem to all follow the same stress pattern. Here are a few examples: NOUNS I have a really long address. There is a huge contrast between winter and spring. Not a single object is blue. I'm not very good at creating produc...
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Measurement of a quantum observable (in an appropriate, old-fashioned sense) necessarily involves coupling to a system with a macroscopically large number of degrees of freedom. Entanglement with this "apparatus" takes care of the decoherence. It is often said (I can provide references upon request) that the remaining ...
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I am studying for the AP BC Calculus Exam and I know about the free response questions from AP Central, and the Multiple Choice Collection. I was wondering if anyone here knew of where to obtain more problems? At least a collection of problems similar to those that appear on the BC Exam. I realize this is not a questio...
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From what I understand, in simple terms, The definition of iteration : The act of repeating a process The definition of recursion : The act of repeating smaller process of the same problem It these definitions aren't too far fetched, it looks to me that a recursion is a type of iteration. But I am yet to find a reliabl...
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I don't want to re-invent the wheel here, and I know that there are a lot of good math libraries out there for all sorts of things; what I'm wondering is if there's one that generates its answers in LaTex? (Could be any sort of TeX; I'm not really familiar with which ones are used for what) Well, it could look like any...
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I'm going to start self-studying General Relativity from Sean Caroll's Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity. I'd like to have a textbook on Differential Geometry/Calculus on Manifolds for me on the side. I do like mathematical rigor, and I'd like a textbook whose focus caters to my need. Having...
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Four suspects were assembled in the director's office, having been accused of a devious crime: turning off the light switch during Mr. Buehler's business presentation. It was known that only one of the four turned off the switch. All four were friends, and the director's secretary overheard them plotting before they we...
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I would like to know if there is any physical significance associated with the derivative of a quantity with respect to proper time or is it just a mathematical trick. Since proper time is measured in its "rest" frame of a moving particle, it seems to me that particle is not going through any dynamics and therefore tim...
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I am looking for a word that describes audio that does not contain words. For instance: John William's piece Duel of the Fates would be this, since they are just vocables for their musical effect, similar to the way any other instrument is used in that context. A recording of machine gun fire would be this, since there...
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I know that string theory is still under heavy development, and as such it still can't make predictions (or not that many predictions anyways). On the other hand, it is clear from the number of years this theory has been under development and from the large number of theoretical physicists studying it, that it is consi...
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We've learnt that friction is the opposition of motion and that friction appears the instant a force is applied on an object i.e when an object is at rest (with no force acting on it) then there is no frictional force. The moment a small amount of force is applied, friction becomes a factor. Therefore, friction is just...
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I probably have seen this happen at various times in movies set in eras where people were very obsequious to royalty. The action I am trying to find the word for is a motion of the hand in a kind of circular motion or spiral (generally towards and away from oneself) while bowing towards someone, often while slowly movi...
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I'm attempting a novel approach to some tough integration problems. I'm using the idea of series expansions to help integrate. In other words, I will attempt to approximate integration by integrating the series expansion of an integrand, rather than direct integration or standard numerical methods. I believe I can appr...
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In an earlier post - Phonetic understanding of tongue twisters - a comment was made that "hyphens ...(are) ...not needed in speech, so they must be extraneous". The phrase prompting this assertion was 'state of the art'. What does it mean to say that hyphens are not needed in speech? No one would say state hyphen of hy...
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In my Computer Science class, we were introduced to the Average Salary problem, where a group of people want to determine their average salary, but they don't want anyone to be able to determine the salary of anyone else. I proposed a solution which I later looked up and found to be a fairly common one, wherein everyon...
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I am still trying to get a good grasp on the motivations behind various concepts in Differential Geometry. But I am struggling to come to terms with how certain concepts have this added attribute of being coordinate independent? How does one identify such objects, be it a tangent space or a covariant derivative. How do...
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I am going through the chapter on compactness and completeness from Sternberg's Advanced Calculus and trying to build an intuition for what many of this topological properties mean, and which imply which. The book defines these concepts in the setting of metric spaces, but most of what I found online is in the about to...
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My question concerns the theory proposed in this classic paper by Misner and Wheeler. In the paper, the authors propose the idea of "charge without charge"--namely, that positive and negative particles might really be the ends of a wormhole, with field lines going into a mouth interpreted as a "negative" particle and t...
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I am wondering what some applications of POVMs are in mathematics (or mathematical physics)? I am going through Berberian's 'Notes on Spectral Theory', which shows how we can write a normal operator as an integral over a spectral measure. Because it is not that much extra work, he treats operator valued integrals in ge...
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I'm having a bit of trouble explaining to a friend whether or not there's a big difference between the three modifiers in the title. Same and very on their own are different enough, but when combined, I find it difficult to draw a proper line on their meanings. Consider the following: I lived in the same house you're t...
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I'm trying to translate a video on TED into my native language (Latvian). At the very start there is an expression I'm unfamiliar with - "animal warmth". I think I kind of understand the idea intuitively, but I can't think of any similar expressions in my native tongue (short of direct translation). It would be nice if...
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Is there a single word, or commonly-used term, to describe the act of baiting another person into calling bullshit, when in fact you're not bullshitting? Conceptually, this either a sub-type, or the direct opposite, of bluffing, which is the act of pretending you have better cards than you actually hold, in order to sc...
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About two years ago, I absolutely fell in love with mathematics. Since then, I have studied math almost religiously, absorbing everything I can about every subject I can. I have now established what I would call an understanding of most undergraduate topics, up to intermediate complex analysis, some abstract algebra, m...
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I recently came across the following problem from Paul Zeitz's book The Art and Craft of Problem Solving. Given the image below, can you find a way to connect corresponding blocks (i.e. A to A, B to B, C to C), without having any of the connecting lines intersect one another? The question was an interesting one for me,...
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I am writing an essay on a book that I read where many of the characters are not human and have artificial intelligence instead. When I try to describe these characters, though, I find myself using "android", "machine", and "robot," none of which seems correct. The characters are not humanoid, so I am not sure if andro...
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I'm trying to do Young's double slit experiment at home. Note that I don't have a laser, only a torch. I could get a bulb or use a candle though, if it helps I built the slits by cutting into a black chart paper with a knife. I tried to build a setup by placing a single slit, double slits and a screen one after the oth...
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I'm going to be a teaching assistant and I'm currently looking for books/reviewed articles/journals written by mathematicians or people who taught mathematics (at a university level) about pedagogy and/or their experience of teaching mathematics. I know that these readings can't replace the experience of teaching but I...
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As written in the title, there's a specific word that is not too common in English that's used to describe the feeling you can get when you finally resolve your long-term disdain for someone, or reaching some sort of civility between you and them. I can't remember it but I would know it if I saw it. Example: He attaine...
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I'm a physics undergraduate student who always enjoyed math, and briefly studied it at a university but for various reasons (laziness, youth) gave up and changed 'majors'. But I always wanted to go through an undergraduate math course in my own time, unconstrained by class, etc. Now that I've passed all my exams I was ...
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Some actions (such as generating the Table of Contents) require two passes of the TeX compiler: during the first pass, some data get written to an auxiliary file, only to be retrieved during the second pass. Here are a few TeX.SE questions that require two-pass solutions: Highlight referenced equation number Backrefere...
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In answering Do these matrix rings have non-zero elements that are neither units nor zero divisors? I was surprised how hard it was to find anything on the Web about the generalization of the following fact to commutative rings: A square matrix over a field has trivial kernel if and only if its determinant is non-zero....
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People use the phrase "x strikes a chord with me" to address enthusiasm or personal movement. I know there is another question that addresses what this idiomatic phrase means, but I'm very curious as to where this came from and when? I've searched a number of English dictionaries in hopes that a definition of the idiom...
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They had cooks and drivers, and guards who occupied a gatehouse, armed with machetes. Seeing as I had regularly petitioned my parents for an electric fence, the business with the guards strikes me as the last word in quiet sophistication. - David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day I have three questions about this sentenc...
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I'm writing up my Teaching Statement for an Assistant Professor position in the sciences. Because all I do is read and write science, I have no elegance in my writing at all! I'm trying to make the last sentence sound better: I have been fortunate enough to work with some great mentors in my life journey thus far. Inte...
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I was considering honorifics and I realized that sometimes we include and sometimes we omit a possessive in front of them. I was wondering if there was a formal rule for such? For example: Your highness, the French delegation has arrived. vs. Highness, the French delegation has arrived. Obviously, the your has been omi...
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It is uncanny how many books will insist that neither 'many' nor 'much' can be used in positive sentences. Have you got many pens? / Have you got much money? --> correct I haven't got many pens. / I haven't got much money. --> correct I have got many pens. / I have got much money. --> INCORRECT And yet, those same book...
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I'm interested in others' suggestions/recommendations for resources to help me acquire reading proficiency (of current math literature, as well as classic math texts) in German. I realize that German has evolved as a language, so ideally, the resource(s) I'm looking for take that into account, or else perhaps I'll need...
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My current background in analysis is approximately the material in Folland's Real Analysis. I've also read the Analysis text by Lieb and Loss and I also took a graduate level class on complex analysis, which went up to Big Picard and some Nevanlinna theory. For my own amusement I've thought about furthering my knowledg...
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When you're taking a mathematics class, you usually know exactly what sections of a book you need to know, and you can focus your time on these important sections. However, when studying by myself, even when I'm trying to study the book as thoroughly as possible, I often feel tempted to skip sections of material (maybe...
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I want to refer to parties that are hosted for players. Which of the following phrases is grammatically correct? "Player Parties" "Players Parties" "Players' Parties" "Player's Parties" A sentence where I might use this phrase is as follows: "We host [...]" Intended usage: I want to use the phrase in a promotional clip...
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First of all, I want to make clear what I'm NOT asking. I'm not hoping to do a rehash of the implications of nonstandard analysis on calculus. Rather, I'm interested in its use in "harder" math. I'm currently reading through Goldblatt's Lectures on the Hyperreals and working on the later sections, wherein he discusses ...
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First time I've asked on this Stack; I hope this is on-topic. I'm laying out a control panel. One of its functions involves an alarm, but under certain circumstances the alarm might be triggered repeatedly, which is annoying. So there's a button which prevents the alarm happening for a while, which is labelled "[proble...
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I recently started to study problems with prolate spheroidal geometries, for which prolate spheroidal coordinates are most suited. In particular I have the advantage that the problem is axisymmetric around the spheroid major axis. While I'm used to Spherical Harmonics expansions and also to solutions of Laplace equatio...
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In my physics lessons, my teachers have always been keen to tell my class that Jupiter is considered a 'failed star' by scientists. Is this true? In my own effort I wondered if maybe this could just be being regurgitated from an outdated physics syllabus that still considers the Solar System to have nine planets. From ...
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I have read this text about a man who has spent a terrible holiday (in the island of Thassos) due to the disorganisation of the travel company. In fact the text consists in the complaint letter that he wrote to the bloke of the company... I report the passage that I can't understand: Over the years I have been on many ...
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I remember sitting in on a conference talk by a person (possibly Rainer Blatt) doing research with trapped ions (or single atoms strongly coupled to light in an optical cavity), and the person showed a photo of the trap with dots of light from the fluorescence of the single atoms/ions. I thought the person mentioned yo...
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I am standing on the surface of some planet. Gravity is described via General Relativity with some static metric (e.g. the Schwarzschild metric, so static means no time dependence, but the metric may vary from place to place). I send a blue photon up to my friend, who is x meters above me in some tower (we are both at ...
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Trying to name things in a computer data model. People have a variety of name roles, such as legal name, maiden name, etc. "The Sultan of Swat" is a nickname or pseudonym of George Ruth. It seems to stand alone. You don't often see him called "The Sultan of Swat" Ruth. "Babe" is also his nickname, but is often used tog...
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I find it hard to comprehend the law of conservation of energy. Allow me to explain my confusion. I understand that the law of conservation of energy states that energy is neither created nor destroyed. However, it has to come to a point in time where the origin of that energy is magically 'created'. How do we explain ...
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I was copy-editing a report at work and came across the following sentence: While sustainability in the transport sector was rated relatively high, the sustainability of the power sector was found to be weak. The grammar nerd in me says this should be: While sustainability in the financial and transport sector projects...
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To be clear on this, I know what is the definition of an inner product space and some properties and theorems about them. What I am asking for is an intuition for this definition in the complex case. In the real case, the intuition (or at least one of them) is geometric: The inner product of two vectors is the length o...
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Sometimes, I got really confused by the use of the Present Perfect tense. Given the fact, that we don't have this structure in Russian, all we can is to base our knowledge on grammar rules. The rules are quite simple: Experience: I have been to London twice. Unfinished actions: I have lived in Moscow since I was born. ...
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I am modeling a closed natural circulation loop, filled with water. Some parts of the loop are heated, some are cooled and other are assumed adiabatic. As an effect of heating and cooling the density of water changes and so does the total pressure in the loop. My question is as follows: Is there a way to calculate the ...
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I am trying to the calculate the link budget for link between a ground station on Earth (with a particular latitude and longitude) and a rover at a particular location on the surface of Mars, either directly or through a satellite on Mars. Now, if I need to determine the link availability between the rover and the grou...
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I can find good explanations of how the disjoint union topology is constructed, but I am confused about how things such as complements, boundaries, limit points, etc. are to be understood in this context. For example, suppose we have two spaces, P and M and create their disjoint Union X with the disjoint union topology...
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A nice little oddity which I thought I'd ask about. I stumbled across the delightful word 'Boustrophedon' in relation to the scanning actions of some printers (inkjet/dot matrix). I believe that this roughly derives from the notion of 'As the ox ploughs the field'. I mentioned this to a colleague who had a farming back...
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I just graduated and a mate moved into a flat (none of us are physicists by the way). So, were graduates, we got a new flat, and were broke. So, were now having a debate on how to keep a fridge cool... well, cooler. I suggest that a fridge full of water will keep the food colder, as objects get cooler when water evapor...
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Let's imagine standing on a shore, and dropping rocks into a lake. Each rock causes ripples to travel outwards. Now let's imagine there is a monstrous whirl pool somewhere out there in the lake gobbling up waves.. It's quite complex to picture, but In my imagination I could envision a clever enough person analyzing the...
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A hollow metal sphere is electrically neutral (no excess charge). A small amount of negative charge is suddenly placed at one point P on this metal sphere. If we check on this excess negative charge a few seconds later we will find one of the following possibilities: (a) All of the excess charge remains right around P....
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The following paragraph has been extracted from the Wikipedia (Atomic orbitals): Simple pictures showing orbital shapes are intended to describe the angular forms of regions in space where the electrons occupying the orbital are likely to be found. The diagrams cannot, however, show the entire region where an electron ...
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I was watching "Cold Opening: Homeland Security - Saturday Night Live". I am supposed to translate the entire sketch for my next classes, but I really don't know what is the joke here. I only know that magenta is a color and that is all. Can someone explain to me what is funny about this? I really need that. Here is a ...
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This question is sort of in the spirit of this xkcd: The light we get from stars was emitted many years in the past, but the distances to stars which are bright enough to be visible to the naked eye are not that great, so the light we received likely wasn't emitted long enough ago that the stars would have undertaken s...
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This popular question about "whether an AC circuit with one end grounded to Earth and the other end grounded to Mars would work (ignoring resistance/inductance of the wire)" was recently asked on the Electronics SE. (Picture edited from the one in the above link) Though I respect the AC/DC experts there, I think (with ...
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I'd like to learn formal math. Preferably, though not necessarily, starting with predicate logic/first order logic rather than higher order logic. I am trying to find resources (papers, books etc.) for doing this, but I haven't found anything I really like. There are lots of resources for predicate and first order logi...
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I understand that photons, even when traveling at the speed of light, cannot escape the event horizon of a black hole. Are gravitons and other virtual particles traveling at the speed of light also confined by event horizons? If so, it seems that the gravitational field created by the black hole would result only from ...
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I was teaching my young nephew some math the other day, and from discussing the typical sort of word problems he's encountering in class, I noticed that the "-th" suffix adds a distinct meaning to adjectives. For example: If a ship is long, it has length. If a woman is wide, she has width. If a person is strong, he pos...
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Consider a lone photon. As its frequency increases, its energy increases. Taken to the limit, a sufficiently-high-frequency photon could be a black hole unto itself. But the frequency of a photon is dependent on the inertial frame of the observer. Two observers could each observe this photon to be either above or below...
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Does an object possess specificity to or for another object? Every time I go to express this concept in writing, I struggle over which preposition is the more appropriate and more precise. This is dilemma is encountered all the time in technical scientific writing, for example in biology where one speaks of enzymes wit...
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It is fine to say that for an object flying past a massive object, the spacetime is curved by the massive object, and so the object flying past follows the curved path of the geodesic, so it "appears" to be experiencing gravitational acceleration. Do we also say along with it, that the object flying past in reality exe...
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Which is correct? There are no comments. There is no comment. Which would you use for a web application, i.e. what to display when a blog post or an article has no comment attached? Actually, I am trying to fix an application that says: "There is no comments"! Would that ever be right? More generally speaking, it feels...
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The word "complete" seems to be used in several distinct ways. Perhaps my confusion is as much linguistic as mathematical? A basis, by definition, spans the space; some books call this "complete" -- though then the phrase "complete basis" is redundant. In physics/engineering, "complete" seems to be reserved for orthogo...
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I was recently asked the question "How do you know when you've become a better mathematician/better at mathematics?," and I realized that at that moment I did not have a valid answer, since I have been using my performance on tests to make that judgement. After putting some thought into it, I would say that one could a...
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If I have a normal distribution, the posterior for the variance is the inverse Chi-square distribution assuming the same is used as a conjugate prior. But what if my data has extra noise added so that the observed sample variance is the sum of the population variance and my extra noise variance? But then the poisterior...
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I own a company called Find My Bus Ltd that brands itself as Find My Bus. Yesterday we sat down and had a discussion regarding the name and all came to the agreement that it didn't represent the company as we originally wanted it to. Seeing three separate words in a name that when thought of without any context sounds ...
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Quantum numbers are supposed to denote every individual orbital. But if orbital shells are probability functions, then orbitals can't be definite, solid things. So in that case, there can be variation in the amount of energy given off when an electron drops between shells - it might, say, give off a tiny little bit mor...
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How do issues of naturalness arise when regularizing QFT using dimensional regularization? I can only recall ever seeing naturalness arguments (hierarchy problem, cosmological constant problem, etc.) phrased in terms regularizing with a cutoff, where naturalness issues arise when physical quantities are quadratically d...
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Well let's start off with that I'm not a physicist but I'd like some thoughts on something I came across in my hometown. This guy: Is it possible that due to the electrical charge of magnets this guy can make the illusion that he can float ? Or is this probably a cheap trick that fools the eye ? I was standing there fo...
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I am trying to understand the meanings of "covariant transformation" and "contravariant transformation" and how they are related. I have read the related Wikipedia article and still feel I cannot state, with mathematical precision, the definition of these terms. The Wikipedia article states that a covariant transformat...
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I had the idea of, what if you ground up some magnets into a fine powder, what would happen with the powered, and how would it act? After some google searches, it seems that this isn't done very often, and that not much would come of the powder as the poles will mostly be misaligned. So my next question was, what (if a...
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Prompted by comments to this question on English Learners (about "That's you done"), I've been searching Google Books for similar constructions of the general form that's [pro]noun adjective (for this context, I classify past-tense verb forms such as done, fucked, finished as adjectives). What I seem to be finding is t...
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The question is written like this: Is it possible to find an infinite set of points in the plane, not all on the same straight line, such that the distance between EVERY pair of points is rational? This would be so easy if these points could be on the same straight line, but I couldn't get any idea to solve the questio...
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Recent observations of the accelerating expansion of the universe have been quantified and for the time being given a name as to the cause: Dark Energy. And from what I've read from other, similar questions is that Dark Matter is a pressure that is causing this expansion, although we don't know the details of the mecha...
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