Natural laws often feature squares and square roots, and second-order differential equations. Cubic laws, cube-roots, and third-order differentials are fairly rare.  (Some counter-examples: square-cube laws turn up when area/volume effects are scaled, and Stefan–Boltzmann law involves a fourth-power. Perhaps I'm just ignorant but I struggle to come up with many more.)  Is there a deep reason why higher-order effects would be rarer?
I mean, why is $F=ma$? Why not $m^{0.123}$, $a^{1.43}$ or some random non-integers or irrational?  I hope you understand that my question isn't limited just to force, energy, velocity, etc.; it also extends to the area of a square, circle, etc. and all other formulas.  I think the whole thing starts with direct proportionality.  Most of them tell about the area of a circle, $A = πr^2$, where π is 3.14159..... an irrational number! It's not about the constant. I am talking about the power of a physical quantity.  I know why it has pi. It's because we chose the constant for area square to be one. If we chose it to be 1 for the circle then the area of a square will have a constant, 1/pi.   I've edited the question to 'rational exponents' since all are giving me examples of decimal non-integers.
Run VirtualBox in background, without a window? I opened Cairo-dock in my terminal with: open cairo-dock and that worked but if I close the terminal it goes with it. How can I keep it open regardless of the terminal? How do I exclude plugins from getting automatically updated? There is an opt-in filter that allows all plugins on my site to receive automatic updates:  add_filter( 'auto_update_plugin', '__return_true' );  I like this feature, but I don't want all my plugins to be updated automatically. How can I allow some plugins to be updated automatically, while excluding those I want to do manually? If you have a java.io.InputStream object, how should you process that object and produce a String?    Suppose I have an InputStream that contains text data, and I want to convert it to a String, so for example I can write that to a log file.  What is the easiest way to take the InputStream and convert it to a String?  public String convertStreamToString(InputStream is) {     // ??? } The Problem  Accessing my site over https (the only protocol allowed) I get the content, but none of the CSS, images etc.  Drupal is creating pages in response to https requests that include http links to these resources, but it should be using https.  What I've done  I have copied a site to a dev server. The site loads and basically works fine - I can log in etc. It's just that all the links drupal generates are http. The site I've copied it from also runs over https. The site does not exist on http (it would just get a Forbidden error). I've drush cc all.  So Apache's working - I can access the site. .htaccess is working (clean urls work, for example).  I'm using SNI to access the site because the server has other vhosts too, but I'm only accessing the site using the latest Firefox (and as it's a dev site and I'm the only dev, nobody else will use it).  I've done this dozens of times and am quite stumped! Why does Drupal not notice that the request came over https?  The fix  Turns out that .htaccess has this to say:   /* Base URL (optional).                                                          If Drupal is generating incorrect URLs on your site, which could             be in HTML headers (links to CSS and JS files) or visible links on pages     (such as in menus), uncomment the Base URL statement below (remove the       leading hash sign) and fill in the absolute URL to your Drupal installation.    Sure enough, putting $base_url = 'https://example.com'; fixed it.  But why is this necessary? Tree level QFT and classical fields/particles command to zip multiple directories into individual zip files I have a single directory that contains dozens of directories inside of it.  I'm new to command line and I'm struggling to come up with a command that will zip each sub-directory into a unique sub-directory.zip file.  So in the end my primary directory will be filled with all of my original sub-directories, plus the corresponding .zip files that contain the zipped up content of each sub-directory.  Is something like this possible? If so, please show me how it's done. Solving an equation over the reals: $ x^3 + 1 = 2\sqrt[3]{{2x - 1}}$ Solve the following equation over the reals:$$ x^3  + 1 = 2\sqrt[3]{{2x - 1}} $$ I noticed that 1 is a trivial solution, then I tried raising the equation to the 3rd, then dividing the polynomial by $(x-1)$.. But I can't see the solution, how do I go from here? Finding information on German soldiers from World War I and World War II? Is it considered rude if you only ask Questions but almost never answer one yourself I have used the websites of SO a lot the past few months because I am busy with a large scale web project. I feel I get better answers here on SO than when I just do a Google search, maybe because I can be more specific here with my problem, and the responses are really fast.  Occasionally when I am not working I try to answer some questions, but the question almost always has an answer which is 'as good as' or 'better' than the answer I would supply.  So my question/answer ratio is about 20/1 something, if not more. When I look at my profile page I see a bucket-load of questions and almost nothing I answered myself.  Is this considered bad behaviour? I can see that this looks a little egoistic.  : One devoted to one's own interests and advancement. I've just gotten through replacing capacitors on a trio of dead LCD screens (nothing's blown up yet, so far) - they either had one or two capacitors on their inverter circuit SLIGHTLY bloated, and not quite leaky. I ended up replacing all capacitors of the same brand/'colour', even the ones that looked fine, in case.  Now, checking a bad resistor is simple - i can use a standard multimeter to test it, and i tend to check my solders with the continuity testing option of the multimeter.  How would i test a capacitor ? Is there some standard, common way to test one? How do you tell if caps lock is on using JavaScript? How do you tell if caps lock is on using JavaScript?  One caveat though: I did google it and the best solution I could find was to attach an onkeypress event to every input, then check each time if the letter pressed was uppercase, and if it was, then check if shift was also held down. If it wasn't, therefore caps lock must be on. This feels really dirty and just... wasteful - surely there's a better way than this? How can I solve this quantum mechanical "paradox"? Resolve build errors due to circular dependency amongst classes I often find myself in a situation where I am facing multiple compilation/linker errors in a C++ project due to some bad design decisions (made by someone else :) ) which lead to circular dependencies between C++ classes in different header files (can happen also in the same file). But fortunately(?) this doesn't happen often enough for me to remember the solution to this problem for the next time it happens again.  So for the purposes of easy recall in the future I am going to post a representative problem and a solution along with it. Better solutions are of-course welcome.     A.h  class B; class A {     int _val;     B *_b; public:      A(int val)         :_val(val)     {     }      void SetB(B *b)     {         _b = b;         _b-&gt;Print(); // COMPILER ERROR: C2027: use of undefined type 'B'     }      void Print()     {         cout&lt;&lt;"Type:A val="&lt;&lt;_val&lt;&lt;endl;     } };       B.h  #include "A.h" class B {     double _val;     A* _a; public:      B(double val)         :_val(val)     {     }      void SetA(A *a)     {         _a = a;         _a-&gt;Print();     }      void Print()     {         cout&lt;&lt;"Type:B val="&lt;&lt;_val&lt;&lt;endl;     } };       main.cpp  #include "B.h" #include &lt;iostream&gt;  int main(int argc, char* argv[]) {     A a(10);     B b(3.14);     a.Print();     a.SetB(&amp;b);     b.Print();     b.SetA(&amp;a);     return 0; } Do thermostat-controlled, auto-adjust HVAC vents exist? The residential forced-air HVAC systems I have seen are controlled by a single thermostat in one room.  One has to manually adjust the vents in order to adjust the temperature in other rooms.  Is there such a think as thermostat-controlled, automatically-adjustable vents so that one can have multiple heating/cooling zones without having multiple furnaces and air-conditioners? If the plural of ‘man’ is ‘men,’ shouldn’t the plural of ‘German’ be ‘Germen’? What makes these two words so different that 'man' is changed to 'men', but 'German' is changed to 'Germans'? The staircase paradox, or why $\pi\ne4$ How does linear regression use the normal distribution? I'm following the , but on launching the upgrade tool I get this response:  Checking for a new ubuntu release No new release found   Am I doing something wrong? Is there a workaround? Evolution threads extra lines before signature