I'm  and I noticed a strange issue.  Some questions list a "Questions asking for code must demonstrate a minimal understanding of the problem being solved. Include attempted solutions, why they didn't work, and the expected results." close vote:    But I have no such option under off-topic. These are the off-topic reasons I can see:    The "minimal understanding" option is not there. Reading through meta I understood the option has been removed some time ago (look in the related questions on the right), yet I see it.  Am I missing an option, is it an alias for one of the available options or is it a close vote lingering from before the voting mechanism rework?
I've found strange behavior when closing this  - I definitely see that there are 3 closing votes and 2 of them are at "Off-topic" section:   -but there are no explanations on section itself:   -while, normally, it's expected that it will appear. In custom comments section there are also no closing-votes displayed.   Perhaps it's just my browser (which is FF 26 x64 under Win) - so marking this as a "possible bug". Thank you for your attention.
If n is an odd integer, show there exists a positive integer k such that 2^k mod n = 1. Is there a performance difference between i++ and ++i in C? Is there a performance difference between i++ and ++i if the resulting value is not used? Is there a website that summarizes the luggage and check-in requirements for each airplane company? I don't travel much by plane but I use a wide variety of companies. Since there is not much harmonization, specially with LCC, each one has its own requirements about luggage size, weight, extra luggage price, need for on-line check-in and printed ticket.  Each time I fly I ask my self what are the requirements, and although I can check them online at the official website this can't be quick, sometimes I leave it for last or, with so many, I just confuse airline requirements.  Is there a website or resource that lists this information? This would be very useful to quickly check or just compare requirements. Why do I get 'HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed' message when booting with external usb hard drive? I've installed Ubuntu 11.10 on an external USB (2.0) Hard Drive (/dev/sdb1) but when Ubuntu starts I get a message that says:     ata_id[279]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed for '/dev/sdb': Invalid argument   where I made a mistake? The first HD contains Windows 7 (the official OS of my packard bell notebook). Assume that $A$ is an $n\times n$  real matrix, i.e. $$A^T=-A.$$  Since $\det(A-\lambda I)=\det(A^T-\lambda I)$, $A$ and $A^T$ have the same eigenvalues. On the other hand, $A^T$ and $-A$ also have the same eigenvalues. Thus if $\lambda$ is an eigenvalue of $A$, so is $-\lambda$. If $n$ is odd, $\lambda = 0 $ is an eigenvalue.  A curious search in Google returns  the nonzero eigenvalues of $A$ are all pure imaginary and thus are of the form $iλ_1, −iλ_1, iλ_2, −iλ_2,$ … where each of the $λ_k$ are real.   Here is my question:     How can I prove the fact that "the nonzero eigenvalues of $A$ are all pure imaginary"? Should the personal/research statement be technical? Related:   I know I must describe my past and current research in my personal/research statement or statement of purpose. But do I use technical terms?  I was given the advice that since the people reading my statement are mathematicians (I am applying to US for applied mathematics), they should know what I am talking about.  Although I am applying to applied mathematics, it would also be nice to hear from other fields (biology, computer science, engineering etc) about this. Footnotes in tables? I would like to have footnotes in tables, but the \footnote command does not work inside a table environment.  Googling one finds that this is , at least in the UK.  That link contains a list of solutions to the problem, but since the author of the FAQ does not believe that this is good style, no comparison is made between the different methods.  I am sure that there are good typographical reasons why in most situations it is undesirable to have footnotes in tables (although I have never come across them), however I have recently felt the need to do just this in a paper I am currently writing.  Therefore I'd like to ask two questions:   What are the arguments against footnotes in tables? If one really must go against the advice in 1., which method (whether considered in the  or not) would you recommend?   Thanks in advance.  Added  In response to ShreevatsaR's comment: I do not much care for where the text of the footnote appears.  I do however insist on the footnote marks being attached to the relevant entries in the table, so that I can avoid having to reference "the second entry in the eighth line of the table", etc... Beamer: how to justify the whole text? How can I justify the text in the whole document in beamer without using \usepackage{ragged2e} and \justifying at the beginning of each frame?  \documentclass[8pt,handout,t]{beamer} \usepackage{pifont} %used inside itemize environment \item[\ding{226}] \usepackage{lipsum} \begin{document}  \begin{frame} \begin{columns}[T]  \begin{column}{0.3\textwidth} \includegraphics[width=\columnwidth]{example-image-1x1} \end{column} \begin{column}{0.65\textwidth} \begin{itemize} \item[\ding{226}] \lipsum[2] \item[\ding{226}] \lipsum[3] \end{itemize} \end{column}  \end{columns} \end{frame}  \begin{frame}  \lipsum[3]  \begin{itemize}    \item[\ding{226}] \lipsum[4]  \end{itemize} \end{frame} \begin{frame}   \begin{columns}[t] \begin{column}{0.4\textwidth} \lipsum[3] \end{column} \begin{column}{0.4\textwidth} \lipsum[5] \end{column} \end{columns} \end{frame} \end{document}     Edit: I had already checked  out but it does not work for both the columns and the itemize environment. Isomorphism of centers of isomorphic groups Error: Declaration of MyClass::start_lvl() should be compatible with that of Walker_Nav_Menu::start_lvl() Stars and pins are retained when chat messages are moved! In the chat system, stars and pins are retained when moved to another room. This is probably a bug. Here a picture:  When a room owner pins a message, they can move it to another room, and they cannot unpin it. However when a starred message is moved to another room, the user can unstar it in the room it was moved to. Conversation source:  * is irrelevant and does not have to do with this bug report. Many thanks to . Property of Entire Functions LED light fixture glows when not turned on This past week at Menards I bought 2 Smart Electrician® 3650 Lumens 46" LED Linkable Shop Light Model Number: 0053-0011  |  Menards® SKU: 3481400.  The LED shop light fixture has a glow to it. Looked like the LEDs were turned on, but not all the way. The power switch is turned off. Don’t know why I did this but I took one of those three prong adaptors converters to two prong and to my surprise the light fixture didn’t light up. I unplug the cord with the adaptor and turned it around and it still didn’t light up. The power supply electronics inside the light fixture must be using the earth ground wire somehow. Using my volt meter. I measured to earth ground to the green wire that comes out of the adaptor and to my surprise depending how I plug in the adaptor. I’m getting 112 volts AC. That's because the adaptor isn't keyed and I'm switching the HOT and NEUTRAL around depending how I  plug it in.  I connected the LED light fixture to “Safety Analyzer tester”. When I press the “Open Ground” button, the fixture stops glowing (lightly lite LED’s).  Looks like the power supply circuit inside the fixture has a connection to “Earth Ground”.  I then switched the “Normal” on the polarity switch to “Reverse” and the LED’s were off. Switching the Neutral to open position has no effect. I'm thinking of taking them apart and see inside what's going on or take them back.  I figured out the problem.    In this light fixture you can clearly see the white wire (neutral/common) is connected to the light switch, turning the power off the LED light strip. Commonly we switch off the “HOT” to your light socket so when you change your bulb you have a less of a chance of getting electrocuted (that’s another story for later). Sometimes in Power supply circuits they place capacitors in there to help filter electrical noise out. Also known as suppressers (electronics to reduce unwanted noise or oscillation in a circuit or unwanted frequencies in a signal). Depending on how or where they are placed in the circuit it could possible cause some issue if not installed correctly or if the circuit isn’t designed correctly.   Since the BLACK live wire is connected to the LED PCB all the time, anything connected to that line will potentially be LIVE voltage, that way when I disconnected the earth ground from the socket and measured 112 volts on it. My guess is they have capacitors connected to both LIVE and NEUTRAL to the earth ground wire.  The current is flowing through capacitor C2, just enough to turn the LED’s on slightly. If the switch was on the hot side, this problem wouldn’t be happening. I still may use them just not connect the “earth ground” wire. Because that’s providing the return path for lighting the LED’s. "Reality" of EM waves vs. wavefunction of individual photons - why not treat the wave function as equally "Real"? In thinking how to ask this question (somewhat) succinctly, I keep coming back to a Microwave Oven.  A Microwave Oven has a grid of holes over the window specifically designed to be smaller in diameter than the wavelength of the microwaves it produces, yet larger than the wavelengths of the visible light spectrum - this is so you can watch your food being heated without getting an eye full of microwaves.  The "realness" of electromagnetic waves seems indisputable - both from the microwave example above, and also because if I want to broadcast a radio wave with a certain wavelength, then I need to make sure I have an antenna of corresponding length to produce the wave I'm looking for.  Furthermore, we discuss and treat these waves as real, measurable "objects" that exist and can be manipulated.     Now, if I want to describe the behavior of my Microwave Oven in the framework of QM (let's pretend my oven is going to only produce 1 photon of energy corresponding to a wavelength of the microwave spectrum for simplicity) then I'll describe the behavior of that photon as a wavefunction that evolves over time and gives a probability distribution within my microwave that similarly does not allow the photon to pass through the safety grid and exit the oven cavity giving me a retinal burn.  The difference is, the wavefunction is never treated as something "real" in this description.  When the safety grid is described as working to protect you because it has holes smaller than the wavelength of the classical waves it's blocking, this is a useful description that seems to describe "real" objects/be-ables.  While it is possible to describe why an individual photon has low probability of passing through the same grid but extended physical properties such as wavelength (in space) are treated as non-real because we're dealing with a point particle and with behavior described by something we also treat as non-real (the wavefunction); it seems unclear to me why we insist this wave function which predicts behavior of physical measurements so well is somehow "non-real."    Put another way, if we have no problem treating EM waves as "Real," then why do we insist on treating the wavefunction that describes the same behavior as "unreal?"  I understand there is recent research (Eric Cavalcanti and his group for one) trying to argue this point, but as every respectable physics professor, I've ever encountered, has treated the wavefunction as an indisputably non-real mathematical tool, I needed to ask this community for an answer. General relativity is expressed in terms of differential geometry, which allows you to do interesting things with the coordinates: multiple coordinates may refer to a single point, eg. the  has whole lines at the top and the bottom that correspond to the North and South poles, respectively; or a single coordinate may refer to multiple points, for example by using inverse geometry the origin refers to all the points infinitely far away.  So, is the singularity just a single point in the curved spacetime, or can it be a more extended object, described by a single coordinate? What kinds of compensation can I get from Deutsche Bahn for canceled and late trains? My task is to write a precise mathematical statement that "the sequence $(a_n)$ does not converge to a number $\mathscr l$"  So, I have my definition of a convergent sequence: "$\forall\varepsilon&gt;0$ $\exists N\in\Bbb R$ such that $|x_n -\mathscr l|&lt;\varepsilon$ $\forall n \in \Bbb N$ with $n&gt;N$"  Would the correct negation of this be "$\forall\varepsilon&gt;0$ $\exists N\in\Bbb R$ such that $|x_n -\mathscr l|&gt;\varepsilon$ $\forall n \in \Bbb N$ with $n&gt;N$"?  It doesn't seem that this is the answer as the next part of my task is to prove that a sequence is divergent using my formed proof, but it'd be difficult to do since it's a general proof of divergence and not just a proof that $(a_n)$ doesn't converge a specific number $\mathscr l$  Perhaps I should find a prove that $(a_n)$ tends to $\pm\infty$? This is more simple but it does not include monotone sequences such as $x_n:=(-1)^n$.  Can someone assist me with this task? All comments and answers are appreciated. Past participle form of "exit"? I read on the :     Focal-length determines the angle-of-view seen through a lens for a   given sensor-size. With a full-frame sensor a lens gives the same   angle-of-view as it would on a 35mm film camera. With a smaller   sensor, the angle-of-view becomes smaller. The crop-factor, also   called FLM, is the ratio representing the difference in equivalent   focal-lengths. So a 150mm on a full-frame DSLR such as the Nikon D700   gives the same angle-of-view as a 100mm on a D7000 since its FLM is   1.5X.      Short focal-lengths show a greater angle-of-view compared to longer   ones. [...]   In layman's terms, what is angle-of-view? Is it the same as focal length? If not, how is it different? How is it used? Why do I need to know about it? Dilemma: Present Perfect Or Perfect Continuous?