I am looking to buy a book that my father read as a boy, for his next birthday.  I know very little about it except the protagonist is able to bodily trans-locate in a manner referred to specifically as a 'Jaunt' or 'jaunting'.  My father's childhood was in the late 1930's through the 40's, so I would guess this is relatively early SciFi.
There's a story my grandpa use to tell me when I was younger, about the sole survivor of of an attack on a mining vessel in space. The man lives in space for months/years, ignored by the company he worked for and never rescued. Then when he thinks he is being rescued, it's actually another set of raiders who attack him and kidnap him.  He then wakes up in captivity in some sort of prison inside of an asteroid, and has a word tattooed on his forehead. My grandpa called him Ronin (that's what the tattoo on his forehead said) but I don't know what the character's real name is. Anyways, he learns that he has the ability to teleport after having a brush with death and decides to make his way back to Earth so that he can exact revenge on the mining company who abandoned him and left him floating to die.  Does anyone know what this story or book may be? My grandpa told it to me when I was little, he said that he got it from a book he use to love reading when he was younger. I'm assuming the book is very old (possibly pre 1940's as he was born in the 20s). I can't ask him as he is no longer alive. I'm also unsure as to whether or not all the details in the story he told me, are the same as in the original.
Let $a&gt;0$, show that for $x&gt;0$, $1&lt;f(x)&lt;2$, where $$f(x)=\frac{1}{\sqrt{1+x}}+\frac{1}{\sqrt{1+a}}+\sqrt{\frac{ax}{ax+8}}$$  I could take the derivative, find the maximum of the function and conclude. But that involves heady algebra and you have to solve a high degree polynomial. Is there an easier way simply using inequalities? Thanks, much appreciated While I am familiar with Descartes and the oft-quoted idea, I think therefore I am, I am not familiar with any philosophy that actively sought to rationalize that anybody else exists.  Are there philosophers who analyzed this question? Or is it taken for granted that it is (im)possible for anybody to validate their own existence to somebody else? At the moment, in major part because they are two separate post objects in the system, the excerpt and the body of a tag wiki count as two separate posts with regards to suggested edits in the queue. Mechanically, this is sane, but when it comes to handling the actual queue, it can be confusing. A body edit might consist of little more than a bed of links, which looks bad. But then an excerpt is shown that includes the rest of the data, and since excerpts can be included on the actual wiki page, it makes a lot more sense when they're taken in the same space.  And this is how they are composed, too. The actual edit interface for working on tag wikis has both the excerpt and the body on the same page. In a sense, the excerpt behaves a lot like the "title" of the wiki, if we make a parallel to normal post edits.  Thus, my suggestion (which is to say a suggestion that I repossessed from Robert Cartaino) is that when suggested edits are reviewed for tag wikis, that they be presented in a single unit, treating the excerpt the same as how a title is treated in a question edit. This way, relevant information that is crossed between the two isn't lost because they are reviewed separately. I have 3 old 3.5" internal hard drives sitting gathering dust at the moment. 2 are SATA, and one IDE. I want to either start putting them to use, or dispose of them to clear up some space.  What is the best approach towards disposing of the drives in terms of thoroughly cleaning the contents before throwing away or selling? Are there any recommendations for good software to use to do this?   Are there any 100% successful methods which result in having a usable drive at the end? Why bosons have integer spin and fermions have half-integer ones? Due the fact that the fermions are the "block particles" and the bosons are the "carriers" I just came out with the question that, why the "block particle" have half-integer spin and the "carriers" have an integer spin? Internet through wireless hotspot, intranet through wired network - can I use both at the same time? I have been tring this for a while now, without success. I have read online this can be done, either by changing the default gateway (DG) or messing with the DG's metric  The short story is: I need to connect to my company's ERP system (port 80 for some web services and port 22 for sftp and bash) with using my notebook computer's LAN card - but I can't connect to the Internet on this network. So I have my mobile phone's 3g hotspot when I need to go online. But I want to use both at the same time without so much as opening another web browser process.  At the moment, I am using the ERP system regularly - and whenever I need to go online to check a mail or research something related to work, I need to unplug the network cable so the wifi can kick in... which is starting to become annoying especially if I am connected to the ERP system using FTP (Filezilla) or Shell (putty)  Can someone help me with the configurations?  Below are some of the details I can provide:  Wired network - office LAN - for connection to the ERP system: DHCP -    Yes IPv4      10.64.200.245 Subnet    255.255.240.0 DG        10.64.193.254 DHCP Serv 10.64.17.191 DNS       10.68.72.200           10.68.20.200 WINS      10.68.77.200           10.64.20.200   Below are the details for my WiFi internet connection - over my mobile hotspot  DHCP      Yes IPv4      192.168.43.39 &lt;- I'm guessing this changes every time I restart the wifi subnet    255.255.255.0 DG        192.168.43.1 DHCP      192.168.43.1 DNS       192.168.43.1   Finally, here is the tracert results (btw, I'm on Windows 7, 64bit and the remote system should be on Linux) - the target ERP ip address is 10.76.142.39  Tracing route to 10.76.142.39 over a maximum of ...    1    &lt;1 ms    &lt;1 ms    &lt;1 ms  10.64.193.253   2    &lt;1 ms    &lt;1 ms    &lt;1 ms  10.64.4.13   3    &lt;1 ms    &lt;1 ms    &lt;1 ms  10.76.23.124   4     1 ms    &lt;1 ms    &lt;1 ms  10.76.23.93   5     1 ms    &lt;1 ms    &lt;1 ms  2xx-xx-xx-9.adsl...   6     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  2xx-xx-xx-9.adsl...   7     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  2xx-xx-xx-10.adsl..   8     2 ms     1 ms     2 ms  10.76.135.125   9     1 ms     1 ms     1 ms  10.76.142.39   sorry, I had to mask out some details above... wasn't sure if they would have any confidentiality issues.  Any help is much appreciated. Consider $\mathbb R^{[0,1]}$ the space of all functions from $[0,1]$  to $\mathbb R$  and the cylindrical sigma algebra $\mathcal B$  on it. The question is: how to prove that $C[0,1]\notin \mathcal B$. I am looking at the 4-vector treatment of special relativity, but I have had no formal training in Tensor algebra and thus am having difficulty understanding some of the concepts which appear.  One such concept is the notion of contra- and co-variant vectors.  describes a contra-variant vector as varying with the co-ordinates, i.e. the inverse of the reference axes. It gives the example of a change of basis matrix $\mathbf{M}$, and a contra-variant vector $\vec{v}$ and states that in the new set of co-ordinates, we have:  $$\vec{v}'=\mathbf{M}\vec{v}$$  It then states that a covariant vector varies with the co-ordinate axes.     Does this mean that for a covariant vector $\vec{u}$ and change of basis matrix $\mathbf{M}$ we have: $$\vec{u}'=\mathbf{M}^{-1}\vec{u}?$$   I am also having problems understanding the concept of raising and lowering indices. For instance, Wikipedia states that for two four-vectors $\vec{A},\vec{B}$ and using Einstein summation we have:  $$\left\langle \vec{A} \middle|\vec{B} \right\rangle=A^{\mu}B_{\mu}=A_{\nu}B^{\nu}$$  And I am having difficulty understanding how this relates to the other definition of the inner product:  $$\left\langle \vec{A} \middle|\vec{B} \right\rangle =\mathbf{A}^{T}\mathbf{\eta}\mathbf{B}$$  If anyone could help give me a more intuitive understanding of these concepts I would be grateful. Why is there something instead of nothing? A simple but fundamental question.    The "something" means the whole Universe (known and unknown), it could be represented as the reality version of the set of all sets, which is itself . It includes all the  and such.  A better version of the whole Universe could be described with a .  The "nothing" means an absence of the whole Universe, not a particular void or emptiness in the whole Universe but a nonexistent whole Universe. How to clone/copy all file/directory attributes onto different file/directory? I want to copy the attributes (ownership, group, ACL, extended attributes, etc.) of one directory to another but not the directory contents itself.  This does not work:  cp -v --attributes-only A B cp: omitting directory `A'              Note: It does not have to be cp. I am currently using Ubuntu 10.04. I know there is a 10.10 release, but can I upgrade directly to 11.04? Could you walk me through the steps please? Increasing the size of the memory: not all files are built successfully I am trying to compile a large file which contains a tikz picture with more data points than tex can handle.  Following the questions  and  I set to increase the capacity of tex by changing the file texmf.cnf in my path /usr/local/texlive/2012. I included the line  main_memory = 10000000   and on terminal I run  sudo fmtutil-sys --all   The problem is that this memory is not enough, and numbers bigger than that don't finish the fmtutil run properly. I get the error   fmtutil: Error! Not all formats have been built successfully.   To give a better idea of where the problem is coming from, if I only include in the file texmf.cnf the lines  main_memory.latex = 15000000 main_memory.pdflatex = 15000000   then these are the files which are not properly built:  This is a summary of all `failed' messages: `pdftex -ini  -jobname=latex -progname=latex -translate-file=cp227.tcx *latex.ini' failed `pdftex -ini  -jobname=pdflatex -progname=pdflatex -translate-file=cp227.tcx *pdflatex.ini' failed   How can I increase the size of the memory beyond 10000000? Am I doing anything wrong?  (BTW, I am running texlive 2012 on a mac) What is LookDev/Material Preview mode for in 2.8? the converse of Pythagoras Theorem Is it possible to prove the converse of the Pythagoras theorem with out a geometric proof?.That is from $a^2+b^2=c^2$ to $\Theta=90^\circ$ Why does everyone do 9-overlord, not 10-overlord? Is there an algorithm for N body simulations in General Relativity I am new to general relativity but have a background in computer science.  Why is it so hard to do n-body simulations in GR?  For example, there could be a program which takes the properties (mass, position, velocity, etc.) of each particle as input and numerically integrates the evolution of the system using discrete but very small time steps.  If we throw enough memory and computing power at it, we can get arbitrarily close to the 'real' solution.  I assume the entire histories of the worldlines would need to be known, in order to calculate things like gravitational waves.  I have downloaded programs which show the evolution of the Schrodinger equation, so I am surprised they are so hard to find for GR.  Some responses I've heard elsewhere are 'the equations are nonlinear,' but from what I hear numerical algorithms are great for these types of problems.  What types of numerical algorithms are out there for GR? Array of Matrices in MATLAB I am looking for a way to store a large variable number of matrixes in an array in MATLAB.  Are there any ways to achieve this?  Example:  for i: 1:unknown   myArray(i) = zeros(500,800); end   Where unknown is the varied length of the array, I can revise with additional info if needed.  Update: Performance is the main reason I am trying to accomplish this.  I had it before where it would grab the data as a single matrix, show it in real time and then proceed to process the next set of data.  I attempted it using multidimensional arrays as suggested below by Rocco, however my data is so large that I ran out of Memory, I might have to look into another alternative for my case.  Will update as I attempt other suggestions.  Update 2:  Thank you all for suggestions, however I should have specified beforehand, precision AND speed are both an integral factor here, I may have to look into going back to my original method before trying 3-d arrays and re-evaluate the method for importing the data. Showing $\rho (x,y)=\frac{d(x,y)}{1+d(x,y)}$ is a metric Suppose I define a new theorem "Theorem" and declare that its counter should be reset whenever the subsection counter is incremented or reset:  \newtheorem{theorem}{Theorem}[subsection]   At some point in my (article) document I start a new \section (say, section 2) without starting a \subsection. I expect the first theorem in this section to be numbered with "2.0.1" (which may be considered bad style). However, the theorem is numbered "2.0.2".  Is this "by design" (technically, I didn't start a new \subsection) or a bug? Moreover, what would be a proper workaround? (Such a workaround should not involve manually resetting the theorem counter, and it should work for whatever theorem type I may define in addition to "Theorem".)  \documentclass{article}  \newtheorem{theorem}{Theorem}[subsection]  \begin{document}  \section{bla}  \subsection{blubb}  \begin{theorem} Some text. \end{theorem}  \subsection{foo}  \begin{theorem} Some text. \end{theorem}  \section{bar}  \begin{theorem} Some text. \end{theorem}  \end{document}   EDIT: In response to Seamus' comment: The unexpected counter value also occurs with amsthm and ntheorem. How can I convert my Java program to an .exe file? If I have a Java source file (*.java) or a class file (*.class), how can I convert it to a .exe file?  I also need an installer for my program.