It seems that everyone who dealt with the One Ring called it &quot;precious&quot;. Did the Ring force people to use that moniker? Or was it some artefact of Middle-Earth languages as designed by Tolkien? Or merely the fact that the whole books was a re-telling by Bilbo in The Red Book of Westmarch, and thus he was solely responsible for the word choice?  First, we see Gollum/Sméagol:  'The murder of Déagol haunted Gollum, and he had made up a defence, repeating it to his &quot;precious&quot; over and over again, as he gnawed bones in the dark, until he almost believed it. It was his birthday. Déagol ought to have given the ring to him. It had previously turned up just so as to be a present. It was his birthday present, and so on, and on. 'I saw him there,' answered Gandalf, 'but before that he had wandered far, following Bilbo's trail. It was difficult to learn anything from him for certain, for his talk was constantly interrupted by curses and threats. &quot;What had it got in its pocketses?&quot; he said. &quot;It wouldn't say, no precious. Little cheat. Not a fair question. It cheated first, it did. It broke the rules. We ought to have squeezed it, yes precious. And we will, precious!&quot;  ... and countless other instances in The Hobbit and LOTR.   OK, that may be just Gollum's pet name for The One Ring, or pecularity of wording... except we also have...  Bilbo:  'If I am it is your fault,' said Bilbo. 'It is mine, I tell you. My own. My precious. Yes, my precious.' 'Well, if you want my ring yourself, say so!' cried Bilbo. 'But you won't get it. I won't give my precious away, I tell you.' His hand strayed to the hilt of his small sword.    OK, fine, we can write Bilbo's usage of the word on the fact that he heard Gollum use it in the cave when he found the RIng and subconsciously imprinted the word. BUT then we have ...  Frodo:  'Why, why wasn't it destroyed?' cried Frodo. 'And how did the Enemy ever come to lose it, if he was so strong, and it was so precious to him?' He clutched the Ring in his hand, as if he saw already dark fingers stretching out to seize it. 'What do you mean?' said Frodo. 'Surely the Ring was his precious and the only thing he cared for? But if he hated it, why didn't he get rid of it, or go away and leave it?' Frodo drew the Ring out of his pocket again and looked at it. It now appeared plain and smooth, without mark or device that he could see. The gold looked very fair and pure, and Frodo thought how rich and beautiful was its colour, how perfect was its roundness. It was an admirable thing and altogether precious.  Now, we don't even have the &quot;he heard it&quot; excuse - he didn't discuss the Ring with Bilbo at any time previous! The third quote can be exlained by the fact that her - by then - heard Gandalf use the word when discussing Gollum... BUT the first two quotes definitely happened before he heard that word from Gandalf.   Not only that, but we have other characters use the word as well:  Tom Bombadil:  'Show me the precious Ring!' he said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom.   ... and Isildur, as related in his scroll (recited by Gandalf)  But for my part I will risk no hurt to this thing: of all the works of Sauron the only fair. It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain.   ... and while at it, let's throw in an Istari (Saruman):  'He came and laid his long hand on my arm. &quot;And why not, Gandalf?&quot; he whispered. &quot;Why not? The Ruling Ring? If we could command that, then the Power would pass to us. That is in truth why I brought you here. For I have many eyes in my service, and I believe that you know where this precious thing now lies.'
Many of the Ringbearers (particularly those who carried it longer) used the word "precious" to describe it. Isildur described it as:     "But for my part I will risk no hurt to this thing: of all the works of Sauron the only fair. It is precious to me, though I buy it with great pain."   Bilbo himself used it at least once, when arguing with Gandalf about leaving it behind when he was leaving Bag End (this exchange and the lines were different in the movie, but the word is still there):     "Well, if you want my ring yourself, say so!" cried Bilbo. "But you won’t get it. I won’t give my precious away, I tell you."   And Gollum used it incredibly frequently, almost as if it was the ring's name. It was even his last words:     "Precious, precious, precious!" Gollum cried. "My Precious! O my Precious!"   So my question: Why "Precious"? It wasn't part of the inscription. It wasn't part of the poem that included the inscription. Was it somehow part of Sauron's crafting spell? Did Tolkien ever indicate why the Ringbearers would use that word in particular, other than that it sounded good?
Analogy: "as if" vs. "as though" This is something that confuses me from time to time. When making an analogy in literature, is it better to use the phrase "as if" or "as though", or is it completely a style thing?  E.g.      She looked frazzled, as if she had just gotten off of a roller coaster.   or     She looked frazzled, as though she had just gotten off of a roller coaster. When a ball is tossed straight up, does it experience momentary equilibrium at top of its path? This question has been asked many times all over the Internet and answers can be found on places such as yahoo and ask.com, but I'm not satisfied with those answers and I don't trust the validity of those places.  This seems like a more appropriate place to ask.  So, here's my train of thought and I would like to ask you if you think I'm right or wrong.  Even though most of the answers point to the fact that the ball does not achieve equilibrium because the force of gravity is constantly acting upon it, thus causing an acceleration, I still think there's a moment of equilibrium and here's why:  When the ball is traveling up, it's accelerating towards the ground and eventually reaches a point at which its speed reaches 0.  At this moment, isn't the reason the speed is 0 is due to the fact that net force is 0?  The force that made the ball travel in the upward direction was canceled out by the gravitational force.  So, the sum of forces at that brief moment is equal to 0, otherwise the ball would be moving.  I don't think gravity is the only force acting on the ball at that moment, since the throwing force was acting on it as well, until both canceled each other out for that brief moment.  Am I right or wrong? I have been reading about depth-of-field and presume to have a sufficient understanding of what it means and how it is related to lens properties, lens aperture, focal length, sensor format size and probably even print dimensions in case the picture is being printed. I do have a question about how/if depth-of-field depends on the dimension of a pixel. Let me elaborate:  Given two sensors with differing pixel sizes: x and 4x, the latter sensor integrates more light per-pixel than the former, however, it might have a lower resolution if the sensor dimensions remain fixed. Theory suggests that the depth of field is determined by those circles-of-confusion which are very close to being an in-focus point, and this perhaps also means that these very small CoCs fall within the integration area of the same pixel. Now when a CoC becomes larger than a pixel (like also in the case of diffraction blur), there is some spreading of intensities among neighboring pixels and this would clearly lead to blur. However, if one was using the 4X sized pixel, even with a slightly larger CoC, the intensity would still integrate into the same pixel area, and would thus perhaps be in-focus? Is this the right assumption? And if so, is there any analysis of pixel-area dependence of depth-of-field? Moreover, depth-of-field is in some sense independent of the integration medium as it clearly occurs in analog film devices as well, so is there a trade-off or a difference in depth-of-field between film and digital cameras?  Please point me to the correct references for this question. Please correct me if there seems to be a fundamental issue with the assumptions made above. A girl who transcends time I remember quite a bit, but can't seem to find the title or (female) author.   A girl accompanies her father as he captains a mission to travel at near-light speed in order to experience the effects of time dilation and return to Earth 100 years into its future. She leaves behind her boyfriend (Tal or Tel or something), who promises he'll find a way to stay with her despite the time travel that will render him, well, dead before her return. She's accompanied by a close friend who is deaf but lip-reads and speaks so well as to occasionally fool others into believing she is hearing. They spend a lot of time in the ship's garden. I believe he ends up either getting on a different ship to survive into the future via time dilation, or else having himself frozen. Either way, if I recall correctly, Earth isn't doing well at all by the time the mission with the girl returns. There's been a war or some other disaster. There's an extended period of vague, ambiguous, existential crap in which the girl (now a woman) eventually ends up transferring her consciousness into her own daughter, presumably in order to go on living. Everything wraps up somehow and the girl and her boyfriend walk together hand in hand on a desolate planet into the sunset near the end of time.   It was all really rather trashy and silly, I remember, and took itself entirely way too seriously, but I'd like to at least know what it was so I could read it again. Either it'll be worth a laugh, or it'll turn out to be surprisingly good. Book about a boy who travels to a parallel universe to get a book Installing AMD & Intel dual graphics I'm going to install 64 bit 14.04 on a new machine with something like 1 to maybe 128GB RAM and even more RAM later. How much space should I allocate to the swap partition?   And especially: WHY those recommendations for these numbers?    (None of the existing answers  and  explain any of the why and are a bit dated if we look at 1GB or RAM and up) How to prove that the only subgroup of the symmetric group $S_n$ of order $n!/2$ is $A_n$?  Why isn't there other possibility?  Thanks :) Create a local texmf tree in MiKTeX Reading from text file until EOF repeats last line Is this notification that keeps coming up on my phone a virus? This notification keeps coming up, and i'm not sure if it's real or a virus, or how to stop it coming up. It says 'Android system warning! Google has found serious bugs in your Battery Module!Click on [OK] to view details.'   Screenshot (click for larger variant)  Any help appreciated, thanks. Lauren. To what extent are child actors exposed to the violent aspects of the movie they perform in? Should you use "who" or "that" when talking about multiple people doing something? Which of the following is correct?        There were 10 people that went to the store.   There were 10 people who went to the store.      Edit:  Which of the following is correct?        There were 10 people that had brown hair.   There were 10 people who had brown hair. Yes, I know the topic has been discussed before. I know that Meta already has threads that complain about how flagging doesn't work. I wanted to give a practical example.  Today, a  came in to the  chat and asked the :  Hey guys, as soon as I embed javascript, all my html elements are gone. Even if the script is empty!? ...Can anyone help out? The example is really minimalistic &lt;script type='text/javascript' src=&quot;http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.3/jquery.min.js&quot;/&gt; &lt;script type='text/javascript' src=&quot;script.js&quot;/&gt; These lines make everything vanish. script.js is empty! I use google chrome and the file is on localhost  Some context:  The JS room encourages people to come and ask questions that are too small/badly put for main. The room encourages people to just ask questions rather than ask to ask. In fact we even have a bot that prompts users to just ask if they have a question whenever they join. The above user has a good Q to A ratio having 1K rep in the main site and over 80 answers. The user has no negative context in the chat. No previous offenses or anything like that.  That message got 7 flags  Had a mod (ThiefMaster) not been present and invalidated those flags in time that user would have probably been suspended from the chat. This is bad, it sends the wrong message and it is very rude. Now, some other rooms don't allow people to just come and ask questions right away so maybe users from other rooms validated the flag. Maybe users thought he was being rude? I don't know. I do know that we don't want this sort of negative atmosphere in the JS room (and I'm sure other useful rooms such as PHP don't want it either), we have enough on our hands trying to maintain a community while helping people joining and handing with vamps/trolls. Possible solutions:  Drop spam/offensive flags altogether. Make spam/offensive flags room specific for big enough (tm) rooms. Give room owners just the ability to invalidate spam/offensive flags. How to manage a redirect request after a jQuery Ajax call I'm using $.post() to call a servlet using Ajax and then using the resulting HTML fragment to replace a div element in the user's current page. However, if the session times out, the server sends a redirect directive to send the user to the login page. In this case, jQuery is replacing the div element with the contents of the login page, forcing the user's eyes to witness a rare scene indeed.   How can I manage a redirect directive from an Ajax call with jQuery 1.2.6? Residuals correlated positively with response variable strongly in linear regression What does // mean in a path? I was working in my terminal, when I misspelled while cd to root (/). Accidentally, I typed // and I got in terminal:  root@weblocalhost://#   When i type pwd, i get response // but when I type ls -s i got same list as in / directory.  When you type more than 2, i.e. /// you get:  root@weblocalhost:/#   Always 1 / except for 2. Is there any difference and what is // for? What does the dot mean On my reelbox (running Ubuntu) I have found a file in /etc/init that contains the following  # frontpanel-pre - check for frontpanel CAPs and adjust time #  description     "check frontpanel caps"  #start on starting mountall #start on tty-device-added DEVNAME=/dev/ttyS0  task  script         (         /sbin/dev_frontpanel.sh         /sbin/reelfpctl -capability         ) &gt; /dev/.frontpanel.caps         initctl emit --no-wait frontpanel-linked end script   I wonder if the dot in /dev/.frontpanel has some special meaning in linux  I thought the output of the commands in the brackets will be written to a file called ".frontpanel.caps" in /dev/ but there is no such file. In /dev/ there is a frontpanel which is a link to /dev/ttyS0  Could it be, that e.g. echo something &gt; /dev/.frontpanel.caps actually sends data (something in this case) to /dev/frontpanel ?  What does .caps do then? Prove that the product of a non-zero rational and irrational number is irrational. System freezes completely with Intel Bay Trail