I have some findings (new but nothing ground-breaking) from my master thesis in the field of A which I could publish if I spent more time on the topic. However, my PhD and future specialization is going to be in B. So spending time in A and particularly trying to publish in the field may be a distraction from the B. When applying for postdocs and tenured positions, is any researcher/application assessor going to appreciate my publications from a different field?  I know one mathematician from Princeton. He comes to workshops and always solves some problem. He would never publish it (even if nobody else did) because it is a distraction from what he is doing. Then other participants write his ideas and publish it with his name as coauthors. On the other hand, my personal tutor told me that any publications are good as they demonstrate the researcher's independence and capability. Hence it seems, that unless a person is a top researcher in the field, publishing in other fields is not a distraction, but a plus.
If one obtains results in one area of a field (say during an MSc thesis) before deciding that one is not interested in making a career in that area, should one take the time (as a PhD student) to get make those results publishable, or is it better to focus on the new area?
Launch shell scripts from anywhere Is it possible to run my scripts located in ~/scripts from anywhere?  Say i want to run ./scriptname regardless of my current working directory. For users running Java application or applets in the browser, what difference does it make running either Sun Java or OpenJDK?  EDIT  Oracle will be , and basing the proprietary implementation on OpenJDK. Can we expect similar experience in running Java apps using either OpenJDK or Oracle JDK? Is there a way to have a copy of any message sent from a Gmail account sent to another address?  I've got any messages coming to my address copied to another (see  for one solution, setting up filters is another), but I haven't yet found a way to have outbound messages automatically copied.  Is there a way? integral roots for $f(x) = 41$ if $f(x) = 37$ has 5 distinct integral roots. Calendar date to yyyy-MM-dd format in java Why didn't Dumbledore show his memory of Barty Crouch Jr's confession to Cornelius Fudge to confirm his point that Voldemort returned? Wouldn't that just prevent all the mumbo-jumbo happening in the 5th book? I found the following proof arguing for the irrationality of $\sqrt{2}$.     Suppose for the sake of contradiction that $\sqrt{2}$ is rational, and choose the least integer $q &gt; 0$ such that $(\sqrt{2} - 1)q$ is a nonnegative integer. Let $q'::= (\sqrt{2} - 1)q$. Clearly $0 &lt; q' &lt; q$. But an easy computation shows that $(\sqrt{2} - 1)q'$ is a nonnegative integer, contradicting the minimality of $q$.   Clearly, this is a vague proof in that it expects the reader to work out the math involved on his own. I took that as an exercise and worked out the following:  Assuming $\sqrt{2}$ to be rational, let $$\sqrt{2} = \frac{p}{q}$$ where $p$ and $q$ are least possible integers.  Clearly then, $\sqrt{2} - 1$ would also be rational, $$\sqrt{2} - 1 = \frac{p-q}{q}$$ where both $(p-q)$ and $q$ are also integers.  Multiplying both sides by $q$, we get $$(\sqrt{2} - 1)q = (p-q) = q'$$ where $q'$ is an integer. Using, $2&gt;\sqrt{2} &gt; 1$ , we get $$1&gt;\sqrt{2}-1&gt;0$$ proving that $q'$ is a non-negative integer.  As stated in the proof, computing $(\sqrt{2}-1)q'$ we get, $$(\sqrt{2}-1)q' = \frac{(p-q)^2}{q}$$which is not necessarily an integer (in fact necessarily not an integer). However, the proof claims it to be.  Am I missing something or something is wrong with how I proceeded?  Here is a link to the textbook where I found this proof: , (p 32, problem 1.14).  P.S. This is my first post here and my first time with TeX. I'd also like to know if there is anything wrong with the way my question is presented. The energy of an electromagnetic wave The intensity of an electromagnetic wave is only related to its amplitude $E^2$ and not its frequency. A photon has the same wavelength as the wave that's carrying it, and its energy is $h  f$.   So if a laser wave is kept at the same amplitude and the wave length is reduced, why does its intensity remain the same even though its photons now carry less energy?  Why are the intensities of electromagnetic waves so different to sound waves (and other waves travelling through a medium) which are related to $f^2  E^2$? A variation on the induced topology (subspace topology) Grub not loading after Windows 8 Install Do I need Transit Visa to visit London for 4-5 hours during layover? Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers I'm having serious problems installing the Broadcom drivers for Ubuntu. It worked perfectly on my previous version, but now, it is impossible.   What are the steps to install Broadcom wireless drivers for a BCM43xx card?  I'm a user with no advance knowledge in Linux, so I would need clear explanations on how to make, compile, etc.    lspci -vnn | grep Network showed:   Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:432b]      iwconfig showed:  lo        no wireless extensions. eth0      no wireless extensions.   NOTE: Answer below is updated every time new information is added and confirmed working. Massive spam users and spam entries despite triple layer protection I know that I can create/burn bootable CD/DVD or live USB and can boot/install from it. But suppose I am currently running GNU/Linux and I've ISO file of another GNU/Linux that I want to install on my hard disk, then Can I directly boot from ISO from hard disk and try/install that GNU/Linux operating system? I'm trying to amass a list of physics books with open-source licenses, like Creative Commons, GPL, etc. The books can be about a particular field in physics or about physics  in general.  What are some freely available great physics books on the Internet? edit: I'm aware that there are tons of freely available lecture notes online. Still, it'd be nice to be able to know the best available free resources around.  As a starter:         Table of contents sorted by field (in alphabetical order): Electrostatics and tv screens How can I detect mouse events on sprites in a canvas? I'm making an HTML 5 game. I want mouse clicks on sprites drawn in a canvas element cause events that my code can react to. At the moment, I'm doing it by checking through all of my sprites in a for-loop on each click.  Is there a way to do that by adding an event listener to a sprite so it would respond just like that?  Are Javascript's custom events useful in this situation? I know it's possible with KinectJS, but I don't have any experience with it and really I'd like to learn how to do this myself without the help of a library. Where can I find free elevation data for Europe?   The available resolutions and terms of use are important details that I also seek. Is there an alternative to Cantor's cardinalities that makes proper subsets smaller than their sets? Cantor defined an infinite set as a set whose subset can be placed in a one-to-one correspondence with its subset. That is, take the set of all natural numbers: {0, 1, 2, 3, 4,...}. From that set, you can form a subset of all even numbers: {0, 2, 4, 6,...}. There is a one-to-one correspondence between both these sets. After all, you can multiply each member in the set of all natural numbers by 2, and you’ll get the set of all even numbers. Because of this one-to-one correspondence, the two sets have the same cardinality, despite the set of even numbers being a subset of the set of natural numbers. This is counter-intuitive to me. How can a subset of a set be as big as the set itself? To make the intuition more concrete, consider the set of multiples of 1,000,000: {0, 1,000,000, 2,000,000,...}. There is a one-to-one correspondence between this set and the set of all natural numbers. So they have the same cardinality. This is really counter-intuitive.  From as far as I can tell, there are basically two axioms at play here:  A1: If all members of set A can be placed in a one-to-one correspondence with all the members of set B, then both sets have the same cardinality.  A2: If set A is a proper subset of set B, then A has a smaller cardinality than set B.  How Cantor defined infinite sets is that he accepted A1 and rejected A2. That is counter-intuitive to me. But mathematicians might say that my intuition is just wrong. So my question is whether we can define infinite sets in another way, i.e. accept A2 but reject A1. That is, the set of even numbers is smaller than the set of all natural numbers, even though both sets have a one-to-one correspondence. If you think this is counter-intuitive because sets with one-to-one correspondence with each other should have the same cardinality, and thus think this is wrong, why can’t I say the same when Cantor accepted A1 and rejected A2? Either way, there is something counter-intuitive and paradoxical.   So, my questions are:   Can we accept A2 and reject A1 for the definition of an infinite set? What arguments, if any, are given for accepting A1 and rejecting A2? Proving an integral equation.