If they're immortal beings wouldn't their population keep increasing and increasing if they could procreate?
This is inspired by some discussions in .  In the Harry Potter universe, how are Dementors born?  Or are they artificially created by some magical means?
Nullable type issue with ?: Conditional Operator What is the most preferred and easiest way to do pagination in ASP.NET MVC?  I.e. what is the easiest way to break up a list into several browsable pages.  As an example lets say I get a list of elements from a database/gateway/repository like this:  public ActionResult ListMyItems() {     List&lt;Item&gt; list = ItemDB.GetListOfItems();     ViewData["ItemList"] = list;      return View(); }   For simplicity's sake I'd like to specify just a page number for my action as parameter. Like this:  public ActionResult ListMyItems(int page) {    //... } Convert Shapefiles to GeoJSON? I'm trying to convert Shapefiles from the  website into a GeoJSON file for use with Google Maps API. I'm using QGIS to facilitate but I can't get the projection/coordinates right. So far I've tried Google Mercator (EPSG:900913) and WGS 84 (EPSG:4326) with no luck. I'm using the OpenLayers to verify results and it keeps placing Texas near the  Gulf of Guinea (0 lat, 0 lng). Why the galaxies form 2D planes (or spiral-like) instead of 3D balls (or spherical-like)? Question: As we know, (1) the macroscopic spatial dimension of our universe is 3 dimension, and (2) gravity attracts massive objects together and the gravitational force is isotropic without directional preferences. Why do we have the spiral 2D plane-like Galaxy(galaxies), instead of spherical or elliptic-like galaxies?   Input: Gravity is (at least, seems to be) isotropic from its force law (Newtonian gravity). It should show no directional preferences from the form of force vector $\vec{F}=\frac{GM(r_1)m(r_2)}{(\vec{r_1}-\vec{r_2})^2} \hat{r_{12}}$. The Einstein gravity also does not show directional dependence at least microscopically.  If the gravity attracts massive objects together isotropically, and the macroscopic space dimension is 3-dimensional, it seems to be natural to have a spherical shape of massive objects gather together. Such as the globular clusters, or GC, are roughly spherical groupings , as shown in the Wiki picture:     However, my impression is that, even if we have observed some more spherical or more-ball-like , it is more common to find more-planar  such as our ? (Is this statement correct? Let me know if I am wrong.)  Also, such have a look at this more-planar Spiral "galaxy" as this NGC 4414 galaxy:    Is there some physics or math theory explains why the  turns out to be planar-like (or spiral-like) instead of spherical-like?  See also a   p.s. Other than the classical stability of a 2D plane perpendicular to a classical angular momentum, is there an interpretation in terms of the quantum theory of vortices in a macroscopic manner (just my personal speculation)?  Thank you for your comments/answers! Is there a Stack Exchange site for architecture? "You're too clever a man" You're too clever a man to imagine this.   The above sentence was , a man of excellent rhetorical skills.   Since he said it, I doubt it's wrong, grammatically. But, I wonder if there is an explanation for this. Because adjectives always come after the article not before it. e.g. You're a clever man.   How could this be, grammatically? What's "Another Way In"? There's a new achievement and I'm stumped as to how to get it:     Start a game without breaking the laboratory wall   I assume it has something to do with the new Gadgets but none of them sound like they'd help. How do I get this achievement? Fluent and Query Expression — Is there any benefit(s) of one over other? LINQ is one of the greatest improvements to .NET since generics and it saves me tons of time, and lines of code.  However, the fluent syntax seems to come much more natural to me than the query expression syntax.  var title = entries.Where(e =&gt; e.Approved)     .OrderBy(e =&gt; e.Rating).Select(e =&gt; e.Title)     .FirstOrDefault();  var query = (from e in entries              where e.Approved              orderby e.Rating              select e.Title).FirstOrDefault();   Is there any difference between the two or is there any particular benefit of one over other? How can I query the  for tags I've created? Orthogonal basis for infinite-dimensional vector spaces Uniform convergence on two separate intervals How do I withdraw all money from my HSA account as a non-resident? I have lived in US for 5 years, and I (still) have an HSA account with BoA. Now I am living in Europe, and there's a fat chance I'll ever go back to live in US, so I would like to withdraw the money from my HSA, pay the due taxes, of course, and just be able to use them. How exactly I go about that?  Thanks in advance. How to automatically hyphenate within \texttt? This question was phrased as a bug report for LaTeX and I thought it would be helpful to be presented here (including an answer).  The person had a lot of "common words" in typewriter font sprinkled around his text and he was surprised that this text would not automatically hyphenate and he had to manually insert \- to mark hypenation points. I'm testing an application which opens its own ports (acts as a server for these ports, hence listens at that ports) and where the same application connects to ports bound by other applications (acts as client for these ports).  I would like to get an overview as to which ports the application creates and to which applications and ports it connects to.  How can I do this? How deterministic is floating point inaccuracy? Proving the inequality $\frac{n^k}{k^k}\leq\binom{n}{k}\leq\frac{n^k}{k!}$ involving binomial coefficient. What is the best way of proving inequalities including binomial coefficients in general? Lets look at this example:     $$\frac{n^k}{k^k}\leq\binom{n}{k}\leq\frac{n^k}{k!}$$   What I started with is:  $$\binom{n}{k}\frac{1}{n^k}\leq\frac{1}{k!}$$ $$\frac{n!}{k!(n-k)!}\frac{1}{n^k}\leq\frac{1}{k!}$$ $$\frac{(n-1)!}{(n-k)!n^{k-1}}\leq1$$ This is where I got stuck. How can I prove that is is lower than or equal to 1? Could you give me a hint? Checking the way to stop duplicate names - validation rules or triggers Eclipse is giving me this error when I try to copy an object back to the Force.com server: "unable to perform synchronize check with remote server Invalid username, password, security token; or user locked out Your project may be out of sync."  This is my first try at using Eclipse, so it may not be set up right.  Can anyone help?  Thanks!  Edit: screenshot of trying to deploy: What does "Ubuntu" mean, and why did they choose that particular name? Debian 10 systemd, how to disable autostart of graphical environments I installed a graphical environment on a server and I have decided that I no longer want to run that environment at boot. How can I disable it with systemd? This is gnome desktop environment.