Silmarillion tells how Sauron made Numenoreans worship Morgoth and offer him human sacrifices.  However,  states that Sauron first created this cult before his Numenorean captivity, for Men tribes of Middle-earth he dominated. There's no citation though. Is it true? Did Sauron's Men vassals in Second Age Middle-earth have Morgoth cult as their religion, and did they perform human sacrifices? Or did they worship Sauron himself as a god?  Also, are there any indications that this practice had survived until War of the Ring?
Watching The Lord of the Rings movies I was really captivated by the   elephant riders and the men in brazen scale armor who aided the orcs   against the forces of Gondor and Rohan. From what I know they are from   the cultures that worship Sauron. I'd like to know what Tolkien wrote   about them, their religion, their way of life, and so on.   From
How can I add a newline in the text of a label in WPF such as the following?  &lt;Label&gt;Lorem    ipsum&lt;/Label&gt; Do singularities have a "real" as opposed to mathematical or idealized existence? I was thinking of, for example a Schwarzchild metric at r=0, i.e. the gravitational singularity, a point of infinite density. I realise that there are different types of singularities--timelike, spacelike, co-ordinate singularities etc. In a short discussion with Lubos, I was a bit surprised when I assumed they are idealized and I believe he feels they exist. I am not a string theorist, so am not familiar with how singularities are dealt with in it.  In GR, I know the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems, but I also know that Hawking has introduced his no-boundary, imaginary time model for the Big Bang, eliminating the need for that singularity. Are cosmic strings and other topological defects singularities or approximations of them (if they exist).  In what sense does a singularity exist in our universe? --as a real entity, as a mathematical or asymptotic idealization, as a pathology in equations to be renormalized or otherwise ignored, as not real as in LQG, or as real in Max Tegmark's over-the-top "all mathematical structures are real"? Since I updated the system to 10.11.5, the Facebook message notification is not showing message text.   Is this a bug in this software upgrade of OSX? L1 regression estimates median whereas L2 regression estimates mean? Is it ok to put old papers on the arXiv? In my field (I am a condensed-matter theoretical physicist) it is such a normal thing to put papers on the arXiv, that people sometimes look at other people's arXiv list of papers instead of their publication record to get to know what they do, etc.  It just so happens that a few years ago I did a PhD with a supervisor that does not like the arXiv that much (he apparently had some conflict with some authors of a paper that was very similar to one of his papers, but one was already published while the other was just an arXiv preprint -or something like that). As a result, from my list of less than 20 publications, there are four of them from my PhD that are missing on the arXiv.  I was thinking of submitting the latest versions I have of them as arXiv preprints now, four years after their publication. For this I already have the agreement of all co-authors (including my supervisor), and all the journals involved seem to allow to put preprints of the material they publish. Do you see any problem with this? I fear that some people might take it as a way to advertise as new something that was already published a long time ago (though I would of course give the full reference to the published version). There may be other issues I am not aware of. The reason why I would like to do this is that I am applying for fellowships, positions, etc. and I am afraid some of my (best) publications may go unnoticed if somebody looks me up on the arXiv.  Thank you, Stephen Proving $1-\exp(-4x^2/ \pi) \ge \text{erf}(x)^2$ Changing unusual foreign currencies in London I've just returned from several unusual countries in Asia, and annoyingly despite being told I'd have no problem, I'm unable to find anyone in London to change back to pounds.  I've tried Travelex in Heathrow, a currency exchange place, and the post office.  The currencies include cash from: Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.  Most of the responses when shown the money is to the tone of "What the hell currency is this?" which doesn't fill me with confidence.  Any suggestions welcomed for places that may change this. Otherwise I may need to go back next year ;) I have the following ammeter:   The seller recommends 75mV 100A shunt be placed with it. I want to know what will happen if I change the voltage going through the shunt. Should I be changing the shunt as well to read amps correctly?   I want to build a 1-40V (or maybe 50V) adjustable DC power supply and use this ammeter to measure current. What the right value of shunt that I should use to get the right measurement? Changing shunts in a lab bench power supply is impractical, of course.  EDIT: I am planning to measure only up to 5A or so. Sorry I forgot to mention this previously. Rigorous proof that surjectivity implies injectivity for finite sets vertical align middle in How do you access the matched groups in a JavaScript regular expression? I want to match a portion of a string using a  and then access that parenthesized substring:  var myString = "something format_abc"; // I want "abc"  var arr = /(?:^|\s)format_(.*?)(?:\s|$)/.exec(myString);  console.log(arr);     // Prints: [" format_abc", "abc"] .. so far so good. console.log(arr[1]);  // Prints: undefined  (???) console.log(arr[0]);  // Prints: format_undefined (!!!)   What am I doing wrong?    I've discovered that there was nothing wrong with the regular expression code above: the actual string which I was testing against was this:  "date format_%A"   Reporting that "%A" is undefined seems a very strange behaviour, but it is not directly related to this question, so I've opened a new one, .    The issue was that console.log takes its parameters like a printf statement, and since the string I was logging ("%A") had a special value, it was trying to find the value of the next parameter. NullPointerException accessing views in onCreate() My father wrote some papers on cosmology that remained unpublished at the time of his death.  I have been looking for a publisher for them. I contacted IOP publishing but they said that, while Dad’s writings were interesting, they were not ready for publishing in any of their journals. For example, they need a reference list citing other current published research on the same topic.  I am not a scientist and have no idea how to do this. Where can I get help with this? Would something like  be a good idea? Where is the operator panel in Blender 2.8? The tutorial I read is based on 2.79. So I'm not sure if it's still the same name in 2.8. But I can't find anything providing similar functionalities. When I tried to connect my Ubuntu 13.10 to my VM Centos 6.5 using ssh appear the message "Connection refused" or "No route to host" even than I change the port, noting change.    I need to use SSH, VPN and Samba, but this IP in my VM Centos do not work.  How Can I resolve this problem? As the topic is there exist a homeomorphism between either pair of $(0, 1),(0,1],[0,1]$ A while back, I read a story in a collection, but I don't remember very much. I know that it was about some missionaries on Mars. Eventually they found a bunch of spheres that apparently have escaped sin by leaving the material world. I don't remember anything else about it. Someone told me that it was in "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury, but I checked my copy and couldn't find. I'm pretty sure that it was by Ray Bradbury though. Help would be greatly appreciated. Question: If $G$ is a finite group such that the product of its elements (each chosen only once) is always $1$, independent of the ordering in the product, what can we say about $G$?  I was trying to conclude that $G$ must be abelian (I am not sure about this). I proceed as follows: if $|G|\leq 4$, then obviously, $G$ is abelian. Suppose $|G|&gt;4$. Then consider products of all elements in the order $a^{-1}b^{-1}ab cc^{-1}dd^{-1}....$. This, being identity, implies that $a^{-1}b^{-1}ab=1$, i.e. $G$ is abelian.  BUT, the problem is in $a^{-1}b^{-1}ab$, the elements $a$ and $a^{-1}$ should be distinct, and similarly for $b$. Otherwise, the product $a^{-1}b^{-1}ab cc^{-1}dd^{-1}....$ is not in the prescribed form as in question.  Also, note that the cyclic group of order $4$ doesn't satisfy that $abcd=1$ where $\{a,b,c,d\}\cong \mathbb{Z}_4$. How can I `alias sudo !!`? Why is saltatory conduction in myelinated axons faster than continuous conduction in unmyelinated axons? How does spacing apart sodium and potassium channels allow the action potential to travel faster down the axon? This is the reason always cited for saltatory conduction and myelination, but my mental model of conduction tells me that the density of ion gates along the axon should not affect the speed of the AP.   To illustrate, consider a myelinated axon. A wave of Na$^+$ from action potential site 1, a node of Ranvier, rushes into and quickly diffuses down the axon. (It travels in both directions, but backwards is still in the refractory period.) It diffuses through the myelinated region, its concentration always diminishing. Before it attenuates too much, however, it happens upon node of Ranvier 2, where it triggers another action potential. A new wave of Na$^+$ rushes in and the cycle repeats. This should be plain so far.  Now imagine that there is actually a node of Ranvier halfway between node 1 and 2, called node 1.5. The wave of Na$^+$, on its way to node 2, happens to trigger an action potential at node 1.5, from which a wave of Na$^+$ pours in and either boosts the original wave or replaces it by taking its momentum. Now the reinforced wave proceeds to node 2 and triggers it just as soon as, perhaps even sooner than, if node 1.5 had not existed. Repeatedly insert nodes at higher densities until the situation is simply lack of myelination, and we conclude that unmyelinated axons can transmit an action-potential-triggering wave of Na+ as fast as or faster than a myelinated one.  In short, my point of confusion is this: I cannot see how a higher density of gated channels can possibly slow down the wavefront of Na+ that triggers action potentials. If anything, the additional influxes of Na+ should speed up the all-important wavefront, assuming that new waves really "either boost the original wave or replace it by taking its momentum", and also assuming that the wavefront of Na$^+$ is really all-important for signal transmission, and also assuming that the mere presence of (voltage?) gated ion channels in the membrane does not significantly retard the wavefront.  But the usual explanation for why saltatory conduction is faster than continuous conduction (a fact I hope is empirically and unambiguously established) relies on the putative slowing effect of ion channels on the signal fore. Please explain this effect in more detail, if it is not a misconception.