I am trying to remember the name of a tale or novel by Isaac Asimov. I am positive I've read this some years ago, but for the life of me, I can't recall the name.  In the story, one of the characters, some kind of diplomat, speaks profusely. Only after recording and analysing his speech, the main character(s) come to the conclusion that there is no actual information to all his verbosity. He was a master at speaking without actually saying a thing.
I'm looking for a book that starts with the premise that (once the population size had exceeded a certain number) the future development of mankind (revolutions and wars in so and so many years, colonization of other planets in so and so many years, and so on) could be predicted completely by applied statistics. (IIRC, they used slide rules for those exact predictions, but that is certainly owed to the time the story was written). Next, the predictability was used to take a few tiny measures that would change mankind's fate in a favourable way. After a long time, the predictive system fails(?) because a mutation occurs in some person(s).  And now is the part where I'm not sure if it belongs to this or another story: The mutation results in the ability to "beam" by thinking of a place where one has been before...
Are all integers fractions? Are real guns used in movies? How do you make clothes move along with model how do you make clothes move along with your model? Do you rig the model first and then parent it to the body of the character then click cloth simulation? I am a little bit confused with the process. Thanks for the help. Why is the root directory denoted by a / sign? I have done some research about this on Google, but the results were cloudy. Why is the / sign used to denote the root directory. Are there any solid reasons behind it? Let $F : X → X$ be continuous. Prove that the set $\{x ∈ X : F(x) = x\}$ of fixed points of F is closed in X Here X is a Hausdorff Space.  I know that singleton sets, {x}, are closed in a Hausdorff space. Although Im not sure if thats how to use the Hausdorff property.   Should I investigate $h=F(x)-x$?  Can anyone give a hint How does langid field in biblatex differ from language field? Could someone summarise the differences in the use of the langid field from language field in biblatex? Documentation to Gost package for bibtex says that langid is a synonym of language but has priority over it. What contributes to expanded company details being displayed in Google search results? For some results returned in Google Search, on the right side it displays the company details, logo, contact numbers, etc...   For example, see the following screenshot:    I'd like to know what contributes to this so that I can try to achieve it for my site too. I only get four video output options What is the variance of the weighted mixture of two gaussians? Say I have two normal distributions A and B with means $\mu_A$ and $\mu_B$ and variances $\sigma_A$ and $\sigma_B$. I want to take a weighted mixture of these two distributions using weights $p$ and $q$ where $0\le p \le 1$ and $q = 1-p$. I know that the mean of this mixture would be $\mu_{AB} = (p\times\mu_A) + (q\times\mu_B)$.  What would the variance be?    A concrete example would be if I knew the parameters for the distribution of male and female height. If I had a room of people that was 60% male, I could produce the expected mean height for the whole room, but what about the variance? How can I update youtube-dl? How to access the Index Of A Generic.List By Reflection? ok, ive a class and i pass an object as property.  the object that i pass is a List&lt;X&gt;  in my class im trying to access the Object index by reflection BUT I CAN'T!!!   Example:  this class works i just wrote down the part i want to show you and i need help.  class MyClass {     private object _recordSet;     public object RecordSet     {         get { return _recordSet; }         set { _recordSet = value; }     }      public string Draw()     {         system.reflection.Assembly asem = system.reflection.Assembly.getAssembly(_dataSource.GetType());          object instance;          instance = asem.CreateInstance(_dataSource.GetType().UnderlyingSystemType.FullName);          //to access de Count of my List         int recordcount = int.Parse(_dataSource.GetType().GetProperty("Count").GetValue(_dataSource,null));          //i need to do a          for(int cont = 0; cont &lt; recordCount; cont++)         {             _dataSource[cont].Name; // &lt;-- THIS PART IS NOT WORKING!!! because i cant access the Index Directly.... WHAT TO DO!! ???         }     } } I don't really know how to anticipate the changes in an option's price.  If I have an call set to expire the following Friday at $10 above the current share price, I know in the absence of other changes it loses value with each day that passes getting closer to its expiration. (Talking about American options.) But it gains value as the share price gets closer to the strike price.  So, if two days pass but the stock goes up $3, would the option have gained value or lost value? Is there any way to calculate this? Rotate single PDF page when viewing I got a Latex document which renders fine, some content is rotated using the turn environment from the rotate package. Everything works like it should.  Except: It know that it is possible to display a single page in a pdf in another orientation. The document viewer then rotates this page when viewing. This would help the readers of my document to read the turned text.   How is this possible? Perhaps somehow using the pdfpageattr command?   Again: I do not to want to rotate the content, I just want to tell the PDF-Reader that it should rotate the page when displaying. Can I run CAT5/6 cables parallel to electrical cables? TestMethod do not support Web service callouts, test skipped I have written a test class for a trigger on the lead object.  When i run the test class i get the following error:  Methods defined as TestMethod do not support Web service callouts, test skipped  There is an other trigger on lead that has a call to a webservice so i get this error.  I have wrapped the call with:  if (!Test.isRunningTest()) {    // do callout }   But i’m still getting the same error.  Any other way to run correctly the test class?  Thank you in advantage. Editing Photoshop (PSD) files on Ubuntu? I was wondering that is it possible to edit PSD files on Ubuntu (like with Gimp). Actually, I need to edit layers. I haven't managed to do it. It would be nice if there is a chance! :) Proving $\int_0^1 \frac{(\ln(x))^5}{1+x} \mathrm{d}x = -\frac{31\pi^6}{252}$ I would like to show the following identity:     $$\boxed{ I :=  \int_0^1 \dfrac{(\ln(x))^5}{1+x} \mathrm{d}x = -\dfrac{31\pi^6}{252} }$$     Here is what I tried. The change of variables $u=1/x$ yields $$I= \int_1^{\infty} \dfrac{(\ln(x))^5}{1+1/u} \dfrac{1}{u^2} \mathrm{d}u = \int_1^{\infty} \dfrac{(\ln(x))^5}{u^2+u} \mathrm{d}u$$ Then $z=u-1$ gives $$I = \int_{0}^{\infty} \dfrac{(\ln(z+1))^5}{z^2+3z+2} \mathrm{d}z $$ with $z^2+3z+2=(z+1)(z+2)$. I wanted to use contour integration like , but I was not sure how to proceed in this case. Anyway, the computations of the residues (of which "well-chosen" function? Maybe something like ?) seem to be difficult.  I believe that we can generalize to $\frac{(\ln(x))^n}{1+x}$, or maybe even more (e.g. $\frac{(\ln(x))^n}{ax^2+bx+c}$). Related computations are: , , , .  Thank you for your detailed help. Find the limit of $\sum\limits_{k=1}^n\left(\sqrt{1+\frac{k}{n^2}}-1\right)$ I'm having trouble with the OpenLayers Plugin of Qgis and the map composer:  If I create an OSM-background layer and if I want to export this, the OSM-Layer looks perfectly all right in the normal qgis program window. But in the map composer and after export the layer has shifted relatively to my other shape layers (EPSG:32633 - WGS 84 / UTM zone 33N).  The second thing is that the output resolution of the exported osm-layer is very, very poor.   A really bad way of getting around this whole trouble would be to increase the screen resolution and make a screenshot of the map composition window of qgis. But I don't think this would be very professional. It also would cause a lot of pain :)   I'm using Qgis 1.8.0-Lisboa under Linux. The openlayers plugin is version 0.92. How to Create Bootable Windows 10 image in Debian? Pseudocode but originally developed for Windows 7 iso file but applied for Windows 8 in the thread  but it does not work with Windows 10 iso  # https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/customizing-a-windows-7-install-iso/ # https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/312477/16920 $ dd if=../en_windows_10_x64_dvd.iso \     of=boot.img bs=2048 count=8 skip=734  $ mkisofs -o ../new-win.iso -b boot.img -no-emul-boot -c BOOT.CAT \     -iso-level 2 -udf \     -J -l -D -N -joliet-long -relaxed-filenames .   Unsuccessful output when run on Windows 10 image  dd if=/home/masi/Downloads/en_windows_10_multiple_editions_version_1511_x64_dvd.iso of=/home/masi/Downloads/boot.img bs=2048 count=8 skip=734 8+0 records in 8+0 records out 16384 bytes (16 kB) copied, 0.000392973 s, 41.7 MB/s    Some of the following fields have changed for the iso file used in dd   bs=2048 count=8  skip=734   How can you study which field values you can use for Windows 10 iso?  OS: Debian 8.5 64 bit Hardware: Asus Zenbook UX303UA Linux kernel: 4.6 of backports Related threads: ,  Motivation: I need Windows 10 to use Canon P-150 duplex scanner, but when I started my Windows, I got Error 0xC0000428 because Windows update has again broken things there and I use Windows otherwise so rarely; and I have no spare Windows left to make bootable media