During the '60s and '70s there was a series of Sci-Fi short story collection anthologies. One story was particularly interesting and I am wondering if the story relates to any other, longer, ones. This story started off by describing the oriental game of Go. This was being played out on a galactic scale. Just who was grabbing up planetary systems was not mentioned, but humans were involved. A military expedition lands and explores a planet. One group falls into a gigantic &quot;amoeba&quot;. It digests their useless body parts, except for their brains and additional bits and pieces that can help the thing survive. Later, two of the expeditions' &quot;brains&quot; utilize the thing's abilities to eliminate the other (militaristic) brains, so that they can go and live in the wilderness. Was there any follow up story?
I think this story dates from the 1950s, plus or minus a decade - I read it about 30-35 years ago in a (then) fairly old story collection. It involves explorers on a planet falling into a gelatinous object that dissolves most of their bodies except for their brains and nervous systems. About four of them fall in to the same creature, and they discover that by thinking about it they can grow limbs and other body parts. At first they try to fight each other, by growing arms so they can hit each other's brains - and one of them realises that growing a skull would be a good idea - but later they agree to grow legs and move the creature around co-operatively. I would love to identify this story.
I just spilt coffee on my laptop, what should I do? Am wondering if somewhere there is a list of industry "minimums" for browser support. My company release two "portals" over the past 6 months and did very little to support IE8 users, who at this time, according to my G Analytics makes up about 14% of all IE visitors. Amazingly enough IE7 is 25%...  Figured support for IE7 was out the window already, but figured 14% was significant enough to warrant some support.  Any arguments to support my side of wanting to support IE8?  Any arguments to NOT support IE8? What exactly is a distribution? I know very little of Probability and Statistics, and am wishing to learn.  I see the word "distribution" used all over the place in different contexts.  For example, a discrete random variable has a "probability distribution."  I know what this is. A continuous random variable has a probability density function, then for $x\in\mathbb{R}$, the integral from $-\infty$ to $x$ of the probability density function is the cumulative distribution function evaluated at $x$.   And apparently just "distribution function" is synonymous with "cumulative distribution function," at least when talking about continuous random variables (question: are they always synonyms?).  Then there are many famous distributions.  $\Gamma$ distribution $\chi^2$ distribution, etc.  But what exactly is a $\Gamma$ distribution?  Is it the cumulative distribution function of a $\Gamma$ random variable?  Or the probability density function of a $\Gamma$ random variable?  But then a frequency distribution of a finite data set appears to be a histogram.  Long story short: in Probability and Statistics, what is the definition of the word "distribution"?    I know the definition of distribution in Mathematics (an element of the dual space of the collection of test functions equipped with the inductive limit topology), but not Probability and Statistics. My question is in the title. I'm a little lost in how to solve this problem. There is a hint associated with the problem that states the following:   Use a line integral to show that $ |f(z)| \leq A + |z| $ where A = $\max\{1, |f(0)|\}$  Thanks for the help. The stress tensor can be written as: $$\sigma_{ij}=-p \delta_{ij}+\sigma'_{ij}\label{1}\tag{1}$$ where $\sigma_{ij}'$ is called the extra stress tensor.   From what I understand pressure is pressure is force per unit area, so that the force acting on the surface $d\vec A$ is given by:  $$\vec F=-p d\vec A\label{2}\tag{2}$$ (This has the effect that the force on an infinitesimally thin surface due to a continuous pressure is zero). However, $\sigma_{ij}$ represent the force in the $i$ direction on a surface with normal in the $\hat e_j$ direction. So the force acting on a surface $d \vec A$ must be: $$F_i=\sigma_{ij}dA_j\label{3}\tag{3}$$ Equations (2) and (3) clearly do not agree (even if we look soley at the force in the $d\vec A$ direction they don't agree). So my question is what is the exact meaning of pressure in expression (1) and why do we not have: $$\sigma_{ii}=-p$$ Calculate Euler equations of fluid dynamics without division? I'm working on the calculation of the  with the . Unfortunately I'm not allowed to do a division. So I'm wondering if there's a form which does not need a division.  At the moment the Euler equations look like this:  $$ \frac{\partial}{\partial t} \begin{pmatrix} \rho \\ \rho v_1 \\ \rho v_2 \\ \rho v_3 \\ \rho E \end{pmatrix} = -\mathrm{div} \begin{pmatrix} \rho v_1 &amp; \rho v_2 &amp; \rho v_3 \\  \rho v_1^2 + p &amp; \rho v_1 v_2 &amp; \rho v_1 v_3 \\  \rho v_2 v_1 &amp; \rho v_2^2 + p &amp; \rho v_2 v_3 \\  \rho v_3 v_1 &amp; \rho v_3 v_2 &amp; \rho v_3^2 + p \\  (\rho E + p) v_1 &amp; (\rho E + p) v_2 &amp; (\rho E + p) v_3 \end{pmatrix} $$  As you can see, I first need to calculate $\frac{\rho v_1}{\rho}$ to get $v_1$ so I can calculate e.g. $\rho v_1^2$ I want to use the "BackSpace" button as a shortcut key on nautilus. I want to return to the previous folder whilst browsing the Home folder, just like windows 7.   Also I want the same thing while using Firefox, In a way that when I press the shortcut key I will return to the previous web page. I'm having a hard time finding the solution of the following equation:  $$0 = x\cos(x)+2$$  This is part of showing that $f(x):= x^2e^{\sin(x)}$ has 3 extremas in $[-\frac{\pi}{2},\frac{\pi}{2}]$. How do I install minecraft 1.9 on mac? What is this shell/Bash syntax: someVariable=someValue someCommand Is it possible to add an email just below the authors in this code?  \documentclass[11pt,oneside,a4paper]{article} \usepackage{hyperref}   \title{Hello} \author{User1 \and User2}    \begin{document} \maketitle  \section{Introduction} A1 \section{Literature Review} A2  \section{Conclusion} A2  \end{document} First Order Time-Variant System : Picard Method I looking at a time variant first order system. I am trying to prove that a sequence of functions $x^{[k]}(t)$ generated using Picard iterations converges uniformly on some interval $[0,T]$.  Given:  $\dot{x}(t)=A(t)x(t)$ where $x(0)=x_0$  $x(t)=x∈R^n$ where $A(t)$ is a $n×n$ matrix  Assume there exists $M$ such that $||A(t)||\le M$ for all $t\ge 0$ and that $A(t)$ is a piecewise continuous function. Show that, for any $T &gt; 0$, a solution exists in the interval $[0,T]$.  I know that $x(t)=x_0+\int^t_0A(τ)x(τ) dτ$ must be satisfied if the solution does indeed exist.  I am supposed to use Picard iterations to prove this, which I am not familiar with yet. But I know that they are of the form: $x^{[k+1]}=x_0+\int^t_0A(τ)x^{[k]}(τ) dτ$. Where $x^{[0]}(t)=x_0$  Can I use the standard Picard proof to prove this or do I need to start somewhere else?  I was also asked to show that this method satisfies  $|x^{[k+1]}(t)-x^{[k]}(t)|\le |x_0| $$\frac{π^{k+1}(t)}{(k+1)!}$ where $π(t)=\int^t_0||A(τ)||dτ$.  I have no idea where to start with this, but hopefully it will become clearer once I finish the first part. Lisp Executable I've just started learning Lisp and I can't figure out how to compile and link lisp code to an executable.  I'm using clisp and clisp -c produces two files:   .fas .lib   What do I do next to get an executable? I typed up an assignment with a lot of numbers in LaTeX and turned it in to my adviser.  When he returned it to me with some corrections, one of which was a lot of $ around my numbers.  I understand that $ are necessary around some mathematical formulas, but I was just using numbers like -2 and 4.  I did not see any change in the font of the numbers when I added the $ either.  Since my adviser did not want to give me an explanation, what is the rationale? Bohr's model of an atom doesn't seem to have overcome the drawback of Rutherford's model I understand the idea of a focal length for a single lens, i e the distance from the lens to the point at which parallel rays of light converge. However, in the case of a photographic lens with multiple lens elements, where exactly is the focal length of the lens as a whole measured from? Something very odd is happening here.   I have a query that looks like this.  SELECT CAST(FT.DOP AS SMALLINT) FROM TRACKING_DATA WHERE date &gt; @mydate and identifier = 0000000000   When run as a raw query it returns data just fine.  When i place it in a stored procedure that alters the where clause it throws this error.  Msg 244, Level 16, State 2, Procedure myprocedure, Line 107 [Batch Start Line 2] The conversion of the varchar value '58629' overflowed an INT2 column. Use a larger integer column.   So here is the oddity. I go through all the possible data for that where clause with a query like this.  SELECT DISTINCT DOP FROM TRACKING_DATA where identifier = 000000000000   and  SELECT DISTINCT CAST(DOP AS smallint) FROM TRACKING_DATA where identifier = 000000000000   And this is what i get back.  17 12 9 19 8 14 6 16 11 13 7 10 0 18 5 15 4   Nowhere does it have anything remotely too large for a SMALLINT. So i thought, ok maybe its a non-printable ASCII character. But i can't find any.  I'm a little perplexed at the moment. It runs find as a raw query, explodes as a procedure and all possible data based on the where is valid. My only suspicion is that the query plan is doing something odd with filtering or maybe runs with different validation when run as a procedure. If every element of set A ia an element of set B then we say that A is subset of B. A is said to be proper subset if A does not equal B.  My question is - whether the symbol we use to show subset is  same as that for proper subset? I have seen that A is subset of A itself is shown by the same symbol as that for the subset while when we write improper subset, we usually write equal to sign with symbol of subset. So, please help me to know this. How to Implement Page Object and Page Factory Pattern in Selenium Webdriver? What does 'Ign' , `Get` or 'Hit' mean when running an apt-get update? I had a bunch of errors in the output of sudo apt-get update:  duplicate entries and 404 not found errors.  Figured those out, I hope: I removed PPAs that didn't have any packages associated with them, then I removed out a duplicate entry in /etc/apt/sources.list.  It seems I have royally buggered it up.  Now most of the lines say Ign when I do sudo apt-get update.  How do I go about straightening out what I have screwed up?  I need to get rid of these Igns that are all over the place.  There are about 50% (eyeball guess) Igns!