Today a  in English language learners concerning tenses in a short sentence with multiple verbs. Basically it was, which is correct?   I thought you wrote poetry. I thought you write poetry.   My answer (in summary) was that #2 sounded better. Some did not like the answer, thinking the usage to be ungrammatical. We even had a friendly chat about it. Lambie and Gustavson did their best to convince me. I ended up saying that the only basis I could fully agree with them is if tense agreement were grammatically required.  I'm not asking for up-votes (go down-vote the answer, and even this question, if you want), but I chose to escalate the question to the PhD and expert folks here to see if that grammatical requirement actually exists.  Lambie's final comment  was:     OK, call it agreement, that's fine. "I'm thinking I will buy some chicken." She was thinking she would buy some chicken. ...   People had to leave before I saw a difference and could comment on it. In his final example, the chicken buying was a single act. It happened yesterday and has nothing to do with today, except maybe dinner. 🍗 However, if she happens to be a professional chicken buyer, then that remains true.  The state of her professional chicken-buyerhood does not change with midnight.  Nor does the potential poet in the original question. So, today:   I think you write poetry.   Tomorrow, what will be this thought about (tomorrow's) yesterday? Did I think you are an ongoing writer of poetry, or that you were someone who once wrote poetry?  So that is my case as to why two tenses might be grammatically used in a short sentence.  Am I wrong?
I know the past tense carries the past tense in every dependent clause, but referring specifically to places or to things that are eternal, like the Earth, seems a bit weird and therefore we sometimes (I believe incorrectly) say     He didn't know that New Jersey was actually on the East Coast.   Because it still is. Or     He thought the Earth was round.   So is it square now?  Logically speaking, would you consider the use of past tense here a bit confusing in a day-to-day speech in these examples? Would you instinctively opt for using the present tense?
The polymorph spell states, in part:     The target’s game statistics, including mental ability scores, are   replaced by the statistics of the chosen beast. It retains its   alignment and personality.   Does retaining its personality suffice to let it remember who its allies are?  Even if transformed into something stupid like a T-rex?  What does it even mean for a beast with Int 2 to have someone's "personality"? How to access QGIS Plugin Repositories from behind a proxy? I have been trying to teach myself QGIS by using this forum and others to help. Most of my questions can be answered by downloading plugins that are available through 3rd party repositories but for some reason I am not able to connect with these. Anyone have any ideas why this is the case? I almost remember it but not really Is there a word for the feeling/situation where we almost remember a thing/word/scene,etc. but are not able to exactly recall it. For example, the other day I was trying to recall the author of the book Contact (i.e. Carl Sagan). I wasn't able to exactly recall 'Carl Sagan' but was in that situation where I could feel I almost remember it. I could recall there was the letter 'C' in his name. Finally after some effort I could recall the exact name 'Carl Sagan'. Is there any word for such a feeling/situation? EDIT:  The feeling is not necessarily of trying to remember a single word(as in from vocabulary). It could be trying to remember a movie or an experience that you were a part of, etc. Eg: If say I was with friends and we were having a conversation. After few days I was able to recall a statement said by someone, but wasn't able to remember by whom; i.e. I had a clouded recollection and I could almost remember but not really. Determine the SQL Server version and edition from the available set up, before actually installing it? WARNING DO NOT ATTEMPT TO RUN THIS ON A PRODUCTION MACHINE   In reading the  I generally follow what's going on with the following code:  :(){ :|:&amp; };:   excerpt of description     The following fork bomb was presented as art in 2002;   its exact origin is unknown, but it existed on Usenet prior to 2002.   The bomb is executed by pasting the following 13 characters into a    shell such as  or . It operates by defining   a function called ':', which calls itself twice, once in the   foreground and once in the background.   However the last bit isn't entirely clear to me. I see the function definition:  :(){ ... }   But what else is going on?  Also do other shells such as ksh, csh, and tcsh also suffer the same fate of being able to construct something similar? I have $k$ pairs of samples from different distributions. For each pair of samples I want to check if the samples are taken from a normal distribution with the same mean and variance. I assume the normal distributions for each pair is different and independent of other pairs. I do not know the mean and variance of any of the distributions.  I am doing a two sample t-test for each of the pairs. I want to combine the $k$ resulting p-values.   I could use Fisher's method but I am wondering about the distribution of the average t-value. If these were z-values rather than t-values I would use Stouffer's z-test. I could also approximate the t-distribution with a z-distribution and than use Stouffer's z-test, but I am not sure if that is a good approximation.  Is there a test like Stouffer's z-test for t-values?  Is there a better way to combine the t-values? How to add a script to Startup Applications from the command line? Why is spawning threads in Java EE container discouraged? One of the first things I've learned about Java EE development is that I shouldn't spawn my own threads inside a Java EE container. But when I come to think about it, I don't know the reason.  Can you clearly explain why it is discouraged?   I am sure most enterprise applications need some kind of asynchronous jobs like mail daemons, idle sessions, cleanup jobs etc.  So, if indeed one shouldn't spawn threads, what is the correct way to do it when needed? How can I calculate magnification ratio I get by reversing a lens? I am looking for a way to mathematically determine the maximum magnification ratio that is possible/practical to achieve by reverse mounting a non-macro lens, prior to purchasing the lens.     See related questions: My sketch exports seem to be pixelated even when am exporting it to 1x "along the river" vs "alongside the river"? In a question on "along" vs "alongside", I have seen this question and the correct answer on the web site makes me confused.      The question is: I enjoyed my walk _________________ the river.  a) along b) alongside  I selected "...along the river" as the correct answer, but on the web site it is shown as wrong and the correct answer is "alongside".  How can that be? I still do not agree, because I have studied the difference between the two. "along" is just the right preposition for thin and long places like road, path, street, beach etc".   So, why would the correct answer be "alongside" which simply means "next to"? Do you not think "along" seems to be better fitting?  Regards,  Note: I would be more than gratefull, if somebody show it to me in a video, like "a walk along the river" and "a walk alongside the river". Maybe I can understand the how "a walk along the river" and "a walk alongside the river" would take place. I have a directory filled with files with names like logXX where XX is a two-character, zero-padded, uppercase hex number such as:  log00 log01 log02 ... log0A log0B log0C ... log4E log4F log50 ...   Generally there will be fewer than say 20 or 30 files total.  The date and time on my particular system is not something that can be relied up on (an embedded system with no reliable NTP or GPS time sources).  However the filenames will reliably increment as shown above.  I wish to grep through all the files for the single most recent log entry of a certain type, I was hoping to cat the files together such as...  cat /tmp/logs/log* | grep 'WARNING 07 -' | tail -n1   However it occurred to me that different versions of bash or sh or zsh etc. might have different ideas about how the * is expanded.  The man bash page doesn't say whether or not the expansion of * would be a definitely ascending alphabetical list of matching filenames.  It does seem to be ascending every time I've tried it on all the systems I have available to me -- but is it DEFINED behaviour or just implementation specific?  In other words can I absolutely rely on cat /tmp/logs/log* to concatenate all my log files together in alphabetical order? $S$ be a collection of subsets of $\{1,...,100\}$ ; any two sets in $S$ has non-empty intersection , what is the maximum possible value of $|S|$? Show us who submitted offensive and comment flags Solving equation involving Euler's totient function Given $m\in\mathbb{N}$, is there a general way to solve the equation \begin{equation} \varphi(n)=m \end{equation} where $\varphi$ is the Euler's totient function? For example, I want to solve for all the $n$'s such that $\varphi(n)=4$. Is there any way to solve it that are also applicable to many (if not general) cases? What happened to Control.InvokeRequired in WPF? Dirac's remark that inspired Feynman when formulating path integral When Feynman was trying to formulate  of quantum mechanics, he was inspired by Dirac's remark which roughly states that $e^{i\frac{S}{\hbar}}$corresponds to the transition amplitude, where $S$ is the action.   I'm wondering what was Dirac's original argument behind this statement. Consider $X = (a+b)^n-a^n-b^n$  where  $a$ and $b$ and $a+b$ are not divisible by $n$, $n&gt;=3$ is positive and prime, $a \ne b$ and both are greater than 1.  By the binomial expansion we know $X$ is divisible by $n$, but how can we study whether $X$ is divisible by $n^2$ or other powers of $n$? Specifically I am interested to prove $X$ is NOT divisible by $n^2$, but I am not sure how to prove or disprove it. What does 'synchronized' mean? How to create a bootable USB stick?