I cant imagine, what philosophers do in 21 centuary. My question is if is any hot topic in philosophy in these days?  Ps. i am so sorry if this tag is not right to my topic, but dont know which is the right one.
I've been reading about a lot of different types of philosophies, religions, ways of thinking etc. I was wondering what are the most recently created philosophical ways of looking at the universe? Where can one find out about new cutting edge ideas?  Example: Before we had Marxism, Communism, Zen, Christianity etc. Now X,Y, and Z have been created building on and evolving the ideas of A,B,C.   Everything I read about are ideas that were created a long time ago. What is new and updated?
What does Superman do with his regular clothes after changing in the phone booth? We all know that Superman changes in the phone booth. But where does he put his regular clothes while he's on a mission? He doesn't throw it out, because he changes back. But we don't see him carrying a bag of dirty laundry while he's on a mission.  ("In his right hand, Superman has Lois Lane, and in his left hand he seems to be holding... boxers??)  And I can't imagine he leaves it in the phone booth.  So where does Superman leave his regular clothes after he changes? How can I parse dates and convert time zones in Perl? I'm currently reading the TeXbook, and I use \show a lot to see how Knuth defined plain-TeX macros in terms of TeX primitives. For instance, to have access to the definition of \centerline, I would write \show\centerline in my input file. When I compile  that file with pdftex in interactive mode from the command line (a Unix terminal, in my case), TeX generates an error message that shows me the definition of \centerline in the terminal and offers me a menu of options (as described in Chapter 6: Running TeX in the TeXbook).  I understand that design choice by Knuth of having TeX generate an error message for each instance of \show: he probably wanted to leave the user some time to read what \show... prints in the terminal before letting TeX resume execution, instead of having to open the log file only after the end of the compilation.  However, instances of \show... in the input file have the undesirable side-effect of raising "errors" (false alarms, really) when pdftex is called from within an IDE such as TeXmaker with option -interaction=nonstopmode. For example,  \show\centerline \bye   when compiled with pdftex -interaction=nonstopmode causes TeXmaker to report     Obviously, those false alarms prove really annoying when debugging. I always have to ask myself: Wait... are those errors due to instances of \show in my input file, or are they bona fide errors? On the other hand, my understanding is that you have to specify  -interaction=nonstopmode   if you want to call pdftex from within an IDE. Therefore, my question is:  Is there any way of preventing TeXmaker from reporting those "false alarms"?  Note: the problem I describe may be present in IDEs other than TeXmaker as well. Is it possible to reference an excel cell in a comment? I have an Excel balance sheet with a total at the bottom. On that cell I have a comment that says that the reason the total is X is because of what happens in J2. What happens if I insert another row before that, now my comment is wrong because all the rows jumped up a value.  Is there any way to reference a cell dynamically in an Excel commment? Further customize color of hyperref links I have tried to find a way to customize how internal links are colored, but I don't yet have the expertise in finding and redefining commands. In the LaTeX example below, I describe how I would like to change the colors of various links. Any ideas or examples are much appreciated.  \documentclass{article}  \usepackage[backref=true]{biblatex} \begin{filecontents}{refs.bib} @book{cit1, title = {The backreferences should be yellow}, author = {Last, First} } \end{filecontents} \bibliography{refs.bib}  \usepackage{color} \usepackage[usenames,dvipsnames,svgnames,table]{xcolor} \usepackage[colorlinks=true,             linkcolor=red,             urlcolor=blue,             citecolor=gray]{hyperref}  \begin{document}  \title{Title} \maketitle \tableofcontents \listoffigures  \section{Table of content's links should be green} \label{s1} All text, captions, and section headers after the list of figures should be black. The citation links should be gray.\autocite{cit1} \subsection{Table of content's subsections links should be orange} Internal links like this section link \ref{s1}  or this figure link \ref{f1} should be blue.  \begin{figure}[h] \caption{List of figures links red} \label{f1} \end{figure}  \printbibliography  \end{document} How to put terms in lexicographic order? Often I have a question, in a specific area (say Math SE or English SE) that is appropriate for the child meta of that site.   Then I realize it is not particular to the meta for that site but for Meta for all sites (like this question itself; I wanted a link to Meta Stack Exchange from meta.english, but realized no meta sites had such a link).  Wouldn't it be nice to have a link in all meta sites to Meta? I have a query to insert a row into a table, which has a field called ID, which is populated using an AUTO_INCREMENT on the column. I need to get this value for the next bit of functionality, but when I run the following, it always returns 0 even though the actual value is not 0:  MySqlCommand comm = connect.CreateCommand(); comm.CommandText = insertInvoice; comm.CommandText += "\'" + invoiceDate.ToString("yyyy:MM:dd hh:mm:ss") + "\', " + bookFee + ", " + adminFee + ", " + totalFee + ", " + customerID +  ")"; int id = Convert.ToInt32(comm.ExecuteScalar());   According to my understanding, this should return the ID column, but it just returns 0 every time. Any ideas?  EDIT:  When I run:  "INSERT INTO INVOICE (INVOICE_DATE, BOOK_FEE, ADMIN_FEE, TOTAL_FEE, CUSTOMER_ID) VALUES ('2009:01:01 10:21:12', 50, 7, 57, 2134);last_insert_id();"   I get:  {"You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'last_insert_id()' at line 1"} When lasers are used to cool atoms or ions, etc where does the heat go? According to the first law of thermodynamics, sourced from wikipedia "In any process in an isolated system, the total energy remains the same."  So when lasers are used for cooling in traps, similar to the description here:  where is the heat transferred?    From what I gather of a cursory reading on traps, whether laser, magnetic, etc the general idea is to isolate the target, then transfer heat from it, thereby cooling it.  I don't understand how sending photons at a(n) atom(s) can cause that structure to shed energy, and this mechanism seems to be the key to these systems. My model has a clear plastic (or glass) dome with objects inside.  The objects appear dark.  I've tried the glass shader with color 100% RGB, with very small IOR, and using just a refraction shader.    I know Cycles has problems with caustics, but I just want broad illumination to fall clean through the glass.  The light-to-column path can ignore refraction, but is blocked or tremendously attenuated. The camera-column path needs refraction, and seems to work fine anyway.  This demo image offers all optical paths of interest:   light upon object, seen directly light upon object, seen through glass (looks okay) light through glass onto object, seen directly. This is the shadow on the lit side of the column just below the glass tubing.  I expect full illumination, but there is shadow.  There is some light, but it's diffuse light from the floor. light through glass onto object, seen through glass. This     I did at one point try non-progressive rendering, and find extremely coarse light where there shouldn't be shadow, but this is not a practical way to make nice images. I've even tried cranking up certain sampling settings to many thousands, but still get bad noise though less, at the cost of long render times. I  would like to finish my creations sometime before "Star Trek, the Generation After the Next" becomes real life, if you know what I mean.  The next image is an example. I think Transmission in Sampling was 5000, but not sure.    I'm using Cycles in Blender 2.67 on a quad core Linux machine, 16GB RAM. Machine limits have never been a problem for 3D rendering.  Possibly, I screwed up some setting when I made my startup file, and just need to fix it. OTOH maybe this is just a limitation of path tracing, or of the way Cycles does it. If that's the case, what to real-world Blender artists do when they need to produce images on a budget and schedule?  What is the practical real-world fix? Banner ads should not be shown on the right-hand ad slot I'm new to linux and the terminal. As I learn how to use the terminal to navigate through directories, I like to use the gui file explorer to mirror my terminal navigation. The icons and file extension info in the gui file explorer help me figure out what everything is. However, I can't access the root folder via the gui, I can only access it via the terminal. Is there a way to enable access to the root folder outside of the terminal? Equation for a smooth staircase function I am looking for a smooth staircase equation $f(h,w,x)$ that is a function of the step height $h$, step width $w$ in the range $x$.   I cannot use the unit step or other similar functions since they are just one step. I have been experimenting with various sigmoid curves and while I can get a single smooth step I cannot get to realize the staircase shape. The closest staircase function I have found is given in  in equation (18) and depicted in Fig. 4 and it is a close example of what I want (i.e generate a staircase in the range $x$ for arbitrary step heights and widths) but it is not smooth at all.  Regarding smooth steps, a likely starting point I found is  but it gives a smooth function of just a single step. I have been unable to modify the equation to make it into a staircase. I would like to specify arbitrary step heights and widths and generate a smooth staircase in the range $x$ specified.    Edit (Extra info): The smooth function I mention above has the problem that the upper, horizontal line is not equal in length to the lower, horizontal line which is why I have been unable to adapt it into a staircase function   Edit 2 Including some pictures     Edit 2 Plot of $s$ with a steep slope showing a different width on the first horizontal line Implicit newline at the end of each paragraph? How to Start Web Mapping? I want to start working on a web map at work to map some of our statistics by city.    I have an idea, but I'm not exactly sure where to start.   Are there any definitive resources that provide step by step guidance on how to do this? I'm writing a bash script that needs to delete old files.  It's currently implemented using :  find $LOCATION -name $REQUIRED_FILES -type f -mtime +1 -delete   This will delete of the files older than 1 day.  However, what if I need a finer resolution that 1 day, say like 6 hours old? Is there a nice clean way to do it, like there is using find and -mtime? As you know, we can enable the spell checker on single line text boxes in the following way:    We have to enable it every time for checking words.  How can we enable it forever, so it doesn't need to be enabled each time? Was Quirrell the Defense against the Dark Arts teacher for more than one year? It's well seen throughout the series that there is a “curse” on the DADA teacher position, that no one can hold that post for more than a year. But it seems like Quirrell has been around for longer than a year. What's up with that? Once it is compiled, is there a difference between:  delegate { x = 0; }   and  () =&gt; { x = 0 }   ? Relativity Of Simultaneity Confusion