I remember reading this novel ten or more years ago. The prologue had the narrator reminiscing of Tokyo Bay and condoms floating onto the shore. The protagonist seems to be an immortal or incredibly long-lived human with powers to create or morph planets to his liking. There appear to be numerous similar individuals of different alien races who travel around the Galaxy, creating hospitable worlds. I think one of the worlds had silicon-based life on it.
I read this at least 20 years ago, and I believe it was originally published in the '60s.   The main character is a human, but somehow "inherits godhood" from an alien, whose species is very long lived. IIRC this is one of the old-style god thingies, i.e. "god of thunder" not "omniscient omnipotent omnipresent transcendent being".  The plot somehow revolved around identifying and fighting some enemy which, I believe, was in turn a member of the alien species who acted as the avatar of the opposite god in the alien pantheon.  The only thing I remember for sure is that the enemy was identified as "green green" or "gringrin" (sadly, I read this in translation so I am not sure what the original meant)
Searching for Google contacts not in Groups Possible Duplicate:          In Google Contacts, I've had Groups set up which look like this: All Contacts.. Family.. School.. Work.. etc.  Each contact I have is assigned to All Contacts. In addition, it is assigned to at least one more Group.  Sometimes when I add contacts, I forgot to bucket them in the respective groups, so I was wondering is there anyway I could do a search for contact that belongs toAll Contact-group, but does not belong to any other group ? The advantages and disadvantages of using Kaiser Rule to select the number of principal components It's possible to define dependent picklist in the setup and the are supported out-of-the-box in Visualforce.  Are they also supported in Lightning natively? Is it on the roadmap to support them soon? If not: is there a best practice or a easily reusable workaround available right now? How to prove that: $\tan(3\pi/11) + 4\sin(2\pi/11) = \sqrt{11}$ Is it true every ideal of $\mathbb{Z}[x]$ is finitely generated? Let $I$ be any ideal of $\mathbb {Z}[x]$, and $I=\left&lt;{f_1,f_2 , ...}\right&gt;$.  Without loss of generality, $f_1$ has minimal (absolute value) coefficient of constant term (if there exist).  Then, let $g$ be any element of $I$ .  We have for some integer $m$ that $g - mf_1$ is element of $I$ (minimal coefficient and division algorithm).  I guess this process terminate finitely, but I don't know how can I do next step.  ( ex. $g-mf_1, g-mf_1-nf_2, ...$)  Please help me and thanks for in advance. Assign VNC password using script I am using a script to automatically set up a computer. I need to assign a password to the vnc server for the user, which is normally done using the vncserver command. However, it prompts for the user to enter and re-enter their password, neither of which the script is capable of doing. So, how can I set up the VNC password without an interactive prompt?   Thanks. Solve $x^{5} \equiv 2$ mod $221\ $ [Taking modular $k$'th roots if unique] Are there any rules for adjudicating a ranged attack fired at a target engaged in melee combat with an ally? While running a session recently, one of the players chose to "assist" his companion who was in melee with a goblin, by firing an arrow at the pair of them. I couldn't find any particular rules for this scenario so just had him roll at a disadvantage, counting a miss as a hit on his companion (damage to be ascertained by a second roll).   This seemed to work okay, and became a running joke for the night as the arrow bounced off the companions back, but are there specific rules for this scenario? Let $G(r, n)$ be the Grassmannian of the set of all $r$-planes in a $n$-dim vector space. How to show that the cohomology of a Grassmannian has a basis consisting of the equivalent classes represented by Schubert cycles? I am confused since I don't know how to compute the cohomology of a variety (how to construct the co-chain complex). I am really appreciate if you can compute the cohomology of, for example, $G(2,4)$ and show that it has a basis consisting of the equivalent classes represented by Schubert cycles. When does the set enter set theory? I wonder about the foundations of set theory and my question can be stated in some related forms:   If we base Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory on first order logic, does that mean first order logic is not allowed to contain the notion of sets? The axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory seem to already expect the notion of a set to be defined. Is there are pre-definition of what we are dealing with? And where? In set theory, if a function is defined as a set using tuples, why or how does first order logic and the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory contain parameter dependend properties $\psi(u_1,u_2,q,...)$, which basically are functions? Merging banking and casual style in moderncv (2) I really like the solution given in  but what to do if I want to keep the footer information of the casual style from page 2 on? That is, with this solution, I can put the header as I want in the first page, but the footer disappears from the rest of the pages and I do not want that.  I want the header of the first page to look like this (with an empty footer):   And the footer from the second page on to look like this: Concurrently interleaving execution of Lua and TeX in LuaTeX The usual way to interleave Lua and TeX in generating documents is by invoking Lua from Tex through the \directlua facility and generate Tex from Lua using tex.print().  For example, consider the Plain LuaTeX:  \directlua{     es=""; someluatex = function () tex.everypar="PAR!" end     tex.print("one", es, "two")     someluatex()     tex.print("three", es, "four") } five\bye   Looking at the document LuaTeX generates for that input, we see that someluatex() is run before the Tex backend does anything with the output: the PAR!s will be inserted before "one" and "two", as well as after "three".  Is there best practice for ensuring that TeX code issued by some Lua code is issued before some other LuaTeX code?  There are several ways to do this: with some code I am working with I am trying the following scheme:   Wrap the code executed by the \directlua in a coroutine, call it myco; At the point we want to ensure the Tex so far tex.print-ed is executed, use:  tex.print("\\directlua{coroutine.resume(myco)}") coroutine.yield()  If everything is in order, the Lua will resume after the Tex is processed.   This is not ideal, however: we must ensure that the TeX backend is in the right state to understand the \directlua command, which may not always be the case.  Is there a better way to achieve this? How can native English speakers read an unknown word correctly? I have learned English for many years, and from the first day I began to learn it I know the dictionary is necessary for the study.  One of the important aspects is that English words, unlike German and Spanish, usually can not be read correctly without phonetics.  But recently, I talked with some native speakers and they told me they can read any word directly and rightly even though they never learned it before.  I just want to know how they can do that -- there is no ordinarily acceptable method to read an English word? What's the meaning of the term "gib"? Especially while talking about FPS, the term "gib" is quite common. While I get it's related to a sudden and gruesome death, I'd like to know its actual meaning and where it comes from. In Ubuntu releases prior to Ubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine, when I run a command with sudo, that command receives my home directory in the $HOME environment variable. This is the behavior I have long expected and . If I want sudo to reset the $HOME environment variable, so that it refers to the target user's home directory instead of my own, I have to pass the -H option (or -i, though that does more).    ek@Kip:~$ lsb_release -d Description:    Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS ek@Kip:~$ sudo printenv HOME  # Shows ek's home, not root's. /home/ek ek@Kip:~$ sudo -u as printenv HOME  # Shows ek's home, not as's. /home/ek ek@Kip:~$ sudo -H printenv HOME  # Shows root's home. /root ek@Kip:~$ sudo -Hu as printenv HOME  # Shows as's home. /home/as   When I first upgraded to Ubuntu 19.10, I was surprised to discover that sudo seems to reset $HOME no matter what! I continue to observe this now that 19.10 is released and I've installed updates--both on newly installed systems and one I upgraded to 19.10.  ek@Cord:~$ lsb_release -d Description:    Ubuntu 19.10 ek@Cord:~$ sudo printenv HOME  # Shows root's home, even without -H or -i. /root ek@Cord:~$ sudo -u as printenv HOME  # Shows as's home, even without -H or -i. /home/as ek@Cord:~$ sudo -H printenv HOME  # Also shows root's home. /root ek@Cord:~$ sudo -Hu as printenv HOME  # Also shows as's home. /home/as   I thought this might be due to .  But I checked, and always_set_home does not appear in any Defaults line in my 19.10 /etc/sudoers file.  What makes sudo treat $HOME differently starting in 19.10, and why was this change made? Does this make it safe to use plain sudo in cases where I would previously have used sudo -H? SPSite.Exists returning true for a just deleted site collection Short story - I have a process that creates some sitecollection, so to test it I keep deleting and recreating the same site over and over. The process includes a check with the istruction SPSite.Exits, done to check if the sitecollection is present or should be created.  Sometime, soon after I delete the site collection, SPSite.Exists will report it as still available. Is this a cache related problem? Neutrino Oscillations and Conservation of Momentum I would like to better understand how neutrino oscillations are consistent with conservation of momentum because I'm encountering some conceptual difficulties when thinking about it. I do have a background in standard QM but only rudimentary knowledge of particle physics.   If the velocity expectation value of a neutrino in transit is constant, then it would appear to me that conservation of momentum could be violated when the flavor eigenstate at the location of the neutrino source is different from that at the location of the interaction, since they are associated with different masses.  For this reason I would think that the velocity expectation value changes in transit (for instance, in such a way to keep the momentum expectation value constant as the neutrino oscillates), but then it seems to me that the neutrino is in effect "accelerating" without a "force" acting on it (of course, since the momentum expectation value is presumed constant, there may not be a real problem here, but it still seems strange).   Any comments? What does the "Current event" post notice mean? The recently introduced &quot;Current event&quot;  feels incomplete:  At the very least, it needs a period at the end to complete the sentence. Aside from that, what is a future visitor of a question supposed to take away from this notice? The &quot;citation needed&quot; text explains what expectations are placed on the question bearing the notice and invites action. Is the &quot;current event&quot; notice purely informational? What's the desired effect of adding it to a question? The current on-question notice is:  This post relates to a rapidly changing event.  In addition to answering those questions, I'm hoping we can work out a proposal for a wording change to make it more clear. I can't come up with anything to start with, since I don't quite get what the notice is supposed to achieve in the first place. I am trying to really understand why the gradient of a function gives the direction of steepest ascent intuitively.  Assuming that the function is differentiable at the point in question, a) I had a look at a few resources online and also looked at this   , a popular question on this stackexchange site. The accepted answer basically says that we multiply the gradient with an arbitrary vector and then say that the product is maximum when the vector points in the same direction as the gradient? This to me really does not answer the question, but it has 31 upvotes so can someone please point out what I am obviously missing?  b) Does the gradient of a function tell us a way to reach the maxima or minima? if yes, then how and which one - maxima or minima or both? Edit: I read the gradient descent algorithm and that answers this part of my question.  c) Since gradient is a feature of the function at some particular point - am I right in assuming that it can only point to the local maxima or minima? What *is* an Artificial Neural Network?