In English, we have    7 days &#8594; a week 14/15 days &#8594; a fortnight 30/31 days &#8594; a month 365 days &#8594; a year   Is there any word for six months? Not half a year, or biannually (which is linked to a main event). I need a specific term that can be used without a ‘crutch’ word.   The closest I've found is the word semester. But that's not right either.   Like a concrete fact or a universal truth, e.g. the sun rises in the east. The expression half a year ago could refer to any time, in respect to the specified event.  What I would like is a term that fills this gap.     Every year has two _____   Half a year (in a sentence, e.g. either make a random sentence with half a year that is a present perfect, or consider any similar ones, such as biannually) is not a single-word and it is ambiguous.  Also, if that word doesn't exist in the English vocabulary, I would like to know if any other language has such a word.
Is there a word that means "a span of six months"? That is, I want to connote a stretch of time that lasts half a year, not an event that happens every six months.
What's wrong with this experiment showing that either FTL communication is possible or complementarity doesn't hold? The assumptions are:    Alice and Bob have perfectly synchronized clocks Alice and Bob have successfully exchanged a pair of entangled photons   The idea is simply to have Alice and Bob perform the Quantum Eraser Experiment (doesn't need to be the delayed choice).   Alice and Bob agree on a specific time when Bob's photon will be between the "path marker" (which is usually just after the slits) and the detector.  If Alice acts collpasing the wave-function on her photon, the interference pattern will disappear. If not it won't.  Alice and Bob can be spatially separated...  What am I misunderstanding?   The only meaningful difference from this spatially separated quantum eraser experiment to one done on tabletop is that you won't be able to use a coincidence detector, but that is not impeditive to identifying the interference pattern, just will make errors more probable. Which we should be able to deal with a appropriate protocol...  There is a experimental paper with a small amount of citations pointing out to the breaking of complementarity in a very similar setup: Earlier today, I was suspended from chat due to an inappropriate message (I totally deserved it, but that's not the point). I looked at my phone, and this is all that it told me:    ...which confused me because chat was still moving as normal. I didn't realize that I had been suspended until I checked on my computer to see what the heck was going on.  To me, "This room is read-only" sounds like some sort of database lockup or something related specifically to the room, not the user. It doesn't give any feedback to indicate that the room will be "read-only" for 30 minutes, and doesn't mention that all other rooms are also "read-only". Even a message saying just "You have been suspended from chat" would be more helpful. Common binaries with support for command execution, like `awk` and `vim`, not respecting setuid bit? to Global Variables inside functions String representation of an Enum What is the correct formula for gravitational time dilation for a satellite in a circular orbit? In the Wikipedia article on  I see two formulae for the gravitational time dilation. One contains $\sqrt{1 - r_0/r}$ but the other $\sqrt{1 - 1.5 r_0/r}$. What formula should I use to calculate the time dilation due to gravity inside a satellite? The speed induced time dilation is of course just special relativity.  With the first of these two formulas I can perfectly reproduce the graphs on time dilation as a function of $r$,  I find that the two contributions to time dilation cancel at 1.5 Earth radii, all numbers are OK... But why not the second formula? When I press the power button on my Epson WorkForce WF-3520 printer, it starts up normally, but shuts down within 30 seconds. Ten seconds later, it starts itself and the stop/start cycle is repeated again and again. This has only started happening today (6th December 2016). I am working with dimensionality reduction algorithms. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is a supervised algorithm that takes into account the class label (which is not the case of PCA for example). I am using Python to do a comparative study between some algorithms.  Why with two classes (k = 2), regardless of the data dimensionality, LDA gives one dimension, i.e. the new subspace is composed of only one dimension? For example if I try to project my dataset (of 100 attributes and 2 classes) to 10-dimensional space by using LDA(n_components=10) I only obtain 1 dimension?  For k&gt;2 I can obtain the number of discriminant vectors that I specified as n_components. How can I get n_components dimensions for k=2? Array index out of bound behavior Simulate repeated rolls of a 7-sided die with a 6-sided die What is the most efficient way to simulate a 7-sided die with a 6-sided die? I've put some thought into it but I'm not sure I get somewhere specifically.  To create a 7-sided die we can use a rejection technique. 3-bits give uniform 1-8 and we need uniform 1-7 which means that we have to reject 1/8 i.e. 12.5% rejection probability.  To create $n * 7$-sided die rolls we need $\lceil log_2(  7^n ) \rceil$ bits. This means that our rejection probability is $p_r(n)=1-\frac{7^n}{2^{\lceil log_2(  7^n ) \rceil}}$.  It turns out that the rejection probability varies wildly but for $n=26$ we get $p_r(26) = 1 - \frac{7^{26}}{2^{\lceil log_2(7^{26}) \rceil}} = 1-\frac{7^{26}}{2^{73}} \approx 0.6\%$ rejection probability which is quite good. This means that we can generate with good odds 26 7-die rolls out of 73 bits.  Similarly, if we throw a fair die $n$ times we get number from $0...(6^n-1)$ which gives us $\lfloor log_2(6^{n}) \rfloor$ bits by rejecting everything which is above $2^{\lfloor log_2(6^{n}) \rfloor}$. Consequently the rejection probability is $p_r(n)=1-\frac{2^{\lfloor log_2(  6^{n} ) \rfloor}}{6^n}$.  Again this varies wildly but for $n = 53$, we get $p_r(53) = 1-\frac{2^{137}}{6^{53}} \approx 0.2\%$ which is excellent. As a result, we can roll the 6-face die 53 times and get ~137 bits.  This means that we get about $\frac{137}{53} * \frac{26}{73} = 0.9207$ 7-face die rolls out of 6-face die rolls which is close to the optimum $\frac{log 7}{log6} = 0.9208$.  Is there a way to get the optimum? Is there an way to find those $n$ numbers as above that minimize errors? Is there relevant theory I could have a look at?  P.S. Relevant python expressions:  min([ (i, round(1000*(1-(  7**i )  /  (2**ceil(log(7**i,2)))) )/10)  for i in xrange(1,100)], key=lambda x: x[1]) min([ (i, round(1000*(1- ((2**floor(log(6**i,2))) / (  6**i ))   )    )/10)  for i in xrange(1,100)], key=lambda x: x[1])   P.S.2 Thanks to @Erick Wong for helping me get the question right with his great comments.  Related question: Optimization paramters read-only mysql 5.7 database? What's the best way to configure a MySQL database that is only read-only, and will never have any modifications made to it?  1) I have increased my innodb_buffer_pool_size to 70% of available RAM  2) Increase query cache size to 40mb  Running against a load generator, after some time the database starts bottlenecking to only 1000 statements per second.  The configuration is 2-cores, 8GB ram 50GB SSD. The database contains a single InnoDB 13 GB table with the same exact query running on two indexed columns.  We are using a vertx server to hit the database. The symptom we see is that the web service performance degrades after 15-20 minutes of heavy load.  Where can the bottleneck be? What parameters should we optimize? Is there any way in QGIS to apply service area buffers e.g if I have a point on a map I wish to show the service coverage of 1 mile, 2 mile, 3 mile, breaks using  the road network? It has been a while since I read the Lord of the Rings novels (don't have a copy at the moment) but I seem to recall he went to Hobbiton at least once, as the young hobbits were always excited to see him.   Did he travel there often? SF Story about human adapting to alien environment This is a story that was read on BBC radio about thirty years ago, and this is about as right as I can remember it: The human pilot of a spacecraft is doing some reconnaissance on an alien planet. He crashes but survives. For some reason, no one will know where to look for him. He sees something in the distance that looks like a building of some sort. When he gets there, it seems to be a home. Very much like a human home. There's furniture, but it's strange and uncomfortable . There's food, but it's inedible. There's a faucet but what comes out of it seems more like acid. Everything looks as though it should be right, but it's not. He leaves the house, wanders and after a few days is desperate for water. But there isn't any water anywhere. He's close to death, crawling on the ground and then something happens. There are cracks in the soil and there appears to be water bubbling up from perhaps some underground stream. The water revives him. He goes back to the house and tries the food again. It's delicious and he eats enough to gain back his strength. Then he decides to try the water again. It's pure and wonderful. He takes a shower and the last line of the story is how refreshing the water is on his skin and something about him lifting his tail. How can I check if a directory exists in a Bash shell script? What command can be used to check if a directory exists or not, within a Bash shell script? Blowing your own sail? How it this possible? Even if the gif is fake, the Mythbusters did it and with a large sail it really moves forward. What is the explanation? Proving $1-\exp(-4x^2/ \pi) \ge \text{erf}(x)^2$ Is there a convenient way to place a figure* at the end of the current page instead of taking up the entire next page in the twocolumn environment? Placement modifiers [Hb] do not work. The add comment link and comment box overlaps bounty box Show that  $$\frac{\sin x}{\cos 3x}+\frac{\sin 3x}{\cos 9x}+\frac{\sin 9x}{\cos 27x} = \frac{1}{2}\left(\tan 27x-\tan x\right)$$