This question is probably some variant of (or loosely related to) the pole-in-the-barn problem.   Simply stated, if I punch at relativistic speeds, would it experience Lorentz contractions so as to not reach the target? Or would it result in a paradox that the there is a hit from target's frame of reference but falling short from the puncher's frame of reference?  Below are the rules/notes -   Both the body and the target are stationary / at rest in relation to each other. Only the punching arm is moving.  The punch travels in a straight line towards the target.  The punch is being observed by both the target and the puncher.  We're not concerned about the mechanism and strength of muscles etc. The body can punch very close to the speed of light without breaking. It can be thought of as a spear thrust into a stationary target or  even a piston between two walls.  For simplicity, let's say that the length of the arm (or spear or piston) is same as the distance that the punch has to travel from the initial position to the target.    It might sound like an outlandish/comical problem but the core of the question is how it'll work from the reference frames of the target and the puncher.    EDIT 1: The punch stops after the arm has been fully extended but not because of it. In other words, let's say the length of the arm is 1m (and the distance to be traveled to make contact is also 1m), the punch knows to stop after traveling exactly 1m. The information/instruction that it has to stop after 1m is available to the punch (and every other part of the arm) before it is thrown. Deceleration happens instantaneously.
Yesterday we started relativity on our physics class, and my professor taught us a few concepts. We did some examples on how things changed by looking them from different reference systems, and a paradox came to my mind from an example he did on the blackboard:  Suppose that we have a bug inside a hole (and suppose that the height of the bug is $0$). This hole is $L$ meters deep. There's a man outside the hole that wants to kill the bug with a nail of length $l$, with $l&lt;L$. Obviously, it's not possible for him to kill the bug by trying to push the nail in the hole. However, if the nail moves really fast, from it's reference system the hole will have a height $L_n&lt;L$, and if it moves fast enough then it will happen that $L_n&lt;l$, so he finally could kill the bug. On the other hand, the bug knows that from his reference system, the nail will have a lenght $l_b&lt;l$, so it would never reach him.  Is it possible to quantify the problem? How is it possible that the nail reach the bug from it's reference system and from the bug's reference system it's even smaller than before?
I have a list of cards for a deck I want to build or buy. What should I do to check whether that deck is legal in a particular format (Standard, for example)? What formats supporting animation are suitable for the web? What formats supporting animation are suitable for the web and what are the pros and cons of each. On a series involving harmonic numbers I installed the latest pgAdmin 4 (v2.1) but I found out that (), for the moment, the only way to establish a connection through an SSH tunneling is using another outside process, an  says:  I setup a tunnel as follows: ssh -f dpage(at)hostname(dot)enterprisedb(dot)com -L 5999: hostname.enterprisedb.com:5432 -N  (...) I was running on Mac, but the same procedure should work on Linux. On Windows, there's a tunnelling app in Putty iirc, but I don't know how to use it offhand.  I have found a simple . The connection is established but it seems, when I try to connect through pgAdmin it fails or is refused (using 127.0.0.1:3306 or 127.0.0.1:5432 as the tunnel's destination). Why? With Glade Designer that lets you set up Gtk-Ui's you can check the option that windows are not shown in the launcher. If I take a look at the ui-file generated by Glade, it says &lt;property name="skip_taskbar_hint"&gt;True&lt;/property&gt;. In gtk code this hint is  window.set_property('skip-taskbar-hint', True). However I believe that this option is not exclusively Gtk-specific, and want to apply this one on my PyQt4-app. The Ubuntu window manager must be able to receive that hint, otherwise I would see the window of a gtk-application i use (stickynotes-indicator). So there MUST be a way of doing this in Qt or any other language, right?  Does anybody know such an option? Python or Qt syntax, doesn't matter! Take most recent (or concatenate) edit comments when editing during grace period Recently, I edited  to update a link to a better resource. I clicked "Save" without entering a description of the edit (edit #1).  Then I realised that the question was asked by a new user who may not be able to easily identify the change that was made. So I edited it again, this time only to add a detailed edit description (edit #2).  Since edit #2 was made during the grace period (within 5 minutes of edit #1), the system has merged them into a single edit, but only the edit comment from edit #1 was recorded in the revision history, whereas edit #2's comment was simply discarded/ignored.  I'd suggest that either the most recent (non-default) edit comment is taken or that the comments are concatenated to provide a more useful edit history Symbols instead of numbers as footnote markers What is the difference between "owing to" and "due to"? I am an Australian currently on a Netherlands working holiday visa that ends in May next year. I would like to know if when my visa ends I then get another 90 days just as a regular tourist visa as I would like to do some more travel within Europe when my visa ends before going home to Australia. Evil thoughts without actions? How to interpret regression coefficients when response was transformed by the 4th root? I'm using fourth root (1/4) power transformation on my response variable, as a result of heteroscedasticity. But now I'm not sure how to interpret my regression coefficients.   I assume that I would need to take the coefficients to the fourth power when I back-transform (see below regression output). All of the variables are in units of dollar in millions, but I would like to know the change in dollar in billions.    While holding the other independent variable constant, a billion dollar change in fees, on average, leads to a change of 32 (or 32,000 dollars) in collections. I take 0.000075223 * 1000 (to get to billions) ^ 4 = 0.000032. Now do I multiply this number by 1 million or 1 billion (the original unit of the dependent variable is in millions)?  lm(formula = (Collections^(1/4)) ~ Fees + DIR)                   Estimate      Std. Error  t value            Pr(&gt;|t|) (Intercept)   2.094573355     0.112292375   18.653  0.0000000000000151 Fees        **0.000075223   **0.000008411    8.943  0.0000000131878713 DIR           0.000022279     0.000004107    5.425  0.0000221138881913 Where to start learning Linear Algebra? I'm starting a very long quest to learn about math, so that I can program games. I'm mostly a corporate developer, and it's somewhat boring and non exciting. When I began my career, I chose it because I wanted to create games.  I'm told that Linear Algebra is the best place to start. Where should I go? ref to subsection number only How to list all files ordered by size I would like to list all files in the order of big to small in size and the files could be present anywhere in a certain folder. Using 3rd party Python modules Does there exists an Isomorphism between $\mathbb{C}^* $ under multiplication with $\mathbb{C}$ under addition.  Attempt In my opinion It does not exists.  If there exists such an isomorphism say $\phi :\mathbb{C}^* \to \mathbb{C}$ then, from the fact that Isomorphism takes identity to identity we have $$\phi \left( 1 \right)=0$$  From the fact      Given $\phi:G \to H$ be an isomorphism, then For a fixed integer $k$ and a fixed group element $b$ in $G$, the   equation $x^k=b$ has the same number of solutions in $G$ as does   the equation $x^k=\phi\left(b\right)$ in $H$.   We have $x^4=1$ and $x^4=0$ must have same number of solutions, but the solutions to these equations are 4 and 1 only. When my receiver that I have hooked up to my pc turns on it causes my monitors to turn black is there a way to stop this? I'm not a git master, but I have been working with it for some time now, with several different projects.  In each project, I always git clone [repository] and from that point, can always git pull, so long as I don't have outstanding changes, of course.  Recently, I had to revert to a previous branch, and did so with git checkout 4f82a29.  When I was again ready to pull, I found that I had to set my branch back to master.  Now, I can not pull using a straight git pull but instead, have to specify git pull origin master, which is annoying, and indicates to me that I don't fully understand what is going on.  What has changed which does not allow me to do a straight git pull without specifying origin master, and how to I change it back?  UPDATE:  -bash-3.1$ cat config [core]     repositoryformatversion = 0     filemode = true     bare = false     logallrefupdates = true [branch "master"] [remote "origin"]     url = git@github.com:user/project.git     fetch = refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*   UPDATE 2: To be clear, I understand that my original method may have been incorrect, but I need to fix this repo so that I can simply use git pull again.  Currently, git pull results in:  -bash-3.1$ git pull You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you want to merge with, and 'branch.master.merge' in your configuration file does not tell me either.  Please name which branch you want to merge on the command line and try again (e.g. 'git pull  '). See git-pull(1) for details on the refspec.  If you often merge with the same branch, you may want to configure the following variables in your configuration file:      branch.master.remote =      branch.master.merge =      remote..url =      remote..fetch =   See git-config(1) for details.   I can tell git pull which branch to merge, and it works correctly, but git pull does not work as it did originally before my git checkout. tikz: Ignore one path in bounding box calculation Plotting a 3d surface in tikz, with a limit to the infinity