In the integral form $\int \! f(x) \, \mathrm{d}x$ does $f(x)\,\mathrm{d}x$ can be seen as a multiplication of $f(x)$ and $\mathrm{d}x$?
When I was at school and learning integration in maths class at A Level my teacher wrote things like this on the board.  $$\int f(x)\, dx$$  When he came to explain the meaning of the $dx$, he told us "think of it as a full stop".  For whatever reason I did not raise my hand and question him about it.  But I have always shaken my head at such a poor explanation for putting a $dx$ at the end of integration equations such as these.  To this day I do not know the purpose of the $dx$.  Can someone explain this to me without resorting to grammatical metaphors?
Converting string of 1s and 0s into binary value I'm trying to convert an incoming sting of 1s and 0s from stdin into their respective binary values (where a string such as "11110111" would be converted to 0xF7). This seems pretty trivial but I don't want to reinvent the wheel so I'm wondering if there's anything in the C/C++ standard libs that can already perform such an operation? How would I remove the border from an iframe embedded in my web app? An example of the iframe is:  &lt;iframe src="myURL" width="300" height="300"&gt;Browser not compatible.&lt;/iframe&gt;   I would like the transition from the content on my page to the contents of the iframe to be seamless, assuming the background colors are consistent. The target browser is IE6 only and unfortunately solutions for others will not help. Balancing long table inside multicol in LaTeX I would like to put some longer tabular data inside the multicols environment while maintaining its balancing abilities. I have tried supertabular with the trick to redefine \newpage as columnbreak. This isn't good though, because the columns aren't properly balanced. Finally I ended up using \halign:  \documentclass[11pt, a4paper]{article} \usepackage[margin=3cm]{geometry} \usepackage{supertabular} \usepackage{multicol}  \def\shortlipsum{\par Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut purus elit, vestibulum ut, placerat ac, adipiscing vitae, felis. Curabitur dictum gravida mauris. Nam arcu libero, nonummy eget, consectetuer id, vulputate a, magna. Donec vehicula augue eu neque.\par}  \newcounter{entryno} \setcounter{entryno}{1} \def\tabline{Test &amp; \the\value{entryno} &amp; Description\addtocounter{entryno}{1}\\} \def\tablines{\tabline\tabline\tabline\tabline\tabline} \def\mybreak{\hrule width \columnwidth height 0pt \columnbreak}  \begin{document} \begin{multicols}{2} \shortlipsum \medskip  % % This doesn't balance the columns. Whole table ends up in the left column (it fits) % \begingroup\let\newpage\mybreak % \noindent\begin{supertabular*}{\columnwidth}{@{\indent}l l l} % \tablines\tablines\tablines\tablines\tablines\tablines % \end{supertabular*} % \endgroup  \begingroup\let\\\cr \noindent\halign{\indent#\quad&amp;#\quad&amp;#\hfil\cr \tablines\tablines\tablines\tablines\tablines\tablines} \endgroup  \medskip \shortlipsum \end{multicols} \shortlipsum \end{document}     I was wondering if I'm the only one using \halign to achieve this result. On the other hand supertabular leaves me with an undesired almost empty right column. How would you approach this problem? How to skip kernel update? The kernel and range of the powers of a self-adjoint operator How does similar_text work? $\mathbb Z[\sqrt 3]$ contains infinitely many units How to count number of distinct values in a range? JavaScript open in a new window, not tab I have a select box that calls window.open(url) when an item is selected.  Firefox will open the page in a new tab by default.  However, I would like the page to open in a new window, not a new tab.    How can I accomplish this? Showing current taxonomy terms I've created a custom post type called "References" and a custom taxonomy "Genre".  I have 2 terms : Applications and Games.  My problem is that I'd like to show posts associated in Applications on a page (and the same for the games). I believe WordPress do this like doing the same for tags....  In fact, I just need to make a query and getting the current term of the page.  Here is what I tried but I get the same list for each terms page (Applications and Games) :  &lt;?php get_header(); ?&gt;           &lt;div class="container" role="main"&gt;                              &lt;h1 class="entry-title"&gt;&lt;?php single_cat_title(); ?&gt;&lt;/h1&gt; &lt;div class="entry-content ref"&gt;     &lt;?php      $loop = new WP_Query( array( 'post_type' =&gt; 'references' , 'genre' =&gt; '') ); ?&gt;     &lt;?php while ( $loop-&gt;have_posts() ) : $loop-&gt;the_post(); ?&gt;          &lt;div id="post-&lt;?php the_ID(); ?&gt;" &lt;?php post_class(); ?&gt;&gt;                  &lt;h2 class="entry-title"&gt;&lt;?php the_title(); ?&gt;&lt;/h2&gt;                  &lt;div class="ref"&gt;&lt;?php the_content(); ?&gt;&lt;/div&gt;          &lt;/div&gt;&lt;!-- #post-## --&gt;          &lt;?php the_post_thumbnail();?&gt;      &lt;?php endwhile; // end of the loop. ?&gt;  &lt;/div&gt;&lt;!-- .entry-content --&gt;           &lt;/div&gt;&lt;!-- #container --&gt;  &lt;?php get_footer(); ?&gt;   Hope someone can help me. I've Googled for a week now... Manipulating the axis on a ListLinePlot How to maintain a file's 'last modified' date? Why doesn't the Related question list show that questions are closed? How can we extract specific files from a large tar.gz file? I found  but, when I tried the mentioned command there, I got the error:  $ tar --extract --file={test.tar.gz} {extract11} tar: {test.tar.gz}: Cannot open: No such file or directory tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now   How do I then extract a file from tar.gz? Out-of-control starship results in some crew members landing in a rebirthed universe? I am flying from Los Angeles to Bangalore. I have a flight option from LAX to Minneapolis and from there to Paris. I have only 45 minutes at Minneapolis before my next flight. Is this too risky a schedule? I am not an American, so I guess I would need to cross emigration too? Why does a Ubuntu guest in VirtualBox run very, very slowly? I'm using currently Ubuntu 12.04 LTS as a host machine, and I've virtualized three machines:   a Xubuntu 12.04 guest a Windows 7 guest a Ubuntu 12.10 guest   All the guests have the same VirtualBox default settings, but Ubuntu 12.10 is slower!  The installation took 1h 40 min! (Normally, it takes 40 minutes.) Now it is impossible to use it, and all operations are very, very slow.  I'm using VirtualBox version 4.2.4.  Any ideas?  Why is it slow? And how can I make it faster? Is there a fairly simple way to divide a circle into equal parts using Adobe Illustrator CC? Has the wall been repaired? Using 'return' instead of 'else' in JavaScript