I am baffled by a sentence that I came across in a book recently. "Americans are a very practical people". Why do we need the article "a" here?
The plural of "person" is "people".  The plural of "people" is "peoples". Person-people-peoples is the only sequence like this that I know of, but I'm looking for another.  (The equivalent question is, is there another plural noun which has become a singular countable collective noun?)  EDIT  For those of you that think that people is nothing but a collective noun (and not an irregular plural, like mice), I urge you to consider:   Do you treat other collective nouns as plurals?  One person, two people, but one star, two galaxy? Do you treat other plurals as collective nouns?  You can certainly say "a galaxy of stars" but do you say "a mice of mouses"?    For those of you that think the customary plural of person is persons, try it on the next three, uh, persons you see: "Finish this sentence: 'one person, two _ ?' "
EU flight compensation distance for connecting flight I recently had a flight from Valencia to London, going through Düsseldorf, cancelled. According to EU regulations there are different levels of compensation for flights below and above 1500 km in distance. I assume that this distance refers to start and end airport regardless of connection. Is this the case? I haven't found a proper definition online. Here, it would make a difference as VLC to LHR is around 1350 km, but the complete itinerary is above the 1500 km threshold. Octal number literals: When? Why? Ever? I have never used octal numbers in my code nor come across any code that used it (hexadecimal and bit twiddling notwithstanding).  I started programming in C/C++ about 1994 so maybe I'm too young for this? Does older code use octal? C includes support for these by prepending a 0, but where is the code that uses these base 8 number literals? Do I need to change my ESTA address when visiting the US? I have an ESTA for my visit last Sept to NY and I know it is valid for 2years.  I am going to Las Vegas in May, do I have to update the address at which I will be staying? What is the difference between cascade & inverse in hibernate, what are they used for? How was Dumbledore able to defeat Grindelwald, since Grindelwald had the Elder Wand? Beamer and pseudocode I have been running Ubuntu 18.04 for a couple of weeks. I upgraded from 16.04 and all went smoothly.   I am not sure what I changed, but this morning I noticed that the "Settings" Icon that launches gnome-control-center is missing from "Show Applications" and the applications menu as well. When I searched from "Show Applications" for gnome-control-center or just settings, nothing showed up.   So, I figured I must have accidentally removed it and figured a reinstall of the package would resolve the issue. I have searched and found several postings where this worked. I tried:  sudo apt install gnome-control-center   And then rebooted - which reinstalled the gnome-control-center and I could then launch it from the command line. However, there was still no Settings Icon in any of the menus.   I also tried many other suggestions including:  sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome-control-center sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop --reinstall sudo apt-get install unity-control-center   However, none of these has been successful in restoring the icon into "Show Applications" or any applications menu.   Anyone have any suggestions on something I haven't tried? Would be much appreciated.  Or, is there a way to just manually recreate the icon?   Output of locate gnome-control-center.desktop:  /usr/share/applications/gnome-control-center.desktop  /home/dccrens/.local/share/applications/gnome-control-center.desktop /home/dccrens/.gnome/apps/gnome-control-center.desktop   I am running Ubuntu 18.04 desktop on kernel 4.15.0-45-generic. Reference style links validating as improperly formatted code London Heathrow airport - do I need a transit visa? I am traveling from the US to India via London Heathrow on November 6. I will be at LHR on 7th at 6:20 am and departing at 9:25 pm. I'm an Indian national and have a valid US visa.  Do I need a transit visa to stay airside?  I have been scared that British Airways have stopped a few people from boarding flights (no details just rumors).  Do I need a transit visa to stay landside? I want to do some sightseeing. What are the chances of getting past officials using transit without visa concession?  Real stories will help a lot to calm the butterflies in my stomach. I have two partitions that I want to mount on startup: /dev/sda3   /mnt/devel  ext4    defaults    0   2 /dev/sda2   /mnt/excess ntfs    defaults    0   2  The ext4 partition mounts fine (owned by me, writable only by me), but the NTFS mounts owned by root with R\W permission for all. How to fix this? drwxr-xr-x  7 amanda amanda 4096 2012-03-14 19:07 devel drwxrwxrwx  1 root   root   4096 2012-03-14 22:38 excess "My wife and I's seafood collaboration dinner" I've done numerous WP sites, written my own plugins, run my own server, etc etc.  But I have not seen this before. I just installed a fresh 4.7.1 and installed the  and all its plugins.  When I went to add media files, I got:  Maximum upload file size: 2 KB.   I deactivated all plugins one by one...no dice. My PHP memory limit is set to 256MB for this installation via wp_config.php.  Googling the 2 KB limit turned up no results.   Anyone seen this before or know how to fix this limit? How to make unit selection circles merge? I would like to know how to make this effect of merged circle selection. Here are images to illustrate:     Basically I'm looking for this effect:    How the merge effect of the circles can be achieved ? I didn't found any explanation concerning this effect. I know that to project those texture I can develop a decal system but I don't know how to create the merging effect.  If possible, I'm looking for purely shaders solution. Pass by Reference / Value in C++ I would like to clarify the differences between by value and by reference.  I drew a picture     So, for passing by value,  a copy of an identical object is created with a different reference, and the local variable is assigned the new reference, so to point to the new copy  How to understand the words: " If the function modifies that value, the modifications appear also within the scope of the calling function for both passing by value and by reference "  Thanks! I used the OzTeX implementation of TeX, also I used to typeset my docs in plain TeX, not LaTeX for me, so I had no problem to insert an image using the OzTeX, now I'm back to TeX docs, am using the TeXWorks frontend, but I can't insert an .eps image file, it seems the \includegraphics macro its only for LaTeX, so I can't use it, any idea on how to insert an image when using plain TeX? Let $f$ be a continuous function on a set $E$.  Is it always true that $f^{-1}(A)$ is always measurable if $A$ is measurable?  I say no.  We know that $\bar{\psi(x)}:=\frac{\phi(x)+x}{2}$ where $\phi$ is the Cantor (or Cantor-Lebesgue) function and $\bar{\psi}:[0,1] \rightarrow [0,1]$.  We know this function maps a measurable subset of $C$ (the Cantor set) into a non-measurable set $W$.  A few observations about $\bar{\psi(x)}$.  It is strictly increasing and continuous, so it has a continuous inverse $\bar{\psi(x)}^{-1}$.  Thus $\bar{\psi(x)}^{-1}(W)=c \subset C$; that is, $\bar{\psi(x)}^{-1}(W)$ is non-measurable, but c is.  Is this correct? How to illuminate the darkness inside glass objects in Cycles? 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? In  (not feature request), :  ... if we find that people are abusing the system their accounts may get suspended. I would consider that kind of behavior abuse.  Well  sure qualifies. He has 11 Stack Exchange accounts and has in the last day spammed at least 8 of them to gain the Suffrage and sometimes Vox Populi badges. That's over 250 votes† in just a few hours! (And  -- while voting on other user's posts too.) I guarantee that he's not voting on those posts for/by their merits. Here's when he scammed the Suffrage badge per site (while also gaming the Vox Populi on some sites):                      - 2017-03-11 16:23:15Z                     - 2017-03-11 17:41:41Z                     - 2017-03-11 18:08:13Z                           - 2017-03-11 19:25:10Z                  - 2017-03-11 19:55:16Z                               - 2017-03-11 20:00:49Z               - 2017-03-11 20:03:13Z  - 2017-03-11 21:11:40Z  Note that he got the badge on three sites within an 8 minute span (but that might just be job run times). Please revoke badges gained through improper voting. And, maybe also warn/suspend such abusive voters.   † His account vote totals don't show all votes as some serial voting was reversed -- but none of the ill-gotten badges were. I have a sheet in which I first apply a filter to a certain column to show "Unique records only". Now I have a column which contains, for e.g., values like:  Applepie Applesauce Crabapple Banana Mango   What I need is the count of all visible cells containing the word "Apple". Note that this should exclude the hidden (filtered out) cells. Now I have found out a formula:  `=SUMPRODUCT(SUBTOTAL(3,OFFSET(Sheet1!A:A,ROW(Sheet1!A:A)-MIN(ROW(Sheet1!A:A)),,1))*(Sheet1!A:A="&lt;Text to search&gt;"))`   However the problem with this one is this formula searches for the entire text. NOT just a part of it. How do I modify this formula to return count of cells containing "Apple" i.e. for this example it should return 3 as the result. How to write an academic paper for the first time? While writing , I realized I don't really have a good list of resources that could be useful to first-time authors, like MSc or PhD students who write their first paper. I often direct my own students to these two papers:   G. M. Whitesides, , Adv. Mater. 2004, 16, 1375–1377 (). P. E. Bourne, , PLOS Computational Biology 2005, 1, 0341.   I also make sure that they read the journal's editorial policy and authors guidelines.  What are other sources of good information for students and first-time academic authors?