Just curious is it crucial?  It's one of the reasons I like academia that I don't need to care too much the boring stuff like wearing suits.
Are there expected dressing norms at faculty interviews? Will a casual tee-jeans be discouraged?  In the same vein, what is expected when a student visits the campus for an interview?
Is it possible to find a smooth function $p$ such that $$p(x)=0 \text{ if } x\le -1$$ $$p(x)=0 \text{ if } x&gt; 0$$ $$0\le p(x) \le 1 \text{ if } -1&lt;x&lt;1$$ $$p(x) = 1 \text{ if } -\frac{1}{2}\le x \le \frac{1}{2}$$ Hint: The following function has continuous derivatives of all orders $$f(x) = 0 \text{ if } x\le 0$$ $$f(x) = e^{-\frac{1}{x^2}} \text{ if } x&gt;0$$  My thought: Considering the left-half of the function $p$, I tried something like $e^{-\frac{1}{\tan^2(x\pi)}}$. The shape looks good but I am not sure about the smoothness at $-1$ and $-\frac{1}{2}$. For $x=-1$, since $\tan$ is infinitely differentiable so we have smoothness there. But for $x=-\frac{1}{2}$, I am not sure about the smoothness after &quot;gluing&quot; with $y=1$. How to pack a sphere with cubes? I read a little bit about , but I imagine the problem changes drastically when trying to fill a sphere with unit cubes. For example, how many unit cubes could one fit into a sphere of radius five? Clearly the upper limit would be $\left \lfloor \frac{4}{3}\pi \cdot 5^3 \right \rfloor$, but I imagine there will be plenty more empty space than just a small fraction of a cube. How to call Apex REST API from Javascript? I have two different developer orgs. One contains apex REST web service, and I want to call that REST service from my second org. I have tried to call that REST service using normal ajax post request and forcetk.js, But I got following error     XMLHttpRequest cannot load   . Origin    is not allowed by   Access-Control-Allow-Origin.   I searched about this problem then I got to know that Salesforce never allows CORS (Cross-Origin-Resource-Sharing).  Initially I was using apex to call that REST web service, that time I was able to post data from apex. But as we have callout limitation in salesforce, I want to use javascript.  Can anybody please help me? Why can't energy be created or destroyed? My physics instructor told the class, when lecturing about energy, that it can't be created or destroyed.  Why is that?  Is there a theory or scientific evidence that proves his statement true or false?  I apologize for the elementary question, but I sometimes tend to over-think things, and this is one of those times. :) Do we have different badges in different SE sites I am not able to install LanguageTool extension for LibreOffice. Getting exception when I try to install it.   p.s. Somebody says that the solution is installing openoffice.org-java-common package but Ubuntu 14.04 does not have this package in its repository.  System details:  OS: Ubuntu 14.04 LTS  LibreOffice: 4.2 (4.2.3.3)  LanguageTool: 2.5  Java: Oracle JDK 1.8.0_05     Exception message: I know that contents of double quotes are expanded, whereas the contents of single quotes are not, such that  echo '$1'   gives  $1   where as   echo "$1"   gives  &lt;the argument - blank in this particular example&gt;   the same as   echo $1   However, the question  led me to wonder why double quotes and not single quotes were used when declaring the alias, thus:  alias cutf="_cutf"   instead of   alias cutf='_cutf'   I would have employed single quotes as in the latter example. Most examples on the web use single too, unless there is some expansion required. However, in this case, no expansion, to my eyes, is apparent. Is it that, in this case, they are interchangeable, or are the double quotes necessary because a function definition is employed? What is the strict aliasing rule? Estimate the population variance from a set of means Somewhere in the provided answer:   $$\int \frac{1}{\sqrt{2-x^2}} dx = \sin^{-1}{\frac{x}{\sqrt{2}}}$$  How did they get that? What I have:   $$\frac{1}{\sqrt{2-x^2}} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2(1-\frac{x^2}{2})}} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2} \sqrt{1-\frac{x^2}{2}}}$$  $$\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} \int \frac{1}{\sqrt{1-(\frac{x}{\sqrt{2}})^2}} = \frac{1}{\sqrt{2}} \sin^{-1}{\frac{x}{\sqrt{2}}}$$  So I have an extra $\frac{1}{\sqrt{2}}$ ... I probably had some stupid mistakes? iOS app crashes after deleting a comment Why are floating point numbers inaccurate? How do you correctly use a meat thermometer? How can I type accented characters like ë? Currently I use the character palette applet in gnome panel to put special characters into text.  This is okay, but I have to stop typing, select the character I want from the applet and then copy and paste.  Is there a way to simply type special characters with different key combinations? If so, how do I do it? How to revert to GNOME Classic Desktop? Why does observation collapse the wave function? In one of the first lectures on QM we are always taught about Young's experiment and how particles behave either as waves or as particles depending on whether or not they are being observed. I want to know what about observation causes this change? Do I need an ESTA to enter the US with the Victoria Clipper ferry? I am thinking of visiting Victoria, BC in Canada and then going to Seattle, WA in the US, with the .  I am a national of a country under the Visa Waiver Program. I think that if I enter by air, I need to fill an ESTA form. If I enter by car, I don't need one, I can fill a form when crossing the border.  With the ferry, what is the procedure? Should I necessarily have an ESTA? Mutual set of representatives for left and right cosets: what about infinite groups? Let $G$ be a group and $H$ a subgroup of $G$. If $G$ is finite, then according to Philip Hall's "marriage theorem" there is a left transversal $T$ of $H$ in $G$ (that is, $T$ contains precisely one element from each left coset of $H$) such that $T$ is also a right transversal of $H$.   Does this theorem generalize to infinite groups? The original theorem treats only the case where $|H| &lt; \infty$ and $[G:H] &lt; \infty$.  What can we say when $|H| = \infty$ and $[G:H] = \infty$? What about $|H| &lt; \infty$ and $[G:H] = \infty$? Also $|H| = \infty$ and $[G:H] &lt; \infty$? Support for OpenID ended on July 25, 2018 NOTE: Signing up or Logging in via OpenID is no longer officially supported from any of our sites. Currently,  is still on the internet, but we are in the process of completely removing it.    Stack Overflow was an early and strong supporter of . We built our sign up/log in flow around it. We were idealistic and had , but these hopes weren't realized. Over the years people have wondered if  is . We've had to remove support as OpenID providers  or .  The time has come to part ways. The reality is OpenID support has created a ton of complexity in our codebase and the number of users actively using OpenID simply don't justify that cost. Users have spoken with their actions. You prefer Google, Facebook and Stack Exchange (aka email/PW) based account auth.     Of our 9,813,747 accounts around one-tenth of a percent are actively using OpenID (defined as having visited a site in the past 12 months). If you include all the inactive accounts it is still less than 2.9% of all accounts.  So, what is the plan?   DONE - Remove the ability to create a new account with most OpenID providers DONE - Add the ability to  DONE - Convert Launchpad (used on  ) to OAuth DONE - Remove creating new accounts with Steam from  (Steam removed support for OAuth. Only 454 accounts that use Steam have visited Arqade in the past 6 months.) DONE - We will email all users that rely on deprecated OpenID credentials and request that they  DONE - Run an announcement banner for any user who signs in with deprecated OpenID credentials urging them to  DONE - End support for logging in via OpenID  In progress - Remove  (note: only 0.2% of authorized sites in the last year have been non-Stack Exchange sites.)   Obviously, if your account relies on OpenID, then make life easy and go now and .   If you've forgotten what you credentials you use to login, then  to refresh your memory. If you don't see one of the three account types shown in the image below (Google, Facebook or Stack Exchange) then click the "add more logins" button to add one of them to your account.    Remember, SE OpenID accounts are really email/pw accounts handled through complicated OpenID code path. They will be migrated to a simpler email/pw only code path as a part of this change. No extra work required on your part. Prove that a group is infinite and nonabelian. I'm trying to solve a question of Hungerford's Algebra:     Show that the group defined by generators $a,b$ and relations   $a^2=b^3=e$ is infinite and nonabelian.   I guess a good approach would be to find an infinite and nonabelian group with two generators satisfying the same conditions and let Van Dyck do all the work. I've been thinking about the group of permutations $S_{\mathbb N}$, some groups of matrices, but I couldn't get it. Could anyone give me a hint? Thanks in advance!