I'm trying to find the name of a novel (or was it a short story) where a group of humans travel to a distant planet and along the way (through genetics?) become more and more intelligent. I seem to recall that at some point they send back one of their who's a little less bright. Also, they send communications coded with some mathematical factorization that takes humans a long time to decrypt.  Any ideas?
I'm looking for the title of a Sci-Fi story (probably pre-1990) where a group is sent off into deep space and I believe unbeknownst to them it's a one-way journey.  In the course of the journey they all become very intelligent, they make psychoactive drugs from the plants on board, I recall that they discovered it's a one-way journey to test the affects of space travel, and they redesign/refit their engines and return to Earth.  Lame recall, sorry, that's all I got. Any help appreciated.
We have $n$ charged and $n$ uncharged batteries and a radio which needs two charged batteries to work. I've got two arrays of the same size.  I'd like to merge the two so the values of one are the key indexes of the new array, and the values of the new array are the values of the other.  Right now I'm just looping through the arrays and creating the new array manually, but I have a feeling there is a much more elegant way to go about this.  I don't see any array functions for this purpose, but maybe I missed something?  Is there a simple way to this along these lines?  $mapped_array = mapkeys($array_with_keys, $array_with_values); How to connect an LED indicator to a circuit? I would like to know how can i add a safety switch with an LED indicator to a circuit , so that if the safety switch is on then the LED lights , and when i want to use the device , all what i have to do is to press the normally-open switch.   I have attached this schematic and im not sure if it will work correctly  ,as i am a very beginner in electronics   Thanks Word for a person who knows two or three languages A polyglot is a person who is fluent in many languages, but what do we call a person who is fluent in only two or three languages?  Is bi-glot a proper term for this?  I don't think the words bilingual / trilingual fit the bill, because I am looking for a -glot word. Checking out  and  (and some papers) was a bit difficult for understanding Group Action. The closest to understanding was this part:    I understand the definition of homomorphism (a structure-preserving map between two algebraic structures of the same type). And from what I understand the symmetric group is a group of functions (bijective functions) mapping elements of a set $X$ onto itself.  However I get confused at this line:     ...an action of $G$ on $X$ may be formally defined as a group homomorphism $\phi$ from $G$ to the symmetric group of $X$.   That seems to be the definition of group action, but I am having trouble understanding how to apply that.  What that says to me is it is a homomorphism (function) $f \colon X \rightarrow S$ where $S$ is a set of bijective functions on $X$. That itself seems weird, I thought a group action would result in a number or something related to $\{1, 2, 3\}$ (defined next).  Continuing, if we have a set $X = \{1, 2, 3\}$ and a group $(*,\{4, 5, 6\})$, then the symmetric group of $X$ would be something like $S = \{1 \rightarrow 2, 2 \rightarrow 3, \dots \}$, and $\phi$ would be something like $f : \{4, 5, 6\} \rightarrow S$. That doesn't make sense to me and I feel like I'm interpreting something wrong. I don't see how mapping to a set of functions $S$ will result in an action on the set. Cool Text Highlighting in LaTeX LaTeX has soul. ConTeXt, of course, , where you can put sweet hightligher under your text for free!    In the pictured example, you can see highlights that not only highlight, but that do it with cool edges that look so good, you can smell fumes! The fearless author says he'll show how that was done in another post; this one shows only how to lay down a straight, yellow box. But, it is possible to do word-wrapped highlighting with cool-shapped boxes within ConTeXt, presumably.  The trouble for me is that getting into the ConTeXt world is steep climb right now, given the state of documentation and the flux of changes, so I need to continue with LaTeX. But the real problem is that now I can't live without the Organic-Looking Highlights of Awesomeness in that picture!  As I said, Non-Organic-Looking Highlights of the Ordinary are easy with the soul package:  \hl{Some awesome text that word wraps fine.}   It just taunts me on the page with its straight lines. So, if I sacrifice word wrapping, I can use PGF/TiKz and create the following macro:  \newcommand\hl[1]{%     \tikz[baseline,%       decoration={random steps,amplitude=1pt,segment length=15pt},%       outer sep=-15pt, inner sep = 0pt%     ]%    \node[decorate,rectangle,fill=navcolor,anchor=text]{#1\xspace};% }%   Which creates something like this:    Now, my color is too dark and my randomness needs adjusting, but you see that a similar effect could be achieved.  My trouble is that I don't understand TeX enough to dig into the Soul package and add the TiKz/PGF goodness that it so sorely needs. So, I leave it to you guys. Anyone want to tackle this?   Or is it yet another piece of fruit, just a touch out of reach, that shall have to wait until ConTeXt settles down? Pick random row from a file Joined pipelines Considering a routine such as this one:  alpha() { echo a b c |tr ' ' '\n'; }   which outputs a stream, I would like to take the output stream, transform it, and paste it with the original output stream.  If I take use upcasing as a sample transformation, I can achieve what I want with:  $ mkfifo p1 p2 $ alpha | tee p1 &gt;( tr a-z A-Z &gt; p2) &gt;/dev/null &amp; $ paste p1 p2 a       A b       B c       C   My question is, is there a better way to do this, preferably one not involving named pipes? Every time I click to open a link, other windows start opening. They all want to sell me Detox your Mac or have warnings about how my Mac is at risk or infected.  How can I check for malware? QGIS locked into fullscreen mode on Ubuntu 12.04 How to copy metadata of Partial Sandbox into a new Developer sandbox? I Have only one license of Partial sandbox. I want to refresh it with Production. Before that I want to copy all the metadata present in the Partial sandbox into New/Existing Developer sandbox. How can do that?  Is it supported by salesforce? or are there any tools available for this requirement.  Thanks. Get latest Flash player on Ubuntu Can I use SharePoint Designer 2013 to edit SharePoint 2010 sites? Can I use SharePoint Designer 2013 to edit SharePoint 2010 sites?   Couldn't find this info in the web. Subscribing to questions and comments that don't belong to you There has been some discussion about getting notified on comments to questions or answers that don't belong to you, and the long-standing wish to be able to keep track of new answers or developments in questions asked by other people.  Previous discussion in regards to subscribing to questions:                  (very similar to this one)      In regards to subscribing to comments:                    The general feeling - at least here on meta - seems to be against broadening the notification rules, out of fears of useless notifications to flood users' inboxes, turning SO into more of a discussion forum than it should be, etc.   Here's a suggestion that would keep the user 100% in control what they get notified about, not generate any notifications by default, and require only minimal modifications to the User Interface.  Each question and each comment area would get an envelope symbol.    it is inactive (=white) by default.  When those envelopes are hovered over, the tooltip says click to subscribe or something.  When clicked on, the envelope lights up in green or some other colour (but different from the actual notification envelope's orange to avoid confusion.) You are then subscribed to any updates to that question or comment thread.    For each subscription, you receive notifications in the "responses" tab, as if you were the owner of the comment or question.     To unsubscribe from a question or comment thread, you open the page, and click the green envelope. It turns back white, and the notifications disappear from your responses tab (if technically possible - otherwise, there just won't be any new ones added.)    No further functionality, like managing subscriptions or anything, is necessary IMO. If the flood of notifications from a subscribed question starts to annoy you, you just open it and unclick the envelope. Done.   It would make it possible to leave a comment to a newbie's question and make sure their answer reaches you even if they don't know they need to address you using @username You could subscribe to those "oh, I'd like to know the answer to that" questions and receive active notification, instead of them getting forgotten in your favourites list You could subscribe to discussions you are interested in the outcome of, but don't want to participate in. It would (in my opinion) sort out a number of woes aired by many users in a good way, without adding annoyances to those who like the system just fine the way it is. It would not require a change in the visible layout. As far as I can see, the space the envelope would need to be is empty everywhere.   I don't know SO under the hood of course, but technically, the system would be doing what it's doing already, notify question owners of updates - just that the circle of internal "owners" would grow. I have an internal microphone in my laptop. I think it uses Intel High Definition Audio. But I can't get it to work with Ubuntu. It doesn't work with either the Sound Recorder or Skype.  On the Input tab in 'Sound Preferences', I just see Internal Analog Input Device... Is there any way to view Chrome browser notifications history? I get Chrome notifications from several websites and they work when I don't even have any tabs open for those sites.  But sometimes I get these Chrome notifications when I am not at my desk or looking at my laptop.  As some of these notifications are useful to me, I would like to be able to access any that I have missed.  Is there a way to view the notification history? What is wrong in this proof: That $\mathbb{R}$ has measure zero Consider $\mathbb{Q}$ which is countable, we may enumerate $\mathbb{Q}=\{q_1, q_2, \dots\}$. For each rational number $q_k$, cover it by an open interval $I_k$ centered at $q_k$ with radius $\epsilon/2^k$.  The total length of the intervals is a geometric progression that sums up to $\epsilon$.  Each real number is arbitrarily close to a rational number since $\mathbb{Q}$ is dense in $\mathbb{R}$. Thus, each real number is in one of the open intervals.  Thus the entire real line is covered by the union of the $I_k$, thus $\mathbb{R}$ is a null set with measure zero.  Clearly there is something wrong in the above proof, however I am not sure where is it?  Thanks for any help. Does it make a difference if your URL path ends in a trailing slash or not? Does it make any difference to SEO ratings what-so-ever if your url has a trailing slash:  http://www.example.com/some/slug/paths/   as opposed to one that does not:  http://www.example.com/some/slug/paths What would I do if I want to have a generic method that only accepts types that have overloaded an operator, for instance the subtraction operator. I tried using an interface as a constraint but interfaces can't have operator overloading.   What is the best way to achieve this? I need to install more applications - can I use my external HD (samsung T5) and add an additional applications folder? I have loads of space on it and it the speeds are great.