I am thinking to test the process of dry aging at home. I have some questions:   What exactly are the processes a piece of meat experiences, in this case, beef, from the time it is slaughtered to the time its cuts show up in the meat counter in your local market.  How do these processes deviate from the beef that is labeled as 'dry-aged' in the meat counter.    Dry-aging is supposed to achieve two things: 1) Evaporate moisture and concentrate flavor 2) Enzymes break protein into glutamic acids (umami components)  I have noticed that there is plenty of debate about the time involved required to properly dry-age. Is there any research about the time involved for the chemical reactions related to the 2nd part?
I'm looking into the technique of 'hanging' meat, and whether there are 'home' applications that would be safe and have a beneficial effect.  Now, there are a lot of (possible) synonyms that muddle the waters (for me). There's hanging, dry-aging, faisandage (for game birds), and more. What I'm looking for is the 1-3 day (near) room-temperature storage of meat and the spoiling / enzyme process that will cause a flavor change. Feel free to help me along by clarifying the answer.  Basically:   Is there any (good) use for this technique / process for supermarket / butcher cuts of meat? What should be taken in consideration for safe execution?
How to download a file over HTTP? I have a small utility that I use to download an MP3 file from a website on a schedule and then builds/updates a podcast XML file which I've added to iTunes.  The text processing that creates/updates the XML file is written in Python. However, I use wget inside a Windows .bat file to download the actual MP3 file. I would prefer to have the entire utility written in Python.  I struggled to find a way to actually download the file in Python, thus why I resorted to using wget.  So, how do I download the file using Python? What's a word for lack of confidence? The problem statement is: for $a,b$ coprime, prove that there exists positive integers $x,y$ such that $ax-by=1$.  The question is form Arthur Egnels' problem solving text, and from the chapter on the pigeonhole principle.    My question: His proof begins by generating a list $a,\ldots,a(b-1)$, where he then points out that each element in this list(which proceeds sequentially) doesn't have remainder $0\pmod{b}$.  He then shows that we arrive at a contradiction if we assume that we also don't get remainder $1$ in this list $\bmod b$.  To show the contradiction in this last statement, he first states that we would have positive integers $p,q $ where $ 0&lt;p&lt;q&lt;b$ so that $pa\equiv qa \pmod{b}$.  He then goes on to point out that since we $a$ and $b$ are coprime, we then have that $b| q-p$.  I understand the last part here, but don't see why we get $pa\equiv qa \pmod{b}$.  Thanks in advance "'Hello', says he. 'Hello', says I" — is this correct? I'm reading a novel in which once in a while a character says something like "I are", "He do", and similar stuff. I understand the author is just reproducing the way people talk on the streets.  However I've found a piece of text of which I'm not sure if it's proper English. One of the characters, who almost always speaks proper English, is reproducing a conversation that happened many years ago using the present tense in the following manner:     I was with this guy and "Hi", says he, "how are you", says I...   and so on.  My question is if the "says I" is proper English (a special case in which "I" is treated as a third person because we are relating in present tense something that happened in the past) or it's just kind of slang.  I was also a bit surprised by how the usual order is switched ("says he" instead of "he says") but to me it's secondary to the "says I" issue. Schengen area 90 days limit: Can I leave on the 91st day? Can anyone tell me if the 90 days is in fact 90 nights? Can you leave the Schengen area on the 91st day? Or are you only allowed 89 nights and you are required to leave on the 90th day? How can we prove that any bijection on any set is  a composition of 2 involutions ?  Since involutions are bijections mapping elements of a set to elements of the same set, I find it weird that this applies to any bijection.  Thanks for your help ! I'm running Bash scripting, but sometimes I get confused which of these commands I use belong to who. Sometimes man xxx works, sometimes doesn't, so I use --help or info, mostly one of these works to show description of the command. Can anyone tell me how I would know what command belongs to what? Bash builtin, GNU utility, etc. Ward model implementation: specular component too weak I'm trying to implement the Ward shading model, the anisotropic, computationally efficient version:       This is how I made it:    float alphaX=0.5, alphaY=0.5; // asinotropic roughness float minFloat= 1.e-6;   vec4 Ward(vec3 L, vec3 N, vec3 V) {     vec3 H= normalize(L+V);     float NdotL= max(dot(N,L),0.0);     float NdotV= max(dot(N,V),0.0);      vec3 e= vec3(1.0,0.0,0.0);     vec3 T= normalize(cross(N,e));     vec3 B= normalize(cross(N,T));     float HdotT= max(dot(H,T),0.0);     float HdotB= max(dot(H,B),0.0);     float HdotN= max(dot(H,N),0.0);      float beta= -2.0 * ( pow(HdotN/alphaX, 2.0) + pow(HdotB/alphaY,2.0) ) / (1.0 + HdotN);     float den= max(minFloat, 4.0 * pi * alphaX * alphaY * sqrt(NdotL * NdotV) );     vec4 specular= Ps * 1.0/den * exp(beta);     return (Pd + specular) * NdotL; }   But I get a result similar to a lambertian surface or Oren-Nayar model, where the specular component is absent: Progressive Draw 2 and Draw 4 Uno When playing with progressive Draw 2 and Draw 4 and (say that there are 2 players playing) and    Player 1 goes out with a Draw 2  Player 2 puts down a Draw 2    Does player 1 have to pick up 4 cards? ls command very slow after deletion of thousand files on a directory I have a dir under /home/myuser dir which an application stores and deletes millions of temporary files. When I do ls on this dir (now it only has a hundred files only) it is too slow (actually I do not get any output for many minutes). After some google search and doing:  ls -dl ~/mydir/   I get this  drwxrwxrwx 2 myuser myuser 160108544 Oct 12 11:31 /home/myuser/mydir/   which basically means I have to re-index directory entries for this directory (if I understood correctly). How do I do force such a re-indexing on this dir? Alignment numbered apalike bibliography style I prefer the apalike bibliography style with the number in brackets in front (see also  and ). However what I am curious about is how to align the first and subsequent text lines neatly next to the number in brackets.    Does anyone know how to do this? In the comment field on StackOverflow (and other StackExchange sites as well, I presume) you're required to write 15 characters for the server to accept your post. If a shorter post is submitted, an information message states that the comment is too short. That is all good.  However, below the comment field is a counter, which counts up to 15 and then down from however many characters you're allowed to type minus fifteen. This counter doesn't always act the same as the actual validation: if I pad my message with whitespace, the validation notices and still says the message is too short, but the counter does not notice, and counts as usual.  Suggested fix: make the character counter trim the message before it counts, so the two messages say the same thing. Is there a test for the different styles within maths mode?  What I really want is to be able to save the current style to reinvoke it later on, but a \if along the lines of \ifmmode would work just as well.  In the specific example, I want to measure how big something will be when displayed in maths mode, so I do:  \settoheight{\mathheight}{some bit of maths}   except that it complains because the some bit of maths gets put in a box and measured, and the box doesn't know that it's maths.  So instead I put:  \settoheight{\mathheight}{\(some bit of maths\)}   except that then I get the wrong answer if this is used in displayed maths.  So ideally, I want:  \ifdisplaystyle  \let\currentstyle\displaystyle \else  \iftextstyle   \let\currentstyle\textstyle  ...  \fi \fi \settoheight{\mathheight}{\(\currentstyle some bit of maths\)}   and then I'll be happy.  Is there such a test?    Okay, so \mathchoice is clearly the way to go (thanks Martin!), but its behaviour is a little odd and since I want to use it to define a macro depending on which mode I'm in, this oddity is quite important.  Here's the code:  \newcommand{\mathtest}{% \gdef\name{a}% \mathchoice{% \name \gdef\name{b}% }{% \name \gdef\name{c}% }{% \name \gdef\name{d}% }{% \name \gdef\name{e}% }% \name}  \[ \mathtest \]   If \mathchoice behaved like \if, this ought to print ab.  But it prints ae.  All the options to \mathchoice get processed (which makes me wonder a bit how it works, but that's by-the-by).  So, is there an obvious way to make \mathchoice behave a little more like \if? Can there be multiple paths for which Fermat's least time principle can be obeyed? Can there be more than one path for which Fermat's least time principle is obeyed? Book recommendation on the history of PDE/ODE? How to convert a unix timestamp (seconds since epoch) to Ruby DateTime? Problem :   Solve in $\mathbb N$ :   $8n+9\equiv 0\pmod{1163}$  The mathematics give me : $n=435+1163k$ , $k\in\mathbb N$   $1163$ is a prime number   $8n\equiv -9\pmod{1163}$   $8n\equiv 1154\pmod{1163}$   I don't know any ideas to complete my work ?   I have to see your hints How to show GRUB after install Ubuntu over Windows 8? I installed Windows 8 and after that I installed Ubuntu. This are my partition now:   70Gb --> Windows 8 50Gb --> Ubuntu 12.10 100Mb --> UEFI 300Mb --> Recovery   I installed the GRUB on /dev/sda. Then, after GRUB not showing up and booting directly into Windows 8, I turned the laptop off and booted again into Ubuntu LiveCD and ran the Boot-repair utility, it give me  but it didn't solved the problem.  My Laptop still boots directly into Windows 8, without GRUB or Ubuntu even showing up. When searching for "Skype" I always see these 2 entries.  There is this duplicate blank Skype icon. Both of them seem to run Skype in the same way.    But I've checked both /usr/share/applications, and ~/.local/share/applications, and can't find the extra icon so I can delete it.    Also as described , sometimes similar ghost icons are present even after removing associated applications. How to change the Play Store language?