quintic

I have a 10-year-old Dell Dimension 8250. I want to replace the original hard drive with a bigger one, say 160GB or 250GB. OEM hard drives for the 8250 are available on eBay for about £30, but I'd like to fit a drive that's a bit more advanced, say with a higher buffer memory of 32MB or more. What would be a good IDE hard drive for the 8250? Ideally, I'd like it to slot in with the minimum of fuss. According to the manual, the internal drive bays are for 1 inch high hard drives.

I'm intrigued by this article -- http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2013/04/dawkins-a... -- and by some of the comments.

As I understand it, according to the Koran and Hadiths, in Muhammad's "Night Journey" he was taken at night to Jerusalem and thence on a tour of the heavens in the company of the Archangel Gabriel. In the course of the journey, the prophet had meetings with Biblical characters including Moses and John the Baptist, and conversed with Allah.

My question is: how do Muslims interpret the Night Journey? Of course, different people might have different interpretations. Please select one of the following options:

A) Muhammad literally flew to heaven on a winged horse. That is, in his physical body, Muhammad rode a physical winged horse, from Mecca to Jerusalem, and thence to heaven, where he met and conversed with physical dead prophets.

B) Muhammad had a visionary experience; i.e., he was vouchsafed a vision of heaven, a vision that was more real than an ordinary dream, in the sense that the vision that came from Allah and may therefore be described as being "real". But he did not literally fly to heaven on a winged horse.

C) Muhammad had a lucid dream, or similar experience in a state midway between sleep and wakefulness, which did not come from Allah.

D) None of the above. (Please elaborate.)

No abusive comments, please.

Is there a technical term for when a young animal first opens its eyes? (Similar to "menarche" being the first menstrual period.)

Find a necessary and sufficient condition on a, b, c that the roots of x³ + ax² + bx + c = 0 are in arithmetic progression.

Ignore air resistance. Assume flat, level ground, a uniform gravitational field, and anything else that seems reasonable.

Suppose you have a clock with an hour hand and a minute hand. Unfortunately, the two hands are indistinguishable! How many moments are there, in the interval from noon to midnight (including noon but excluding midnight), where the time shown by the clock is ambiguous?

Where n is also an integer.

Why does Budweiser promote itself as the "King of Beers", given that:

(a) the nation that makes up its main market fought a well known war against a king, and

(b) it suggests that it didn't reach its preeminent market position on merit?

Inspired by Christine P's question about digital sums, what percentage of numbers are coprime to their digital roots?

The digital root of a number can be calculated by repeatedly taking the digital sum, until a single-digit number is reached.

For example, d(148) = d(1+4+8) = d(13) = d(1+3) = d(4) = 4.

Then gcd(148, 4) = 4.

Does anyone else find it a bit annoying to keep seeing, "Hmm...it looks like you have a lot of punctuation", when answering math(s) questions?! ;-)

What's the best way to explain to a student why, when you multiply both sides of an inequality by a negative number, you must swap the direction of the inequality sign? For example:

-2x > 6.

Multiply both sides by -½:

x < -3.

I have several ideas, some intuitive based on the number line, and some more algebraic. What do you think?

Take any triangular number and append the digit '1'. Do the factors of the resulting number always end in 1 or 9?

For example the 67th triangular number is 2278. Appending '1', we get 22781. The factors of 22781 are 1, 11, 19, 109, 209, 1199, 2071, and 22781.

Find, in terms of the coefficients, a necessary and sufficient condition for at least one of the roots of ax³ + bx² + cx + d = 0 (a ≠ 0) to be equal to the product of the other two roots.

(A) one point

(B) two points

(C) one line

(D) two lines

(E) a right angle

Please do not give your method of solution -- just indicate A, B, C, D, or E.

When proving a result using mathematical induction the basis step (which often involves verifying the proposition for n = 0 or 1) is usually trivial. But the inductive step -- showing that if the proposition is true for n = k, then it is true for n = k+1 -- is often much more complicated.

Are there any examples of an inductive proof where the inductive step is trivial but the basis step is complicated and/or difficult?

On flat land.

Find the exact values of AC and AX, in surd form.