new placeholder

I had intended this just to be a "placeholder" post to make sure that the draft posts I created to keep this Morton post sticky. They all (seemingly) worked this time, but for some bizarre reason the draft post thing doesn't always hold the proper order.

Well, so far I've had no luck asking why Third Edge of the Sword is being shunned by Technoratti, so I suppose the next logical step is to ask another question of the blogosphere.

Just having some fun, I've done a little playing around with some fairly complex integrals. This one is particularly tricky:


Anybody know of an effective trick to solve it? Is there some trigonometric substitution I need to know? The answer to the actual problem is already known to me: This page tells me right away the equation for the surface area of a torus. But in my case the above is half of a messy pair of integrals formed by this equation while doing Surface of Revolution calculations.

At this point I simply want to get to work solving the actual integral whether I need the answer or not. Suggestions on what method to use would be preferable to simply doing the rest of the work for me.

Update, 5:00am: This placeholder post, which was right below the Morton one, has still ended up sandwiched in between the other drafts. What the hell is causing this?