User talk:Dmcq/Archive 3

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Antichristos' socks

Do you know what is happing with the investigation? It really seems that tougher action by admins needs to be taken especially given the increasing incivility. That and it's starting to get boring now. ChiZeroOne (talk) 22:46, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Sorry I don't know more than is at Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Systemizer. I see the ip at the Physics talk page has practically admitted to being the same by changing he/she/it to he. Dmcq (talk) 22:49, 22 January 2011 (UTC)

Comment request

Hi, I wonder if you could give your opinion on the title of the Nations and intelligence article here [1].--Victor Chmara (talk) 21:00, 24 January 2011 (UTC)

Floating point and integers

I suspect you misread what I had written in the floating point article. Real numbers include integers and fractional numbers, thus I was saying that 'floating point' is a way of representing those integers and non-integers that cannot be otherwise represented using the hardware integer formats. That is not to say that 'floating point' cannot also be used to store numbers that can be stored in hardware integers because of course it can, as you rightly point out. I'm not entirely happy with your edit as it seems to be saying that floating point numbers are being represented by integers, which although accurate in hardware terms, can be a bit confusing. I still prefer the previous text, though it could be added, I suppose, that floating point format can also be used to store integers that can also be stored in hardware integer formats. DerekP (talk) 12:56, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

Yes I misread. Bringing in integer representations in a computer is just irrelevant. Dmcq (talk) 13:39, 27 January 2011 (UTC)

The Z3 wasn't the first computer according to other reliable cites.

Regarding this, our own article on the Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine says that it was the first computer. You can quibble about whether a computer needs to be 'stored-program' to be a real computer (as far as I'm concerned, it does), but the fact this debate exists at all (it does) indicates that we ought to be a bit more circumspect when throwing words around. How about we qualify the article with "considered by some" or something? The cite certainly supports that. —chbarts (talk) 05:08, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

It says it was the first stored program computer, not the first computer. It isn't a quibble. Your opinion doesn't matter, go and argue with he people on the History of computing hardware page instead about the citations there. Dmcq (talk) 07:26, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for being civil.—chbarts (talk) 09:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

If you do wish to dispute something like that then the History of computing hardware article is the one to tackle first. Please do not start saying 'untrue' about things without checking an appropriate place first. Dmcq (talk) 13:02, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

I note the article quoted Manchester Small-Scale Experimental Machine also says "Konrad Zuse's Z3 was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computer, with binary digital arithmetic logic, but it lacked the conditional branching of a Turing machine." Note the words 'first' 'working' 'computer' which were exactly the ones I used. Dmcq (talk) 21:03, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

IEEE 754 edits on February 3

To both Chbarts and Dmcq: please take note of WP:3RR. Glrx (talk) 19:40, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Please take notice of WP:CANVASS re your edit at Talk:History of computing hardware.[2] Glrx (talk) 19:46, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Glrx and Dmcq, this looks like a slow edit war. If you are deadlocked, please follow the steps of WP:Dispute resolution. If reverts continue, full protection of IEEE 754-1985 may be the next step. Thank you, EdJohnston (talk) 21:58, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

Well I'd be only too happy if they'd get a third opinion at a site which is much more relevant for a good answer rather than just sticking in their own POV, but no they just change the original text to their version even after I raise dit there myself without taking any advice. Dmcq (talk) 23:32, 8 February 2011 (UTC)

February 2011

Please stop your disruptive editing. If you continue to vandalize Wikipedia, you may be blocked from editing. -Atmoz (talk) 19:01, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

This was from an editor who was editing a policy page against consensus on the talk page. Dmcq (talk) 20:47, 16 February 2011 (UTC)

Hello, Dmcq. You have new messages at JamesBWatson's talk page.
You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

JamesBWatson (talk) 11:49, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

...and another one. JamesBWatson (talk) 12:04, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Whisperback

Hello. You have a new message at Talk:Spark_(fire)#Article_title's talk page. Cheers!--Yaksar (let's chat) 04:59, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Creating disambiguation pages.

It is proper edit when creating disambiguation pages to correct all incoming links to those pages. If you insist on making Paper folding into a disambiguation page, please correct all incoming links to that page before you occupy yourself with other tasks. bd2412 T 15:14, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I think you have things slightly wrong. A page should only be disambiguated if there is a clear main topic and if you just take a quick look at the links to the page you'll see that there are loads of different meaning people think for paper folding. Therefore the page should be a disambiguation page. I cannot be responsible for all the mistakes people have made. I will have a look at fixing them up but what you say is wrong - leaving it as an ordinary article would mean more links would point to the wrong place because they would not be fixed up by the people trawling round wikipedia looking for disambiguations to fix. Dmcq (talk) 15:21, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

The point is that the term is not really ambiguous. Perhaps it should point to List of different kinds of paper folding, but the page itself remains a collection of articles relating to the folding of paper. Furthermore, to conform with the MOS for disambig pages, most of the links presently on the page will have to be removed because they do not contain the term "paper folding". bd2412 T 16:15, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

A disambiguation page is for when the 'term' is ambiguous, not just for when the 'title' is ambiguous. Dmcq (talk) 16:19, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I've had another look at it and I still think it would remain a scrappy stub if restored. What I think is really needed is an article called 'paper craft' or 'paper art'. The main missing use I could see for 'paper folding' as an entity was as an artistic technique. Dmcq (talk) 18:41, 1 March 2011 (UTC)

I have been working on crafting a workable disambiguation policy for this project for six years, and have hundreds of thousands of edits in this project to show for it. So far as I can tell, all you've managed to do in the area of disambiguation is create work for others while shrugging off your own responsibilities to clean up what messes you make. There is no consensus for the direction that Paper folding should go, so I am going to work to make an article out of it. If you refuse to help, please do not impede. bd2412 T 01:28, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I see from the talk page there that they are now just about starting to see the light about this article. Perhaps they will be able to do something useful instead of restoring rubbish if they learn a bit more about the subject. Dmcq (talk) 03:33, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I apologize for the harsh tone of my last comment. Sometimes my singleminded focus gets the better of me. Cheers! bd2412 T 03:53, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

Search tool?

I didn't want to flood the VP with this tangent, but I'm genuinely curious: you seem to have a lot more confidence in the search tool than I do. I don't know that it can distinguish between articles on people who are New York lawyers, for example, and articles that merely mention New York lawyers (or even merely use those words). And I don't know that it can target a set of articles for mass/group editing by an automated editing tool such as AWB, which can create a list of articles from a category. And I don't know that you can use "related changes" on search results like you can on a category's contents. Maybe I'm reading more into your comments than you intended, but it seems like you would rather have the category system doing something else because you think the search tool can do most of what it does? postdlf (talk) 15:21, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

I think categories like 'bridges built in 1933' are a broken way of doing something that could be far better done otherwise, in particular by searching for infobox data Dmcq (talk) 16:54, 8 March 2011 (UTC)

BLP, ethnicity, gender

Wikipedia talk:Biographies of living persons#Include "ethnicity, gender," to match all other guidelines

Wikilawyers have been trying to drive through a wording loophole in WP:BLP, saying ethnicity and gender of WP:EGRS don't apply to living persons, simply because the two words aren't in the policy. (Apparently, they think it should only apply to dead people.) I see that you have participated on this topic at the Village Pump.

They also are trying to remove the notability, relevance, and self-identification criteria at WT:EGRS, but that's another fight for another day, I'm simply too busy to watch two fronts at the same time.
--William Allen Simpson (talk) 21:27, 11 March 2011 (UTC)

talk

Just refer the hyperlink and get the information about afghanistan but i do not know what is the special stamp of reliable source on internet on the basis of which wikipedia provide the information. http://veda.wikidot.com/vedic-history-of-afghanistan cheers and enjoy your life.

A man from Matrix (talk) 19:46, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

Re: Use of {{-}}

Hello, Dmcq. You have new messages at MC10's talk page.
Message added 18:24, 21 March 2011 (UTC). You can remove this notice at any time by removing the {{Talkback}} or {{Tb}} template.

—mc10 (t/c) 18:24, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

Limits in math

Hi, You might right. I have never checked it in any English book. However I allways used in this way. I also thought the latex command \limits came from the word limit (border). Russians and Hungarians definitely used the notation in "my way". Even in WP. Euty (talk) 14:12, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

LaTeX was designed to be easy to use, not so you always had to add extra bits. \sum and the various logical operations work with the limits below and above and if they thought integral should work in the same way they would have had it work the same way, it would have been no bother. If you look at for instance Mathematica integrate or do a search for English books with Google specifying "definite integration" you'll find they're all like this, the form with it above or below is rare, perhaps in examples like

$\iint \limits _{x^{2}+y^{2}\leq r^{2}}dx\,dy$

By the way the following limits are also written after the symbol:

$\int _{a}^{b}f(x)dx={\bigg [}F(x){\bigg ]}_{a}^{b}=F(x){\bigg |}_{a}^{b}=F(b)-F(a)$

Dmcq (talk) 18:36, 3 April 2011 (UTC)

As far as I know the latex standard is the following. Separate from the text, when one uses the integral between $$, the integral borders go by my way. Whithin the text using one $ they go by the other way. I have checked the following books:

Paul Dirac: The principles of quantum mechanics. Pauli: General principles of quantum mechanics.

Both using "my way". However they are very old books. Therefore I checked the Thomas: Calculus and it used the other way. So I am not sure. (But the translation of the Thomas uses "my way" ;-) Euty (talk) 07:59, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

I see someone has written a Wikipedia article about this Integral symbol. Dmcq (talk) 08:13, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

I just had a look at that Dirac book, I must admit I was quite surprised as he was English. I guess he was following the people in Germany since that's where all the action in quantum mechanics was. Dmcq (talk) 09:13, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the link. Dirac was very good at mathematics. He was better than the Germans and definitelly better than Heisenberg (in maths). I leave the integral notation problem to you. You can change my notations back if you want. Euty (talk) 11:24, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Actually I've always written integral signs straight downwards like the German version shown at the link, I'm not so keen on the slanting version. Dmcq (talk) 11:47, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Cycle notation

We edited that article at the same time. I tried to integrate your added sentence into the article. I wish there was some more recent book than one from 1930; I feel bad calling anything from 1930 a reference outside of historical articles. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:06, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

I have a soft spot for that book as I bought it for myself while I was still at school :) Dmcq (talk) 13:23, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

I don't object to it for any reasonable reason, so I'll put it back. — Carl (CBM · talk) 13:26, 22 April 2011 (UTC)

RE: Exercise category removals

I had a look at your contributions to try and see why you removed |Category Exercise from Dance and Health and it seems you are removing it from a lot of other things I'd have though rather relevant too and I don't see why. The Dance and health article deals specifically with the benefits and problems of dance as an exercise. What are the criteria or why are you doing this thanks? Dmcq (talk) 16:26, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for your message - I hope that this finds you well! I was trying to clarify the articles in Category:Exercise, and it appears that a number of what at some point were unrelated articles which were sat within other categories are now sat twice in that category once someone had moved the main catgeory under Exercise. Hence Dance and health sits under the Category:Dance and is listed in Exercise, as is the article Dance. In recategorising Dance and health I felt that the health bit was less exercise orientated and more health orientated, hence my re-cat. But if you have a strong preference or objection, I have no set position on the issue. Best Regards, --Trident13 (talk) 18:30, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

quote diving issue

better to discuss this in talk (and I'd prefer if you redacted your request for an explanation from the NOR talk page, since it just detracts from the main discussion there).

Your statement -"It's fine for you to complain about a student but the editors here are not your students and I bet you have enough trouble getting students to do things your way." - is unrelated to what we are discussing. My relationship with students is not at issue, and no one is likely to assume that other editors here are my students regardless, so what would the purpose of this statement be? Moreover, my options for responding to it seem to be:

• Ignore it it as irrelevant - that troubles to me, because whatever your intentions it sounds like you're insulting my ability to teach for no readily apparent reason.
• Comment on it in order to correct the misperception it creates - that drags the conversation farther off-topic.
• Say something sarcastic or mildly insulting back at you - not acceptable in any case.

None of those options are good. Redacting the statement does not in any way change the meaning of your point, and it removes an unnecessary and somewhat irritating comment from the page so that I don't have to respond to it. Unless you really want to argue that that was a necessary and important comment to make in the discussion, I'd ask you to let the redaction stand because (i) it would be in line with wp:CIV, (ii) it would keep the discussion from wandering off into unnecessary personal avenues, and (iii) it would make me happy. --Ludwigs2 00:10, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for trying to explain your issue. I was illustrating the point about it being difficult by using something familiar to you that you yourself had brought up in relating to this topic. I do not see how what I said was any reflection on your abilities. I think it is something difficult, and you yourself said you had to mark students down for not following it. I think it was an important point and I see no incivility. Ask yourself if it is reasonably easy to teach your students this and if is is why have they got to be marked down for not doing it? It isn't easy so why get in a huff about me pointing out the bleeding obvious? Only if the editors here generally followed that or could be brought to agree on that by consensus would it have a hope and you've already got evidence people don't do that generally and some like me disagree with it anyway.

See WP:TPO about striking out other peoples comments. If you think it is just uncivil then don't strike it out, only if it is an obvious personal attack is that considered okay. In this case what I got was my comments removed and a remark by you saying in effect that I did personal attacks. It would have been far better for you to assume good faith, see WP:AGF#Dealing with bad faith about dealing with where you think there has been bad faith. If you go around reading bad faith into things like I wrote you'll just get yourself into endless disputes and end up getting a heart attack editing Wikipedia.

I will go and redact those bits with the comment that they were redacted at your request on my talk page. Dmcq (talk) 07:30, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

thanks, I appreciate it. The two real issues from my perspective were (i) that that comment shifted focus from academic standards (which was what my reference to giving C's and D's was) to something that sounded like my personal preferences, and (ii) that it set the stage for a protracted, off-topic tangent if I tried to argue with it. In truth, I don't have any real problem teaching this to students because every professor they work with requires more-or-less the same standards. College-level work has the weird aspect that students are often writing papers using articles by people that their professors know personally, and very few professors are keen on seeing their friends, colleagues and acquaintances misrepresented. I don't expect everyone on wikipedia to understand these standards - even among editors with advanced degrees, many are from physical sciences where this kind of misrepresentation is not as much of a concern - and this is part of why I think we need something in policy that holds up he standards. but we can talk about that on the talk page.

with respect to TPO: I'm well acquainted with that page. To be frank, I've been having protracted issues with editors being uncivil to me, and I've been trying out different ways of dealing with the issue, without too much success. I can't seem to get editors to stop on their own, can't get admins to take an interest, and have been attracting some extensive flak simply by trying to keep people from being nasty to me. This is my current approach - carefully and politely removing things that strike me as uncivil or that will lead to unpleasant distractions (such as might fall within the boundaries of TPO), so that they never get the chance to mature into real unpleasantness on talk pages. I think this would actually be a wonderful procedure if everyone did it - get the community to politely police each other, and incivility would disappear almost overnight. But I'll have to see how it works out over time.

If it helps any, I recognize that this comment was right on the borderline - clearly not intended to be mean, and only marginally over the lip of wp:CIV. I decided to remove it because it really did bug me on a personal level, and I assumed (correctly, as it works out) that you would be graceful about it. again, thank you for that. --Ludwigs2 08:26, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

I do not recognize what I said as incivility of any sort and only removed it because of your perception as such in the interest of keeping things calm on the page. If you really think something like that is incivility take it to WP:WQA to get an outside opinion. Dmcq (talk) 09:28, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

Since there is already a discussion here, maybe it's best to take this here as well. It's refreshing to see someone actually trying to evaluate this NSF source properly. I haven't seen this for a while. The broken NSF web site is a red herring. This is an official report which the NSF (more precisely the National Science Board, a formally different organisation but basically just the NSF) has to create for the US government every two years. I guess this all looks like a very minor conflict to you now, but it isn't. Last year I planned an RfC against the user who created a great deal of disruption by pushing the same misquotation from this source into more than a dozen articles and creating several confusing RfCs around them. For that purpose I began to document this disruption, but only did the part that was in article space. The policy talk and article talk part of the disruption was more significant and harder to document, and I will only do that if necessary. (I hope not.)

This may interest you more: I also wrote up the basic information required for evaluating the source at User:Hans Adler/Science and Engineering Indicators. The lead of the write-up gives the general background (who is responsible for the document, and why). The rest is structured exactly like the document itself, copying all the passages that I felt are relevant for evaluating the source, with the most relevant things in red. This gives a sense of proportion, showing how far you have to zoom in to find the misquoted passage.

The main problem with the claim that ghosts are pseudoscience is that it plainly contradicts philosophers of science who write long articles about pseudoscience and even notable sceptics such as Michael Shermer, whom the NSF document quotes. (Shermer also uses the Gallup poll on belief in paranormal, but in exactly the same way as the NSF document: On page 26 of Why people believe weird things, he asks "why do so many pseudoscientific and nonscientific beliefs abound?" Then he cites Gallup, explicitly as a poll on "belief in the paranormal". And the next paragraph starts "Other popular ideas of our time that have little to no scientific support include [...]". Clearly Shermer can distinguish between pseudoscience and other related nonsense. Unfortunately some of the self-described sceptics here seem unable or unwilling to do that.) I think it's safe to say that the last thing the NSF intended to do with the SEI 2006 document is making a novel and authoritative contribution to a philosophical debate. Yet that is how the source is used. Hans Adler 09:03, 29 April 2011 (UTC)

So you have editors with what I called 'a bee in their bonnet'. It happens often with this sort of thing and can be very difficult indeed, I guess then having later reports and the bit in dispute removed from the report has had no weight with them. I agree there is synthesis but it is of a sort many editors will find difficult to identify. I do not believe a straight attack saying they are doing original research is very useful, it just places them on the defensive, and what Ludwig2 is asking for isn't arguing from clear current policy. I think it is better to remove the NSF bits as confusing and wrong in the context because the NSF didn't phrase things well and they have removed it in later reports. Evidence of a change in the source is more convincing than logic, 'verifiability not truth' shows the source has stopped saying things like that. Dmcq (talk) 10:26, 29 April 2011 (UTC)