User talk:Dysprosia/Archive (19)

Quote Of The Decade

All who have accomplished great things have had a great aim, have fixed their gaze on a goal which was high, one which sometimes seemed impossible. Orison Swett Marden.

-- fm Anthere

I, Reene, hereby award dysprosia the Wiki Wiffle Bat for her general awesomeness and a great attitude.

For crosswords above and beyond the call of duty, I hereby award you this ____star (4 letters, often raised by the Amish). —CXI

In recognition of commendable deeds of musical heroism on Goldberg variations-- fm Rama

Thank you for your recording of the Brahms Intermezzo. I find it to be quite nice and see no reason why you should replace it with another recording in the future. The Uninvited Co., Inc. 18:53, 10 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I'm stupid...

I read that wrong. Geez. Whoops, sorry. Thanks for fixing. ral315 05:18, Feb 14, 2005 (UTC)

Use of bold

Hi Dysprosia, I noticed on Permutation that you de-bolded several terms there, with the edit summary: "we bold synonyms of the article title only. italicise important terms." But you left the bolding of "cycle". Was that an oversight? Or am I reading your edit summary too literally? As far as I can tell, the standard practice for Wikipedia's mathematics articles seems to be to use bold for any term defined in the article especially if that term redirects to that article. (Of course self links are rendered as bold, but I'm not talking about that case) I can provide lots and lots of examples if you like. Are you saying this practice needs to change? Paul August ☎ 15:24, Feb 16, 2005 (UTC)

Hello I am confused by the statement in "Support": " Singular supports may also be used to understand phenomena special to distribution theory, such as attempts to 'multiply' distributions (squaring the Dirac delta function fails - essentially because the singular supports of two distributions to multiply should be disjoint)." Seems to me if you multiply two distributions whose support is disjoint, you will get zero. Is that not true? Seems to me that the problem in squaring a Dirac Delta has more to do with orders of infinity and limiting processes. Thanks Peter (Pdn)

OK thanks for reply - I will pursue the foregoing question as you suggest. By the way, since you are "Dysprosia" you might want to peek at where I stuck in a reference to Welsbach (one of the discoverers of many of the rare earths) in a reference to gas mantles on the entry for Cerium pdn

PS: How do I put in those neat UTC notations and sign off when I edit a discussion or user page, please? Pdn

Mucho gratias, consider four tildes my middle name Pdn 00:41, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Grothendieck-Riemann-Roch theorem

... is a nice new page, with some TeX on it which currently is displaying horribly. I can't see what the problem is - but I'm no expert. When you have a moment ...

Charles Matthews 16:52, 21 Feb 2005 (UTC)

link problem

Hi Dysprosia, I'm having a bit of difficulty creating a link from The_Duke_of_Wellington's_(West_Riding)_Regiment to The_Duke_of_Wellington's_Regiment It constantly comes up advising of an internal error. Could you please advise accordingly? Richard Harvey 10:55, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Oh yes Excellent:- you get a big hug for that...Richard Harvey 12:17, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

:)

"Because I owe Dysprosia 5$" by Jonathan Cary [1] --mav 23:39, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Sydney Hilton bombing

Hello,

I note that you made a contribution to this page some time ago. There is a rather nasty revert war going on at the moment with user:ambi. She makes no changes, never edits the talk page, but continuously reverts the page. This is of particular concern because she appears to have gotten herslef onto the Arbitration commitee, so this is more important than just the Hilton Bombing page.

Could you please review the page. Please make some (possibly small) contribution to it to indicate your general support.

(But please check the history and be careful to review/contribute to the full page, not a reverted one. The full page is quite long and includes an "Evidence of Misconduct" section.)

Thanks,

Aberglas 04:58, 26 Feb 2005 (UTC) aberglas

Linux other-uses text

Hi! Long time, no see: you were the first person I spoke to on here. I'm back editing Wikipedia as you can see, although not too much because I still don't have my own Internet connection.

Regarding, your edit of the above. This is all pretty minor stuff, but, noticing that page and my thinking being that the other-uses sections should be as concise as possible, I tried to edit that section so that it said the same thing in fewer words without annoying the pro-`GNU' people in the `GNU' v. `Linux' debate too much (because I know how much this is a hot potato).

Removal of the other mention of GNU (that I left) may annoy those people. (Aside: I am one of those people, at least sometimes, outside of Wikipedia but I accept that Wikipedia has decided on one usage based on popularity and that that should be stuck too, so I'm not fussed what it says).

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 23:24, 2005 Mar 3 (UTC)

P.S. Would you mind if I ask you about a few things I've been wondering about Wikipedia?

P.P.S. I don't quite understand your comment on your edit.

P.P.P.S. I'm going off-line now as I need to go home and get some food/sleep.

All the recent edits on this have been reverted anyway, so I'll leave it like that (as clearly some object to trying to shorten it and I'm not arguing about such a minor point).

So, it doesn't matter now, but just as an aside (because there seems to be a lot of confusion by outsiders over what the GNU v. Linux v. GNU/Linux debate is actually about):

GNU isn't really an OS, people use the term to refer to a set of tools.

I think the point is that those who actually use the term, GNU, and the compromise term, GNU/Linux,(e.g.: the FSF), use it to refer to a free-software-based OS. You may prefer to always refer to that OS as multiple OSs based somewhat arbitrarily on the kernel that is used, and may consider the only common factor between those OSs to be what you call a toolkit. However, that doesn't cause the semantics of GNU to change.

Semantically equivalent analogy: the fact that one may not believe that God exist, does not change the fact that the word refers to an omnipotent being, for those who believe in God and those who don't. Now, s/God/GNU and s/omnipotent being/operating system.

So saying a "GNU operating system" isn't quite right.

In terms of the exact phrase in question, even if GNU isn't an operating system, GNU in GNU operating system is an attributive noun (i.e.: acts as an adjective) so it is more likely to refer to a `toolkit' than an OS. I'm not exactly sure what toolkit is supposed to refer to, but as long as toolkit ≠ operating system, what I said stands. (NB: I'm not saying that I think there was anything wrong with your edit.)

Syntatically equivalent analogy: does the phrase, child killer, always have to refer to someone who is a child. Now s/child/GNU and s/killer/operating system. (Couldn't think of a nicer example which quite made the point as well.)

In fact, I was being biased against the FSF viewpoint there (on the grounds that Wikipedia seems to have officially decided to discount their point of view so its OK to be a bit biased against it), because saying a GNU OS implies that GNU is not an OS; if one considers it an OS, one would not talk of a GNU OS (the implication being that GNU is not an OS but multiple OSs or, rather, an attribute that OSs can have). Also, the fact that OS would be redundant in that phrase, also favours a `toolkit' interpretation.

Didn't quite mean to ramble on that much. Actually, scratch that. Here's a shorter response:

GNU isn't really an OS

No, its GNU is not Unix :-)

--Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley _talk _contrib 14:54, 2005 Mar 4 (UTC)

Still fighting the good fight, I see. Well, kudos. I'd like to give you an orange star or a pink heart or a red balloon or what have you, but I have no idea what that stuff means (if anything). More practically, I wish I could help, but I wikistressed out long ago. Glad to see there is still at least one voice of sanity left on the Wikipedia though. :o) Keep up the good work...please. Paige 06:14, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Modular electronics diagrams

What do you think of this proposal?

Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#Modular_electronics_diagrams

Please leave comments there. Just bringing this to the attention of a handful of people who might care... - Omegatron 00:57, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)

WMV

At Steve Ballmer: are you saying that the initialism WMV is widely enough known that people in general will recognize it as a file type? Certainly wasn't one I was familiar with. I suspect that only people who commonly watch videos on line will know this. -- Jmabel | Talk 04:02, Mar 6, 2005 (UTC)

There's an easy solution to this that I looked over. I hope it's suitable, please take a look. Dysprosia 04:23, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

phi vs. varphi

do any mathematicians really use ${\frac {\partial ^{2}f}{\partial \phi ^{2}}}$ when dealing with spherical coordinates instead of ${\frac {\partial ^{2}f}{\partial \varphi ^{2}}}$ though? It seems to me that in every math class and physics class I've been in, the symbol used was $\varphi$ . Of course, in math and physics the two coordinates are usually switched, and wikipedia seems to use the physics version, but in both math and physics courses I've been in and textbooks I've used, the $\varphi$ phi symbol was the one used for these coordinates, with the "standard" $\phi$ reserved for other uses

--Jacobolus 07:51, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Note: I think that the symbol is called "varphi" not to represent "variable phi" but rather "variant phi symbol". There are also "varepsilon", "vartheta", "varpi", "varrho", etc. but these aren't all used for variable symbols. Looking back at my math and physics books, it actually appears that 3 different math books use the varphi symbol, while 2 different physics books use the phi symbol. --Jacobolus 08:48, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Ok, sorry. I've removed that comment. Dysprosia 09:52, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

phi vs. theta, r vs. rho in spherical/cylindrical coords

Hi. I posted another question to the Mathematics Talk page. I was wondering what your thoughts are on the issue of variables in cylindrical and spherical coords. --Jacobolus 08:19, 6 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Cat:Math

Thanks for the work you've done categorizing math articles. However, try to keep articles out of the root category Category:Mathematics, as its best we keep this as a sort of "gateway" category. HTH Dysprosia 05:19, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I am aware of that. I put things in Category:Mathematics only when I believe that's the best one. It is of course always possible that I can get something wrong (MathMartin applied one correction for example). Tomorrow I will go to Category:Mathematics and check if those articles can go into some other category. Oleg Alexandrov 05:26, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You are fast! :) Oleg Alexandrov 05:27, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for fixing equation solving. And above, my wording was poor (now corrected). I did not mean to say that you should go fix things after me, rather, that I would be grateful if you fix any bug you run into. 06:06, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

PS I took a look at Category:Mathematics and found some misclassified articles (none by me so far :) Oleg Alexandrov 06:06, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

I usually put stray math articles which I am unable to categorize any better into Category:Mathematics. Then someone more knowledgeable can move them into the appropriate subcategory/subcategories later. So I do not see a problem with articles being categorized as Category:Mathematics as long as they don't stay there too long. MathMartin 12:19, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)

wanna vote?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Categories_for_deletion#Category:Female_chess_players --Sonjaaa 23:43, Mar 9, 2005 (UTC)

RE: George Gerbner

I am interested in the full citations of the references used in this article. If you have them available, I would be most appreciative. If they are around somewhere and I am simply wikitarded, please excuse my ignorance and perhaps simply point me in the proper direction?

Thanks!

What article are you talking about? There's no such article as George Gerber. I have no idea who he is anyway... Dysprosia 00:03, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Whoops. Sorry, that's supposed to be George Gerbner! It's an article about his cultivation theory..

Sorry, I know nothing about him or references for use. I merely cleaned up a sentence in the article. Dysprosia 01:59, 12 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Small bug =

Quotations in "experimenter's regress." Thanks for fixing that (I was fixing it at the same time, but you found it first.) Actually, this is a small bug in Wikipedia search: I searched on the quoted string "experimenter's regress" in order to avoid any hits on "experimenter" or "regress"... but then after the software found no article and offered to create one by that name, it created a new article with quote symbols in the title. I didn't notice this until later. (I'm fairly new here... where would I report such a problem?) --Wjbeaty 05:30, Mar 15, 2005 (UTC)

You can register, login and submit a bug at http://bugzilla.wikipedia.org . By the way, talk goes at the bottom of the page :) Dysprosia 05:40, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Voluntary Student Unionism

Nice work on that page - it does work better. Thanks! Lacrimosus 07:59, 15 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Int'l Writing Contest

Wikipedia:International_writing_contest is up. Please let people know, and keep it in mind as you browse the wiki... `+sj + 18:01, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)