User talk:Anville/Archive1

Links I forget
You might find these links helpful in creating new pages or helping with the above tasks: How to edit a page, How to write a great article, Naming conventions, Manual of Style. You should read our policies at some point too.

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Again, welcome! - Meelar 23:05, 18 Feb 2004 (UTC)

LOL
LOL, I just finished rewriting the Hanford site in a non-emotional way and just saw you beat me, LOL! Nice :-) Woofles 01:10, Aug 17, 2004 (UTC)
 * Glad to see I'm not the only one who cares about such things! The original read line a cozy reminiscence in some coffee-table book&mdash;odd for an article I found from list of nuclear accidents.
 * Anville 18:27, 22 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Three Laws of Robotics
Thank you. I would have replied you sooner, but I wasn't sure how. I only just read "Risk" a couple of weeks ago so it was easy for me to remember, so don't feel foolish! :-)

Coralys

Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Please keep an eye on this page... recent edits seem to me to be heading in the direction of a bland public-relations puff-piece with too much being said about how great MIT is. Might just be me but I'd like the eyes of previous contributors on this article as well. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 19:28, 2 Oct 2004 (UTC)

I loved your rant on Talk:MIT about "MIT v. the Humanities"; especially the line about "[T]he last time I heard anyone rigorously classify the "liberal arts" was Martianus Capella, just before Rome went to pieces". Great stuff. Noel 20:59, 15 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Brass rats
You said: "Perhaps I should also mention my old roommate, who casts copies of his own Brass Rat in silver, for anybody who wants one."

No thanks... but I might be tempted if someone could get me one made of brass.

And I would definitely be interested in getting one made of yellow plastic, perferably with a "one-size-fits-all" springy-split-ring. Especially if I could get one with a flashing LED in it. [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 19:26, 3 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Liouville's equation
I don't think I follow the argument on non-crossing of phase-space trajectories as sufficient.

I suggest that _that_ is part of a subsidiary argument for showing that the volume in phase space always contains the same number of representative points, N.

The other key element is to show that the phase space volume V over which the particles are distributed, does not change. This occurs IIRC because the stretching in delta q is balanced by the shrinkage in delta p, (or vv), so deltap.deltaq is constant when following a particle and its environs. This comes about because the rate of change of $$\Delta p.\Delta q$$ is


 * $$\frac {d} {dt} ({\Delta p_i}{\Delta q_i}) = \Delta p_i \Delta q_i \cdot \left(\frac{\partial}{\partial p_i}{\dot p_i}+\frac {\partial}{\partial q_i}{\dot q_i}\right)$$

AND by Hamilton's relations, this is zero.

NB NB Hamilton's relations between p and q are ESSENTIAL to this argument - determinism is NOT enough.

This is the way I was taught it long ago in stat mechanics and is essentially as the fuller argument given at

astron.berkeley.edu/~jgr/ay202/

Linuxlad 18:16, 29 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Later - if you can bear to treat the motion through phase-space as fluid mechanics then Hamilton's relations ensure the 'velocity' field has zero divergence.

Liouville's theorem (Hamiltonian)
Just in case you haven't noticed yet: you don't need to write commutators ; since you can just write  commutator s. This "s" outside the brackets still gets highlighted in blue as part of the link. Michael Hardy 22:07, 8 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Article Licensing
Hi, I've started a drive to get users to multi-license all of their contributions that they've made to either (1) all U.S. state, county, and city articles or (2) all articles, using the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC-by-sa) v1.0 and v2.0 Licenses or into the public domain if they prefer. The CC-by-sa license is a true free documentation license that is similar to Wikipedia's license, the GFDL, but it allows other projects, such as WikiTravel, to use our articles. Since you are among the top 2000 Wikipedians by edits, I was wondering if you would be willing to multi-license all of your contributions or at minimum those on the geographic articles. Over 90% of people asked have agreed. For More Information:
 * Multi-Licensing FAQ - Lots of questions answered
 * Multi-Licensing Guide
 * Free the Rambot Articles Project

To allow us to track those users who muli-license their contributions, many users copy and paste the " " template into their user page, but there are other options at Template messages/User namespace. The following examples could also copied and pasted into your user page:


 * Option 1
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

OR
 * Option 2
 * I agree to multi-license all my contributions to any U.S. state, county, or city article as described below:

Or if you wanted to place your work into the public domain, you could replace " " with "  ". If you only prefer using the GFDL, I would like to know that too. Please let me know what you think at my talk page. It's important to know either way so no one keeps asking. -- Ram-Man (comment| talk)

Finite corridor
Glad to see the length pinned down. Where, may I ask, did you get the information? Just curious, not challenging it. You can reply here if you like, I'll watch this page. Dpbsmith (talk) 16:38, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)


 * The length I quoted was from the MIThenge site the article linked to. Their figures are probably close enough to the real thing (neglecting thermal expansion and quantum uncertainty).
 * Anville 20:53, 26 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Harrrrumph!
I was not neither "an example of academic failure." I got my SB in Course XVIII and made the Dean's List, thank you very much.

That's a joke.

I wish Wikipedia had some kind of hit counter; many of my contributions appear to have gotten no attention at all (except from the gnomes who come through in waves overlinking everything). It would be nice to know whether anyone had actually looked at them.

As for The Hidden Curriculum, for now, I fixed a typo. I'll look at more carefully when I have the chance. I never read the book, though, so I probably won't have a lot to say.

Thanks for your attention to MIT-related subjects. Dpbsmith (talk) 19:48, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Wikibreak
To whomever it may concern:

Detecting in myself signs of Wikipediholism and excessive Wikipediphilia, I have decided to take a nice, long vacation. When I get back, say in April, I expect to have lots of nice new things for The Giver, string theory and a few others. Until then, I remain,

Fondly yours, Anville 17:03, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Peer review/The Hidden Curriculum/archive1
Have commented on that page... hope you find this useful! - Ta bu shi da yu 02:11, 16 Feb 2005 (UTC)
 * You still about? I'm shifting this to the archives, if you would like it put back just reinstate it and remove it's entry from the January archives. Good luck with getting it to FAC status! - Ta bu shi da yu 01:39, 24 Feb 2005 (UTC)

The Giver
Most impressive. I've only had a moment to look over your work, but it seems that you've done an excellent job. I'll check it out more thoroughly later, but from what I've seen it looks like you've done a very good job!
 * Just a heads up. I submitted this for Featured Article status believing that you've expanded upon this over previous objections.  I hope you'll work with the community to help get this to FA status like it deserves to be.  I'm really impressed by your work on this and hope we can recognize it with FA status. -SocratesJedi | Talk 05:41, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Delany's Nova
Thanks! Very nice work in expanding the article. Ray Girvan.

A little experiment
I'm very tired of wiki editing, wiki politics and the pettiness which festers in the wiki mindset&mdash;of the bush wars which erupt over inconsequential articles while entire regions of human inquiry fust undocumented. I think it's about time I hung up my hat and went off to write something which will make me happy, or at least bring me fame and fortune. Because my heart is a shriveled cinder, however, I thought it best to provide a parting gift. I wanted to make it something which would really infuriate as many people as I could&mdash;when I act small, I do it on the grand scale&mdash;while being as careful and scholarly as I could possibly manage.

There are more footnotes on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Wikipedia philosophy.

So, I took a couple days when I probably wouldn't do anything else anyway, and I put together a little essay entitled "Influence and Criticims of Atlas Shrugged". Yes, the canonical Big Thick Book for the first subculture to be seen as over-representing itself on this encyclopedia. Given that nothing I could ever write would please the hard-core Objectivists, since a free encyclopedia is really only a way to let the Looters of this world get away without doing research on their own (isn't it?), I figured that my most rigorous scholarship would still start a pissing contest.

I'm vaguely curious to see how it looks, in a few months. Until then, let me note that the paragraph on "Influence" as it stood before was not just pathetically short but also unforgivably sloppy. It managed to mis-represent the two sources it did cite, while making an unjustified claim about the entire libertarian science fiction sub-genre. It included a phrase in quotation marks which did not appear in any of the sources it cited, which tends to support my intuition that nobody checks sources anyway. I included a reference to Eric S. Raymond's essay "A Political History of SF" to address the first problem; not that I agree entirely with ESR's conclusions, but he addresses the topic, and does so in what I consider an admirably rational manner.

For the curious, or those worried about copyvios, my rough draft is available at User:Anville/Atlas Shrugged Criticism. If its style seems a little jarring, I can only reply that I wrote it the same way I did my material for the Three Laws of Robotics, i.e., the material which pushed that article to FA status. I used the same standards and the same nerve circuits as I did for Isaac Asimov or Calvin and Hobbes, and nobody has taken those off the FA list, either. Yes, if what I say stands the way I said it, somebody will probably go away thinking that Atlas Shrugged is too childish for consideration. That means I've done my job. It's now up to somebody else to present whatever counterarguments, literary or historical, which competent critics have made. I would really prefer those arguments to come from outside sources, paraphrased and summarized with proper attribution, but I won't be surprised if they aren't.

One of the perks you discover while being a writer is that, thanks to revision, you can make something which is actually better than any given thought which goes through your brain on a day-to-day basis. Just like Einstein's mother didn't have to be a great physicist, and just like natural selection can make thumbs opposable without a Grand Designer's whim, the product can turn out better than its creator. Kind of funny, actually.

One or two people can probably make a book which will not only outlive their bodies but also live more grandly and with greater subtlety than their quotidian lives can manage. I remain to be convinced that an encyclopedia, produced by the conflicting jibber-jabber of ten thousand web-surfing yahoodim, can really attain more sophistication than the original Humanity which it mirrors.


 * Self-taught and referential,
 * Drunk on your own potential,
 * That cool impatient chuckling
 * Is just your inner duckling. . ..
 * If you were really clever,
 * You'd make it live forever.
 * Pray God that when the drought hits
 * You'll get to keep the outfits.

&mdash;Mary Prankster, "Swan Dive", from the album Roulette Girl

Anville 01:26, 26 May 2005 (UTC)