User talk:Army1987/Archive 2

Hacker
Thanks for making the dab move. I have leapt in to do some cleanup of the new dab page. Hope you approve. Colonel Warden (talk) 11:06, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks, some of the definitions are better than the ones I could think. I had a different sorting in mind, though.
 * That's fine. I've tweaked it a bit further.  There's some more cleaning of the miscellaneous stuff needed at the end but we're getting there.  Note that I've also started on the hats - see Black hat.  I plan to cut back lots of the extraneous clutter which may help in getting some of this stuff merged.  There's lots  of text without proper sources and so it seems easy to cut back to the meat. Colonel Warden (talk) 12:55, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

userbox relocation
Hi, just a heads-up that a userbox you have on your pages (interest in conspiracy theories) has changed location to User:Sappho%27d/Userboxes/Conspiracybutnoreptoids

Cheers. Drywontonmee (talk) 07:02, 28 June 2008 (UTC)

Open systems and Newton's Second Law
Thanks for improving the citations. However, it appears that you turned a excerpt from Kleppner and Kolenkow into a paraphrase. If it was originally an exact quote, I think it should be presented fully intact as an indented quotation; otherwise, if we want to present it as a paraphrase, the wording needs to be changed substantially to avoid plagiarism. MarcusMaximus (talk) 20:06, 13 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry, it said "The reasoning [...] is excerpted here", but for some reason I remembered it said "summarized" rather than "excerpted", and for some even more mysterious reason I didn't notice that until I viewed the page history. Please whack me with a wet trout. I'm restoring the original form, using blockquote rather than colons to indent. --A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 09:29, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I guess the reason for my confusion was that it says "given in An Introduction to Mechanics by Kleppner and Kolenkow and other modern texts" [strong emphasis added], and I must have thought that would make no sense for a quotation unless several books use the same words. --A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 09:37, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I was thrown off by that too, and I had to reread it many times before I concluded something was wrong. We can probably reword it so it is not misleading. MarcusMaximus (talk) 19:08, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I searched the page history to find out who originally inserted that paragraph, and left a message on his talk page (User talk:Loom91). Unfortunately, I looked up his contributions and he hasn't make any edit since 19 July. --A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 19:20, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

I went on Amazon and used the "search inside" feature on the Kleppner and Kolenkow textbook. I searched for all the key terms and phrases in the allegedly excerpted paragraph and I could not find it in the text. Maybe it is not a quotation from the book in question. MarcusMaximus (talk) 08:17, 16 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I guess we'd better remove the indentation then... A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 23:14, 16 September 2008 (UTC)

Image:ExtremeValueTheorem.png
I notice that you created Image:ExtremeValueTheorem.png to illustrate the extreme value theorem in continuous function. This doesn't seem like a good example as written, though, because it's not even clear what function you intended to define. You wrote, "The high number of samples caused them to overlap, forming a continuous line." This is only true if the points have a finite size, as in the plot, but in this case it forms a contiguous area, not a line. Is the function supposed to be the maximum of the shaded area in the plot, or the linear interpolation of these points, or...? Moreover, it's rather confusing because your algorithm does not have a well-defined limit as you increase the number of samples.

Probably it would be better to use a different example.

—Steven G. Johnson (talk) 23:17, 17 September 2008 (UTC)


 * It is a random walk. The issue of overlapping points refers to the way the image itself was made, not to the mathematical concept it illustrates; conceptually the function is supposed to be the linear interpolation of those points. And the limit as the number of points N goes to infinity, the product N&sigma;2 staying constant, is a Wiener process. --A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 23:42, 17 September 2008 (UTC)
 * See also Brownian noise. --A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 23:47, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Time between edits
Thank you for making the recent update to the above page.  κaτaʟ aveno TC 00:44, 25 September 2008 (UTC)

How do I put a template in a category?
I have created a new template, radic. I want to put it in Category:Mathematical formatting templates. So I edited radic/doc and added  in the   section, but that's not working. What am I missing? -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  23:37, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Hi Army. What you actually need to do is place the category on the template page itself, between the and . Cheers, Prince of Canadat 23:43, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I guess it would work, but WP:DOC claims that cats should be added to the includeonly section of the /doc subpage, and indeed I've seen templates doing that (e.g. fact/doc). -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  23:50, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Hmmm. Fixed. Removing the tags did it.Prince of Canadat 23:57, 25 September 2008 (UTC)
 * But, that way, the /doc page itself was also included in the category, not just the template, which I guess is the point of the noinclude. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  00:02, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Never mind. I found the answer. Help:Category. Thank you anyway. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  00:07, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted
I was moving one option at Village pump (proposals)/Persistent proposals/Straw poll for view-deleted while you were voting, hopefully your vote ended up in the right place.... Please check just to make sure. Cheers! ~  JohnnyMrNinja  10:20, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, I didn't state the WP:OBVIOUS in my proposal (that is, that it should be restricted to logged-in users), but now I clarified that and put in in the right section. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  10:26, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I didn't think to list it IPs as an option until someone said it, so I listed them all. *sigh* ~  JohnnyMrNinja  10:36, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Help with quark
I'd just like to say that I appreciate the ample effort you've been putting in. I think this is getting closer to the FA standard each edit, no? &mdash; Anonymous Dissident  Talk 13:03, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is much better than when you nominated it. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  13:11, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * What areas do you feel still require improvement? &mdash; Anonymous Dissident  Talk 13:15, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I dunno right now, I'm going to take a more careful look at it. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  13:17, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Request to review quark
I'll give it a thorough read-over in the next day or two. -- SCZenz (talk) 19:44, 28 September 2008 (UTC)

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Splitting document
Could you please restore the !votes I made, or revert the split. NOW. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:28, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Done (I think). -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  18:37, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Almost; you reverted VegasWikian's vote on one of the A.1's when you inserted mine. I think it's fixed, now.  However, you need to cross-check on each move you make, and save the deletion from the main article before you save the created subarticle, as the first save will fail if there's an edit conflict.  — Arthur Rubin  (talk) 19:03, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing out this. Anyway, I've put a inuse warning until I'm done, to avoid similar problems. -- A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  19:05, 26 September 2008 (UTC)

Please close Quark peer review
Per WP:FAC guidelines, a peer review cannot be open for a featured article candidate at the same time: "Before nominating an article, ensure that it meets all of the FA criteria and that peer reviews are closed and archived." Please close the peer review you have opened. I assure you, at any rate, that the sections relating to QCD are wholly accurate; my references are not incorrect, and there are plenty of references. &mdash; Anonymous Dissident  Talk 00:16, 29 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Yes, I missed that point, I'm sorry for it. OTOH, somebody has already closed the PR. (I had asked some WP:PHYS participants listing particle physics in their areas of interest to take a look to the article, as I thought it wouldn't hurt (and it didn't hurt), but I hadn't explicitly mentioned the now-archived PR.) --<span style="font-family: monospace; font-weight: 600; color: #00F; background-color: #FFF; border: thin solid black"> Army1987!!! 11:53, 30 September 2008 (UTC)

Your signature
Can you please change your sig by either making it smaller or changing it completely since it fails the WP:SIGN policy..thanks ...-- Cometstyles 00:04, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Is it OK now? --<span style="font-family: monospace; font-weight: 600; color: #00F; background-color: #FFF; border: thin solid black"> Army1987!!! 11:50, 30 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I came here to say the same, because it makes FACs very hard to read; eliminating the framing and the exclamation points would be nice. Please see Signatures.  Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 05:30, 6 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Done. -- Army1987 (t — c) 12:03, 7 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Much better ! Sandy Georgia  (Talk) 15:57, 8 October 2008 (UTC)

Mathematical coincidence with pi
A part of your edit is questioned at Talk:Mathematical coincidence Have you seen this way to tell it in a reliable source, and has it been called humorously or similar by a reliable source? PrimeHunter (talk) 15:51, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
 * It was a long time ago, so I don't remember well, but IIRC I had copied or moved that statement from some other Wikipedia article, presumably Pi (mathematical constant). I probably didn't even notice whether there was any reference for it or not, and if I did, I don't remember. -- Army1987 (t — c) 14:28, 24 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Well, I said in the edit summary that it was taken from the early May 2005 revision] of Pi. There was no inline reference for that statement (they weren't so common on Wikipedia then), but maybe whoever added it in the first place took it from one of the "External links" given... -- Army1987 (t — c) 14:35, 24 October 2008 (UTC)

First to theorize the electron
It looks like I have an issue with your edit of the electron article. Stoney was not actually the first to theorize the existince of elementary charges; that was done earlier by Laming and others. I think also that Stoney didn't actually postulate a particle, but rather a quantum of electrical charge. (See for example Histories of the Electron 2001.) This is the reason I didn't credit Stoney in the lead for the concept. There are several sources that confirm this, some of which I used in the article. This needs to be addressed, as the lead now no longer matches the history section.&mdash;RJH (talk) 16:28, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Thanks for pointing out that and fixing the article. I learned about Stoney theorizing the electron from the George Johnstone Stoney article; while it doesn't explicitly say he was the first one to introduce the concept, maybe you want to fix that article, too, to make it less misleading. -- Army1987 (t — c) 09:02, 26 October 2008 (UTC)

You might want to take a look at WP:Jargon concerning the use of terminology with which the reader may not be familiar.&mdash;RJH (talk) 21:06, 1 November 2008 (UTC)

Also please see Manual_of_Style_(links). Thanks.&mdash;RJH (talk) 21:08, 1 November 2008 (UTC)
 * I suppose you refer to my removal of definitions of "atomic mass unit" and "electron volt" in the electron article? Well, someone who doesn't know what the amu is, is likely not to know how heavy a carbon atom is, either. All what is needed to understand that sentence is that the amu is an unit of mass, which is clear from the context; if one wants to know its value, they can follow the link. Ditto for the electron volt. As a comparison, consider that there is no "which is the mass of the platinum-iridium prototype ..." immediately after "kilogram", even if Americans are unfamiliar with it. -- Army1987 (t — c) 21:12, 1 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Actually I put the remarks about the carbon atom in there deliberately to give it some perspective, a sense of scale, for the lay person. I don't see that the article has improved by the removal of clarifications and examples.&mdash;RJH (talk) 21:18, 1 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Maybe, an idea could be putting the definition in a footnote, so that it is still available but does not disrupt the flow of text? -- Army1987 (t — c) 21:22, 1 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Curiously, right when I was beginning to think that my trimmage might have been a little excessive, you trimmed it even more. :-) -- Army1987 (t — c) 02:21, 2 November 2008 (UTC)

Euler-Lagrange equation article
I have just scanned through your update of the Euler-Lagrange equation article and I like it. There are just a few points: All in all the article looks much better now although in the other sections there are still remnants of previous versions which use notations which are not consistent with the more recent improvements. Bas Michielsen (talk) 22:08, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
 * In the statement section, you say q is the function to be optimized. I think, I would prefer to read "to be found" here (or, possibly, "to be constructed such that the functional will be optimized"). But the word "optimized" has something ambiguous about it, which we should perhaps avoid.
 * Apparently, you do not like the mapping notation where the \mapsto gives names to the variables and mapping values. I won't change that back again, but I had thought that this would help people to better recognize the structure of the function composition.
 * In the classical mechanics section, there is a switch in the order of the arguments of the Lagrangian. In fact, putting the t parameter last is what you see most, but the whole article was initially with t in the first position.
 * Good points, I'll try to fix them. (As for the \mapsto notation, I don't object to it, but "incorporating" the domain/codomain in it with \in and \ni is somewhat hard to read. I was thinking about using both but separately. As for the position of the t parameter, I usually put it last; in the first instance in the Classical mechanics section, I put it first to be consistent with the remainder of the article, but "my" ordering slipped through in the second instance.) --<span style="font-family: monospace; font-weight: 600; color: #00F; background-color: #FFF; white-space: nowrap;">A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 22:23, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
 * You're responding so quickly that I am beginning to feel guilty. Don't forget to get some sleep from time to time and don't forget that your university courses are even more important than wikipedia ;) Bas Michielsen (talk) 23:15, 11 September 2008 (UTC)
 * I passed my analytical classical mechanics exam yesterday (the day before yesterday, actually, since midnight has passed in my time zone...), and today (yesterday, actually...) I have slept all the day after being out all the night, so I'm not really sleepy right now. And no, there's no need to feel guilty... :-) <span style="font-family: monospace; font-weight: 600; color: #00F; background-color: #FFF; white-space: nowrap;">A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! ! 23:25, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Hello Army1987, just a few remarks on your latest edits of the E-L article: What do you think? Bas Michielsen (talk) 16:27, 14 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Differential equations should be defined on open intervals in order to make sense on all points, i.e., you need your functions to be defined on an open neighbourhood of any point to be able to define the derivative. Boundaryvalue problems are formulated on spaces of functions having given boundary "limit"s but the (partial) differential equations can only hold on open domains.
 * I was not too happy with the anonymous insert of the rolling ball example, in a first instance I just completed it to make it consistent with the rest of the example. However, on second thought, I think it disturbs the example a bit. The person who added the two coordinate functions explicitly, was not entirely wrong in doing so, but, unfortunately, this is only applying to the context of the rolling ball example. I would have preferred that the example remain as generic as possible
 * As for the first point, you can just define the derivative of f: [a, b] → R at the point a as the right derivative
 * $$f'(a) = \lim_{x \to 0^+} \frac {f(x+h) - f(x)}{h}$$
 * and likewise for f&prime;(b) using the left derivative. (I have seen some definitions of limit like the one in (ε, δ)-definition of limit, but adding "...for all x in the domain of f with 0 < |x − c| < δ..."; such definitions make the derivative at the boundary of the domain automatically defined the way I'm showing.) As for the rolling ball, yes, I agree that it just complicates it all. I'm removing that part. <span style="font-family: monospace; font-weight: 600; color: #00F; background-color: #FFF; white-space: nowrap;">A r m y 1 9 8 7 ! ! !  16:43, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for continuing the editing I started today. TomyDuby (talk) 20:19, 14 September 2008 (UTC)

Do you know that Liebniz discovered calculus before newtron, and that you cannot understand calculus without understanding the infinitesimal? Did you know that the limit comes from the infinitesimal and it is not the other way around as taught in textbooks? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.234.28.20 (talk) 06:17, 5 November 2008 (UTC)
 * So what? Whatever came first historically, what matters is the way they are defined today. And what does that have to do with me, exactly?-- Army1987 (t — c) 10:05, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

Liebniz discovered calculus, and Newton stole what he knew from Liebniz. You cannot understand calculus without understanding the infinitesimal, and your Italian school knows this. They know that, and they are just fucking with you. They do not want to help you understand anything, all they want to do is filter you, and test you and turn you into a goon. It means that the limit, is an aproximation, but you can actually know it, by thinking like liebniz. they just want to throw you into aproximations and models so they can control you, and make you a dumb slut. so you should drop out of school, and read liebniz. and realize that when you graduate you problably cant get a job anyway. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 210.55.77.59 (talk) 00:59, 7 November 2008

Sewer Cover Barnstar

 * I award this to you with humbleness and awe. You’ve done what I truly can not. Greg L (talk) 03:10, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Congratulations, would you care to share your experience? Ohconfucius (talk) 08:17, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Yesterday, the morning lessons had finished, and a classmate of mine suggested to wait until 2:20 pm before we went to the canteen, so that the queue would be much shorter, and we accepted his suggestion. That is what I did to pass my time, meanwhile. My ideas:
 * An article like 1925 or 2008 as they are structured now is not terribly useful. Personally, I'd split it into List of 1925 events, List of people born in 1925 and List of people died in 1925. It could be useful to create a prose article about the year, à la 1345, which would ideally provide general historic context for events having happened/books written/etc. in that year. (I acknowledge that this would be very hard to do for some years; also, I have no good idea of what to do to 1925 between the time the current list of lists is split and the time when a decent article is written.)
 * As for October 1 or October 16, I simply cannot understand what those lists are supposed to be useful for – I don't just claim that they are not useful for someone clicking October 1 from, e.g. Alberta; I claim that they are not useful at all, so the solution is not to delink them – it is to remove them. Wikipedia is not an indiscriminate collection of information; why would anyone need a list of completely unrelated events which just happened to happen on the same day of different years? As for what I would do with those articles, I would include stuff such as:
 * A summary style introduction to the major holidays and celebrations hold worldwide on that day, with maybe some historical perspective; ideally, there would still be a reason why Christmas should link December 25 (but Belize or Compaq shouldn't);
 * Stuff like the average sun declination and equation of time of that day, and maybe even the high and low temperatures and precipitations on that day for some of the main cities worldwide (averaged over the last ten years or so); (but for the latter, I don't think it'd be easy to obtain that information).
 * In other words, IMO, things related to the day October 1 of all years should belong to that article, things related to October 1 of any particular year shouldn't, unless they have been celebrated on October 1 of later years.
 * BTW, thank you for the barnstar, Greg. -- Army1987 (t — c) 16:26, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
 * My pleasure. You should consider copying this thread over to WT:MOSNUM. Greg L (talk) 20:14, 7 November 2008 (UTC)