User talk:Dast

Socrates
I conclude, from the mention of Aeschines, that you want to Tell Wikipedia, and so Tell the World, about I. F. Stone's Socrates. It's a good book; if I were more active in editing Socrates, I would have made sure it was mentioned.

But, although Stone really does persuade me, it is not Wikipedia's purpose to argue for his view, or any view, of Socrates. That is what is meant by WP:NPOV, which (like Deletion policy) should be read and followed more often than it is.

Stone's view of Socrates is conjecture; it is valuable and persuasive conjecture becuase he read the sources - the same way he did his reporting. Please do the same; reading Stone's book is not an equivalent. Socrates links to versions of the major sources; Aeschines and Aristotle are on Perseus. Septentrionalis 19:26, 7 August 2005 (UTC)


 * No - I don't plan to do any of the things you conjectured from my mention of Aeschines. What I do plan to do, you'll be glad to hear, certainly has NPOV and pays due respect to the sources.

Eudaimonia
Hello, I just saw you added yourself to the philosophy list. The article on Eudaimonia could use some help with the Socratic/Platonic perspective--at the moment it is mostly Aristotelian. Even if you think the two are pretty much the same, we could use some input on the talk page there. WhiteC 04:15, 15 August 2005 (UTC)

3D_Incongruent_Counterparts_Blue.jpg
Hi, I deleted the image. Adam Bishop 15:38, 17 August 2005 (UTC)
 * Excellent, thankyou. --Dast 10:51, 19 August 2005 (UTC)

Image copyright questions
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you - I've been busy with off-line things.

You asked whether Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp covers 3D artworks. Unfortunately it does not. Bridgeman only covers cases where the intent and effect of the copier is to reproduce the original exactly, without adding any original artistic content. Even the choice of angle or lighting qualifies as "artistic content", so a photo of a statue does not qualify. There's lots of grey area - photos of coins or woodcuts, for instance, could be argued either way - but your example is clear-cut.

You also asked whether Bridgeman has any weight outside the U.S. No, not directly. But since Wikipedia servers reside in the U.S., any suits would have to be filed in the U.S., where the images are legal. And yes, you can upload any image or scan of a PD work and tag it PD-art (or PD-old, for that matter.)

You asked if there was an equivalent to "quoting" in images. This is the tricky subject of fair use. You can (in the U.S.) reprint brief quotes from a book without the author's permission, since that is a legally-defined "fair use" of the text. And "fair use" does apply to images. The problem is, there's no clear-cut standard of what's a fair use and what isn't - there's just a myriad of court cases, and you'd have to be a lawyer to know for sure whether a specific use would be considered "fair" or not. To add the fairuse tag to an image, you should make a fair use claim on the image description page. The more valid justifications you add, the more likely your fair use claim will be accepted by the Wikipedia community (or by a judge, should the copyright-holder sue). Good justifications include: that the image is being used for educational use only; that the use of the image is not for profit; that the size and quality of the image is no bigger than necessary to illustrate the article; that the image is not reproduceable (e.g. it's a photo of a historic event, or a photo of a sculpture housed in a museum that does not allow photographs); that no "free" version of the image is available; that the copyright holder is not selling the image for profit; etc. It also helps if you list the source of the image and name the copyright holder if you know who it is.

Hope all this helps! – Quadell (talk) (sleuth) 03:57, August 19, 2005 (UTC)

Plato
Hello! The point about thumb(-nail)ing images is that the reader can decide for herself whether she wants to see a larger version; the thumbed versions make the page load more quickly (which can be important for those using dial-up connections. --Mel Etitis  ( Μελ Ετητης ) 22:10, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

Collaboration
Dear sir or madam,

I would specifically enjoy an opportunities to contribute toward and / or co-clean the articles of your concern. I would also like to find a partner to help me modernize Thucydides' Melian Dialogue for a younger audience. Since I began my career in mathematics, progressed to clinical work, and am now carefully progressing back to mathematics, I think it is not just important but imperative that we start challenging our young ones to examine everything around them.

The Melian Dialogue is an excellent start, and the Socratic Method needs to be forked so it can stop being pointlessly obfuscated. A problem I have had with philosophers in the past is the demand for ornamentally challenging diction and syntax. As someone trained in mathematics who is always focused on keeping the rhetoric extremely elegant and understandable for my audience, I think the approach many philosophers take is not helpful to attract a following.

I held a guided discussion just one month ago during a lunch-time visit to a "poor" high school. We discussed the nature of time (yawn). However, it became evident to me that the students had never thought about the nature of time or their possible analogues. I carried them through this simple thought exercise after using weak induction to demonstrate that we perceive time as linear:


 * 1) if time is linear, then we can always place any two events in sequence (one is 'before' and the other is 'after')
 * 2) you were born on your birthday
 * 3) by (1) and (2), you were not alive nor even conceived one year before the day you were born
 * 4) if time travel were possible through any of the following methods, then you could create the scenario in (5).
 * (a) time is a circle but rolls like a wheel; we may discover how to move forward so far in time that there is potential we could fast-forward through the entire loop to shake hands with ourselves yesterday or the day prior. this seems to violate the laws of conservation of energy, unless all that really happens is the timing of the placement of that energy has been shifted (and time is only something we perceive rather than an actual fact).  this is difficult because for a wheel-of-time to exist, one would expect continuity of Δ(||moment1-moment2||) for all values of moment1 and moment2.
 * (b) time may be a ray with a starting but no ending point or with no starting but with an ending point. neither of these have particularly strong implications with which we can work, but if we take their intersection then a theist and creationist view could be validated: there was a beginning of time and there will be an end to time.
 * (c) time is a one-dimensional segment as in (b), only it oscillates: start -> stop -> start -> stop. we would never notice which direction we were traversing anyway.  it may as well be an analog to (b)
 * (d) is it relevant at all that a second existed before we became sentient beings? is it relevant at all that just minutes after our deaths we cease to become sentient beings?  this one is somewhat fatalistic and anomic yet at the same time poetic.  perhaps this is a null hypothesis based upon the fact that we must be human to observe anything in the first place
 * (e) if time is (or is not) linear but can be traversed in either direction, then it should be possible once the vehicle for transport exists to visit your parents one year before your birth (thus you have not been conceived).


 * 5) let us assume that option 4(e) is a reasonable candidate. Now us yourself make a decision to travel back to the year before our birth to shoot to death both our mother and our father.  What is the result?


 * When it was my time to return to work and see the runny-nosed (signalled by a high school bell ringing), not one person flinched; they were completely enthralled and were discussing whether they "disappear" (by ceasing to ever have existed) after pulling the trigger, before pulling the trigger, once the necessary tools were compiled in the present version of 'now,' or whether the individual ceased to have ever existed immediately upon entertaining the thought. A lone voice of reason from the back of the area asked why time had to be one-dimensional.


 * Please respond to this either here or on my talk page; I will be returning permanently to education very soon (clinical work was just not for me) and would thoroughly enjoy something equivalent to a debate circuit.


 * Thanks,


 * Morelos

DrMorelos 09:57, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:08, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 13:33, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of File:Durer's Magic Square.jpg


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