User talk:EdJohnston/Archive 1

Glad you decided to help us out! If you run into any questions, please leave me a message on my talk page!

~Kylu ( u | t )  06:33, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Cohn's irreducibility criterion
I have no problems with your proposed changes & rename of A. Cohn's irreducibility criterion. Afraid I can't help you out with references though - my only involvement was tidying up the original stub article. Gandalf61 14:35, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Erlanger Programm as a pdf document?
Hi, just a followup to our discussion on my own user talk page: the Haskell translation was published well before 1923 so in the public domain, but I checked with an expert who confirms it would be OK to put this on-line in one or more appropriate venues (not wikipedia.org). I have a scan of the first half as individual jpeg images, about 1.3 MB each. Once I receive the remaining pages, can you bundle them into a single pdf document?

I am seriously interested in writing a separate paper with editorial comments, based upon papers by Hawkins, Crowe, Yaglom, and other modern sources, plus some original sources, since few modern readers will have at hand the background in "analytic"/algebraic geometry circa 1870 to understand what Klein is talking about in the more technical places.

I'd like to discuss in detail, perhaps in a second paper, comparing some continous and finite examples, since this would give me more freedom to exposit some relevant, beautiful, but possibly hard to find permutation group theory. That is, although finite projective planes came along later in explicit form (they are usually credited to Fano c. 194x, but I've seen suggestions that the idea is much older than this), it is a fine exercise in computational Kleinian geometry to compare in detail projective and affine geometries on projective spaces over finite fields, and to compare in turn with base field the complex numbers. If you follow the writings of John Baez, this is a warmup for an attack on the neglected second half of the Programm: given a transformation group (possibly a permutation group on a finite set), determine, explain, and interpret the resulting "geometry". In particular, do this for the reflection groups and their Weyl groups associated with the ADE classification. As a warmup, consider various finite analogs of symplectic geometries on even dimensional complex vector spaces.---CH 03:42, 22 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks for your response about the idea of making a PDF of the full English text of Klein's Erlangen Program. Yes, I'll take whatever scanned images you can obtain and find a way of posting a PDF file on the web.  Your idea of writing a commentary article on the Erlangen Program using more modern sources seems wonderful.  At a minimum it would brighten up the math.HO section on the arXiv.  Certainly adding it to the scan of the Erlangen Program as a 'commentary' would help to justify posting such a combined document on the arXiv.  Wikipedia's E.P. article at present says nothing about E. Cartan, H. Weyl or the 20th century so I'm sure that article could use some more info on the consequences and benefits of the E.P.  One or more of us could do that update using the data in your proposed paper.  Incidentally, John Baez's recent article "The octonions" (2002) seems to present some nice overview information about classes of algebras that belongs in Wikipedia if it's not already there.  I'm thinking about the discussion at  that seems to be proposing a nonstandard and possibly cranky classification of algebras.  One way of 'restoring order' on Wikipedia could be just to be to present the standard information in a very clear way.  EdJohnston 20:43, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, I know John (in fact, I've recently been falsely accused of being John, which as you will probably appreciate was rather flattering in a way!). I am fed up with fighting cranks, particularly since lack of good policies seem to give them a ridiculous competitive advantage which does not serve WP readers well; this episode is one more depressing that (contrary to what some WP Mathematics members wrote on my user talk page a few months ago), cranks are a rapidly growing problem in the math pages as well as the physics pages. It has been my depressing experience that cranks tend to turn up utterly unexpected places; no doubt no-one would have imagined that there could be a hypernumber crank (unless they read sci.physics.research, where there is ample evidence to the contrary, which is possibly not unrelated to the episode you mentioned--- I haven't the heart to check).

I'll be in touch about the pdf document. ---CH 21:16, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi, Ed, I have obtained a complete high quality scan of each individual page, resulting in jpeg documents (about 1.2 MB each). How should I get them to you? ---CH 18:21, 25 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Chris, please send me mail via 'E-mail this user'. Attach a PDF of the first page of regular text so I can try an OCR. I will reply with info about sending the remaining pages. EdJohnston 19:19, 25 August 2006 (UTC)

ISBNs

 * Thanks for your note, and taking the trouble to check, this was caused by trailing dashes. I will scan for other articles which may have the same problem. Rich Farmbrough 10:59 31 August 2006 (GMT).

Buckingham Palace
I haven't spoken to FClef yet, I have just researched the book, and can confirm a leading 0 should be added. This may be because of the change from the British SBN to ISBN. Rich Farmbrough, 20:37 1 September 2006 (GMT).
 * Thanks, Ed. And about a third of those problems that weren't check-digit are one Pokemon book, so I've fixed about 400!  I also tget the impression that a lot of numbers have been fixed in ones or twos, as the number seems to be going down.  (Unless people are just saying "I know it's right", and removing the category/template.) Rich Farmbrough, 21:27 1  September 2006 (GMT).

Changeover timing
HI Ed, I missed your note on this earlier. I expect the book-world will become increasingly aware of the changeover, and support it by midnight 31 December. Clearly we and they will still support the old system, and periodically update any ISBN 10's, as I already periodically remove ":"s and replace spaces with hyphens. Did I mention Template:auto isbn? Rich Farmbrough, 10:23 2 September 2006 (GMT).

Olwen Headley Buckingham Palace book
Hello Ed. Just a courtesy answer - I think Rich Farmbrough has fixed this and I have thanked him. Check my talk page for his answer. –– FClef (talk) 12:11, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Cancelled ISBNs
This is getting interesting! I want to do some more research, perhaps mail the International ISBN agency. Incidentally the Ginseberg ISBN is on Amazon, as the reprint, so I wonder if "cancelled" and "ISBN" are meant to run into each other. Rich Farmbrough, 15:54 2 September 2006 (GMT).


 * thanks for your hard work. I don't have a strong opinion on what to do with the "invalid isbn printed on the book" scenario, your solution seems fine to me at the moment.  We could put a category/template on the talk page and reference it on [{WP:ISBN]], perhaps. Rich Farmbrough, 19:54 5  September 2006 (GMT).

Incidentally this may be of interest. Rich Farmbrough, 19:58 5 September 2006 (GMT).

Zarrinkoub
I think we should keep it. It has some dates, and the site itself is a good portal for finding other such info on writers of Iran. If nothing at all, it verifies that such a person does (did) exist. And perhaps the links will be updated soon and be replaced.--129.111.56.85 03:34, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

13 digit numbers
Thanks, I was trying to work through these. Rich Farmbrough, 12:39 7 September 2006 (GMT).

Proposed explanation to use when removing published-invalid ISBNs from articles
As used with the 'Rose' book at Talk:Amon Liner:

Wikipedia has a robot called 'SmackBot' that is used to check ISBNs. This robot noticed that the ISBN supplied for 'Rose' was not valid (checksum failed) which you can verify by typing 0932112092 into the test box at isbn.org/converterpub.asp. It turns out that the book was published using this invalid ISBN (confirmed using Library of Congress catalog). Since it is a lot of trouble to manually track those ISBNs that have problems which cannot be fixed, I have begun replacing these with 'No ISBN available'. Should the book be re-issued with a valid number, please update the article accordingly. EdJohnston 17:13, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Difficult ISBNs
Here are some published-invalid ISBNs that I have been involved in correcting. Over at User_talk:Rich Farmbrough the list I made there will soon scroll off into the vast archives.


 * 2-10-4: Both the old and new ISBNs for the Jack Farrell book are invalid. Marked as 'No ISBN available'. Comment left on Talk page.


 * A Certain Woman: Now marked as 'No ISBN available'. History comment says 'Please supply corrected ISBN if found.'


 * I'saka language: Book by Donohue and San Roque now marked as 'No ISBN available'. Provided a link to an online article by same authors.


 * Ahmad al-Alawi: Book by Johan Cartigny is now marked as 'No ISBN available'. Comment left on Talk page.

EdJohnston 19:07, 8 September 2006 (UTC)
 * Ajahn Sobin S. Namto: 'Insight Meditation' book is now marked as 'No ISBN available'. Comment left on Talk page.

How to find sub-pages
A note to myself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:VPT#Finding_subpages

Sources for non-English language ISBNs
You asked on my talk page about non-Enlish ISBN sources. If I can't find the book at the Library of Congress or the British Library, I google "National library " for the appropriate country and I usually have pretty good luck finding the book. For example, France's national library is.

Have fun! RainbowCrane | Talk 20:13, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

SmackBot
Hi, Ed. Thanks for the comments on SmackBot's page (I copied them to Sam's page), in future would it be possible to leave them on the editor's talk page (and mine if you have time), as every edit on SB's talk page stops it. Thanks. Rich Farmbrough, 21:46 8 September 2006 (GMT). Point taken! EdJohnston 00:36, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

More fun
I don't know if enough people use the cat to be worth a shortcut, but I don't mind one. The checksum calculation is done offline, on a database dump. Regards, Rich Farmbrough, 11:12 10 September 2006 (GMT).
 * P.S. the latest run was merely changing the template name, not assesing the ISBNs. Rich Farmbrough, 11:31 10 September 2006 (GMT).

Links to invalid ISBN category, failing ISBN list and repeated error list
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Articles_with_invalid_ISBNs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_pages_with_Invalid_ISBNs

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Rich_Farmbrough/notebook/common_errors

Re:Tiger book
Thanks for the support in that the ISBN may not properly exist. I do suggest you be careful about concluding that a book does not exist (esspecially foreign language ones), as the book may just be a little on the rare side. There's a few I've found that just took me a good while to find the real ISBN. I've tended to look as hard as I can for a very similar ISBN (the one the editor ment to put into the article), rather than replace it with one from say.. amazon. A little bit of extra work can often find the real ISBN, though yeah, there's some that don't exist. Also there's a few like the naval wars in the levant where the original ISBN isn't recorded anywhere, even on prinston university press's website, though that one has been replaced en-masse by rich to the newer edition version. Kevin_b_er 03:52, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Re: Azucena Villaflor old ISBN == ==

Hello Jesse, I see you added the OCLC number for this book, given that the ISBN wasn't good. That seems like a step forward, and could be done elsewhere too! How would you feel about also adding the phrase 'No ISBN available?' Somebody might innocently re-add the invalid ISBN otherwise. I did this with A Certain Woman, but nobody has picked up on my wonderful innovation yet. :-) By the way, Editorial Catálogos is the name of a publisher, you might consider putting it back. EdJohnston 00:47, 12 September 2006 (UTC) (copied from my talk page)
 * Regarding OCLC numbers, I've just now made a template for them OCLC which slightly shortens the job of adding them; if you know of some places it should be mentioned, please do. Regarding "No ISBN available" - only use it if you have a speific reason to think that; i.e. it was published before ISBNs were in use, or some other reason; there may be an ISBN available otherwise.  Thanks for the note about "Editorial Catálogos"  can you give me a citation where that is said to be the name of the publisher; I took it out becuase I couldn't find such a thing. JesseW, the juggling janitor 00:58, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Greetings
Hi! Yes, I'm working on the floating point page, among other things. It's quite a mess, and the fact that it has a "cleanup" tag is attracting random people, who aren't always helpful.

I still work at Philips Medical, acquired from Agilent, spun off from HP, where I went as per your suggestion. William Ackerman 23:10, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

Action of 8 July 1716 Anderson book ISBN not flagged by SmackBot
Note to myself. I was revisiting one of the articles I thought was already correct, and its ISBN was bad! On 24-Aug SmackBot visited this article and did its hyphenation thing on the Anderson book, and took the article out of the invalid ISBN category, but the ISBN it hyphenated is not valid! Just for the record it was 0878397990. It's been corrected elsewhere to 1578985382 (which hyphenates to 1-57898-538-2). I gather that faulty ISBNs can be searched for throughout Wikipedia using the Wikipedia:List_of_pages_with_invalid_ISBNs. I'll keep looking for invalid-but-unflagged ISBNs. EdJohnston 19:05, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

Floating point page
Yes. I happen to think that the "cleanup" judgement is a bit harsh, and it hasn't escaped my notice that the person making that judgement isn't involved with the page. But that's OK, up to a point -- from the perspective of an outsider, perhaps the page is disorganized. (On the other hand, the same is often said of many of the math pages; see many discussion threads on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics; some things are just hard to make appealing to non-experts.)

So it's really hard to say whether the page is in poor shape. But one thing I have noticed is that, since that tag appeared, the vultures have descended. I don't know much about the details of how WP operates, but there must be some "pages needing attention" page that random people go to when looking for things to work on, and, if so, it has attracted a lot of randoms. I don't think that an insufficient number of ungrammatical and nonsensical sentence fragments was what the complaint was about!

Anyway, I take the flag seriously. My plan was to put the page into the best shape I could, put something on the FP talk page inviting discussion about the flag, and put a note in Earle Martin's page asking him to come and discuss. But I've been making no progress, because the vultures increase the entropy as fast as I can reduce it. I reverted a few things recently. Maybe this weekend I can take a good look at things.

One thing I need to fix up is the tendency to make the FP page a repository of "_isnan doesn't work on my Borland 99.99 compiler." things. I need to put something in the discussion about how that isn't appropriate, and maybe there should be other pages for discussion of specific implementations and their shortcomings.

While there are people who are not helping the page, there are others who seem to really know their stuff. User:mfc comes to mind. IBM in England, knows what he's talking about. He hasn't done much lately; my hypothesis is that he is too appalled by what's been happening. User:Stevenj is another person who contributes good knowledge. (And knows about Rodrigues' formula too!)

Anyway, I hope to make this page worthy of you, me, and the experts I've named above, and then find out just what Earle's complaint is. You mention peer review, as though it's a formal process one can request. If so, that sounds like a good idea. Once I drain the swamp. William Ackerman 21:35, 20 September 2006 (UTC)

Re: Trimming ISBN list
I've been trimming based on comparing with the category list, and assuming any item not in the category has been done. That's basically it. JesseW, the juggling janitor 23:01, 22 September 2006 (UTC)

Abramowitz & Stegun references
Please see my note on Talk:Orthogonal_polynomials William Ackerman 21:50, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

Cleanup instead of PROD

 * Hello RJH! I would like to mark The Ashes of Eden as needing the same cleanup that you (helpfully) provided for Acts of War.  I can assign a cleanup template to the main book page, but what wording should I put in to ask for removal of the form data?  If I just put in a date, the page will hang around for months, most likely.  If I go ahead and remove the form data, that's kind of uncooperative.  EdJohnston 20:07, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Hi EdJohnston,

You could try contacting PeregrineV, the person who added the template (as a minor edit!) and see if they can help clean it up. Thanks. &mdash; RJH (talk) 20:12, 29 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks
I'd actually checked that site before (with a google search), it its always worth a second look :) I think I'll probably email the guy. Olfazer seems to be the man for computational morphology of Turkic languages, so its probably worth getting in contact with him anyway. :) Regards... - Francis Tyers · 00:21, 30 September 2006 (UTC)

ISBN
OK, jimfbleak 19:30, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

Floating point page
The page floating point needs expert attention, and such experts are extremely rare. Based on your past contributions in this or related fields, I wonder if you could take a look. William Ackerman 22:12, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

ISEN
Is an advert. The current text has been deleted as a copyvio and re-inserted. I will check if I can speedy it, under the latest conditions. Rich Farmbrough, 21:28 3 October 2006 (GMT).
 * Speedy G11 applies. Rgds, Rich Farmbrough, 21:32 3 October 2006 (GMT).

Esbn
G11'd/. Rich Farmbrough, 08:53 4 October 2006 (GMT).

Titular county
Hi. I noticed you removed my prod at Titular county. I've replied explaining my reasons for proposing it so at talk:titular county. I must stress that it is a weird artefact in vision of britain's database, and not an existing concept outside of there. Morwen - Talk 17:27, 4 October 2006 (UTC)