User talk:Gramby

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--WillMak050389 18:55, 17 June 2006 (UTC)

JA article
Hi Gramby. I have responded to your comments about the Jesus Army in the discussion page. I took the liberty of copying your comment to the bottom in order to create a more visible section for this. I don't know if you have personal experience of this subject and perhaps should have read your userpage first. I hope that you won't feel that the article as it stands is a fait accompli. Like all articles it is likely to grow. I appreciated your comments. -Peter Bristol Sycamore (talk) 09:27, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your response on my Talk page (I am not sure where's best for our conversation. Shall both talk on my page or on yours?) The fact that I am an ex-member of the JA presents a problem. I am the author of a document which kick-started the JA's very public expulsion from the Evangelical Alliance, but this fact is apparently not allowed to be mentioned according to Wiki rules because they hold that criticism authored by "apostates" (as they will insist on calling us) is by its nature biased. I am not sure why it isn't still allowed to be part of the history though; whether biased or not, it still happened. It was published and had wide circulation but wiki insit that since I published it myself, it cannot be considered a published source, so cannot be cited, even though thas itself been cited by other sources. You will appreciate that the whole project was a frustrating business. I think that you can see that wikipedia is the perfect outlet for a group like the JA to advertise itself while using wiki's perverse rules to protect itself from the whole story getting out. I had to fight hard to get popular media articles accepted as unbiased sources. An book written by an undercover reporter was deemed unacceptable because his ethics were called into question, giving rise to the suggestion that he lied because his angle was antiJA.Bristol Sycamore (talk) 18:20, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
 * I should add that a church which is the subject of the article may speak of itself more freely than may its critics, so John does not have to prove that members of the church deny something to be true, but I do have to prove that something is asserted (by someone other than myself) about the church (even though I am the original author of the criticism in the 1980s). In effect John may speak as a source on behalf of the church, but because I am a critic, I may not speak for my position; it is almost as if wiki are saying that John is unbiased, while I am biased. But I also have to say that wiki's belief that an academic source is unbiased, per se, strikes me as intellectually naive.Bristol Sycamore (talk) 19:15, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Gillie's conjecture
Please look at Talk:Gillies%27_conjecture. What you wrote was rendered as if it was supposed to be
 * log log B/log A,

but your strange way of using curly braces made it look as if you might have intended
 * log(log B/log A),

which is what the article now says.

Lately we've been seeing a lot of stuff like
 * \log{A}

instead of
 * \log A

and I suspect it's because someone is using imperfect software to do the TeX coding rather than doing it by hand. Sometimes it's even stuff like

where
 * x^2

suffices. I clean these up when I see them because it misleads people naive about TeX coding into thinking the former form is a good way to do things, and because it makes editing cumbersome. Michael Hardy (talk) 22:01, 25 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I wrote that by hand and I have no issue with the style; however, I did indeed intend to add the parenthesis which were in the original. It was merely an accident of omission. I have no issue with using grouping to clearly delineate things. I suppose that's 30 years worth of writing software that's coming in to play. That said, had I been less liberal with the groupings, I might well have noticed the missing parenthesis. Thanks. Gramby (talk) 06:32, 26 January 2014 (UTC)