User talk:Hankwang/Archive 2004

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Again, welcome! :) fabiform | talk 14:49, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)


 * Thank you, I found the links helpful. I thought that you were a robot, but apparently you personally welcome selected people. I feel honored. Hankwang 14:10, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC) :)


 * :) I'm not a robot, but I see why you might have thought that. There's a group of people who try to welcome all the users who have recently created accounts, so I thought I'd join in.  Welcome again!  fabiform | talk 14:22, 15 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Primary Colors (not the movie [wink])
Thanks for your good contribution on primary colors (and excuse me for not taking time right now to read what looks at a glance like another valuable one by you previously on that page).

I was about to write you saying
 * I'm not sure how to fix the apparent garble in
 * (We would call the colors blue, red, and yellow, but that the cans actually did read C, M, Y, not B, R, Y.)

but then i finally got it.

I now can't figure out how i failed to get it earlier, but it may be your excellent English reflects a lot more study than colloquial usage experience -- an impressive accomplishment, BTW, if that is the case. And tho i think the "but that" construction is grammatically correct (mostly because i have occasionally seen it, i think in old or formal contexts), i doubt i ever use it, and it may be a little archaic.

If you wanted to consider rewording it, i'd have begun, depending on your exact intent, with either
 * We students would have called the colors blue, red, and yellow,

or
 * We at WP would call the colors blue, red, and yellow,

And i'd have ended with any of the following
 * except that the cans actually did read C, M, Y, not B, R, Y.
 * if the cans had read B, R, Y, rather than C, M, Y, as they did.
 * but for the fact that the cans actually did read C, M, Y, not B, R, Y.
 * if it hadn't been for the cans reading C, M, Y, not B, R, Y.

(I'm not sure whether it's worth the trouble of your changing it, but i hate it when i go around using an odd-sounding expression in German -- which i learned in school -- so i thought you might value the tip; if you on the other hand find this kind of hint annoying rather than helpful, i apologize for my presumption.)


 * Thank you for your extremely tactful comments. The core of the misunderstanding was probably the word "that" that shouldn't be there. No ultrahigh-level English here. I'll try to write in a less compact manner next time. :) - Hankwang 16:23, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * [Blush] I can never remember that when i can't figure something out, it's probably because i'm over-analysing something really simple. And now i'd put my money on your
 * having several generations of American ancestors, and maybe
 * being the blonde and blue-eyed scion of bunch of Swedish-Americans and Danish-Americans and named Pedersen outside of Wiki-space, and
 * being quite capable of chuckling over my (former, and look, still current) obsession with that "that" that i didn't understand. [grin]
 * In any case the joke's on me. [smile] --Jerzy 17:09, 2004 Feb 23 (UTC)
 * Number three is correct. I'm Dutch with Asiatic ancestors (black hair, brown eyes), but I currently live in Sweden (you might have guessed these facts from my name and the fact that I edited both Gouda cheese and some Scandinavian entries :) ). My English is in no way as fluent as that of a native speaker, but when I pay attention, I can usually avoid mistakes in spelling and grammar. I achieve the latter mostly by a time-consuming rewording of phrases in order to avoid constructions that I am not sure of. --Hankwang 11:04, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * Ah! No, i hadn't looked at your contribs list; the Scandanavian reference was just a means (and for me a vivid one) of expressing what is also vividly stated in the cartoon that shows a terrier typing at a PC and thinking to himself "The great thing about the internet is that no one can tell you're a dog." That is to say, Carl Pedersen of Duluth, Minnesota might for any of a number of reasons choose the user name of Hankwang. Or Han Kwang might be either Taiwan Chinese, perhaps with poor English, or Hong Kong Chinese, perhaps with great English, or any of many other possiblities, including yours.  Or Hank Wang might be a third-generation American with a taste for Zydeco, or any of the othe possibilities we've alluded to. Isn't it a gloriously complex world? [smile]
 * (While i'm blabbering on, i'm reminded of my Belgian colleagues, Henri and Francois, who had Dutch-sounding surnames. I always wondered if things would have been different with them, if they had had French-sounding surnames to go with those given names, or Dutch-sounding given names to go with their surnames:  if they had, would they have been less offended by hearing American colleagues speak of themselves as working "with Hank and Frank"?) --Jerzy 18:04, 2004 Feb 24 (UTC)

As to your move of your earlier contribution, i now wish i hadn't worded my heading "badly located". Altho it was better for you to move it as you did, than for me to have done so, i didn't mean to push you into doing so; IMO a heading (preferably with a less pejoratiave adjective) was enough to have kept it from staying invisible. The move you did is an improvement. But it's a minor improvement relative to the improvement of having a heading on the single edit, and not necessarily worth your effort.

On another minor aspect of that edit: If you look at a particular "(last)" or "Difference between revisions" page, among those available when you follow a "Page history" link, you will see that you apparently left behind one "=" from the heading "== A badly located recent contribution == ", (or inadvertantly typed a stray one, or mistakenly removed some and then put one more back), with the result that the heading was left "unbalanced". Because the same code is apparently not used for parsing headings for different purposes, such a broken heading-markup not only doesn't necessarily result in a heading being displayed, it also exercises a vulnerablity of the section-editing software, which will confuse you when you eventually encounter it.

I try to give special attention to catching these when i edit, and nevertheless still break them occasionally, so this is far from being a reprimand! If you want to make use of it, tho, it's a learning opportunity. If you're used to section edits by now, you might choose to play a little with attempting to start overall and section edits of pages w/ broken headings; that is a good use for Sandbox. (In fact, since here are no section edits on the "out-of-date revisions" available from the history, you could open a whole-page edit of, say,, cut and paste the whole markup to the Sandbox, save, and then try out editing the whole thing or various sections.)


 * I'll try to watch out next time. I tend to follow the Wikipedia advice, though; I just edit in the knowledge that someone else will correct or point out mistakes. Which you just did. :) - Hankwang 16:23, 23 Feb 2004 (UTC)
 * Attaguy! "Edit boldly" is always good advice, even with this confusing bug lurking about. --Jerzy 17:09, 2004 Feb 23 (UTC)

Let me add my welcome to those already on this page. (Can't have too many physicists! Do you know anything about fuel cells?) Hope you continue to find this thing worthwhile. --Jerzy 23:18, 2004 Feb 18 (UTC)


 * Another belated welcome from me. Thanks for actually doing some stuff with nonlinear optics, which I started long ago and have been staring at guiltily ever since. -- DrBob 21:45, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Hi michael

 * Hi Michael, are you following me around or do we just happen to share interests? :)

Could be the latter, since I had not noticed your existence before getting this query. As my user page makes clear, I've worked on lots of math articles. I also created list of optical topics, although I have only the most naive grasp of optics. Michael Hardy 22:26, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Oversaturation etc.
Hi there,

I noticed your article on oversaturation. There is a separate article on supersaturated solutions. Perhaps:


 * The two articles could be combined on the supersaturation page.
 * Supersaturation could be turned into a disambiguation page with one link to oversaturation and another to supersaturated solution.

I know that supersaturation refers to solutions in the liquid form that have a higher concentration than normally allowed and which require the addition of a small crystal to solidify. Does oversaturation refer to this phenomenon as well, or is it limited to cases in which the vapour concentration is greater than the vapour pressure?

Thanks,

Acegikmo1 21:31, Mar 17, 2004 (UTC)


 * I searched in vain for both supersaturation and oversaturation but somehow I seem to have done something wrong (the search box on Wikipedia never seems to do what I want). :-) I'd say the two terms are synonyms. I'd prefer a single page "supersaturation" in analogy with superheating and supercooling and because a single word is easier to remember than two words. (supersaturation is not used in other contexts afaik.) -- Hankwang 21:48, 17 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Spectroscopy
Can you explain the difference between spectophotometry and electromagnetic spectroscopy? Bensaccount 03:03, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Neat pic on Lund
Very good; it is the motive I'd chosen to illustrate Lund too, but you beat me to it. (and you are perhaps a better photographer too :-). Nice work! &#9999; Sverdrup 19:12, 12 Apr 2004 (UTC)
 * Tack! I just got myself a (cheap) digicam and I was lucky with the wheather. :)

Light year
[From fabiforms talk page] Can you help me to move Light-year to light year? The rationale is on Talk:light-year. No-one objected during about one month. Light year currently redirects to light-year. I tried moving light year and the associated talk page to subpages of light-year in order to make room for moving light-year to light year, but Wikipedia refuses anyhow. Thanks. -- Hankwang 13:27, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hi. :) It wouldn't let you move it because there was a page history at light year (nothing exciting, two different redirects and a blank page), so I've deleted this for you, and moved light-year to light year.  I'm a tad confused about the talk pages though.  I didn't delete talk:light-year, so that's still there, and talk:light year seems to redirect to a third different page.  You might want to try to sort this out yourself (at least interlink them).  If you need any more things deleted to help you do this, then give me a shout. :) fabiform | talk 13:43, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! Ok, I'm confused myself, I will think twice before I try such a move again. :-) My whole desktop is cluttered with lightyears of all possible kinds. I'm trying to figure out what happened, but that's not made easier with other users moving around pages in the background...

OK, this should happen now:
 * light year/more - remove
 * light-year/more - remove (now redirect to light year)
 * talk:light-year and talk:light year/other - merge into talk:light year. I think I read somewhere that pages can be merged by sysops.

Hankwang 15:45, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * I wasn't sure how to do all this, so I asked on IRC and User:SethIlys and User:Angela did the merging and deleting for you. :) fabiform | talk 16:10, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks to all of you! By the way, how do you make this |talk behind your name without typing it? -- Hankwang 17:24, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Go to your preferences (top right hand corner of the screen) and see where it says "your nickamne (for signatures)", I have written fabiform]] | [[User talk:Fabiform|talk ... so play around with it until it looks like you want. :) fabiform | talk 07:17, 24 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Color blindness
Moved to Talk:Color blindness.

Not to be ungrateful, but...
I noticed that you removed my superfluous hyphen in the phrase "frequently-contested" in one of my comments at Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style. Not to be ungrateful, but I don't think people should edit other people's Talk page comments. Your correction was accurate, and your point about accuracy in a Manual of Style discussion was valid, but people should be responsible for their own accuracy in such discussions. Unlike articles, the content in Talk pages does not have to conform to article standards, and is expected to be a representation of each person's opinions and, not incidentally, their own skills in communicating. As embarrassed as I was to make the error, I think others have a right to recognize when I make mistakes. I've certainly taken appropriate notice of other people's writing skills (and their subsequent correctionsl, if any) when considering their positions on writing-style controversies. Or maybe I'm just being too anal about it all. &#9786; It was a kind gesture, regardless. Thanks. &mdash; Jeff Q 02:35, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry that you felt like that, won't do it again. Han-Kwang (talk) 09:05, 3 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Cie chromaticity diagram wavelength.png
Hi, I'm working on untagged images within wikipedia to ensure we have proper copywrite notices. This image uploaded by you doesn't have a copyright tag. Could you either let me know what its status is (e.g. public domain, created by you and covered by GFDL. Thanks Sortior 19:29, Dec 11, 2004 (UTC)


 * I modified an existing image. My modifications are PD, but you'll have to hunt down the author of the original. I can create a completely new image if necessary. Han-Kwang (talk) 12:41, 13 Dec 2004 (UTC)