User talk:Koeplinger/Archive 1 - 2009-04-30

Thanks for all you do!
I have a lot to learn from you.

Calm down and have a beer, good advice.

The edit war that once raged at classical hamiltonian quaternions seems to be at an end. That one guy, that I probably was not as welcoming as I could have been, I admit really got on my nerves. I am really not used to flame wars were not even insults are allowed, and I suppose I somewhat broke the rules of civil discussion, but it really seemed to me that he was being just a little bit unreasonable.

One thing that helped is when I read the rules on how to deal with vandals, and trolls, is don't feed them. That worked pretty well, while he was demanding that I provide documentation for my unsupported statement that a positive number minus another positive number is equal to a negative number, I thought, why not just ignore this guy and fix all the broken links. Seems like he just wants attention.

A lot of the stuff that he deleted was stuff that I had placed in section 6 of the article already, which I thought was good but probably belonged some place else, that I thought was analysis, and he thought was OR.

If you have scrolled down to the bottom of the article at some point it gets to the subject that interests you, the Octonians. How to order that material is still an area of difficulty. Article 214 of elements was something that really interests me. Hamilton basically demonstrates that if there is a 1 and i,j,k then there has to be at least one more imaginary. In Elements he calls it h, and says that it is the imaginary scalar, that acts like a scalar when multiplied. In other words h is both commutative and associative.

Now here is something you will find interesting, in proof sheet after proof sheet, he says over and over again that in this article we are talking about h that is associative and commutative, and it was clear to me, that there were going to be articles were he explored the other possibility.

A section on Hamilton's writings on octonians, may be short, but still important. It was pretty stressful seeing a lot of my effort go down the drain, but I learned a lot from that process and neither of my articles got deleted, and a lot of pretty good stuff is left in the article on quaternions, but the history article, I don't know, I don't think I will really work all that much on that article, because history is so subjective, that you can't really say what is true and what isn't, and past that there are so many things that happened in the past that even if something is true then they can always say that it is not relevant. But the way we have things now, I think it is pretty good sketch of at least what goes in a particular article and what goes out.

So thanks again for voting not to delete the article.


 * Ah, you're just too kind. Thanks a lot for your nice words! And: Thanks for your patience and dilligence in going through all the Hamilton material!! That's not an easy task to do, I know that; it just needs to get done once, right. And you're the key actor here. That's pretty impressive, if you think about it. Nothing in the debate on the Classical Hamiltonian quaternions page was really about the content, it was really all about the way it's presented. I'm getting interested in having a closer look at the article later this summer, and I'll be sure to check the edits you've put in before the recent changes. Thanks, Jens Koeplinger (talk) 02:03, 16 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The more I think about it the more I think you are right, about just presenting what Hamilton said. Hardy is a really great secondary source.  Remember Hamilton died before he ever finished elements. One of the things he said he was going to do, but never got around to was write a really easy, basic introductory book on quaternions.  What Hardy claims he is going is writing the basic book that Hamilton would have written had he lived longer.  So Hardy always agrees with Hamilton, but simplifies.  He might over to simple for a man of your intellect after a while, but reading his presentation of high school geometry problems solved in quaternion notation will save you a lot of time.  Once you get to Hamilton you will have a really big head start.

Tait wrote 8 books on quaternions, he is a really great writer, and one of these days there needs to be a page devoted exclusively to his extensions of Hamilton's work. But Tait is also completely faithful to Hamilton. Every time I have looked at one of his books, if he does something like call a versor a unit quaterion, he will always first mention that called it a versor.

Tait is another really great secondary source on Hamilton, and good with advanced stuff.

But hey gotta get to my thermodynamics class.

Wiki admin(s) in overdrive?
Er ... ok ... maybe I put a request in with the GNOC, to have traffic from the legacy-Cingular proxy leave the intranet at a different IP? Seeing that the internet-facing IP is legacy-BellSouth, I might also have to put a word in with the IT NOC, since it'll be natted internally at least once before going outbound ... I think something's crossed-over here. Surely, at 300,000 employees you're guaranteed to have a troll here and there, with a smaller (but sizable) portion going through named proxy that's currently blocked. Blocking the IP seems reasonable; I don't see the point, however, in blocking registered users from using anonymizing proxies. Jens Koeplinger (talk) 01:35, 17 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Update: They've changed the routing, traffic now leaves at a different IP. Funny. Koeplinger (talk) 22:57, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Administrators gone wild
The more I think about it, the more I appreciate your wisdom in suggesting that the vector of a quaterion be moved into classical hamiltonian quaternions. Apparently an administrative decision has now been made, that just about anybody who cites Hamilton, and links to page scans has the same aim as the venerable original and long ago blocked creator of those articles. Your clear thinking is responsible for that content not now being deleted.

user:robotics lab user:quaternionist and user:homebum have now been blocked. They made a valiant effort, but now they are gone. Some of us will miss them. Hopefully you can do some work this summer.

We live in a world I suppose were it is smarter for quaternionists to just not log in. nutfarm(talk) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 165.196.194.199 (talk) 03:22, 17 April 2009 (UTC)


 * All these users trace to one person (you?). This is distracting and time consuming, and it is impossible to track the large content moves from the past weeks. The right thing to do would have been to chill and wait, give it some time; which didn't happen. Even after the first sockpuppet blocks, where it should have been definitely clear that this kind of multiple-user account creation is unwanted here (which I very much support). This all is quite different from the episode above, about blocking registered, long-term users in Wikipedia from making edits because they're an employee of a large corporation where someone else did something somewhere that's flagged as an action through an "anonymous proxy". Koeplinger (talk) 12:53, 17 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the good advice.
Hey thanks for all the great advice and support.

Hope you get around to reading Hamilton's books one of these days!

You are a pretty smart guy already, but once you have studied Hamilton everybody will think you are a even smarter guy than they think you are now.

There was once a user who typed from this ip address, who is now blocked, but now looks like at least the ip address itself is not blocked. Right now none of the people who live at this house really feels like doing any editing in article space, hopefully typing in user talk space will not generate to much attention?

So thanks again for all that you do, and I we here at the ip address of he who's name may not be spoken will be looking forward to your future edits. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.191.171.210 (talk) 18:17, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * I tried. Right when it began, I wanted to step in and alert you against using more than one account. But, as it so happens, some admin(s) blocked AT&T employees from editing Wikipedia while at work, and I couldn't. I tried to have the block removed, but it was rejected. In bureaucratic closure, you have now been blocked indefinitely from editing Wikipedia. Bureaucrazy (misspelled as intended) is the downfall of Wikipedia. Thanks, Jens Koeplinger (talk) 13:49, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!
This made me chuckle. pablo hablo. 20:33, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Sage advice, about chilling that is.
But no, an IP trace would have revealed that those edits were coming from multiple IP addresses, and that each user account consistently logged in at the same locations.

Homebum, was using the same IP address as the venerable founder of this article.

What the heck, a guy starting a user account on April fools day, was never really intending to fool anybody. It said right on his user page, that the ignore all rules applied to his editing.

Sorry for any confusion this might have caused, but it was some what of an emergency, as a lot of really hard work was about to go down the drain.

The other users were blocked for appearing to have the same aim as hobojaks. Of particular interest is user:quaternionist. All his or her edits were from public libraries. He or she never participated in a discussion, and all contributions were direct quotes from Hamilton or citations of formulas copied directly out of elements. So now this means anybody who does that, can be accused of Having the same aim as hobojaks.

To add to the confusion user:bitter grapes of wrath has been blocked for requesting to be unblocked, with out ever having typed in article space at all.

But it looks like the period of frantic editing is over. Still a lot more work to do, but you have always given good advice.

It seems to me like it would be better if people started thinking about what an edit was, in order to decide if it was a good or a bad edit, and not base things on who made the edit. So thanks again for all your help.

You realize that they are going to propose deleting this article again and again every six months right? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.86.14.40 (talk) 00:59, 18 April 2009 (UTC)


 * Many things may happen. Until then: Make edits, not Wikidrama. Thanks, Jens Koeplinger (talk) 01:07, 20 April 2009 (UTC) PS: One account per natural person.