User talk:Maury Markowitz/Archive 1, 2003

P-61 This might sound a little piquane, but I am reading the P-61 article and have to say that stylistically is is very bad. The wiki is an encyclopedia, not an aviation history magazine, and the article appears to be confusing the two. There are many "offhand comments", asides and other writing techniques that should be removed outright. Nor does it really seem appropriate to include an entire mini-article on night fighting in the article, when there is a full article on the topic only a mouse click away. Sentances like "They were not built to be forgiving machines" are definitely not in keeping with the style of the wiki. The article needs severe clipping. (Maury)


 * As a P-61 historian, I'm writing as fully detailed history of the aircraft as seems reasonable for a relatively condensed, non-book sized resource on the aircraft. Once I'm done posting the major sections, I definitely will be going back through from the top and polishing the overall cut and finish of the article.


 * I included the short section about airborne night fighting since a brief understanding of it and the very real stigma and conottations associated with it at the time, are intertwined in being able to properly explain the P-61, not just an aircraft design, but also as an operational machine and military system. The prejudices and fears of flying in the dark came into play quite prominently with the crews and equipment during its shakedown period and early deployments, and in a few other smaller places later on.


 * That combat aircraft of the period were not built with the pilot's safety and possible lack of skill as a primary concern is a commonly agreed upon fact. Designers of the era--Kelly Johnson and Jack Northrop among them--flat out said as much, either then, or later on.  I believed having the section explain that these aircraft were extraordinarily difficult or, not infrequently, deadly to fly even in the best of circumstances, was important in properly explaining the stigma and fears of flying at night, much less flying in combat at night; that explanation is exceptionally helpful to the reader in properly understanding the significant fear and stigma-rooted issues that arose later on.


 * My wording and style is obviously mine, at least to begin with. Of course, I'm not done yet. :)  Once the content is done, then I go back and revise.  If you still feel my final revisions aren't sufficient, then once I remove the article hold, you are obvously welcome to alter it as you see necessary--assuming they aren't personal or punitive, and truly improve the entry.  I can't say I won't look at them extra hard or not change some of them, but I don't think either of us will let an article about a 60 year old aircraft of which less than 1500 were made degrade into a revert and edit war. ;)


 * Thanks for your message! GarageBay9

Maury, a slingshot produces more velocity because energy is mv^2, and at pericentron a spacecraft is already moving faster. The dv multiplies by the existing velocity. It's not something for nothing, it's a way of utilizing the gravitational potential energy of the rocket fuel.

The math works, and the maneuver works, so please put the text back.

User:Ray Van De Walker

One question: why did you bother to edit Markup language when you made no changes to it at all? The only thing you did was to merge several the source lines into one, making the diffs less useful and taking up database space for no reason. Please don't do that. --LDC

Actually I made several changes, including a much longer description of the history of SGML and it's eventual conversion into XML. I assume you must have seen some interim version. I save a lot, after having lost several lengthy articles to random events.


 * I see the new changes, thanks. I just sent that note right after your first change, which didn't change any actual content but did take line breaks out of the source text.  That's just a personal peeve of mine--I like to be able to see compact diffs. --LDC

admission to the science museam in London has been free for about the last year or so... I think the V&A is also free now quercus robur

oh wow, that's probably 1 month after I was last over

Hi - re your change to EnigmA - back in the old days, before the software that the 'pedia ran on was changed, titles like "EnigmA", with funny capitals, were the normal way of making links. They were very common, and correct. Of course they're not any more, but keeping the pages as redirects does no harm (there's no shortage of hard disk space), and in the event that somebody has made a link to the page from an external site, it's important to keep the redirect in place. They may as well be left as they are. --Camembert


 * Hmm, having said that, it seems the entry was clogging up the list of short pages for some reason, so I guess there was reason to delete it after all - sorry about that :)  In future though, if you see a page you think should be deleted, adding it to Votes for deletion will ensure people in a position to delete it see it. --Camembert

Ok, thanks!

Nice piece on interface description language, good work! --Nixdorf

Hi Maury, can you read Selbstopfer, thanks. Ericd

I'll check, Maury, but I doubt that I'll have anything much on the Dagger. Most of my aero engine knowledge comes from LJK Setright's wonderful The power to fly, which I must have read 15 times as a kid, say 20 or 30 years ago, and almost learned off by heart. I'm sure that Setright would have quite a bit on it. Alas, it belonged to my father, and he lent it to a friend of his who died, and he didn't like to ask the widow for it back. It's out of print and I can't find another copy anywhere. But I'll poke around and see if I have anything. Nice work on the Lion/Napier split, by the way. Tannin

Hi Maury, nice article on the Napier Nomad. You seems to be more interrested in aviation engine but if you feel you can copyedit my additions on Porsche which remains very incomplete. Ericd

Maury, re. Messerschmitt Me 210, what is "the RLM"? I think this pops up in some of your other articles, too, but I have no idea what it stands for. Am I dumb? LOL. Pandora 19:07 Jan 31, 2003 (UTC)

Maury, I've just posted a discussion of aircraft naming conventions on Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (aircraft). Slip over there and see what you think. Comment, add, change, whatever.

Also, I've made a start on trying to list all the many different entries on individual aircraft types. There are lots of great articles about particular aircraft (and some horrible stubs!), but (so far as I know) no central index, so you only stubmle over most of the entries through blind luck. Last night I listed as many military types as I could find, putting the results in Weapon. That list is more-or-less up to date, and could usefully be copied over to other places - List of aircraft types or something like that. We still need to add civil types and non-combat military types. Maybe I'll do them in a day or two.

Cheers, Tannin 14:40 Feb 5, 2003 (UTC)

See:

Henschel & Son Susan Mason

(is there some easy way to do a revert I'm not aware of?)

"Older Versions", select the version you want to revert to, "Edit", save. Salsa Shark 00:39 Mar 14, 2003 (UTC)

I'm not clear on exactly why you think it should be Grumman S-2 instead of S-2 Tracker. Naming conventions (aircraft) says "the best names to use are: US military aircraft: Number and name", which seems pretty definite to me, and the other US aircraft articles follow this convention quite consistently. Stan 03:45 Apr 30, 2003 (UTC)

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Thanks Maury for your helping me along here in my introduction to a remarkable enterprise. Your definition is trenchant and I will use it as a structure to build on. Are the 'meta' sites the talk areas for the different subjects? I am not clear on this. Also are communicatons such as this one to be placed here in reply or on my user site? Appreciate your time...User:ArtificioSapiens

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Thanks Maury, got your reply ArtificioSapiens

Thanks! Annoying when such simple things as a redirect fucks up! -- Ruhrjung 13:29 May 3, 2003 (UTC)

Hi Maury. I noticed that you added aviation info on angle of incidence. It occured to me that some potential readers might confuse angle of incidence with angle of attack, so I added angle of attack under "see also". The link came up red, which surprised me. Since you seem to know a lot about aviation I thought I'd check with you before writing a stub. Is angle of attack the angle that the wing makes with the oncoming airflow, or the angle that the aircraft makes with the airflow, or something else ? If you write a stub for the page I'd be happy to create a nice diagram. Theresa knott 14:06 22 May 2003 (UTC)

Maury -- I'll be redirecting feudal ranks at some point. No offense meant, but it's a bit misleading and needa some rewriting to be truthful. I looked at the websites and they are very general, but very oversimplified. JHK

Since when is replacing all of the MG42 article a "minor edit"? Pizza Puzzle

Hi Maury, in response to your Amiga questions, there was a fair bit of talk about the Atari/Commodore fight over the Amiga in print in 1984 and 1985, but finding the stuff online is a little tough. There are the Creative Computing archives at http://www.atarimagazines.com/ that make for some interesting reading. A Google search for "Amiga" on that site turns up lots of stuff.

Cheers, Dave Farquhar 14:24 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I found a transcript of a lecture RJ Mical gave in the 1980s, discussing the fall of Amiga Inc. It's at. Dave Farquhar 16:18 14 Jun 2003 (UTC)

-- Much thanks for your redirect for Case/Operation Blau/Blue. I didn't know that. Well done!

Now, with three tildies &#8230; PaulinSaudi

Hi, some text in one of your edits on Bomber Harris:


 * Disappointed by such reappraisal of his war aims and methods, Harris lived for a time in South Africa, where from 1946 to 1953 he was managing director of the South African Marine Corporation.

appears identical to that in a Britannica article. I've reverted it, just to be safe: could you check what you have written, please? -- The Anome 12:49, 5 Aug 2003 (UTC)

- Hi- Nice work on the Tandem Computers article. I worked at Ungermann-Bass in 1989 when it was acquired by Tandem and got to be sysadmin on a CLX. Tandem was a cool place. I noticed most of your updates are marked as "minor" changes; but they are definitely not. Minor is best used for fixing typos, etc. Give yourself credit for writing some good stuff! :-)  -- Amillar 21:41, 8 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Just because nothing on wikipeida links to a badly spelled redirect is no reason to blank or delete a page, look at http://www.google.com/search?q=natural%20satelite. Mintguy 12:51, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Well the wikipedia page is the top out of 17800 hits for the two words. "Natural satelite" gets 44 hits (including one on a wikipedia talk page), so whilst it's not overly common to type it in, it's not unknown. Mintguy 15:16, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hello. I attempted to move your new article, lift to drag ratio, to lift-to-drag ratio, but that page already existed, having been originally written by you. I had also done some of the same editing on both articles after you created them. Generally, I think it is better to write "In zoology, a dog is an animal" than "Dog is a term used in zoology to describe an animal." Since I was unable to move the page, I just took the text of your new article and pasted it over the old article, then redirected the new one to the old one. My reasons for considering the old article title better than the new one can be found at hyphen (unless that page has been drastically edited since I last looked at it). Michael Hardy 21:08, 23 Aug 2003 (UTC)

Hi, thanks for fixing the DDT page. I looked at it when that anon linked the ITS page to it, and I couldn't believe how bad it was! Alas, I lacked the energy to fix it - I see you took the Gordian approach! Noel 00:29, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

I appreciate that you discovered the Detentions at Hogwarts was copyrighted. I think you should investigate the author's past articles for possible copyright infrigment. I have deleted the link to Detentions at Hogwarts from the Hogwarts page.

Have you seen the latest Avro Arrow change http://www.wikipedia.org/w/wiki.phtml?title=Avro_Arrow&diff=0&oldid=1400361 ? It looks like bogus conspiracy stuff mostly, but I don't have enough background on this plane to evaluate. Stan 17:45, 6 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Message on Talk:Fragile base class. CGS 12:06, 14 Sep 2003 (UTC). - Hi Maury ! Have a look at Talk:Sud Aviation Super-Caravelle Ericd 01:46, 29 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Hi. Thanks for catching my dupe on the Stirling bomber vs Shorts Stirling thing. I have a couple of trivial questions: Firstly, shouldn't that be "Short Stirling" (as van Gelderen has), as the company is Short Brothers, not Shorts Brothers. I think the google matches for "Shorts Stirling" can mostly be ascribed to that rather odd british pseudo-collective idiom ("I'm going to Safeways" rather than the correct "I'm going to Safeway"). Secondly, I'm afraid that RCAF link the page has is dead ;( -- Finlay McWalter 13:18, 16 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Hi Maury, great recent work on the BAC 1-11. I added the court-line pic (also used on the Court Line page), and I happen to know the colours are correct. The image is a little washed out, but not to the extent that it is meant to be portraying a the yellow/gold/orange scheme - It is actually pink! I made a note about this on the 1-11 talk page but maybe you didn't see it. Though the yellow scheme was probably the best known, as it was used on their first TriStar G-BAAA, they had three other funky schemes which were used across the rest of the fleet - green bands, pink bands (also used on the second L-1011), and purple bands. They used to be a cheerful sight flying over our school in Hemel Hempstead when I was a kid - always turned my head to watch whenever they went over, though the 1-11s in particular were hard to avoid as they were so noisy! Airliners nowadays are a lot better, but also a lot more boring, and that goes for the colour schemes of the airlines too. GRAHAMUK 23:54, 18 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Please don't blank those Bonkers-related stubs, I know it's a little annoying but they are valid stubs, and are linked to.

Thanks Dysprosia 23:54, 6 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Never mind, it looks like they're going to be merged. Dysprosia 23:58, 6 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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Hi Maury. Thanks for your improvements to my Buteyko technique piece. I felt that the original was NPOV but did not know of the clinical trials. However, I edited your comments to remove some perhaps accidental NPOV. I also split it into two subheads for clarity, which also seemed to remove what seemed like critical weighting at the end. Hopefully we'll both be happy with it now. Keir 14:01, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)~

- Hi where did you get the clock information for the MOS Technologies 6502 from, as I remember it as a static device with no clock multiplier. I've checked my Rockwell and Synertek databooks this morning and cannot find supporting evidence (the Z80 etc had clock dividers they never went at 4mhz as claimed!) Archivist 01:45, Nov 16, 2003 (UTC)


 * The 6502 was not static, it was dynamic. But there is no clock multiplier.  The CMOS derivatives are partially or completely static.  --Brouhaha 20:14, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

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Maury, I added the PowerPC Endian Modes discussion as a seperate page from PowerPC because I thought that the comment was too esoteric for the main page. It's really not a major feature of the architecture. However, I'm new here and am not that familiar with the conventions. What was your rationale for combining the two pages? --Kday 02:32, 16 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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Should LADAR be part of LIDAR - rather than the other way around? -see Talk:LADAR. kiwiinapanic 10:09, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)