User talk:Sbyrnes321/Archives/2016

Current-voltage characteristic
Hello S! In Current-voltage characteristic there is a great diagram showing the current-voltage characteristics of four devices. I understand you created this diagram. Well done!

The line depicting the characteristic for a battery appears to be sloping the wrong way. It shows that as the current flowing in the battery increases, the emf (V) supplied by the battery also increases. The highest voltage produced by a battery occurs when the battery is delivering zero current. As the current increases the voltage declines.

The standard test for a battery, such as an automotive battery, is to operate the battery in its circuit (such as trying to start the engine of the automobile) and measure the drop in voltage. If the voltage drop is too great it is time to buy a new battery. The diagram shows a voltage increase when a large current is drawn from the battery. Perhaps the diagram needs some revision. Best regards. Dolphin ( t ) 12:33, 2 March 2016 (UTC)


 * All four plots use the passive sign convention.


 * In the passive sign convention, when you draw current from a battery, we call it a negative current. (A positive current would be recharging the battery.) And indeed, with a negative current, the voltage drops, just like it's supposed to.


 * You can't say that a sign convention is "right" or "wrong". It can only be "clear" or "confusing".


 * So, what I think you mean to say is: "It is confusing to use passive sign convention for a battery, because people more often describe batteries using the active sign convention." Well, I concede that this is true. But I think it would be far more confusing to have four side-by-side plots in which three of the plots have one sign convention and the fourth plot has the opposite sign convention. I think it's important for the plots to be consistent with each other.


 * To mitigate the problem, it says right there in the caption: "All four plots use the passive sign convention." --Steve (talk) 15:37, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Thanks Steve. You have explained the situation clearly. I no longer have a problem. Dolphin ( t ) 23:45, 2 March 2016 (UTC)

Regarding Max efficiency band gap data
Hi. In there is a curve showing the maximum efficiency as a function of band gap energies.

Could you please provide a table with the data used, or refer me to some place where data like that is to be found? That would be much appreciated.

I should note that this is my first post on Wikipedia, so I apologise if this is not the right place to make a request like this.

Kind regards. :-)

/User: EmilMadsen90


 * I can email it to you. What's your address? Or email me and I'll reply. My address is on the front page at http://sjbyrnes.com/ --Steve (talk) 11:57, 29 March 2016 (UTC)

Fortifying wikiquanta
Hi, I seek volunteers for this. Boris Tsirelson (talk) 17:49, 15 April 2016 (UTC)

Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy
Regarding this edit. Sorry I didn't realise that you had already removed the reference when I reverted. This guy has been adding WP:REFSPAM for at least two years. Feel free to revert my edit if you think your editing of the wording is an improvement. Cheers SmartSE (talk) 12:45, 10 May 2016 (UTC)


 * No problem. I might or might not add my words back in, I don't feel strongly either way. --Steve (talk) 18:45, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

Your animation on Telegrapher's equations
Good morning Steve, I was just looking at your animation on Telegrapher's equations. It’s a great animation, but I found myself confused looking at it. I believe we’ve talked about your animations on some related topics and you and I and others reached a good consensus and they made sense to me then. It’s been over a year since I looked at any of them and I’m confused now. I’m going to suggest that me looking at now, and being confused, is more representative of a person looking at it for the first time, than me a year ago with heightened awareness, so to speak. Anyway, I finally figured out why I was confused. The electric field arrows are changing direction and color. It’s sort of a double negative. I’m no longer confused and I understand what you are trying to convey. But, I think it is a case that more is less. Or maybe that less would be more. Anyway, I think it would be a better depiction if the arrows did not change color. Cheers. Constant314 (talk) 18:13, 28 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Thanks! That makes sense to me. Can you look at this and offer feedback? --Steve (talk) 23:59, 28 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Assuming the dots are electrons, I think that I see the following:
 * 1. Maximum electron density at the head of the maximum arrow
 * 2. Minimum electron density at the tail of the maximum arrow.
 * 3. Max current at the head and tail of the max arrow.
 * 4. Equal electron density on both conductors at zero length arrow.
 * 5. Zero current at zero length arrow.
 * I believe that is all correct. Constant314 (talk) 00:52, 29 May 2016 (UTC)


 * I updated it, thanks for your suggestion!! --Steve (talk) 19:03, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Benford's law
I'm afraid I don't understand either of your points.


 * "more likely to be smaller" falsely suggests that we are comparing some digits to other digits

Isn't that exactly what we're doing?


 * "Most significant digit" is not technically correct.

Why not? – Smyth\talk 09:53, 5 July 2016 (UTC)


 * When you say "the most significant digit is more likely to be smaller", I think readers will read an implied comparison and fill it in as: "the most significant digit is more likely to be smaller [than the second and third and other digits]". If that's how they read it, then they're getting the wrong impression. The point of Benford's law is not that the first digit of a number is typically smaller than the twelfth digit of a number. (That's true, but it's not the main Benford's law, it is merely an unimportant, incidental consequence of Benford's law.)


 * For "most significant digit", the question is whether this is a synonym of "leftmost significant digit". My comment was wrong, this usage is common and accepted (and "technically correct") in the context of computer science. (Sorry about that!) But many readers don't have any computer science background, but rather learned about significant digits in, say, grade-school science class. In grade-school science class, as far as I can tell, people generally learn that digits are either significant or not significant, but not "more significant" or "less significant". If you look at significant figures article, you'll see that that's the perspective. So these readers would be confused by "most significant digit", whereas they would understand "leading significant digit".


 * Do you agree? Am I missing something? --Steve (talk) 12:47, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, that's a good explanation. – Smyth\talk 17:10, 5 July 2016 (UTC)

Guideline on overlinkig
With regard to your reverts, the manual of style MOS:DUPLINK states, "Generally, a link should appear only once in an article, but if helpful for readers, a link may be repeated in infoboxes, tables, image captions, footnotes, hatnotes, and at the first occurrence after the lead." --Mark viking (talk) 19:50, 11 November 2016 (UTC)


 * I was trying to make sense of this ridiculous rule and found this discussion. Essentially everyone who supported the current wording interpreted it as being a gentle suggestion rather than a strict rule. And a lot of people did not even support the wording in the first place.
 * Anyway, I hope we can agree that your quote above is superseded by that other sentence from the section:
 * A good question to ask yourself is whether reading the article you're about to link to would help someone understand the article you are linking from.
 * Isn't "helping someone understand the article you are linking from" the point? What is the point of Wikipedia, if not to write articles that are maximally effective in conveying information to readers? Why are we doing this?
 * So if we agree on that axiom, I am happy to discuss with you why I think my edits were in support of it. (I did not revert all your changes, only the ones that I thought would make life harder for readers.) --Steve (talk) 00:48, 12 November 2016 (UTC)