User talk:DavidCBryant/Archive 2

This is an archive page for User talk:DavidCBryant. Please do not alter it. dcb

Motivation

A cf cannot be "motivated" -- it is inanimate.

The OED disagrees with you. It includes citations back to 1949 of "motivated" applied to the inanimate result of a motiv. For example, "The vast majority of pictures are sexually motivated." "Their actions appear ... strangely motivated." -- Dominus 15:11, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Yeah, well, I finally got around to dragging all 9 pounds of the good old OED off my bookshelf, and I still think the change I made is a good one. Apparently some authors (ca 1850) used the verb "to motivate" to mean "instill with a motif", as in "to put flowery wallpaper in two or three rooms of a house". In more modern usage, though, the word is generally taken as a synonym for "to stimulate", more or less.

Using phrases like "the song was motivated by a desire to express his burning love" is figurative speech that is easily understood -- clearly, the author of the song was motivated (or stimulated) to write it. In writing about mathematics, though, I would rather avoid such figures of speech most of the time. DavidCBryant 18:56, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, you changed "continued fractions are motivated by..." to "the study of continued fractions is motivated by...", which is not consistent with either the ratinale above or with the one you put in the edit summary. What you really meant was something like "the mathematicians who invented continued fractions were motivated by...". -- Dominus 00:02, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

Areas of mathematics

Thanks for you intro for the Analysis section in Areas of mathematics... I trimmed the historic information, as though releant, it quite doesn't fit with the main aim of the article (to explain the nature of the multitude of mathematical fields). Unfortunately, the article has to be always breif and concise - otherwise it would get very big, very quickly. Tompw (talk) 18:52, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

I didn't delete all your prose, only the historic material... my point above was that the article explains about maths as it is, rather than how we got there. I agree with you completely when you say the material is dry and potentially dull, and there is absolutly room for more general prose, espically under the big section headings. Also, thanks for adding info on recreational mathematics. Tompw (talk) 19:36, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

Woth regard to page size... it used to be that certain browsers couldn't edit pages over 32KB in size. The problem sn't around, but the idea of 32KB as a maximum size for articles. As it happens, this equates to about 20 minutes reading for the average adult, in line with a typical attention span. So, WP still flashes up an alert if a page is over 32KB in size, because it provides a useful indiactor that the page might need shortening, or breaking up.

Anyway, Areas of mathematics is no where near that size. I wish all the headings would get expanded (shocking grammer that), so it would be possible to get an idea of how much to write in the way of intros etc.

NPOV discussion: Does quoting Stroock's statements violate NPOV?

This is about the wiki article Manifold Destiny and related talks:

NPOV refers to "representing fairly and without bias all significant views that have been published by a reliable source". It doesn't mean wikiusers must balance the number of characters of the verifiable statements from two sides, or reduce statements from both sides to a few harmless sentences. In contrast, Daniel Stroock, Michael Anderson and Joseph Kohn were all interviewees of Nasar when she wrote the article. Their views are "significant views", and the quotes are from reliable sources. In regard to the quotes of their statements, NPOV only means "representing fairly and without bias Daniel Stroock/Michael Anderson/Joseph Kohn's views that have been published by a reliable source". I am really surprised to see that NPOV is interpreted to be constant & instant deletion, and used as a weapon to threaten other wikiusers.

As to the threat, I mean the following sentence you posted on my talk page: "I will be watching this article, and you, for a while, to be certain that you understand and adhere to the NPOV policy." What do you mean by "watching" me "for a while"? What were you thinking when you posted this threatening sentence? Can you stick on the definition of NPOV and stop threating people by using NPOV as a weapon? Do you really understand what NPOV is? --Jiejunkong 04:05, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

What I believe: NPOV = Putting everything on the table

I come to wikipedia to learn things. I guess this is the purpose of creating an encyclopedia. Therefore, I believe all wikipedia policies will eventually help people learn things, rather than blocking people from seeing the truth.

Interestingly, I also find the three major content policies, namely Wikipedia:Verifiability Wikipedia:No original research and Wikipedia:Neutral point of view, coincidently relate to a British/American legal case, where the witnesses must provide verifiable and admittible proofs, the judge and the public want the lawyers (of the plaintiff and the defendant) to show everything on the table, and finally the jury should produce a neutral and objective verdict. Of course, this time everything is with a touch of computer networks, so there is some difference on other dimensions.

Hence comes what I believe: NPOV = Putting everything on the table. You see a biased 1-side affidavit. That's fine. As long as all presentable and verifiable facts are put on the table, you have the ability to combine all affidavits together, then you have NPOV. You cannot delete the affidavit and blame those people who offered it to you. Blocking the view of facts only blinds yourself and make you more biased.

Let me tell you something you may not know about the Perelman-Yau-Nasar incident. I am trying to put it on the table, so that there is less misunderstanding, but I don't think I am capable of doing that given the current context. I believe many people who have read the wiki-items about Perelman-Yau-Nasar are more biased than before. This is not good because it only breeds more hatred and prejudice.

The fact I know is like this:

• Grisha Perelman is a genius. You have known a lot from the Wikipedia, so I will tell you the other side of the story. He is a hero in terms of geometry, but an anti-hero in terms of math community buildup. He is a nice person who does not offend nobody, but also exhibits autism to some degree. During 1990s, he was offered lots of chances to do postdoc or even tenure-track in US, but he refused. He also had problems with his Russian collegues and quit from his research lab in Saint Petersburg. Perhaps without such autism he won't be such a genius (this is a guess). As to Poincare's conjecture, he refused to explain the three landmark papers after he posted them on arXiV manuscript eprint site in 2002 and 2003. His manuscripts need further elaboration, otherwise it cannot be called a formal math proof (that is the reason why there were 3 teams formed by various reasons to do this job). If he wanted to continue, then there would never been so many controversies afterwards. But for some reasons (not related to Yau because at that moment Yau and Perelman were strangers to each other) he decided to leave the math community. And then ......
• Here comes the controversial part. On one hand, many people in math community thought, what the heck? who are you? Everybody was born naked and has experienced as much frustration as you did. Even if you are a genius, you need to go through all the hard work to finish your job! On the other hand, people have gradually figured out that Perelman is a real genius who has the correct answer, so he should be awarded Fields Medal (which is the most competitive award in math community, the other more famous awards are more-or-less honors than competition medals). There you go. Perelman got the Fields Medal but he refused to take it. However, the way Perelman proved the conjecture obviously does no good to the math community. If this sketchy-but-correct style of proving math theorems becomes a convention, then the math community will go crazy and crashes. First, before the prover finishes the final touch, how can other people know the proof is correct? This is a chicken-and-egg problem. Second, as the final touch has little credit, then who will do it? Now you see why all three verification teams worked on a very slow pace? I think Cao-Zhu team produced more details only because Yau pushed harder on them (since they were Yau's students and the other 2 teams are not related to Yau). My personal guess is, Yau does have some opinions toward Perelman, but it is at a very normal level I described above. And if Perelman wants to work with Yau or anybody else, there's no problem at all. The math community was just having an ordinary day. Things were not ugly at that time, at most some everyday nuisance.
• Finally Nasar came and wanted to create another "A Beautiful Mind". Okie-dokie, we see the drama you have seen now. Somebody becomes demon, somebody becomes angel, somebody becomes rich, somebody becomes famous......

If you don't know some of these, then I think wikipedia has somehow failed. If you already know all of these and say nothing to make the situation clearer to other wiki-users, then you are as biased as me because not everything is on the table yet! --Jiejunkong 08:04, 22 December 2006 (UTC)

Complex inequalities

I can't find it in the article. Where should I be looking? Mogmiester 18:52, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

Farever

IMHO Farever (talk · contribs) is almost certainly Amorrow (talk · contribs). If so, however, what do we do about it? -- Antaeus Feldspar 00:27, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Category:Erdös Number debate

There is no "significance" to these categories, they are just a quirky game. Osomec 14:38, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

Hi, Osomec!

After noting your cavalier attitude toward things mathematical, I visited your user page. Then I got curious, and decided to investigate "Category:Golf". Lo and behold, it contains 24 subcategories, and seven articles. And all of that for a quirky little game!  ;^> DavidCBryant 00:10, 21 February 2007 (UTC)

PS I don't care how you vote on such debates. That's your business. I do wonder, though, why you would even want to vote on a question that only affects the mathematicians. I'm sure I'd muck up the voting if I ever decided to participate in one of the debates about golf. Why are so many people willing to act like experts in these deletion debates?

Perhaps because they are interested in and think about categorisation, which is rather more relevant to the issue than mathematics. Wikipedia is one project and should have consistent standards and presentation. If subject editors made in each area made all the presentational decisions wikipedia would be chaotically inconsistent. Who do you think makes the structural and presentational decisions for Britannica? Probably expert encyclopedists, rather than mathematicians, or theologians, or anyone else with irrelevant specialist knowledge. PS. Wikipedia is probably the best reference resource on competitive golf that exists, and there are more English-speakers that are interested in golf than in high level mathematics. Osomec 00:46, 22 February 2007 (UTC)

Slang vs. Scatology

You have as much right to complain about my scatology outside the articles as I have to complain about slang outside the articles; which is none.

Inside the articles, it's a whole different story.

Assessing "elegance", what the devil* might that be, it's not relevant, as far as any encyclopaedia is concerned.

Come on... "loss of elegance"??? Are you freaking* kidding me? What the devil* is that supposed to mean?

Really, this kind of "poetic phrasing" shouldn't be allowed in any objetive, denotative exposition.

If the intention is saying "simplicity", then say "simplicity" already. Otherwise, it sounds like "beauty". And noticing the "loss of beauty" of an alternative set of axioms is utterly irrelevant and subjective.

(*) To show what a nice guy I am, I specially curbed my scatology on your talk page, in your consideration. And I don't even fucking know you. The preceding unsigned comment was added by 200.164.220.194 at 22:17 16 March 2007.

Oops! Had a little slip of the tongue right near the end there, pal. Oh – I didn't exactly complain about your language. I merely characterized it, and tried to explain that you'll get more co-operation from other editors if you behave yourself, instead of acting like a jerk all the time. DavidCBryant 22:28, 16 March 2007 (UTC)

Hehehehe... that "slip of tongue" was supposed to be a joke... :-)

The thing is I am an actual jerk. And you know how they say you should always be yourself. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 200.164.220.194 (talk) 22:41, 16 March 2007 (UTC).

No. You should try to be better than you are. JRSpriggs 08:58, 17 March 2007 (UTC)

Stress majorization

Regarding your comment about the Stress majorization article: At the time I applied the speedy delete tag, the article consisted on one or two sentences that made no sense to a mere mortal such as myself. There was not enough context to show what it was. The author should have created the article in the sandbox or elsewhere first, as otherwise it looked just like many of the other countless two-line articles about a garage band, someone's best friend, a wrestler on some obscure circuit in Mississippi, or some kind of anime. I apologize for being a bit hasty. I will say, though that the article's subject is way too technical for the vast majority of readers, so if there's some way you folks can make it a little less technical, that would be good. Realkyhick 05:14, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

OK, Realkyhick, you apparently don't understand what I'm asking of you. Please be nice to other editors.

I don't have time to read through your archived talk pages, so I just looked through the stuff that hasn't been archived yet. Here's what I found.

• You put a speedy deletion tag on KTron, and it was actually deleted, then recreated.
• You labeled Geoemyda yuwonoi as a hoax within ten minutes after tha author started to write it. If you had run a simple Google search you would have located this academic paper with about 10 seconds of effort. You might have even incorporated some of the information from that paper into the article, instead of labeling it first as a hoax, and then as unreferenced.
• You tagged Steve Allott for speedy deletion within one minute after the author started to write it. It took the author 90 minutes to finish writing the article. 90 minutes isn't quick enough for you?
• You tagged Rickshaw Inn for speedy deletion within one minute after the author started writing it. You got a rise out of the author on that one.
• The author of Perfection (Latter Day Saints) wrote to you saying "You added a 'noncompliant' tag to this article eight minutes after I first created it."
• You put a speedy delete tag on Fachinformationszentrum Karlsruhe within one minute after the author started to write it. It took that author 37 minutes to write a fairly good, well-referenced article. 37 minutes isn't quick enough for you? At least you didn't call this one a hoax.
• You put a speedy delete tag on Stress majorization within six minutes after the author started to write it.

So that's seven articles in a month where you interrupted a contributor who was writing something new for Wikipedia and made that author deal with the tags you had placed (instead of working on the new content). And every instance might easily have been avoided if you had simply checked the history page to see that the article was under construction.

I'll say it again. Please be nice to your fellow editors. (Oh – as to your request for "less technical" math articles, I'll see what I can do. But math is technical, so some of the more advanced articles are going to be hard for most people to understand. Knowledge is like that.) DavidCBryant 11:59, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

David, I have already apologized for being quick on the draw with the Stress majorization article, and then you rake me over the coals again, ironically telling me to be nice to other editors. As for telling users to use the sandbox, that is standard procedure that many other editors use (that's where I got the idea). If you will take the time to look history at the articles I've listed, you will find that almost every one of them was nothing more than a sentence or two, with little or no context. In that respect, they look no different than the typical "'The Garage Band' is a major influence on the culture of greater Sheyboygan" or "Jason is the coolest person ever" articles (and those are the entire text of the article). However, I'll give folks a little more time when it isn't obvious vandalism. Sometimes I think I get into a "rhythm" of putting speedy tags on articles which are obvious candidates and may ding one or two that, in retrospect, need lesser action. Having said that, if you look at my overall counter-vandalism work, you'll find that my "hits" are far greater than my "misses."

As for the Perfection (Latter Day Saints) article, the noncompliant tag was placed because the article was written as a statement of doctrine, with the only references being scripture; that is not the encyclopedic tone required for Wikipedia articles. As you can see by the very lengthy discussions on the talk page (very few of which involve me), there are still issues related to my concerns that are being debated, so I stand by more original action on that article.

As for making the math articles less technical, I realize that's a pretty tall order, and way over my head, but if there's a way to do it, it would help push the article toward good article status. This is one of those things that is "Do as I say, not as I do," because I haven't the foggiest notion of how to simplify an article such as stress majorization, so I'll leave that to folks smarter than me, which is a pretty doggone large pool. :-) Realkyhick 17:26, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

I certainly don't intend to "rake you over the coals". I'm making a simple plea for civility here. Just exactly how hard would it be to look at the history page for an article before you tag it for speedy deletion? Please show a little consideration for your fellow man. You save ten seconds by ignoring the article's history, and the author of a new article gets to waste five or ten minutes writing to your talk page. That's not fair. Please think of others as equals. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. That's all. DavidCBryant 18:15, 27 March 2007 (UTC)